Run the Risk (9 page)

I thanked her and placed it gingerly against the side of my face.

“Have you found the man who killed my husband?” she said.

I lifted the towel from my face. “No.”

“Is that to be expected?” she asked.

I wanted to drift away into the cool ice I was holding against the side of my face. I wanted to find my daughter, I wanted to sleep, I wanted to be anywhere but right where I was. For the first time in my entire career, the thought entered my mind that my mother may have been right about me becoming a cop. I glanced at Harrison, who saw in my eyes that I wanted him to take it.

“Did anything different happen to your husband over the last couple of weeks?” Harrison asked.

“I don't understand,” Mrs. Finley said.

“Did he seem upset or talk about something unusual at the shop?”

She shook her head. “I don't believe so.”

Throbbing pain rolled across my cheek like a wildfire. It was all I could do to stay upright in the chair.

“Why are you asking these questions?” Mrs. Finley asked. “I thought my husband was killed in a robbery.”

“We're exploring every possibility,” Harrison said.

“What other possibilities are there?”

“This happens in every homicide, Mrs. Finley,” I said. “It's part of the process of every investigation. We look into everything, regardless how small.”

“I wouldn't know,” she said in resignation.

“Do you know an employee of the shop named Sweeny?” I asked.

“I don't think . . .” She thought for a moment, then shook her head. “No, I never met him. He must have been a temp.”

I stood up and motioned toward the door to Harrison.

“Would you let us know if anything is missing after the burglary, or if you find something you don't expect?” I said, handing her my card.

She nodded without interest.

“You can keep the towel, Lieutenant,” she said.

I thanked her and started out the door, then stopped when I looked out into the yard.

“Why is the yard in the shape it is?” I asked, turning back to Mrs. Finley.

She looked at me, puzzled by the question, then made the connection to what I was asking.

“Oh . . . that,” she said. “Daniel's philosophy was changing.”

Harrison looked over to me and shrugged in confusion.

“I'm not following you,” I said.

“He was getting rid of the lawn, going organic . . . native grasses.”

I glanced down at the doormat.

“Think green,” I said.

Mrs. Finley's eyes moistened with tears as she nodded. I turned and walked out of the house and into the yard. The sun appeared unnaturally bright after being in the dark house. When I slipped on my sunglasses the frame touched the side of my face where the door had hit me, and sent another wave of pain through my head. I put the ice back against my face and the pain began to pass.

“Does it seem odd to you that in a business with only three employees she didn't know Sweeny?” Harrison said.

I glanced back at the house. “Not if she was lying.”

“You think she was lying?”

“The other two employees are women. How did she know Sweeny was a man?”

I glanced one more time around the yard and realized there was one other thing that troubled me. He was changing his philosophy, going green, the same conversion my daughter had just “leaped” into with both feet and a spray bottle. I searched my memory trying to come up with something that would dismiss this entire line of thinking as the feverish worries of a mother who might just have suffered a concussion. I missed the mark. I remembered the carved wooden sign on the front door of Breem's flower shop instead.
GREEN IS OUR COLOR
.

“Goddamnit,” I whispered to myself.

“What?” Harrison asked.

“I'm thinking too much. It's nothing.”

My heart skipped a beat. There was no such thing as coincidence, not when murder was involved. I didn't want to believe it, couldn't believe it. Every dogma eventually runs smack into the reality of the exception to the rule. This had to be it, must be it. The dots we had been connecting were not going to include my daughter. Throw a stick in California you'll probably hit an environmentalist. Forget it.

“You don't look so good, Lieutenant,” Harrison said.

“I'm a little light-headed.”

I walked out of the yard and over to the passenger side of the car.

“You better drive,” I said.

“I think you should see a doctor,” Harrison said.

Absolutely, I thought. I wanted to disappear in a nice fat hospital bed, drift away in Demerol. I took the ice off the side of my face and looked at Harrison.

“So he can tell me I have to lie in bed for forty-eight hours? I don't think we have that kind of time.”

I tossed him the keys. “Unless you want to lead the investigation by yourself?”

Harrison's eyes did a little dance and then he shook his head. “I don't think so.”

I checked my watch; it was twelve-thirty. The day wasn't half over and we had already found another body, my daughter's life had been threatened, I was entertaining thoughts that she was somehow remotely connected to the rest of the investigation, and I had been hit in the side of the head with a slab of oak from the Arts and Crafts movement.

I got in the car and sank back into the seat. Harrison walked around and slid in behind the wheel. The jolt from the closing of the door went through my head like another shot from Sweeny.

“Sorry,” Harrison said, seeing the corners of my mouth wince from pain.

“Call Fraser and get them over here to execute the search warrant. If Sweeny didn't find what he was looking for, I want to.”

“Where we going?”

“My daughter's school. I'm supposed to meet her there at . . .” I checked myself. “She'll be there at one.”

PRINCIPAL PARKS WAS
in his late forties, with the trim build of a runner. He favored the pressed collars of Brooks Brothers to the casual dress most of his teachers wore. Whatever high-minded tone he may have contemplated using with me vanished the moment I walked into his office and he saw my bruised face and the blood on my shirt collar. Nothing kills a party like blood.

He stood dumbfounded for a moment like a passing motorist staring at a wreck.

“Have you had an accident?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I was hit with a door.”

He seemed to have trouble getting his mind around what I assumed was a first for a parent conference.

“A Craftsman door,” I said, trying to sharpen his understanding.

He sat silently for a moment, then seemed to have a breakthrough.

“I love Green and Green,” he said, as if we were on a walking tour of Pasadena's most famous Arts and Crafts houses and he was trying to impress me with his knowledge of these two architects. The absurdity of his words
struck him a second later and he added, “If you would like to do this another time . . .”

“This is the only time I have,” I said.

His eyes looked as if they were pleading for me to leave his office until it dawned on him I wasn't moving.

“Did you bring Lacy?” he asked.

“No one has seen my daughter since you sent her home,” I said.

“I don't understand.”

“What part of ‘No one has seen her' do you not understand?” I replied.

He shifted uneasily in his chair.

“I'm sure it's just a misunderstanding.”

I wanted to agree with him, I wanted to agree with him more than I've wanted anything in my entire life.

“I'm not sure,” I said.

Parks stared at me like someone who had drifted off the map with no idea where he was headed. Rather than talk, he sat strangely quiet, shuffling papers and occasionally glancing at my gun as we waited for Lacy.

Ten minutes after one, he finally spoke up.

“Is she often late?” he asked nervously.

In truth she was chronically late, but I didn't think that was it, no matter how much I wanted it to be.

“No,” I said.

My imagination began to outpace actual events, leading me down paths every mother has visited in nightmares, but thankfully very few ever visit in reality.

Why had she spoken to me when I was drifting in and out of consciousness at Finley's? Was she reaching out to me? Was she calling for help? I began to search madly for meaning in things where none could possibly be found. I replayed the phone conversation I had had with her in my office, examining every word for something guarded or hidden. I tried to picture how much gas was in her car, what clothes she had chosen that day, what coffee she had ordered at Starbucks, as if they would all lead to her walking through the office door.

Five minutes passed and Parks began checking his watch. Two minutes after that he cleared his throat and tentatively spoke.

“Maybe we should discuss a few things before she arrives.”

It was nearly twenty after. Lacy was never that late.

“She isn't coming,” I said almost involuntarily. The sound of the words coming out of my mouth startled me as if they had been said by someone else. What remained was why? Why wasn't she here? A cop immediately assumes the worst. But I was a mother now clinging to every other possible explanation. That was unthinkable. I took out my cell phone and called home. With each ring I would silently repeat, “Answer it, answer it, answer it,” like a mantra.

The machine picked up.

“If you're there, honey, please pick up,” I said. “Lacy, pick up the phone, come on, it's me . . .”

I waited until I ran out of tape, then I retrieved the messages in case she had called. There were three more calls from reporters, and then a voice that sent chills through me.

“Your daughter is a cunt.”

It sounded middle-aged, white, no detectable geographical origin. The residual fog that had engulfed me since I was hit by the door was instantly gone. I turned the phone off. To Park's credit he sensed that I had not gotten good news on the other end of the phone.

“Maybe we should talk to some of her friends, in case she said something to one of them before leaving.”

I looked at him and realized I hadn't heard a word he had spoken.

“I'm sorry . . .” I said.

“Her friends . . . why don't we talk to them?”

I nodded. Yes, that was a good idea. She must have said something. Lacy always had something to say.

“Do you know which friends she would possibly confide in?”

Everything came crashing down.

I looked at Parks and shook my head. I had just failed my daughter again.

“I don't know any of her friends. . . . I should . . . but I . . .”

Parks stepped in. “Maybe just a first name? We can figure out the rest.”

I looked at him for a moment and realized that this was not the first time he had had this conversation with a parent who has just discovered her child is a stranger. I felt pathetic. I had no excuses.

I frantically searched every crevasse in my memory and finally stumbled across a name.

“Carrie,” I said. “She knows someone named Carrie.”

Parks buzzed his secretary, who walked in a moment later.

“Karen, we need to find a senior or a junior named Carrie.”

“There're three. Only one is a senior—Carrie Jacobson.”

“Would you find out what class she's in and bring her here.”

As she walked out I called Officer James and told her that Lacy had not shown up at school.

“I'll give the surrounding departments a description of her car,” she answered.

She then tried to find something encouraging to say. “You know how kids are, Lieutenant. She's probably at a movie.”

“I have a voice recorded on my phone machine,” I said.

There was a pause on the other end of the line as she played that out.

“If it comes to that it might be useful, Lieutenant, but for right now—”

“I'm not a civilian, Officer,” I said.

“No . . . but you are a mother.”

I turned the phone off as Carrie Jacobson was escorted in by the secretary. I thought I would be able to tell just by looking at her if she was a friend of my daughter's, but quickly realized I was clueless again. She wore no makeup,
had two piercings in her left ear, and blond hair with a streak of lime green down the right side. The soles of her tennis shoes looked to be four inches high.

Parks did the introductions, but I cut him off.

“Are you a friend of Lacy's?” I asked.

Her eyes moved guardedly back and forth between Parks and me. I could only imagine what she had heard about me from Lacy. Mom the cop. A teenager's worst nightmare. Her eyes froze on the blood on my shirt and then traveled reluctantly up to the bruising on my face as if she didn't want to see the source of the blood.

“Oh, God, did something happen?” she said, her voice shaken.

Parks looked over to me with no idea how to respond. I moved my chair closer to Carrie, trying to act as much as I could like a mother instead of a cop. The blood clearly made it a stretch. That, and I was out of practice.

“I had some trouble, but it had nothing to do with Lacy.” Which as far as I knew was still the truth. I hoped to God, anyway, it was still the truth.

“You're a friend, I've heard her say your name,” I said.

She nodded uneasily.

“Did you talk to Lacy before she left school today?”

She shook her head.

“Is she in trouble?” she asked.

“She may be in danger. I need to find her. Did she talk to you or anybody about where she might be going?”

“What kind of danger?”

“Someone may be trying to hurt her.”

I saw hesitation in her eyes, as if betrayal was the first thing she thought of.

“Someone's threatened her, someone possibly very dangerous.”

Her shoulders sank toward the floor, the color in her face drained away.

“All she said was . . .” Her eyes darted toward Parks, then away. “ ‘Those fucking assholes' . . . that's all . . . Is she going to be all right?”

I looked over at Parks. The anger that I had felt toward him began to rise back to the surface. I clenched my teeth, trying my best not to say something I would probably regret later, then turned back to the girl.

“She was talking about Principal Parks?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said, as if annoyed by the obviousness of the question. “She just came from his office; she was really pissed. I mean, all she did was make a political statement and she was kicked out of school so the administration can look like they're doing something to the people who are pissed about what Lacy did.”

“That's enough, young lady,” Parks said.

I looked over at him.

“The time for Mr. Parks to explain himself will come.” I turned back to Carrie. “Right now my only concern is Lacy's safety.”

She nodded.

“Did she mention any other names?”

She took a nervous breath and nodded.

“What other names?” I asked.

She looked me right in the eye. “Yours.”

“What did she say?”

Carrie didn't flinch. “She said, ‘Like my mother's going to do something about it.' ”

I found myself liking this generation in ways I wasn't aware of before. If this girl and my daughter were examples of their strength of character, I figured they'd be all right. They'd survive the piercings, the tattoos, and the sherbet-colored hair. Their parents, on the other hand, and their whole self-absorbed generation, seemed entirely hopeless. I was an expert on that.

“Did she mention any names in connection with what she did at the pageant? Someone maybe you've never heard of?”

She shook her head. “I didn't even know about it.”

She smiled when she said that. She wasn't lying. She took pride in Lacy's ability to have kept what she did a secret. I found myself feeling the same thing.

Carrie glanced defiantly at Parks. “I think what she did was awesome.”

“So do I,” I said to Carrie.

The ability of my daughter to inspire a friend like this only increased my sense of desperation. I could hear a clock beginning to tick away the seconds in my head. Things were spinning out of control and I felt helpless to do a goddamn thing.

“Is there any place where she would go that we should look for her?”

She hesitated, still wrestling with trusting me.

“Please, Carrie, I need your help.”

She nodded. A wave of relief flooded my body.

“Starbucks.”

My heart sank. With one word my options had vanished.

“Shit,” I said involuntarily.

Carrie's surprise at my reaction served to increase her understanding that Lacy was in real danger.

“I'm sorry,” she whispered.

“If you can think of anything else, or if you hear from her, call me at this number,” I said, handing her a card.

Her fingers tried to slip quickly out of my hand like a hummingbird darting away from a flower, but I gently took hold of her hand before she could pull away. I looked down at the flawless, smooth skin. There wasn't a line or a crack; time hadn't touched her yet. I gripped her hand as if I were holding my daughter's.

“No more secrets, okay?” I said weakly.

She looked down at my hand for a moment, then into my eyes. “Lacy's smart. She'll be all right.”

I started to respond, but the words caught in my throat and all I could manage was a feeble nod.

“You can go back to class,” Parks said.

She glanced at me and I nodded.

Almost imperceptibly her fingers slipped out of my hand and she was out of the room. I sat motionless for a moment, my mind unable to focus on anything. It was the same sensation I remember feeling when we buried Lacy's
father. A disbelief, a terrible sense that there was no one there to help me. I saw Harrison step up to the glass door and knock. His presence reminded me that I wasn't there just as a mother, there was a madman out there with a bomb.

“You have a call,” he said, holding up a phone.

I looked at the phone in his hand as if I had never seen one before. Harrison saw the confusion in my eyes.

“I think you better take it,” he said, his tone leaving little doubt that this couldn't wait.