The Big Keep: A Lena Dane Mystery (Lena Dane Mysteries) (16 page)

“Hey,” I said uncertainly.

“Hello, Baby Girl.”
 

“I can’t talk about...the thing,” I waved my hands in the air to indicate, you know, my unborn child.

“All right.”
 

“But can we be cool anyway?”

She smiled at me, and stretched her leg under her utility desk to kick out the metal chair facing it.
 

“Of course. What is happening with your case?”

I sat down in the chair and filled her in on the whole thing: Starla, the apartment, the kids, and what I’d found in Jason Anderson’s office.

“It’s called what?”

“‘Gun for Hire: A True Story.’ I especially like how he made a point to say that it was all true. Not stupid at all.”
 

“No kidding.” Cristina leaned back in her desk chair, her arms stretching behind her head. “And he disappeared two weeks ago? Well, we can talk to Homicide and maybe Organized Crime, but that may be a roundabout way of doing it.”

“What else can we do?”

She stared at me soberly. “Baby Girl, if this man was trying to follow around a professional killer...we can check the morgue.”

19. Especially In Your Condition

As soon as she could get away, Cristina and I fought the traffic on the 10 east toward North Mission Road, where the city of Los Angeles houses its dead.
 

In LA every single person who dies from a trauma or unnatural death ends up at the county coroner’s office, a stately mission-style brick building not far from Dodger Stadium. The general public doesn’t usually get to view remains there, but then Cristina wasn’t general public. She was friendly with a couple of the Coroner’s Office investigators, and she spent part of the drive calling around to see if anyone was working late that night. She found a guy just heading out the door who agreed to hang around until we arrived.
 

And less than an hour later, I was standing over the body of Nate’s father, fighting back tears.

It had been depressingly easy. We met Cristina’s friend Steve McHugh, a portly older guy with a buzz cut that whitened near his temples, and I explained the problem and showed him a recent photo that Starla had given me. He brought us to the set of rooms devoted to unidentified corpses, where a technician took a two-second glance at the picture and led us immediately to the right morgue drawer. He pulled it out far enough for us to see the body’s head, and I felt my heart sink into my pelvis. One eye had been crushed by a terrible blow, and traces of blood still marred his dark blond hair, but it was Jason Anderson.

Cristina took one look at my face and stepped up to question the morgue attendant herself. Anderson had been there a little over a week, found in a dumpster near USC by a homeless guy. He had no identification on him, and frankly I wasn’t surprised that a guy who thought sneaking around using aliases was a valid lifestyle choice had ended up being a pain to identify. Cause of death was a gunshot wound to the chest, but he had been beaten pretty severely before that. There were no promising leads.
 

Too much of a coward to do it myself, I gave the coroner’s assistant Starla’s name and phone number so he could inform next of kin.The detectives assigned to Jason’s homicide wanted to interview me, and with one thing and another it was nearly three hours before we left the coroner’s.
 

I dripped silent tears the whole ride home. Damned hormones. Cristina, for once, said nothing.
 

It was my own stupid fault, really. On any other case, contacting the local morgues for John Does would have been one of my first moves. Instead, I had chosen to hope—no, to actually
believe
—that Jason Anderson was alive, not to mention capable of taking care of a boy that I’d grown so fond of. I had let myself ignore the obvious, and wasted Nate’s time and resources on a false hope. And now I would have to tell a fourteen-year-old boy that he was an orphan, and would be going into the system.
 

Fantastic work, Selena. Banner day all around.

It was after ten when we got back to Cristina’s, which meant it was midnight in Chicago. I used this as an excuse to put off calling Nate until the next morning. It was an unprofessional, spineless move, but I did it anyway because, well, I’m like that sometimes. Let Nate have one more night of hope before I crushed it.

Back at the condo, I went to the couch and sat down numbly, my mind in a fog of thoughts. After a moment Cristina came and sat down next to me, looking concerned.

“Baby Girl...Lena, do you want to talk about it? I have never seen you like this.”

“Like what?” I asked curiously. “Unprofessional? Emotionally invested? Crying?”

She smiled sadly. “Well, no. I have seen you most of those things.” She reached over to smooth back my hair, and I tried not to flinch in surprise. Maternal, Cristina is not.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I whispered.

Christina gestured helplessly for a moment, looking for the right words. “Lena...when we first met you were passionate and mouthy and ambitious, and you were a brilliant cop. But you weren’t brilliant because of those things; but because you cared. I have never met another cop who cared about every victim, good guy, bad guy, old, young, homeless, anything. You put your whole heart into every single case. That’s your gift, the energy to care for everyone. But when you left the force,” she gestured helplessly in the air, “you lost your way.”

I stiffened, but didn’t protest. Like I said, not so good at fighting with Cristina. Bitch is always right. Instead, I said quietly, “What does that have to do with this?”

She sighed, as if that was the wrong answer. “You haven’t cared about much for years now, Baby Girl. He took that away from you. But now, you found a case to care about again.”

“So what?” I said, frustrated. “Nothing I’ve done on this case has made a bit of difference. Jason was already dead when Nate hired me.”

Cristina shrugged. “He was, yes. But because he hired you, this boy now knows he has a brother and a sister. Maybe you couldn’t produce the father, but you did find him some family, some blood.” She reached over and squeezed my hand. “Baby Girl, give yourself a break. Caring about your cases, that was never a mistake. You’re just...you know. Out of practice.”
 

Pep talk completed, Cristina gave me one last hug and left for a late date with Miguel. I knew she wanted to give me some space, and I appreciated it. I also appreciated what she’d said too, but it didn’t make me feel much better. Starla was twenty-two and barely scraping by with herself and two kids: even if the courts would allow her to, she could never be responsible for Nate. It would be like the blind leading the...well, not-quite-so-blind, but underaged.
 

I changed into pajama pants and a t-shirt and curled up in front of Cristina’s television for awhile, paying no attention to what was on. I was busy silently cursing out Jason Anderson for his idiocy. Why did he have to be so...
him
? Why couldn’t he have been happy with two gorgeous children and a loving (if slightly dim) girlfriend? Hell, for that matter, why couldn’t he have been happy back in Chicago? We’d missed him by only a few days, but it was Jason’s stupid choices that had led to that dumpster.

After half an hour of self-pity and resentment, I realized that I was starving. I hadn’t eaten anything since a drive-thru at lunchtime, and I was starting to get nauseous from the combination of hunger and baby hormones. Cristina didn’t keep much food in the house, so I turned off the TV and grabbed the car keys. Without bothering to change out of my pajama pants, I went down to the Volvo, intent on going through the drive-through at In-N-Out burger. Granted, eating In-N-Out Burger two days in a row was probably not my healthiest idea. But I was past caring.

The line for the drive-through was seven cars long, even at 10:30 at night, but there were only two cars parked in the lot. Americans. I was too hungry to wait, so I shrugged to myself and parked the car to walk inside. Being seen in public in my pajama pants would have sent Rory into palpitations of shame, but I just couldn’t work up the energy to give a shit what the In-N-Out employees thought of me. They should just be grateful that I’d remembered to put on flip-flops. And a bra.
 

The food calmed my stomach a little, and by the time I left the restaurant and headed back for Cristina’s car, I was trying to focus my thoughts on the future. First thing in the morning, I needed to call Nate. I figured he’d want to stop the investigation, since finding Jason Anderson’s killer wouldn’t help his situation at this point. Which meant that the case was over. Which also meant that as soon as I got home, I needed to talk to Toby. It was time to face the fact that I was going to have a baby, Cleary’s anniversary or not.

The LA night was cool and dry, and a little breeze played on the raised goosebumps that covered my arms. I didn’t mind the chill – it was probably thirty degrees cooler in Chicago just then. Because I had circled the lot to check out the drive-through, I had parked in an awkward spot behind the garbage area, away from the main door. I went around the fenced-in dumpster and started digging in my messenger bag for Cristina’s keys.

I never did find them.
 

As I walked around the corner of the fence, a blur of motion on my right caught my eye, a shape moving towards me. Years of reflexes helped me throw up my right arm, but it was too late. The man in the black ski mask grabbed my raised arm and whirled me around the fence in one move, slamming me against the dumpster once, twice. I dropped my purse and got my hands up to defend my face, but my arms tangled in the long strap of my messenger bag, and while I was still pulling my right arm free to strike him he grabbed me around the neck.
 

I opened my mouth to scream, and he slapped my face so hard that my vision went fuzzy at the edges. His fingers closed harder against my windpipe, and I was running on autopilot now, my hands scrabbling at his fingers. When that didn’t work I shifted my weight to kick him in the groin, but he saw it coming and shifted his lower body to take it in the hip. I sobbed air as he pulled me forward just far enough to slam me back against the Dumpster again.
 

I blacked out for a moment, and when my vision cleared again he had thrown me down onto the blacktop.
 

This was bad. This was so bad. I tried to remember where my arms and legs were, but by the time I figured it out he had climbed onto of me, pinning my arms to the ground as he knelt on my midsection. He’d momentarily let go of my throat, so I took in another breath to scream, but he calmly punched a tight fist into my neck. “Be quiet,” he ordered, in a low, gravelly voice. I got my first real look at him, but other than a slim build and ears that probably stuck out a little under the ski mask, there wasn’t much that would help me identify him. “Or you will die right here, in the dirt, like an animal.”

I stilled, and for the first time I remembered the baby. His weight was on my arms and sides right now, but holy shit, had he hit my stomach? I tried to remember the blows I’d taken, but my head was still swimming.
 

I jerked as he slapped me hard across the face – again. “Focus, Selena.”
 

“Asshole, if you don’t stop slapping me I’m going to throw up on you,” I whispered hoarsely.

He smiled cruelly, his lips perfectly framed by the ski mask. “Listen carefully. You will drop Jason Anderson’s case. Go back to Chicago, tell whomever you’d like that Anderson is dead, and let the matter drop. I would
hate
to have to kill you-” he released my neck, sitting back on his heels—“especially in your condition.”

My eyes widened despite myself, and some primal unthinking part of me began to struggle anew. He cursed as I freed my right arm, ducking too late to miss the damn good uppercut I laid on his chin. Before I could plant another, though, he reeled back out of my grasp, releasing my arm. I was too out of it, too slow, to stop him as he backhanded me hard. Then it was dark.

20. She Was My Hero

Nate was breaking one of his own rules, big time. He woke up Tuesday morning and actually called himself in sick. Tom probably would have done it if he’d asked, but then Tom would want to know why, and Nate didn’t feel like getting into how tired he was – or how much he wanted a break from school. From his life, really.

He slept in a delicious two hours late, and then dressed quietly and tiptoed guiltily from the house before the home nurse would arrive to check on Tom.
 

After an hour on the bus, Nate arrived at the comic book store. There was a different woman sitting at the front desk when he walked in, and he almost gasped. This woman looked so much like Lena, only with different hair and a little extra weight, not to mention a nose that hadn’t been broken. And a very different wardrobe – Nate couldn’t really remember what Lena wore when they met, but she always dressed so...herself. This woman was wearing a dark green corduroy jacket-thing, a cream turtleneck, and brown corduroy pants. Nate couldn’t really picture Lena in that outfit.

The woman who was not Lena looked up and smiled at him welcomely, and the smile was Lena’s, too, with maybe a little less mischief in it, Nate decided. He smiled back automatically, and said, “I’m looking for Mr. Dane...um, Peter?”

“No problem,” she said, and then her voice rose as she hollered, “Dad!”
 

Peter Dane came charging out of the DC section, and Nate grinned just to see him. Today Lena’s father was wearing khaki pants, blue suspenders, and a red t-shirt that said
Faster than a speeding bullet!
“Nate!” Peter said happily, slowing his pace. “How are you?” Peter stretched out his hand, and, surprised at this adult gesture, Nate shook it.
 

“This,” Peter continued, “is Rory, my other daughter. She’s usually the one with better manners, but I believe she thinks I’m going deaf.” He turned to the woman who was not Lena, and she grinned back at him.