She had to work her way back to getting kicked out of the sweatshop, reconstructing the sequence event by dreadful event, before she realized with relief that today was still Monday. It was late afternoon and, as it happened, smoggy. The driving restrictions had succeeded in making people mad but not, it seemed, much else. For days on end, the city would still be wreathed in thick white cloud. At dawn, it could look like a morning mist. Except it would refuse to disperse or burn off as the sun came up. Instead it would linger, squatting there in the bowl of the city, refusing to budge, sometimes so dense you could stand on one side of the road unable to see what was on the other. Some blamed the slashing of the old clean air standards, shredded years ago in the name of maintaining America’s competitiveness. The US authorities said the responsibility lay with ‘Asia’, insisting that the smog came in on springtime winds from the east. On the street, less fastidiously, people blamed China.
It didn’t smell, but it played havoc on your lungs. These days even Maddy had a smog mask, though she kept it tucked away in the glove compartment.
The phone rang, its sound quickly transferred to the speakers. She glanced down to check the caller ID, but the phone was in her bag. She took a second, weighing the chance of dodging a call from a sympathetic friend against the risk of missing Jeff or one of his police colleagues bringing new information, before deciding the latter was too great. She pressed the button.
‘Hi there, is that Madison?’ The voice young, chirpy. Valley.
‘Who’s calling?’ Maddy said, wary and driving slower now, peering through the oncoming smog, the headlights on even in the afternoon.
‘Hi, I’m from the Los Angeles Times? We haven’t met?’
‘Hi.’
‘I just want to say how sorry we all are about your loss? Everyone here sends condolences?’
‘OK.’
‘We’re just trying to put together something about Abigail for Metro …’
A surge of irritation passed through Maddy, the first cause being that ‘Abigail’. Don’t you dare speak about her as if you knew her, as if she were your friend.
‘… you know, just some details, maybe an anecdote about what she was like.’
It took a second or two for Maddy to process what she had just heard. Then she said, ‘Are you seriously trying to interview me about my sister? Is that why you’re calling?’
‘Well, it’s not … I wouldn’t call it an interview, just maybe something you’d like to …’ The reporter at the other end of the line suddenly sounded very young.
‘Who put you up to this?’
‘Put me up to … I’m sorry, I don’t understand?’
‘Who told you to call me?’
There was another pause and then: ‘The news editor. Howard? He thought it’d be OK to call you? I’m really sorry, is this a bad time?’
‘You’re damn right it’s a bad time. And you can tell Howard Burke that next time he wants to know about my family he can damn well have the balls to call me himself.’
‘I’m sorry, I just …’
Maddy could hear the nervousness in the woman’s voice. Suddenly she felt a jolt of familiarity. It used to be her on the end of that phone. She had done it a dozen or more times, especially when she first started out on the police beat. Calling the victim’s family, perhaps the most gruesome part of the job, harder even than seeing the body – and Howard had made her do it. After the first or second time, he hadn’t needed to ask. It became routine. She was more adept at it than this one; she knew not to sound perky, not to sound like a girl who had just spotted a bargain at the mall. She had a bereavement voice, which breathed sincerity. But now, sitting alone in her car, on a smog-bound, jammed freeway, she was not sure that put her on any kind of higher moral plane. In fact she knew it didn’t. She was just better at it.
She apologized to the woman and promised to text her a line or two later.
Forty minutes later and she was at the house – or as near to it as she could get. There was no room to park: both sides of the road were filled. She checked the note she made, to be sure she was in the right place. But there was no mistake.
There was a small crowd by the front door which, as she got nearer, she could see was an overspill from inside. She slowed down, making an instant assessment of the people there: poor, but dressed in their most formal clothes. It was the mud she spotted on two pairs of dark leather shoes that settled it. Rosario Padilla had died nearly three weeks ago. In homicide cases it often took that long to release the body from the morgue and return it to the family. These people must have just come from the funeral.
She nudged and excused-me’d her way in, working herself up the steps onto the porch and through the screen-door into the house. Once in, she heard the hush. Someone was making a speech. She stood behind a knot of middle-aged Latinas, all nodding as they listened. Before them, next to a mantelpiece covered in family photographs, was a man she guessed was her own age. Dark and in a suit that seemed too small for him, he was speaking with great intensity.
‘And her faith was important to her. My aunts will tell you, Rosario was the one who actually wanted to go to church.’ The women in front of Maddy turned to smile at one another at that. ‘I hope that faith is a comfort to her now. Because I’ll be honest with you, and I didn’t want to say this there, at the cemetery. But I’m finding it hard to believe right now.’ His voice choked, a show of weakness that made him shake his head. An older man placed his hand on his shoulder.
Maddy had seen plenty of moments like this: a father comforting the brother of the deceased, the extended family wiping away their own tears. It was familiar to her, yet it struck her with new force. Soon she would not be watching this scene, from the back. She would be there, at the front: she, Quincy and her mother, the mourners. Quincy would doubtless demand one of them do what this man was doing right now: deliver a eulogy at the wake, offering a few words about the life of Abigail. She realized her eyes were stinging, but the tears did not come.
He stopped speaking now, held in a long, silent embrace by his father. The mother was hugging the aunts who were hugging her back. The rest were shuffling on the spot, uncertain where to put themselves, waiting for a moment to speak to the family.
Maddy held back, examining more of the photographs on the walls, trying to work out how each of those she could see here related to each other. Eventually she found herself next to the brother. She extended a hand.
He took it, showing her a puzzled brow. ‘Are you one of Rosario’s friends?’
‘No, I’m not. Though I wish I was. She sounds like a great person.’
‘She was.’
‘I’m here because I lost my sister too.’
‘OK. Um, I’m sorry.’
‘It just happened actually. In quite similar circumstances to Rosar—’ She stopped herself. ‘To your sister. Is there somewhere we can talk?’
He led her first into the kitchen, but that was packed even more tightly than the living room. The hallways were jammed too. Finally, he ushered her out back, into a tiny concrete yard. There was no option but to stand close together, their faces near. He introduced himself as Mario Padilla. She said her name was Madison Webb.
‘Hold on a second, I know that name.’ He checked his phone, scrolling down, as if looking for something.
‘Is there something wrong?’
‘Here we are. I knew I’d seen that name. You’re a reporter, right?’
Her answer sounded like an admission of guilt. ‘Right.’
‘You wrote that thing about the sweatshops. I saw that. That was good. Those guys need to be exposed.’
‘Thank you.’
‘But I’m confused. According to this,’ he held up the phone, ‘your sister died last night.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you’re here? At my house? Shouldn’t you be with your family or something?’ Seeing Maddy’s face fall, he rowed back. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t mean to judge you. But this is hard. You n
eed to give yourself time.’
She wanted to say that there was no time, that the golden hour had already passed, that that had been his mistake: he had waited till it was too late and now he was hurtling down the dead-end of a lawsuit against the coroner. She even felt an unfamiliar urge to tell him that there was no family to speak of, just Quincy and a mother who … But she would say none of these things. Instead all she managed was, ‘I know I do. But I also want to know what happened.’
‘And you think talking to me might help?’
‘It might. I know you think the coroner got it wrong, that your sister did not kill … did not die by accident.’
‘There’s no way. A heroin overdose? Rosie? That’s just crazy.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘Because Rosie lived in this house, same as me. I saw her come home every evening and leave for work in the morning.’
‘What work did she do?’
‘Catering company. In accounts. Good job, but didn’t pay so great. I told that to the police. Smack costs. It’s expensive. If they think she was some kind of addict, how do they think she was paying for it?’
‘What did they say?’
‘They didn’t give me a straight answer, because there is no straight answer except “We got it wrong, she wasn’t on drugs.” Tried to tell me addicts get very good at deceiving people, even their loved ones.’
‘Especially their loved ones.’
‘That’s right! That’s exactly what they said! They say that to you too?’
‘Not this time. But I’ve heard it often.’ When he gave her a quizzical look she explained as concisely as she could, as if it were a mere aside, that she used to cover crime. Then, ‘And you don’t buy it?’
‘Course I don’t. We know our own family, I bet you’re the same as me. You can’t keep nothing secret in a family.’
There was so much Maddy could say to that, but she wouldn’t have known where to start. Instead she said, ‘Was there anything else that didn’t fit? In your lawsuit against the coroner, what’s the case you’re going to make?’
‘We’ve got letters from doctors and all that, saying she was healthy. She’d had an exam like a month before: no sign of any of that shit. So we’re going to say that. But the main thing is the arm.’
‘The arm?’
‘Rosario was found with a needle hole in her right arm.’ He tapped the crook of his right elbow to show where. ‘Now, I’ve never injected myself with anything. But I’m guessing this is how you do it, right?’ He mimed the action of pushing the plunger of a syringe into his arm.
‘Right,’ Maddy said, with a glimmer of what was coming next.
‘I’m using my left hand. That’s the only way I can do it. I can’t be doing this,’ and now he mimed administering an injection into his right arm with his right hand, his wrist forced into an impossible contortion. ‘If the hole is in the right arm, then it has to be done with the left hand. Ain’t no other way.’
‘OK.’
‘But why would you do that? It’s much easier for me to inject into my left arm.’ He mimed that, to show her how much easier. ‘That’s what anybody would do.’
‘Unless they were left-handed.’
‘Exactly. Unless they were left-handed. Which Rosario was not. Same as me, same as everyone except my dad. We’re all right-handed.’
‘And you said this to the police?’
‘Course. But they gave me the same bullshit. “Addicts will inject wherever they can inject.”’
Maddy nodded, taking in what she had heard. ‘So a healthy woman, with no history of drug use, is found dead with a single needle mark in her right arm and a massive dose of heroin in her system.’
‘That’s it.’ He looked back into the house, at the crowd filling the corridor. ‘Same with you?’
‘Same with me. Although, as it happens, my sister was left-handed. So theoretically …’
‘And is that what the police are saying to you? They saying she did that to herself?’
‘Not quite. And where was your sister found?’ This was the more polite version of the question she really wanted to ask: in what state was your sister found?
‘That’s what’s so crazy about this. She was in the hallway. Just there.’ He pointed towards the front door. ‘Just kind of stretched out. On her back. Arms at her side.’
‘And this was late at night?’
‘Nearly one in the morning. More than two weeks ago. She’d been out.’ Madison remembered the police estimate of Abigail’s time of death: shortly after one am. Abigail too had been out.
‘And do you have any idea why she would be in the hall?’
‘No I don’t. Even if you think my sister was some kind of junkie, which she was not, she’s waited this whole time to get home. Why wouldn’t she wait the extra two or three seconds it would take to get to her room? Or even the bathroom? The only reason it’d be out here, is someone followed her home, followed her into the house, did this thing to her – and that someone didn’t want to get caught.’
Maddy paused, looked back towards the front door, as if taking in what Mario had just said. ‘And did she look as if she had been … hurt in any way?’
‘That’s it, you see. Police said there was “no sign of a struggle”. Couple of scratches here and there, but they said she could have got those anywhere.’
Maddy girded herself for what she was about to ask. ‘Did the police suspect anything else had happened to your sister?’ She let the question hang in the air, the weight on the words ‘anything else’.
His head sunk onto his chest. ‘No. I’m grateful for that. No.’ He looked up, his eyes conveying a question.
‘No,’ Maddy replied. ‘Nothing like that either … All right,’ she said finally. ‘Thank you for telling me all this. It sounds like we’ve suffered something very similar.’
‘Tell me, Miss Webb. Do you think the person who killed Rosario killed your sister? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘I don’t know.’ He looked at her with great need, an expression she recognized. It was the face she had seen in the mirror a matter of hours ago, her own need for answers reflected back at her.
He showed her out, leading her to the front door. ‘You should have a mask on,’ he said.
She wheeled around, feeling very suddenly exposed. Had her emotions been that obvious, written all over her face?
‘For the smog. I told Rosario that all the time. “You gotta wear a mask when it’s like this.”’ He paused, staring into the street, ignoring the couple touching him on the shoulder by way of a goodbye as they left the wake. ‘I was worried about her.’
And then, as if remembering himself, he reached into his pocket for his phone. ‘I just realized, I never showed you a picture.’
‘Oh, I’d love that.’ This too was a familiar ritual. Every homicide Maddy had ever covered, the family always wanted to tell you stories or show you photos, to make sure you understood what they had lost. He swiped a few images, then settled on one he liked, turning the screen towards Maddy, angling it in the light.
‘See,’ he said. ‘She was a beautiful girl.’
Filling the frame was a standard, college graduation photograph, a smiling young woman in mortarboard and gown. Maddy nodded her agreement that she was indeed lovely looking. But that was not what struck her with great force, settling at last the question that had nagged at her since she had embarked on that computer search nearly three hours ago. She had seen this picture online, but had assumed it was some kind of mistake. Because the woman before her, beaming from the screen of her grieving brother’s phone, was not what she had expected. In striking contrast with her brother and her aunts, Rosario Padilla had long blonde hair and skin as fine and pale as alabaster.
Chapter 11
Who would dominate? If you had to bet, you’d say it was the guy in the Dead T-shirt, longish hair. If they were testing ketchup or soda, he’d be the alpha dog, no doubt about it. But for this? Not
so sure. Maybe the woman, overweight, polyester pants; you’d bet on her having strong views. Or the older man, retired accountant maybe. Or a dentist. If this were a jury, he’d be the foreman: prissy, stickler for the rules, president of his condo residents’ association. You’d stake your wages on it. But this was not a jury. Way more unpredictable.
The man at his side leaned in to whisper. ‘We’ll do a dummy first,’ he said before straightening up again. They were both standing, gazing through a large, rectangular window, like engineers behind the glass in a recording studio. Except no one was making music on the other side. Instead, this scientifically selected sample of the California electorate were being paid ‘expenses’ to give up an hour of their early evening to sit in a semi-circle of hard chairs in a specially equipped room in a hotel off the 605 near Anaheim. They had come on the promise of ‘an exciting opportunity to be involved in the early stages of marketing a brand-new product!’ As always, no one had warned the members of this particular focus group that the product in question was a new political message.
Bill Doran remembered the days when these were a novelty. The first one he witnessed seemed to him a revelation, the tool that would transform the trade plied by him and his fellow political consultants, that travelling band of mercenaries who rented out their smarts and experience to the parade of shallow, shiny inadequates and deviants who hankered after public office in the United States. Now focus groups were part of the established order. If anything they were under threat, dismissed as old school by the kids who seemed to base every judgement on the latest meme coursing through Weibo.
Bald, barrel-chested and thick-necked and, as such, a long-time standout among the bespectacled, chess-club dweebs of the political consultant community, Doran checked his phone while the dummy was underway, a question about the pizza that had been offered and chowed down by the group. ‘I knew it,’ said the Deadhead. ‘I told my pal, Joe, I said to him, “I bet it’s pizza”. And boom! It’s pizza.’ The man chuckled to himself and Doran adjusted his expectations, predicting that this was not a man his fellow focus-groupers were likely to follow.
The 3rd Woman Page 8
