Camouflage (Nameless Detective Mysteries) by Bill Pronzini Read Free Book Online Page B

psychological or other problems. Except for the five-months-and-out marriage to the investment banker, Kevin Dinowski, but that could’ve been simple incompatability; whatever the reason for the quick split, there was no indication of it in the public record. Still, everybody had some dark spots in their lives, no matter how small or how well buried. Get a hint of what they were and you could usually pull them out into the open.
    Tamara picked up the Whalen hint when she started probing into the lives of her two sisters. Gwen Whalen, the unmarried one living in Berkeley, had tried to commit suicide when she was sixteen and had spent three months in a psychiatric facility. Wasn’t her only stay in a twitch bin—six months in another at age twenty. No public record on cause or treatment in either case, and hacking into private hospital files was a risky proposition; get caught and there went your career down the rabbit hole. The last of Gwen’s two incarcerations was six years ago; she seemed to have pulled her life together since then. The past several years she’d worked as a caregiver in a Berkeley elderly-care facility called the Sunshine Rest Home and, from all indications, appeared to be leading a normal life. What passed for one these days, anyhow.
    Tracy Holland, the second, married sister living down in Ojai, had one stand-out blemish on her record: arrested four years ago for battery on her six-year-old daughter, the charge brought by her mother-in-law. Charge was dropped the next day, either because the mother-in-law changed her mind or because Tracy’s husband had stepped in on her behalf. Social Services had looked into the matter, but they must not have found anything to justify taking further action. The Hollands were still married, still had custody of the child.
    Broad hints, both of these. When kids were abused, they often developed one kind of psychological problem or another as they got older, and some of them turned into abusers themselves when they became parents. So if all three Whalen girls had been childhood victims of abusive parents, that might be the answer to why a childless woman like Francine would start beating up on the first kid to come into her charge.
    One problem with that idea: the girls’ parents weren’t the likeliest of suspects. The father, George Whalen, had died in a freak industrial accident when Francine, the oldest of the girls, was five and the youngest, Gwen, just two. Pretty young for abuse to start … unless he’d been one of these real sickos who get off on sexually and physically molesting their kids when they’re barely out of infancy. Could also have been the mother, after the father was dead, taking out her frustrations on her daughters—that kind of thing happened often enough—but Arlene Whalen had been in declining health for years with a blood disease that finally took her out when Francine was thirteen. Neither George nor Arlene had any kind of police record, and there were no red flags in their personal or professional lives.
    After Arlene’s death, the girls had been raised by her mother in Grandma’s home in Concord. Another possibility there. The grandmother, Joan Cartwright, had been in her mid-sixties, widowed and living alone for eight years, when she took the kids in. Figure her quiet life had to’ve been disrupted by the presence of three young girls and the hassles of coping with them. Possible she’d taken out her frustrations by using them as punching bags.
    Tamara did some probing into Joan Cartwright’s life. Nothing there to support the theory. So then she went back and dug deeper into Francine Whalen’s, as deep as she was able to without a lead in a new direction, but all she got out of that was an empty hole.
    Well, the sisters-abuse angle was something, at least, for Jake to follow up on. She got him on his cell, caught him free, and laid out what she’d learned and the possibilities it indicated. Nothing more she could do for