Demolition Angel (17 page)

Starkey lit a second cigarette, thankful for the slow pace of the traffic. Around her, cars pulsed from parking garages like the life bleeding from a corpse. Going to Kelso was not an acceptable option. Even thinking about it made her feel cheesy and low.

She couldn’t get Pell out of her head.

Starkey didn’t know anything about migraine headaches, but what had happened in the parking lot had scared her even more than Pell losing control with Tennant. She fretted that beating the hell out of suspects was Pell’s ATF way of doing things, and that meant he would do it again, placing her in even greater legal jeopardy. She was certain that he was hiding something. She had enough secrets of her own to know that people didn’t hide strengths; they guarded their weaknesses. Now she feared Pell’s. The bomb investigators that she had known were all detail people; they moved slowly and methodically because they built puzzles often made of many small pieces over investigations that lasted weeks, and often months. Pell didn’t act like a bomb investigator. His manner was predatory and fast, his actions with Tennant extreme and violent. Even his gun didn’t fit the profile, that big ass Smith 10.

She drove home, feeling as if she was in a weakened position and angry because of it. She thought about calling Pell at his hotel and raising more hell, but knew that would do no good. She could either call Kelso or move on; anything else was just jerking off.

At home, Starkey filled her tub with hot water for a bath, then poured a stiff gin and brought it to her bedroom where she took off her clothes.

Naked, she stood at the foot of her bed, listening to the water splash, sipping the gin. She was intensely aware of the mirror on the closet. It was behind her, almost as if it were waiting. She took a big slug of the drink, then turned and
looked at herself. She saw the scars. She saw the craters and rills and valleys, the discolorations and the pinhole stitching. She looked at her thigh, and saw the print of his hand as clearly as if she bore a brand.

Starkey sighed deeply and turned away.

“You must be out of your goddamned mind.”

She finished the drink in a long series of gulps, stalked into the bath, and let the heat consume her.

“Tell me about Pell.”

“He’s a fed with the ATF. That’s Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.”

“I know.”

“If you knew, why did you ask?”

“I meant I know what the acronym stands for, that ATF is the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. You seem irritable today, Carol.”

“How inconsiderate of me. I must have forgotten to take my daily dose of mellow.”

Starkey was annoyed with herself for mentioning Pell to Dana. On the drive to Santa Monica, she had mapped out what she wanted to talk about in today’s session, which had not included Pell, yet Pell was the first damned thing that popped from her mouth.

“I put myself at risk for this guy, and I don’t even know him.”

“Why did you do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“If you had to guess.”

“Nobody likes a rat.”

“But he violated the law, Carol. You said so yourself. He laid hands on this prisoner, and now you are in jeopardy for not reporting him. You clearly don’t approve of what he did, yet you are conflicted about what to do.”

Starkey lost track of Dana’s voice. She stood at the window, watching the traffic on Santa Monica Boulevard, smoking. A cluster of women waited at the crosswalk below, anxiously watching their bus idle on the other side of six lanes of bumper-to-bumper morning rush hour traffic. From their squat Central American builds and plastic shopping bags, Starkey made them for housekeepers on their way to work in the exclusive homes north of Montana. When the light changed, the bus began to rumble away. The women panicked, charging across the street even as cars continued through the red. Horns blew, a black Nissan swerving, almost nailing two of the women, who never once looked at the car as it passed. They ignored it in their need to catch the bus, giving themselves up to chance. Starkey knew she could never do that.

“Carol?”

Starkey didn’t want to talk about Pell anymore or watch a bunch of women with nothing more on their minds than catching a goddamned bus.

She went back to her seat and crushed out her cigarette.

“I want to ask you a question.”

“All right.”

“I’m not sure if I want to do this or not.”

“Do what, Carol? Ask me the question?”

“No, do what I’m about to tell you about. I got these tapes of what happened to Charlie Riggio, the news video that the TV stations took. You know what I realized? The TV station has tapes of me, too. They have videotape of what happened to me and Sugar. Now I can’t stop thinking about it, that it’s out there right now, trapped on a tape, and I could see it.”

Dana wrote something on her pad.

“When and if you decide that you’re ready for something like that, I think it would be a good idea.”

Starkey’s stomach went cold. Part of her had wanted Dana’s permission; part of her had wanted to be let off the hook.

“I don’t know.”

Dana put her pad aside. Starkey didn’t know whether to be frightened by that or not. She had never known Dana to put aside the pad.

“How long have you had the dreams, now, Carol?”

“Almost three years.”

“So you see Sugar’s death, and your own, almost every night for three years. I had a thought about this the other day. I don’t know if it’s right or not, but I want to share it with you.”

Starkey eyed her suspiciously. She hated the word “share.”

“Do you know what a perception illusion is?”

“No.”

“It’s a drawing. You look at it, and you see a vase. But if you look at it with a different mind-set, you see two women facing each other. It’s like a picture hidden within a picture. Which you see depends upon the perceptions and predispositions you bring to the viewing. When a person looks at a picture over and over again, maybe they’re trying to find that hidden picture. They keep looking, hoping that they’ll see it, but they can’t.”

Starkey thought this was all bullshit.

“You’re saying that I’m having the dream because I’m trying to make sense of what happened?”

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

“I think that if you don’t know, I sure as hell don’t. You’re the one with a Ph.D.”

“Fair enough. Okay, the Ph.D. suggests that we have to deal with the past in order to heal the present.”

“I do that. I try to do that. Christ, I think about that goddamned day so much I’m sick of it.” Starkey raised a hand. “And, yes, I know that thinking about it isn’t the same as dealing with it.”

“I wasn’t going to say that.”

“Right.”

“This isn’t a criticism, Carol. It’s an exploration.”

“Whatever.”

“Let’s get back to the perception illusion. The notion I had is that your dream is the first picture. You return to it because you haven’t found the second picture, the hidden picture. You can only see the vase. You’re looking for the two women, you suspect that they’re there, but you haven’t been able to find them. It occurred to me that maybe this is because what you’re seeing isn’t what really happened. It’s what you imagined happening.”

Starkey felt her irritation turning to anger.

“Of course it’s what I imagined. I was fucking dead, for Christ’s sake.”

“The tape would show what really happened.”

Starkey drew a deep breath.

“Then, if there are two women to be found, you might be able to find them. Maybe what you would discover is that there is only the vase. Whichever you find, maybe that knowledge would help you put this behind you.”

Starkey looked past Dana to the window again. She pushed to her feet and went back to the window.

“Please come back to your seat.”

Starkey shook out a cigarette, lit up. Dana wasn’t looking at her. Dana faced the empty seat as if Starkey were still there.

“Carol, please come back to your seat.”

Starkey blew out a huge screen of smoke. She sucked deep, filled the air with more.

“I’m okay over here.”

“Have you realized that whenever we come to something that you don’t want to hear or that you want to avoid, you escape through that window?”

Starkey stalked back to the chair.

“The dream changed.”

“How so?”

Starkey crossed her legs, realized what she was doing, uncrossed them.

“Pell was in the dream. They took off Sugar’s helmet, and it was that bastard Pell.”

Dana nodded.

“You’re attracted to him.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

“Are you?”

“I don’t know.”

“A little while ago, you told me that he scared you. Maybe this is the true reason why.”

“The two faces?”

“Yes. The hidden picture.”

Starkey tried to make a joke of it.

“Maybe I’m just a freak who likes to put herself at risk. Why else would I work the Bomb Squad?”

“You haven’t seen anyone since it happened?”

Starkey felt herself flush. She averted her eyes, hoping she looked thoughtful instead of sick to her stomach with fear.

“No. No one.”

“Are you going to act on this attraction?”

“I don’t know.”

They sat quietly until Dana glanced at her clock.

“Looks like our time is almost up. I’d like to leave you with something else to think about for next time.”

“Like I don’t have enough?”

Dana smiled as she picked up the pad, laying it across her legs as if she was already considering the notes she would write.

“You made a joke about working on the Bomb Squad because you enjoyed the risk. I remember something that you said when we were first seeing each other. I had said that being a bomb technician seemed like a very dangerous profession.”

“Yeah?”

Starkey didn’t remember.

“You told me that it wasn’t. You told me that you never thought of bombs as dangerous, that a bomb was just a puzzle that you had to solve, all neat and contained and predictable. I think you feel safe with bombs, Carol. It’s people who scare you. Do you think that’s why you enjoyed the Bomb Squad so much?”

Starkey glanced at the clock.

“Looks like you were right. Time’s up.”

After leaving Dana, Starkey worked her way through the crosstown traffic toward Spring Street with a growing sense of inevitability. She told herself it was resolve, but she knew it was as much about resolve as a drunk falling down stairs. He was going to hit the bottom whether he resolved to or not. She was on the stairs. She was falling. She was going to see herself die.

By the time Starkey reached CCS, she felt numb and fuzzy, as if she were a ghost come back to haunt a house, but was now separate from it, unseen and weightless.

Across the squad room, Hooker was screwing around with the coffee machine. She watched him, thinking that Hooker had the phone numbers for the TV news departments. She told herself to get the numbers, start calling, and find the goddamned tapes of herself. Do it
now
, before she chickened out.

She marched to the coffee machine.

“Jorge, did you set it up to have those tapes enhanced?”

“Yeah. I told you I’d take care of it, remember?”

“Mm. I just wanted to be sure.”

“It’s a postproduction company in Hollywood that the department uses. We should have them in two or three days.”

“Right. I remember. Listen, did we get any of those tapes from channel eight?”

“Yeah. You took one of them home, Carol. Don’t you remember?”

“For Christ’s sake, Jorge, I took a shitload of tapes home. Can I remember where they all came from?”

Hooker was staring at her.

“No. I guess not.”

“Who’d you talk to over there at channel eight? To get the tapes?”

“Sue Borman. She’s the news director.”

“Lemme have her phone, okay? Something I want to ask her about.”

“Maybe I can help. What do you want to know?”

Nothing was easy. He couldn’t just say, sure, and go get the goddamned number.

“I want to talk to her about the tapes, Jorge. Now, could I please have her number?”

Starkey followed Hooker back to his desk for the number, then went directly to her phone where she called channel eight. She punched the number mechanically, without thought of what she would say or how she would say it. She didn’t want to think. She didn’t want to give herself time to not do it.

Channel eight was the only television station that she recalled at the trailer park. She knew that others had been there, but she did not remember which others and didn’t want to call around, asking. Channel eight she remembered because of their station ID letters. KROK. The bomb techs used to call the KROK remote vehicle the shitmobile.

“This is Detective Carol Starkey with LAPD. I’d like Sue Borman, please.”

When Borman came on, she sounded harried. Starkey guessed that probably went with the job.

“We sent tapes over there. Is everything all right with them? You don’t have a playback problem, do you?”

“No, ma’am. The tapes are fine. We appreciate your cooperation. I’m calling about another set of tapes.”

“What you got are the only tapes we have. We sent you everything.”

“These are older tapes. They’d probably be in your library. Three years ago, an officer was killed at a trailer park in Chatsworth, and another officer was injured. Do you remember that?”

“No. Was that another bomb thing?”

Starkey closed her eyes.

“Yes. It was a bomb thing.”

“Waitaminute. It wasn’t just one guy; both guys were killed, but they brought back one of them at the scene, right?”

“That’s the one.”

“I was a news writer back then. I think I wrote the story.”

“It’s been three years. Maybe you don’t keep the tapes.”

“We keep everything. Listen, what did you say your name is?”

“Detective Starkey.”

“You’re not who I talked to about the Silver Lake thing, right?”

“No, that was Detective Santos.”

“Okay, what I’ll have to do is check our library. I’ll do that and get back to you. Gimme the date of the incident and your phone number.”