Eve pushed her empty plate away. “I’m killing myself in front of you right now by eating this.”
“It’s not quite the same thing.”
“What have you been up to this morning?” she asked, ungracefully changing the subject.
He sighed and let her get away with it. “I sent the search warrant over to Celeste Crawford’s cellular carrier and her credit card companies to get the records for the week of her mother’s disappearance. I should have it all today.”
“What do you think our next move should be on the Morton case?”
“Same move we just took with Celeste Crawford. Use cell phone GPS records and credit card data to see if we can track Towler, Harding, and Frankel’s movements on the day of Sabrina’s disappearance. Burnside is working on getting us the search warrants.”
Eve nodded and checked the time on her phone. It was almost 2:00 p.m. “Do you mind dropping me off at the Enterprise Rent-A-Car at Canoga and Sherman Way before you go back? I’ve got some personal stuff to do. I may not get in today.”
“No one is expecting you to show up for a while. You were involved in a shooting.”
“No I wasn’t. I didn’t fire my weapon and nobody shot at me.”
“You saw a man die,” Duncan said. “It’s okay to be affected by it.”
“How about you?”
“It didn’t happen to me,” Duncan said.
“But is everybody treating you like a traitor for arresting two deputies? Are they blaming you for Pruitt’s suicide?”
“Of course not. It’s all on you. I’m the fat old guy who has been here for decades, proven he’s a stand-up guy, and is on his way out. I’m blameless. You’re the young, attractive publicity whore who doesn’t care how many careers you have to ruin, or deputies you have to kill, to get to the top.”
“My God, is that what people are actually saying?”
“Only the ones who are being kind,” he said. “You don’t want to hear what the haters are saying.”
That made her laugh. “I’ll just look at my car.”
“That about sums it up.”
Duncan drove Eve to the Enterprise Rent-A-Car on Sherman Way. On the drive, she called Greta Halsey, the crime scene cleaner, who was a retired cop. Greta agreed to meet Eve at the condo at 3:00 p.m. but suggested that Eve call her insurance company first.
“You’re probably covered for this,” Greta said. She had a heavy Chicago accent.
“You really think so?”
“I’m ninety-nine-point-nine percent certain because I work with most of the insurance companies and they also use me as an expert adjuster in these cases.”
One-stop shopping. Eve liked that.
Duncan dropped her off and went back to Lost Hills. Before Eve went inside the Enterprise office, she called her insurance company, which covered her home and car, and explained the situation. Greta was right. Eve was covered for the cleaning of her condo and her car, less her $1,000 deductible on both, and was eligible for reimbursements of $129 a day for a hotel room and $40 a day for car rental.
Eve rented a Kia Forte and got to her condo in Calabasas a little after 3:00 p.m. The crime scene tape was still stretched across her front door. She was relieved that only Greta was waiting for her and that there were no reporters staking out her house.
Greta was a hard-looking gray-haired woman in her sixties in white, wearing a Tyvek suit and black rubber boots, leaning against her van and smoking a cigarette.
Eve had brought along her crime scene kit when Duncan picked her up at the hotel. She put protective booties over her shoes, slipped on a pair of rubber gloves, and grabbed a dust mask before getting out of her car.
Greta snubbed out her cigarette on the side of her van and tossed the butt into the open passenger window. “It’s not often that I get a client who comes prepared to walk the scene without getting contaminated.”
“It’s what I do.”
“Not usually in your own home. I can do this without you, if you like, then come out and give you the lowdown.”
“I’d rather see it for myself.”
Greta nodded. “Let’s do it.”
They put on their dust masks. Eve walked up to the front door, pulled down the crime scene tape, unlocked the place, and let Greta in.
The bike had been moved to the living room, and Pruitt’s body was gone, but otherwise everything looked pretty much the same as it had last night. Despite the dust mask, she could tell that the smell was the same, only now there was an additional chemical scent in the mix. She wondered if the smell would ever go away, or if it was now a permanent part of the house’s scent or her own.
Greta studied Pruitt’s blood, flesh, and brain matter on the kitchen cabinets, counter, and backsplash, and then the pooled blood, urine, and fecal stains on the kitchen floor.
“The good news is that most of the mess is localized to this immediate area. The solid marble countertop can be wiped, but the backsplash is going to have to be replaced. The cabinet doors can be cleaned and repainted.” She turned on a little Maglite, opened the cabinets and drawers, and played the beam over dishes and utensils inside. “The blood and brain matter is like mist. It gets into every nook and crack. All the dishes, pots, and pans are going to have to be washed or tossed.”
“Tossed,” Eve said.
Greta examined the oven, stove, and refrigerator.
“The appliances seem fine—they were outside the spatter pattern—but we’ll take a closer look, of course, and disinfect the entire condo. We’ll check out the air vents, filters, everything.”
She squatted and let her Maglite beam play over the tiled floor. “He bled out here. His bowels and bladder also evacuated. The fluids have seeped into the grout between the tiles and into the board underneath. This will all have to be torn out and replaced.” She looked up at the ceiling and so did Eve. There was even spatter up there and on the light fixture. “The light can be cleaned, but we’ll probably have to cut out that drywall and repaint.”
“Do whatever you have to do,” Eve said, knowing the landlord would appreciate it, and handed her the house keys. “I’ve got a question for you. My Subaru Outback is parked behind the Hilton in Calabasas. Four guys spray-painted a slur on my car, broke in, filled it with bags of dog shit, and then urinated all over everything. Can you clean that, too?”
Greta gave her a long look. “You’re not particularly well liked, are you?”
“Not lately.”
“I know the feeling. It’s why I moved out here after I retired from the Chicago PD,” Greta said. “Sure, I can clean the car, but you’ll have to get it repainted on your own.”
Eve looked at Greta and wondered if she was seeing her future, moving halfway across the country and spending her days cleaning up after death. Then again, wasn’t that what she was doing now, only without the soap and sponge?
“The car keys are at the front desk. You can leave them with the clerk again when you’re finished.” Eve headed for the door. “Give me a call when you’re all done.”
“Don’t you want to go up and get your valuables before you go?”
Eve stopped at the door. She had her off-duty personal Glock on her. Other than that, she couldn’t think of anything that would be safer with her, or in her hotel room, than in the condo. “I don’t have any valuables.”
“Every woman has some jewelry that’s important to her.”
Like the cheap charm bracelet her mom gave her when she was a kid. Or the shark tooth necklace she bought in Hawaii with her first serious boyfriend.
“Yeah, but mine is worthless, nothing anybody would ever want to steal.”
“How about packing some clothes? It might take us four or five days to clean and restore all of this.”
Eve looked up the staircase. She thought of her clothes, which had been locked in with the smell of Brad Pruitt’s innards for the last eighteen or twenty hours. “You can toss it all.”
Greta looked at her incredulously. “
You want me to throw out your clothes?”
“Everything.” Her mom would be delighted that she was finally updating her wardrobe. “And the sheets, blankets, towels, and mattress, too. They’re probably contaminated.”
“I don’t see how.”
“I do,” Eve said and walked out. She was half tempted to tell Greta to just burn the whole place down.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Eve decided not to go into the station and headed to the Westfield Topanga Mall to buy a few days’ worth of new clothes, some toiletries, and ten bars of soap. Her phone never stopped vibrating with calls and texts the whole time. Ignoring the media, the Hollywood agent, and her physical therapist was easy, but she felt guilty about avoiding her family. She knew they were genuinely concerned about her, and she appreciated that, but she wasn’t ready to talk with them about what happened.
She took her new purchases to her rented Kia Forte and was about to drive to her hotel, but the idea of going back to her room filled her with dread. On impulse, she picked up her phone and scrolled through the dozens of notifications until she found Daniel’s number.
He answered on the first ring. Before Daniel could get past hello, she asked: “Can I spend the night with you?”
“Sure, just give me a few minutes to kick out the woman who’s here.”
She laughed, grateful for the humor. Not everyone hated her. Not everyone thought she was a TRAITOR BITCH. “Thank you. I’ll bring a pizza and a six-pack for dinner.”
“You are a dream come true. I’ll text you the address.”
She picked up the pizza and beer at Barone’s in Woodland Hills, which took thirty minutes, then spent the next hour in traffic on the southbound 405 freeway to the Santa Monica Boulevard exit, heading west.
Daniel lived in West Los Angeles in a 1960s-era, two-story apartment building with outdoor hallways around a central courtyard. The building was called Paradise Palms, written in wrought iron cursive across stacked-stone cladding, though there wasn’t a single palm tree around. Perhaps there were palms once, back when there had been a pool in the courtyard instead of a planter full of gravel, ice plants, and cacti.
Eve found a parking spot on the street, where every car seemed to have a UCLA parking permit on the dashboard, and got out holding the pizza box with one hand and the six-pack with the other. She went up the courtyard staircase to Daniel’s apartment and rang the bell.
He opened the door with a forced smile on his lips and deep concern in his eyes. The conflict playing out on his face, reflecting his uncertainty about how to behave and what to say given what he obviously knew she’d been through, frightened her. She was afraid of what he might say, of what he might think of her. What she needed now wasn’t words. It was human warmth. Someone to hold her . . . and an escape.
So, before he could speak, she kissed him tenderly. When he tried once more to say something, she kissed him again, pushing him back into the apartment with her body pressed against his and kicking the door closed behind her.
Daniel took the pizza box from her while she was still kissing him and dropped it on his IKEA coffee table. She dropped the six-pack on his IKEA couch. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed a short hallway that led to the bedroom.
Eve reached for the belt on his jeans and began to unbuckle it while kissing him and backing him toward the bedroom. Daniel got the message, stopped trying to say anything, and started unbuttoning her shirt as fast as he could.
An hour or so later, Daniel walked naked out to the living room, his butt practically glowing white against his darkly tanned skin, and brought the pizza box, six-pack of beer, and some napkins back to the bed. They ate the cold pizza and lukewarm beer while sitting up, side by side, against the headboard.
“This may be the best pizza and beer I’ve ever had in my life,” Daniel said. It was the first thing Eve had let him say besides “faster,” “slow,” or “stop” since she’d walked through the door.
“It’s the sex. It makes everything taste great.”
“I don’t think you’d say that if we were eating beets right now.”
“Who eats beets after sex?”
“My point exactly.”
They ate some more and drank some more.
“Thank you,” Eve said.
“For what?”
“This.”
“I should be thanking you. It’s not often I get sex, pizza, and beer delivered to my door. To be honest, this is the first time.” He stole a sideways glance at her. “How are you doing?”
“Much better now.”
“Have you seen the news or read the Los Angeles Times?” he asked tentatively. She shook her head. “You don’t have to be worried about it. They are calling you a hero.”
“Even after what happened in my kitchen?”
He nodded. “The sheriff, the DA, your captain—they’re all standing behind you.”
“Not everyone.”
“Not the deputy’s wife, of course. She’s all over the TV, saying you drove her husband to suicide and that she’s going to sue you and the department.”
“I put a lot of pressure on him, it’s true, and I purposely did it in front of his family.”
“You couldn’t have known that he’d kill himself.”
“No, but if he hadn’t blown his brains out in my kitchen last night, I would have confronted him at his house again this morning, or as he was dropping his kid off at school, to jack up the pressure to tell us everything or I’d take him down with the three rapists and killers that he was protecting. I wanted him to crack and he did. I’m just thankful that he didn’t take his family or me with him.”
Eve glanced at Daniel to see if she’d lost him with her lack of remorse, if his face registered disapproval or disgust. But instead she saw no judgment at all, just attentiveness and concern.
“I am, too.” Daniel used his napkin to wipe some grease from her cheek. “How would you feel about chocolate ice cream and Oreo cookies for dessert?”
“Could we eat them out of their cartons here in bed?”
“Absolutely.”
He got out of bed to get dessert. Eve watched his white butt go down the hall again and doubted that the LASD psychologist could possibly offer any therapy more helpful than this.
When Eve woke up on Thursday, her stomach felt like it was full of bubbling acid. She figured it was the combination of stress and junk food that was to blame.
“They say that breakfast is the most important meal of the day,” Daniel said, buttering his bagel at the kitchen table and watching Eve as she sat down in the chair beside him with a handful of fruity-flavored Tums tablets that she’d found in his bathroom.
“I totally agree.”
“Do you want milk and a bowl for your Tums or do you prefer eating them dry?”
“Dry.” She was naked underneath his bathrobe. He wore a pair of boxers. She ate one Tum at a time.
He smiled at her. “You look like you’re savoring each one.”
“I’m pretending they’re M&M’s.”
“Next time, maybe bring a salad instead of pizza.”
“How about beets?”
“Sure, why not? I’m game for testing your theory about sex and its impact on postcoital appetite and taste. We can try a whole range of foods. Maybe I can write a paper on it.”
“I can think of worse ways to get fat,” she said.
He reached over and gave her hand a squeeze. “You’re welcome to stay as long as you like.”
“I’m not going to hide from the world.” But it was certainly tempting.
“Is that what you’re doing?”
“No, but I’m afraid that’s what it would become. I feel so comfortable here with you.”
“That sounds horrible,” he said, teasing her. “I can see why you’re worried.”
Her phone vibrated. She glanced at it. It was 7:00 a.m. and the caller was Rebecca Burnside. Eve slipped her hand away from Daniel’s, held a finger to her lips to signal h
im to be quiet, and answered the call.
“You’re at work early, Counselor,” Eve said.
“I’ve got a trial at eight. How are you doing?”
“I’m doing fine, thank you. But I’m guessing you didn’t call to see how I am.”
“Jimmy Frankel reached out from Soledad through his lawyer. He’s willing to talk, but only to you. Alone.”
The news excited her. She thought that this could be a decisive break in their murder case. It could also be a waste of time. But at least it would get her back to work, out of Los Angeles and away from the media for another day. The state correctional facility at Soledad was in the Salinas Valley, three hundred miles north, a five-hour drive up the 101 freeway.
“I’ll leave in a few minutes. Frankel may be willing to cut a deal to testify against Towler and Harding in return for a reduced sentence,” Eve said. “How much negotiating room do I have?”
“None. Only the DA can make deals. But you can tell him you’ve been told that reduced time is on the table or, if he killed Sabrina, the possibility of life in prison versus the death penalty. It all depends on the value and truthfulness of his information and the extent of his cooperation.”
“I’ll let you know how it goes.” Eve disconnected and looked at Daniel. “I have to drive up to Soledad.”
“You have such a glamorous job.” He took another bite of his bagel.
Eve reached out and stroked Daniel’s bedroom hair while he chewed. “We hardly know each other, but you were here for me, despite all of the baggage that I brought with me. That was very sweet of you.”
She pulled Daniel close and gave him a kiss with a lot of tongue.
“I wish you’d warned me that a kiss was coming,” he said. “I would have swallowed that mouthful of bagel first.”
Eve laughed at his joke. “You may just be too good to be true.”
The drive to Soledad followed the coastline, at times right beside the water, from Ventura to Gaviota, where the freeway turned inland, before heading due north again at Buellton, best known as the home of Pea Soup Andersen’s, a truck stop–cum-hotel famous for a bowl of split pea soup that Eve thought looked and tasted like hot vomit. It was a pleasant scenic drive and Eve had the windows rolled down so she could enjoy the crisp fresh air and drown out the buzz of her phone, which was still vibrating with calls and texts, mostly from reporters or numbers she didn’t recognize.
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