The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17

by Lisa Scottoline

  “How you doon?” he said, accent heavy. I knew he didn’t expect, even want, a reply. He understood English fine but didn’t have any confidence in his ability to speak it.

  I shrugged and unfolded the New York Times, my daily indulgence, a buck from the box outside the door. I could, and usually did, spend hours working my way through each day’s issue, even before I began the crossword.

  I didn’t get far this morning, though. About 3:30 A.M., just as Sandy came back on duty, a TV truck pulled up outside. An attractive young black woman, buried inside a thick down parka, got out. The parka fell lower on her thigh than her skirt did.

  She came inside. The truck kept running, and I could see the silhouette of the driver, his head against the headrest. I recognized the woman as a reporter on the morning news, which I usually watched before going to bed. She did the weather reports, too.

  She flagged down Sandy as she was carrying the coffeepot on a circuit of the counter. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

  Sandy put the pot back on the warmer and took a step back. “What you want?” She was beginning to do the nose thing again.

  “I understand Nancilee Harper was in here last night before she was killed?”

  I waited for the reporter’s notebook to appear, but the woman kept her hands in her parka pockets. Sandy looked at the floor, shook her head, and walked into the back room.

  The reporter glanced around the room, appraising the rest of us, before approaching Notebook Guy. I heard her repeat the question to him. Sandy peeked through the door just as the guy replied with a word salad, the way he does when he’s been palming his medications. I winked at Sandy.

  Unfortunately, the reporter persisted by moving down one table to the old couple. Vern and Viv knew who I was. They knew about Iris. The reporter sat down at his invitation, and the three of them talked for a long time.

  Sandy finally had no choice but to come out of the office when a four-top of security guards came in. When I saw the old guy and the reporter looking at me, then at Sandy, I threw a few dollars on the counter and left. Sandy watched me go as she dealt a tray full of waffles to the guards.

  Against my better judgment, I watched the early news later that morning. They led with the girl’s report. She did a standup with Vern and Viv in front of the restaurant.

  “This is Tayndra Stephens. Behind me is the Waffle House restaurant on Staley Road, where twenty-four hours ago young Nancilee Harper was abducted, in front of eight witnesses who did nothing to stop her kidnapper. An hour later, she was dead.”

  She skewered, skinned, and hung the old couple, who seemed oblivious to the callous impression they were making on the audience. All the time they talked, Sandy was visible in the background, moving back and forth in the same forty feet of behind-the-counter space that now circumscribed her life. The reporter made sure to work my name into the report.

  “Among the witnesses was Tim Parker, ex-husband of the waitress you see behind me, Sandy Parker. Only three years ago, Parker was charged with drunken driving and negligent homicide in the death of their only daughter, Iris, who, ironically, was also twelve. The charges were later dropped. Neither Parker nor his ex-wife would comment for this report.”

  Jesus.

  I was seriously mulling over the bars that I knew were open and quiet at 8 A.M. when Sandy called.

  “You saw the news,” she said.

  “Yeah. Good decision, refusing that interview.”

  “Thanks. Tony got here a little bit ago.” I could hear her twisting the cord again.

  “The detectives say he’s somebody she met online. They found a bunch of messages on her computer from a chatroom, going back a couple of months, from a boy named Torrey, who claimed to live on a horse farm near Springfield. The plan was his cousin would pick her up here and take her to his estate.”

  I smacked the table. “It was a scam, right? One of those trolls?”

  I heard her strike a match, the sipping sound of a cigarette. “The bald guy has a record. He did time for molesting his own daughter. There was a court order prohibiting him from using the Internet. That did a fuck of a lot of good, huh?”

  “They catch him?” Although Iris was only three years gone, I couldn’t quite remember what it was like, worrying about your daughter in a world where there was a boogeyman behind every door.

  “Yeah, in some strip club in Whitehall. Tony said he was throwing himself a going-away party. He’d been passing rocks of crack around like they were jelly beans, had himself quite a posse.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah, boy. You want to get some breakfast? I’m off at eight.”

  I begged off, claiming I’d taken a Vicodin and was ready to crash. In truth, I was in pain, but not the kind a painkiller would help with. I was afraid to leave the house, since the bars were calling to me again. Also, Texaco had left half a bottle of cheap merlot in the fridge, although I’d asked him when he moved in to keep any booze in his room, and I wanted to reserve my option to uncap it.

  The knock on the door an hour later caught me standing at the fridge with the door open, staring at the wine. I slammed the door closed and limped over to the peephole. Sandy stood there, her cheap pile jacket wrapped around her black and yellow uniform. I let her in.

  “Jesus,” she said, “what a pigpen.” She smelled faintly of grease and flour. The room looked messy in a way you only notice when someone you care about enters. Papers stacked against the wall, CDs in disorder, lint on the couch. The windows hadn’t been washed for at least a decade.

  She fixed a pot of coffee; out of habit, I suppose. “You know what I don’t get?” she said as she filled the pot with water.

  I played along. “What’s that?”

  “Where the hell are the girl’s parents? How could you walk away from your own baby? What do they expect to find in their lives that they think is going to be better than sleeping next to your own baby?” She lit a cigarette, although she knew I didn’t allow smoking in the apartment. “And the grandmother. What kind of cunt lets her kid go to a Waffle House in the middle of the night to meet some pervert?”

  When Iris was killed, we were on our way to visit Sandy at work. On her break.

  She walked to the back door, pulled the blind to one side, and looked across the backyard fence like Texaco did, watching a truck upend one dumpster after another. I pretended to resume the crossword I’d given up on twenty minutes before.

  When the coffee was ready, she poured herself a cup and took a chair across from me at the kitchen table. She picked up the metro section of the paper and began to leaf through it, licking her finger before each page turn.

  I took some relief from the page interposed between us. Then I heard the clunk of metal on the linoleum tabletop.

  I reached over and lifted the paper a few inches, until I could see the revolver. I recognized it as the one Sandy had shown me one night, when the manager forgot to lock his bottom desk drawer. A .38, five-shot, cheap. I could see the shells in the cylinder.

  “Have you lost your mind?” I said.

  She picked up the gun by the end of the grip, letting it dangle in front of my face.

  “So what—you’re Jack Ruby all of a sudden?” I said.

  “Who?” She slugged back the rest of the coffee in her cup.

  “Never mind.” I thought to myself I used to know what to do with her. I didn’t anymore.

  “You owe me,” she said, swinging the gun like a hypnotist’s watch. “You owe me this.”

  “You want me to walk into the police station and murder this guy? I owe that to you?”

  She shook her head as though I’d made a bad joke. “No, asshole. I expect you to kill Grandma. Tony promised me the bald guy’s going to get what’s coming to him. She’s the one that’s going to walk away.”

  Sandy cocked the trigger. “She was supposed to look out for the girl. Instead, she went partying. The bald guy was the boogeyman. There’s a boogeyman under every bed. Anybody know
s that. But that’s why we’re on this earth, right? To stand between our kids and the bad guys?”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Right?” she said again, challengingly. She stuck the barrel in my face. “Right?”

  MICHAEL CONNELLY

  A Fine Mist of Blood

  FROM Vengeance

  The dna hits came in the mail, in yellow envelopes from the regional crime lab’s genetics unit. Fingerprint matches were less formal; notification usually came by e-mail. Case-to-case data hits were rare birds and were handled in yet a different manner—direct contact between the synthesizer and the submitting investigator.

  Harry Bosch had a day off and was in the waiting area outside the school principal’s office when he got the call. More like a half a day off. His plan was to head downtown to the PAB after dealing with the summons from the school’s high command.

  The buzzing of his phone brought an immediate response from the woman behind the gateway desk.

  “There’s no cell phones in here,” she said.

  “I’m not a student,” Bosch said, stating the obvious as he pulled the offending instrument from his pocket.

  “Doesn’t matter. There’s no cell phones in here.”

  “I’ll take it outside.”

  “I won’t come out to find you. If you miss your appointment, then you’ll have to reschedule, and your daughter’s situation won’t be resolved.”

  “I’ll risk it. I’ll just be in the hallway, okay?”

  He pushed through the door into the hallway as he connected to the call. The hallway was quiet, as it was the middle of the fourth period. The ID on the screen had said simply LAPD data, but that had been enough to give Bosch a stirring of excitement.

  The call was from a tech named Malek Pran. Bosch had never dealt with him and had to ask him to repeat his name twice. Pran was from Data Evaluation and Theory—known internally as the DEATH squad—which was part of a new effort by the Open- Unsolved Unit to clear cases through what was called data synthesizing.

  For the past three years the DEATH squad had been digitizing archived murder books—the hard-copy investigative records—of unsolved cases, creating a massive database of easily accessible and comparable information on unsolved crimes. Suspects, witnesses, weapons, locations, word constructions—anything that an investigator thought important enough to note in an investigative record was now digitized and could be compared with other cases.

  The project had actually been initiated simply to create space. The city’s records archives were bursting at the seams with acres of files and file boxes. Shifting it all to digital would make room in the cramped department.

  Pran said he had a case-to-case hit. A witness listed in a cold case Bosch had submitted for synthesizing had come up in another case, also a homicide, as a witness once again. Her name was Diane Gables. Bosch’s case was from 1999 and the second case was from 2007, which was too recent to fall under the purview of the Open-Unsolved Unit.

  “Who submitted the 2007 case?”

  “Uh, it was out of Hollywood Division. Detective Jerry Edgar made the submission.”

  Bosch almost smiled in the hallway. He went a distance back with Jerry Edgar.

  “Have you talked to Edgar yet about the hit?” Bosch asked.

  “No. I started with you. Do you want his contact info?”

  “I already have it. What’s the vic’s name on that case?”

  “Raymond Randolph, DOB six, six, sixty-one—that’s a lot of sixes. DOD July second, 2007.”

  “Okay, I’ll get the rest from Edgar. You did good, Pran. This gives me something I can work with.”

  Bosch disconnected and went back into the principal’s office. He had not missed his appointment. He checked his watch. He’d give it fifteen minutes, and then he’d have to start moving on the case. His daughter would have to go without her confiscated cell phone until he could get another appointment with the principal.

  Before contacting Jerry Edgar at Hollywood Division, Bosch pulled up the files—both hard and digital—on his own case. It involved the murder of a precious-metals swindler named Roy Alan McIntyre. He had sold gold futures by phone and Internet. It was the oldest story in the book: there was no gold, or not enough of it. It was a Ponzi scheme through and through, and like all of them, it finally collapsed upon itself. The victims lost tens of millions. McIntyre was arrested as the mastermind, but the evidence was tenuous. A good lawyer came to his defense and was able to convince the media that McIntyre was a victim himself, a dupe for organized-crime elements that had pulled the strings on the scheme. The DA started floating a deal that would put McIntyre on probation—provided he cooperated and returned all the money he still had access to. But word leaked about the impending deal, and hundreds of the scam’s victims organized to oppose it. Before the whole thing went to court, McIntyre was murdered in the garage under the Westwood condominium tower where he lived. Shot once between the eyes, his body found on the concrete next to the open door of his car.

  The crime scene was clean; not even a shell casing from the nine-millimeter bullet that had killed him was recovered. The investigators had no physical evidence and a list of possible suspects that numbered in the hundreds. The killing looked like a hit. It could have been McIntyre’s unsavory backers in the gold scam or it could have been any of the investors who’d gotten ripped off. The only bright spot was that there was a witness. She was Diane Gables, a twenty-nine-year-old stockbroker who happened to be driving by McIntyre’s condo on her way home from work. She’d reported seeing a man wearing a ski mask and carrying a gun at his side run from the garage and jump into the passenger seat of a black SUV waiting in front. Panicked by the sight of the gun, she didn’t get an exact make or model of the SUV or its license plate number. She’d pulled to the side of the road rather than following the vehicle as it sped off.

  Bosch had not interviewed Gables when he had reevaluated the case in the Open-Unsolved Unit. He had simply reviewed the file and submitted it to the DEATH squad. Now, of course, he would be talking to her.

  He picked the phone up and dialed a number from memory. Jerry Edgar was at his desk.

  “It’s me—Bosch. Looks like we’re going to be working together again.”

  “Sounds good to me, Harry. What’ve you got?”

  Diane Gables’s current address, obtained through the DMV, was in Studio City. Edgar drove while Bosch looked through the file on the 2007 case. It involved the murder of a man who had been awaiting trial for raping a seventeen-year-old girl who had knocked on his door to sell him candy bars as part of a fundraiser for a school trip to Washington, D.C.

  As Bosch read through the murder book, he remembered the case. It had been in the news because the circumstances suggested it had been a crime of vigilante justice by someone who was not willing to wait for Raymond Randolph to go on trial. Randolph was intending to mount a defense that would acknowledge that he’d had sexual intercourse with the girl but state that it was consensual. He planned to claim that the victim offered him sex in exchange for his buying her whole carton of candy bars.

  The forty-six-year-old Randolph was found in the single-car garage behind his bungalow on Orange Grove, south of Sunset. He had been on his knees when he was shot twice in the back of the head.

  The crime scene was clean, but it was a hot day in July and a neighbor who had her windows open because of a broken air conditioner heard the two shots, followed by the high revving and rapid departure of a vehicle in the street. She called 911, which brought a near-immediate response from the police at Hollywood Station, three blocks away, and also served to peg the time of the murder almost to the minute.

  Jerry Edgar was the lead investigator on the case. While obvious suspicion focused on the family and friends of the rape victim, Edgar cast a wide net—Bosch took some pride in seeing that—and in doing so came across Diane Gables. Two blocks from the Randolph home was an intersection controlled by a traffic signal and equipped wit
h a camera that photographed vehicles that ran the red light. The camera took a double photo—one shot of the vehicle’s license plate, and one shot of the person behind the wheel. This was done so that when the traffic citation was sent to the vehicle’s owner, he or she could determine who’d been behind the wheel when the infraction occurred.

  Diane Gables was photographed in her Lexus driving through the red light in the same minute as the 911 call reporting the gunshots was made. The photograph and registration were obtained from the DMV the day after the murder, and Gables, now thirty-seven, was interviewed by Edgar and his partner, Detective Manuel Soto. She was then dismissed as both a possible suspect and a witness.

  “So, how well do you remember this interview?” Bosch asked.

  “I remember it because she was a real looker,” Edgar said. “You always remember the lookers.”

  “According to the book, you interviewed her and dropped her. How come? Why so fast?”

  “She and her story checked out. Keep going. It’s in there.”

  Bosch found the interview summary and scanned it. Gables had told Edgar and Soto that she had been cruising through the neighborhood after filling out a crime report at the nearby Hollywood Station on Wilcox. Her Lexus had been damaged by a hit-and-run driver the night before while parked on the street outside a restaurant on Franklin. In order to apply for insurance coverage on the repairs, she had to file a police report. After stopping at the station, she was running late for work and went through the light on what she thought was a yellow signal. The camera said otherwise.

  “So she had filed the report?” Bosch asked.

  “She had indeed. She checked out. And that’s what makes me think we’re dealing with just a coincidence here, Harry.”

  Bosch nodded but continued to grind it down inside. He didn’t like coincidences. He didn’t believe in them.

  “You checked her work too?”