by Scott Frost
“Mom,” Lacy said. “Mom.”
The tunnel began to open. Light began to filter in.
“Lacy,” I think I said.
The light began to come faster and then the image of a face appeared right in front of mine. It was soft at first, out of focus.
I said, “Lacy,” again.
My eyes blinked and the softness of the face began to sharpen. I could see the mouth move as if talking, but I heard nothing. I blinked again and tried to force my eyes to focus.
“Lieutenant,” Harrison said.
I slipped out of the tunnel and found myself on the floor of the hallway, propped against the wall. Harrison’s hand was on my shoulder, steadying me so I wouldn’t fall over onto my side.
“Can you hear me, Lieutenant?”
I looked at Harrison, and then up and down the hallway trying to orient myself. My eyes stopped on the heavy oak door of the closet.
“Oh, yeah,” I whispered, finally placing myself. I remembered the sound of the door hitting my face.
“Are you all right?”
The floor seemed to float like water for a moment, then it settled.
“They made very solid houses back then.” I looked at Harrison. “I heard my daughter’s voice . . . she was . . .”
Harrison looked at me and shook his head. “It’s just me. I’m sorry I couldn’t get through the back door. I had to come through a window.”
I looked at the floor and my gun was still there.
“He left my gun,” I said, half-surprised.
“Did you get a look at him?”
I tried to replay the events in my head, but it came slowly. It was like trying to put tape back in a cassette that had spilled out onto the floor. I remembered the door, the handle digging into my ribs.
“I dropped my gun when I hit the door handle. . . . Then the other door hit me.”
The side of my face throbbed and I felt unsteady. I remembered the smell of varnish in my mouth. I reached up and touched my lip, and my fingers came away bloody.
“He said he was sorry,” I said. I was angry. The last thing you want from someone bashing your brains in is kindness. “How long have I been sitting here?”
“You’ve been drifting in and out for a few minutes. I checked out front, he was already gone,” Harrison said. “If he drove away I didn’t see a car.”
My head cleared as if I had just stepped out of a heavy fog.
“I saw him,” I said. “He stepped into the shaft of light from the doorway.”
“Can you ID him?” he asked.
I reached out, picked up my Glock, and slid it back into my belt holster. I then took hold of Harrison’s shoulder and raised myself to my feet.
“It was Sweeny,” I said.
Harrison looked at me as if trying to decide if my judgment had been affected from the knock on the head.
“From the bungalow? You’re sure?”
I nodded. “I think he was looking for something; he rifled a desk.”
“I’ll go call it in.”
“Shit.” A voice came from the front door.
We both turned and saw a woman holding a packet of information from a funeral home.
“I saw your car with the radio. I assume you’re policemen.”
“Mrs. Finley,” I said.
She nodded. She had short dark hair, pale skin, and wore black jeans and a black sweater that, if worn anyplace other than Southern California might be taken as a statement of mourning. She was younger than her late husband. I put her in her mid-thirties. Beneath the exhausted look of someone who had dealt with death for two days, she had the face of a free spirit, pretty, hanging on to youth with every muscle in her body.
She looked into the living room and saw the contents of the desk spread out on the floor. “What happened?”
“You’ve been burglarized.”
Her shoulders sank ever so slightly, and she took a deep breath. “That’s great.”
“It’s not unusual for this to happen after a tragedy. They follow things like that in the paper,” I said, not wanting to draw too much attention to it.
She looked down at the folders from the funeral home she was holding in her hands.
“I guess they know you won’t be around,” she said angrily.
“I’m Lieutenant Delillo. I’m investigating your husband’s murder. This is Detective Harrison. I would have talked to you yesterday, but that wasn’t possible.”
Mrs. Finley walked in and tossed the packet from the funeral home onto the dining room table with the rest of the junk mail that had piled up. She sat down and looked at me. I took a chair on the other side of the table.
“You have blood on you,” she said, looking flushed.
I reached up and wiped it off my chin.
“We surprised him,” I said.
“Looks like you’re the one who was surprised, Lieutenant.”
She looked at me for a moment, her eyes reflecting someone who had used up all the emotions she had stored and had nothing left. What could possibly surprise a person whose husband had just been gunned down?
“I’m sorry. Can I get you something?” she asked.
“I’m fine,” I lied.
“You don’t look fine. Trust me, I’m an expert on the subject,” she said.
She got up and walked into the kitchen, returning a moment later with a damp towel wrapped around ice cubes.
I thanked her and placed it gingerly against the side of my face.
“Have you found the man who killed my husband?” she said.
I lifted the towel from my face. “No.”
“Is that to be expected?” she asked.
I wanted to drift away into the cool ice I was holding against the side of my face. I wanted to find my daughter, I wanted to sleep, I wanted to be anywhere but right where I was. For the first time in my entire career, the thought entered my mind that my mother may have been right about me becoming a cop. I glanced at Harrison, who saw in my eyes that I wanted him to take it.
“Did anything different happen to your husband over the last couple of weeks?” Harrison asked.
“I don’t understand,” Mrs. Finley said.
“Did he seem upset or talk about something unusual at the shop?”
She shook her head. “I don’t believe so.”
Throbbing pain rolled across my cheek like a wildfire. It was all I could do to stay upright in the chair.
“Why are you asking these questions?” Mrs. Finley asked. “I thought my husband was killed in a robbery.”
“We’re exploring every possibility,” Harrison said.
“What other possibilities are there?”
“This happens in every homicide, Mrs. Finley,” I said. “It’s part of the process of every investigation. We look into everything, regardless how small.”
“I wouldn’t know,” she said in resignation.
“Do you know an employee of the shop named Sweeny?” I asked.
“I don’t think . . .” She thought for a moment, then shook her head. “No, I never met him. He must have been a temp.”
I stood up and motioned toward the door to Harrison.
“Would you let us know if anything is missing after the burglary, or if you find something you don’t expect?” I said, handing her my card.
She nodded without interest.
“You can keep the towel, Lieutenant,” she said.
I thanked her and started out the door, then stopped when I looked out into the yard.
“Why is the yard in the shape it is?” I asked, turning back to Mrs. Finley.
She looked at me, puzzled by the question, then made the connection to what I was asking.
“Oh . . . that,” she said. “Daniel’s philosophy was changing.”
Harrison looked over to me and shrugged in confusion.
“I’m not following you,” I said.
“He was getting rid of the lawn, going organic . . . native grasses.”
I gla
nced down at the doormat.
“Think green,” I said.
Mrs. Finley’s eyes moistened with tears as she nodded. I turned and walked out of the house and into the yard. The sun appeared unnaturally bright after being in the dark house. When I slipped on my sunglasses the frame touched the side of my face where the door had hit me, and sent another wave of pain through my head. I put the ice back against my face and the pain began to pass.
“Does it seem odd to you that in a business with only three employees she didn’t know Sweeny?” Harrison said.
I glanced back at the house. “Not if she was lying.”
“You think she was lying?”
“The other two employees are women. How did she know Sweeny was a man?”
I glanced one more time around the yard and realized there was one other thing that troubled me. He was changing his philosophy, going green, the same conversion my daughter had just “leaped” into with both feet and a spray bottle. I searched my memory trying to come up with something that would dismiss this entire line of thinking as the feverish worries of a mother who might just have suffered a concussion. I missed the mark. I remembered the carved wooden sign on the front door of Breem’s flower shop instead. GREEN IS OUR COLOR.
“Goddamnit,” I whispered to myself.
“What?” Harrison asked.
“I’m thinking too much. It’s nothing.”
My heart skipped a beat. There was no such thing as coincidence, not when murder was involved. I didn’t want to believe it, couldn’t believe it. Every dogma eventually runs smack into the reality of the exception to the rule. This had to be it, must be it. The dots we had been connecting were not going to include my daughter. Throw a stick in California you’ll probably hit an environmentalist. Forget it.
“You don’t look so good, Lieutenant,” Harrison said.
“I’m a little light-headed.”
I walked out of the yard and over to the passenger side of the car.
“You better drive,” I said.
“I think you should see a doctor,” Harrison said.
Absolutely, I thought. I wanted to disappear in a nice fat hospital bed, drift away in Demerol. I took the ice off the side of my face and looked at Harrison.
“So he can tell me I have to lie in bed for forty-eight hours? I don’t think we have that kind of time.”
I tossed him the keys. “Unless you want to lead the investigation by yourself?”
Harrison’s eyes did a little dance and then he shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
I checked my watch; it was twelve-thirty. The day wasn’t half over and we had already found another body, my daughter’s life had been threatened, I was entertaining thoughts that she was somehow remotely connected to the rest of the investigation, and I had been hit in the side of the head with a slab of oak from the Arts and Crafts movement.
I got in the car and sank back into the seat. Harrison walked around and slid in behind the wheel. The jolt from the closing of the door went through my head like another shot from Sweeny.
“Sorry,” Harrison said, seeing the corners of my mouth wince from pain.
“Call Fraser and get them over here to execute the search warrant. If Sweeny didn’t find what he was looking for, I want to.”
“Where we going?”
“My daughter’s school. I’m supposed to meet her there at . . .” I checked myself. “She’ll be there at one.”
7
PRINCIPAL PARKS WAS in his late forties, with the trim build of a runner. He favored the pressed collars of Brooks Brothers to the casual dress most of his teachers wore. Whatever high-minded tone he may have contemplated using with me vanished the moment I walked into his office and he saw my bruised face and the blood on my shirt collar. Nothing kills a party like blood.
He stood dumbfounded for a moment like a passing motorist staring at a wreck.
“Have you had an accident?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I was hit with a door.”
He seemed to have trouble getting his mind around what I assumed was a first for a parent conference.
“A Craftsman door,” I said, trying to sharpen his understanding.
He sat silently for a moment, then seemed to have a breakthrough.
“I love Green and Green,” he said, as if we were on a walking tour of Pasadena’s most famous Arts and Crafts houses and he was trying to impress me with his knowledge of these two architects. The absurdity of his words struck him a second later and he added, “If you would like to do this another time . . .”
“This is the only time I have,” I said.
His eyes looked as if they were pleading for me to leave his office until it dawned on him I wasn’t moving.
“Did you bring Lacy?” he asked.
“No one has seen my daughter since you sent her home,” I said.
“I don’t understand.”
“What part of ‘No one has seen her’ do you not understand?” I replied.
He shifted uneasily in his chair.
“I’m sure it’s just a misunderstanding.”
I wanted to agree with him, I wanted to agree with him more than I’ve wanted anything in my entire life.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
Parks stared at me like someone who had drifted off the map with no idea where he was headed. Rather than talk, he sat strangely quiet, shuffling papers and occasionally glancing at my gun as we waited for Lacy.
Ten minutes after one, he finally spoke up.
“Is she often late?” he asked nervously.
In truth she was chronically late, but I didn’t think that was it, no matter how much I wanted it to be.
“No,” I said.
My imagination began to outpace actual events, leading me down paths every mother has visited in nightmares, but thankfully very few ever visit in reality.
Why had she spoken to me when I was drifting in and out of consciousness at Finley’s? Was she reaching out to me? Was she calling for help? I began to search madly for meaning in things where none could possibly be found. I replayed the phone conversation I had had with her in my office, examining every word for something guarded or hidden. I tried to picture how much gas was in her car, what clothes she had chosen that day, what coffee she had ordered at Starbucks, as if they would all lead to her walking through the office door.
Five minutes passed and Parks began checking his watch. Two minutes after that he cleared his throat and tentatively spoke.
“Maybe we should discuss a few things before she arrives.”
It was nearly twenty after. Lacy was never that late.
“She isn’t coming,” I said almost involuntarily. The sound of the words coming out of my mouth startled me as if they had been said by someone else. What remained was why? Why wasn’t she here? A cop immediately assumes the worst. But I was a mother now clinging to every other possible explanation. That was unthinkable. I took out my cell phone and called home. With each ring I would silently repeat, “Answer it, answer it, answer it,” like a mantra.
The machine picked up.
“If you’re there, honey, please pick up,” I said. “Lacy, pick up the phone, come on, it’s me . . .”
I waited until I ran out of tape, then I retrieved the messages in case she had called. There were three more calls from reporters, and then a voice that sent chills through me.
“Your daughter is a cunt.”
It sounded middle-aged, white, no detectable geographical origin. The residual fog that had engulfed me since I was hit by the door was instantly gone. I turned the phone off. To Park’s credit he sensed that I had not gotten good news on the other end of the phone.
“Maybe we should talk to some of her friends, in case she said something to one of them before leaving.”
I looked at him and realized I hadn’t heard a word he had spoken.
“I’m sorry . . .” I said.
“Her friends . . . why don’t we talk to them?”
I nodded. Yes, that was a good idea. She must have said something. Lacy always had something to say.
“Do you know which friends she would possibly confide in?”
Everything came crashing down.
I looked at Parks and shook my head. I had just failed my daughter again.
“I don’t know any of her friends. . . . I should . . . but I . . .”
Parks stepped in. “Maybe just a first name? We can figure out the rest.”
I looked at him for a moment and realized that this was not the first time he had had this conversation with a parent who has just discovered her child is a stranger. I felt pathetic. I had no excuses.
I frantically searched every crevasse in my memory and finally stumbled across a name.
“Carrie,” I said. “She knows someone named Carrie.”
Parks buzzed his secretary, who walked in a moment later.
“Karen, we need to find a senior or a junior named Carrie.”
“There’re three. Only one is a senior—Carrie Jacobson.”
“Would you find out what class she’s in and bring her here.”
As she walked out I called Officer James and told her that Lacy had not shown up at school.
“I’ll give the surrounding departments a description of her car,” she answered.
She then tried to find something encouraging to say. “You know how kids are, Lieutenant. She’s probably at a movie.”
“I have a voice recorded on my phone machine,” I said.
There was a pause on the other end of the line as she played that out.
“If it comes to that it might be useful, Lieutenant, but for right now—”
“I’m not a civilian, Officer,” I said.
“No . . . but you are a mother.”
I turned the phone off as Carrie Jacobson was escorted in by the secretary. I thought I would be able to tell just by looking at her if she was a friend of my daughter’s, but quickly realized I was clueless again. She wore no makeup, had two piercings in her left ear, and blond hair with a streak of lime green down the right side. The soles of her tennis shoes looked to be four inches high.
