Although you never know.

  He pressed the intercom button because the door was locked and he couldn’t see inside. When the buzzer sounded, he entered the reception area, which had two sets of back-to-back chrome-framed chairs with black vinyl seats, reminiscent of an oil-change waiting room, only cleaner.

  The owner, Charlie Fullerton, came to the lobby to apologize, saying he couldn’t get the footage copied until Monday.

  “It’s just me in the office today,” he said. “Skeleton crew on the weekends.”

  “But isn’t that when you have the most security calls?” Goode asked, bemused.

  “Yes, which is why there’s no one else here. They’re all in the field.”

  Chapter 8

  Katrina

  Saturday

  On the short drive back to the Sheraton, Katrina wondered why the police would hold a presser simply to ID the victims and characterize the Fontaines’ deaths as “suspicious.” They could have done that with a simple news release.

  That was the worst kind of dog and pony show. San Diego may have a population of 1.3 million now, but it’s as small-town as ever.

  A murder-suicide scenario seemed highly unlikely for a father and daughter, unless they had a horrible degenerative disease like Huntington’s, which ran in Katrina’s family on her dad’s side, and gave her more insight into such matters. That left a double murder, or maybe a homicide mixed with an accidental overdose. She wanted to dig deeper, but she really needed to find a place to live.

  After quickly arranging to see a few apartments on Sunday through a rental website, she had just enough time for a run at the Shores and a shower before heading over to Vincent Battrelle’s.

  Around six thirty, Katrina cruised down Whale Watch Way and parked in the cul-de-sac. It was the gloaming, that wonderful time of the evening when it’s barely bright enough to read home addresses from the street, but before the streetlights have turned on.

  It was hard to miss Vincent’s palatial cream-colored home, which was so big it could have been designed for an Arab sheikh. She could see two stories from the street but figured it had additional hidden levels, or even a pool, that stepped down the hillside behind it. The silver Jaguar at the bottom of the steep slate driveway had a personalized license plate that read “SDPUB.”

  Wearing heels had been a mistake, because they kept slipping out from under her. She was relieved to reach the bottom of the driveway without falling into the spiky succulents that ran along an undulating sea of gray river rocks and coral-pink gravel.

  After ringing the doorbell, she waited almost a full minute before she heard the thud of footsteps inside. In the meantime, her cell phone rang in her purse, but assuming it was Linda, she let it go to voicemail. Vincent said the visit was “personal,” so therefore none of Linda’s business.

  To her surprise, Vincent opened the door, when she’d expected to see an assistant or a young trophy wife. She was impressed by his trim build and well-preserved face, albeit a little sunspotted.

  Probably a lot of tennis, sailing, or golf. And some Botox.

  “Come in. Sorry, I was down in the wine cellar, and it took me a minute to get upstairs. My wife and daughter are in Europe, spending my money on more of these overpriced trinkets,” he said, leading her through a long hallway of handwoven rugs and shelves lined with hand-painted boxes, carved wooden masks, and tiny statuettes made of jade and ivory.

  Vincent put his hand on the small of her back to guide her down the steps into a spacious sitting area with the magnificent ocean view she’d envisioned and motioned her toward a beige leather couch that wrapped around a cherrywood coffee table. Most of the wall was taken up by one of the largest flat-screen televisions she’d ever seen, far too close for her screening comfort. Luckily, it was turned off.

  “I have Chardonnay, Pinot Grigio, or Sauvignon Blanc,” he said, approaching a bar where several chilled bottles of wine were sweating. “Isn’t that what you young ladies drink these days? Or am I out of touch?”

  “Pinot Grigio would be perfect,” she said, smiling politely.

  Any wine, including a red, would have been fine, but she didn’t want to seem too excited at the prospect. This was a professional visit to her employer’s home, after all, not a night out with her coworkers, most of whom swam in booze without a suit. It was a high-stress job, and they needed to come down from the adrenaline somehow, which didn’t make for a healthy lifestyle.

  “I picked up some Thai coconut prawns that my wife won’t let me eat, because of my cholesterol numbers. So, I only eat them when she’s out of town.”

  Is he flirting with me?

  “This house is gorgeous, Mr. Battrelle,” she said, watching him struggle with the corkscrew, a mundane task that, apparently, others usually handled.

  “Oh, please call me Vincent,” he said.

  “Vincent.”

  “Yes?” he said, turning toward her.

  “You said, ‘Please call me Vincent.’”

  His face lit up like a child’s. He would be eating out of her hand in no time.

  “Funny girl,” he cooed.

  “This how you welcome all the new recruits?”

  “No, actually, it isn’t,” he said, pouring her glass gauchely to the brim. “In fact, I hope you don’t think less of me, but I’ve never asked a reporter over to the house before.” He paused, adding impishly, “Is that awful?”

  “Uh, well, that’s not for me to say. I never met the owner of my last paper.”

  “Good. Then I don’t feel so bad.”

  The wine was light and crisp. “This is delicious,” she said.

  Tapping his pinky ring on the bottle, Vincent replied, “There’s more where that came from, so have as much as you like.”

  She wished he’d stop with the seduction act and get down to it. He was old enough to be her father, and he was her boss’s boss several times over. Despite, and possibly because of, Linda’s warning, she wanted to ask his reaction to the Fontaines’ deaths and whether Vitaleron was in any trouble. But she didn’t.

  “You’re probably wondering why I’ve invited you here,” he said, unfolding the take-out container and holding the savory fried prawns under her nose. They smelled like a heart attack in a box, but heavenly.

  “Very nice,” she said, eyeing his hand on her forearm. “Yes, do tell.”

  Picking up her discomfort, he removed his hand. “Sorry, you’ll have to excuse me,” he said. “I’m a little shaken up by the news about the Fontaines. They were very close friends of mine. Anyway, I took a personal interest in your hiring.”

  “Really?”

  Is that the “personal” matter?

  “Yes, you may not know this, but I dated your mother many years ago. Shortly after we broke up, she married your father. It was all rather fast. The three of us went to law school together. Such a tragedy what happened to your family. I’m so sorry.”

  Wait, what? That was an unexpected information dump.

  Katrina was temporarily speechless. Vincent spooned the shrimp onto two plates, and after adding a dollop of sweet-and-sour sauce, he handed her a plate with chopsticks and a cocktail napkin.

  “Dig in,” he said, stuffing a prawn into his mouth before settling into an armchair adjacent to her.

  “Thanks,” she mumbled, still tongue-tied. “I wasn’t aware that you knew my mother. She never mentioned you.”

  “Ah, well, it was a long time ago. So, back to your hiring, we thought it was a coup to get you, and without a big-ticket price. I mention that not to upset you, but because I’ve got a business proposition for you concerning my son. If you’re interested, that is.”

  Which son? The playboy or the dull, steady one?

  Katrina was hesitant, but curious. Was she supposed to feel naïve and stupid that Linda had taken advantage of her, or was he merely stating the obvious, that he was in charge of her future? Either way, it made her a little nauseated.

  For someone who was allegedly grieving, Vincent was acting rather playful. In fact, she felt a predatory vibe from him, as if he were a cat and she were a hummingbird, wrapped in catnip, that he wanted to toss around.

  “Okay, let’s hear it,” she said. She hoped it wasn’t something twisted, sexual, or both.

  “First things first,” he said, his tone changing abruptly from coy flirtation to serious business. “I need your word that you won’t mention our meeting to anyone in the newsroom. I make a point of staying out of the day-to-day operations and let the staff make their own decisions about coverage. But if you agree to move forward, I’ll need you to sign an NDA prohibiting you from discussing with editors or reporters what you learn working for me and also from writing about it in the newspaper.”

  Katrina’s brain raced ahead. What the hell?

  “If you’ll sign this, we’ll be good to go,” he said, handing her a stapled document he’d pulled from a briefcase under the table.

  “I’ll have to read it more carefully and then think about it,” she said. She dutifully skimmed the front page, then folded the papers and tucked them into her purse.

  “I need you to do more than think,” he said gravely. “I need you to say, ‘Vincent, I give you my word.’”

  Surely the publisher of a major metropolitan newspaper would have considered the ethics of what he was asking. Did he not anticipate that she, as an investigative reporter, would get pulled into the Fontaine story and that the Battrelles, as primary investors and board members of Vitaleron, would top the list of logical sources? That by asking her to do this, he was creating a conflict of interest that could ethically hamper, if not prevent, her from covering the story properly?

  Unless he doesn’t know Linda assigned me to it. Although he reached me in the newsroom this morning, when the story was breaking.

  “Which son are you talking about?” she asked noncommittally.

  Vincent picked up a photo album from the coffee table and moved to sit beside her. Close enough that she could smell the sweetness of the alcohol he’d been drinking long before she arrived.

  “Alex, my older son,” he said, pointing to the cute tyke squeezing his mother’s cheek. “He’s the quintessential middle child, always acting out to win my attention. And it’s worked. Michael is smart and steady, and Meredith is a good girl, but Alex has always been my favorite. I had such high hopes for him, but, unfortunately, he’s been my biggest disappointment.”

  As Vincent turned the pages, Alex went from an apathetic adolescent at La Jolla Country Day, a private prep school, to a surly teenager at Dartmouth, where he leaned against his black Porsche 911 Carrera in a James Dean stance of invincibility, with an air of entitlement.

  “He was a very bright and good-looking kid, so he never had to try that hard in school,” Vincent said. “But he thought rules were for other people. In high school, he drank our liquor, refilled what he’d consumed with water, and thought we wouldn’t notice. After he graduated from Dartmouth, I got him a job at an investment firm on Wall Street where my roommate at Yale was a partner. That’s when the cocaine started.

  “It’s common for brokers to party together; it’s an intoxicating business, investing other people’s money. But he had no boundaries. No self-discipline. We were sending him an allowance until he could get a client list established, but he never told us that he’d been fired. Or that he was running around with a bunch of trust-fund kids in the West Village, by which time he’d moved on to heroin.”

  Vincent stopped to sip his wine, his eyes transfixed on the ocean.

  “So, what did you do?” Katrina asked.

  Alex sounds like Franny, only worse.

  “An intervention, of course. We flew him home and put him in rehab, but he kept relapsing,” Vincent said, pointing to Alex’s puffy eyes, the skin sagging like a sad clown. “He’d get very drunk and go Jekyll and Hyde on us, say the most horrible things to his mother, punch doors, throw wineglasses at the wall. The day after, he’d offer contrite apologies and claim he couldn’t remember any of it.”

  Katrina had lived this story with Franny too. The seesaw between the brief stints of sobriety and the hope-crushing calls at 3:00 a.m.

  As Vincent talked, Katrina’s mind wandered back to the Skype call with her parents the night of her and Franny’s thirtieth birthday. He was seven minutes her junior, so she’d been confused when she didn’t see him on the shared screen.

  “Where’s Franny?” she asked.

  “We have some terrible news,” her mother said, her eyes reflecting a blank numbness. “Franny is dead, honey. He OD’d.”

  Katrina felt a blow to her gut. “On what?” she asked softly.

  “A little bit of everything: OxyContin, Xanax, Ambien, Adderall, and Absolut Citron vodka.”

  “But he doesn’t even like lemons!” she blurted out.

  The three of them sat in silence for a few moments while she tried to absorb the news.

  “Are you sure he did it on purpose?” she asked, casting about for an alternative reality. “Maybe he couldn’t sleep and took too many by accident.”

  Her mother speculated that Franny was unable to face another decade of causing turmoil for her and Katrina, who cherished him. Franny wasn’t as close with their father, who took a more methodical approach.

  “He’d been sober for a whole year,” her dad said. “He really seemed to have turned a corner. Why didn’t he come to us if he was in trouble?”

  “Maybe he was upside down on a deal and couldn’t dig his way out,” her mother said.

  “Or maybe someone wanted him dead and used the knowledge of his addictions to take him out,” Katrina replied, wondering if someone had forced him to drink a lemon-infused cocktail spiked with drugs.

  “It could also have been the Huntington’s,” her father said, “so I feel partly to blame. But we don’t know.”

  Although her father had managed to escape the plight of the genetic degenerative illness, it had sent his mother to a nursing home to die in bed, unable to swallow her own food, so Katrina was plagued by the fear of coming down with it. The symptoms generally hit between ages thirty and fifty but could strike at any time. The disease gradually ate away the nervous system until a person had no control over his or her withering body and mind.

  Even though she and Franny knew they could have the Huntington’s ticking time bombs in their bodies, both were too scared to take the genetic test that would either confirm they had the disease or release them from that gruesome plight. But in light of this news, Katrina wondered if he’d gotten tested without telling her and learned he was positive.

  “You know about my brother, Franny, right?” she asked Vincent, feeling the tears start to well up.

  “Yes, Katrina, I’m sorry, I do,” he said. “That’s actually how I ran into your mother and father again, at the McDonald Center’s family support group. Alex and Franny were there again too. We all had kids in and out of there over the years, including Simon and his daughter, Victoria.”

  Wow, that’s a weird coincidence . . . Or is it?

  “I think Franny may have been murdered,” she said.

  “Really?” Vincent asked, sounding surprised.

  “Yes,” she said.

  She couldn’t tell if he was playing innocent, but she quickly wiped away a tear to erase any sign of vulnerability. Even though he seemed sincere and earnest for the first time since she’d arrived, she still felt like she couldn’t trust him after the NDA ploy.

  But there was an invisible bond between people like them, those who had ridden the roller coaster of their loved ones’ addictions. That bittersweet ache of truth and pain that lay beneath the surface that only hurt when you poked it. Like they were doing right now.

  “Anyway, Alex is missing,” he said. “He’s disappeared before, but never for this long. It’s been six months. He’s been known to binge and hide out until one of us brings him back, but as far as I know no one’s seen him. He could be dead for all I know.”

  Vincent said he’d stopped by Alex’s house on West Muirlands Drive several times over the past few months but saw no sign of him or his golden retriever, Talula.

  “Alex loves that dog, so someone must be taking care of her. I’m worried he’s done something to harm himself. Given up,” Vincent whispered. “Couldn’t live with his addictions, couldn’t live without them.”

  He turned toward her. “I want you to find him—if he’s still alive. Talk to his old party buddies, ex-girlfriends, whoever. But you need to do it with discretion,” he said, explaining that the Advocate, the alternative weekly newspaper in town, loved to expose the Battrelle family’s peccadilloes. “They take some sort of sick joy in it. No sense of decency. It really upsets Ruth, my wife.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been there myself,” she said. “I’m sure you read the article loosely tying my brother’s suicide to my parents’ murder.”

  The Advocate article connected a bunch of random dots to suggest that her parents could have been murdered as payback for one of Franny’s projects tanking. But the reporting, based on conjecture and speculation, was superficial and lazy. Checking out a few of its claims, she found more holes than a sprinkler head. However, she did recall that Vincent had been one of Franny’s investors.

  “I’ll match your weekly salary if you can spend some of your off time looking for Alex,” Vincent said. “And sign the NDA.”

  “I’d like to help you,” she said, “but, like I said, I need to think about it.”

  It was hard to say no after this intimate discussion, but she wasn’t going to even consider signing his agreement without a careful read. She hoped that she’d broken through his psychological armor and derailed whatever game he’d been playing. In the meantime, she was determined to remain noncommittal for as long as possible.

  “I’ll give you some names and phone numbers to start with,” Vincent said, handing her a list with Alex’s home address and his favorite local haunts—George’s at the Cove for drinks or dinner, Jose’s Courtroom for margaritas, Harry’s Coffee Shop for breakfast, the Pannikin for coffee, and Windansea or Black’s Beach for surfing. Katrina was familiar with all of them because she’d dated a La Jolla boy one summer during college, though they’d spent most of it having sex in his parents’ guesthouse.