Nobody's Child (The Jeri Howard Series Book 5) Read online

  Praise for Janet Dawson and her 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... for readers who demand not only a fine mystery and wonderfully realized characters but a story filled with social conscience and heart that resonates long after the final page.”

  —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

  By Janet Dawson

  KINDRED CRIMES

  TILL THE OLD MEN DIE

  TAKE A NUMBER

  DON’T TURN YOUR BACK ON THE OCEAN

  NOBODY’S CHILD

  NOBODY’S CHILD

  A Jeri Howard Mystery

  Janet Dawson

  This book contains an excerpt from the hardcover edition of A Credible Threat by Janet Dawson. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the hardcover edition.

  Copyright © 1995 by Janet Dawson

  Excerpt from A Credible Threat copyright © 1996 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 criticial articles or reviews.

  Cover design by Sue Trowbridge, interbridge.com

  ISBN 0-449-22356-6

  ISBN 978-0-9834031-4-2(ePub)

  First Hardcover Edition: October 1995

  First Mass Market Edition: October 1996

  To my friend and second reader, Fred Isaac, for believing in me all these years.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter Forty-four

  Chapter Forty-five

  Chapter Forty-six

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  MANY THANKS TO DR. ANN PETRU OF THE PEDIATRIC HIV/AIDS Program, Children’s Hospital Oakland, for her dedication to her kids and her willingness to provide me with information. I also wish to thank Leila Laurence Dobscha, Laurel Brody, Perry Marker, Bridget Massie, and Christina Weahunt. And Charles Dickens, whose commentary is as relevant today as it was 150 years ago.

  One

  “MIND IF I SMOKE?” MRS. SMITH ASKED.

  I did mind, but the woman who sat across from me appeared to be in desperate need of a cigarette. Without saying anything, I pulled open a desk drawer and took out a glass ashtray, setting it on the desk surface between us.

  She immediately went into that preparatory routine a lot of smokers have, only she wasn’t carrying a cellophane-wrapped pack of butts and a book of matches from some bar. She reached into her black leather clutch purse and pulled out a brushed gold cigarette case with a matching lighter, both engraved with a pair of initials I couldn’t quite make out. She flipped open the case, shook out a thin black cigarette, shut the case and whacked the end of the cigarette against it before flicking open the lighter. She fired up the cigarette and sucked in smoke as though her carmine lips were clamped around the mouthpiece of an oxygen tank. All of this took a few minutes, but it gave me the opportunity to examine her.

  Mrs. Smith—or so she called herself—looked as though she’d drawn the age line somewhere around fifty. She was skinny to the point of emaciation, her bony frame draped in a scarlet designer suit trimmed with black at the collar and cuffs, and fastened with a row of shiny jet buttons. It probably cost her the equivalent of a month’s rent, if not more, on my humble office here in downtown Oakland. Her skeletal fingers were weighted with jewelry, all of it gold with big chunky stones, one of them a bloodred ruby the size of my thumbnail. I couldn’t tell what color her hair was. It was concealed by a black turban decorated by a wicked-looking hat pin topped by another ruby. Under the expertly applied layer of expensive makeup, her narrow sharp-featured face was sallow and yielded no secrets. The eyes beneath the plucked brows were brown. Not warm brown, mind you, but a dark hard surface, like highly polished rock. The only passion I’d seen in those eyes had been quenched when she obtained her nicotine fix.

  “You’ve been here for nearly ten minutes,” I said, with a sidelong glance at my office clock. “Want to tell me what this is about?”

  She exhaled twin streams of smoke through her pinched, pointed nose and knocked some soot into the ashtray. “That body, up in the fire zone.”

  I straightened in my chair. Behind me rain rattled against the windowpane that provided the only source of natural light in my long narrow office. I sifted through my brain’s memory banks until something clicked into place. The local media hadn’t given it much play, but I recalled some details. The decomposing corpse of a young woman had been found several weeks ago, buried in the rain-softened soil next to the denuded concrete foundation of what had once been a house on Buena Vista Avenue, in that part of Oakland where the East Bay fire a few years back had consumed people and animals as well as houses and vegetation. A construction crew doing some work on the lot had found the body, which, as far as I knew, had not been identified.

  “What do you know about that body?”

  “I don’t know anything about it.” Her voice was as cold as her eyes. The turbaned head tilted slightly to one side. She sucked on her cigarette and recrossed her legs.

  “Then why did you come to see me, Mrs. Smith?” Impatience showed in my voice. “If that’s really your name.”

  “Want to see my driver’s license?” she snapped, her tone matched by the poisonous twist of her lips.

  She reached into her clutch bag, then tossed a brown eelskin wallet at my face. I caught the missile in midair and opened it, scanning the credit cards and the California driver’s license with the usual unflattering photo. Her name was Smith, all right, Mrs. Naomi C. Smith. She lived at an address in Piedmont, an upper-middle-class enclave completely surrounded by Oakland, where exp
ensive houses sat on winding hilly streets shaded by trees.

  I sighed. Despite my antipathy toward this woman, she had roused my curiosity.

  “What is it you want, Mrs. Smith?”

  “I want you to find out who that girl was.”

  “Why?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “I don’t work in a vacuum. Either you level with me or you find yourself another private investigator.”

  She took her time answering. When she spoke, her thin lips curved, more like a grimace than a smile.

  “I think it may be my daughter.”

  I sat back and stared at her. “Why are you here? You should be talking to the police. I can give you the names of the detectives handling the case.” As I knew from the account in the Oakland Tribune, they were my ex-husband, Sid Vernon, and his partner, Wayne Hobart.

  She looked as horrified as if I’d suggested she peddle crack in the Grand Lobby of the Paramount Theatre.

  “I don’t want the police. I want discretion.”

  The rain spattering against the window behind me increased in intensity as I looked across my desk, trying to read the woman’s face. What she wasn’t telling me spoke a lot louder than anything she’d said so far. Why didn’t I just send her out the door? She grated on me like fingernails screeching down a blackboard.

  Maybe it was the whole mother-and-daughter thing. I’m a veteran of that particular war myself. Maybe it was the thought of that unclaimed, unidentified, unmourned body lying in a refrigerated drawer over at the coroner’s office, with no one offering to bury it again, this time in a coffin, with some flowers and a few words said over it.

  I picked up my blue ceramic mug, took a sip of my coffee, and discovered that it had gone cold.

  “When was the last time you saw your daughter?”

  Two

  FOR SOMEONE WHO WAS WILLING TO HIRE A PRIVATE investigator to do what she could have done herself, Naomi Smith was remarkably stingy with information.

  Her daughter’s name was Maureen. If she was still alive, Maureen would be twenty-one years old on February 27. But Naomi Smith was convinced her daughter was dead. Why it had taken her more than a month to do anything about it was a subject for further investigation.

  The face in the photograph she gave me did resemble the face in the yellowed reprint of the police sketch Naomi had excised from the newspaper. The police artist had attempted to add some life to the ordinary-looking features. But the body the artist was working from had been lifeless for some time before its discovery. No amount of skill with a pencil would animate that countenance.

  The four-by-six-inch snapshot I held in my hand had been excised too. Roughly half of it had been whacked off with a pair of scissors. What remained showed a plain thin-faced girl with long straight brown hair and a tentative smile, image frozen in the netherworld between adolescence and adulthood. Her hazel eyes, circled by shadows, looked much older.

  “Who else was in the picture?” I asked.

  “Nothing that concerns you,” Naomi Smith snapped.

  Once again I considered showing her the door. I didn’t need a client that badly, particularly one this disagreeable. On the other hand, business had been slow the past six weeks, a fact brought home to me earlier this week when I’d written checks to cover the stack of usual monthly bills.

  Then my eyes went back to Maureen Smith’s face, staring into the camera as though she wasn’t sure she trusted it or the person who wielded it. She was seated in what looked like a kitchen chair. I saw a pale gold butcher-block counter behind her, its surface holding a set of white canisters. Maureen had metal hoops in her earlobes, visible between strands of lank hair that fell onto her shoulders. She wore blue jeans and a baggy navy-blue sweater, unraveled a bit at the neck and the end of one sleeve. Her right hand was folded neatly in her lap, as though she were holding a linen napkin at a tea party. Her other arm stretched to the left, hand invisible because it was in the section of the photograph that had been cut off.

  In the background I saw a calendar hanging on the kitchen wall. I held the snapshot closer and squinted.

  “March,” I said. “This was taken nine months ago. Do you have any more recent photos?”

  Naomi Smith shook her head and drew a black-and-white wallet-sized photo from her clutch bag. “That was all I brought. And this. Her senior picture.”

  I examined the face of a younger Maureen, one whose eyes were still the same age she was. “When did she graduate from high school?”

  “She didn’t. She ran away a few months after that was taken. In March, right after her eighteenth birthday.” Naomi Smith looked through me at the window, still smeared with rain. “Since then, the only time I saw her was when this picture was taken.”

  Naomi Smith insisted she didn’t know why her only child bailed out on what seemed to be a comfortable, well-ordered life, just three months before she was due to graduate from Piedmont High School. I didn’t believe my client but that was neither here nor there. If that body found up in the hills was indeed Maureen Smith, it was too late to help her now. The only thing I could do for Maureen was help her move from the coroner’s office to a more permanent resting place.

  Before Naomi Smith took her umbrella and Burberry out into the rain, I told her I’d need a copy of Maureen’s birth certificate. She should also contact the family dentist to obtain Maureen’s records for comparison. The girl had a driver’s license, so her thumbprint would be on file with the Department of Motor Vehicles. However, from what I’d read about the condition of the body when it was found, I didn’t think there had been any fingers to print.

  When my new client had signed all the necessary paperwork, including a substantial retainer check, she departed, leaving the stale odor of cigarette smoke. The rain that had been falling all morning had abated, so I opened the window at the back of the office, letting in a fresh chilly breeze that made me shiver. I dumped the cold dregs of my coffee into the dirt of my ivy plant, which seemed to thrive on regular doses of caffeine, and poured myself another cup. I kept a heavy sweater hanging on my coat tree to augment the building’s inadequate heat, and now I reached for it, slipping my arms into the cardigan’s thick warm sleeves.

  Would I ever shake this cold? The virus had cut me down in the week before Thanksgiving. I spent three days in bed, trying to get some rest as I drank fluids, gobbled over-the-counter medicines, and mopped my streaming nose with several boxes of tissues. My doctor’s nurse cheerfully advised that I could do little else and the symptoms were persistent this winter, hanging on four to six weeks. The doctor didn’t need to see me unless my temperature went over a hundred degrees. Which it never did.

  I felt like hell anyway and had improved only as far as heck. I spent my mandatory rest brooding, sleeping fitfully in my bed, with my large tabby cat Abigail at my feet, or wrapped in blankets on the sofa as I watched videotapes of old Fred Astaire movies. After three days of this, cabin fever drove me from my apartment back to the office, where things were slow. In addition to feeling tired and debilitated, I was swathed in a foul mood to match my physical discomfort.

  I switched on my computer and opened a file on the Smith case. When that was done, I bundled myself in my rain gear, locked my office, and set out on foot across downtown Oakland. The rain started again, moving quickly from drizzle to a pelting and windblown downpour. Those of us who live in drought-scarred Northern California spend our rainy winters telling ourselves, “Oh, well, we need the rain.” Today the damn stuff was making me grumpy.

  My malaise predated my cold. It began in late October, around the time of my birthday. Turning thirty-four was not the same sort of cultural or personal milestone as forty or fifty, but for some reason it bothered me a great deal. As the year spun itself to a conclusion, my depression continued, fed by everything from the perilous state of the world to my physical condition and this cold gray rain that had been falling for days. I had just turned the calendar page to December. Christmas decorati
ons had been up since Halloween. All around me people were anticipating the holidays, while I felt off-center and despairing and couldn’t figure out why.

  When I reached the police administration building on Seventh between Broadway and Washington, I took off my hat and shook drops in a three-foot radius, while my other hand scrabbled in my purse for a packet of tissues. Then I took the stairs up to the Criminal Investigation Division on the second floor, and down the hallway to Homicide. Desks, chairs, and bookcases crowded the room, and case files overflowed the available surfaces. Phones jangled constantly and I heard scraps of several conversations, including one rather heated exchange behind the closed door leading to an interview room.

  I didn’t see Wayne Hobart, but Sid was at his desk, a telephone receiver held to his ear, listening and taking notes. I took up a position at one corner and looked at my ex-husband. He was leaning back in his chair, so you couldn’t see how tall he was, just that he had a broad-shouldered, muscular torso. When he saw me, his golden cat’s eyes flickered and he raised his thick eyebrows in inquiry. A mustache rode the top of his sensual lips, now mobile as he spoke into the receiver. I saw some gray strands in his curly dark blond hair, more than he’d had when I met him. I had a feeling I’d put some of them there.

  It had been two years in October since we’d split up. Sometimes I wondered how the two of us had ever gotten together. Physical attraction had a lot to do with it. We were compatible in that regard, even if we weren’t in all the other factors that make up a marriage. I still thought he was a damned good-looking man. And sometimes, despite the acrimonious bickering that had colored our divorce, I still saw him looking at me the same way he did before it all went bad.

  Next to the phone I saw a five-by-seven-inch photo in a brightly painted wooden frame. It showed Sid’s daughter Vicki, from his first marriage. She was eighteen now, in her first year at the University of California in Berkeley. Her face was so alive and animated I couldn’t help contrasting it with the face in that police sketch that might be Maureen Smith.