Fever(67)

So I killed her first. In self-defense. There wasn’t anything else I could do. She deserved to die. I’m not sorry I destroyed the bitch.

But I’m sorry Brian is dead. He was my best friend and I killed him too. I can’t live with that and I won’t go to jail because of what I did to her. I’m a coward a miserable fucking coward I don’t care what





That was all. Ended in mid-run-on sentence on the second page.

Runyon backed away again. All of it was clear now. That first day he’d come here … Brian in Brandy’s persona, Myers pretending to be Brian at her insistence—find out what he wanted, why Rose Youngblood had hired a detective. Myers, weak, ineffectual, chafing under Brandy’s lash but unable to break loose, making the anonymous call out of desperation. And when that didn’t bring results quickly enough, when Brandy made her demand that he steal another five thousand from his company and threatened to kill him if he didn’t, Myers swinging that brass lamp in sudden blind fury.

He returned to the bedroom, stood looking down at what was left of Brian Youngblood. He could almost see the headline in tomorrow’s Chronicle: BIZARRE TRANSVESTITE MURDER-SUICIDE. Yeah, the media would love this. Even in San Francisco, where bizarre happenings were part of the norm, it was just kinky enough to warrant a big play—the kind that provokes smarmy comments and sick jokes.

Brian doesn’t have anyone else who cares as much as I do. I’ll pray for him.

It’d tear his mother up. Her only child, all she’d had in a life barren other than her religion. His death, even the money troubles and the collusion in Myers’s embezzlement—with the help of her pastor, she’d learn to live with that. But the rest of it…

He kept staring at the body lying there in the ice-blue dress and the black net stockings. Lipstick, eyeshadow—you could scrub that off. The bloody dress and the stockings and woman’s underwear and wig could be disposed of easily enough. Not so all those clothes in the closet, bottles of makeup on the dresser—but he could’ve been living with a woman, it could look that way in the preliminary stages.

Only one person besides him knew the truth about Brian Youngblood now, and Ginny Lawson wasn’t talking to anyone about Brandy. Might come out later that Brian had been a cross-dresser, but by then it wouldn’t have any media appeal. It was what he was wearing when he died, and the dual-personality angle, and Myers’s suicide note that made it sleazy media fodder. One click of the delete button would erase the suicide note. With men’s clothing on the body instead of the dress and underwear, with some of the details left out or glossed over …

Tampering with evidence.

Thirteen years as a police officer, another seven as a private investigator, and this was the first time he’d ever for one second thought of crossing the line.

Did it make any real difference to the law if the details of a conclusive murder-suicide were altered slightly? No. Would it make a difference to a bereaved mother and her memories of her son? Definitely. Strong arguments in favor.

But not strong enough.

He wasn’t going to do it. Wasn’t capable of doing it, for Rose Youngblood, for Aaron Myers’s sister and her two kids in Pacifica, for anyone. Not because he might get caught, but because it would destroy one of the last things he had left that mattered to him: his self-respect.

He opened his cell phone and tapped out 911.





24




On the way into the Oakland Hills I tried to find a possible fit for Rebecca Weaver in the Krochek disappearance. Hard to do without more facts and the answers to a bunch of questions. And there might not be a fit. An affair six months old was a pretty cold dish to go digging around in.

Unless Mitchell Krochek had started sleeping with her again, or had been sleeping with her the entire time he’d been bedding Deanne Goldman. From what I’d learned about him, he was the type of man capable of maintaining two concurrent affairs, particularly when one of the women lived right next door.

Krochek had told me he’d talked to his neighbors after the disappearance, but he hadn’t been specific about which ones. One of them must have been Weaver, given her proximity, and there was no reason for her not to have been candid with him if she’d seen anything out of the ordinary. Ms. Goldman had no idea one way or the other; he hadn’t mentioned the woman’s name recently. How did Weaver and Janice Krochek get along? She didn’t know, she said, but if there’d been any problems Mitch would have told her, he told her everything about his private life. Sure he did. She also claimed not to know anything about Weaver other than what she’d confided to me about the brief affair.