The Driver

He picked up his cellphone from the bedside table and called the usual number.

34

Milton was headed to the Moscone Centre when his cellphone buzzed in its cradle. He glanced at the display: Trip Macklemore was calling. He pulled out of the traffic, parked and called him back.

“Have you heard?” Trip said as soon as he accepted the call.

“Heard what?”

“They’ve found another body — it’s on the news.”

“It isn’t Madison.”

“How do you know that?”

“The police brought me in again.”

“You’re kidding?”

“It’s just routine. It’s nothing.”

“It might not be her now but it’s just a matter of time, isn’t it? You know that — she’ll be next.”

“We don’t know that.”

“I do.”

Milton thought he could hear traffic on the call. “Where are you?”

“In a taxi. I’m going up there.”

“What for?”

“To see Brady.”

“No, Trip—”

“Yes, Mr. Smith. He did it. It’s fucking obvious. It’s him. We know he’s been lying to us, right from the start. What else has he been lying about? I’m go

“How are you going to do that?”

“It’s alright. I’ll take it from here.”

Milton gripped the wheel. “Don’t,” he said. “Turn around and come back. We just need to wait. Getting into an argument up there will make things worse.”

“I’m sick of waiting. Nothing’s happening. They’re not doing shit.”

Milton was about to tell him about Efron and what he had learned but the call went dead.

He redialled but there was no answer.

Dammit.

The boy had sounded terrible: wired, his voice straining with stress, as if at his breaking point. Milton had to stop him before he did something stupid, something that would wreck his life. He put the Explorer into gear, pulled out into the traffic and swung around. He drove as fast as he dared. Trip was already on the way. Where was he? The traffic was mercifully light as he accelerated across the Golden Gate Bridge and it stayed clear all the way to the turning onto Tiburon Boulevard. He swung to the south, still clear, and reached Pine Shore without seeing the boy. He drove inside the gates: there was an outside broadcast truck parked across the sidewalk and a reporter delivering a piece to camera. Great, Milton thought. He was hoping the media would all have moved on by now but the new body had juiced the story again and, with the police still floundering, they were going to focus on the place where the next presumed victim went missing. There was nothing else for them to go on.

An empty San Francisco cab was coming the other way.

Too late?

Milton parked outside Brady’s cottage and hurried up the steps. The door was ajar and he could hear raised voices from inside.

He made out two bellowed words: “Tell me!”

He pushed the door and quickly followed the corridor through into the living room. Brady was on one side of the room, next to the wide window with the view down to the Bay. Trip was opposite him.

“I know she was in here!” Trip said, angrily stabbing a finger at the doctor.

“No, she wasn’t.”

“Don’t fucking lie to me!”

“Get out of my house!”

“I’m not going anywhere. What did you do to her?”

Milton was behind Trip and it was Brady who noticed him first. “Get this meathead out of here,” he ordered. “You got ten seconds or I’m calling the cops.”

“Go and ahead and call them,” Trip thundered back at him. “Maybe they’ll finally ask you some questions.”

“I’ve told you — I had nothing to do with whatever it was that happened to you girlfriend. You know what? Maybe you want to stop harassing me and start thinking that maybe if you’d done something to stop her from going out hooking then none of this would have happened.”

That really pushed Trip’s buttons: he surged forward, knocking a chair out of the way. Brady’s face registered stark fear as Trip raised his fist and drilled him in the mouth. The doctor stumbled backwards, and, forced to compensate on his prosthetic leg, overbalanced and slammed against the low wooden coffee table, the impact snapping one table leg and tipping a fruit bowl onto the floor.

“Where is she?” Trip yelled.

Brady shuffled away from him on the seat of his pants. “I don’t know,” he stammered, blood dribbling out of the corner of his mouth.

“Trip!” Milton said. “Calm down.”

“Fuck that. What’s that got us so far? Nothing. We need to do something.”

“We are doing something.”

“Yeah? What are you doing? I don’t see anything happening. Doing things your way hasn’t got us anywhere, has it? It’s my turn now. I’m telling you, man, this piece of shit is going to tell me what happened to my girl.”

The boy reached down with his right hand and Milton saw, just in time, the glint of silver that emerged from the darkness of his half-open jacket. He thrust his own arm out, his hand fastening around Trip’s wrist. “No,” the boy said, struggling, and he was young and strong, but Milton knew all kind of things that the boy could only dream about and he slid his index and forefinger around to the inside of his arm, down until it was two fingers up from the crease of his wrist, and squeezed. The pressure point was above the median nerve and Milton applied just enough torque to buckle the boy’s knees with the unexpected shock. “Don’t,” Milton said, looking at him with sudden, narrow-eyed aggression.

Trip gritted his teeth through the blare of pain. “He did it.”

Milton kept the pressure on, impelling Trip back towards the hallway. “No he didn’t.”

He looked at Milton in fuming, helpless entreaty. “Then who did?”

“I have a better idea,” he said.

Confusion broke through the pain on the boy’s face. “Who?”

“You’re going to go outside now,” Milton said in a firm voice that did not brook disobedience. “There’s a reporter out there, down the road, so you need to be calm, like nothing’s going on — we don’t want there to be a scene. Understand?”

“Who is it?”

“I’ll tell you on the way back. But you have to tell me you understand. Do you understand?”

Trip’s eyes were red-raw, scoured and agitated. He looked as if he had gone without sleep. “Fine.”

Milton gave him the keys to the car. “I’ll be right after you,” he said.

“What are you going to do?”

“Just go.”

Milton waited until he heard the squeak of the front door as Trip opened it.

He went across the room and offered a hand to Brady. The man took it and Milton helped him back to his feet.

Brady went to the galley kitchen, picked up a tea cloth and mopped the blood from his face. “If you think that’s the end of this you’re out of your mind.”

“It is the end of it,” Milton said.

“You saw — he sucker punched me!”

“I know and he’s sorry he did that. So am I. I know you’ve got nothing to do with what happened to Madison.”

“Damn straight I don’t.”

“But I also know that it’s better for you to forget that just happened and move on.”

“You reckon? I don’t think so.”

“I do. A friend of mine works for St Francis. Legal department. You said you used to work down there so once I found out that you were lying about what happened to your leg I thought maybe it was worth getting her to have a look into your record, see if it stacked up like you said that it did. And it turns out you have a pretty thick perso

“How dare you—”

“Here’s what I know: you didn’t choose to leave, you were asked to go. Two sexual harassment cases. The first one was a nurse, right?”

Brady scowled at him, but said nothing.

“And the second one was a technician. She had to be persuaded from going to the police. You had to pay her a lot of money, didn’t you?” Milton was next to the picture of Brady in the desert; he picked it up and made a show of examining it. “It was an interesting read, Dr. Brady. You want me to go on?”