The Shape of Dread Read online

  THE SHAPE OF DREAD

  A

  SHARON McCONE

  MYSTERY

  BY

  MARCIA MULLER

  For Bi

  Copyright © 1989 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust

  Ebook Copyright 2011 by AudioGO. All rights reserved.

  ISBN 978-1-60998-619-3

  42 Whitecap Drive

  North Kingstown, RI 02852

  Visit us online at www.audiogo.com

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  1

  San Quentin Prison stands on a windswept headland on San Francisco Bay. At first sight it does not look like such a bad place: its sandstone-colored walls and red roof are architecturally imposing. The cypress-fringed hill that abuts them and the row of sturdy palms along the shoreline lend the natural setting a certain charm. The waters of the bay are azure or green or steel gray, depending on the weather, dotted with sailboats and the sleek ferries that ply their way from Marin County’s Larkspur Landing to San Francisco. Not such a bad place at all.

  But as you approach the prison’s iron gates down a narrow lane lined mostly with ramshackle houses, you hear the rumble of loudspeakers in the yard and the monotonous hum of the generators that keep the huge physical plant functioning. You see the guard tower and floodlights and warning signs, and the weary hopelessness in the eyes of the people who trickle through the visitors’ entrance. The wind feels colder; it carries the stench of stagnant water and an indefinable decay.

  Then you notice that elsewhere on the promontory no healthy vegetation grows, as if even trees and shrubs are wary of venturing too near the grim edifice. You realize how far removed Point San Quentin is from the posh newness of Larkspur Landing, the million-dollar homes of nearby Tiburon and Belvedere, the majesty of the redwoods and Mount Tamalpais. In spirit, this place shares more with Richmond, the city that lies across a graceless span of bridge to the northeast-a troubled community blighted by slums, populated largely by struggling blacks from whose ranks many of those housed behind the prison walls have come.

  And on a darkly overcast winter morning, such as the one in late December when I first visited there, you are almost certain to remind yourself that this is a place of misery, where human beings are often sent to die.

  I’d left the city early that Thursday morning, hoping to be at the prison at eight-thirty, but traffic was slowed by an accident in one of the northbound lanes on the Golden Gate Bridge, and it was nine-fifteen when I presented my identification and signed the east gate log. I passed through the metal detector at the security checkpoint, where an officer inspected the contents of my briefcase and shoulder bag. Then I sat down as directed on a bench in the visiting area.

  It was early enough that there were few people in the area; most of them I judged to be either attorneys or investigators like myself, there to confer with inmates in private. I waited for close to an hour before approval came down, even though my name had supposedly been added to the list of visitors authorized by the prisoner’s attorney. The desk officer entered my tape recorder in his log of recording and photographic equipment, and then I was led to one of the segregated visiting rooms for inmates of the adjustment center and death row.

  After the guard locked me in, I looked around the room for a moment. It was institutional tan, divided down the center by a wall-to-wall table. A heavy grille extended from the table to the ceiling. Had I possessed tendencies to claustrophobia, my surroundings would probably have prompted me to pound on the door and demand to be let out. As it was, I felt curiously suspended, as if time had stopped and wasn’t going to start up again until some distant and unknown power said it could. Finally I crossed to the table, set my briefcase on it, and sat in one of three wooden chairs.

  It was another ten minutes before the door on the other side of the grille opened and a young black man in blue prison work clothes was admitted. He was slender, of medium height, with a complexion the shade of cinnamon. In spite of his age, which I knew to be twenty, his hairline was receding; the short black curls formed an M on his high forehead. Beneath it, his eyes were heavy lidded and unreadable, his nose long and broad, his mouth set tight. When the door locked behind him, he glanced back at it and balled his fists reflexively.

  I’d viewed a videotape of his confession the night before, but in person he looked different. Smaller and more vulnerable. And somehow incapable of perpetrating the vicious crime he’d admitted to on the tape.

  As I studied him, I thought-not for the first time-that it was possible he’d been railroaded by a criminal justice system that is not exactly blind when a poorly educated young black with a juvenile record is brought to trial on sensational charges. A victim of that system, or a cold-blooded killer? For the moment I preferred to reserve judgment.

  “Mr. Foster,” I said, “I’m Sharon McCone from All Souls Legal Cooperative. Jack Stuart told you I’d be visiting.”

  Bobby Foster nodded but didn’t move.

  “It would be better if you sat down.” I gestured at the single chair on his side of the grille. “We have a lot to go over.”

  This time he made no response of any kind. I waited.

  Finally he said, “Don’t know what you think you can do for me.” His voice was deep-a large man’s voice trapped in a smallish man’s body.

  “I’m not sure if there is anything I can do. That’s what I’m here to find out.”

  My admission of uncertainty seemed to relax him; perhaps he liked the fact that I didn’t pretend to have all the answers. He moved to the chair and perched on its edge.

  “What did Jack Stuart tell you about me, Bobby? It is okay to call you Bobby?”

  He shrugged.

  “And please call me Sharon.”

  He regarded me from under those heavy eyelids for a moment, then said, “Stuart, all he tell me is you a private eye for that law firm of his. He say maybe there’s something you can do to get me out of this mess.”

  “You don’t seem to believe that.”

  Another shrug. “Don’t see what nobody can do. They try me, send me up here. One of these days they gonna kill me.”

  “But you claim you didn’t do the murder.”

  “Now you the one look like you don’t believe me.”

  “I’m not sure what I think yet. A lot of guilty people claim they’re innocent. But I haven’t heard your side of the story. And Jack Stuart believes you.”

  He shifted position, leaning back in the chair. “That Stuart, he okay. Better than the PD I had for my trial, maybe.”

  Bobby’s first attorney had been a public defender; after the conviction his mother had raised the money to retain All Souls for the appeals process. “Jack’s a good criminal lawyer,” I said. “If there’s a procedural basis for overturning your conviction, he’ll find it. But the PD you had wasn’t bad, either. What it boiled down to is that there was a strong case against you.”

  His eyes narrowed and he leaned forward, arms on t
he table. “You call that a case? They never even find her body.”

  I knew that both the public defender and Jack had explained to him the legal basis for conviction in a “no-body” case. I also knew that he stubbornly refused to accept the explanation and argued vehemently with them every time the subject came up. What I suspected was that-lacking anything else-he had seized upon the issue as a last hope and wasn’t about to turn loose of it. Determined not to let him get off on that overworked tangent, I asked, “What do you think happened to her?”

  “Tracy Kostakos was a friend of yours. You must have some idea about her disappearance.”

  “If I did, would I be here?”

  “Some people think she’s still alive. Her own mother, for instance. Laura Kostakos thinks her daughter disappeared of her own free will.”

  His gaze moved away from mine, to a point beyond my left shoulder. Immediately I felt a prickling at the base of my spine-the kind I often get when I sense someone is withholding something important from me.

  I said, “Bobby? What do you think happened to Tracy?”

  “Don’t know,” he replied, still avoiding my eyes. “But she ain’t alive. If she was, she’d of heard about me and come back and put things right.” He was silent for a moment, then added softly, “Tracy, she dead all right. But I didn’t do it to her.”

  “Why did you confess, then?”

  “I took that back later. That just a story.”

  “A story, Bobby?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It fit the facts pretty closely.”

  “Facts? Ain’t no facts. Ain’t even a body!”

  “Why did you confess?”

  He clenched his fists, then tipped his head back so he was looking at the ceiling. The cords in his neck grew taut as he struggled for control.

  Bobby Foster had a history of losing his temper-and a juvenile record to go with it. But while in the custody of the California Youth Authority, he’d apparently learned to cope with the impulse to violence. Life had been looking up for him-until Tracy Kostakos had disappeared one rainy night nearly two years ago.

  After a bit he unclenched his fists and lowered his head. His eyes were intense but free of anger. “You ever really been scared, lady? Scared shitless?”

  I had, on numerous occasions, but I sensed he was talking about a different kind of fear. I shook my head.

  “Then you don’t know. They hammer at me for hours, tell me what I did. They say I flunked the lie detector test I took before. Later my lawyer, he found out that wasn’t true; it say I lied about some things but not about killing her. But then I believe them, and it scare me even more. I get tired, mixed up. After a while I start believing everything they tell me. The way it work, it’s like you remembering some dream you had. What they tell you, you start seeing it, only you can’t really ‘cause it just a dream.”

  “And then?”

  “It start getting real. You see it better. But it still be like the picture of an old TV that don’t work right. You stop being scared ‘cause you so tired. They hammer at you some more and you think maybe if you tell them the dream they go away. Doesn’t matter, it just a dream-right? So you tell them. Then you find out it ain’t no dream-it’s a fucking nightmare.”

  I leaned back in my chair, trying to imagine what he’d told me. I could, and yet I couldn’t. But it fit with certain inconsistencies I’d noticed in the trial transcript and the videotape of his confession. Police interrogation methods these days are more civilized than the old back-room tactics, but still capable of producing false admissions of guilt.

  After a moment I said, “Tell me about yourself, Bobby.”

  His face, which had become animated while he was talking about the confession, went blank. “Why?”

  “If I’m to try to help you, I need to know something about you.”

  “What you want to know?”

  “Anything you’d care to tell me.”

  Ain’t nothing to tell.”

  “You grew up in San Francisco, right?”

  “Potrero Hill. The projects.”

  “Went to school there?”

  “For a while.”

  “To what grade?”

  “Seventh.”

  “And then you were in and out of the CYA?”

  He nodded.

  Even though I already knew, I asked, “What did you do to end up there?”

  Silence.

  “Bobby?”

  “Look, Stuart know all that stuff. Why don’t you ask him?”

  “I’d rather hear it from you.”

  He hesitated, regarding me with a mixture of suspicion and hope. “You really think you can help me?”

  “I’m going to try.”

  “How?”

  “By turning up new evidence. By finding out if Tracy Kostakos is still alive. And if she’s not, I’ll try to find out what really happened to her.”

  “Why you have to know all this stuff about me, then?”

  “In my business, I never know what information is going to be important. I want to hear about your life, right up to the minute you walked into this room this morning.”

  That seemed to satisfy him. He nodded, took a deep breath, and said, “Okay. Where you want me to start?”

  “At the point where you quit school and started getting in trouble. But first let me set up my tape recorder.” I took it out of my briefcase and placed it on the table. Bobby looked dubiously at it but didn’t protest. After I’d tested it, I started the tape and leaned back in my chair.

  “All right,” I said, “just talk. Don’t hurry or leave anything out-I’ll come back next week if I have to. You and I have a lot of work to do.”

  As Bobby began talking, I looked down at my hands. They lay in my lap, palms turned upward, fingers curled. Cupped, as if I were about to hold his life in them.

  2

  My visit to Bobby Foster was the result of an impromptu picnic I’d gone on with Jack Stuart, our criminal law specialist at All Souls. He’d turned up on my doorstep the previous noon-Wednesday of that last, afterthought week of the year, which serves no earthly purpose except to frustrate those of us who have had enough of the holidays and are anxious to get our lives back to normal.

  I’d taken the dead time off in order to launch my campaign (I refused to call it a New Year’s resolution) to once and for all have the construction finished on the back porch of my house. I’d begun enclosing it to make a second bedroom the previous summer but had run out of money halfway through. In October I’d refinanced my mortgage and received funds to complete the job, as well as to make a number of other necessary and essentially uninteresting repairs. Then I’d gotten caught up in Christmas shopping and holiday festivities. This week had been reasonably productive, but now I found myself infected with the general lassitude that was going around, and none of the contractors whom I’d had in to give estimates had gotten back to me. When Jack rang the bell, I was wandering around the backyard harboring half-hearted notions of murdering some of the blackberry vines that had taken hold there. If he hadn’t shown up, I’d have been wringing my hands in boredom inside of fifteen minutes.

  So I was happy to climb into his van and go off to nearby Glen Park. Jack had with him a shopping bag stuffed with French bread and cheese and salami, plus a bottle of reasonably good wine that I recognized as filched from the store laid in by All Souls for the annual New Year’s Eve party. I’d brought along some catalogs I’d been meaning to study, and when we arrived at the far end of Glen Canyon, I found an old blanket in the back of the van and sat down by a big tree stump to read, while Jack proceeded to climb the rocks on the canyon wall.

  Jack was an avid climber, but unfortunately not a very good one. He’d taken up the hobby by way of sublimating the pain caused by his divorce the year before, but in my opinion he could have done with more psychic pain and fewer physical injuries. In early November he’d suffered three cracked ribs in a fall while climbing at the Pinnacles; he was only now g
etting back into shape. The dangers here in Glen Canyon, he’d informed me, were only categorized as Zone One-meaning no permanent damage was likely to result from a mishap. That was just as well, since this holiday season was the first he’d spent alone since the divorce, and he was presently sublimating with a vengeance. It made me nervous to watch him, so I kept my eyes focused on the catalog I was paging through.

  The catalog was from something called the Educational Swap Meet-a loosely organized coalition of self-styled experts who jointly advertised courses they hoped to offer. For a few weeks now I’d been thinking I really ought to get back into the social swing-I’d been unattached and without much interest in pursuing a relationship for nine months-and, on the precept that Dear Abby is usually right, had decided taking a class would be a good way to Meet People with Similar Interests. Unfortunately what was offered in this particular catalog seemed odd, if not downright perplexing, and I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to meet people with interests in those areas.

  I called to Jack, “How about this one-‘Spiritual Gunhandling for Gentle People’?”

  Jack grunted loudly. I glanced up. He was dangling in a treacherous-looking fashion near the top of the rock formation, not all that far above. Quickly I returned my eyes to the catalog.

  “What it is, is the art of Zen shooting,” I said. “You’re supposed to make friends with your gun and use it in meditation.”

  Jack gasped. I turned the page.

  “Here’s another-‘Meeting One’s Soul Mate through Visualization and Astrology.’ No, wait. This is it-‘Getting into Death. Face your own inevitable demise and actually feel good about it.’”

  There was a thump. Afraid that Jack was facing his demise without benefit of the course, I looked up. He had jumped off the rocks and was brushing dirt from his jeans as he came toward me.