Chasing the Dime

by Michael Connelly

  "First of all," she said, "with no body, it is very difficult to make a case against anybody.

  It is doable but very difficult —especially in this case, when you consider the victim's lifestyle and source of income. I mean, she could be anywhere. And if she is dead, then the suspect list is going to be very long.

  "Second, his tying your break-in at one scene to a possible homicide at another scene is not going to work. That's a stretch that I cannot see the DA's office being willing to make. Remember, I worked there and bringing cops down to reality was half the work. I think that unless things change in a big way, you'll be okay, Henry. On all of it."

  "What big way?"

  "Like they find the body. Like they find the body and somehow link it to you."

  Pierce shook his head.

  "Nothing will link it to me. I never met her."

  "Then good. Then you should be in the clear."

  "Should be?"

  "Nothing is ever a hundred percent. Especially in the law. We'll still have to wait and see."

  Langwiser reviewed her notes for a few more moments before speaking again.

  "Okay," she finally said. "Now, let's call Detective Renner."

  Pierce raised his eyebrows —what was left of them —and it hurt. He winced and said,

  "Call him? Why?"

  "To put him on notice that you have representation and to see what he has to say for himself."

  She took a cell phone out of her case and opened it.

  "I think I have his card in my wallet," Pierce said. "It should be in the table drawer."

  "It's all right, I remember the number."

  Her call to the Pacific Division was answered quickly and she asked for Renner. It took a few minutes but she finally got him on the line. While she waited she turned up the volume on the phone and angled it from her ear so Pierce could hear both ends of the conversation. She pointed at him and then put her fingers to her lips, telling him not to enter the conversation.

  "Hey, Bob, Janis Langwiser. Remember me?"

  After a pause Renner said, "Sure. I heard you went over to the dark side, though."

  "Very funny. Listen, I'm over here at St. John's. I was visiting with Henry Pierce."

  Another pause.

  "Henry Pierce, the Good Samaritan. Longtime rescuer of missing whores and lost pets."

  Pierce felt his face redden.

  "You are just full of good humor today, Bob," Langwiser said dryly. "That's a new wrinkle with you, isn't it?"

  "Henry Pierce is the joker, the stories he tells."

  "Well, that's why I'm calling. No more stories from Henry, Bob. I am representing him and he's no longer talking to you. You blew the chance you had."

  Pierce looked up at Langwiser and she winked at him.

  "I didn't blow anything," Renner protested. "Anytime he wants to start telling me the complete and true story, I'm here. Otherwise —"

  "Look, Detective, you're more interested in busting my guy's chops than figuring out what really happened. That's got to stop. Henry Pierce is now out of your loop. And another thing, you try to take this to court and I'm going to shove that two-tape-recorders trick up your ass."

  "I told him I was recording," Renner protested. "I read him his rights and he said he understood them. That is all I'm required to do. I did nothing illegal during his voluntary interview."

  "Maybe not per se, Bob. But judges and juries don't like the cops tricking people. They like a clean game."

  Now there was a long pause from Renner, and Pierce was beginning to think that Langwiser was going too far, that she might push the detective into seeking a charge against him out of pure anger or resentment.

  "You really did cross over, didn't you?" Renner finally said. "I hope you'll be happy over there."

  "Well, if I only get clients like Henry Pierce, people who were just trying to do a good thing, then I will be."

  "A good thing? I wonder if Lucy LaPorte thinks what he did was a good thing."

  "Did he find her?" Pierce blurted out.

  Langwiser immediately held her hand up to quiet him.

  "Is that Mr. Pierce there? I didn't know we had him listening in, Janis. Speaking of tricks, that was nice of you to tell me."

  "I didn't have to."

  "And I didn't have to tell him about the second recorder once I told him the conversation was being recorded. So shove that up your ass. I gotta go."

  "Wait. Did you find Lucy LaPorte?"

  "That's official police business, ma'am. You stay in your loop and I'll stay in mine.

  Good-bye now."

  Renner hung up and Langwiser closed her phone.

  "I told you not to say anything."

  "Sorry. It's just that I've been trying to reach her since Sunday. I wish I could just find out where she is and whether she's okay or needs help. If anything's happened, it's my fault."

  There I go again, he thought. Finding my own fault in things, offering public admissions of guilt.

  Langwiser didn't seem to notice. She was putting away her phone and notebook.

  "I'll make some calls on it. I know some people in Pacific that are a little bit more cooperative than Detective Renner. Like his boss, for example."

  "Will you call me as soon as you find out something?"

  "I have your numbers. Meantime, you stay away from all of this. With any luck, that call will scare Renner away for the time being, maybe make him second-guess his moves.

  You're not out of the woods on this yet, Henry. I think you're almost in the clear but other things could still happen. Keep your head down and stay away from it."

  "Okay, I will."

  "And next time the doctor comes in, get a list of the specific drugs that would have been in your system when Renner recorded you."

  "Okay."

  "Do you know when you are getting out of here yet?"

  "Supposed to be anytime now."

  Pierce looked at his watch. He'd been waiting almost two hours for Dr. Hansen to sign him out.

  He looked back at Langwiser. She looked ready to go. But she was looking at him like she wanted to ask something but wasn't sure how to ask it.

  "What?"

  "I don't know. I was just thinking that it was a long jump in your thinking. When you were just a boy, I mean, and you thought your stepfather was the reason your sister left."

  Pierce didn't say anything.

  "Anything else you want to tell me about that?"

  Pierce looked up at the blank television screen again and saw nothing there. He shook his head.

  "No, that's about it."

  He doubted he had gotten the line by her. He assumed that criminal defense lawyers dealt with liars as a matter of course and were as expert at picking up the subtleties of eye movement and body inflection as machines designed for it. But Langwiser simply nodded and let it slide.

  "Well, I need to go. I have an arraignment downtown."

  "Okay. Thanks for coming to see me here. That was nice."

  "Part of the service. I'll make some calls while I'm driving in and let you know what I hear about Lucy LaPorte or anything else. But meantime, you really need to stay away from this. Okay? Go back to work."

  Pierce held his hands up in surrender.

  "I'm done with it."

  She smiled professionally and left the room.

  Pierce detached the phone from the bed's side guard and was punching in Cody Zeller's number when Nicole James stepped into the room. He put the phone back in its place.

  Nicole had agreed to come by to drive Pierce home after he was checked out by Dr.

  Hansen and released. She silently registered pain as she studied Pierce's damaged face.

  She had visited him often during his hospital stay but it seemed as though she could not get used to seeing the stitch zippers.

  Pierce had actually taken her frowns and sympathetic murmurings as a good sign. He would consider it to have been worth all the trouble if it got them back together.r />
  "Poor baby," she said, lightly patting his cheek. "How do you feel?"

  "Pretty good," he told her. "But I'm still waiting on the doctor to sign me out. Almost two hours now."

  "I'll go out and check on things."

  She went back to the door but looked back at Pierce.

  "Who was that woman?"

  "What woman?"

  "Who just left your room."

  "Oh, she's my lawyer. Kaz got her for me."

  "Why do you need her if you have Kaz?"

  "She's a criminal defense lawyer."

  She stepped away from the door and went back closer to the bed.

  "Criminal defense lawyer? Henry, people who get wrong numbers usually don't need lawyers. What is going on?"

  Pierce shrugged his shoulders.

  "I don't really know anymore. I got into something and now I'm just trying to get out in one piece. Let me ask you something."

  He got off the bed and walked up to her. His balance was off at first but then he was okay. He lightly touched her forearms with his hands. A suspicious look came across her face.

  "What?"

  "When we leave here, where are you taking me?"

  "Henry, I told you, I'm taking you home. Your home."

  Even with the puffiness and the road map of stitches, his disappointment was visibly evident.

  "Henry, we agreed to at least try this. So let's try."

  "I just thought . . ."

  He didn't finish. He didn't know exactly what he thought or how to put it into words.

  "You seem to think that what happened with us all happened so quickly," she said. "And that it can be fixed quickly."

  She turned and headed back toward the door.

  "And I'm wrong."

  She looked back at him.

  "Months, Henry, and you know it. Maybe longer. We hadn't been good together in a long, long time."

  She went through the door to look for the doctor. Pierce sat on the bed and tried to remember the time they were on the Ferris wheel and everything seemed so perfect in the world.

  25

  Blood was everywhere. A trail of it across the beige rug, on the brand-new bed, on two of the walls and all over the telephone. Pierce stood in the doorway of his bedroom and looked at the mess. He could remember almost none of what had happened after Wentz and his sidekick monster had left.

  He stepped into the room and bent down next to the phone. He gingerly lifted the receiver with two fingers and held it a good three inches from his head, just enough to hear the tone and determine if he had any messages.

  There were none. He reached over and unplugged the phone and then carried it into the bathroom to attempt to clean it.

  Dried blood was splashed across the sink. There were bloody fingerprints on the medicine cabinet door. Pierce had no memory of going into the bathroom after the attack.

  But the place was a mess. The blood had dried hard and brown and it reminded him of the mattress he had seen the police remove from Lilly Quinlan's apartment.

  As he used wet tissues to wipe off the phone as best he could, he had a memory of going to a movie called Curdled a few years earlier with Cody Zeller. It was about a woman whose job was to clean up bloody crime scenes after the police were finished with the onsite investigation. He now wondered if there was really such a job and a service he could call. The prospect of cleaning up the bedroom was not attractive to him in the least.

  After the phone was reasonably clean he plugged it back into the wall in the bedroom and sat down with it on an unstained edge of the mattress. He checked for messages and again there were none. He thought it unusual. He had not been home for nearly seventy-two hours, yet there were no messages. He thought maybe Lilly Quinlan's page had finally been taken off the L.A. Darlings website. Then he remembered something else. He punched in his number at Amedeo Technologies and waited for the call to ring through to Monica Purl's desk.

  "Monica, it's me. Did you change my phone number?"

  "Henry? What are —"

  "Did you change the number at my apartment?"

  "Yes, you told me to. It was supposed to start yesterday."

  "I think it did."

  He knew that when he had been talking Monica into making the call to All American Mail on Saturday that he had told her to change the number on Monday. At the time he guessed he meant it. But now he felt strangely unsettled about losing the number. It was a connection to another world, to Lilly and Lucy.

  "Henry? Are you still there?"

  "Yes. What's my new number?"

  "I have to look it up. Are you out of the hospital?"

  "Yes, I'm out. Just look it up, please."

  "I am, I am. I was going to give it to you yesterday but when I went in your room you had that visitor."

  "I understand."

  "Okay, here it is."

  She gave him the number and he grabbed a pen off the bed table and wrote it on his wrist because he didn't have a notebook handy.

  "Is there a forwarding on the last number?"

  "No, because then I thought all of those guys would be still calling you."

  "Exactly. Good work."

  "Um, Henry, are you coming in today? Charlie was asking about your schedule."

  He thought about this before answering. The day was already half shot. Charlie probably wanted to talk and then overtalk about the Proteus demonstration still scheduled for the next day with Maurice Goddard despite Pierce's urging to delay it.

  "I don't know if I'm going to make it in," Pierce told Monica. "The doctor wants me to take it easy. If Charlie wants to talk, tell him I'm at home and give him the new number."

  "Okay, Henry."

  "Thank you, Monica. I'll see you later."

  He waited for her to say good-bye but she didn't. He was about to hang up when she spoke.

  "Henry, are you all right?"

  "I'm fine. I just don't want to come in and scare everybody with this face. Like I scared you yesterday."

  "I wasn't —"

  "Yes, you were but that's okay. And thanks for asking how I'm doing, Monica. That was nice. I've gotta go now. Oh, listen, the man who was in my room when you came by?"

  "Yes?"

  "He's a detective named Renner. From the LAPD. He will probably be calling you to ask about me."

  "About what?"

  "About what I had you do for me. You know, making that call as Lilly Quinlan. Things like that."

  There was a short silence and then Monica's voice sounded different, nervous.

  "Henry, am I in trouble?"

  "Not at all, Monica. He's investigating her disappearance. And he's investigating me. Not you. He's just backtracking on what I did. So if he calls you, just tell him the truth and everything will be fine."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Yes, I'm sure. Don't worry about it. I should go now."

  They hung up. Pierce got a fresh dial tone and called Lucy LaPorte's number, knowing it now by heart. Once again he got her voice mail but the greeting was now different. It was her voice but the message was that she was taking a vacation and would not be accepting clients until mid-November.

  More than a month, Pierce thought. He felt his insides constrict as he thought about what Renner had intimated and about Wentz and his goon and what they could've done to her.

  He left a message regardless of what she had said in her greeting.

  "Lucy, it's Henry Pierce. It's important. Call me back. I don't care what happened or what they did to you, call me. I can help you. I've got a new number now, so write it down."

  He read the number off his wrist and then hung up. He held the phone on his lap for a few moments, half expecting, half hoping she would immediately call back. She didn't. After a while he got up and left the bedroom.

  In the kitchen Pierce found the empty laundry basket on the counter. He remembered he had been using it to carry grocery bags up from the car when he first encountered Wentz and Six-Eight by the elevator. He remembered dr
opping the laundry basket when he was pushed out of the elevator. Now the basket was here. He opened the refrigerator and looked inside. Everything he had been carrying up —except the eggs, which had probably broken —had been placed inside. He wondered who had done this. Nicole? The police? A neighbor he did not even know?