Witness To Evil

  Praise for Janet Dawson’s Jeri Howard mysteries

  Kindred Crimes

  “A welcome addition to this tough genre.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  Till the Old Men Die

  “Dawson keeps suspense and interest at high pitch.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Take a Number

  “Entertaining, enlightening, and most satisfying.”

  —Mostly Murder

  Don’t Turn Your Back on the Ocean

  “Mother/daughter feuds, family solidarity, an ecological mystery: Dawson blends these familiar ingredients with a chef’s élan.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  Nobody’s Child

  “A rich plum pudding of a story sprinkled throughout with memorable characters.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  A Credible Threat

  “Thoroughly satisfying... As usual, Dawson offers a well-constructed plot and smoothly polished writing.”

  —Booklist

  Please turn to the back of the book for an interview with Janet Dawson.

  By Janet Dawson

  KINDRED CRIMES

  TILL THE OLD MEN DIE

  TAKE A NUMBER

  DON’T TURN YOUR BACK ON THE OCEAN

  NOBODY’S CHILD

  A CREDIBLE THREAT

  WITNESS TO EVIL

  WHERE THE BODIES ARE BURIED

  A KILLING AT THE TRACK

  BIT PLAYER

  WITNESS TO EVIL

  A Jeri Howard Mystery

  Janet Dawson

  Copyright © 1997 by Janet Dawson

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Cover design by Sue Trowbridge, interbridge.com

  ISBN 0-449-22471-6

  ISBN 978-0-9834031-6-6

  First Hardcover Edition: October 1997

  First Mass Market Edition: October 1998

  To Gus

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue: July

  Part One: April

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Part Two: July

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Forty

  Forty-one

  Forty-two

  Forty-three

  Forty-four

  Forty-five

  Forty-six

  Forty-seven

  Forty-eight

  Afterword

  A Conversation with Janet Dawson

  Acknowledgments

  Merci beaucoup à Bonnie Odiorne, ma chère compagnon de voyage.

  Thanks also to Nina Koepke; Dawn Church; Fay Gaul; Jerry Kennealy; Barbara Littwin; Sunny Frazier; Sergeant Ed Bowen, Bakersfield Police Department; Commander Donny Youngblood, Kern County Sheriff’s Department; Sergeant Ron Adolph, Fresno County Sheriff’s Department; Paul Bishop, LAPD; and the staff at the Simon Wiesenthal Center and Museum of Tolerance, Los Angeles.

  Prologue

  July

  I KNEW DARCY WAS IN TROUBLE EVEN BEFORE I found out about the murder.

  The tremble in her voice told me as I listened to the answering machine tape, once, twice, three times. Teenaged bravado only went so far. It didn’t disguise outright fear.

  “Jeri, it’s Darcy. Are you there? If you are, please pick up the phone. Damn.”

  She sighed. For a few seconds the answering machine cassette played background noises. I leaned forward, my auditory filters picking up voices in the distance, indistinct, each overlaying the others. I heard the tinkling of a bell, the whir of wheels on pavement, the impatient bleat of a horn.

  “Jeri, I called because... you said any time I needed help, just call. Well, I need it now.” There was another pause, with the same background sounds as before, with one addition, the slam of a car door. When she spoke again, Darcy’s voice sounded hurried, stretched with anxiety. “I gotta go now, Jeri. I’ll call you again. Remember, we’ll always have Paris.”

  I’d heard enough to be seriously disturbed. This time when I rewound the tape, I removed the cassette from the machine for safekeeping, for... what? I reached for my car keys, thinking about Darcy and how our beautiful friendship began, nearly three months earlier, when I went to Paris on someone else’s franc.

  Part One

  April

  One

  IT WAS THE MONEY.

  I admit that, quite readily. I could use the money. The Stefanos were willing to part with it. In fact, they had more money than they had sense. They also had a problem.

  When I was working as a paralegal, before I’d been recruited to join the Errol Seville Agency as an investigator, one of my colleagues told me that people who go to lawyers are sick and want to be healed. People go to private investigators for similar reasons. We get hired to solve other people’s problems, the ones they can’t—or won’t—solve themselves.

  Dan Stefano phoned me on a Monday morning in late April. After hearing him out, I agreed to meet him and his wife, Elaine, that afternoon, at The House.

  The ostentatious edifice the Stefanos were building was located just off Sea View Parkway, on what the developers call Harbor Bay Isle and I call Bay Farm Island. It’s a section of Alameda that used to be marshland and is now landfill, located north of the Oakland airport. Once it really was an island, where farmers grew produce, at the end of a causeway that became Island Drive. Now developers grow condos and huge houses that crowd small lots. A good many of them are stucco palaces that look as though they belong in Miami Beach, not the Alameda I grew up in, with its stately Victorians, wood-framed and decorated with gingerbread trim.

  When I first saw the place Monday afternoon, all I could think of was the Winchester Mystery House down in San Jose, the project that just kept getting bigger and bigger. Sarah Winchester, heir to the Winchester arms fortune, gave new meaning to the term eccentric. Haunted by evil spirits known only to her, she designed a house built to outwit them and spent thirty-eight years remodeling. The place has a hundred and sixty rooms, thirteen of them bathrooms. There are two thousand doors, ten thousand windows, and forty-seven fireplaces, as well as secret passageways and doors and staircases that lead nowhere. The place is such a rabbit warren that Sarah and her servants needed maps to find their way around.

  Elaine Stefano wasn’t aiming for a hundred and sixty rooms, but the structure that rose from the shoreline lot resembled an office building rather than a home. It was three stories high, blocking the view of the house behind it. Terra-cotta-colored stucco and a brown tile roof contributed to a vaguely Spanish-Italian-Mediterranean look. A three-car garage with a short driveway presented its face to Sea View Parkway. I parked my Toyota here, alongside a contractor’s truck and a late-model Mercedes. Then I followed a path that snaked around to the left, where a few steps led up to a porch and the double front doors, one of them ajar.

  As I stepped into a spacious foyer, I heard the whine of a power saw coming from somewhere above me, accompanied by a radio playing country music. Several voices conversed in Spanish. A wide uncarpeted staircase curved up to my right, while ahead of me I saw an open airy space that looked as though it were going to be an enormous kitchen when it grew up.

  On my immediate left was an area probably intended as a formal dining room, but as yet there was no table beneath the spiky modern chandelier. Beyond this, a foot lower and anchored by a massive stone fireplace, was a living room, also uncarpeted. It was bigger than my one-bedroom apartment over in the Adams Point section of Oakland. I walked slowly toward a wall of glass, windows and a sliding door looking out onto the water, with a sweeping view of the Bay Bridge and San Francisco beyond. The water reflected the glare of the afternoon sun.

  I turned from the Bay and looked back the way I’d come, seeing several paint cans arrayed against the dining room wall. Carpet samples and books of fabric swatches were piled in the corner. The huge kitchen featured lots of blinding white tile and bleached pine cabinets, with a rectangular work island in the middle. There was a big gap on one wall, next to the window over the white porcelain sink, where the refrigerator would go. On the counter between this and the sink, someone had set up a white Braun coffeemaker, its carafe half-full of strong black coffee, and, next to it, a motley collection of plastic mugs.

  I was alone, save for the workers upstairs. Then a woman with straight, shoulder-length brown hair came through the sliding glass door that led from the living room to the small rectangle of dirt that was the y
ard, fronting on the Shoreline Trail. She wore loose-fitting blue slacks with a matching jacket over an ivory blouse, and sandals with low heels. A slim leather shoulder bag completed this ensemble.

  She had a cordless phone glued to her left ear and was gesturing with her right hand. “I don’t want to listen to any more excuses,” she barked into the mouthpiece. “It’s the last week in April. You’re three weeks behind, anyway.”

  A couple of runners jogged by on the trail, followed by a cyclist and an elderly woman walking a frisky golden retriever. The woman with the phone listened impatiently to the other person’s half of the conversation. She walked into the kitchen, poured some coffee into a mug, and swallowed a mouthful. Then she started talking again. Her abrupt tone made me guess she’d cut off the other voice. I didn’t think she’d seen me. Certainly she hadn’t acknowledged my presence.

  She was still talking when a man wearing a short-sleeved yellow knit shirt, faded jeans, and a pair of loafers without socks came through the front door and looked at me. “Jeri Howard?”

  “Yes.” I held out my hand. “Dan Stefano?”

  He nodded distractedly as he shook my hand, his brown eyes on the woman I assumed was his wife, Elaine. I’m five-eight, and he was perhaps an inch taller, with an incipient paunch rounding his stomach and a computer-nerd slouch. He was losing what used to be a headful of curly black hair.

  When he’d called me earlier, Dan Stefano had told me he was in the computer game business. I’d checked him out. He was being modest. He’d started StefanoWorks two years ago and was considered a hot entrepreneur in a highly competitive business. He and his small staff of employees created innovative interactive CD-ROM games in a suite of offices located not far from here at the Harbor Bay business park. His most recent release had won a prize and was selling like the proverbial hot-cakes. StefanoWorks was worth serious big bucks.

  I’d checked out Elaine Stefano as well. She was a real estate agent at a big firm in Alameda. When she wasn’t selling houses, I guessed she supervised construction of The House.

  “Elaine, get off the phone already,” Dan said in a voice that told me he was from back east someplace, Jersey maybe. “I need to get back to work.”

  “This conversation isn’t over,” Elaine snapped into the phone, the chill in her voice designed to strike fear into the heart of whoever was on the other end. “I’ll call you back,” She punched a button and set the cordless on the kitchen counter. “Damned decorators.”

  Then she looked at me as though seeing me for the first time, and put on her company face. It smoothed the scowl that drew lines between her eyebrows and at the corners of her hazel eyes. Her full mouth segued from a frown to a polite and businesslike smile. She was taller than Dan, with sleek athletic curves that made me speculate she was into jogging or aerobics when she wasn’t terrorizing decorators.

  “Hello, I’m Elaine.” She held out her hand. “You must be Jeri Howard. Thank you so much for meeting us here. Would you like some coffee?”

  “No, thanks.” I shook the proffered hand. “I gather Mr. Stefano has to get back to the office. Let’s get right to it.”

  “Call me Dan,” he said. “I’d offer you a seat, but...” He shrugged and looked at the disarray around him.

  “Never mind,” I said, leaning against the kitchen work island. “Dan, you said on the phone you want me to look for your daughter. You were very brief. Now I’d like a more detailed picture. When did you realize Darcy was missing?”

  Two

  “IF WE’D SENT HER TO BOARDING SCHOOL, AS I SUGGESTED, none of this would have happened.”

  Elaine’s cool exterior cracked, just enough for me to see the anger crackling underneath. She ran one hand through her glossy brown hair and skewered her husband with her gaze.

  Dan wasn’t the source of her fury, however. Elaine Stefano was royally pissed at her daughter.

  “We already had this conversation,” he said wearily. “Several times.”

  I interrupted. I was here to get information, not watch a domestic squabble. “Darcy went missing... when?”

  “It was Wednesday, last week,” Elaine said.

  Dan shook his head, brow furrowed. “No, it was Thursday.”

  “She left Wednesday, okay?” Elaine’s voice grew argumentative. “We didn’t notice until Thursday.”

  And why was that? I’d have thought the parents of a seventeen-year-old girl would notice if their daughter didn’t come home that night. Of course, I’d met a lot of parents who didn’t give a damn. At least the Stefanos wanted me to find the girl.

  “We thought she was spending the night with her friend Heather.” Elaine gave me another company smile. “That was on Darcy’s calendar, but obviously she planned it as a diversion. We didn’t know she was gone until Sister Bernardine called us from St. Joseph’s Thursday morning, wanting to know why Darcy wasn’t in class.”

  “Catholic school instead of boarding school.” I scribbled the information in my notebook. St. Joseph’s was over on the main island on Chestnut Street, near the old Victorian that had belonged to my grandmother Jerusha Howard.

  “Both the kids go to St. Joe’s,” Dan said. “They started last fall.” This was the first I’d heard of another child in the Stefano household. I must have looked curious, because Dan enlightened me. “Darren. He turned thirteen this past weekend. He’s in the eighth grade.”

  “A well-behaved kid,” Elaine declared. “Darren’s never given us a moment of trouble. Unlike his sister. Suspended for fighting in the halls...”

  As I digested this last comment, the power saw stopped. The workers’ voices, full of laughter, splashed down the stairwell. Elaine sniffed the air like a bird dog. “Excuse me,” she said, heading for the stairs. She went halfway up, to the landing, and spoke a few sharp words in Spanish. The laughter stopped abruptly.

  As Elaine marched down the stairs and back to the white-tiled kitchen, I steered the conversation back to Darcy. “So the Sister told you Darcy had cut class, and you checked with her friend Heather. What’s Heather’s last name?”

  “Heather McRae. She goes to school at Alameda High. But Heather said she hadn’t seen Darcy since the weekend before last,” Elaine finished. “Then I checked my wallet and saw that my American Express card was gone. Her name’s Darcy Elaine, you see. She’s gotten damned good at forging my signature.” She scowled again. “I figured she’d pulled another stunt like New York.”

  “She’s done this before?” I raised an eyebrow. His daughter had run away, Dan Stefano had told me on the phone this morning. He hadn’t mentioned that this was a repeat performance.

  “Yeah,” Dan said. “She... ah... lifted her mom’s credit card last October and headed for the Big Apple. Bought a shit-load of stuff and went to a bunch of shows. I caught up with her four days later. At the Plaza, no less.”

  The lyrics and tune of “Autumn in New York” suddenly sauntered through my mind, as Darcy must have sauntered down Fifth Avenue, purloined credit card in hand. “How many other times has she run away? Before New York?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to get into this. What Dan had told me on the phone this morning sounded simple. It was getting more complicated as the Stefanos talked. Was Darcy a habitual runaway?

  “Well, there was Carmel,” Elaine said, even as Dan muttered something about last summer up at Lake Tahoe.

  Great... They couldn’t even get their stories straight.

  Dan assured me that Lake Tahoe was merely a misunderstanding about Darcy staying at someone’s summer cabin. But Carmel predated Lake Tahoe. That one happened over Memorial Day weekend, nearly a year ago, at the end of Darcy’s junior year at Alameda High School. Darcy helped herself to Mom’s Mercedes and tootled on down to Carmel with a carload of classmates, including the aforementioned Heather.

  It was this incident, I gathered, that led the Stefanos to discuss boarding school. Instead they transferred their errant daughter, and her paragon of a younger brother, from public to parochial school. I had the distinct feeling the Stefanos had hoped the nuns would wave a magic wand and make Darcy behave. She’d gone to New York instead.

  I held up my hand. “Let’s get back to the current incident. What did you do when you discovered the credit card was missing?”