Elmer seemed to be studying him. “Do you remember Jimmy Yazzie?”
Luke’s eyebrows rose in a question. Jimmy was his best friend in the first grade. In addition to reading and arithmetic, Luke learned about child abuse during that year. Jimmy had slept at their home more often than his own for reasons that Luke understood only after witnessing a beating he wasn’t supposed to see.
“What does Jimmy Yazzie have to do with any of this?”
“A lot, I think. What you learned about Jimmy’s home had a profound effect on you. Remember your nightmares? They went on for months.”
“Dad, why don’t we talk about this another time?” He started to slide out of the booth.
“Sit still and let me finish.” Elmer showed his son an uncharacteristically somber face.
After a few seconds, his father continued, “The choices you’ve made in your life — going to Annapolis, becoming a SEAL, your decision to become a pediatrician — all of it. From a young age, you seemed to have a need to protect the innocents of the world. That’s not such a bad thing, Luke.”
A pair of men walked into the restaurant and handed Antonio their business cards. Luke recognized one of them: Detective O’Reilly. The three of them stood by the cash register near the front door and launched into a conversation.
“Let’s change the subject,” Luke said.
“Okay, then. How’s Megan doing these days?”
Luke continued to look past his father at the detectives, trying to hide his annoyance at the question. “She’s doing better, I think. She’s strong.”
“She’s more than that.”
Luke looked from the detectives to his father.
Elmer made a show of lifting his crumb roll and examining it from various angles. “You know, Luke, some things in life are just too good to do without.”
His father’s expression betrayed nothing other than a keen interest in his pastry.
The detectives turned and swept the room with their eyes.
O’Reilly locked on Luke. A minute later he was standing next to their booth. “Dr. McKenna, sorry for the intrusion. We’re here tying up some loose ends and I have a few more questions for you. Would you mind stepping outside for a minute?”
The other detective, if that’s what he was, eyed Elmer. The man’s scrutiny irritated Luke.
“This is my father,” Luke said. “He knew Kate. You can ask your questions in front of him.”
O’Reilly seemed to weigh the issue for a moment before saying, “When we spoke, you said you didn’t see Dr. Tartaglia the night she was murdered. Is that right?”
“Right.”
The morning sun climbed over the heliport atop the hospital. Luke squinted as a blinding glare cascaded down the window.
“You sure you never saw her that evening, even for a moment?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“You find that e-mail message?”
Luke shook his head.
“But you still have the phone message from Dr. Tartaglia, the one you told me about?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. Would you allow us to make a copy of it?”
Luke shrugged. “Sure.”
“I’ll give you a call. We’d like to do that sometime today.”
Inside the green van parked across the street from Kolter’s Deli, Calderon adjusted his headphones and listened through the static while studying McKenna from a side porthole window.
“Dad, would you check to see if you received an e-mail from Kate?”
“An e-mail? Why?”
“She sent me something, but I never got it. Maybe she addressed it to you by mistake.”
Calderon swung his tripod-mounted spotting scope toward the booth along the restaurant’s rear wall where Mr. Kong was sitting. The man was bent over his plate, shoveling eggs into his mouth. Why did Chinese people eat that way?
Even though he was right-handed, Kong held the fork in his left hand. Cupped in his right hand was a miniaturized directional microphone, pointed at McKenna’s table.
Calderon had spent most of the previous day acquiring the surveillance equipment. He didn’t like doing things this way — it was too rushed — but his client’s carelessness had left him no choice. Fortunately, he had done several jobs in L.A. He knew the town and its sources, and had used Kong as an intermediary for the purchases. He wanted his trip to Los Angeles to remain dark, untraceable.
He clicked back the magnification and took in the two detectives talking to a man at the cash register. Calderon recognized one of the cops from the woman’s house.
Eventually, the detectives turned and started walking toward McKenna’s table.
With any luck, Calderon thought, he’d be back in Guatemala in two days. He hadn’t planned on being away from the project site this long.
Calderon was fiddling with a knob on the radio receiver when he heard:
“But you still have the phone message from Dr. Tartaglia, the one you told me about?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. Would you allow us to make a copy of it?”
Calderon slammed the side of the van with the base of his fist, then grabbed the cell phone and called his client.
16
When Luke arrived home thirty minutes later, there was a voicemail from O’Reilly. The detective left his number and said he’d stop by that evening to retrieve Kate’s phone message.
Luke pressed SAVED MESSAGES and replayed Kate’s voicemail.
Again, the trepidation in her voice swirled around him like unsettled air.
Outside his front window the morning mist had burned away and it was a perfectly crisp January day, so he did what he had always done to untangle his mind. He changed into baggy navy-blue shorts and a loose-fitting gray sweatshirt, and went for a run.
Griffith Park was his backyard, over four thousand acres of hilly terrain covered with California live oak, sagebrush, and chaparral. The hills were speckled with bare spots, and from a distance they had a moth-eaten appearance. The craggy park was the botanical equivalent of a mutt.
But it was his mutt, and his haven. After years of almost daily eight-to-ten mile runs, he knew virtually every rut in the fifty miles of crisscrossing dirt trails. He let his thoughts drift as he climbed to the summit of Mount Hollywood and then ran down the backside of the mountain.
As the sweat started to flow from his pores, so did an undercurrent of feelings he’d been holding at a distance.
The memory of Kate’s life filled him with a poignant sadness for what her life might have been. But the deep ache he felt was for Megan.
He had soaked up her affection, laid claim to her trust, and then shattered them in a stupendously self-destructive impulse. His self-indulgent need to punish Megan’s predator had ruined any hope of a future with her.
He didn’t deserve her, he knew, but that didn’t stop him from wanting her.
Luke tried to empty his mind on the return leg of his run. He slowed to a jog as he ran along Griffith Park Drive, then accelerated as he came up the hill on Los Feliz Boulevard. By the time he turned north onto Commonwealth Avenue, his hair was soaked through with sweat.
He was three blocks from his home when the Lexus coupe that had been following him for the past mile pulled up alongside him.
“How’s it hanging, Flash?”
For reasons that Luke couldn’t decipher, people seemed to have an inexplicable need to tag him with nicknames, but only one person had ever called him “Flash.”
When Luke looked inside the car, there he was. Sammy Wilkes.
Sammy’s coal-black skin was a little less tightly drawn around the jaw than when their lives had first crossed fifteen years earlier, but his smile was as big as ever. His overly large teeth had a way of taking over his face when he grinned, which was often.