Run the Risk

by Scott Frost

  “There’s no sign in the car or the pavement that she was injured,” he said.

  I swallowed heavily, still fighting for air. “You’re saying there’s no blood?”

  “Yes.”

  “Am I supposed to feel better for that?”

  He shook his head. “I’m saying this may not be connected to Finley.”

  He was pointing to something that I couldn’t see, and it made me angry. I didn’t need more unanswered questions. I wanted my daughter back.

  “What the hell are you saying?”

  “I’m saying everyone else this guy has come in contact with is dead. If this was him, I think Lacy would still be in the car.”

  This was moving too fast. I wasn’t ready to work a scene, not yet. I couldn’t get past the fact that my daughter was gone. Someone had yanked her out the window of her car. I felt helpless. The gun and the badge felt like props, ornaments we hang on ourselves to reassure a frightened public that we know what we’re doing. Tears filled my eyes and I turned away.

  The street was quickly filling with other black-and-whites. Uniformed cops moved about like a useless, occupying army. I reached up to wipe away a tear and noticed my hand was trembling. I tucked it under my other arm and squeezed my fist trying to wring the fear out of it.

  “The phone threats?” I said, looking back at Harrison. “The middle-aged male Caucasian?”

  “It’s a possibility.”

  “If that’s true, then we’ve just gone from multiple leads to none, a voice on a phone machine . . . nothing,” I said.

  “We’ll know where he made that call.”

  “And that will be a pay phone, if we’re lucky, and the one print that will matter won’t be on it.”

  “The only thing that’s certain is that we don’t know anything yet, so there’s no reason to think the worst.”

  “The worst has already happened.”

  He shook his head. His eyes drifted into memory for just an instant, then he looked back at me. “No it hasn’t.”

  No, the worst hadn’t happened. He knew about the worst.

  The side of my face began to throb as if current were flowing through it. I walked over to my car, slipped inside, and closed the door and the windows.

  “Think,” I whispered. “Do your job.”

  I was pleading with myself, trying to pull myself out of helplessness. There had to be an answer right there in front of me, I just had to see it. It had to be that simple. Every crime always was, it never failed. I tried to take some slow, deep breaths. I closed my eyes, but my mind still raced out of control. It was all tumbling down on top of me, every piece of information from the moment Lacy had screamed “You’re all killers” at an audience who had come to see beauty on parade. There were Breem’s phone calls. Finley’s orange socks, and a stream of blood. The door swinging toward me. The uncut grass of Finley’s yard. The red sweater in the dark water of the pool. Sweeny saying, “I’m sorry.” The white flash of the explosion. Dave disappearing in the cloud of dust. A car named sunflower. A young bird learning the joy of flight.

  A tapping on the window pulled me back. Harrison and James were standing there. I opened the door.

  “A woman saw a car driving away shortly after hearing some breaking glass.”

  He motioned across the street. “She’s over there.”

  I quickly stepped out and started across the street. She was standing on the other side of the yellow tape. She looked sixty, white hair, slacks and a blue sweater with puffy white clouds on it. I wished it had been a man. Men were useful for identifying makes and models of cars, like it’s part of their genetic code. Unless it was a kind of car they have driven, women usually give you the color.

  She had been watching Oprah. She smiled nervously, the way citizens do in the face of this many police.

  “Oprah had on a woman who had starved herself nearly to death until she found strength in . . . I just love Oprah.”

  “What did you see outside?”

  It surprised her that a discussion of anorexia wasn’t germane to the investigation.

  “Oh, I see, I’m sorry.”

  “That’s fine. What did you see?”

  “I thought maybe a radio had been stolen when I walked out and saw the broken glass. Then I thought maybe it was just a broken bottle so I didn’t call the police. I guess I should have. Is all this about a radio?”

  “What did the car look like?” I asked.

  She glanced at all the cops on the street. “Am I in some sort of danger staying here?”

  “There’s no danger,” James said.

  “Tell me about the car,” I said. “What did you see?”

  She took a breath and put her hand over her heart like she was swearing to the truth. “It was going that way,” she said, pointing north. “It was white.”

  I waited for more, but nothing came.

  “Is that all?”

  She didn’t get it.

  “How big was it?”

  “Oh . . . small, probably, yes, it was small.”

  “Two doors or four?”

  “I . . . don’t . . . two.”

  “Did it have a trunk or hatchback?”

  She thought for a moment. “It was square, hatchback.”

  “Make?”

  She looked at me puzzled, then understood. “Foreign, I think. Most are, aren’t they? I wouldn’t know what kind. It looked cheap.”

  “New or old?”

  “Not new. It wasn’t shiny. Could have just been dirty, I guess.”

  “How many people inside?”

  “I only saw a driver. He had dark hair.”

  “Skin color?”

  “Couldn’t tell.”

  “Male or female?”

  “Male, I think.”

  “You’re sure about the dark hair?”

  “I think so.”

  That was it. The only witness to the kidnapping of my daughter saw a small, white hatchback that was maybe not new, maybe foreign, maybe driven by a man, who might have dark hair.

  I walked back to Lacy’s car and forced myself to look it over. Maybe I would see something that only I would understand because I’m her mother. Maybe an answer would jump out at me by the sheer force of love. I knew it wouldn’t, but I tried anyway.

  I knelt next to the open door and looked over every inch of the inside. I could still smell her presence inside, the same as when I had lain down on her bed and she was still there in the fabric of the pillow. She was so close. A plastic sunflower hung from the mirror on a braided yellow and orange cord. An empty Starbucks cup lay on the floor on the passenger side: double mocha latte. The cup was crumpled, the mat was damp with spilled coffee. She had still been it drinking when she was . . . I didn’t finish the thought.

  Her backpack from school was on the backseat. I opened the glove compartment; taped inside was a photograph of her standing next to her father. She had her arm around him, they both were smiling. He still had his wedding ring on. But I hadn’t taken the photograph. I imagined the woman he was having the affair with had been holding the camera, which meant Lacy knew about the affair before I did and she hadn’t said anything, not a word to me. It was their secret.

  “Anything?” Harrison asked. He was standing over my shoulder.

  I closed the glove compartment.

  “No,” I said.

  I reached into the backseat and pulled out her backpack.

  “I want to go over this, go through her phone numbers.”

  “If it was the caller who made the threats, then there won’t be anything in her book—”

  I shot a look at him. “I need to think that I can do something to bring my daughter back.”

  I wanted to be a mother grizzly at that moment, to eliminate doubt.

  He nodded. “We’ll bring her back.”

  It was the sort of thing my injured partner Traver would have said, except Traver would have believed the words with every cell in his body. Harrison knew better, though h
e did his best to sell it.

  “The description of the car went out; every department has it.”

  “If it was the caller who took her, then he’ll make contact. He’ll make demands, or he’ll just boast about it. If it’s connected to Finley, we won’t hear anything.”

  Harrison nodded agreement.

  “Then we pray it’s not.”

  I stepped under the perimeter tape and stopped next to the hood of my car. I had to begin to think like a cop. I couldn’t help her if I was thinking like her mother. But it meant I had to let go, if just a little—let her slip through my hands to the column on the report under “victim.” I clutched her pack in my hands and looked back down the street at her car.

  “I’m missing something,” I said.

  “You want to go back over it?”

  I shook my head. “What I’m missing isn’t here.”

  “You lost me,” Harrison said.

  I thought for a moment. It was like trying to find my way through a dark room. I began to work backward. There was something I hadn’t connected to, hiding in plain sight.

  “The car,” I said to myself almost involuntarily.

  “What about it?” Harrison asked.

  “The white car was a hatchback.”

  “Yeah.”

  “A Hyundai.”

  “She didn’t ID a make.”

  “I am.”

  “I’m not following.”

  “The morning after Finley’s killing at the flower shop, I was driving home just before dawn. A white Hyundai pulled out and nearly hit me before the driver started delivering The Star News. When I opened the garage door and stepped out of the car, the Hyundai was stopped at the bottom of my driveway. When he saw I was looking at him he squealed his tires and raced away.”

  “Maybe he saw the photograph of Lacy in the paper?”

  “He didn’t throw another paper the rest of the street. Why didn’t he finish delivering his papers?”

  “You think he might have been involved in taking her?”

  “We’re going to find out.”

  “You see him?”

  I looked one more time at Lacy’s car and tried not to imagine what horror she was going through. It was impossible.

  “Yeah, I saw him.”

  Officer James walked up with a cell phone in her hand. She hesitated a moment, not wanting to interrupt.

  “Dispatch got a call for you from someone who identified themselves as a newspaper deliveryman. Said you would know him, and that he wanted to talk to you about the end of the world. They assumed it was a crank until your daughter was taken.”

  “Did he say which newspaper?”

  “The Star News.”

  9

  ACCORDING TO THE CIRCULATION manager at The Star News, the delivery driver who had stopped outside my house and who had apparently just made the call to me was named Philippe Genet. French, he thought, though he wasn’t certain. Not many questions are asked in the off-the-books economy. He had worked for them for less than two months. He hadn’t talked much. Hadn’t made friends. All they really knew about him was that he would work for six dollars an hour.

  He had picked up his papers as usual the morning I encountered him, then delivered only eight papers on his route, all on my block, my own being the last one he threw. Eight papers out of nearly four hundred. They hadn’t heard from or seen him since. They had no phone number for him, just an address in Hollywood.

  The sun was starting to set as Harrison and I drove toward Hollywood on the 134 freeway. Behind us the San Gabriels were aglow in shades of orange and pink. In front of us, the gray line of the ocean stretched across the distant horizon, the buildings of Century City rose, and the vast expanse of greater L.A. spread out as far as the eye could see to the south past the towers of downtown. Directly in our path Hollywood descended into shadow below the Griffith Observatory and the Hollywood Hills.

  I tried to focus on facts, on the pieces of the puzzle that would bring Lacy back, but nothing was falling into place. The florist Breem was still missing. The trace on the ballistics from the gun that killed Daniel Finley had turned up nothing. The missing employee Sweeny was out there. And the Mexican army was a hopeless maze of phone calls and bureaucracy.

  I called home on the slim chance and prayer that it had all been a mistake and Lacy was sitting in front of the TV. Even though I knew better, my heart still sank when the machine picked up.

  There was a call from a friend of hers about what an asshole Principal Parks was. Another reporter wanted a quote from the “Green Beauty Queen,” as he called her. And then, short of the voice of the person who had pulled Lacy out through the window of her car, I heard the last voice I wanted to hear.

  “Alex, it’s your mother. I just saw my granddaughter on the news. . . .”

  There was a pause. I could hear measured breathing as she found just the right words.

  “It would have been nice to have learned about this from someone other than Tom Brokaw, but I suppose you have your reasons. . . . Call me, if you have time.”

  I hung up. Great. I looked at the phone, trying to figure out how to tell her that her only grandchild had been kidnapped. I punched her number out on the touch pad of the phone but didn’t call. Listening to her break into tears wasn’t going to help Lacy. And hearing that it was all my fault wasn’t going to help me.

  “Something?” Harrison asked.

  “My . . . It’s nothing.”

  I took a breath. “My mother.”

  “Forget I asked.”

  I slipped the phone back in my pocket and opened Lacy’s pack. Her phone book had a black leather cover that had “Numbers” carved into it. I began looking for the number that didn’t fit, or a name that rang an alarm bell. A few names I recognized, but most meant nothing to me. The more I tried to work it, the less I was able to focus. I wanted to hold my daughter. I wanted to be a dysfunctional mother again. I wanted to say the wrong thing just one more time and spend the rest of my life repairing whatever damage I had done to her.

  I rolled the window down and closed my eyes, letting the breeze wash over my face. Instead of a moment of peace, my mother’s words rushed out of the past on a gust of wind.

  “If you become a policeman, you’ll ruin your life. I expect something more of you.”

  Harrison turned onto Sunset and headed west through the east side of Hollywood. The Walk of Fame was only a couple of miles away, but no stars were remembered here, no tourists snapped pictures. Here there were storefront chapels and transient hotels. The sidewalks were littered with the broken dreams of immigrants who spent their days dodging INS agents and random street crime.

  Philippe, the Star News delivery driver, lived in a run-down section just a few blocks south of Sunset Boulevard. We found the address and circled the block looking for the Hyundai, but there was no sign of it.

  “If Philippe is in his apartment, he didn’t drive here,” I said.

  Harrison stopped outside the address on Wilcox. It was a three-story, mustard-yellow building with louvered windows. Overflowing garbage cans lined the sidewalk. The charred remains of a Christmas tree lay on the ground next to a dying palm tree that had been spray-painted with gang tags.

  I sat there for a moment without making any move to get out of the car. A young Mexican woman was carrying a child across the street. I stared at her for a second, closed my eyes, and imagined my infant in my arms as we went home from the hospital.

  “You okay?” Harrison asked.

  I slipped back into the present. “Yeah.”

  I don’t think I fooled him. His eyes carried the look of a fellow traveler to the “addiction of memory.” I had known a few men who suffered from it, but not many. Women were better suited to it, I thought. The residue of nurturing.

  “I’m okay,” I said.

  I looked around to ground myself in the details of my surroundings. Up on the corner of the block, a hooker with a vaguely familiar look eyed our car suspiciou
sly. God, I was sick of people willingly destroying their lives. It was all too short. Don’t we know that, or can we just not stop ourselves?

  “She looks like somebody,” Harrison said.

  I eyed her for a moment, then nodded. “Jamie Lee Curtis.”

  “Theme hookers?” Harrison said in amazement.

  “And she’s a guy,” I added.

  Harrison looked at me to read whether I was joking. Not that it was a guy, just that it was Jamie Lee.

  “A Fish Called Wanda?”

  I nodded. “I was in Vice for a month; three of those weeks I spent dressed as Jamie Lee. She has a solid fan base.”

  We stepped out of the car and stared at the building.

  “Does this strike you as a little serendipitous?” Harrison said.

  “No, it strikes me as a setup.”

  I don’t think my answer was exactly what he wanted to hear since the last two times I had entered a building, one blew up, and in the other a door was slammed into my head.

  “What do you want to do?”

  I started walking across the street. “Let’s go in.”

  Stepping into the apartment building was like walking into the Third World plunked down only two blocks from Ronald Reagan’s star on the Walk of Fame.

  There were no lights in the hallway. The walls were streaked with stains of God knows what. From an apartment on one side came the wailing of Middle Eastern music. From another, the crying of a baby and salsa music. The place smelled of turmeric and lard and urine. I tried not to imagine Lacy’s presence in a place like this. I tried desperately to cling to the image of her lying on her bed, listening to her Walkman, and ignoring my attempts to talk to her.

  “Third floor in the back,” Harrison said uneasily. This wasn’t territory that the bomb squad visited frequently. Bombs were a high-end crime, the product of education. Why go through the bother of blowing up a place like this when a single match would do just as well?

  The second-floor landing was littered with fast-food bags and rat droppings. We moved up to the third floor. There were six apartments, three on each side.

  “He’s the last one on the right,” Harrison said.

  We walked slowly down the hallway, the sound of Iranian and Spanish language television coming from several of the apartments. One of the doors cracked open then just as quickly closed when the occupant recognized us as cops. As we reached the last apartment on the right, I removed my Glock and held it at my side. Harrison glanced at it with a mixture of surprise and apprehension.