The Lost Witness (10 page)

“Did you serve in the military, Doctor?”

His face changed as he considered the question. “Vietnam. The last two years of the war.”

“What was your role?”

“Survival. I was drafted. I was a grunt.”

“Did you see much combat?”

His eyes flooded with more irritation, his voice becoming higher pitched. “I was working at a medical station in the jungle ten miles west of the Cu Chi tunnels. Yes, I saw a lot of
combat. It’s the reason I went to medical school. Now, would you please tell me why you are here?”

Lena didn’t respond, letting the silence work on the doctor’s nerves. He fit the profile. He could be the
one.
But Fontaine fit a lot of profiles. He could have been
McBride’s drug supplier. Or, just one of the clients reveling under her spell.

“We were wondering about your relationship with a young woman living in Venice. Jennifer McBride.”

Fontaine cleared his throat. “Who?”

Lena repeated her name, then watched Fontaine think it over and shake his head. His performance was more lame than convincing. He was shooting quick looks at Rhodes, and seemed concerned that
the detective was writing everything down.

“I don’t know a Jennifer McBride,” he said.

Lena crossed her legs. “Maybe you should take a moment to think it over, Doctor.”

“I don’t need a moment to think it over. I don’t know her.”

“You’re sure?”

He slapped his desk. “Absolutely. Who was she?”

Everything stopped. Fontaine had just used the past tense. Everyone in the room knew that he’d slipped up. Even Fontaine.

“She was a prostitute,” Lena said.

The doctor let out a nervous laugh that died off quickly. His eyes were jerking back and forth as if something was clicking in his head. Lena noticed the sweat beginning to bead on his forehead.
His cheeks, a bright red. As much as she wanted to look at Dietrich and measure her reaction, she kept her gaze fixed on the doctor.

“I don’t know any prostitutes,” he managed.

“She might have called herself a massage therapist.”

“I don’t know any of them, either.”

His right hand began to quiver. When he noticed, he pulled away his arm and hid it behind his desk. The conversation was no longer beneath him. All of a sudden he was in over his head.

Lena wanted to seize the moment, amplifying the pressure with another measured dose of silence. She glanced at Rhodes in the chair by the window. As she took in the office and noted the
expensive furnishings, she realized that there was only one photograph in the entire room. A picture of an older woman with white hair set in a silver frame and placed on the credenza by the phone.
The resemblance between Fontaine and the old woman was striking.

She lowered her voice. “You need to be careful, Doctor. You’re speaking to two police officers. And you’ve got a lot to lose.”

“I know who I’m talking to.”

“We have phone records,” she said. “I never asked if you knew Jennifer McBride because we already knew that you did. All I asked was
how
you knew her.”

“Maybe you should think about who
you’re
talking to,” he said. “You’ve made a mistake, Detective. Your records are wrong. I never called her because I
didn’t know her.”

Lena met the doctor’s eyes. “Then how did you know that she was dead?”

A beat went by. Thirty seconds of empty air billowing into the room. He glanced at his assistant without answering the question. Lena kept her eyes on the man.

“You called her three times on the day she was murdered, Doctor.”

The strong man with the athletic body wilted in his chair, still staring at Greta Dietrich for help.

“Where were you two nights ago?” Lena asked.

He looked confused, anxious. When he didn’t respond, Dietrich cut in.

“He was at the Biltmore,” she said. “A reception and dinner. The invitation’s still on my desk.”

“Dinners like that are usually over by nine or ten. What time did it end?”

The doctor turned back to her. His eyes were hollow now, his anxiety evolving into anger fully realized. He flashed a mean grin.

“You know what?” he said. “We’re through here. Call my attorney, Greta, and show these good people the fucking door.”

H
e’s doing her,” Rhodes said.

Lena nodded. It had been obvious the moment Dietrich followed Fontaine around his desk, the moment she spotted the matching tans. Dietrich wasn’t supporting her boss. She was standing
beside her man. Even after hearing about McBride.

Rhodes held up his hand and Lena tossed him the keys. As she climbed into the passenger seat, she understood how difficult it would be to interpret Fontaine’s shaky behavior. She
didn’t buy anything he said. Fontaine knew the murder victim, looked them in the eye and lied. But he had a lot of reasons besides Dietrich to want to keep hidden his relationship with a
young prostitute. He was a doctor who worked with children. McBride wasn’t much more than a girl. Even worse, she looked young for her age. Innocent.

The possibilities, the secrets, suddenly appeared more than grim.

Rhodes pulled out of the lot into a sea of cars inching their way down Wilshire Boulevard. She looked out the window at all the brake lights. The twelve-mile trip downtown would probably take a
couple of hours. When her cell phone vibrated, she checked the video screen, saw Lieutenant Barrera’s name and flipped it open.

“Where are you guys at?” he said.

She turned on the speaker so Rhodes could listen, then gave Barrera an update in broad strokes, what they had found at McBride’s apartment and who they had met in Beverly Hills.

“This is L.A.,” he said. “Sounds like a start.”

She tried to smile, but couldn’t. “What’s going on with the video?”

“SID’s working on it, but it’s still hard to see his face. We checked everything for prints. McBride’s license and the USB drive—not even a smudge. Everything had
been wiped down.”

“What about the envelope?”

“Another strikeout,” Barrera said. “And we’re having trouble locating the messenger service. Sanchez got out of court early and made some calls. There’s no record
of the delivery anywhere in town. And the guys behind the front desk didn’t get a receipt.”

“What about the messenger?” Rhodes asked.

“A kid in a leather jacket wearing a Dodger cap. That’s all they remember. He didn’t ask them to sign anything. But here’s the deal. I ran McBride through the system,
Lena. No priors. Nothing that stands out at all. Her only living relative is her mother, Pamela McBride.”

“You get an address?”

“She lives in Van Nuys,” he said. “Odessa Avenue. Just north of the airport and east of Northridge Military Academy.”

“We’ll need to talk to her tonight,” Lena said. “I don’t want her to hear about this on the news.”

“I agree,” Barrera said. “And don’t worry about the chief. I straightened everything out.”

“What about Klinger?”

“I don’t give a shit about Klinger. Do whatever you have to do. Just do it right.”

Barrera gave her Pamela McBride’s address, and she wrote it down. As Rhodes made a U-turn, heading north toward the Valley, she slipped the phone into her pocket and fought off an anxious
yawn. She was beginning to feel the weight of a long day that had begun with an autopsy at the morgue and hadn’t included much food. A day that would end with the difficult task of a
next-of-kin notification. Telling Jennifer McBride’s mother that her only child was dead.

She thought about Fontaine and the front he had created for himself, wondering if his assistant meant anything more to him than a prop. She thought about appearances and perversion, and about
the man’s guilt that she could feel creeping into her bones. And she thought about those cigarettes Rhodes kept in his glove compartment. She thought about them two or three times over the
next hour until they finally reached Odessa Avenue.

It was a small California bungalow standing in the middle of the block. The kind you could have bought out of a Sears Catalog in the early 1900s and had a local carpenter assemble. The design
was an offshoot of the Arts and Crafts movement and so popular it swept across the entire nation. Clean and simple and easy on the eyes with gardens on both sides of the stoop.

Rhodes pulled to the curb and they gazed at the windows. Lena could see a TV flickering through the linen curtains. McBride’s mother was home.

“Let’s get this over with,” she said.

“You want me to tell her?”

“I’ll do it,” she said.

They glanced at each other and got out, watching a private jet brush the treetops overhead on its approach to the regional airport one block south. As they climbed the steps, Lena noted the
empty rocker on the porch. When she knocked on the front door, she took a deep breath and thought about that pack of cigarettes again.

A beat went by, and then the door finally opened. Lena met the woman’s eyes, recognized the pain, and knew in an instant that Pamela McBride had been expecting them.

“Please,” the woman said. “It’s cold outside. Come in.”

Lena hadn’t been aware of the temperature until she stepped inside and felt the warmth of the house. Although the light was off in the kitchen, she could smell the remnants of dinner in
the air, a rich tomato sauce that had probably been simmering on the stove for most of the afternoon.

She turned back to the living room. McBride’s mother was offering them seats and asking if they would like something hot to drink. Lena thanked her, but shook her head, spotting the candle
over the fireplace as she sat down.

“I’ve been lighting it every night,” the woman said. “Hoping things would be okay again and Jennifer might come home.”

She sat on the couch, picked up the remote, and switched off the TV. As Lena studied her face, she guessed that the age she was wearing came from fatigue and despair, not the passage of time.
McBride’s mother couldn’t have been more than forty-five years old, but she looked closer to sixty. She was a small-boned woman with delicate features. She wore a pair of corduroy
slacks with a black V-neck sweater.

“You were close?” Lena asked.

The woman offered a weary smile, her mind drifting into the past. “We used to be. We sure did. Things used to be real good.”

“When did they change?”

“I guess when she was about fifteen. That’s when she started looking more like a woman than my little girl.”

Lena concentrated on her breathing and tried to relax. She could tell that Pamela McBride sensed why they were here. But the woman appeared willing to talk, and Lena wanted to find out as much
about her daughter as she could before she gave her the bad news. She knew that she would lose the mother at that point. And any background information they might learn before that moment might
prove invaluable to solving the case.

“What about your husband?” she asked.

“I raised Jennifer on my own. Her father walked out before she was even five. I don’t think she had any memories of him. Just what I told her. I didn’t know much myself, so I
tried to keep it positive. For her benefit as well as mine.”

“Did you ever reconcile with her?”

The woman leaned forward with a sense of expectation and appeared visibly nervous now. “When she moved out things got a little better. She found a good job, but things were never really
the same. I always felt like I wasn’t getting the real story. Like she was keeping secrets. You know how kids are.”

Lena tried not to think about what Jennifer McBride had done for a living. Tried not to think about what they found in her duffel bag, or the men waiting for her in their hotel rooms. Still, she
had to ask the question. It was part of the job.

“What did your daughter do for a living?”

The woman took a deep breath and shuddered when she exhaled. “She said it had something to do with advertising. I knew that she was making money because I saw how much she was paying for
rent. There wasn’t much left for anything else. But she seemed to like her job, that’s all I cared about. She seemed happy.”

“Did you see her very often?”

“About once a week. Usually for Sunday dinner.”

“Did she ever come with a friend?”

“A boyfriend?”

Lena nodded.

“No. She never did. I always thought it was odd. A girl with her looks. There should’ve been a line around the block, but there never was.”

The woman’s voice died off and the room became so quiet that Lena thought she could hear the sound of the candle burning on the mantel. She looked at Rhodes staring back at her and caught
the gentle nod. This was the right time to tell her. The right moment. She tried to put the words together in her head. Find some way of saying it that wouldn’t feel like a knockout punch. In
the end she realized that it was hopeless, that she couldn’t protect the woman from what she was about to learn.

“I’m sorry to have to tell you this,” she said. “But your daughter Jennifer has been murdered. She’s dead.”

The woman didn’t move or say anything for a long time. Instead, she stared at Lena, studying her face. After a while a tear dripped down her cheek. Then another.

“If there’s anything we can do,” Lena said. “Anything at all.”

McBride’s mother finally turned away. “It must be some kind of mistake,” she whispered.

“I’m sorry. There’s no mistake. It happened Wednesday night. Her ID was missing. It took us this long to find you.”

Another long moment passed. Lena could see the woman struggling to put it together.

“But I’ve known she was dead for two years,” the woman said.

Lena’s eyes snapped across the room to Rhodes, then rocked back.

“What do you mean you’ve known for two years?”

The woman began to tremble, her voice barely audible. “There was a bank robbery in North Hollywood two years ago. Three men wearing ski masks. Jennifer was at the bank. I thought you came
here tonight to tell me that you finally caught them. The three men who shot Jennifer.”

I
f fuck-ups could be measured,
if records were kept on a fuck-up’s size and weight and the number of people ruined
or lost, this was the mother load.