Read Zigzag for Free Online Page B

arrested on the assault charge.”
    Tamara finished typing the names into a new file. “Okay. That all for now?”
    â€œUnless you turn up some other names.”
    She didn’t. Her preliminary searches revealed no new names worth consulting and no new information that pertained to Fentress. Mears had no criminal record, the only official blot being a domestic violence incident with a woman in Monte Rio who refused to press charges. Buckner and Kennedy were solid citizens, at least insofar as the law was concerned. Retzyck had one D&D and one arrest for the illegal purchase of an assault weapon that had gotten him a slap-on-the-wrist fine, both more than four years ago.
    So the leads I had to work with were pretty slim, as expected. I’d closed cases starting with fewer and slimmer before; maybe I’d get lucky with this one, even though the odds were stacked against it. And maybe if I did get lucky, it would be in a way that gave Doreen Fentress some closure and peace of mind. Depressing as hell, the prospect of having to face her one final time with dead-end news.
    Well, I’d have no one to blame but myself if that was how it turned out. Me and my ever-bleeding heart.
    *   *   *
    I dislike and begrudge conducting agency business on weekends. Saturdays and Sundays are reserved for time with Kerry and Emily—picnics, museum and aquarium visits in Golden Gate Park, baseball games in season, drives in the country, lunches and dinners at old-favorite restaurants. So optimally I would have spent this Saturday in the bosom of my family and started in on the Fentress matter on Monday. But circumstances conspired to change the game plan.
    Emily had made a bowling date with some of her friends and didn’t want to break it. The friends included a couple of males, a fact she readily admitted, but that was all right. My adopted daughter is as trustworthy as any almost-fifteen-year-old can be, and brighter and more grounded than at least 95 percent of her peers. Proud papa, sure, that’s me, but one with justification and without blinders; she truly is an exceptional young lady. And I’d learned to accept the fact, somewhat grudgingly, that teenagers as they grow older neither want nor need to spend as much of their free time in the company of Mom and Pop as they had in their younger days.
    Kerry was busy, too. One way in which she was coping with her mother’s death in late November was the assembling of a three-volume collection of Cybil’s pulp magazine stories about hard-boiled detective Samuel Leatherman. Together we’d found a small e-book and print on demand publisher who agreed to bring out all three volumes, as well as to reprint Cybil’s two retro Leatherman novels, Dead Eye and Black Eye . Kerry was in the process of writing lengthy introductions to each of the five editions—a highly therapeutic undertaking that I had no intention of interrupting. Her health was good now, no recurrence of the breast cancer and no more lingering physical or emotional effects of the abduction ordeal she’d suffered last summer, but Cybil’s death had been another harsh blow to her still-fragile psyche. The loss would have been even more devastating without the creation of what amounted to a shrine to her mother’s memory.
    So I was at loose ends this day, and the prospect of sitting around the condo by myself held little appeal. And it so happened that Joe Buckner worked the day shift weekends at the Bighorn Tavern—Tamara was nothing if not thorough in her searches. Why not drive over to the Excelsior District, then, and conduct the interview with him today? It shouldn’t take long and it would be one less task I’d have to face next week. Two, maybe, if it turned out that Pete Retzyck worked Saturdays at Mission Sporting Goods.

 
    7
    The Excelsior District runs along Mission Street east of San Jose Avenue and south of Highway 280, on the