The Best American Mystery Stories 2013

by Lisa Scottoline

  We rode in silence for a few blocks. The address she had was on the other end of town. I waited until we were on the freeway before I said, “This is a mistake.”

  Another nose twitch. “You can’t spend the rest of your life hiding. She needs us.”

  “The last thing she needs is us. She’s probably suffering enough as it is.”

  That was enough chitchat for our car ride. A short while later, she turned onto Bryden Road. We cruised slowly down the row of huge old houses, now subdivided into apartments, until we spotted the address. Most of the houses were dark upstairs, with a few lights on downstairs. We could see a group of people on Phara’s front porch. Or, more accurately, we could see cigarette glows, moving in arcs from waist level to head level, growing in intensity, then descending.

  Sandy parallel-parked a few doors down the street, which took a few minutes. We walked up the unshoveled sidewalk, snow squeaking under our shoes. We could hear conversation, laughter, even the clink of a glass from the porch. Sandy took my arm.

  The concrete steps up to the front yard were broken, uneven, without a guardrail. I took them one at a time, favoring the hip and knee I’d had replaced. I could feel the eyes on us. The conversation on the porch stopped.

  Sandy stopped at the foot of the stairs onto the porch. A small black man separated himself from the circle, crossed to the top of the stairs, and said, “May I help you?” He said it politely, usher polite.

  Sandy stood mute, so I said, “We came to express our condolences to the girl’s grandmother.”

  The man didn’t move aside but looked at me. “Do we know you, sir?” He had a subtle accent, not Western Hemisphere.

  “No, I don’t think so. We were in the restaurant where the girl was kidnapped.” As soon as I said it, I realized how pathetic I sounded. Grasping.

  One of the men farther back on the porch, deeper in shadow, made a snort of derision. I could hear muttering. Sandy was studying the stairs, holding on to my arm as if it were a life preserver.

  “You saw my daughter? Last night?” The man didn’t come down the steps, but he leaned forward at the waist, as if he were looking into a fish tank.

  I nodded. “This morning. About three. She came in the diner for some breakfast.”

  The muttering grew louder. “And the police have talked to you?”

  “Sure. They were there this morning. They catch the guy yet?”

  “What guy?” he said, placing his cigarette in the corner of his mouth.

  “The bald white guy,” Sandy said. “That picked her up.”

  Another man emerged from the group. He was black as well, much larger, younger, beefy with the wide head, nose, round cheeks and chin I’d come to associate with Central Africa.

  The bigger man said, “What did this guy look like?” He had no accent. He stood well apart from the first man.

  I described the bald white guy. As I talked, I could see faintly someone deeper on the porch writing on a spiral pad. The large man turned toward the porch when I was finished, said something I couldn’t hear, listened, and nodded.

  “Mrs. Johnson’s not here. Who shall we say came to call?” He said it perfunctorily, like the kiss-off from a good administrative assistant.

  I gave him our names. He nodded, as did the smaller man. Neither seemed prone to continue our conversation or move aside to invite us in, so we nodded in return and headed back to the street. My heart was beating so loudly I could almost not make out the laughter as one voice said, “You tell ’em Phara’s back at the club?”

  “Well, that was a clusterfuck,” I said as Sandy started the car. I was plenty warm now, although the heater still didn’t work. I hadn’t been exactly scared, but I was certainly on edge.

  “How can they laugh with that poor girl dead?” Sandy said, nose twitching again. “With her father standing there? Have they no respect? And that grandmother? What a bitch.”

  “What I don’t get is why they didn’t know about the bald guy.”

  “Maybe the cops are afraid they’d go after him themselves.”

  “Maybe they should.”

  Sandy dropped me off at home after a silent ride across town. We didn’t even say goodbye, just nodded, knowing we’d see one another again in a few hours at the Waffle House.

  Tex had not returned yet so I had the apartment to myself. I filled the tub with hot water and soaked for a while, until my back and hip stopped aching. I usually shower, because the tub brings back memories of bathing my daughter, Iris, when she was two or so. I’d keep an old pair of swimming trunks on the rack on the back of the bathroom door to wear, because she loved to soak me with hand splashes of water, and I enjoyed it too much to convince her to stop.

  I found the same old crowd seated in their same old places when I arrived at the Waffle House about 3 the next morning. Sandy was on break, her feet on the manager’s desk and Art Bell on the radio. Otilio waved to me and slid a coffee cup down the counter, following with the coffeepot to fill it.

  “How you doon?” he said, accent heavy. I knew he didn’t expect, even want, a reply. He understood English fine but didn’t have any confidence in his ability to speak it.

  I shrugged and unfolded the New York Times, my daily indulgence, a buck from the box outside the door. I could, and usually did, spend hours working my way through each day’s issue, even before I began the crossword.

  I didn’t get far this morning, though. About 3:30 A.M., just as Sandy came back on duty, a TV truck pulled up outside. An attractive young black woman, buried inside a thick down parka, got out. The parka fell lower on her thigh than her skirt did.

  She came inside. The truck kept running, and I could see the silhouette of the driver, his head against the headrest. I recognized the woman as a reporter on the morning news, which I usually watched before going to bed. She did the weather reports, too.

  She flagged down Sandy as she was carrying the coffeepot on a circuit of the counter. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

  Sandy put the pot back on the warmer and took a step back. “What you want?” She was beginning to do the nose thing again.

  “I understand Nancilee Harper was in here last night before she was killed?”

  I waited for the reporter’s notebook to appear, but the woman kept her hands in her parka pockets. Sandy looked at the floor, shook her head, and walked into the back room.

  The reporter glanced around the room, appraising the rest of us, before approaching Notebook Guy. I heard her repeat the question to him. Sandy peeked through the door just as the guy replied with a word salad, the way he does when he’s been palming his medications. I winked at Sandy.

  Unfortunately, the reporter persisted by moving down one table to the old couple. Vern and Viv knew who I was. They knew about Iris. The reporter sat down at his invitation, and the three of them talked for a long time.

  Sandy finally had no choice but to come out of the office when a four-top of security guards came in. When I saw the old guy and the reporter looking at me, then at Sandy, I threw a few dollars on the counter and left. Sandy watched me go as she dealt a tray full of waffles to the guards.

  Against my better judgment, I watched the early news later that morning. They led with the girl’s report. She did a standup with Vern and Viv in front of the restaurant.

  “This is Tayndra Stephens. Behind me is the Waffle House restaurant on Staley Road, where twenty-four hours ago young Nancilee Harper was abducted, in front of eight witnesses who did nothing to stop her kidnapper. An hour later, she was dead.”

  She skewered, skinned, and hung the old couple, who seemed oblivious to the callous impression they were making on the audience. All the time they talked, Sandy was visible in the background, moving back and forth in the same forty feet of behind-the-counter space that now circumscribed her life. The reporter made sure to work my name into the report.

  “Among the witnesses was Tim Parker, ex-husband of the waitress you see behind me, Sandy Parker. Only three y
ears ago, Parker was charged with drunken driving and negligent homicide in the death of their only daughter, Iris, who, ironically, was also twelve. The charges were later dropped. Neither Parker nor his ex-wife would comment for this report.”

  Jesus.

  I was seriously mulling over the bars that I knew were open and quiet at 8 A.M. when Sandy called.

  “You saw the news,” she said.

  “Yeah. Good decision, refusing that interview.”

  “Thanks. Tony got here a little bit ago.” I could hear her twisting the cord again.

  “The detectives say he’s somebody she met online. They found a bunch of messages on her computer from a chatroom, going back a couple of months, from a boy named Torrey, who claimed to live on a horse farm near Springfield. The plan was his cousin would pick her up here and take her to his estate.”

  I smacked the table. “It was a scam, right? One of those trolls?”

  I heard her strike a match, the sipping sound of a cigarette. “The bald guy has a record. He did time for molesting his own daughter. There was a court order prohibiting him from using the Internet. That did a fuck of a lot of good, huh?”

  “They catch him?” Although Iris was only three years gone, I couldn’t quite remember what it was like, worrying about your daughter in a world where there was a boogeyman behind every door.

  “Yeah, in some strip club in Whitehall. Tony said he was throwing himself a going-away party. He’d been passing rocks of crack around like they were jelly beans, had himself quite a posse.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah, boy. You want to get some breakfast? I’m off at eight.”

  I begged off, claiming I’d taken a Vicodin and was ready to crash. In truth, I was in pain, but not the kind a painkiller would help with. I was afraid to leave the house, since the bars were calling to me again. Also, Texaco had left half a bottle of cheap merlot in the fridge, although I’d asked him when he moved in to keep any booze in his room, and I wanted to reserve my option to uncap it.

  The knock on the door an hour later caught me standing at the fridge with the door open, staring at the wine. I slammed the door closed and limped over to the peephole. Sandy stood there, her cheap pile jacket wrapped around her black and yellow uniform. I let her in.

  “Jesus,” she said, “what a pigpen.” She smelled faintly of grease and flour. The room looked messy in a way you only notice when someone you care about enters. Papers stacked against the wall, CDs in disorder, lint on the couch. The windows hadn’t been washed for at least a decade.

  She fixed a pot of coffee; out of habit, I suppose. “You know what I don’t get?” she said as she filled the pot with water.

  I played along. “What’s that?”

  “Where the hell are the girl’s parents? How could you walk away from your own baby? What do they expect to find in their lives that they think is going to be better than sleeping next to your own baby?” She lit a cigarette, although she knew I didn’t allow smoking in the apartment. “And the grandmother. What kind of cunt lets her kid go to a Waffle House in the middle of the night to meet some pervert?”

  When Iris was killed, we were on our way to visit Sandy at work. On her break.

  She walked to the back door, pulled the blind to one side, and looked across the backyard fence like Texaco did, watching a truck upend one dumpster after another. I pretended to resume the crossword I’d given up on twenty minutes before.

  When the coffee was ready, she poured herself a cup and took a chair across from me at the kitchen table. She picked up the metro section of the paper and began to leaf through it, licking her finger before each page turn.

  I took some relief from the page interposed between us. Then I heard the clunk of metal on the linoleum tabletop.

  I reached over and lifted the paper a few inches, until I could see the revolver. I recognized it as the one Sandy had shown me one night, when the manager forgot to lock his bottom desk drawer. A .38, five-shot, cheap. I could see the shells in the cylinder.

  “Have you lost your mind?” I said.

  She picked up the gun by the end of the grip, letting it dangle in front of my face.

  “So what—you’re Jack Ruby all of a sudden?” I said.

  “Who?” She slugged back the rest of the coffee in her cup.

  “Never mind.” I thought to myself I used to know what to do with her. I didn’t anymore.

  “You owe me,” she said, swinging the gun like a hypnotist’s watch. “You owe me this.”

  “You want me to walk into the police station and murder this guy? I owe that to you?”

  She shook her head as though I’d made a bad joke. “No, asshole. I expect you to kill Grandma. Tony promised me the bald guy’s going to get what’s coming to him. She’s the one that’s going to walk away.”

  Sandy cocked the trigger. “She was supposed to look out for the girl. Instead, she went partying. The bald guy was the boogeyman. There’s a boogeyman under every bed. Anybody knows that. But that’s why we’re on this earth, right? To stand between our kids and the bad guys?”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Right?” she said again, challengingly. She stuck the barrel in my face. “Right?”

  MICHAEL CONNELLY

  A Fine Mist of Blood

  FROM Vengeance

  THE DNA HITS came in the mail, in yellow envelopes from the regional crime lab’s genetics unit. Fingerprint matches were less formal; notification usually came by e-mail. Case-to-case data hits were rare birds and were handled in yet a different manner—direct contact between the synthesizer and the submitting investigator.

  Harry Bosch had a day off and was in the waiting area outside the school principal’s office when he got the call. More like a half a day off. His plan was to head downtown to the PAB after dealing with the summons from the school’s high command.

  The buzzing of his phone brought an immediate response from the woman behind the gateway desk.

  “There’s no cell phones in here,” she said.

  “I’m not a student,” Bosch said, stating the obvious as he pulled the offending instrument from his pocket.

  “Doesn’t matter. There’s no cell phones in here.”

  “I’ll take it outside.”

  “I won’t come out to find you. If you miss your appointment, then you’ll have to reschedule, and your daughter’s situation won’t be resolved.”

  “I’ll risk it. I’ll just be in the hallway, okay?”

  He pushed through the door into the hallway as he connected to the call. The hallway was quiet, as it was the middle of the fourth period. The ID on the screen had said simply LAPD data, but that had been enough to give Bosch a stirring of excitement.

  The call was from a tech named Malek Pran. Bosch had never dealt with him and had to ask him to repeat his name twice. Pran was from Data Evaluation and Theory—known internally as the DEATH squad—which was part of a new effort by the Open- Unsolved Unit to clear cases through what was called data synthesizing.

  For the past three years the DEATH squad had been digitizing archived murder books—the hard-copy investigative records—of unsolved cases, creating a massive database of easily accessible and comparable information on unsolved crimes. Suspects, witnesses, weapons, locations, word constructions—anything that an investigator thought important enough to note in an investigative record was now digitized and could be compared with other cases.

  The project had actually been initiated simply to create space. The city’s records archives were bursting at the seams with acres of files and file boxes. Shifting it all to digital would make room in the cramped department.

  Pran said he had a case-to-case hit. A witness listed in a cold case Bosch had submitted for synthesizing had come up in another case, also a homicide, as a witness once again. Her name was Diane Gables. Bosch’s case was from 1999 and the second case was from 2007, which was too recent to fall under the purview of the Open-Unsolved Unit.

 
“Who submitted the 2007 case?”

  “Uh, it was out of Hollywood Division. Detective Jerry Edgar made the submission.”

  Bosch almost smiled in the hallway. He went a distance back with Jerry Edgar.

  “Have you talked to Edgar yet about the hit?” Bosch asked.

  “No. I started with you. Do you want his contact info?”

  “I already have it. What’s the vic’s name on that case?”

  “Raymond Randolph, DOB six, six, sixty-one—that’s a lot of sixes. DOD July second, 2007.”

  “Okay, I’ll get the rest from Edgar. You did good, Pran. This gives me something I can work with.”

  Bosch disconnected and went back into the principal’s office. He had not missed his appointment. He checked his watch. He’d give it fifteen minutes, and then he’d have to start moving on the case. His daughter would have to go without her confiscated cell phone until he could get another appointment with the principal.

  Before contacting Jerry Edgar at Hollywood Division, Bosch pulled up the files—both hard and digital—on his own case. It involved the murder of a precious-metals swindler named Roy Alan McIntyre. He had sold gold futures by phone and Internet. It was the oldest story in the book: there was no gold, or not enough of it. It was a Ponzi scheme through and through, and like all of them, it finally collapsed upon itself. The victims lost tens of millions. McIntyre was arrested as the mastermind, but the evidence was tenuous. A good lawyer came to his defense and was able to convince the media that McIntyre was a victim himself, a dupe for organized-crime elements that had pulled the strings on the scheme. The DA started floating a deal that would put McIntyre on probation—provided he cooperated and returned all the money he still had access to. But word leaked about the impending deal, and hundreds of the scam’s victims organized to oppose it. Before the whole thing went to court, McIntyre was murdered in the garage under the Westwood condominium tower where he lived. Shot once between the eyes, his body found on the concrete next to the open door of his car.