Perfect Killer (8 page)

I thought about this as I sat on the stinking rocks and watched the
Jambalaya
and the Cigarette boat melt into one crumpling mass of gasoline, diesel fuel, and burning fiberglass resin that had gone up far quicker than I had ever seen before. I guessed it was the enormous amount of gasoline in the Cigarette boat's tanks.

The Harbor Patrol and the Coast Guard spotlights supplemented the already ample light from private watercraft, blasting the scene with stark, flat illumination from so many directions it bleached out shadows and washed away colors with a blue-white gesso that made it look like a virgin paint-by-numbers canvas. I squinted into the light, grateful to see all three passengers aboard the Cigarette boat being pulled aboard other boats.

The
Jambalaya's
aluminum mast softened from the heat, then wilted, sending the masthead anemometer and other instruments plunging into the water.
The Coast Guard vessel maneuvered gingerly in close to the wreckage to allow the crew to spray fire-suppressing foam. Abruptly the two burning boats made a noise oddly reminiscent of a flushing toilet, then sank immediately, propelled to the bottom, no doubt, by the massive lead weight in the
Jambalaya's
finned, torpedo-shaped keel.
Watching the
Jambalaya's
rigging disappear beneath the water sucked me under my own surface for a moment. Like the individual frames of a motion picture flashing by too quickly to focus on any single one the images of what I had lost aboard the
Jambalaya
created a deep, unified sense of loss.
I stood up straight and tall and tried to shake off the sadness. I focused instead on the Coast Guard scattering foam to quell the remaining fire on the surface; I teased the scene apart with my eyes, desperate to spot someone thrashing about. But as one of the Harbor Patrol's inflatables made its way toward me, I grew increasingly comfortable that my assailant had not made it out before the burning mass sizzled beneath the waves.
"What in hell've you gotten yourself into this time, Doc?" I recognized sheriff's sergeant Vince Sloane's gruff Brooklyn accent before I actually recognized his face through the glare. "It looked like the freaking Fourth of July out there." He was a beefy, powerful man with no tolerance for BS and an amazing capacity to keep his temper under control. He was a perp's nightmare, hell on wheels with a heart for the innocent that knew no natural bounds.
Sloane knelt amidships as the helmsman feathered the throttle and brought the craft within inches of the jetty and kept it there without actually touching the riprap. That had to be Lexus Guzman. She was the only deputy with such a deft hand on the helm.
"Hell if I can figure it out," I replied to Sloane as I climbed aboard the inflatable.
"Doc, you smell like manure," Lexus said as she moved the inflatable away from the jetty.
"Good evening to you too, Lexus," I replied. Her real name was Carolina; she'd come from a well-to-do family with a vineyard down near Ensenada and had shown up for work the first day in a bright, shiny new Lexus convertible. And while she had gone on to newer and fancier cars, the nickname Lexus stuck.
We made our way north in the main channel and I filled them in. Overhead, a sheriff's helicopter passed us heading west, then settled into a rock-solid hover above the accident scene at the mouth of the harbor.
"I should give you this," I said as I tugged the Colt .45 automatic from my Windbreaker, pulled out the magazine, and ejected the cartridge in the chamber. I held the .45 upside down dangling with one finger in the trigger guard. Vince made a question with his face.
"I think when they finally pull the wreckage up, they're going to find three bodies and one of them is going to be carrying a slug from this."
Sloane frowned deeply as he took all this in. Even without pay, I served as a sworn peace officer, which meant I would be placed on administrative leave while Internal Affairs investigated this officer-involved shooting.
"Okay," Sloane said, his voice heavy with resignation. "Tell me everything before I have to write it down officially." He nodded to Lexus, who slowed the inflatable and made a broad, sweeping circle. As I began, a television helicopter thwacked past overhead, the station's call letters prominently illuminated on the tail for maximum marketing impact. The door was open with the cameraman strapped in the opening. Another TV chopper followed close on its tail as we made lazy circles in the channel. Soon, the sky above and around the harbor breakwater looked like an aerial parking lot for giant mechanical dragonflies.
Ignoring the circus in the sky, I spilled everything, especially the part about how I thought it had been a botched drug rip-off and how professional my assailants had been.
"But not professional enough for you, eh, Doc?" Sloane gave me the same curiously wary look he wore whenever my military service came up. He had seen my DD214, the official discharge document issued by the Department of Defense summarizing my military service. A lot of stuff was too classified to put on it. I didn't talk about it and Sloane was too smart to pry. Guzman steered the craft slowly to the sheriff's dock.
"Just lucky," I said, and shrugged.
"Lucky!" Sloane scoffed. "If you'd've been lucky, the bastards would've hit the right boat and not yours." He mumbled, "You have any idea how much freaking paperwork this is going to be? Not to mention that bozo season is here and I can't afford to lose a good reserve officer."
I was about to make a sarcastic wisecrack about how sorry I was for his terrible evening when my cell made a fuzzy buzzing sound. The wet speaker had a hard time with Robert's Johnson's "Crossroad Blues," which I used as my ring tone, but I was amazed the phone still worked.
I answered and froze at the sound of a full, melodic, and all too familiar voice.
"Mr. Stone?"
I checked my watch. "Jasmine?"
"It's me. My flight was one of those very rare creatures that arrived early."
"Oh, jeez!" I blurted. "No, don't…I didn't mean that the way it sounded. Its just…I've been…my boat's been in an accident and—"
"You okay?"
"For now. But there's going to be a lot of paperwork and the usual hassles."
"Okay. Look, I booked a room at the Crown Plaza right near LAX. Why don't I check in and call you in the morning?"
Guzman brought the inflatable to soft landing at the dock. Sloane grabbed the inflatable's bow line, jumped out, and tied it to the nearest cleat. He took the stern line from Guzman and did the same.
"Look, it's okay." Jasmine's voice was warm and confident, like her mother's. I'm not a tourist here."
I had once clipped a
Newsweek
article on Vanessa with a sidebar on Jasmine. She'd graduated from USC, then Stanford law school, clerked for a justice on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, then went to work with her mother in New York. When Vanessa moved to Mississippi, Jasmine stayed up North with a multimegaton Manhattan law firm. I manipulated the dates of the articles in my head and figured that Jasmine was in her midor maybe late thirties.
Then six months ago, after Vanessa's murder, Jasmine had come home to continue her mother's legacy at the Advocacy Foundation for Mississippi Justice, a Delta powerhouse inspired by Martha Bergmark's Mississippi Center for Justice down in Jackson.
"Still—" I stuttered.
"Still nothing. Take care of business and call me in the morning." The confidence and generosity in her voice amazed me and fooled me again into believing for an instant that I was talking to Vanessa. The daughter's genes had fallen right close the source, I thought, at least the DNA from Vanessa had. No one actually knew about the other half.
I stood there with the phone in my hand, thinking about the mystery of DNA and how it encapsulated the strong and independent thinking that had made Vanessa so incorruptibly autonomous. I wondered whether Jasmine had the same stuff.
Most of what I knew about both of them came from magazine and newspaper articles about Vanessa I had occasionally clipped and thrown into an expandable file. Some I had read and reread until the edges frayed and carried the smudges of my fingers.
When I married Camilla, I put the file in storage, a symbolic putting away of all others.
After the accident when we knew Camilla's coma had no end and I could no longer face the ghosts in our house, I took to living aboard the
Jambalaya
three or four nights a week and the rest at a cot in my office. I dragged Vanessa's old file down to the J
ambalaya.
At first, I'd sit belowdecks and simply touch the file. Every time I tried to open it, I'd see Camilla wasting away on her motorized hospital bed with the panoramic view of the Pacific, which no one could tell if she saw or not. Legally we remained husband and wife, but the coma had evicted the real Camilla from the body. Still, I remained faithful to the
memory
of Camilla, to the
idea
of who she had been. My nondecision to remain poised without action haunted every part of my life.
The day Vanessa was buried, my heart told me I could read her file without the spirits of adultery reaching out for me. From that cold winter day until this very morning, I'd sit aboard the
Jambalaya—
in the cockpit on warm sunny days and down below in the main cabin at night—and reread the pieces written about her. I was surprised at how complete a record I had collected, going back almost thirty years. Sometimes I felt guilty when I read the pieces, wondering at first, then knowing in my heart that Camilla had always been my second choice.
With Jasmine's voice echoing in my head, I remembered a
New York Times
article that emphasized that Jasmine had never met her father. She had been conceived during a one-night stand back in the licentious 1970s when Vanessa was a volunteer at a San Francisco law firm representing Native Americans arrested in the occupation of Alcatraz.
Vanessa's quote from the article struck me now as I listened to her daughter: "Good breeding material doesn't necessarily make for a good parent. Too damn many black children grow up with episodic and unreliable fathers who create expectations of love and trust that rank several steps below the family dog. I also didn't like the way abortion felt for me, so I raised her myself."
All of this hurtled through my mind as I struggled to say something intelligent to Vanessa's daughter. I came off inarticulate and banal, then said good-bye.
"Daughter of an old friend," I said to Sloane as he stood on the dock looking down at me. He raised the eyebrow that said he had questions that could wait. When he extended his hand, I accepted it.
"Thanks, Sarge."
He grunted something I took as a "You're welcome."
We walked toward the Coast Guard and sheriff's building, but it no longer felt familiar and secure to me. Now it loomed alien and full of unknown menace as we pushed through the doors and headed for the suspect-interview rooms where the doors locked from the outside.
Vince grabbed a first-aid kit on the way in. "Technically, we oughta have the paramedics look at this," he mumbled as he wiped at my earlobe with an alcohol pad, which burned worse than the original wound.
"Hell, that's not even big enough to put a Band-Aid on," Vince said.
He slapped me on the shoulder, then left me alone to wrestle with life, death, murder, and salvation. Little did I know that the enormity of what had just happened would pale into insignificance within just a few hours.

Fifteen minutes later, two plainclothes officers I had hoped never to see walked in. Internal Affairs was a lot like the Internal Revenue Service: necessary for the proper functioning of the organization, but best if never actually experienced firsthand. They interviewed me until nearly midnight. They had a job to do, but their assumption I was guilty pissed me off.

I told my story three times, first with both the investigators, then, by turns, with each of them alone. They asked me about my military background and tried to pry into the classified stuff. I told them they should talk to Vince or to call the Pentagon. I gave them the number.

They left the room by turns, and from the follow-up questions they asked after returning, I surmised they had called the Pentagon and interviewed Vince. Clearly they had also interviewed witnesses on the other boats, obtained copies of the duty logs from the Coast Guard and sheriff's dispatchers, and listened to the radio tapes of my Mayday calls. Their swift professionalism made me feel a lot less like an Inquisition victim.

They didn't know what to make of the reference one of the men had made to the Blackberry and at first were skeptical that I also had no clue. But over time, their attitudes mellowed; softened, I assumed, by the consistency of my story and its concurrence with the other witnesses, my radio calls, the gunshots, flares, and their discovery of a militarystyle inflatable drifting west of the breakwater

They constructed a timeline and eventually wound things up by telling me I should be available at any time for more interviews. They also explained that releasing me was not an exoneration for my killing the men.

I finally grabbed my Windbreaker and walked from the interview room, toward the locker room and a quick shower. Trudging through a grinding fatigue where fluorescent lights glared way too bright and normal sounds hit my ears as too loud and brittle, I recognized the adrenaline hangover that always accompanied every life-or-death battle. I half-closed my eyes as I made my way down the familiar corridors, through a quick rinse in the shower, and back toward the main office, dressed in a ratty pair of old cargo shorts and Cafe Pacifico T-shirt that had been stuffed in the back of my locker.

I made my way through a mostly deserted warren of desks and offices and spotted Vince at the doorway leading to the visitors' reception area.
"How you feeling?" He searched my face.
"Okay, I suppose. Internal Affairs has a job to do."
"Uh-uh."
When he shook his head at my words, then nodded back toward the breakwater where the firefight had happened, I knew what he was trying to say.
"They started it, Sarge," I said. "Whoever they were, they deserved what they got. It was them or me. That part doesn't bother me a bit." I paused. "Having my boat sunk bothers me."
Vince looked at me strangely, cocking his head and focusing on my eyes as if he could see something mysterious there. Unlike others, I never experienced guilt or remorse after killing an assailant.
As a neuroscientist, I cognitively understood why about 98 percent of the population had trouble with killing in self-defense, but I had never grasped the emotional sense of it. Decades ago, that combination of personal characteristics had once allowed me to keep effectively soldiering along while combat fatigue claimed people around me. But on this night, age and a lack of practice had taken their toll; fatigue hit me a lot harder than it would have twenty-five years before.
"Uh-huh," Vince said doubtfully. "Regardless of how you
feel,
you still
look
like shit, Doc, even if you don't smell like it anymore."
"And you
sound
like an echo."
"Well, you may want to perk up a little. You have a visitor." Cocked his head toward the reception area.
"Who?"
He shook his head.
"See for yourself."
I combed my fingers through my still-wet hair.
"Go on in," Vince said impatiently "The young lady has been waiting patiently."
In the brightly lit reception area, a murmuring entourage of uniforms jammed the front: three or four khaki-clad sheriffs deputies, two LAPD partners in navy blue, and a CHP motorcycle cop in knee-length leather boots holding his helmet in his left hand. In the next moment they parted like a curtain, framing Jasmine Thompson, who made her entrance. She looked more like her mother than she sounded. The similarity took me by surprise and made me wonder if she had her mother's intellect and sense of humor as well. The whole package would be astonishing.
As Jasmine made her way to me, I got a collective glare from the assembled audience, equal parts displeasure and envy.
"Mr. Stone!" I picked up on the sly winks and nudges among the cops flanking her. Most were half my age and looked palpably relieved at her formal greeting.
As Jasmine drew near, she appeared to be Vanessa reincarnate. I felt the faint stir of old, faded memories. Jasmine had her mother's generous, almost Lane Bryant figure, which amply filled out her jeans and knit top in a way that guaranteed the undivided attention of the appreciative audience around her.
I recognized differences in Jasmine as she approached. Jasmine stood a head taller than Vanessa. She was nearly as tall as me, making it necessary for most of the cops to look up at her face. A wild halo of ringlet curls surrounded her face and cascaded nearly to her shoulders. Her intensely black hair dazzled with rainbows. And where her mother's skin reminded me of creamy mocha, Jasmine's glowed more warmly like maple sugar. Her lips were fashionably full even without makeup, and her nose looked more American Indian than African-American. Two small diamond studs on one of her ears dazzled intensely even under the fluorescent lights.
But her eyes dominated everything else: large, intense, with the pale luminescence of wisteria blooms accentuated by the warm, dusky hues of her high, aristocratic cheekbones. If these were the window to her soul, then I swear I could see Vanessa shining through.
I remembered Vanessa in the next minute and swallowed against the constriction in my throat. Jasmine held out her arms as she approached; I followed automatically, accepting a brief, polite, concerned family-variety hug.
For an instant the minor notes of Mississippi funerals played in my head. Then those dark, anxious emotions vanished as her scent, blissfully different from Vanessa's, made a direct connection with my innermost thoughts.
Jasmine's scent moved my heart before my mind could grasp it. In one instant, it made me sorry the hug was so chaste; then the next instant, guilt hit me for feeling that. The human mind is a strange amalgam of deep-seated, foundational Darwinian impulses and rational centers of higher control. The first govern basic animal survival and land people in prison when the second doesn't take control. Impulses happen physically, spontaneously. They are hormone-driven and totally without thought. Free will can either surrender or control the chemicals. In an instant, I knew then my reaction was physical, the impulse all wrong. I worked at thinking with my big head and not the small one.
"How are you?" she asked as she stood back a step, and I saw concern make its way across her face as she took in my face and head. "Are you all right?"
"A scratch," I said gently, touching the top of my ear. "I got lucky."
She frowned.
"You should see the other guy." I smiled.
She shook her head.
I said, "I thought you—how did you find me?"
"Television. Every local channel has a helicopter."
I nodded slowly "But you really shouldn't have—"
"Do you really think I'd miss the action this close to my hotel?"
"You really
are
your mother's child."
A quick shadow of loss momentarily eclipsed the smile in her eyes and made me regret my words. Jasmine had had six months of getting on with life to ease her pain, but I knew that the loss of someone so close would leave a wound that would never quite heal. I also knew I had to be careful, because open psychological wounds leave us all emotionally vulnerable, irrational, apt to go with the flow of our natural steroids. I thought of people who get divorced and marry on the rebound, or Stockholm-syndrome hostages who fall in love with their captors.
"Awright, awright! Quit the gawking!" Vince Sloane's voice boomed as he made his way in front of us toward the assembly of law enforcement personnel. "Don't you guys have a report to file or something?" When the clot of uniforms failed to give way, he bulled his way through and motioned Jasmine and me to follow. "C'mon, c'mon! I hear your mother calling you. Step aside; there's nothing to see here; gimme some air," he barked like the Marine gunnery sergeant he had once been.
We followed Vince out of the building and into a night that had turned crisp and clean with a light breeze off Santa Monica Bay. I followed Jasmine to a Mercedes twoseater glowing bright red under the streetlights. Vince gave a low whistle as he looked admiringly at the car's polished shine that reflected every streetlight in the vicinity back at us. The chrome dazzled, the top was down.
"I didn't know you could rent these," I said.
"You can rent
anything
in L.A." She hit the alarm release. "Anything." She gave me a Mona Lisa smile that hid more than it revealed. "All it takes is money"
Jasmine looked good next to the Mercedes. She wore style without looking flashy and pretentious. Vince had stopped a good ten yards from the car. I turned back to look at him, He gave me a wink and a nod of approval, then turned back toward the building, where the uniformed officers still crowded behind the broad plate-glass windows. Vince slowly shook his head as he advanced on them.
Jasmine opened her door and nodded at me. "Hop in."
I obeyed as she cranked the engine and backed out of the space.
"Where to?"
I thought for a moment as she headed slowly toward the cop controlling traffic into the lot. Beyond, a jam of television trucks with their satellite dishes worshiping the southern sky crowded both shoulders.
"Just around the marina; I said as we cleared the checkpoint and made our way toward Fisherman's Village. The mob of television functionaries instantly spotted the flashy convertible, then recognized me.
Shoulder-cam lights burst out of the darkness like magnesium flares.
Jasmine muttered some low derogatory curse about leeches or roaches
as she hit the accelerator and sent both production crews and the well
coiffed talking heads lurching for safety. In an instant, we were through
the corridor of inquisition and into the freedom of early-morning
darkness.
Jasmine looked in her rearview mirror and smiled; a sly satisfaction lit up her eyes. My heart filled with trouble when I studied Jasmine's eyes and felt Vanessa's irresistible gravity that had never let me go. I looked quickly away and struggled against memories I dared not recall.
"They'll follow us," she said as she pressed on the Mercedes's accelerator.
"Not much chance the way you're driving."
She looked over at me and raised her eyebrows. "Too fast?"
The g-forces pulled me toward her as she steered the car through a sweeping curve.
"Nope," I said. When her face made that ambiguous smile again, I wondered what she was thinking and worked diligently on not caring.
Our trajectory straightened out parallel to the H Basin; ahead of us, the light at the intersection at Admiralty Way turned red.
She braked hard, "Which way?"
"Left," I said. "My truck is over near my slip."
"Truck?" She raised her eyebrows again and eased through the red. "I didn't know brain surgeons drove trucks. Next you'll be telling me you wear Fruit Of The Loom briefs and watch television wrestling."
I did wear Fruit Of The Loom briefs, bought in twelve-packs at Target, and almost said I was a neurophysiologist and hadn't performed brain surgery since the accident, but it all played in my head as too stuffy, too fussy…too
old,
and something in me wanted very much not to sound too old for Jasmine. But in fact, I thought of nothing that didn't sound old or lame, so I said nothing at all.
I closed my eyes and we rode in silence for several long moments. The scene on the
Jambalaya
played in my head.
"The guy said, ‘I want the Blackberry.' That's what he said," I mumbled to myself.
"Pardon?"
I opened my eyes and caught Jasmine looking at me.
"The guy on the boat. He said he wanted the Blackberry your mother gave me." I shook my head. "I don't remember a Blackberry.
"What could be so important about a PDA that people are willing to kill for it?"