Guilt

CHAPTER 22

Donald Chang took us down in the elevator to a parking garage filled with vehicles save for a section cordoned by a mesh gate. Behind the mesh was a wall lined with storage lockers.

Chang unlocked the gate and one of the lockers and stood back. “The two in front are Adriana’s, everything else is our stuff.”

Milo drew out a cardboard wardrobe and a carton of the same material, around two feet square. Both boxes had been sealed cleanly with packing tape and neatly labeled Adriana Betts’s Belongings.

Chang said, “Can’t tell you what’s in there, Lilly packed. Do you want to go upstairs to look at them?”

“Thanks, but we’ll take them back to L.A.”

“Forensic procedure and all that? Makes sense. Good luck, guys.”

Milo gave him a card. “In case you or your wife remember something.”

Chang tugged a mustache end. “I don’t want to demean the dead but my opinion is Adriana was a bit odder than you just heard from Lilly.”

“How so, Dr. Chang?”

“My wife sees the good in everyone, puts a gloss on everything. The way I perceived Adriana she was a total loner, no life at all other than caring for May and cleaning like a demon.”

I said, “Except for that one time the red car picked her up.”

“Yes, that would be the exception, but outliers don’t necessarily say much, do they?”

Milo said, “When she got back from the date she looked okay.”

“Nothing stood out but bear in mind that neither of us was psychoanalyzing Adriana, our priority was that May stay calm during the drive home.”

Another mustache tug. “I certainly don’t want to put Adriana down just because she stuck to herself, lots of the people I worked with in computer sciences at Yale were like that. And I’m not complaining about her work, as Lilly said Adriana was a dream employee, great with May. But once in a while, I wondered about her.”

“Wondered about what?”

“Her being too good to be true. Because I’ve observed people like that-the ones who come across totally dedicated to the job, single-minded, no outside life. Sometimes they’re fine but other times they end up cracking. I’ve seen it on high-pressure wards, your saintly types can turn out to be horrid.”

I’d learned the same lesson working my first job as a psychologist: the plastic bubble unit on the Western Peds cancer ward where I finally figured out the most important question to ask prospective hires: What do you do for fun?

Milo said, “So you were waiting for the shoe to fall, huh?”

“No, I’m not saying that, Lieutenant. Not even close, I liked Adriana, was pleased with the order she brought to our lives. I’m just a curious person.” He smiled. “Maybe overly analytic. I didn’t want to say any of this in front of Lilly. She was totally enamored of Adriana, hearing about the murder was pretty traumatic for her. I know she looked fine to you but two hours ago she was sobbing her heart out. It’s an especially soft heart, my wife likes to believe in happy endings.”

I said, “You’re a bit more discriminating.”

“Maybe I’m just a distrustful bastard by nature, but when Adriana flaked on us-what we thought was flaking-Lilly was surprised but I wasn’t.”

Milo said, “You figured something stressed her out.”

“I figured she was like everyone else: Something better comes up, you bail.” Chang smiled again, wider but no warmer. “That’s a California thing, right?”

We placed the boxes in the back of the unmarked and headed back to L.A.

Milo swerved into the carpool lane and kept up a steady eighty-five per, jutting his head forward, as if personally cutting through wind resistance.

At Del Mar, he said, “Adriana goes on her one and only date with someone in a red car. So maybe the SUV little Heather saw isn’t relevant. Hell, what’s to say any of it’s relevant?”

I said, “Something drew Adriana to that park.”

“Something drew her to L.A., amigo. I’d say a better gig but bailing on the Changs for extra dough doesn’t sound in character.”

“A friend in need might have lured her. Someone with a baby.”

“It was Mama in a red car, not a date?”

“Mama in a red car who called Adriana for help because something scared her. If those fears were justified, Adriana could have lost her life because she got too close to the situation.”

“Bad Daddy.”

“Major-league monster Daddy who murdered the mother of his child and the child, held on to the baby’s skeleton as a psychopathic trophy. That ended when he read about the bones in Holly Ruche’s backyard and decided to ditch his collection nearby. Mom had already been taken care of and Adriana, suspicious after her friend disappeared, followed him. Unfortunately, he spotted her.”

He drove for a while. “Charming scenario. Too bad I’ve got nada to back any of it up.”

“You’ve got Adriana’s personal effects.”

“There was anything juicy in those boxes, the Changs-being trained observers-would’ve noticed and said something.”

“That’s assuming they snooped.”

“Everyone snoops, Alex.”

“Not busy people.”

“Okay, fine. I’ll burn some incense to the Evidence Gods, pray a hot lead shows up in the boxes. I was a less pro-fessional detective, I’d pull into the next truck stop and do an impromptu forensic.”

“Everything goes straight to the lab?”

“Hell, no,” he said. “Finders keepers, but I’m doing it by the book.”

We got off the freeway at Santa Monica Boulevard at 1:36 a.m. For all its rep as a party town, most of L.A. closes down early and the streets were dark, hazy, and empty. That can stimulate the creepers and the crawlers but Milo’s police radio was calm and back at the station the big detective room was nearly deserted, every interview room empty.

He used the same room where Helene Johanson had cried, dragged in an additional table and created a work space. Spraying the surfaces with disinfectant, he gloved up, used a box cutter to slit the wardrobe open, emptied the contents.

Clothing. More clothing. A peer at the bottom evoked a disgusted head shake. He examined the garments anyway.

A couple more bland dresses similar to the one Adriana Betts had died in, two pairs of no-nonsense jeans, seven nondescript blouses, cotton undergarments, T-shirts, a pair of sneakers, black flats, cheap plastic sunglasses.

“No naughty secret-life duds, amigo.” He sniffed the garments. “No secret-life perfume, either. Adriana, you wild and crazy kid.” Shutting his eyes for several moments as if meditating, he opened them, repacked the clothes, sealed the box and filled out a lab tag.

The smaller box yielded a hairbrush, a toothbrush, antacid, acetaminophen, a blue bandanna, and more garments: two pairs of walking shorts and a wad of white T-shirts. Milo was about to put everything back when he stopped and hefted the shirts.

“Too heavy.” Running his hands over each tee, he extracted a shirt from the middle of the stack and unfolded. Inside was a brown leatherette album around six inches square, fastened by a brass key clasp.

“Looky here, Dear Diary.” He pressed his palms together prayerfully. “Our Father Who Art in Heaven, grant me something evidentiary and I’ll attend Mass next Sunday for the first time in You know how long.”

The clasp sprang free with a finger-tap. A pulse in his neck throbbed as he opened the book.

No diary notations, no prose of any sort. Three cardboard pages held photographs moored by clear plastic bands.

The first page was of a teenage Adriana Betts with a boy her age. Bubbly cursive read:

Dwayne and Me. Happy Times.

Dwayne Hightower had been a huge kid, easily six six, three hundred, with a side-of-beef upper body and thick, short, hairless limbs. His face was a pink pie under coppery curls, his smile wide and open as the prairie. He and Adriana had posed in front of hay bales, barns, a brick-faced building, and a green John Deere tractor with wheels as tall as Adriana. In each shot, Hightower’s heavy arm rested lightly on Adriana’s shoulder. Her head reached his elbow. She clung to his biceps.

Their smiles were a match in terms of innocence and wattage.

The following page began with more of the same but ended with shots from Dwayne Hightower’s funeral. Adriana in a black dress, her hair tied back severely. Wearing the cheap sunglasses from the wardrobe.

The final page was all group shots: Adriana and several other young adults in front of a red-brick church. The edifice that had backdropped her and Dwayne. Had they planned to wed there?

Not a single tattoo, body pierce, or edgy hairdo in sight. These pictures could’ve dated from the fifties. Heartland America, unaffected by fad or fashion.

In some of the shots, a portly white-haired man in his sixties wearing a suit and tie stood to the left of the group.

In most of the pictures, Adriana, though not particularly tall, had positioned herself at the back. Not so in the last three, where she posed front-center, next to the same person.

Young black woman with short, straightened hair and a heart-shaped face. Extremely pretty and graceful despite a drab smock that could’ve come out of Adriana’s closet.

A single chocolate dot in a sea of vanilla.

The bones in the park had yielded African American maternal DNA.

I didn’t need to say anything. Milo muttered, “Maybe.” Then he pointed to the older man in the suit. “Got to be the pastor, whatever his name is.”

“Reverend Goleman,” I said. “Life Tabernacle Church of the Fields.”

He turned to me. “You memorize everything?”

“Just what I think might be important.”

“You figured the church might be important? Why didn’t you say so?”

“There’s might and there’s is,” I said. “No lead before its time.”

“You and that party wine from when we were kids-the Orson Welles thing.”

“Paul Masson.”

“Now you’re showing off.”

I reexamined the photos that included the black woman. “Adriana stands nearer to her than she does to anyone else. So let’s assume a close relationship.”

“The pal in the red car?”

“What we’ve heard about Adriana says she had a moral compass, would never have bailed on the Changs without a good reason. Helping a good friend might qualify.”

“If she was murdered because she knew too much, why dump the bones near her and risk the association?”

“He’s a confident guy.”

“Talk about a poor choice for your baby’s daddy. And that leads me back to the problem I had before. Child abuse, even murder, something rage-related, happens all the time. But I’m still having trouble seeing anyone, even a psychopath, taking the time to clean and wax his own offspring’s bones then tossing them like trash.”

I have no trouble seeing anything and that turns some nights hellish. I said, “You’re probably right. The first step is I.D.’ing this woman.”

He looked at his watch. Close to three a.m. “Too early to rouse Reverend Goleman in Idaho.” Separating the photo album from the cartons, he dropped it into an evidence bag. We carried both boxes to the big D-room, where he secured them in a locker. Returning to his office, he wrote an email to the crime lab. Leaning back in his chair, he yawned. “Go home, sleep late, kiss Robin and pet the pooch. Have a nice breakfast tomorrow morning.”

“You’re not going home.”

“There’s a sleeping room near the holding cells. I may just bunk out so I can be ready to phone Boise in four hours. Hopefully a devout fellow like the Rev will be cooperative.”

“Speaking of devout,” I said, “where will you be attending Sunday Mass?”

“What? Oh, that. I said evidentiary, not suggestive.”

“Driving a tough bargain with the Almighty?”

“He wouldn’t respect me otherwise.”