The Third Eye Read online

  “Drop it.” He hoisted the shot, drained it and slapped down the glass. An unsteady landing meant the small vessel toppled and rolled a few inches. With exaggerated care and a grunt of irritation, he set it upright.

  She watched this with affected disinterest and ignored Simpson’s attempts to catch her gaze. Obviously, Peterson was cut off and Simpson wanted her to handle it. Great, she thought with heavy disgust, now I can do the bartender’s job too.

  “You want me to ignore the fact that you look about two steps past okay, or do you want me to ignore the fact that one of our sergeants murdered one of our rookies because she caught on to his criminal activities? I mean, really, Peterson, which is it?”

  He shook his head and looked straight ahead. She’d shamed him, and she blinked hard. She’d focus on the latter of her two concerns for now.

  “Don’t investigate the murder of one of our officers?” She took another sip of beer and considered how to proceed. “Is your casual attitude the result of advanced alcoholism or impending dementia?”

  “I knew you were wet behind the ears six years ago, Borelli, but I figured I musta taught you a few things. Now I know how much I failed you.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” She masked her hurt, wondering if Peterson knew he’d crossed the line from their usual teasing banter into mean-spiritedness. Was he trying to provoke her? Or was he becoming a mean drunk? Was she missing something?

  “You’re planning to look at Donnelly’s death and work backward?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “Who’re you looking at, his mom, his girlfriend? His neighbors, maybe his priest? Christ, Borelli, you think this is some big, bad conspiracy and you’re gonna crack it wide open? Are you completely fucking paranoid?”

  “No.” She took a deep breath, finally aware that some part of his touchiness came out of his concern for her well-being. Though warmed by his caring, she had to fight annoyance at having to face her own worries about where the investigation might lead. “I know there could be some awkwardness, might mess up my future as a suave, hotshot politico.”

  Peterson stood, bracing himself on the bar. Simpson gave Brenda another warning look, which she acknowledged with a nod as she slid off her own stool, standing by in case her old partner needed extra steadying. Peterson turned slowly to face her, and she was struck by how much he’d aged in the couple of weeks since she’d last seen him.

  “Come on, Peterson,” she said in as light a tone as she could muster, working to quash her rising alarm. “I can take care of myself.”

  “You’re a guppy, Borelli, and these waters are chock-full of sharks. This is a stupid mistake and you’re bound and determined to make it.”

  He turned too quickly and had to brace himself with a hand on the barstool. “You made up your mind without telling me a damn thing. That shows me exactly how useless I really am to you. Just like with my girls. I’m useless.” He tottered with remarkable speed across the mostly empty bar to the restroom.

  “He’s cut off, Borelli,” said Simpson.

  “Got it. How much?” She reached for her wallet.

  “He keeps a tab, pays it off at the end of the month like most of the old guys. A tip for the girl might be nice.”

  She handed Simpson a ten-dollar bill, which he accepted with an absent nod. She was just turning away from the bar when she sensed someone behind her. She turned slowly, figuring it had to be another cop.

  “Where’d you come from?”

  Retired captain Harry Trimble ignored her question. He had retired about the same time as Peterson but looked a decade younger than his contemporary. He was trim, with a full head of glossy white hair that was frosted with an artificial layer of lemon yellow.

  She noted toned muscles under his Arnold Palmer golf togs, the same light blue polyester outfit she’d seen him wearing dozens of times, back when Tori had coerced her into joining the Briarwood Fitness Club so they could casually run into their superiors on the course and in the clubhouse. Tori turned out to be a natural, effortless golfer, of course, and eventually stopped making hopeless duffer Brenda come along.

  She wondered if Tori and Trimble still competed as fiercely as they used to. Trimble was sizing Brenda up as much as she was him, and she wondered what the man saw when he looked at her. She had to give him credit: he’d apparently been wearing the same clothing size for thirty years and had both a full head of hair and an enviable swing.

  “You driving our friend home, Borelli?”

  “It’s that or let him float home on his own.” She crinkled her eyes and widened her mouth in a poor showing of a fake smile. She had only vague memories of Trimble’s work on the force. She knew there was no love lost between him and Peterson and that Trimble’s contemporaries didn’t have much to say about him.

  In her experience, silence so complete was usually indicative of some problem. She assumed Trimble had spent more of his career kissing brass than doing actual police work, but she’d always wondered if there was more to it than that. Was he someone she should look at for Donnelly’s murder, if murder it was?

  “You enjoy The Hole, Borelli?” Trimble leered and winked at Simpson, who turned away but continued to eavesdrop with little attempt at concealing his nosiness.

  “I’m meeting up with my old partner for lunch. How about you, Captain? You spend a lot of daylight hours in here?”

  His mouth tightened before he forced a wide smile and followed it with a hearty laugh. “No, I spend most of my time on the golf course and following my wife around the mall, trying to explain what a limited income is.” He chucked his chin in the general direction of the bathrooms. “He’s looking a little rough.”

  “Misses me, I guess.”

  His laugh seemed to catch him by surprise. “Do you see him much these days?”

  “Now and then,” she said with a vacuous expression. “You?”

  “Oh, now and then.” He ran his fingers through his thick white hair. “He and I worked together years ago. Early days for both of us, still in uniform. He was a pain, always too smart for his own good. One of those who can’t walk away from the job. These guys don’t know how to live as civilians, and they don’t last long. Drink, drugs, women or gambling. Hope your old partner doesn’t fall into those traps. We’ve both been off the clock for nearly a year now, and the strain is starting to show on your buddy there. Time he let it go.”

  “And you have?” Brenda offered a smile to soften her arch question.

  “Yes, Captain Borelli, I have. In part because things never change, do they?”

  She made a noncommittal noise and inclined her head.

  “Oh, sure, the girls can play with the boys now, and even the gays, the coloreds, whatever. But it’s still the same old game. The big guys run the show and the little guys shove themselves in harm’s way and never get any thanks.”

  She decided to ignore the casual bigotry. “You sound pretty bitter.”

  “Ah, don’t listen to me. I guess I’m a little bored, that’s all. Still talking shop, so I guess I’m just as bad as Peterson.”

  “He’s not so—”

  “Funny,” Trimble continued, smoothing down his pastel shirt, “none of my old partners stay in touch with me, but here you are visiting Peterson at his home away from home. Nice. Maybe that’s one of the benefits of letting the girls join the club. I hear there are lots of fringe benefits.”

  “Peterson was a good cop, Trimble. And a good friend. I’m not sure what else you’re suggesting.”

  She considered the slight man in front of her. Was Trimble trying to unsettle her for some specific reason? Maybe Peterson had been right. Maybe she was a guppy in a shark tank. Thinking of how hard Tori had fought to move up in the department, she offered Trimble her blankest pleasant expression as she waited for his response.

  “I’m just joking around, Borelli. I know Peterson’s a good man. Uh, listen, you handled yourself pretty well at that hearing.”

  She raised an ey
ebrow. “I didn’t know you were there.”

  “I hear things.” He waved an airy hand. “You know how it is. Funny, the other thing going around is how the department’s gotten so top-heavy the last few years. Five commanders and seven captains for a department this small? Doesn’t that seem odd to you?”

  She didn’t respond. Of course it had occurred to her. But a police department had to spend every dollar of its annual budget to get its allocation the next, and Briarwood had grown very quickly and not in a particularly healthy way. At least that’s what she’d been telling herself for the last couple of years.

  She wondered why Trimble was bringing up the issue with her. He was, if she recalled correctly, part of the group that pushed to expand the brass section. He certainly seemed interested in rattling her cage.

  “Oh, well,” he muttered, turning away, “everybody gets a nice, fat pension. At least, that’s what they tell us. Doesn’t feel so fat to me. Take care, Captain.”

  She waited until the door swung shut, closing out the brightness that flared when it opened, the glare she recalled not noticing just before Trimble showed up behind her. She waited three beats before easing over to peek through a gap in the thick plastic blinds that blocked most of the sunlight from coming through the bar’s big front window.

  She watched Trimble climb into his beige, four-door sedan and ease out into midday traffic. It was the same car he’d been driving when she’d moved to Briarwood in the eighties. He lived in the same house, wore the same watch, the same shoes, the same clothes. Same wife too, which meant that unlike most officers she knew, he actually got to hold on to his money.

  He probably had a million dollars sitting in the bank and still kept complaining about how broke he was. She pondered his repeated references to his limited financial resources. Was he shamming, or did he have some weird paranoia about running out of money? Between his membership at the country club, his big old boat, and his membership in Wharf Rats, the marina’s most exclusive yacht club, Trimble had a pretty nice lifestyle.

  She checked her watch. Peterson had been gone four minutes. She gave it another sixty seconds before ambling toward the head. Was he so drunk he’d passed out or taken a fall in the john? Or had he been the victim of some health crisis? He was only in his late sixties, but he’d lived a hard life. He’d also spent what looked like much of the morning tying one on at the bar. Maybe that was how he spent most of his mornings.

  “Hey, I know you’ve got a huge prostate, but I don’t have all day,” she called through the door. No response. The doorknob yielded to gentle pressure, and she walked into the surprisingly clean men’s room to find it empty. She dashed out and checked the alley beyond the emergency exit, but it was occupied only by a startled cat and an overflowing Dumpster.

  Jonas Peterson had disappeared.

  Chapter Three

  “What do you mean, he disappeared?”

  Tori’s voice was too loud, and Brenda held the phone a few inches from her ear.

  “He went to the john and out the back, that’s all I can figure. I called his cell phone but he hasn’t called me back. I can’t imagine why he’d just take off like that.”

  “Maybe he didn’t want to get sucked into one of your crusades. He’s retired. Some people actually stop working when they retire. Maybe he went home.”

  “No, I looked. His car’s still here.”

  Tori exhaled loudly. “Hasn’t he been drinking? He was a drunk on the job, even more so after he retired. The fact he knows better than to drive after spending all morning in a bar means he isn’t entirely pickled.”

  “Listen, forget I said anything. I wouldn’t have, except you called just as I was looking for him.” She bit her lip and shook a stray curl out of her eyes.

  Yes, Peterson liked a drink, but so did most of the people she knew. She couldn’t get the image out of her mind: Peterson sitting in front of a collection of empty glasses, his shoes dull and his shirt wrinkled.

  “Well,” Tori said with a huff. “Sorry I bothered you.”

  “Wait, why did you call? What’s up?”

  “Not on the phone. Meet me at home. At your house. Ten minutes.”

  She sketched a wave at Simpson and tried not to race to her Caprice parked around the corner from the bar. She and Tori hadn’t been alone in the house since Tori moved out. For the first time, she realized she’d never asked Tori to give her back the key to the front door. Would she let herself in?

  She didn’t. When Brenda pulled into her driveway, Tori was sitting in her red Mustang convertible, parked on the street. Was Tori aware, Brenda wondered, that she was parked right where the Lexus—the vehicle belonging to Tori’s fling—had sat seven months before?

  She doubted Tori allowed herself to think about that. Tori’s choice was a matter of stating the obvious: her presence here was that of a guest and not a resident in Brenda’s life or in her house. While this was accurate, it was another painful reminder of what should have been and wasn’t.

  She and Tori should have spent the rest of their lives together. They should have taken the trips to Spain, Egypt, Japan, Australia, and everywhere else they’d planned to visit. They should have gone through with the adoption they’d talked about for years. One child, they’d said, and then we’ll see. But they never did it. They should have bought one of those cabins they’d gone to view that second summer and saved up for.

  Tori had wanted a boat and to join the yacht club. The boat, bought to surprise Tori for her birthday, still sat in its expensive berth. She didn’t even know Brenda had bought it for her. If she’d known about it, would she still have cheated? How much of her cheating was Brenda’s fault?

  The question hung around her as she walked past her former lover with only a curt nod. She unlocked the door and left it open for Tori to follow. She put on the kettle, knowing Tori would want a cup of tea. Brenda fought defensiveness because she didn’t have any of the fancy loose-leaf kinds Tori liked, but she refrained from making excuses as she pulled out the tin of ready-made teabags and set it gently on the counter next to the gas stove Tori had chosen.

  She heard Tori come in and ease the door closed. Maybe Tori was as shaken by their meeting here as she was. Why, then, had she insisted on meeting at home? Was Tori playing some kind of game? Was her information so secret that she couldn’t risk someone overhearing it, or did she only want Brenda to think it was?

  “I wanted to talk to you alone.”

  Brenda nearly dropped the yellow caneware sugar bowl, part of the set they’d found at an antique shop near San Francisco. For ten years, she’d joked that Tori could read her mind. She’d seen it as a sign of their closeness. Now that they were disconnected in all the important ways, she wondered if she was just predictable.

  She made a face. “About Donnelly.”

  “Obviously. Listen, I need a minute.”

  Tori gestured toward the hall bathroom, and Brenda nodded like Tori might have forgotten where it was. She got out a box of stale cookies, realizing how much of the food in the house had been purchased by Tori when she still lived here. She put the box back in the pantry. She heard Tori come back from the bathroom but ignored her entrance until she heard Tori’s brusque voice.

  “Any suspects?”

  She shook her head. Over the years, she’d gotten used to Tori’s abrupt conversational style. Tori could schmooze when it benefited her to do so, and it felt intimate, the way Tori didn’t feel compelled to put on her company manners with Brenda. Was that self-deception? Was Tori’s casual curtness more a matter of indifference than of familiarity?

  “You need to look outside the department, Bren.” Tori headed for the stove when the kettle whistled. At the last second she backed off and watched Brenda pour into the lovely teapot that was part of the set she’d left behind because she said Brenda didn’t have the taste to pick anything decent for herself. Brenda wobbled the kettle a moment, wondering if Tori remembered all the horrible things she’d said to her.
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  “Because?”

  She sat at the red, Formica-and-chrome table Tori had picked out, gesturing so Tori would sit, wondering at the strange formality of their manners.

  “Because I’m already looking inside the department.” Tori sat across from her, not in her old chair but the other one, the one with the gimpy back leg they’d talked about fixing but which still wobbled on its shorter fourth foot. Tori leaned forward, elbows on the table, breasts resting on the tablecloth, glorious cleavage on display. Brenda leaned back.

  “Do you have any suspects?”

  Tori shook her head, and they sat in silence for a long moment.

  “Since you’re here, I’ve been meaning to ask… You said you didn’t want anything else when you left. Have you changed your mind? Is there anything here you decided you want? It would be okay. It would be fair. We got pretty much everything in this house together. You picked almost everything, since you were always the one with taste.”

  Tori eyed Brenda, her expression unreadable. She sat back, letting the chair wobble.

  After a beat she persisted. “Just so I know. So there isn’t some resentment between us because you want the silver salad tongs or the Bing or whatever.”

  “I love her work. Remember when we—” Tori looked toward the living room, where the huge Bernice Bing painting had pride of place on the wall facing the front door.

  “Of course. How could I forget? That’s one of my favorite memories.”

  They’d talked endlessly about it ahead of time, making sure they could afford to invest in one original piece by their favorite artist before they went to the Berkeley gallery auction. They’d both loved the same colorful abstract and simply smiled at each other when bidding started for the large painting. It had been both their hands on the paddle.

  This had been during the golden period of their relationship, when their intimacy was still unspoiled by hurt feelings and disappointment and misunderstandings. Brenda swallowed hard. She’d never imagined the impossible distance that stretched between them now.