Chi sits in the armchair at the windows, wearing suit pants and a blue, long-sleeved shirt. Behind him, the lights of Petco Park stadium shine.
She smiles as the trench coat slides off her body and lands on the thick blue carpet. “Someone order room service?” she coos.
Ohmygosh, that sounded so good!
His eyes move from her hips to her breasts and back to her face. “Long time no see,” he says.
“And do you like what you see?” she asks.
He smiles and beckons her to come to him.
She takes one step and then another … another … until she stands over him.
His pupils are as big as pennies. And there’s already white powder on his nostrils.
“You started the party without me?” she asks, fake pouting.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “I have everything you need. Sit.”
Nikita straddles him, then leans back until her long hair brushes his knees.
“You miss me?” he asks, his voice thick, his fingers tracing her long neck.
She stiffens but nods: his hands are freezing and his fingers feel like sausages. Ugh.
“You’re not scared, are you?” His crooked smile never reaches his eyes.
“I’m a big girl,” she says. “I can handle what you got, baby.” She bends forward to kiss him.
He grips her neck, keeps her from that kiss. “Still not scared?”
What was this? A hazing ritual? Why did she have to prove—?
“I asked you a question,” he says, his hold tightening.
She squeezes out, “No,” but now air comes by sips and gulps. Her heart beats double time. “Stop, baby. You’re—”
Tighter.
And now, Nikita is on her back, on that thick blue carpet, with a view of the ceiling, most of it blocked by Chi’s twitching, sweaty face.
Only Malia knew she was driving down to San Diego; and Malia won’t worry if Nikita doesn’t show up to their dorm room because—
Tighter.
She tries to push him off, to bat him away.
His free hand pins her left arm down and his knee pins down the right.
Tighter.
The light in the room … fuzzy … gray.
How long has she…?
12
As I left the autopsy chamber with a photograph of Monique Darson in my hand, Brooks’s Stryker saw buzzed to life. The tool sounded like a dentist’s drill but louder, meaner. Even though I was thirty paces down the hallway, memory told me that I smelled hot-burning bone, that I heard the pop of the cranium separating like two halves of a honeydew melon. Memory can be a callous bitch sometimes.
Monique Darson’s family needed to know that she had been murdered—it was four in the morning, though. Usually, horrific news was best delivered before breakfast, but not today. I couldn’t do that to this family, who probably hadn’t been concerned with her absence.
Growing up without Tori, I had freaked out every time the phone rang, every time someone knocked on our door. Would it be the police with news? Would it be Tori? Sometimes, it had been Detective Tommy Peet with an update—still no Tori. It had never been my sister knocking or calling. And it had never been my dad, who could have heard through the grapevine that his eldest daughter had disappeared and here he was, back from Wherever, to look for her … and to comfort me. No.
Some mouth-breather realtor had told Colin that the city of Glendale was just a twenty-minute drive over the hill to South Los Angeles. Genius didn’t take into account … Los Angeles, with its overturned cement trucks, six-car fender-benders, and lost refrigerators blocking the left lanes of the freeway. And what about the road closures and the men working and the roving police chases? Unless the agent had meant twenty football minutes. Converted into real time, that would be … a six-hour drive. Sounded right.
The thought of driving all that way to Glendale and then, in three hours, driving back over the hill into Los Angeles, made Colin as weepy as a pastor’s wife in a strip club. He kept staring at his car, and then, glowering at the foggy purple foothills to the north, back to the car, back to the hills, and on and on.
I watched Mr. Ready-Fire-Aim-Just-Do-It-Already for a moment, watched as his lips vanished and his eyes hollowed, watched as his inner Colin kneaded his sweater. Feeling charitable, I said, “Hey, you can shower and crash a moment at my place.” Not waiting for his response, I climbed into the Porsche.
His face lit up as though I had just offered him a pot of gold and a Playboy Bunny with no gag reflex. And so he followed me home, past downtown, past the Jungle and Culver City, until we reached Cielo, my condo development just a stone’s throw from the Pacific Ocean.
Three years ago, Greg and I had purchased a million-dollar three-bedroom, trilevel condominium right in the middle of this urban heaven. On my salary, a million dollars was the same as a trillion dollars, but Greg had it like that: a six-figure salary, royalties from his graphic novels, no kids or ex-wives to pay. And he said that we would save in the long run since he worked only three blocks away. He claimed that a million dollars was a steal—this unit was detached, and at 3,200 square feet was larger than the average house. We had the Ballona Wetlands and the Pacific Ocean, a coffee shop, a dry cleaner, a sushi joint, and a market all around the corner. “And when the revolution begins,” he had said, “you won’t have to leave the block for milk and uramaki. Cielo truly is paradise.”
It took an eleven-year-old girl dying after storing her mother’s crystal meth in her vagina to make me sign the title. After catching that case, I had needed a retreat from evil, a Shangri-la far from nuts who lit loved ones on fire and drowned their babies in toilets.
Now, I pulled into my driveway at forty-five minutes past four in the morning. The sun’s arrival was just an hour or so away, and the sky was still wet with marine layer. Light shone from a few windows but no televisions had started their whisperings of morning news and cartoons.
Colin, idling at the open garage door with a knapsack of fresh clothes, stretched and groaned as his muscles flexed. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath like a man who had been stuck all day in a musty elevator. “There’s no circulation in Glendale,” he said.
“I know: we stole the air when we stole the water.” I pointed to his cowboy boots. “You gotta leave those shit-kickers out here. A happy home is one that does not smell of other people’s death.” Then, I slipped off my own shoes and carried them inside the house.
Greg’s original artwork from his graphic novels and video games lined the walls. By the time Colin had wandered from the garage and through the game room, he had said “Wow” and “Hey, I played that game” about a hundred times. By the time we reached the guest room, he was in wide-eyed fanboy mode. “He illustrated all this?” he asked.
I nodded, annoyed with the cloaked goblins, big-titted Nazi huntresses, and zombie marines. I wanted Regular People’s Art—fake Picassos sold at Ikea or real art found at those convention center shows, the ones where everybody’s uncle had a booth and every painting looked Motel 6 ready. Alas, Greg’s ego had hoarded all the wall space. Eleven years ago, when we had first met, I had found his creative confidence hella sexy. Eleven years ago.
“You should introduce me to your husband,” Colin declared.
“Why?”
He shrugged and blushed and studied the charcoal sketch of a sexy she-elf. “I’m a cop—I could give him tips for making those games of his more realistic.”
I stared at him—not only was I a cop, I was also married to the man. If he confabbed with anybody, it would be (and had been) me.
“I wanna do that consulting thing, you know?” Colin continued. “A lot of these games are all hat and no cattle, know what I mean? I wanna be the detective that Hollywood turns to. Makin’ shit they come up with more real.”
I sighed, then pointed to my left. “There’s the bathroom. Towels are in the cabinet. If you need me, I’ll be upstairs.”
“So is that a no, you won�
��t introduce me?”
“It’s a ‘there’s the bathroom and towels are in the cabinet.’”
“Later then?”
As I turned to leave, Colin said, “Hey, Lou?” He was doing that squinty-eye-lip-bite thing that was supposed to get me all loose-limbed and fuck-friendly.
And with my shoes off like that, it was kind of working. “Yeah?”
“Thanks for not sending me over the hill.”
I waited for more, but that was it. “Sure. No problem.”
I left Colin to do his business and drifted to the kitchen to check voice mail: Mom (Do I need to send out a search party for you?), Syeeda (Guess what I’m working on?), and an automatic reminder from Arrowhead to leave my empty water bottles on the porch. No message from Greg, and it was now dinnertime in Japan. He couldn’t have called before heading out for teppanyaki? What the hell was he doing?
You mean, who the hell is he doing?
Stop.
Where is he, then?
Working. In a meeting. Hasn’t had the chance to call, is all.
Loafers in hand, I marched up the stairs to the sun deck and grabbed the can of Lysol that lived there. I sprayed three bursts of “clean linen” on the soles and the insteps, and then set the shoes on an Adirondack chair. Good footwear was the best tool I had, and I treated my shoes like a farm treated its best combine. Being a detective meant constantly walking, sometimes running, a lot of times stepping in blood that had the consistency of almost-there chocolate pudding.
Back to my room I went.
I slipped off my suit jacket, pants, and shirt for the second time in nine hours, then grabbed the bottle of Febreze from the nightstand. I gave my clothes a half-assed spritz, but changed my mind and shoved all of it into the bag of clothes that needed to be burned.
The bed was just as I had left it on Wednesday morning—tucked and neat. The cream carpet was free of charcoal pencils, little scraps of plastic wrapping, and Hawaiian Roll bread crumbs. More proof that Greg really wasn’t home. I eyed Heart of the Volcano, my latest trashy romance novel waiting for me on the nightstand. But I had no time for fire priestesses and sexy gargoyles.
I padded to the walk-in closet. Since I didn’t expect to encounter death again until the Darson case had ended or had been shoved to the back burner (like my other two cases) by a more exciting murder, I chose a linen, faux–St. John pantsuit and a yellow silk blouse. I glanced at the top shelf, at the document box stowed beneath a winter blanket.
I hung my outfit on the doorknob and pulled the box from its place. Held my breath as I slipped off the top.
Even though I had collected every report and statement that had been generated, Tori’s case file was still as thick as a Pee-Chee folder on the first day of school. I had also taken Tori’s senior yearbook and had found a copy of the school picture that Mom had given the police. There was also one newspaper clipping reporting her disappearance and a “Have you seen me?” flyer that had been designed by our church. For years Mom had kept Tori’s things in our bedroom. Back then, Mom would always say, “Any day now, she’ll be home.” She signed the financial aid papers for Tori’s first semester at Cal State Northridge and bought her a new knapsack. That first Christmas, she bought Tori a box set of Love’s Baby Soft, a makeup bag, and blank cassette tapes. The presents sat beneath the tree, wrapped and waiting to be opened. Tori, of course, never opened them and those wrapped gifts disappeared on January 1.
Twenty-five years passed with no new developments or “aha” moments about Tori’s disappearance. But I still hoped, even though that part of me was supposed to be extinct by now. After all this time, Tori’s disappearance still hurt. On many occasions, Lena and Syeeda had asked me to talk about that first week without my sister. I would open my mouth to speak, but sorrow trampled clear thought. My eyes misted, my lips quivered, and defeated, I swallowed that pain. All I could offer them was a sad smile and a shake of my head. But on every November 12, Tori’s birthday, they joined me and silently raised their glasses of wine to toast a woman they would never meet.
Greg: he was the only one who knew it all. And he was always the person sitting next to me on our bed on every July 17, waiting until I finished my conversation with Mom, holding me afterward as I cried and memorialized the day my sister disappeared. And before he had been pulled into the black hole that scientists had named It’s All About Me, Greg had hired a private investigator to find my sister. The guy was a charlatan—he had sounded like a cop only because he had played one on TV.
Many cold cases have been solved because of the development of hadron colliders and new ways to split atoms. Maybe now, smart guys like Brooks and Zucca would pull a fingerprint off Tori’s left-behind Nike. Maybe they could analyze that blood spot to see if it belonged to her or to the Bad Guy. Maybe …
I didn’t open Tori’s file—I knew that the first document there was the incident report taken by Detective Peet. The words there had been typed on an IBM Selectric with a worn ribbon. And now, time had stolen those words just as it had stolen the LAPD’s interest. In that way, the monster who had taken my sister was winning, erasing her from all of life as though she had never existed. I would not let that devil enjoy this victory.
Beneath Peet’s incident report was my witness statement—the ramblings of a frightened thirteen-year-old girl—along with the witness statements from Napoleon Crase, who had owned the liquor store, and from seventeen-year-old kids named Kesha Thompkins and Golden Lee, Tori’s best friends.
I hadn’t come face-to-face with Crase since that July afternoon, but I had cut out every article that mentioned him. I had taped those slips of paper into a notebook kept at my desk in the squad room—he didn’t deserve to share a space in Tori’s storage container, my only resting place for her. There had been the “good” stories about Crase—more stores purchased around the city, a car dealership opened, Man of the Year honors from churches and civic groups. And there had been the sordid stories: young women caught in compromising situations with him at parks and movie theaters, domestic disturbances between him and those girls now wearing layers of makeup and lipstick to hide the bruises, now taking it all back for jewelry, handbags, and another day aboveground.
It was an understatement to say that I saw Napoleon Crase in my sleep.
Kesha and Golden, though … I tried to recall their faces, but had no luck. Even though I recalled some of that day perfectly, my brain didn’t want to remember all of Golden and Kesha. Fear killed memory, and sometimes I wondered if that day in July truly happened.
“Can I get something to drink?” Colin shouted from the kitchen.
I slammed the top back on the box as though he’d found me flipping through Hustler. “Yeah,” I shouted back. “I’ll be down in a minute.”
Fifteen minutes later, I jogged downstairs showered, dressed, and smelling of Flowerbomb.
Colin stood in the den, bent before my bookcase as he read the books’ spines. “A Wicked Liaison, The Playboy Sheikh’s Virgin Stable Girl, The Naked Duke…” He squinted at me. “Didn’t figure you for the cheesy romance novel type.” He had changed into crisp khakis and a white long-sleeved Oxford shirt. His still-damp blond hair stuck to his scalp, and lather hid in his right ear.
“Virgin stable girls get my mind off murder,” I said. “Coffee?”
“Please.” He now stood before my wedding portrait. “He’s a good-looking guy.”
“Yes, he’s aware,” I said, rolling my eyes. Skin medium-toasted, pecan-colored eyes, barely there mustache and goatee, lopsided smile, six-foot-three, 215 pounds. Yes, Greg and the entire world had noted his looks. Then, they all told me that I was a lucky girl. Yep, as lucky as Nancy Reagan getting lost in Watts on New Year’s Eve.
I glanced back at Colin and caught him staring at my ass—not in a scientific, detached “Oh, that’s an ass” way. But in the “Damn, that’s an ass” gaze that men sometimes lose themselves in. I wouldn’t make anything of it since maybe it wasn’t anything at al
l, just a look from a ho-hum-looking guy from Colorado. By his just looking, though, my hormones had startled awake and now jiggered through my bloodstream. Couldn’t remember the last time I had caught a man admiring my body and me not being offended by his admiration.
So, I did the least erotic task I could manage: I busied myself with measuring water and coffee beans.
He picked up another picture, studied it, then slipped it back in its place. A moment later, he settled on a stool at the breakfast bar. “So when are you gonna tell me?”
I pointed at his right ear. “You have a little soap … When am I gonna tell you what?”
He swiped at the lather. “About your sister.” He nodded back at the photos on the mantel. “Cute picture of you and her at Disneyland. Big ears, big smiles. How old were you?”
I paused in my step, then restarted. Sugar, cream, spoons … “I was seven. She was twelve. And who told you that I had something to tell about my sister?”
“Pepe.”
I grabbed two mugs from the cupboard, then stared at him.
He had an expectant smile on his lips.
Seconds shimmied by. Coffee burbled into the pot. My stomach growled.
I pinched the bridge of my nose, then said, “There’s really nothing to tell. We went to the liquor store that afternoon. She stole a pack of Starbursts and got caught by the guy who owned the place, Napoleon Crase—”
“Of Crase Parc and Promenade?”
“The one and only,” I said, pouring coffee into our cups. “Then, I ran home. Two hours later, my mother stepped through the front door and Tori was still gone. Mom went to go search for her, didn’t find her, came back home to call the police and the cops kinda searched for her but…” I dumped one teaspoon of sugar into my mug. “I don’t remember much about the scene at the liquor store. Her friends were there—they gave statements, but it didn’t help.”
“Who is this Crase character?” he asked.
“Back in the day, he owned only one store,” I said. “Crase Liquor Emporium. It was in the torn-down plaza across the street from where we found Monique Darson’s Lexus. Then, one store became two stores, then so on and so forth.”
Land of Shadows Page 6