by Tami Hoag
“I don’t know,” she said softly. “Maybe a disgruntled client, maybe a family member of a victim in a case Lenny won. Maybe someone wanted something here Lenny didn’t want to give up.”
Her gaze landed on a credenza at the far side of her father’s desk. A cube-shaped black safe that was maybe two feet square squatted in the cabinet, the door open. “He kept cash in that safe.”
“Did you check the safe, Parker?” Kyle asked, the Man In Charge.
Parker turned to Jimmy Chew. “Jimmy, did you look in that safe when you got here?”
“Why, yes, Detective Parker, I did,” Chew said with false formality. He didn’t so much as glance at Kyle. “When my partner and I arrived at nineteen hundred hours and fourteen minutes, we first secured the scene and called in Homicide. While looking around the office, my partner observed the safe was open and that it appeared to contain only documents, which we did not examine.”
“No cash?” Parker asked.
“No, sir. No money. Not in plain sight anyway.”
“I know there was money,” Abby Lowell said with an edge in her voice. “A lot of Lenny’s clients preferred to pay him in cash.”
“There’s a surprise,” Jimmy Chew muttered, retreating.
“He never had less than five thousand dollars in that safe—usually more. He kept it in a bank bag.”
“Was your father having problems with any of his clients?” Kyle asked.
“He didn’t talk to me about his clients, Detective Kyle. Even scum-sucking dirtbag attorneys have their ethics.”
“I didn’t mean to imply otherwise, Ms. Lowell. I apologize on behalf of the department if anyone here may have given you that impression. I’m sure your father had ethics.”
And he probably kept them in a jar at the back of a cupboard, next to the pickled onions and some ten-year-old canned salmon, never to be opened, Parker thought. He’d seen Lenny Lowell at work in the courtroom. Short on scruples and ethics, Lowell would have impugned the testimony of his own mother if it meant getting an acquittal.
“We’ll need to see his client records,” Kyle said.
“Sure. As soon as someone rewrites the Constitution,” Abby Lowell returned. “That information is privileged.”
“A list of his clients, then.”
“I’m a student, not stupid. Unless a judge tells me I have to, you get nothing confidential out of this office.”
Color began to creep upward from Kyle’s starched white collar. “Do you want us to solve your father’s murder, Ms. Lowell? Or is there some reason you’d rather we didn’t?”
“Of course I want it solved,” she snapped. “But I also know that I now have to look out for my father’s clients and for the best interest of his practice. If I just hand over privileged information, that could open my father’s estate to lawsuits, compromise ongoing cases, and could very well keep me from my chosen profession. I don’t want to be disbarred before I even take the bar exam, Detective Kyle. This has to be done by the book.”
“You don’t need to compromise yourself, Ms. Lowell. Names and addresses aren’t privileged,” Parker said calmly, pulling her attention away from Kyle. “And it’s not necessary for us to access your father’s files. The criminal records of his clients are readily available. When was the last time you spoke with your father?”
He saw more value in trying to get Abby Lowell on his side than in bullying her into an adversarial position. She wasn’t some weak, hysterical woman, terrified of the police, which was what Kyle wanted her to be. She had already dug in her heels, put a chip on her shoulder, and dared him to knock it off.
She rubbed a slightly trembling manicured hand across her forehead and let a slightly shaky sigh escape, showing a tiny crack in the armor. “I spoke with Lenny around six-thirty. We were supposed to meet for dinner at Cicada. I got there early, had a drink, called him on my cell phone. He said he might be a little late,” she said, her voice tightening, her dark eyes filling. She blinked the tears back. “He said he was waiting for a bike messenger to pick something up.”
“Did he say what?”
“No.”
“Late in the day to call a messenger.”
She shrugged. “Probably something he needed to get to a client.”
“Do you know what service he used?”
“Whichever could pick up and deliver the fastest and the cheapest.”
“If we can find out which service, their dispatch office will have the address the package was going to, maybe a vague description of what was in it, and the name of the messenger they sent,” Parker said. “Do you know if the messenger ever arrived?”
“No. I told you, when I last spoke with Lenny, he was waiting.”
Parker glanced over at the safe, frowning.
“That would be stupid,” she said, reading his mind. “Like you said, his dispatch office will have the messenger’s name.”
Which could very well not be real, Parker thought. Bike messengers weren’t known for being stable, family types. They tended to be loners, oddballs, living a hand-to-mouth existence. The way they raced the downtown streets—balls-out, no fear for life or limb, no regard for themselves or anyone else—it wasn’t a stretch to imagine more than one of them was hopped up on something.
So some down-on-his-luck junkie messenger shows up for a package, gets a look in Lowell’s open safe, decides to elevate his social standing, kills Lowell, takes the money, and vanishes into the night, never to be seen again. The guy could be on a bus to Vegas while they stood around talking about it.
“It’s not my job to draw conclusions, Ms. Lowell. I have to consider all possibilities.
“Who called 911?” he asked, turning again to Jimmy Chew.
“The ever-popular anonymous citizen.”
“Anything around here open or inhabited?”
“Not on a night like this. There’s a 76 station and a bail-bonds place down the street, on the other side. And the 24/7 Laundromat.”
“Go see if anyone at the Laundromat has anything to say.”
“They’re closed.”
“I thought you said it was called 24/7.”
“It’s raining,” Chew said, incredulous. “Me and Stevie cruised past around six-fifteen. The place was locked up tight. Besides, they quit being open twenty-four after their night clerk was robbed and raped six, eight months ago.”
Kyle smirked. “Great neighborhood you work, Parker.”
“Killers are killers, no matter what neighborhood you’re in, Bradley,” Parker said. “The only difference is, you can’t make the news off the murders here.”
He turned back to Abby Lowell. “How were you notified of your father’s death, Ms. Lowell?”
She looked at him like she thought he might be pulling something on her. “One of the officers called.”
Parker looked at Chew, who held up his hands in denial, then looked at Chew’s partner, who shook his head.
“Someone called you. On your cell phone,” Parker said.
Abby Lowell’s eyes bounced from one man to another, uncertain. “Yes. Why?”
“What did the caller say to you?”
“That my father had been killed, and could I please come to his office. Why?”
“May I see your cell phone?”
“I don’t understand,” she said, hesitantly pulling her phone out of a pocket in her trench coat.
“LAPD wouldn’t tell you something like that over the phone, Ms. Lowell,” Parker said. “An officer or detective would have come to your residence to give you the news.”
Her eyes widened as the implication sank in. “Are you telling me I was on the phone with my father’s killer?”
“What time did you get the call?”
“Maybe twenty minutes ago. I was at the restaurant.”
“Do you have a call list on that thing?” Parker asked, nodding toward the phone she clutched in her hand.
“Yes.” She scrolled through a list of commands and brought up the scr
een that listed calls received. Her hand was trembling. “I don’t recognize the number.”
“You didn’t recognize the voice?”
“No. Of course not.”
Parker held his hand out. “May I?”
Abby Lowell handed him the phone. She couldn’t jerk her hand back from it quickly enough, as if it had just been revealed to her that the thing was in fact a live reptile. Parker checked the number, hit the button to call it back, then listened as it rang unanswered on the other end.
“Oh, my God,” Lenny Lowell’s daughter breathed. She pressed a hand to her lips and blinked away the gathering tears.
Parker turned back to Chew. “Track down the owner of the Laundromat. Find out who was working and what time they closed. I want that person located. I want to know if there was a single living being in proximity of this office between six-thirty and seven-fifteen. If a rat crawled by the back door and someone saw it, I want to know.”
“Roger that, boss.” Chew flipped Kyle’s smirk back at him as he went to speak to his partner.
Parker went to the vic’s desk. The old Rolodex was closed. He flipped the cover up with the tip of a pen, then turned to the Latent Prints tech. “Cynthia, I want every print you can lift off this thing, inside and out. Every frigging card, but priority on this one.”
Abby Lowell’s. Beneath her name was her home number, her cell number, her address.
“Go ahead and cover the bases for us, Parker,” Kyle said tightly as he stepped in beside Parker behind the desk. “But don’t get too cozy. If the word comes down from the mountain, you’re out.”
Parker stared at him for a second, then a new voice called from the front office. “Parker, please tell me your DB had a heart attack. I need a nice simple ‘natural causes’ so I can go home. It’s raining.”
Diane Nicholson, coroner’s investigator for the County of Los Angeles, forty-two, and a long cool drink of gin to look at. She took no shit and no prisoners—an attitude that had earned her the fear and respect of cops all over the city. No one messed with a Nicholson crime scene.
She stopped just inside the door to Lowell’s private office and looked down at Lenny Lowell. “Oh, shit.” This with more disappointment than horror. There wasn’t much that shocked her.
She looked at Parker with flat eyes, giving away nothing, then looked at Kyle and seemed offended at the sight of him.
“Parker is the detective of record,” she announced. “Until I hear differently from someone more important than you, Bradley, I talk to Parker.”
She didn’t wait for a response from Kyle. What he might have to say was of no interest or consequence to her. She worked for the coroner’s office. The coroner might jump to the bark of big dogs in Parker Center; Diane Nicholson did not.
She pulled on a pair of latex gloves and knelt down to begin her examination of the body.
Lenny Lowell’s pants pockets yielded forty-three cents, a Chiclet, and a laminated, faded, dog-eared pari-mutuel ticket from a horse race at Santa Anita.
“He carried it for luck.”
The voice that had been so strong and forceful earlier was now barely audible. Parker looked at Abby Lowell, watched her eyes fill again as she stared at the small piece of red cardstock in Nicholson’s hand. She didn’t try to blink the tears back this time. They spilled over her lashes and down her cheeks, one fat drop at a time. Her face was white; the skin appeared nearly translucent, like fine porcelain. Parker thought she might faint, and brushed past Kyle to go to her.
“The ticket,” she said. She tried to force a sardonic smile at some private joke, but her mouth was trembling. “He carried it for luck.”
Parker touched her arm gently. “Is there a friend you can stay with, Ms. Lowell? I’ll have an officer drive you. I’ll call you tomorrow and we’ll set up a time for you to come into the station and talk more about your father.”
Abby Lowell jerked her arm away without looking at him, her gaze nailed to the floor, to her father’s wingtips. “Don’t pretend concern for me, Detective,” she said bitterly. “I don’t want your phony sympathy. I’ll drive myself home.”
No one said anything as she walked away and hurried down the hall and out the back door.
Nicholson broke the silence, slipping Lenny Lowell’s good-luck charm into an envelope in case it might turn out to be relevant later on. “I guess he should have cashed it in while he had the chance.”
6
Jace worked his way back to Lenny Lowell’s neighborhood through alleys and between buildings, avoiding streetlights and open spaces, his heart racing every time a car crossed his field of vision. He had no way of knowing where Predator had gone. He had no way of knowing whether or not the son of a bitch was half a block away, parked at the curb, rifling through the messenger bag for the packet that had to have been his objective in the attack—and discovering that it wasn’t there, that he hadn’t finished his job.
It seemed to take for-fucking-ever to walk The Beast back to familiar territory. He tried to balance the mangled bike up on its good front wheel and at the same time balance his own weight against the bike like a crutch. His wrenched ankle was throbbing. He had at least recovered his boot, but the swelling in his ankle prevented him from tying the laces tight. If he were a gazelle, like on those nature shows Tyler soaked up from the Discovery Channel, the next lion to come hunting would take him down.
He came to the 76 station from the alley, propped The Beast up against the back wall of the building, then leaned around the corner and peered out of the darkness toward the island of fluorescent light surrounding the gas pumps. No one was buying gas. There were few cars on the street. Those that drove past went with purpose, going somewhere and determined to get there on what was in their tank.
It was still raining. Jace was shaking with cold and fear, adrenaline and exhaustion. He felt weak and faint and on edge, all at once. Home was still a long walk away. As soon as he could find a pay phone that worked, he would call the Chens and ask to speak to Tyler. There was no phone in the Damons’ three rooms above the fish market. Jace couldn’t afford one, and had no one to call on a regular basis anyway.
He wished that wasn’t true tonight. It would have been a damn good night to call a friend for a ride. But he had no friends, only acquaintances, and it seemed best not to drag anyone into the mess in which he found himself. Instinctively, he thought in terms of isolation, keeping his life as uncomplicated by other people as was possible. He sure as hell could have done without knowing Lenny Lowell tonight.
His stomach rumbled and started to cramp. He needed to put something in it, needed fuel for what the rest of the night might bring. Lenny Lowell’s twenty-dollar tip was in his pocket. He could buy himself a soda and a candy bar. Unlike a lot of the messengers, Jace never stored money or anything of personal value in his messenger bag. He knew too well that anything could be taken from him at any time.
An overhang along the front of the booth offered shelter from the rain. A thin, dark guy in an orange turban sat in the booth behind the bulletproof glass. He startled at Jace’s sudden appearance, grabbed his microphone, and said with a crisp British accent: “The police are just down the block.”
As if he had already called them in anticipation of being robbed.
“A Snickers and a Mountain Dew.” Jace dug two damp, crumpled bills out of his pocket and stuck them in the pay tray.
“I have no more than fifty dollars in the till,” the man went on, his voice sounding tinny and distant through the cheap speaker. He pointed to the sign stuck to the window among the many warning stickers. Exposure to gas fumes could cause birth defects. Cigarettes caused cancer but if a person didn’t care and wanted them anyway, 76 stations would ask for an ID, in accordance with the law. The night clerk had no more than fifty bucks in the cash register.
“And I have a gun.”
He pulled a big-ass handgun out from under the cluttered counter and pointed it at Jace’s face, even as he snagged the two d
ollars from the tray with his other hand.
“Isn’t that glass bulletproof?” Jace asked.
The clerk scowled. “Yes, you cannot shoot me.”
“I don’t have a gun,” Jace said. “And if you try to shoot me, the glass will stop your bullet, maybe even bounce it back into your face. Did you ever think of that?”
Jace spread his hands where the clerk could see them. “I’m not robbing you anyway. I just want a Snickers and a Mountain Dew. Come on, man. It’s raining.”
From the corner of his eye Jace caught the watery red intermittent flash of a police strobe down the street, and his pulse kicked up a beat. The car wasn’t moving. Nor were any of its companions parked around the same small chunk of real estate.
“What’s going on down there?”
Maybe Lenny had called the cops when he figured out the package hadn’t been delivered. Maybe the envelope was stuffed with cash and everyone assumed the bike messenger had taken off with it. Maybe there was even now, as Jace stood trying to buy a candy bar from a guy in an orange turban who pointed a gun at him, an APB out on him, and LAPD cruisers were trolling the streets in search of him.
The clerk put his gun down on the counter, as casually as if he were putting a cigarette on the lip of an ashtray. “A murder,” he said. “I listen to the scanner.”
Jace felt the blood rush out of his head.
“Who?” he asked, still staring at the congregation of vehicles the next block down, on the other side of the street.
“Maybe you,” the clerk said.
Jace looked at him, a weird current of déjà vu going through him. Maybe he had been murdered? Maybe he was dead. Maybe he hadn’t gotten away. Maybe Predator’s bullet had gone through him, and this surreality he found himself in was the afterlife. Maybe this guy was the guardian at the gate.
“Maybe you are the killer,” the clerk said, then laughed as if he hadn’t three minutes ago assumed Jace was there to rob him.
“Who was killed?” Jace asked again. The shaking he had in part attributed to hunger was growing stronger, but he’d already forgotten his empty belly.
