The Deepest Cut (23 page)

“I’m gonna nail you down now. Next week?”

“Sure.”

“I’m holding you to it.”

Vining smiled and turned to leave. At the door, she said, “Thanks, Tara.”

Her friend wistfully returned the smile. “You’re welcome, Nan. Take care.”

TWENTY-THREE

V
INING DROVE TO THE CORNER OF NEWCASTLE STREET AND ORANGE
Grove Boulevard. She recognized one of the PPD surveillance vehicles, a van painted as a mobile pet shampooing service, parked near the corner.

One of Marvin Li’s employees, Victor Chang, stood on the corner, swinging a large plastic arrow that advertised apartments for lease. He was dressed in a black T-shirt and chinos, but wore a King Tut headdress that extended to his shoulders.

She slowed while driving past. Chang spotted her and gave a half-hearted wave. She gave him a nod and continued up Newcastle to Mountain.

There she saw Daniel Shin, another of Li’s crew she’d interviewed earlier. He wore a multi-colored Afro, like Scrappy had worn, but no costume. His sign advertised
LUXURY CONDOS
and he was swinging it to point across Mountain.

Vining continued driving in that direction.

Three blocks north of Mountain, she stopped in front of the first apartment building she saw. A wooden sign on the façade in script letters said:
Bali Hai.
A large tiki head near the entrance was losing a bat-tle with dry rot. It had two stories and was built in a 1960s courtyard
style with exterior corridors facing a kidney-shaped pool in the center patio. Vining took a picture of the building.

The managers were an older couple, the Shugarts, who let her inside. They knew nothing about anyone hiring human directionals to promote their apartment building. When they had a vacancy, they always placed an ad in the PennySaver.

Next she drove to the alley behind the tire store where Cameron Lam said his team had found a tagged death threat against her. The words were pure street-gang bravado, but the tag didn’t look like any she’d seen before:

It had been done in spray paint, the tagger’s typical medium. While many taggers’ work was artistic, Vining had never seen this style of lettering. Plus, the tag was huge; the letters were about three feet tall. The edges were clean and precise. After studying the work with her flashlight beam, Vining saw remnants of a pencil sketch that the tagger had done before he began painting. This art wasn’t the result of a spur-of-the-moment inspiration. This had been well planned and had to have taken a long time.

The walls on the backs of the buildings along the alley were covered with graffiti. Attempts had been made to cover it up with neutral-colored paint, but that only provided a fresh canvas for new tags.

She looked around and didn’t see any security cameras. A wooden plank fence was on the other side of the alley. A couple of planks were broken or missing. Vining directed her flashlight beam inside and saw the backyard of the bungalow that faced the side street. The yard was mostly dirt but had persistent patches of grass. Weathered white resin lawn furniture and toys were scattered around.

She walked the street that was perpendicular to the alley. It was lined with small houses and ramshackle apartment buildings. She went down a cracked cement path that led to the front door of the house that was along the alley. Shifting land had made the three cement steps
that led to the porch separate a few inches from it. A beat-up couch and a small table were on the porch.

She pressed the doorbell buzzer, but the button sank beneath her thumb without sounding. After knocking and announcing, “Police,” she saw movement from behind the closed drapes. A young Latina opened the door holding a baby boy on her hip. The baby had wide brown eyes and was sucking a pacifier.

Vining asked her in English about the tag, and then exercised her rudimentary Spanish. The young woman said she didn’t know anything, which didn’t surprise Vining. No one around there would want to be seen talking to the cops.

She returned to the alley and walked down it behind two auto repair shops. Their yards were surrounded by chain-link fences topped with barbed wire. Neither had security cameras. She walked in the other direction, passing the loading dock of the Terra Cosmetika building.

The cosmetics firm might have been on the cutting edge of eco-friendly, but it took an unfriendly stance when it came to intruders. It was all about high-tech security. CCTV cameras were positioned on both corners of the building to observe the loading dock. The one on the western side might have caught the length of the alley behind the tire store.

She walked to the front of the building. The corner diagonally across was where Scrappy had last worked, waving his arrow in his clown suit, and where Victor Chang was still standing, wearing his King Tut headdress.

She thought of Scrappy’s tag in the Hollenbeck Paper building: China Dog 187. The style of the “Vining 187” tag was completely different. She thought it unlikely that Scrappy was responsible for both tags. Still it was odd to find a tag with the same verbiage on a wall near where Scrappy had last worked.

There was a CCTV camera over Terra Cosmetika’s front entrance. The building’s façade was of stamped concrete and bamboo wood. Drought resistant plants spilled from large painted concrete planters. A plaque beside the door stated that the building was built with environmentally friendly materials and largely powered by renewable resources.

Vining looked around at the homely but friendly mom-and-pop
businesses on the street— the brass shop, the hubcap shop, the mechanic who specialized in British sports cars— and reflected that the Pasadena that she knew and loved was being crushed under the steamroller of so-called progress.

She tried Terra Cosmetika’s sepia-tinted glass door and, of course, it was locked. There was a smart-card device for employees and a buzzer for visitors. She looked up at the CCTV camera and waved. Guess no one had figured out a way to make criminals eco-friendly

She’d come back tomorrow.

BACK IN HER CAR, SHE CALLED KISSICK. HE WAS 13 ON HER CELL PHONE
speed dial. His phone rang several times before going into voicemail. Her name would show up as a “Missed Call” anyway, so she might as well leave a message.

“Jim, just checking in. Hope everything’s going good. Bye.”

As tired as she was, she felt a little horny.

After a years-long sexual drought, Kissick hadn’t just awakened her sensuality, he’d jump-started it. She’d never felt this way before. She’d never craved sex. She’d had few sexual partners. Her ex-husband Wes had been her high school sweetheart and her first. After he’d walked out on her, she’d dated a little, mostly for revenge. She’d soon given it up, not wanting to re-create with her daughter the parade of men that her mother had made her endure. She still took pains to hide from Emily her true relationship with Kissick.

She’d thought that her and Wes’s sexual relationship had been good. Now that she knew the difference, she realized it had been warm and comforting, like a bowl of Cream of Wheat. During the short months that she and Kissick were together the first time, she’d thought their sexual relationship was lovely and nice. Now she knew she’d been tentative and restrained.

All that had been before. Before T. B. Mann had broken her down and seized her life, until, at the last second, she’d seized it back. “Restrained” wouldn’t be in the vocabulary of words she’d use to describe her and Kissick now. Only tired clichés came to mind— fireworks, runaway trains, geysers erupting. Still, sometimes clichés were apt.

That brought her up to today. She thought of her strange meeting with the subversive Marvin Li, when he stroked the spiraling butterflies on his pectoral with his fine, long fingers. Was what she was feeling now set in motion by him? Maybe she should be disgusted.

Maybe she should just tell her brain to shut up and relax.

She looked at the cell phone in her palm. She again dialed 13 and pressed the pound sign. Again she got Kissick’s voicemail. Her message was plain.

“I need you tonight.”

She mashed her thumb on the button to end the call and immediately regretted having left the message.

TWENTY-FOUR

S
TANDING ON THE SANDSPIT NEAR THE YELLOW NYLON ROPE THAT
marked the snowy plover restricted habitat, Zeke Denver pointed to show Kissick where they’d found Marilu Feathers’s body He also showed him where they’d found the remains of the campfire inside the restricted area.

Even though September was still summertime in California, with long, warm days into which twilight crept slowly, the beach was not crowded. Groups of surfer dudes, the tops of their wetsuits pulled down to reveal toned-and-tanned torsos, gathered on the sand with their girlfriends in bikini bottoms and hoodies. The wind had kicked up as the sun began to set. The ocean was dotted with whitecaps.

After Denver had indicated the spot, he dropped into thoughtful silence. They both watched as the setting sun disappeared behind a fog bank, radiating bright orange. It reappeared beneath the fog a few minutes later.

Out of the blue, Denver said, “There are people who believe this place is magical. Where else can you stand on the beach and be eye-level with the ocean?”

Kissick looked straight-on at the roiling waves.

“Mighty force, that ocean,” Denver added. “I believe she wants to
kill us. Rogue waves snatch people off this shore a couple of times a year.”

As if on cue, a woman on horseback appeared from the passageway between the dunes. After the horse trotted across the softer sand, it eased into a gallop once it hit the waterline, seemingly without urging.

Kissick thought he saw moisture in the corner of Zeke Denver’s eye.

AFTER KISSICK BID DENVER GOOD-BYE, HE HEADED TO CAMBRIA, TO THE
house where Marilu Feathers had grown up and where her mother, Margaret, still lived. He drove with all the car windows down, traveling north on Highway 1 along one of the most beautiful, unspoiled stretches of coastline in California. He used to drive this route as a college student off to visit friends at U.C. Santa Cruz in his Volkswagen Beetle that he’d modified into a Baja Bug and painted tangerine with a metallic flake.

He reached Cambria, an artsy town that straddled the ocean and a mountainous pine forest. He followed Margaret Feathers’s directions into the forested part, winding higher through narrow streets until he found her address.

The small, sturdy wooden cottage was set off the road and nestled among pine trees. Its red paint with brown shutters needed refreshing. Two stone chimneys pierced the pitched roof that was littered with dry pine needles. The modest flower beds were planted only with shade-loving impatiens that had grown leggy. The small front yard was circled by a white picket fence and consisted of sandy dirt and pine needles beneath towering pines.

The house wasn’t decrepit, but it looked careworn. Zeke Denver had told Kissick that Margaret Feathers had been a widow for several years and lived in the house by herself. Marilu’s brother and his family lived nearby. Denver and his wife checked in on Margaret and helped her with chores and maintenance. Her son was encouraging her to sell the house and move into a senior community in a bigger city that was closer to more services. Margaret, vibrant at age sixty-eight, wasn’t ready for that just yet.

Kissick opened the gate in the picket fence and walked down an
uneven flagstone path, avoiding stepping on pine cones. The air here was warmer than on the sandspit and smelled of pine forest rather than ocean. The forest side of Cambria gave no hint of the ocean on the other side.

As he approached the cozy, solid-looking house, he understood Margaret Feathers’s unwillingness to move. A wreath of silk flowers framed a brass look-through in the door that had a grate of narrow bars on the outside and a knocker beneath. Kissick knew that inside he’d find a small brass door that closed with a latch. He had something similar on his front door.

The front door swung open before Kissick had a chance to sound the knocker.

“Detective Kissick. I’m Margaret Feathers. Please come in.”

“Nice to meet you, Dr. Feathers.”

“Call me Margaret, please. A doctor of sociology doesn’t even get a good dinner reservation.”

Kissick smiled appreciatively at her wit as she stepped aside to let him in.

Dr. Feathers was tall, big-boned, and lean like her daughter Mar-ilu, but her face was softer and more feminine. Marilu had inherited the strong features of her accountant father. Margaret was dressed in a white blouse trimmed with lace tucked into gray slacks. Her gray hair still showed a little brown and was styled in soft, close-cropped curls.

The house was as inviting as Kissick had imagined. The front door led directly into the living room, which had a deeply pitched ceiling with exposed knotty-pine beams. The Early American maple furniture covered in plaid fabric was in need of reupholstering. The floor was of random-width knotty pine planks covered with an oval braided-wool rug. There was a stone fireplace with a raised hearth and a tarnished brass fireplace set. Firewood was stacked in an iron basket and kindling was in a brass bucket. Two easy chairs and a couch were positioned to enjoy the fire. One chair was draped with a throw that was heavily coated with light-colored pet fur. Through an archway beside the fireplace he saw a dining room and a kitchen beyond it. To the left was a comfortable-looking den with an old television on a stand.