by Dianne Emley
She’d met them later and they’d spent the weekend in the penthouse suite of an exclusive hotel. She’d gone lots of other nights, too. Mostly they went to the couple’s home. It was big and private and perfect for their kind of partying. The sex slowly got rougher and the setup, disguises, and rules of the game more complex. John Lesley had a predator’s instinct for luring her in. He stoked her confidence and dependence on him while, ever so slowly, they progressed from the erotic and experimental to the perverted. She once came home with bruises, nothing visible outside her clothes, and locks of hair yanked out. She refused to meet him again, but he wore her down. Near the first of the month, when things were tight and the mortgage on her tiny condo was due, a knock on her door brought a messenger with a robin’s egg blue box from Tiffany’s and a manila envelope crammed with crisp hundred-dollar bills. Not having to worry about money for the first time in her life was blissfully freeing. A natural aphrodisiac.
Didn’t she deserve nice things? She’d busted her hump her whole life and was still on the outside looking in. She had also missed the sexy excitement of the tightrope walk he represented. Worse yet, she missed him. She’d fallen in love with him a little. That made her feel crazier than she wanted to accept.
What she was doing was immoral, but it wasn’t illegal. She’d checked. She’d also checked them out. Knew everything about them. Knowledge was power and she made sure she was always in control. She told herself that the moment she stopped feeling in control, she’d walk away, keeping his gifts and money. She had told no one and made sure there were no traces between them. She had taken pains to avoid an ugly confrontation between her two lives. As for the Lesleys, they also held her at arm’s length. Frankie flirted with worst-case scenarios, but the style suited her personal agenda. Their liaison would eventually end and no one wanted repercussions.
It was beyond dangerous. Every cop instinct in her body told her so. And it was thrilling.
Frankie said to him, “Sir, I understand you’ve been robbed.”
At a stoplight, the smoked-glass partition rolled down and Pussycat grinned back at them, her teeth unnaturally white and her lips too full.
“I haven’t been robbed yet, Officer Lynde, but I’m ready.”
He pulled away his tuxedo jacket, exposing himself through his unzipped pants.
Pussycat let out a throaty laugh.
“I’ll take your report now, sir.”
Frankie lowered her head to his lap.
He stretched his arms across the seat back. “That’s right, baby. That’s it.”
She felt his excitement building.
Grabbing her tightly pinned hair, he followed her up-and-down motion. Suddenly, he forced her head down and held it there. She began to choke and struggled to push away. He let go. She didn’t like his smug expression.
She reached for the pepper spray on her equipment belt. “You prick. I warned you about that rough stuff.”
She could tell he relished her distress.
There was a flicker of that look in his eyes. The look that betrayed his soul. It quickly passed, making Frankie wonder if she’d misjudged. He smiled and caressed her face between his hands. The smile of a charming man. She was still a sucker for it. She couldn’t get past it. It had to do with not receiving enough attention from her father growing up and blah, blah, blah. She slid the pepper spray back into its sleeve.
“Aw, Officer Lynde, I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“Could have fooled me.”
“I have something for you.”
“You already gave me something I didn’t like.” Lately she’d wondered if the party was coming to an end.
He took a small box from his inside jacket pocket and ceremoniously opened the hinged lid.
She drew in a sharp breath as he slipped the watch around her wrist. She caught the look in Pussycat’s eyes in the rearview mirror and took pleasure in the hint of shock and hurt there. Maybe the wife was the one who was on the way out.
“Patek Philippe,” he said. “Twenty-five grand.”
“It’s beautiful.” The watch was gold and paper thin, lying nearly flush against her wrist. A line of diamonds around the face sparkled.
Pussycat kept driving, her shoulders stiff.
“I have something for you, too, my love,” he told his wife.
“Really?”
“Yes, really. Something you want. It’s at home.” He rolled his eyes. “Women.”
They had left the freeway and were heading up Mulholland Drive. Pussycat pulled off onto a lookout point. Twinkling lights blanketed the landscape to land’s end. A classic L.A. postcard. No other cars were parked there. Pussycat got out and climbed into the back with them.
Frankie gulped the flute of Cristal that John Lesley gave her and closed her eyes as Pussycat massaged her shoulders, the watch issue forgotten.
“Poor Frankie. She works so hard.” She began unbuttoning Frankie’s shirt.
He refilled Frankie’s glass, stuck his finger in the champagne, and painted her lips. She sucked his finger. She threw the brimming glass to the floor and began kissing him and madly ripping at his clothes as Pussycat did the same to her. She felt her equipment belt fall away and raised her hips to allow Pussycat to pull off her slacks.
He gently guided her head to where he wanted her. Relaxed now and aroused, she started again. She couldn’t wait.
This was her addiction, this feeling of wild abandon, of doing and having, wasting money and indulging every fantasy. They sometimes drove past MacArthur Park near downtown L.A. and let fistfuls of twenty-dollar bills flutter from the limo’s moon roof just to laugh as the drug addicts and dealers chased and fought over the money. They rolled in sex for days on end. Later, at work or at home, the guilt would come and Frankie would ask herself why. But not now. The moment had taken hold. Why had no meaning here. Why was the lament of the weak and sleeping.
He was close. He was there.
He slid his hands around Frankie’s throat and squeezed.
Frankie tried to pull away, but he wouldn’t let her. This was too soon for the rough stuff. She flailed her arms and reached for her gun. This was over right now. Where was her gun?
She heard Pussycat jabbering incoherently and felt her trying to pry off his fingers.
Frankie reached up and jabbed her thumbs into his eyes. She bit down on him as hard as she could. He cried out, but it wasn’t a cry of true, sustained pain and it sounded far away. Her thumbs and jaw had no force. There were spots in front of her eyes and a metallic taste in her mouth.
The last thing she saw before going out was his face. It was pure evil.
T W O
I T WAS NEARLY A YEAR SINCE OFFICER NAN VINING HAD LAST WALKED UP the six low steps that lead to the Pasadena Police Department on her way to work. She wanted to avoid returning so close to the one-year anniversary, but bureaucratic B.S. had interfered, postponing the end of her leave until then. She refused to see it as anything more than coincidence.
Officers generally came in by the back entrance through the garage, but that route would take her through the thick of the graveyard shift, officially called Morning Watch, waiting to go home and the Day Watch preparing to roll out. She needed to make this transition slowly. Ease back in. It had been a long journey. No one except her daughter, Emily, knew how far she had traveled.
At the top of the steps, a supporting post of the arcade bore four plaques commemorating officers killed in the line of duty since the city’s incorporation in 1886. Sergeant Sebastian Crone, shot responding to a liquor store robbery in 1971, was the last. Vining reflected that she had nearly become the fifth name, beneath Crone’s.
“Okay, Em,” Vining whispered, imagining her fourteen-year-old standing beside her. “I’ll be honest.”
Em had insisted on Vining’s respect for the journey, an incident that Vining dismissed as the fickle finger of fate, the cards she’d been dealt, how her cookie had crumbled, combined with a medically explainable neuro
logical effect. For Em, it had been much more.
“I was the fifth. For two minutes and twelve seconds, I was the fifth.”
Vining stood erect and snapped her hand to her forehead in a salute. People who passed looked, but she didn’t care. Em was right about that. Vining had changed.
T. B. Mann had changed Emily, too. It was as if she and Em had been traveling down a road and someone had shoved them off. Now they were still traveling the same direction as the road, but walking in the brush and pebbles beside it. The road was right there, but damned if they knew how to get back on. But they were fine, her and Em. They were doing all right.
She entered the building into the records lobby.
The three-story Mission Revival structure was built in 1989. New, as police departments went. Nice, as police departments went. Virtually all the PPD’s operations, other than the gun range, heliport, and a couple of substations in minimalls, were based in this building.
Pasadena, California, has a resident population of 135,000 that swells to 500,000 during the workweek. With over 200 sworn officers, it has one of the largest police forces in the state but is dwarfed by that of Los Angeles, its neighbor to the west. LAPD has about 10,000 officers serving a population of 2.5 million.
The PPD is small enough to be family. The chief’s office is in the same building from which the patrol cars roll out. The jail is in the basement.
Vining had been on the force for twelve years. Five were spent in various detective desks, the past three in Homicide. She included the previous year in the total. She had bled for it. She had earned it.
A short line had already formed behind the bulletproof glass that protected the cadets who staffed the two reception windows. The department had installed the glass after 9/11. A female and three males were sitting on the two wood benches in the lobby. Vining suspected they were waiting to be escorted to the jail downstairs. The female had a brown paper shopping bag that probably held the change of underwear, book, and few toiletries prisoners were allowed.
Outside one of the windows, a woman was reporting a stolen car to a cadet whom Vining didn’t recognize. The stool next to him was empty.
Vining stood at the locked door that led to the main lobby and elevators and looked over at the cadet, waiting for him to unlock the door.
She was searching for her keys when he asked, “Ma’am, who are you here to see?”
The cadet was around nineteen years old. Vining guessed he was a student at Pasadena City College, nearly all the cadets were, but he already had acquired the unyielding, unhesitating demeanor of a cop. In a way Vining was glad he didn’t know who she was. Maybe her story wasn’t as notorious around the department as she thought.
She was about to pull her flat badge from her pocket when Rosalie, who had worked in the records department forever, spotted her from behind the windows, burst through the side door, and jogged across the fired tile floor. She enveloped Vining in a bear hug.
“Nan, you’re back! Oh my gosh. It’s so good to see you. They told me you were in last week; I was so sorry I missed you. How are you?” Rosalie held her at arm’s length, her eyes glittering with tears.
“I’m good.”
“You look terrific.”
“Thank you. I feel good.”
Vining had worked hard physically and mentally to prepare for this day. She wanted to obliterate the idea—the shadow of an idea—in anyone’s mind that she was not capable of returning to her job. She’d struggled to convince her superiors that she was up to working at her old desk in Homicide. She’d lost. They’d offered her Residential Burglary. She’d be dealing with crimes against property, not persons. Nothing that bled. Detective Sergeant Kendra Early would no longer be her boss. Vining was philosophical. Among other things, she’d learned patience in the year she’d been gone. She’d get her old job back in time. After having nearly lost her future, she was calm with the knowledge that time was on her side.
She loved being a cop. She’d fallen into the career, but now saw it as destiny rather than happenstance. It had taken her tragedy to reveal to her the reason for her fervor, as if it had always been there but obscured. A shape behind a screen. There were people out there who needed to be put in prison. There was one man in particular. The man who had killed her. She and Emily had named him. T. B. Mann. The Bad Man.
“Come in this way.” Rosalie pulled her inside through another door. “Say hi to Joanie and Ramon.”
Others came to greet her. She felt eyes on the long scar on her neck and the smaller one on the back of her right hand. The scars had faded to pink. After much deliberation, Vining decided she wasn’t going to cover them. They defined who she was now. But the attention made her uncomfortable in a way she hadn’t anticipated.
“It was so horrible. We prayed for you every day, Nan. Every day. All of us.”
“Thank you.” She didn’t believe in prayers, but neither did she feel they did any harm. It was nice that people had taken time out of their day to think of her. Many throughout Pasadena, across the country, and even around the world had done so. The department had received scads of cards and notes from well-wishers. Kind, heartfelt sentiments. One stood out. One was not nice. Camouflaged inside a cheery Hallmark card with a cartoon doctor and patient on the front, was this note: “You should have died, bitch.”
She dismissed it as probably sent by someone still ticked off about the man she had shot and killed five years ago. The shooting was determined to have been in policy. A good shooting. Still, she’d received lots of hate mail. It eventually tapered off. Vining figured her appearance in the news this past year had fanned the last sparks of resentment about that incident. It was disturbing to think T. B. Mann might have sent the nasty greeting card, knowing he had fully intended for her to die.
“Nan, I can’t believe he’s still out there. That he got away with it.”
“He hasn’t gotten away with it. Not for long. Not for long.” She repeated it, as if T. B. Mann could hear her.
“Look, thanks, everyone, for your kind calls and letters. They really cheered me up and kept me going, but I’ve got to get to work.” She couldn’t help but grin. Today was the day. She was back.
Vining took the elevator with two uniformed officers who were late for roll call. They nodded at her but didn’t speak. The elevator opened on the second floor and the uniforms got off to head for the briefing room. Nan stepped out and turned in the other direction. She walked down the hallway past a display case with a collection of antique police badges donated by a retired officer. Framed newspaper pages showing the World Trade Center towers just after the attacks and patriotic posters lined the walls.
At the end of the hall was the Detectives Section. She punched in the access code and entered a large, open room filled with cubicles upholstered in pearl gray fabric, looking like cubes in an office anywhere. Affixed to the outside of each were computer-made signs printed on white paper in bold type: Missing Persons, Assaults, Residential Burglary, Commercial Burglary, Auto Theft, Financial Crimes, Robbery, Sex Assaults/Runaways, Domestic Violence, Homicide.
“Poison Ivy!” A nickname she hated boomed from a man who was not her ally.
“Hey, Pickachu.” It was the first time she’d ever called Tony Ruiz by his moniker. It was apt as he resembled the squat, rotund cartoon character, but she had found it mean, even if the department nicknames were presumably uttered with familial affection. Today she was trying to be game. The style didn’t come naturally to her. Most things about cop work did, but not the jiving, joking, buddy-making part. Ruiz wouldn’t warm to her no matter what she did. His enmity wasn’t caused by anything she had actively done. She was a victim of association. There was no love lost between Ruiz and Lieutenant Bill Gavigan, who had taken Vining under his wing from the time she was a rookie and he was a patrol sergeant. Sometimes Vining thought Ruiz disliked her simply because she was taller. He was having the last laugh. After years of trying, he finally had her job.
R
uiz had made the obligatory visit to her hospital room but hadn’t contacted her after that. That was fine with her. She didn’t find his presence particularly healing.
Heads began popping up like prairie dogs over the tops of cubicles.
“Look who’s back.”
“Ivy’s here.”
“Hey, Quick Draw. Howyadoin’?”
Vining cringed at that nickname, too, but took it in stride, slapping palms and accepting hugs.
“Heard they transferred you to Community Services, Vining.”
“I couldn’t get the stench of the second floor off me. I’m ruined for any other job.”
“I hear that running the Citizen’s Police Academy is very rewarding.”
“So is teaching Sunday school. I haven’t heard about you doing that.”
Vining peeked into Jim Kissick’s cubicle. He wasn’t there.
“Kissick’s probably in the can,” Ruiz offered.
“Whoa. You’ve got a story to tell the grandkids, huh?” A young man who looked vaguely familiar to Vining was pointing at her scar. Everyone else had the good manners to look without really looking.
“I don’t believe we’ve met.” Vining extended her hand over the cubicle, her gaze cool. She guessed he was in his twenties. She detected a callow cockiness that sometimes got young cops into trouble.
His eyes dropped from her scar to her bust.
Only the top button of her blouse was undone. The fabric was medium blue and not transparent. She was wearing a jacket and was lean anyway, so there was nothing to see. Vining pitied the women who stumbled across this scumbag.
He finished his once-over before grasping her palm. “Alex Caspers. Like the friendly ghost with an s.”
“You can ignore him,” one of the guys said. “He’s rotating out of Residential Burglary at the end of this week. He can’t wait. He doesn’t like it up here with us.”