The Lost Witness (15 page)

Xanax in the morning, Ambien CR at night, keeps a soldier boy from climbing out of his skin.

It was the war zone diet everybody followed because you were in real deep shit and on your own. No one could tell who the enemy was and no one could escape. When he was transferred to Eastern
Europe, the pills were given just as freely, no questions asked. Just a wink and a smile with a shot of water for all the good work he was doing to save the fucking sand world.

It was Saturday, December 15. According to the notation in his planner, he had popped two milligrams of Xanax he didn’t remember taking at 6:00 a.m., along with a Boniva, the once-a-month
solution to maintaining strong bones he had seen advertised so often on TV. If he went by the book he’d have to wait seven to eight hours before taking another Xanax. He spent a moment
looking at his hands trembling before his eyes. Then he ripped open the side pocket in his briefcase and picked through his medications. When he found the bottle of Xanax, he shook a pill onto his
palm, tossed it into his mouth, and swallowed it dry.

Sometimes just taking the pill made him feel right again. Sometimes half an hour went by before the drug kicked in. He gazed around the room. The TV was switched to CNN. As his mind began to
loosen up, he started thinking about Fontaine again. Once the king gave him the keys to the SRX, Cava planned on making his maiden voyage a return trip to Beverly Hills. He needed to lock in the
doctor’s weekend schedule and figure out how he was going to handle things with the girlfriend and those two bodyguards around. Something quiet that no one would notice for a while. And what
about the witness? Now that he’d traded in his car, should he keep the witness on the back burner or amp up his pursuit?

He looked back at the TV. When he saw a photograph of the girl he’d murdered, his mind bolted to the surface. They were running the story on CNN, but the focus seemed to be on the
detective investigating the case. A woman named Lena Gamble who worked out of the Robbery-Homicide Division and solved another case last year. Apparently she was trying to locate a witness to the
murder. Someone who helped but hadn’t come forward.

Cava jotted Gamble’s name down as quickly as he could, mesmerized by the sight of her. He looked at her tangled hair. Her angular face and long body. Her hips hidden beneath her clothes.
The video on the screen had been taken at night with a telephoto lens eight months ago during the wildfires. Gamble was exiting a crime scene with a shotgun in her hands. Her cheekbones glistened
with fresh blood spatter. But it was the determination on her face, the smoke in her dusky-blue eyes that he found so captivating. When the report cut back to the present and ended with
side-by-side photographs of the victim and her killer, he gazed at the blurred-out image of himself and realized that he wasn’t shaking anymore.

“That guy looks like a goddamn ghost,” a woman shouted.

Cava turned and found the woman sitting in a chair by the coffeemaker and donut tray. She was an older woman. The kind you see with a cigarette in her mouth working the slots in Vegas. He
hadn’t heard her enter the room. She looked back at the TV and squinted through her glasses.

“I can’t tell who he is,” she went on. “But I’d bet the house he’s an ugly son-of-bitch.”

Cava gave her a long look, then started laughing. He was feeling good again. Right again. Thanking the gods of modern medicine.

“You got that right, lady. I’ll bet that guy’s ugly as sin . . .”

L
ena hit Rhodes’s speed-dial number on her cell
as she pulled out of the lot. After two rings, he picked up.

“Where are you?” he said.

“Just leaving the bank. Did Barrera make it in?”

“No, but Klinger’s here.”

She shrugged it off. “I’ve got news,” she said. “Jane Doe made a fifty-thousand-dollar deposit six days before she was murdered.”

Rhodes didn’t say anything right away, but she could guess what he was thinking. Fifty thousand dollars was on the table. People had been killed for a lot less.

“You think she was blackmailing Fontaine,” he said finally.

“It would explain why he lied to us.”

“It would explain a lot of things.”

She filled him in on her meeting with Steve Avadar, working her way through the victim’s weekly deposits until she reached the check from Western Union and the kid stealing money from the
ATMs one small piece at a time. The kid she believed had witnessed the abduction and walked into the lobby at Parker Center to deliver the package.

“So, our witness is a thief with a guilty conscience,” Rhodes said.

“Or a greedy Good Samaritan. We need to pull the surveillance video from the lobby. He made the delivery late yesterday morning.”

“I’ll get things started. When are you coming in? Klinger’s been asking for you.”

“As soon as I run Jane Doe’s photo by McBride’s mother.”

“There’s no need,” he said. “I just got off the phone with her. She saw the news last night and talked to most of her daughter’s friends. The TV stations posted the
pictures on their Web sites so everybody can see them now. Her friends don’t know her, either. It’s a dead end.”

Lena tossed it over without responding. She hadn’t expected a connection between Jane Doe and the real Jennifer McBride and thought that there was enough information out there for the
victim to have stolen the identity outright. Still, there was always that feeling of hope flickering in the background. Hope that she might be wrong and the answers would come more quickly. She had
thought it would turn out this way, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t disappointed.

“What about the help line?” she asked.

“Three people called to order pizza. It’s a downhill ride from there.”

Lena shifted lanes and made a U-turn at the corner, heading for the 10 Freeway.

“I’ll see you as soon as I can,” she said.

She closed her phone and slipped it into her pocket. Over the past few years it had become increasingly difficult to find witnesses willing to speak up. The trend began with gang crimes and new
rounds of witness intimidation that included kidnapping, torture, and often times, murder. As the word spread through news stories and the worst of hip-hop, fear gripped the city and the witness
pool for all sorts of homicide investigations began to dry up.

Snitches wear stitches.

For Lena those three words were more than the code of the street. They were a warning beacon, a reminder of how frail a society can become. How easily ignorance and nihilism can take root when
so many people have stopped watching.

She tried to shake off the bad vibes—tried to keep her mind off the personal reasons why the one witness they knew about probably wouldn’t step forward. After hitting the Fourth
Street ramp and accelerating onto the freeway, she found the left lane and switched on her CD player. Flipping over to the last disc, she thought about Klinger, skipped to track 2 and hit play. The
cut she wanted to listen to was called
Stop,
a digital remaster of the album
Super Session,
recorded by Al Kooper, Mike Bloomfield, and Stephen Stills nine years before she was even
born. She had discovered a vinyl copy in her brother’s recording studio and liked it so much she bought the CD. That was six months ago, and the album still held a spot in her five-disc
player. As the music started, she settled back in her seat and felt her body relax some.

The case was beginning to take shape. With Fontaine uncovered and the discovery of the cash in the victim’s bank account, the investigation was finally beginning to move forward. Yet, she
couldn’t help thinking that something was wrong. She hadn’t slept well last night, tossing and turning in spite of the wine. She didn’t understand why the detectives from Internal
Affairs were parked outside her house. Why they would risk their careers by tapping her phone. And she wasn’t sure she should mention it to anyone until she had a better read on why they were
really there. Why did Klinger and Chief Logan feel the need to keep such close tabs on her? Why did someone from the sixth floor—probably Klinger himself—call the press on the night
Jane Doe’s body was discovered in Hollywood? Why did he want to make sure that everyone knew her name was attached to the case?

The more she thought it over, the more worried she became that she was missing something important. That she had become lost in the details of a complicated investigation and wasn’t seeing
the big picture. The key ingredient that made it all move.

By the time she reached Parker Center, she could feel the dread following her into the elevator. She rode up to the third floor and found the bureau empty, a picture of Fontaine from the DMV on
Rhodes’s desk. Hiking up the back steps to SID, she spotted Henry Rollins, a forensic analyst from the photographic unit, working at a computer terminal equipped with a double set of
flat-panel monitors. The overhead lights were off, the room darkened.

“What are you doing here on a Saturday?” she asked.

He grinned, but looked tired. “I’ve got your video up,” he said. “I’m cutting the shots together. It’ll only take a second.”

Lena entered the room, pulling a chair over and handing him the DVD Avadar had given her.

“Video from the ATMs,” she said.

“We’ll run them side by side.”

“Where’s Rhodes?”

“He walked out to make a phone call.”

Rollins turned back to the pair of twenty-one-inch monitors, streaming through a series of shots so quickly that the images didn’t register as anything more than digital noise. He was
creating a time line and pulling shots already previewed from an open window on the second monitor. The shots were no bigger than thumbnails and hard to see. As Lena moved closer, she realized that
Rollins was doing more than just piecing together surveillance video from the cameras hidden in the lobby. He had taken the extra step and pulled shots from the cameras overlooking the street
outside Parker Center.

She sat back in the chair and watched him finish the time line, then quickly download the video clips from the bank. She had never worked with Rollins before, but knew him because of their
mutual friendship with Lamar Newton, the crime scene photographer assigned to the case. Rollins was young and lean with bright eyes and a dark complexion. He was just three years out of graduate
school from UCLA. Although he never talked about it, Lena had heard rumors that the police departments in New York, Chicago, and Miami had tried to lure him away with offers of a signing bonus.
According to Newton, Chief Logan had become involved and convinced Rollins to stay in Los Angeles. At the time bidding wars for new recruits were rare, but now the practice was commonplace.

Rhodes entered the room and grabbed a chair. “Are we close?”

“We’re almost there,” Rollins said.

Rhodes turned to Lena. “I just got off the phone with Tito,” he said. “Fontaine’s hired a couple of bodyguards.”

“He saw them?”

“Yeah. From the neighbor’s house. Two guys taking a smoke break in the backyard.”

“What do you think it means?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Tito’s gonna knock on Fontaine’s door and see if he wants to talk about it.”

Their eyes met, that feeling of dread still working through her body. When she finally turned back to Rollins, he moved the cursor to the start of the time line, hit the spacebar on his
keyboard, and both videos started rolling. As they watched, Lena couldn’t help thinking that the edited sequence felt more like a finished work than raw surveillance footage. And there was
something spooky about the images, almost as if she was watching a crime unfold before her eyes. Rollins was cutting from camera to camera, following the messenger’s progress from the moment
he exited the underground garage one block up and started walking down North Los Angeles Street. Although the camera angle was high, the images were in color and far clearer than the video from the
ATM machines playing on the second monitor. Lena could see the package underneath the messenger’s arm. She could see him turning his face away and looking at the ground as he passed two cops
on the sidewalk.

“It gets better,” Rollins said. “As soon as he walks inside, it gets a lot better.”

Lena checked the second monitor, watching the kid work the ATM machine and steal the victim’s daily cash limit. She noted the Dodger cap and leather jacket, focusing on the shape of his
mouth and chin. When she turned back to the first monitor, she watched the messenger dressed in the same clothes enter Parker Center and cross the lobby to the front desk.

It was him. There could be no doubt that the messenger was the same kid standing before the ATM machine, and most likely, the same person who witnessed Jane Doe’s abduction on the night of
her brutal murder. Eighteen or nineteen with long brown hair and pale skin. The thin and nervous type with dark circles under his eyes. Wasted and scared, she thought. A user in need of another hot
load. Someone from the streets with a pocket full of free money and no address.

“He’s rolling his eyes underneath the hat,” Rhodes said.

Rollins pointed to the image. “He knows that the cameras are there, but he’s not sure where they are. He’s trying to find them without anyone noticing. He doesn’t realize
that it’s hopeless. He’s walking right into the shot.”

Lena turned back to the monitor as the kid moved closer. The camera was right in front of him, recording every expression on his face. Every blink and every breath. Yet, he couldn’t find
the lens. He couldn’t hide below the bill of his baseball cap. When he stopped at the front desk, Lena noticed the lunch stand in the background. The two cops taking the package were talking
to another cop buying a sandwich. All three were laughing as if someone had just hit the punch line in a good joke. No one was paying any attention to the kid moving quickly across the lobby and
back out the door.

Lena watched the monitor as Rollins cut back to the surveillance cameras outside the building and followed the kid up the street.