“What do you want?”
“To ask you a few questions, about your former husband.”
“Lester or Malcolm?”
“Lester.”
“Who are you?”
“Inspector Cain, with the SFPD.”
He reached into his jacket, slowly, not taking his eyes from her. He took out his badge and held it up.
“Lester got himself killed in Santa Clara. We lived in Walnut Creek. How does the SFPD have anything to do with that?”
“The gun that shot him turned up in another crime scene.”
He took another ten steps toward the house. Susan looked to be about forty-five. She had dark blond hair, hints of gray at the roots. Her eyes were focused and clear. She was wearing a chambray shirt and blue jeans, a pair of doeskin work gloves in her hip pocket. On the porch next to her front door was a pair of mud-covered rubber galoshes. Gardening tools were leaning against the wood plank wall. There weren’t any flowers or vegetable plots in the clearing around the cabin, but he’d seen the satellite picture before coming out here. He knew that farther back in the woods behind the cabin, there was another structure. He figured it must be a greenhouse, but he wasn’t here to investigate what she might be growing there.
“I’m not going to ask about anything but Lester,” Cain said. “Can I come up to the porch?”
She leaned back into the cabin and he heard her set something down. Then she came out, empty-handed, and closed the door behind her. There were a few wooden chairs at one end of the porch and she sat in one, pulling the gloves from her pocket and setting them on her knee. Cain came up the steps and took the other chair, angling it so that he could sit facing her. He had a notebook and pen with him but didn’t take them out.
“I saw the investigator’s notes, from 1998,” Cain said. “You and Lester had a daughter?”
“Cari.”
“Now she’s what—twenty-one, twenty-two?”
“Twenty-two. She’s at Humboldt State.”
“She was two when Lester was killed,” Cain said. “And he’d just lost his job?”
“That’s right. I wasn’t working either.”
“So things weren’t easy.”
“Desperate would be a good word. You’ve got a toddler. You have a mortgage. Two car payments to make.”
“What did he do—before he lost his job, what did he do?”
“He was a software engineer.”
“So he was looking for jobs in Silicon Valley?”
“That’s right.”
“Did he say where?”
“Everywhere.”
“He had a bachelor’s in computer science from Cal, isn’t that right?”
“That’s right.”
“Is that where you met him?”
She shook her head.
“We met after college.”
“Did you know anything about his friends in college? His frat brothers?”
“I knew he was in a fraternity. He had the tattoo.”
“Did he tell you about it?”
“No.”
“Did you ask?”
“I guess I might have.”
“But what? He changed the subject? Went silent?”
“That’s right.”
“What about the burn on his ear and the scar on his throat?”
“There was a fire in his dorm,” Susan said. “He was asleep when it started. He made it out, but some of the other kids didn’t.”
“That’s what he told you?”
She nodded.
“He spoke in a whisper—is that right?”
“He said—” She paused and looked at her lap, her eyebrows pressing toward each other. “He was stumbling down a staircase. There was smoke. He fell and he hit something and crushed his throat. That was just a story? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“I don’t know.”
“What crime scene was it, where you found the gun? Or can’t you say?”
“It made the paper this week. I can tell you that,” Cain said. He watched her face for recognition, but when there wasn’t any, he moved on. “When Lester was shot, he was in a red Cadillac Eldorado. Had he always been an Eldorado man?”
Now Susan smiled, some memory lighting upon her face.
“I made fun of him for that. I couldn’t decide what he looked like more, driving those cars of his—a retiree, headed down to the VFW for steak night? Or was it a pimp? He hated that, me making fun of him. He’d always had Eldorados. His grandfather gave him one when he turned sixteen.”
“So he had one in college.”
“That’s right.”
“Was Lester a good man?”
“I thought so at the time. As far as husbands go, as far as fathers go, I didn’t have anything to compare him to.”
“And later?”
“Later on, the comparison didn’t help him.”
“Do you still have any pictures of him?”
“I’ve got one box. It’s in a box of his things. I kept it for Cari, in case she ever wanted to know about her dad. She looked through it, but she never kept anything. She latched on to Malcolm when I married him.”
“Where’s Malcolm now?”
“He had a heart attack, ten years ago. He was older than me.”
“The box with Lester’s things—may I look through it?”
“What are you looking for?”
“I don’t know,” Cain said, honestly.