Kill the Messenger (17 page)

                        
      23

Tyler knew every inch of the building, from the secret hole in the ceiling of the apartment’s bathroom, where Jace hid stuff, to the loading dock below, the storerooms, the closets, the space under the cupboard at the back of the employee break room, where Tyler sometimes hid to eavesdrop on Chi and the others.

He was small for his age, which helped in his efforts to go unnoticed. It would have helped even more if his hair was black and he didn’t stand out like a yellow duck among the Chinese. He had dyed it once when he was eight, buying a box of Clairol that had been on clearance at the drugstore for $3.49.

The process had been a lot messier than he had counted on. By the time he finished, his head was black, his ears were black, his neck was black, his hands were black—on account of the latex gloves included in the package had been way too large for him and had kept coming off. He had the stuff on his forehead, smeared across one cheek, and dotted on the tip of his nose.

Jace had said that for a smart kid he did some pretty stupid things, and Tyler had spent the next few hours scrubbing the bathroom with Comet. And then he’d gotten a good scrubbing himself.

It had taken weeks for the stuff to come out. The kids at the school he went to were mostly Chinese. They had made fun of him until his hair had grown out enough to buzz the dyed stuff off. In another couple of weeks he had started to look like that yellow duck again.

Now when he wanted to be anonymous, he wore a faded black sweatshirt with a hood. The shirt was Jace’s from who knew when, and who knew who had had it before him. It was soft with age, and the color Tyler imagined a ghost would be, like fog over darkness. The sleeves were long enough to cover his hands to the tips of his fingers, the hood so deep it swallowed his face.

Going unnoticed was a skill Tyler had honed from an early age. Jace always wanted to protect him from everything, shelter him like he was a baby or something. But Tyler wanted to know everything about everything. Knowledge was power. Knowledge diminished the chance of unpleasant surprises. Forewarned was forearmed.

Tyler believed all of these things. He was just a little kid, and too small to control his world by physical means, but he had an IQ of 168. He had taken all kinds of tests on the Internet. Real tests, not the stupid, made-up kind. His brain was his strength, and the more he could learn—through books, through observation, by experimentation—the stronger he became. He might never be able to push around someone like Chi, but he would always be able to outsmart him.

He stayed back inside the hood now as he cracked open the door of the broom closet just down the hall from Madame Chen’s office, and spied Chi with his ear to the office door, trying to listen in. Tyler had never liked Chi. He was always tense and sour. Grandfather Chen said Chi had swallowed the seeds of jealousy as a child, and that the roots were now intertwined with every part of him, and nothing would ever dig them out.

Jace had been late coming home. Again. Tyler had watched for him out the small window in the bathroom, had seen him drive in, had watched him standing like a statue beside the car, as if he was trying to decide what to do next. As soon as he had headed for Madame Chen’s office, Tyler had grabbed his secret cloak of invisibility and beat it downstairs in his stocking feet, scurrying like a little mouse to get to the broom closet.

He knew something was wrong, and he knew it was worse than Jace just taking a fall from The Beast. He had known it the instant Jace had spoken to him the night before. There had been a tension in him. He hadn’t quite looked Tyler in the eyes when he’d said he’d had an accident and that was all.

Tyler was sensitive that way. Because he’d spent a lot of time observing people, listening to people, studying people without them knowing he was studying them, he had developed an uncanny sense of whether or not a person was telling the truth. He knew Jace hadn’t been, but Tyler had been too scared to call him on it.

Grandfather Chen said lies could be more dangerous than vipers. Tyler believed him.

But now, as he crouched in the broom closet that shared part of an uninsulated wall with Madame Chen’s office, he wondered if the truth wasn’t just as bad.

The police thought Jace had killed a guy! Tyler’s eyes filled as his mind raced, picturing all the things Jace was saying about going to jail and child services dragging him—Tyler—off to foster care.

Tyler didn’t want to have to give up his home, or the school Madame Chen had gotten him into, a small private school where no one seemed to think it strange at all that a Chinese woman showed up for his parent-teacher conferences. His stomach started to hurt at the idea of being forced to leave Madame Chen and Grandfather Chen, being forced to go live with strangers.

Strangers wouldn’t know what he was like, what he liked to eat, what he liked to do. Strangers wouldn’t know that even though he had an IQ of 168, he was still a kid, and sometimes he was afraid of stupid stuff like the dark or a bad dream. How would strangers understand that?

Maybe they would be good people, and mean well, and try hard—Madame Chen and Grandfather Chen had been strangers once, he reminded himself—but maybe they wouldn’t be. And no matter what they were, good or bad, they wouldn’t be family.

Tyler barely remembered his mother. When he thought of her, he thought of the sound of her voice, the touch of her hand, the scent of her skin. What specific memories he did have, he wasn’t sure his brain hadn’t manufactured. He knew that could happen, that the brain could fill in the blanks, and bridge the gaps between real events and what might have happened, or what a person wished had happened.

Tyler wished a lot of things. He wished his mother hadn’t died. He wished they could all live in a house together—a house like families on television lived in, like in those old shows like
Leave It to Beaver
—him and Jace and their mom. And he wished they had a dad, but they didn’t.

And he wished now with all his heart that Jace wasn’t in trouble, that there wasn’t a chance of him going away and never coming back.

Tyler tucked himself into a little ball with his arms wrapped around his legs, and his cheek pressed against his knees, and he held himself tight like that, squeezing his eyes shut against the burning tears.

It wouldn’t do him any good to cry, no matter how much he wanted to. He had to think. He had to try to gather as much information as he could, and lay it all out, and reason through it, and come up with some ideas of what to do and how to help. That was what he was supposed to do with his 168 IQ.

But even knowing that, he was still a little kid, and he’d never been so scared in his life.

                        
      24

For a woman the size of a pixie, Andi Kelly’s capacity for food seemed to defy the laws of nature. She ate like a wolf, like she would actually snap at the hand of an unsuspecting busboy trying to take her plate away before every molecule had been devoured.

Parker watched her with amazement. LA was a town where eating real food was frowned on for women. Half the women he knew would come to Morton’s, order endive salad and a piece of shrimp, and go throw it all up afterward.

But then, Andi Kelly didn’t fit any particular mold. In Parker’s limited experience with her, it seemed Andi was who she was 24/7. No apologies, no subterfuge, no games. She said what she wanted to say, did what she wanted to do, wore what she wanted to wear. She was a breath of fresh, cinnamon-scented air—he’d noticed her perfume during the kiss hello. She greeted him like he was an old dear friend she’d seen just two days ago, sat down, and started chatting.

Parker was getting too keyed up to eat much himself. The nervous tension that wound inside him during an investigation like this one—a case that had snagged his interest, intrigued and challenged him—revved him up to a point where he didn’t want to stop moving, not to eat, not to sleep. He wasn’t quite to that point yet, but he knew all the signs. He could feel them now like the subtle foreshocks of an earthquake.

“So this kid, Caldrovics, says he got a tip on your murder,” Kelly informed him between bites of prime Angus beef.

Parker nursed a glass of Cabernet. “From who?”

She rolled her eyes. “You’re kidding, right? These little devil spawn come out of the womb ready to claw your throat out so they can feed on your blood then step over your rotting corpse to move up the mountain to stardom. He won’t tell me.”

“Beat it out of him,” Parker suggested, deadpan.

“What do you think I am? A cop?”

“So you’re saying you’re old and you’re marked for death?”

Kelly snarled and sliced another juicy chunk off her steak. “I’m too mean to die. I know I look sweet, and everyone remarks on how pleasant and agreeable I am, but I have a dark side,” she informed him, pointing her steak knife at him. “I’ll turn this little shit inside out and pick my teeth with his bones if there’s something in it for me.” She gave Parker the hairy eyeball. “There had better be something in it for me.”

“You’re not the only one who’s after something in this,” Parker confessed quietly, his gaze casually scanning the territory around them.

Tucked back in lush landscaping on Melrose in trendy West Hollywood, Morton’s was a throwback to the days of old Hollywood glamour and still a hangout for deal-makers and power players. Particularly for the old-time heavy hitters, the generation that had never stopped eating red meat. They all had their designated tables forward of the second palm tree, where they could see and be seen.

Looking around, Parker wondered if an eavesdropper might tune in to his conversation with Kelly and mistake it for a movie pitch.

“Lowell’s daughter is holding back on me,” he said. “Someone tossed her place today, threatened to kill her. Assaulted her, she said.”

“She said?” Kelly arched a brow.

“Knocked her down. She didn’t look any the worse for wear to me.”

“Don’t you know it’s politically incorrect to doubt the victim?”

“My victim is Lenny Lowell, who’s dead on a slab in the morgue. For all I know, the daughter had him whacked. She’s looking for something besides her father’s will, and she lied to me about it. Whoever tossed her place was looking for something, and she claimed not to know what. If she was at that murder scene before I got there, I need to know about it. That’s why I want an explanation from your little friend down there at the Daily Planet.”

Sitting back, Kelly gazed with satisfaction at the puddle of blood and grease on her otherwise empty plate. She patted her mouth with her napkin, took a breath, and let it out. “Here it is, Kev: The kid says he picked up the call on the scanner—”

“Bullshit. He was never on the scene. If he caught it on the scanner, why didn’t he come to the scene? He never talked to me. Nobody said anything to me about a reporter.”

“Well, he claims he talked to someone who knew what was what, and that he confirmed with someone else at the coroner’s office.”

“Who at LAPD? Who at the coroner’s office?” Parker demanded, as if Kelly had given the kid written directions herself.

“Hey, don’t kill the messenger,” she said, reaching for the last of her scotch. “You asked me to find out what I could. I’m telling you what I found out. I got this from the boss.”

Parker sighed, scowled, turned the news over in his mind. “And it’s okay with him the kid won’t reveal his sources on this nothing little story?”

“A newspaperman? We’re all wrapped in the cloak of the First Amendment, or did you forget you’ve had your fill of ‘unnamed sources’? Nobody had to tell you where they got the dirt to smear you with.”

“It’s obstruction,” Parker complained. “This is a murder investigation. If this little jerk has something, if he talked to someone—”

“Maybe you can put the fear of God into him yourself,” Kelly said. “You’ve got more leverage than I do. He’ll think I’m trying to screw with him, get him in trouble, steal his story. You can, oh, I don’t know, pistol-whip him or something. Threaten to arrest him for a traffic violation then stick him in jail and lose his paperwork while he gets to know his cell mates on an intimate level.”

“So I’m buying you a steak at Morton’s so you can tell me all you have to give me is his name,” Parker said.

“Actually, that’s all you asked me to do. Think of it as goodwill that will pay off later,” Kelly suggested with a sweet smile. Her eyes were an amazing shade of French blue. Her hair was the color of an Irish setter, and looked like maybe she’d cut it herself with pinking shears. It stood up in a messy little spiky cap on her head. It suited her.

Parker shook his head, smiling. “You’re a trip, Andi.”

“To paradise,” she murmured dramatically, then bobbed her eyebrows.

“How’d this story make the paper at all?” Parker asked.

“Slow news day. They got down to press time and needed filler on the page. Caldrovics had two inches of ink for them.”

Parker’s pager vibrated at his waist. He unclipped it from his belt and squinted at the screen. Diane’s cell phone number.

“Excuse me,” he said, standing up. “I have to make a call to someone much more important than you.”

Kelly rolled her eyes. “You’re just trying to stick me with the tab.”

Parker ignored her and went out of the restaurant to return the call.

The marine layer had crept into the city, a cold, silver mist tinged with salt. Parker could feel it envelop him and seep into his bones, making him wish he’d grabbed his trench coat.

Diane answered before the first ring had finished. “Did I tear you away from a hot date?” she asked.

“Not exactly.”

“Where are you?”

“Morton’s. Where are you?”

“The Peninsula. A fund-raiser for the DA. I just overheard your name in a conversation.”

“Yeah? And then did they all turn their heads and spit on the ground?”

“It was Giradello,” she said. “And Bradley Kyle.”

Parker said nothing. Everything seemed to freeze in and around him for a few seconds as he tried to process the significance of the information.

“Kev? Are you there?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m here. What was the context?”

“I only caught a few words. I got the impression Kyle was supposed to have done something about something, but hadn’t.”

“And my name was in there somewhere?”

“First there was a name I didn’t recognize. Yours came later in the conversation.”

“The first name—do you remember what it was?”

“I don’t know. It didn’t mean anything to me.”

“Try.” Parker held his breath and waited.

Diane hummed a little as she searched her memory. “I think it started with a
D.
Desmond? Devon, maybe?”

A rush of internal heat went through Parker like a flash fire. “Damon.”