Run the Risk (11 page)

Her backpack from school was on the backseat. I opened the glove compartment; taped inside was a photograph of her standing next to her father. She had her arm around him, they both were smiling. He still had his wedding ring on. But I hadn't taken the photograph. I imagined the woman he was having the affair with had been holding the camera, which meant Lacy knew about the affair before I did and she hadn't said anything, not a word to me. It was their secret.

“Anything?” Harrison asked. He was standing over my shoulder.

I closed the glove compartment.

“No,” I said.

I reached into the backseat and pulled out her backpack.

“I want to go over this, go through her phone numbers.”

“If it was the caller who made the threats, then there won't be anything in her book—”

I shot a look at him. “I need to think that I can do something to bring my daughter back.”

I wanted to be a mother grizzly at that moment, to eliminate doubt.

He nodded. “We'll bring her back.”

It was the sort of thing my injured partner Traver would
have said, except Traver would have believed the words with every cell in his body. Harrison knew better, though he did his best to sell it.

“The description of the car went out; every department has it.”

“If it was the caller who took her, then he'll make contact. He'll make demands, or he'll just boast about it. If it's connected to Finley, we won't hear anything.”

Harrison nodded agreement.

“Then we pray it's not.”

I stepped under the perimeter tape and stopped next to the hood of my car. I had to begin to think like a cop. I couldn't help her if I was thinking like her mother. But it meant I had to let go, if just a little—let her slip through my hands to the column on the report under “victim.” I clutched her pack in my hands and looked back down the street at her car.

“I'm missing something,” I said.

“You want to go back over it?”

I shook my head. “What I'm missing isn't here.”

“You lost me,” Harrison said.

I thought for a moment. It was like trying to find my way through a dark room. I began to work backward. There was something I hadn't connected to, hiding in plain sight.

“The car,” I said to myself almost involuntarily.

“What about it?” Harrison asked.

“The white car was a hatchback.”

“Yeah.”

“A Hyundai.”

“She didn't ID a make.”

“I am.”

“I'm not following.”

“The morning after Finley's killing at the flower shop, I was driving home just before dawn. A white Hyundai pulled out and nearly hit me before the driver started delivering
The Star News.
When I opened the garage door and stepped out of the car, the Hyundai was stopped at the bottom of my driveway. When he saw I was looking at him he squealed his tires and raced away.”

“Maybe he saw the photograph of Lacy in the paper?”

“He didn't throw another paper the rest of the street. Why didn't he finish delivering his papers?”

“You think he might have been involved in taking her?”

“We're going to find out.”

“You see him?”

I looked one more time at Lacy's car and tried not to imagine what horror she was going through. It was impossible.

“Yeah, I saw him.”

Officer James walked up with a cell phone in her hand. She hesitated a moment, not wanting to interrupt.

“Dispatch got a call for you from someone who identified themselves as a newspaper deliveryman. Said you would know him, and that he wanted to talk to you about the end of the world. They assumed it was a crank until your daughter was taken.”

“Did he say which newspaper?”

“The Star News.”

ACCORDING TO THE CIRCULATION
manager at
The Star News,
the delivery driver who had stopped outside my house and who had apparently just made the call to me was named Philippe Genet. French, he thought, though he wasn't certain. Not many questions are asked in the off-the-books economy. He had worked for them for less than two months. He hadn't talked much. Hadn't made friends. All they really knew about him was that he would work for six dollars an hour.

He had picked up his papers as usual the morning I encountered him, then delivered only eight papers on his route, all on my block, my own being the last one he threw. Eight papers out of nearly four hundred. They hadn't heard from or seen him since. They had no phone number for him, just an address in Hollywood.

The sun was starting to set as Harrison and I drove toward Hollywood on the 134 freeway. Behind us the San Gabriels were aglow in shades of orange and pink. In front of us, the gray line of the ocean stretched across the distant horizon, the buildings of Century City rose, and the vast
expanse of greater L.A. spread out as far as the eye could see to the south past the towers of downtown. Directly in our path Hollywood descended into shadow below the Griffith Observatory and the Hollywood Hills.

I tried to focus on facts, on the pieces of the puzzle that would bring Lacy back, but nothing was falling into place. The florist Breem was still missing. The trace on the ballistics from the gun that killed Daniel Finley had turned up nothing. The missing employee Sweeny was out there. And the Mexican army was a hopeless maze of phone calls and bureaucracy.

I called home on the slim chance and prayer that it had all been a mistake and Lacy was sitting in front of the TV. Even though I knew better, my heart still sank when the machine picked up.

There was a call from a friend of hers about what an asshole Principal Parks was. Another reporter wanted a quote from the “Green Beauty Queen,” as he called her. And then, short of the voice of the person who had pulled Lacy out through the window of her car, I heard the last voice I wanted to hear.

“Alex, it's your mother. I just saw my granddaughter on the news. . . .”

There was a pause. I could hear measured breathing as she found just the right words.

“It would have been nice to have learned about this from someone other than Tom Brokaw, but I suppose you have your reasons. . . . Call me, if you have time.”

I hung up. Great. I looked at the phone, trying to figure out how to tell her that her only grandchild had been kidnapped. I punched her number out on the touch pad of the phone but didn't call. Listening to her break into tears wasn't going to help Lacy. And hearing that it was all my fault wasn't going to help me.

“Something?” Harrison asked.

“My . . . It's nothing.”

I took a breath. “My mother.”

“Forget I asked.”

I slipped the phone back in my pocket and opened Lacy's pack. Her phone book had a black leather cover that had “Numbers” carved into it. I began looking for the number that didn't fit, or a name that rang an alarm bell. A few names I recognized, but most meant nothing to me. The more I tried to work it, the less I was able to focus. I wanted to hold my daughter. I wanted to be a dysfunctional mother again. I wanted to say the wrong thing just one more time and spend the rest of my life repairing whatever damage I had done to her.

I rolled the window down and closed my eyes, letting the breeze wash over my face. Instead of a moment of peace, my mother's words rushed out of the past on a gust of wind.

“If you become a policeman, you'll ruin your life. I expect something more of you.”

Harrison turned onto Sunset and headed west through the east side of Hollywood. The Walk of Fame was only a couple of miles away, but no stars were remembered here, no tourists snapped pictures. Here there were storefront chapels and transient hotels. The sidewalks were littered with the broken dreams of immigrants who spent their days dodging INS agents and random street crime.

Philippe, the
Star News
delivery driver, lived in a run-down section just a few blocks south of Sunset Boulevard. We found the address and circled the block looking for the Hyundai, but there was no sign of it.

“If Philippe is in his apartment, he didn't drive here,” I said.

Harrison stopped outside the address on Wilcox. It was a three-story, mustard-yellow building with louvered windows. Overflowing garbage cans lined the sidewalk. The charred remains of a Christmas tree lay on the ground next to a dying palm tree that had been spray-painted with gang tags.

I sat there for a moment without making any move to
get out of the car. A young Mexican woman was carrying a child across the street. I stared at her for a second, closed my eyes, and imagined my infant in my arms as we went home from the hospital.

“You okay?” Harrison asked.

I slipped back into the present. “Yeah.”

I don't think I fooled him. His eyes carried the look of a fellow traveler to the “addiction of memory.” I had known a few men who suffered from it, but not many. Women were better suited to it, I thought. The residue of nurturing.

“I'm okay,” I said.

I looked around to ground myself in the details of my surroundings. Up on the corner of the block, a hooker with a vaguely familiar look eyed our car suspiciously. God, I was sick of people willingly destroying their lives. It was all too short. Don't we know that, or can we just not stop ourselves?

“She looks like somebody,” Harrison said.

I eyed her for a moment, then nodded. “Jamie Lee Curtis.”

“Theme hookers?” Harrison said in amazement.

“And she's a guy,” I added.

Harrison looked at me to read whether I was joking. Not that it was a guy, just that it was Jamie Lee.

“
A Fish Called Wanda
?”

I nodded. “I was in Vice for a month; three of those weeks I spent dressed as Jamie Lee. She has a solid fan base.”

We stepped out of the car and stared at the building.

“Does this strike you as a little serendipitous?” Harrison said.

“No, it strikes me as a setup.”

I don't think my answer was exactly what he wanted to hear since the last two times I had entered a building, one blew up, and in the other a door was slammed into my head.

“What do you want to do?”

I started walking across the street. “Let's go in.”

Stepping into the apartment building was like walking
into the Third World plunked down only two blocks from Ronald Reagan's star on the Walk of Fame.

There were no lights in the hallway. The walls were streaked with stains of God knows what. From an apartment on one side came the wailing of Middle Eastern music. From another, the crying of a baby and salsa music. The place smelled of turmeric and lard and urine. I tried not to imagine Lacy's presence in a place like this. I tried desperately to cling to the image of her lying on her bed, listening to her Walkman, and ignoring my attempts to talk to her.

“Third floor in the back,” Harrison said uneasily. This wasn't territory that the bomb squad visited frequently. Bombs were a high-end crime, the product of education. Why go through the bother of blowing up a place like this when a single match would do just as well?

The second-floor landing was littered with fast-food bags and rat droppings. We moved up to the third floor. There were six apartments, three on each side.

“He's the last one on the right,” Harrison said.

We walked slowly down the hallway, the sound of Iranian and Spanish language television coming from several of the apartments. One of the doors cracked open then just as quickly closed when the occupant recognized us as cops. As we reached the last apartment on the right, I removed my Glock and held it at my side. Harrison glanced at it with a mixture of surprise and apprehension.

“I should—”

I nodded.

He reached down and carefully removed his 9mm like a person picking up an artichoke in the grocery store.

“Take the other side,” I said in a whisper, motioning to the other side of the door.

He took his position and nodded that he was ready. I started to reach for the door handle and then thought of Dave disappearing in a cloud of dust. My hand stopped short as I looked over to Harrison and then stepped back from the door.

“Assuming the worst, how do we do this without getting blown up?” I asked.

Harrison thought for a second. “If we had optics we could look under the door.”

I glanced at my watch. It was after five: rush hour.

“How long to get it here?”

“At least an hour in traffic this time of day.”

“What about LAPD?”

“Not much shorter. Bomb squad operates out of the Academy.”

I looked at my watch. With every second she was slipping farther away.

“My daughter doesn't have an hour.”

Harrison thought about the problem for a moment, looking at the walls next to the door.

“If it's a shaped charge like the other one, the walls will offer enough shielding. Don't touch the handle. We kick it open and then hug the wall.”

“What if my daughter's inside?”

I could see in his eyes that he didn't want to answer. I'd just put him in the position of being responsible for Lacy's life if he said it was all right to go through the door.

“What was it the caller wanted to talk about? The end of the world?” I asked.

“Something like that.”

“This is my call, then, whatever happens.”

“Do you think she's inside?” he asked.

I looked at him and then stared at the door. Half of the number on it had fallen off. Dirty handprints lined the edges like fancy stenciling.

“No,” I said. There was no reason for her to be. It would have been much too simple. For whatever reason Lacy was taken, it wasn't to make things less complicated.

“I agree,” Harrison said.

We moved back to the door and took positions to kick it in. Echoing up the stairwell came the shouts of an argument in Spanish. The man's voice sounded drunk, the woman's carried the edge of fear. Outside a car alarm
briefly wailed and then fell silent. I nodded to Harrison and counted off . . . “One, two . . .” With three we kicked.

The door gave way with a splintering of wood and flew open, banging hard against the wall. We hugged the wall for an instant, waiting for the deafening concussion and the whoosh of air to take our breath away.

Nothing.

I swung around and stole a glance into the room with my Glock raised. The fading light barely illuminated the simple, spare room. In one corner a sink and counter served as the kitchen. Opposite that a door led to what must be the bathroom. In the center of the room, in front of the two windows a man sat absolutely still in a chair. I ducked back behind the wall and looked at Harrison. I didn't have to say a word. He could see on my face that something was wrong. The muffled sound of a voice drifted out the door. Harrison raised his gun and looked in the apartment. I could see the surprise register on his face. And then I watched his eyes as they focused in the low light at what sat in the middle of the room. He then retook his position behind the wall.

“Is that the guy you saw delivering the papers?”

I wasn't sure. “Could be. I need a closer look at him.”

“That might not be a good idea,” Harrison said.

“Why?”

“I think he's wired.”

He took a breath then stole another glance around the door opening.

“We have a problem,” Harrison said.

“A bomb?”

“More than that. I think the opening of the door started a timer.”

“What?”

“There's a timer on his chest. It's counting down.”

He looked at me for a moment, though his eyes were already inside the room working the device.

“I think it's a safe bet he wasn't the one who made that phone call to talk to me,” I said. “Which means whoever
did wanted us in this room with that bomb. His message is beginning to make sense.”

Harrison nodded. “You don't have to be inside.”

Before I could say anything he quickly got up and went through the door. I went in behind him and swung my weapon left and right, clearing the room, then pushed open the door to the bathroom. It was clear. Harrison went directly to the figure who sat in a chair, explosives wired around his chest.

There were two mattresses on the floor, a cheap television, a prayer mat, and some cardboard boxes with clothes. Against one wall was a cheap chest of drawers and a mirror. The floor was littered with copies of
The Star News.

I stepped next to Harrison and looked at the frightened face of the man in the chair. He had duct tape around his mouth; otherwise there were no restraints. He could have gotten up and walked away, except that a glass motion detector the size of a double-A battery sat on his lap. It reminded me of a carpenter's level. Two wires led from that to the small plastic circuit box that served as the detonator. There were six sticks of dynamite taped around his chest. A small digital kitchen timer was taped to the center of the sticks. He was well aware that if he had tried to run he would have been blown all over the walls of the room. His dark eyes were wild with fear, pleading for help, his T-shirt soaked with perspiration.