The Lost Witness

by Robert Ellis

  Lena opened her address book, found Steve Avadar’s number over at Wells Fargo, and picked up the phone. Five rings went by before she heard the line click over to his service. But instead of hitting an outgoing message, Avadar actually picked up. Even more surprising, he recognized her voice. They had worked together on a forgery case that led to a conviction. But it was a small case, something she closed out more than three years ago.

  “It doesn’t sound like you’re in your office,” she said.

  “I’m forwarding everything to my cell. Hold it a second. It’s loud here.”

  She could hear music in the background. People talking and laughing like they knew each other. Avadar was at a holiday party, but still taking business calls. After a moment, the noise began to fade and she heard a door close.

  “That’s better,” he said. “How can I help, Lena?”

  She gave him a summary of the case, along with Jane Doe’s financial history. Avadar understood what she wanted immediately.

  “I can pull her account statements and get you everything by nine tomorrow morning. If she wrote checks online, you’ll have more than a name. You’ll have each account’s address and phone number. Would that be okay?”

  “It would be great. What about her credit-card statements? Is that doable?”

  “I’ll pull everything. Should I call this number when I’m ready?”

  “Better use my cell.”

  She gave him the number. When she spotted Tito Sanchez entering the bureau floor with a file under his arm, she thanked Avadar for the favor and hung up. Sanchez stopped at his desk. Then Rhodes got off the phone and pointed to the captain’s office, and all three headed back. Barrera was still sitting at the conference table. But now that can of Diet Pepsi was empty, the aluminum flattened into a makeshift ashtray for his half-smoked cigar.

  “Let’s see them,” he said.

  Sanchez opened the file and placed two photographs on the table. The first was a blowup of the victim from her driver’s license. The second, a single frame from the video recorded by the witness on the night of the abduction and murder. No one said anything—everyone’s eyes riveted to that second photograph. Lena moved closer, trying to cut through the blur as she thought about the doctor’s face.

  “Does it look like Fontaine?” Barrera said. “Is he the one?”

  The hair color was close, she thought. And so was the jawline. But the image remained lost in a hazy, midnight blur.

  “I can’t tell.”

  “I can’t, either,” Rhodes said. “But Fontaine knows the victim and lied about it. He even knew that she was dead. When Lena pushed him, he lawyered up so we know he’s involved. The man’s guilty of something.”

  Barrera leaned forward. “Everybody’s guilty of something.”

  “Fontaine’s guilty of more than that,” Lena said. “But I can’t tell from this image. It’s still out of focus.”

  Sanchez cleared his throat. “Rollins says it’ll get better, but he needs more time. Another day or two. Monday at the latest.”

  “We don’t have a day or two,” Barrera said. “We’ve got five minutes. Do we release the pictures tonight or not?”

  Lena thought it over. There were a lot of reasons to release the photographs no matter what their condition. The case was running out of time. Fast-tracking its way to archives and the deep freeze of every other cold case in the open/unsolved drawer. The victim had been murdered two nights ago—not just murdered, but mutilated and thrown out with the trash. Two days and all they had was her body and a stolen ID. No crime scene and no real name. Releasing the photos would put the story out there. And even if no one could tell who the murderer was, someone might recognize the victim. Someone who knew her. Most people keep track of beautiful women. There was a good chance someone was keeping track of Jane Doe before she stole McBride’s identity. Before she became a prostitute.

  “Okay,” Barrera said. “We’re releasing the photographs. Maybe we’ll get lucky. Anything else before I make the call?”

  Lena thought about the snow globe they found in the victim’s apartment. “We should probably run these photos in Vegas as well.”

  Barrera looked at her. “Why Vegas?”

  “Because she may have been there. Because of the way she made a living.”

  “It can’t hurt,” Rhodes said.

  “Okay,” Barrera said. “I’ll make the calls. Anything else?”

  Lena turned to Rhodes. “What happened with the DMV?”

  “They’re sending over a certified copy of her photo and fingerprint,” he said. “We should have everything by Wednesday. She owns a car registered in California under Jennifer McBride’s name. A black Toyota Matrix. If it’s on the road, we’ll find it. But this woman’s off the charts. Her driver’s license looks legit because it is. She walked into the DMV and gave them her social security number. They snapped her picture and she took the test.”

  13

  Lena pulled into the drive, grabbed her briefcase and made her way through the darkness to her front door. It had been a long day. The kind of day that began with an early morning autopsy but was fueled with hope by a witness. The kind of day that ended with a next-of-kin notification that went so wrong she would never forget it as long as she lived. A day filled with ups and downs and packed so tight it didn’t include taking a break for food. But as she sifted through her keys and opened the front door, she wasn’t thinking about details or any of the people she had met along the way.

  She was thinking about Jane Doe. The woman who stole a dead girl’s identity and placed sex ads in the LA. Weekly.

  The woman who cast spells.

  Lena switched on the lights and glanced at her telephone mounted over the counter between the living room and kitchen. When she saw the message light blinking, she hit play and listened to Rhodes’s voice. He was telling her what he’d already told her in the car this afternoon, that he would be driving up to Oxnard tomorrow night to spend time with his sister. She let the message play even though she knew how it ended. She liked the sound of his voice. Liked knowing that it was on her answering machine.

  When the house finally quieted, she turned up the heat, checked the time and found the remote on the coffee table. As she sat down on the couch and peeled off her shoes, she switched on the TV, toggled up to Channel 4, and muted the sound. She had a few minutes before the news started. A few minutes to think.

  There was something about Jane Doe she couldn’t shake. A feeling she couldn’t place. A certain curiosity and fascination. She had been wrestling with it ever since she walked into the woman’s apartment, ever since she went through her duffel bag and heard her voice on the telephone answering machine. The connection seemed inexplicable, yet it was there—dark and out of focus like that photograph of the man they were hunting. The one who killed her.

  As she mulled it over, she realized how many of her own memories had been triggered by the victim. Her mother walking out on them after her brother was born. Her father’s early death and what it meant to be orphaned at sixteen. Grabbing her younger brother and fleeing Colorado before the Department of Human Services could get them. Arriving in Los Angeles. Living out of their father’s car until she found a job and made enough money to rent an efficiency apartment smaller than Jane Doe’s. Going to sleep hungry once or twice a week in a city where the streets were paved with gold.

  Lena looked through the slider at the vast basin below Hollywood Hills. It was a clear night, and she could see the lights of the city shimmering from downtown all the way to the Pacific Ocean. She found the Santa Monica Freeway in the distance. The traffic was so thick, the lights so fluid, it took on the appearance of a fifteen-mile-long lava flow.

  The connection was loneliness, she decided. Living life on her own. Floating through time on a raft. Seeing the sharks in the water and doing whatever it takes to survive. She had handled herself differently than Jane Doe. She had made her own choices—and her memories, no matter how bleak on th
e surface, were good ones. Yet the connection was still there because it felt like they had started out in the same place. They had been spoon-fed from the same empty bottle. She didn’t understand why the chief assigned her the case, but knew deep down in the marrow of her bones that no matter how bad things got, how cold the trail grew, she would never let this one go. The woman laid out on a gurney at the morgue was her client. No matter who she was. The connection was irrevocable and she wouldn’t let go.

  Her mind surfaced, her eyes focusing on the TV and a news broadcast that had just begun. Although she knew that Jane Doe’s murder wasn’t the first story, it took a moment to figure out what was going on. A live remote had been set up from somewhere on the Westside. From what Lena could tell a man had bought his wife a new Lexus for Christmas. After pulling into his driveway, he attached the large red bow the dealership had given him to the roof. As he adjusted the ribbon from inside the car, a chunk of ice the size of a basketball fell out of the sky, crushing the vehicle and killing the man. Nothing was left except the big red bow and a story that would probably run for most of the night. The house and driveway were flooded with camera lights. The reporters that came with the cameras were fighting off grins and struggling to put on their game faces.

  Lena turned up the sound. A scientist from Caltech was being interviewed from his office in Pasadena over a shot of the police line and pile of rubble in the driveway. Either it came from a passing jet, he was saying, or the more likely theory—the chunk of ice was really an atmospheric meteorite, the tragedy a result of global warming.

  Christmas in the Palisades …

  If the murder was broadcast at all, it would be so brief no one would notice.

  Lena tossed the remote on the couch and walked around the counter into the kitchen. She didn’t watch much television, particularly since the networks had been invaded by the pharmaceutical companies, bludgeoning their audiences with all those idiotic TV ads the same way candy, cereal, and fast-food makers tried to brainwash kids. Watching television these days carried unmeasurable risks, yet no one cared enough to say anything.

  She opened the fridge and looked around, but still felt too unsettled to eat. Moving to the pantry, she spotted the case of wine on the floor and reached for a bottle. As she opened it on the counter and poured a glass, the wine triggered another series of memories, this time good ones. It was a bottle of Pinot Noir from Hirsch Vineyards, and the price was way out of her league. The case had been a gift from someone she met at a restaurant downtown, a stranger she shared a meal with last month while sitting at the chef’s table in the kitchen. Lena had become friends with the chef at Patina exactly one year after moving to Los Angeles. It had taken a year for her to realize that the easiest way to a full stomach was working at a restaurant, and she lucked out when she got the job. Ever since her graduation from UCLA, the chef had invited her into the kitchen and served what was undoubtedly the best food she had ever tasted. The invitations came two or three times a year and had never stopped. Last month she sat at the table with a developer whom she had read about but never previously met, the man most people considered the prime mover in reshaping the City of Angels. Because Lena had majored in architecture, they had a lot to talk about. After the dinner ended, the man asked her to pull her car around to the kitchen door and threw the case in her trunk. When she tried to object, he laughed and told her that he was a new grandfather of twins. His wife was helping his son and daughter-in-law at the house. He didn’t smoke cigars anymore, so she had to accept the wine as his gift.

  It had been an act of generosity and grace from someone who loved the city as much as she did—the kind of thing you don’t hear about very often. As she sipped the red wine and savored its clean, smooth taste, she felt her stomach glow and finally began to relax. After a second sip, she returned to the living room and opened her briefcase.

  Before leaving Parker Center, she had stopped by SID and picked up a second eight-by-ten photo of the victim pulled from her driver’s license. Lena would meet with Steve Avadar from Wells Fargo Bank in the morning. But she also wanted to show Pamela McBride the photograph on the outside chance that her daughter and Jane Doe knew each other. Although Jane Doe’s knowledge of the identity she stole was crystal clear, Lena still considered the possibility unlikely. This was a case about people feeding off people who couldn’t fight back. The law of the technological jungle. The iJungle. The me-jungle. The fuck-everybody-else-jungle. As she thought about the mother’s scrapbook, more than enough information had been published in the newspapers for Jane Doe to get started. If she had any computer savvy at all, it would have been easy to fill in the blanks over the Internet. Still, the idea needed to be checked out and crossed off the list.

  She took another sip of wine and looked at the TV. A commercial had just ended and they were cutting back to the newsroom. After the picture faded up, she saw a graphic that included Jane Doe’s photograph and the help-line number.

  They were doing the story.

  As the newsreader summarized the case, Lena realized why the station wanted so much lead time with the photographs. They had set up another remote, not on the Westside covering a crushed Lexus, but in an alley just north of Hollywood Boulevard. And this time there wasn’t even a hint of a smile on the reporter’s face. It was all business as the man stood beside the Dumpster where Jane Doe’s body had been found.

  The station had done their homework. They knew the condition of the body even though the details had never been released. They cut to a series of shots from last night. The camera operator must have paid off someone because he found a position on a rooftop and recorded the body being loaded into the coroner’s van. They even included a shot of Lena walking away from the crime scene, along with a brief history of her role in the Romeo murder case.

  She didn’t care about the leak or about being singled out. They had spent five entire minutes on the story and ended it with the two photographs set side-by-side—the victim and her killer. Lena couldn’t have hoped for more.

  The phone began to ring. Moving to the counter, she switched on the small table lamp and read the name off the Caller ID screen. It was Rhodes.

  “I think Barrera did good,” he said. “Tonight was the right time to release the story.”

  “You hear anything?”

  “Only that I’m still working with you. At least through tomorrow.”

  “What about Tito?”

  “He made plans, so he’s not that happy about it. He’ll be there, though.”

  “You guys will start with Fontaine, right?”

  “I’ll run him through the system,” he said. “Tito’s geared up to interview the doctor’s neighbors. What about you?”

  She thought about her meeting with Steve Avadar in the morning. That just maybe the victim’s bank statements would shed some light on Fontaine’s involvement. She didn’t say anything because it was only a hunch. Still, it had been the single reason why she called Avadar on a Friday night. The reason she didn’t want to wait until Monday to see the statements.

  “I’ll be in later,” she said. “I’ll call from the bank when I’m done.”

  “Sounds good. What are you drinking?”

  She smiled. “How do you know I’m drinking?”

  “Your voice,” he said. “It changes. It gets deeper and cracks.”

  She set the glass down on the counter. “Ice water,” she said.

  Rhodes laughed. “I’ll bet it’s really good ice water. Try and get some sleep. I think we’re gonna need it. I’ve got a feeling about this one.”

  “Me, too,” she said.

  He hung up. Lena stared at the phone, thinking about what Rhodes said for a moment. Letting the words sink in. Then she switched off the TV, crossed the room to the slider, and opened the door. The thermometer on the wall read thirty-nine degrees, but it felt much colder than that. As she stepped outside and walked down the steps to the pool, she could feel the cold penetrating her socks from the concrete.<
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  She sat down at the table and lifted her feet off the ground. Gazing over the lip of the pool, her eyes swept across the city below. She could see the world moving, but she couldn’t hear it.

  She took another sip from her glass. She was beginning to feel the wine now. The ebb and flow of her breathing. As her mind quieted, she thought about Rhodes and wondered if he was alone tonight. She could tell that he still had feelings for her. Although she felt the same way, she was torn because she liked working with him so much and didn’t want it to end.

  A moment passed, her thoughts lingering. Dreams. Fantasies. The smell of his skin. And that’s when she heard the sound of a car door.

  It was close. Too close. The sound had come from right in front of the house. Her closest neighbor was through the brush on the other side of the hill. There was no reason for a car to be parked there. The road was too narrow, the twists and turns through the hills too sharp.

  She got to her feet, glancing at her socks and wishing that she had a pair of shoes on. Checking the driveway, she slid into the shadows and followed the path around the other side of the house. She moved slowly, silently—her feet burning from the cold. As she reached the clearing, she paused a moment and looked around the corner. Satisfied that she was alone on the property, she kept to the darkness and started through the brush. There was a bluff between her house and the road, about twenty feet high, and she could hear voices now. Lowering her body to the ground, she crawled to the top and peered over the other side.

  It was a Caprice, parked across the street underneath the trees.

  A man in a suit was leaning against the door, smoking a cigarette, and whispering to someone through the open window. They were laughing about something. She noted the chiseled young face and short brown hair. She could see the gun strapped to his shoulder and knew that he carried a badge. Even though she couldn’t place the name, she remembered seeing him around and knew where he worked. He was one of Klinger’s friends—someone Klinger was bringing along before he left Internal Affairs. She was having trouble with the name because the bureau wasn’t housed at Parker Center. Instead, they were over on Broadway several blocks away.