by E. E. Giorgi
She inhaled, held her breath, and squeezed five rounds out.
Other than a light breeze it was a fine day. Behind the steel targets, the hills of the Angeles Forest weaved against the backdrop of an evenly blue sky. The range wasn’t too crowded, given that it was a holiday: only two other folks shooting at the ten-yard line and a bunch of show-offs at the black and concrete benches.
I took my binos and squinted at the silhouette. “You got two in the scoring ring,” I said, though she was unlikely to hear me through earplugs and earmuffs.
When I turned, she’d put the gun down and was shoving her things back in her bag. “Break,” she mouthed. I yanked my earmuffs off.
“Where are you going?”
“It’s not my day,” she scoffed. She swung the bag across her shoulder and marched inside the lobby.
I gathered mags, ammos, and guns, and followed her. She wasn’t in the lobby anymore. I stopped at the vending machine, got a couple of Cokes, and chased her scent. That wasn’t hard to do. Bears have no problem tracking down honey.
I found her sitting at one of the picnic tables outside. A tear of sweat wept down her cheek. It smelled salty. It smelled of all the things I wanted in life and couldn’t have. She brought a stainless steel bottle to her lips and I followed the rise and falls of her neckline as she chugged down the water.
“Drink this instead.” I sat next to her and pushed the chilled can of Coke toward her.
It was a regular Coke, not diet. She looked at it the way a vegan would’ve looked at pork chops. It didn’t discourage me from flipping the tab. I popped the can and took a long swig.
“Last time I got all rounds on target. Twice,” she complained.
“You’re out of practice.”
“I haven’t been shooting for a month—that’s not too long.” She sighed, checked her watch. “It’s five twenty. I need to be home by six. Ellie invited me to a barbeque at her boyfriend’s. Wanna join us?” There was no particular expectation in her voice.
Ellie was Diane’s feminazi friend who could find testosterone-driven contempt in a handshake.
“I better go to bed early tonight,” I said.
She took a mouthful of water and almost choked on it. “Who? You? On the Fourth?”
“Flattered. I didn’t sleep at all last night. I was dozing off in the backyard when you called.”
Diane took the unopened can and rolled it against her neck. Her skin raised in tiny goose bumps. “Friday night partying?”
I fiddled with the soda tab. “Yeah. You know who else came to the party? A detective from Hollenbeck, a county coroner assistant, an SID photographer, and six bodies. The bodies were too young to drink, so they just hung out in black plastic bags.”
Diane put down the soda can and drew in a sharp breath. “How young?”
“Infants.”
“Shit. Six infants? Where?”
“Up in an undeveloped part of El Sereno. They were down at the bottom of a dried up water tank. One was completely soaped, the others only partly. And they were all headless.”
“Jesus. Stuff like that gives me the shivers. Are you and Satish going to investigate it?”
I shook my head. “Hollenbeck got the case. A guy named Ganzberg. He’s okay. Bit passive aggressive at first, but quieted down once he saw the bodies. Matt, the guy from the coroner’s office, said they could be partial birth abortions.”
Diane drank some more of her water then brought a thumb to her mouth and nibbled it. “Those are done in clinics. Clinics, whether illegal or not, are smart enough not to dump bodies in open spaces. Ganzberg should be looking at the households nearby the dump, instead.”
I took a swig of Coke and considered. “It’s an isolated area. Not many houses around. Why do you say that?”
She shrugged one shoulder. “Statistics. Mothers are the most likely perpetrators in infanticides. Wanet Hoyt killed five of her children. Marybeth Tinning killed nine. There was a recent case, a few years ago, in Germany. The woman hid the bodies in flowerpots in her garden.”
“Jeezus.”
Hard-boiled dicks like me have this mental image of serial killers as males. It’s how we’re wired. And yet, there was something even more disturbing than a faceless killer attacking his victims with sulfuric acid. And that’s a killer with a familiar face—the face of a parent.
The one who gives you life, takes your life.
The Spartans threw unfit newborns down Mount Taygetos. The Romans had the power of life or death over their children. Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to the gods, Orchamus had his daughter buried alive, Medea killed her two sons for revenge over their father. These weren’t just myths. Of all children murdered under the age of five, sixty percent are killed by one of the parents.
What I’d found wasn’t just a body dump. It was a shrine.
I drained the can and crushed it. “I’m hungry,” I said. “Wanna go grab a bite before I drop you off?”
Diane smiled for the first time since I’d picked her up from her house. “Only if you promise to keep both work and guns away from any conversation.”
Her cheeks were flushed, her hair tousled. Her scent was jazz for my nostrils, as thrilling and enticing as the drum solo in Dave Brubeck’s Take Five. I leaned forward and kissed her cheek.
Man, she was fast. She grabbed my chin and dug her nails in it. “I don’t want a one-night thing, Track, you understand?”
I nodded politely and she retracted her claws. She brushed her fingers against my stubble, gently this time, and briskly kissed me on the lips. “Let’s go, then. I need coffee.”
And so I followed. Again.
And no, there was no one-night thing.
There was no night at all.
I dropped her off at her place and went to Parker to review the murder books. I wasn’t sure what to look for, so I just picked aimlessly at Amy’s and Charlie’s last days: bank accounts, phone logs, friends’, neighbors’ and family’s statements. Charlie continued to cash his weekly five hundred bucks, give or take twenty, until the beginning of January. His family had estranged him eight years earlier. Neighbors claimed he was at home a lot more since he’d been laid off, but nobody had noticed any special visitor or anything weird in his lifestyle. He had dated for some time a man in the same complex, and they had remained on good terms, according to the same neighbors.
I wondered about Olsen’s story—the black Alero that smelled of nail polish. Weird clue. If he were making that up he would’ve gone for something more sensible.
I read the hardware scan done on Callahan’s personal computer. A lot of activity on Facebook, social networks, and the lesbian-gay pages of Craigslist, where he hung out under the screen name “Code7.”
Interesting choice. Code 7 is the police radio code for “lunch break.” A coincidence?
Nothing else raised a red flag.
Nothing particular in Amy’s lifestyle either, except for what I knew already—her relationship with Lyons. I found it hard to believe nobody else except for Laura Lyons knew about it. Somehow I couldn’t imagine a wife being quiet about her husband’s extra marital relationship. Somebody close to her must’ve offered a listening ear.
I went through the list of contact numbers on Laura’s cell phone, left a half a dozen messages, got ahold of a couple of coworkers who knew very little about her, and finally found a gal on maternity leave who seemed eager to share a few thousand words. Most of the words got swallowed by the screeching and howling of what I guessed to be a brood of toddlers running and spinning around her.
“Laura was very private about her personal life,” she told me. “She resented being known as the wife of the famous Dr. Lyons. She strived to push her work forward, to be known for what she’d done, not who she was married to—hold on, honey, the milk is almost ready.”
“Did she succeed?” I asked.
Something beeped, maybe a microwave. “Detective, in order to stay afloat in our line of work you have to ei
ther be smart and clever or act as if you were smart and clever. Does that make sense?”
“Perfectly. And Laura was neither?”
“Laura’s problem was that she didn’t believe in herself. She felt she was her husband’s shadow—one second, hon. Oh, please don’t step on Rufus’s tail!”
“She must’ve been angry when she found out her husband was cheating on her,” I hollered over the crying and the rattling and the barking.
“She was, but they’d already grown apart. They just happened to still live under the same roof. Laura and I jogged at the park together, before, you know, this happened.” I heard the bawling and assumed “This” was unhappy about the milk. The conversation got lost for half a minute, then the bawling magically stopped and she came back to the phone. “There was this guy we’d often see jogging. Laura said she found him sexy. I told her she should start dating again. She laughed and said why not. I was happy when she told me they were finally going forward with the divorce papers.”
“Do you know if she ever talked to this guy at the park?”
“If she did, she never mentioned.”
I asked for a description of the sexy guy, took note of where they’d jogged and when, then thanked her and wished her all the best with her brood. Something crashed on the floor. A child howled. A dog barked. She didn’t run. She breathed into the receiver then replied, “What brood? I’ve got only one, he’s two and a half and he makes for ten.”
I had no problem believing her. “Good luck raising him,” I said. “Sounds like he’s ready to manage the LAPD.”
Next on my list were Laura’s close relatives, which weren’t many and scattered all over the country. Aside from the sister coming down from Sacramento, Satish had mentioned a disabled mother who wasn’t going to be able to leave her home for the funeral.
I flipped through my notes and found a phone number, area code from Olympia, Washington. I dialed and waited.
Mrs. Fawn picked up at the third ring. “I was expecting your call,” she said once I identified myself. She had one of those soothing voices that had climbed the rises and falls of life. A voice that had cried a little, laughed a little, and then settled on a low croon, like a scratched LP that had been loved and played one too many times.
“I’m sorry for your loss. Mrs. Fawn.”
“I’m not the only one who lost a child that night, Detective. Whoever did this to her is a lost child too.”
I stared vacantly at the wanted faces decorating the walls of the squad room and tried to picture them as lost children. I shrugged. They still looked like the usual bastards to me.
“Mrs. Fawn, did your daughter tell you she’d filed for divorce?”
There was a pause so long I thought I’d lost the line.
“My daughter wouldn’t share things like that with me. Last I’d seen her was the day after Christmas. She came by herself, she said Freddy—”
I heard a rustle—old fingers brushing over paper, or maybe a table. “We still call him Freddy. I suppose he’d be Dr. Lyons to you.”
I said he would. She carried on. “Freddy was too busy to make it. He’s been too busy to come for the past five years.”
I sensed the scratches in her voice deepen. I figured I could get something out of it, so I dug further. “Do you think Freddy killed your daughter?”
Again, she took a long pause before replying. “Would I be surprised he did? The older I get, the fewer things surprise me.” I heard her swallow. “But then again, the way she was—”
I heard a rustle, then a lot of static. When she came back her voice had changed. “Did you look into her bank account yet?”
I frowned at the question. The papers were on Satish’s desk. “We just started,” I said. “Why?”
“I don’t mean the one she had with Freddy. I mean her stock portfolio. Ah, never mind, he’s probably going to inherit everything because they weren’t divorced yet, isn’t he?”
“I’m not sure, Mrs. Fawn. Why d’you ask?”
“She borrowed money to buy these stocks. Freddy talked her into it. I’d like to have my money back.”
My ears perked up. “What kind of stocks, Ms. Fawn?” I wedged the phone between my ear and shoulder and opened the laptop on my desk.
“Jan-something. I think. Hold on.” She set the phone down. When she came back something like a paper folder was rustling in her hands. “It’s right here… there. Jank, spelled like Bank, with a J. That’s the company.”
The name sounded familiar. I Googled it. CEO’s name was Robert Kunst. Executives, lab directors—no trace of the name Lyons anywhere.
“Are you still there?”
“Yes, Mrs. Fawn, I’m listening. Laura borrowed money from you to buy stocks from Jank—how much?”
“A lot. The exact amount is irrelevant. Laura said it’d beat my retirement plan. She said the stocks would make us both rich. I’m sure Freddy got her into that.”
“Did she ever mention anything else about this company? Why was her husband so confident it was a good investment?”
“No idea. All I know is that it had to be his idea. She’d never done stocks before.”
“I gather you didn’t get rich?”
“I got tired of waiting, Detective.”
“Mrs. Fawn?”
“Yes.”
“Your other daughter said you won’t be coming for the funeral.”
She thought it over before replying. “She told you I’m paraplegic, didn’t she? Yeah, that’s my official excuse. Haven’t been out in ten years. I suppose I could come down, if I believed in all that. Don’t you wish you believed, sometimes, Detective?”
I let the question drift.
“My daughter’s looking at me right now. Laura is. She’s holding a lollipop and her lips are red and shiny from the sugar. She’s been fussing all day about that lollipop. I told her no, we’ve got to stop at a few more doors. People are happier to buy when you show up with a child. And my, she’s a cute child, she is. The books don’t sell, but I buy her the lollipop anyway. Because sometimes you just gotta follow your guts. To hell with encyclopedias, look at where they are right now. Nobody wants them anymore, it’s all on the Internet anyway. But the lollipop, that one lollipop makes her happy. And me with her. That’s my Laura, looking at me and smiling. There’s no other way I want to remember her.”
The scratches in her voice mended. She wished me good night and hung up.
I stared at the screen of my laptop.
Jank Biologicals had been a small corporation until its main objective became HIV vaccine design. They bought Lyons’s vaccine patent in 2003. Lyons was listed under “benefactors” in the company’s “About” page. Under “Recent News” I found an article from 2005 that announced Jank’s IPO. I checked the dates on Google: the company went public the day after Lyons injected himself with his vaccine. It raised close to two billion dollars on the first day, selling over fifty million shares.
Smooth move, Doc. I’d inject myself too for that kinda money.
I got up and retrieved Laura’s bank statements from Satish’s desk. She’d made a $200,000 investment in shares from Jank in January last year. I opened Amy Liu’s file. March last year, $80,000. Jank, again.
Neither lady had a history of buying stocks before. This was their very first investment and it was huge.
I’m sure Freddy got her into that, Laura’s mother said.
I checked the market. Jank’s stocks had been doing exceedingly well. There were blips, here and there, as it often happens with stocks, but since 2007 the shares had over quadrupled their value.
Why was Mrs. Fawn so sour?
She probably never got her money back from Laura…
Being the Fourth of July, there wasn’t even the slightest chance of getting ahold of Lyons’s bank assets. I wrote a note with my findings, dropped it on Satish’s desk, then flopped back into my chair.
A faceless killer. A maniac. The Byzantine Strangler.
No. Ps
ychopaths don’t follow patterns. They kill randomly.
Two docs in a row, both working on HIV… too much of a coincidence.
I looked at Amy Liu’s phone logs. She called one number twice a week—her mother. I spotted several other regulars: friends, a hair salon, colleagues. Lyons’s cellphone number never appeared, which didn’t surprise me. They probably had more than one occasion to arrange their meetings in person. I kept scanning the log from beginning to end and then all over again from the beginning. I found one instance of Lyons’s home number. Strange, not his cell. I flipped back, but out of a whole month, that was the only time the number appeared. The call lasted five minutes and forty-two seconds, and it took place four days before she was killed. Maybe it was just the invitation to the party.
Maybe.
I left the squad room. Save a few patrol cars on call, Los Angeles Street was deserted. I could hear the music and drums from the celebrations down on Olivera Street. It made me all the more desolate, so I drove through skid row just for the company. That part of town never misses its crowds.
Back at home, there was no lahmajoun at my door, no envelope under the mat, no scarf, no nothing. My mood was as flat as a slashed tire. Thanks goodness for my two boys: Will did his usual “I’m so excited to see you” welcome dance as soon as I opened the door, and The King actually dignified me with a mew. They both followed me to the kitchen, where I served them dinner and opened a bottle of Brunello. The King gave two bites to his dinner then hopped on the countertop and stared intently at the wine.
“Best company on lonely nights,” I said.
He agreed.
I poured myself a glass, twirled it, then sipped. The King kept staring at me, the tip of his tail bending ever so slightly.
“Fine,” I said. I took out a saucer and spilled a few drops of Brunello on it. Damn cat of mine licked it all up in two seconds. He licked his whiskers, too, then hopped back down on the kitchen floor and returned to his dinner bowl.
“Alcohol is bad for felines,” I said.
He chomped on his dinner and ignored me.