‘All right, thanks everyone,’ the facilitator was saying, a studiedly informal man in dark jeans and a pressed white shirt. ‘Moving on. First of all I want to show you a very short film. Then I’m going to be asking for your responses to a few statements. I’ll read them out and you just tell me what you think, OK? Just like we did with the pizza, all right? Everyone happy?’ There was nodding around the semi-circle, except from the Deadhead as he slowly realized he had, in fact, lost his bet with Joe.
Doran watched as the film played on the other side of the glass, a short video primer explaining the Chinese presence on US soil. Apparently aimed at twelve year olds – The story starts on Capitol Hill … – it was ideal for this audience. Not that Doran was looking at the screen. His focus remained fixed on the faces in front of him.
Less than three minutes later, the focus group facilitator was rising from his chair. ‘Thank you, folks. Now, as promised, I’m going to read you a series of statements and I want to get your reaction. OK, here’s the first one. “The only troops on California soil should be American troops.” Anyone want me to read that again? OK, here goes. “The only troops on California soil should be American troops.”’
There was some spirited nodding and a rambling few sentences of assent from both the polyester trousers and the Deadhead. But then the dentist (or accountant) said, ‘We all agree with that, sure. In an ideal world, we’d only have American troops here. We all want that. But it’s not going to happen. The Treaty’s the Treaty. It’s signed, sealed and delivered. Nothing we can do about it.’
‘It’s too late,’ nodded a woman who, Doran guessed, had been recruited to represent the suburban married female demographic, the one they had called ‘soccer moms’ back when he was starting out in this business. Quaint, that phrase seemed now.
Doran checked his watch. Precisely twenty-three seconds after the idea had been floated the obvious rebuttal had followed: nice idea, but impossible. He watched as the rest of the group fell into line behind the accountant. The Deadhead attempted a rallying speech: ‘But we don’t have to accept that! Washington and Lincoln didn’t just accept the British being here, did they? They fought back!’ But, though no one corrected him on his history, his argument found no takers. Brief as it was, this little episode would be useful ammunition next time he got pressure from Ted Norman and his band of ultras in the state party, demanding the candidate adopt a more muscular nationalist position. He could tell them, ‘That’ll work – for precisely twenty-three seconds.’
‘All righty,’ cooed the facilitator, scribbling a note. ‘How about this one? “This is our country. We’ve accepted the Chinese presence here, but it’s got to be on our terms.” Shall I repeat that? Here goes …’
Much more support for that. It took a full minute and a half before anyone asked what, exactly, ‘our terms’ meant. Doran and the pollster looked at each other. Suitably vague, instantly consensual, apparently commonsensical: you couldn’t ask much more from a campaign message.
‘Let’s do a couple more. OK, this one’s a little longer. “The Chinese are here now, but that doesn’t mean they should be here forever. The new Governor of California should try to renegotiate the Treaty.”’ Lots of enthusiasm for the first sentence, Doran noted, but confusion on the second. The word renegotiate needed some work. That would never fly in a thirty-second TV spot. He heard his own voice, nearly a decade ago, tutoring the young Leo Harris: ‘Avoid Latinate words wherever possible, go Anglo-Saxon every time. No one wants to have intercourse. They want to fuck. Same with politics. It’s not financial institutions. It’s banks.’ Harris was such a good pupil, he had remembered it all. Motherfucker.
‘And here’s our last one. “The Chinese army are here. But they don’t have a blank cheque. They can’t do what they like. They need to follow our rules and obey our laws.”’
Every head nodding.
Doran felt his phone buzzing. Cupping his hand over the mouthpiece, he turned his back to the two-way mirror, making sure the pollster – whom he had long suspected was leaking to the LA Times – could not hear the conversation.
‘What can I do for you, Elena?’ It was the candidate, the underdog challenger for the governorship of the great state of California. Though the voice was not the one known to millions of viewers of Fox News, where she had become a favourite. There she was sharper, more acidic, obligingly playing to her network billing as ‘the tough-as-nails former prosecutor’. In person and now on the phone, her voice was smoother and calmer. (One of the tasks Bill had set himself was to encourage Elena Sigurdsson to behave on camera the way she did in person. That was always harder than it sounded, but in Sigurdsson’s case there was an extra difficulty: the Republican base, including the Ted Norman crowd who’d made sure she bagged the nomination, liked the persona of the ball-breaking former DA of LA County and she was reluctant to let it go.)
‘I won’t have any numbers from here for a while. But I can give you a readout based—’
‘No,’ Sigurdsson said. ‘I have some news for you.’
‘OK.’ This was worrying. You never wanted candidates to have their own information stream. Ideally you’d remove their smartphones altogether, citing security reasons. ‘How intriguing! Fire away.’
‘You know about this murder story, the sister of the journalist?’
Doran had seen a single weib mentioning it, which he had glided over and failed to absorb. ‘Sure.’
‘I’m hearing Berger’s nervy about it.’
‘Really? Why would he care?’
‘Not sure. Seems he’s putting the squeeze on the Chief of Police. Wants to get this done.’
‘“Seems”?’
‘The Chief of Police has declared it a priority. Putting pressure on his team.’
‘And he’s said this publicly, the Chief of Police?’
‘No, but that’s what I’m hearing. From my people at LAPD. They reckon it must mean he’s getting heat from the mayor. For Christ’s sake, Bill, is there a problem here?’
He was, he realized, challenging her. Some candidates liked that, but they were a minority. Even the ones who told interviewers the last thing they wanted was to be surrounded by yes men wanted to be surrounded by yes men. They needed the reassurance. He had given Sigurdsson more credit than that, but perhaps she was the same as the rest.
An awkward thought eeled its way into his mind. Was he showing her less respect because she was a woman? She had brought political information to him and he hadn’t simply accepted it but had doubted her. Would he have done the same with a man?
Who the hell cared? He had been right to doubt her, hadn’t he? She had jumped to conclusions – that Berger was nervy – on the basis of nothing her opponent had actually said or done, nothing even that the Chief of Police had said or done but just some watercooler talk she’d picked up from her cop friends. Not good enough. He had been right to push her. Worrying about sexism was Leo Harris, Democrat, political correctness bullshit. He scolded himself for breaking one of his own rules: never let them get inside your head.
‘I’ll look into it. That could be very useful. Thank you, Elena.’
‘If Berger’s sweating, that’s an opening. You said it yourself, he hasn’t shown us many weaknesses.’
Doran hung up, dissatisfied with both himself and his candidate. His assumption was that she was wrong. There was no reason for a mayor to worry about a single death in his city. That the victim’s sister was a journalist certainly raised a flag: the police would need to do their job properly, otherwise she could make some noise. But that was a long way off.
Still, Sigurdsson wouldn’t have got everything wrong. If the cops were telling her they were feeling some pressure, they probably were. Such pressure could originate in a dozen places. Could be Berger, over-anxious about his campaign, could be the Chief of Police himself. Or someone neither of them had even thought of.
Chapter 12
The Great Hall of the People was a landmark. The buildin
g itself was nothing special – an entrance on South Wall Street next to a vintage clothes store – but everyone knew it, thanks to the green-uniformed sentries who guarded the door, alongside two outdoor flame-heaters, in oversized peaked caps and retro People’s Liberation Army fatigues.
Maddy had only been once, but she remembered it. Beijing kitsch was the theme: heroic posters of Mao, waiters in workers’ caps, and on one wall a giant TV screen, the pixels usually flooding red, projecting patriotic slogans. Even from her vantage point in the car parked on the other side of the street, she could see the words ‘Innovation, Inclusiveness, Virtue’ in bold yellow and in English, against the rippling flag of the People’s Republic.
She guessed the place was heaving now, the long, long tables – styled after the dining hall of a Mao-era peasant farm – packed and spilling over. The Great Hall filled up early every night, serving Chinese fusion – dim sum with Waldorf salad, roast duck served with fries – to couples and irony-chasing twentysomethings before nine, then giving way to business types grabbing a midnight bite after their morning calls to Beijing and Shanghai. The food was surprisingly good for what was essentially a theme bar, good enough that even Chinese expats were known to eat here, though maybe they came for the irony too.
She stayed low in the driver’s seat, eyeing Barbara’s car, the same one the detective had once shared with Jeff Howe.
Jeff. Even the name induced a pang of guilt. The very worst thing you can do, she knew, with a man like that was to offer false hope. In fact, that was not the very worst thing. The very worst thing was to give him false hope and somehow become obligated towards him. She had managed to do both.
She had been driving back from the Padilla house, still reeling from the discovery that Rosario belonged in that category the California bureaucrats called ‘white Hispanic’ – that she, like Abigail, was a blonde. It was hardly conclusive but, coupled with the fact that Rosario, like Abigail, had no history of intravenous drug use, it should at least be of interest to the police. It might be a lead. Maddy had covered enough homicides to know that the mere possibility that they were looking for a man who had killed a similar-looking woman in a similar way would be worth checking. At the very least she should telephone Detective Barbara Miller, pass on this nugget of information – which might or might not be of relevance – and then she could leave it to them. Only then did Maddy spell out to herself what that would mean: that her beloved baby sister was the victim of a serial killer.
She had pulled over at the next rest-stop, then dug into the pocket of her jeans to extract the already crumpled business card Miller had given her when they met. The conversation had been short, the bare minimum, Maddy suspected, that would allow Miller to check the box marked ‘family support’.
Shit.
The card was the standard one, giving the general number of the LAPD switchboard. But Miller had scribbled a number on the reverse. At the time, Maddy had assumed that this would be the detective’s personal cellphone number. Except now she looked and could see that Miller had simply written on the back the same switchboard number that was printed on the front.
Maddy wondered if that was generic unhelpfulness, designed to keep any outsider at bay, or whether this was bespoke bullshit, tailormade for her. Perhaps Miller feared journalistic meddling in her investigation, but she was denying Maddy the treatment all other victims of such a serious crime would regard as their right.
Madison had let her head fall into her hands. She was so unbearably tired that the interior of the car was revolving around her. But she had to pass this information on.
The LAPD switchboard was the twenty-first-century labyrinth of the ancients: no one got out of there alive. If she was to make contact with Miller, she would need her cell.
She got out of the car, so that she could pace around it. There on the cracked asphalt, standing by a tall weed that had grown through a crack, was a trucker, baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, taking a break. He nodded in her direction. She turned away, aware that a return nod could well be interpreted as a friendliness she did not mean and that could only delay her.
She realized what it looked like. The windows of her car open, Maddy pacing around in her skinny jeans and tight sweater, albeit one with a hole below the armpit. That was the trouble with being a woman her age and not physically repulsive: you had actively to signal your lack of interest and non-availability. Otherwise any activity that for a man would be regarded as normal, human behaviour – including taking a break from driving to get a breath of fresh air – would be read as a come-on.
The trucker was still smiling, refusing to take the cue and look away. Had this man appeared before or after she got here? Was it possible he had turned off the freeway when she had? Because she had? Had he been there the last twenty minutes, watching her make her phone calls, waiting for her?
Suddenly she was seized by a feeling she had not known before, a kind of vicarious fear. She was imagining the terror that must have grasped her sister in her final moments, the fright that must have shaken her as she understood that she was about to die. Had Abigail too been pursued by a man like this? Had he followed her home, chased her up the stairs and, just when she thought she was safe and that she had eluded him, had he caught up with her, jamming his hand in the door just before it was slammed shut, shoving it open and forcing his way inside her apartment? And then …
Maddy realized she was breathing too heavily. Audibly. She looked over towards the baseball cap and, to her relief, saw that he was back in his cab, about to set off. Clasping the top of the car door, she allowed herself three more deep breaths and resolved to get a grip.
And that’s when she turned to Jeff.
‘I need Barbara Miller’s cell,’ she said, her voice tight and short. Striving to give him no more misplaced encouragement, she sounded terse and somehow entitled instead. She took the number and could almost visualize the debt that was mounting between them.
He told her that Miller was clamming up, that she was nervous about him leaking any information on the investigation to a journalist. Madison needed to be very careful with whatever he told her, otherwise he would be exposed and compromised. It had to stay private, just between them.
Then he asked her to hold, returning sixty seconds later. That same hint of eagerness – of a man handing over the quid in expectation of the quo – in his voice.
‘I’ve just checked on the tracking system here. Barbara and Steve are at the Great Hall bar, downtown,’ he said.
‘I know that place. What are they doing there?’
‘It seems a girl matching Abigail’s description was seen there last night. With a young white male; possibly left with him. There’s a witness who says they heard an argument between them. There’s CCTV footage apparently. Miller and Agar are looking at it right now.’
So here she was, waiting in her car across the street. She worked through her options. Dash in, wade through the throng and find the security room, interrupting Barbara and Steve while they viewed the CCTV pictures? Disaster. They’d have her down as a stalker, shadowing their investigation, making it impossible to do their jobs. She could write the official complaint they would make herself. Besides, she would glean no information that way. They, and whoever was showing them the footage, would immediately clam up, demanding she tell them why and how the hell she had tracked them down there. Jeff would be disciplined – and would never tell her anything again.
And yet whatever it was they had just found out, she needed to know.
Waiting. Never her first instinct, but the only viable course for now. She would watch and wait.
Ten minutes went by, then another five and finally she could see movement by the door that suggested people coming out rather than in. Steve emerged first, talking into his cellphone. Barbara followed. Maddy sunk still lower into her seat, regretting that she was not wearing a top with a hood.
She watched the pair of detectives drive away, their vehicle unmarked, save
for a white-on-black ‘W’ on the licence plate: the symbol that connoted permission to drive every day of the week. Maddy counted to ten, pressed the three digits that would keep her hidden from caller ID software, then dialled the number she had already searched and loaded onto her phone.
Three rings, then: ‘Great Hall of the People.’ The accent American, the voice male, young, bored.
Involuntarily, she closed her eyes, less to steel herself for what she was about to do than to focus on it, to concentrate all her energies on the task at hand. She lowered the pitch of her voice and spoke.
‘This is Detective Miller, my colleague and I were there just a moment ago. Sweetheart, could you put me through to the manager please?’
A short delay then a new voice, female and brisk. Damn. Women, Maddy had found, were less credulous than men. But there was no going back.
‘Hello there. My colleague and I were with y’all a few moments ago, viewing the security footage?’
‘Yes.’
‘I think there’s something we may need to review again. I wish I could come back myself, but we don’t have much time. I’m sending over one of my junior colleagues to see you, her name is Madison Halliday. Is that OK, honey? Nothing complicated, just show her what you showed me.’
She held her breath, her eyes still closed. She was wincing.
Eventually the manager spoke. ‘Is there something wrong?’
‘Nothing wrong, sweetheart. Just need a second look.’
Another delay and then, ‘OK. How long will she be?’
‘Not long at all. I’ve put Officer Halliday on it because she’s in the area already. With you in the next few minutes. Thanks, honey.’
The 3rd Woman Page 9
