The Lost Witness (34 page)

He didn’t say anything, still working on his prosthetic leg.

“You signed up?”

He laughed. “Yeah, I bought the lies and signed up. And if I could go back I would. Not for the idiot politicians who started it and wanted it, or the ones who watched and sat on their
butts. Not for the chicken shit TV reporters who’ve had their heads stuck up their asses since nine-eleven and don’t give a damn about the truth anymore. Not even for my fucking country
because I don’t know what that means right now. But I’d go back if I could for the guys I met and everybody else who got screwed by people like you. I’d go back to help the people
who lived there and got fucked. I’d go back to fix the lie and everything else we broke.”

His voice died off. His anger and bitterness seemed to subside as the silence returned.

“Is there a problem with the prosthetic leg?” she asked.

“The leg’s fine,” he said. “It’s the liner. I should have changed it today, but didn’t.”

Bloom fixed his jeans and stood up. Then he planted his right leg in the sand and pivoted his body. The adjustment he made seemed to work. His grimace was gone, and he sat back down on the
boulder and lit another Marlboro.

“You need to keep digging,” he said. “It’s okay the way it is, but the coyotes will sniff out anything above three feet. If you don’t wanna be eaten—if you
wanna rest in peace—you’ve gotta go deeper.”

She kept her mouth shut. Slamming the shovel into the sand, she lifted out another load. Then she heard his cell phone ring and watched him dig it out of his jacket. He didn’t say much.
From what Lena could hear, it sounded like he was answering questions, not asking them. When he clicked off the phone, he stared back at her and smoked that Marlboro. He seemed more nervous now.
More edgy. And he didn’t say anything. He just sat there, measuring her progress and smoking.

After another ten minutes and another cigarette, he got up and walked over.

“That’s good enough,” he said. “Get out of the hole.”

She started shaking. Struggling to catch her breath. She stepped out of her grave and gave him a long look—then watched as he reached into his pocket, trading his own gun for hers. She
wasn’t sure if she should close her eyes or not. She was thinking about her brother who had been murdered six years ago. Thinking about her father’s death, and the mother who abandoned
them. She was thinking about a lot of things that had nothing to do with this murder case or the desert she would end up in.

Bloom stepped closer, gun in hand, everything over. When he finally reached point-blank range, he stopped and tossed the spent Marlboro in the sand. Lena could hear her watch ticking in the
silence. Time streaming by.

Then Bloom handed over her gun and reached into his pocket for her ID.

“My sister wasn’t a whore,” he said. “We need to go back to the house and talk.”

L
ena needed to sit down.
Bloom pointed to the table in the kitchen, but anywhere in the house would have been just as
good. She needed time to compose herself and collect her thoughts. Time to let her emotions catch up to where she stood.

She wasn’t dead. She hadn’t been executed in the desert and left in a shallow grave for the coyotes to feed on. But there was more. Jane Doe No. 99 was no longer a Jane Doe living
under the stolen identity of Jennifer McBride.

She had been Mike Bloom’s sister. And as they drove back to the house, he had given Lena her legal name: Jennifer Bloom.

Lena watched Bloom pour two cups of coffee and join her at the table. Although the sadness remained, his rough edges were gone. Even his voice had changed.

“I thought it was important that she keep the same first name,” he said. “I didn’t want her to blow it.”

“You mean you created the identity for her?”

He shrugged. “I’d been a cop, so I had access to the information she needed and knew how to use it. But finding someone with the same first name took some time. When I finally hit on
Jennifer McBride, I had certain misgivings because the girl had been a murder victim in a bank robbery. But almost everything else about McBride was perfect, so we went with it. They didn’t
look alike, and I saw that as an advantage. There was so much background information available. So many stories about McBride’s life on the Internet. It made the job much easier. It gave the
identity detail.”

“What about your sister’s driver’s license? The DMV says it’s real. When we ran McBride’s name through the system, she didn’t come up as deceased.”

“I thought my sister needed one piece of identification no one could question. I had a friend at the DMV who agreed to work with me on McBride’s history. He made a few deletions.
Then Jennifer walked into a DMV and had her picture taken, took the test, and walked out.”

Lena sat back in the chair, her head spinning. She looked around the house. It was an open floor plan not much different than her own house in Hollywood Hills. And she was surprised by the art
on the walls and the number of books in the living room.

“I’m sorry,” Bloom whispered. “The way I spoke to you out there. The way I treated you. I didn’t know what was going on. I had to make sure you were
okay.”

Lena took a sip of coffee, trying to steady her hand. Then Bloom pulled out his cell phone and showed her a picture that he had taken of Lena digging her own grave. After a moment he clicked to
another picture of her that had been sent to his phone by whomever ran the background check. For a split second, but only a split second, she thought about cell phones again and how Bloom’s
had saved her life.

She looked back at the man, taking in his brown eyes and sunburned skin. The emotion on his face that she had misread as madness less than half an hour ago.

“The question is why,” she said. “Why did you do all this?”

Bloom thought it over. “If you’d ever had the chance to meet Jennifer, you’d know. But I guess the answer is that she used to be married. She loved the guy and I did, too. He
was with me when I lost my leg. He lost more than that. And she did, too.”

A moment passed. Jennifer Bloom had lost her husband in the war.

“It tore her up pretty good,” Bloom said. “But she was a strong-willed woman. Lots of spirit. The kind that lights up a room. Somehow she got past it and moved on.”

“Then why did she need to steal McBride’s identity?”

“Follow me.”

Bloom crossed the living room, then led the way upstairs. Lena could tell that his leg was bothering him again as they walked down the hall. When they reached the room at the very end, Bloom
stepped aside. It wasn’t a bedroom. It was a nursery.

“She got past her husband’s death,” Bloom said. “But she couldn’t get past this one. I’m not sure any mother who loses a child ever does.”

It felt like the floor was moving beneath her feet, the air charged with electricity. Lena looked at the crib. The changing table. A mobile hanging by the window. Her mind was suddenly razor
sharp. Jennifer Bloom had gone to see Dr. Ryan because she had a thyroid problem. Ryan believed that her patient had been pregnant, but didn’t carry it through because she didn’t want
to talk about her child.

“Is something wrong?” Bloom asked from the doorway.

Lena shook her head. “Tell me what happened.”

He entered the room and walked over to a chest of drawers. Lena’s eyes zeroed in on a framed picture of Jennifer with her husband and baby. It looked like the photograph had been taken in
the backyard by the windmill. Three people with their futures ahead of them—a moment in time when everything was good.

“She had a son,” Bloom said. “A little boy just a year and a half old. He had health issues though. He was asthmatic. It wasn’t constant. The attacks seemed to come and
go. But they were scary.”

Bloom was having trouble talking about it. Remembering it. He became silent for a while, then reached for a plastic bag on the chest and handed it to her.

“This was the medication the doctor prescribed. He died about twenty minutes after his mother gave it to him. One minute he was breathing. The next minute he wasn’t. I guess a lot of
kids have had the same kind of luck. The drug got pulled off the market, but it took a while. The FDA’s still trying to sort it out.”

Lena noticed the nebulizer on the chest, the child’s face mask, then examined the medication that had been sealed in the plastic bag. As she read the label, it felt like she was still
standing over her grave in the desert. Like Bloom still held the gun in his hand and had just pulled the trigger. The drug manufacturer was Anders Dahl Pharmaceuticals. Dean Tremell’s name
was even listed in the fine print.

Jennifer Bloom had never been a whore. She had been a mom. Another fallen hero like her husband. And the case was radioactive now.

S
he could see her house on top of the hill
as the jet eased over the Valley toward Burbank and glided with the wind. She
could see it in the blue light. Her small house standing over a city that spanned as far as the eye could see. Her anchor. After the plane landed, she walked down the rear steps onto the tarmac and
out the airport exit to the parking garage just across the street.

She had spent the last hour staring out the window and letting her mind wander. Being alone with herself and watching the loose ends drop away on their own. The same way her brother used to tell
her he could feel the moment for what it really was and improvise on his guitar.

The smoke Dean Tremell had sent up about this case had been the best money could buy. The best Lena had ever known or read about or could even imagine. As she paid her parking ticket and exited
the garage, she couldn’t help but find Tremell’s expertise and attention to detail something to behold. Every possibility had been accounted for. Everything rigged so well that Jennifer
Bloom never stood a chance.

The fake ad in the
L.A. Weekly
and the messages on her answering machine that it harvested after her death. The bag of tricks left in her closet filled with lingerie and sex toys, scented
oils, and plenty of prescription drugs. He even gave her a company line.
The woman who cast spells.

Lena had seen the bait and snapped at the hook. She had bought it. All of the above.

And then there was the
almost
bought, but smelled bad . . .

Justin Tremell’s heartfelt story about his friendship for the victim that turned into something else. Dean Tremell’s bullshit act as the concerned father. And what about the fifty
thousand that wound up in the victim’s bank account?

The deception had been so complete, so thorough, so brilliant. A command performance by every participant on every front.

It worked, of course, because somehow Dean Tremell had uncovered Jennifer Bloom’s secret. At some point he found out about her stolen identity and would have understood that he was working
with an empty canvas. After her murder, Tremell would have known that he could define Bloom any way he wanted and make the crime look the way it did.

She could see Tremell standing in his boardroom sipping bourbon from a crystal glass. She could see him working out the logic for his demented plan. Deciding what it should look like and who
would take the fall. Jennifer McBride would no longer be a mother who had lost her son. Once the transformation was complete, all anyone would ever see was a greedy whore. A whore blackmailing one
of her wealthy clients—or so the bullshit went.

The scope of the crime took Lena’s breath away. The brutality. The audacity. The sickness.

She flipped open her cell, found Denny Ramira’s number and hit
ENTER
. She thought she finally knew what the reporter’s book was about and why he had been so reluctant to talk about
it. And she thought that she knew who his contact was. The one who wanted to remain anonymous. It had been sitting out there all along. The way the pieces fit. It had been hidden behind a veil of
money and power and absolute barbarism. Hidden in a stolen identity. She saw it now.

Ramira wasn’t picking up his cell. Paging through recent calls, she found his house number from earlier in the day and clicked it. When she hit his message service, she began to get a bad
feeling and pulled over to the side of the road. Her address book was in her briefcase. Lena punched in Ramira’s number at
The Times.
After nine rings, a woman finally answered but
sounded rushed.

“I’m trying to reach Denny,” Lena said.

“I’m sorry, but he’s not in. Could you try back later? We’re busy.”

“It’s important,” she said. “I’ve tried the house and his cell. Where is he?”

“We were wondering the same thing. Denny didn’t come in today.”

Lena felt her heart sink. “Does he still live in Silver Lake?”

“As far as I know. Why?”

Lena snapped her cell shut without answering the woman. Pulling back onto the road, she brought the car up to speed, blew through a red light, and jumped onto the 5 Freeway. It was 4:30 p.m.
with just enough traffic to spike her blood pressure. She worked the road hard and fast and dipped onto the shoulder when she needed it. By the time she reached the reservoir and found
Ramira’s house off Edgewater Terrace, the sun had set and every house on the block had its lights on.

Except for Ramira’s. Even worse, his car was in the drive.

She grabbed a pair of gloves, found a small flashlight in the glove compartment and walked up the drive. It was a California Craftsman with a long front porch and large windows. When she reached
the steps and got picked up by the motion detectors, the sudden wash of bright light spooked her.

She could feel the tension, the heat in the cold air. And when she moved to the window and peered through the glass, she could feel the terror.

Something was swaying from the banister on the second floor. After a moment, she realized that it was Ramira’s Chihuahua, Freddie. She had met the dog eight months ago when she gave the
reporter her account of the Romeo murder case. She hadn’t been to the house since, but remembered that his dog barked a lot and had plenty of attitude. It looked like someone had tied the
leash to the banister and let the choke chain do the rest.