“A witness saw him at your apartment the night Anya disappeared.”
He wouldn’t meet Davie’s gaze. “I wouldn’t know anything about that. I wasn’t home Saturday night.”
Vaughn scanned the living room and adjoining kitchen. “Where’s your inventory? All I see is one computer.”
“I’m low on product at the moment.”
“Who else was Anya sleeping with?” Vaughn said.
“Nobody. Before me there was just Gallway.”
“How do you know?” Davie said.
“That’s what she told me and I believed her.”
Lucien seemed sincere, but Davie knew men sometimes anesthetized their insecurities with chemicals and denial.
“Mind if I have a look at your computer?” Vaughn said.
Lucien bolted toward the table and closed the lid of his laptop. “Yes, I do mind.”
“I can call a judge and get a warrant,” Davie said, “or you can give Detective Vaughn permission to check the date and time Ms. Nosova wrote the letter. What’s the harm if you have nothing to hide?”
Lucien paused a moment to weigh the pros and cons of the offer. “Okay. Just don’t screw up my files.”
While Vaughn searched the computer’s hard drive, Lucien gave consent for Davie to explore the rest of the apartment and collect anything she needed for DNA comparison. She grabbed a handful of evidence envelopes from the bag Vaughn had brought from the car and headed down the hallway. Lucien seemed torn between watching Vaughn and monitoring Davie. He eventually stationed himself in the hallway between the two of them.
Neither Anya nor Lucien appeared adept at housecleaning. The apartment had only one bathroom and judging from a hairy fringe attached to the toilet bowl at the water line, the place hadn’t been cleaned since Thomas Crapper filed his first patent. Toothpaste oozed from a tube onto the countertop. The medicine cabinet held over-the-counter meds but no drugs, not even prescriptions. Two toothbrushes lay on the counter.
Davie poked her head into the hall. “Hey, Mr. Lucien. Which one of these toothbrushes belonged to Ms. Nosova?”
“The red one.”
“You ever use it?”
“No. That’s gross.”
“Anybody else been in your bathroom since Saturday?”
“Just me.”
Davie gloved up and dropped the red toothbrush into a paper evidence bag, hoping it might contain enough saliva for DNA testing.
At the end of the narrow hallway, she entered a small bedroom. Taped to the walls in random order were red construction-paper hearts that looked like a child had made them for a grade school Valentine party. It reminded her of the three-by-five cards plastered to the walls of John Bell’s living room. She pulled back the covers on the double bed but found no visible bloodstains on the sheets or mattress.
Men’s clothing occupied most of the closet space. Hanging at one end was what appeared to be the tank top Anya wore in Bell’s snapshot and a pair of jeans that looked too big for a slender woman like Anya Nosova. Pink-flowered flip-flops rested on the closet floor. Anya must have brought more outfits than that when she moved to L.A. from Ukraine. Davie wondered what had happened to them.
On the low-slung dresser was a brush that contained long blonde hairs. Several appeared to have roots attached. SID would need at least a hundred of them for accurate testing, preferably from different areas of Anya’s head. Davie doubted there were enough for that, but she pulled the hairs from the brush and dropped them into a paper bindle. Then she folded the bindle and dropped it into a paper evidence bag, along with the brush.
A search of the dresser revealed a stash of men’s T-shirts, socks, and a couple of sweaters. Tucked in a corner of a drawer, Davie found several pairs of women’s underwear wrapped around a collection of heart-shaped collectibles, including a small candle and a handkerchief embroidered with a trio of hearts. Davie wasn’t sure where a person could buy a woman’s handkerchief these days. Maybe Anya had brought it to the US from her home in Kiev. There was also a business card for Inky Dink Tattoos in Venice. The owner had one of those Scandinavian names impossible to pronounce: Karen Skjelstad.
Davie studied the heart-themed items cradled in her hand and the paper hearts taped to the wall. She wondered if they spoke of a young girl’s naïve faith in romance or something darker—a woman with a prison tat and a drug-dealer boyfriend who died knowing love was just an illusion.
Davie photographed the wall collage. Then she bagged the heart items and returned to the living room just as Vaughn was closing the lid of Lucien’s laptop.
“The note is time-stamped just after seven p.m. last Saturday,” he said, “the day Nosova disappeared. Our wit says she left the apartment at eight, so she could have typed it.”
Davie stared at Lucien. “Where were you Saturday night?”
Lucien collapsed onto the sofa. “I took my mother to dinner and a movie on Saturday. I left my apartment at about three and slept at her house in Simi Valley that night. I was bummed about Anya, so I stayed at my mom’s house until yesterday afternoon. I swear I never saw Anya again.”
Davie wrote down his mother’s name and phone number so she could verify his alibi.
“Where are Anya’s clothes?”
“She didn’t have much when she moved in. Her old apartment was burglarized. I was going to buy her new stuff, but she didn’t like to go shopping. I got her a new cell phone, though. The old one was stolen.”
Davie stood at the kitchen counter looking through a pile of mail. “Who paid for her braces?”
He seemed confused, as if he’d never considered the question before. “I don’t know. She had them when I met her.”
“And where was that?”
“At Café Brew in Venice.”
Davie held up the Inky Dink card. “Is this where she got her tattoo?”
He shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Where did she get the money for a tat?”
“Not from me. I hated it. Told her it made her look like a lowlife.”
Davie showed him the bag of heart-themed items. “Where did Anya get these?”
“Bought them, I guess. She had a thing for hearts.”
“Mind if I take them for evidence?”
“Go ahead.”
“Are any of Anya’s things missing?”
He inhaled deeply and then blew out the air. “A black cocktail dress and a red coat. She must have been wearing them the night she left. A red heart-shaped purse too. Beaded. And a locket, shaped like a heart. She never took that off, not even in bed.”
Vaughn changed the subject to keep Lucien off balance. “Why did you file the missing person report in Devonshire Division?”
He buried his head in his hands. His shoulders trembled. “Like I told you, I went to my mom’s place on Saturday. I tried to call Anya all night and all day Sunday, but she didn’t pick up. I was worried. Mom told me to report it to the police. Devonshire was the closest station to her house.”
Vaughn pulled a tissue from a box on the counter and let it float into Lucien’s lap. “Did your mommy know she was about to become a grandma?”
Lucien wiped his nose with the tissue. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Come on, Mr. Lucien,” he said. “You must have known your girlfriend was pregnant. That’s what you wanted, right?”
Lucien sat in silence, as if digesting the words. “I didn’t get her pregnant.”
Vaughn looked like his bullshit meter had just overloaded. “Don’t tell me. You had a vasectomy.”
“I had mumps when I was eighteen. It blew out my gonads. My mom said having children was overrated, so I was glad when Anya told me she didn’t want them, either.”
Davie glanced at Vaughn. Bell had told them Lucien wanted a child but Anya didn’t. Somebody was lying.
&
nbsp; A few minutes later, Lucien located the phone number for Anya’s father in Kiev and they headed back to the car.
“Let’s drive to Venice and interview the tattoo shop owner,” Davie said.
“No use both of us spending all night doing paperwork. You talk to Karen Skajello or Skajellabad or however the hell you pronounce her name. I’ll go back to the station, book the evidence, and find Troy Gallway. I’ll also ask RACR to track down a Russian translator. ”
Vaughn was right. They couldn’t afford to waste time. Finding Gallway was a priority. She was confident the Real-Time Analysis and Critical Response Division could find a translator among the department’s nearly ten thousand ethnically and culturally diverse officers.
Fifteen minutes later, she dropped her partner at the front door of the station and headed to Venice.
11
Venice Beach was second only to Disneyland as L.A.’s biggest tourist destination. By the time Davie arrived, the flotsam and jetsam of society’s fringe had washed onto the boardwalk and were hustling a busload of Japanese tourists. Con artists, panhandlers, and psychics pitched their services to the uninitiated. Local shop owners hawked T-shirts and L.A. souvenirs made in China.
A homeless junkie slumped against the building. Mylar strips hung from his watch cap like a carwash for heads, which Davie guessed he needed, from the look of his matted hair.
“Hey, pretty lady,” he said. “I could use a bite to eat. Can you help me out?”
She stopped in front of him. “You know I’m a cop. Right?”
He cocked his head, as if listening to a sound only he could hear. “Sure. But that doesn’t mean you don’t feel for a war vet down on his luck.”
“What war is that, sir? The war on drugs?”
“Grenada.”
Davie continued walking. “There’s a shelter down the street. Maybe they’ll give you lunch and a more creative sales pitch.”
“It’s okay if you’re a little short today,” he shouted after her. “Jesus loves you anyway.”
His blessing triggered a deep racking cough. Davie figured it was God’s warning that neither name-dropping nor begging would get this junkie any closer to the pearly gates. She wondered if redemption were even possible for a drug addict circling the drain.
Maybe it was the flicker of intelligence in his eyes that hinted at the man he once was or maybe it was just because he’d called her pretty, but she stopped and walked back to where he was sitting. She pulled out a five-dollar bill from her ID-card holder.
“Here,” she said. “Don’t spend this on drugs. Okay?”
“I’m not going to lie to you, pretty lady. I’ll do my best, but I can’t promise.”
Davie rolled her eyes as she walked toward the pink neon Inky Dink Tattoos sign and headed up the narrow flight of stairs. Framed photos of skin art lined both sides of the walls, mostly skeletons with ghoulish smiles, lethal-looking snakes, scorpions, and fire-breathing dragons. As she opened the door, she heard a bell tinkle, a gentle sound that seemed incongruous in the company of all those moody reptiles.
The waiting room was dressed in gunmetal gray walls and black leather chairs that looked expensive even in the dim light. Behind a three-panel partition, a reclining chair and a massage-type table stood empty. A dozen or so tattoo needles hung from a metal rod on the wall above a shelf holding bottles of colored ink.
“Today’s your lucky day. I just had a cancellation.”
Davie turned toward the voice. A woman sat on a chair, wearing an orange do-rag tied over her electric blue hair. Her neck was unadorned, exposing skin as pale and rich as clotted cream. Inked on her right arm was a koi swimming in a pool of lotus flowers. On the left arm was a geisha with a flirtatious smile just visible above her fan. The woman had a brown tabby pinned down on her lap. If the nail clipper in her right hand was any clue, the cat was about to get a manicure.
“I’m not here for a tattoo.” Davie pulled the Inky Dink business card from her pocket and pointed to the name. “Is this you?”
“It’s pronounced Shellstad,” she said, “just so you don’t embarrass yourself.” The woman’s gaze swept Davie’s black pantsuit, stopping at the bulge of the Smith & Wesson under her jacket. “My bad. I should know a girl never covers her body art. I can see now the only thing you have under that polyester is a gun and a badge.”
Davie doubted the woman’s gift for identifying synthetic fabric would lead to clues in Anya Nosova’s death, but she decided to reserve judgment. She pulled the victim’s photo from her notebook.
“Do you recognize this woman?”
Skjelstad glanced at the snapshot as she rested her forearm over the cat’s neck and squeezed its right front paw between her thumb and forefinger. “Yeah. Anya Nosova. Strange little chick. What did she do?”
Davie thought it interesting that the woman immediately assumed Anya had done something wrong. “Strange how?”
Skjelstad acknowledged Davie’s unresponsiveness with a shrug. “She used to sit on the bench in front of my shop, staring at the ocean. One day I went out and told her I was going to charge rent if she didn’t buy something. I was joking, but she started to cry.”
“Did you do her tattoo?”
Skjelstad kissed the cat’s head and squeezed the clipper. A piece of nail took flight and landed on the floor. “I have a bad habit of taking in strays, so I invited her in. After that, she stopped by almost every day. She thought my art was genius. She told me her mother worked for the Louvre in Paris. She wanted to set up an exhibition of my designs.”
Anya had told John Bell that her mother was a dancer with the Bolshoi. Davie doubted she was also a curator in a famous museum. Somebody had a faulty memory or else Anya was a compulsive liar.
“Did you take her up on the offer?”
Skjelstad chuckled. “Are you kidding me? The Louvre? She was playing me, but I didn’t care because she was good at it, a real charmer. One day business was slow so I offered to give her a freebie.”
“Why a spiderweb? That’s a prison tat. It usually means the person killed somebody.”
“I told her it would give some people the wrong idea, but she insisted.”
“Did she say why?”
Skjelstad hesitated. “You got some sort of ID?”
Davie showed Skjelstad her department ID and also handed her a business card. The woman studied the card. When she looked up, her eyes were moist.
“This says you’re a homicide detective. The girl’s dead, isn’t she?”
Davie nodded. “I hope you can help me find the person who killed her.”
Skjelstad didn’t respond right away. She finished clipping the nails on one paw and started on the other. Both she and the cat seemed restless.
“I got the impression Anya hooked up with some bad people in L.A. I don’t know the details, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she had a long list of folks she wanted dead. Maybe the spiderweb was just credit in advance.”
“Did she mention any names?”
She tucked a wisp of blue hair under her do-rag. “But she nearly jumped out of her skin every time my shop door opened. I told her to call the cops if somebody was hassling her, but I don’t think she ever did.”
“Did she tell you she was pregnant?”
“She didn’t have to. She was skinny like you, only taller. She wasn’t that far along but her baby bump looked like an olive stuck in a straw.”
“Who was the father?”
Skjelstad snipped the last two nails. The cat jumped to the floor and headed toward its food dish, whirring like a margarita blender. “I just know it wasn’t her boyfriend, because she told me he was shooting blanks.”
Anya must have lied to John Bell about Andre Lucien pressuring her to have kids because she already knew he was sterile. Maybe she was playing Bell to get his sympathy, because she knew he w
as attracted to her. Anya seemed to have a knack for telling people what they wanted to hear, just like her fib to Skjelstad. Lying with flattery was a common tool of sociopaths and survivors.
“Anything else you remember?”
Skjelstad shook her head. “I’ve known a few clients who’ve been murdered. Some of them deserved to die, but not Anya. I hope you get the bastard who killed her.”
Davie hoped so too.
The junkie was gone when Davie left the shop, probably on the nod in an alley somewhere courtesy of her five bucks. She made her way back to the car and headed for the station.
12
Rags dropped the five-dollar bill from the pretty-lady cop into his backpack and headed down Pacific Avenue toward his go-to newspaper box near the beach. He had told her the truth: he might use the money to buy drugs, because he had a King Kong habit for Mexican black tar heroin that eclipsed fear or common sense. Brown Sugar. Horse. Caca. His need for the drug was nearly as vast as his bad luck.
Cold air seeped into the joints of his fingers, making them stiff as he jimmied the lock on the coin box of the newspaper stand. He brushed the coins into his palm—a disappointing three dollars and twenty-five cents—not even close to the money he’d need to buy heroin.
Rags used to read the paper, but he was losing his vision. Even when he squinted, he couldn’t see the small print anymore. Maybe someone at the homeless shelter could fit him with a pair of glasses. He needed twenty-twenty to see the evil in a man’s eyes.
He thought about grabbing a couple more newspapers to protect his chest from the cold, because surviving winter, even in sunny California, meant dressing in layers. After careful consideration, he decided to keep the paper he was already wearing. It had a color photo splashed across the front page—men wearing business suits and phony smiles. It reminded Rags he had to protect himself against the forces of evil.
The coins dropped into the bottom of his backpack with a muted jingle. Rags preferred to shoot up alone because life on the street had taught him to distrust people in general and drug addicts in particular, but his need for a fix coupled with his current monetary shortfall had forced him to look for business partners.
Pacific Homicide Page 7
