“I’ve got a trainee did some task force work down your way. I’d like to find out how she was.”
“Trying to get in her head or her pants?”
“Her head is scary enough for me. Her name is Ruiz. Renee Ruiz.”
“I’ll see what I can find out.”
They traded a few more insults and hung up. Parker turned his attention to the results of his DMV search.
Of Mini Coopers registered in the state of California, in the Los Angeles area, seventeen matched the possible combinations of numbers and letters Parker had offered for the search. Of those, seven were listed as being green, five black. None of them were registered to Jace or J. C. Damon. None of them had been reported stolen.
The detectives at Abby Lowell’s break-in would be looking for the car too, though Parker doubted they would get to it until the next day. Their case was basically a B&E. No serious violence. They wouldn’t be excited enough to stay late—unless it was just to spite him.
Parker couldn’t let them go hunting first. Maybe they were good at what they did, and they would pull it off without a problem. But he thought it more likely they would go charging through the clutch of Mini Cooper owners like stampeding cattle, bolting the lot of them, tipping off Damon. He couldn’t risk losing his suspect because of stupidity and territorial bullshit.
He dug a map of the city out of his desk drawer and spread it across Ruiz’s desk, then took his Thomas Guide and began locating the addresses of the Mini Cooper owners. He marked the places on the map. None were in the immediate vicinity of the mailbox rented to Allison Jennings and passed on to J. C. Damon.
Working his way outward from that location, Parker found one of the owners lived in the Miracle Mile area, not far from Abby Lowell’s apartment. That car was registered to Punjhar, Rajhid, DDS. One was in Westwood, near UCLA. One was registered to a Chen, Lu, who lived in Chinatown—on his way home.
He plotted all twelve, and stared at the map with his splotches of red ink like bloodstains scattered over the city. Which car did Damon have access to? Where the hell did he live? Why was he so secretive about it? He didn’t have a record. And if he had one under another name, who in his day-to-day life would know? If he was living under an alias, the only way he was going to be found out was to be arrested or have his fingerprints turn up at a crime scene. They had the partial prints from the murder weapon, but not enough to get a hit running them through the system.
Maybe the kid was a career criminal. Or maybe he was hiding from someone. Whatever the reason for all his secrecy, Damon was driving around in somebody’s Mini Cooper. And if he hadn’t killed Lenny Lowell, why would he search out Lenny’s daughter? How would he know anything about this missing something everyone wanted so badly?
And why had Robbery-Homicide shown up at that scene?
Parker put his head in his hands and rubbed his face, his scalp, the corded muscles in the back of his neck. He needed fresh air, and he needed answers. He put his coat on and went outside in search of both.
The clock had struck rush hour two hours ago. The streets were nose-to-tail cars, everyone in such a hurry to get somewhere that no one was getting anywhere. A few people came out of Central Bureau and headed for cars—stragglers. The shift had changed a couple of hours ago, and the business day was over. Things would soon be settling down for the night.
Parker walked to his car and slipped behind the wheel. This one was the workhorse, a five-year-old Chrysler Sebring convertible. He drove it to work, drove it to crime scenes when he was on call. Time off the job was for the bottle-green vintage Jag, his beautiful, sexy, secret lover. He smiled a little at that. Then the smile faded as he remembered Ruiz asking him about the car. She’d heard rumors, she’d said.
He dug his cell phone out of his coat pocket, dialed Andi Kelly, and opened with: “What have you done for me lately, gorgeous?”
“Jesus, you’re a pushy son of a bitch. I have priorities other than you, you know. Cocktail hour is at hand, my friend. I have a date with a seventeen-year-old.”
“Still pounding down the scotch, huh?”
“How do you know it isn’t a young man?”
“Because you’re too smart to tell me if it was. Seventeen isn’t legal, not that you didn’t already know that.”
“Besides which, it would be gross,” Kelly declared. “I’d be old enough to be the kid’s mother. That’s way too Demi Moore for me. I’ve never been interested in boys, anyway, only men,” she purred.
Parker cleared his throat. “So? Do you have anything for me?”
“My memory isn’t so good before dinner,” she said. “Meet me at Morton’s in West Hollywood. You’re buying.”
22
Jace parked Madame Chen’s car in the narrow space reserved for her behind the office. He wiped down the interior with wet paper napkins, trying to erase any sign he’d been behind the wheel, or touched a door, or left a handprint on a seat. Then he stood beside the car for he didn’t know how long, trying to decide what to do next.
A thick fog had rolled in off the ocean and settled into the nooks and crannies of the city, a milky filter softening the lines of buildings, diffusing the yellow light glowing in windows. He felt like he was a character in a dream, like he could be gone in the blink of an eye and no one would quite remember him.
Maybe that was what he was supposed to do—go underground completely. That was what Alicia would have done. She would have packed them up without a word, moved out in the middle of the night. They would have popped up like toadstools in another part of town, with new names and no explanation why.
Jace had wondered why, many times. When he was Tyler’s age, he had dreamed up all kinds of stories about his mother, always painting her as the heroine. She was protecting her children from one kind of danger or another. As he had grown older and wiser, more savvy about life and the streets, he had wondered all the time if Alicia had been evading the police.
Why, he couldn’t imagine. His mother had been a quiet, kind person who had made him cry after she caught him shoplifting just by telling him how disappointed in him she was.
Maybe she was like me, he thought now, in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“Why don’t you want to come into the light, JayCee?”
Madame Chen came into focus as she spoke, as if she had just magically appeared beneath the dim light over the office door.
“I have a lot on my mind,” Jace said.
“Your thoughts are heavy like stones.”
“I’m sorry I’m so late with your car, Madame Chen.”
“Where did you go to fix the bicycle? The moon?”
Jace opened his mouth to answer, but his voice stuck in his throat like a ball of dough. He thought again of the day his mother had caught him stealing.
“I have to talk to you about something important,” he said at last. “In private.”
She nodded and went back inside. Jace followed, head down. She motioned him to a hard wooden straight-backed chair beside her desk, and kept her back to him as she made two cups of tea from the ever-present hot pot perched precariously on the window ledge above the cluttered desk.
“They have no phones on the moon, I suppose,” she said matter-of-factly. “Moon men have no families worrying about them.”
“I’m in a bad situation, Madame Chen,” Jace said.
“You are in trouble,” she corrected him, turning to face him. She couldn’t hide her reaction. The color left her face, her small mouth formed an O of shock.
He had tried to clean up with some paper napkins and a bottle of water he got out of a vending machine outside a Mexican market in Los Feliz. Water didn’t wash away cuts or bruises or swollen knobs of flesh. He knew he looked like he’d been on the wrong side of a prizefight.