The fact that someone watched my apartment made the shower a short one. Even with the stool jammed beneath the handle I felt vulnerable and jumped back into my street clothes before the water dried on my skin. I knew the police could put my apartment under surveillance—Logan’s way to convince me to mind my own business—but didn’t think the watcher had ever worked for the police except as a jailhouse snitch. Maybe he was the guy who’d dropped the rat in my car. That made sense but didn’t reveal what he had against me or why.
The door chime caught me beneath the hair dryer. I wrapped my right hand around the baseball bat I kept in the bedroom closet—the closest thing to a weapon I’m allowed under the terms of my parole agreement—and moved toward the door. When the Rott sat a few feet from the threshold, his expression rapt, I knew I wasn’t in immediate danger. I checked the parabolic peephole just to be sure, saw Sean Tyler’s face bending away from the lens. I opened the door.
“Getting ready to hit my fastball?” he asked when he saw the bat.
“Somebody’s staking out my apartment,” I said.
The flicker in his eyes read as fear and guilt.
“I’m pretty sure it’s not the department,” I added, conscious not to turn my head toward the watcher. “White Toyota Tercel parked across the street. I’ve got a camera set on telephoto by the window.”
He nodded as though thinking it over.
“Aren’t you going to ask me in?”
Maybe I’d been wrong about the flicker. I stepped away from the door. Sean paused just long enough to give the Rott a quick scratch and slid over to stick his eye to the viewfinder.
“I don’t see anything,” he said.
I nudged him aside and bent to look. Shadow and pavement showed through the lens, an empty parking space where the Toyota had been. “I just got out of the shower.” I ruffled my hair to demonstrate it hadn’t yet fully dried. “He must have moved while I was away.”
He nodded as though he almost believed me.
I thought about the coincidence of Sean’s knock and the Tercel’s disappearance, decided it wasn’t a coincidence at all. “What kind of wheels are you driving tonight?”
“Same crappy car last time I saw you.”
“Crown Victoria?”
“I drive what the motor pool gives me.”
I showed him the webbing between my thumb and forefinger.
“The guy in the car? He has twin lightning bolts tattooed right here.”
He took that as an excuse to grab my hand, as though he needed to inspect my skin to tell me what I already knew. “You figure he’s a con?”
“He knew the car,” I said. “That’s why he took off.”
“You mean the Crown Vic?” He dropped my hand, leaned over to peek around the edge of the drape. “Sure, if he’s a pro, that’s possible. You write down the plate?”
The scent of him went to my head like a cocktail, the mix of leather, cologne, and body oils a fragrance as uniquely Sean’s as his face. I told him I got the plates on film, and backed toward the open kitchen because I knew what would happen if I remained within kissing distance of him. “I was thinking he was maybe the guy who left the dead rat in my car,” I said.
“What dead rat?”
I lifted a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and two tumblers from the kitchen cabinet. “Somebody cut a hole in the Caddy’s ragtop, dropped a packet of rat poison and a dead rat onto the front seat.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I reported it to Logan.” I showed him the ice-cube tray, pulled from the freezer. “I didn’t think you’d want to get involved.”
He raised his forefinger to signal one cube and said, “Somebody threatens you, I want to know about it.”
“Really?”
He nodded.
“Somebody threatened me just this afternoon. Right in the middle of Parker Center.” I slid the tumbler across the Formica countertop and told him about my interrogation. Sean sipped at his bourbon and shifted away from me while I spoke, a sign, I thought, of personal conflict. He couldn’t help me without damaging his career and I didn’t think either of us wanted that. It would be simpler just to end it, no matter how I felt about him.
Strong emotions can ruin lives.
I told him that Dougan recommended I go on vacation for a while.
“You might take that suggestion a little more seriously,” he said.
“I don’t get vacation time, not paid anyway.”
“Maybe just a few days, then.” He leaned against the kitchen cabinet, staring at me. “Up the coast, somewhere like Morro Bay, or maybe inland, to Death Valley. This time of year, it’s just hot enough to drive away the tourists, but not so hot to keep us from hiking the desert.”
I took down the bourbon in one pull and poured another, dropping an ice cube into the tumbler to slow my drinking. That he asked shocked me. Whenever I’m surprised my curiosity engages, just before my natural suspicion. I didn’t know who Sean was, any more than he knew me. “You worked undercover, how many years?” I asked.
“Seven,” he said, continuing to stare at me. “Not straight. I was working organized crime, vice mostly. I’d go under, then come back out, wait for another operation, go under again.” He smiled. “I was good at it, but the burn rate for that kind of work, it’s astronomical.”
“You develop a taste for hiding things while you worked undercover, or were you always that way?”
The question puzzled him at first, but then he considered it, and the implications disturbed him. “A little bit of both, probably.” He wandered from the kitchen into the darkness of the main room and spoke with his back to me. “My father is a religious man. A deeply religious man. I’m not. Never was, not even as a child. I grew up pretending I was something I wasn’t. Went to choir practice, Bible study, I was even going to study for the ministry until I crapped out for lack of vocation, discovered I couldn’t fake faith anymore. I’m not saying I’m a Godless atheist…” His laugh was short-lived and bitter. “But I don’t have the special relationship my father has. In fact, I probably get along better with the devil.” The kitchen light glittered in his eyes when he glanced back at me. “Present company excluded.”
“I’m not the devil you think I am,” I said. “But I am poison to you. Makes me wonder why you’re here.”
“The good things in life are always a little poisonous.” He sipped at his drink and stared at me so intently I felt myself falling into his eyes. “You like whiskey?”
I nodded.
“So do I.” He shook his head at how much he liked it. “Too much will kill you. Alcohol poisoning. You chug a fifth of ninety proof in an hour, you’ll die. But just the right amount, your heart beats a little faster, your skin flushes, you feel warm all over.”
“The trick is knowing when to stop.” I walked toward him, the kitchen light throwing my face into shadow, forcing him to peer to read my expression. “Two drinks, three or four, you feel fine, but then a little time passes and you start to fall faster than you climb, and you don’t want to let it go away, that high, that wonderful high, so down go five, six, seven, and then it’s not so much fun anymore, it all feels sour no matter how much you drink, and if you drink eight, nine, ten, you’ll suffer like you’re gunshot.”
Then I kissed him, because he’d been truthful, yes, and because if he knew I was poison, it was his responsibility and not mine to know how much would be fatal, and most of all I kissed him because he smelled so incredibly delicious. As good as he smelled, he tasted better. I took him down like that second drink, the good one that’s sipped and savored and not bolted like the first, the one that brings the flush of joy to your skin and makes you just the right amount of high so that when it’s done you immediately want more, even if more is too much. I backed him into the bedroom. We had time and privacy this time, and savored each other in long, slow kisses and teasing caresses, praising with lips and fingertips the skin we found beneath the leather and cotton we unwrapped from
our limbs. We had been barely conscious of making love the first time, too rushed to be fully aware of what we were doing until it was done. We wanted to make up for it the second time, allowing the sexual tension between us to build one kiss, one caress, one dispensed article of clothing at a time, pleasure washing over us in sustained moments of ecstasy as mind-altering as any drug. In the depths of my pleasure I heard the phones ring, first the land line and then the cell, but I was somewhere else by then, floating and darting through a sexual landscape I had always sensed existed but never fully experienced before, a landscape so thrilling but terrifying that I bit him in fear and anger and he bit me, pain fueling passion to streak us into bliss.
The door buzzer jarred me from the postcoital languor of Sean’s arms and the excited bark of the Rott yanked me out of bed. When I told Sean I’d check out who rang I was speaking to a moving target, his clothes already bundled against his chest as he slid toward the bathroom door. Maybe that was one of the lessons working undercover taught him, to move fast when uncertainty threatened.
The Rott was stutter dancing by the front door when I emerged from the bedroom, behavior that meant he was excited to see whoever stood on the porch. The bell rang again, the sustained burst of someone leaning on the button in frustration. I tucked a T-shirt into my jeans and put my eye to the peephole. Cassie stood on the opposite end of the parabolic lens, a backpack bigger than her torso towering over her shoulders. I snapped open the door, shocked to see her.
“I was waiting at the bus station for you,” she said, her voice so high and stressed that the Rott matched it with a whine of his own. “Why didn’t you come pick me up?” She tilted forward to keep from tipping back down the steps under the weight of the backpack.
I pulled her over the threshold and lifted the pack from her shoulders. “I didn’t even know you were coming in today.”
She wilted once released from the pack, her knees buckling and her shoulders curving into her chest. “I wrote you two postcards!”
I lay the backpack against the wall and winced, not from the weight of the pack but from guilt. I hadn’t checked my mailbox. “I’m sorry, but I haven’t been around the past couple of days and when I got in tonight I forgot to get my mail.”
Cassie glanced at the closed door to the bedroom, her shoulders still huddled toward her chest, and she lifted her chin, sniffing at the air. “I’ll bet you forgot.” She made an angry but insincere grab at her backpack. “I’ll be going now. I don’t want to get in your way. I can take care of myself.”
I wrapped my arms around her and before she could run or protest I hugged her, hard, telling her that she was staying, and that was final.
“I even called,” she said, letting me hug her. “Didn’t you hear my voice on the answering machine? Why didn’t you pick up?”
“I keep the sound turned down. My parole officer has a habit of dropping in unannounced and I don’t want her to monitor my calls.”
I released her when the door to the bedroom opened and Sean emerged.
“Thanks for letting me use your bathroom,” he said, wiping water from his hands. “The grease from the carburetor was impossible to get off. I hope I didn’t leave too much of a mess in there.” He grinned at Cassie, the white of his teeth against the black stubble on his jaw making him look like a friendly wolf, and reached out to shake her hand. “You must be Cassie. Great to meet you. Your aunt is incredible, know that?”
“This is Sean, a friend of mine,” I said.
“A friend, sure,” she said, but she took his hand.
“Don’t think too badly of me, but I gotta go. Maybe we’ll get a chance to talk later, after you’ve settled in.” He winked at me. “Walk me downstairs?”
I nodded, glanced into the bedroom through the open door, noticed the bed had been freshly made, the bedspread stretched taut to conceal that we’d been twisting the sheets into knots for the past hour. An affair with a cop who once worked undercover had some advantages. I told Cassie she could move her backpack into the bedroom and followed Sean down the stairs. “That was pretty fast thinking,” I said at the bottom.
“I didn’t want to embarrass you.” He turned to give me a lingering kiss goodbye. “I’m going to light a fire under the detectives in Pacific, see if I can get them to assign a patrol to your house, keep an eye on you.”
“Sure,” I said, not believing that would do any good.
“If this creep shows up again, give me a call, I’ll cruise by to check him out. And if you need help with the plates, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.”
One of the few things I’ve learned in life about men is that the ones who want more than a midnight fling intrude upon a woman’s life in ways that attempt to be helpful, offering to fix things that may or may not be broken, or to buy things that may or may not be needed. It was sweet of him to offer and I thanked him for it as I waved him into his Crown Vic, but I didn’t intend to allow that, not yet. I could take good enough care of myself. I didn’t want to set him up with false expectations of my dependence or his indispensability, figured that would work better for both of us in the long run.
When his taillights turned the corner I detoured around the staircase to key the box that held my mail, stuffed beyond bursting with neighborhood circulars and other species of junk mail. Cassie’s postcards lay at the bottom of the box, one a photograph of Sid Vicious and the other of a saguaro cactus in full bloom, a hurried scrawl announcing the arrival date and time of her Greyhound bus on the backs of both. An oversized envelope stood pressed against the rear of the box, the blank back facing outward. I pulled it free, crumpled the circulars into a ball, and it wasn’t until I started to climb the steps that I noticed the Mickey Mouse stamps affixed to the upper right corner of the envelope.
“He’s a thief, isn’t he?” Cassie asked when I keyed through the door.
“Sean? He’s a cop.”
I tossed the mail onto the kitchen counter.
Her mouth gaped. “You’re kidding. He’s too sexy to be a cop.”
She followed me into the bedroom, where I opened the door to my closet and pulled a pair of cotton gloves, normally used for handling negatives, from a roll-out bin of photo supplies.
“What are you doing hooking up with a cop?” she asked. “Aren’t you afraid he’s gonna, like, bust you? Or is it like he’s already got something on you, some incriminating evidence, and so he’s extorting you for sex?”
I shook my head as I walked back to the mail on the kitchen counter, astonished that she’d asked the question.
“Mom said that kinda stuff happens all the time.”
Her mother had worked as a call girl for nearly ten years, before getting into the confidence game. She’d spoken from experience, I was sure, but I didn’t want Cassie to think all cops worked like that. “Sean is a friend.” I glanced down to slit the lip of the envelope with a kitchen knife. “I hope a good one, but I don’t know that yet, and the questions you’re asking aren’t helping me to figure that out.”
“Sorry,” she said, as though she didn’t mean it.
I turned the envelope upside down and shook out a photograph of a dark-haired man in his thirties, his well-fed face and elegant suit failing to conceal an ice-pick coldness in his eyes and lips sculpted to a permanent sneer.
“My God, it’s Andrew Luster,” Cassie said.
Heir to the Max Factor fortune, Luster had been arrested the year before on eighty-seven charges of poisoning and date rape. It didn’t surprise me that Cassie recognized the man by his photograph; my niece knew criminals like other teenage girls knew boy bands. When the police raided his beachfront home in Mussel Shoals, eighty miles north of Los Angeles, they found scores of videotapes of Luster having sex with unconscious and seemingly drugged women, most of whom had yet to be identified. The search warrant had been issued after a woman accused him of spiking her drink with GHB and raping her. Neither Frank nor I had been assigned to that story but its sleazy blend of spoiled weal
th and drug-forced sex had proven irresistible to Scandal Times, which gave it extensive coverage. It had been rumored, in the pages of Scandal Times and elsewhere, that Luster was part of an international ring of playboy millionaires who traded date-rape tips and video clips over the Internet. I flipped the photo by the edge face down onto the counter. A message of some kind had been scrawled onto the back of the photo in a spidery hand that matched the lettering on the envelope: J, O, K, E (no S).
“Who’s it from?” Cassie asked, craning her neck to read the message.
“The guy who mailed me the video, the one showing Christine, you know, what happened to her.”
“You mean Stewart Starbal?”
I thought about it for a second. We hadn’t yet printed Starbal’s name in Scandal Times and I hadn’t mentioned his name to her. I hadn’t even met him until she’d already flown back to Phoenix. “How did you know that?” I asked.
“You’re not the only one knows about Christine’s diary,” she said. “I’ve gone through all her posts a dozen times. I caught the trick with the mirror, ‘LA Brats’ spelling ‘Starbal,’ just like Nephthys did.”
“You talked to her?”
“Sure, all the time. We’re like, girlfriends.”
“Suicide Girls, it’s an adult website. How did you get in?”
She gave me a scornful look, said, “Please, I’ve been doing illegal stuff since the day I was born.”
“You talked to Nephthys about this?”
“Her roommate Tammy, too,” she said, nodding. “I’ve probably talked with them more than you have. When I heard Stewart Starbal’s name on the radio tonight I figured it had to be him that sent you the video, then suicided himself from guilt. You think he helped kill Christine?”
Zero to the Bone Page 21