Guilt By Degrees

62

We never did make it out of my room. In fact, Toni never even made it home. She crashed on the couch.

The next morning dawned bright and sunny. I got up and felt the window. It seemed warmer today than it had been. Maybe that would help ease the aches and pains. I still felt like I was about ninety years old. I heard Bailey moving around in the other bedroom. Did I smell coffee?

I quickly showered and inventoried the damage to my face and torso. Better, though not good. But now some yellow was peeking through the purple. Progress. I threw on some jeans and a sweater. Well, not throw exactly. I inched my way into them. When I reached the living room, I saw there was indeed coffee. And pastries. And bagels. With Bailey for a roommate, I was going to wind up wearing bedspreads to court. I poured myself a cup of coffee and pulled off half a bagel.

Toni sat up, yawning, then sleepwalked to the bathroom. Two seconds later, the shower began to run.

“How you feeling, sunshine?” Bailey said, looking perfect in her brown pencil slacks and short boots.

“Better.” I took another sip of coffee. “Thanks for ordering.”

Bailey smirked, knowing I wasn’t entirely pleased with the selection. “Come on, it won’t kill you, and your security might put up with you longer if you give ’em a bear claw.”

“On second thought, pass me that Danish.”

She passed me the plate. “That’s the spirit,” she said.

I put most of the remaining pastries on a spare dish and stepped out into the hall. Gary was standing closest to the door, and I could see Mario at the end of the hall. I held out the plate to Gary.

“I thought we should all get fat together,” I joked.

“You have nothing to worry about, Rachel,” Gary said, taking the plate from me.

If someone else had said it, the line might’ve sounded a little bit lecherous. But Gary just made it sound reassuring.

“Your wife is probably the luckiest woman on earth,” I said.

“So I’ve been telling her for the past ten years,” he replied. “But feel free to call and back me up. A little corroboration never hurts.” He held up the plate. “And thank you for these. Mario’ll love it.”

“My pleasure.”

I went back into the room, picked up the remaining Danish, and took a big bite. It was fresh and delicious. “It’s time to hit up Lilah’s parents.” We’d been hoping to have enough information on her to keep them honest before we had the meeting, but it looked like we had all we were going to get.

Bailey nodded. “I know we’ve talked about it for a while,” she said. “But I’m not sure what we expect to get from them. They’re on her side. Even if they don’t know we’re looking at her possible involvement in Simon’s murder, they’ve got to know she’s flying under the radar and using an alias. I don’t see them helping us.”

Bailey sat back and folded her arms over her chest. Her thinking posture. I got up and paced. My thinking posture. One of us had a more annoying thinking posture than the other.

I thought out loud. “You couldn’t find any trace of her under any of her known names-”

“I’ve checked every database in every city, county, and state in this country. I’ve checked banks, jails, prisons, hospitals, even the morgue, I’ve checked-”

I held up my hand. “Enough. I get it. But she can’t just be No-Name. She must’ve gotten a new ID, right?”

“Right,” Bailey said. “Though that may not necessarily mean she’s up to no good. She’s got every reason to want to change her name and erase her past.”

True enough. “But even if she is into something shady, she can’t get by with no ID.”

And Lilah’s new name was the least of the unknowns that’d been plaguing me. Was she a cold-blooded murderer? Or was she the victim of a misguided investigation-someone whose life had been ruined by being falsely accused? If the latter, then what was she doing now? Why was she seemingly in hiding? I had a hard time believing she was cowering in a corner somewhere. I’d studied her on that surveillance footage too many times to count, and one thing was clear to me: that strong, confident stride didn’t fit with someone who’d disappeared out of fear or shame. But that single conclusion, based only on my intuition, left a world of questions unanswered. Every time I thought about Lilah, I wound up on this same circular path.

“No one gets by in this world without ID,” Bailey agreed. “And I didn’t see anything in her past that was helpful. Though I did think it was weird that she got a GED instead of finishing high school.”

“Especially since she’d just come back home after years of getting stellar grades in a boarding school.”

Bailey sat up. “When’d you come up with that?”

“A little while ago.” I shrugged. “Checked out her school records, talked to a few people. Seems she got into enough trouble to make the counselor recommend a boarding school for ‘problem children.’”

“She have a juvenile record?”

“No. And it seems the boarding school did straighten her out. By the time she left, she had a four-oh.”

Bailey looked at me intently. “You pulling all-nighters working on this woman, or what? And elementary school? How on earth’s that supposed to help us find her now?”

Until that moment, I hadn’t thought to question it. But now I wondered: What did I hope to gain by delving into Lilah’s personal history-especially that far back?

“I just wanted to fill in some blanks,” I said. “I needed to get some answers for a change, instead of questions that only led to more questions. It’s been frustrating, you know?”

Bailey nodded. Her puzzled look told me she wasn’t entirely convinced, but I didn’t have any better explanation.

I paused to look out the window at Pershing Square. The small park in the middle of downtown always sets up an ice rink in winter. A young girl wearing lighted reindeer antlers stumbled blindly around the oval rink. She couldn’t have been more than fourteen. Her wet jeans told me her efforts to stay upright hadn’t been a total success. Suddenly she slip-slided her way off the ice and into a roped-off area, where she dropped heavily onto one of the folding chairs. A rink official glided over and appeared to order her out of the area. When she unsteadily followed his directions, he sat her down at one of the public tables. Was she stoned? Or just new on skates?

I brought my thoughts back to the matter at hand and gave voice to an issue that’d been dancing around in my mind.

“How did Lilah and Zack meet anyway?” I asked.

“No one knows,” Bailey replied. “Even Zack’s parents were vague. At some party or something.”

I nodded, frowning, and turned back to the window.

The girl with the antlers duckwalked her way back onto the rink and began to bounce off the low wood barriers. This time, a tall, strong-looking rink official quickly skated up behind her, grabbed her under the arms, and steered her off the ice, then motioned for a nearby patrol officer. Stoned. Definitely not the skates.

I began to pace again. “If they did meet at a party, then how come no one has any details? Like when or where it was, or who threw the party?”

Bailey shrugged.

“It bugs me that they have no logical point of intersection,” I said. “Work? School? Church?” I turned another circle, thinking.

“Your pacing is making me nuts,” Bailey warned. “And dizzy.”

She had a point. The room was pretty small, so my circles were tight and fast. “Sorry,” I said. I resumed pacing but tried to make it look like a casual stroll. “Zack didn’t go to law school-”

“-so they didn’t meet there,” Bailey said. “And they didn’t meet at work. When she interned for the DA’s office, she was down in Orange County.”

“And no one ever said they were churchgoers-”

“She’d immolate on the threshold.” Toni emerged from the bathroom looking like a magazine cover.

Makeup, flawless. Hair, perfect. Clothes, chic. And if circumstances required, she could even do it fast. I was no slouch, but I was a mere grasshopper next to Master Toni.

I resumed pacing. “She went to law school, interned at the DA’s office, and got hired at a fancy law firm. None of that explains how she and Zack crossed paths.”

Bailey refolded her arms and stared down at the table. After a moment, she looked up. “If she did kill Zack, it wouldn’t be a big strain to believe Lilah had a shady past.”

I stopped pacing and looked at Bailey. “A hotshot corporate lawyer with a shady past? Impossible,” I said with a sarcastic smile. “So maybe they met at Zack’s workplace.”

“As in, Zack busted her for something?”

I shrugged.

But Bailey was frowning. “I don’t know. Men think with the little head and all that, but hooking up with a suspect…” She shook her head. “It’s a career wrecker if anyone finds out. And from everything we’ve heard about him, Zack was an ambitious guy. Cops who want to be captain-or more-don’t take those kinds of chances.”

“I agree,” I replied. “And if he did bust her for something, he must’ve hidden it, because she’s got no rap sheet, right?”

“None,” Bailey said. “But then again…we’re pretty sure she’s got an alias now, right? Maybe she had an alias back then…”

No cover-up would’ve been required.

“Or maybe he didn’t bust her,” Toni chimed in. “Maybe she was a witness.”

I nodded. “That might’ve given her a legit reason to have an alias…”

“Such as?” Bailey asked.

“She was hiding from an abusive boyfriend,” Toni said.

“If she did have an alias back then-for whatever reason-it’d be a lot easier to go back to it now than to get a whole new set of fake IDs,” I said.

Bailey sighed. “This means we’ve got to go through Zack’s arrest reports and see if we can find a witness or suspect who fits her description. Needle in a haystack.”

I nodded glumly. This time, I had no magnet.