The address Tamara had pulled up for Aaron Myers was a little over a mile from Duncan Street, in Noe Valley at the edge of the Mission District. Nondescript building with eight apartments that would be about half the size of Brian Youngblood’s flat. Myers’s was on the first floor, rear. Runyon rang the bell, waited, rang it again, waited some more.
Nobody home.
Dré Janssen? After five already. Bayside Video would be closed by the time he made it to Chesnut Street. Janssen and Myers could both wait until later. Rose Youngblood? She should be home by this time. No need to see her in person; he used his cell.
She answered almost immediately. He identified himself, listened to her voice turn flat when he told her he had nothing to report yet, just a more few questions.
“Have you heard from your son since we spoke on Friday?” he asked.
“No. I went to his apartment on Saturday, but he wasn’t home.”
“Did you go inside?”
“Of course not. I’m not that kind of parent. I respect my son’s privacy.”
“Do you know a woman friend of his named Brandy?”
“Brandy? No.”
“He never mentioned the name?”
“I’ve never heard of anyone named Brandy.”
“She seems to know you. Quite a bit about you, anyway.”
“Brian must have told her. Who is she?”
“Not your son’s usual kind of friend.” He offered a capsule description without any of the details.
Hum on the line for a time before she said, “I had no idea Brian knew anyone as … coarse as that. I can’t imagine why … oh.” The last word was small and disapproving. She’d just imagined why. But then she talked herself out of it by saying, “No, he’d wouldn’t have anything to do with a woman like that. Not in that way. He’s a good Christian, my son. No, absolutely not.”
He let it go. Good mothers, particularly strongly religious mothers, were unreliable witnesses. They almost always believed, no matter how much evidence was presented to them, that their children were innocent creatures incapable of making the wrong choices, committing the kinds of sins they themselves would never dream of committing.
He ate his dinner in the coffee shop on the corner of Nineteenth Avenue and Taraval. The woman with the scarf wasn’t there; he hadn’t expected her to be.
Hadn’t expected to do what he did when he finished eating, either. Just went ahead and did it, without conscious thought and against his better judgment, from some inner compulsion that he couldn’t or wouldn’t let himself identify.
He talked to both waitresses and a couple of customers, learned nothing, and then began canvassing the neighborhood for somebody who could tell him who she was.
9
Some days you’d be better off staying in bed with the covers pulled over your head.
You know the kind I mean. You wake up feeling out of sorts. The weather is lousy, cold and gray, and everything seems to be a source of irritation. Things like this happen: You cut yourself shaving, you squish barefoot into a deposit of strategically placed cat barf, little squabbles over nothing flare up to mar the normally comfortable breakfast-table atmosphere. Then you venture out into the damn city. Traffic seems heavier and some idiot cuts you off and one of the jet-propelled variety of lunatics runs a red light and nearly causes a collision. And then you arrive at the office and the day plunges downhill in earnest.
Wednesday was like that for me. Kerry calls Wednesdays hump days, a workplace term that means it’s the middle of the week and once noon comes and goes, you’re over the hump and heading for the weekend. This Wednesday was hump day, all right. In spades and with a whole new meaning to the term. Wednesday was the humper and I was the humpee.
Tamara had nothing to do with it; she was in a good mood and gave me no reason to growl at her personally. It was her answer to my simple question, “Any messages?” that provoked the initial growling and grumbling.
“Four,” she said. “All from the same person, about every ten minutes since I got here at nine.”
“And who would that be?”
“You’re not going to like it.”
“Then don’t tell me.”
“Mitchell Krochek,” she said.
“You were right, I don’t like it. What does he want now?”
“Wouldn’t say. Wouldn’t even leave you a voice mail. Just wants you to call him at his home number.”
“His wife must’ve run off again.”
“Well, he sounded pretty strung out.”
“What does he expect us to do? We can’t keep finding her and dragging her back every time she—”