It was a standoff. Classic hostage-barricade situation. Negotiations failed. Shots were heard inside the warehouse. There was fear that the hostages were being killed. SWAT went in.
The robbers, still heavily armed, put up massive resistance. When the firefight ended, two SWAT officers lay wounded, and the three bad guys lay dead.
And the family ...
Dead. All four.
They had died in the cross fire. Some nonlethal wounds had been inflicted by the robbers. But the fatal bullets had all been fired by D Platoon guns.
During the aftermath, almost every cop in Harbor Division had been at the scene. It was highly likely that C.J. Osborn saw the damage, up close and personal. She would have been new to the force back then, still a “boot”—a rookie. Her training officer would have explained to her that the robbers used the hostages as human shields, that it wasn’t the cops’ fault. But maybe she hadn’t bought it. And why should she?
Tanner had heard all the same excuses back then, and he hadn’t bought any of them either.
It was SWAT’s job to keep people alive. But who could believe it, after the fiasco at the warehouse? Only the same people who thought the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team had done an A-1 job at Waco.
“You think that’s it?” Tanner asked quietly, sobered by the thought.
“Man, I don’t know.” Chang smacked the gum. “It’s a theory, that’s all. If you really care, ask her.”
“I just might.”
“Good for you. And if it all works out, I want to be best man at the ceremony.”
“Give me a break. I mean, I’m serious about her, but ... not that serious.” Tanner frowned. “Am I?”
Chang settled back in his seat. “You’re pretty slow sometimes, you know that? You don’t even know what’s going on in your own mind.”
“But you do, I guess? You can read me?”
“Like an open book, partner.” Chang laced his fingers behind his head and grinned through the wad of gum. “Like an open book.”
10
Down the street from Newton Station was a coffee shop run by Philippine immigrants. It was a hangout for cops, though it did less business than the local bars. Cops saw a lot of things that encouraged drinking. C.J. herself avoided alcohol, but she sometimes wondered how long her resolve could hold out against the daily assault of drive-bys and arson fires and craziness.
She led Adam to the coffee shop, past a legless beggar on the curb rattling a tin cup, an image out of Calcutta.
The shop was small and close and crowded. The air conditioner made a great deal of noise but produced little change in temperature. There were biscuit crumbs and horseflies on the Formica surface of the nearest available table. C.J. shooed the flies and sat down.
“Nice place,” Adam said with a wince as he settled into a wobbly-legged chair. “Come here often?”
“Believe it or not, I do. Mr. and Mrs. Salazar are good people.” She saw his questioning glance and added, “They run the place.”
“Keep it nice and clean too.” Adam swept some of the crumbs away with his sleeve.
“They don’t have enough help. This is the busiest time of the day—right after shift change.” She caught Mrs. Salazar’s eye and held up two fingers. “Two lattes,” she explained to Adam. “That okay?”
“Sure.”
“It’s the best thing they serve. Stay away from the frappuccino.”
“I’ll remember that if I ever bring a client here.”
She indulged him with a laugh. “I guess it’s not the greatest place in town, but you know, I’m used to it.”
“How long has it been since you transferred to Newton?”
“A year. I moved over here just after—well, you know.”
“After you filed for divorce.”
“Right.”
“You can say the words, C.J. I’m a big boy.” He leaned back in his chair, which creaked ominously. “You know, I used to think you were nuts.”
“Did you?” She felt a spasm of irritation at him and hid it behind a smile. “How so?”
“Doing this job. When I hear gunshots, I run the other way. You go toward them. There’s a certain element of insanity in that behavior, don’t you think?”
“We can’t all be lawyers,” she said peevishly.
“I’m not being confrontational. I just mean, what you do is so foreign to me. Always has been.”
“Sometimes it feels foreign to me too. When I hear gunshots, I’d like to run the other way, just like you.”
“But you don’t. I admire that. I don’t profess to understand it, necessarily—but I admire it anyway.”
The compliment silenced her. She was not accustomed to kindness from him.
The caffe lattes arrived, carried by Mrs. Salazar. C.J. sipped the foam in silence and considered what Adam had said. Did he admire her? Had he ever? She suspected his actual feelings were closer to contempt—not for her alone, but for people in general, all those people who were not smart enough or flashy enough or suave enough to rise to the heights he was scaling. She might be wrong, though. She hoped so.
“C.J.?” Adam asked. “You still here?”
She looked up, remembering where she was. “Sorry. Guess you kind of startled me with that little testimonial.”
“I’ll take it all back if it makes you feel better.”
She smiled. “No, I liked hearing it. Except, you know, there are times when I think you might be right about the insanity part. I wonder if maybe there’s not a kind of death wish in what I do.” The words came out before she had time to consider them.
Adam leaned forward, frowning. “Crisis of confidence? That’s not like you.”
She wished she hadn’t said anything. But that was how it had always been with her and Adam—his simple presence seemed to bring out her innermost thoughts.
“It’s nothing,” she said. “I’m not myself today, that’s all.”
“Why not?”
“Well, there was this situation—” She stopped herself, thinking, There I go again.
“Situation?”
“We don’t have to talk about this.”
“It’s okay,” Adam said.
She wondered if it really was okay—to open up to this man who had betrayed her. It felt wrong, and yet he was here, and she needed to talk to someone.
His blue eyes watched her, patient, waiting.
“It was a hostage situation,” she said slowly. “My partner had called for backup. We should’ve waited for SWAT.”
“But you didn’t?”
“No.”
“You and your partner went into some kind of SWAT situation without backup?”
“Not my partner. Me.”
“Alone?”
“Yup.”
“Christ, when you said you had a death wish—” He cut himself off. “Sorry, that didn’t come out too well.”
“It came out fine. You’re right. It was a stupid thing for me to do. Except, see, there was a child involved. And I thought he’d be safer if I went in alone.”
“Isn’t SWAT trained to handle these things?”
C.J. looked away. “Their training doesn’t always work out so well in the real world. I didn’t want a bloodbath in there.”
“Bloodbath?”
“It happens.” She had never told him what she’d seen at Harbor Division, and she wasn’t going to share it with him now.
“I thought SWAT were the elite, the pros.”
“They are. But ... well, sometimes things go wrong. You know, everybody says this city is a war zone, and they’re right. But maybe we shouldn’t fight on those terms—or at least we shouldn’t be so gung ho about it. These SWAT guys—you haven’t seen them. They get all dressed up in their paramilitary duds, and they go in with their machine guns and their flash grenades, and civilian casualties become acceptable losses....”
She realized she was babbling and shut up.
“Is the kid okay?” Adam asked after a short sile
nce.
“He’s fine.”
“And you?”
“Didn’t lose any fingers”—she waved her hands at him to demonstrate—“or toes, or any other vital parts.”
“You shouldn’t take risks like that, C.J.”
Someone has to, she almost snapped at him, but she knew her anger was inappropriate, an aftereffect of stress. “Well,” she said lightly, “it turned out all right, anyhow. You know, I hate talking shop. Let’s change the subject.”
“Fair enough.” Adam finished his latte and set down the mug. “How about Emmylou Harris?”
“Emmylou Harris?”
“You still like her?”
“Sure,” she answered warily.
“Well, she’s playing at a club in the Valley. Some honky-tonk cowboy saloon, the kind we used to go to. How about it?”
She was grateful to have an excuse. “Sorry, I can’t. Tonight’s my volunteer work, remember? Every Wednesday night, at the junior high, the at-risk kids program—”
“I’m not talking about tonight. I meant this Friday.”
“Oh.” Her excuse evaporated.
“Come on, let’s do it. You and me, sipping some brewskis, listening to some C ’n’ W from the pre-Shania era.”
Her heart sped up a little, and she realized that what she felt was fear. “That sounds almost like a date.”
He sensed her alarm and tried to wave it away. “No, not a date. A little reunion, that’s all. You know, for old times’ sake. Frankly, I wouldn’t have brought it up, except there’s nobody at the firm who goes in for country-western, and I hate going to a show alone.”
Is that it? C.J. wondered. Or is it that you hate being alone, period?
“Maybe she’ll play our song,” she said quietly, watching Adam closely to gauge his reaction.
“As I recall”—his expression was bland—“our song was ‘She’s Always a Woman.’ That’s in Billy Joel’s repertoire, not Emmylou’s.”
“I didn’t mean our, uh, official song. I meant the other one. The one that was playing when—never mind.”
Had he really forgotten? Or was his studied blankness only a mask to hide what he was feeling? There was a time when she had thought he couldn’t deceive her, but events had proven her wrong.
“So it’s not a date?” she asked, returning to the main issue.
Adam lifted his shoulders a little too casually. “Just two pals out on the town.”
“Two pals,” she echoed.
“Right.”
“Who used to be married to each other.”
“There’s no law that says you can’t be friends with your ex. I’m an attorney, I ought to know.” That smile again. What was Tanner’s word? Rakish. “Anyway, I want to catch up on what’s been happening in your life. And I, well, basically I want to brag some more about my career. So you want to do it?”
Some part of her wanted to say no, but she couldn’t decide if it was her more sensible self or merely the dull, cruel side of her that nursed a grudge.
“Well,” she said finally, “as long as you understand—”
He held up both hands in mock surrender. “I understand. Just friends.”
“Okay, then.”
He flashed another smile, his teeth very white against the tanned planes of his face. “I’ll call you with the details later this week. It’ll be fun, C.J.”
“Fun,” she repeated. She hoped so.
Adam insisted on paying for the lattes. Outside the coffee shop, she said good-bye to him.
There was no hug when they parted. He sketched a salute, a habit he’d picked up the first time he saw her wearing a uniform, and she returned it with a smile. Then he disappeared down the street, and she stared after him and wondered if she should have listened to the inner voice that had wanted to turn him down.
But he couldn’t possibly think there was any chance of reconciliation ... could he?
Well, one night with Adam wouldn’t kill her. And she had always liked his company, even if, in the end, he’d shown himself to be someone other than the man she’d thought he was.
Her car was in the station house parking lot. She walked back to the station and entered through the lobby.
Delano was still at the desk. He smiled when she came in. “That’s your ex, huh, Killer?”
“None of your business, but yeah.”
“I was talking to him before. Seems like an okay guy.”
“He is an okay guy. As long as you don’t trust him too much.”
11
Autopsies weren’t the only things Walsh hated. Running a meeting was another. He sometimes wondered why he had ever accepted a promotion to the rank of Detective-3. What he loved was being out in the field, and now, in his supervisory capacity, he rarely had time to investigate a case personally. Then again, at fifty-two, he supposed he had better leave the legwork to the next generation.
At the moment he was surrounded by representatives of that generation, who crowded three desks pushed together to make a single long table in the Robbery-Homicide squad room at Parker Center, the LAPD’s downtown headquarters. He had called a meeting of the Hourglass Killer task force, or at least its core members. Over the past two months, since the abduction of Nikki Carter, the task force had grown to include liaison personnel from the Homicide Bureau of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department—Carter’s body had been dumped in an auto graveyard in East LA, territory which was under the Sheriff’s jurisdiction—as well as miscellaneous bureaucrats from the County Probation Department and the State Department of Corrections.
So far the FBI had been kept out of it, except for the obligatory psychological profile of the killer supplied by the Behavioral Science Section at Quantico.
If everybody connected with the investigation had been assembled, the squad room would have been filled to capacity. Walsh restricted most meetings to the LAPD Robbery-Homicide detectives who did the heavy lifting on the case.
Today’s meeting had been scheduled to start promptly at 4:00 P.M. Naturally it was almost four-thirty when the last stragglers wandered in. Walsh knew he ought to dress them down for their tardiness, but he had never been much good as a disciplinarian. He had reared three kids without once raising his voice, and he figured he could handle a half-dozen Metro detectives with equal self-restraint.
“Okay,” he said, silencing the chatter around the table, “now that we’re all here, we can get started.” Crisply he summarized the autopsy of Martha Eversol. “Anything new on the tats?” he asked when he had finished, directing his inquiry at Detectives Stark and Merriwether, who were working that angle.
“Nothing much,” Stark answered. “We’ve visited every tattoo parlor in town, and I mean every goddamn one. No hourglass patterns. A lot of snakes, flags, hearts with arrows through them.”
“And the style isn’t recognizable,” Merriwether added. “Most of the pros say it’s an amateur working with a homemade stencil, applying the ink by hand.”
“Like jailhouse tats?” Len Sotheby wondered. “Could mean our guy has a rap sheet.”
“No, not jailhouse. Those are almost always gray and black, ’cause the scratchers can’t get hold of any colored pigments. It’s what the experts call blackwork. What we’re looking at here is bold color in a geometrical design. They tell me it’s similar to the original tattoo technique used in the Pacific—the Philippines, Samoa, Tahiti, places like that. In Samoa it’s still done.”
“What is the technique exactly?” Walsh asked, jotting down notes.
“Traditionally, the artist takes a piece of bone and files one end to, like, a serrated edge—you know, like a comb. Then he attaches it to a wooden handle, dips the pointy end in pigment, and drives it into the skin with a mallet.”
Expressions of dismay and a grunted “ouch” made their way around the table.
“They tattoo every part of the body that way,” Merriwether went on imperturbably, “even the genitals. It’s a test of manhood.”
“Really?” Donna Cellini said with a smile. “That’s a test none of you guys would pass.”
Laughter broke through the temporary discomfort in the room.
“Anyway,” Merriwether said, “instead of chiseled bone, our guy has needles, and instead of soot and water, which the Polynesians and the Samoans used, he buys ink. It would take him maybe half an hour to apply the tattoo postmortem. He uses a 0.3-inch diameter needle for line work, 0.36 for coloring. Standard sizes, don’t lead us anywhere. The ink is standard too—couple hundred thousand bottles sold each year.”
“How about the hourglass design?” Walsh asked.
“It could be a stencil, which would speed up the process, but if so, it’s one he made himself, not a commercially available variety. The fact that it’s a geometric pattern—two triangles—might or might not be significant. The Polynesians were really into geometrical designs. They had this pottery done in what’s called the Lapita style, and they used the same designs when making tattoos. So our guy might be knowledgeable about ancient Polynesian culture, but it’s just as likely to be a coincidence. Most of the Polynesian designs were a lot more complicated than an hourglass. It was a real art form, the way they did it.”
“Sounds like you’re really getting into this stuff,” Ed Lopez remarked. “You sure you haven’t got ‘To Protect and Serve’ tattooed on your butt?”
“Ask your wife,” Merriwether responded placidly, to general amusement.
“Okay,” Walsh said, “since the tats are a dead end, I want you two to go back to working the index cards.”
“Shit,” Stark groused, “that got us nowhere. They’re ordinary three-by-five cards. You can buy ’em in any stationery store.”
“Work them anyway.” Walsh sank back in his seat. “Ed, Gary, you have any better luck with the victims’ background checks?”
Ed Lopez fielded the question. “We haven’t found anything that ties Nikki Carter to Martha Eversol.” Eversol had been assumed to be the Hourglass Killer’s second victim even before her body was found; the date of her disappearance had fit the pattern begun by Nikki Carter. “Checked out their doctors, dentists, employers and their colleagues at work, neighbors, landlords, boyfriends, ex-boyfriends, every damn thing we could think of. No links.”
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