Perfect Killer (9 page)

While I pondered the mysterious missing Blackberry, Jasmine sped past the turnoff.
"That was our turn," I said, pointing behind us to the left.
"No problem." She slowed for a turn lane, then hit the brakes hard enough for my shoulder belt's inertial catch to grab as she steered the Mercedes through a 180 and headed back.
"What Blackberry?"
She reached the turnoff and I pointed toward the parking lot next to
Jambalaya's
berth. We pulled into the lot and found a parking space next to my battered three-quarterton Chevy pickup with the off-road roll bar and sheet metal sculpted by a decade's worth of encounters with a wide assortment of near misses and tight squeezes with high-Sierra trees and granite boulders.
"Impressive," she said, looking up at my truck. "Perfect for L.A. freeways."
"Nobody tries to crowd me when I merge."
She nodded and turned off the ignition. "Nothing to lose."
"Pardon?"
"They take one look and know you've got nothing to lose and they let you in, right?"
"Something like that."
"That's such a totally contra-L.A. thing."
I shrugged.
"No, really." She leaned over and placed her hand on my forearm; her touch felt electric. "That's very cool." She paused, and in the silence the sounds of engines and tortured tires grew louder.
"The jackals are coming," she said. "Give me a ride and tell me about the Blackberry."
We transferred everything to my pickup. I cranked up the big-block V-8 and pulled out of the parking lot. The light was red at Admiralty Way.
"Duck down." I faced away from the onrushing surge of television vehicles as Jasmine slumped down in her seat. Nobody gave my battered truck a second glance. I didn't have a plan yet, so I took the easy path and turned south on Lincoln.
"Could Mom have slipped something in your pocket there in the cemetery and you didn't remember?"
"I suppose. Everything happened really quickly and I could have easily missed something. Our brains can only handle focusing on one thing at a time We switch back and forth between things so fast we think we're multitasking, but it's an illusion."
"Mom always told me it was impossible to have a conversation with you without learning something."
I looked over at her.
"Mom was right," she said.
Jasmine gave me her mother's smile again and, with no warning, opened up an epic blockbuster of a memory. The vision nailed me with fine holographic details like one of those incredible black-and-white Ansel Adams photos where you can see the needles on a Jeffrey pine all the way across Lake Tahoe way up on the top of the distant Sierra ridges.
Jasmine's smile did that. It brought me face-to-face with that fateful Christmas party so long ago. Vanessa opened the door as if she had watched me come up the walk, and when I stepped in, she stood so close I felt the heat from her face and savored the aroma of Doublemint gum on her breath. I recalled the fine variegated color detail in her eyes as she focused on mine, holding my gaze right down to the last instant, when I had to turn away from the moment that would have been our first kiss had the house not been jammed with people.
This memory struck me now, as I drove my truck and Vanessa's daughter across the Ballona Creek bridge. All of this seized my thoughts so completely that I ran the stoplight at Jefferson.
"Oh, hell." I slowed down, half-expecting to see the lights of a police car, then realizing it was unlikely in the dead of night.
Emotions careered wildly about in my head, then suddenly distilled themselves; I visualized the heap of bloody clothes I had stuffed into a plastic bag in my Mississippi motel room after Mama's funeral.
"Hold on? I said quietly at first.
Jasmine looked at me expectantly.
"Whoa! That's got to be it."
I slammed on the brakes and hung a U-turn.
"If it's anywhere, it'll be in the suit I wore at my mother's funeral."
"The Blackberry?"
I nodded. "It's the only possible thing."
I replayed the scene in Itta Bena once again. Only this time I had trouble focusing on Vanessa's face. It came to me now as one of those hyperpixelated images you get when you enlarge a digital photo too much.
Excitedly, I described things to Jasmine, slowly struggling to relate every detail as I drove north along Lincoln, making most of the green lights and easing through the reds. I visualized the cracked concrete in the garage of our little stucco beach house in Playa Del Rey a block from the ocean where the music of the surf rode the ocean breezes through the open windows on warm summer evenings. My mind saw the washer and dryer and the kids' bicycles and my workbench and the tools and the stacks of boxes I had packed when I had briefly thought of selling the place after the accident. But mostly I fixed on the plastic bag from the hotel room in Jackson all knotted up around the bloody new suit.
"How could you possibly have hung on to that?"
I shrugged. "Memories. Why does the Catholic Church hang on to the bones and other relics of saints?"
"Perversity?"
I laughed. "Okay, that's why I didn't toss it."
When I pulled the truck into the driveway of the white, 1930s, art deco bungalow with the giant jade plants and the white picket fence guarding the little postage stamp of fescue in front, I knew at once everything was all wrong.

"Porch light's on." I sat in the truck and tried to decipher the shadows around my house.
"So?" Jasmine asked.
"So it's on a heat and motion sensor." I killed the engine.
"Maybe we triggered it."
I shook my head. "It was on when we were half a block away."
"A dog?"
Again, I shook my head. "I adjusted the sensitivity so that doesn't happen. It used to wake us up all the time."
I yanked the keys from the ignition, shouldered open my door, and got out. "Wait here."
I climbed into the truck bed and opened the big metal box bolted to the truck right behind the cab. The box held a few tools, chains for snowy Sierra roads, and a lot of gear for sailing, hiking, and mountain biking. And shooting.
Jasmine got out and made her way to the side of the truck bed, where she watched me pull out a sturdy metal box, locked with a casehardened padlock and secured by a thick security cable to a bracket welded to the truck bed. I unlocked the box and pulled out the Beretta Model 92F 9mm semiautomatic pistol I used for duty as a reserve sheriff's deputy. With another key on my chain, I unlatched the trigger lock, pulled a fifteen-round magazine from the box, slid it into the handle, and worked the slide to chamber a round. I grabbed two more fifteen-round magazines and shoved them in the pockets of my shorts.
"I thought you were going to wait there." I nodded toward the front seat.
"I never said that." She gave me that wry smile again.
"Whatever." I climbed down. "They might still be here." I motioned toward the house.
Jasmine gave me a "So what?" look.
"You might want to wait in the truck."
She rolled her eyes, then pulled her cell phone off its belt clip and waved it at me. "Isn't this one of those times when you're supposed to call for backup or something?"
That stopped me. I took a deep breath and held it for a long moment against the tension wringing my guts like a high-C piano string gone sharp. The palms of my hands tingled.
Was I overreacting? There was no sign of movement. I thought about the hours I had already spent with Internal Affairs and the probability that dialing 911 would mean more bureaucratic hassles and paperwork, and the reality that calling the LAPD for help usually meant waiting on hold.
"Well, I think the guys who attacked my boat wouldn't have done it if they'd found what they were looking for here."
"Maybe," she said. "Or not."
"Well, we can debate it all night or find out." I turned and made my way up the short walk to the porch and found the front door ajar. I motioned Jasmine to stay back, but she ignored me again. I reached inside the front door, turned on the entryway light, and stepped in.
We made our way to the living room. I went first, following the Beretta, then turned on the overhead lights.
"Oh, hell."
My home, which I had lovingly saved from the wrecking ball with my own sweat, muscle, and considerable money, had been expertly tossed, drawers emptied, cushions slashed open, fixtures ripped out, heating-duct grills pulled and thrown about. With a gathering sense of dread, and Jasmine right behind, I made my way from room to room. In the bedroom I had once shared with Camilla, the snapshots of her and the children lay scattered on the hardwood floors amid the fragments of glass and remnants of frames.
The devastation hit me hardest in the children's room. Untouched since the accident, the toys lay scattered, broken and shattered open with venality beyond professional thoroughness. I froze when my eye caught sight of a tiny stuffed tiger, my daughter's constant companion and sleep partner. It lay disemboweled on the floor, the stuffing probed and discarded. This ripped my heart like rusty barbed wire.
"Motherfuckers." I bent over and picked up the tiger. The touch brought memories and tears. Then I stepped through the debris and placed the tiger gently on the lower bunk where my daughter's head used to lie, so perfectly beautiful in her sleep.
I swallowed hard against the tears, and when I turned away, my heart was hard again and filled with the momentum of revenge.
"Come on," I said.
We headed through the kitchen and made our way toward the garage door, stepping carefully through the mess of broken glass, spilled flour, and broken mustard jars. A couple of feet before we got to the door leading down the two concrete steps to the garage door, we came to the walk-in pantry on the right. I laid my hand on the knob and paused.
"The suit should be in a plastic bag." I nodded toward the garage. "Next to the washer and dryer. I never got around to doing anything about it, but I couldn't throw it away"
The image flooded back vividly so I turned from the pantry and went to the garage door opened to reveal a new scene of chaos.
It stank like a stale beer joint. The reason became clear when I turned on the light and smashed on the concrete floor lay the remains of a full case of Lagunitas IPA. Foam still adorned the puddles. I drew a quick mental sketch of the cluttered one-car garage: my tool bench on the wall to the right with nothing disturbed, the old refrigerator-freezer used for beer, wine, and Costco overflow, piles of boxes stacked nearly to the ceiling, mounds of sailing and sporting gear. I spotted the shreds of the plastic bag from the hotel room in Jackson, scattered about the floor amid the articles of wrinkled, bloodstained clothing. In the split second it took me to comprehend this, the door to the walk-in pantry burst open.
"Hey!" Jasmine yelled as the door slammed into her. Then a single gunshot and the voice of a man cursing.
I whirled, Beretta at the ready. Jasmine stumbled sideways as the pantry door swung open again, slammed into my foot, and stopped instantly. The top twisted forward as if someone was shoving it with his shoulder. The upper hinge complained as the screws holding it in the casing began to splinter.
A gun muzzle emerged at the edge of the door, followed by the rest of a largecaliber revolver gripped by an even larger left hand overgrown with thick brambles of black hair. Jasmine threw herself to the floor as the muzzle found her. I fired two shots through the hollow-core door; the pistol dropped to the floor and clattered away. Pressure on the pantry door ceased immediately. I jumped back, pulling the door with me. There, bent double on the floor, a tall, muscular man clad in Levi's and a navy blue T-shirt cradled his arms around his belly and moaned softly. He rocked himself gently as a severed artery siphoned the life from his body and flooded it across my terra-cotta tiles. Blood filled a small crater dug by the solitary round the man had accidentally fired when the opening door hit Jasmine. He had obviously assumed we had continued on into the garage when he'd sprung his ambush and run into us instead.
Jasmine stood up and joined me, her face oddly composed and her eyes working to take in everything.
"Get his gun," I said.
Jasmine followed my gaze and picked it up.
"Forty-four Magnum," she said, holding it with an easy familiarity.
"Know how to use that?"
"I'm a civil rights lawyer from Mississippi. What do you think?"
"Good point."
I looked down at the man on the floor. "He could have a friend. Shoot anybody that's not me." I moved cautiously toward the garage with the
Beretta ready. The garage was small, cramped, and left few places to hide. I cleared it quickly, checking behind the towers of boxes and even inside the refrigerator.
"Okay, time for 911," I said reluctantly when I got back to the kitchen.
"Done already!" Jasmine waved her cell phone at me. "On hold."
The big man lay still now, his skin whiter than a kosher chicken and surrounded by an enormous pool of blood that no longer expanded.
"He's gone," I said.
"But you're a doctor."
"Even if I gave a damn, he's a goner. A severed aorta empties a body faster than you can count seconds on one hand. Come on." I clicked the safety on the Beretta and headed for the garage. "Let's see if we can find anything in my suit they missed."
I made my way through the mess to the cabinet holding sandpaper and painting supplies and grabbed a box of latex gloves. I pulled out a pair, then offered the box to Jasmine.
She shook her head. "It's my mother's blood. I don't mind touching it."
The way she said it made me feel guilty for getting the gloves in the first place. Jasmine placed the .44 Magnum on my workbench, then picked up the bloody suit coat. I couldn't think of anything to say so I slipped on the gloves and went to the kitchen. I leaned way over the pool of blood, not wanting to step in it, not wanting it on me or my clothes. The body lay on its left side, which made it easy for me to pat down both rear pockets and the right side.
Nothing. I struggled him over on his back and found the left-side pocket empty as well. The man was a cipher.
"Brad!" Jasmine's voice reached me loud and excited. I turned. She stood at the garage door holding up a scrap of plastic smaller than her pinky nail.
"It's a MicroSD card," she said, walking over to me.
"Of course! Flash memory data storage."
She let it drop into my hand. Small wonder I had overlooked it and so had my assailants.
"How did you find it so fast?"
"I knew what to look for. Mom wouldn't give you the whole Blackberry. So I—" She cocked her head like a person listening to unheard voices.
"One moment, please," she said into her cell phone and handed it to me.
"It's for you," she said.