by Paul Bishop
She checked her watch. Five o’clock. It had been a long shift. As she got older, she didn’t seem to have the same stamina she as when she first came on the job.
She could remember pulling all-night stakeouts, working through the next shift, and then going out to party. Those days were long gone. Now, if she wasn’t in bed by ten, she dragged through the next day as if she had five-pound weights on her eyelids. And a shift like this one was guaranteed to screw her metabolism up for the rest of the week. Getting old was hell.
She rubbed her eyes before making a few notes on a yellow legal pad. She wanted to stay on this case, but she also knew that she wouldn’t be any good to anybody if she didn’t get some rest.
It had been an emotional rollercoaster of a day. From the high of the successful interrogation of Darcy Wyatt, to the low of the discovery of the murder victim. The high of the sparks she felt after meeting Ash, to the lows of dealing with her shrink and her brother.
If she could work it right, she’d brief Mike Cahill on the Unit’s progress, check with her people that there was nothing else that could be done before morning, and then get clear for some dinner and shut eye.
It wasn’t just getting old that was hell. Living until you died wasn’t that easy either.
Chapter 20
Fey felt weary. Even her hair ached. She’d finally escaped from the office shortly before eight o’clock – much later than she’d intended. Mike Cahill knew that Fey did not like dealing with the press, so he often stood in for her. The gesture had a lot to do with the fact that Cahill enjoyed seeing himself on the eleven-o’clock sound bites. Everyone knew that if a TV camera showed up at the station, it wouldn’t be long before Cahill found a way to get himself in front of it.
Today, however, Cahill had forced Fey to step into the spotlights as part of her punishment for arguing with him about keeping the case. Cahill also had damage control in mind. If this case suddenly went sideways, he wanted to be able to hang Fey out as the scapegoat.
Unlike Cahill, Fey hated watching herself on television, and there was no way she was going to watch herself tonight on the local broadcast. She’d been having a bad hair day to begin with, and by the time she was shoved in front of the cameras to say her piece, she knew the wear and tear of the day had deepened the dark circles under her eyes. All in all, she figured she probably looked to all the viewing world like the Wicked Witch of the West.
She’d driven home in an exhausted slump. When she finally pulled into her driveway, she sat for a few minutes with her head back against the headrest and her eyes closed.
“Are you all right?” a young voice asked.
Slightly startled, Fey sat up, looking out the driver’s side window at a teenage girl with long blond hair pulled back into a ponytail. She was wearing worn jeans, well used rough-outs, and a man’s plaid shirt.
Fey opened the car door. “Good grief, Lori. You scared the daylights out of me.”
“Oh, I’m real sorry.” The girl put a hand up to her mouth in apparent worry.
“Relax,” Fey said with a laugh, seeing the girl’s concern. “I’m not mad at you.” She put her hand on her chest feeling her pulse pounding. “I’ve just got to pull back on the reins of my heart.”
Lori giggled and then smiled, revealing a mouth full of braces. “That sounds like the catch phrase of a bad country-western song.”
Fey broke into a twangy falsetto and sang, “You threw me over for a honky-tonk tramp, so now I’ve just got to pull back on the reins of my heart.”
“You’ve got it,” Lori said, and both of them laughed together.
“What are you doing here so late?” Fey asked. Lori and her family had recently moved into the neighborhood a few houses up the street from Fey.
“I had a dentist appointment this afternoon, and then Mom made me do all my homework before she’d let me come over and take care of the horses. I’ve got this dumb term paper due for history.”
Fey and Lori had struck up a friendship over Constable and Thieftaker, the two horses Fey stabled in her back yard. Lori loved horses, having figured out instinctively that they were smarter, more reliable, better friends, less problems, and more fun than boys. In return for caring for Fey’s horses, Lori could ride them whenever she wanted and also picked up good spending money.
Fey had often relied on one of her immediate neighbors – Peter, a freelance journalist with horses of his own – to take care of feeding and mucking out when the press of work made it impossible for Fey to do it herself. Recently, however, Peter had been unavailable, and both he and Fey had needed somebody to help them out. At a responsible fifteen years old, Lori had been the answer to that need.
Fey still rode on a regular basis, but the day-to-day slog of feed and care for the animals, on top of the escalating and stress-filled workload of the Homicide Unit, was taking its toll. Increasingly, Fey was getting Lori to take care of her horses even if she herself was available. It was an indulgence, but one that she found definitely worthwhile.
“How’s the gang?” Fey asked, referring to the horses.
“As ornery as ever, but eating well as usual.”
“Well, I hope they appreciate you as much as I do.”
“Uhmm ...”
“Yes?” Fey prompted.
“There was this guy hanging around outside the house about an hour ago. I saw him when I first came over.”
Fey was instantly very wary. “What did he look like?”
Lori shrugged. “Geeky, I guess. He was short and skinny and his face was full of acne craters.”
“How old?”
“I don’t know ... older guy ... in his forties maybe.”
“Long hair?”
“Yeah. Black. Pulled back into a frizzy ponytail.”
Tommy, Fey thought to herself. He was the only forty-year-old geek she knew who would be hanging around her house.
“You speak to him?” she asked.
“Yeah. He was ringing your front doorbell. I told him you weren’t home yet. He asked me when you’d be coming back. I told him I didn’t know.”
“Then what happened?”
Lori gave her all-purpose teenage shrug again. “He got on his motorcycle and split.”
It was Tommy all right. Obviously, he’d been released from the hospital. But what, Fey thought, would propel him to come to her house? Especially in light of their confrontation earlier in the day.
She didn’t want him around her house. She’d sent him to jail for breaking into it and ransacking the contents to feed his drug habit. It had been the last of the last straws. While she still wanted to help Tommy, Fey didn’t need him invading her life or her castle.
“Do you know the guy?” Lori asked.
“Sounds like my brother,” Fey said.
“Oh,” said Lori, picking up on Fey’s tone.
“Yeah, oh,” Fey said, with raised eyebrows. “Steer clear of him if you ever see him again. He won’t hurt you, but you don’t need the hassle of confronting him.”
“Okay.”
“It’s been a long day,” Fey said. “I’m going to go in and crash. Are you done with the horses?”
“They’re put up for the night.”
“Thanks.”
With a wave Lori turned and headed off toward home. Fey returned the wave and walked to her front door. Her mind had kicked into an even higher whirl. She felt as if her head was spinning. She needed to be concentrating on the homicide – she brought home with her a copy of the file on the Sheriffs’ homicide to sift through – but her personal life kept intruding. First her shrink telling her she should be writing letters to her dead father – no way that was ever going to happen in this lifetime – and now her brother was beginning to play mind games with her all over again. Tommy should be able to take care of himself by now, but he was over forty years old and still thought the world revolved around the rock-n’-roll lifestyle. Personally, Fey didn’t need the grief.
As she let herself in through
the front door, a white blur of fur and claws darted in to attack her shoes. Expecting the assault, Fey bent down and scooped her cat up into her arms. As she did so, the file she had been carrying spilled onto the tiled entryway.
“Hello, darling,” Fey said, nuzzling her pet. “How is my little Brentwood today? Did you miss me?”
The cat yowled.
“Oh, I see,” Fey said. “As usual, all you’re interested in is being fed. If I didn’t know better, I would swear you were a male. Of course, then all you would be interested in was being fed and getting laid.”
She set Brentwood on the floor and walked through to the kitchen to open a can of food. The cat followed her, running through and around Fey’s legs while keeping up a constant chatter of yowls.
The house was a long, ranch-style floor plan that had been constructed to Fey’s design with the proceeds from the disaster of her second marriage. It was the only positive and enduring entity to come out of that relationship. There was a small pool and Jacuzzi in the back yard, and beyond that, separated by a six foot high slump stone wall was the stable and corral area for Thieftaker and Constable.
Fey had been forced to rebuild the stables after they had been destroyed by an arson fire a year earlier. The fire had been devastating at first, but in the long run she was now happier with the new, more modern stable building.
After feeding Brentwood and checking on the horses – Lori had done her usual fine job – Fey showered and changed into a set of sweats. She drank an iced vodka and 7Up as she threw together a prepackaged Caesar salad and cut up a boneless, grilled chicken breast to sprinkle across the top. Turning on the small TV she kept in the kitchen, she tuned the channel to CNN – more for the noise of human voices than for the entertainment value.
She ate while standing up, leafing through the day’s collection of junk mail and feeding bites of chicken to Brentwood, who sat attentively on the kitchen counter next to her. When she was done, she cleaned up and poured another drink. She took her glass through to the front door and bent down to pick up the scattered file.
Shuffling the papers together, she noticed an advertising circular of the type usually left by real estate agents on the front doorstep. This one had been folded in half and actually shoved half under the front door. She picked it up and unfolded it, noticing that there were block letters inscribed on the blank back side of the advertisement. She’d seen enough of Tommy’s hate letters to recognize his writing.
This one was different, however.
It simply said, “I’m sorry.”
Fey put a hand to her forehead. She was already crouched down, and now she let herself the rest of the way down to sit on the floor.
For the first time since she was thirteen, she began to cry.
Chapter 21
“Explain to me why you’re busting your balls on this, Brindle. Exactly what’s in it for you?”
Seeing as she was tired, and seeing as the request came from the innocuous Alphabet, Brindle did not take offense. In actuality, it was a pretty fair question. One to which Brindle didn’t have a ready answer.
“Call it professional pride,” she said, leaning back against a brick wall and feeling the thumping vibration of the music from the Doppelganger nightclub on the other side. It was muggy out on the street, night bringing no relief from the heat of the day.
“Get outta here,” Alphabet said. “I’ll grant that you have a certain amount of professional pride, but it has nothing to do with solving cases.”
“Okay, okay, so the bitch is getting to me. She acts as if the only way I can get a promotion is by wearing out a pair of knee pads.”
“Why are you pissed at Fey? It’s not her fault that you behave that way.”
Brindle shot Alphabet a look hard enough to blast him into the next postal zone. “Screw you, Alphabet.”
“Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?”
“In spades, Jew boy.”
“Now that’s funny,” Alphabet said, unfazed.
Brindle covered her eyes and chuckled. “Yeah, I guess it is. But she pisses me off. I want to be the one to break this case open. Rub her nose in it.”
“You had your hostility levels checked lately? All Fey is doing is pushing you to live up to what she thinks is your potential.”
“Now who’s putting who on?”
“No, I’m serious. You could be a hell of a detective if you dropped all this seduction crap and got on with the job.”
Brindle didn’t know why she let Alphabet get away with talking to her like this. There was something about him, however, that made her think he was more than just some guy who wanted to get into her shorts. If she gave him the chance, she figured he probably would jump her bones, but if she didn’t, he’d still be her friend anyway.
Brindle had gone home shortly after Fey had left the station. She’d done her full eight-hour shift and then some, but she knew that Monk and Fey had put in even more overtime. They’d had to handle the early morning call-in on the rape suspect.
While still at work, she had spent time on the telephone with Alice Long – poor, dead Ricky’s mother. Alice had been called in from the scene of a traffic accident, where she’d been taking a report. Her watch commander had softened her up for the shock, but Brindle was still surprised at how calmly the woman had taken the news. It was as if Alice had been expecting something like this to happen to Ricky, and now she was relieved that she could stop worrying about it.
Brindle’s interview with the woman had covered the basics. Ricky was the oldest of Alice’s four children and had always been a problem. Alice had been a cop for six years, seeing it as a way to support her family without a husband in the home. The father of her three other children had also been a cop, but he was out of the picture now. Alice was never really sure who Ricky’s father had been. When she had been younger, she’d never claimed to be a model of abstinence. Now, her own mother took care of the kids while Alice worked to keep them all in Cheerios and underwear.
Ricky was eight when he ran away for the first time. He ran away three more times before Alice had discovered that Ricky was being molested by an uncle who had been happily acting as a babysitter. During the prosecution, Ricky had run away again to avoid testifying.
Every time he came home or was brought home after running away, Ricky appeared to be more and more withdrawn. Alice didn’t know how to reach him. Family intervention, counseling, nothing seemed to work. When he’d been picked up three weeks earlier by the West Hollywood Sheriffs for prostitution, Alice had finally known that there would never be a happy ending for Ricky. And now he was dead.
Alice herself felt dead inside. Six years of being a cop, however, had taught her to kill any outward display of emotion. She took the news that Brindle broke to her without tears or hysterics. Later that night, she would perhaps consider eating a bullet from her service revolver, but until then she would handle the situation with icy calm.
Brindle had tried to elicit as much information as she could from Alice Long, but she knew she would have to do a more in-depth follow-up when Alice came to LA to claim the body. It appeared, though, that Alice would be able to give the LA detectives little to go on. Ricky’s story was pathetic, but not unusual. The fact that his mother was a cop simply proved that carrying a badge didn’t make you immune; it didn’t make you a god; and it sure as hell didn’t protect you from being personally touched by the horrors of the world.
After leaving work for the day, Brindle had thought about Ricky Long. She also thought about the John Doe victim from the Sheriff’s murder. From talking with the vice unit at the West Hollywood Sheriffs’ station, she knew the name of the nightclub where Ricky had been busted for prostitution. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that perhaps the John Doe had operated in the same area.
She called Alphabet at home, catching him in the middle of his daily NordicTrack workout. Monk had asked them to concentrate on getting a positive make on the John Doe. The identity could help
establish a connection between the two victims and give them a clear lead to the killer.
Alphabet had been surprised when Brindle called. She never paid him much attention at work. He figured this was probably because he couldn’t do anything for her, couldn’t smooth out the fast track to a promotion or a cushy assignment. Still, it didn’t take much persuading on her part to get him to meet her in West Hollywood with pictures of the two victims taken from the murder books.
Brindle and Alphabet started their quest at the West Hollywood Sheriffs’ station, a squat building on the corner of San Vincente and Santa Monica Boulevard. The city of West Hollywood butts up against the northeast end of LAPD’s West Los Angeles Area. It is a small municipality, known as a predominantly gay enclave. For cost and resource reasons, the city contracted its law enforcement needs through the Los Angeles Sheriff’s department.
Checking in with the deputies assigned the Sheriffs’ vice detail, the two LA detectives flashed around pictures of Ricky Long and the John Doe. The deputy who’d arrested Ricky happened to be at the station. The young boy had been caught up in a sweep of male prostitutes who ply their trade outside the area nightclubs. There was nothing special about the arrest, except perhaps for Ricky’s age, but even that wasn’t unusual enough to elicit more than passing comment.
“Street kids,” Deputy Hogan said. He was a big man, ex-football player type with a heavy mustache. “They’re the same here as everywhere else. They close ranks for their own protection. I don’t think you’re going to get anywhere showing them the photo of your John Doe. They won’t tell you a thing.”
“I agree,” Brindle said, although she didn’t. “But we’ve got to cover all the bases to satisfy our boss.”
Hogan shrugged. “Good luck to you then, but I still say you’re spinning your wheels.”
“The overtime money is too good to pass up,” Alphabet said. “If the city wants to pay us to spin our wheels, who are we to complain?” He gave Hogan a knowing wink. He wanted to give the deputy the feeling they weren’t going to be looking to hard. If the deputies began to think LAPD might ace them out of a good murder case lead, they’d become less cooperative – hoping to grab any brownie points for themselves.