Lucidity Page 6

  The prophet stared at him blankly. It took him a few seconds to absorb what Fremmer had said, but he did seem to absorb it, for all of a sudden he seemed quite distraught.

  “I didn’t push her,” he said. “They just want to put me away again. They always have. It’s OK, though. You know why it’s OK?”

  Fremmer didn’t know.

  “Because we’re all best when we are challenged. Look at disabled people. They are bound and determined to face their challenge. It’s part of the human instinct. When you face a challenge, you face something you really don’t like. You get points for trying. We all get points for trying.”

  “What’s your name?” Fremmer asked.

  “Ronald.”

  “Ronald, you sure you didn’t do this? Because if it was an accident, if you did something by accident, you need to tell them. They will give you some points for that.”

  “If there was an accident, I would have said there was an accident. I did that once. I saw an accident. I gave a statement. I’m an incredible witness.”

  “Credible,” Fremmer corrected him.

  “Yeah, that, too,” Ronald said.

  8/ She Doesn’t Come Cheap

  “THE TRUTH IS THAT AT THE TIME IT HAPPENED I DOWNPLAYED OUR relationship a little. I was worried people would view her in a bad light, that she was this, you know, adulterous ho and she had it coming to her. Because that’s how people think. I told you guys we hooked up a few times. But it was more than a few. It was probably like once a week for six months. You do the math on that.”

  Sitting across from Madden was Vladimir Bronsky, Stacey Walker’s former lover. Bronsky resembled the man Pastorini questioned at the old Menlo Park police station twenty years ago. Only he seemed far removed from his younger, more strapping self. The long dark hair he once wore in a ponytail was now gray and replaced by a crew cut that helped to camouflage a bald spot on the crown of his head. The shorter hair brought out his features more, and his prominent nose and high cheekbones were more pronounced than Madden remembered them. And while he remained slim, he looked unhealthy. Madden had never seen him smoke, but he looked like a guy who had a pack-a-day smoking habit.

  “I guess it worked because you guys did a good job keeping it out of the papers,” Bronsky went on. “It just kind of got slipped into the press that she even had a lover. And it was framed in a good way. It said that detectives had confirmed with a former boyfriend that Stacey was planning on leaving her husband and that she’d set up a secret bank account with some money so she’d have something to live on when she left. But that bank account was never touched after she disappeared. And her credit cards never used.”

  Madden remembered the article. It was in The Almanac, a small weekly newspaper, which had done the most in-depth piece on Stacey’s disappearance. Not the Chronicle. Not the Mercury. The Almanac. And he also remembered they’d kept a lid on the boyfriend angle for the very reasons Bronsky cited: They didn’t want the public to develop an unsympathetic view of Stacey.

  “It sounds like you regret downplaying your relationship,” Madden remarked.

  “Look, I was a suspect,” Bronsky said. “I knew you guys were pretty sure the husband had done it, but you couldn’t overlook the other possibilities. And that woman from the DA’s office went all pitbull on me.”

  Pitbull, huh. Madden smiled. He had a little surprise for Bronsky.

  “But you had nothing to hide,” he said.

  “Subconsciously, I guess I was trying to protect her.”

  Madden nodded. He looked down at his phone to make sure it was recording. They were seated at one of the umbrella-covered outdoor tables in front of the Starbucks in Sharon Heights Shopping Center, one of Madden’s favorite spots for coffee in the morning. The shopping center was just off Sand Hill Road, which served as one of the main outlets to the 280 freeway but was better known as a roosting spot for major venture capital firms. Their arrival decades earlier had changed the tenor of the area and Rosewood had built a high-end, pretentiously casual hotel with Napa Valley overtones on sixteen acres by the freeway. It catered to high-tech professionals and executives from around the world as well as the wealthy parents of Stanford students—or aspiring Stanford students, most of whom would never get in.

  In contrast, Sharon Heights Shopping Center was decidedly more low-key and lower-rent, harking back to more middle-class days, which suited Madden just fine. A series of mostly simple one-story structures with flat, shingled roofs, it was anchored by a Safeway grocery store and hadn’t changed much in the fifty years since it opened. Its name and the neighborhood’s had been inherited from the former estate of Frederick Sharon, the son of Senator William Sharon, who, in the 1880s, was the largest single taxpayer in the state of California and had his own 55,000-square-foot estate up the road in Belmont when Menlo Park had only 250 residents.

  Not that anybody cared about history, Madden thought. Or history pre-dating the founding of Hewlett-Packard in a garage on 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto in the late 1930s. That they cared about. That was sacred ground. The place where time began. The birthplace of Silicon Valley.

  “What about the book?” he asked Bronsky.

  “What about it?”

  “I didn’t see you say anywhere in there that you downplayed the relationship. As far as I could tell, you told Marcus the exact same thing you told us. You stuck to your story.”

  Bronsky gave a little shrug of his shoulders and Madden watched as a smile crept across his face. “Why shouldn’t I? I mean, I didn’t want to talk to the guy in the first place. I trust a writer less than I trust the police, especially an amateur like him. I didn’t know what he was going to do with what I said. It’s not like The New York Times is coming to talk to you, where they have fact checkers and all that. He was this guy who knew Stacey a little in high school then served her drinks for a few months and suddenly decided he wanted to write a book. He didn’t even have a contract.”

  “But he was on a personal mission to solve a mystery.”

  “It wasn’t a mystery to me. After all, she told me her husband threatened to kill her if she left him. He said he was going to kill her and bury her where no one would find her.”

  “But that’s hearsay.”

  Madden may have been thinking the same thing, but he wasn’t the one who said it. Rather, the objection came from Carolyn Dupuy, who was standing behind him with a Baby Bjorn strapped to her chest, a small head covered in dark peach fuzz peeking out from the top of it. She’d just emerged from the parking lot right in front of the Starbucks.

  “Mr. Bronsky,” Madden said, standing up. “Ms. Dupuy. You two know each other, I believe.”

  Bronsky stared at her, not knowing quite what to say. They were both in their early forties, but she looked younger than he did. With her olive skin and dark straight hair and brown eyes, she always came across as mildly exotic. However, depending on how much make-up she wore and her clothing selection, she was capable of raising and lowering the volume of exoticism. Today, it was more muted. She was dressed casually in jeans and a light blue blouse, with a short strand of white pearls around her neck. Despite the simplicity of her outfit, she wasn’t a woman who just threw stuff on. She worked at looking good. She had a regime. She exercised. She didn’t eat red meat. And despite the crow’s feet and half-moons around and under her eyes, she was in such good shape that if she didn’t have the kid strapped to her chest, Madden would’ve never guessed she was a new mom.

  “Hello, Vlad,” Dupuy said. “Thanks for meeting with us today.”

  “You’re the bitch from the DA’s office,” Bronsky said.

  “Well, I’m in private practice now, but yes, I’m still a bitch. And maybe bitch squared, if you count this little screaming terror attached to me. Man, she can cry when she’s hungry.”

  Madden pulled out the empty chair next to him so she could sit down more easily.

  “Ms. Dupuy’s working with me on this,” Madden explained. “She actually kn
ows more about the case than I do, so I thought I should bring her on while she’s still on maternity leave.”

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said. “Please, go on. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  “We were just talking about the Marcus book and how Mr. Bronsky came across in it,” Madden recapped.

  “I came across better than she did,” Bronsky said.

  “Well, that wasn’t a high bar to get over,” Dupuy replied. “Everything he got about me was filtered through people who had an ax to grind or didn’t like me, which doesn’t leave much room for a positive assessment. Even you had some choice words for me, Vlad.”

  “You said horrible things to me. You called me devious and a liar.”

  “I made you cry, Vlad.”

  “Yeah, you made me cry.”

  “And I’m sorry about that,” Dupuy said. “I was young and insecure and perhaps a touch overzealous. But on a more positive note, we didn’t charge you with anything and we publicly announced that we didn’t find anything to implicate you in Stacey’s disappearance.”

  “Couldn’t,” Bronsky shot back angrily. “You should have said didn’t. But you said you couldn’t find anything to implicate me. There’s a big difference. You purposely left a little room for doubt. And that’s part of the reason I spoke to Marcus. Because if I hadn’t, he would have cast suspicions on me for not talking. If you don’t fill the void, someone else will.”

  “So true,” Dupuy said. Then to Madden in a quieter voice: “Behind you at three o’clock. Slow turn. That the car you were talking about?”

  Madden waited a moment, then peeked over his right shoulder. The Audi sedan he’d seen the other day was parked over by the liquor store adjacent to Safeway.

  “Think so,” Madden said. “Same color anyway.”

  “I took a picture of the plate,” she said.

  “Woah,” Bronsky said, suddenly alarmed. “What’s going on?”

  “Someone’s following me,” Madden said. “Or at least we think so.”

  “Who?” Bronsky asked.

  “Probably my client. He likes to keep tabs even though he says he’s hands-off.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Can’t say,” Madden said.

  “Would I know him?”

  “You might. You might not.”

  “He must be paying you well,” Bronsky said.

  “Why do you say that?” Madden asked.

  “Because she doesn’t come cheap,” he said, motioning toward Dupuy. “I know what lawyers cost. They sucked me dry in my divorce.”

  “Maybe she’s working pro-bono.”

  Bronsky laughed. “Her? No way. She’s in it for the dough. You are, too, Detective. What’s this guy paying you?”

  “Why do you care?” Dupuy asked. Maybe it was the shift to a more aggressive tone or that she leaned forward a little when she spoke, but the baby stirred, making a sound that was part cry, part cough. She looked down and stroked the baby’s head for a moment, comforting her, then went back at Bronsky. “What do you want, Vlad? You want to know what’s in it for you?”

  “Back in the day there was a $75,000 reward for information that would help lead the police to finding Stacey,” Bronsky replied coolly.

  “What’s it up to now?”

  Dupuy glanced over at Madden, their eyes locking for a moment.

  “Do you have information, Mr. Bronsky?” Madden asked.

  Bronsky looked down at the half-eaten blueberry muffin on his plate. He stared at it a moment, then broke a small piece off and tossed it in the direction of a couple of small blackbirds that had been patrolling the area, noisily scavenging for crumbs.

  “That recorder still on?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Madden said.

  “Turn it off for a minute.”

  Madden heeded his request.

  “Look,” Bronsky said. “I’ve been doing OK lately. It’s been good. I’ve had a lot of ups and downs. People think everybody here with an engineering degree from Stanford is raking it in. Well, that’s not the case.”

  Madden was about to say something, but then he felt Dupuy’s hand on his leg. She gave it a little squeeze, signaling him not to interrupt.

  Bronsky looked down at his muffin again, picked another piece off, and threw it at the birds, only harder this time.

  “You make a couple of bad decisions,” he went on, “you go for the equity and get with a company you think has potential but turns out is run by a bunch of idiots who thought they were smarter than they really were, and things can go south. Fast. There’s a lot of mediocrity in this valley. It’s a goddamn mecca of mediocrity. And it’s easy to become part of it. Easier than you think. And frankly the whole Stacey thing set me back. I needed to be at the top of my game and I wasn’t. I drank. I did drugs. And I fucked some things up, including my marriage.”

  “But you’re doing OK now,” Madden said.

  “Yeah. I’m doing well now and I don’t want to screw that up. I’ve got my own business. I’ve got a good relationship with my kids. My ex talks to me like a human being again. I can’t afford to be accused of something I didn’t do. You understand? I can’t afford to hire a lawyer.”

  “We’re not accusing you of anything,” Madden offered.

  “I want her to be found as much as anybody,” he said. “That’s why I came today.”

  “But you want to be compensated in some way if you tell us something that helps her to be found,” Dupuy guessed.

  “I was thinking something along those lines,” he said. “Until you showed up.”

  Dupuy pointed at her own face. “Me?”

  “Yeah. I may have something. It also may be nothing. But if it is something, it’s going to be a problem for me. I’m going to need a lawyer. I was thinking I could use the reward, if there still is one, to help pay for that. But now that you showed up, I’m thinking why not eliminate the uncertainty. I should just take you. Right now.”

  Dupuy recoiled a little.

  “As my attorney,” Bronsky clarified. “Pro-bono.”

  “Oh,” Dupuy said. “I get it.”

  Madden smiled. It always amused him how people could go from making derogatory comments about Dupuy to wanting her to represent them. They didn’t like a pitbull attacking them. But protection was another story.

  Bronsky had other demands. “I want full service. Real representation. And before I say anything, I want it in writing. So you guys go ahead and talk it over and get back to me—”

  “No, it’s OK,” she said, cutting him off. “I’ll do it. I’ll draw something up right now. Let me get my legal pad out of the car.”

  And she did. Within twenty minutes they had an agreement in place that seemed satisfactory. Then, at Bronsky’s request, all three of them turned their phones into voice recorders and Dupuy read the agreement aloud to get it “on record.”

  When she finished it was Bronsky’s turn to talk.

  “I don’t know if you know this,” he began, “but on the two-year anniversary of Stacey going missing I got a call from Ross. I told the police about it. And they got the F.B.I. involved. They traced the call and found it came from a payphone in Washington State.”

  “What’d he say?” Madden asked.

  “He just said, ‘Hey, you know who this is? Well, I know what you did to my wife, you loser. And someday they’re going to find out. They’re going to find out and you’re going to San Quentin.’ And that was it. He hung up.”

  “And you were sure it was Ross?”

  “I never met the guy. But I saw him interviewed on TV. And it sounded like him.”

  “And that’s the only time you heard from him?” Dupuy asked.

  “The only time I told the police about,” he said.

  They waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. Instead, he looked away, in the direction of the Safeway, and ran his palm across his forehead up along the top of his scalp, as if he was pulling his hair back—as if he had hair to pull back.

  He
took a deep breath, then said: “About two years later I got another call. Sounded like the same guy. He said the same thing. ‘You know who this is?’ And then he said something again about knowing what I did to his wife and that I was going to pay for it. But then I realized he wasn’t talking about me killing her, he was talking about me having sex with her, because he then said something about where he’d buried her. He said, ‘They all think I buried her on my own property, but why would I do that? Wouldn’t it be a whole lot smarter to bury her on the real killer’s property?’”

  “The real killer,” Madden said. “Meaning you?”

  “Meaning my property. He said, and I’ll never forget this. He said, ‘Why don’t you look in your own backyard, lover?’ And then he started laughing and hung up.”

  Both Madden and Dupuy sat there speechless for a moment. Finally, Madden said, “And you’ve never told this to anybody before?”

  “No.”

  “And he never called back?” Dupuy asked.

  Bronsky shook his head. “That was it. And then about a year after that the book came out. And there was the whole thing about finding his arm and the passport in Vietnam. And I was just hoping he was dead.”

  “So when you didn’t hear anything, you assumed he was.”

  “I didn’t assume anything. The truth is whenever I see a Caller ID number I don’t recognize, a little part of me thinks it’s going to be him.”

  “Did you do what he said?” Dupuy asked. “Did you look for her?”

  Bronsky smiled. “I thought about it. I went onto my little patio and smoked a joint and tried, you know, to get my Zen powers going. I got it in my mind that she was there, in this one spot in the corner of the yard by the fence.”

  “Did you dig there?” Madden asked.

  “No. I did what I thought was the best thing for my sanity.”

  “What was that?” Dupuy asked.

  “I moved the hell out.”

  9/ Best I Can Do

  THEY MUST HAVE BEEN WATCHING OR LISTENING BECAUSE NOT LONG after Ronald told Fremmer his name and Fremmer gave Ronald his business card, Detective Gray came back and informed Fremmer he’d be leaving soon, they were just finishing up the paperwork and he’d be free to go. He sounded almost apologetic.