Kasey Broach's naked body had been dumped under a concrete freeway on-ramp. She lay on her back, chin tossed up and to the side as if she were trying to flip the hair from her face. A nasty abrasion mottled her right hip, and the skin looked split on her right cheek. Her wrists were bound with tape, her ankles with white rope. Around her, weeds pushed up from cracked asphalt. The skeleton of a fence remained in the background, chain-link sloughed from three remaining posts. A beater of a coupe sagged on slashed tires, windows smashed in, roof dented down to the headrests, hood dense with bird shit. Behind it on the sloping underbelly of the ramp, a graffiti artist had abandoned a work in progress.
A close-up showed Broach's arms spotted with marks where flies had started their work. For some reason they underscored her death. So helpless, incapable of swatting a bug feasting on her.
I stared at Kaden. "'The killer duplicated every specific'? Of Genevieve's murder? Are you kidding me? He kidnapped a woman, drugged her, moved her body, stripped her, bound the wrists and ankles, and dumped her in a public place."
"There are an alarming number of similarities," Delveckio said.
"As for the differences? We usually see an upward evolution as a killer grows more experienced, learns from prior mistakes."
"You neglected to mention that earlier, when you were busting my door down. Why do you think she's naked?"
"Growing bolder," Kaden offered, studying me closely. "Could be part of a growing fantasy."
"Or he stripped her for the bleach washdown," Delveckio added, "which meant he knew we'd analyze the body for trace and foreign biologicals."
"And? Was she raped?"
Delveckio shook his head.
"What'd you find?"
"Aside from your blood and your hair?" Kaden flipped through his notepad. He tapped his pen to the paper. "Ah, here it is: None of your fucking business."
"Bruising at the wrists and ankles would indicate she was bound before the fatal stabbing, no?"
The detectives exchanged an irritated glance but didn't respond. Crafty detective work, keeping me in the dark like this.
"The Sevoflurane. She was kept alive. Unlike Genevieve. Points to sadistic tendencies?" I returned their stares. "Blink twice if I'm getting warm. How about the abrasions on the hip and cheek? From being thrown out of the vehicle?"
Delveckio gave me the sour face, but Kaden just grinned his amusement. "You know, we got some experience with bodies," he said. "Maybe even as much as you." His cell phone chimed, and he glanced at it, then nodded at Delveckio and stood. "You're not our partner. You're not a cop. You're a fucking writer. And, according to your first verdict, a killer. When we require your help, we'll question you."
As they gave me their backs, blocking the mirror's view of me, I slid a handful of printouts from the table down into my lap. The move was purely, bizarrely instinctual.
Stealing evidence from an interrogation room in Parker Center. I was setting new standards for bad judgment.
Kaden paused at the door, his grand exit stymied, and came back for his photos, minus a few duplicates. He stepped into the hall beside Delveckio and nodded at one of their underlings, out of sight. "Get a full statement. Then kick him loose."
The door slammed shut, and I was alone with my reflection and crime-scene photos stuffed down my pants.
Chapter 11
Chic dropped me off, nodding and touching the brim of his cap. "Will that be all, Miss Daisy?"
"You people are so well mannered." I hopped out.
My trash can had been upended beside the house, garbage strewn along the side run. My sneakers crackled across the bits of glass in the entry. Two nights home, two intrusions. In my head I replayed the groggy house search after I'd awakened with the cut on my foot. Had my assailant been in the house with me? Or had he already slipped away? Had he approached from the street or hiked up the slope? I examined the sliding glass door for smudges that I might have overlooked in the darkness, then walked out onto the deck and peered over the railing as if I could distinguish lightly trampled ivy from untrampled ivy. Back inside, I followed the washed-out blood footprints upstairs. The tape was of course missing from my newly cracked digital camcorder, a disappointment since I'd wanted to preserve for posterity my oh-shit face the instant before I'd been proned out by ninety-seven SWAT members. I guess future Danners would have to content themselves with late-night reruns of Hunter Pray.
In my office the cops had left the drawers open, files and bills crammed back out of place or tossed on the floor. My mound of unread mail had been re-sorted, and they'd helpfully opened the items I hadn't gotten to yet.
I took a steaming shower, the jets doing their best to blast Kasey Broach's pallid face from my memory. Her curled hands, like fleshy claws. Her exposed arms spotted with insect bites. What would she have thought if someone had pulled her aside in third grade, or tenth, and told her that someday she'd wind up dumped under a freeway in Rampart? I thought about my so-called tough morning compared to the morning her family was still having, and it became startlingly clear that I had little to bitch about. I thought about the hot water I could still feel, the air I could still breathe. About Chic and Angela and Preston. How I had the right to remain silent and the right to an attorney and a jury that intelligently weighed my culpability. I was alive. I was free. I was healthy. What I felt was not guilt no, not that but, oddly, gratitude. And the inkling that from gratitude, not from anger or even guilt, could I pull myself out of where I'd landed.
I toweled off. A Post-it note on my mirror, written in Chic's childish scrawl, quoted Eleanor Roosevelt: You have to accept whatever comes, and the only important thing is that you meet it with courage and with the best that you have to give. Chic had sent me home from my newcomers' meeting with it. It had fallen off and been retaped countless times.
Face everything. One day at a time. I could do that. I could do better than that.
The purloined crime-scene photos, rescued from my pants, sat on the counter beside my toothpaste tube. As I'd pointed out to Preston, I had no official leverage. But I had something in place of that, beyond my peculiar skill at thinking through mayhem, beyond my friends from various bizarre walks of life, beyond my list of contacts oddly suited for… well, this.
I had a story. Or at least the beginning of one.
But as I'd asked myself last night where to go from here? I stared at those pictures of Kasey Broach, dimpled from their illicit journey, and wanted to know why her corpse had intersected with my life. I clicked through my PalmPilot's consultants list, compiled over the course of Derek Chainer's career Navy SEALs, cops, deputy marshals, assistant DAs, coroners, hard-boiled PIs, soft-boiled security guards, firemen, criminalists. Grabbing a pad from my night-stand drawer, I wrote down those who could bring relevant knowledge to bear. Beneath it I made a list of all the people who hated me or might want to do me harm. The Bertrands. Genevieve's fictional lover. Kaden and Delveckio. A thought interrupted the scribbling: I'd arrived in this unenviable position because I'd cut a corner. I'd cut plenty of other corners in my life. The question was, which ones could be catching up with me now?
The doorbell rang. In my towel I greeted the messenger from my lawyers' office, who bore my case files. Amazing the service a quarter mil will buy you.
The discovery process entitled me to the murder book LAPD had assembled in preparation for my trial full insider evidence for Genevieve's case. I set it on the kitchen table, which wobbled its appreciation, and flipped through.
The inserts were familiar and foreign at the same time. They seemed from another phase of my life, though my final verdict had been handed down just the day before yesterday.