Cold Springs(80)

Through the windshield, Chadwick could see Kindra Jones tapping her watch.

“You believe that bullshit?” Chadwick asked Damarodas.

“Me?” Damarodas took a puff from his stench-stick, making the tip glow. “Hell, no. Me, I think somebody's messing with your mind. And I'll tell you something else for free. That kid David Kraft? He seemed pretty damn anxious to make the Zedmans look bad. Loved them almost as much as he loved you. He told me there'd been rumors at Laurel Heights about John Zedman way before this embezzlement scandal broke, back when Kraft was still a student—rumors that when Zedman was working development for his wife, he was structuring the accounts in . . . let's say in some truly creative ways. Taking advantage of the tax-free nonprofit status, being a little loose about what money belonged to Zedman Development and what belonged to his wife's school. You get what I'm saying?”

“I never heard anything like that.”

“Yeah, well, maybe young Kraft is full of shit. On the other hand, maybe he shared that information with somebody else years ago, and that somebody looked into it. Maybe that's where the blackmail came from.”

Chadwick liked the idea about as well as the smell of the cigarillo. “You told Laramie this?”

“Not yet. I'd like to have a candidate for blackmailer, first.”

“Samuel Montrose.”

“I might believe that. I checked the police records, like you suggested. I talked to some old-timers in the department. Your friend Samuel had quite a juvenile record. A dozen arrests for drug dealing. Possession. Accessory to murder in two different drive-bys. Never did any time. He was a freelancer with the drugs—got himself on the wrong side of several gangs. Something else interesting that might go in his column—1988, when the kid was just ten years old, his stepdad Elbridge Montrose was shot to death a block away from his house.”

“Stepdad?”

“Yeah. There was another husband before that, I guess. Point is, I talked to the guy who worked the '88 case, retired now. He remembered that the oldest boy Samuel was a suspect. Seems Samuel didn't get along with the late unlamented Elbridge. There was some evidence the stepdad had been hitting the mom, maybe even molesting the kids. No charges were ever brought in the murder. A few years later, about the time your daughter knew Samuel, another one of Talia's boyfriends disappears—guy named Ali Muhammad, like the boxer, only backwards. Word was he was abusive to the kids, too.” Damarodas sighed. “Now you take all that into consideration, I might go for the idea that Samuel Montrose was holding you responsible for your daughter's suicide, maybe the Zedmans, too, because they were your best friends, and easier to get to than you. If he cared about Katherine the way he cared about his little brothers and sisters, maybe Samuel held a grudge. I'd buy that Samuel Montrose killed his own mother because she tried to strike a deal with John Zedman, then he punished the Zedmans by arranging the embezzlement. No need for Samuel to be a financial whiz kid—he just sticks a gun to Zedman's head and tells him to figure out the details. That were the case, I'd say now Samuel's got his hands on a lot of money and is having a good laugh while all the people he hates are at each other's throats.”

Chadwick stared into the sergeant's blue eyes. He promised himself that he would never make the mistake of underestimating this man.

“You say you might believe your scenario,” he told Damarodas. “So what's stopping you?”

“One little thing, my friend.”

Chadwick was silent.

“When I looked at Samuel Montrose's sheet,” Damarodas said, “there were only juvenile records. They'd never been sealed, because Samuel Montrose never petitioned for them to be. He has no adult sheet, though; as far as the Oakland PD is concerned, Samuel Montrose is still out there somewhere. Then I got the bright idea to check with some other municipalities.”

Damarodas' eyes burned into him. “Hayward, late 1993. A body washed up on the beach just in time for New Year's Eve. Three gunshot wounds to the chest. One in the mouth, which gave it the mark of a gang killing—the way gangs treat rogues dealing in their territory. The victim had been wrapped in a sheet, weighted down, thrown into the Bay, but the ropes had slipped and the body floated up. You want to guess who that body was?”

“A mistake,” Chadwick said. “It had to be.”

“No mistake,” Damarodas said. “Fingerprints. Dental. The mother herself ID'ed the clothing and personal effects. I checked everything. Samuel Montrose is dead. Has been for nine years.”

20

Chadwick barely remembered the pickup in Palo Alto, the parents looking scared and nervous about handing over their rebellious teen to a pissed-off black woman who'd had seven cups of coffee and a six-foot-eight zombie with blood on his shoe.

It was a long flight back on the Texas red-eye, but the trip went unexpectedly without incident. After sleeping like the dead for six hours, Chadwick stood on his dorm room balcony in the Big Lodge, listening to Mozart, watching the rain clouds crack open and admit a fleeting spill of afternoon light. He was trying not to think about John Zedman.

Down below, tan levels were stringing Christmas garlands from their art therapy class on the railings of the deck. A pair of armadillos scuttled their way toward the river on some armor-plated tryst.

Chadwick tried to think in numbers, but the only one that would come to him was his age, forty-seven.