Turning on the Tide

by Jenna Rae

  Del sat for a while longer, then heaved herself up and started unloading the dishwasher. Her phone vibrated across the table, and she held it still for a moment before looking. Janet again, expressing her love and concern. Was Del okay? Why wasn’t she answering?

  Del typed in her response: I love LOLA. Shouldn’t have texted you.

  After the dishwasher, she started cleaning out the junk drawer, and when the phone started dancing again she wrapped it in a towel and put it on top of the fridge.

  “Out of sight, out of mind, right?”

  Del tried several more times to talk to Lola, but it was impossible. Finally she decided to just give it time. She didn’t try to kiss or hug Lola and she certainly didn’t approach her for more than that. Nor did Lola approach her.

  Making it all the way to Tuesday morning without exchanging anything but pleasantries with Lola was like crab-walking a marathon, and Del entered the station with a relieved sigh. She was going to have to resolve things before Lola died from sleep deprivation. Her side of the bed practically had cobwebs on it.

  Phan plunked a cup of coffee on her desk a few minutes later and Del hid a smile.

  “Thanks, sugar. What’s the pie today?”

  Phan rolled his eyes. “How come you never get me coffee?”

  “You take too long to drink it.”

  They scowled at each other for a minute.

  “Anything moving?”

  Phan tilted his head. “I can’t read Hahn for shit. She’s slippery. We dumped her phone.”

  It was part accusation, part face-saving opportunity. If she told him, it was better for both of them.

  “Yeah. She’s been texting me.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But I haven’t been able to get anything useful out of her.”

  “Ah.”

  Del examined Phan’s posture, his expression. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  “Hahn’s place burned down. The whole building has been condemned.”

  Del gaped. “When? Was anyone hurt?”

  “Couple nights back. Arson investigator is saying it was accidental, just some random thing. You know, ’cause there’s no way it could be connected to the fact that you got shot in there right before the fire. I don’t know who you pissed off, partner.”

  Del shook her head. “Who didn’t I piss off? Hahn and me together, that’s a sore subject after her muckraking article came out. They’d rather pretend it’s some weird lesbian shit. Not that they’ll come right out and say so.”

  “Hmm. Anyway, no one was hurt, because no one but Hahn lived in the building and she was gone. She owned it. She—I don’t get her game. She never told you about the fire?”

  “No. She didn’t tell me, and you didn’t.”

  “I wanted to know if she would tell you.”

  “And if I would tell you.” Del sat back. “Yeah. Okay.”

  “It’s just—”

  Del waved Phan’s words away. “No, I get it. I didn’t know. She didn’t tell me. Obviously, the apartment was staged. Right? I mean, why else keep the building empty?”

  “I agree it’s a possibility. But she could have just bought the place and not hired a property manager. She could just like her space. Who knows? She’s unpredictable at best. The real question is whether the shooting was staged.”

  Del nodded. “Yeah. I want to say no, but it’s hard to dismiss the possibility. I keep going back and forth about how much I trust her and how dangerous I think she could be. How can I possibly be objective about her?”

  “Think about it. We’ll see where your head is after a day or two. If she did stage the shooting, we have to consider the possibility that she’s dangerous to you, to Lola.”

  “Yeah, I know. Where is she?”

  “Don’t know. She’s not taking my calls.”

  “I don’t know if it’s a good idea for me to keep trying to reach out to her.”

  “Oh.” Phan’s eyes searched Del’s downcast face. “Got it. You better get to it, time for the third degree.”

  Before she could return to active duty, Del had to undergo an evaluation, face two rounds of videotaped questioning and dance around the question of whether she was the officer who’d been tapped for Janet’s exposé the previous year. No one asked that directly, but it colored every question, every follow-up and the attitudes of the investigators. Del felt more like a suspect than a victim and wondered if all victims felt this way.

  “You’re probably back on,” the head of the committee finally grudged. “Provisionally. We may have more questions.”

  She was on the outside again and worried it would taint Phan. She tried to talk to him about it but he waved away her concerns.

  “You know, this game is getting old.”

  She turned, startled. “What?”

  “You’re the best partner I’ve ever had, darling, now go away.”

  “Right. Yeah.” She shrugged. “I just don’t want you to get painted with the shithead brush along with me.”

  “Too late. I had my own mess, remember?”

  “How could I forget?” Phan’s old partner had been a corrupt jackass, and he’d tried very hard to ruin Phan’s reputation in order to save his own. Del remembered Phan being ostracized by most of the department nearly as clearly as she remembered when she was the scapegoat.

  “Why do you think we got paired up? We’re the two losers nobody wants to work with.”

  “Stop with the flattery already.”

  They spent a few hours catching up on the seemingly endless follow-up and research of tracking the missing women. There were dozens, and each had to be painstakingly run down so they could look for patterns.

  “Are we just chasing our tails? I mean, there’s gotta be somebody who does this for a living, right? Some profiler or whatever? We don’t have the manpower or the expertise to handle such a huge thing.”

  Phan waggled his head. “If there was budget for it, if the missing women were rich or famous or whatever, blah, blah, blah. Why agonize over it? It is what it is. We’re duplicating the same work a dozen other folks are doing, but it has to be done. Maybe we’ll hit something.”

  “Maybe.” Del rolled her head on her neck, forgetting to be careful, and heard a series of pops. Something in her upper arm made a hot, searing jab and she stilled. Whatever that was, she didn’t want to do it again.

  It was mostly quiet in the station, and Del was glad of the chance to focus on something other than Janet and Lola and all the ways she’d fucked up things with both of them. It’s pretty bad, she thought, when running in circles on missing women is the highlight of your day. She started getting hungry at some point but didn’t want to stop working. She heard Phan’s stomach growl then her own as if in response. She looked up and saw Phan grinning at her. He dropped his pen.

  “Let’s go out to lunch.”

  “What, out, out? Like to the taqueria?”

  “How about I surprise you?”

  She frowned at him. His face was wide open, cartoonish in its portrayal of innocence.

  “Okay.”

  It wasn’t until Phan’s wheezing truck was hugging the coast on Highway 1 that Del shook her head and laughed.

  “I give. Where the hell are we going?”

  “What’s down here, Mason? You’ve lived in the city for how many years?”

  “A lot. Daly City? No, Pacifica.”

  “There you go.”

  “Why do you want to talk to me in private?”

  He smiled. “Gold star for my partner. After we eat.”

  He handed her his phone. “Ready to go. Hit it and order two Godfathers.”

  Del scowled but did as he asked. As they wound down into the valley that hid the small burg of Pacifica in a nearly permanent bank of fog, she started to get edgy.

  “Any hints?”

  “Use two napkins.”

  “Phan—”

  He smirked. “We’ll get our food and park at the beach.”

  Del
looked around, seeing only a shroud of fog. “What beach? I don’t want to get frostbite.”

  “Haven’t you ever been here?” He laughed. “Just wait.”

  Godfathers turned out to be giant, fragrant sandwiches from an Italian deli, and Del gave Phan a look as they carried their booty to the truck.

  “Not exactly health food.”

  “Yeah, well, you look like you’re down around twenty pounds, so it’s okay.”

  Del considered as he got back on the highway and headed south. It was true. She’d had to use a screwdriver to make an extra hole in her belt.

  “What about you, fatty?”

  He laughed. “Alana likes big boys.” His girlfriend was a tiny thing, small and thin enough to make a skeleton look puffy.

  “Not too big, I’m guessing.”

  He laughed again. “She’s making dinner tonight. All vegetarian all the time with her. I need some meat for lunch or I’m gonna die.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Phan cleared his throat. “Wilson.”

  Del eyed her partner. “Penn. Dunlop. Gamma. Prince.”

  He made a face. “No, tinfoil hat from the SRO. Remember her? Her missing daughter is still on my desk. Can you take it over?”

  “Thought you were doing it.”

  “I was, until she turned out not to be Mrs. Mary Wilson, but an alias.”

  “How does that change anything?”

  Phan batted his scrawny eyelashes at Del. “Y’all are ever so brilliant at tracking down those mystery characters, dahlin’.”

  “In other words, you’re senior partner, so I get stuck with the shit.”

  “She liked you. She trusted you. And it may be nothing, but it’s the weirdest note in the stack of files we’ve got.”

  Del considered this. Whether that was Phan’s motivation or not, it was true. “She made it sound like a doctor raped her. Don’t know if it’s true or not. I could look into allegations of rape by psych patients around here. Tinfoil got knocked up in eighty-five, so that’s a place to start.”

  “If they did the paperwork. If she reported it. If she’s telling the truth.”

  “That’s a lot of unknowns.”

  “Aren’t there always? We have all these missing women and no thread to pull.”

  “Theories?”

  “God, you know it could be anything. Trafficking, drug mules. They’re all over the map, profile-wise. Hookers, homeless and housewives, you know? I don’t have time to track it all down, find a pattern, pull it apart and chase Tinfoil.”

  “Ah, shit. I’ll take it.”

  “Come on,” Phan teased. “Lucy in Records has the hots for you. She’ll track down Tinfoil Wilson for you. And she’ll probably help you find a pattern if you’re sweet.”

  “Yeah,” Del responded. “And all I have to do is lead on the poor girl. Unspoken promises of sexual rewards and whatnot.”

  “She’ll survive, Mason. Word is, she’s currently screwing every woman and half the men in the department.”

  “Ah, don’t tell me you fall for that shit. She got promoted to sergeant. That’s all she had to do to get labeled a slut who’s sleeping her way to the middle.”

  Phan held up eyebrows as if in surrender. “I know, I know. But she does like you and she will help if you ask.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  It wasn’t until they were parked yards from a public beach in a small, sunny bay a few miles south that Del spoke again. “Same town? It’s like a whole different place.”

  Phan nodded sagely and took a huge bite of his overloaded sandwich, muscling it down before answering.

  “Right?”

  It wasn’t hot, but the sun was bright, the sky was clear, and the ocean tumbled over the sand like in a movie about a tropical paradise. The beach was mostly deserted, except for a group of women trudging up and down the beach in matching fuchsia shirts that proclaimed their intention to “Live life to the fullest” in glittery gold script. Just beyond them, a young couple walked three golden retrievers. It felt like a different planet from the station and Del was touched. This was a gift.

  “Not bad, I guess.”

  They ate in silence for a while, then Phan belched loudly.

  “Ah,” he moaned, holding his stomach. “Tell me that’s not the best sandwich you ever ate.”

  “It’s actually pretty good.”

  Phan clutched his chest. “Is that a compliment?”

  Del rolled her eyes. Her partner was distracted now. Thinking over what he wanted to say, she guessed.

  “Spit it out.”

  “Okay.” He rubbed his chin for a few seconds. “I want to tell you what I’ve put together on Janet Hahn. But first I’m gonna tell you why and I need you to just listen.”

  She pretended to lock her mouth and throw away the key.

  “There’s no one in her life. No family, no one who’s been around for any length of time. There’s a pattern. She gets intensely interactive with a crowd of people for a while and then drops them. No one’s reported her missing, but I’m not sure there’s anyone who would. She didn’t die in the fire, so she’s out there somewhere in the wind and no one’s missing her.”

  Del nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

  “I went back a couple years. Checked her phone, her financials, all that. She’s crazy rich, inherited millions from her tech-rich computer whiz daddy and pretty little trophy-wife mommy, did you know?” Phan didn’t wait for her nod, didn’t look at her. “Talked to her agent. She’s a freelancer. You know that, I guess. About a year ago, the agent, a Robby Shaw, talked to Janet about a story on photography and filming as sex crimes. Janet put together a whole thing. Brilliant, according to the agent. The lens as phallus.”

  “Guys filming the ladies’ room toilet, landlords filming their tenants, upskirting, all that?”

  “Right.”

  “She focuses on the effects. Interviews psychologists, victims, the people in their lives, the family and friends of the voyeurs and the vics. Not a quickie. Not a fluff piece.”

  Del nodded, filing away Phan’s insistence on this.

  “So Shaw gets the first few weekly updates, and it seems like she might be just starting to get somewhere. Then radio silence. He calls, texts, emails—nothing. She’s off planet for a few days, then he gets a text saying she’s fine, had the flu, sorry.”

  “But—”

  “Another few days and she sends an email. She tells him she’s taking a break, wants to write a book.”

  “Her computer?”

  “One of the few things we took before the fire. Wiped clean. Jones is on it.”

  “Good.”

  “Says somebody did a pretty thorough job of cleaning off the hard drive. It may take him a while to get data back.”

  “Okay.”

  “I think you should file a missing persons report, Mason. Give us the leash to work this. Maybe she’s off doing her thing, maybe she’s playing a game, okay, but maybe she’s in trouble. Maybe she’s part of the pattern of missing women and maybe not.”

  Del watched the couple with the retrievers throw tennis balls across the beach. Their dogs leapt joyfully and bounded across the sand to retrieve them. One of them wagged his tail so hard it nearly toppled him. Del smiled. She loved dogs. Why hadn’t she ever had one? As a kid, she’d probably spent more time with stray critters than people. As an adult, she’d been busy, going to college and the academy and working the lousy shifts of a rookie. But she had a house now. A dog could live there. It was one of the reasons she’d wanted a house so much. Maybe it was finally time to get that dog. Or two. Why not? Lola was a softie. She’d love a nice, playful pup or two. Del’s smile died. Janet wouldn’t like the shedding or the drooling or the attention a dog would pull from her.

  “I don’t really know much about Janet,” Del murmured, watching the game. “I wonder if she ever had a dog. I wonder where she went to college. I don’t know anything about her family. I don’t know her friends, her anyth
ing. How can you have a six-month relationship with a person and not know anything about her?”

  Phan glanced at Del. “I can fill in some details if you want.”

  Del considered this and couldn’t decide if it was sadder that her partner needed to fill in the blanks or that she desperately wanted him to do so. Finally she nodded.

  “Filthy rich, you know that. Parents and sister died a long time ago, accident. All the money went to our girl, who was away in her senior year at some exclusive rich, bright and badly behaved kid boarding school in Europe. For the last decade-and-a-half she’s been bouncing around the world, mostly Europe and the US. Some college, good schools, never quite finished any real degree. Donates to art and gay rights and women’s groups and whatnot. Doesn’t really fit in with the rich folks, doesn’t really work, doesn’t really live in one place. Boyfriends, girlfriends, some drugs, a couple of half-assed suicide attempts, a few short stints in expensive private mental hospitals and rehabs. Lots of shopping and moving and flipping real estate. She’d be in jail if she didn’t have truckloads of money. She’s fired several lawyers, doctors, financial managers, housekeepers. The only person she’s stayed in touch with longer than a few months is you. Nobody but you is likely to report her missing.”

  Del pressed her lips together, unsure whether or how she wanted to respond to all of that. Was she really the only person who might have noticed Janet was missing? “Okay.”

  They watched as the couple on the sand kept up the game for a while and gave the tennis balls a good workout. The wind took one of them and it soared toward the highway. All three dogs focused on that one and dashed toward the racing traffic, while the couple chased after them. Del hopped out of the truck and dashed across the parking lot, snagging the tennis ball and hurling it away from the freeway and toward the surf, glad she had one arm that worked.

  The couple waved their thanks, and Del stood for a moment before heading back to the truck. The air was cold and salty and clean. She could have stood there sucking up the freshness for an hour. She turned to look back. Phan was waiting for her in the real world, where Janet was missing and maybe in trouble and maybe a bad guy. Del gave the bounding sea a last long look and trudged back to the truck.