“So you think her birth mother should just get away with what she did?”
Lisbet’s voice softened. “No,” she said. “But when you find her, and I know you will, I wonder if you’ll be as certain about what justice is or isn’t as you lead her away in handcuffs. I think what you’ll find is a young woman living in a hell of her own making, a hell that she’ll have to live with until the day she dies.”
“What I find too often are crocodile tears passing for the real thing. I am not good with the idea of supposed remorse paying for a crime. What works for me is punishment.”
“I can understand why you would want that. I hope you can also understand why in the future I don’t want to be used to further your investigations.”
“No problem.”
Both of us fell silent. Wounded pride kept me from saying anything else.
After a few seconds, and an eternity, Lisbet said, “Before I talked to Sylvia I had planned to call you to say what a wonderful time I had last night.”
“It’s still the same number.”
“But will anybody be home?”
It was a good question. Had I already checked out of our relationship even before it had begun? I might have been able to smooth things over then, but I didn’t. I put the ball back in her court-or maybe it was just the gauntlet.
“I guess you’ll have to call to find out.”
“Good-bye, Michael.”
“Adios,” I said.
I did a lot of muttering during the drive out to the desert. I was in a foul mood, and my partner had to listen to me vent.
“She doesn’t understand that it’s my job. And when you do the job right it’s not tea and crumpets. If I dangled her as bait in front of that reporter, and I’m not exactly saying that’s what happened, I did it because this is a homicide investigation.”
I took my partner’s silence as tacit agreement.
“I am looking for a murderer, dammit. My job is police work, not social work. I have to do whatever it takes to make an arrest.”
What I was saying sounded right to me, but it felt wrong. My motives had been anything but pure. Lisbet had seen through my ploy.
“Besides, shouldn’t she want to help me? I mean if something was there between the two of us-if it was real, that is-shouldn’t she want to stand by me?”
I sighed.
The drive east was relatively free of traffic, but the ride home promised to be a bear. Every weekend Las Vegas gets in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand visitors from LA. We would be part of Sunday’s return caravan.
The winds were kicking up, which made my foul mood that much worse. I hate it when Ellis Haines is right. The weather pattern had Santa Ana written all over it.
“Like my dad once told me, ‘If she’s stupid enough to leave, then you have to be smart enough to let her go.’”
My father had said that back when my high school girlfriend broke up with me. His words hadn’t made the event any less painful then, and they didn’t help now. Someone was bowling in my gut and using my ribs as pins.
“This too shall pass,” I said.
Words don’t impress dogs. They’re a foreign language to them. My partner knew what lay behind the facade, and he tried to reassure me by nuzzling my neck with his muzzle. I reached back with my hand, gave him a pat, and decided not to bullshit him anymore. We rode in silence. He stayed close to me, and every so often one of us touched the other.
With every minute that passed I knew that the divide between Lisbet and me was growing. I knew I should call her back. I thought about what I would say. But that was as far as I could bring myself to go.
Arriving at the cemetery was almost a relief. Men don’t like to address their feelings. Emotions make us feel helpless. My job gave me something to do, a task to perform, a reason to move. I needed that.
There was no one around, so I let Sirius walk the grounds with me. The desert winds can be fierce, and nothing stirs them like a Santa Ana condition. Swirling winds pelted my face with granules of sand and dirt. I knew it was only going to get worse.
Camera in hand, I went and joined the waiting waifs at the Garden of Angels, but at first I couldn’t bring myself to click away. I stood for a minute, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to pray or wanted to apologize. I felt the hurt in my throat and swallowed hard.
Damn feelings again.
I started taking pictures. When you look at the world through a viewfinder, it doesn’t hurt as much.
Most of my shots were of Rose’s cross. That was why I was here. I wanted a poignant reminder of her life on the front page of the University Times. That might make them wonder about Rose’s mother and remember something. Lisbet had been right. I hadn’t wanted the readers to think about the dead baby so much as I wanted them to think about her mother. I wasn’t asking them to behold the rose so much as I wanted them to think about the thorn.
Of course the oversized CSULA sweatshirt might just be my wild goose chase. The sweatshirt could have belonged to a sibling, or a friend, or maybe Rose’s mom had bought it at a thrift shop for a buck in order to hide her burgeoning belly.
I kept clicking anyway. Occasionally, my lens wandered, and I found myself looking at another name on another cross. Or I focused on a gravesite with a toy car, or a doll.
Leaning against Rose’s grave marker was a white feather, a small offering left by one of the doves. The swirling winds had driven the feather to this spot, where it looked as if it had found refuge. I wanted to believe it was a sign and took several close-up shots. I knew the feather wouldn’t be able to hold out long against the wind, so I picked it up and placed it in my pocket. Maybe I was hoping the feather would bring me peace in much the way a four-leaf clover is supposed to bring luck. Or maybe I’d contract avian flu.
When you take something, you should give something back. Head lowered to the wind, I trudged back to the car and went through the change drawer. As luck would have it, I found a shiny, newly minted penny. Maybe it wasn’t as good as finding a penny from heaven, but it was the best I could do.
There was something else I needed to leave as well. I took some tape from the glove compartment and walked back to Rose’s grave. I hoped that what I planned on doing wasn’t some kind of sacrilege.
Rose’s death had resulted in very little publicity. There had been no coverage of her funeral, and no mention anywhere of where she was buried. If Lisbet was right, Rose’s mother would care about her buried daughter. I was betting on Lisbet’s judgment more than mine. I was hoping Rose’s mother would read the newspaper article and find out where her daughter was buried. Maybe that would spur her to visit Rose’s grave.
On the stone cross I placed the penny on the west crossbeam. The skies didn’t open and Bing Crosby didn’t sing about pennies from heaven. And then I took a step over and on its east crossbeam I taped my business card. I didn’t leave a message. The person I was leaving it for would know why it was there.
“I am sorry,” I said.
My business card had no place being on the cross. My only defense was that Rose had no business being dead.
CHAPTER 18:
The drive back from the Garden of Angels was stop and go, and by the time Sirius and I made it home, my mind was about as tired as my brake foot. During the drive I kept hoping that Lisbet would call my cell, but that never happened. I had tried to multitask during my trip and spent half an hour on a conference call with Gump and Martinez, but it was more of a gripe session than anything else. Everyone was getting increasingly frustrated with the stalled Klein case.
“As of tomorrow Paul Klein will have been up on his cross seven nights,” said Gump, “and us there with him.”
He was overstating the pressure associated with our working the case, but not by much. All of us had agreed to meet at headquarters early. Maybe the new day would bring us something.