A Wicked Snow (2 page)

The sun cut over the jagged edge of the San Gabriel Mountains. Sharp and bright, its rays hacked through the haze from the millions who crawled to work on the hot, gummy freeways of the Los Angeles basin fifty-five miles away. Magenta clouds of bougainvillea softened the chain-link fences corralling the cinder-block homes lining Cabrillo Avenue, the busiest street into Santa Louisa. As Hannah Griffin drove to work on a sunny August morning, a newsman's voice droned on about the date being the anniversary of President Nixon's resignation. Even at that hour, Hannah was not the first to pull into the parking lot of the Santa Louisa County Courthouse where she had worked in the crime investigations unit for the past five and a half years. She guided the burgundy Volvo wagon into a spot east of a stand of eucalyptus that ran along the median.
Messy trees, ugly trees
, she thought. But when the temperature hit the ninety-degree mark as had been warned by the weather-man, shade would make a difference before the day was over. Hannah craned her neck and reached for a cardboard shield her husband had bought her to prevent the dashboard from cracking in the heat. On one side was a pair of cartoon sunglasses with eyebrows arched over the lenses. On the other, foot-tall letters
: Call 911! Emergency!

Santa Louisa County was an hour and a half northeast of Los Angeles. It was a world away from California's most imitated and chided city. Santa Louisa, the county and the town that shared the same name, was nothing but a Southern California footnote. Santa Louisa's biggest industry was agriculture. Flower seeds grew in a zigzag afghan that gave the monotony of the landscape a Crayola jolt with strawflowers and bachelor's buttons. A welcome sign into town invited tourists to have a
BLOOMING GOOD TIME
. Hannah, her husband, Ethan, and their daughter, Amber, made the pilgrimage to the flower fields every spring. Amber looked like her father--at least Hannah thought so as she studied her profile. Amber's nose was a slight ski jump, like Ethan's. Her blond hair was wavy, as was Ethan's. Whenever Hannah told Ethan their daughter resembled him, he'd exaggerate a cringing reaction. It was, Hannah knew, an act. In reality, Ethan was very handsome, and if Amber looked like him, she'd grow up to be a good-looking woman. That spring, as in the others, the couple took turns snapping photographs of their eight-year-old, up to her waist in yellow and blue.

"I promise this'll be the last year," Hannah lied as she framed Amber in one more gorgeous exposure. Then a quick second shot, too.

Of course, there will always be a next year. Hannah had an old
Life
magazine she had kept for years... the reason why it has followed her for two decades was not important, not now. In the back of the magazine there was a photo spread of a little girl posed in her father's fireman's uniform. Boots nearly swallow her stubby limbs; the helmet, an awning over her face. But as the years pass, the little girl grows into the uniform. By the end of the series, a pretty young woman stands next to her mother and father, helmet askew, grin as wide as the pages allowed. Hannah liked that kind of continuum. She'd always wanted that for Amber because it had eluded her.

Before getting out of her car, Hannah caught her reflection in the mirror. Her eyes were puffy, and she rubbed them with her forefinger. In her early thirties, she knew that popping out of bed after four hours' sleep exacted a price. And yet with her dark blond hair streaked by the California sun, freckles across the bridge of her nose, and enormous brown eyes, she was lovely even on a bad day. Even so, she thanked Max Factor for cover-up stick as she walked across the lot. Ted Ripperton, CSI lead, met her by the door.

"You're here early," he said, a paper coffee cup in hand.

"No more than any other day this summer. Make that this year," she said. "Glad you came in early yourself. I'm going to see Joanne Garcia this morning."

"She expecting you?" Ripp asked, tilting his coffee awkwardly to suck the nipple-lid for the last drop.

"We talked last night," Hannah answered. "At least, she
listened
." She unloaded her briefcase and spread out the Garcia case file. The fourty-four-year-old investigator's eyes darted around the room, more indicative of a person who couldn't focus on a damn thing than a man who didn't have the skills to do so. Hannah had gone to county attorney Bill Gilliand twice to register complaints about Ripp's work--two times more than she had ought to have. Both complaints had been made in her first two weeks of service. She felt so foolish. She didn't know Ted Ripperton's wife's maiden name was Gilliand. Geneva Ripperton had been born Geneva
Gilliand
. Ripp's job was a family favor.

"I'm between things," he said. "You want me to go out to Taco Trench with you?"

"Her home is in Valle los Reyes," Hannah said, without giving Ripp the satisfaction of a glare.

He shrugged. "Well, they should raze the whole damn place."

"Not everyone marries well or is handed a good job."

"Don't go there, Hannah."

"Or you'll tell?" She let a beat pass. "You know I'm only kidding," Hannah lied as she studied the photo on the top of the file once more. A little girl's eyes stared from a Polaroid. Mimi Garcia was five. She had sullen hazel eyes.

"We're leaving at nine thirty," she said, taking off an earring and reaching over to the phone. That was her signal to Ripp that he was to leave. Thankfully, he took the hint. Hannah watched him turn down the hall to the little room where coffee was brewed and lunches consumed by the lab staff and a few of the clerks who hadn't learned that in the various legal professions everything is about association. Of course, Ripp didn't care about that. He had a job for as long as voters kept his brother-in-law in office. And for as long as Geneva put up with him. Hannah knew it was only a matter of time and he'd be a school crossing guard on the west side of town. Maybe he'd even end up in Valle los Reyes?
That
, she thought,
would be so sweet
.

Hannah took a Dr Pepper from the vending machine, a bad habit she'd started when a case kept her coming into the lab in the wee hours before Lotta Latte on Cabrillo opened its drive-thru window for the morning commute. Her eyes scanned the break room's notice board. A rental cabin at Big Bear beckoned, but the idea of the mountains chilled her so much she shuddered. A flyer for a cat that had been homeless had met with success. It had "
Thank You, Katie Marino
," scrawled across it. Hannah smiled, flipped the top on her soda can, and shuffled off to her cramped office. She was beat, but resolute. The Garcia case was just the kind she loved to work. It would suck her in like a whirlpool until justice was done. She had some calls to make and reports to scrutinize--the benefit of being promoted into a supervisory job that no one else had really wanted.

Before taking her chair, Hannah saw a small box atop her heaping pile of incoming mail. It was addressed to her, but with a middle name that caused her pulse to jackhammer.

HANNAH LOGAN GRIFFIN

She tore at the brown wrapper with a nail file she retrieved from a tidy desk drawer.
Logan. No one called her that. No one knew.
Carefully, but quickly, she turned back the sealed edges of the box. A musty odor and a glimpse of dark, nearly winy, color startled her so much, that the container slipped from her hands and fell to the floor.

For a second, she could not take her eyes off the carton. She averted her gaze only long enough to glance through the narrow glass window that ran the full length of her office door and provided a view of the county crime laboratory.
Please, no one come in
. In one rapid movement, she swiveled her chair and picked up the brown wrapper that had enclosed the contents for shipping. The address was written in permanent marker in an odd combination of printed letters and cursive script. There was no return address. On the backside of the brown paper, Hannah could see that the sender had simply cut apart a grocery bag to cover the box for mailing. Red ink spelled out
S-a-f-e-w
. For a second, she wondered how the box could have been delivered to her desk in the first place. It could be anything, from anyone. Even a bomb.

But the instant she saw it, she knew. The package was not a bomb. It was something far worse.

Hannah brushed wisps of dark blond hair from her forehead. The office was warm, though she could hear the air conditioner hum through the overhead ducts. As tears rained from her eyes, she fumbled for a tissue. She blotted and then studied the tissue as though the tears had been blood.

The postmark indicated the package had come from Los Angeles.
Jesus Christ, L.A. was only the second largest city in the country.
Anyone could have dumped it into a bin and walked off to a job, a bus station, LAX. She felt the burning warning of bile rise in her throat, telling her to fight the urge to vomit, swallow hard, or look for a trash receptacle. Extending the tip of her shoe, Hannah peeled back the rest of the tissue concealing the contents of the box. She did so gingerly, the way one might gently kick a dead rattlesnake to ensure that the venomous reptile was no longer a threat. A swatch of black and brown caught her eye. Her stomach knotted. Her first glance had not misled her.
Dear Jesus, sweet Jesus
.

Just then Ted Ripperton pushed open the door and burst in, with all the grace of the interloper he was and always would be. Blank-eyed and reeking of cigarette smoke, he was oblivious to her tears.

"Ready?" he asked.

Hannah had barely caught her breath. "Don't you knock?"

Ripp made a face. "Don't you act like a bitch," he said. "
Kidding
," he added as quickly as he could, evidently recalling the time he'd been turned into Human Resources for saying something inappropriate to a surly file clerk.
Surly
was his adjective. "I mean, you look upset."

It was true the color had drained from her face, but Hannah shook off his half-baked attempt at compassion and gave him some slack. That cobra basket on her floor had scared the hell out of her, and she didn't wish to discuss it with the likes of Ted Ripperton.

"Let's go. I'm fine and you're stupid," she said, letting a beat pass before she returned the favor:
"Kidding."

She reached for her briefcase, hoping that Ripp hadn't noticed her slightly trembling hands.

Berto and Joanne Garcia's mobile home was set amid the squalor of human-inhabited aluminum loaf pans called a "trailer-made community" by the owner/operator of the ten-acre tract that had once been a birdhouse gourd farm. Because the plant had readily reseeded, most of the hot boxes that residents called home were festooned with the bulbous gourds cut with portholes for swallows and, for the luckier, purple martins. It was flat land--the bottom of a broad valley. It had, at most, seven or eight palm trees to bring up the vertical space. They were the spindly kind of palms, each collared with aluminum bands to stop rats from nesting in their fern-like crowns.

Ripperton lurched his two-year-old Town Car in front of Space 22. They knew Joanne was home alone; Berto was a guest of the county--in jail on suspicion of child abuse.

"I'll go in first," Hannah said, swinging the passenger door open and brushing against a Big Wheel tricycle bleached to pale amber by the Santa Louisa summer.

Ripp pulled out a smoke. "I'll sit tight and play radio roulette. Better not be long."

As if his advice mattered.
The fact was she wouldn't be long regardless of Ripperton's demands. Hannah wanted to interview Mrs. Garcia about her daughter and husband, and she knew if Mrs. Garcia was indeed ready to talk, Ripperton would be called inside anyway. He was as good a witness as she had to ensure the woman couldn't back out of her story later. He provided the kind of pressure they'd need to take her into the courtroom.

A woman met Hannah at the door. She peered through the wire mesh of a tattered screen and introduced herself as Joanne Garcia. She was thirty years old, unemployed, a few months pregnant. Mascara clumped at the tips of her spiky eyelashes. She pressed her face close to the aluminum doorframe and warily regarded her visitor.

"Mrs. Garcia, I'm Hannah Griffin. I'm with the county, here to investigate your daughter's case."

"Oh, Miss Griffin," Garcia said, pausing before muttering something that went nowhere. Her eyes traced Hannah from head to toe, lingering on a jade silk blouse and creamy white linen skirt that was the well-dressed CSI's summer uniform. Not that it mattered. Inside the confines of the lab, Hannah was shrouded with a dingy lab coat anyway.

"I don't think I have anything to say to you," Garcia finally said.

Hannah inched closer. "That surprises me," she said. "Yesterday you told me you had a lot to say. I understand that this is very, very difficult. But you know," she paused, "you--more than anyone--can ensure that what happened to Mimi never happens again."

Joanne Garcia's tongue ran over cracked lips. "Yeah, but--"

"Don't you realize that you are running out of options here? You have no choice but to do the right thing. I think you know that. Can I come in?"

Joanne Garcia hesitated as if she didn't want to say much, but Hannah knew the woman in the trailer wanted to spill her guts. She knew it from all of the child rapes, the molestations, the neglect and abuse cases--the "chick cases," as the jealous in the lab called them to de-mean her work. Guys like Ripp figured no case was worth working on unless it was murder with special circumstances--the grislier the better. Throw in a few sexual elements and they'd be in CSI nirvana, stomping around the lab like sand-kicking macho men.

"You're letting all the air conditioning out of the house. Come inside for a minute," Joanne said, flinging the screen open with her foot pressing against the metal spring that kept it shut. Light fell on her features with a blast of white. "Then you'll have to go."