The First Cut (6 page)

Vining nearly collided with him, falling onto her butt and scraping her palms.

Kissick recoiled when he caught sight of a snake lying on the ground in a loose pile. It was gold with brown stripes and nearly as big around as a fire hose.

It wasn’t moving.

“I hate snakes,” he said.

Vining tossed a stone and hit it. “Dead.”

“You think?”

“All the noise we made coming down, it would have slithered into the brush.”

“You had to use that word. Slither.”

“Carry on, Daniel Boone.”

Detouring away from the snake, Kissick crossed and switched back until he reached the body. He squatted beside it and waited for Vining before grabbing the sheet. He raised it.

The dead woman was tall and well-built. She was on her side, her face turned toward the bridge. Her head was lower than her feet, her legs splayed, her right arm tossed over her head. Locks of long, blond, blood-matted hair were twisted around her neck. Bruises mottled her face and torso. Her tumble down the hill had pulled open the deep knife wound to her throat. Weeds and dirt adhered to the dried blood and her hair. A crumpled In-N-Out Burger drink cup lay near her head.

While her body told a different story, her face seemed peaceful. Maybe at the end, she was glad it was over.

“Prick bastard.” Kissick dropped the sheet. He partially stood, grabbing on to the branches of a nearby tree. “Head’s almost cut off and he beat the crap out of her.”

“Is it Lynde’s daughter?” Ruiz asked.

The others peered down over the edge at them.

Kissick shook his head, his mouth drawn open in anguish. “Might be Frankie. Can’t tell for sure.” He rubbed his free hand over his face, mixing dirt with perspiration. “She’s a mess.”

Vining crept closer and picked up the sheet. She leaned in.

The dead woman’s parted lips were blue-gray. Her eyes were clouded.

Her eyes sparked with life.

Vining started, nearly losing her balance on the hill. She blinked hard, not believing what she had seen.

The eyes shifted to her.

Vining began to feel that familiar and unwelcome tightness in her chest. The hobgoblin.

Oh no. Not here. Please. Not now.

Kissick and the others were talking across the expanse.

Vining drew in a wheezing breath.

The woman’s chapped lips moved. She whispered, “I am you.”

Vining dropped to her knees, clutching a thatch of weeds to keep from sliding. She struggled to breathe. She felt like ice, yet she was perspiring. She still held the sheet, unable to tear her eyes from the corpse.

The dead woman then whispered, “I am not you.”

“Nan, you okay?” Early shouted down to her.

Adam, boy, Charles, David, Edward…

Vining murmured the phonetic alphabet, the device she’d adopted to focus on something else.

“’M okay.”

Still holding on to the weeds, she sat hard on the ground, dropping the sheet and covering the battered face.

Frank, George, Henry, Ida, Ida…Come on…John, King, Lincoln, Mary…

She put her head between her knees, cupped a hand over her nose and mouth, and breathed through it, hoping her legs shielded what she was doing.

Kissick squatted beside her.

Nora, ocean, Paul…
“Didn’t have breakfast.” She squeezed out the words and tried to smile. “I’m okay.”

She could tell by Kissick’s face that she looked like hell. She’d seen herself in a mirror after a panic attack. Her skin color was probably slightly warmer than that of the corpse on the ground.

“I’m okay,” she insisted. “Tell them. Jim, tell them I’m okay.”

Kissick touched her shoulder and yelled up to the ridge. “She’s all right. Just a little low blood sugar.”

Vining appreciated him going along with her lie. He’d worked with her enough to know she never skipped meals.

She again got to her knees, picked up the sheet, and leaned over the dead woman to make a point that the body hadn’t gotten to her. The spell had lasted only a minute. The damage might be permanent. She forced herself to take a good look. She saw the face of a dead woman, the life gone from her eyes. Her lips were not about to whisper to Vining or anyone.

You were hallucinating.

The roar of a motorcycle engine cut through the din of helicopters and freeway traffic. Right on its heels was a patrol car with lights and siren. The motorcycle fell silent, the noise replaced by yelling.

Kissick and Vining looked at each other then at the top of the hill. Everyone had moved away and they couldn’t see what was going on. He started back up and held out his hand for her. She took it and scampered after him.

The crowd shuffled back to the edge. In the middle was Frank Lynde. He was a giant man, tall and heavyset, and it took all of them to keep him from heading down the slope.

“Is it her?” he wailed. “Is it Frankie?”

Kissick stepped back onto the flat area and reached to help Vining up.

Restrained by three men, Lynde still managed to take a step forward as Kissick approached.

“Is it her?” Lynde’s normally ruddy complexion was bright pink, his cheeks streaked with tears. “Jim, is it her?”

Kissick put his hand on Lynde’s shoulder. “Frank, I can’t be sure.”

Vining came up beside him. She said nothing, but couldn’t avoid Lynde’s eyes. The daughter was there, in the father.

Perhaps he was overcome by emotion or saw the truth in Vining’s face. Lynde’s knees buckled and he dropped to the ground.

F I V E

V
INING KNEW THE CORPSE WAS FRANKIE LYNDE. SHE HAD BEEN OBSESSED
with the case since the police officer had gone missing, intrigued by the similarities with her own assault. A tall and fit female police officer was lured to a place where she was abducted. Lynde was twenty-eight. Vining was thirty-four. Now Vining learned they had both suffered knife wounds. But Vining was ambushed while on duty. Lynde had gone willingly into a situation that had called for elaborate preparation on her part and had reeked of danger.

Vining persisted in seeing more similarities than differences. T. B. Mann could have adapted his tactics to fit Lynde’s circumstances. He could have studied her, learned her vulnerabilities, used them against her, and dumped her in the city where Vining worked close to the year anniversary of his attack on her.

Kissick, Ruiz, and Early took note of the parallels with Vining’s attempted murder but saw them as curiosity rather than design. They didn’t know the motive for the attack on her, but weren’t convinced they should go the serial killer route. Vining didn’t argue with them. Neither did she let on how much she knew about Frankie Lynde.

She had spent the last days of her leave investigating the case. She had her PPD shield and I.D. card, but tried to avoid using them as it could backfire on her. She went to XXX Marks the Spot and lied to the manager, telling him she was a friend of Frankie’s. It would not be the first lie she’d tell in her quest to get closer to Lynde. Seeing the club in person told her volumes. It was no place for a woman to go alone, unless she was looking to be picked up. And Lynde had been picked up, by a woman after a silly bit of role-playing. Lynde wouldn’t have been the first officer who answered the call of the dark side.

Vining called Steve Schuyler, the LAPD detective in charge of Lynde’s missing person case. She again claimed to be a friend of Frankie’s. He wouldn’t give her information over the phone and told her to come in. She decided that would be really stepping over the line. She dropped it. Without proving her bona fides to Schuyler, she was just another wacko off the street. Besides, she was returning to duty shortly and could more legitimately follow up then.

She went around him and called a female LAPD sergeant she knew slightly. The sergeant didn’t know Lynde personally but filled in the blanks of the media reports and gave her Lynde’s home address. She said that Lynde had been good at her job in vice prostitution. Maybe too good.

Vining went to Frankie’s home in Studio City on the southeastern edge of the San Fernando Valley. It was an older apartment building that had been converted to condominiums. A sign on the façade said “The Royal Palms” in wooden script. Two stories of stucco surrounded a courtyard with a swimming pool. Chaise longues were lined up like coffins on a battlefield. The earth-toned paint and palm trees were designed to make the place look upscale and resortlike, an effect that was undone by the 101 freeway that ran behind the complex.

Someone had left a stone propping open the locked front gate. Vining entered and walked upstairs where she found an elderly woman locking the door to Lynde’s unit. Vining badged her.

“The police were here already.” Her voice wavered but her gaze was clear and direct. The top of her stiff coiffure barely reached the middle of Vining’s chest.

“I’m Detective Nan Vining and I’m investigating for the city of Pasadena. We’ve had leads on the case. We’re assisting LAPD.”

Vining knew she’d be toast if the woman checked out her story.

The woman introduced herself as Mrs. Bodek and said she was Lynde’s neighbor across the walkway. She took care of Lynde’s place, bringing in mail and newspapers, whenever Lynde was gone. She volunteered that this had happened a lot before Lynde disappeared.

“Could you let me inside?”

She felt a pang of guilt. Elderly people tended to trust others, especially authority figures, a trait that made Mrs. Bodek’s generation a frequent victim of scams. Vining was taking advantage of that trust. Her guilt faded quickly. She had to see. She had to learn more about Frankie Lynde.

She learned the old lady was nobody’s fool.

Mrs. Bodek narrowed her eyes at Vining. “Do you have another I.D.? I don’t mean to be rude, but how do I know that badge isn’t fake?”

Vining dug inside her handbag for her police I.D. card. Mrs. Bodek scrutinized it to her satisfaction, returned it, and unlocked the door.

Vining feared a panic attack upon entering Lynde’s condo, but none came. Maybe she was cured or maybe the place felt like home.

“Did Officer Lynde have a boyfriend?” She was counting on Mrs. Bodek being the type who peeked out of her drapes at her neighbors’ comings and goings.

“There was one who came around sometimes. Tall, dark man. Short hair. Like a crew cut. Kind of bad skin. Old acne scars. That policeman who’s looking into Frankie’s disappearance came one day with a picture.”

“Detective Schuyler?”

“That sounds right. I looked at the picture and said, yeah, I think that’s the one.”

“Did he tell you who the man in the photograph was?”

“No. Wouldn’t tell me anything. When Frankie’s gentleman friend came by, I didn’t get the idea it was a date, if you get my drift. He’d stay for a couple of hours during the day and then leave. If I was a betting woman, I’d bet he was married.”

Mrs. Bodek squared her jaw. “I hate to talk about Frankie like this, but seeing as we don’t know what happened to her, there’s no point in keeping it to myself. If you ask me, she could have done a whole lot better.”

I know the feeling,
Vining thought.

“Lately, Frankie was gone overnight a lot. A couple days at a time, sometimes. Could have been working. Hard to tell because her schedule changed a lot. She wasn’t one to talk much about her personal life. I like that in a person, especially a woman. Not a quality you see much anymore.”

The condo was pleasantly but not lovingly decorated, with framed art prints on the walls and comfortable, midlevel furniture. Vining surmised her house would look the same if she didn’t have Emily.

Vining guessed it was all about the job for Lynde. Male cops had wives and girlfriends to feather their nests and make a home. If they didn’t, it was all about partying, and no one expected more than a grimy bachelor pad. If a female cop’s job consumed her, the absence of an outside life was more obvious than it was for a man.

Thank goodness for Emily, her anchor.

Vining walked slowly through the small place. Whatever had happened to Lynde had not happened there. She hadn’t brought it home with her. She hadn’t opened her front door to it. The space felt empty but expectant. A life hovering on a knife edge. Running her hand over the officer’s bed pillows, Vining sensed the unsettledness in Lynde’s heart. There was trouble here. The opportunity for trouble. A crack in the armor.

Vining knew her perceptions were useless. There was nothing in them that could help anyone find Lynde.

She walked to a dresser and examined the bottles of fragrance on a glass round. Expensive brands. She couldn’t recall the last time she’d spritzed on cologne. She still had the bottle of Chanel No. 5 that her ex-husband Wes had given her one Valentine’s Day years ago.

She asked Mrs. Bodek, “Can you think of any reason she’d run away? Was she happy?”

“Happy? Who’s happy? But we don’t run away.”

Vining looked at framed photographs on the dresser. She recognized Frank Lynde in his wedding photo and was surprised by how much hair he had. Frankie looked like her mother. All the others were current photos of Frankie with friends. Judging by the tabletop real estate devoted to family, Frankie didn’t seem close to them.

A grammar school photo of Frankie was stuck into the mirror frame. It was a goofy bucktoothed, preadolescent photo. A whimsical outline of the beauty that Frankie would become. Vining wondered why that photograph was significant to Frankie. Maybe she came upon it while looking through old papers and spontaneously planted it on the mirror. That explanation didn’t satisfy Vining. People may not consciously be aware of the multitude of decisions they make each day, but they’re often not the result of happenstance.

She made notes in a memo pad and took shots with her digital camera—a birthday gift from her mother and grandmother, purchased with Emily’s help.

She thanked Mrs. Bodek and was about to leave when the old woman touched her arm.

“Almost forgot. Week before last, I’d been out grocery shopping and came up the steps when I see this gal leaving Frankie’s place. I think, what’s this? I came right up to her and said, ‘Hi. Can I help you?’ She became very flustered. She was carrying this big handbag that was almost a suitcase. She drops it and I don’t know what all. I can tell it’s heavy. She says she’s a friend of Frankie’s from out of town and Frankie said she could stay with her for a few days.