Shadows of Doubt (16 page)

Shevaun beamed proudly. “Yeah, I am pretty fond of ‘em. Well the cat anyway.” She winked at Abby.

“Oh nice! Thanks, Momma.” Lou sat Angus on the floor and got up from her seat, glancing down again at the plans one more time. “You really think you can save the oaks and stuff?” She asked again.

Abby’s smile for Lou was as bright as the sun as she nodded in the affirmative. “I can pretty much guarantee it. You call me if you think of anything else. If your mother signs off on these, we hope to get started right away, so don’t be shy and hesitate!” Without really thinking, Abby stepped in and gave Lou a warm hug then stepped back, still smiling. “It was really wonderful to meet you.”

Perhaps Lou should have felt odd with a total stranger hugging her out of the blue, but she didn’t. Instead she felt really happy, at least for the moment, before she heard the shrill of her partner’s horn blasting at her from the driveway.

“Oh shit... err... excuse my language.” Lou blew out a breath. “It was wonderful meeting you too. I’m sure I’ll see you again soon. I gotta go before my partner shatters the glass with his horn.” Lou leaned over and gave her mother a quick kiss then raced for the door with a wave. “See ya! Oh Momma, the plans are awesome so just sign them.” Lou winked at Abby before she closed the door behind her.

Shevaun stared at the front door for a moment in shock at her daughter’s complete turn around on the new neighbor. “Well, those must be quite some plans for her to say that.”

Abby turned her full attention to Lou’s mother now. “Well, as I told your daughter, I have significant pull in the design and planning so you two just tell me if there is anything I can do to make things more agreeable. I have a very strong feeling we are all going to be very good friends because of this little venture.”

“Well that sounds lovely. Lets get a good look at these plans and see if we can start your prediction off on the right foot, shall we?” Shevaun sat down and picked up where her daughter had apparently left off.

Abby was confident that Lou’s mother would approve of the plans just as Lou had, so she settled herself and waited to field any questions Shevaun might have. In the meantime she was bubbling inside over having met the object of her Dominor’s distraction and the fact that she liked her. She couldn’t wait to call Frankie and tell him about her not so accidental mix-up and meeting Lou face to face. Frankie would probably have a fit over Abby taking such a risk but he would get over it. She needed to know if this mystery detective was worthy of her Dom and if she warranted all of Abby’s considerable skills to make the stars align properly for this match to be made. As she listened and answered all of Shevaun’s very articulate and intelligent questions, Abby was certain this was a worthy cause.

Lou had prepared herself for a perfectly dreary Friday morning stuck in
traffic with her partner complaining as usual, but Vinny had decided they were taking the scenic route to the station. By scenic route, he had meant by way of the Chatsworth Glenn apartments to talk to Janine Winslow’s roommate. Carla Schwartz had not reported Winslow missing because she herself had been out of town at a training seminar for her vocation which was as an instructor at the local beauty college. Ms. Schwartz, despite her gleaming plum hair, was what Lou considered a chihuahua of a person. She was shaky, bug-eyed and would not shut up. Fortunately, her continuous chatter yielded them some crumbs of information that gave them a clearer picture of who their victim was.

Janine Winslow was a decent young woman who had moved to California when grandmother, her only living relative, passed away after a long battle with lung cancer. Janine had dreamed of being a dancer since she was a little girl and had taken classes up until her grandmother took ill. After playing nursemaid for several years, Janine took what little inheritance was left to her and came to California to finish her education so that one day she could fulfill her second place dream of working in a museum or art gallery. She had answered Schwartz’s ad in the paper for a roommate nearly three years ago and they had been residing at Chatsworth Glenn ever since. Winslow had started dancing at the strip joint because the price of her education was far more than she had expected, along with the cost of living in Los Angeles. Schwartz stated Janine was emphatic about keeping ‘Jade’, her dancing persona, entirely separate from the rest of her life. What little time Winslow had between classes and work she spent volunteering for her professors on various projects. According to the roommate, Janine had been helping one of her professors with some sort of big event that was taking place at some museum in the next week or so. Although that was vague, it would be easy enough for them to track down which museum was holding an event that qualified as big.

Once Lou and Vinny left the roommate, they were able to track down the professor and sketch a decent time line of Winslow’s movements for the week prior to her abduction. They just needed to confirm her comings and goings from work to fill in the gaps. Unfortunately, that was going to have to wait since they had put off checking in at the station as long as they could. Fortunately, the club was in Sheriff’s jurisdiction and being acquainted with the establishment from their days in narcotics, they knew they had a few hours before anyone would be there to answer any questions. So the two of them headed to Homicide to finish up their official paperwork on Janine Winslow and ship off copies to the investigating officers at LAPD. Before they had the chance to stew about how much they hated shipping those reports off, they got a call to a neat and tidy little crime scene that provided a perfect time filler.

They arrived at the one bedroom apartment to find a frail and weathered fifty-something woman who looked like she had been repeatedly dropped face first off the balcony, then kicked down the stairs several times for good measure. The woman sat silently with a detached expression. Staring off into the long distant nothing while a uniformed deputy stood over her. Lou and Vinny walked past her for the time being to get a look at the scene. The apartment looked like it had been picked up and shaken like a snow globe. Furniture flung, fragments of some sort of crockery everywhere, even a piece lodged in the wall. The sofa was on its side and askew by the door to the apartment which made it appear as though it had been used to barricade the door from the inside, unsuccessfully. The door itself had been hacked nearly to splinters with a gaping hole where the doorknob had once been. Later, Lou and Vinny were informed that the victim had indeed hacked his way through the door with an ax when the suspect had barred his entry by whatever means she could. When they finally saw the victim among the rubble, it appeared as though he had been both stabbed in the chest with a bread knife then smashed in the head with a cast iron skillet. Lou couldn’t help but think of the old adage, if first you don’t succeed, try, try again. The victim was an enormous man, who amazingly enough, beyond the smell of blood and brain matter, reeked of tequila. He easily outweighed the suspect by one-hundred pounds and was still clutching the ax in his right hand and a tattered copy of a Restraining Order in his left.

It had taken them about two hours to make sure everything was done by the book but once all was said and done, it was a clean case of self defense. The real victim, Lupe Gonzales, had been a repeated victim of abuse at the hand of the now deceased George Perez, her former boyfriend. The apartment had been the location of over a dozen domestic violence calls over the past two months and the officers on scene knew that if George didn’t drink himself to death first, either he or Lupe was going to wind up dead by the other’s hand. The sad part was that Lupe had been really trying to do the right things since her last release from the hospital two days prior. She had gotten counseling. Found someone at Legal Aide that helped her with the paperwork and finally gotten a restraining order against George. He had been served that morning and that had set off the latest and fatal attack. Lupe had called 9-1-1 when George started hacking at her door. The operator could hear him screaming that he was going to kill Lupe through the phone even over Lupe’s own cries for help. It was all on the 9-1-1 recording. Clear as day for everyone to hear. Even the part where George had broken through the door, told Lupe she was going to die and even still when he yelled at her for stabbing him and told her he was going to rape her dead corpse. It was neat and tidy from a legal standpoint but it was a safe bet that Lupe Gonzales would be a mess forever.

“God, I really want to go home and kiss my wife.” Vinny finally spoke once they left Homicide after filing their reports and talking to the powers that be to make sure Lupe Gonzales wouldn’t have to spend the night in lock-up. Lou didn’t say anything. She simply stared out the side window. “Ah shit, you okay kiddo?” Realization struck Vinny that this sort of case was way too close to home for Lou.

She looked at him and smiled solemnly. “I’m good.” She turned back to stare out the window.

Lou hadn’t dated when she moved back to California until eight years ago when she unwittingly agreed to go out to dinner with a ticking bomb. The guy had seemed nice enough. A new clerk at the downtown courthouse. But Lou had known after dinner that he wasn’t her type and that he was a little too clingy out of the gate. She had thought they parted ways that evening well enough and when he had called to ask her out again she simply told him she was really busy with her career and it wasn’t a good time in her life for any sort of dating. The man apparently had other plans for her. He had hacked her email, broken into her apartment, even tried to storm the station she was working out of at the time. She got a restraining order and he broke it the same day he was served, very much like George Perez had done to Lupe.

It had been on a Wednesday night when Lou had been wearing her headphones and had her back to the door of her apartment when he picked the lock, snuck up behind her, then proceeded to beat her to a pulp. Her uncle had scared him off when he came by unexpectedly to check on her, finding the door open and Lou unconscious on the kitchen floor. That was when Lou’s uncle made her move in with him and her aunt. They picked the psycho up the next morning but a handy and hefty trust fund had the bastard out on bail before the weekend.

His second attempt on Lou’s life was when she was driving home from the station the Saturday night after he made bail. It was simple and efficient planning on his part. He waited until she pulled up to the stop sign less than a block away from her uncle’s house and when she started to go through, he and his rented Hummer were careening into her car at over sixty miles per hour. The impact was so violent that it shot Lou out the passenger side of the car, along with the door that had blown right off it’s hinge. The moron hadn’t counted on his own airbag knocking him out so he was still at the scene when Lou’s uncle Seamus and Vinny ran up on him after hearing the crash. No one ever questioned how the son of a bitch was so banged up and bloody even though there was no evidence of blood inside his car. It was obvious, or so the District Attorney had argued at the trial. He had sustained his injuries when he attempted to flee the scene and fell, several times.

Vinny didn’t press Lou to talk about it now. He remembered that the bastard was going to be eligible for parole at the end of the year and that was probably why Lou wasn’t shaking it off like she normally would. Instead, Vinny thought it best to shut up and get her home, safe and sound.

“Hey!” She shouted at him. “You missed the turnoff!”

Vinny nearly sideswiped the car next to them when she shouted at him. “What the hell, Lou?!”

“We’re going to the strip joint, remember?”

“Seriously? You still wanna do that tonight?” He glanced at her quickly, not wanting to take his eyes from the road for too long.

“Seriously! What are you thinking? We can’t wait on that! LAPD will be all over the place. We can’t afford to wait until after they’re done. We’ll draw too much attention if we wait.”

So maybe getting her head into Winslow was a better idea then her stewing at home. Grinning at his tough as nails partner, he got off at the next turnoff and headed to the strip club.

Max stood watching
the city go by from his terrace already polished, pressed and nervous as hell. He had well over an hour before they had to leave to make his dinner engagement. It irked him beyond belief that he was nervous over something as simple as having dinner with the McAllisters. Especially since he had spent the better part of the day scouring the underbelly of the city in search of a ruthless sadistic killer without batting an eyelash. The foolishness of it was that Max had known Joe for all of Joe’s life and was his superior after all. But now things were decidedly different. Now Max knew that they were Lou’s parents. Granted, Joe was technically her step-father but he had raised her for the majority of her life and from all of Frank’s research, Lou regarded Joe as her father. So it was indeed very different, if only to Max. These were the parents of the woman that had knocked the wind out of him. Without warning, without want. He had resigned himself that it was pure stupidity and nothing would ever come of it, but deep down in his core he was powerless to it. He mulled it all over in his head when all of a sudden, as if the Fates needed to highlight the point, there she was. He thought it was his own head playing tricks. Forcing him to see her in random people but when he saw her brawny partner join her on the street corner a block or so over

“Un-bloody-believable!” Max hissed through his teeth.

“What’s up Boss?” Frank asked as he handed him a snifter of cognac of which Max drained in one gulp. As Frank followed Max’s gaze he had to restrain himself from flat-out giggling when he saw Lou Donovan and her partner standing on the corner near a strip club. He checked himself quickly and put on his best grimace. “What the hell are they doing there?” It was a rhetorical question. “You don’t think its over the Winslow woman do you? I mean this is Sheriff’s turf so maybe it’s something else.”

Max turned to Frank and scowled at him. “Isn’t it your job to find out? And get me Carpesh on the line right away. I want to know if Caroline has been snooping.” He stormed off the terrace and disappeared into the suite with his empty snifter. Frank just looked back at the two detectives on the corner and did in fact giggle, quietly. After a few seconds, he ran to Abby and his suite to fill her in on the latest development.

Six minutes later, Abby walked out onto Max’s terrace to find him staring across the block at the strip club with a half empty snifter of cognac. She quickly staunched her grin and cleared her throat.

“I have Carpesh on the line for you, my Dom.” She handed him the cell phone and played it formal because she knew he was having an internal struggle at the moment and was seriously grumpy about it.

He snatched the phone from her with barely a glance. “Peter, what’s the status on Devereux? Is she minding her own or what?”

Abby took three steps back and tried to decipher the content of the conversation based upon Max’s facial expressions. From what she could see, it wasn’t good. Max even dropped the phone to his side for a moment and made a sound that Abby often described as a growl. She could hear what sounded like Carpesh’s faint stutter coming from the phone before Max put it back to his ear.

“Carpesh... Carpesh...” Max rolled his eyes. “Peter! Stop! Breathe!” It would appear that Peter Carpesh was panicking again and Abby literally had to bite her lip so that she wouldn’t laugh.

“I will handle it. You do your job and do it meticulously, that is all. Do you understand?” Max was straining to not bite the man’s head off. “No, you leave that to us. You simply contact me, Frank or Abby immediately if anything else pops up like this. But Peter, think before you dial that phone, make certain it’s a legitimate call and not paranoia, do you understand me?” Max listened for about three more seconds then actually attempted to strangle the phone before he resumed speaking to Carpesh. “This was not paranoia. This should have been relayed to us immediately. Do you see the difference? Good. We’ll be in touch.” Max calmly pressed the disconnect button then turned and pitched the phone somewhere in the direction of Roxbury Road. It appeared as though he contemplated tossing his snifter as well but he thought better of it then turned back to Abby. “Sorry about your phone.”