breathing back to normal. I bent down to pick up the bag. “Thanks for coming.”
Tess straightened up. She was wearing a dark pea coat, heavier than the weather called for, over a collarless white shirt, black trousers, and black stack-heeled boots, the same kind she’d worn the first time I saw her. She’d cut her bronze hair back to chin length since I’d seen her last.
“Did you run when you heard the sirens?” she asked.
I nodded.
“I thought maybe I was too late,” she said. Then she nodded toward the Crossfire. “Let’s not linger here longer than we have to, shall we?”
7
Tess lived in Westwood, not far from UCLA, in a Tudor house set back from a quiet street. She led me to a guest room and left me alone to shower, but I couldn’t wait to turn on CNN, to find out what the rest of the world thought it knew about me.
The police officer’s name was Greg Stepakoff. His murder wasn’t fresh news this Saturday night; a line-of-duty death had first been reported in a San Francisco Police Department press release on Friday night, in time for the late news broadcasts. Stepakoff had been thirty-five, with a wife and daughter, and he hadn’t shown up for his midwatch shift as scheduled at four P.M. Friday. His colleagues had been concerned, as Stepakoff was responsible and punctual. Several hours later, responding to a citizen’s phone tip, officers had gone to a St. Francis Wood address, where they’d found Stepakoff’s car in the driveway and the officer dead in the house, shot twice in the chest. An ambulance had been called to transport a second person to the hospital. Pressed for details, the SFPD press liaison would say only that the second victim was a civilian, not an officer. This sparked early reports of a double shooting, which were erroneous.
By Saturday morning the second victim had been identified, and in turn that identification made the story catch fire in the national media. The second victim, who had died late Friday night at UCSF Medical Center, was Violet Eastman, heiress to the Eastman distillery fortune and—under the pen name V. K. Eastman—a science-fiction writer of some note from the 1970s and ’80s. She hadn’t been shot but had died of dehydration, and her tox screen showed high levels of an unnamed sedative.
At a five P.M. news conference, the assembled reporters and the SFPD had different agendas. The SFPD press liaison mostly wanted to stress how much manpower was going into the investigation and to talk about plans for a Stepakoff memorial. The reporters’ questions were much more pointed.
They wanted to know whether Eastman’s death was being investigated as an illness or a poisoning. They also pointed out that the first sign that Stepakoff was missing had been when he’d failed to clock in and that it was apparently his personal car that was found in Eastman’s driveway. In light of that, they asked, could he really be considered to have been killed in the line of duty? And if Eastman had lived alone and had been comatose, how had Stepakoff accessed the house? Had he gone in without a warrant?
And of course they wanted to know about the rumors of a young live-in caretaker at the Eastman house who now couldn’t be located.
The press liaison said simply that the case would be treated as a line-of-duty death until further notice and that they didn’t know how Stepakoff had accessed the house, but “we have no indication that he acted other than professionally.” About the rumors of a young tenant/caregiver, she said again that “leads are being developed, and to comment further would be to jeopardize our investigation.”
That didn’t work as well as the department hoped. An hour later a radio station had reported the tenant/caretaker’s name as Hailey Cain. Neighbors had seen her coming and going from the house, but only at a distance. A few had heard Eastman mention her by name. But no one had seen the young woman since all the official vehicles had convened in Eastman’s driveway, the evening the cop was shot and Eastman was carried out on a stretcher.
The SFPD, apparently deciding that the door had been opened and that it was better to have the eyes and ears of the public working for them, had faxed another news release to the media confirming the tenant’s name and adding a detailed description. That had been the source of the news report that Serena had seen. Now,