The Forgotten (35 page)

Something between lapping and slurping. The animal was drinking, though God only knew where it had found water. The ground underneath was hard and dusty; the foliage was kindling. Though the air was damp, it hadn’t rained in months.

The lapping stopped, and in its wake came that dreaded silence. He had nothing but his breathing for company.

A sudden
snap
crackled through the air, sending a shiver down Decker’s spine. Then a distinct crunching sound, jaws crushing hard matter, pulverizing it to powder. Snap, crackle, pop, but it sure as hell wasn’t Rice Krispies.

He had interrupted someone’s meal.

His thoughts went back to the pair of eyes, what he had thought was an opossum. Okay, that made sense. A big wild
animal had made dinner out of a smaller wild animal. That was the natural order of things. Let the feline sate itself, because then it would move on. And then he could move on.

More gnawing…chewing…gnashing.

Another loud
snap
that startled him.

Just hang in there, Deck.

Lap, lap…slurp, slurp…lap, lap.

It was drinking blood…an awful lot of blood coming from an opossum.

More chomps.

An awful lot of eating, too.

Maybe it was a bigger kill. There were loads of deer in these parts. Stray dogs and wolves…coyotes.

The noises abruptly stopped.

The gait…
cla-clomp, cla-clomp
. Leaves and twigs broke underfoot.

Two flaming orbs peered out from the bush. A thin sliver of moonlight allowed Decker to catch a flicker of white fangs.

Don’t make me do it, Kitty. I’m a dead-on shot!

Talking to himself and talking hype at that. He couldn’t see anything well except the eyes. Wounding a wild animal was a course of last resort. Scaring it off was preferable. Without changing his carriage, he lowered one hand down to the ground, then finger walked until he felt the handle of his flashlight. Sweaty fingers gripped the metal, the moisture from his hands making it slippery in his hold. He placed it back on the ground, then coated his palm with dirt from the forest floor. He picked up the handle again…played with it until he had a firm grasp.

Slowly, he raised it to the level of the cat’s eyes.

His finger touched the surface until he found the power button.

He turned the beam on.

Nothing.

Waved the beam a couple of times.

Seconds strolled by like sightseers.

Finally, the alien eyes withdrew from sight. He could hear the animal walking…walking, not running. But the sound was retreating instead of advancing.

That was a good thing.

Thank you very much, God.

He
benched
a quick
Gomel,
a prayer recited when delivered from danger. It was a supplication he had said before…too many close calls in his life. How long before his luck ran out?

Don’t think about that now.

He waited. And waited and waited and waited.

Finally, finally, he allowed himself to stand upright. After that, he broke into a fit of coughing—horrid, dry hacking worse than anything he had experienced in his smoker days. His eyes became puddles of water, his nose spewed out mucus, spittle shot out from between his lips. Gun still in hand, he wiped his face on his jacket sleeve, then shone the beam back and forth at the previously occupied thicket. The illumination failed to elicit any response.

He went over to investigate the kill. He shouldn’t have been shocked by what he saw, but the raw horror of it brought up a surge of bile.

The lower portion of the face was gone, leaving only the skull, the eye sockets, and a few scattered teeth. The cranium still had the hair attached—rich, brown, frizzy hair that now looked like a clown wig. The torso had been devoured down to the ribs, the body cavity completely eviscerated, leaving the hips and legs detached from the thorax. One leg had been eaten to the bone, the large femur still whole. The other leg, sitting a few feet away from the torso, was untouched, the limb still wrapped in denim pants, a high-back sneaker still on the foot. The ground was damp and sticky, but there wasn’t much blood left in what once had been a body. The cat had slaked its thirst.

Decker inched backward, his nostrils assaulted by the strong stench of urine. Beside the pile of bone, flesh, and shredded fabric was a mound of feces, still warm and sending
up condensation in the cooler night air—a wretched, fetid stink. Decker’s throat gurgled. He moved several feet to the right and puked. Then he picked up his radio and connected through to Martinez. “Found him.”

“Where?” The detective’s voice was animated. “Loo, where are you? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” He took a deep breath and let it out. “I’m not sure of my exact location…somewhere northeast of the original grid. I’ll wave my flashlight’s blinking beam up in the air. Tell the choppers to look for it. They’ll zero in on the site.”

“Do you need backup?”

“Nope. He’s dead.”

“Dead?”

“Very much so.”

“Should I call the shooting team?”

“Not necessary. All I need is the coroner. Tell the doc to bring a body bag…and a small one at that.”

He wasn’t sure
what hurt more, his bones or his head, but it really didn’t matter. Advil was all he had for relief, so it would have to do, although the pain was way beyond anything offered OTC. Decker was dirty and tired and sick to his stomach, and all he wanted to do was crawl into bed. On his desk were piles of paperwork. He told himself it could wait until morning, except now, it was the morning. As he slogged through sheaf after sheaf, writing until his hand cramped, he tried to sort out the salient data. But he was too spent to think.

Marge came in a little after seven. “I’d like to see Vega off to school.”

Decker attempted to focus on her face. She came out as a blur of ash-colored flesh. “Good idea. We’ll talk later. Or even tomorrow if you want.”

“No, I’ll come back around two. Will you be here?”

“I’ll be here.”

She regarded his red and watery eyes. “Maybe you
shouldn’t
be here, Pete. Maybe you should go home, too. You’re looking so bedraggled, you make Skid Row Sam look stylish.”

Decker looked at his wrinkled suit. “If this was linen instead of wool, you’d think me very stylish.”

“It isn’t linen, Pete.” She stared at his clothing. “I don’t think it’s even wool.”

“It’s a wool blend. Say you’re sorry.”

“Ex-
cuse
me.” Marge dragged over a chair and sat opposite him. “Don’t you find the entire thing ironic?”

Confused, Decker waited for the right answer.

“The survivalist getting eaten,” Marge explained. “How did
that
happen?”

Decker shrugged. “Beats me.”

“Like…was it an exceptionally big mountain lion?”

“I don’t know, Marge. I didn’t get that close.”

“Because mountain lions don’t take down full-grown men. They’re usually content with dogs and children. If the guy was any kind of survivalist, he wouldn’t have tripped up over a cougar.”

“Maybe Holt stank of fear. Animals can smell it, you know. And even with Holt being a stone psycho, anyone would be a tad edgy with half of the LAPD looking for him. Or maybe the cat was really hungry. Or Holt stumbled on to a nursing female who was protecting her cubs.”

Marge was unconvinced. “You’re rationalizing. He should have known better.”

“Then perhaps Holt wasn’t the survivalist that Erin made him out to be. He lied about everything else. Why not that?”

Marge rubbed her forehead. “But was he the computer genius that Erin made him out to be?”

“Since I’m not a computer maven, I don’t know,” Decker answered.

Marge reached over his desk and drank up his lukewarm coffee. “It’s going to take the experts to break into all of Dee Baldwin’s files. Her system has a ton of firewalls.”

“What about Merv Baldwin’s files?”

“We haven’t gone through all his, either. But hers are the ones having to do with the purloined tests.”

“So from what you and Scott were able to tap into, are we on the right track?”

She frowned. “What’s our track again?”

“Dee Baldwin acquiring advance copies of the achievement tests?”

“Yeah. Right. This is all we have so far. She was paying Holt money for something. I don’t think it was because of his good looks or charm. Her computer has links to some systems, but we don’t know what they are. She also has lots of test files that we opened with very little difficulty. Dr. Estes said the tests in storage were just old achievement tests used for study purposes, not any different from the SAT or SAT II or MCAT test books available for purchase.”

“We should go over the tests and find out when they were entered into the Baldwin computer. Then we’ll try to find out when that particular test was given out to the students at large.
If
the computer date was earlier than the test date—or even the same day—it would tell us that Dee had insider’s information.”

“Okay.” Marge wrote the assignment in her notepad. “I’ll see how Scotty’s doing. Maybe we’ll go back to the Beverly Hills office this afternoon.”

“And what about Merv?”

She shrugged haplessly.

“And Ernesto? Did you pull out the rest of his file?”

“Yes, we did. He seemed to be making progress. So their wee-hour tryst could have been just therapy.”

“Or if Ruby’s letters are any indication, just maybe,
maybe
he was telling Mervin about his wife’s illegal activities.”

“Why would he do that?”

“The kid had an attack of conscience. Maybe he thought Merv had one as well. Maybe that’s why Holt popped both of them. He was tipped by Ruby, and Holt did the rest.”

“That’s so depressing.”

“Yes, it is.”

Marge yawned, then swallowed back a sour taste.

“Go home,” Decker ordered.

Marge ignored him. “You know, it would streamline things considerably if Ruby Ranger would wake up and explain everything to us in detail.”

“She is up…I mean conscious,” Decker explained. “Well, she’s not conscious at the moment, because she’s in
surgery. But at some point between going on the gurney and being prepped for the OR, she became conscious. What kind of evidence of wrongdoing do we have against her?”

“Nothing,” Marge said. “She wasn’t on the Baldwin payroll as far as Scott and I could tell.”

“Swell.”

“We didn’t access all the files, so who knows? What about Erin?”

“She’s out on bail.” Decker rolled his shoulders. “Those two girls hate each other. And, while I can’t swear that either was involved with the murders, I’m sure that both were into illegal activities. Erin has a nasty jones, and Ruby is a known hacker. I bet we can play one against the other.”

“Try to get Erin to turn State’s?”

“Whoever rolls over first.”

“Erin’s a juvenile. We can get her off easier.”

“But Ruby, being an adult, has much more to lose if she doesn’t turn State’s. We’ll talk to the D.A. and see how it plays out. And maybe she can clear up what happened with Ernesto.”

No one spoke.

“Poor Ernesto,” Decker remarked. “First, Ruby messed with his head. Then, when he starts getting it together, the bastard just cut him down.”

“Holt cut Dee down as well,” Marge said. “Killed his own golden goose.”

“Holt was afraid that Dee would rat on him…that’s my take.” Decker rubbed his eyes. “I suppose we’ll know more after we’ve talked to Ruby…if we can talk to Ruby. There are lots of things we don’t know, and a scam of this magnitude with so many deaths…I hope we get everyone. More important, I pray that no more bodies pop up.”

“Amen.”

“Until we know everything, we need to be meticulous. That means going over the crime scenes again to make sure we didn’t overlook anything. We’ll need to reinterview the witnesses…canvas the area again. Maybe someone saw
Holt go in and out of Dee’s beach condo even if the person didn’t see him the day of the murder. Also, we’ll need to question the boys at the nature camp again—one by one.”

“We questioned them one by one.”

“Notice I used the word ‘again.’ God is in the details. As far as I’m concerned, this is still an ongoing investigation. There could be dozens of people that we haven’t unearthed.”

“I hear you, Lieutenant. But right now, I’m too tired to think.”

“Yeah, weren’t you going to go home?”

“I was.” But Marge made no attempt to get up from the chair.

“Any reason you’re dragging your heels?”

“Fatigue.”

“And?”

“And, actually…I feel more competent here than I do at home.” Marge sighed. “At work, we’ve got some kind of method. You do an investigation, you follow a procedure. Sure, there’s a kink here and there, but mostly it’s…” She extended her right hand to mimic a beeline path. “At home…I don’t know…we make the rules up as we go along.”

Decker nodded.

Marge smiled. “It’s probably different when you’ve raised them since infancy.”

“No, not really.”

“C’mon,” Marge insisted. “You got history together.”

“Good history and bad history. You don’t think that Jacob has chinked some of Rina’s armor?”

“Poor Rina. How does she deal with it?”

“Rina’s low key. Not that she doesn’t ache, but…” He threw his hands up. “Outwardly, she’s very calm. It bugs the crap out of me. She should get apoplectic like I do.” He threw a pencil across the room. “Maybe she’s had too many hard knocks to be bothered by an errant teenager.”

“You always said that Jacob was the easy one. What happened?”

“Things came up. Life is full of surprises, Marjorie.”

“He’s a bright boy, Pete. He’ll be okay.”

“That’s what I tell myself.” He stacked up the papers. “Well, I’m feeling pretty nonfunctional. Maybe we should both go home.”

“And feel nonfunctional there?”

“We’ve made our beds, Margie. We might as well sleep in them.”

Eight in the morning, and there were already visitors in the house. Maybe they were relatives, because Rina thought a few of the women resembled Jill. There were also about a dozen teenagers. Maybe cousins, maybe friends of Karl’s, maybe kids from Ernesto’s class. They were talking in hushed voices, the boys looking at their feet, the girls wiping their red eyes with tissues. Within moments, a Jill look-alike approached her, looked her up and down, then managed a courteous nod. “I’m Brook Hart. May I help you?”

“Are you Jill’s sister?” Rina asked.

“Yes, I am. What can I do for you, Ms….”

“I’m Rina Decker.”

“Oh.” Brook regarded her with suspicious eyes. “The detective’s wife.”

“Yes, but I’m not here on any police business.”

“So why are you here, holding a big briefcase?” Brook pinkened. “I don’t mean to sound rude, but this is a difficult time for the family. I’m sure you can appreciate that.”

“Yes, of course. Actually, I’m here to see Mr. Golding. The contents of the briefcase are for him.”

“Oh.” Again the wary look. “What’s inside?”

“It’s of a personal nature.”

“Oh…how personal?”

“Is he available?”

Brook frowned. “Wait here a moment.”

“Thank you.”

The moment stretched into minutes. Rina busied herself
by trying to look inconspicuous while she studied the people. There was one girl in particular who seemed to be focused in on her. Maybe it was Rina’s clothes—the simple blue sweater, the midi-length jeans skirt that fell over her boots, the black tam that hid most of her hair. In this room, almost all the women were wearing pants.

The girl was still looking at her. Even with the nose pierce, the teen was a pretty little thing with dark hair, dark eyes, and dimples. Rina didn’t recall meeting her. Still, when the girl smiled at her, Rina smiled back. The teen edged forward, slowly walking toward her. Then she stuck out her hand.

“I’m Lisa Halloway. You’re Jacob’s mother, aren’t you?”

Rina held the thin fingers and gave them a light squeeze. “Yes, I am. Have we met before?”

“No, but you look just like him…or I guess it’s actually he looks like you.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Lisa. Where do you know Jacob from?”

“Just from around.”

From the drug parties.

“How’s he doing?” she asked.

“Right now, he’s very saddened and upset by what happened to Ernesto Golding. I’m sure you feel the same way.”

Tears moistened her eyes. “I was Ernesto’s girlfriend…ex-girlfriend.” Droplets ran down her cheek. “It’s very…unreal.”

Without thinking, Rina reached out, and the girl fell into the embrace, crying with her entire body. Rina sighed as she smoothed the teen’s bouncy curls. She was so young to be in so much pain.

“Life sucks!” Lisa choked out.

“Sometimes.”

“All the time.”

“No, not all the time.”

Lisa pulled away. “Well, wake me up when I get to the non-sucky parts.”

“It won’t be necessary.” Rina smiled at her. “You’ll know when you’re there.”

Lisa broke away and took a step backward. “Say hello to Jacob for me.”

“I will.”

“Tell him to drop by sometime.”

Sure,
Rina thought. “Sure,” Rina said. As she watched the girl melt in with her peers, Carter Golding materialized by her side. They watched the kids together.

“Poor kids,” Golding said. “What a thing to have to go through at such a young age.”

Rina turned to him. His face was drawn, his complexion wan. His beard seemed to have grayed overnight. He had been a short man. Now he was a small man as well. He wore a black turtleneck over black pants. His feet were covered with white crew socks, as if they’d been bandaged. She said, “Did you get any sleep last night?”

“No. I don’t think I’ll ever sleep again.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“So am I.” He picked at his beard. “Brook told me you were here.”

“Is there a place where we could talk in privacy?”

“All the bedrooms are being utilized by family members. Except for the master, but Jill’s sleeping. I don’t want to disturb her.”

“Of course not. Maybe we can talk in the kitchen or in a study?”

“This house doesn’t have many interior doors. Except for the bedrooms, there are no other enclosed spaces with locks. I wanted everything out in the open. It’s the type of people my wife and I are. Open…nothing hidden. What you see is what you get. See, I wanted that…because…my family was so hidden.” He faced her. “I take it that’s why you’re here.”

“Yes.”

“What’s the verdict?”

“Mr. Golding, perhaps we could use a bathroom?”

“It’s bad, huh?”

“No, it’s complicated. How about an upstairs bathroom? I take it you have a lock on your bathrooms.”

“Of course we have locking bathrooms, we’re not perverts!”

Rina felt heat in her face. “Of course.”

Golding shook his head. “I’m sorry I snapped—”

“It’s fine, Mr. Golding—”

“No, it’s not fine! And call me Carter, damn it!”

“Of course.”

Golding stared at her, then looked away. “I don’t know what the hell is wrong with me. I can’t control my temper…I can’t…”

“Carter, I was a widow at twenty-four. It’s not the same thing as your experience, but there are similarities. Don’t apologize for your behavior. I never did.”

He regarded her. “How did your husband die?”