“Yes.”
“How old is she?”
“Late twenties, maybe thirty.”
“Description?”
“Bottle blonde. Five three or four, slender but top-heavy. Robert always did like big boobs … mine weren’t enough for him.”
Runyon let that pass. “Know anything about her background? Where she was born, if she was married before, has any kids?”
“I think she’s divorced, but I’m not sure. I hope to God she never had any children of her own.”
“When did she start working for Robert’s firm?”
“Three years ago. In the summer.”
“Any idea where she worked before?”
“No. Robert never told me and I had no reason to ask.”
The good side of Bryn’s face was flushed and she was still shivering. Gently he took her arm, turned her back the way they’d come. At the bottom of her porch steps he said, “Better wait awhile before you talk to Bobby, let him calm down.”
“Yes.”
“Call me afterward.”
“I will.”
He said, “It’ll be all right, Bryn. We’ll make it all right.” Hollow words and cold comfort, but for now they were all he had to give.
* * *
In his apartment on Ortega he brewed a cup of tea and booted up his laptop to run a preliminary background check on Francine Whalen. He wasn’t nearly as skilled at computer searches as Tamara, but he’d done enough of them using the agency’s search engines and a few of her hacker’s tricks to be able to pull up the basics on any known subject.
Finding Francine Whalen proved easy enough. Born in Alameda twenty-nine years ago; father and mother both deceased. Two younger sisters: Gwen, unmarried, a resident of Berkeley, and Tracy, married and living in Ojai in Southern California. Graduate of Sadler Business School in Oakland. Three previous paralegal jobs before joining the West Portal firm of Darby and Feldman three years ago; exemplary references. Married to an S.F. investment banker, Kevin Dinowski, in September 2005; divorced February, 2006, no children. Previous address before moving in with Robert Darby: apartment on Broderick Street in the Laurel Heights neighborhood that she’d shared with another woman, Charlene Kepler, also a paralegal, age twenty-five.
Police record: none, not even a traffic citation.
No red flags in any of that, unless there was something in the brevity of her marriage. Abusers of children were usually one or a combination of three things: victims of abuse themselves, the possessors of deep-seated hostilities and anger management problems, chronic drug users or alcoholics. There was a fourth, less common variety: psychotic child haters, the worst of the lot. Finding out which of these fit Whalen might take some work, but it could be done. The problem was tying whatever explanation for her actions to her abuse of Bobby. Robert Darby, as the boy’s legal guardian, was the one who had to be convinced first, and without Bobby’s corroboration it’d take conclusive evidence to make his father accept the truth about the woman he was planning to marry.
Runyon did quick checks on her two sisters, ex-husband, and former roommate. Nothing there, either; records all as superficially clean as Francine Whalen’s. He created a file of all the information he’d gleaned. If need be, he’d turn it over to Tamara on Monday and ask her to run deeper background checks. One of the benefits, like his talk with Bill yesterday, of working for good people in a small agency.
He spent what was left of the afternoon in front of a bad but commercial-free TV movie. Not watching it, using it for white noise while he waited to hear from Bryn. He had the ability to switch off his thoughts, like shutting down a machine, during any waiting situation. Survival trick he’d learned over the long months of Colleen’s illness, the only way he’d been able to keep himself sane and functioning while he watched the cancer eat away at her.
Bryn called a little after six. Her voice was quiet and even toned, but he’d known her long enough to be sensitive to her moods and feelings. As she was to his. Damage control mechanism between two damaged people. He knew what she was going to say before she said it.
“Bobby still won’t admit anything, Jake. He won’t talk about Francine at all.”
“You ask him directly about the abuse?”
“Not at first. I asked how he liked her, if they got along, if he was glad she was going to be his stepmother, that kind of thing. All he did was mumble. He wouldn’t look at me the entire time. Finally I just … I came right out and asked him if she was hurting him.”
“And?”
“That was the only time he reacted. He shouted at me to leave him alone and ran out and hid in the crawlspace.”