They spoke only once, when he shifted his weight from one hip to the other. She turned then and looked at him, a kind of wondering, searching look. “You’re so good to me,” she said.
“Why do you say that?”
“We always do what I want to. Or don’t want to. Don’t you ever get tired of giving in to my moods?”
“I don’t see it as giving in.”
“How do you see it?”
He shrugged. “I like to make you happy.”
“Happy, Jake?”
“Comfortable, then. If you’re comfortable, I’m comfortable.”
Five-beat. Then, “You’re not only good to me, you’re good for me. You really are.”
“I feel the same about you.”
“You make me feel . . . safe. I need you right now, I don’t know what I’d do without you, but . . .”
“But?”
“I’m not sure I deserve you.”
“Come on, now. I’m nobody special.”
“Oh yes, you are. What I should have said is that I’m not sure you deserve me . . . someone like me. A woman with a boatload of problems and insecurities. You should be with somebody normal—”
“That’s enough of that,” he said. “You are normal. And I don’t want to be with anybody else.”
“Right now you don’t.”
“Right now is enough. One day at a time, Bryn.”
“Yes,” she said. “One day at a time.”
8
TAMARA
Doctor Easy’s name was Hawkins, Eugene Z. Hawkins, D.C.M.
And he was a scumbag.
She ran him through six different databases and several linked sources, including the Chronicle and a couple of other Bay Area newspapers, and Felice ran him through the SFPD and NJIS files. Routine info at first. Age forty-two. Twice married, once divorced, no children. Doctor of Chiropractic Medicine for nearly twenty years, first in San Jose, then in Cupertino, then in S.F. for the last eleven. Shared offices with another chiropractor on Ocean Avenue. Lived with his second wife in a home in Monterey Heights, drove a Lexus, seemed to be well off financially.
The rest of his background record told a different story.
Arrested in San Jose in 1994 on a charge of soliciting a male vice cop for sex in a public restroom—an undercover sting like the one that’d caught the Idaho senator a while back. Protested his innocence, same as the senator, went to court, and walked on a technicality.
Accused by a woman patient in 1997 of inappropriate touching during soft-tissue therapy, whatever that was. Not arrested because she changed her mind, or had it changed for her, and dropped the charges. Nearly cost him his license to practice and was probably the reason for his move from Cupertino to S.F.
Arrested in Petaluma in 2000, in another sting operation—this one for Internet solicitation of sex with what he believed to be a sixteen-year-old male. Nabbed when he showed up for a prearranged date at a motel. Protested his innocence again, said it was all a misunderstanding, but this time he didn’t have any wiggle room. Convicted, fined, forced to register as a sex offender. That was when his first wife divorced him.
Accused by the California Franchise Tax Board in 2004 of failure to pay adequate state income tax over the previous five years. Found guilty and heavily fined.
Yeah, a scumbag.
Question was, what else was he? Just a bisexual member of the sports club? A scam victim of the phony Lucas? Or a scammer himself?
Decision time.
Doctor Easy was a solid lead, the only one she had, but she couldn’t risk bracing him herself. No way of knowing if the phony Lucas had told him about her, maybe even described her. Hawkins wouldn’t be likely to tell a woman anything anyway, especially not about the down-low club.
Like it or not, what she needed was a man—a good-looking male op who could pass for a successful, bisexual businessman.
And he had to be black.
That meant bringing in an outsider, a borrow from one of the other agencies in S.F. or the Bay Area. Trouble was, full-time field ops were usually kept as busy as she kept Jake Runyon; finding one who looked the part and had a hole in his caseload might not be easy. A part-timer was the best bet.
Well, she knew one possible—and he fit the profile. Deron Stewart. Part-timer for several different agencies, mainly Matt Bannerman’s. Good record—seven years with the California Highway Patrol, eight years with a big national outfit in their S.F. office before the economic crunch squeezed him out—but no luck so far in landing a staff job anywhere since. But did she want to work with him? The man was a pussy hound; one meeting with him and she’d known that from the way he talked, swaggered a little in her presence, and roamed his eyes over her body. Egotistical cocksman types turned her off. Sniff, sniff, sniff around every woman they met from eight to eighty, black, white, or yellow, crippled, blind, or crazy.