Expert Witness

by Rebecca Forster

  “Got it, man,” Archer growled. “You can just tell me I missed the turn.”

  In the Hollywood Hills the roads were narrow, the streets carved out willy-nilly and street signs were often hidden behind overgrown bushes or low-hanging branches that had been there since Mary Pickford was queen of the screen. All Young had to do was point the sign out. Archer rolled on his hip, dug in his pocket and passed a slip of paper to Daniel.

  “Here, read me the address.”

  “Thirty two and a half Sunrise Court,” Daniel confirmed. “I know I saw Sunrise Court. It was right back there.”

  Archer stepped on the gas, heading forward looking for a place he could safely turn around.

  “Go the other way. Come on, Archer. Didn’t you hear me?” Daniel demanded.

  Archer slammed on the brakes, threw the car into reverse, and put his arm over the back of the passenger seat. He hit the gas and fishtailed into a turn only to slam on the brakes again. That sent Daniel slapping against his restraints and back against the seat again. The face Young turned his way was not what Archer expected. It was pale with resentment and moist with sweat and his expression was disdainful.

  “Very nice,” Daniel noted drily, and that was just enough to make Archer really angry.

  “Listen to me real carefully, Young. You are here as a courtesy. You don’t order me around, and you don’t insult Josie or me. Got it?”

  “You’re right. I wouldn’t want to infringe upon your territory or disrupt your work.”

  Archer pulled his lips together. He looked out the front window knowing they both had reason to be angry and anxious. Young wasn’t the bad guy, but he shouldn’t be here now. Archer owned the bad. He had bought into the urgency Young presented when he showed up at Archer’s door. He should have sent the guy home. If he had, Archer could have done his job the right way.

  “I apologize,” Archer said, knowing Daniel’s little snipe paled in comparison to Archer’s own behavior in Young’s office. “I’m tired. I’m worried. Josie means a lot to me.”

  “I know,” Daniel answered. “Just remember this: right now, I’m the only one taking you seriously, and you’re the only one who believes I might be in danger. That makes us rather like partners, doesn’t it?”

  They looked at one another, two shadows in a darkened car. Archer put his hand on the gearshift, but his eyes still held Daniel’s. There was something about this all- knowing, carefully groomed psychiatrist that unsettled Archer; there was something in him that Archer both despised and admired. He had to admit that Young’s determination to be part of his own salvation was admirable. Most people in his situation would be cowering behind a locked door and demanding police protection. That didn’t make Daniel Young any easier to stomach.

  “I’m scared, too,” Daniel said quietly. “So much can go wrong if one isn’t careful. People could really get hurt. I don’t think Josie Bates ever thought about that.”

  “Yeah, well, I got it,” Archer offered a curt nod.

  “My name is on that list,” Daniel reminded him.

  “I got it,” Archer mumbled.

  “I want to be a part of whatever happens.”

  Young put out a well-manicured hand and waited for Archer to shake. Archer would rather have walked over hot coals than seal a deal with this guy, but what could he do. He took the proffered hand and shook it. They were partners. Maybe Young wasn’t quite the dilettante Archer thought him to be. His hand was strong; his skin was that of a man who knew some physical work, and Archer found that comforting. He gave Young a second more and their time was over.

  Archer shifted hard, put his foot on the gas and drove on, leaning over the wheel and peering through the dark. He pulled up short and made a U-turn before easing onto a small road and cutting the headlights as he coasted to a stop in front of a prime example of California architecture: the bungalow.

  Erika Gardener’s House, Hollywood Hills

  Erika Gardener’s house was yellow with white wood trim. The front door was red and the porch floor was painted hunter green. There was a rattan couch and round table under the front window. Tea roses in full bloom spilled over the porch railing. Grass grew between parallel strips of concrete that led up to a one car detached garage in the back. Pink poufs of hydrangea billowed on a monstrous bush of big, dark green waxy leaves. A yellow light warmed a room somewhere in the back of the place, but the front porch light was off.

  Archer popped the door of the Hummer and stepped out into the humid heat of the Hollywood Hills. He rounded the front of the car just as Daniel Young stepped off the running board and started up the walk. Archer caught up with him and touched his arm.

  “We check it out slow,” he whispered.

  “It looks fine,” Young noted.

  “So did Josie’s car. So did yours,” he pointed out. “Let me go. I don’t want to have to worry about you.”

  Archer hadn't taken more than three steps when Daniel stopped him.

  “Just watch out for yourself.” Daniel was defiant and Archer pivoted, narrowing his eyes at this guy. Young set his jaw and met Archer’s gaze. “We both bring something to this table, Archer. I might need you to use that gun you carry in the back of your pants, but you might need me to talk down whoever is in there.”

  “Why do you think someone might be in there?”

  “Because we’re being led by the nose. Eventually, we’re going to meet up with whoever it is. What if that someone is Xavier Hernandez? A killer. A brutal murderer. Do you think he would tell you where Ms. Bates is if you acted the way you did in my office?”

  “Young, for a smart guy you are not real bright. Hernandez is in prison.”

  “But he has friends. It could be one of his friends. You knew what I meant,” Daniel snapped, coloring at his mistake. “I’m just pointing out that we don’t know what we’re walking into.”

  Archer gave his neck a twist and tucked his jaw down. It gave him the heebie-jeebies to have Young hanging in his literal and mental peripheral vision, but he was there. Archer wasn’t going to risk some hissy fit about who was leading and who was following. Archer passed the next minute looking at the house. Right now it wasn’t who might be in there that really mattered, it was the real possibility that someone might be. Archer made a decision.

  “Okay, but I say down and you hit the deck. Got it?”

  “And if I say be quiet, you stop talking. Agreed?”

  Archer nodded and walked ahead thinking about what could be waiting for them. One: Erika Gardener dead. Two: Josie and Erika, prisoners inside that house. Three: Erika and Josie both dead. And that led him right back to, why not Young? That was the million-dollar question, but there were also good answers to it: Young was a man and more difficult to take, Young had somehow sidestepped the effort and didn’t know it, or Young wasn’t as enticing as two women.

  Abandoning speculation, Archer walked up the narrow driveway, past the porch and stopped briefly at the side window. The living room was empty. Young peered over Archer’s shoulder. They saw nothing and heard nothing and that meant nothing. Archer had a good sense for abandoned and this place felt empty.

  Young stepped away as Archer walked parallel to the flowerbed that ran down the side of the house. In the back, the raised porch was covered by a red awning with white piping and was accessible by three concrete steps. Archer knew the door he was looking at led to the kitchen. All these places were the same. The yard was manageable and framed by the driveway on one side, flower beds on the other, and a detached garage at the end of the property. There were more colossal hydrangea bushes in the back and they were covered with flowers the size of a man’s head. Those plants were interspersed with lilies and ferns and other plants Archer couldn’t name. There was a smiling ceramic frog squatting under one big bush, and a food dish closer to the porch than the garage. That dish was small, so the woman probably had a cat. A dog would have made noise. Although, if there were someone inside wanting to do harm the first harm would have b
een done to a dog.

  The kitchen door window was bare. Archer looked toward the garage and then back to the porch. The porch it would be. He walked up the steps, flattened himself against the wall, waited a beat, and then looked through the paned window. He tried the door. It was locked. Daniel Young had paused at the side of the house, but Archer could feel his eagerness and curiosity.

  What? What do you see?

  Archer shook his head as he came back down the steps.

  Nothing. Nothing at all.

  Archer motioned for Young to stay where he was, and then moved quickly to the other side of the house. Around the corner he saw a fence and a locked gate. The neighbor was close, but a stand of Italian Cypress cut off the view from one house to the other and created a natural sound break. Archer went back the way he had come.

  “Come on,” he muttered.

  Together, they retraced their steps, walked across the lawn and went up the steps to the porch and the front door. Young raised his fist to knock; Archer caught it. He wanted a minute more to think. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked, and then all was quiet again. He looked through the window into the dining room. He tried the knob. It turned. He could go in quiet or make some noise. He decided to ring the bell. If Erika Gardener showed up, he would know instantly whether she was under duress. If she were, Archer would decide what to do when he looked into her eyes; if she weren’t, they would all settle down for a nice chat.

  It was now approximately thirty hours since Josie had disappeared, a second night had fallen, and Archer prayed that this wasn’t a dead end. When Erika didn’t come, Archer rang one more time. When everything stayed still, Archer turned the knob fully with one hand and drew his gun with the other. He motioned for Daniel Young to stay back just before he crossed over Erika Gardener’s threshold and into her life.

  An Outbuilding in the California Mountains

  Josie had it in her head that a person could die of thirst in three days. She had no idea when she had been abducted, or how often she had come to and managed to take a drink of water from the bottle before the damn thing cracked. She was going to assume that she had been there two days at least and had her last drink approximately six hours earlier. Eight tops.

  She had watched the progress of the sun through the hole in the wall and noted the temperature change. Darkness came. There was nothing like mountain darkness, and in this hut, away from the moon and stars, it was all encompassing, a night unlike Josie had ever seen. This dark – this situation - terrified her. It was better when Erika was awake, but she wasn’t. That was understandable. Whatever they had been given had a lengthy residual effect. Though Josie was a few hours ahead of Erika, she was still drifting in and out herself.

  Still, she believed someone had miscalculated. They would both come out of it soon, and no one had returned to give them another dose of whatever it was that kept them unconscious. Unless they were being left to die. That wouldn’t take long if she was right about the three-day water window. And if they weren’t meant to die, what would it take to free them? Ransom? Archer would have paid it gladly. Then again, money may have changed hands, and they were still here, languishing. That meant this was personal. If it was personal, then she and Erika had crossed the same person. The question was who?

  Second thought: if there were no intention of releasing them, why go to all the trouble to leave the water and the granola bar? Why tie their hands? A locked door would have restrained them long enough to allow them to die. This was about power and humiliation. Someone gave and someone could take away food, water, and freedom. That meant there were only two other choices.

  “Punishment or revenge,” Josie whispered to herself. Then she raised her voice. “What do you think, Erika? Have you done anything bad enough to be punished liked this?”

  But Josie was speaking to the dark. Erika Gardener slept on as easily as if she were in her own bed.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN:

  Erika Gardener’s House, Hollywood Hills

  Erika Gardener liked things clean and sharp and colorful. The couch was leather and colored the deepest of purples, the walls were white, the pillows yellow and green and sapphire blue. A huge print hung on one wall; an entertainment center with state of the art sound system was in a corner. Wall-to-wall built-in shelves behind the couch were filled with books. Erika Gardener had lined them up neatly by height. The books on the square, squat coffee table were about travel and fashion. The rest of the tabletop was peppered with pottery. There was a beautiful rug on the hardwood floor, a low-slung chair and an antique set of stacking tables. Atop those tables were fresh flowers: roses that were still opening, and drinking up clear water. She’d been there within the last twenty-four hours, if the assumption was that she had arranged the flowers.

  The woman had good taste and enough money to reasonably indulge it. Archer glanced toward the sparkling kitchen. A dining area sported another glass top table on a metal pedestal, and chairs upholstered in purple. The walls were white. There was a grouping of black and white photos in silver frames with red mats. He wandered toward the photos. Most were of foreign destinations, and some showed an attractive woman who Archer took to be Erika Gardener. His eyes scanned the photos – twenty or so in all – only to be drawn to one where she was dressed in an evening gown at an event that was obviously important to her. She had an impressive chest. Suddenly, Archer pivoted. His nerves spiked. Daniel was by his side and standing too close.

  “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”

  “Assuming that’s her,” Archer said quietly.

  “It is,” Daniel answered.

  “Yeah, she cleans up nice,” Archer said off-handedly. She was very pretty, but beautiful? Archer didn’t think so, but his touch-point was Josie. Josie with her height, her athletic body, her finely sculpted face and startlingly intelligent eyes, was beautiful. “I guess you don’t forget someone who looks like that. Did she interview you?”

  “I thought we knew each other well.” Daniel laughed softly as if the experience had been enormously satisfying and disappointing at the same time.

  “Lucky you.”

  Archer moved away. He took the short hallway alone. There were three open doors. If anyone were there, Archer would turn in his investigator’s license and check himself into an old folk’s home. Erika’s place was not only empty it felt like no one was coming back.

  He took a quick look in the first room. A den. Same good taste as the living room but softened by comfort things: a television, a crocheted afghan, and fuzzy slippers by the couch. He doubted Erika Gardener spent her evenings crocheting, so the afghan had to be a gift. Mom? Grandmother? If so, there might be someone who would have seen her recently.

  In the guest room there was a bed and a dresser. This room was not as well thought out as the other rooms. Erika Gardener didn’t have many guests, or at least not many who spent the night in this room. There was a bed and a chest of drawers, an old printer, a treadmill and a couple of baskets that seemed to have had a purpose at one time or another. He looked at the junk for a few minutes, and then poked his head into the small, attached bathroom.

  At the end of the hall was the master bedroom. Erika slept on a very expensive mattress set atop a black lacquer platform. Six down pillows were stacked neatly at the head of the bed; a down comforter was folded at the foot, European style. An original oil of a naked woman – and a none-too-pretty one at that – hung over the bed.

  Archer holstered his gun as he looked into the bathroom. No 1950s bungalow had a claw-footed tub that looked quite like the one Ms. Gardener soaked in, but she had done a nice job restoring the original pink and black deco tile. There were bath oils and candles near the tub.

  Archer retraced his steps to the framed pictures on the dresser. These pictures showed her as a little girl with her parents and another of her as a teenager sitting by a river. Young had been right. She was beautiful and had been since birth, but when she was young she wore it easily. In the bedside table dra
wer was a vibrator and birth control pills. She wasn’t a hermit or a prude. There would be a man – probably more than one – in her life. If there were only one, there would have been a third picture in the bedroom. Archer opened the closet. The clothing wasn’t overly expensive and almost all of it casual. He touched a fancy dress. The one she had worn in the picture in the dining room. It was long and backless and purple. He started to close the closet, but paused and touched that gown again. He didn’t know why he was drawn to it, only that he was. Finally, he shut the doors. Time was flying.

  Knowing now that nobody was in the house, Archer went back to the den. Daniel Young watched him from down the hall then followed him.

  Erika worked in the den. Magazines were strewn about: Bloomberg, U.S. News and People. Archer stood near the computer on the desk. He fired it up. It was locked and he wouldn’t waste time looking for a way in. With one finger he pushed around some papers. There was a coffee cup beside it all. Archer picked up the cup, Young looked at the papers.

  “She’s been working.”

  Archer glanced at the papers. “She’s been editing for someone, this isn’t her name.”

  “Pseudonym,” Young murmured, as he read the work.

  “How do you know? Could be she was helping someone out.”

  “I know it’s hers. She has a very distinct style.”

  Archer half listened. He picked up the cup and sniffed the cold dark liquid in the bottom. He lost interest and put it back down.

  There was no sign of a struggle in any of these rooms. Then again, Josie’s car didn’t exactly throw up any clues as to her whereabouts. Archer left the den light on and went into the hall. He had taken one step into the living room when suddenly he saw a dark flash out of the corner of his eye. He crouched fast and drew his gun smoothly only to hold up.

  “Oh, my God.” Daniel threw himself away from Archer and against the wall. Archer stood up, fighting the urge to laugh.

  “Cat, Daniel. I think you’re safe.”