Tourist Trap (Rebecca Schwartz #3) (A Rebecca Schwartz Mystery) (The Rebecca Schwartz Series)

enemy’—but I didn’t know who he meant. Maybe Mr. Zimbardo, but I don’t know for sure. But he said he wasn’t finished. He said San Francisco was still a hellhole and he was still going to close it down, and how he was going to get revenge was he was going to make the city pay him off. He said now he’d seen to it they’d try his ‘enemy’ and convict him, but he could keep killing because he could pretend to be a copycat of his own self. He said he could get away with it, because now he was asking for money, which the Trapper hadn’t done before. So they’d still think his enemy was the Trapper and he was a Trapper copycat, but all the same, they’d still have to pay him off to get him to stop. He thought he was real clever. He said they didn’t pay attention the first time—when he bombed the elevator—but he was going to keep on trapping tourists till they had to. He used those words, too—‘trapping tourists.’ I just lay there, you know, real scared and still. Then he told me how he finally got up the nerve to call Mr. Burns—instead of just writing notes—after he wrecked the cable car, and Mr. Burns asked him my name.” At the recollection, his face contorted. “See, Les always called me Miranda Warning—that was his nickname for me. And that day at Mount Davidson, that was the name I gave Mr. Burns. So when he said Mr. Burns had asked him that, I knew that was why he’d tracked me down. He thought I suspected he was the Trapper and I’d told Mr. Burns about it. He came there to kill me!” She screamed the last sentence.
    “How did you know that?”
    “He said it! He kept saying it over and over and over.” She stopped for what seemed a long time and then began again, her voice dull. “But that was later. First he rolled over like he was going to kiss me, but he didn’t—he started strangling me. Then he started saying, ‘I’m going to kill you, I’m going to kill you,’ over and over again. He put both hands around my neck, and I tried to pull them off, but I couldn’t. But then I remembered the knife under the mattress.”
    I was so stunned I couldn’t speak for a moment; my thoughts simply wouldn’t arrange themselves into patterns I could recognize. Miranda looked straight at me, not down in her lap. “He hardly bled at all,” she said. “We dumped the body in the woods. Mean-Mouth and me.”

22
     
    If I hadn’t been in a half stupor, it would never have happened that way. The minute Miranda mentioned the knife, I would have smelled what was coming and asked the court to appoint a lawyer for her. The lawyer would have told her to take the Fifth and she would have. But as it happens, I wasn’t the only one who was too slow to stop the confession. Both Liz and the judge had as much obligation as I did to see that she didn’t incriminate herself. And neither of them thought quickly enough. The judge declared a mistrial.
    As soon as I could get away, I went to Marin General, where I found Dad scheduled for surgery to clean out his left carotid artery. “Just like a rusty pipe, Beck,” he said. “They tell me it happens all the time, to people of a certain age. You have a little arteriosclerosis, your artery goes narrow on you, and you don’t get enough blood to the language center. So who needed me, anyway? Congratulations.”
    He and Mom had already heard some of the story on the radio, but I filled them in on the details and watched them react in their accustomed ways—Mom having a near breakdown because I’d taken such a chance, Dad chuckling because I’d pulled it off. They could both have been furious for all I cared—my client was free and my dad was going to be fine.
    The thing Dad had was called a transient ischemic attack, or TIA to the docs. It had happened to him once before, in Israel, for about ten minutes. He couldn’t speak and felt weak in his right arm and face. He got worried—thinking brain tumor thoughts—and got Mom to come home quickly without really explaining why. But then, when it didn’t recur at first, he got the feeling it was only his imagination. With Mom’s propensity for terror, I could understand why he’d kept it to himself.
    I left feeling buoyant, but the mood lasted only as long as it took me to get to my car. Up till then, I’d had Lou on my mind, and Dad. With both worries removed, my mind switched to other things, and something began to nag at me. Something that still didn’t fit. I drove around a long