The Big Keep: A Lena Dane Mystery (Lena Dane Mysteries)

by Melissa F. Olson

  To my surprise, Starla opened her door holding a chubby two-year-old boy with her golden hair – and Nate’s green eyes. Her face was flushed and maybe a little tear-stained, and I noticed the man standing a few feet behind her, looking impatient and angry. He was maybe ten years older than her. Alarm bells went off in my head, and I wished I had my gun. I hadn’t brought the Browning with me on this trip, partly because traveling with a gun is obnoxiously complicated, and partly because this was a fact-finding mission.

  “Everything okay, Starla?” I asked cautiously.

  “What?” she said, and glanced back at the guy behind her. “Oh, yeah!” She gave me a bright smile that said, “this is not what it looks like,” and I relaxed a little. I realized then that the man looked an awful lot like Starla – only with a receding hairline and strong-looking arms that contradicted the little paunch at his waistline. Golf, I was guessing.

  “Lena, this is my brother Connie—sorry, Conrad Mills. And Conrad, this is Lena,” she said, stepping back so I could move forward and shake Conrad’s hand.

  I stepped inside and looked around. Behind Starla on the floor was a little girl the same age as the boy, playing with a giant-size puzzle. My eyes trailed around the toddler paraphernalia strewn about the room, and the spills and stains that decorated the back of the small couch and the carpet. The kids were hers. Well, that explained why she’d been so confused when I’d mentioned being hired by Jason’s son. As far as Starla had known, Jason’s only son was still crayoning the walls.

  “Hello,” Conrad said amiably, giving my hand a too-hard squeeze. “Selena, is it?’

  “It is, but most people call me Lena.”

  “What a shame. Selena is such a lovely name.” His voice had a snide suggestion in it, as if to say that while Selena was lovely, Lena was common and trashy. “Anyway,” he continued, “I’m just on my way out. You’ll think about what we discussed?” he asked Starla, raising her eyebrows. She promised she would, and with a nod to me Conrad edged around to the doorway and sauntered out.

  “He wants me to stop looking for Jason,” Starla explained, after the door was fully closed behind her brother. She looked exhausted, but she kept pausing to kiss the top of the toddler’s head. She sat down on the couch and motioned to me to take the ratty armchair across from it. I stepped gingerly over the puzzle and sat, clutching my bag on my lap. “Connie’s just convinced that Jason ran off with another woman and won’t be coming back.”

  I wasn’t entirely sure I didn’t think the same thing, but it didn’t seem like a good time to say that. The boy in Starla’s arms fussed a little, and she said, “Oh! Sorry, this is Tristan.” She gestured toward the boy in her arms, who was determinedly reaching for her ponytail, “and that’s Antigone. Annie.”

  Personally, I thought those were stupidly pretentious names for toddlers, but then again I’m named for a comic book character, so I don’t really get to throw stones from my glass house. Hearing her name, the little girl looked up from her large-size puzzle, squinched her nose at me, and went back to work. Unable to voice the question delicately, I said, “Um, Starla, are these children...” My fingers twitched helplessly.

  She blinked rapidly. “What?”

  “You know...uh, is Jason their father?” The classical names definitely sounded like Jason’s doing.

  “Oh!” Starla nodded matter-of-factly, not offended. “Twins run in my family. Conrad actually had a twin sister, but she died before I was born.” She absently rose and crossed the room to place Tristan on the floor next to his sister, and he picked up a plastic truck to run over the puzzle. Annie ignored all of us. Starla stood over them for a moment, looking wistful.

  “Starla,” I said gently, “You were saying that Jason is missing?”

  I could see tears well in her eyes. She motioned me to follow her and fled through a chaotic little kitchen into the hallway beyond. We leaned against the wall, with Starla running one shaky finger under each eye the way that women do to keep their mascara on. “I don’t want them to see me upset,” she whispered, and then tears started coursing freely down her cheeks and into her white work blouse. I wished I had a handkerchief, like in old movies. Instead I backtracked a few feet in the kitchen and found a roll of paper towels. I handed her a wad, and Starla shot me a grateful look. “I don’t know where he is,” she sniffed, dabbing at her face. “I was hoping that’s why you came to see me; that you had found him somehow.”

  She looked so young and lost, with strands of blond hair sticking to her damp cheeks, that I couldn’t help but reach out and pat her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Starla,” I said softly. “I need to find Jason for a different reason. But the good news is, it won’t really matter who finds him, so long as someone does, right?”

  She nodded, not comforted, and I pressed on.

  “When did you last see him?”

  “Almost two weeks ago,” she whispered, “he left me this note that said, ‘Gotta research, back soon.’ That was it. But that was so long ago; he’s never been gone this long without calling.” Her eyes flicked through the kitchen doorway into the living room, where Annie’s face had scrunched up with anger. The little girl was sucking in breath to scream. “Tristan, if you don’t stop running your truck over Annie’s puzzle, you’re going to get a time out,” she called. I was always impressed with the sixth-sense that mothers seemed to have about their kids misbehaving – or being in danger.

  “Did you file a missing persons report?” I asked her.

  “Yeah, I did. But when I went to the police station with the kids, they just looked at me, like, ‘who wouldn’t leave this girl?’ They said the note proved he was fine.” There was only a trace of bitterness to her voice. “I mean, I know lots of people thought he was too good for me, or whatever, but we were making it work. He loves me.” Her eyes shone, pleading for me to believe her.

  “I’m sure he does.” I patted her shoulder again. It’s good to stick with your best moves. “I know you’re working at the restaurant – what was Jason doing for work?”

  She straightened her shoulders proudly. “He’s a writer. He was working on a new screenplay.”

  “Really?” I thought for a moment. “Was it already, um...sold to someone?”

  Starla shook her head. “No, but that’s just it. He’s written so many that never got anywhere, so this one was going to be special.”

  “Special how?”

  Her face clouded over with confusion. “Well, I’m not really sure, except that he had to go out a lot and do research and stuff. He was like, trying to get the inside scoop, I guess.”

  “Inside scoop on what? What kind of a movie was he writing?”

  She shrugged. “He wouldn’t say. He just said it was an action movie, and you know how those can make so much money.” She nodded knowingly at me, as if I had the slightest clue about how movies were made. I just nodded knowingly right back. “He kept saying it was better for me not to know. Like, he was protecting me or something.” She rolled her eyes a little. “I always thought he was being kind of dramatic, like, he’s a writer, for crying out loud. Not a spy. But he seemed so...convinced. Like in old movies where the miners find gold? And they’re all obsessed and protective?”

  I understood. “He struck gold?”

  She nodded her head emphatically. “Yeah. I think he really did.”

  Starla led me into the twins’ bedroom, which also served as Jason Anderson’s writing office. She explained that Jason wrote at coffee shops and parks during the day, and would type in here at night after the twins were asleep. There was no sign of a laptop, but Starla assured me that he never went anywhere without it, so it would be wherever he was.

  While Starla left to check on the twins, I sat down at the cheap IKEA desk and began opening drawers. I found office supplies, blank paper, pens...but nothing of any consequence. There was an entire drawer of yellow writing pads with strange phrases scribbled on them, like “man who doesn’t know he’s a parrot” and “Children�
�s book author – priest?” I tried to make sense of them for awhile, then gave up and opened another drawer. This one was full of blank computer paper, though I flipped through the stack just in case there were clues hidden between the pages. No luck.

  I leaned back in the little office chair and thought about it. If Jason Anderson was convinced he was onto something, and he really believed that knowing about it could be dangerous, then he’d hide anything significant. And this was a drama-loving, movie guy...I squatted down on the floor and pulled out all the drawers again. Sure enough, there was an envelope taped under the front right drawer.

  Sighing at his lack of creativity, I pulled Jason’s notes off and sat back down to open them. There were two sheets of paper, stapled together, and it looked like some kind of outline for a story. I scanned it quickly, groaning to myself. The title was: “Gun for Hire: a True Story.”

  Shit.

  I knew of one professional killer case that was working during my time with the cops, and most of us barely took it seriously at first. There’s just something kind of funny about the idea of a professional hitman—or hitwoman—in the twenty-first century. You see it a thousand times in movies, and it always seems so over-the-top. It’s like meeting someone who’s a professional circus acrobat – sure, I guess they exist, but come on.

  But hired killers happen, more often than you’d expect. It’s almost never like in the movies or on TV, with some sexy, sadistic killer in a $3,000 suit, or the swarthy Italian mobster with no remorse. The average hit man is a low-level thug, a drug dealer or mugger who agrees to branch out for some extra cash. They’re rarely brilliant criminal masterminds, and like any other bad guy, they either figure out how to get good at what they do, or they get caught.

  At any rate, murder is a serious charge, and a cornered killer is a very dangerous thing. If Jason Anderson had actually managed to find a professional killer (which is even harder than finding a professional circus acrobat), and he’d asked too many questions, well...that could be very bad news for Nate. And Starla.

  It was almost six by the time I got on the highway, but Cristina would still be at work. I drove straight to her station, a little nervous. We hadn’t actually spoken since the restaurant, except for a few texts to let her know that I was okay. But we’d both had time to cool down, and I couldn’t avoid her forever. Who says I can’t be mature?

  Cristina’s office at the LAPD doesn’t look anything like the station in the Lethal Weapon movies, much to my disgust. It looks a lot more like the setting of Office Space, if you want to be honest. Cristina had long since graduated from the center cubicles, and taken over a tiny, neatly organized side office. It smelled like Cristina, complete with the hint of fresh blood, and I wondered for the millionth time how that happens. I could always ask her if she butchers her own meat on the weekends or something, but part of me enjoyed the mystery.

  I knocked hesitantly on her open door frame. Cristina looked up from her computer.

  “Hey,” I said uncertainly.

  “Hello, Baby Girl.”

  “I can’t talk about...the thing,” I waved my hands in the air to indicate, you know, my unborn child.

  “All right.”

  “But can we be cool anyway?”

  She smiled at me, and stretched her leg under her utility desk to kick out the metal chair facing it.

  “Of course. What is happening with your case?”

  I sat down in the chair and filled her in on the whole thing: Starla, the apartment, the kids, and what I’d found in Jason Anderson’s office.

  “It’s called what?”

  “‘Gun for Hire: A True Story.’ I especially like how he made a point to say that it was all true. Not stupid at all.”

  “No kidding.” Cristina leaned back in her desk chair, her arms stretching behind her head. “And he disappeared two weeks ago? Well, we can talk to Homicide and maybe Organized Crime, but that may be a roundabout way of doing it.”

  “What else can we do?”

  She stared at me soberly. “Baby Girl, if this man was trying to follow around a professional killer...we can check the morgue.”

  19. Especially In Your Condition

  As soon as she could get away, Cristina and I fought the traffic on the 10 east toward North Mission Road, where the city of Los Angeles houses its dead.

  In LA every single person who dies from a trauma or unnatural death ends up at the county coroner’s office, a stately mission-style brick building not far from Dodger Stadium. The general public doesn’t usually get to view remains there, but then Cristina wasn’t general public. She was friendly with a couple of the Coroner’s Office investigators, and she spent part of the drive calling around to see if anyone was working late that night. She found a guy just heading out the door who agreed to hang around until we arrived.

  And less than an hour later, I was standing over the body of Nate’s father, fighting back tears.

  It had been depressingly easy. We met Cristina’s friend Steve McHugh, a portly older guy with a buzz cut that whitened near his temples, and I explained the problem and showed him a recent photo that Starla had given me. He brought us to the set of rooms devoted to unidentified corpses, where a technician took a two-second glance at the picture and led us immediately to the right morgue drawer. He pulled it out far enough for us to see the body’s head, and I felt my heart sink into my pelvis. One eye had been crushed by a terrible blow, and traces of blood still marred his dark blond hair, but it was Jason Anderson.

  Cristina took one look at my face and stepped up to question the morgue attendant herself. Anderson had been there a little over a week, found in a dumpster near USC by a homeless guy. He had no identification on him, and frankly I wasn’t surprised that a guy who thought sneaking around using aliases was a valid lifestyle choice had ended up being a pain to identify. Cause of death was a gunshot wound to the chest, but he had been beaten pretty severely before that. There were no promising leads.

  Too much of a coward to do it myself, I gave the coroner’s assistant Starla’s name and phone number so he could inform next of kin.The detectives assigned to Jason’s homicide wanted to interview me, and with one thing and another it was nearly three hours before we left the coroner’s.

  I dripped silent tears the whole ride home. Damned hormones. Cristina, for once, said nothing.

  It was my own stupid fault, really. On any other case, contacting the local morgues for John Does would have been one of my first moves. Instead, I had chosen to hope—no, to actually believe—that Jason Anderson was alive, not to mention capable of taking care of a boy that I’d grown so fond of. I had let myself ignore the obvious, and wasted Nate’s time and resources on a false hope. And now I would have to tell a fourteen-year-old boy that he was an orphan, and would be going into the system.

  Fantastic work, Selena. Banner day all around.

  It was after ten when we got back to Cristina’s, which meant it was midnight in Chicago. I used this as an excuse to put off calling Nate until the next morning. It was an unprofessional, spineless move, but I did it anyway because, well, I’m like that sometimes. Let Nate have one more night of hope before I crushed it.

  Back at the condo, I went to the couch and sat down numbly, my mind in a fog of thoughts. After a moment Cristina came and sat down next to me, looking concerned.

  “Baby Girl...Lena, do you want to talk about it? I have never seen you like this.”

  “Like what?” I asked curiously. “Unprofessional? Emotionally invested? Crying?”

  She smiled sadly. “Well, no. I have seen you most of those things.” She reached over to smooth back my hair, and I tried not to flinch in surprise. Maternal, Cristina is not.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing,” I whispered.

  Christina gestured helplessly for a moment, looking for the right words. “Lena...when we first met you were passionate and mouthy and ambitious, and you were a brilliant cop. But you weren’t brilliant because of those things; bu
t because you cared. I have never met another cop who cared about every victim, good guy, bad guy, old, young, homeless, anything. You put your whole heart into every single case. That’s your gift, the energy to care for everyone. But when you left the force,” she gestured helplessly in the air, “you lost your way.”

  I stiffened, but didn’t protest. Like I said, not so good at fighting with Cristina. Bitch is always right. Instead, I said quietly, “What does that have to do with this?”

  She sighed, as if that was the wrong answer. “You haven’t cared about much for years now, Baby Girl. He took that away from you. But now, you found a case to care about again.”

  “So what?” I said, frustrated. “Nothing I’ve done on this case has made a bit of difference. Jason was already dead when Nate hired me.”

  Cristina shrugged. “He was, yes. But because he hired you, this boy now knows he has a brother and a sister. Maybe you couldn’t produce the father, but you did find him some family, some blood.” She reached over and squeezed my hand. “Baby Girl, give yourself a break. Caring about your cases, that was never a mistake. You’re just...you know. Out of practice.”

  Pep talk completed, Cristina gave me one last hug and left for a late date with Miguel. I knew she wanted to give me some space, and I appreciated it. I also appreciated what she’d said too, but it didn’t make me feel much better. Starla was twenty-two and barely scraping by with herself and two kids: even if the courts would allow her to, she could never be responsible for Nate. It would be like the blind leading the...well, not-quite-so-blind, but underaged.

  I changed into pajama pants and a t-shirt and curled up in front of Cristina’s television for awhile, paying no attention to what was on. I was busy silently cursing out Jason Anderson for his idiocy. Why did he have to be so...him? Why couldn’t he have been happy with two gorgeous children and a loving (if slightly dim) girlfriend? Hell, for that matter, why couldn’t he have been happy back in Chicago? We’d missed him by only a few days, but it was Jason’s stupid choices that had led to that dumpster.