“He’s twenty-two years old, drives a chrome-plated Bentley, lives in a mansion in the Oaks, and probably makes $10 million a year,” Duncan said. “And yet he’s done stupid shit like shoplifting a six-pack of beer from Ralphs.”
Eve and Duncan got out of the Explorer as Coco Crispy fist-bumped Garvey, handed him an eight-by-ten photo, and then lay down in the back seat of the car. Garvey closed the car door, said a few words to the Hispanic woman in the driver’s seat, and watched the Sonata drive out the gate with Coco Crispy hidden from view.
Duncan joined Garvey and tapped the photo in his hand. “Are you gonna frame that?”
Garvey shook his head. “It’s the third one he’s given me.”
“So he’s been here a lot,” Eve said.
“Never for anything serious,” Garvey said. “He’s basically a good kid.”
She didn’t like Garvey much. Working out of Lost Hills, Garvey encountered lots of Hollywood power players and treated them all as if he were their personal law enforcement concierge.
“What did Coco Puffs do this time?” Duncan asked.
“Coco Crispy,” Garvey said. “He had a little too much to drink and took a shit in his neighbor’s Jacuzzi.”
Duncan nodded knowingly. “So that’s why he’s slipping out the back door and sneaking away on the floor of his maid’s car.”
Something didn’t smell right to Eve. “Why isn’t there a mob of paparazzi out there waiting for him?”
“Because nobody knows he’s here,” Garvey said. “I booked him under Rodney Turner, his real name.”
“That was thoughtful of you,” she said.
Garvey picked up on the snide tone in her voice and glared at her. “Our job is to protect and to serve. Sometimes we forget that last part. Other kids make the same kind of mistakes as Coco and nobody ever knows. But because he’s a celebrity, he—”
“—can’t take a shit in a neighbor’s pool without everybody knowing about it.” Duncan interrupted him and finished his thought. “And who among us hasn’t done that?”
“I’m just giving him the same privacy to mess up that anybody else would have,” Garvey said.
That’s a fair argument, Eve thought. Most people didn’t have to worry about the whole world knowing about every embarrassing mistake they ever made. It was different with celebrities.
“The neighbor could talk,” Eve said.
Garvey shook his head. “While Coco was sobering up in a cell, I brokered an understanding between the two parties. Coco agreed to pay her pool-cleaning bill for as long as she lives there and she dropped the charges. Everybody wins.”
“You should be an agent, Tubbs,” Duncan said.
“I’d rather be a producer,” Garvey said.
At least he’s honest about it, Eve thought, and went inside the station.
Eve and Duncan spent the next few hours in their squad room cubicles, doing the tedious but necessary paperwork to start the investigation on the remains found in Sherwood Mintner’s backyard. They assigned the case a file number, filled out a detailed report on all the facts they’d gathered so far, wrote up Mintner’s statement, and started a chronological record of every step they’d made.
Eve was nearly finished with her half of the work when she got a call from Kurt, the front desk duty officer, that there was someone in the lobby to see her.
“Who is it?” she asked. Eve wasn’t expecting any guests.
“Says he’s Linwood Taggert from Creative Artists Agency.”
Eve swore to herself. She’d been dodging the agent’s calls for weeks. She knew that he wanted to represent her and pitch her story to Hollywood. She wasn’t interested.
How did he know she was in the station? She glanced over at Garvey, who was in his cubicle, pretending to be busy. Eve told the duty officer she’d be right out, hung up the phone, got up, and walked over to Garvey’s cubicle.
The three partitions of his cubicle were adorned with autographed celebrity photos, like the ones on display in almost every dry cleaner, mechanic’s garage, restaurant, hair salon, and bar in Los Angeles. Garvey was in some of the pictures, too, with a chummy arm around the star’s shoulder.
Eve leaned against the cubicle and looked down at Garvey. “Linwood Taggert from CAA is out front. Did you tell him I was here?”
Garvey raised his eyebrows. “Linwood Taggert is here? Really? That’s huge. He’s a senior partner.”
“You didn’t answer my question. I’ve been avoiding his calls for a reason.”
“Think it through. Linwood lives in Hidden Hills and you’ve been ducking him. He was probably on his way home and figured he’d take a shot, stop by, and see if you were here. What’s it cost him? Five minutes?” he said. “Linwood is a giant in the industry. You should be honored that he came to you. He never does that.”
“I’ll be sure to bow when I see him.”
Duncan leaned out of his cubicle, his chair squeaking under his weight. “I think you mean curtsy.”
Eve ignored his comment, marched out of the squad room, down the hall, and through the door to the front lobby.
Linwood was the only person out there besides Kurt, the uniformed deputy behind the front counter. The agent was in his fifties and wore a perfectly tailored Italian suit and an outrageously thick, titanium Swiss watch that could probably be worn to measure ocean depth while diving the Mariana Trench or used as an altimeter while skydiving.
“Mr. Taggert,” she said. “I’m Eve Ronin.”
“It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, Detective. You’re a hard woman to reach,” he said. “Can we go somewhere to talk?”
She didn’t move. “I’m very busy and you’re wasting your time. I don’t need an agent.”
“Of course you do. Your story is out there. Someone is going to tell it and make a lot of money doing it,” Linwood said. “Shouldn’t that person be you?”
“The only thing I’m interested in is solving crimes.”
“Bullshit.” He said it with a smile but it didn’t make the response any less offensive to her.
“What did you say?”
“Bullshit. You got where you are by leveraging your media exposure from that YouTube video. Then you solved a triple murder and pulled off a daring rescue, adding a narrative spine to your story. It was a brilliant use of social media.”
Yes, she’d used the first YouTube video to her advantage. But he made it sound like she’d scripted and staged everything that had happened to her since. Eve had no idea how her first homicide investigation, a gruesome triple murder, would play out or that a firefighter would be there to film her escaping the wildfire with a child in her arms. It was all pure luck.
“I was just doing my job,” she said, rubbing her sore wrist.
“And if you have any aspirations to reach a higher level in the department, a TV series or movie about you will get you there.”
Eve didn’t know what her aspirations were but they certainly didn’t include anything to do with Hollywood. She despised the business after living through what it had done to her mother, Jen, who’d dreamed of making it as an actress, but for the last thirty years had mostly worked as a background extra, one of the anonymous people filling out a restaurant, office, or sidewalk behind the actors who were actually in front of the camera. Jen ended up as a single parent with three children fathered by three different men who were in the entertainment industry, too. Eve spent her teenage years trying to bring order to the chaos at home, raising her two younger siblings while her mom was off chasing roles and men. Eve resented her mother, her absentee father, and Hollywood for stealing her childhood.
“I’ll establish myself in the department by closing cases and putting criminals behind bars,” Eve said, rubbing her sore wrist.
“How was that working for you before you put Blake Largo on the ground?” Linwood asked.
The answer, she knew, was that she’d probably still be investigating residential burglaries and purse thefts in Lancaster ins
tead of working homicides in Calabasas. They both knew it. The run-in with Largo was a lucky break that she used to her advantage. But what Linwood Taggert was proposing was something else entirely.
“A movie or TV series about you is going to get made,” he said. “With or without your involvement or consent.”
“I don’t care.”
Linwood cocked his head, as if examining her from a new angle. “So you don’t mind if Eve Ronin is a big-boobed blonde in a low-cut blouse and stiletto heels who rides her Harley to work and caps every arrest with a wink and her catchphrase, ‘Kiss this, honey’?”
“That won’t happen.” At least she hoped it wouldn’t.
“It could if you let someone else tell your story. You need to control the message, and how you are portrayed, to get the most out of it, professionally and financially. I can do that for you, leaving you free to do this.” He waved his hand in the air to indicate the sheriff’s station and everything it represented.
“I already am,” Eve said. “I don’t need your help to do my job.”
Linwood reached into his jacket, took out his card, and offered it to her. She took the card. It was embossed and the paper stock was heavy. “Think about it.”
He smiled at her and walked out. She watched him go and she felt a percolating rage. Everybody in Hollywood was under the misguided, arrogant belief that everyone dreams of becoming a celebrity, and that there was no higher calling or greater achievement than being the center of a TV show or movie, either as the star, or the director, or the executive producer of the series. So naturally people were certain that Eve thought of her job only as a means to achieve fame and fortune. It rankled her that nobody could accept that being a good homicide detective was really all that she wanted.
Of course, it didn’t help her argument that she’d leveraged her YouTube fame to get her promotion. So perhaps she had only herself to blame for the unwanted attention from Hollywood. That realization didn’t make her feel any better about everyone’s wrongheaded assumptions about her motives.
Eve went back down the hall to the squad room and tossed Linwood Taggert’s business card on Garvey’s desk as she walked by. “For your collection.”
Garvey picked up the card and admired it. “I don’t think you appreciate how powerful he is.”
Eve took a seat at her cubicle, her back to Garvey. “I don’t think you appreciate how little I care.”
Duncan leaned out of his cubicle and looked at her. “Does this mean you didn’t curtsy?”
CHAPTER FOUR
It was 7:00 p.m. when Eve walked out of the station. She was about to get into her Subaru Outback for the short drive home when she spotted a dusty old Ford Fusion parked beside the mobile crime lab. It was the same car she saw outside of Sherwood Mintner’s house before she met Daniel Brooks. It wasn’t a big deduction to guess who the car belonged to. She walked over to the lab, climbed the two steps to the door, and pressed the speaker button beside the keypad.
“Yes?” Daniel’s voice crackled through the cheap speaker.
“It’s Eve. Can I come in?”
“Of course.” There was a buzz, she heard the door lock unlatch, and she went in.
It felt like she’d walked into a meat locker. The temperature must have been only ten or fifteen degrees above freezing. The room was white, with a metal examination table in the center. In the back, there was a refrigeration unit similar to what she’d seen in the morgue, with several drawers for holding bodies.
Daniel stood over the exam table, which was covered with bones, some intact and others fragments, laid out like a person on her back.
“How did it go out there today?” she asked. Her wrist ached again. She wondered if her wrist was really sore, or if it was all in her head, if seeing all the shattered bones had reminded her about her recent fracture.
“It went well,” he said. She noticed that his nose was sunburned. “Would you like me to tell you what I know?”
She smiled at him. “Unless you’d prefer to be interrogated.”
“Her body was on the hillside prior to the fire. I know that from the dispersal pattern of the bones.”
“What kind of dispersal pattern is that?”
“Starting out small on the hill and spreading out wide at the bottom. The pieces of the skull, for example, were found in eight different places. That, and the charring patterns on the bones, tells me they were scattered during the fire and by the elements. Wind, water, that kind of thing.”
“So she fell or was dumped from Latigo Canyon Road.” Eve shivered in the cold room. If she stayed much longer, her teeth would start to chatter.
“That’s correct. The fusion of her clavicle confirms my initial conclusion that she was in her twenties. I know that not long before her death, she broke her elbow and needed surgery to put it back together. We found a partial radius bone with a plate screwed onto it.” He pointed the bone out. There was a thin band of titanium, resembling the sprockets on a strip of movie film, screwed into it. He picked up something off the table that looked like a silver bottle stopper and held it out to her. “We also found the loose titanium radial head that had been embedded in the bone.”
“What is a radial head?” Eve asked.
“The knobby end where the radial bone meets the elbow,” Daniel said, demonstrating by placing the titanium radial head into a hole at the tip of the bone, giving it a rounded end. “Her radial head was shattered, so the surgeon replaced it with this. Take a closer look at the implant.”
He handed her the titanium radial head and a magnifying glass. Eve examined the implant under the glass and could see a string of numbers and some kind of logo. She felt her pulse quicken with excitement.
“Can we use this serial number to trace the implant back to the surgeon and the patient?”
“Absolutely. That’s why it’s there.”
“To identify corpses?”
“That’s a side benefit. Implants are engraved with individual serial numbers so they can be traced if a design or manufacturing flaw is discovered later that poses a threat to patients and requires a recall.”
“You mean so they can cut you open again and take it out.”
Daniel nodded. “Just like replacing a faulty part in a car.”
“Ouch,” Eve said. She’d been so fascinated by the implant, and what it meant, that she’d momentarily forgotten how cold she was. Now she was shivering. Daniel didn’t seem bothered by the cold at all. She figured he was used to it.
“The implant manufacturer is back east,” he said. “Nan probably won’t be able to get the information to you until tomorrow morning.”
“I can wait,” she said. But that was a lie. She really wanted it now and wondered if she’d get into trouble calling the company’s CEO at home. She didn’t care about upsetting him, but she’d definitely piss off Nan, and that would have repercussions. So she’d wait. Patiently. At least until 9:00 a.m.
“I can also tell you, by looking at the healing of her broken radius bone, that she died within a few weeks of getting out of her cast.”
“Do you know how she died?”
“Not yet,” he said. “There are still a lot of bones we haven’t found, like her lower jaw and most of the spine. It’s frustrating, because I know they’re out there.”
She felt the same way about clues in an investigation. “Did you find anything else, like jewelry, keys, or maybe a bullet?”
“Wouldn’t that be nice,” he said.
“Is that a no?”
“All we found was a zipper, some screws from her implants, and the underwire from a bra.”
She glanced at the wire. “A C-cup.”
“You know your bras.”
“I’ve had some experience.”
“That’s outside my range of expertise. I’m going back out to the scene to poke around while there’s still some light,” he said. “I won’t give up until I recover every bone there is to find.”
She thanked him and rush
ed back outside, where it was warm.
Eve was home five minutes later. That was because she lived only two miles away, on the other side of the 101 freeway, in a two-story street-front condo on the north end of Las Virgenes Road. All her furniture was purely functional screw-together stuff from IKEA, and the walls were bare. She didn’t spend enough time at home to care about decoration. Her racing bike was parked behind the couch in the living room, because that was the most convenient place for it.
She went into the kitchen, opened the freezer, and got an ice pack out for her wrist and a chicken potpie out for her dinner. While the potpie was cooking in the microwave, she iced her wrist at the table and stared at her bike. It had been six weeks since she’d gone on a ride. She missed it. The microwave dinged at the same time her cell phone rang. The caller ID warned her that it was her mom. Eve answered it anyway.
“Hi, Mom.”
“I saw you on TV.” Jen had a scratchy voice that men found sexy. She got it by smoking Marlboros for years. Eve wondered if men would still find her mom’s voice so sexy when she was dragging around an oxygen tank. “It’s smart of you to stay in the public eye.”
“That’s not what I’m doing.”
“You should be. You don’t want people forgetting you.”
“That’s exactly what I want.” Eve put her phone on speaker, set it down on the table, and used a hot pad to take her potpie out of the microwave. She slammed the door to the microwave shut with her free hand.
“You have to stop eating potpies,” Jen said, reacting to both the sound from the microwave and her knowledge of her daughter’s habits.
Eve brought the potpie back to the table and placed it beside the phone to cool off. “It’s the perfect meal. It has everything. Meat, vegetables, and bread.”
She’d learned to love them when she was a teenager and her mom was off partying somewhere, leaving her responsible for feeding her sister, Lisa, who was three years younger than her, and her little brother, Kenny, who was five years younger. Lisa’s father was a grip, one of the guys who moved lights and equipment around on a movie set, and Kenny’s was a struggling actor who gave up years ago and moved back to Green Bay.
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