Missing: The Body of Evidence (10 page)

Logan was leaning on the desk at
reception talking to Claire when Nancy arrived at headquarters. They stopped
talking, glanced her way and nodded. Nancy responded with a smile and greeted
them both.

‘Good morning.’

She carried on walking toward the offices.
A glimpse at the reflection behind her on the glass door to the office showed
her they were still watching her, which Nancy thought was odd. As the office
door swung closed behind her, she looked over her shoulder. Logan was talking
to Claire again, but both of them were glancing her way. Nancy had the distinct
impression they had been talking about her, or at least talking about something
they didn’t want her to hear. Nancy simply shrugged her shoulders, unloaded her
purse onto her desk and went to the coffee machine.

‘Shame about Tracy,’ said Archie, a fellow
detective.

‘Sure is.’

‘Even more of a shame about that janitor of
yours.’

Her coffee almost spilled as she spun
around.

‘What shame?’

‘Found him last night in his car, under a
bridge along the San Diego Freeway, with a bullet through his skull and a six
pack on his lap.’

‘What, you found him?’

‘Nah, some passing driver called it in. Saw
a flash of light and heard the shot. Poor bastard committed suicide.’

‘Time?’

‘Called in around ten-twenty-five.’

‘Who’s on the case?’

‘Nancy, my office,’ Logan interrupted, ‘and
bring me the file on the professor.’

Nancy scurried off to her desk and grabbed
the file from her OUT tray. She rummaged in her purse for the copy of the
report Tracy had given her and placed it in the file. The left side of her head
ached and she felt a throbbing pain. Her fingers ran over the source of the
pain. There wasn’t a bump, but where she had banged her head on the shower
tiles hurt like hell.

The door to Logan’s office was ajar. She
tapped on the frosted glass, paused and walked in.

‘The professor’s file.’

Nancy dropped it on the desk and sat down.

‘I don’t know what you have lined up for me
today, but I have a doctor’s appointment at twelve-thirty.’

He didn’t even glance at her, but picked up
the report and opened it. Logan took Tracy’s report from the file and scanned
the pages.

‘Why did Tracy give you this report?’

The words to answer him, stuck in her
throat. She was half expecting him to show some scepticism towards the
spontaneous combustion theory, but sensed from the delivery of his question,
that the interview was going to take a different direction. Her eyes rolled and
a sigh escaped her lips.

‘Well, I’m waiting.’

‘Ask Tracy. I don’t know. I wasn’t
expecting her to call. As far as I knew the case was closed.’

He kept his head down, but threw her a look
that, with the shadows from the lighting, gave him the appearance of an evil
gargoyle.

‘When I ask a question, I expect an answer.
So I’ll repeat, why did she give you this report?’

Nancy was tired of playing games. Sucking
up to the boss and skirting around subjects was becoming tedious.

‘Because like me; and unlike her boss,
she’s not happy with the explanation that spontaneous combustion is the reason
for the professor’s death. We both smell cover up. Okay?’

‘No, it isn’t okay. So explain it to me.’

‘It’s all too neat. Kelly had the
opportunity, if not the motive. Kelly is connected to the professor through
Astral Chemical, a company that doesn’t exist. The CIA had the professor’s DNA
and fingerprints on file, so he comes under their radar. And, get this, the
goons are running around convincing everyone, the coroner included, it’s a
freak accident. Why? Now the janitor is dead. Perfect circle if you ask me. A
little like the Lee Harvey Oswald scenario. All too well packaged to my way of
thinking, hire a patsy hit man… then kill him.’

Logan sat back, his expression one of
thunder. She wondered if he ever lightened up.

‘Where were you last night... between say,
ten and eleven?’

Her cheeks flushed and her head pounded.
She was in no mood for fencing with him, and fired back.

‘What’s that got to do with the price of
fish?’

She knew, as soon as the words slipped out,
that she had stepped over the invisible line. He rose to his full height. His
lips tightened and his pallor went to Defcon-one.

‘I’ll tell you where you were at, the
janitor’s apartment block. Now stop dancing and tell me your movements and what
you found.’

Nancy tried to retrieve the situation. She
felt like a schoolgirl, caught on camera smoking cannabis. Logan had more
informants than a street cop and knew everything everyone was up to at any
given time. There was no point skirting around the subject. Reluctantly, she
decided to give him a potted version that the intrusion into her private life
deserved.

‘I left the Porter Ranch Wal-Mart at ten,
just as they were closing. Then I drove to the janitor’s apartment. It was
empty. I questioned the woman from number five and she said he had moved out
around two in the afternoon. Then I drove home. Why?’

‘So let’s get this right, I tell you the
case is closed and you go sniffing around the apartment. What did you hope to
achieve?’ He glanced at a map of Los Angeles on his wall. ‘I’m guessing you
drove along Ronald Reagan Freeway.’

‘Yes, why?’

‘Because that’s where they found the
janitor, under the bridge in his black Toyota, at the intersection with San
Diego Freeway.’

‘Black Toyota?’

Nancy felt as if a veil had dropped between
her and Logan. She ran a picture through her mind of the black Toyota following
her.

‘Was the janitor stalking you?’

The question broke through the haze and
started alarm bells ringing. Nancy was at a loss as to how to respond. She knew
she hadn’t told anyone following her, and doubted he could read her mind.
Instinct put her on alert as to how his question would have arisen. Logan sat
down, picked up a pencil and began to chew on it, swivelling left and right in
his chair and casting Nancy a stare that seemed to be drilling holes in her
brain. She decided against revealing that she thought she
had
been
followed and chose to answer his question with a question.

‘What are you saying? What makes you think
he might have been stalking me?’

Her heart pounded in her chest as if it were
trying to find a way to get more oxygen. She tapped her fingers on the armrest.
The palms of her hands felt moist. Logan snapped the pencil in half and tossed
the halves into the wastebasket. He leaned forward, and she waited for a
definitive answer.

‘That’s all for now, I have some cold case
files I want you to go through. Claire will get them for you.’

‘Wait a minute; am I some sort of suspect,
Archie said it was suicide?’

‘So it would seem.’

What, it seems that I’m a suspect, or it
seems like he committed suicide?
Nancy realized her
thoughts went one question too far and that of course she couldn’t be a
suspect. She wondered if maybe he was toying with her mind to teach her a
lesson for snooping after he had told her the case was closed.

‘Did he leave a suicide note?’

‘Not one I’d recognize as a suicide note.
Before you leave, can you tell me if you write shorthand?’

Shorthand?

He stared as if he had thrown a sneaky
hardball and awaited the result.

‘No. Who’s on the case?’

‘Kyle.’

The pile of cold case files on Nancy’s
desk, looked as though they would keep her occupied until retirement. Her
fingers itched to phone Kyle and to ask what he had found while investigating
Kelly’s suicide. Something at the back of her mind told her to butt-out and not
to call him on his cell phone.

She wished that she had phoned in sick, to
save her the embarrassment of the meeting with Logan. With the time approaching
eleven-thirty, Nancy picked up her purse and headed to her car, to set off for
her doctor’s appointment. It was nagging away at her mind, why Logan would ask
if Kelly had been stalking her, when she knew that she was the one that had a
fixation. A question in the opposite direction would have been more appropriate
in the circumstances. Thoughts of the black Toyota where they had found Kelly’s
corpse, freaked her out, but she put it down to coincidence. Her mind turned to
David. She hoped he wasn’t locked away somewhere waiting for his dad to return.
Logan was talking to Archie in reception. Nancy stood behind them and cleared
her throat.

‘Ahem. Sorry to interrupt, I have to be
going for my doctor’s appointment. I was just wondering; has anyone located
David, Kelly’s son? Maybe Kelly has him locked up somewhere.’

‘According to his attorney, David’s in a
secure institution... Anything else?’

He didn’t wait for a reply and turned to
carry on his conversation with Archie.

Nancy huffed and pushed hard on the swing
doors to open them and headed down the stairway to her car. Nancy yanked the
handle to open her car door, climbed onto her seat and slammed her door closed.
But all the slamming of the door did was to close her rage in the car with her.
Nancy turned the key in the ignition, engaged first and pulled out of the
parking lot, belting up as she drove. All she wanted was to put some miles
between her and the office. Two, three, four, five, she raced through the gears
and stepped on the gas pedal.

Traffic was heavy, but she managed to use
her knowledge of the back streets of LA to arrive at the doctor’s on time. The
receptionist signed her in, and she headed for the waiting room. Her head felt
like it might explode as a migraine developed. Her name echoed over the public
address and she entered the doctor’s room.

‘Take a seat. Dear God, you look dreadful.’

‘Migraine. It’s settling down now.’

The doctor accessed her records on his
computer.

‘How long have you suffered having the
migraines?’

‘On and off ever since I ran into that
bough of a tree a few weeks ago. Sometimes I’ve been getting migraines and
sometimes just headaches.’

‘You had a concussion, it says here from
your hospital report, but the X-rays didn’t show any damage. Let’s take a look.’

He walked up behind her and inspected her
scalp.

‘Hmm, there’s some redness. It should have
cleared up by now.’

‘Yeah, but I banged my head when I slipped
in the bath tub yesterday and then today I had an accident in the shower
cubicle and banged it again.’

‘How have you been in general since you
came out of the hospital?’

‘Fine... okay no, not really fine.’ She let
a sigh escape her lips. ‘I keep getting overly emotional and cranky with
people. And, I keep having dreams I can remember in detail. Then there’s the
asthma attack I had this morning in my sleep.’

‘Asthma attack? Tell me what happened.’

Nancy relayed all the details as he walked
back to his desk and sat down. When she had finished, he sat back and smiled.

‘I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve
heard that story. I wouldn’t worry about it. Look it up in any dream book. It
means you’re in a situation in life you need to get out of, so they say. If it
carries on, I can recommend a good therapist.’

‘A shrink... no thanks.’

‘What are those blotches on your arms?’

Nancy glanced at her arms.

‘Oh those; scalded myself in the shower
when I fell. It stings like hell, but I’ll be fine.’

‘All the same I’ll write a script for some
cream and tablets for the migraine. Wait here?’

Before he left the room, she detected a
look of concern as he glanced her way. She dwelt on his explanation for the
dream. Maybe she did need to talk to someone, she thought. But there again,
thoughts of lying on a therapy couch and baring her soul didn’t appeal to her.
If she did have a problem with the direction her life was taking, she reckoned
she had the strength to find her own solution.

The doctor re-entered the room and handed
her a sheet of paper and a prescription.

‘I’ve managed to find a cancellation on
Monday for you to have an MRI scan as a precaution.’

Her jaw dropped and her mind raced over why
he wanted the scan.
Why the urgency?
What seemed like a million
questions ran through her mind, but not one of them worked their way out into
words. The worry must have been evident. He placed his hand on her shoulder.

‘Don’t worry; it really is just a
precaution. All the details are on the letter. In the meantime, I need you to
rest. I hope you have nothing energetic planned for the weekend?’

I hope he doesn’t mean sex.
‘No, nothing energetic.’

‘Good, that will be all.’

He walked with her to the door. The journey
to her car and getting in was a blur. She ran her fingers over the source of
the pain on the left side of her head, it was still sore to the touch. Visions
of her having a surgeon drilling into her head flashed though her mind. A
shiver ran through her body and she shrugged her shoulders. She looked at the
appointment letter and the realization struck her that she suffered a fear of
enclosed spaces.
Oh my God, how am I going to get through this?