Chapter 10: A Strange Request - Lucidity

THE QUADCOPTER TOOK OFF FROM WERRY PARK, WHICH REALLY wasn’t much of a park, more like a small grassy area with a jungle gym surrounded by trees just south of Stanford Avenue on Dartmouth. It ascended straight up to about sixty feet, hovered there, then slowly began to make its way in an east, passing over Harvard, Princeton, and Oberlin, before turning south at Cornell.

The area was made up of smaller houses, fairly densely packed, many of them cottages or bungalows on quarter-acre lots. Back in the day the houses were cheap; two- and three-bedrooms had cost a couple hundred thousand. Now sellers were getting two million for an 800-square-foot cottage that might very well be demolished and replaced by a much larger home.

“We started doing this a couple years ago,” Marcus said as the reconnaissance video played on the large-screen TV in the same spartan white office Madden had visited a few weeks earlier. “Right now we only do it for our trophy properties, but it’s a great marketing tool, especially for folks who are newer to the area. You get a real sense of the neighborhood and it really captures the grandeur of it all. We even do some stuff where we walk a drone through the house. It creates a Steadicam effect for a fraction of the cost. Looks great. You can get some really cool shots. I’ve also got a guy working on some VR stuff for me.”

The drone came to a stop over a particular house and hovered there for a moment.

“That’s it alright,” Bronsky said.

He, Madden, Dupuy, and Marcus comprised the small audience gathered in front of the television screen. Marcus’s wife, Kendra Hargrove, a tall woman with very short blond hair sculpted in such a way that made you think she’d just come off a runway in Paris or Milan or the set of a science-fiction movie, had welcomed them warmly when they first arrived. Now she sat at a desk in the back of the room, working quietly on the computer. Somehow her presence hovered over the proceedings like her husband’s drone. She had neither the time nor the interest to spend on her husband’s high-tech presentation.

Madden had met her a few times. His early impressions were that she shared some of Dupuy’s no-bullshit, cut-to-chase qualities. But he knew Dupuy well enough to understand that some of her boldness emanated from her insecurities. He’d seen her vulnerable side over the years. Hargrove seemed more emotionally detached, and Madden thought both she and Marcus had played against their personality types in forging their relationship. Marcus was the better looking of the two, she the more charismatic. The result was that when the two were in each other’s company she came across more shallow while he gained some depth.

“It’s changed a little,” Bronsky observed of his old residence, “though not that much. They redid the deck.”

The small redwood-colored deck had what looked like a hot tub, kidney shaped, with a dark brown cover over it, built in at one end. The deck overlooked a small lawn—probably no more than twenty-five feet squared—that was surrounded by shrubs, flowering plants and some trees. They could see some brown patches of grass, a byproduct of the drought and city-enforced water rationing, but it wasn’t totally dead like some of the lawns the drone had flown over.

“As you can see, there’s some landscaping,” Marcus said, pausing the video. “It’s not a big space, but you’re still probably looking at five to ten grand at least to really rip everything up and put it back exactly as it was or make it better.”

They’d assembled to discuss strategies for approaching the owners about excavating their backyard. Over the years Madden had searched homes and yards for evidence, but in those instances he’d been issued a search warrant that gave him the authority to go traipsing about private property. But here he had no authority, and despite being a mostly by-the-book guy during his career, for purely selfish reasons he wasn’t ready call the Palo Alto PD or his old pals at the MPPD and encourage them to investigate. For starters, he wanted to preserve a clear path to Shelby’s reward, but just as importantly he didn’t want to look foolish if they didn’t find anything. So he’d asked Marcus, the real-estate expert, what tactics they might employ to gain access discreetly. Marcus came up with the idea of a reconnaissance video.

“You don’t have to do the lawn,” Bronsky said. “I would have known if someone had buried her there. I would have seen that the ground was disturbed.”

“You sure about that?” Dupuy asked.

“I went out there pretty regularly,” he said. “You can’t dig a grave in the middle of a lawn and not notice it.”

They considered that for a moment, but before anybody could comment, Bronsky got up and went to the screen.

“I think you’re just looking at the plant beds here,” he said, running his finger around the perimeter of the lawn. “You could come into the lawn a little.”

“If we’re going to go to the trouble of doing it,” Madden interjected, “we might as well do the whole thing. It’s a small area. We could go over the place with a ground radar machine first, but it may not show anything.”

Dupuy agreed. “Let’s not leave any doubt.”

“I would like to bring your attention to one small detail,” Marcus said.

Now it was his turn to approach the screen. He hit a button on the remote to restart the video. After a few seconds the drone gradually began to descend. It hovered over the middle of the lawn at about ten to fifteen feet then made a slow right turn. Marcus hit the pause button.

He went to the screen and drew an imaginary circle around a set of plants on one side of the garden. “You see that,” he said. “Our occupants are cultivating a little patch of cannabis.”

Marcus was right. A set of five or six plants clustered together each bore the distinct leaf pattern of marijuana.

“How’s that help us?” Dupuy asked.

“I was thinking the opposite,” Marcus said. “It may actually hurt. These people may not want anybody near their backyard, especially anybody remotely associated with law enforcement.”

“Who are they anyway?” Dupuy asked.

“Young couple,” Kendra Hargrove interjected from the back of the room in a commanding voice. “The guy works at IDEO, the design company. The woman does PR for some sort of Kickstarter-backed fitness-tracking device and a couple of other start-ups. She’s got a gmail address on this press release so I’d bet this phone number is for her cell. I’ll call her right now. You guys need to stop over-thinking this. Just give me a budget, Mr. Madden. What are you comfortable with?”

That morning he’d spoken to Shelby, who’d been emailing him sporadically with the same question in the subject line and no text in the body.

How goes the fight, Detective?

Normal people would have asked how the investigation was going. Or if there was any progress. But how goes the fight? What was that?

Madden didn’t want to have anything to do with Shelby’s one-line email messages. They made him queasy. Whenever he received one he got an urge to refund Shelby and walk away. The only problem was he’d already spent a good chunk of the initial payment. Five thousand went to Dupuy as a retainer fee, eight he’d put aside for taxes, and his wife got the rest. She was always asking him for money to send to her relatives in Nicaragua and was usually happy to get five hundred here or a thousand there. But a check for seven thousand! Wow! She couldn’t believe it. Her eyes welled up with tears. Actual tears. When he got the key to the city, she’d never showed that kind of emotion. But one fat check for her extended family and he was suddenly a hero.

“No major breakthroughs,” he wrote Shelby back each time. “As agreed upon, will have a full report at the end of the month.”

Dupuy had counseled him to be very careful about what he put in writing. Which is why he’d chosen to call Shelby that morning instead of email him. It didn’t take long for his new boss to approve funding the excavation—and even provide his own landscaper—but he wanted the cost of the project to come out of Madden’s reward money should they find Stacey. He wasn’t being petty, he explained, he just wanted Madden to think like a guy who was spending his own money, not someone else’s.

“My client gave me a $25,000 cap,” Madden now told Hargrove. “I’m not saying he won’t go higher, but that’s the number he gave me.”

“Got it,” Hargrove said, then picked up the office phone and dialed a number.

“Wait,” Madden said, moving toward her, semi-panicked. “What are you going to say?”

Marcus grabbed him by the arm, stopping him.

“Chill,” he said. “Let her do her thing.”

Hargrove held up a hand, indicating she wanted silence in the room.

“Veronica,” she said. “Is this Veronica McCarthy?” A pause, then: “Hi, this is Kendra Hargrove from Hargrove Realty in Palo Alto. Sorry to bother you, but I have a little bit of a strange request from a client that I think will interest you. Regarding your property.”

Another pause.

“I’m glad you’ve heard of us,” she said after a moment. “And no, this isn’t a mistake, someone didn’t list your home on Airbnb. Hear me out if you don’t mind. I have a client who lived in your house way back when. Or he had a girlfriend who did. I don’t know the full story. But he apparently got the idea for his company while he was living there with a couple of other people. And somehow he got it into his head that instead of going on some fancy retreat, he wanted to take a few of his top executives and hang out there in his old house for the week and you know, kind of relive their youth, get inspired and all that stuff. I think he’s crazy, but he’s bent on doing this and is willing to pay well above market and put you up in a nice hotel for the week. We could do the Four Seasons or Rosewood. Or whatever you want.”

They all sat there, staring, as she waited for a response.

“Ideally in the next couple of weeks,” she went on. “He’s offering eight thousand for the week but I may be able to get him to go a little higher. And we could talk about some sweeteners. I think he’ll work with you to make this happen.”

Hargrove glanced over at Madden and flashed a confident smile. She made some faces as Veronica spoke.

“No, I’m sorry, I can’t give you his name. He doesn’t want this getting out. I mean, if this got out, social media would have a field day. I see the tweets now. ‘Wealthy tech entrepreneur goes back to his roots, slumming it in tiny $2 million Palo Alto home.’ In some ways it’s worse than him throwing one of these ridiculously lavish parties.”

Another pause, this one longer.

“Of course you need to speak to your husband about it. Just get back to me soon. I’ll be in the office ’til six today and you’re welcome to come by at any time, just let me know.”

She said goodbye, hung up the phone, then stood up and assumed a self-satisfied victory pose, her hands on her hips. She was Wonder Woman in a different costume. Everybody except her husband was slightly awed.

“Now we just have to wait for the husband to sign off,” she said. “But she seems on board, which means we’re ninety-eight percent of the way home. I tell you, if it were me, I’d take that deal in a heartbeat. Wouldn’t you?”