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  That morning he’d spoken to Shelby, who’d been emailing him sporadically with the same question in the subject line and no text in the body.

  How goes the fight, Detective?

  Normal people would have asked how the investigation was going. Or if there was any progress. But how goes the fight? What was that?

  Madden didn’t want to have anything to do with Shelby’s one-line email messages. They made him queasy. Whenever he received one he got an urge to refund Shelby and walk away. The only problem was he’d already spent a good chunk of the initial payment. Five thousand went to Dupuy as a retainer fee, eight he’d put aside for taxes, and his wife got the rest. She was always asking him for money to send to her relatives in Nicaragua and was usually happy to get five hundred here or a thousand there. But a check for seven thousand! Wow! She couldn’t believe it. Her eyes welled up with tears. Actual tears. When he got the key to the city, she’d never showed that kind of emotion. But one fat check for her extended family and he was suddenly a hero.

  “No major breakthroughs,” he wrote Shelby back each time. “As agreed upon, will have a full report at the end of the month.”

  Dupuy had counseled him to be very careful about what he put in writing. Which is why he’d chosen to call Shelby that morning instead of email him. It didn’t take long for his new boss to approve funding the excavation—and even provide his own landscaper—but he wanted the cost of the project to come out of Madden’s reward money should they find Stacey. He wasn’t being petty, he explained, he just wanted Madden to think like a guy who was spending his own money, not someone else’s.

  “My client gave me a $25,000 cap,” Madden now told Hargrove. “I’m not saying he won’t go higher, but that’s the number he gave me.”

  “Got it,” Hargrove said, then picked up the office phone and dialed a number.

  “Wait,” Madden said, moving toward her, semi-panicked. “What are you going to say?”

  Marcus grabbed him by the arm, stopping him.

  “Chill,” he said. “Let her do her thing.”

  Hargrove held up a hand, indicating she wanted silence in the room.

  “Veronica,” she said. “Is this Veronica McCarthy?” A pause, then: “Hi, this is Kendra Hargrove from Hargrove Realty in Palo Alto. Sorry to bother you, but I have a little bit of a strange request from a client that I think will interest you. Regarding your property.”

  Another pause.

  “I’m glad you’ve heard of us,” she said after a moment. “And no, this isn’t a mistake, someone didn’t list your home on Airbnb. Hear me out if you don’t mind. I have a client who lived in your house way back when. Or he had a girlfriend who did. I don’t know the full story. But he apparently got the idea for his company while he was living there with a couple of other people. And somehow he got it into his head that instead of going on some fancy retreat, he wanted to take a few of his top executives and hang out there in his old house for the week and you know, kind of relive their youth, get inspired and all that stuff. I think he’s crazy, but he’s bent on doing this and is willing to pay well above market and put you up in a nice hotel for the week. We could do the Four Seasons or Rosewood. Or whatever you want.”

  They all sat there, staring, as she waited for a response.

  “Ideally in the next couple of weeks,” she went on. “He’s offering eight thousand for the week but I may be able to get him to go a little higher. And we could talk about some sweeteners. I think he’ll work with you to make this happen.”

  Hargrove glanced over at Madden and flashed a confident smile. She made some faces as Veronica spoke.

  “No, I’m sorry, I can’t give you his name. He doesn’t want this getting out. I mean, if this got out, social media would have a field day. I see the tweets now. ‘Wealthy tech entrepreneur goes back to his roots, slumming it in tiny $2 million Palo Alto home.’ In some ways it’s worse than him throwing one of these ridiculously lavish parties.”

  Another pause, this one longer.

  “Of course you need to speak to your husband about it. Just get back to me soon. I’ll be in the office ’til six today and you’re welcome to come by at any time, just let me know.”

  She said goodbye, hung up the phone, then stood up and assumed a self-satisfied victory pose, her hands on her hips. She was Wonder Woman in a different costume. Everybody except her husband was slightly awed.

  “Now we just have to wait for the husband to sign off,” she said. “But she seems on board, which means we’re ninety-eight percent of the way home. I tell you, if it were me, I’d take that deal in a heartbeat. Wouldn’t you?”

  11/ First Mover

  “I CAN’T DO THIS,” MORTON WHISPERED.

  “Sure you can,” Fremmer said. “You have to.”

  Morton had just gotten off the phone with Ronald and they were still standing in the waiting room of the police station. Now Morton was visibly upset.

  “I don’t think you understand something, Max,” he said, loosely covering his mouth with his right hand to muffle his voice. “I have two kids. I have an ex-wife. I have to pay child support. And if I don’t pay it, I become a deadbeat dad. I don’t want to become a deadbeat dad. So, you know what that means?”

  “I do,” Fremmer replied, also covering his mouth.

  They looked like a pitcher and catcher conversing on the mound, hiding their lip movements with their gloves, except they had no gloves, just hands.

  “That means I have to make money,” Morton said. “And in order to make money, I need clients who have money and are actually willing to pay me with money. The guy in there has no money and has no ability to pay me. And that is why he will get a fine public defender to defend him. I can’t afford to do pro-bono work. Is that clear?”

  “We’re going to do this,” Fremmer said. “Just hear me out.”

  “We? How did this become we?”

  “I’m going to help you. I may not be a practicing lawyer, but I passed the bar in New York and I’ve kept up the CLE requirements and paid my bar dues every year. I’m fully accredited.”

  “OK, now I get it,” Morton said. “This is really about you. You want to defend this guy. Well, you go right ahead.”

  “You know I can’t do that. But I can help. And I can get you money.”

  That got Morton’s attention.

  “How are you going to do that?” he asked.

  “I’ll get it. Trust me. This is going to be good for you.”

  “You have no idea what’s involved in a case like this, Max. The time. The cost. We’d have to hire expert witnesses to evaluate him. I’ve never done an insanity defense.”

  “So you’re going to spend your whole life doing divorces, DUIs, and defending assorted other petty criminals?”

  “You’re one to talk. If we’re talking barrel scrapings, I think you’re the low man on the board. You make a living gussying up people’s dreck and publishing it. I got news for you, it’s still dreck.”

  “I’m more partial to drivel,” Fremmer said. “But I like your use of ‘gussy up.’ It’s an underused verb slash preposition.”

  “I’m serious, Max. I don’t want to represent this guy.”

  “Yes, you do. I told you, he didn’t do it.”

  “Come on. Stop it.”

  “Just think about this for a minute. My client told me she knew something real bad about someone and she feared for her safety. I didn’t believe her at the time, but the fact is that’s what she told me. And then a couple weeks later she gets pushed in front of a car by a homeless guy. Really? Does that make sense to you?”

  “Coincidence,” Morton said. “Negative attitude. People bring bad things upon themselves.”

  Fremmer cocked his head a little to the left, made a face.

  “I’m telling you there’s something very strange going on here,” he went on. “You need to be a first mover on this. You need to get in there and help this guy. This is how you make a name for yourself. You get in fro
nt of the cameras, get some press. Yeah, I understand the concept of building a reputation gradually and with care. But you’re what, forty-five, forty-six—”

  “I just turned forty,” Morton said.

  “Well, you look like shit.”

  “I just went through a divorce.”

  “The client I met with a few hours ago did, too. And look at him. He wrote a novel. Just banged it out, the novel he’s always wanted to write. Now it’s your turn. This is your novel, Carlos. This is your game changer.”

  Morton pondered all that for a moment.

  “They’ll deny him bail,” he said, thinking aloud. “Probably take him downtown. The Tombs.”

  “Well, you gotta get in there now and introduce yourself. He needs to see a face. Even if it’s for a minute. I’ll wait for you outside. I’m going to sell some books.”

  “Sell some books?” Morton said, suddenly alarmed.

  “I gotta speak to the media. I’ve gotta let them know about Candace’s books and frame them correctly. It’s going to get out there eventually. We might as well own it.”

  “Do not do that, Max. As your counselor, I advise you not to speak to the press.”

  “I have to. Not for me. But for her kid. She’s gonna need the money.”

  “That’s a really bad idea. Now’s the time to protect their privacy.”

  Just then a police official dressed in plainclothes, a community affairs officer, approached them. They were clearing the waiting room.

  “Sir, I need you to leave,” he said to Morton.

  “I can’t leave,” Morton declared. “You’re holding my client.”

  “Who’s your client?” the officer asked.

  “The guy everybody’s outside for. Ronald Darby. I need to speak with him now. He’s entitled to see his attorney.”

  “I thought you were his attorney,” he said, motioning to Fremmer.

  “I was. Now I’m Mr. Darby’s. I spoke to him on the phone a few minutes ago. Go ask him. Morton’s my name. Carlos Morton.”

  The officer clearly wasn’t sold on Morton’s story, but he also wasn’t ready to dismiss it. In the end, he settled for removing just Fremmer, who gathered up his scooter and backpack and headed for the exit.

  “Don’t do it, Max,” Morton said as he left.

  “Thanks again for coming,” Fremmer replied without looking back. “Despite what your ex-wife said in that deposition, you’re a good man. Text me after you get out.”

  PART 2

  12/ Lennon’s Least Favorite Beatles Song

  ONE NIGHT MADDEN HAD A DREAM THAT HE WAS IN THE BACKYARD of Bronsky’s former home looking back at Hal Shelby standing on the deck behind him.

  “Here?” Madden asked him.

  “Is that what the map’s telling you?” Shelby said.

  Madden didn’t realize he had a map. But there it was, in his hand. It looked like a pirate’s map, the kind his grandfather drew up for him on his birthday when he was a little kid. His grandfather used to create elaborate treasure hunts that took several hours to set up. The treasure never amounted to much more than a small stack of silver dollars, which at the time seemed like a fortune to Madden.

  He looked at the map, then at a spot in the plant bed in front of him. It looked right, so he started to dig.

  The shovel went into the ground much easier than he thought it would, considering the drought. The earth was moist, dark and rich. An earthworm wriggled in the soil on his shovel. Madden dumped each shovelful onto the pile next to the deepening hole.

  Then he hit something. Not a rock. But it was hard, maybe something wooden. A miniature treasure chest?

  He probed around the object until first one corner was exposed, then the whole top. It was the chest. Had to be. He dug around it a little more, then dropped the shovel and got down on one knee to extract it. But when he went to lift it he noticed a hand was grasping it. Not a skeleton hand, a real hand, fleshy and undecayed. Was it alive? It seemed alive. Madden picked up the shovel and dug as fast as he could.

  The hand became a full arm and then a shoulder and a flash of hair. Long golden hair mixed with dirt. He dropped to his knees again, cleared dirt away from the face, a female face, with his hands. But she wasn’t Stacey Walker. No, the face was younger, that of a girl, and he realized she was Kristen Kroiter, the seventeen-year-old whose suicide he’d once investigated as a murder.

  “Is it her?” Shelby called out.

  He stared at Kristen’s unblemished, serene face. “No,” he said, dumbfounded. “It’s someone else.”

  “Someone else?” Shelby said. “That’s not in the contract. Who is it?”

  “Kristen,” Madden said. And as soon as he said her name, her eyes opened. Then he woke up.

  A week later he found himself on the deck in the backyard of Bronsky’s former home sitting at an umbrellaed table a few feet from where Shelby had been standing in the dream. Madden was watching a ground-radar technician push around a contraption that looked like a modified baby stroller.

  The technician, a guy in his late twenties with a full beard, was wearing a pair of headphones and listening to music. He nudged the machine forward a few feet at a time then stopped to look at a monochrome screen that showed subtle variations or “disturbances” in the ground. There was nothing detailed about the images—they looked more like a series of disconnected, compressed lines—and the technician had warned him that while the technology was improving, it wouldn’t show the outline of bones or specific shapes of objects.

  On the table in front of Madden was a platter of lox and bagels and another with fruit on skewers. Dupuy had decided to cater their little expedition, make it a brunch-slash-dig, and was in the kitchen filling an ice bucket to hold the bottles of sparkling wine and fresh-squeezed orange juice she’d picked up at Draeger’s in Menlo Park. She was making mimosas to celebrate the completion of breastfeeding her daughter, who was asleep in a baby carriage parked near the table.

  Reaching for a fruit skewer, Madden heard a muffled scream from inside the house. He jumped up from his seat, knocked his leg against the underside of the table and nearly fell over. After regaining his balance he limped over to the open sliding glass door, pushed aside the sheer curtain, and entered the small living room, where, near the entrance to the kitchen, he saw Dupuy standing face-to-face with an intruder, a tall, sleepy-eyed, forty-something male wearing cutoff jeans, flip flops, and a navy blue T-shirt with the slogan “Where is your wall?” Instinctively, Madden reached across his chest to grasp the gun he quickly realized wasn’t there.

  “Hey,” the intruder said cheerfully, “you guys are here early. What’s that machine out there? It’s like a grave finder machine, isn’t it? It can see underground?”

  “Who are you?” Madden asked.

  “J.J.”

  “Do you live here, J.J?”

  “Temporarily.”

  “Temporarily?”

  “I’m here for the week,” he explained. “Hal Shelby set me up. And from your reaction, I’m guessing he didn’t tell you.”

  “You scared the shit out of me,” Dupuy said. “No one’s supposed to be here.”

  “What exactly are you doing here?” Madden asked, annoyed.

  “Just chillin’. Clearing the mind. Getting back to my roots. It was Hal’s idea. Get the creative juices flowing. I grew up in the area, in a house like this. Gunn High. Class of ’85.”

  “You an entrepreneur?” Dupuy asked.

  “No, musician.”

  It was if he’d uttered some magical word, for suddenly her eyes lit up, her jaw dropped a little.

  “You’re J.J. Carradine, aren’t you?” she said.

  The name didn’t ring any bells for Madden. The only Carradine he knew was David, who played the Shaolin monk cum martial-arts expert Caine on Kung Fu, a TV show he’d watched religiously during his twenties.

  “That’s what they keep telling me,” J.J. said.

  “This guy’s a rock star, Hank,” Dupuy said.
“Literally, a rock star.”

  Well, more of a has-been rock star, Madden soon learned. Which was why he was holed up in a small cottage in one of the more modest sections of Palo Alto, looking for inspiration. It wasn’t for lack of money. He had plenty of that. Too much, in fact. In the ’90s, his band, for which he was the focal and spiritual leader, had a string of hits and sold out Madison Square Garden in their last tour. Then nothing. They couldn’t get their next album out.

  J.J. took full blame for their demise. “I just started hating everything I was writing,” he explained to Madden. “Everything seemed trite, shallow. And then I just got in a bad mood with everybody always asking where the new album was. Every person I met was like, ‘Hey, love you guys, where’s the new album?’ And I’d be like ‘Dude, it’s coming.’ And it just got oppressive. I felt fat, man,” he said patting his flat stomach. “I felt like I was carrying around all this extra weight even though I was a stick. I wasn’t eating.”

  He was still a stick. A good-looking one, too. Clean cut, he had a strange hairdo. His hair was cut very short on the sides but longer on top, with a stunted ponytail flaring out of the back of his head, cinched off with a hair tie. He looked more frat boy than rock star, with only a couple of small tattoos visible—a tiny bird on his left forearm and da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man across his right shin; it was almost the size of a soccer shin pad.

  J.J. said his band, now comprised of only two original members, didn’t play stadiums anymore. They mainly played corporate gigs for a couple hundred thousand bucks a pop, sometimes more. Which was how he knew Shelby.

  “Thank God for the tech boom,” he went on. “All these overcompensated geeks are suddenly nostalgic for their youth. Fine by me. The way I look at it I’m in a cover band for my own music. That’s all the Stones are, a cover band of The Stones. Hey, is that food out there? If you don’t mind, I’m starving. I fasted yesterday.”