The Lost Witness (6 page)

She took a first sip of coffee, glanced around the room, and turned back to her laptop. She had filed a preliminary report and created the murder book last night—a three-ring binder often
called a
Blue Book
that would serve as the complete record for the case. But her concern right now was the chronological record. The program on her computer mirrored the first section in the
murder book and amounted to a journal. Every step she made in the investigation—what she was thinking, planning, or had ruled out—would be included. And she wanted to update the file
and print it so that she could give the chief and his adjutant copies when they met.

She had come up with the idea last night when she couldn’t get to sleep. The only way to beat the micromanagers on the sixth floor was to flood them with paper. Keep them occupied with
something tangible or nearly tangible so that she could work the case.

She checked her watch and started typing. After hitting the locker room, she had walked Jane Doe’s fingerprints up to the Latent Print Section on the second floor. Someone must have
prepped the way because SID agreed to make the run immediately. Lena was well aware of the backlog and assumed that the call to bump her to the head of the line had come from the chief, or even
Klinger. Still, she would have the results within a day—not a week—and that’s all that really mattered.

She wanted to push Jane Doe through the system as quickly as she could. Hit the speed bumps fast with the hope that just maybe something would shake out.

She wasn’t counting on anything. She knew the odds of SID identifying the girl were handicapped. In order to get a hit, Jane Doe’s fingerprints would already have to be in the
system. One look at Jane Doe’s clear brown eyes told Lena that she was an innocent. The chances of her committing a crime or working a job that required fingerprinting was just short of
nowhere.

But at least she finally had an accurate physical description. Lena typed in the victim’s height and weight from her notes jotted down at the autopsy. On the way over, she had made another
call to Benson at Missing Persons and given him an update. Madina’s office had already sent over the autopsy photos, including close-ups of the victim’s belly ring and heart-shaped
tattoo. Benson would make a run through the database and have results for her in an hour or two. But that only covered Los Angeles. The California Department of Justice would make a second, more
extensive run. And with any luck, Lena would have their results in a couple of days.

She moved the cursor up to the menu bar and hit save. When she reached for her coffee, she looked up and saw someone walking toward her from the other side of the room. It was Denny Ramira, the
crime-beat reporter from
The Times.

“What are you doing here, Ramira?”

“I saw you on the street,” he said.

“You followed me?”

“Yeah. I’ve never been here before. Nice place.”

“Don’t make it a habit, okay?”

He smiled, still looking around. “Senator West digs you, Lena. You made his day by taking that picture with him. Did you see the paper?”

She shook her head. She had left the house early this morning and didn’t open the paper.

“You guys are friends?” she asked.

“His office is helping me research something on the side. Maybe a book; we’ll see. It’s not that far along yet.”

“A book about what?”

Ramira smiled again. “You might steal my idea.”

“Yeah, Ramira. I’ve got a lot of time on my hands. I really want to steal your idea.”

“Okay, so I’ll give you a hint. It’s about crime. White-collar crime. You know, the kind where nobody goes to jail because everybody’s rich enough to buy their way
out.”

Lena followed the reporter’s gaze to her laptop. He was trying to get a look at the screen, but his angle was off. As he stepped to his left, she closed the file, shut down her computer,
and started packing up.

“Sorry, but I’m not real sure I want to find my reports in one of your stories.”

“Hey, I wasn’t looking. Besides, if you had anything real, you’d give me a call. We’ve still got a deal, right?”

He gave her a look, and she shot it back at him. Ramira was thin and angular, about her height, and probably five years older. He was a handsome man with an intelligent face framed by dark hair
and a pair of glasses that seemed to sharpen the light in his eyes. Although he may have been one of the best reporters Lena had ever known, that didn’t make him any less dangerous. The deal
he was talking about had been struck after her last case. The doer had worn a badge, and the brass on the sixth floor wanted to keep it buried at the expense of an innocent man’s reputation.
Lena needed an insurance policy and had given Ramira an exclusive “off-the-record” account of the investigation. Getting the story in print was the only way of ensuring that everyone
involved lived up to the truth. When it was over—when the official record became straight and true—Ramira won an award, and Lena’s plight with Chief Logan was born.

“What deal is that?” she asked. “You already got your story”

“You know what I’m talking about, Lena. You need me just as much as I need you. Even the senator said it last night. He saw Logan reaming you out. That’s why he walked in on
you and broke it up.”

Lena slipped her computer into her briefcase without responding. Ramira checked the room, then sat down at the table and lowered his voice.

“You want me to say it straight out, then I will. You’re in a rough business, Lena, and you need friends. Everybody knows that you’re on the outs with the chief and his band of
self-righteous boy scouts. It’s all about your last case. You were right and he was wrong, and everything went down in public. I know that you didn’t mean to embarrass him, but you did.
The bottom line is that no matter how much he’d like to, he can’t transfer you to the Valley and he can’t fire your ass to oblivion. His hands are tied, and he can’t get rid
of you. But I’ll bet he’s thinking about it. I’d bet the city he spends a lot of time thinking about it. And that’s why you need friends.”

Lena relied on her ability to size people up quickly and accurately. As she stood up, she wondered if her read on Ramira had been off the mark.

“You need to chill,” she said. “Take some time off. What you’re implying is ludicrous.”

“Is it, Lena? Like I said, you’re in a rough business. Shit happens.”

Ramira met her eyes. He looked tired and a little nervous. She wished that he hadn’t followed her into the café.

A
s Lena crossed the lobby
at Parker Center and started around the security line, one of the two cops behind the front
desk called out her name. He lifted a package in the air, an eight-by-ten manila envelope.

“A messenger dropped it off five minutes ago,” he said. “You saved me a trip upstairs.”

“Thanks.”

She glanced at the return address but didn’t recognize the name. McBride. Navy Street. Venice Beach. None of it registered.

Stepping into the elevator, she hit the button to her floor, and took another look at the package. It was a padded mailer and she didn’t think the contents felt like a book or CD. When the
doors finally closed, the elevator shook and groaned and vibrated all the way up to the third floor.

Parker Center, aka the Glass House, was due to be leveled sometime in the next five years. Lena tried not to think about it because there was nothing she could do to make it happen any faster.
Still, every time she stepped into an elevator, the question of her own personal safety crossed her mind. Parker Center hadn’t survived the last earthquake, but city officials were saying
that it did—pretending that it did. The replacement cost of the building was more important to city government than the safety of the people who worked here. At least that’s the way it
appeared to Lena as she did the math. The Northridge earthquake had rumbled through Los Angeles almost fifteen years ago. The department would get a new building, but only after the people working
here waited it out for a grand total of twenty years. For some, that was a life sentence. The length of their entire careers.

The doors opened and the thought vanished. Lena walked down the hall and around the corner, passing the lieutenant’s desk at the head of the bureau floor. The Robbery-Homicide Division was
comprised of twenty-four desks pushed together in four groups of six. Today was Friday, less than two weeks before Christmas, and it looked like just about everyone had left for lunch. Stan Rhodes
was the only holdout, waving at her as he spoke with someone on the phone. She didn’t see Lt. Barrera at his desk, or his computer, and guessed that he was working in Captain
Dillworth’s office across from the interrogation rooms. Captain Dillworth was taking an off-season Alaskan cruise with his wife, hoping to see the glaciers and polar bears before the ice
melted and all the animals drowned. Although the crime logs had been moved upstairs to the Cold Case Unit, the only conference table on the entire floor was in his office, so he never locked the
door.

Lena slid behind her desk, grateful that the bureau was nearly empty. She glanced out the window, still thinking about her conversation with Ramira. What he implied seemed so over the top. The
chief and his adjutant may have given her a rough time last night, but that’s all it was. That’s all it had ever been for the past eight months. A steady diet of rough time. Not once
had she ever sensed that it was anything more than that. Not once had she ever thought that she couldn’t wait them out and survive with her career intact. She could still see Ramira measuring
her after he finished. The fire in his nervous eyes.

She wondered why something so ridiculous was still on her mind. Why she found it troubling enough that it had followed her all the way to her desk.

She checked the time, then reached for her laptop. She still had fifteen minutes before her meeting. As the computer booted up, she found the tab on the back of the mailer and tore open the
package. Holding the envelope to the window light, she gazed inside. And that’s when she felt her pulse quicken.

It was an ID. Someone’s driver’s license. And there was something else caught in the corner of the mailer. At first, she thought it might be a key ring. But as she spread open the
bubble wrap, she realized that it was a small storage device about the size of a cigarette lighter. Someone had sent her a USB flash drive.

She reached down for her briefcase, fishing out a pair of gloves. Pushing her laptop aside, she dumped the license and flash drive onto her desk. Then she flipped the ID over and zeroed in on
the photograph. She noted the long blond hair. The soft brown eyes and high cheekbones.

Jane Doe No. 99 was no longer Jane Doe No. 99.

Her name was Jennifer McBride. And Art Madina had been right. If a reconstructed view of the victim’s face had been necessary, it would have revealed a beautiful young woman.

Lena checked the return address on the mailer against the driver’s license. Whoever sent the package used the victim’s address. Jennifer McBride lived in an apartment on Navy Street,
and had celebrated her twenty-fifth birthday less than two weeks before her death.

“Why are you wearing gloves?” Rhodes asked. “Is everything okay?”

She looked up. Rhodes was holding the phone against his chest and she could see the concern on his face. His partner, Tito Sanchez, had entered the room and was standing beside him.

“Where’s Barrera?” she said.

Rhodes’s eyes flicked to the captain’s office in the alcove behind her, then moved back.

“Something’s happened,” she said.

Maybe it was the way she said it. Maybe it was Rhodes’s instinctual ability to read her, their rekindled friendship, and that feeling in her gut that the case was about to lift off a blank
page. Either way, Rhodes got rid of his call and within a few minutes, all three men were huddled around her desk. She brought them up to date, describing the location of the body dump in broad
strokes. As she filled them in on the results from the autopsy, she pulled her computer closer and pushed the flash drive into the USB port. Then she clicked the drive icon and waited a beat to see
what was inside.

It was a single file—a video file. Sanchez killed the overhead lights. Then everyone leaned closer as it began to play on her laptop.

The images were recorded at night and so degraded, Lena felt certain that the camera had been a cell phone. By all appearances, the photographer was more than nervous, hiding between two parked
cars and unable to hold the lens still. The entire video only lasted five seconds, then looped back to the start and began playing again.

She could see a car parked in the shadows about twenty-five yards away. A building stood in the distance with a neon sign on the roof. A man with blond hair was tossing something in the Dumpster
by the car, then turning toward the lens and bending over a large object on the ground. The man’s face was blurred beyond recognition. The sign on the roof of the building, lost in digital
noise. But as the shot ended, the last frame flashed a bright white. And in that instant, the large object on the ground took on definition.

The man was leaning over Jennifer McBride’s body.

“Jesus Christ,” Barrera said. “We’ve hooked a witness.”

“Or they’ve hooked us,” Rhodes said. “You think that was her purse going into the Dumpster?”

Lena glanced at McBride’s license on her desk, then looked back at the screen as the video recycled to the beginning and the man tossed the object into the trash.

“That’s her purse,” Barrera said.

Lena agreed, her eyes riveted to the screen. When the man turned back toward the camera, she clicked the pause button on the media player and the image froze. The man’s face remained out
of focus, but it was there. And he was wearing something around his neck. Something that glistened in the darkness. A medallion of some kind.

Barrera moved closer to the screen. “Madina thinks he’s a surgeon?”

“Someone with military training,” she said.