Naked Addiction

by Caitlin Rother

  “Well, Sharona had red marks on her neck, just like Tania.”

  Alison gasped.

  “Yup, but there was no sign of sexual activity this time, which makes me even more confused. I’ve been thinking there might be a drug-dealing operation at Pumphouse or at the beauty school—high-quality cocaine and methamphetamine. What do you think?”

  “Well, I don’t know. I don’t do drugs.”

  Goode believed her. “What about Tania?”

  “I don’t know. She never did them when I was around. How do you tell if someone’s doing coke?”

  “They look nervous, agitated. They grind their teeth, talk fast, sniffle, and wipe their noses a lot.”

  Alison shook her head. “In that case, then no. Not that I could tell. She always looked totally put together, and I didn’t notice any of that.”

  “Well, we found coke and meth in Tania’s apartment, and some white powder in Sharona’s apartment. We don’t know for sure yet, but I’m guessing it’s coke.”

  Alison’s eyes widened. “Wow. I guess Tania had me fooled. . . .But why would she get involved in drug dealing? It’s not like she needed the money.”

  “Yeah, that’s one flaw in my theory,” he said. “But then, how do you explain the drugs on her living room table? Maybe she only did it when you weren’t around. Plus, the manager says she had quite a few visitors. Anyway, it’s something I’m exploring. You could end up being right, my little detective.”

  That got a smile out of her, which relieved Goode.

  “One more thing. Did Tania smoke?” he asked.

  “No, why?”

  “I just noticed that you did, so I thought maybe she did, too.”

  “Oh, I don’t really smoke. I was just trying something.”

  Goode nodded as though he understood, even though he really didn’t.

  “Did Tania ever mention that she was trying to set up an escort service?”

  “An escort service?” Alison asked. She looked sincerely shocked, which gave Goode the validation he was seeking. “No. Are you serious?”

  “Sure am.”

  “You know what? I didn’t know that girl at all,” Alison said, blowing her nose again. “See? Now that my nose is running you’re going to think I’m doing coke, too.”

  Goode chuckled. “Don’t worry about that. You seem like a good girl to me.”

  Not knowing exactly how to exit gracefully, he offered his hand, and she took it. She held it for a minute, then looked up at him with those sad, soulful eyes of hers. Goode was totally confused about what was going on between them. He just knew he had to leave before he grabbed her again and really screwed up his life.

  Chapter 27

  Goode

  Goode felt complete culture shock as he left PB and drove to a tiny suburban community in the eastern part of the county known as Lemon Grove, where Sharona Glass’ parents had moved from La Jolla some years earlier. All he needed to know before making up his mind about the place was that its proud fathers built a giant lemon statue on a grassy median downtown.

  A beach bum at heart, Goode tried to avoid East County whenever possible. It made him feel like he’d been transported to the Bible Belt, surrounded by white men driving trucks with gun racks. He was curious to meet Sharona’s mother, though, so he could see if there was a connection between Sharona’s and Tania’s deaths other than the obvious—the beauty school, Pumphouse, and drugs.

  Goode met with Patricia Glass for a couple hours, gathering quite a bit of background information about the family and their long connection to Clover Ziegler’s. However, when he read over his notes in his van afterward, he realized that most of it was generally irrelevant to solving the case. Sharona and Clover had been childhood friends, and because Clover was also a beauty school student, Goode knew a visit with her was long overdue.

  Patricia Glass confirmed that Clover lived with her mother and stepfather in a mansion on Mount Soledad in La Jolla, where he headed as soon as he was done going over his notes. But after wasting two hours with Sharona’s mother, gathering mostly useless information, Goode was more than a little frustrated when he rang Clover’s doorbell and no one answered. He left his card in the front doorframe, with a message: Urgent. Please call me right away!

  From there, he cruised down Nautilus Street to Harry’s to have some coffee while he reviewed Tania’s emails again, but he still couldn’t find any new ties between the two murders. His mind ran through the variables once more: the escort service, drugs, the beauty school, Pumphouse, Ms. X, Ms. Monica, Seth, Keith, Paul, Clover, and One-Eye. Alison? Tony? Goode made a mental note to swing by the crime lab to drop off Alison’s cigarette butt.

  Once again, Byron was handling autopsy duties, which made Goode feel a little out of the loop, especially with the two murders occurring so close together. Stone had been coordinating all the logistics and lab testing, but by late morning the cable news networks had descended on them in full force. Chief Thompson had developed a sudden fear of cameras, so Stone had even more on his plate.

  After a few flubs during live shots, the chief decided Stone should be the public face on this case, leaving the sergeant little or no room to refuse. That meant Stone had to run around the city doing satellite interviews that the department’s media relations officer had arranged.

  Stone called Goode to vent while he was at Harry’s. “It’s a little unnerving to sit in a small, dark room with a backdrop of the downtown skyscape behind me, pretending to be having a conversation with an anchor who’s across the country,” Stone said. “I hear these questions in an earpiece, and then I have to answer by speaking to a camera lens in front of me like it’s a person.”

  Stone said his biggest worry was that the media officer had told him to look straight into the lens when he talked or he would seem shifty-eyed. “I was focusing so much on what the voice was saying in my ear, and on what I was saying back, I kept forgetting to look at the camera lens. But hell. The chief should have been doing this, not me.”

  Goode agreed. He wished he could tell Thompson that his decision to use Stone for this purpose was hurting their investigation, but he barely knew the guy and didn’t think that would be such a good idea. It might cost him his transfer.

  Right after he hung up with Stone, Goode got a call from Byron that put a whole new perspective on things. The DNA tests had come back on the semen samples.

  “They were definitely two different people, but you’re not going to believe this,” Byron said.

  “Try me,” Goode said.

  “The first was Seth, obviously, but the second wasn’t your other possible perp, Keith Warner,” Byron said.

  “No shit.”

  “That’s right. We’ve got a third man out there.”

  “Wow,” Goode said, pausing. “I wasn’t expecting that.”

  He hung up feeling numb. Until he decided this was good news. The new DNA lead could very well point to Paul Walters as the third man. That said, he couldn’t imagine how Paul would’ve gotten Tania into a sexual situation, let alone a threesome. It was also possible that the third man was someone else who’d inserted himself into the investigation, as killers often do, someone who had stayed under the radar so far. Maybe he lived in the apartment building and they’d overlooked him.

  Goode wracked his brain but he couldn’t think of anyone who fit that description. There was always the bartender and Jake, but they seemed to be trying to distance themselves from the investigation, not insert themselves into it.

  Then again, maybe he was trying too hard to eliminate Paul as a suspect. Even if he clearly wasn’t a man on stimulants, could he be one of Seth’s salesmen? Goode couldn’t see any link between the two other than drugs. Could they have murdered her together? The trouble was, he saw no apparent motive for Seth other than anger over getting blown off Saturday night. And that was weak.

  Paul, on the other hand, seemed more like the type to get upset at rejection. Goode knew of murders based on less than tha
t, especially when drugs were involved. From Alison’s account, it wasn’t clear how hard Paul had tried to get Tania to go out with him. He didn’t seem like the violent type, but who knew. It certainly would be convenient to stalk your next-door neighbor. But then where did Sharona Glass fit in?

  Goode really wished he could go surfing to clear his mind and do a mental sort of the new evidence, but he decided to settle for cruising by Windansea to look at the waves, which always seemed to help. Part of the problem was that he couldn’t get Alison out of his head, which led to a train of unrelated thought he couldn’t seem to derail.

  She was, after all, the first woman in a long time that he’d allowed himself to kiss. He’d stuck to his resolve for the past few years, but there was something about this case that was causing him to come a little unglued. But what really pissed him off was that kissing Alison had brought back memories of his ex-wife, Miranda. Just when he thought he was well on the way to recovery, the episode that morning had put him back in line for the roller coaster.

  Goode had started dating Miranda their freshman year at UCLA. She was like a drug to him. He couldn’t stop thinking about her and the way their bodies fit together just so. It went well for the first year, but then she started smoking cigarettes and hanging out in trendy bars in Westwood, Hollywood and Brentwood, and whatever other woods she could find.

  “I’m too young to have a serious boyfriend,” she said right before she broke up with him the summer after their sophomore year.

  After that he saw her driving around town in a white Jaguar with some frat boy from Newport Beach. The guy had the IQ of a poodle and Goode hated poodles. But Miranda soon tired of Poodle Boy and came back to Goode. All in all, she left him three times in college, but she always came back.

  “Ken,” she would say, “You’re the best after all.”

  Post-graduation, he got up his courage to give her an ultimatum. “Quit messing with my head and marry me, or take a walk,” he said.

  “Let me think about it,” she replied.

  She disappeared for a few weeks, came back with a tan, and said yes. So they got married.

  Goode had hoped Miranda would be ready to settle down soon and have some little ones, but he obviously had blinders on. For five years she tried to find what she wanted to do with her life, and eventually got hired to read scripts at one of the big movie studios.

  Unfortunately, this career of hers soon led them to fall into the same arguments they’d had in college. Only instead of fraternity parties, it became hip Hollywood gatherings that she didn’t feel comfortable bringing him to.

  “Having a police officer there would cramp everyone’s style,” she said, explaining there were a lot of illicit substances going around, not to mention high-priced escorts. “And I don’t want to be the one bringing everybody down.”

  So she went alone. At the time, Goode was working the three-to-midnight shift at the LAPD. But rather than deal with his troubled marriage, he simply worked more overtime. He finally came down with a virus that turned into pneumonia, which forced him to stay home and think. A couple weeks later, he suggested they separate. Smartest move he ever made. Then, he wussed out. Changed his mind.

  But she surprised him. “No, maybe you have a point,” she said. “I want a divorce.”

  Goode felt sad, but something inside told him it was the right thing to do. He only regretted that he hadn’t been strong enough to say so first. At least he could’ve saved some face.

  From there, life started getting better. He did some good police work, then applied to a few other departments, including San Diego. Starting off in patrol there, he was soon able to transfer to a job in Narcotics. He’d been in San Diego for a couple of years when Miranda called from a resort in Borrego Springs.

  “I’m tired running around with these Hollywood assholes,” she said. She had “settled down” with a man she thought she could trust, but he’d disappointed her, blah, blah, blah, and she wanted to know if she could come down and see him. She’d been thinking, blah, blah, blah, that she’d made a big mistake letting him go. Goode thought something in her voice had changed. Or maybe he just wanted to hear a change. Anyway, he decided to give her one more chance. Dumbest move he ever made.

  Miranda filled his apartment with her stuff and was soon suggesting they get remarried. Stupidly, he allowed himself to be snowed. Again. As cynical as cops can be, it always amazed Goode how gullible they were in their personal lives. And he was no exception.

  They decided to hold the ceremony at the St. James-by-the-Sea Episcopal Church, with the reception across the street at the La Jolla Contemporary Museum of Art. Their wedding day fell on a gloomy Sunday afternoon in June. The marine layer was starting to burn off as the church filled up with the fifty guests they’d invited. Miranda was ten minutes late, then twenty, then thirty. Goode developed a sick feeling of déjà vu. Finally, an hour after the scheduled start time, the minister pulled him aside.

  “I’m so sorry to have to tell you this, but Miranda just called to say she can’t go through with it,” the minister told him. “She’s at the airport on her way to the Caribbean with her boss.”

  Three women who worked with Miranda at a local television station overheard the conversation and took Goode to José’s, which was right down the street on Prospect. After they got him drunk on margaritas, one of them spent the night with him. It certainly helped soften the impact. But more importantly, it taught him a lesson about Miranda. And any other woman like her.

  “Never again,” he said aloud as he drove down Nautilus toward Windansea. At the bottom of the hill, he could see an expanse of water so great that the horizon was almost a semicircle, as if he could see halfway around the globe. He parked his van in the lot overlooking the beach near the hut with the roof made of palm fronds. The sun was about to drop below the sea.

  As usual, the locals were lined up for the daily ceremony known as Sunset, where they sipped wine or beer and waited for the big show. Some smoked cigarettes, their wetsuits peeled half off, exposing deeply tanned backs that were freckled and leathery. Conversation stopped while the sun did a monologue center stage, its orange and gold reflection rippling. As the waves crashed onto the shore, Goode became hypnotized by the rhythm of the shoreline breathing. It was always a mystical experience for him. The ocean and Goode—they were connected somehow.

  Then, as silently as it had risen that morning, the sun vanished under the horizon and he saw the green flash. That was the signal, like curtains closing, that everyone could leave, promising to come back tomorrow and watch the inevitable encore.

  Goode slowly returned to reality and flashed on the sensation of Alison’s breasts pressing into his chest. He sighed and gunned the engine.

  Fletcher hadn’t turned up any kind of ties between Samantha Williams and Seth, Keith or Tania. The escort service lead wasn’t going anywhere, so Goode mentally shifted it to the back burner.

  Despite Alison’s remarks, however, Goode still thought his drug-ring theory had merit. He was, after all, a narcotics detective. But he knew he had work to do to tie it to the murders, such as talking to Clover about her drug source.

  Where is the woman? In hiding?

  A saliva sample from Paul Walters was definitely in order, but he planned to try getting it the nice way first—ask him to give one voluntarily to rule him out as a suspect. He’d had his suspicions about the guy as soon as he’d laid eyes on him, but murder? Without more information, Goode didn’t have enough for a court order to get the sample. Yet.

  As Goode pulled up behind Tania’s apartment complex, this time it was Maureen’s body he imagined lying between the trash cans in the alley. He made his way up the staircase and imagined what hell it would be to carry groceries up to the third floor. His calves ached by the time he got there.

  Not surprised to see that Paul’s curtains were still closed, Goode put his ear to the door and heard Jim Morrison of The Doors singing. Goode banged solidly three times with hi
s fist. The music suddenly quieted, but Paul didn’t open up.

  “San Diego police,” he said in his macho cop voice. “Open the door.” Still no answer. “Come on, I know you’re in there,” he shouted. “I don’t have time for hide and seek.”

  Goode jumped when he heard that Jamaican voice next to him. “What’s going on, detective?” It was the manager, Mrs. Lacey, who had appeared at Goode’s side as quietly as the night falls. “Is there a problem?”

  “Well, ma’am, I’m trying to get Paul Walters here to open his door,” he said.

  She moved to knock herself, but Goode held up his hand to stop her. “It would be better if you could go back to your apartment and let me handle this, Mrs. Lacey.” He pounded again. “Walters, if you don’t open this door, I’m going to break it down.”

  “If you do that, somebody’s going to have to pay for it,” Mrs. Lacey mumbled as she started down the stairs.

  A disheveled Paul, his eyes red and glassy, opened up the door a crack. “What’s going on?” he said, almost incoherently. “I’m sick. I was sleeping.”

  “Well, my friend, I need to talk to you. If you don’t want to open up then I’ll need to take you downtown. Comprendez?”

  “I told you everything I know about Tania Marcus,” Paul said, sighing. “Can’t we do this another time? I’ve got a temperature of a hundred and two. My head is killing me.”

  With one hand on the doorjamb, Goode leaned into Paul’s face. “I’m sorry you’re not feeling well, but this can’t wait any longer. Are you going to let me in, or do I have to make a scene and haul your ass out of there?”

  Paul slithered around the door and stepped outside, pulling the door closed behind him. Then he stood there, with his arms crossed over his scrawny, hairless chest. His jeans hung beneath his navel, exposing a path of black curls and a strip of blue boxer shorts.