Kill the Messenger

by Tami Hoag

  He walked away from the black-and-white without looking back, and returned to the plaza, where Metheny knelt on the ground, with Eddie Davis’s head in his big hands.

  “Is he alive?” Parker asked.

  “So far.”

  Metheny pressed a thumb against bullet holes on either side of Davis’s forehead. Diane’s shot had gone in one side and out the other, straight through the frontal lobes. Davis appeared to be surprised, but Parker couldn’t tell if he was actually conscious or not. Still, he was breathing.

  Metheny looked up at him. “I feel like the damn little Dutch boy plugging the dike. If I take my thumbs away, this guy’s brains are gonna run out.”

  “Eddie. Can you hear me?” Parker asked, leaning down to him. Davis didn’t respond. “Shit.”

  “That chick was a wild card, man,” Metheny said. “Did you see that coming?”

  “No,” Parker said. “I didn’t.”

  “I didn’t get a good look at her. Do you know who she is?”

  Parker didn’t answer. He didn’t know what to say.

  He stepped over Davis and went to Jace Damon. The kid was lying on his back, staring up.

  “Knocked the wind out of you?” Parker asked.

  The kid nodded.

  Parker kneeled down and helped him onto his hands and knees. Jace sat back on his heels and wheezed.

  “You shouldn’t have stepped that close to him,” Parker said. “I told you not to get close. I gave you the gun so you’d stay back from him. Of course, it wasn’t loaded. . . .”

  Damon turned his head and glared at him, mouthing the word “What?”

  “Jesus, I’d never give a loaded gun to a civilian. Get my ass fired,” Parker muttered. “Not that that won’t happen anyway. Metheny had your back.”

  The kid finally got his breath. “Who the hell is Metheny?”

  Parker nodded in his former partner’s direction. “I didn’t want you to know he was there. I didn’t want you glancing over at him, tipping Davis.”

  “Well, thanks for thinking about me,” Jace said. He struggled to get a deep breath. “I think I broke a rib.”

  He sat up a little more on his heels and opened his coat, revealing the light-colored Kevlar vest Parker had strapped him into. And thank God, was all Parker could think. The kid had taken the force of Davis’s blow with the knife, and could well have broken a rib, but the blade hadn’t penetrated the material of the vest, which was five times stronger than steel.

  “Just sit still and try to relax,” Parker told him as the ambulance came into sight. “We’ll get an EMT to check you out after they take care of your friend here.”

  He put a hand on Jace’s shoulder. “That was a really brave thing you did, Jace.”

  “For Eta,” Jace said. “Partly anyway.”

  Parker nodded. “I know. But it’s not your fault she died. That’s on Davis. His choice.”

  “But if I’d turned myself in—”

  “How about if Davis and Lowell hadn’t cooked up the blackmail scheme? How about if none of this had happened? How about if we could all fly to Mars and start over? There are a lot of what-ifs on that list before it gets to you.”

  The kid nodded, but with his eyes pointed at the ground, the guilt still weighing on him.

  “Jace,” Parker said. “You don’t know me. You don’t know I’m not just full of shit. But I’m telling you, you did what you believed you had to do through all of this. Not what was easiest or best for you. You did what you did, and you’re owning it. And I don’t know ten men who would be brave enough to do that.”

  “Jace!”

  The excited shriek arrived about a nanosecond before Tyler hurled himself at his brother.

  Parker leaned over and ruffled the boy’s hair. “Good work, Scout.”

  Tyler beamed up at him. “Me and Andi let the air out of the tires on that Lexus!”

  Parker turned to Andi, who shrugged and made a face, waiting for him to yell at her. Instead, he took a few steps away from the boys, and rested his hands on his hips.

  “Well, this is a hell of a mess,” he said.

  Kelly studied his face, sober as a judge. “Who’s down there, Kev? Phillip?”

  “Diane Nicholson.”

  “What? I don’t understand.”

  “Yeah, well, that makes two of us,” Parker said. He looked across the plaza as an ambulance arrived and EMTs piled out of it. “It looks like she hired Davis to kill Tricia, and she set up Rob Cole to take the fall.”

  “Oh, my God. Diane Nicholson? From the coroner’s office?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  He shook his head. He watched the paramedics swarm around Eddie Davis.

  “What the hell happened?” one of them asked. “Ice pick? Twin ice picks?”

  “Shot,” Metheny said. “Through-and-through.”

  The paramedic turned Davis’s head one way, then the other. “The poor man’s lobotomy.”

  “He won’t miss it,” Metheny said. “He wasn’t using that part anyway.”

  It was something Parker would have said himself, but the black humor every cop he knew used to diffuse the stress wasn’t there for him. Numbness had begun to set in. Thank God.

  Kelly touched his hand. “Kev? Are you all right?”

  “No,” he whispered. “I’m not.”

  And he turned and walked away.

  51

  Ruiz caught the call to the shooting. She showed up in a white suit and strappy sandals. Parker, sitting back against the hood of a black-and-white, didn’t have the energy to comment.

  She walked up to him, shaking her head in frustration. “What the fuck were you thinking?”

  “Shut up.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said, shut up,” Parker said calmly. “I don’t need a bunch of crap from you, Ruiz.”

  The no-bullshit sharpness of his tone set her back a step.

  “You put a civilian in harm’s way,” she said.

  “He’s not going to sue the city, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Parker said. “The kid had a stake in this. He wanted to do it for Eta. Despite all recent evidence to the contrary, there are a few people left in the world who know the meaning of honor and duty.”

  “Don’t bag on me, Parker,” she bitched. “You could be blackmailing the preppie killer. You could be up to your ass in drug money, for all we know.”

  “‘All you know’ doesn’t amount to much, does it?” he said. “Tell me, was Kyle standing right there when you called and tipped me on Pershing Square? Nice and close, so you could hang up the phone, turn your head, and give him a blowjob?”

  She didn’t answer, and that spoke volumes.

  “Who tipped Kyle?”

  Ruiz opened her handbag, took out a cigarette, and lit it. “I did,” she said on a stream of blue smoke. “Damon really did call for you.”

  “And you called Davis, so RHD could set up the whole thing,” Parker said. “In a public park at rush hour. An uncontrollable situation in an uncontrolled environment. I would say that trumps what I did.”

  He reached out and yanked the cigarette from her lips. “Don’t smoke at a crime scene, Ruiz. Haven’t I taught you anything?”

  He crushed the cigarette beneath the toe of his shoe, took it to a trash can, and threw it away.

  “Parker! I’m not done talking to you!” she said, doing the high-heel jog to catch up with him. “I need to get your statement. I have to file the preliminary report.”

  Parker looked at her like she smelled. “They couldn’t send a real detective?”

  “I’m on the rotation until my paperwork from IA comes through.”

  “Well, that’s your problem. I’ve said everything I have to say to you.”

  He started to walk away again, then hesitated. “That’s not exactly true.”

  Ruiz waited, stiffening for a tirade.

  “I doctor scripts for Matt Connors.”

  He might have told he
r he was a hermaphrodite. Her expression would have been the same. “What?”

  “My big secret,” Parker said. “I doctor scripts and serve as a technical consultant to Matt Connors.”

  “The movie guy?”

  “Yeah. The movie guy.”

  “Jesus!” she breathed. “Why didn’t you just tell us?”

  Parker smiled a bitter, crooked smile and walked away, shaking his head. In this town, he probably would have gotten a promotion if he’d let on he was connected in the industry. He hadn’t wanted the attention. All he had wanted from LAPD was a chance to make it back from purgatory, and to do it through his own sweat and brainpower.

  He could have held Renee Ruiz down and explained that to her nine thousand times, and she would never have understood.

  The bitter irony was, in fighting for his own resurrection, he had ultimately revealed the fall of a woman he cared about. Yin and yang. Everything in life came with a price.

  “I want my money back,” he mumbled as he approached Bradley Kyle.

  Kyle stood amid a tiny forest of evidence markers, trying to boss one of the SID people around. He turned and smirked at Parker. “You really screwed the pooch this time, Parker. Or is that a poor choice of words? I hear you and Nicholson—”

  Parker hit him so hard with a right cross, Kyle spun halfway around before he hit the dirt. Everyone stopped what they were doing, but no one made a move toward him.

  Parker turned to Moose Roddick and said, “All the paperwork on the Lowell homicide is in my trunk. Come and get it.”

  The news vans had rolled in. The choppers were swarming. They were just in time for breaking in live on the eleven o’clock news. But they wouldn’t have the story behind what had happened here. That shit would hit the fan tomorrow, and the feeding frenzy would begin.

  Rob Cole was about to get another fifteen minutes of fame. The Good Man Wrongly Accused would be set free. Or, from a more cynical standpoint, an idiot too stupid to escape being framed for murder was about to be let back into the gene pool.

  Parker didn’t know the whole story himself, but he was willing to bet Rob Cole was not the hero, and he knew there wouldn’t be a happy ending.

  He turned his cell phone on as he walked toward his car, and hit the button for voice mail. He had one message. Ito saying he had the photograph ready.

  52

  Diane sat on a chair in a front corner of the interview room, her feet tucked up, her arms around her legs, her cheek pressed to her knees. No makeup, no veneer of control. Parker had never seen anyone look more vulnerable. Not in the vulnerable way of a child who trusts, but in the way of a grown woman who knows better but has no defenses left.

  Parker closed the door behind him and sat on the edge of the table.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi,” she said in a voice so small and thin, it seemed to have come from another room.

  She had stretched the sleeves of her black sweater to the point that only the tips of her fingers showed. She used the sweater to dab at the tears that fell at random. Her gaze moved from point to point around the small white room, not lighting on anything for more than a few seconds. Not touching his face at all.

  “Are you cold?” he asked, already slipping off his jacket.

  It wouldn’t have mattered if she had said no. He wanted the excuse to touch her. He wrapped the jacket around her shoulders and touched her cheek with his fingertips.

  “Who’s watching?” she asked, looking across the room at the two-way mirror set into the wall.

  “No one. It’s just us. Do you have an attorney?”

  She shook her head.

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  “Kev, you don’t have to—”

  “It’s done.”

  She sighed and looked away. “Thank you.”

  “So . . . you hired Eddie Davis to kill Tricia Crowne-Cole, and set up Rob Cole to take the fall,” Parker said. Drained of energy himself, he didn’t think he could project his voice any farther than the next chair. “That’s a pretty harsh sentence for having a married guy hit on you.”

  She looked away and closed her eyes. The only sound in the room was the annoying buzz of the fluorescent lighting. It was late. Parker had gotten her shipped to Central Division before RHD could make a move. The territorial dispute was being left until morning. Spending the night in one holding cell was pretty much the same as spending the night in another. And no one was going to question her without an attorney present.

  “It’s just us, Diane,” he said. “I’m not here as a cop. Hell, I probably won’t even be a cop by this time tomorrow. I’m just here as me. Your friend.”

  “I play it through in my head,” she murmured. “It’s not me. I can’t believe it’s me in those memories. I’m too smart, too cynical. I’m too sharp a judge of character. I’ve listened to women friends cry about this guy or that guy, and the promises they made, and the excuses the women made to cover when none of it happened. And I would think, What’s wrong with her? How stupid is she? What kind of self-respecting woman would stand for that? How pathetic can she be?

  “And then I found out. It’s some kind of insanity. The intensity, the passion, the unbridled joy. It’s like a drug.”

  “What’s it?” Parker asked.

  “Love. The kind people write about, but no one really believes in. I always wanted to know what it was like to feel that, to have someone feel it for me.”

  “Cole told you he did.”

  “No one has ever made me feel the way you make me feel. No one has ever understood me the way you understand me. I’ve never loved anyone the way I love you.” Her mouth twisted in a bitter smile. “I know. I know. What’s wrong with her? How stupid is she? I look back now, and I say the same thing. How pathetic am I? But I believed everything he told me because I felt the same way. I said the same things, and I meant them. I wanted to believe he meant them too. I should have seen him coming a mile away.”

  She rested her head on her knees again, her eyes staring at nothing.

  “He’s an actor,” Parker said. “He’s been playing that role for a long time.”

  “The poor, misunderstood bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks,” she said. “Victim of his own popularity. Trapped in a loveless marriage. He’s finally found the love of his life. If only we could be together. But I was married . . . and he was married . . . and Tricia was ‘fragile.’ And then suddenly I wasn’t married . . . and things became difficult . . . and Tricia was practically suicidal, he said . . . and he had an obligation . . . and he had to sacrifice himself . . . and do what was right. . . .”

  She closed her eyes and the fluorescent lights hummed. Parker thought she might have fallen asleep, and he didn’t even care. It wouldn’t be long before everything changed, and she would be surrounded by people, and there would be no late-night chats, just the two of them in a room alone.

  Very softly, she sang a few bars of a song she’d once heard on the radio. “I never believed it could happen to me. Something like this only happens to dumb girls.”

  “Why kill Tricia?” Parker asked. “Why not Cole? He deserved it.”

  “You can’t know the rage I felt,” she whispered. “My marriage was already falling apart when I met Rob. I was vulnerable, lonely. He knew just how to prey on those feelings. And then, when Joseph died . . . The guilt was terrible. Not that I’d caused his death, but that I hadn’t been a very good partner, that I’d cheated him, and cheated on him. And Rob knew just what to do with those feelings too.

  “I trusted him. I gave him everything I was. How dare he take that gift and break it?”

  She was trembling. She squeezed her eyes shut, straining against an inner pain Parker knew he couldn’t imagine. He waited for the moment to pass with the sad patience of someone knowing nothing good was coming and there wasn’t anything he could do about it.

  “And then one day, I got in an elevator at the Crowne building. I was there . . . something to do with Joseph’s p
ension. And there was Tricia,” she said. “Just the two of us riding up to the highest floors in the building. And she stood there looking at me with this smug, evil, superior look on her face.”

  “She knew?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, laughing without humor. “She knew. She knew everything. She knew things she couldn’t possibly have known without having witnessed them happening.”

  Parker’s blood went cold as the implication of what she was telling him sank in.

  Diane’s mouth twisted in a bitter smile. “You see, I wasn’t a game just to Rob Cole. I was a game to them both.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Parker breathed. Nausea washed over him.

  Fat tears rolled like pearls down Diane’s cheeks. “And she said, in this voice I’d never heard before: ‘He always comes back to me.’ And there was nothing fragile about her.”

  Parker could picture the scene in his mind. Diane would have pretended not to react, because she was proud and controlled. While inside she would have shattered like glass.

  “A couple of days later I got a package in the mail. A videotape of me and Rob in bed together, him telling me all those things I wanted to hear, wanted to believe. Then there they were, the two of them—Tricia and Rob—reenacting that very same scene, line for line, and laughing about it afterward.”

  Parker’s stomach turned at the cruelty.

  Diane unfolded herself from the chair and began to move around, her arms banded around her as if she were in a strait jacket.

  “Something inside me just broke. It was as if some hidden, festering wound had opened and poisoned me,” she said. “I started drinking. A lot. I was in a bar one night crying to the bartender. There was a man two stools down, listening. He told me he could help me, for a price.”

  “Eddie Davis,” Parker said.

  “I think about it now, and I can’t believe any of that happened. I can’t believe I hired a killer, and I came up with a plan, and I went through with that plan. It was all like a weird nightmare.