Red Light

by T. Jefferson Parker

  Red Light

  T. JEFFERSON PARKER

  It's two years after the death of Tim Hess, her partner and the father of her child, and Merci is working hard to do her job, take care of her son, and hold it all together. In this suspenseful, emotionally charged sequel to The Blue Hour, Merci faces a challenge that makes her question everything she has taken for granted.

  PROLOGUE

  You might not have liked Aubrey Whittaker. She acted superior. She walked as if she were the most beautiful woman on Earth, which she wasn't. She didn't say very much. She was tall but wore heels anyway, and if she finally did say something, you felt like a driver getting a ticket. Her eyes were blue and infinitely disappointed in you. She was nineteen.

  She let him come to her place again that night, something that had only happened once before. Strictly against policy. But he was different than the rest, different in ways that mattered. In her life she had learned to read men, who were as easy to understand as street signs: Caution, Yield, Stop. But did you ever really know one?

  Aubrey had chosen a small black dress, hose with a seam up the back, heels with ankle straps and a string of pearls. No wig, just her regular hair, which was blond and cut short, sticking up like a boy's. The lipstick was apple red.

  She made him dinner. She could only cook one thing well, so she cooked it. And a salad, rolls from the bakery, a pot of the good French roast coffee he liked, a dessert. Flowers in a squat round crystal vase that had cost a lot of money. They sat across from each other at the small table.

  Aubrey gave D.C. the seat with the view of the Pacific. "D.C." was the abbreviation for Dark Cloud, the nickname she'd invented to capture his pessimism about human nature. It was an ironic nickname, too, because D.C. wasn't dark to look at, but light, with a broad, tanned face, a neat mustache, sharp eyes and a chunk of heavy blond hair that fell over his forehead like a schoolboy's. He was quick to smile, although it was usually a nervous smile. He was taller than her by a good three inches and strong as a horse, she could tell. He told stupid jokes.

  She told him he could hang his gun on the chair, but he left it holstered tight against his left side, farther around his back than in the movies, the handle pointing out. Whatever, she thought. The idea of safety pleased her, made her feel compliant in a genuine way. Aubrey Whittaker rarely allowed herself a genuine feeling, couldn't always tell them from the ones she portrayed.

  They talked. His eyes rarely strayed from her face, and they were always eager to get back. Hungry eyes. When dinner was over he sat there a moment, wiping the silverware with his napkin. He was fastidious. Then he left, at exactly the time he'd told her he'd leave. Off to see a man about a dog, he said. Another little joke of theirs.

  At the door she put her arms around him and hugged him lightly, setting her chin against the top of his shoulder, leaning her head against his ear for just a moment. She could feel the tension coming off him like heat off a highway. She thought the kind of guy she wanted would be a lot like D.C. Then she straightened and smiled and shut the door behind him. It was only ten minutes after ten.

  She flipped on the kitchen TV to an evangelist, put the dishes in the sink and ran water over them. She watched a car roll out of the parking area below, brake lights at the speed bump. It might have been D.C.'s big, serious four-door or it might not have been.

  Aubrey felt warm inside, like all her blood had heated up a couple of degrees, like she was just out of a hot bath or had just drank a big glass of red wine. She shook her head and smile lines appeared at the edges of her apple-red lips. It's just unbelievable, girl, she thought, what you've done with your life. Nineteen going on a hundred. You finally find a guy you can halfway stand, he trembles when you touch him through his clothes and you let him drive away.

  Oh that you would kiss me, with the kisses of your mouth!

  Song in the Bible.

  I sucked you off in a theater.

  Song on the radio.

  Has everything changed, or nothing?

  She rinsed the dishes, dried her hands and worked in some lotion. The fragrance was of lavender. Through the window she saw the black ocean and the pale sand and the white rush where the water broadened onto the beach then receded.

  In the middle of the living room Aubrey stood and looked out at the water and the night. Thinking of the different shades of black, she pried off her high heels, then got down on all fours. Balance. She could smell the lavender. From there she was eye level to the arm of the black leather sofa.

  Tentatively she placed her left hand out. Tentatively she raised her right knee and slid it forward. Then the hard part, the transfer of weight to her other hand and the moment of peril as the left knee came up to support her.

  She wavered just a little, but when her left leg settled beneath her she was okay and very focused because she had to repeat the whole complex procedure again. Her doctor friend, the shrink, had advised her to do this. She had never learned. She had walked at eleven months.

  Her doctor friend had said that for an adult to develop fully, to form certain concepts, especially mathematical ones, she needed to know how to crawl.

  Then she heard the knock at the door. A flash of embarrassment went through her as she realized what she was: a six-foot woman in a short black dress crawling across her living room through the scent of lavender.

  She sprang up and walked over. "Who's there?"

  "Just me again, Aubrey—"

  It was a little hard to hear, with all the cars roaring by on Coast Highway.

  "—Your Dark Cloud."

  She flipped the outside light switch and looked through the peephole. The bug bulb must have finally burned out because all she saw was one corner of the apartment building across the alley laced with Christmas lights, and the tiny headlights out on Coast Highway, miniaturized in a fish-eye lens clouded with moisture. She hadn't replaced that bulb in months. When she opened the door she was smiling because she half expected his return, because she knew he was in her control now. And because she was happy.

  Then her smile died from the inside out and she formed her last thought: No!.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six …

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE

  "Out of the way, please. Sheriff's investigator. Come on now. Out."

  Merci Rayborn ducked under the ribbon and continued down the walk. Her heart was beating fast and her senses were jacked up high, registering all at once the cars hissing along Coast Highway to her left, waves breaking on the other side of the building, the citizens murmuring behind her, the moon hanging low over the eastern hills, the sm
ell of ocean and exhaust, the night air cool against her cheeks, the walkway slats bending under her duty boots. She figured a place like this, oceanfront in San Clemente, would run you two grand a month and you still got termites in your walkway and spiderwebs high in the porch corners.

  Or maybe you got worse.

  Two patrolmen were talking to two paramedics, all four of whom nodded and stepped aside. Merci stopped short of the entryway alcove to 23 Wave Street and looked at the door. It was open about two inches. It was painted a flat Cape Cod gray. The red splatter a foot above the doorknob looked wet in the overhead light, a yellow-tinted bulb so as not to draw insects.

  "Sergeant, the neighbor heard a disturbance, suspected something was wrong. He saw the presumed blood. We knocked, identified ourselves, no response. The door was ajar. I proceeded inside, found the body where it is right now, notified my partner. Together we searched the apartment for any other possible victims. Negative. And for a perpetrator. Negative again. I checked for vitals, and found the victim deceased. Then we called it in, sealed it off."

  "What else did you do inside?”

  "Nothing. I closed the door to the same approximate position I found it in. Not using the knob."

  "Did you touch any of the light switches?"

  "Yes. I forgot that. Forgot to tell you that."

  "This outdoor light, was it on when you got here?"

  "Bug light, affirmative."

  "Was the door ajar when the neighbor first came down?"

  "That was his statement."

  "See if he'll let us set up shop in his place. If he says no, do it anyway."

  "Yes."

  "Start an Order of Entry Log, fill it in and fasten it to this wall somehow. Nobody gets in but the coroners and Zamorra. Nobody."

  "Yes, Sergeant."

  The paramedics were leaning against the walkway railing but stood up straight when Merci turned to them. They were young and handsome and looked to Merci like TV actors.

  "We went in, examined her and came back out," one offered. "We didn't defib or try CPR. She was cold, blood already draining down, extremities in early rigor. I turned on the lights just inside the door there, then turned them off. Looks like gunshot."

  Merci looked at her watch: 11:40, Tuesday, December 11. She gloved up, then toed open the door with her boot.

  Muted light shone from inside. Merci saw a kitchen, a small TV screen flickering, a dining-room table with flowers, a sliding glass door beyond the table. But what drew her attention lay just inside the arc of the door she now held open with one elbow: a young woman in a black dress, arms thrown casually back like someone deep in sleep, her face peaceful and unmarked and inclined slightly toward the sliding glass door behind her. Her chest and stomach were still wet with blood, which looked black in the weak light. The blackness had progressed onto the pale carpet on both sides of her.

  Merci knelt down and placed two of her right fingers on the woman's jugular vein. She believed that she owed hope to the dead, even if the dead were beyond it.

  She pulled a little flashlight from her pocket and found the hole in the dress, below the left breast but close to center, straight over the heart. She looked for another but found none. The neighbor said nothing about hearing a gunshot. Merci retraced her steps to the front door and pushed it closed with her boot. The paramedics who looked like actors watched her, a fade-out.

  She stood between the body and the dining room. No signs of forced entry or struggle, so far. She noted that the table had been set for two. A pair of seductive high heels stood near the couch, facing her, like a ghost was standing in them, watching. The apartment was still, the slider closed against the cool December night. Good for scent. She closed her eyes. Salt air. Baked fowl. Coffee. Goddamn rubber gloves, of course. A whiff of burned gunpowder? Leather.

  Maybe a trace of perfume, or the flowers on the table—gardenia, rose, lavender? And, of course, the obscenity of spilled blood—intimate, meaty, shameful.

  She listened to the waves. To the traffic. To the little kitchen TV turned low: an evangelist bleating for money. To the clunk of someone on the old walkway. To her heart, fast and heavy in her chest. Merci felt most alive when working for the dead. She'd always loved an underdog.

  In the bedroom she found a purse with a wallet. There was a thick pinch of hundreds in the wallet, some twenties, several credit cards and a driver's license. Aubrey Whittaker. Nineteen.

  The woman was a girl and the girl was only a little over half her own age. The year Aubrey Whittaker was born, Merci was a junior in high school. The year Aubrey Whittaker was murdered, Merci was an Orange County Sheriff Department sergeant, Homicide Detail, age 36. A single mother. A once proud woman recovering from a broken heart, and from what police psychologists like to call critical incident stress. She'd painted up her exterior, but inside she was still a wreck.

  Aubrey's slaughtered youth made Merci sad and angry, but many things about her career made her feel that way. She looked out the bedroom window toward Coast Highway. The building next door already had its Christmas lights up, a neat outline of tiny white bulbs blinking at random. On the big dresser across from the bed Merci found a jewelry box filled with expensive-looking rings and necklaces. Under the lamp there was a greeting card propped up, this one with a soft-focus photograph of a tree on a hillside. She bent and read it without touching it.

  In the muted blue sky were the words: In God's World... The quip was completed inside: There's a special place for Friendship. It was signed: Sincerely, Your D.C.

  She could hear the footsteps on the walkway, louder now. She listened as they came toward the door and stopped. Voices.

  She went to the door and looked through the peephole. She saw Paul Zamorra in the elliptical foreground, and the two Coroner's Autopsy Team techs behind him. When she opened the door her partner met her with his joyless black eyes, then stepped inside. The techs followed him.

  They all looked at Aubrey Whittaker. Zamorra walked to her side, knelt down and looked at her some more. He brought gloves from the pocket of his sport coat, worked them on. "Get to it, guys," he said. "We've got about twenty minutes before the hordes thunder in."

  The hordes thundered in: three more patrol units bearing six deputies; the paramedic supervisors; the Coroner's Investigation Team; the rest of the Coroner's Autopsy Team; the county pathologist; the crime-scene scientists; the crime-scene technicians; the criminalists; the assistant district attorney and two of his investigators, all trudging down the wooden walkway to Aubrey Whittaker's place under the drone of two Sheriff Department choppers that circled overhead and beamed unhopeful shafts of light into the city below. The police reporters came next. And, as always, concerned citizens multiplied as the minutes wore on, drawn from the darkness by the flashing lights of the prowl cars.

  Close neighbors compared notes on the apparently deceased girl who came and went from 23 Wave Street at late hours: very attractive, well dressed, very tall, quiet. There was firm disagreement on what color, style or length of hair she had.

  Outsiders gathered what they could, speculated. Most everyone was bundled up in something, arms around themselves or each other, blowing on their hands, puffs of breath coming out when they spoke. Surfers in hooded Mexican ponchos leaned against their little trucks drinking tall beers, slurring their vowels.

  Merci Rayborn at first admitted only five people into number 23. Two were the best crime-scene people she'd ever worked with—Criminalist Lynda Coiner and Crime-Scene Investigator Evan O'Brien. They were standing near the door when she finally opened it, knowing she'd need them first

  Then, the assistant DA and his man. The People. They were the ones she'd bring her case to, the ones for whom she was really gathering evidence. It didn't hurt that they were smart, quiet and knew the drill. Last, the coroner's investigator, mainly for the body temp, which would help them with rime of death, and the body cavities, which can leak evidentiary fluids into the transport bags, complicating the job of the lab p
athologists.

  And everyone else, thought Merci, can stay the hell out for half an hour. Let my people work.

  While they worked, Merci and Zamorra toured the apartment. It was an upscale interior in a downscale building: good carpet, leather furniture, recessed lighting aimed to dramatize good prints of Kahlo and O'Keeffe, Hockney and Basquiat. Over the expansive black leather sofa in the living room hung a painting she'd never seen before. It was ghostly but vibrant at the same time, a little too crime-lab for an ocean-view room, in her opinion. It was a Rembrandt of someone raising somebody else from the dead.

  Good luck, she thought. She had tried it herself, twice.

  Zamorra spoke occasionally into a tiny tape recorder. Merci, as always, wrote her observations into a small notebook with a blue cover.

  She wrote: Aubrey Whittaker, what did you do?

  But between the contents of Aubrey's closet—provocative clothes and lots of them—and the contents of a leather-bound calendar in her purse—a blizzard of dates with a blizzard of people listed only by initials, coded notes in the margins, phone numbers all over it—Merci came to suspect that Aubrey's profession was one of the oldest. The 240-count box of condoms Zamorra found beside a pair of thigh-high leather boots in the bottom of the closet seemed to confirm it.

  Nineteen and a real pro.

  The bed was neatly made. There was a Bible open on the stand beside it. A crucifix hung on one of the bedroom walls. And the damned evangelist on TV. Zamorra stared at Merci. It hurt. Zamorra's newlywed bride had been diagnosed with a brain tumor just two months ago; since that day his sharp face, once sly and charming, had taken on an expression of increasingly resigned menace. She was worried about him but didn't think she knew him well enough to question or intrude. Good fences made good neighbors and Zamorra's fence seemed excellent: He said almost nothing about anything. She was going to talk to a doctor about him.