The Lost Witness (20 page)

Something glistened in the light. She caught it out of the corner of her eye. Inching her way to the other end of the table, she found a carving knife laid out on top of a liquor carton. She
looked at the knife without touching it. The drops of blood. Two smaller knifes were here as well, along with a black Sharpie.

She paused a moment, adjusting the tissue over her nose.

The garage had been cleaned, the floor swept. Whatever belonged to the Andolinis looked as if it had been moved to the back of the garage and stacked beside a workbench. When Lena spotted the
trash can, she moved closer and gazed inside the plastic liner. Several pairs of vinyl gloves had been discarded, along with a smock, a pair of goggles, store-bought rags, and numerous sets of
paper booties.

Her eyes skipped across the workbench. She took a deep breath and pushed the foul air out of her lungs. Felt the chills begin to swarm her spine and shake it. There was a roll of parchment paper
here. But even worse, a meat grinder had been mounted to the surface with a thumb screw.

She closed her eyes and stepped back, thinking that she might be sick. Gathering her strength, she shook the thought out of her head and turned away. And that’s when she noticed the coat
rack on the wall. She had walked right by it. Missed it as she took the horror in.

The victim’s clothes were here. Everything hanging neatly from the hooks on the rack as if it belonged in the woman’s bedroom closet. A pair of jeans and a simple white blouse. A
sweater. Her bra and panties. On the floor her shoes had been set side by side, her socks folded and carefully placed on top.

Lena moved closer, picking up a light scent of perfume—the same fragrance that managed to cut through the stench at the morgue during the young woman’s autopsy. As her eyes swept
across the rack, she spotted a string of Rosary beads hanging from the last hook.

A moment passed. A long stretch of oppressive silence broken up by the sound of her heart pounding in her ears. She was thinking about Jane Doe, the young woman who had stolen Jennifer
McBride’s identity and walked into this nightmare. She was playing back her last few moments of life in her head. She was thinking about what Art Madina had told her on Friday. That the
killer had kept her alive for as long as he could. That her death hadn’t been quick or easy.

The man the Andolinis knew as Nathan Good.

Her mind surfaced. She noticed her breath as she exhaled. She could see it dissipating in the cold air as it passed through the tissue. Her body was shaking now, but she couldn’t tell if
she was shivering or trembling anymore. Couldn’t tell if it was the December air working through her body or this living vision of hell closing in on her.

She shook it off and headed for the door. Squeezing through the narrow space, she stepped outside and moved away from the garage as quickly as she could. The winds had changed direction. She
could smell moisture in the air, the promise of rain. She could hear a door opening.

“Come in and get warm.”

She looked up and saw Paladino on the porch, but it took a moment to register.

“I’ll be there in a minute,” she said. “Where are the Andolinis?”

“Resting. I went through it with them before you got here. They’re tired. I figured you could talk to them later. You don’t look so good, Lena. Come in and sit down.”

She took a deep breath, trying to get a grip on herself. After several moments she climbed the steps and followed Paladino into the kitchen. The room was small but clean, the appliances dated.
Moving to the sink, she turned on the hot water. As she splashed her face, she couldn’t help noticing all the prescriptions lined up on the windowsill. There must have been at least thirty
different medications. A small house plant broke the line of pill bottles into two groups. An African violet in bloom. Taped to the sill on the left and right were the words
HIS
and
HERS
.

Paladino gave her look, his voice quiet and gentle. “What was it like in there?”

“Exactly what you think it was like,” she said.

“Then this is the crime scene.”

“This is it.”

She turned off the water, her heart still pounding in her chest as she tried to think.

“Your friends,” she said. “If they couldn’t get a read from the picture on TV, what prompted the call?”

“Wednesday night. That’s the night of the murder, right?”

She leaned against the counter and nodded.

“He shows up here around eleven. Backs his car up to the garage. The lights wake them up. They told me he spent four hours in there. Didn’t leave until after three in the morning. He
carried a trash bag out and it looked heavy.”

“Did you ask them what kind of car he drives?”

“A red Hummer. But they didn’t get the license plate. They didn’t have any reason to. They saw the story on the news Friday night. Yesterday they put it together.”

Lena glanced at the coffeepot.

“The mugs are in the cabinet behind you,” Paladino said. “But it’s not very good. I couldn’t drink it.”

She didn’t care. All she really wanted was to shake the chills. She turned to the cabinet above the sink and swung the first door open.

“The other one,” he said.

She heard him, but kept her eyes on the cabinet. The shelves were empty except for a single can of tuna and half a box of rigatoni. She shot Paladino a look, then glanced back at the
prescriptions on the sill. The Andolinis needed food and medication to stay alive, but couldn’t afford both. Something was wrong.

I
t had taken fourteen hours
to process the crime scene on Barton Avenue. Fourteen hours to photograph it and dust it.
Fourteen hours to log the evidence in, break it down, and carry the mess away. For Lena, it had only taken a split second to understand that the thoughts and images she collected and endured would
haunt her for the rest of her days.

It was after ten, the streets wetted down by a light rain. As she reached Beachwood Canyon and started up Gower Street past the Monastery of the Angels, the road leading to her house appeared
more desolate than usual. The night, three or four shades darker.

Lena had shown the Andolinis the six-pack that Rollins had created on his computer—the six faces generated from the image recorded by the witness on his cell phone. Working with a sketch
artist, a single image emerged and was fine tuned. Remarkably, Rollins had come close to depicting the killer’s actual face. Using the nose from one image, the mouth from another, the eyes
and ears from the next two—it all added up to the man who rented the garage. The man calling himself Nathan Good, who didn’t seem to exist when Lena made the call and Barrera ran his
name through the system. The man no one saw or wanted to remember seeing when she canvassed the neighborhood in search of a witness. The man with the meat grinder who drove a red Hummer and lived
below the water line.

She pulled into her drive. The outside lights were off. As she lugged her briefcase through the darkness, she felt the cool rain misting her face.

On the plus side, if there could be a plus side, the depravity of the case was out in the open now. The gruesome reality was no longer reserved for Art Madina and herself as they examined the
victim at the autopsy on their own two days ago. Somehow, word of what they found had traveled down Barton Avenue to the press staging their cameras in front of the graveyard. Perhaps because of
their grim location, perhaps because of the foul weather, or perhaps because SID couldn’t back their truck up the narrow drive and everyone got a good look at that makeshift operating table
being carried out—an almost palpable current of fear swept through the press corps. More important to Lena, it was a Sunday and details had already risen to the brass on the sixth floor.
Already reached them in their warm and comfortable homes. No one would be dropping the case because Jane Doe No. 99 had worked in the sex trade. Nor was there any threat of delay at the crime labs.
SID had moved the investigation to the top of their list.

Lena unlocked the front door, pausing a beat as she sensed something was wrong. She pushed the door open and peered into the darkness.

The phone was ringing inside the house. Not once before bouncing over to her cell, but in succession as if she hadn’t turned call forwarding on.

She hit the lights and crossed the living room. When she saw Denny Ramira’s name and number on the screen, she grabbed the phone before her answering machine picked up.

“I’ve gotta call you back,” she said.

“Call me back? We’ve gotta talk right now.”

“Can’t do it, Denny. I’ll call you back in five minutes.”

She switched off the phone before the reporter could say anything someone might hear. Although his voice sounded shaky, she couldn’t think about it right now. Her friends from Internal
Affairs had figured out what she was doing with the phones. Obviously they had been inside the house.

She noticed the cold air and turned up the heat, then unlocked the slider and legged it around the house. As she expected, the tap and wireless transmitter had been removed. But she could hear
something. Footsteps on gravel fading onto soft earth. She looked ahead and caught a glimpse of two men moving quickly through the brush toward the road. Rushing up the path, she climbed the bluff
and saw the two men hurrying back to the Caprice parked thirty yards down the road. The first was familiar to her, the same clean-cut man with the young face and short brown hair she had seen
before. But it was the second man who shook her up. She got a good look at him as he turned to get in the car. His lean, rigid body. His short gray hair and wounded eyes.

It was the chief’s adjutant himself. Ken Klinger.

She took a deep breath and exhaled. She didn’t have time for this.

Sliding down the hill, she ran back to the house and shut the slider. Nothing that she could see appeared out of place, but she expected this, too. She picked up the phone, stepped into the
kitchen, and pried off the faceplate with a knife. Lifting away the speaker, she spotted a small black cylinder with metal coils buried in the wires. She was familiar with the device and knew that
the microphone inside could pick up anything in the room whether she was on the phone or not. A radio transmitter went with the low-tech bug and would be hidden somewhere away from the television
and her audio equipment in the living room. But what worried her was Klinger. Because he worked for the chief, he knew that she would have been tied up at the crime scene all day. He would have had
time to wire the rest of the house. This was obviously the bug she was meant to find—the
feel-good
bug that was supposed to make her feel safe after she located the device and
discarded it. They could have planted anything anywhere. Internal Affairs owned the equipment and supposedly knew how to use it.

She closed the handset and returned it to her charger, leaving the bug in place and wondering why they hadn’t turned call forwarding back on. As she thought it over, she realized that they
probably turned off the service in order to test their handiwork. Once the service was off, there would have been no way to restore it without calling her cell. Lena would have seen her home number
when the call came in and figured it out. Instead of taking the risk, they were probably counting on her not remembering whether she’d turned the service on this morning.

All in all, it added up to poor planning and sloppy police work. Klinger, the man who thought of himself as an expert at crime detection but hadn’t worked a single day in his entire life
as an investigator, couldn’t even wire up a house right.

She hoped he liked good music because he was going to hear a lot of it.

Lena switched on her receiver, moved to the computer, and logged onto WRTI’s Web site, a jazz station out of Philly. Klinger was in luck. According to the playlist, the station would be
dedicating the entire night to Coleman Hawkins and his tenor sax. First up was a digital remaster of the LP, At Ease with Coleman Hawkins. One of Lena’s favorites, “Poor
Butterfly,” was on the album. But as she played the cut back in her head, it occurred to her that Klinger wasn’t worthy of the music. Returning to her bookmarks, she switched over to
KROQ’s Web site and checked their playlist. She smiled as she scrolled through the long list of heavy metal bands. Tonight was theme night. Twelve hours of great headbangers from the
past.

Perfect.

She found the
LISTEN LIVE
icon on the screen and clicked it. Then she turned up the volume, grabbed her leather jacket, and walked out onto the back porch. Moving away from the slider, she
leaned against the side of the house and gazed at the pool. The lights were off, the rain breaking the water’s smooth black surface like stones falling out of the sky.

She flipped open her cell. Ramira from
The Times
would have to wait. When she found the medical examiner’s home number in her address book and hit
ENTER
, Art Madina picked up on the
first ring.

“It’s me,” she said. “And I need a favor.”

“What is it? And what’s that in the background? It sounds like we’ve got the same station on.”

She smiled again. She knew Madina listened to rock and still went to the clubs on weekends. She knew that he had been a fan of her brother’s music as well.

“I need a favor,” she repeated.

“Tell me what I can do.”

“I want to take another look at Jane Doe’s body.”

“That’s easy. She’s in the cooler. Come over any time you want to.”

“I don’t mean a quick look,” she said. “I don’t know what your schedule’s like, but I really think we need to do it as soon as possible, Art. How’s
tomorrow morning sound?”

“Hold on a second.”

She heard him set down the phone, then shut off the music at his end. When he finally came back, his voice had changed.

“What’s going on, Lena? Tell me what you’re looking for.”

“We need to make sure that she’s all there.”

A moment passed. She could still see that meat grinder on the workbench.