The Shape of Dread Read online

  He said, “Why don’t you just take another photography course?”

  “Because I’ve had to face the fact I’m lousy at it.”

  “You’d be lousy at getting into death, too. And meditating with your gun sounds dangerous.”

  “True.” I tossed the catalog-and my hope of meeting my soul mate through exotic means-aside.

  Jack went to the van to get the sack with our lunch. I slumped against the tree stump, savoring the crisp day.

  It was clear, but the sun’s rays had that watery, filtered quality that tells northern Californians the rains are not far off. The canyon was heavily silent. Usually Glen Park-a recreational haven in the south central neighborhood of the same name-teems with the offspring of families who inhabit the nearby cottages and small homes, but today they must have been off enjoying such Christmas-vacation treats as movies and visits to the Exploratorium. The narrow, densely wooded canyon extending north from the playgrounds and tennis courts where we were was especially deserted.

  I leaned my head back against the big stump’s rough bark and stared up through the silvered, shifting leaves of the surrounding eucalyptus trees. A jay sat in a starburst of light on one of the topmost branches. Beyond him a haze of woodsmoke drifted from the fireplaces of the homes and condominiums on affluent Diamond Heights. Had it not been for the angular outlines of their overhanging balconies and the growl of a bus toiling up O’Shaughnessy Street, I could have imagined I was deep in the wilderness, rather than in one of the nation’s major cities.

  Jack came back, dropped down onto the blanket, and began pawing through the sack.

  I said, “Well, at least you’re still alive.”

  “Those rocks are a piece of cake. As I told you, only Danger Zone One.”

  “How many zones are there?”

  “Three. An error in Two can put you in a wheelchair for good. Before you tackle Zone Three, you check with your life insurance agent to make sure your coverage is in force.”

  “Hey, what a hobby.”

  Jack’s lean, craggy face broke into a grin. “What can I say-it’s fun living on the edge.”

  “The only way I want to do that is on the edge of the chair while reading a good horror novel.”

  He began fiddling with a corkscrew. “Fear takes my mind off my troubles.”

  “This Christmas was a rough one?”

  “In some ways. In others, not so bad. At least I wasn’t constantly poking holes in somebody else’s expectations.”

  I knew what he meant, having burst quite a few of those shiny holiday bubbles in my own day.

  Jack poured the wine into plastic cups and handed one to me. “Here’s to better times and new beginnings.” When he touched his cup to mine, our fingers grazed.

  I sipped and looked away to cover my confusion. For a while now I’d suspected that Jack was interested in me. It was an interest I didn’t want to encourage.

  The Stuart marriage had not been particularly happy, but it had been a long one. They’d wed while still in law school and stayed together for twenty years, in spite of radically divergent politics and career paths. But a move from Los Angeles to San Francisco and new jobs-hers with a prestigious, conservative downtown firm, his with yet another liberal law cooperative-had widened the chasm. Jack hadn’t wanted the divorce, and his misery was compounded when his ex-wife married her boss a week after the final decree.

  Even now, close to a year later, his pain was too fresh for him to be able to base a new relationship on anything other than “how things used to be.” He would-for better or worse-compare every action of a new woman to those of his former wife. He would expect either more or less than she was actually capable of giving. I liked Jack a lot, could have felt romantically inclined toward him, but I wasn’t about to let myself in for that kind of no-win situation. And I sensed that at this juncture all he could handle was a frivolous, casual relationship-the kind I no longer care to indulge in.

  In spite of his self-absorption, Jack was not imperceptive. He noticed my discomfort, cut bread and cheese and salami, and changed the direction of the conversation.

  “In addition to the pleasure of your company, I had a business reason for asking you along today,” he said. “I’d like to discuss a case I need some help on. I’ve been debating whether it’s worth taking up your time, and I’ve decided it is.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Do you know what a no-body case is?”

  “More or less. As I understand it, it’s one in which the victim’s body hasn’t been found, but there’s enough evidence aside from the purely circumstantial to assume that a crime has taken place. Physical evidence of the death-bloodstains, an eyewitness account, a confession-can prove the corpus delicti.”

  Jack looked surprised. “You read a lot of criminology?”

  “A fair amount. I took a few courses in it when I was at Berkeley; given my work, it’s a natural interest.”

  “The reason I ask is that most people think ‘corpus delicti’ has something to do with the actual dead body, rather than the body of the crime. Probably because it sounds so much like ‘corpse.’ I’m having difficulty getting the concept across to my client.”

  “I wasn’t aware you were handling a murder case right now. Who’s the defendant?”

  “A twenty-year-old black kid named Bobby Forster. Already convicted and sentenced to death. Case was brought to us for appeal.

  The name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it. “Death sentence? That’s pretty stringent for a no-body case-and for such a young defendant.”

  “The murder was committed in the course of a kidnapping. Special circumstances. There’s a confession-pretty brutal stuff. The victim came from a prominent family: old money, and both parents are professors at Stanford. She herself was a young comedian whose star was rising fast.”

  Now I remembered where I’d heard Foster’s name. “The Tracy Kostakos case.”

  “Right.”

  “Jesus.”

  The murder had happened nearly two years before, but I remembered it because the newspapers had given it prominence, and the chief investigator, Ben Gallagher, had been something of a friend of mine. The published accounts had intrigued me, and for a while I’d followed the case closely. Now I recalled most of the details, with Jack occasionally refreshing my memory.

  Tracy Kostakos had been a very funny, highly talented woman of only twenty-two. The summer before her death she’d stolen the show at the Comedy Celebration Day at the polo fields in Golden Gate Park; for several months she’d been headlining at Jay Larkey’s trendy Café Comedie south of Market, where she’d previously worked as a cocktail waitress. On a rainy Thursday night, February twelfth, she disappeared after finishing her nine o’clock show there. While the unexplained overnight absence of most women her age in a city like San Francisco would have been little cause for alarm, Tracy’s parents and friends had good reason to think something was amiss: all her life she had been dependable and punctual-almost abnormally so.

  From Café Comedie she was supposed to go to an improvisational session at the loft of a friend near India Basin. She’d attended the same sessions with more or less the same group of participants for close to three years and never missed one. Her absence was commented upon.

  The improv sessions usually broke up about two in the morning. Tracy always returned immediately to the apartment she shared with a friend, Amy Barbour, on Upper Market Street. That morning she had promised to wake her roommate when she came in for a very special reason: the thirteenth of February was Amy’s twenty-first birthday, and the friends planned to share a first legal bottle of celebratory champagne. Tracy, however, didn’t come home.

  Friday was Tracy’s day to travel to Palo Alto for lunch with her mother, Laura Kostakos. But before that she had planned to attend an early call for actors at a casting office on Fillmore Street. The audition was for a TB commercial for Wendy’s restaurants, to be shown in test markets in the Midwest. While la
nding the role didn’t guarantee national exposure, it was a step in that direction, and Tracy Kostakos was as interested in the lucrative television market as any other rising-and largely underpaid-comedian. But she never showed at the casting office, and friends who would have been competing against her were both relieved and concerned.

  In her office in the mathematics department at Stanford University, Laura Kostakos waited for Tracy’s call from the train station. Tracy had assured her she would reach Palo Alto for their standing luncheon date at the usual hour of one-thirty, but when she’d heard nothing by three, Mrs. Kostakos called her husband, George, in his office in the psychology department. He had had no word from Tracy, either. Later Laura Kostakos told reporters that while she wasn’t superstitious, she hadn’t been able to keep from thinking about it being Friday the thirteenth.

  Officially the police could do nothing about Tracy’s disappearance until seventy-two hours had passed, but long before that a barely literate, poorly typed ransom note arrived at the Kostakoses’ Palo Alto home. A modest ransom note, as such things go: the kidnappers wanted only $250,000.

  The FBI was brought in. The Kostakoses got the ransom money together, and agents waited with them for the promised Sunday-evening call from the kidnappers. It never came. No further notes arrived. They never heard from their daughter again.

  By the middle of the next week, the investigation focused on Bobby Foster, who was working as a valet parking attendant at Café Comedie. He had been seen by one of the other valets and a pair of patrons arguing with Tracy on the sidewalk in front of the club after her last performance. Bobby had an explanation: Tracy-who disliked driving so much she’d declined her parents’ offer of a car of her own-had been nervous about waiting for her bus on a dark corner two blocks away and had asked him to walk over and wait with her. When he’d refused-because Jay Larkey, owner of the club, was notorious for firing valets who didn’t tend to their jobs-they’d quarreled. But his story didn’t ring true. Tracy reportedly had an ample allowance from her parents and could easily have afforded a cab if she were really uneasy. And besides, according to all who knew her, she was fearless when it came to walking dark city streets alone. It was unlikely she would have asked Bobby to risk his job for such a reason-not when he was such a good friend that she had a standing appointment to tutor him for his high-school-equivalency exams on Wednesday afternoons.

  Bobby Foster stuck to his story, stubbornly refusing to get a lawyer, but balked at taking a polygraph test. Eventually he consented, and while he didn’t pass with flying colors, the results were inconclusive enough to make the authorities lose interest in him.

  By late spring the FBI had withdrawn from active participation in the case; the SFPD’s investigation dragged. Then in June the wife of Jay Larkey’s partner at Café Comedie-where Foster was no longer employed-came across a notebook he had left behind in the employees’ lounge, and turned it over to the police. It was one he had used in his tutoring sessions with Tracy for the equivalency exams; in it were several nude sketches of a woman who resembled her, and a number of misspellings that matched those found in the badly typed ransom note.

  The police moved cautiously, questioning Foster again but not holding him.

  In late July a dark blue Volvo with bloodstained upholstery turned up in a ravine in the Santa Cruz Mountains, some seventy miles south of San Francisco. Its owner had reported it stolen from Café Comedie’s valet parking lot the night of Tracy’s disappearance. The employee who had parked it was Bobby Foster; his fingerprints appeared inside it-as did those of Tracy Kostakos. The bloodstains on the front seat matched Tracy’s type and subtype.

  The police questioned Foster again. At first he claimed he had not parked the Volvo. Then he said he didn’t remember that particular car or its driver; he parked so many in the course of an evening. But finally he confessed to kidnapping and murdering Tracy Kostakos.

  “You say the confession’s grim?” I asked Jack.

  He nodded. “I have a video of it. If you’re going to help on this, I’d like you to look at it, as well as read the public defender’s files and the trial transcript.”

  “What exactly is it you want me to do? What basis are you appealing on?”

  “The usual technicalities. But that part of it doesn’t concern you. I want you to work on the murder.”

  “On a two-year-old case, where there’s already been a confession and a conviction? Come on, Jack!””

  He ran both hands through his thick gray hair. “I know it sounds insane, Shar, but I don’t think the kid’s guilty.”

  “What about this confession?”

  “He retracted it before the case went to trial.”

  “On the advice of his attorney.”

  “Before he had one. The kid was stupid, refused counsel because he thought having a lawyer would make him look guilty. And you know about false confessions.”

  I was silent.

  Jack asked, “Did you follow the trial?”

  “No. last summer, wasn’t it?”

  “August. Case took a long time getting to court.”

  “I was away on vacation then. I never manage to catch up on the newspapers afterwards.”

  “Well, one of the things that kept coming out at the trial was that some people don’t think Tracy Kostakos is dead-including her own mother.”

  “They think she faked her own kidnapping?”

  “Yes. Disappeared voluntarily, using the ransom note as a ploy to throw people off her trail.”

  “Why would she do such a thing? Did she have reason to disappear?”

  “That’s one of the things I want you to find out.”

  “What about the bloodstained car?”

  “Another ploy.”

  “Sounds farfetched.”

  “Maybe. But Laura Kostakos firmly believes her daughter is still alive-so much so that she pays Tracy’s share of the rent for her apartment and keeps her room the way it was, waiting for her return.”

  “Maybe the woman’s gone around the bend.”

  “Maybe. The Kostakoses separated before the trial.”

  “You said some people. Who else believes this scenario?”

  “Jay Larkey, owner of the club she worked at.”

  Larkey, a man in his fifties, had risen to national television stardom out of the comedy clubs of San Francisco. When his popularity waned, he’d returned to the city and established a club of his own, to give other struggling comedians the same chance he’d had. “Anyone else?”

  “Her boyfriend, Marc Emmons.”

  “That’s probably just wishful thinking.”

  “There’s something else, though. The roommate, Amy Barbour. She testified for the prosecution at the trial, but the PD had the impression she wasn’t telling all she knew.”

  I leaned my head back against the tree stump. The eucalyptus leaves shimmered in the pale sunlight. The jay in the top branches had been joined by several others; they screeched harshly-a fitting background chorus for the tragedy we were discussing.

  I asked “What does Bobby Foster think happened to Kostakos?”

  “If he has any opinion he’s keeping it to himself. All he wants to do is argue that they shouldn’t have convicted him without a body. I’m hoping you can get beyond that subject with him.”

  It struck me as an incredible long shot, to pick up on a two-year-old trail that, even when fresh, had led investigators nowhere. And I feared it would be a futile effort; in order to convict in the absence of a body, the case against Foster would have been strong. In spite of the prevailing romantic belief, only a very small number of felons are convicted unjustly. I’d once heard a well-known criminal lawyer claim that 96 percent of his clients were guilty as charged; the other 4 percent, he said, were probably guilty of something.

  Still, if Foster was among that 4 percent, he didn’t deserve to die….

  I sighed. “My week off is almost over. I was getting bored, anyway.”

  Jack sighed, t
oo-in relief. “Thanks. I appreciate it. After we finish eating, we’ll go back to All Souls and I’ll turn over the files and that video I mentioned.” He paused. I glanced at him, saw his eyes had clouded. “I’ve got to warn you,” he added, “you’re not going to like what you hear.”

  “I got her out the car, and I drop her there on the edge of that hollow. Then I give her a push, and she roll away down the hill.”

  “Did you go down there with her? Try to hide the body?”

  The first voice belonged to the young black man with the weary, strained face. The other was Inspector Ben Gallagher’s, but I couldn’t see him or his partner; the video camera was fixed on Bobby Foster as he made his confession.

  “No, man, I didn’t want no part of her no more. She just dead meat to me. Just dead white meat, something to throw away.”

  “Go on.”

  “That’s it, man. I told you all of it.”

  “What about the blood? There was a lot of blood in the car. Was there any on you?”

  Foster looked blank momentarily. Confused, I thought.

  “Blood. Yeah. On me, all over me.”

  I got up and switched the VCR off. Foster’s face turned into that of a commentator reading the midnight news on the cable channel. It was the second time I’d viewed the tape-more than enough. I shut off the TV too and went to the kitchen for a glass of milk. Comfort food, I thought wryly.

  The tape had been grim-stomach-turning in parts. Foster had admitted to kidnapping Kostakos, with the intention of holding her in an apartment in the western Addition until he could collect the ransom from her wealthy parents. He’d offered her a ride to her improve session in a car he’d earlier stolen off the Café Comedie lot, knocked her unconscious, and driven there. But once inside, she’d come to and tried to escape. In the struggle that ensued, he’d stabbed her repeatedly; then he’d raped her lifeless body. Finally he’d loaded it back in the car, driven south to the mountains, and dumped it in a ravine. The details were particularly grisly because of the flat, unemotional manner in which he related them. Still, there was something that didn’t quite ring true. Many things…