Kill the Messenger (5 page)

                      
      7

“What a creep.”

Parker walked into the bedroom naked with a glass of wine in each hand. A nice, full-bodied Cab from Peru. He had hardly touched the hard stuff since about two months after he had gotten sent down from Robbery-Homicide. In those two months he had downed enough booze to float a boat. Then he woke up one day, said enough was enough, and took up tai chi instead.

“Was it something I said?”

The woman in bed didn’t take her eyes off the television. Her face was sour with disgust. “Rob Cole, that piece of dirt. I hope he gets the needle. And after he’s dead, I hope we can dig him up and kill him all over again.”

“That’s what I like about you, Diane. Overflowing with the milk of human kindness.”

He handed her a glass, set his on the night table, and slipped between the covers.

He and Diane Nicholson had what they both considered to be the perfect relationship. They liked and respected each other, were a pair of animals in bed, and neither of them had any interest in being anything other than friends.

Parker because he didn’t see the point in marriage. He’d never seen one that worked. His parents had been engaged in a cold war for forty-five years. Most of the cops he knew had been divorced at least once. He himself had never had a romantic relationship that hadn’t crashed and burned, primarily because of his job.

Diane had her own reasons, none of which she had ever confided in him. He knew she had been married to a Crowne Enterprises executive who had died of a heart attack a few years past. But when she spoke of him, which was hardly ever, she talked about him without emotion, as if he were a mere acquaintance, or a shoe. Not the great love of her life.

Whoever had put her off the idea of everlasting love had come after the marriage. Curious by nature and by vocation, Parker had nosed around for an answer to that question when they had first gotten involved, almost a year before. He hadn’t found out a thing. Absolutely no one knew who Diane had been seeing after her husband’s death, only they believed she had been seeing someone and that things had ended badly.

Parker figured the guy was married or a muckety-muck in the coroner’s office or both. But he dropped the unsolved mystery, figuring that if Diane had been so careful, so discreet that not even her friends knew, then it was none of his business. She was entitled to her secrets.

He liked having his secrets too. He had always figured the less anyone knew about him, the better. Knowledge was power, and could be used against him. He had learned that lesson the hard way. Now he kept his personal life personal. No one at LAPD needed to know who he saw or what he did with his time off the job.

She scoffed at his milk-of-human-kindness line. “This guy deserves an acid bath.”

They were watching
CNN Headline News.
Diane had televisions all over the house and sometimes had them all on at once so she could go from room to room without missing anything.

It was late, but it always took a while to wind down after a murder. Uniforms had knocked on doors within viewing distance of Lowell’s office, but the shops were empty for the night and there wasn’t a soul to speak to. If there had been, Parker would’ve worked through the night. Instead, he had locked down the scene, gone to the station to start his paperwork, making Ruiz go with him instead of chasing after Bradley Kyle like a cat in heat. From there he had gone to Diane’s Craftsman bungalow on the Westside.

“Fifty-five-gallon drum, and forty gallons of acid,” he said matter-of-factly. “Keep the drum in your basement, leave it for the next homeowner, who leaves it for the next one after that.”

Most women would probably have been appalled that he had that kind of stuff in his head. Diane just nodded absently.

The story running was about jury selection for Cole’s upcoming trial, and a recap of the whole sickening mess—from the discovery of Tricia Crowne-Cole’s body; the funeral with Norman Crowne sobbing on his daughter’s closed casket, his son leaning over his shoulder, trying to comfort him; all the way back to her wedding to Rob Cole. An incongruous photograph: Cole posing like an Armani tuxedo model, Tricia looking like maybe she was his older, dowdy sister who had been left at the altar. She would have been better off.

“Look at this clown,” Diane said as they ran file footage of Cole starring in his short-lived TV drama, the aptly named
B.S.: Bomb Squad.
“Looking like he thinks he’s somebody.”

“He used to be.”

“In his own mind. That guy is all about one thing: himself.”

There was never any gray area with Diane. Rob Cole was an instant
ON
button for her opinions. She had worked the murder scene more than a year ago now. She and Parker had had numerous variations of this conversation since. Every time some new phase of jurisprudence kicked Cole’s name into the headlines again, she resurrected her ire and outrage.

“I met him at a party once, you know,” she said.

“The memory is as vivid as if I had been there myself,” Parker remarked dryly. She must have told him a hundred and ten times since the murder. Somehow the mere mention of Cole’s name shut down her short-term memory.

“He hit on you.”

“He told me he was trying to put together a new series and maybe I could help him out with the research. The main character was going to be a coroner’s-investigator-slash-private-eye. What crap.”

“He just wanted to get in your pants,” Parker said.

“With his wife standing not ten feet away,” she said with disgust. “He’s only got eyes for me. He’s the bad boy. He’s all charm. He’s the big white grin.”

“He’s the guy all the guys want to be and all the women want to go home with,” Parker said.

“He’s a jerk.”

“I guess you still haven’t signed on to the ‘Free Rob Cole’ Web site,” Parker said, bringing his hand up to massage the back of her neck. The muscles were as taut as guy wires.

She scowled. “People are idiots.”

Parker slid his arm around her. She sighed softly as she let her head fall against his shoulder.

“No argument there,” he murmured. “No matter how rotten, how guilty a criminal may be, there are always people who don’t want to hear it.”

“Like I said. And these are the same people who can’t get out of jury duty. Cole will end up being the new millennium’s Ted Bundy and have some dumb-as-dirt woman marry him from the witness box in the middle of his murder trial.”

Parker didn’t give a shit about Rob Cole. LA was a “what have you done for me lately” kind of town, and aside from being accused of murder, Cole hadn’t done anything noteworthy in a decade. One production deal after another had gone down the drain. Starring roles had tapered off to guest roles of diminishing importance on episodic television, and a slew of forgettable movies of the week for those powerhouse networks: Lifetime and USA.

Parker’s attention was on the file footage of Cole being brought into Parker Center by a posse of Robbery-Homicide hotshots, Bradley Kyle and his pal Moose among the pack. Cole, red-faced and bug-eyed with anger, a drastic contrast in mood to his corny trademark fifties vintage bowling shirt; the Robbery-Homicide boys stone-faced in sharp suits and ties, mirrored shades hiding their eyes. Everyone costumed and playing their parts to the hilt.

“Why were Kyle and the Hulk there tonight?” Diane asked.

Parker shrugged as if it didn’t matter to him. “I don’t know. I didn’t invite them.”

“You think the dead guy was connected to something big and juicy?”

“The Lenny Lowells of the world are the Lenny Lowells of the world because they can’t hook on to something big and juicy even if they trip and fall in it.”

“He tripped and fell in something. And it killed him. Something smelly enough for the Parker Center boys to come sniffing.”

“It’s my case until my captain tells me it’s not,” Parker said. “Then I’ll walk away.”

Diane laughed, a throaty, sexy sound that moved her shoulders on its way out. “You liar. You wanted to run Bradley out of there like a tiger protecting its kill.”

“Well, I
do
hate the guy.”

“You’re entitled. He’s a prick. I hate the guy too. Everybody hates the guy. I’ll bet his mother hated him in utero,” she said. “But that’s all beside the point. I just don’t get what RHD would want with the murder of a bottom-feeder like that lawyer.”

“I don’t know,” Parker said as the
Headline News
anchor jumped from the Cole story to a story about the sudden surge in sales of vintage bowling shirts in Los Angeles. “But I’ll find out. Crack of dawn, I’m finding that bike messenger.”

                      
      8

The Chinatown of LA is not the Chinatown of San Francisco. There are no pretty cable cars. Shops selling cheap souvenirs and knockoff designer handbags are fewer, and far from being the largest part of the economy.

The Chinatown of LA was the first modern American Chinatown owned and planned by the Chinese themselves, home now to more than fifteen thousand people of Asian heritage. In recent years it has begun to attract artists and young professionals of all races, and has become a hip place to live.

The Chinatown of LA is about the thriving avant-garde mix of people who make it their home, who live and work there. The streets are lined with meat markets with duck carcasses hanging in the front window, fish markets where the fishmongers wield razor-sharp knives, and places to buy herbs and medicinal cures that the Chinese have been using for thousands of years. Signs in windows are written in Chinese. The primary language spoken is Chinese in a multitude of dialects. But alongside the traditional Chinese shops are contemporary art galleries, and boutiques, and yoga schools.

Jace had moved himself and Tyler to Chinatown after their mother died. They had dumped their meager possessions in a couple of laundry bags pilfered from the back of a delivery truck parked behind a restaurant, and jumped on a bus. Every evening when he returned to Chinatown, Jace recalled the day he had led his brother by the hand beneath the Gate of Filial Piety and to a place no one would ever come looking for them.

Alicia Damon had died as a Jane Doe in Good Samaritan Hospital. Jace knew this because he had taken her to the emergency room himself, “borrowing” the car of a junkie neighbor who was too wasted to notice the scrawny kid next door taking his keys.

His mother had not given the admissions clerk her name or address. She had not allowed Jace to appear to be with her, or to attract attention to himself in any way, or to give anyone his name or tell anyone where they lived.

Alicia had trusted no one in any position of authority, her greatest fear being the Children and Family Services people, who had the power to take her sons away from her. What little mail they got came to a rented box, never to whatever crappy apartment they were living in at the time. They had no phone. Jace had been registered in public school under the name John Charles Jameson. They lived on what money Alicia could make at menial jobs that paid cash, and on a Social Security check that came monthly, made out to Allison Jennings.

They had no family friends. Jace had never brought any school friends home with him. He had never met his father, or even seen a photograph of him. When he was younger, he had asked why, but he had stopped asking by the time he was six, because it upset his mother so much that she would go into another room and cry.

He had an idea who Tyler’s dad might be—a bartender from a dive his mother had worked at briefly. He had seen the guy a couple of times because he had secretly followed his mother to work, afraid to stay alone in the room they were renting at the time. Twice he had seen them through a window, kissing after everyone else had gone from the bar. Then suddenly the Damons picked up and moved to another part of the city. Some months later, Tyler was born. Jace had never seen the bartender again.

Whenever Jace had asked for an explanation about the way they lived, Alicia would only reply: “You can’t be too careful.”

Jace had taken her at her word. After her death, he had made no claim on his mother’s body, because people would ask questions, and questions were never a good thing. He had been just thirteen at the time, and knew without having to be told that Children and Family Services would swoop in like hawks and he and Tyler would be put into foster care, probably not even together.

There was no money for a funeral anyway. And besides, the mother he and Tyler had known was gone. The dead body had nothing really to do with who she had been and would never be again. And so the body had been shipped off to the LA County Coroner’s building to be stored in the morgue with the other three hundred or so Jane and John Does that came in every year, waiting in vain for someone to remember them and care enough to come looking for them.

With stubby candles in cobalt blue votives from the Catholic church three blocks from their apartment, and wilted, unsalable flowers from the Korean market down the street, Jace and Tyler had made their own memorial to their mother. They had set up a little altar of sorts in the living room. Their centerpiece: a photograph of Alicia, taken long ago, in better times.

Tyler had dug the picture out of a cloth-covered box their mother had had as long as Jace could remember. He had looked through it many times when his mother had been out, but not with her there. She hadn’t offered to share it. A box of memories with no stories, no explanations. Photographs of people Jace had never known, taken in places he had never been. Secrets that would forever remain secrets.

Jace had given a short eulogy, then he and Tyler had each named the qualities about their mother they had loved most, and would miss most. They had said their good-byes and put out the candles. Then Jace had held his little brother tight, and both of them had cried, Jace as silently as he could because he was all they had now, and he had to be strong.

Alicia had told Jace never to worry if something ever happened to her, that in the event of tragedy, he should call a phone number she made him memorize, and ask for Alli. Only, when Jace called the number from a pay phone, he was told it was no longer in service. And so there was no Alli, and there was plenty to worry about.

The next day Jace had gone looking for another place for them to live. He had set his sights on Chinatown for a number of reasons. One, because he wanted Tyler to grow up in a place where he didn’t have to worry some junkie would beat his head in for a nickel or take him and sell him to a pedophile to get money for his next fix. Two, because the community was so eclectic, no one would think them out of place there. And three, because he figured if he could actually get them in among the Chinese, he wouldn’t have to worry someone would rat them out to Children and Family Services. The Chinese ran their community their own way, discouraging intrusion from the outside world. Family was more than just a word defined by the County of Los Angeles. The difficulty would be in getting accepted.

Jace had gone up and down the streets, looking for a menial job, being turned down again and again. Nobody wanted him, nobody trusted him, and most of them conveyed the sentiment without speaking a word of English.

At the end of the third fruitless day, when Jace had been almost ready to give up, Tyler had dragged him into a fish market to look at the live catfish in the tank in the front window.

Typical Tyler, he had gone right up to the person who looked most likely to have answers, and proceeded to ask half a million questions about the catfish—where had they come from, how old were they, what kind were they, were they boys or girls, what did they eat, how often did the tank have to be cleaned.

The person he had chosen to ask was a tiny Chinese woman with the bearing of a queen, nicely dressed, dark hair done up in a bun. She was probably fifty-something, and looked as if she could have balanced a glass of champagne on top of her head and walked to the end of the block without spilling a drop.

She listened to Tyler’s stream-of-consciousness questions with one brow lifted, then took him by the hand, went to the fish tank, and patiently answered each of them. Tyler soaked up the information like a sponge, like he had never learned anything more fascinating. He looked up at the woman with wide-eyed eager wonder, and the woman’s heart melted.

Tyler had that sort of effect on people. There was something about him that seemed both wise and innocent at once. An old soul, Madame Chen called him. She had fed them dinner in the small restaurant next door, where everyone jumped to please her as she snapped at them in Chinese.

She had quizzed Jace about their background. He had been as vague as possible about most of it, but had told her about their mother’s death and that they had no relatives. He had admitted that they were afraid of being put into foster care, separated, possibly never to see each other again. Tyler was likely to be adopted, because he was young. Placing a teenage boy was a whole other thing.

Madame Chen had weighed all these matters as she sipped her tea. She was silent for so long, Jace was certain she was going to tell them to get lost. But when she finally spoke, she looked from Jace’s eyes to Tyler’s and back, and said: “Family is everything.”

The line reverberated in Jace’s head as he limped down the back alleys of Chinatown in the dead of night. In the best of times he felt detached from most of the world, the outsider, the loner. He relied on no one, confided in no one, expected nothing from anyone. He had been raised not to trust, had seen many reasons not to trust, so he didn’t trust.

But he liked the Chens, and was deeply grateful to them. He enjoyed the company of the other messengers, though he didn’t think he could call them friends. These were his connections, the circle of people around himself and Tyler, tied to him by thin threads that could be easily broken if necessary.

Someone had tried to kill him. The police wanted him for questioning at the very least, to charge him with the murder of Lenny Lowell at the worst. He couldn’t go to anyone he knew to share those burdens. Relying on someone else meant risking too much by dependence. And why would any of the people he knew risk part of their lives for him?

Jace could see that loose circle around him coming apart, sending the people of his life away from him like so many particles of a meteor as it hurtled through Earth’s atmosphere. He was surprised to realize how much those casual connections meant to him. He hadn’t felt so bleakly, completely alone since the days after his mother died.

Family is everything.

His only real family was a ten-year-old boy, and Jace would go to any lengths to keep this danger from touching him.

He had managed to get back to Chinatown without arousing the suspicions of anyone except for a few street people camping out in boxes in the alleys Jace had taken. But tomorrow the cops would be making the rounds of the messenger agencies, trying to track down the messenger who had picked up a package at Lowell’s office. He would become the center of everyone’s suspicions then. For all Jace knew, his would-be killer would be making those same rounds, trying to get a name and address, trying to get to the package that was still pressed against his belly beneath his clothes.

Whoever was looking would have a hard time finding him. The address he had put on his job application at Speed wasn’t where he and Tyler lived. He gave that address to no one. He was paid in cash under the table—not an uncommon practice among the shadier agencies in the messenger game. Getting paid in cash meant none of his money went to the government; therefore, the government didn’t know he existed, and the agency didn’t have to provide him with health insurance and workers’ comp.

It was a risky proposition at first glance. If he was injured on the job, he had no medical coverage. And injury was inevitable. Statistics showed that the average cyclist could expect to have one serious accident every two thousand miles on the bike. Jace figured he clocked two thousand miles every couple of months, give or take. But he made more money this way—a straight fifty percent on the price of every run—and if the agency had to cover him, he might have his hospital bills paid once, but he probably wouldn’t have a job waiting for him when he got out. The company would consider him a risk and dump him.

No one could track him through utility bills, because he paid the Chens in cash for water and power, and for the cable feed to the television in the apartment. Rent was traded for work shoveling ice for the cases in the fish market. He never brought visitors home, wasn’t close enough to anyone to have reason to. He rarely dated, had no time for a relationship. The few girls he had gone out with knew little about him or where he lived. As he had been trained from a very young age, he left no paper trail that could lead anyone to him and Tyler.

Even knowing how difficult it would be for anyone to find him, Jace felt skittish about going home. Despite the fact that he hadn’t run into the cops or seen Predator’s car again, he couldn’t escape the feeling that someone was watching him, following him. Some omniscient evil floating over the city just beneath the storm clouds. Or maybe it was just the onset of hypothermia making him shake as he let himself in the back door of the fish market and climbed the stairs to the tiny apartment.

He heard voices as he neared the door. Male voices. Angry voices. Jace held his breath, pressed his ear to the door, and tried to make out the conversation over the roaring of his pulse in his ears. The voices went silent. His heart pounded harder. Then a louder voice shouted to shop for a car at Cerritos Auto Square.

“We save more, so you save more! Cerritos Auto Square.”

Jace exhaled and let himself into the apartment.

The only light came from the television in the corner of the room, splashing colors across the small space and over the two bodies on the futon: Tyler, sprawled, head and one arm hanging over the edge of the cushion, legs splayed; and the old man Tyler called Grandfather Chen, the ancient father of Madame Chen’s deceased husband. Grandfather Chen sat upright on the futon, his head back, his mouth open, his arms out from his sides with palms up, like a painting of some tormented saint pleading with God to spare him.

Jace went to his brother, moved the boy’s dead weight up onto the cushion, and covered him with a blanket that had fallen to the floor. Tyler didn’t stir, didn’t open his eyes. Grandfather Chen made a crying sound and jerked awake, raising his arms in front of his face defensively.

“It’s okay. It’s only me,” Jace whispered.

The old man put his arms down and scowled at Jace, scolding him in rapid-fire Chinese, a language Jace had not managed to master in his six years of living in Chinatown. He could say
good morning,
and
thank you,
and that was about it. But he didn’t have to understand Grandfather Chen to understand that it was very late and Tyler had been worried about him. The old man went on like an automatic weapon, pointing to his watch, pointing to Tyler, shaking his finger at Jace.