Terminal (A Lomax & Biggs Mystery Book 5) (17 page)

“Where’s the kid?” I said.

“It’s past her bedtime. I told her to wash up and brush her teeth in a hurry.”

“Well she didn’t waste any time saying hello. How was pizza with Angel?”

“Fun. How was your visit with Big Jim?”

“What’s a dozen notches down from fun?”

“He’s on a mission to get you to adopt Sophie. Angel and I both told him to give you some space.”

“That’s basically what I suggested. Except I may have used slightly different words.”

I was hoping for a laugh, or at least a smile, but she gave me neither.

“Look, Diana, I’m sorry about jumping down your throat last night, but this whole thing with Carly caught me by surprise.”

“It caught all of us by surprise—Sophie most of all. But you’re a cop, Mike. I thought you could handle surprises.”

“Did you hear the part where I apologized for last night?”

“I heard the part where you said,
I’m sorry, but
, and then you
tried to blame your bad behavior on the bad news itself. Fine. I accept your apology, but I don’t buy your explanation. The sudden shock of Carly’s arrest is over. It’s twenty-four hours later, and right now we’re looking at a very harsh reality. Sophie can either move in with a father she doesn’t know in LA, or an aunt and uncle she doesn’t know in Beijing. The Mike Lomax I know would be scrambling to give the girl some better options. But you’re not. I don’t know what your problem is, but it has nothing to do with the bombshell Daniel and Lucy dropped on the family last night. By the way, they’re picking her up in the morning.”

“The morning? Bullshit. They can’t take her out of the country without our written consent.”

“Relax, Mike. They’re not leaving the country. They’re picking her up in the morning, and the three of them are spending the day at Familyland. Lucy thought it would be a nice, fun, kid-friendly place where she and Daniel could get to know Sophie better.”

“Okay, but just to be on the safe side, make sure her passport stays here in the house.”

“Aye, aye, detective.”

“Diana!” It was Sophie calling from upstairs. “Goodnight. Thanks for pizza.”

“Do you want me to come in?” Diana called back.

“Nope. I’m good. See you in the morning.”

“Sweet dreams, sweetheart,” Diana chirped.

“That’s it?” I said. “She’s been coming out to say goodnight for five months. Tonight she’s phoning it in, and I’m not on the short list?”

“She’s mad at you. She knows I’m willing to fight to keep her here, and you’re not.”

“I’m going to tuck her in,” I said.

“I don’t think she wants to be tucked.”

“I don’t care.”

I went upstairs to Sophie’s room. It was dark, except for the lotus flower night-light that slowly changed colors. I sat down on the edge of the bed as the soft glow of indigo transmuted to a soothing blue.

“I heard you’re going to Familyland tomorrow,” I said.

“Mmmm,” she grunted, squinched up in a fetal position, her back to me.

“I know the head of security there.”

“I know,” she said. “You told me that when we went there this summer.”

“You remember how he got us back-doored to all the good rides? I can call him, so you and Daniel and Lucy don’t have to wait on any long lines.”

“No thanks. The three of us will wait on line with all the other
families
at
Family
land.”

Sophie Tan is a force to be reckoned with, and the way she skewered the word
family
twice in one sentence was testimony to her uncanny verbal skills. Even so, I had to remind myself that while she could go one-on-one with most adults intellectually, she still had the emotional development of an eight-year-old—one whose parents had left her to figure out life without them.

I’d have liked to tell her that I was in my forties and still working on the same process, but I didn’t say a word. I just sat beside her for the next twenty minutes, listening to her soft breathing, and watching the lotus flower slowly morph through its rainbow of color.

CHAPTER 43

I SET THE
silent alarm on my Fitbit for 5 a.m., threw on my running gear, and jogged three miles to a secluded spot on Santa Monica beach so I could watch the sun rise on the most important day of the year.

I’ve never really gotten the hang of meditating. My mind has trouble quieting down and reaching that elusive level of inner calm. But I gave it my best shot, taking long slow deep breaths, focusing on the sound of the waves, the smell of the salt air, and the cool sand beneath me.

Silently I repeated the single-word mantra Joanie had taught me when she decided to cram some peace and tranquility into my hectic cop life.

One
.

“That’s my secret word?” I asked her the day she unveiled it to me. “
One
? I thought you were going to give me some magical, mystical Sanskrit mantra that I could chant aloud to the deities.”

“You mean like
Om Gum Ganapatayei Namah
,” she said.

“Yeah, that’s got sex appeal. Can I use that?”

“You’re not ready,” she told me. “Just keep repeating the word ‘one.’ And no chanting. Just say it in your mind.”

“One. You sure you don’t mean
om
?” I said.

“Mike, you can’t argue your way into a state of nirvana,” she said. “Now in the words of the revered master Garab Dorje,
‘Shut the fuck up and meditate.’”

And so, on that balmy Saturday morning, the eighteenth of October, I sat in silent reflection on a lonely strip of beach, as the sun broke orange and gold over the Pacific Ocean.

It was the second anniversary of Joanie’s death, and while
two
seemed a much more appropriate mantra for the occasion, my somewhat enlightened spirit knew better, and I stuck with
one
.

I was pretty sure that Diana wouldn’t know the significance of this date in my life. There were only two people who might hone in on it. Big Jim was one of them, but after our failed beer summit from the previous night I doubted that I’d be talking to him.

The other, of course, was Terry. Our plan for the morning was to have another long talk with Bruce Bower. In the twenty-four hours since he’d told us his story about being recruited to murder Wade Yancy, Terry and I had done a lot of solid police work, and we had a long list of new questions for him.

But first, breakfast. The Headlines Diner & Press Club on Kinross is one of our favorite places, and it’s only a half mile from UCLA Med. Terry was already at a table when I got there. True to form, he went right for the heart of my day. Joanie.

“Two years,” he said, as soon as I sat down. “It doesn’t seem possible. How are you holding up?”

“I ran down to the beach to watch the sun rise,” I said. “That helped. But I think I made a big mistake not telling Diana why I can’t make a commitment to adopting Sophie. She’s not happy with me, and the kid is downright pissed. She didn’t say good night to me last night, and she wouldn’t even look at me this morning.”

“So come clean. Tell Diana what’s going on.”

“To what end? I’d rather wait till Tuesday, and I can tell her something beyond the speculation stage.”

“Are the aunt and uncle willing to wait around till you make up your mind?”

“They have no choice. They can’t get Sophie out of the coun
try without my permission. However, they’re doing their best to win her over. They’re taking her to Familyland today.”

“Familyland,” Terry said. “It’s been a year and a half since we saved that venerable institution from near extinction. Does Sophie know you walk on water in that theme park?”

“Everyone walks on water there, Biggs” I said. “They’re cartoon characters. But it doesn’t matter. I offered to pick up the phone and get Sophie the VIP treatment, but she turned me down.”

“Damn, she is pissed at you.”

Terry’s cell rang. He looked at the caller ID and frowned. “Detective Biggs,” he said.

He listened for thirty seconds, the frown on his face slowly turning into a scowl. “Thanks for the call, doc,” he said. “You saved us a trip.”

He hung up. “That was UCLA Med. Bruce Bower just died.”

I shook my head and let the news sink in. We still had a lot of questions. We were going to have to get answers from someplace else.

“As long as we’re not going to UCLA, I need to take some personal time,” I said.

“Take all the time you need,” Terry said. “I’ll go to the office and catch up on some paperwork.”

Terry didn’t have to ask where I was going. He knew.

CHAPTER 44

I GOT IN
the car, opened the glove compartment, and took out the CD mix that Joanie had made for me when we were first dating. She’d labeled it Show Tunes For Real Men. It was part of her long-range plan to broaden my limited cultural horizons.

I popped it in the player, pushed the random button, and turned up the volume. As if she’d planned it, the first song out of the box was “Oh, What A Beautiful Mornin’.”

“Sure it is, Joanie. Sure it is,” I said, as I headed west on Wilshire toward Woodlawn Cemetery.

“If you have to spend eternity in LA,” Joanie had told me when she picked out her final resting place, “Woodlawn is your best option. It’s got great views of the Pacific Ocean, the Santa Monica Mountains, and there’s a Denny’s a mile away that’s open twenty-four hours.”

The marker on her grave was simple. A bronze plaque set in granite at ground level, with her name, Joanellen Stockton Lomax, and the dates of her birth and death.

I bought some lilies from a flower vendor on Pico, set them down on the bed of green grass near her head, and took a knee.

“You’re a real piece of work,” I said to her. “Two years, and you’re still surprising the shit out of me. I thought there were nine letters.
Nine
. And then out of the blue last night, Big Jim tells me there are ‘a few more for special occasions.’ He deliv
ered the ‘congratulations, Dad-to-be’ letter last night.

“I read it two, or three, or thirty times. I just want you to know that I appreciate the sentiment, but I’m not sure I’m a Dad-to-be, and even if I am, it’s not the way you might have pictured it, with my hand resting on my new wife’s belly, and my face lighting up with every fetal kick. It’s a long story—a lot has happened since I was here in July, but I’m guessing you have time.”

I told her about Grandma Xiaoling’s death, Carly’s prison sentence, and the sudden opportunity to become the father of an eight-year-old girl I adored.

“So what’s stopping me, you might ask. Good question. What do you know about white blood cell counts?”

I told her everything, bandying about the new medical terminology that was now burned into my brain—Chronic Myeloid Leukemia, Philadelphia chromosome, pathognomonic, bone marrow biopsy.

“Bottom line,” I said, closing my eyes, “I don’t want to say no to Sophie, but she’s already lost a father and a mother, and if my doc comes back with bad news, I don’t want her to have to go through the pain of losing me.”

It doesn’t matter if you’re her father or not. She loves you. She’d be losing you either way, dummy
.

I opened my eyes and scanned the cemetery. The nearest living soul was at least an acre away. My eyes welled up, and I felt the warm tears rolling down my cheeks.

I pounded the heel of my fist on the cool grass, and I let the dam burst wide open. I sobbed with an anguish known only to those who have lost a loved one in the prime of their life.

Dying is a part of living, Mike. Don’t let Sophie get away because you want to spare her the pain of loss. If you knew I was going to die young, would you not have married me?

I smiled when I heard that. Joanie’s logic never failed to ring true.

“God, I fucking miss you,” I said, standing up.

I debated whether or not I should tell her about Dr. Kraus. She’d be upset about the murder, but then I’d have to get into the whole thing about Ovamax, and I wasn’t ready to share that with her, especially if the worst of it were true.

My cell phone rang. “Sorry, it’s Diana,” I said, taking the call. “Hey, what’s up?”

“Sophie’s gone,” Diana said. “She’s missing.”

I braced myself. “What do you mean ‘missing’?”

“She was at Familyland with Daniel and Lucy. They don’t know what happened. Once minute they had her, and the next minute she was gone.”

“Call security. Ask for Brian Curry. It’s Familyland for God’s sake—she must have wandered off.”

“Security is already involved. But Daniel and Lucy don’t think she went off on her own. They’re hysterical. They think she was taken.”

“Meet me at Familyland,” I said, and I raced to my car cursing the name of Jeremy Tan, and completely forgetting to say goodbye to my wife.

PART THREE

UP IN THE AIR

CHAPTER 45

AS SOON AS
I peeled out of the cemetery my first instinct was to call Terry. I picked up the phone, then tossed it back on the front seat. There was nothing he could do except get crazy because there was nothing he could do. I was on my own.

Twenty minutes later Brian Curry called me. “We haven’t found her yet,” he said, “but we have a sighting. I’m on my way to Jackrabbit Junction to see if I can track her down.”

“Can you call ahead to the ride operator and ask him to hold onto her?”

“Sorry, Mike,” he said. “Every damn thing connected to this place goes by a cutesy name. Jackrabbit’s not a ride. It’s our major transportation hub. It’s basically Grand Central Terminal for tens of thousands of guests and employees. We get five, six hundred buses rolling though there on a normal day—charters, airport and hotel shuttles, plus over thirty different metro and long-distance carriers, some of which come from as far as a hundred and fifty miles away.”

“I’ll meet you there,” I said.

“Do you know where it is?”

“Not, but once I get in the park, somebody can—”

“Mike, it’s not in the park. It’s two miles from the main gate.”

“
Two miles
? Then someone must have snatched her. An eight-year-old kid couldn’t get that far on her own.”