Death Never Lies
Page 37
Looked at one way, Agent Kane probably wouldn’t want him to say, but looked at another way Danny thought that maybe he should tell her. So he did.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
By the time he had packed and dealt with all the airport nonsense, flown across the country, and checked in at the Best Western he booked over the Internet Greg was too tired to do anything beyond grabbing a quick dinner and watching an HBO movie on the room’s TV. When he woke the next morning he reminded himself that he was on a vacation, of sorts, with no schedule or deadlines and he treated himself to a long, hot shower and a lazy breakfast before setting out on what, in the cold light of day, seemed to be a fool’s errand. Perhaps, he thought, this trip was evidence that his brain had not really healed itself after all.
Kane plugged the address into the rental car’s GPS and about twenty minutes later spotted the white and black marble sign: “Fairhaven Acres Memorial Park.” He took a left and pulled into the lot fronting the caretakers’ building. At first Kane was surprised by the number of vehicles but then realized that the media frenzy surrounding the Supreme Court decision would have spilled over into every aspect of Lyla Masterson’s life including this one.
A white gazebo flanked the beginning of a path that wound through the grounds and inside it Kane found an index to the graves. The edges of the page holding Lyla’s name were worn from frequent use. According to the plastic-covered map she had been laid to rest in plot 843, just past Sunrise Hill near the beginning of Serenity Glade.
When Kane reached the top of the slope he noticed a trickle of people wending among the markers, pausing in ones and twos for a few moments at one particular spot. Greg ducked back under the greening branches of a big-leaf sycamore and waited for them to leave. Where Washington had been gray and battered by storms here the breeze felt soft on his face and bore the fragrance of eucalyptus and bay. Kane gladly waited, enjoying the morning sun that warmed his skin. After about fifteen minutes the last of the other visitors turned away and Greg walked down the slope.
The headstone was black marble with the name “Lyla Masterson” inscribed in gold leaf. Above it a laminated photograph of a smiling child in a pink dress had been set into a depression chiseled into the stone. Below her name and the dates of her birth and death were the words:
Gone From Life Too Soon
But Her Dreams Live On
In All Of Us
Kane stared at the marker but heard and felt nothing beyond the rustle of the breeze and the distant screech of a stellar jay. A part of him wanted to ask if she really had appeared in his dream and what she had wanted to tell him but he knew that only a fool or a lunatic would believe something like that. For a moment he wished that he could whisper the thoughts racing through his head but then realized that even if Lyla were standing before him that they could not be translated into words.
What am I doing? Kane berated himself. The only part of Lyla Masterson here is the memory of her in the minds of her visitors. The child herself is irretrievably lost. Kane stared at the headstone a moment longer and knew himself to be a fool.
For a second the breeze picked up and brought Kane the sound of footsteps moving down the path behind him. Time to go, Kane knew, and put this madness behind him. He turned away from Lyla’s marker then froze when he saw her standing in front of him.
“Hey, sailor,” Allison said, “buy a girl a drink?” and before he could answer she was in his arms.
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
The conference room was in a basement and furnished with a couple of dozen folding chairs, a card table and an ancient coffee machine. A random group of fifteen or so people dressed in everything from jeans to business suits, polyester to silk, populated the room. The meeting was just about to begin when a lone man slipped through the door and took a seat in the back.
A woman dressed in a blue and black blouse and gray slacks stood and walked to the front of the room.
“I’m Irene Goldin,” she said.
“Hi, Irene,” everyone except the last-minute visitor replied.
“We’ll get started in a minute but first I want to ask, do we have any new people here today?” For a moment no one answered but when Goldin’s eyes settled on the late arrival the man hesitated then uneasily got to his feet. Everyone swiveled in their chairs to face him.
“Umm, I’ve never been to one of these meetings before,” he said, nervously fingering the cuff of his grimy shirt. “To tell you the truth I didn’t want to stop drinking. I didn’t think I could keep from going insane without the booze, but someone told me that there was a way that I could have a better life and that he believed in me, and I didn’t want to let him down, so I’ve been trying to stop. It’s been eleven days since I had my last drink and I don’t know if I can hold out much longer. I feel like I’m hanging off the side of a building by my fingertips and that any second I’m going to fall.”
“You can have a better life,” Goldin said. “We’re all proof of that. We’ve all been where you are. The first step is letting go of the past and learning to live one day at a time. We know that’s harder than it sounds but we’ll help you. Before we go any farther, it’s customary to begin by telling us your name.”
“Sorry,” the man said, dipping his hand into his pocket and rubbing his fingers over the letter that was now his constant companion. “I knew that.” He paused a moment and looked at the people who seemed to think that he still had some value and that maybe he still had a chance at a decent life.
“My name is Randy,” he said, “and I’m an alcoholic.”
– The End –
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Grace has written fifteen novels. To see a list of his other books and to read free excerpts from them, visit his website by tapping or clicking on
http://WWW.DavidGraceAuthor.Com
Print editions of his novels are also available for between $7.99 and $8.99 from Wildside Press and Amazon.com
Here is an excerpt from David Grace's previous novel, Death Never Sleeps.
DEATH NEVER SLEEPS
CHAPTER ONE
Detective James Timothy “Big Jim” Donegan leaned forward and peered into the wood chipper. His flashlight penetrated about three feet down the chute and stopped at the point where the victim’s thighs disappeared into the blades.
“Never was built to do a load like this,” the Parks & Rec guy muttered, shaking his head at the misuse of his equipment. A piece of masking tape with the inked name, “Woody,” was pasted to his hard-hat’s brim. “See, this is a model 900. She’s only supposed to be used for brush and branches and stuff like that. This lady,” Woody waved idly at the torso protruding from the hopper, “she would need at least a model 1200 to, you know . . . .” Woody shrugged and looked back at Big Jim.
“To completely grind her up?” Big Jim suggested. Woody gave him an uneasy nod.
“Yeah, well, you know, the right tool for the right job,” Woody muttered and stuck his head down into the chute. After a brief pause he frowned and turned back to Big Jim. “Boy, she’s stuck in there real good.”
“How hard is it going to be for us to get her out once the Coroner is finished?”
Woody tilted his head to one side then glanced over at his toolbox.
“I can try putting this guy in reverse. If that doesn’t work I’m gonna have to disconnect the belt.” Woody reached for the start button but Big Jim grabbed his wrist.
“The Coroner has to examine the body first. He’ll give you the go-ahead when he’s ready.”
Woody looked anxiously around. “Which one is him? I got a crew waiting on this guy.” Woody patted the chipper’s sheet metal side and elicited a dull thump.
“He’s on his way. Take a break and I’ll let you know when he gets here.”
Woody gave the protruding torso a final, nervous glance then wandered back to his truck.
Big Jim gazed past the milling uniforms and spectators stretched out behind the yellow tape. The sycamores at the
edge of the park had begun to bud out with pale green shoots. The jacarandas were even farther along though it would be a couple of months before they gowned themselves with purple blossoms. A raven, scenting fresh meat, cawed at the cops from high in an old black oak.
Needing to find some distraction from the awful scene, Big Jim imagined flowers and flapping leaves and children at play, and smiled. Life was too short, he reminded himself, to abandon beauty, even on a day like this. Especially on a day like this.
“We’re going to need a crew to sift the remains.” Big Jim snapped back to the present and saw his partner pointing at the mound of chopped meat and bone in front of the chipper. “If the killer had any sense he sent her purse through the blades ahead of her.”
“What’s your take on this, Chris?” Big Jim asked.
Chris Hunter knew that the question was a test. Everything Big Jim did was intended to teach him something. Sometimes it was about being a cop. More often it was about life in general, a subject that Chris found perpetually confusing. Guns, forensics, computers, software, forms, reports, laws, rules — all of those things he could master without breaking a sweat. He was comfortable with rules and regulations. More than comfortable. The truth was that he required them for the world to make any sense to him. It was people who confused him. Why they did what they did was a mystery that Chris Hunter feared he would never solve.
He looked again at the body, the gray skin, the eyes so clouded that their color was almost gone.
“Prostitute,” Chris began, answering Big Jim’s question, “early to mid-twenties, former heroin addict, not speed, central or eastern European ancestry, possibly Romanian, maybe a little farther east. She’s been in the U.S. less than three years so I’d guess that she’s maybe twenty-two or so. Strangled to death before he put her into the machine.”
Big Jim cocked his head a little to one side and Chris realized that he had surprised his mentor.
“Run it down for me,” Big Jim ordered.
Chris couldn’t completely stop himself from giving Big Jim a brief smile.
“The marks on her throat and the petechial hemorrhaging say ‘strangulation’ loud and clear. A ligature of some kind. We’ll have to wait until the bruises fully develop to get a better idea of the size and type.
“The tracks on her arms say ‘smack’ but they’re three to six months old so it looks like she’d recently gotten herself clean. The teeth don’t show any signs of meth. The hair is auburn and her eyes were gray, so that pretty much rules out Hispanic. She’s got high cheekbones and facial dimensions that are typical of Slavic ancestry. She’s cut the tips out of her bra so her nipples show through her blouse so, again, hooker. When I looked in her mouth I saw Eastern-European dental work on one of the back molars. Most of the pimps around here keep their girls hooked so they’re easier to control but this one looks like she was in pretty decent shape so she hasn’t been in the trade for more than a year or two.”
“Why do you figure she was in her early twenties?”
“The eyes,” Chris said, glancing at the corpse. “The skin is still smooth and tight. The Life ages a woman real fast. By twenty-seven or eight they’re already developing crow’s feet and bags, which she doesn’t have.”
“What if she didn’t get into the business until she was in her mid-twenties and she’s been a working girl for only a couple of years?”
“No,” Chris said, shaking his head, “they won’t bring over anyone older than twenty or so. Fresh girls are the moneymakers. If you start with someone in their mid-twenties they’ve only got a year or two of good earning power left before the Life wears them out so much that they get sent down to second string. It’s like the NFL not wanting a quarterback over thirty-five.” Chris froze when he saw Big Jim’s frown. Had he said the wrong thing, again? Chris replayed it over in his head and tried to figure out where he had made his mistake. Did football teams hire quarterbacks who were over thirty-five? How old was Drew Breeze?
“Good job, Chris,” Big Jim said after a little pause and gave his partner an encouraging nod. Chris instantly smiled back, pleased that he had not let Big Jim down after all. “So, Chris, any idea who she worked for?”
“According to Vice, Johnny-Boy Watkins is running the girls from here down to just this side of The Beach.” Big Jim’s face clouded upon hearing Johnny-Boy’s name.
“She looks a little rich for Johnny-Boy and the word is that he gets most of his girls out of Thailand via the Philippines. I would figure Gregor Rostov for someone like her.”
“No, his girls mostly work out-call in Montclair, Ardenwood and High Oak. They usually don’t get this far south in The Valley.”
“She could have been grabbed up in High Oak and brought down here to be dumped,” Big Jim said, half-seriously, half to make Chris lay out the steps in his logic.
“She was strangled before he put her into the chipper and it rained two days ago. If he’d driven her over the lawn we would have seen tire tracks. That means he either carried her or she walked. If he was big enough to carry her then her weight added to his would have left impressions in the grass and there aren’t any, so she walked in and he killed her here.”
“He still could have grabbed her up in High Oak or maybe Hidden Valley and driven her down here, couldn’t he?”
Chris frowned, struggling to put his thoughts into words. “We’re a fifteen minute drive from High Oak. She’s been on the job for a couple of years and if she got into a John’s car up there and he tried to drive her all the way down here she would’ve been kicking and screaming most of the way.”
“Maybe she was.”
Chris shook his head. “Her nails weren’t broken and there’s no bruising on her wrists and no tape residue. She didn’t put up a fight and she wasn’t tied up. She met him here in the park. That means she was either freelancing or she was one of Johnny-Boy’s girls.” Chris looked at Big Jim expectantly.
“I can’t argue with that,” Big Jim said, giving Chris a little smile. “So, OK, what’s our next move?”
“We have the uniforms canvas the area, and after the Coroner finishes with the body we have a talk with Johnny-Boy Watkins.”
“Did you put some pictures of her on your phone?”
“First thing.”
“All right, we’ll interview Johnny-Boy after lunch. Otherwise he’ll piss me off so much it’ll ruin my appetite. . . . There’s the Coroner. Broken nails or no broken nails, make sure he bags her hands. I’ll tell Woody that we’re almost ready to get her out of that contraption.”
After one last glance at what used to be a young woman and now was only a drugged, brutalized, exploited and murdered corpse, Big Jim ambled toward the Parks’ Department truck and tried to think happier thoughts.
CHAPTER TWO
The Department had switched from Crown Vics to Chevy Malibus and, as usual, Chris drove so that Big Jim could scan the sidewalks for gang-bangers, druggies, hookers, pimps, lookouts, dealers, parolees and other persons of interest, not so much to bust them as to keep up on who was doing what to whom.
“See that kid with the red hair?” Big Jim pointed to a beefy guy in his early twenties carrying a bag of groceries. Chris took his eyes off the traffic for a quick glance.
“Who’s he?”
“He used to boost cars for a bunch of crooks operating out of a warehouse near the Port. Now he’s the cook at Salciccio’s.”
“The bar on Western?”
“They serve food too. He’s studying to become a pastry chef. He makes one hell of an Alsatian apple pie.”
Chris didn’t know what to say. Big Jim was always coming up with stuff like that, oddball comments out of the blue. Chris knew that Big Jim was getting at something but he didn’t know what. It wouldn’t do him any good to ask. He knew that Big Jim wanted him to figure it out on his own. Half the time Chris felt as if he was a contestant in a game-show with Big Jim tallying the score.
“How do you know him?” Chris asked.
“But, he just gave up?”
“It didn’t take me long to figure it out.”
“Figure what out?”
“That he wanted it to be over. I could tell that he didn’t want to be a thief anymore.”
“You could just tell? How?”
Big Jim knew that Chris wanted a set of clear, simple rules, some mechanism that could be used to disassemble events into their component parts, neat and clean — ‘This means this. That means that.’ But people aren’t black and white. They aren’t Star Trek’s Mr. Spock running some emotionless computer program behind their eyes. Big Jim sighed and tried to figure out how to put what he knew into words that Chris could understand.
“Just for a second I saw it on his face,” Big Jim began, “surrender, like a guy who gets up every morning expecting to be collared and is relieved when it finally happens, when the running and hiding is finally over. As soon as I flashed my badge the kid slouched. His shoulders slumped. He let his arms hang loose and he dropped the Slim Jim without me having to tell him to. You watch a guy’s hands and you’ll always know if he’s going to fight you. A man’s face can lie but not his shoulders or his hands, or his feet for that matter. That’s when I knew that some part of the kid had been waiting for an excuse to get out of that life.”