Disturbance (5 page)

Wrigley gave the introduction, putting on that public persona that actually makes him appear serious and competent. Anyone who looked hard enough could see that he was enjoying himself.

I wasn’t too surprised to notice that Ethan had left his desk in the newsroom and managed to slip into a chair in the back row, where he alternately tried to signal me with an occasional thumbs-up and glared ferociously at anyone who asked a question that he deemed out of line. It was enough to amuse me into remaining calm.

After the Q & A ended, Wrigley stayed behind to chat up some of those who lingered. John, Ethan, and I headed back upstairs. I heard someone rushing down the stairwell just as John was asking Ethan if he had enjoyed making an ass out of himself for the entertainment of the competition. Lydia came to a halt on the landing above us. “They found her,” she said, looking shaken.

“Who?” Ethan asked.

“Marilyn Foster.”

“Alive?” I asked, knowing the answer even before Lydia shook her head.

“In an abandoned warehouse, near the harbor.”

“What aren’t you telling us?” I asked, knowing that no one who works as a city editor would be looking like she did over a garden-variety homicide.

“She was tortured.” Lydia shuddered. “The killer drew things on her in some kind of indelible ink. Moths.”

I went to work on
a rewrite. Ethan was sent to talk to the police—he had to borrow my car. Now that it was a homicide investigation, John was hesitant to send me, even though it wasn’t going to be Frank’s case. Before Ethan left, I took him aside and said, “This may sound strange, but mention the hose to them. A couple of nights ago, someone pulled the same trick on Marilyn Foster.”

His eyes widened.

“Yes, it scares me. No, I won’t try to find another way home. I’ll wait until you get back and can stay with me.”

“Good,” he said. “What time does Frank get back?”

“Depends on traffic,” I said. “Probably late this evening.”

“Call him.”

“He’s probably out of range of a signal.”

Ethan looked skeptical.

“And I really, really don’t want to fuck up his time off,” I quickly added. He started to leave, but I had seen the mischievous gleam in his eyes, and I caught his sleeve. “Ethan, don’t you call him, either!”

“I make no promises,” he said, freeing his shirt from my grip.

“Ethan!”

But he was out the door.

If John thought I looked
bad before the press conference, he should have seen me after I called Dwayne Foster.

Sometimes families of victims take out their understandable rage and feelings of helplessness on the press—they can afford to alienate us but not the police who are investigating their loved ones’ deaths, so we get the force of their reactions. But I soon discovered that Foster wasn’t hostile, he was just bereft, lost in that numb state of denial and pain where a person tries to deal with every intruding thought that isn’t the essential one. I was someone who had listened to him when few others had paid attention, and he needed a listener now, however disjointed his conversation might be.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said several times.

I asked him if there was anyone in his family, or a friend, who might come to stay with him. He told me that his brother was on the way from Santa Monica.

“They haven’t found her car yet. I was thinking about driving around, looking for the car. If he’s in it—”

“Do you think that’s a good idea?”

“No,” he said, defeated. “No. But—moths. Why moths?”

From the moment Lydia had told me about the decorations on Marilyn Foster’s body, my thoughts had gone to the warning on the Moths’ blog. Had this woman been killed as a warning to me? The idea that the Moths might go to that extreme horrified me.

I thought of Marilyn’s ex-boyfriend in prison—someone who was LWOP, as was Parrish. Like me, Marilyn had dark hair and blue eyes—Parrish was known to choose victims with those features. And there was that weird business with the garden hose.

But Parrish was in prison. There was no doubt about that. And the Moths on the blog had always seemed more likely to bluster than to act. Surely they knew that if they started committing murders, computer forensics experts would track them down.

I had no real evidence, though, and wondered if I was making connections based on my own fears. I was sleep-deprived and stressed nearly to my limit, in no shape to see things clearly.

So when Dwayne Foster asked me about moths, I didn’t give him the answer that seemed likely to me, but he didn’t seem to need one. The question was just part of that emotional pinball game playing in his mind.

“I can’t help but think about … about what he did to her. Why? Why her? She was so sweet. She never did anything to anyone.” He took a big, gulping breath, let it out on a sob.

“Tell me more about her. Tell me how you met,” I said.

It worked. For a few minutes, he focused on something other than the last day of Marilyn’s life. His brother arrived, and we ended the call.

My phone rang again almost as soon as I hung up.

“Irene? Ethan. I’m with Reed and Vince,” he said, naming two homicide detectives with the LPPD. “I told them about the hose. They want to know if you’ll meet them at your house in about an hour.”

“I’ve got a rewrite, and you’ve got my car, remember?”

I heard him talking to them.

“Reed says, when we’re both done for the day at the paper, give him a call and he’ll meet us.”

All of that seemed as
if it might work out just fine. Ethan and I had turned in our stories. Reed and Vince were following us back to my house from the paper. But then, just before I turned down my street, I saw something that made me slam on my brakes and nearly get rear-ended by the unmarked car behind me.

Marilyn Foster’s blue Chevy Malibu was parked in the space that had been empty the night before.

I
got out of my car, but before I had taken three steps forward, Reed ran up to me and grabbed hold of my shoulders. “Wait,” he said as Vince hurried past, using a radio to call for a crime scene unit and a couple of units for traffic control.

I was semicoherently telling Reed that the space had been empty the night before, that the dogs had led us to it. He was getting similar information at the same time from Ethan, who had also rushed to my side. Vince put gloves on and was reaching for the trunk button when I screamed, “Vince, no!”

He looked back at me, puzzled.

“He’s used explosives in the past,” I said, hearing shakiness in my voice.

“Who?”

“Nick Parrish!”

The three men exchanged glances. “Nick Parrish is in prison,” Reed said, in the sort of quiet, patient tone one reserves for three-year-olds frightened by thunder.

But I was cringing, because Vince was pushing in that trunk button. It snicked softly, and the trunk lid came up. No explosions.

“Oh, Christ—” Vince said, and Ethan, Reed, and I moved closer.

At first glance it appeared to be a woman cloaked in a colorful blanket. Except there wasn’t a blanket, just her softly rounded nude body, wrapped in thin, clear plastic, and the skin beneath that plastic was covered with moths.

Artistically drawn moths, colorful, and richly detailed, but with a fanciful quality—if real moths exist in matching designs, I’ve never seen one locally. If not for the chosen canvas, I might have thought them beautiful.

Her straight blond hair was pulled back into a short pony-tail. Because of the moths and the plastic wrap, I could not see much of her face, but judging by her hands, which were not painted, I guessed her to be a young woman. Her eyes were closed.

Vince reached in and touched her with a gloved finger, then drew his hand back suddenly. “Jesus! She’s frozen!”

Someone honked a horn, and Vince quickly shut the trunk. Our cars were blocking traffic. I saw a martial light come into his eye as he walked back toward the horn honker, badge coming out of his pocket.

I looked back at the closed trunk. “Parrish did that, too. Froze some of his victims.”

“Don’t touch anything,” Reed warned me, quite unnecessarily. If he hadn’t been holding on to me, I think I would have run home. Maybe something in my body communicated that to him, because he asked Ethan to drive me home and wait for them there.

“I can drive,” I said.

He shook his head. “Ethan drives. Both of you, wait outside the house. Before you go in, I want to make sure you don’t have any visitors.”

We had just pulled in
the driveway when my cell phone rang. I recognized Frank’s number.

“Irene?” I could hear the worry in the way he said my name. Jumping to a conclusion, I was ready to kill Ethan for calling him, but then Frank said, “I just heard the news on the radio. Are you okay?”

For a wild moment, I wondered if the events of thirty seconds ago were already being broadcast. “What news?”

“You. The press conference.”

“Oh, that.”

“Yes, that.”

“I didn’t think it would air outside the local area.”

“You sounded shaken. And you sound shaken now. What’s going on?”

I ignored an impulse to gloss over events until he got home. I’d have too much explaining to do. And since he’d heard the press conference, trying to hide my feelings from him was an equally bad idea.

“I’m not really doing so well, to be honest, but Ethan and Ben have stayed with me, and now Reed and Vince are here. Kind of. They won’t let me go in the house, but Ethan’s waiting with me. Vince and Reed are at the end of our street, looking at a frozen body in the trunk of a car. She has moths painted on her. Or maybe inked.”

There was a silence, then he said, “What?”

I didn’t blame him. It wasn’t exactly a clear explanation. So I started over, with the story of the call from Aaron, then went on to the stories of the garden hose, Marilyn Foster, and finding the car. Although I hit a couple of rough patches in the telling, on the whole, talking to him about it calmed me down. I suspect it had the opposite effect on him, but he said, “I’m going to get home as fast as I can.”

“More important to me that you get here safely.”

“We’re still a couple of hours away from Las Piernas. God, I’m so sorry I haven’t been there with you, Irene.”

“Just tell me you and Jack and the dogs had a good time.”

“We did, but—”

“But nothing. I’m going to be so glad to see you.”

“Me you, too. Let me talk to Ethan.”

I handed the phone over. Ethan listened for a minute, then said, “Of course I’m staying here until you come home. Ben will be here any minute now—I texted him while Irene was talking to you.” He glanced at me, then away. He added in a too casual voice, “Give Vince and Reed a call, will you? … Not yet, but you know how they can be…. We’ll be okay. See you soon.”

He handed the phone back. Frank repeated that he’d see me soon, told me to call him if I needed to talk again between now and when he got home. He told me he loved me, and I said the same back, not caring who overheard us.

I hung up and turned to Ethan. “I should have known he’d find out, but—thanks for not tipping him off before now.”

He shrugged. “I was tempted, but I figured it was your decision to make.”

I took a deep breath, let it out slowly. It didn’t help. “I need to wait outside the car.”

“Claustrophobia kicking in?” he asked, as we opened the doors.

“Yes.”

“I’m calling the paper,” Ethan told me.

I nodded, even as I wondered what the hell was happening to me that I hadn’t thought of that on my own.

After Ethan had talked to him for a while, John asked to talk to me. I told him what little I knew, which was no more than what Ethan had given him.

“I have to go,” John said suddenly. “Wrigley wants me at the
board meeting. Tell Ethan to get something to me before deadline.” He ended the call before I could ask him what, if anything, he wanted me to write up.

I paced on the front lawn, watching as half a dozen patrol cars and a crime scene mobile unit pulled up at the end of a street.

“Wonder if Wrigley’s going to hold another press conference,” Ethan said, clearly trying to distract me. “He was in his glory this afternoon.”

The comment made me halt my pacing and stare at him.

“What?” he asked.

“Wrigley’s up to something.”

“Isn’t he always?”

“He’s asked John to come to a board meeting.”

“That’s happening a lot lately. You know how things are. Probably means more layoffs, which means I’m about to lose my job.”

“You don’t sound too broken up about it.”

He looked away, and in that moment I realized how wrong I was. When he looked back at me, he said, “Aren’t you in the same place? I mean, the threat hangs over you long enough, you half wish it would happen just to get it over with.”

“I don’t know. I don’t have a lot of hope, but—I don’t know. Right now, I’m just trying to figure out Wrigley. He’s never invited other media into the building. Even when newsworthy events happened in the building itself. Did you see who he was hanging out with after the show?”

“The show, is it? Well, I guess it was. No. I was too interested in making sure you got out of there without being buttonholed.”