The Lost Witness

by Robert Ellis

  It took about half an hour to clear the city and suburbs. Once the city finally vanished in her rearview mirror, she spent another fifteen minutes on paved roads, then more than ten miles on gravel. It was brighter here, warmer—the open desert, raw and untouched. As the road dipped and curved and seemed to melt into the sand, she finally spotted a mailbox. But as she got closer, she saw the burned out house and kept moving. After five more miles, another mailbox appeared on the right. This time the house that went with it was still standing. She could see it a hundred yards off the road.

  She pulled behind a sand dune, looking at the dust trail she had just left. If Bloom was anywhere near a window, then he knew that someone was here.

  She got out of the car, trying not to think about it. Climbing the dune, she lowered her body onto the sand and peered over the top.

  The house shimmered in the distance, its windmill standing motionless in the still air. She could see Bloom’s pickup parked in front of the garage. Behind the house she noticed a shed. From this distance everything appeared weatherbeaten. Dried out, windswept, and so quiet and undisturbed that it didn’t feel right. All she could hear was the sound of her own breathing. The rhythm between her breaths.

  And then something started rattling in the car.

  Lena slid down the hill and looked inside. It was her cell, beating against the map on the passenger seat. She checked the display and flipped it open. It was Ramira again, and he sounded panic-stricken.

  “I need to see you,” he said. “The shit’s hitting the fan.”

  Lena moved back to her position on top of the sand dune. “What is it, Denny?”

  “The shit’s hitting the fan. What more do you fucking need? How soon can you get here?”

  “Where’s here?”

  “My place. We need to meet and I’m ready to talk.”

  “Why don’t you start by telling me what this is about?”

  Ramira paused just as Lena expected he would. She looked back at the house.

  “I can’t reach my contact,” he said finally. “I think they got to him. I think he’s dead.”

  “The senator?”

  “Not West. My contact.”

  “Who’s your contact, Denny?”

  Ramira shut down again. Lena was losing her patience and thought about hanging up.

  “I get it,” she said. “You’re still not ready to talk.”

  “It’s not that. It’s just that I can’t tell you the guy’s name. I’m a reporter.”

  “What difference would it make if he’s dead?”

  “But I promised. And I don’t know that he’s dead.”

  “Like I said, Denny, you’re not ready to talk. And I’m out of town and too busy to fool around. If the shit’s really hitting the fan, you know what to do. Hang up and call nine-one-one. If it can wait and you change your mind and really want to talk, I’ll be back sometime late this afternoon.”

  He didn’t respond. Lena waited a beat, then slipped the phone into her pocket.

  Smoke.

  She looked over the dune, scanning the property and trying to put Ramira out of her mind. She took in the house and shed—the Ford F-150 parked in front of the garage and the windmill that wouldn’t turn. The place reeked with bad vibes. It felt too remote. Too much like the last stop on the train. Too much like a place someone would live if his life had gone dark four years ago just like Bloom’s had.

  Lena checked her wristwatch. It was still early enough that she had options. She no longer wanted to approach him here. She could drive down to the end of the road and spend a few hours waiting him out, then follow his pickup to the market or the bank. Any public place would be better than here. If he stayed home, she still had time to drive back to Vegas and work the meeting through the LVPD.

  She turned away from the house. Turned and heard the slide rock back on a semiautomatic pistol. Turned and saw the man standing beside her rental car.

  “Are you the one who called?” he said. “The one asking for Jennifer McBride?”

  Lena’s eyes zeroed in on the gun Bloom was holding. It was another Glock—a .40 or a .45. Either way, she knew that he only needed to fire a single round.

  She nodded, hoping her voice wouldn’t betray her fear. “Did you know her?”

  Bloom’s eyes narrowed. He motioned her toward him with the gun, then slammed her body against the car. He was bigger than her, stronger than her, at least five inches taller with dirty blond hair and sunburned skin. He looked like he hadn’t shaved in a couple of days. Like he didn’t get much sleep. He spun her around and frisked her. His search was quick and professional and left nothing to chance. He pulled her gun and ID and slipped them into his pocket. He found her cell and tossed it inside her car. Then his large hands rolled over every inch of her body, from her neck down to her ankles. Satisfied that he had found everything, he pointed the gun at her and backed away from the car.

  Lena turned and watched him light a Marlboro. Bloom stared back at her like he meant business.

  “Jennifer said that if anyone ever asked for her and used that name, they were trouble.”

  “I’m a police officer,” Lena said.

  “You think I give a shit? Welcome to Vegas, bitch. Now, get in the car and drive.”

  “Where?”

  He moved around the car, limping slightly, then climbed into the passenger seat with the gun on her. “Down the driveway to my pickup,” he said. “This piece of shit won’t go anywhere in the sand.”

  37

  She pulled the rental car up to the garage, unable to ignore the dread weighing her down. As they got out and walked over to Bloom’s pickup, her legs felt weak and mushy. She couldn’t think her way out of this. Nothing was coming. Just Mike Bloom with his Glock.

  “Get behind the wheel,” he said. “You’re driving.”

  She climbed in, then watched Bloom enter. He tossed over the keys, pointing at the desert that began at his driveway and didn’t seem to end.

  “That way,” he said. “Now let’s roll.”

  She pulled off the gravel into the sand, trying to keep Bloom’s house in the rearview mirror for as long as possible. She checked the odometer, noting the mileage. She could see her fingers trembling as she gripped the wheel. When she tried to say something, he told her to shut up.

  They drove in an eerie silence. Pushed forward over the brush, crossing a dried-out stream bed and bouncing over the rough terrain. She knew that her only real chance of surviving was to appeal to Bloom on some personal level. But as she glanced over at him and saw the madness in his eyes, the brutal determination on his face, the hope flickered out and died. About two miles into the desert, she steered the pickup around a hill and came to a clearing.

  “This looks like a good spot,” Bloom said. “Pull over and get out.”

  Lena did as she was told, watching the man grab a shovel out of the bed and throw it at her.

  “Start digging,” he said.

  She picked up the shovel and stared at him, calculating the distance between them.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “Your eyes are all big. You’re breathing heavy. You’re all revved up because you’re about to die. And now you’ve got that shovel in your hands. You’re thinking maybe this is your chance to take me out. Well, forget it, bitch. It takes one point five seconds for a human being to travel twenty-one feet—the same amount of time it would take me to draw my weapon and fire. It’s called the twenty-one-foot rule. Only you’re more than twenty-five feet away, and this gun’s out and ready to rock and roll. Now start digging.”

  She drove the shovel into the sand, keeping her eyes on him as he sat down on a boulder and grimaced. He lit another Marlboro and started rubbing his right leg. If Lena was looking for a weakness, it had to be his leg. There was something wrong with it. A pulled muscle in his lower thigh. Or, maybe a blown ligament in his knee.

  She tossed another load of sand out of the hole, feeling the sun on her back. She paced he
rself—not too fast or too slow—just steady enough to not be noticed and keep things going. Maybe buy enough time to come up with something out of nothing. It suddenly occurred to her that she hadn’t told anyone where she was. Other than Ramira, no one knew that she had left Los Angeles.

  “You used the past tense,” Bloom said after a long stretch of silence.

  Lena stopped digging and gave him a look.

  “Back at the house you used the past tense,” he said. “What happened to her?”

  “She was murdered. Wednesday night. Exactly one week ago.”

  She watched him take it. She saw him lower his eyes and shake his head. The pain he felt was deeper now. But more important, it seemed real.

  “I know that you used to be a cop,” she said.

  Bloom met her eyes, but remained silent.

  “I looked you up when I found the phone number,” she said.

  “How’d you find the number?”

  She watched him smoke the cigarette. He’d asked her a question, but didn’t seem to care if she answered it.

  “She left it with her doctor.”

  “Now I know you’re full of shit,” he said. “Jennifer would never do that.”

  “I’m a homicide detective. I’m trying to figure out who she was.”

  He shrugged. “Who do you think she was?”

  “A prostitute working in Venice. Someone trying to hide what she was doing by using someone else’s name.”

  “Is that it?” he asked.

  “Pretty much.”

  “Then I’d say you know all you need to know. Shut up and dig.”

  She got back to work with the shovel. After a while she looked up and saw him whispering something into his cell phone. But the call didn’t last very long, only three or four minutes before he clicked off. When he noticed her looking at him, he waved the gun at her and she turned slightly. Bloom was lifting his pant leg. As he pulled it over his knee, she knew what the problem was and had a better than good idea of what the man had been doing for the past four years.

  Bloom had a prosthetic right leg. There was something wrong with the fit around his thigh. Something that required an adjustment. After a moment, he looked over and caught her watching him again.

  “Don’t get any crazy ideas,” he said. “I don’t need two legs to shoot a stupid bitch like you.”

  Lena shrugged it off. “You were in Iraq. That’s why you left the department.”

  He didn’t say anything, still working on his prosthetic leg.

  “You signed up?”

  He laughed. “Yeah, I bought the lies and signed up. And if I could go back I would. Not for the idiot politicians who started it and wanted it, or the ones who watched and sat on their butts. Not for the chicken shit TV reporters who’ve had their heads stuck up their asses since nine-eleven and don’t give a damn about the truth anymore. Not even for my fucking country because I don’t know what that means right now. But I’d go back if I could for the guys I met and everybody else who got screwed by people like you. I’d go back to help the people who lived there and got fucked. I’d go back to fix the lie and everything else we broke.”

  His voice died off. His anger and bitterness seemed to subside as the silence returned.

  “Is there a problem with the prosthetic leg?” she asked.

  “The leg’s fine,” he said. “It’s the liner. I should have changed it today, but didn’t.”

  Bloom fixed his jeans and stood up. Then he planted his right leg in the sand and pivoted his body. The adjustment he made seemed to work. His grimace was gone, and he sat back down on the boulder and lit another Marlboro.

  “You need to keep digging,” he said. “It’s okay the way it is, but the coyotes will sniff out anything above three feet. If you don’t wanna be eaten—if you wanna rest in peace—you’ve gotta go deeper.”

  She kept her mouth shut. Slamming the shovel into the sand, she lifted out another load. Then she heard his cell phone ring and watched him dig it out of his jacket. He didn’t say much. From what Lena could hear, it sounded like he was answering questions, not asking them. When he clicked off the phone, he stared back at her and smoked that Marlboro. He seemed more nervous now. More edgy. And he didn’t say anything. He just sat there, measuring her progress and smoking.

  After another ten minutes and another cigarette, he got up and walked over.

  “That’s good enough,” he said. “Get out of the hole.”

  She started shaking. Struggling to catch her breath. She stepped out of her grave and gave him a long look—then watched as he reached into his pocket, trading his own gun for hers. She wasn’t sure if she should close her eyes or not. She was thinking about her brother who had been murdered six years ago. Thinking about her father’s death, and the mother who abandoned them. She was thinking about a lot of things that had nothing to do with this murder case or the desert she would end up in.

  Bloom stepped closer, gun in hand, everything over. When he finally reached point-blank range, he stopped and tossed the spent Marlboro in the sand. Lena could hear her watch ticking in the silence. Time streaming by.

  Then Bloom handed over her gun and reached into his pocket for her ID.

  “My sister wasn’t a whore,” he said. “We need to go back to the house and talk.”

  38

  Lena needed to sit down. Bloom pointed to the table in the kitchen, but anywhere in the house would have been just as good. She needed time to compose herself and collect her thoughts. Time to let her emotions catch up to where she stood.

  She wasn’t dead. She hadn’t been executed in the desert and left in a shallow grave for the coyotes to feed on. But there was more. Jane Doe No. 99 was no longer a Jane Doe living under the stolen identity of Jennifer McBride.

  She had been Mike Bloom’s sister. And as they drove back to the house, he had given Lena her legal name: Jennifer Bloom.

  Lena watched Bloom pour two cups of coffee and join her at the table. Although the sadness remained, his rough edges were gone. Even his voice had changed.

  “I thought it was important that she keep the same first name,” he said. “I didn’t want her to blow it.”

  “You mean you created the identity for her?”

  He shrugged. “I’d been a cop, so I had access to the information she needed and knew how to use it. But finding someone with the same first name took some time. When I finally hit on Jennifer McBride, I had certain misgivings because the girl had been a murder victim in a bank robbery. But almost everything else about McBride was perfect, so we went with it. They didn’t look alike, and I saw that as an advantage. There was so much background information available. So many stories about McBride’s life on the Internet. It made the job much easier. It gave the identity detail.”

  “What about your sister’s driver’s license? The DMV says it’s real. When we ran McBride’s name through the system, she didn’t come up as deceased.”

  “I thought my sister needed one piece of identification no one could question. I had a friend at the DMV who agreed to work with me on McBride’s history. He made a few deletions. Then Jennifer walked into a DMV and had her picture taken, took the test, and walked out.”

  Lena sat back in the chair, her head spinning. She looked around the house. It was an open floor plan not much different than her own house in Hollywood Hills. And she was surprised by the art on the walls and the number of books in the living room.

  “I’m sorry,” Bloom whispered. “The way I spoke to you out there. The way I treated you. I didn’t know what was going on. I had to make sure you were okay.”

  Lena took a sip of coffee, trying to steady her hand. Then Bloom pulled out his cell phone and showed her a picture that he had taken of Lena digging her own grave. After a moment he clicked to another picture of her that had been sent to his phone by whomever ran the background check. For a split second, but only a split second, she thought about cell phones again and how Bloom’s had saved her life.

&n
bsp; She looked back at the man, taking in his brown eyes and sunburned skin. The emotion on his face that she had misread as madness less than half an hour ago.

  “The question is why,” she said. “Why did you do all this?”

  Bloom thought it over. “If you’d ever had the chance to meet Jennifer, you’d know. But I guess the answer is that she used to be married. She loved the guy and I did, too. He was with me when I lost my leg. He lost more than that. And she did, too.”

  A moment passed. Jennifer Bloom had lost her husband in the war.

  “It tore her up pretty good,” Bloom said. “But she was a strong-willed woman. Lots of spirit. The kind that lights up a room. Somehow she got past it and moved on.”

  “Then why did she need to steal McBride’s identity?”

  “Follow me.”

  Bloom crossed the living room, then led the way upstairs. Lena could tell that his leg was bothering him again as they walked down the hall. When they reached the room at the very end, Bloom stepped aside. It wasn’t a bedroom. It was a nursery.

  “She got past her husband’s death,” Bloom said. “But she couldn’t get past this one. I’m not sure any mother who loses a child ever does.”

  It felt like the floor was moving beneath her feet, the air charged with electricity. Lena looked at the crib. The changing table. A mobile hanging by the window. Her mind was suddenly razor sharp. Jennifer Bloom had gone to see Dr. Ryan because she had a thyroid problem. Ryan believed that her patient had been pregnant, but didn’t carry it through because she didn’t want to talk about her child.

  “Is something wrong?” Bloom asked from the doorway.

  Lena shook her head. “Tell me what happened.”

  He entered the room and walked over to a chest of drawers. Lena’s eyes zeroed in on a framed picture of Jennifer with her husband and baby. It looked like the photograph had been taken in the backyard by the windmill. Three people with their futures ahead of them—a moment in time when everything was good.

  “She had a son,” Bloom said. “A little boy just a year and a half old. He had health issues though. He was asthmatic. It wasn’t constant. The attacks seemed to come and go. But they were scary.”