City of Fire (27 page)

“I’ll probably just order chicken,” he said in a quiet voice. “You haven’t had rigatoni this week.”

“I was thinking eggplant.”

“Lasagna?”

She smiled through a yawn. “Eggplant lasagna with marinara sauce and an iced tea.”

“I spoke with them about half orders the other day.”

“That’s okay. What I don’t eat I’ll take home. I was up late last night and want to go to sleep early.”

He had it. Confirmation that she was with Burell last night. He could see it in her eyes. He turned back to his desk, wondering if he should make the entry in his notebook before he forgot.

“Is something wrong, Martin?”

He shook his head. “I’m fine.”

He wouldn’t forget, he decided. He couldn’t.

“I’m fine,” he repeated.

She handed him a $10 bill and he headed for the door. Until two months ago he had been convinced that Harriet was a good girl. Quiet, simple, the kind of woman he had always dreamed of. Until two months ago he thought she might even be the Virgin Mary, making a return visit to show him the way to his salvation. Now he realized that the situation was reversed and he needed to find a way to save her.

Ignoring the receptionist, he slipped on his sunglasses, pushed the front door open, and legged it across the parking lot. Although the diner was within walking distance, the sun was out so he would have to drive. Ten minutes later he stood in line, waiting on his order and watching Finn through the window. His friend had just arrived and was sitting at their table in the shade reading a newspaper. Fellows turned to the old woman behind the counter, straining to remain patient.
She was short and round and telling another one of her crude jokes to the customer ahead of him. Fellows had stopped listening to her banter months ago. But everyone seated at the counter seemed to think she was funny and he could hear them laughing. When his order finally came up, he stepped over to the register, paying the woman with a forced smile as if he were in on the joke and adding his usual 10 percent to the tip jar. Then he grabbed a tray, two bottles of mineral water, and hurried outside to join Finn.

“I’m sorry, Martin. I can’t stay long. Something’s come up at work.”

Fellows didn’t say anything, trying to conceal his disappointment. Setting both orders of chicken cacciatore down, he wiped off his fork with a paper napkin and got started on his salad.

“You look tired,” Finn said. “You should’ve gone straight home from the gym last night. Instead, you took that drive in the hills.”

Fellows adjusted his sunglasses and gazed at his friend. “I’m not tired. It’s the light. It’s bright today.”

“The sun’s reflecting off that window. Want to switch places?”

Fellows looked at the apartment over the Pink Canary. The bright light bouncing off the glass seemed to be picking him out of the crowd.

“I’m okay,” he said. “What about tonight?”

“Everything’s set. We’re on.”

Fellows lowered his fork, his body shuddering with excitement. “Why didn’t you just say so? Last night it sounded like you wanted to back out.”

“No, Martin. There’s no backing out. Tonight’s the night. I’ll be there to spot you.”

Finn smiled. Fellows took another bite of salad, his hand trembling.

“How?”

“I’ll tell you when we get there,” Finn said. “And do me a favor. Stop talking with your mouth full. People are staring.”

There were four tables by the diner’s entrance. Fellows
turned to have a look over his sunglasses. By the time he craned his head back, no one was looking their way. Still, he made a point of chewing his salad without speaking. There was something different about the dressing. A new ingredient that he found disturbing. He wondered if the olive oil hadn’t turned. He hoped he wouldn’t get sick and ruin his friend’s plans for the evening.

“Does any of this concern you?” Finn asked, thumping his knuckles on the newspaper.

Fellows glanced at the article as he took a sip of water. The police had held a press conference yesterday and the story wound up on the front page. He remembered hearing excerpts on the radio last night after leaving the gym. James Brant was no longer a suspect in his wife’s murder. Jose Lopez was due to be released from jail, but remained inside the building for some unknown reason. According to the police, DNA results linked both murders to someone else.

Fellows stopped reading and turned toward the beach to think it over. It was a difficult view, a view that didn’t go well with lunch because an indigent on Rollerblades was pushing a stolen grocery cart filled with trash down the promenade. The man’s shirt appeared tattered, his pants, heavily soiled. Although he lacked any sense of personal hygiene or self-esteem, he wore a smile on his face. A big smile that hinted at madness.

“You still with me?” Finn asked. “Or do you have something on your mind?”

Fellows watched the homeless man skate into the bright sunlight and vanish in the sheen.

“The DNA is irrelevant,” he said finally.

Finn leaned closer and lowered his voice. “It’s your DNA, Martin.”

“It doesn’t matter where it came from.”

“It connects two murders. I guess your definition of irrelevant is different than mine.”

“Without me, the DNA doesn’t point to anything but itself,” Fellows said. “It’s a closed set. Besides, it couldn’t be helped.”

“I think you take too many risks. They’re unnecessary. You should know better.”

“What time?” Fellows asked.

“You’re not listening to me.”

“I heard everything you said. What time?”

Finn got up from the table. “Around ten.”

SHE couldn’t go there. Even though Novak insisted that she leave the crime scene, take the day off and get some rest, she couldn’t go home. She had seen the tears in her partner’s eyes, heard his voice cracking, thought he was making sense. Yet she couldn’t do it.

That’s where all the memories lived. Inside the home she once shared with her brother.

The light turned green at Franklin and Gower. The decision beckoned. When someone behind her started working their horn, she made a right and followed the hill down to Sunset.

Her body was still trembling, her mind, unable to lock in on the present. Somehow she didn’t think that her memories qualified as memories anymore. She didn’t have her back to the past. She was facing it again, staring at it. Her personal history was lurking in the gloom from somewhere in the future, waiting to be rewritten and reused.

Tim Holt had moved back to L.A., buying a home from Sally and Joe Garcia. Now he and his girlfriend were dead.

She crossed Sunset and pulled into the lot at Gower Gulch. Seconds ticked off as she bought a pack of smokes at the drugstore. Minutes streamed by in a direction of their own as she ordered a tall coffee-of-the-day at Starbucks.

It had been her choice. Get juiced at the Cat N’ Fiddle until the world blurred or sharpen the edge with both eyes open and force herself to gaze at the infection. Before she knew it, she was back in the car, watching herself drive up
Gower, make the left onto Hollywood Boulevard, and then the right of all rights onto Vista Del Mar.

Her brother, David, had been gunned down on Vista Del Mar. A single shot in the center of his chest.

She eased off the gas, rolling forward at a crawl. To her left was an empty parking lot. To the right, an auto body shop surrounded by a chain-link fence and barbed wire. The road petered out at the base of a short hill and an abandoned one-room chapel, the grounds blanketed with spent needles. The refuse left behind from cash-and-smack deals and trips to the moon via the Holy Grail.

She pulled over and cut the engine. Leaning back in the seat, she removed the lid from her coffee. The hot steam rose up into her face, warming her cheeks and mouth as she took a first sip and savored its strength. After several moments, she let her eyes wander past the cup and outside the car, crossing the street slowly, deliberately, until they reached the spot where she’d found her brother’s body five years ago.

The stillness hit her in waves. One after another until she finally let the nightmare in.

She had been on duty that night, cruising the boulevard with her partner when their radio lit up. An anonymous call had been placed directly to the front desk at the Hollywood station over on Wilcox, bypassing the 911 system and the audio recorders that backed it up.

In spite of the darkness, Lena could remember homing in on the make and model of the car. The front tires had rolled up over the curb. The headlights were on, the engine running. Even though the driver’s-side door stood open, the interior light remained off and she couldn’t make out any detail. But she could recall that sharp feeling of terror gripping her as she switched her flashlight on and approached the car. The blow she took in the gut as the beam of light washed over the victim and ferreted out a face. An identity.

Her heart locked up and she couldn’t breathe.

He was lying across the front seat in a fetal position and, at a glance, appeared to be sleeping until she noticed the hole in his chest and the pool of blood. But what Lena
couldn’t forget were his hands. His long, elegant fingers. They were clasped together between his thighs. The same way he’d held them when he was a little boy and had a stomachache or the flu. Her brother’s death hadn’t been peaceful and hadn’t come quick. When David died, he knew what was happening to him and it obviously hurt.

Lena didn’t remember much more than that—something Dr. Bernhardt called retro amnesia during their sessions. Everything remained in a haze, taking years to clarify and pin down. According to Dr. Bernhardt, retro amnesia could be caused by any traumatic event and wipe out three or four days. Even worse, no one was immune. Rescue workers and cops could be struck by the experience just as easily as the victim’s friends and family. It was all about the shock. The depth of the bite. The sudden jolt of power shorting out the nervous system.

The irony was that it happened here, she thought. In the shadows of the Capitol Records building just on the other side of the empty parking lot.

She turned away from the building, sipping her coffee and opening the pack of cigarettes. Lena and David Gamble had been a team. Since childhood. Since the beginning.

Their mother had run off just after David’s birth and missed out on meeting him and getting to know who her children might become. Their father raised them. On his own in Denver without the help of anyone.

Despite her mother abandoning them, most of Lena’s childhood memories were good. Her father had been a welder, highly sought after for his ability to work at great heights in spite of the wind. Nearly every high-rise building in the Denver skyline erected between 1976 and 1990 bore its shape from the labor of his torch. She could remember her father laughing one night at a fireworks display over the city. He was holding her in his arms and the explosions overtop the buildings looked just like the sparks she saw spewing from his torch. When she mentioned it, he pulled her closer and kissed her on the forehead, calling the display his “magic torch.”

They were more than happy. And money had never been
an issue in their lives. At least not until the recession hit in the early nineties and no one seemed to need tall buildings anymore. Her father’s hours changed after that and he began working a series of part-time jobs. Still, they managed. Lena was sixteen at the time, keeping an eye on her little brother most nights even though all he ever did was listen to music and play his guitar. Somehow it all worked out until one night the doorbell rang and everything went black.

Two men delivered the news. Two ugly men with white hair and puffy, red noses, wearing windbreakers marked with a company logo she had never seen before and smelling like a broken whiskey bottle.

It seemed her father had been in an accident, they told her. A bad accident and it didn’t look good.

By the time they reached the hospital, it was already over and Lena was smart enough to know that the two men had lied to her. Their father had been working the night shift at a pipe-manufacturing plant. When his arm was sucked into a conveyor belt, he bled to death before a coworker found him and hit the kill switch. According to a third man, an attorney who met them at the hospital, the accident appeared to be the result of something called
operator error.
In the days that followed, Lena learned that there had been many other accidents just like this one. That the plant had been cited for numerous safety violations but had attributed each and every accident to operator error rather than fork up the money to comply. Because their father had been a part-time employee, financial restitution would be slim to none. Even worse, both Lena and David were minors. As wards of the state, they would be picked up by the Department of Human Services and institutionalized until they were adopted or reached the age of eighteen.

Lena laid her head back, thinking about that photograph of Nikki Brant standing outside the orphanage. Shaking it off, she looked through the windshield at the dilapidated chapel just up the hill. The steeple had toppled over. She could see a junkie inside the building, peeking through the window and staring at her. His face had withered. His eyes had that hollow
look that could only mean that he was on his own and one or two steps away from the finish line.