She reached for the phone and called Katharine, briefing her rapidly. They had done this before, cracking the identity of a Facebook user hiding behind a pseudonym. Besides, once she had heard the message addressed to Abigail, repeated by Maddy as coolly and dispassionately as she could manage, her friend did not need to be persuaded.
In the interim, Maddy paced. She made a brief stop in her bedroom where, still thinking, she perched on the end of her bed.
What felt like an instant later, she felt her hand vibrating, the sound of it reaching her brain only much later. She put the device to her ear, hearing her own voice, thicker than usual. ‘Hello?’
‘I’ve got something.’ Katharine.
‘That was quick.’
‘Actually, it wasn’t so quick. That took me forty minutes.’
Maddy pulled the phone from her ear to look at its clock. Her friend was right: without realizing how it had begun, with no idea that it had happened at all, she had fallen asleep, her hand coiled tightly around her phone.
She grabbed some clothes, the top chosen simply for being the only one in the closet guaranteed to be clean. She caught a fleeting look at herself in the mirror. Somehow, despite the permanent lack of sleep, her body was refusing to give the game away entirely. Yes, there were dark circles under her eyes, but they gave her an oddly sultry look. The phrase ‘come to bed eyes’ slipped into her head. She gave a bitter laugh: it had been a while.
She had the sense that her exterior appearance concealed a full-scale disintegration beneath – that one day, as in a fairytale, the pleasant, youthful-looking mask would fracture, the splinters falling away to reveal her true face: that of a haggard old crone.
She reached for the car keys, took the elevator and was soon in her car, on her way to the address she had been given. She rushed, not because Katharine had told her there was any great urgency – on the contrary, her friend had warned her to take great care – but because she did not want to create a pause in which hesitation might grow. Neither of them had said it explicitly, but there was no doubting what they both thought: that Maddy might be on her way to confront her sister’s killer.
Katharine had established with near-complete certainty that ‘Greg Stanhouse’, the author of the message to Abigail, was in fact Denis Parker, male and in his fifties, resident of San Pedro and Second downtown: Skid Row. As she got closer, Maddy remembered she had been in precisely this area on a story about five years earlier, investigating a drugs ring, but she had not been back much since. It had been seedy then. It was worse now, one boarded-up storefront after another, the only economic sign of life coming from the occasional neon flash of a liquor store.
She parked up, around the corner from the address. She glanced at the glove compartment in front of the passenger seat. Not for the first time, she regretted that it contained no gun. But it was a shared view in the crime reporters’ fraternity, reached by the older hands the hard way, that journalists needed to be unarmed if they were to do their job: carry a weapon and they’d be seen as just another arm of ‘the Feds’. Most of the time, Maddy believed it made her safer too. Trouble was less likely to escalate. But she did not feel that way tonight.
She was careful how she walked. In an area like this you had to be. Too slow and you’re a tourist. Too brisk and you’re the authorities. But she was not kidding herself. She was young and female and from the other side of the tracks. She stood out no matter how she walked.
She was there at the door, sandwiched between two stores. There were vertical bars to protect the glass, their once cream-coloured paint peeling. At the right side, caked in dust and painted over, was what had once been a doorbell. She pressed it. The button responded to her touch but she could hear no sound from the other side of the door. She tried it again. Still nothing.
There was a whisper of noise behind her. She wheeled around to see a homeless man shuffling past. He gave her a sideways glance from a bloodshot eye and moved on.
She ran her finger around the door frame, lingering by the single lock. She pushed at the wood, confirming what she had suspected, that the timber was soft and rotten. With no forethought, she turned sideways and gave the door a single, firm shove with her shoulder. It offered the scantest resistance and was open.
In front of her was a staircase, covered in a carpet so thin and moth-eaten it barely merited the name. She looked down at her feet, using the small flashlight she kept in her bag to reveal a half dozen fliers and junk circulars. She saw one addressed to a Mr D Parker. She started climbing the stairs, her tread gentle and noiseless.
She came up into a landing that was bare, leading off to three doors. There were no pictures on the walls, nothing by which she could orientate herself or about which she could make any kind of guess. She could feel her heart, the pulse from her neck accelerating.
With her foot, she pushed at one door to reveal a tiny kitchen. The torch picked out a table, a sink full of dishes, a rear door leading to a fire escape. There was a smell of old garbage.
She was about to choose between the other two doors – one surely a bathroom, the other a bedroom – when she saw a sickly line of greenish light escaping from underneath the nearer of the two. She could hear voices too, muffled and distant. Her heart was pressing against her ribs, loud and insistent.
She caught a scent and with it an elusive, yet definite memory. It took her a second or two to grasp hold of it, to catch the source of its familiarity. It was from a long time ago, but the memory was sharp, one that she had never been allowed to forget, one that stayed with her every day and especially at night. Strange, she had never associated that event with an aroma until this moment. But there was no doubting the connection. Filling her nostrils, now as it had that night when she was fourteen years old, was the smell of fear.
Any longer and she knew it would overwhelm her; her courage had limited patience. Before she had even formed the thought, she stepped forward and, in a single motion, turned the handle and flung open the door.
What she saw first was the bareness. The room was almost empty, the floorboards uncovered, the walls naked, not a shelf or closet to be found. Only at the back, visible in mere outline, was a single bed. It was less a bedroom than a monastic cell.
In the centre was a plain, wooden table. On it seemed to rest nothing but a computer screen, its back facing her, sending out a fan of unnatural blue-green light. And then – seen by Maddy first, yet understood last – a man, hunched over the machine and masturbating furiously.
‘Stop. Police,’ Maddy called out, in a voice that was not her own. She thrust both hands forward, one gripping the flashlight, the other displaying the badge of Detective Madison Halliday.
The man sprang up and backward instantly. He put his hands in the air, a motion which saw his pants and underwear slip to his ankles. He stood before her in a loose, night-time T-shirt, which struggled to cover a hairy, pregnant belly and which did nothing to conceal his erection, nor the dark forest from which it sprang. His face was unshaven and exhausted, the face life gives you after years of hard work and no money. His eyes conveyed terror rather than anger, an impression confirmed as the exposed part of him shrank and shrivelled before her eyes.
‘Step back from the desk,’ she commanded, wielding the flashlight as if it were a weapon, aiming its beam directly into his eyes. Her hope was that the combination of the light, which had blinded him since she burst in, and the badge would lead him to assume she was armed.
He did as he was told, giving her a chance to glance down and check the table to be sure there was nothing there he might try to deploy as a weapon. She could see nothing that represented any threat but she bent slightly, extending her left forearm out to her side – her eyes remaining fixed on her captive – while she made a single, clean sweep across the surface of the desk just in case, bringing a mouse, a couple of pens and a phone to the floor.
For the first time she registered the noise leaking from the computer, tinny and at low volume. Inte
rmittent moans and yelps of pain, set against a repetitive and lazy soundtrack. The sound of porn. Maybe that was why Abigail and the other women had shown no sign of physical contact. This man didn’t want to touch. He liked to look.
Now she ordered him to crouch low and empty out his pants pockets. Only once she had seen him produce a couple of quarters and a yellow-stained, balled-up tissue, and then tug both pockets inside out to confirm their emptiness, did she allow him to pull up his pants. The rest of the time his hands had to stay in the air – and the light remained inhis face.
‘You gonna tell me what this is about?’ he said finally, his voice working-class New York. From his complexion, she’d guess Italian-American, maybe Greek.
‘It’s about you, Denis Parker.’ The voice was louder, more strident than her own. But she was glad of it. It almost concealed the tremor that wavered beneath.
‘What do you want? I ain’t done—’
‘Hey, keep your hands in the air! I want to know about the message you wrote Abigail Webb after her murder on Sunday night. Very soon after.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘On Facebook. Under the name Greg Stanhouse.’
He paused, long enough to confirm that Katharine had indeed identified him correctly, not that Maddy ever doubted it.
‘There’s no proof—’
‘Don’t even bother. You’ll only be in deeper shit than you’re in already. Tell me how you knew the deceased.’ She hadn’t planned to use this technique, though it had always served her well, even without the badge. For the right kind of interviewee, cop language triggered the right kind of response. It was almost instinctive. Maybe because they’d seen it on TV, or perhaps because people automatically reacted that way to the vocabulary of authority. But she had got results from it dozens of times, asking ‘When did you enter the vicinity?’ or ‘Did you approach the suspect?’ or now ‘Tell me how you knew the deceased.’ If you talked like you were the police, they’d answer like they were a witness.
‘I saw her, two, maybe three times. Nothing happened, I swear.’
‘Saw her where?’
‘At the club.’ The beam of light picked out the spheres of sweat forming on his upper lip.
‘What club?’
‘You know, where she worked.’
‘I want you to tell me.’
‘The club. You know the club, don’t you?’
Maddy understood what was at stake here, the small loss of credibility that would ensue if this man believed his sudden inquisitor was not in full possession of the facts. It struck her as a much more severe blow than if he discovered she carried no firearm.
‘We know everything, Parker. Just like we know your name and what you do online and what you jerk off to at night. But I want to hear it from you. So tell me again, how did you know the deceased? No questions, just answers – and keep your hands in the FUCKING AIR.’
‘All right, all right.’ He cleared his throat, which she took as a sign of acquiescence. In the momentary pause, she could hear that the exclamations coming from the computer had turned into cries of agonized anguish. God only knew what filth he was watching. But she was not going to move forward far enough to find out. She needed to maintain her distance. She advanced sufficiently to reach the power cable at the back of the machine and, with one firm tug, yanked it out of the socket. Instantly the noise and the electronic glow were gone.
Now there was only the white beam of her torch on his face, as if he were under military interrogation. She saw him swallow. ‘I saw her dance at the opium den. Maybe three times. Four, max.’
The opium den. A shiver passed through Maddy, one consisting not of fear but of a chemical agent far more corrosive. Had she been wrong after all about Abigail and drugs? Was her sister in fact a drug user? And, if she was, did that mean that everything else Maddy had assumed – culminating in her belief that Abigail had been murdered rather than dying from a self-administered overdose – had been wrong too?
‘Tell me about this opium den.’
‘It opened a year ago, maybe eighteen months. It’s upstairs at the Great Hall of China. Very exclusive.’
It took another second for Maddy to understand what she was being told. But ‘opened’ helped her. He was not speaking about an opium den, but the Opium Den, a private members’ club. She had had no idea of its existence until this moment.
‘And you saw Abigail Webb there?’
‘I didn’t know her name then, but yeah. She was a table dancer. I saw her, like, three times.’
Maddy’s head was flooding. She closed her eyes briefly, as if that might somehow enable her to process the information she was taking in. But it didn’t work. She pictured the multi-coloured, spinning wheel her computer displayed when it could not cope, as if putting its hands up in surrender.
So her sister performed for men like this one. She pictured Abigail in the CCTV footage, her usually free, wavy blonde hair straightened so it fell like a curtain: that must have been her stage look. And she was a regular at the Great Hall bar because she worked just upstairs. Maybe she went there to wind down after a shift. Or perhaps being there – at the bar, looking hot – was part of the job.
Perhaps this was what her mother had been referring to when she said Abigail had been offered ‘another job’. But it hardly dispelled the mystery. Her own sister had been a stranger. She hardly knew her.
‘Did you ever talk to her?’
‘No. Maybe, you know, like “Hi” or something.’
The next question had to be forced out of her throat. ‘Did you ever leave the club with her?’
‘Christ no, you kidding? Me? You gotta be joking.’ His laughter made him even more repulsive. ‘I don’t have that kind of dough.’
‘You said the club was – keep your hands where I can see them! You said it was very exclusive.’
‘Oh it is.’
‘So how come you …’
‘What, you think I was a guest there?’ He was smiling at the absurdity of it. ‘Do you have any idea what that place costs?’ He shook his head in disbelief and, Maddy detected, relief. As if her misunderstanding meant he was off the hook. ‘I work there. I’m on security. That’s how I came to see April.’
‘April?’
‘That was the name she used, the dead girl. They all have phoney names there. I didn’t know her real name till it was on the TV. Jeez, she was gorgeous though.’
Maddy pushed herself to go on. ‘And you would watch? While she danced for someone who could afford to pay?’
‘Yes. Last time I looked that wasn’t a crime in the state of California. Hey, don’t LAPD always send people in pairs? How come you’re on your own?’
She swallowed hard. She had to wrap this up and get out soon. ‘What kind of people did she dance for?’
‘The usual. Rich guys, young guys, the ones who arrive in the big cars. The Opium Den’s become real popular among high rollers, you know? Big with the Chinese, they love it there. Maybe they think it’s funny, you know, ’cause of the name and all. Especially the boys from the garrison. They’re there all the time. And boy, do they love the American girls. Pale skin, blonde hair – they can’t get enough of it.’
Chapter 24
The room was cold, but Madison barely noticed. She had built a fortress around herself, tottering piles of paper along with the detritus of an earlier attempt at dinner. The computer was on, but she wasn’t looking at it. She was hunched instead over a yellow legal pad, pen in hand, scribbling page after page, filling each one with lines and words, sometimes arranged in the form of diagrams, arrows linking one fact or thought with another.
She was doing it at feverish speed, her breathing hard and heavy. She would follow one path of reasoning – tracing, say, the common elements in the deaths of Rosario Padilla, Eveline Plaats and her younger sister – only then to hit a dead-end or to see a new connection that had earlier eluded her. She’d rip the paper from the pad, enjoy scrunching
it into a ball, taking pleasure in the concrete physicality of the act, in hurling it away – only to start on a fresh sheet, certain that this page, this version, would be the definitive account that would, in a series of neat, logical moves, explain the fate of her sister.
More than an hour passed like that, writing furiously as well as reading thousands upon thousands of words – every scrap she could find on life in the People’s Liberation Army garrison that had arisen on the ruins of the old Long Beach Naval Base on Terminal Island, that vast stretch of docks, piers and warehouses by the Port of Los Angeles that had been all but abandoned once the US Navy pulled out at the end of the last century. Eventually a wave rolled through her, heat that seemed to start at her toes and work upward. The first time she had felt it, years ago now, she had been frightened. But these days she knew she just had to wait it out. She folded her arms on the table and rested her head there, closing her eyes as she let the storm pass. For a few minutes she would sleep, the body taking by force what it needed and what it had been denied.
When she awoke, she was newly energized. Of course it was false and fleeting, like a junkie’s high after a fresh fix. But it gave her what she needed. Still surrounded by papers, some balled-up around her ankles, others still intact and spread out over her desk, she turned to the keyboard. She had no plan beyond continuing with the keyboard what she had already started with the pen. She would arrange what she knew, the only way she knew how: by writing it.
The minutes rushed past her, too fast for her to see them. The adrenalin carried her; she surfed it, letting its speed take her. This feeling too was not novel. Writing could do this to her, holding her in a trance, unaware of anything but the sentences flowing out of her fingertips, her concentration total, the sound of the keys, hammering and thudding to her will, a kind of music.
Less than an hour later, it was finished. She read it over, only then fully comprehending what she had done. This was no memo to herself, no plain catalogue of the facts for use as a guide to her own investigation. What she had written, without planning to, was a news story for the LA Times.
The 3rd Woman Page 18
