Claire cleared her throat before speaking. “Sabrina always loved the water. She broke her elbow surfing, but as soon as she got her cast off, she returned to the beach. She wasn’t ready to get back in the water yet, so she watched other surfers. One Saturday, she stayed until dark, socializing with some men on the beach. She drank a few beers and passed out . . .”
She couldn’t go on, overcome with emotion, so her husband continued, an edge in his voice.
“They drugged her, gang-raped her, and just left her on the sand. She went straight to you and you did nothing about it.”
Claire didn’t correct her husband this time. Eve wasn’t offended. She accepted that she represented the entire Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department—past, present, and future—to the Mortons.
“Whatever drug they gave her messed up her memory,” Albert said. “Sabrina couldn’t remember their names or their faces.”
“She remembered their tattoos,” Claire said so softly that Eve almost didn’t hear it.
There was no mention of any tattoos in Nakamura’s report. Her pulse quickened but she tried to keep her expression neutral.
“What tattoos?” Eve asked.
Albert answered. “On their calves. Sabrina said they all had the same one, but you never sent an artist. So she found one herself.”
“A few days later, she was gone,” Claire said.
“The rape was horrible, but being ignored by you was like being violated again,” Albert said, his anger building once more. “It tore her apart.”
Eve took a deep breath. Her next question was a tricky one. “How distraught was she?”
“What do you mean?” Claire asked.
“She left her place without her keys, her purse, or her phone . . .” Eve let her voice trail off.
Albert’s face was getting red. “You’re asking us if we think she walked out the door and threw herself off a cliff. The answer is hell no.”
Claire gripped her husband’s knee. “I’ve asked myself that question every day since she disappeared. I’d like to say the answer is no, but I can’t be sure, not after what she went through.”
Albert shook his head vehemently. “My daughter was a fighter. She wasn’t suicidal, she was furious. That’s why she had a drawing made of the tattoos.” He glared at Eve. “She wasn’t going to wait for you to do something. She was going to find the bastards herself.”
Maybe she did, Eve thought, or they found her. This changed everything. “Do you have a copy of the drawing?”
“No,” Claire said. “But we know who drew it.”
“How did it go?” Duncan asked Eve as she came into the squad room. He was sitting in his cubicle, looking at a picture of the golf course view from the back of his Palm Springs condo. Only 117 days until that was home. He’d mentioned his running count so often that now Eve found herself keeping track of the days, too, though she wasn’t looking forward to him leaving. She’d come to rely on him not only as her partner, but as a teacher, too. She’d miss him terribly when he was gone.
“The parents don’t think we did enough to help their daughter before she disappeared.” She stood next to his cubicle. “Did you talk to Nakamura?”
“I left a message. He’s a busy guy.”
“According to the parents, Sabrina said the three men who raped her all had the same tattoo, but there’s no mention of a tattoo in any of Nakamura’s reports.”
“Maybe she didn’t remember the tattoo when Teddy interviewed her the first time,” Duncan said. “That happens, especially in cases like this. Memories come back in bits and pieces over a long period of time.”
Eve knew that was true, but it still bothered her. “Do you know anybody at the crime lab who can get her rape kit tested?”
“No, I don’t, but even if I did, the sexual assault happened six years ago and the victim is dead,” he said. “What’s my leverage to make her kit a priority over the six thousand others waiting to be tested?”
“Justice has been delayed long enough,” she said. “And whoever attacked her could still be out there and still raping women.”
“I get that, but we aren’t sex crime detectives and there’s no legitimate, pressing reason to move her kit to the top of the heap.”
Not yet, she thought. “What did you learn about her?”
Duncan checked his notes, written in an illegible scrawl all over a legal pad, going in all directions, avoiding the lines altogether. She didn’t get why he didn’t use a blank sheet of printer paper instead.
“Those are definitely her bones. Her dental records match the teeth that were found. I’ve also got the names and current addresses of her former roommate and her employer,” he said. “But there’s no reason to talk to them now. We don’t know yet if a crime has been committed.”
“Yes we do,” Eve said. “She was raped.”
“Allegedly,” he said.
“Sabrina got a friend to draw the tattoo for her,” she said. “I’ve got his name. I’m going to track him down and see if he still has it.”
Duncan sighed, expressing several lifetimes of weariness, the eternity of Sisyphus pushing his boulder up a mountain in Hades. “What is the point of that?”
“The tattoo might be the missing piece that connects her rape to another one out there and give us the leverage we need to finally get her kit tested.”
“I remember when I was as noble, idealistic, and headstrong as you,” he said.
“When was that?”
“The week in kindergarten when I was a junior crossing guard.”
Eve knew that wasn’t true. Duncan hadn’t lost any of his dedication or his drive. He was just a lot more cynical and tired than he was when he’d started out. Or at least he pretended to be. She wondered if that was the inevitable result of experience and age, or if it came from years of repeated disappointment and failure, of living with the cases that he’d never solved, and if there was any way to stop it from happening to her.
She didn’t know. But for now, she believed the key was to keep pushing forward, to keep fighting against the obstacles until either they fell . . . or she did.
Eve went to her cubicle and was about to fire up her computer to track down the artist when Detective Wally Biddle, Garvey’s partner, approached her. His hair was parted in the middle, like Don Johnson, which was one reason why the Crockett nickname stuck.
“Hey, I’ve got something for you.” Biddle handed her a manila envelope. “My next-door neighbor is an actress. She thinks she’d be perfect to play you in the movie.”
“There is no movie,” she said, handing the envelope back.
“Take a look,” he insisted.
Eve opened the envelope and took out an eight by ten of a blonde in her twenties with pouty lips and huge boobs, wearing a low-cut shirt and pointing an enormous gun at the camera. Her name was Porsche DeVille.
“Is this a joke?” Eve asked.
“No,” he said.
Eve flipped the picture over and, out of curiosity, looked at Porsche’s credits on the back. It was a list of bit parts in TV shows and low-budget movies. Waitress. Dog Walker #1. Angry Lady. Stewardess #2. Except for the role of Topless Bather, it was like looking at her mom’s IMDb.com listing, only from a different era.
“There’s no point in giving me this,” Eve said. “If there was a movie being made about me, and there isn’t, I wouldn’t have anything to do with it.”
“Why not? You could make a fortune,” Biddle said. “What do you need this job for?”
My sanity, Eve thought.
“Nice try. You just want me out of here,” she said. “You have from the day I walked in. It’s not going to be that easy.”
“You don’t know how lucky you are to have Hollywood knocking on your door. If someone wanted to make a movie about me, I’d quit this job in a nanosecond, move to Hawaii, and spend my days on the beach.”
“That’s not who I am,” Eve said, handing the photo back to Biddle. “Neither is she.”
“That’s tragic.” He shook his head and walked away.
Eve didn’t see what was so tragic. She lived for her job, for the satisfaction of restoring order. Working in Hollywood, or lying on a beach, couldn’t give her that same sense of balance. It was a kind of peace that she knew she wouldn’t find doing anything else.
But she wasn’t feeling that peace now, not with Sabrina’s disappearance a mystery and her rape unsolved. Eve turned back to her computer and started looking for the artist who could help her set things right.
CHAPTER SIX
Nathan Holt’s family used to live in the same cul-de-sac as the Mortons. But after Nathan graduated from high school, he went off to Valencia to study at Cal Arts and his parents traded their split-level empty nest for a condo in Las Vegas.
Now Nathan lived in Culver City and worked at an advertising agency in Venice that occupied a four-story building that was designed to look like a Santa Monica Beach lifeguard tower. The building had become a tourist attraction, so Eve had to weave and dodge through a forest of selfie sticks to get inside.
Eve introduced herself to the receptionist, who gave her Nathan’s office number on the third floor and pointed her to the elevators. She went up, then wound her way through a maze of cubicles to his open office door.
“I’m glad you were able to find me,” Nathan said from behind his standing desk. “Most people get lost somewhere between the elevators and the copying machine and are never seen again.”
“I have a natural sense of direction.”
Nathan was bald, with purple-framed glasses and an untucked collared shirt that looked like a quilt comprised of different swaths of fabric. His office walls were decorated with mock-ups of various advertising campaigns for Brace, a men’s deodorant. Men diving out of airplanes. Men climbing mountains. Men racing cars. All under the headline: BRACE YOURSELF. BEING A MAN NEVER SMELLED SO GOOD.
“What can I do for you, Detective?” he asked.
Eve stood in front of his desk, which was like facing a podium. “I’m working a cold case, the rape of Sabrina Morton six years ago. I understand from her parents that she came to you to draw the tattoos that she saw on her attackers.”
Nathan took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Have you found her?”
“We recovered her remains yesterday in the Santa Monica Mountains. We don’t know her cause of death yet.”
He was quiet for a long moment, his head down as he cleaned his glasses with his shirttail.
“We grew up next door to each other. I had a crush on her since nursery school.” Nathan raised his head, put his glasses back on, and looked at Eve. “When she told me what happened to her, we cried together for an hour. I wanted to do anything I could to help her.”
“Do you still have the drawing?”
“I’m sure I do somewhere. I’ll look for it when I get home tonight.”
She handed him her card and wrote a phone number on the back. “You can send it to the email address on the card or text it to the number on the back. Do you remember what the tattoo looked like?”
Eve hoped that if he did, he could do a quick sketch for her right now.
“Not really, only that it had something to do with a surfboard and a gun. I sat with them for hours, tweaking the sketch until I got the tattoo exactly the way they remembered it. That was the last time I ever saw her.”
“Them?” Eve said. “Who else was with her?”
“Her roommate, Josie Wallace.”
Something wasn’t adding up. “How could she help Sabrina describe the tattoo?”
“Because Josie was raped that night, too.”
The evening rush hour on the San Diego Freeway usually began at 3:00 p.m. and continued until about 8:00 p.m. Today, the evening rush hour began two hours early, immediately after the six-hour morning rush hour, thanks to a jackknifed big rig on the Sepulveda Pass. So Eve chose a different route back, taking the Pacific Coast Highway thirteen miles west, the beaches to her left and the eroding hillsides of Santa Monica and the Palisades to her right. She called Duncan on the way and filled him in on what she’d learned from Nathan Holt.
“Now we know there were two women raped by those surfers that night,” she said. “I wonder why Sabrina didn’t mention her roommate when she gave her report to Nakamura.”
“Maybe Josie Wallace didn’t want to get involved. Or maybe Josie didn’t share Sabrina’s belief that they were both raped,” Duncan said. “I’ll run Josie’s name through the system and see what comes up.”
Eve let him go and slowed as she neared Topanga Beach, where Sabrina Morton and Josie Wallace were raped. It was part of Topanga State Park, so there wasn’t a row of multimillion-dollar oceanfront houses to block the view of the beach and the bay.
The beach was below the highway, separated by a boulder-lined embankment. It was a rocky shoreline, with bathrooms, a lifeguard tower, a long parking lot, and not much else. At night, even with traffic on PCH, nobody would have been able to see the assault or hear Sabrina and Josie even if they’d been able to scream. The gas station where Sabrina reported her rape had been partially destroyed years ago by a landslide and was now abandoned, boarded up with plywood, and covered with graffiti.
A few miles west, Eve took a right onto Malibu Canyon and headed north toward Calabasas. She was halfway through the fire-ravaged canyon, and about to hit a notorious cellular dead zone, when she got a call from Nan.
“How far are you from the station?” Nan asked.
“About fifteen minutes,” Eve said. “Why?”
“Stop by the mobile lab with Duncan when you get here. I’ve got something to show you both.”
Eve resisted the urge to put on her light and siren, settling instead for driving ten miles over the speed limit, cutting a few minutes from her drive.
Duncan was waiting in the parking lot with his Patagonia coat on when Eve arrived. She wished it had occurred to her to call ahead and ask him to grab her coat, too. It was too late now. He joined her as she got out of the Explorer and walked with her to the lab.
“I hope they keep this trailer here until I retire,” he said. “I hate driving to Monterey Park.”
Nan buzzed them in and escorted them over to the exam table, where there were a lot more bones now, some like bits of charcoal. “We’ve recovered almost all of Sabrina Morton’s bones, enough to know what happened to her.”
Eve was surprised that Daniel wasn’t there, too. “Where’s Daniel?”
Nan and Duncan looked at her with curiosity.
“Daniel?” Duncan said.
“Dr. Brooks, the forensic anthropologist,” Eve said. “I thought he’d want to be here for this.”
“He went back to the scene to search for more bones,” Nan said. “He wants to collect as much of her body as he can before I release the scene, which will be right after this conversation.”
Eve admired him for wanting to find every last shard of bone. She would, too, if she had his job. “How did she die?”
“Someone broke her neck,” Nan said. “Her C3 and C4 vertebrae are fractured.”
“How do you know she didn’t break her neck in a fall?”
“Because there would be blunt force trauma to the skull as well as injuries to other parts of the body. There aren’t any.”
Duncan gestured to the bones. “How can you tell? It looks like someone drove a steamroller over the bones and set ’em on fire.”
“That’s where Dr. Brooks’ expertise comes in,” Nan said. “Those other breaks are all postmortem and consistent with fracturing caused by fire and environmental factors. This is definitely a homicide.”
Duncan nodded and looked at Eve. “There’s your leverage.”
Eve was thinking the same thing. She turned to Nan. “A few weeks before her murder, Sabrina reported that she was gang-raped. Her rape kit hasn’t been tested.”
“It will be now,” Nan said.
“It’s sad that Sabrina had to be murdered to get
her rape kit tested,” Eve said to Duncan when they stepped out of the lab.
Duncan took off his coat and began to jam it into its own inside pocket. “That’s a cynical way to put it and you haven’t been at this long enough to be so jaded.”
“I jade fast,” she said and wondered if she was now one step closer to losing the idealism that Duncan had teased her about.
“I checked out Josie Wallace. She has no arrest record and has never reported the sexual assault, or any other crime. She’s living and working up in San Luis Obispo now.” Duncan had managed to reduce the coat into a tiny zippered pouch that wasn’t much bigger than his hand. It could fit easily in a purse. She decided she had to get one of those coats. “I’ve got some more details about her life. Mundane background stuff. I’ve printed it all out, stuck it in a folder, and put it on your desk.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I’ll go through it before I talk to her.”
He gave her a look. “Is talking to her really necessary?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Josie didn’t want to report the rape six years ago and I doubt the passage of time has changed her reasons. Why do we need her to tell us about it today and relive the worst night of her life?”
“Because now we’re investigating a homicide.”
“We don’t know that the rape had anything to do with Sabrina’s murder.”
“So far, it’s the only lead we’ve got.”
“We’ve only been investigating the homicide for thirty seconds.”
Her stomach growled loud enough to sound like an angry reaction to his gentle rebuke. She put a hand on her stomach, as if that would silence it. “I’m going to grab a late lunch. Can I bring you back anything?”
“Something with lots of meat and grease.”
“You’re not going to have a very long retirement if you keep eating like that.”
“That’s what Lipitor is for,” he said as they reached the Explorer.
She opened the driver’s-side door. “I’ll be sure to remember that line for your eulogy. It will get a big laugh.”
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