Royal Flush

by Stephanie Caffrey

  I forced myself to hit the gym, which was almost deserted in late morning, meaning I had the machines and the remote control all to myself. I wound up watching the Travel Channel, which over the years had morphed into the weird food channel, but I didn't mind. Anything that distracted the mind from the rigors of the elliptical machine was worth watching if it would get me through forty minutes of aerobic exercise. Watching a fat, bald guy eat bug larvae wasn't what I'd had in mind when I went down to the gym, but it did the trick.

  Naturally, when I returned to my apartment my phone was blinking at me again, which made me realize it was silly to leave it behind when I had been expecting a callback from Weakland. But it wasn't Weakland. It was Kent. He was disturbingly vague, but the long and short of it was that he had thought of some new information he wanted to tell me about, and he had to do it in person. The back of my neck began tingling, sensing danger. All of a sudden he wants to meet with me, and it's only a few hours removed from Charles's attempt to pluck me right off the street? And why did it have to be in person? Um, no, I thought. I was not going to be baited into what was most likely a trap of some kind.

  I lounged around my apartment the rest of the morning, not wanting to expose myself by showing up at the office, where Kent and everyone else knew I worked. By one o'clock, I was getting antsy to hear from Detective Weakland. He'd called me around nine that morning, so it was odd that he hadn't returned my call by now. I let another hour slide away and then phoned him again.

  "Hello, this is Schmidt."

  "Excuse me, I think I have the wrong number," I said.

  "You calling for Weakland?"

  "Yes."

  "He's been reassigned. Temporary assignment out of town. I can help you with whatever you need, ma'am."

  That was weird, I thought. Since when do LA cops get "out of town" assignments? "Um, okay. I was just returning his call from this morning."

  "In that case, ma'am, I don't know what to tell you. If you have his personal number, maybe you can get ahold of him that way."

  "Don't you have a contact number I can reach him at?"

  He cleared his throat. "No," he said simply, using the kind of stern tone designed to preclude any further inquiry.

  "All right," I muttered. "Thanks." Thanks for nothing.

  I stewed in my apartment some more, pacing around and trying to work everything out. Weird stuff kept happening, and I began to realize that the central link, the hub of all the strange activity, was me. I considered the possibility that I might just be paranoid and overly sensitive to my own role in all of these events, but I couldn't shake the feeling that my own involvement was central to unraveling this mystery. First my client dies, then I nearly get kidnapped, and then a cop I was working with disappears for some mysterious assignment with no contact number.

  I ended up calling Mike, who picked up on his cell. He was out working an insurance fraud case involving a ninety-two-year-old woman who allegedly got her blouse caught in a slot machine, but he thought it was a setup. After politely listening to his explanation, I filled him in on my situation. His suggestion was to call Commander Bruskewitz. It wasn't a bad idea. Bruskewitz was a bigwig in the Department and personal friends with Phillippe LaGarde, my kind-of mentor here in Vegas, and he had been more than gracious during our brief meeting in his office.

  I was surprised when he took my call right away.

  "Raven," he said, sounding happy to talk to me. "Let me guess. You found me so charming and handsome that you can't stop thinking about me."

  I giggled. "If you could see me right now, Commander, you'd see a woman rolling her eyes directly at the sky. So hard that it hurts."

  "Well, I gave it a shot," he said, his voice still light and breezy. "What can I do for you?"

  "I need a little information, if you don't mind. I've been working with Detective Weakland, but I can't seem to get through to him."

  Silence on the other end. After a few seconds, Bruskewitz finally responded. "Right, well, that's just one of those things. Bureaucratic red tape and so forth. Is there anything I can help you with?"

  "For one, has the tox report come in yet?"

  More silence. "It has." I was sensing extreme reticence on his end. The light and breezy Bruskewitz had been replaced by a tight-lipped bureaucrat.

  "And is there anything interesting in there?" I asked.

  I could almost sense his internal conflict over the phone. He wanted to tell me, but something was preventing him from doing so.

  "I can't really talk about it, Raven," he said in a gravelly voice. "I'm sorry." With that, the line went dead.

  I'm sure my face had a world-class WTF expression on it as I clicked off the phone and threw it in disgust at my couch. I stared vacantly out my window, trying to make sense of this turn of events, another in a long line of twists I had failed to foresee. First, Weakland goes AWOL, and now Bruskewitz, who had been the model of charm and friendliness, cuts me off. The one thing he had confirmed was that the toxicology report had finally been issued, which was a start. Given the way the LAPD were reacting, I guessed that the report had something unusual in it. But why did they want to keep it from me?

  And then there was the matter of the call from Kent, who wanted to meet up with me. I was almost tempted to set something up since I was feeling like a caged animal all cooped up in my apartment. After last night, I wasn't about to go in to the office, or even to Cougar's, and the prospect of being under self-imposed house arrest wasn't all that attractive, especially given the fact that my freezer was almost empty.

  There were always the cops. I had some contacts on the LVPD, but I didn't think I had much to give them. Reviewing the events of last night with cold detachment, I realized all that had really happened was that a man had gotten out of an SUV, put his hand on my arm, and told me to come with him. He didn't have a knife, much less a gun, and since the whole thing had been broken up so quickly, it would be impossible to prove he had attempted anything other than to convince me to get in his SUV. Since I wasn't a small child, that didn't constitute enticement or attempted abduction, or any other crime for that matter. At worst, it looked only like a heavy-handed domestic situation, a flare-up between a man and woman of roughly the same age. Grabbing me could be simple battery, but that wasn't enough to involve the police. What were they going to do, provide me with an armed escort? If they offered protection to every woman who'd had a run-in with a man, they'd never have time to solve crimes.

  Mike called while I was making dinner.

  "I'm a prisoner here," I whined.

  "We'll figure this out, don't worry," he said. He was trying to sound comforting, but it wasn't working. "Anyway, you have a fax here."

  "We have a fax machine?"

  He chuckled. "Yeah. The number is even on your website. Anyway, it had no cover letter, and the number was restricted."

  "You gonna make me guess what it is?" I asked, growing impatient.

  He cleared his throat. "Los Angeles County, Office of the Coroner. Report of Death."

  I perked up. "Keep going."

  "I won't read you the whole thing over the phone. It's six pages. But I can scan it and email it to you if you want."

  "Yes, do that," I said. "Anything juicy in there?"

  "I haven't read the whole thing. But it seems as if she died of a heroin overdose, just as everyone thought. The official cause of death is asphyxiation, but there was a large amount of heroin in her system."

  "Asphyxiation? Like she was strangled?" I asked.

  "No," he said. "That's how you die when you overdose. Basically, your body becomes so relaxed that you forget to breathe. That's in the report, actually."

  "Okay," I said, reminded of what Weakland had told us already. "Anything else?"

  He paused, and I could hear him rifling through the pages. "One little tidbit we didn't know about. Your client was pregnant."

  I dropped the spoon I was holding into the sink and looked up at the ceiling. Did he say pre
gnant?

  "Raven?"

  I shook myself out of it. "Sorry, I'm still here. Did it say how far along she was?"

  "Um, just a minute. Yeah. They estimate the age of the fetus at fifteen to eighteen weeks."

  I let out a deep breath, trying to process everything. "So that puts conception back in May sometime. Right about the time she and Kent were married. I guess it makes sense."

  Mike chuckled. "Yeah, because unmarried couples never have sex."

  I smiled, for the first time in hours. "I guess you're right. I was just trying to connect the dots. Anyway, at fifteen to eighteen weeks she must have known she was pregnant, even though it didn't show. Not that I was looking."

  "I don't know if it changes anything," he said. "But I'll send you the whole thing. Probably ten minutes."

  "Great, thanks. Hey, you want to come over for some spaghetti? The pasta is from a box, and the sauce is from a can. It's a real gourmet act going on over here."

  Mike thought about it, no doubt trying to come up with a polite way of declining. "Uh, no."

  So much for politeness. "Okay, fine," I huffed. "I'll just sit here, all alone, while bad guys are out there plotting ways to kill me."

  He laughed at my melodrama. "I'm sure you'll be fine once you're on your second bottle."

  My mouth gaped open, since he'd pretty much nailed it. I didn't know he had me pegged so well. "I don't know what to say to that. I'll look forward to reading the whole report."

  My phone dinged six minutes later, announcing Mike's email, which I needed to use my laptop to pull up. Page one of the report was pretty boring, listing only the vital details like the estimated time of death, weight at death, weight of the brain, and other things I only skimmed over for fear of having nightmares. Page three confirmed what Mike had told me. At the time of her death, Melanie was carrying a fetus estimated to be a few months old. There were more than trace amounts of heroin in her system, but I didn't know enough biology to make sense of how much had been coursing through her veins or how much a typical fatal dose would be. The report concluded, rather unceremoniously, that no foul play was suspected.

  I read the report twice to make sure I didn't miss anything, and then I began wondering about who had sent me the report. Since I didn't even know we owned a fax machine, the fax number couldn't have come from me. Whoever had sent it had looked me up online and seen the number on my website, figuring a fax would be the best chance to communicate the information to me quickly, and anonymously. My working assumption was that the fax came from Commander Bruskewitz, who probably felt guilty about not being able to share the details with me in the conversation we'd had only minutes earlier.

  It didn't matter so much who the fax came from as much as what the fax contained, of course. But once again, the new kernel of information posed more questions than it answered. I had managed to avoid pregnancy myself, so I was no expert, but I assumed that by fifteen or so weeks almost any woman would suspect that something unusual was going on in her body. But then again, there was also a cable TV show called I Didn't Know I was Pregnant, which poked a little hole in my theory. I was going to go with the odds, though, which told me that Melanie would have known.

  The real question was whether anyone else knew. Did Kent know? Did her parents? And if so, did anyone care? As I rolled the ideas around in my addled brain, I began to come to the conclusion that although the pregnancy was an interesting development, it might not have anything to do with Melanie's death. There were much less drastic means for dealing with an unwanted pregnancy than poisoning the mother.

  My brain was beginning to hurt, and once again I was reminded of Detective Weakland's admonition that most of the time there were no zebras to be found: if it looked like a boring old horse, it probably was. No one besides me was suggesting any kind of criminal angle to Melanie's death, and now the coroner's report confirmed that there was nothing suspicious about her death.

  I called Mike back. "Am I crazy?" I asked.

  He thought for a second. "Well, to state the obvious, yes."

  I had walked into that one. "But seriously, do you think Kent would have killed her if she found out about Jojia's scam? Or maybe she found out that he and Jojia were close."

  Mike paused. "He could have, although I didn't get a murderous vibe off of him. He seems more like a cad than a killer. But no, I don't think you're crazy. You might be onto something."

  "And then there's the pregnancy. And what about the money?" I asked.

  "You're right," he said. "We don't even know if he stands to gain financially from her death. You want me to check on that?"

  "Sure," I said. "That might clear some things up. But then again, it could just raise more questions. Just like everything else does."

  "All right," he said. "I'll get back to you."

  "Thanks, Mike."

  It was nice having help, especially since I felt trapped in my own apartment. I was trying to be tough, but being accosted on the street had rattled me. Being able to pick up the phone and dial Mike was a huge comfort.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon pacing around my apartment, trying to come up with a plan of attack. About eighty percent of me wanted to throw in the towel, but the weirdness of the LA cops was nagging at me, telling me I couldn't go on living the rest of my life in peace unless I made sure everything about Melanie's death was as boring as everyone else seemed to believe.

  Kent was the sticking point, the key to the whole thing, just as he had been from the very beginning. And Kent wanted to meet with me. It was tempting to get it out of the way, so I could either move on with my life or be killed trying. Forcing myself to focus, I narrowed down what I needed to learn from Kent. One, was he involved in Jojia's identity theft scheme? Two, did he know about Melanie's pregnancy? And finally, what did he stand to gain, if anything, from her death? Mike was working on the third question, but I was on my own for the first two.

  I knew that Kent the con man wasn't going to give up much information himself, so just meeting with him face-to-face would not be very productive, and it certainly wouldn't justify putting myself in any danger. But it had to be done, I realized. Pacing back and forth in my apartment, a plan began coming together. If I could somehow get hold of Kent's cell phone, it could be the key that unlocked everything. If he were anything like most twenty-somethings, his whole life would be on there: texts, private messages and tweets, and even old-fashioned emails. His communications with Melanie, with Jojia, and anyone else would be ripe for my prying eyes.

  I had seen Kent using a black iPhone, and I began toying with the idea of trying to pull off the old switcheroo. If I got myself a nearly identical phone, I might be able to swap it for his, so he wouldn't even notice it was gone. At least for a while. I figured if I wore down the battery to zero, he would just think his phone had died, and he wouldn't realize it wasn't his own phone until he charged it up at home. Or, I fantasized, I could just have Carlos steal it off him and sprint away.

  Carlos. His name had just popped into my head, probably because I was feeling vulnerable and he was a mountain of manly muscle. I knew right then that if I was going to meet up with Kent, I would want Carlos with me, probably in the background somewhere, but definitely there. Mike, too, but definitely Carlos.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  I didn't have much in the way of a crystallized plan when I phoned Carlos that Friday afternoon, but that was nothing new for me. My business was getting information, and getting people to spill the beans didn't usually lend itself to massive amounts of advance planning. All I knew was that I needed to talk to Kent, and I didn't want to do it on my own. After all, the guy associated himself with criminals, at least one of whom tried to kidnap me the night before, and on top of that he was on the short list for being Melanie's killer. The fact that Kent had called me seeking a meeting made me very suspicious. When I talked to him the first time, he hadn't seemed all that interested in discussing Melanie, his late wife, so I suspected the proposed mee
ting was really just a trap, a way to lure me somewhere where Charles and anyone else would have a better shot at grabbing me, duct-taping my mouth, and shoving me into the back of a Range Rover. At least, that's how I imagined it.

  "They did what to you?" Carlos asked. I had filled him in on what I'd seen the previous night, as well as what happened on my walk home.

  "It was pretty amateur hour, if you think about it," I said, pretending as if it didn't bother me.

  "But still. You gotta be careful of those guys. If they're scamming as many rich kids as we think they are, that's a lot of IDs and social security numbers. Which means it's a shitload of money, and you just stumbled upon it. They're going to be pissed, and they're gonna try to stop you any way they can."

  "I can't argue with that," I said. "The Kent guy wants to meet with me. That's why I'm calling."

  "What do you gain by meeting with him?" Carlos asked, sounding skeptical.

  "Maybe nothing, maybe everything. Turns out Melanie was pregnant when she died, so I want to see if he knew about that. And if he's involved with the ID stuff, that's a big deal too. If Melanie found out about it and was threatening to expose them, that would be a really good reason to make her overdose."

  He chuckled. "Yeah, that's a pretty good reason. Imagine, you're making tons of money, it's against the law, and then someone stumbles across it and demands that you stop or she'll turn you in."

  "He'd get prison and then get deported," I said.

  "And your plan is?" he asked.

  "I think I have to meet with the guy. It would have to be a public place that's safe enough for me, but also unsafe enough, if you get what I'm saying."