Demolition Angel (4 page)

Starkey sucked deep on the cigarette, then blew smoke angrily at the ground. If this was her mind’s way of making peace with what happened, it was doing a damned shitty job.

She went back across the street to find Marzik.

“Beth? I got another idea. Try to locate the people who own all these shops and see if anyone was threatened, or owed money, or whatever.”

Marzik nodded, still squinting at her.

“Carol, what is that?”

“What is what?”

Marzik stepped closer and sniffed.

“Is that Binaca?”

Starkey glared at Marzik, then went back across the street and spent the rest of the evening helping the search team look for pieces of the bomb.

In the dream, she dies
.

She opens her eyes on the hard-packed trailer-park earth as the paramedics work over her, their latex hands red with blood. The hum in her ears makes her think of a Mixmaster set to a slow speed. Above her, the thin branches of winter gum trees overlap in a delicate lace still swaying from the pressure wave. A paramedic pushes on her chest, trying to restart her heart. Another inserts a long needle. Cold silver paddles press to her flesh
.

A thousand miles beyond the hum, a voice yells, “Clear!” Her body lurches from the jolt of current
.

Starkey finds the strength to say his name
.

“Sugar?”

She is never certain if she says his name or only thinks that she says it
.

Her head lolls, and she sees him. David “Sugar” Boudreaux, a Cajun long out of Louisiana but still with the soft French accent that she finds so sexy. Her sergeant-supervisor. Her secret lover. The man to whom she’s given her heart
.

“Sugar?”

The faraway voices shout. “No pulse!” “Clear!” The horrible electric spasm
.

She reaches toward Sugar, but he is too far away. It is not fair that he is so far. Two hearts that beat as one should not be so far apart. The distance saddens her
.

“Shug?”

Two hearts that no longer beat
.

The paramedics working on Sugar step away. He is gone
.

Her body jolts again, but it does no good, and she is at peace with it
.

She closes her eyes, and feels herself rise through the branches into the sky, and all she knows is relief
.

Starkey woke from the dream just after three that morning, knowing that sleep was beyond her. She lit a cigarette, then lay in the dark, smoking. She had finished at the crime scene just before midnight, but didn’t get home until almost one. There, she showered, ate scrambled eggs, then drank a tumbler of Bombay Sapphire gin to knock herself out. Yet here she was, wide awake two hours later.

After another twenty minutes of blowing smoke at the ceiling, she got out of bed, then went through the house, turning on every light.

The bomb that took Starkey had been a package bomb delivered by a meth dealer to murder the family of an informant. It had been placed behind heavy bushes on the side of the informant’s double-wide, which meant Sugar and Starkey
couldn’t use the robot to wheel in the X-ray or the de-armer. It was a dirty bomb, made of a paint can packed with smokeless powder and roofing tacks. Whoever had made the bomb was a mean sonofabitch who wanted to make sure he got the informant’s three children.

Because of the bushes, Starkey and Sugar both had to work the bomb, Starkey holding aside the brush so that Sugar could get close with the Real Time. When two uniformed patrol officers had called in the suspicious package, they had reported that the package was ticking. It was such a cliché that Starkey and Sugar had burst out laughing, though they weren’t laughing now because the package had stopped ticking. The Real Time showed them that the timer had malfunctioned; the builder had used a hand-wound alarm clock as his timing device, but for some inexplicable reason, the minute hand had frozen at one minute before reaching the lead that would detonate the bomb. It had just stopped.

Sugar made a joke of it.

“Guess he forgot to wind the damned thing.”

She was grinning at his joke when the earthquake struck. An event every bomb tech working in Southern California feared. It would later be reported as 3.2 on the Richter scale, hardly noticeable to the average Angeleno, but the minute hand released, contact was made, and the bomb went off.

The old techs had always told Starkey that the suit would not save her from the frag, and they were right. Sugar saved her. He leaned in front of her just as the bomb went off, so his body caught most of the tacks. But the Real Time was blown out of his hands, and that’s what got her. Two heavy, jagged pieces sliced through the suit, ripped along her right side, and dug a gaping furrow through her right breast. Sugar was knocked back into her, microseconds behind the Real Time. The force of him impacting into her felt as if she had been kicked by God. The shock was so enormous that her heart stopped.

For two minutes and forty seconds, Carol Starkey was dead.

Two teams of emergency medical personnel rushed forward even as pieces of the trailer and torn azalea bushes fell around them. The team that reached Starkey found her without a pulse, peeled away her suit, and injected epinephrine directly into her heart as they administered CPR. They worked for almost three minutes around the blood and gore that had been her chest, and finally—heroically—restarted her heart.

Her heart had started again; Dave “Sugar” Boudreaux’s had not.

Starkey sat at her dinette table, thinking about the dream, and Sugar, and smoking more cigarettes. Only three years, and the memories of Sugar were fading. It was harder to see his face, and harder still to hear his soft Cajun accent. More often than not, now, she returned to their pictures to refresh her memories, and hated herself for having to do that. As if she was betraying him by forgetting. As if the permanence she had once felt about their passion and love had all been a lie told by someone else to a woman who no longer lived.

Everything had changed.

Starkey had started drinking almost as soon as she got out of the hospital. One of her shrinks—she thought it was number two—had said that her issue was survivor’s guilt. Guilt that her heart had started, and Sugar’s had not; guilt that she had lived, and he had not; guilt that, down deep, down in the center of herself where our secret creatures live, she was
thankful
that she had lived, even at the price of Sugar’s life. Starkey had walked out of the therapist’s office that day and never went back. She had gone to a cop bar called the Shortstop, and drank until two Wilshire Division robbery detectives carried her out of the place.

Everything had changed.

Starkey pulled away from people. She grew cold. She protected herself with sarcasm and distance and the single-minded
pursuit of her job until the job was all that she had. Another shrink—she thought it was number three—suggested that she had traded one armored suit for another, then asked if she thought she would ever be able to take it off.

Starkey did not return to answer.

Tired of thinking, Starkey finished her cigarette, then returned to her bedroom to shower. She pulled off her T-shirt and looked at herself with an absence of feeling.

The right half of her abdomen from her breast to her hip was rilled and cratered from the sixteen bits of metal that had punched into her. Two long furrows roped along her side following her lower ribs. Once tanned a walnut brown, her skin was now as white as a table plate because Starkey hadn’t worn a bathing suit since it happened.

The worst of it was her breast. A two-inch piece of the Real Time had impacted on the front of her right breast just beneath the nipple, gouging out a furrow of tissue as it followed the line of her ribs before exiting her back. It had laid her open as if a river valley had been carved in her chest, and that is the way it healed. Her doctors had discussed removing the breast, but decided to save it. They had, but even after the reconstruction, it looked like a misshapen avocado. Her doctors had told her that further cosmetic surgeries could, in time, improve her appearance, but after four operations, Starkey had decided that enough was enough.

She had not been with another man since Sugar had left her bed that morning.

Starkey showered, dressed for the day, then called her office and found two messages.

“It’s me, Starkey, John Chen. I got a pretty good swab from the blast crater. I’ll set it up in the cooker, but that means I won’t be out of here until after three. We should have the chrom around nine. Gimme a call. You owe me.”

The Emergency Services manager had left the second
message, saying that she’d duped the tape of the 911 call reporting the suspicious device.

“I left the tape at the security desk, so you can pick it up anytime you want. The call was placed from a pay phone on Sunset Boulevard at one-fourteen, that would be yesterday afternoon. I’ve got a street address here.”

Starkey copied the information into a spiral casebook, then made a cup of instant coffee. She swallowed two Tagamet, then lit a cigarette before letting herself out into the sultry night air.

It was not quite five, and the world was quiet. A kid in a beat-up red hatchback was delivering the L.A.
Times
, weaving from side to side in the street as he tossed out the papers. An Alta-Dena dairy truck rumbled past.

Starkey decided to drive back to Silver Lake and walk the blast site again. It was better than listening to the silence in her still-beating heart.

Starkey parked in front of the Cuban restaurant next to a Rampart radio car watching over the scene. The mall’s parking lot was otherwise deserted, except for three civilian vehicles that she remembered from the night before.

Starkey held up her badge before she got out.

“Hey, guys, everything okay?”

They were a male/female team, the male officer a skinny guy behind the wheel, the female short and chunky with mannish blonde hair. They were sipping minimart coffee that probably hadn’t been hot for hours.

The female officer nodded.

“Yeah. We’re good, Detective. You need something?”

“I’ve got the case. I’m gonna be walking around.”

The female officer raised her eyebrows.

“We heard a bomb guy got creamed. That so?”

“Yeah.”

“Bummer.”

The male officer leaned past his partner.

“If you’re gonna be here a few, you mind if we Code Seven? There’s an In-’n-Out Burger a couple blocks over. We could bring you something.”

His partner winked at Starkey.

“Weak bladder.”

Starkey shrugged, secretly pleased to be rid of them.

“Take twenty, but you don’t have to bring me anything. I won’t be out of here before then.”

As the radio car pulled away, Starkey clipped her pistol to her right hip, then crossed Sunset to look for the address that the Emergency Services manager had provided. She brought her Maglite, but didn’t turn it on. The area was bright from surrounding security lights.

A pay phone was hanging on the side of a Guatemalan market directly across from the mall, but when Starkey compared it to the address, they didn’t match. From the Guatemalan market, she could look back across Sunset at the Dumpster. She figured out which way the numbers ran and followed them to find the pay phone. It was housed in one of the old glass booths that Pac Bell was discontinuing, one block east on the side of a laundry, across the street from a flower shop.

Starkey copied the name of the laundry and flower shop into her notebook, then walked back to the first phone and checked to see if it worked. It did. She wondered why the person who called 911 hadn’t done so from here. The Dumpster was in clear view, but wasn’t from the other phone. Starkey thought that the caller might’ve been worried that whoever set the bomb could see them, but she decided not to worry about it until she heard the tape.

Starkey was walking back across Sunset when she saw a piece of bent metal in the street. It was about an inch long and twisted like a piece of bow tie pasta, one side rimed with gray
residue. She had picked up nine similar pieces of metal the night before.

She brought it to her car, bagged it in one of the spare evidence bags she kept in the trunk, then walked around the side of the building to the Dumpster. Starkey guessed that the bomb hadn’t been placed to damage the building, but wondered why it had been set beside the Dumpster. She knew that satisfying reasons for questions like this often couldn’t be found. Twice during her time with the Bomb Squad, she had rolled out on devices left on the side of the freeway, far away from overpasses or exits or anything else they might harm. It was as if the assholes who built these things didn’t know what else to do with them, so they just dropped them off on the side of the road.

Starkey walked the scene for another ten minutes and found one more small bit of metal. She was bagging it when the radio car returned to the lot, and the female officer got out with two cups.

“I know you said you didn’t want anything, but we brought a coffee in case you changed your mind.”

“That was nice. Thanks.”

The female officer wanted to chat, but Starkey closed the trunk and told her she needed to get into the office. When the officer went back to her unit, Starkey walked around the far side of her own car and poured out the coffee. She was heading back to the driver’s side when she decided to look over the civilian cars again.

Two of the cars had been pinged by bomb frag, the nearest of which had lost its rear window and suffered substantial damage. Parked closest to the blast, it belonged to the man who owned the bookshop. When the police let him back into the area, he had stared at his car, then kicked it and walked away without another word.

The third car, the one farthest away, was a ’68 Impala with
bad paint and peeling vinyl top. The side windows were down and the rear window had been replaced by cloudy plastic that was brittle with sun damage. She looked beneath it first, found nothing, and was walking around the front of the car when she saw a starburst crack on the windshield. She flashed the Maglite inside and saw a round piece of metal on the dash. It looked like a disk with a single fine wire protruding. Starkey glanced toward the Dumpster and saw it was possible that a piece of frag had come through the open windows to crack the windshield. She fished it out, examined it more closely with no idea what it might be, then dropped it into her pocket.