Treasure Hunt

“Yeah. I’ll talk to him. That’s a good thought. But listen”-Hunt leaned his lanky form forward, his elbows on his knees-“the main thing for all of us-even you, Tam-is to be careful here. Whoever it is, this killer’s now done it twice. Let’s not force a third. All we’re trying to do is collect information and pass the valid stuff along to Devin. That’s all.”

Mickey shook his head. “Nice try, but it’s gotten bigger than that, Wyatt,” he said. “A whole lot bigger.”

The address of the administrative headquarters for the Sanctuary House for Battered Women was on Potrero Avenue near San Francisco General Hospital. Unlike the other service-oriented nonprofits he’d visited in the last few days, for obvious reasons Sanctuary did not shelter, educate, or test any of its clientele on-site-instead, they were assigned, often with their children, to one of the organization’s seventeen secure locations within the city limits. Because of this, Sanctuary’s footprint here on Potrero was so small as to be nearly invisible. Mickey drove by what should have been the address twice before he realized that the office must be somewhere among the buildings that made up the much larger hospital complex.

Fifteen minutes after he’d finally managed to park in a handicapped zone in the hospital’s main but still woefully inadequate lot, he found the place-one of many apparently identical offices on the ground floor of the hospital’s Admitting and Triage Building. It was a typical overused bureaucratic medical landscape-already at nine A.M., long lines had formed at each of the glass windows, with the chairs in the main lobby filled with mostly older and poorly dressed patients. Although there was still the usual complement of mothers with their coughing or sleeping children, spaced- out young adults, and obvious derelicts, all waiting in numb patience while the clammy fluorescent lighting lit the area and reflected up at them from the greenish tile flooring.

The only indication of Sanctuary House’s presence was the name of the organization stenciled onto the glass doorway, now open at the farthest extent of the lobby. Mickey stood in the doorway for a long moment. In front of him, a counter bisected most of the room across the front, and behind it were mazes of green and gray filing cabinets and a few desks. Venetian blinds over the high back windows. To his left, the counter made a right angle, and behind it more of the ubiquitous green-tinged glass separated out the two or three other offices.

He heard low voices, apparently coming from one or more of those offices, but saw no one, so he stepped forward and, following instructions, “Please Ring for Assistance,” pushed the little hotel bell that someone had duct-taped down to the peeling wooden counter.

In five seconds, a tiny and tentative bespectacled young woman appeared from between one of the banks of filing cabinets, wearing what looked to Mickey like a thrift-store cotton dress and a devastated and yet somehow impatient expression. Beneath her wire- rimmed glasses, her eyes were red and swollen. Mickey at once realized two things: that the employees had heard the news about their executive director, and that maybe this should have been an assignment for Tamara-the vast majority of the time, Mickey supposed that men here were going to be the enemy; it came with the turf. Still, he dredged up a look of respectful solicitude.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

Having done his homework, Mickey knew the name of the associate director. “I’d like to speak to Adele Watrous,” he said, “if she’s in.”

“Is there something I can help you with?”

“Are you Ms. Watrous?”

“No.”

“I was hoping to talk to Ms. Watrous.”

“It’s Mrs., and she is having a difficult morning. I’m afraid we all are. Can I tell her what this is about?”

Mickey’s heart went out to this young woman, but he was here to get information-specifically if Nancy Neshek had mentioned to anyone here the question she’d wanted to ask Hunt-and the further down the food chain he went with the staff, he thought, the less likely the result. “I’m afraid it’s about Ms. Neshek, which I can see you already know about. I’m very sorry.”

She opened her mouth to reply, but no words came out, and then she closed it, nodded twice, then again, and finally disappeared back into the maze. After another moment, a grandmotherly woman appeared. Her snow-white hair was disheveled and she, too, had clearly been crying, but she spoke in a crisp, no- nonsense ma

“I’m working on the investigation into Mr. Como’s death,” he began, “and now Ms. Neshek’s. Nancy’s. She made a call to our office on the night she died, and I was hoping to talk to you about whatever she might have told you, if anything, that might shed some light on her death.”

Nodding wearily, Mrs. Watrous lifted the flip-up portion of the counter and motioned him inside into the office proper, then led him beyond the first door they passed and into the second one. Once they were seated, the door closed behind them, she templed her hands at her mouth and blew into them a time or two, regaining her composure.

“When did you hear about it?” Mickey began.

She sighed. “This morning. The phone started ringing around six-thirty. One of our women out at the Jackson Street facility heard it on the news. After that…” She opened her hands. “Everybody.” Then, suddenly, in a kind of a double take, she seemed to focus on him more clearly. “You said you were investigating Dominic Como’s death?”

“Yes.”

“And you think Nancy’s is related to that?”

“We don’t know. What we do know is that Nancy called the hotline at our office after the reward was a

“No. She never made it in here on Tuesday.” She paused. “But that wasn’t by any means unusual. I mean, she’d often get called out to one of the sites and have to stay until whenever…” Trailing off, she shook her head in obvious dismay and confusion.

Mickey gave her a minute. “Were you both here when the reward on Mr. Como’s death was a

“And when was that, exactly?”

“Around four in the afternoon.”

“Well, then”-she considered carefully-“I’m sure we were here, yes, both of us. But I don’t remember hearing about it here. I know we didn’t talk about it.”

This was more or less what Hunt and Mickey had expected, but that didn’t make the bare fact-that Watrous had no information about why Neshek had called the Hunt Club-any easier to accept. He pursed his lips in frustration. “Might Nancy have spoken to anybody else here about it? Did she stay late, for example?”

Again, Mrs. Watrous gave the question its time. And again she shook her head no. “She left right at five on Monday, or a little after. I stayed on till a little past six.”

Grasping at straws, Mickey asked, “Was that also usual, that she left work right around five?”

“No. Usually she stayed much later. Unless she had a fund- raiser or some event or something like that. The work here is never finished, so we tend to put in some long hours.”

“So”-Mickey barely daring to hope, but here at last was a possible opening-“was there something Monday night, then?”

She started to shake her head again, and then abruptly stopped. “Well, yes… I mean. Oh, God, I hadn’t even thought of that.”

“What’s that, Mrs. Watrous?”

“They were having a COO meeting at City Hall.”

“COO?”

“You know? The Communities of Opportunity. Oh, and speaking of which, did you see that thing in the paper this morning, the CityTalk column? That’s what they must have been going to talk about, that report coming out.”