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“Hold it still,” I said, drilling in on the phone.
Was the face pictured on the screen really my father? The more I stared at the image on Richie’s phone, the more the dead man’s features, captured in profile, came together.
It was impossible, but…
I looked up.
Conklin said, “See this? It was right behind the license.”
He showed me a torn scrap of paper. Numbers had been written between the fold lines. The paper shifted in the breeze but I could read the handwriting. It was a phone number, mine, from my landline in the Potrero Hill house before I married and moved to Lake Street with Joe. I looked back at the just-snapped image of the dead man’s face.
My knees buckled. Richie caught me before I dropped and called out to a uni standing beside his marked car a few yards away.
“Thompstett. Open your back door for me, now.”
Officer Thompstett opened the car’s rear door and Rich led me to the seat. Instead of sitting, I steadied myself against the door frame. I took a few deep breaths and looked into Richie’s eyes.
I said, “I want to see him.”
“You sure?”
I nodded and my partner stepped back and got a bead on the crowd. He guided me past the edge of the cordon, ordering people to make way until I was through the break in the fencing, standing next to Claire, both of us staring down at the lifeless body lying face-up on the street.
CHAPTER 5
MY FATHER TOOK off when I was thirteen and my sister, Cat, was seven. He left a note for Mom and booked, leaving his job and family behind, not even reappearing when my mom was dying of breast cancer a decade later. We weren’t shocked. Cancer was too heavy for Marty.
Marty was small comfort when he was around, and later, I’d decided that he was some sort of sociopath. I’d turned my back on him. He came to my mother’s funeral, but never stood up to speak a word for his wife of twenty years. He attended the ceremony the day I was sworn in as a cop, but we didn’t speak. Not too long before I met Joe, Marty had slid back into my life, full of regrets and promises that he wanted to make up for lost time—but then ran off to Mexico when his past started catching up to him and had barely been in touch since. He promised Cat he’d walk me down the aisle at my wedding, then ghosted me.
Later, my old boss, Warren Jacobi, told me that Marty hadn’t abandoned me—he’d died of a heart attack months earlier. Jacobi had gotten the news through some kind of administrative notification regarding my father’s police pension.
There was no body, no funeral, no nothing.
Now I stood looking down at the homicide victim on Harriet Street, confronted by yet another reality.
This was unquestionably my father.
Marty looked smaller in death than I remembered him, the vehicles flanking his body like the steep sides of an open grave. Police cleared onlookers from the scene as CSI moved in, set up lights to take pictures of my dead father where he’d been dropped. After a moment, I too was shooed off so CSI could work. After telling Rich that I was okay, I headed to the medical examiner’s office a block away.
I opened the door to the waiting room and took a seat at the end of an attached row of blue plastic chairs. “I’m waiting for Dr. Washburn,” I said to the receptionist.
“She’s out of the office. Do you want to wait?”
Realizing Claire must still be at the scene, I said yes and stretched out my legs, leaned back, and stared at the ceiling. Alone, under that plain white surface, I saw images of my father, mother, sister, and me.
My father had once also been a homicide cop. When I was young, he’d take me to cop bars, hoist me onto a barstool, buy me a Coke—and forget I was there. I heard many stories from my perch: of the ponies that brought in the money, of bars Marty “protected,” of bets made while a cuffed perp was in the back seat. I saw my father take rolls of cash from his trouser pocket and heard jokes that the dough came from crime scenes, from the pockets of the dead. I knew he was dirty before I knew what dirty was.
I had to wonder—had he faked his death years ago, or had Jacobi passed along bad information? What I knew for sure was that I hadn’t heard a word from or about him since before he missed my wedding… until about two months ago.
That day, two months ago, a group of my coworkers and I had gotten together for lunch at MacBain’s, the bar and grill a block from the Hall of Justice. After gorging on burgers and fries, we’d split the check and headed toward the exit. We were passing the bar that was banked with standing-room-only customers when I heard the name “Marty Boxer,” or thought I did. But who’d spoken it? And why here?
I’d looked around but saw only the backs of HOJ workers laughing and drinking beer. Our group was swept out the door along with an exiting crowd, but once outside, I’d looked back into the bar through the front windows. I didn’t see my dirty dog of a father, but I glimpsed a man in the crowd with big hair and a prominent nose, who looked a little like Bruce “Goose” Cavanaugh. Goose was a private investigator and reputed to be a high-level but unindicted contract killer.
Had I really seen the Goose at MacBain’s? Had he been the one who mentioned Marty Boxer’s name? He’d had a well-known dislike for my father, dating back to a number of clashes between them when Marty was on the force.
As a homicide cop, I’d caught more than one case where Goose Cavanaugh had been the number one suspect. He’d slipped the noose. Last I heard, Cavanaugh lived in Reno, Nevada.
My phone rang. Richie.
