Luke turned to the pathologist. “A woman?”
“A young girl.”
“Did they ever identity the body?”
“He doesn’t think so,” Ben said. “Oh, and by the way, the only similarity with our boy seems to be the lung tissues, so don’t get your hopes up. He was sure their girl didn’t have leukemia. Like I said, it’s a long shot, but I think I’ll stop by and take a look at what they have.”
“When?”
“Sometime tomorrow, probably. I have to call the M.E. who’s handling the case, arrange a time.”
“Good. It so happens I have nothing to do tomorrow.” Luke turned back toward the street. In the relief of the dim streetlights, it looked as if the van’s side doors were ajar.
Ben gave an exaggerated sigh. “I knew I was going to regret telling you about—”
“Do any of your neighbors own a van?” Luke broke in. “Blue, or maybe dark green?”
“A van? What’re you talking about?”
Headlight beams from an approaching car painted the van’s length with a pale swath of light. The van’s side doors were open — just barely, no more than a few inches. The gap narrowed to a sliver as the car passed.
Luke bolted for the entry hall, threw open the front door and ran outside.
By the time Luke reached the stoop of Ben’s front lawn, the van had already pulled away from the curb with its lights off and was accelerating up the street.
“Son of a bitch,” he whispered breathlessly.
Calderon was two blocks from Ben Wilson’s home when his cell phone rang.
“Yes?”
“You sound out of breath,” Mr. Kong observed.
“McKenna spotted me. I had to break off surveillance.”
“Everything okay?”
“Yeah. Tell me about that young woman doctor — Callahan.”
“A cab just dropped her at the international terminal,” Mr. Kong said. “Do you want me to follow her, see if I can get on the same flight?”
“No. I need you here,” Calderon said. “But call down to the project site. Send a team out to that clinic. It’s time to take care of this problem.”
When Luke arrived home two hours later, he drove a quarter mile past his duplex before making a U-turn and retracing his path. There were seven vehicles parked on his block, and he lingered as he passed each one. He knew his in-your-face countersurveillance methods would gain him nothing, but he did it anyway to vent his anger.
He had downplayed the incident with Ben, saying only that the van had looked suspicious. Ben’s overly indulgent head nods had only confirmed that Luke’s explanation didn’t pass muster, but he wasn’t ready to tell anyone—even Ben — that Lloyd Erickson had hired a private investigator to snoop around and meddle in his life.
Even more troubling, though, was the possibility that someone other than the football player’s P.I. had been parked outside Ben’s home. It was a dark van that he had seen, not the blue Ford Mustang that Sammy had described to him. And if Sammy was right — if Erickson’s strategy was to paint Luke as an erratic character — why would the investigator waste his time following him into a quiet neighborhood at night?
But if not Erickson’s investigator, then who was parked across from Ben’s home? A city like L.A. rendered the possibilities almost endless: car thieves, prostitutes and their johns, drug peddlers, garden-variety punks, drunken revelers. And they made up only the beginning of the list.
The LAPD was also on that list, but the possibility that he was a suspect in Kate’s murder seemed farfetched, even after his ill-timed visit to her home. In any case, homicide detectives wouldn’t have cut and run when he ran out of Ben’s house.
By the time Luke finally pulled into his driveway, he was no closer to an answer, and growing tired of his own ruminations.
Maybe his father was right. Maybe he did overthink everything.
When he climbed the stairs to this duplex, he found a card stuffed into the doorjamb.
It was Detective O’Reilly’s business card. Luke had completely forgotten about the detective after Ben’s phone call that afternoon. A handwritten note on the back of the card instructed him to call O’Reilly’s office tomorrow after 7:00 A.M.
Luke glanced at his entry table as soon as he opened the front door. In the upper right-hand corner of his answering machine, a red 1 showed on the SAVED MESSAGES display: Kate’s message.
The NEW MESSAGES display in the lower corner was also lit. It was flashing 1. He pressed PLAY and listened as Detective O’Reilly asked him to return the call.
If it wasn’t already ten-fifteen, he would have called the detective. The sooner they copied Kate’s message, the sooner he could erase it. For a while, at least, he didn’t want to think about her death.
A burst of raindrops clattered on the roof.
It rained all night.
19
“Someone steal your furniture?” Ben was standing in Luke’s entry, looking through the archway into his sparsely furnished living room. “Or is this some sort of minimalist thing you got going here?”
Luke looked at his watch: 8:33 A.M. “We’re going to be late for our meeting with the M.E.”
Ben’s gaze moved among several paintings on the walls. “Looks like you spend all your money on art. Are these all by the same artist?”
“Yeah.” It’d been a long while since he had taken the time to appreciate the watercolors that his mother had painted.
“Nice. Sorta reminds me of New England,” Ben observed.
Continuing the disconnected conversation, Luke said, “Nice buckle.”
Ben was wearing an enormous oval belt buckle with a raised outline of Texas and some kind of gemstone in the shape of a star. It looked as if it probably weighed ten pounds.
His friend tilted the buckle toward himself and polished it with the sleeve of his shirt.
Luke jerked his thumb in the direction of the door. “Let’s go.”
They rode in Ben’s recently purchased gold Cadillac DTS. Loretta Lynn was twanging from the speakers when, ten minutes later, they took the Mission Road exit on Interstate 5. Luke had pulled his sun visor down and flipped open the mirror, studying the vehicles behind them for tails.
He pulled a Mr. Goodbar from his shirt pocket and started unfolding the wrapper.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” Ben said. “Not while you’re sitting on gen-u-ine calf leather seats.”
Before Luke had finished rewrapping his chocolate bar, they pulled into a parking lot adjacent to a plain beige warehouse-like building at the northeast corner of the L.A. County/USC medical campus — home to the Los Angeles County Coroner.
“Who’re we meeting?” Luke asked.
“Some Indian fella with a long name.”
The county morgue was not a place that many people visited by choice, and they found a parking space right next to the entrance. As they walked up the front steps, sunlight bounced off Ben’s belt buckle and cast a bright reflection that Luke figured would scorch any insect in its path. A man walking down the steps sidestepped the beam of light as if to avoid injury.
When they reached the information desk, Ben pulled a slip of paper from his shirt pocket, tried three times to pronounce the scribbled name, then gave up and handed the paper to the receptionist.
A few minutes later Dr. Jainarayan Majumdar was leading them down a flight of stairs to the basement level. The deputy medical examiner had dark skin and spoke with a slight British accent.
“So,” Ben said to their host, “do you have a nickname that won’t break my tongue?”
Luke shot a look at Ben.
Ben responded with an argumentative twitch.
“Jay,” the M.E. replied without a hint of offense. “Everyone calls me Jay.”