by Chris Mooney
Kelly turned to her. “Did the shooter have any blood on him?”
“I didn’t notice any,” she replied.
Alves said, “That’s not surprising. The blood pattern on the pillow and mattress indicates pulsing instead of spurting—the back of the head doesn’t have arteries. And both victims had lowered heart rates, which explains why the crime scene isn’t that messy.” Now he looked to Ellie, his gaze telling her to hurry up.
She turned to the young man and gently lifted the black hair away from his left ear, as though afraid she might wake him.
“This is Alex Hernandez,” she said. “This crease along the top part of his ear? It’s called ‘lidding.’ It should be listed in the distinguishing-characteristic section of his file.”
Alves held his smartphone, tapping the name into the LAPD Blood database through a secured and encrypted link.
Ellie said, “I think he’s the one who wrote the message on the dog tag and left blood. There’s a small cut on his right thumb, and there’s a black ink mark on his hand. The message on the tag was written in black marker. I want to say he’s been missing for three, maybe four years.”
“And you know all of this how?” This from Kelly, Ellie having a hard time reading the man’s tone, whether he was showing normal skepticism or being dismissive.
“His face was all over social media and news websites,” Ellie said. “But the main reason I remember was the billboard on the 110. I saw Alex’s face every day for almost a year when I was taking my Criminal Law and Procedure college class at LATTC.” It was the truth, or at least part of it. His sweet, angelic face had, in fact, haunted her every day on her commute.
There was another reason why she knew Alex Hernandez—a reason why she knew practically every missing carrier in the state of California, one that she would never share with Commissioner Kelly.
Alves looked up from his phone. “The lidding thing is listed in Hernandez’s file. And the photos we have on file look like a solid match.”
Ellie turned her attention to the young woman. She had a round face, but it was lean, the skin healthy and tight. She had a small nose. Good hair. Her mouth hung open. She, too, had given blood. Ellie saw the thick bandages in the crooks of both arms.
“I think she might be Jolie Simone,” Ellie said. “If she is, she’ll have a small heart tattoo on her chest. Her father gave it to her.”
Kelly said, “The father tattooed his own kid?”
Ellie nodded. “For her to remember him by,” she said. “He was a tattoo artist, and he was dying of leukemia. May I pull back the comforter a bit?”
Alves checked with the techs, who were both huddled next to their gear near the entrance of a walk-in closet. The techs said they had taken the necessary pictures, so it was okay to proceed. The smaller one used the camera on his tablet to record Ellie’s movements.
She grabbed the corner of the comforter and carefully pulled it back. Alex Hernandez had a long, lean body and wore blue sweatpants and a San Francisco Giants sweatshirt that seemed too small for him. Had he borrowed the clothes? Yes, he had; she saw his other set of clothes neatly folded on a chair by the window.
“Why is he wearing so many layers?” Kelly asked. “It’s pretty warm in here.”
Ellie answered the question before Alves could: “Your core temperature drops dramatically if you’ve given two or more pints—or, say, fifteen to twenty percent total blood volume. It’s a class two hemorrhage. You have to keep your body warm or you’ll go into shock—which explains why it’s warmer up here than downstairs.”
Kelly turned to Alves and said, “You think they brought the carriers here and gave Vargas a transfusion?”
“I don’t see the point in it,” Alves replied. “You don’t need to bring the carriers. You just need their blood. There’s got to be another reason—one that we haven’t discovered yet.”
Ellie hovered over Hernandez’s body to get a closer look at the woman she believed to be Jolie Simone. She wasn’t wearing layers like Hernandez, just a plain white tank top with a bra. A tanned muscular arm was draped over her waist, and her fingernails were freshly painted a dark red. A cotton ball was taped to the crook of her arm; she’d given blood.
Maybe the blood given to the dead woman in the backyard, Ellie thought as she hooked a finger in the neck of the tank top and gently pulled it aside.
There it was: the nickel-sized tattoo of a blue heart with a crown of thorns.
Then, as an afterthought and mostly to herself, she said, “They took good care of you.”
Kelly moved closer. “What did you say?”
Ellie straightened. “Whoever kept Simone and Hernandez took very good care of them.”
“Explain that.”
“They’re both lean and muscular. Well-fed and well-groomed. Simone painted her nails recently. Whoever had them, wherever they were being kept—they were well treated. Physically, at least.”
All the eyes in the room were pinned on her. They didn’t look friendly, either.
“Sir,” Alves said. “What Officer Batista told us about Jolie Simone’s tattoo? She’s right. It’s listed right here in her file.” He tapped the phone’s screen. “And the pictures we have bear a strong resemblance to our Jane Doe here.”
“How long has she been missing?” Kelly asked.
“Just under five years,” Alves replied. “Hernandez for about four.”
“Officer Batista,” Kelly said, sounding a bit hostile. “A word?”
Ellie followed the commissioner into the hallway. Kelly stopped just outside the bedroom and placed his hands on his hips. Ellie knew what was coming and recalled words Danny had shared with her during her first few months on the job.
Don’t ever try to be helpful, Danny had told her. And never, under any circumstances, offer advice to anyone who has a higher pay grade than you. The higher-ups don’t care about you, what you bring to the table. Your job is always CYA—Cover Your Ass.
“What’s the connection between you and those two victims in there?” Kelly asked.
“There isn’t one.”
Kelly’s eyes looked like they were going to pop out of his head. “You’re telling me you just happened to recall all of the salient points from not one but two missing-persons cases out of thousands?”
His words put some starch into her posture, some heat into her voice. “I’m not lying to you, sir, and I resent the implication.”
“Then how do you know them?”
“I don’t.” Ellie felt beads of sweat rolling down her forehead, the small of her back. This was her big chance to get on BCU and she couldn’t blow it. “The reason I know about Simone and Hernandez is because I read about them. Studied them and others. Finding out as much as I can about the blood world—it’s become sort of a . . . passion of mine.” She paused and took a deep breath. This was her chance, her opportunity. Go for it.
“Sir, I can be an asset to you not only on this case but other cases. Give me a spot on the Blood Unit. You won’t regret it, sir—I promise you.”
Kelly stared at her, deciding her fate.
Either he’s going to offer me a spot on the Blood Unit or he’s going to tear me a new ass for overstepping.
“Christ.” Alves’s voice, coming from the bedroom.
Kelly joined him. Ellie didn’t follow. She could see well enough from the doorway.
The forensic techs had removed the white comforter and bedsheets. Someone—probably Alves—had pushed up Jolie’s tank top over her belly, revealing her stomach, the baby bump the size of a child’s basketball.
CHAPTER 6
SEBASTIAN CRAWLED ALONG the crowded freeway, listening to the all-news radio station, hoping to learn actual details about the shooting in Brentwood. Frank hadn’t had much in the way of specifics when he’d called earlier. He’d promised to call back when he did.
That was forty minutes ago.
The news was high on drama and low on facts. Very low. Police—who were in Brentwood in record numbers, according to one reporter—had confirmed that the owner of the home, Sophia Vargas, and an LAPD officer had been shot and killed in what one witness called a “gangland-style shoot-out,” but so far hadn’t offered up anything beyond that. A witness reported seeing a “black compact car with tinted windows” fleeing the scene. There was no other information.
But that didn’t mean the police hadn’t discovered things. Important, key things.
Paul owned a black BMW with tinted windows. Sebastian wondered if anyone had seen and perhaps memorized a plate number. Maybe a camera in a traffic light had recorded it. The thought made Sebastian feel sick all over.
The radio newscaster teased a possible breaking story. First, Sebastian had to listen to an interview with a witness—a hysterical neighborhood yenta who had been out walking her dog when she heard the gunshots. “It sounded like firecrackers—hundreds of firecrackers going off at the same time. And then came the screaming, the awful screaming.” The woman’s voice caught. “I can’t believe this happened,” she said, and began to sob. “I cannot believe this is happening here.”
Sebastian couldn’t believe it, either. He was having an out-of-body experience—the second of his life. The first one he had experienced years and years ago, when he was a teenager, after the judge sentenced him to life in prison.
Which was exactly what would happen to him again if he didn’t find Paul before the cops did.
Ever since Frank’s initial call, Sebastian had been choking on the thought of Paul already in police custody. Paul didn’t know the inner workings of Sebastian’s blood operation, but he knew enough to throw Sebastian to the wolves. Paul worked with a guy who managed stickmen and acquired carriers exclusively for Sebastian’s business, and Sebastian had allowed him to do some menial tasks like the one today—chauffeuring well-behaved carriers and playing babysitter. Paul knew nothing about the infrastructure or the treatment center, and he didn’t know the names of actual clients and had absolutely no idea of the locations where the donors lived.
Sebastian imagined Paul wearing a shit-eating grin while asking the LAPD if they would be interested in the person behind the elusive Pandora in exchange for a reduced sentence. Or maybe the slick lawyer he would hire would bypass the LAPD altogether and go straight to the Feds, see if they wanted the info in exchange for, say, placement in Witness Protection.
Sebastian’s thoughts shifted to his two donors. Paul had taken Alex Hernandez and Jolie Simone to Brentwood for a day of sun and fun. Sebastian had a special arrangement with Sophia Vargas, a long-standing client who, in exchange for free transfusions, allowed his well-behaved donors to spend a nice, long summer day outside in the privacy of her backyard, get some sun and fresh air when her husband was away on yet another one of his overseas business trips. The system, while unusual, had worked perfectly for the last few years, helped make the donors feel less like prisoners.
Had Paul taken Alex and Jolie with him, or were they dead?
On the radio, the reporter who was live at the scene broke in and said, “We’ve got confirmation police found two bodies inside the house—a yet-unidentified male and female. A source close to the investigation believes the victims are carriers who were abducted several years ago.”
So, there it was.
The phone rang. Frank.
“Paul reached out to me,” Frank said.
Sebastian felt a couple of the stones stacked on his heart slide away.
“I gave him the address of our house in Long Beach,” Frank said. “I told him he could lie low there until we sort this mess out.”
Paul didn’t know about the house in Long Beach, what they used it for. With its sweeping ocean views and stellar sunsets, the fully furnished house was disarming—not the sort of place you figured you’d spend your last moments of life.
Which was the point. Paul wouldn’t suspect a thing.
“He’s on his way there now,” Frank said.
A few more stones fell, Sebastian now feeling like he could finally draw a full breath. Forty minutes ago, he’d had his mind set on going home and getting his new passport and credit cards and cash, packing up some clothes, and preparing for life on the run. Now he had hope.
“You’re sure?” Sebastian asked.
“If you mean am I tracking his cell signal, the answer is no. I’m not at the office at the moment. I’ve had bigger fish to fry.”
Frank, Sebastian knew, was referring to certain business arrangements that had become top priorities. “Our other donors,” Sebastian began.
“Already being moved to our new compound.”
They had built a new facility as a backup, in the event the location of their current one was ever compromised. The locations of his donor compounds were Sebastian’s biggest and most important secret. There was no way Paul would know where the donors lived. But with Paul, he wasn’t going to take any chances.
Frank said, “The old compound is being scrubbed and shut down as we speak. Same with the house where Paul picked up Alex and Jolie this morning. There won’t be a single shred of evidence to indicate they were there—I promise you that.”
“What about his car? The Beemer.”
“He said he took care of it.”
“Took care of it how?”
“He didn’t say, and I didn’t ask, figuring we could do question-and-answer time later. I stuck to the script.”
“How’d he sound?”
“Like he always sounds. Like we were talking about the weather or last night’s box score instead of him killing six people.”
“Six? I’m counting four. Vargas, the cop, and now Alex and Jolie.”
“There was another kid there,” Frank said. “A stickman, I’m hearing.”
“One of Anton’s?”
“I don’t know any details yet. As for the sixth victim, remember Jolie Simone was five months pregnant. State considers that another human life.”
Sebastian thought of Jolie’s unborn kid suffocating to death inside the womb because her mother had been killed. The news angered him—and Frank angered him. Not Frank personally but the deadpan way Frank spoke, like he was a computer rather than a man. Frank always spoke that way, and there were times, like now, when Sebastian wished Frank shared his outrage.
“I have more news from our man on the inside,” Frank said. “It appears Jolie gave blood. And Vargas got a transfusion.”
Sebastian chewed on that for a moment. Jolie wasn’t scheduled to give blood today, or any day, because she was pregnant—and Sophia Vargas wasn’t scheduled to get her transfusion until next month.
“Why would Paul take Jolie’s blood?” Frank asked.
“Must have a side deal going with someone, make some extra money, is the only thing I can think of.”
“With who? The Armenians?”
Let’s hope not, Sebastian thought. “What else do you know?”
“When the cops arrived, they found Sophia Vargas lying in the backyard, in her bikini. She was having a little DIY time—you know, buttering her muffin—even after the cops arrived.”
“What?”
“That’s what our guy said. She ever done anything like that before?”
“No. And she’s been getting Pandora infusions for years.”
“So what changed?”
Sebastian didn’t know. Had no idea. One of the immediate side effects of Pandora was enhanced sexual arousal, yes, and a lot of his male and female clients reported feeling extremely horny for a good couple of weeks or so after a transfusion. But he’d never had a client act the way Sophia Vargas had, if what Frank had just said was true.
“My guy also told me they were executed—his word—while they were passed out, sleeping, what
ever,” Frank said. “Single stab wound to the back of the head with a strong blade, like a hunting or military knife.”
Instant death—at least according to Paul, who had told Sebastian about the night he used his government-issued knife to quickly dispatch a pair of Iraqi soldiers during a night mission over in camel country. Paul had brought that knife home with him—carried it with him. He even had a name for the blade: the Angel’s Kiss.
“Why were the cops called to the house?”
“Because of the dog,” Frank said.
“What dog?”
“Vargas’s dog. Black Lab. Somehow it got out of the fenced-in backyard, was running around the neighborhood when a police car hit it. The cops saw its tag. Someone had left a bloody fingerprint on it and written the words Help Us, I’m told. If I had to guess who did it, I’d say Alex.”
It took Sebastian by surprise, the betrayal, how deeply it stung. Alex and Jolie had been with him since they were kids and had never given him so much as a lick of trouble—had, in fact, been appreciative of how well they were taken care of. They didn’t want for anything. He had made sure of it.
No, that wasn’t entirely true. He couldn’t give them their freedom.
Frank said, “I’m guessing they had some plan in place to run away together, start a family.”
“Run to where?”
“No idea. I’m sure it was more of a fantasy than an actual plan. You remember what it’s like at that age, the stupid shit you do when you’re in love. You believe anything in the world is possible.”
Frank, Sebastian knew, was referring to him and Ava.
Frank, though, didn’t have any personal experience in this area. Frank had never been in love—at least as far as Sebastian knew. He had no idea if Frank saw someone or got laid or if his childhood friend had any interest in sex. Sebastian had no idea about Frank’s sexual preference, either, because Frank was still, after all their years together and after all the shit they’d gone through, intensely, almost pathologically private.