The Lost Witness

by Robert Ellis

  She gazed over the concrete divider at the cars moving up and down Glendale Boulevard below the freeway. Echo Lake was almost invisible. The mariner layer had pushed east from the coast, the cool mist hugging the ground and beginning to fill the basin like concrete rising to the lip of a mold.

  Cava had said that she missed something. Something big.

  And she had no doubt that he was telling her the truth. She had heard it in his voice. And now she could feel it in her gut. The main wheel that guided her internal compass. The thing she relied on that made it all work.

  Something remained hidden. Something essential to the case.

  Her cell started vibrating on the passenger seat. She read Barrera’s name on the display and pried open the phone.

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “Echo Park,” she said. “Heading home.”

  “Don’t go home, Lena.”

  The tone of his voice spooked her. “What is it,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Don’t go home,” he repeated. “I’m in Hollywood. We need to talk.”

  “Where?”

  “How ’bout the parking lot outside Capitol Records in ten minutes?”

  That main wheel in her gut was talking to her again. “I’ll see you then,” she said.

  She closed the phone with an unsteady hand. Lit a cigarette and pulled onto the freeway. The traffic was moving smooth and steady through the gloom toward the Cahuenga Pass. Almost too steady. Her imagination was playing tricks with her. Feeding on something she couldn’t place. Connecting dots that might not be there. When she pulled into the lot, she spotted a Lincoln Town Car parked all the way back against the chainlink fence. On the other side of the fence was Vista Del Mar—a small road tucked away from downtown Hollywood and the exact spot where she had found her brother’s dead body so many years ago.

  Couldn’t be good.

  She got rid of the cigarette and climbed out of her car. As she crossed the empty lot and walked toward the Town Car, the rear door swung open and the interior lights switched on. Barrera was behind the wheel sitting beside a man she had never seen before. When her eyes flicked to the backseat, she froze.

  It was the chief. All three were waiting for her.

  She kept her eyes on them and started backing away. Then she finally turned and made a run for it. Barrera jerked the Town Car forward. Lena jammed her key into the ignition, fired up the engine, and floored it. When she hit Vine Street, she made a hard left and pointed the hood downhill into the congestion. But the Town Car was right behind her—tires screeching and pushing fast.

  She blew through the light at Hollywood Boulevard and gunned it, then checked the mirror. Barrera was closing in. She tried to think. Come up with a plan. She grabbed her phone and hit Rhodes’s speed dial number, waiting for him to pick up. It felt like an eternity. And she could hear the phone beeping through the ring. Someone else trying to break through. Her Honda was a stick shift. At this speed she couldn’t hold the phone and work the road at the same time. Rhodes finally picked up.

  “Where are you?” she said.

  “Venice.”

  “Stay there. Keep your cell on.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know yet. I’ll call as soon as I get there.”

  She threw the phone onto the passenger seat and grabbed the gear shift. The Town Car could easily outrun her on a straight track. Zigzagging her way over to La Brea, she finally hit the Santa Monica Freeway but lost sight of Barrera in the rearview mirror. There were too many headlights. Too much traffic and glare. She brought the car up to a hard ninety. As she wove through the lanes, she checked the mirror searching for a pair of headlights following her path. After a mile she thought she spotted them. But when the car rocketed past her doing a hot one hundred and twenty, it was another Honda, a lowrider with neon lights along the floorboards and a straight pipe out the back.

  She slid into the next lane, keeping her eye on the lowrider and following its course through the traffic. When she hit the Lincoln Boulevard exit, she made a sudden hard cut across three lanes and blew up the ramp. She checked the mirror again. The darkness and the mist. She’d lost them.

  She filled her lungs with air and exhaled, thinking that she needed a place to hide while she called Rhodes back and figured out what was going on. When she finally reached Navy Street, she checked her rearview mirror again and turned back.

  The fog was thicker here. Billowing off the Pacific over the buildings and streets and filling in the rough edges with more gloom.

  Lena cruised past the apartment and found a place to park around the corner. Then she pulled Jennifer Bloom’s keys out of her briefcase and legged it up the sidewalk and into the building.

  She could hear the TV from Jones’s apartment leaking into the foyer. People laughing and buzzers going off from some game show. She hadn’t seen him in the window from the sidewalk and she was glad. She hurried up the steps, unlocked the door, and pushed it open. As she switched on the table lamp in the foyer and leaned against the door, she thought about Barrera.

  She already knew what the word betrayal meant. The way it cut and chewed through your being. The way it tore everything up and burned everything down. She knew what it meant. What it felt like. The scars that it left behind. Still, she was having trouble catching her breath.

  She switched on the lights in the living room and bedroom. Erasing the darkness didn’t seem to help. As she started to walk out, she sensed something and turned back. There was something going on. Something out of place. She scanned the room and checked it against her memory. When her eyes zeroed in on the bedside table, she felt a chill flicker across her shoulder blades.

  The snow globe was missing.

  She glanced at the floor on the other side of the bed. Looked over at the chest of drawers. Tried to remember where it was the last time that she had been here. Snowflakes falling over Las Vegas.

  And that’s when she heard the noise. A floorboard creaking. Someone else was in the apartment.

  Lena eased out of the bedroom, moving silently through the entry way. When she reached the French doors, she stopped and peered through the glass into the living room. It took a moment for the image to register in her brain. She could feel the rush as she stared through the glass.

  It was him—wearing the leather jacket and the Dodger cap.

  The lost witness—tiptoeing his way out of the kitchen toward the window and fire escape with the snow globe in his hand.

  The thief with the guilty conscience who sent her the package and then tapped out the victim’s bank account with the stolen ATM card. Eighteen or nineteen with brown hair and pale skin. The thin and nervous type with dark circles under his eyes. The user loser who needed more cash for more stash and another hot load.

  Lena had walked in on a robbery. The witness hadn’t overdosed and wasn’t stretched out on a gurney at the morgue. The piece of shit had waited them out and picked his night. He was cleaning out the place.

  She turned the corner and stepped into the living room. When the kid spotted her, he dropped the snow globe, and made a run for the window. It was already cracked open, but appeared stuck. Lena raced across the room and grabbed him by his shoulders. Yanking him away, they tumbled back and hit the floor. The kid groaned and appeared panic-stricken. She could feel him trying to squirm out from beneath her, thrashing his arms and legs.

  But he was smaller than her. Lighter. Lena gave him a hard push, then rolled him over onto his back keeping him still with the weight of her body. She grabbed his hands and pinned them to the floor over his head. Then she reached out and pulled off the Dodger cap.

  A long moment passed. The two of them lying there eye to eye. Face to face.

  Lena suddenly became aware of the body underneath her. The long list of things that didn’t add up. The width of his hips and the smell of his skin. His brown eyes—big and wild and staring back at her with a certain reach.

  Releasing her grip
, she got to her feet. The witness didn’t move, looking up at her and panting. She could still hear Cava’s voice on the phone. Still feel the wheel inside her gut turning. She had missed something and it was big.

  She checked the face again. The body. The air in the room suddenly white-hot like a dirty bomb. She hadn’t found and captured the witness. Her eyes were locked on the victim.

  “You’re Jennifer Bloom,” she said. “And I’m investigating your murder.”

  48

  The shock wave was still reverberating. The fallout still playing with her core.

  Lena closed her cell phone after calling Rhodes and gazed at Bloom with utter amazement. She was thinking about the autopsy. The woman she had seen on the stainless steel gurney that had been cut up and dumped in the trash. The woman originally known as Jane Doe No. 99.

  She was trying to picture her face.

  The victim had been beaten. Disfigured. She remembered that her eyes had been spared, but not much else. That the sight of the decapitated head had been hard to look at. Yet, she seemed so vulnerable, it had been difficult for Lena to turn away.

  Identification had been made based on a theoretical reconstruction of her face, a physical description that fit like a glove, overwhelming circumstantial evidence, and more than one eyewitness who saw her at the Cock-a-doodle-do on the night of the abduction and murder. Although the DMV confirmed that her driver’s license was legit, certification that the thumb print on the license matched the print taken from the actual dead body was still pending. Lena remembered Rhodes telling her that it would take a week before they arrived and SID could begin their examination.

  “You’ll be okay,” Lena said to her. “Take my hand.”

  She pulled the young woman off the floor and helped her over to the couch. Bloom was clearly frightened, and Lena’s words didn’t seem to make any difference to her. As Lena thought about the body count, Bloom had every reason to still fear for her life. Tremell had offered all his resources to help find the witness. Cava had been watching her apartment. And Chief Logan had shut down the case and made it the number one priority on his Loose End List. Everyone of them had wanted to find the witness at all costs. Now Lena understood why.

  “You went out to the Cock-a-doodle-do with a friend,” she said. “Your friend was murdered. Who was she?”

  Bloom lowered her eyes. “Beth Gillman,” she whispered. “She was waiting for me in my car.”

  Lena heard the sound of footsteps through the door. They were moving down the hallway. She checked Bloom’s face, caught the edge, and stepped into the foyer. When she heard the tap, she peered through the peephole and unlocked the door. Rhodes hurried in and glanced at Bloom from a distance. Lena could see him making the connections. The shock as he got his first look and realized that their victim wasn’t a ghost.

  “Were you followed?” he whispered under his breath.

  Lena shook her head. “I lost them. A Lincoln. Who’s out there?”

  “Two guys in a black Audi. I couldn’t make out their faces. But it doesn’t look good. They’re waiting for something. Who was in the Lincoln?”

  A memory surfaced before she could answer. Jack Dobbs and Phil Ragetti had chased her down the hill last Sunday night in the rain, then innocently walked into Denny’s restaurant. The two former RHD detectives who got the boot for beating the life out of a murder suspect but somehow managed to escape jail time. She could remember the way they had looked at her when they got out of the black Audi. The recognition on their faces. Seeing them hadn’t been an accident, she realized. They had wanted her to see them. Both detectives had left the department three years before Lena was promoted to RHD. But Rhodes was there at the time and would’ve known them.

  “Jack Dobbs and Phil Ragetti,” she whispered.

  Something stirred in Rhodes’s eyes. “What about them?”

  “Ragetti drives a black Audi,” she said. “They followed me Sunday night. How do we get her out of here?”

  “Not through the front door.”

  Lena gave him a look and they entered the living room. Bloom read their faces and seemed all jacked up.

  “What is it?” she asked. “What’s going on?”

  “We’re not sure yet,” Lena said. “This is Detective Rhodes. Why don’t you tell us why you took your friend with you last Wednesday night.”

  She wanted to keep Bloom talking. Take her mind off what might be going on outside. Bloom appeared to buy it.

  “How much do you know about Dean Tremell and Anders Dahl Pharmaceuticals?” she asked.

  Lena moved to the window. “Your brother told me why you came here. We know about your son, and both of us have read Ramira’s transcripts. Fontaine and Tremell lied to push the drug onto the market when they knew that it wasn’t safe. We know you talked to Ramira and West.”

  “I’ve been listening to the radio,” Bloom said. “Everybody’s dead now. Everybody except for me and West.”

  “Why’d you take your friend with you?” Rhodes asked.

  “Justin Tremell wanted to meet there and talk. If it had been his father I would’ve blown it off. But Justin was different. I didn’t exactly trust him, but I wanted to hear what he had to say. I asked Beth to come with me and wait in the car. I didn’t think I’d be very long and I wasn’t. Justin was speaking for his father. They were making me an offer. Another bribe to not say anything and go away. But there was something about the place where we met—all these prostitutes walking in and out the door. When I asked him why he wanted to meet there, he wouldn’t answer me. I started to get paranoid, like maybe something was wrong. Like maybe I’d found out who these guys were but didn’t really know what they were. And so I left. I ran out to the parking lot. And that’s when I saw a man standing over Beth with a gun in his hand. It was dark, but I could see her body on the ground beside my car. She wasn’t moving and I didn’t know what to do. I found a place to hide and shot that video with my phone, but I was freaking out. All of a sudden I knew why Beth had been murdered. All of a sudden I knew that the guy who did it thought she was me.”

  Bloom covered her face with her hands, the memory still too vivid. Rhodes sat beside her on the couch.

  “You had blond hair,” he said. “The same color eyes. Roughly the same height and weight.”

  “She was waiting in my car. She’s dead because of me.”

  Lena had been listening with her back turned—staring out the window past the fire escape and looking for an anomaly. And she had found one hidden in the billowing clouds. She could see a man standing in the alley at the end of the building. The shape of his figure without any detail. She didn’t need a face or a name to go with the body to understand his purpose. The gun in his right hand said it all.

  She turned and shot Rhodes a quiet look. They were fucked. She tried to keep calm, keep Bloom talking while she thought about what to do.

  “Okay,” Lena said. “So what did you do after they left? You grabbed your friend’s purse out of the Dumpster and then what? Drove your car over to her place and hid out?”

  Bloom met her eyes. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”

  Lena ignored the question and kept cool. “Tell us what you did.”

  “Beth had a garage. I got your name out of the paper. Then I delivered that package to you with my driver’s license and the video clip. But I could see what they were doing. The money they deposited in my bank account and the stories on TV. I never touched their money. I only took what was mine. I knew what they were trying to make it look like. I didn’t come forward because I saw what they did to Beth and knew they’d do it again.”

  She was speaking quickly. Her voice tight as piano wire.

  “Makes sense,” Rhodes said. “As long as they thought you were dead, you thought that you had a chance.”

  “Did you tell anyone?” Lena asked. “Anyone at all?”

  She shook her head. “Not even my brother. Not Ramira, or West, or Fontaine. Beth’s murder was my fault. I coul
dn’t jeopardize anyone else. I couldn’t take the chance. And I didn’t think I needed to. You guys were saying that Beth was me. As long as you were investigating my murder, there was a chance you’d find them before they found me.”

  Lena traded looks with Rhodes. Bloom was a remarkable young woman. There was no reason to tell her that her friend had been beaten beyond recognition. No reason to mention that the man with the gun in the alley had a new buddy and that they had moved closer and were eyeing the fire escape. She drew her weapon from her belt and rocked the slide back. It was a .45 Smith & Wesson. She watched Rhodes check his Glock. Everything was copasetic. Everything tuned and amped up. There was no clean way to walk out of Bloom’s apartment. No easy exit. They’d have to cut their way out.

  “Why did you risk exposure by coming here tonight?” she asked Bloom.

  “Why did you guys just pull out your fucking guns? You’re scaring the shit out of me.”

  Lena noticed the snow globe on the floor and picked it up. As she handed it to the woman she realized that it wasn’t snow falling over Las Vegas. The flakes were actually miniature silver dollars. And the streets outside the Bellagio Hotel and Caesar’s Palace were knee-deep in money.

  “It was a risk,” Lena said. “Why did you take it?”

  Bloom shook the globe and gazed at the silver dollars falling out of the sky. “I made a mistake,” she said. “Everything was okay at Beth’s place until a few days ago. Then the phone started ringing at odd hours. I made a mistake and answered it one night. I was asleep and woke up and wasn’t thinking. They didn’t say anything, but they heard my voice. I knew that I needed to get out of here. My husband gave me the snow globe before he left for the war. It was the only thing I brought with me.”

  “You drove over in your car?” Rhodes said.

  Bloom nodded at him.

  “Where did you park?”

  “Out front.”

  Her words settled into the room. But only for a split second. Then someone tried to kick down the front door. They didn’t make it. The lock held, but Bloom screamed.

  “Get down on the floor,” Lena said.