Shortly after Tricia’s murder, the tabloids had hinted at the possibility of something sordid going on between Caroline Crowne and her stepfather, but the rumors had been squelched like a slug on the sidewalk, and Norman Crowne’s granddaughter had abruptly ceased to be of any interest to the press.
What a list of headlines an affair between Caroline Crowne and Rob Cole would have generated. Poor old Tricia whacked to make way for a May-December romance between her daughter and her sleazy rotten rat-bastard husband. Caroline had been nineteen when her mother died. Barely legal.
It wasn’t all that hard for Diane to imagine.
“One more and we’re out of here,” Jeff said through his teeth as he smiled and raised his glass to someone off to his right.
“I can already taste the sea bass,” Diane said, letting him steer her toward the district attorney.
From the corner of her eye she caught a door swinging open, maybe six, eight feet to her right. Bradley Kyle and his partner came in looking like kids who were being sent to the principal’s office. They were headed in the same direction that Jeff was taking her—toward the DA and the ADA, and Norman and Phillip Crowne.
Giradello turned and looked at the detectives, frowning.
Diane drifted a step in their direction as Giradello excused himself from Phillip Crowne and moved two steps toward the cops. Eavesdropping was the real reason she came to these things.
Jeff interrupted her briefly to introduce her to the district attorney, whom she’d met fifty times before. She smiled, shook the man’s hand, and tuned him out, her gaze sliding just to the right of him.
The conversation was terse, Giradello’s face darkened, Bradley Kyle turned his hands palms-up, like, What do you want me to do about it? Only the odd word escaped for the casual ear to catch. Do, what, can’t, know. Somebody was supposed to have done something, but hadn’t been able to.
Kyle and his partner had worked Tricia Crowne’s murder. Not as leads, as second team. As the trial began they would be called on to double-check, to dig up and polish off notes and memories, to pick at any tiny fibers that could become loose ends.
Rob Cole’s attorney, Martin Gorman, would know everything about them—who they were on the job, who they were off the job, whether one or the other had ever made a derogatory remark about Rob Cole or about actors in general or about too-handsome jerks who went around in vintage bowling shirts no matter what the occasion. Odds were good Gorman had spies in this very room, watching Giradello’s every move, looking for anything that could give him an edge, an opening, or at the very least keep him from getting surprised.
A trial as big as this one was a chess game with layers and layers of strategy. The pieces were being jockeyed into position. Giradello was bringing his army into line. Somebody was supposed to have done something but hadn’t been able to. She wondered what that something was.
Steinman said something. Jeff laughed politely. Diane smiled and nodded.
A word, a curse, a growl, a name she didn’t recognize . . . and one that she did.
21
Ruiz was long gone by the time Parker returned to the station. He wanted to be pissed off, but he couldn’t manage it. It was important to have a life away from the job if you wanted to stay sane on the job. He’d learned that lesson the hard way, so consumed by his rise to stardom in Robbery-Homicide that when that train came off the tracks he hadn’t known what to do or who he was. He’d invested everything in his career.
It would have been nice to go home himself, take a steam, put on some jazz, have a glass of wine, order in some wonton soup and Mongolian beef from the restaurant down the street. He had a script to read, and notes to make. And sleep sounded like a good idea too.
He had a great bed and a view of Chinatown’s neon lights for when he didn’t want to or couldn’t sleep. He could stare out those windows and lose all track of time. A three-dimensional abstract of the streets four stories below. He found the colors soothing, or maybe it was the juxtaposition of vibrant light and sound on the streets with the quiet dark around him in his haven, his cocoon.
He wouldn’t be going home soon. There were too many things he needed to know, and he needed to know them quickly. His instincts had already been on point with this case, and that sense was only getting keener. The oddities of the break-in at Abby Lowell’s apartment—and with Abby Lowell herself—were rubbing against the grain.
She was a study in contradictions. Courting sympathy, giving the cold shoulder, vulnerable, tough as nails, victim, suspect. All applied. The hell she didn’t know what her burglar was after. She was after it herself.
Lenny Lowell’s death was no random act of opportunity. And what the hell would a bike messenger, assigned by the luck of the draw, have known about this mysterious something Lowell apparently possessed that was worth killing for? The money gone from the safe—provided there had ever been any, and they had only Abby Lowell’s say-so on that point—had been nothing but a bonus for the killer.
A simple robbery didn’t send a perp on to his victim’s daughter to toss her apartment and threaten to kill her. Parker’s instincts told him the words scrawled on Abby Lowell’s bathroom mirror had an implied “unless” to them. Next you die . . . unless I get what I’m after. Which implied the assailant believed Abby Lowell knew what he was after.
And why had the mirror been broken? How had the mirror been broken? The damage had been done after the message had been written on it. Abby Lowell hadn’t had a mark on her, nor had she said anything about a struggle in the bathroom, the mirror getting broken, someone bleeding.
She said the guy told her he’d done some work for her father. What was that about? The Emily Post etiquette rules for murderers? Hello, here’s who I am, my references, my connection to you. So sorry, I’m going to kill you now. What crap.
And the guy drives away in a Mini Cooper.
Parker reminded himself the Volkswagen Bug had been the car of choice for serial killers in the seventies. Cute cars were nonthreatening. How could anyone driving a Bug be a bad person? Ted Bundy had driven a Bug.
Parker ran the partial plate from the Abby Lowell break-in through the DMV, and waited, impatient. He made himself a cup of tea, paced while it steeped. Kray’s trainee, Yamoto, was at his desk, studiously working on a report. Ruiz was probably out salsa dancing with the sugar daddy who kept her supplied in Manolo Blahniks.
Girl most likely to marry money. Parker wondered why she hadn’t done so already. She probably figured she had a better shot at a big fish if she went up the career ladder to a better class of crime. Make Robbery-Homicide, become high-profile, start hanging out with political and Hollywood types, and boom: rich husband.
On impulse, he picked up the phone and dialed the number of an old friend who worked Homicide in South Central.
“Metheny,” a gravel-choked voice barked on the other end of the line.
“Hey, Methuselah, you got it under control down there?”
“Kev Parker. I thought you died.”
“I kind of wished I had there for a while,” Parker admitted.
Metheny growled like a bulldog. “Don’t let the motherfuckers get you down.”
“I had that one tattooed on my dick. How’d you know?”
“Your sister told me.”
Parker laughed. “You old son of a bitch.” He had partnered with Metheny a thousand years ago when Parker had been cutting a swath through the food chain to get to Robbery-Homicide. Metheny liked him anyway. “You got any contacts working Latin gangs in your neck of the woods?”
“Yeah. Why?”