Chapter 18: Long Road of Dead Ends - Lucidity

CATHLEEN MILEKI, STACEY WALKER’S ONLY DAUGHTER, LIVED IN Petaluma, an exurb north of San Francisco in Sonoma County. Madden had only been to Petaluma once before. On the way to Calistoga for a wedding, he and his family had stopped there for lunch after running into a nasty patch of weekend wine country traffic just past Marin County, on a rural stretch of the 101 freeway where one didn’t expect traffic.

Lesson learned, this time he set out before dawn on a weekday and made the drive there in ninety minutes. Thanks to Google Maps he knew exactly what Mileki’s house looked like. He also knew that her section of town just to the west of the historically well-preserved downtown had survived the 1906 earthquake mostly intact. According to local real-estate brokers it was a desirable neighborhood.

Madden arrived there just as the sun was preparing to rise. In the predawn light he took in the view, which wasn’t quite majestic, but the neighborhood had a nice, layered, terraced feel to it. The homes, a hodgepodge of architectural styles, sat on lots that were neither grand nor cramped. American Graffiti had been shot in Petaluma. So had other movies that called for a small-town, everyday America feel to them. Looking around the comfortable, middle-class neighborhood, Madden could see why Petaluma, California was such a popular location choice for Hollywood; it was emblematic of the middle-class American Dream.

The two-story house was set on an elevated lot on Rebecca Drive. Its short but wide driveway curved up the incline of the lot to a two-car garage. A fairly steep concrete staircase led up to the front door. Both the house and landscaping around it seemed well maintained and ecologically current, with drought-resistant plants, cacti and most of the front yard covered in small stones instead of grass to save water. The theme was more desert-influenced than Japanese rock garden, but it fell somewhere in between the two.

Two cars were parked in the driveway. Madden could see that the light was already on in the kitchen. Marcus, who’d given him Mileki’s contact info and arranged the initial phone call, had told him Mileki was almost twenty-nine, married and had one child. He still talked to her occasionally.

Madden parked a little further up the street. It was just getting light out, the air was crisp—the outside temperature gauge in his car read 47. He watched the house and thought about what he’d do if the husband were home. Was it better to talk to her alone or with him present? He was still trying to decide when it was decided for him: At six-forty-five a young man came out, insulated coffee cup in hand, laptop bag in the other, bagel clenched between his teeth, got in his car and drove away.

Madden waited fifteen minutes, then decided he looked suspicious sitting in the car. He detected no activity in the house, so he got out, put on a pair of headphones and started walking, doing his best imitation of a senior citizen on his morning walk. The only problem was his version included a limp that made him stand out more than he’d have liked.

He power-walked up and down Rebecca Drive, and after a few passes he saw some movement in one of the front windows of the Mileki house. A child—he or she was young, maybe three or four—was scurrying about. He looked at his watch, almost seven fifteen. Just then his phone pinged with a new text message.

“U there?”

It was Dupuy.

“Y, and she is 2,” he wrote back. “I’m still outside.”

He always felt proud when he effectively shortened his texts. He wasn’t good at it—and his kids made fun of him for trying to be “with it”—but he tried to condense whenever he could, even if he didn’t always adhere to the proper shorthand terms.

“You sitting?” she texted back.

He wasn’t. “Should I be?”

“Maybe.”

She sent a link to a web page. He clicked on it. The text of an article loaded first, followed by an image of Shelby. Madden scrolled down on his iPhone and saw another photo, this one of Stacey Walker, and further down, one of himself. As soon as he finished reading the headline and the first few paragraphs he called Dupuy.

“Are you kidding me?” he said.

“Good morning to you, too,” she replied.

“You think Shelby’s behind it? You think he told him to write that?”

By “him” he meant Bender, who’d written an article on his website, onedumbidea.com, telling the story of Shelby hiring Madden to crack the famously unsolved Walker case. It was a scoop, of course.

“The way it’s written made me think Shelby wrote it himself,” Dupuy said. “Talk about blowjobs.”

“He quoted me,” Madden said. “I never said he could quote me.”

“I think that’s the least of your problems.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just don’t look at the comments. There are a lot of sick, mean-spirited people out there. You’re getting trolled a bit.”

That didn’t sound good. He looked at his screen and a read a particularly bothersome paragraph to her: “Shelby says he’s offering Madden a highly generous bonus commensurate with today’s Silicon Valley standards if he solves the case. ‘You look back at the bounties we were offering for Saddam’s henchmen in Iraq,’ Shelby says. ‘I think it’s time private financiers like myself—or our government—apply some of the same practices to unsolved murder cases in this country. We should have a deck of cold-case cards. I see this as a start to a larger program.’”

Madden’s voice trailed off as he continued to read on his own. “Doesn’t he realize this is going to make my job more difficult? People are going to think it’s millions of dollars?”

“Isn’t it?”

“Yeah, but I don’t need all these crackpots trying to contact me. I really don’t need that.”

“That’s probably what he wants,” she speculated. “He gave you your shot, now he’s decided to open things up, crowdsource the investigation. He’s made you the conduit. It spices up the story, gives it a better hook. You’re a minor celebrity after all.”

“He could have just put up a million-dollar reward and called it a day.”

“Boring. Remember, there’ve been other people who’ve put up rewards before. Ross’s brother put up seventy-five thousand. Back then that was real money.”

Madden looked up at the house. There was more activity. Mileki appeared briefly in the window, then stepped out of view.

“Well, thanks for that fantastic news,” he said. “I’m going to go knock on this door now. Wish me luck. I hope she hasn’t heard about any of this. What time did the story post?”

“Late last night,” Dupuy said.

“Someone could have emailed her.”

“It’s not that big of a deal, Hank. It might help in the long run.”

“Everybody’s going to want a piece, Carolyn. The guys I used to work with back at the MPPD. Billings, for example, he’s going to want in on this. Your old friends back at the DA’s office. And who knows who else.”

Silence on the phone.

“I’m not letting this one go,” he said. “Bender’s going to pay. I will make him pay.”

“Well, I may have something for you there,” Dupuy said. “But we can talk about it later. Call me after you speak to her.”

“If I speak to her.”

“Stop being so negative, Hank.”

“How ’bout you stop being so chipper?”

He hung up, marched toward the front door. His anger had energized him. He rang the bell. A dog started barking.

“Who is it?” Mileki asked through the door.

“Detective Madden,” he practically shouted. “Sorry to bother you at this early hour. I left a message last week saying I might be in the area and wanted to try to meet with you. Well, I’m in the area.”

No response. Just more barking. He felt her looking at him through the peephole, so he held up his driver’s license. Then his private investigator license.

“Pete Pastorini says hello,” he went on, saying the first thing that came into his head. “I told you he had a stroke. He’s doing a little better now but he’s still got some paralysis on—”

She opened the door.

“Stay, Dakota,” she said, struggling to restrain the dog—a yellow Labrador Retriever. As soon as it saw the visitor it stopped barking and started wagging its tail, eager to greet the new guest.

She jerked back on Dakota’s collar and told him to sit. He obeyed briefly, then popped right back up.

“I’m not sure now’s a good time, Mr. Madden,” she said. “I don’t have any problem talking to you. I’m not sure what I can tell you other than what I have already said on the phone.”

“It’ll only take a few minutes. I’m headed up to Calistoga. You were on the way. I wanted to talk to you in person.”

“Down, Dakota.” The dog was now on its hind legs, trying to jump up on him. “OK. I’m taking my son over to his pre-school program in a little while, but I’ll talk to you while I’m getting him ready. You came from Menlo Park?”

“Yeah. Left at five. Got here pretty quickly.”

“Come in,” she said. “Dakota, down. Chill out, animal.”

It took a few minutes, but the dog finally did calm down. Cathleen led Madden into the kitchen, where she continued the task of spreading jam on a couple pieces of multigrain toast for her son. The kid, who had lighter hair than his mother, was cute—not a towhead, but close. He was sitting in one of those simple, ladder-style Scandinavian high chairs at a round table, waiting patiently for his breakfast. Maybe three or four years old, he was big enough to have outgrown a standard high chair, but the one he was in didn’t seem babyish.

“Eli, this is Mr. Madden,” she said, dipping a knife in the jar. “He’s a detective.”

“I know what a detective is,” Eli said. “It’s a special kind of policeman who doesn’t have to wear a uniform.”

“That’s right,” Madden said, impressed by how verbal he was. “You look too old to be a policeman,” the kid remarked.

“I am too old,” Madden said. “I’m retired from the police force, but I work for myself now. I have to keep busy or I get bored.”

“I got bored this morning,” Eli said. “I had nothing to do.”

She served him the pieces of toast on a blue plastic plate, along with a matching cup full of milk.

“He always says he has nothing to do when I take away the iPad from him,” she explained. “I’m thinking of taking it away for good if he keeps saying that. You hear that, buddy?”

“No,” Eli said.

She stepped over to the counter, picked up a remote and turned on a small flat-panel TV mounted below a cabinet near the refrigerator. The PBS Kids channel came on. Eli squealed with delight.

“I’m going to leave you alone for a few minutes, Eli. You OK with that?”

Eli didn’t answer. He was already mesmerized by the TV.

Mileki motioned for Madden to follow her through the open doorway into the living room.

“I’ve got to get him dressed in ten minutes,” she said. “So that’s what you’ve got. I hope it’s worth the detour.”

It already was, he thought, looking at her. Part of him had been expecting someone more sullen, hardened, and emotionally drained. But she was just the opposite. She seemed bright and cheerful, not a line of worry on her face. She was fit and attractive, her light brown hair pulled up and clipped into a bun on top of her head. She had more than a little of her mother in her. The same perfect spacing of the eyes, a similar pointiness to their small noses. Madden knew right away that he liked her.

They sat, she on the couch and he on a club chair facing her, a little off to her left.

“Is it OK if I record you?” he asked. “I’m a little lazy on the note-taking these days.”

That was fine, she said, so he set his iPhone down in the middle of the coffee table in front of her, purposely positioning it between a couple books instead of on top of one of them. He wanted it to blend into the table, making her forget it was there.

“Look, I’ve spoken to Pete a couple more times since I last spoke to you and gone through the file on the case, or most of it anyway.” He didn’t tell her how he got the file, but it turned out Pastorini had made a copy that he kept in a filing box in his garage. “And a few days ago I went down to Orange County to talk to your father’s brother. He says he hasn’t seen or heard from his brother since he took off. You may know this already but for many years after your mother disappeared Pete used to go down to your uncle’s house around the holidays. Sometimes for Thanksgiving, sometimes Christmas Eve. And he staked the place out, figuring your father might show up.” He was about to mention that Pastorini also received secret approval to monitor her uncle’s mail through the post office, but he stopped himself, realizing that information was privileged.

“He told me about that,” she said. “I know he spent a lot of time on the case. Please send him my regards. I’m sorry he had a stroke.”

“He said that one time he just missed your father—or so a neighbor told him.”

She rolled her eyes. “Do you know how many times someone claimed they saw my father? After Dateline NBC ran the story they got over five hundred calls.”

“So I take it you’re in the ‘he’s no longer alive’ camp?”

She pointed to her head. “For me, he’s alive in here. He’ll always be alive.”

“OK, but I have to ask. Has your father ever visited you—in all these years has he either visited you or tried to contact you in any way?”

“Some people claiming to be him have,” she said. “But no, never him.”

“You swear to that? You swear on your son’s life?”

“Yes, I swear,” she replied without hesitation. “I swear my father Ross Walker, who killed my mother Stacey Walker, never has visited me or contacted me in any way.”

She sounded as if she were in court and had been coached by a lawyer. Perhaps he shouldn’t have asked her to swear on anything.

“You’re looking at me a little funny, Mr. Madden,” she said.

“Just the way you responded. I didn’t mean to put you on the stand.”

“It’s not that. Sorry. I’ve been through a lot of therapy. It’s how my therapist taught me to accept what happened. I used to repeat that whenever I met with her. ‘My father Ross Walker killed my mother Stacey Walker and there’s nothing I could have done to save her.’ If you say it enough times, it loses its power over you. After what happened to you, did you ever go into therapy?”

“Excuse me?”

“After your sexual abuse.”

He looked at her, blinking a few times.

“No,” he said. “No, I didn’t. I’m a private person. My therapy was my work. I never analyzed it much, but my wife says it was no accident I became a cop. If I’d been smarter maybe I would have become a doctor and tried to cure cancer or something.”

“Well, you didn’t let it eat away at you, that’s the important thing. You hear about all those boys abused by their priests or team coaches and how they kept it inside them all those years. Some of them ended up on drugs or committing suicide. I think it’s great what you accomplished. I saw they’re making a movie about you with Kevin Spacey.”

He felt his face redden with embarrassment. “There was some talk about that but it didn’t happen.”

“Well, you should make it happen. It’s a good story.” Her eyes lingered on him for a moment. “You do look a little like him. He’d be perfect.”

“I was supposed to write a book,” he said. “I can’t even get that done.”

“An editor at a publishing house once approached me about writing one. But I had no interest. I’d said all I had to say in Frank’s book.”

“He says he still talks to you occasionally.”

“I’ve known him a long time. He was very sensitive to what I was going through. He was one of the few people who really knew my mother. They went to high school together.”

“You grew up with your aunt then?”

“Yes, my uncle down in Laguna Beach was trying to get custody, but the court sided with my mother’s sister. I grew up in Auburn, not far from Sacramento. And then I went to Chico State. My husband’s from here though.”

“We stop in the McDonald’s in Auburn on the way to Tahoe when we go skiing,” Madden said.

“Yeah, I think that’s how people know it—from stopping for gas or at some fast food restaurant. But it’s not a bad place to grow up.”

“And you’re a full-time mom now?”

“Mostly. I have a business organizing people’s closets and homes. I basically help people throw stuff out. You said your job was no accident and mine probably isn’t either.”

“You don’t seem to care whether we find your mother’s body or not.”

“After all the years of having people promising they’ll find her, you tend to get a little jaded.”

“I’m not promising anything.”

“I know you aren’t,” she said.

“Would it make you feel better if she were found? Wouldn’t it bring you some peace of mind?”

“I don’t know. It would just confirm that she’s dead. I assume she is, but the truth is as long as she isn’t found, it leaves me with that tiny bit of hope that she’s still alive.”

He nodded. Like the title of Marcus’s book, he thought. Never found, never dead.

“However, on a more practical level,” she went on, “it would help get some money out of the insurance company.”

“I meant to ask you about that,” he said. “One of the things we as investigators talk about is how your father would benefit from your mother’s death. One of the things cited was the insurance policy. When insurance is a motive the perpetrator usually makes the death look like an accident.”

“I don’t think it was insurance. I think he just didn’t want to pay up in the divorce. And I think he wanted full custody.”

“You were close to your father?”

“Yes. He coached all my sports teams. I played soccer and softball. And I can tell you he didn’t think my mother was a good mother. He thought she was a whore, which is typical of abusive husbands. They’re the righteous one and she’s the whore who deserves to be punished.”

“So you think he planned it?” he asked.

“Absolutely.”

“But you ended up getting some money from his life-insurance policy?”

“Yes, when they finally declared him dead, I got some money. I was around fifteen. It took around seven years to sort it all out. You’re looking at some of that money right now. It helped pay for this house.”

“So, as you say, from a practical standpoint, wouldn’t it be in your best interest for me to find your mother?”

“Sure. But I don’t know how to help you. I’ve told you everything I know. And whatever I said back then is in the police report and Frank’s book. Everything was fresher in my mind then.”

“But you’re twenty-eight now.”

“I actually just turned twenty-nine last week.”

“OK, twenty-nine. Do you look at things differently? Do you see your parents and what was going on between them, all the friction, the affairs, all that stuff, any differently? Has anything ever popped into your head where you say to yourself, ‘Hey, I might have missed something important.’ Or maybe think of a person the police should talk to?”

“I did that, Detective. I’ve been there. I was the one who remembered the name of the Mexican worker who was digging test holes on my father’s property. I was the one who helped the police find him.”

She was. He remembered that from the file. But it hadn’t led to anything. Another dead end along a long road of dead ends.

“What happened to that property?”

“Everything got sold eventually.”

“And it went to you?”

“Some of it. There were creditors who took a big chunk. My father had his debts.”

“So you must be pretty well off?”

“I would have done better holding on to it. The land’s worth a ton more today. But yes, for around here we’re doing fine. We’re comfortable. Someday I’d like to find an open lot somewhere and get one of those green prefab modern homes with all the renewable energy options built-in. But for now this is good. It’s plenty big for the three of us.”

The dog reappeared with a throw toy, dropped it at Madden’s feet, and waited, his tail wagging, eager for the game to begin.

“Sorry, buddy, I can’t play right now,” Madden told him.

“That’s right, Dakota,” she told the dog. “His time’s almost up. You have any other questions, Mr. Madden?”

He thought a moment. He’d come in with a lot of questions, but now he couldn’t think of any of them. Part of him was just happy to see that she’d turned out as well as she had. After chasing bones for so many weeks, it felt good to connect with the closest thing to Stacey Walker in the flesh.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m just a little frustrated. I’ve only worked a few cold cases. What you hope happens is that after so many years you find little chinks in the armor. People die off. And a person who was afraid to talk starts talking. But I’m just not getting much. We had a new lead but it didn’t turn into anything.”

“I know,” she said. “It is frustrating.”

“Oh, before I forget, do you mind if I take a picture of you? You don’t have anything online, no Facebook or anything, and my associate, Carolyn Dupuy—I don’t know if you remember her, she was the assistant DA on the case—she’s been working with me on this and wanted to see what you looked like.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t take pictures.”

Madden wasn’t totally surprised by her response. He figured there might be an explanation for the lack of photos but was still hoping to get a shot. And not just for Dupuy. It was always good to have a current photo of anyone closely involved in a case.

“Why?” he asked.

“I just don’t want it to end up in a story somewhere showing me compared to my mother. It’s not something I want people to see. As a child I saw myself in the newspapers. I don’t want to see that girl again.”

“But it won’t end up in a newspaper or anywhere. I promise.”

“I’m sorry,” she repeated. “The only one who takes pictures of me is my husband. It’s my policy. You’ll just have to draw a picture for her. I do remember her by the way. Quite well. Please say hello.”

With that, she got up from the couch.

“As I said, I’m really impressed with you, Mr. Madden, and what you’ve been able to accomplish. I’m glad we got a chance to meet. I’m rooting for you. I really am. If you get a good lead, something real, please call me.”

It was time. Time to run the big play. It was why he was really here. To run the play, which was really two plays wrapped into one.

Some private dicks—or people who called themselves private dicks—didn’t hesitate to use shadier techniques, like planting bugs or attaching GPS trackers to cars, both of which were illegal to do without a court order. He’d seen ads for tiny GSM bugs with SIM cards that would allow him to call into the bug and listen to what was going on in a room from anywhere. The good ones—the ones that worked—were expensive. But he wasn’t Machiavellian enough to start bugging people’s homes and cars. That wasn’t to say he didn’t have a few tricks up his sleeve.

“Just one other thing,” he said, his eyes never leaving hers. He didn’t want her looking down at the coffee table. “I promised to deliver a message from your uncle.”

He reached into the inside pocket of his sport jacket and pulled out an iPod Touch, which he’d borrowed from his daughter. He hit the home button, input her code to unlock the device, then clicked on the Photos icon. He scrolled through the thumbnails until he got to the one he was looking for, which was actually a video, not a photo.

He hit play and handed her the iPod.

“Hey, kid, it’s your uncle Robbie,” the video started. “It’s been a while.”

He watched her watch her uncle. The video wasn’t long, a little more than a minute, and was mainly a plea to see her again. Robbie and his wife missed her and thought about her often. They hoped she and her new family were doing well.

“Honey, we understand how you feel,” Robbie said. “But like I’ve said a hundred times before, we’re not the bad guy here, we just want to know you, you’re family, you’re all we have left of him.”

The video stopped after that. Madden saw a tear stream down her face. Then another.

A pained look. “They look so old,” she said.

He waited for her to say more, but she just handed him back the iPod and then wiped the tears from underneath her eyes with her ring fingers, careful to avoid messing with her makeup.

“I can’t ask you to do something you don’t want to do,” he told her. “But why don’t you speak with him? What do you have to lose? Maybe he’ll tell you something you don’t know.”

She looked at him. “Tell me or tell you?”

“A lot of years have passed, Cathleen. He’s your father’s brother. If there’s someone who knows where she’s buried, it would be him. He may want to get it off his chest.”

“Why didn’t you ask him that when you saw him?”

“I did. Not exactly like that. But I did say I could get him immunity if he had any information, so he shouldn’t worry about incriminating himself. Pete offered him the same thing.”

“And how did he respond?”

“He said he didn’t think his brother killed your mother.”

“Of course he did. That’s what he’s been saying for twenty years. Oh, and by the way, he’s also made some pretty negative comments about my mother. You pick up on that in your research?”

“Well, I think it’s worth a shot,” he said. “Think about it.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t,” she said. “I spent a long time putting this behind me. As I said, I’m glad we met. But now I must politely ask you to leave. I’ve got things to do. Enjoy Calistoga. It’s nice there during the week.”

She led him to the front door, passing through the kitchen as she did. Madden’s phone was still sitting on the coffee table, recording. But he didn’t say anything, didn’t even look in its direction. He just followed her out.

“Say goodbye to Detective Madden, Eli.”

“Goodbye, Detective Madden,” Eli said.