He waved off the question. “Let’s get a search warrant for her house, have a look at her files, maybe catch a clue that’ll help us.”
Janet, who, to Tony Paterno’s knowledge, had never so much as bent the rules a hair in the name of justice, eyed him warily. “What did you do?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Hell, Paterno, if you aren’t careful, you’re gonna screw this up.”
“Not this one.”
She reached into her pocket, pulled out a small notebook and, taking a pen from the cup holder on his desk, scribbled a note to herself. “I’ll get on it right away. Did the ex-Mr. Pam have anything else to say?”
“Not a whole lot. When I asked him about his daughter, he said they weren’t speaking, that he’d seen her at Pam’s funeral but nothing since. She’s married and lives in the Valley somewhere—he thinks around Napa or Santa Rosa, but being the attentive father he is—he didn’t have an address or phone number. Just a name. Julie Johnson. The husband is Robert, but he and his father-in-law haven’t met.” Paterno impaled Janet with his gaze. “As I said, not exactly a hands-on kinda father. Anyway, I think we should track her down, see what she has to say.”
“Julie Johnson’s a pretty common name.”
“Yeah, but Julie Delacroix Johnson isn’t and I’ve already got her social security number. Check DMV, the Internet, marriage records.” Then he leaned back in his chair and dropped the bomb. “Julie Johnson was the name of the girl who made noises about filing charges against the Cahills.”
“What?” Janet said, a smile crawling from one side of her mouth to the other.
“That’s right. Same name. Now, at the time the girl went to Cahill House, she claimed she wasn’t married. It could be a coincidence.”
“My ass.”
Paterno sniggered. “My guess is the Delacroix girl got herself knocked up, ended up at Cahill House, and the preacher couldn’t keep his hands off her . . . or maybe she made up a story about the reverend. I want to know what happened to her next.”
“I’ll find out,” Janet promised. “Anything else?”
“Yeah. Marla Cahill called and cla
imed that her memory is coming back. Not all of it, mind you, just bits and pieces, but enough that she remembers being in the car with Pam Delacroix. She doesn’t know why or where they were going or even how close a friend she was with the other woman, but she says that she saw someone in the road, lit up like the Goddamned Fourth of July, the way she tells it. Both she and Biggs swerved to miss the bastard. She went to one side of the road, the trucker the other.”
“Jesus, do you believe that?”
“Not yet. She’s coming in later today to make a formal statement, then we’ll see.”
“What happened to the guy who ran into the road?”
“Since he wasn’t flattened into a pancake and there was no trace of a body anywhere in the woods, I assumed he got away, but I’m checking with the hospitals in the area, see if anyone was admitted that night or the next morning. Maybe when Mrs. Cahill gets here she can give us a better description, but I doubt it.”
His phone rang and he answered on the first ring with one hand while motioning Janet to stay seated with the other. The call was short, a report from the lab on a murder case he was working that had occurred off Lombard Street a couple of nights before. He hung up and leaned back so far his chair groaned in protest.
“Why would anyone be in the middle of the road up there in the mountains?” Janet asked.
“And why would he seem to glow?” Paterno’s mind sifted through the possibilities.
“Maybe he didn’t. Maybe Marla Cahill was blinded by the truck’s headlights.”
“She claims that this was different, that the light came from the guy in the road, that she saw the truck’s beams a second or so later and by then it was too late.”
Behind her glasses, Janet Quinn’s eyes narrowed. “You don’t think this has anything to do with the pieces of that mirror we found up there, do you?”
“Don’t know.” Paterno scratched his chin.
“What if the guy held up a mirror—like a hand mirror of some kind—so that it threw the beams of the Mercedes’ headlights back into the driver’s eyes?”
“Why not just take a huge flashlight? Wouldn’t that be easier?”
“Too heavy and bulky, hard to dispose of if he was caught.”