The Baker Street Letters Read online

  Sanger turned around now and saw Reggie.

  “You again? How’d you get in here?” Sanger shouted toward the security guard at the gate. “Walker! Over here!”

  “Don’t blame her,” said Reggie. “I snuck around. It’s important. I couldn’t take a chance on not seeing you personally.”

  “Tell it to security. Right now I’m due in the pit.”

  Sanger stepped onto a five-by-three metal platform that served as the lift into the multistory excavation. Reggie followed.

  “You need to see this,” he said.

  “Don’t have the time. And if you’re still straddling the platform that way after I push the button, the half of you that stays up here can wave good-bye to the half of you that drops.”

  Reggie pushed the sheets of the survey map at Sanger.

  “What the hell—,” said Sanger.

  “Look at it,” said Reggie.

  Sanger looked at it.

  Reggie watched his eyes shift from the location label at the top to the data on the center of the page—and then to the date stamp at the bottom. Sanger stared at that.

  A faintly quizzical expression turned to an overtly angry one. Then he turned the sheet over and looked at the back; and then at the data tables on the front again. His face turned redder than it already was from the sun.

  “Shit!” said Sanger, and in what was apparently a reflex action, he slammed his fist into the platform button control behind him.

  The platform motor whirred.

  Sanger, as tall as Reggie and forty pounds heavier, suddenly grabbed Reggie by the collar and in one quick motion pulled him fully onto the platform just as it began to drop.

  With Reggie secure on the platform, Sanger immediately let go. But then he hit the lift button again, and the platform stopped.

  He glared at Reggie. “It won’t work,” he said. “You won’t get a dime out of me.”

  “I don’t want your dime.”

  “Let me tell you something. Every square inch of this route was sampled and mapped by the best firm in the county. There’s less methane in that tunnel than in your gut.”

  “This map says otherwise.”

  “I don’t care what your map says.”

  “I hear one of your men died in a fire here a month or so ago. Do you care what killed him?”

  “I know what killed him. He ignored the rules and lit up next to the plastic liners. Just like those winos at the downtown site. And the plastic liners here ignited the acetylene tanks, and that’s how you got the explosion. The investigation showed that.”

  “Investigations can be wrong. Especially when there are vested interests. You can ignore this, but we both know what the map shows. It shows you tunneling with perfect precision into a disaster.”

  Reggie hit the button to start the lift upward. “You need to stop drilling, take new samples, and prove it one way or the other,” he said.

  “Right. I’m going to stop drilling at a penalty of two million bucks a day. On your word.”

  “Before, you could have claimed ignorance. Now, you can’t; you’ve been warned. You have to exercise due diligence and check it out.”

  “Geez. What are you, some kind of lawyer?”

  “Some kind.”

  The platform reached level ground at the top of the pit.

  “Figures,” said Sanger. “Well, listen up. I’ve got lawyers of my own to throw at you, and everyone like you—so a bullshit nuisance suit doesn’t scare me one damn bit.”

  Sanger thrust the map back into Reggie’s hands. Then he turned and shouted across to the security gate.

  “Walker, get this shyster off my site. And make sure he doesn’t hurt himself in the process. You know what will happen if he does.”

  As he rode back to the Bonaventure, Reggie checked for messages from Nigel. But there was nothing. Not on his mobile, not at the Bonaventure, and not at the office. Not a word from him.

  Reggie called the jail and learned that Nigel’s bail from the night before had been posted—in cash—by the law firm of O’Malley and Associates.

  “You’re telling me someone sent a lawyer with one million in cash to post my brother’s bail?”

  “If you want to put it that way,” she said. “That’s what it says.”

  Reggie got out of the taxi at the Bonaventure. On his way through the lobby, he called O’Malley and Associates and used his barrister’s credentials to talk his way through to the senior partner. He demanded the name of the client responsible for Nigel’s bail.

  O’Malley pushed back with a lecture about attorney-client confidentiality, told Reggie nothing, and then hung up the phone.

  But that was to be expected. Reggie got in the lift and, despite the hour in London, rang Ms. Brinks at her home. She didn’t pick up, but he left a message for her to find out everything she could about the O’Malley and Associates client list. Confidentiality notwithstanding, many law firms liked to brag about their biggest names in advertisements and, especially, on Internet sites. Something about the novelty of the Web—or perhaps the implicit sense that it was in fact no more real than television—seemed to get their guard down. Reggie guessed an L.A. law firm should not be an exception.

  And at the last moment, he added that she should do a search on Lord Robert Buxton while she was at it.

  Now, finally, Reggie was back in his room. He checked his hotel phone again. There was one message, a short one from Wembley, asking that Reggie call him back.

  Reggie decided to ignore that.

  He rang Laura. He got an answering machine.

  Some days you just can’t reach anybody. Reggie hated days like that. He called room service. Thank God, they, at least, answered; he was hungry. He ordered prime rib and mashed potatoes.

  Then the phone rang as soon as he put it down.

  It might be Laura; he picked up.

  It was Wembley.

  “I have some news,” said Wembley.

  “You’re working late, Wembley. Not on my account, I hope.”

  “Common sentiment,” said Wembley, “among the people I investigate. But I have some good news, and I wanted to tell you directly. Forensics is back on the blow that killed Ocher. They think your brother is not a good fit for that.”

  “Glad you’re coming around,” Reggie said.

  “From the relatively upward angle, and the position we think the perpetrator had to be standing, we think it was most likely a woman.”

  Reggie waited. “Is that all?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you for the call.”

  “Before you go—I’ve been trying to reach Miss Rankin.”

  Reggie hesitated. “Because . . . ?”

  “I’d guess her to be about five seven, correct?”

  “About. Why?”

  “That would be the right height,” said Wembley, who then paused, apparently to let it sink in.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Reggie said after it did.

  “The forensics—”

  “Screw the forensics. How do you know it wasn’t just a short man, or even a taller one crouching a bit to throw you off?”

  “So you’re saying your brother could have done it after all?”

  “Of course not. But—”

  “In any case, no one would have the foresight to perform such a ruse, especially in a crime of passion.”

  “Passion?” Reggie said incredulously. “Ocher and Laura?”

  “Not that kind of passion. Her motive was anger at Ocher, on behalf of Nigel, because of the way she knew Ocher treated him.”

  “That’s absurd,” said Reggie.

  “So she didn’t hate him for that?”

  Reggie hesitated. True, Laura had never liked Ocher. But if she had not so deliberately drawn attention to that fact in the first interview with Wembley in chambers, Wembley would not have gotten onto this tack at all. But Reggie could hardly tell Wembley now that Laura had simply been trying then to steer suspicion away from Nigel.
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  “You’re a bloody idiot,” he said, for lack of anything better.

  “Anyway,” said Wembley, “we found her fingerprints on the murder weapon.”

  “She picked it up after,” said Reggie. “I was there.”

  “But you initially told the investigating officers that nothing had been touched.”

  “That was their misunderstanding. I said it was as we found it. It did not occur to me to immediately point out that Laura gently removed an object from Ocher’s skull after the fact. Make obstruction of that if you can.”

  “Well, of course she could have done that to cover prints she knew she had left earlier.”

  “This is nonsense, and you’re interrupting my meal.”

  “Fine,” said Wembley. “But do let me speak with Miss Rankin. I presume she is with you?”

  “No.”

  “We tried the number she left in New York. It forwarded to a hotel in Beverly Hills.” Wembley paused, in his annoying way, for effect. “A man picked up. Would he be in a position to know?”

  Reggie didn’t answer; he slammed down the phone.

  God, was he ever slipping. If he ever made it back to London, he’d be mincemeat in court.

  A few moments later room service arrived, mercifully, and Reggie started in on the prime rib and mash.

  Then the phone rang again.

  It was Professor Rogers.

  Rogers apologized for the brevity of their previous meeting. He’d had a very full calendar, and just hadn’t been able to focus fully on what Reggie presented to him. He thought he should take a second look. Reggie should bring the document, it might be important, but Rogers had a limiting schedule, and they would need to meet halfway. He had a place in mind. At the lake. At the Hollywood Reservoir. Did Reggie know it?

  Reggie said he could find it. But why there?

  Rogers said something about his usual jog.

  They agreed to meet—at five, at the south gate, over the dam.

  Reggie picked up his raincoat, which might be a bit much for the weather, but he had no light windbreaker, and he was inclined to keep the map pages out of sight. He tucked them into the inside pocket.

  Several minutes before five, Reggie got out of a taxi at the reservoir gate. It was still open; with probably an hour or so of daylight remaining.

  The Lake Hollywood reservoir—situated just above the band of dirty amber haze that marked the city’s smog level, with a public access road that ran around the perimeter and across the dam—was like a Scottish loch plunked down in the heart of a desert. Trees lined the edges of the road and the shoreline, the cobalt blue water shimmered in its angle from the setting sun, and the early evening air raised scents of sagebrush and pine.

  A sign at the gate marked the reservoir road as a public trail, and it was clearly popular with the locals. Young women ran by in shorts and halter tops. Cyclists whirred past. The place was a match for Hyde Park on a spring day.

  Reggie walked out onto the road that spanned the concrete dam. The dam was some 250 hundred yards in length and perhaps 20 feet across; the road across it was flanked on either side by a waist-high cement wall. On one side of that was the deep blue water of the reservoir. On the other was a rocky canyon.

  Reggie leaned against the wall on the water side to wait for Rogers. Two middle-aged women jogged past, one of them eyeing Reggie and his raincoat suspiciously.

  A cyclist passed from the opposite direction. Then a teenage girl being pulled by a red setter on a leash. A tanned, svelte woman in spandex shorts and halter top, gliding comfortably on in-line skates, diverted Reggie’s attention for a moment. Then her boyfriend glided up beside her.

  Nearly twenty minutes had passed. Reggie began to wonder if Rogers would show. He turned and looked back toward the gate to see if anyone else was arriving.

  Suddenly there was impact. Reggie was thrown back against the wall—the spandex skater was in his arms, pressed full front against him, her arms encircling his waist. She apologized profusely and charmingly and disentangled herself amid considerable sweat and heat, and it would not have been an unpleasant collision—but as soon as she had disengaged fully, Reggie realized that she was clutching something that was his.

  She had the map.

  Reggie reached toward her, but at the same moment the lady’s companion swooped in from the opposite direction and took the sheets from her outstretched hand without breaking stride.

  The two were on skates, breaking in opposite directions, and Reggie was off balance; they would surely get away with it.

  But no one had informed the red setter of the plan. The dog saw a game in progress and gamboled forward, turning its leash into a taut three-foot hurdle. The skater had no time to prepare. He stumbled and had to use one hand to catch himself, and although it wasn’t much of an interruption, it was enough. Reggie closed the gap in an instant; before the skater could reestablish his momentum, Reggie had him by the arm.

  He pulled the skater back and grabbed for the map. They struggled up against the low wall—and Reggie would have controlled the situation, or so he believed—but then there was an impact again, and this time in earnest: The female skater had returned, putting her full momentum into it, striking Reggie high in the chest with a surprisingly hard shoulder.

  There was no chance to brace for it. Reggie fell backward over the wall behind him. He had the map pages in his hand, and he stuffed them into his raincoat pocket just as he fell.

  The free fall was just long enough for him to realize the stupidity of that effort—for what good was the paper if he was on the hard side of the dam?

  But he wasn’t. He was on the water side.

  It stung on impact and was shockingly cold. And he was much heavier in the water than he should have been. Reggie struggled out of his raincoat—what a brilliant precaution that had been—and got to the surface.

  He broke out of the water with a gasp. Still breathing deep and fast, he got his bearings.

  He looked up at the top of the dam. He saw passersby looking back at him over the wall—the girl with the setter, a tall, bald man whose sunglasses glinted down at Reggie—but he didn’t see either of the skaters.

  The water was much too cold to hang about, and he began to swim—with difficulty, on his back mostly, using his legs and one arm for momentum and the other arm dragging the bloody raincoat as if he were rescuing it.

  It was only fifty yards or so, and that was a good thing.

  Reggie slogged ashore, stood, and tried to shake off the cold.

  He was at the shoreline just before the dam. Above him was the access road from which he had just fallen. Next to him was a steep slope, thick with undergrowth.

  He began to climb the slope, finding a path between the rocks, manzanita, and low-growth pine.

  He stopped. A glimpse of bright clothing caught his eye. He paused to look.

  Below and to his right, lying between patches of sagebrush near the base of the dam, was Anne.

  Reggie began to scramble quickly back down the slope. His feet dislodged clumps of dry earth and small rocks, sending them tumbling down the slope ahead of him; he immediately adjusted the angle of his approach, afraid that the tumbling rocks would strike her and cause more injury.

  But when he came closer and saw the angle of her body—and the stillness of her eyes—he knew the tumbling rocks did not matter.

  She was already dead. He knew it even before he knelt beside her.

  Her body was broken. The ground around her head was saturated. She had no pulse.

  For an unbearable moment, there was nothing but silence. There was nothing and no one else around, there were no surroundings, there was just Reggie. Reggie and a young woman who was dead because—he was sure of it—she had done him a favor.

  Now Reggie looked up. She could not have just fallen; the wall was too high for that.

  The in-line skaters were nowhere in sight. And the onlookers who had watched Reggie swim to shore were gone now as well. But a
t the near end of the dam—standing at the beginning of the access road, behind a clump of scrub oak, as if he thought it provided concealment—was a smallish, white-haired man in a jogging suit.

  Reggie stood up, staring.

  The two middle-aged women joggers he had seen earlier were paused now as well, on the road above the slope, and they were looking down at Reggie—but he was reckless of what they might be thinking.

  He was too focused on the white-haired man standing at the edge of the dam at the access road.

  Rogers?

  The not-quite-concealed man stared back. Reggie had forgotten to be subtle, and now the man knew he had been seen.

  The man bolted suddenly, like a rabbit from a hedge, running across the access road toward the opposite end of the dam.

  Reggie sprinted up the rough slope after. He had staggered before, but not now. His shock and grief, and his initial anger at himself, had found a better target, and the adrenaline of it pushed him up to the road in short order. He began running.

  Rogers—if indeed it was Rogers—was only halfway across the dam; he had a lead of no more than 150 yards. That meant the result was not in doubt—the man was probably headed for the gate at the opposite end of the reservoir. That gate was more than a mile away. Reggie was capable of a six-minute mile, and the man was doing nowhere near that pace. He knew he would catch him.

  But now there was a shout from behind Reggie.

  “That’s him!”

  It came from the two women.

  But they weren’t pointing at the man getting away at the opposite end of the dam.

  They were standing at the edge of the roadway, above the slope where Reggie had found the young woman—and they were pointing at Reggie.

  Several male runners in USC tank tops came up alongside the women, paused, and looked.

  “There!” screamed the women, still pointing at Reggie. “He’s over there!”

  Reggie turned and looked back at them. He gestured to the women and the contingent from the USC track team and then pointed at Rogers—or the man who might be Rogers—but he could not make himself understood.