Bleeding Out (18 page)

“Do you feel like you can’t handle it?”

“Not at all. I just want to make sure I do it right.”

Frank’s stare was the narc’s only reply, so she asked, “Sure you don’t want lunch?”

“Positive.”

At the door she turned and asked, “What’s that music?”

“It’s a requiem. Faure’s.”

“Hmm. I don’t reckon I know what a requiem
for A’s
is, but it shore is perty. I like it.”

“I’m so very glad,” Frank answered coldly.

He was yelling again. He’d lost his job, his pension, everything. And it was the boy’s fault. What were they supposed to do now that there was no scholarship? Who was going to take care of things? The old man was crying. The boy stood with his ear pressed to the door.

His mother was crying too.

And a new, nameless fear gripped the boy.

Frank knocked on Tracey and Noah’s door on Thanksgiving Day, wondering whose truck was in the driveway. Her blood chilled when she noticed the surf logos and parking sticker. Tracey threw the door open, overflowing her flowery one-piece and screaming. She wrapped her arms around Frank’s neck, mindless of the wine and flowers she was smashing between them, then yanked Frank inside, yelling, “Goddamnit, you old hama-zama, where the hell have you
been
all my life?”

Frank had to laugh.

“Well? Where you been?”

She threw a couple of punches at Frank who raised her offerings, pleading, “I come in peace.”

“Yeah, well, you come that way but I’m not gonna let it stay that way,” she said, taking the flowers, then sweetly asked, “For me?”

“Nope. For No. We got a thing going, didn’t he tell you?”

“I should be so lucky,” Tracey heaved her eyes dramatically. “If it would get him out of my pants for a while, he’s all yours.”

“You guys bad-mouthing me already?” Noah wandered into the living room in his bathing suit, holding a plate of grilled sausages. He held it toward Frank while Tracey moved like a warship into the kitchen.

“What’s your poison tonight, babe? I’ve got margaritas in the blender.”

“Sounds good,” Frank called after her, snagging a piece of meat. She looked flatly at Noah, chewing.

“Tell me whose truck’s in your driveway.”

Noah grinned, “Hey, you’re the lieutenant. You tell me.”

“You didn’t tell me she was going to be here.”

“Ah, relax, Frank, it was a last-minute thing. Don’t get all nutted up about it. Come on, let’s get you oiled so you don’t squeak so loud.”

She followed him into the kitchen, dreading hearing Kennedy’s drawl, but there it was, screeching through the sliding glass door of the backyard. Frank lingered with Tracey, who slammed a frosty, salt-rimmed glass into her hand and raised her own.

“Skoal, sister.”

“Skoal, Trace.”

They swallowed, and Tracey’s eyes admired Frank up and down.

“You are hard like a rock,” she said, squeezing Frank’s arm. “Ouch.”

“And you’re as soft as one of those clouds the angels sit on. I can see you’ve been taking your gorgeous pills every day.”

Tracey flopped a hand against Frank’s chest and said, “Oh, stop teasing. I’m a fat old cow and you know it.”

“You’re gorgeous, Trace. Noah’s the luckiest man in L.A.”

“And don’t think I ever let him forget it,” his wife laughed boisterously. “Come on, come say hi to the calves.”

Reluctantly, Frank let Tracey lead her out of the kitchen. Kennedy was in the pool playing Marco Polo with the kids.

“Leslie!” Tracey bellowed, and they all stopped. “Come say hello to Frank!”

Leslie waved happily and hopped out of the pool, all long legs and innocence. She reminded Frank of Cassie Nichols and she felt a quick, hot pang of sympathy for Cassie’s father. Leslie gave her a big hug, shocking Frank with her frigid skin and dripping suit.

“What did you bring me?” she asked brightly.

“Les,” Noah warned.

“How do you know I brought you anything?” Frank frowned.

“‘Cause you always do.”

“What if I forgot?”

Leslie turned on her heel, tilted her head in the air, and said with an imperious flourish of her hand, “Then you’ll have to leave.”

“She got that from her mother,” Noah commented, basting the turkey on the barbecue, and Tracey snapped a towel at him. Frank sighed and stood up, resigned to her banishment.

“No! Don’t go,” Leslie squealed, wrapping her dripping blue arms around Frank’s legs.

“What’s in your pockets?” she asked curiously as Frank shrugged unknowingly.

She pulled her wallet out and handed it to Leslie.

“Not that.”

She pointed silently at Frank’s front pocket and Frank hauled out her keys. Leslie shook her head. Then Frank pulled out a new Hot Wheels truck and Leslie shook her head again. Frank reached in and found a package of animal stickers. Leslie examined them, but Frank said, “I brought those for Jamie. I don’t have anything for you.”

“What’s that?” Leslie poked at something hard in Frank’s back pocket.

“Oh that,” Frank said dismissively. “That’s nothing.”

“What is it?” Leslie insisted.

“You don’t want that. It’s nothing.”

“Let me see!” Leslie jumped up and down, hugging her goose-bumps.

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“Alright. But you won’t like it.”

“I don’t care. Let me see!” Her eyes were glowing with expectation and her brother and sister had joined her. Frank dipped into her pocket and slowly took out a bottle of purple nail polish. As Leslie grabbed for it, Noah whined, “Jesus, Frank. You tryin’ to make my daughter look like a hooker?”

Frank grinned defenselessly, but Leslie was already sitting and drying her toenails off. Kennedy joined them, wrapping herself up in a towel.

She drawled, “Hey, Lieutenant,” and the rare joviality evaporated off Frank like spit off a red iron. She took a large swallow of her drink and nodded curtly. Mark and Jamie had cursorily examined their toys and begged Kennedy to play Marco Polo some more. To Frank’s relief, she agreed. And why wouldn’t she, Frank thought acerbically, she’s just a kid herself.

Tracey slapped Frank’s thigh.

“Remember that psych tech at work who had a crush on me?”

Frank nodded, and Tracey launched into an animated account about how he’d pinned her against the wall a few days ago and tried to kiss her. Tracey took the bouquet of wildflowers he’d offered, then gave him a dislocated shoulder and testicles the size of oranges.

“And they say the cops are rough.” Frank shook her head.

“Let me tell you,” No said earnestly, “don’t be puttin’ the moves on Trace when she doesn’t want ‘em, man. Uh-uh. You’ll be lucky to wind up dead.”

“Oh, hush. Don’t listen to him, Frank. Let me get you another drink.”

She sailed off. It pleased both Frank and Noah to watch her walk. Noah grinned, and Frank spread her hands.

“I’m telling you, you make her a widow and I’m stepping in.”

“She’d have you in a heartbeat, and you’d be begging for mercy.”

They shared a smile as Tracey returned with a pitcher and another raunchy tech story. By the time Noah declared the turkey done, Mark and Jamie’s teeth were chattering, and Kennedy was shivering uncontrollably. Leslie’s nails gleamed like ripe grapes, and neither Frank, Noah, nor Tracey felt any pain.

Sitting beside her at the table, passing potatoes and green beans, Frank was almost civil to Kennedy. Dinner meandered through a couple bottles of wine and endless stories. Before the adults ate dessert, Tracey and Noah put their nodding kids into bed. When they left the room, Frank started clearing the table. Kennedy helped her, trying to make conversation but getting no encouragement.

Finally, after Frank handed her a rinsed plate for the dishwasher, she stated, “Lieutenant, I get the feelin’ you just about
despise
me. Is that at all accurate?”

“I don’t think I care enough about you to despise you,” Frank said coolly.

Kennedy grinned into the dishwasher. “So I take it it’s nothin’ personal, and that you always act like you’re chewin’ on glass?”

Frank stopped rinsing and focused intently on Kennedy. “Detective,” she said quietly, “you can take that anyway you like. However that is, I really couldn’t care.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Kennedy drawled.

The women barely spoke to each for the rest of the evening, but their eyes met often. Kennedy’s were sparkling and relentless, while Frank’s appeared glacially indifferent.

Frank and Noah were eating lunch in a Chinese restaurant, working on the details of their undercover plan. Frank had spread a map on the table showing where their boy had struck. Around a bite of lo mein, she asked, “Where’s he going to hit next?”

Noah frowned at the map as if it were deliberately withholding the answer from him.

“I think he’ll hit somewhere around the parks again.”

Frank nodded, but said, “Okay, why?”, wanting to hear his reasoning.

“Well, look. You’ve said he’s comfortable in this area, confident. He spread out for the rapes, but abduction’s still a new thing for him, so he’s still working on his confidence in that area. If he’s insecure, he’d want to be in as familiar an environment as possible.”

Noah poured green tea into their little cups, asking, “What say you, Sherlock?”

Frank dexterously grabbed the slippery noodles with her chopsticks and said, “I think we’ll find him where we found Jane Doe and Nichols.”

“Why there?”

“Elementary, Watson. He might plan on hitting the parks again, but two things might thwart that ambition. One is fear and the other is circumstance. He’s got to know he can’t keep going there and getting away with it. Some perps become so good at what they’re doing that they start to mock the police, but I think our boy’s a long way from that kind of self-assurance. That’s why he branched out to the high schools for the last rapes.”

Noah protested with his mouth full. “But Agoura and Peterson were from the parks.”

“Exactly. Let’s assume Jane Doe and Nichols were accidental, chance moments of opportunity. If he’s scared to deliberately go out and grab a girl, he’s going to do it where he’s most comfortable, which I agree is the park areas. But he’s hit them twice now, so between all the previous assaults and now the two murders, he’s got to know both parks are hot for him. He’s sick, not stupid.”

Frank put her chopsticks down and wiped her mouth. “Point two, again assuming Doe and Nichols were just opportunities he couldn’t pass up, he had to have been in their vicinity to catch them, someplace centrally located around the parks. We know he takes advantage of circumstance, so let’s put one—Kennedy—in his path. If we do the parks instead, how do we know which one to pick? I think we’ve got a better chance of running into him on the street.”

“Alright. I can see that. How do you want to play it?” Noah asked.

“Make Kennedy a homeless girl, a runaway. Put her out on the streets.”

“Oh, that’s nice duty in the middle of winter.”

The idea amused Frank but she didn’t show it.

“Well, this guy has a pretty consistent time frame. All the assaults have been on weekdays, in broad daylight. So we dump her predawn and pick her up after dark. Six a.m. to six p.m. Could be worse.”

Frank finished her tea and asked Noah what he thought.

“Glad it’s her and not me,” he grinned.

Later that afternoon, Noah slowly chauffeured Frank, Kennedy, and two officers from the Special Investigation Section, around downtown Culver City. Cruising the neighborhood where Cassandra Nichols and the Jane Doe had been found, they searched for an optimal stakeout area.

Lieutenant Hobbs was a bull of a man and looked like the poster boy for the LAPD’s swat team. In an incongruously high-pitched voice, he said, “Here we go,” pointing to a corner off Sepulveda. Kennedy had to perch on the edge of the seat to see around Marquez, the other SIS officer.

On the southwest corner, facing onto the boulevard, was a squat, concrete building with three store windows. An electronics shop fronted Sepulveda and Venice, and next to it were an auto parts store and a barbershop. An alley ran down the barbershop side, and where the building ended, a six-foot chain-link fence closed the alley off behind the shops. The alley dead-ended against a two-story building. A long drugstore dominated the other side. It was a cul-de-sac accessible only from the opening on Sepulveda. A laundromat on the far side of the boulevard offered an unobstructed view down the alley. They drove around the block to see what the alley dead-ended against. It was a lighting fixture store and a sign-making shop.

“Whaddaya think?” Kennedy asked, firing off a round of bubblegum.

“Looks good,” Hobbs said, and Marquez nodded.

“Go
around again, No. Let me and Hobbs off at the corner. Marquez and Kennedy, see how it looks from the laundromat. We’ll meet you at the Shell down the street.”

The two lieutenants carefully moved past plastic garbage dumpsters pressed against weeds and shrubs that were taking over the alley. They checked for holes in the fence and unexpected doors or windows. Frank searched the ground for drug paraphernalia, not wanting to set Kennedy up in a shooting gallery. There was no access from the roofs, except for jumping straight down, and the vegetation would afford a homeless person adequate cover.

“Looks good,” Hobbs repeated, hands braced on his slim hips.

Frank nodded reluctantly as they left the alley, their long steps evenly matched as they walked down the street.

“I want to wire her. If we lose her visually I still want to be in contact. I know it’s a little extreme, but our perp’s extreme. We don’t know who he is, where he’ll be coming from. I just want this as covered as possible.”

“You got it.”

Frank listened as Hobbs described how he’d fit her for sound.

“Good?” Noah asked when they were all back in the car.

Their alley was situated almost dead-even between the Nichols and the Jane Doe sites. They had their decoy, they had their surveillance team. Now all they needed was their perp.

“Green light,” Frank answered. Kennedy started whistling “Back in the Saddle Again.” The slight narrowing behind Frank’s Ray Bans was the only hint of her irritation.