by Robert Ellis
Sleep had finally come about an hour after Laura turned off the shower. Matt had opened Millie Brown’s murder book and reread every entry that mentioned Jamie Taladyne and his past. When sleep arrived, it was dreamless, which he appreciated and took as a good sign.
He walked back into the guest room, showered and shaved and got dressed in some fresh clothes. When he entered the kitchen, he could see the two officers from Metro standing in the driveway, drinking coffee and waiting for the next team to arrive. They seemed like good guys, but he still wondered if he could trust them after what happened last night. In the end, did he really have any choice?
He pulled on his sweatshirt and grabbed his jacket, then walked outside and down the steps to the pool. Laura was still working on that bougainvillea. She looked tired, but at least she was in her element. Before all this, Laura had been a landscape designer and worked at a nursery on Orange Grove in Pasadena. Before all this.
“You’re up early,” she said.
“You are, too. How’d you sleep?”
She gave him a look and shrugged. “You want breakfast?”
“I’ll get a sandwich on the way in, but I need to talk to you about something.”
Her eyes came back to him and stayed there. He could tell that she was bracing herself for the bad news that she sensed had happened yesterday. Matt watched her set down the clippers. He couldn’t let it go any longer.
“You’re gonna tell me what happened yesterday, aren’t you?” she said.
Her voice was soft and throaty again. She seemed so defenseless.
“It’s about Frankie, isn’t it?” she went on. “It’s about Frankie, and he’s hurt.”
She sat down on the stone wall. Matt joined her.
“He’s dead, Laura. His car went off the road in Mint Canyon yesterday, and I don’t think it was an accident.”
Their eyes met, and she reached for his hand. A long moment passed.
“How did you know it was Frankie?” he whispered.
“I called him after lunch and left a message. He never called back. That’s not Frankie. When I saw your face last night, I knew something had happened. When you didn’t want to talk about it, I knew that it probably wasn’t good.”
“Are you still locked into staying here? Is there any chance that you’d reconsider and visit your parents in Philly?”
“I have to go back to work, Matt. Next week.”
“I bet they’d give you more time off if they knew what was going on.”
“But there’s Kevin’s funeral. They’re releasing his body the day after tomorrow.”
His phone started vibrating in his pocket. Digging it out, he saw Cabrera’s name and stepped away from the wall. He had sent Cabrera a text message before he showered, asking him to call back as soon as he could.
“What’s up?” Cabrera said.
Matt glanced at Laura, then turned away and spoke in a low voice. “I think we need to talk to the girl Taladyne raped in her dormitory.”
“That was five years ago, Matt. She would’ve graduated. She’s probably long gone by now.”
“I don’t think so. Grace and Rodriguez interviewed her when Taladyne was a suspect in Millie Brown’s murder. Her contact info is in the murder book. It says she was living in Playa del Rey. She was at the beach, and it wasn’t that long ago. She could still be there.”
“What about meeting Baylor at the coroner’s office for the ID?”
“I’ll take care of that if you’ll check out the girl and see if you can set something up.”
“When?”
“This morning. Any time she’s free. I’ll text you her contact info and meet you out there as soon as I can.”
“Sounds good,” Cabrera said. “What’s her name?”
“Leah Reynolds. And just so you know, I ran into Orlando last night.”
It sounded like the phone went dead. Matt checked the signal, then the power, which was low. He had forgotten to charge the battery last night.
“Are you there, Denny? You there?”
“I’m here,” Cabrera said. “You ran into Orlando. What happened?”
“Nothing good. We’ll talk later. Be careful.”
Matt slipped the phone into his pocket and turned back to Laura. She had been watching him. When he started walking toward her to say good-bye, her eyes stayed on his face. He thought about that pregnancy test kit he’d seen on the kitchen counter the other night. She had that look going—the same one he’d seen in so many women carrying a child. She seemed so fragile, so vulnerable, so gentle, so possibly pregnant. Or was he just projecting his emotions onto her being? Was she just a blank canvas that he couldn’t help filling in? Either way, he promised himself that he’d be there for her.
CHAPTER 35
His paranoia had returned, following him from the parking lot into the lobby at the coroner’s office. The cops in their uniforms were obvious, but so were the cops in plainclothes. Every glance his way sharpened the edge. Every long look made him wonder if they might not be tied to the enemy in some way.
Grace, Orlando, and Plank.
It was like being overseas. He could no longer tell who was who. If he wanted to stay alive, he could no longer trust anyone at face value. If he wanted to stay alive, he couldn’t take anything for granted anymore.
A woman sitting behind the front desk directed him to the conference room down the hall on the right. When he gazed through the doorway and didn’t see anyone from Hollywood Homicide, he stepped inside and found Art Madina sitting at the head of the table. Baylor was seated with a middle-aged woman who had to be Brooke Anderson’s mother but bore no physical resemblance. A video monitor was mounted to the wall, the screen switched on but blank.
Matt nodded at Baylor as he took a seat on the other side of the table. It sounded like Madina was trying to prepare the woman for the horror she was about to face. The medical examiner had hoped that they could conduct the identification using a video camera, but it seemed like the woman was insisting on seeing her daughter in the flesh.
Matt winced as he listened, trying to bury the memory of Brooke Anderson’s disfigured face with no success. He wondered if he should speak up and tell her about his experiences as a soldier in the desert. He wondered if he should tell her that while she’d never forget seeing her daughter’s corpse, a video image had the chance of dimming over time. An image provided emotional distance, no matter how slight, and had the chance of becoming unreal and fading into the background. Seeing her daughter with her own eyes would have the opposite effect. The experience would become radioactive. The moment would remain in sharp focus, haunting her until the day she died.
As it turned out, Matt didn’t need to interrupt. Madina had switched gears and was making the case for him. Still, as Matt looked her over, he didn’t think she’d change her mind.
There was something about her. Something about the way her face had been stained by her grief.
She was a meaty woman in a small frame, with plain features that seemed masculine and institutionalized. Her black suit appeared well tailored, her light brown hair so even and unnatural in color that Matt guessed that it had been dyed for the trip. He checked her hands. They didn’t look particularly rough or worn, but her fingers were too short and fat for the ring she was wearing. Instead of appearing elegant, what was most likely a very expensive piece of jewelry looked cheap and out of place.
He remembered Baylor telling him that she was the CEO of an insurance company in the Midwest. He looked back at her ring, then at her face, her person, as he thought it over. Anyone in her position had to be used to dealing with crises on a daily basis. She was probably used to getting her own way as well. Today, he thought sadly, it would cost her.
“I’m sorry, Dr. Madina,” he could hear her saying in a surprisingly gentle voice. “Everything you and Dr. Baylor just said makes a great deal of sense to me. I think you’re both probably very good at your jobs, and you know better than I do how things like thi
s work. But I need to see my daughter. I need to see her one last time.”
A beat went by, impregnated by darkness. Then Madina glanced at Baylor, switched off the video monitor with the remote, and everyone rose from the table.
“Mrs. Anderson,” Baylor said. “This is Matt Jones, one of the detectives assigned to your daughter’s case.”
Although what the doctor had just said wasn’t exactly accurate, Matt ignored it and shook the woman’s hand. She nodded slightly but was too upset to hold the gaze or say anything. When he glanced back at Baylor, something was going on with him as well. Fear? Nerves? Compassion? He seemed overwhelmingly concerned for Brooke Anderson’s mother. And as Matt followed them out the door, he watched him take her arm and support her.
The elevator was at the other end of the hall. They walked in silence. A death march. When Matt’s phone began vibrating in his pocket, he pulled it out and slid the lock open. Cabrera had sent a text message: Contact info still good. We’re on for 10. Matt checked his watch and sent a one-word reply. Although he would be facing rush-hour traffic, most people would be headed downtown. He thought he could make it on time.
The elevator doors opened. As he stepped inside with the others, he immediately became aware of the harsh odors emanating from the morgue and operating room in the basement. He could see it registering across Mrs. Anderson’s face as well. He noted her grip on Dr. Baylor’s arm. She was squeezing it as if holding on for dear life. When the doors opened in the basement, the smell of rotting flesh became even stronger, and the woman’s face turned grim and lost all of its color.
Matt wished that he had spoken up. He wished he could have convinced her that nothing good could come from this. He was with Baylor. He got it. He understood. Brooke Anderson’s mother. They were walking in her shoes now.
“This way, please,” Madina said.
They followed him past the operating room and down the hall to the very end, the sound of an ME’s electric skull saw cutting against the sound of their shoes beating against the tiled floor. They stood in silence as Madina unlocked a door and swung it open.
Brooke Anderson was here, lying beneath a sheet on a stainless steel gurney.
A long moment passed before they entered the room, like driving by the last exit before hitting a toll road. When Madina closed the door, Matt became aware of the bright fluorescent lights vibrating and humming. The white walls and the white sheet. It was a small room, almost the same size as the elevator, and Matt could smell Brooke Anderson’s corpse through the sheet. He remembered kneeling beside her nude body in Hollywood Hills that night, the smell of her soap and shampoo wafting in the cool fresh air.
But all of that was gone now. The only thing left was the stench.
He looked up and saw the girl’s mother leaning against Baylor’s chest with her arms up and ready to block the view. Both of them looked terrified, their eyes big and wild and pinned to the white sheet.
And then Madina lifted the cover away, and their faces froze as if someone had crept into the room and taken a snapshot.
Matt followed their gaze down to Brooke Anderson’s face and took the hit. Time hadn’t been very kind to the victim. The Glasgow smile. The Chelsea grin. The cuts between her ears and lips were even more exaggerated, more distressing, more hideous than before. Matt wasn’t sure if there was a God or not, but that was the first thing that entered his mind. As he stared at the girl’s wounds, he wondered what God would do if he did exist. Would he fix her face? Or would she be forced to pass through the heavens like this for the rest of eternity? Would it depend on who she had been? Would it depend on how she had acted throughout the course of her short life? Would it depend on anything at all? But even more, could anyone or anything, even a god, really fix this?
He heard the girl’s mother let out a yelp and looked at her. The snapshot had become unglued, the mother cringing and shaking and weeping as Baylor held her from behind. She couldn’t stop looking at her daughter’s face. She was moving her lips, but nothing was coming out. Matt watched Baylor trying to comfort her but knew that they were five minutes too late. They had used the elevator to reach the basement. They had opened the door at the end of the hall and lifted the sheet away.
They had looked at her.
The girl’s mother struggled to take a breath. Her chest heaved. She was drowning in it. She was ruined.
CHAPTER 36
The twenty-mile drive between the coroner’s office and Playa del Rey took just over an hour. Matt didn’t mind. The sun had burned off the marine layer, the sky a bright blue. In spite of the cool air, the windows were down, the wind beating against his face.
He needed it.
He cruised down Pershing Drive and made the turn toward the ocean. Every house on the quiet street came equipped with a million-dollar view of the beach. If you could get past how close each house stood to the next, how tight the lots were packed, how surreal it all seemed, every one of them had the look and feel of having been made in paradise. When he spotted Leah Reynolds’s house three doors down, he realized that it was no exception. He noted the large windows, the wraparound decks off each floor, a central chimney that housed three flues, and what appeared to be an enclosed terrace for a small pool and spa. But even more, he could smell the ocean in the air, the salt water. And when he pulled in behind Cabrera’s SUV and switched off the engine, he could hear the waves crashing on the beach without the sound of a freeway in the background.
He thought about his run-down house in the hills overlooking Potrero Canyon Park and smiled a little. He hadn’t smiled in four days, and he needed that, too.
Cabrera got out of his car and walked over. Matt disconnected the charger and checked the battery on his phone as he switched off the ringer. The power icon indicated only a slight charge. It wouldn’t be enough to get through the morning.
“How’d it go with Brooke Anderson’s mother?”
Matt gave him a look and got out of the car. “We’re in a bad place, Denny. I caught Orlando peeping on Hughes’s wife last night. I think he’s the one who broke into the house the night before. He stole the files Hughes was keeping on Faith Novakoff’s murder, then went into the bedroom for a look at his wife. I think there’s a good chance he’s a perv.”
“You think he suspects what we know?”
Matt shrugged. “Probably not that they planted evidence on Harris or murdered three cops. Probably none of the details. We wouldn’t be here if he did. But he knows something’s up. And he knows it’s not good.”
“How? Why?”
“Because my .45 was aimed at his chest.”
Cabrera let it sink in, then shook his head.
Matt looked up at the house. It was a good guess that the young woman with light brown hair watching them from the deck was Leah Reynolds. She waved at them with a tentative expression on her face, then walked into the house. A moment later she opened the front door.
Matt led the way up the steps. He pulled out his ID, but Reynolds didn’t do much more than glance at it before showing them into the living room. As she found a place on the couch, he looked her over and wondered, just as he always did, how anyone could hurt her. How anyone could deliberately hurt anyone at all.
Reynolds was a gentle-looking woman with an angular face, freckled cheeks, and brown eyes that weren’t much darker than her tanned skin. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, her bare feet and legs folded beneath her body. When she offered them coffee, both Matt and Cabrera thanked her but declined.
“Nice neighborhood,” Matt said.
She smiled at him. “I’m lucky to live here.”
“Are we gonna get you in trouble with your boss?” Cabrera asked. “Are you gonna be late for work?”
She shook her head. “Not at all. I’m not working right now.”
Matt understood what Cabrera was getting at because he had thought the same thing. He looked around the room. The tiled floors, the fireplace, the modern furniture, the oversized windows facing
the ocean. Reynolds had money.
“Who lives here with you?” he said.
He must have touched a nerve because she looked down at the floor and lowered her voice. She was thinking about something.
“No one,” she said. “I really haven’t been able to . . . you know . . . be with anyone for a long time.”
Matt knew that it didn’t matter that five years had passed since the woman had been raped by Jamie Taladyne. Rape usually carried a life sentence for its victims. Usually, but not every time. There were always the lucky ones.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “We can’t thank you enough for talking to us. And I apologize for both me and my partner for any bad memories that might resurface.”
She nodded but seemed to become more timid. “Did he do it to someone else? Your partner told me on the phone that you were working on something similar.”
“It’s possible,” Matt said. “For now we’re just trying to get a sense of who Taladyne is and where he might have moved to. Things have come up that weren’t covered when you met with Detectives Grace and Rodriguez a while back. We’d like to hear what happened to you in your own words. Taladyne served two years in prison. I realize that’s not nearly enough time. But we were wondering if you’d seen him since his release. We were wondering if he ever tried to contact you.”
She shook her head. Her eyes had lost their focus and reach.
“My counselor said that he might, but he never did. After the trial, I never saw him again.”
“What about phone calls? Frequent hang-ups?”
“My number’s unlisted.”
Matt glanced at Cabrera, then turned back to Reynolds. “Why don’t you tell us what happened?”
