Kill the Messenger

7

“What a creep.”

Parker walked into the bedroom naked with a glass of wine in each hand. A nice, full-bodied Cab from Peru. He had hardly touched the hard stuff since about two months after he had gotten sent down from Robbery-Homicide. In those two months he had downed enough booze to float a boat. Then he woke up one day, said enough was enough, and took up tai chi instead.

“Was it something I said?”

The woman in bed didn’t take her eyes off the television. Her face was sour with disgust. “Rob Cole, that piece of dirt. I hope he gets the needle. And after he’s dead, I hope we can dig him up and kill him all over again.”

“That’s what I like about you, Diane. Overflowing with the milk of human kindness.”

He handed her a glass, set his on the night table, and slipped between the covers.

He and Diane Nicholson had what they both considered to be the perfect relationship. They liked and respected each other, were a pair of animals in bed, and neither of them had any interest in being anything other than friends.

Parker because he didn’t see the point in marriage. He’d never seen one that worked. His parents had been engaged in a cold war for forty-five years. Most of the cops he knew had been divorced at least once. He himself had never had a romantic relationship that hadn’t crashed and burned, primarily because of his job.

Diane had her own reasons, none of which she had ever confided in him. He knew she had been married to a Crowne Enterprises executive who had died of a heart attack a few years past. But when she spoke of him, which was hardly ever, she talked about him without emotion, as if he were a mere acquaintance, or a shoe. Not the great love of her life.

Whoever had put her off the idea of everlasting love had come after the marriage. Curious by nature and by vocation, Parker had nosed around for an answer to that question when they had first gotten involved, almost a year before. He hadn’t found out a thing. Absolutely no one knew who Diane had been seeing after her husband’s death, only they believed she had been seeing someone and that things had ended badly.

Parker figured the guy was married or a muckety-muck in the coroner’s office or both. But he dropped the unsolved mystery, figuring that if Diane had been so careful, so discreet that not even her friends knew, then it was none of his business. She was entitled to her secrets.

He liked having his secrets too. He had always figured the less anyone knew about him, the better. Knowledge was power, and could be used against him. He had learned that lesson the hard way. Now he kept his personal life personal. No one at LAPD needed to know who he saw or what he did with his time off the job.

She scoffed at his milk-of-human-kindness line. “This guy deserves an acid bath.”

They were watching CNN Headline News. Diane had televisions all over the house and sometimes had them all on at once so she could go from room to room without missing anything.

It was late, but it always took a while to wind down after a murder. Uniforms had knocked on doors within viewing distance of Lowell’s office, but the shops were empty for the night and there wasn’t a soul to speak to. If there had been, Parker would’ve worked through the night. Instead, he had locked down the scene, gone to the station to start his paperwork, making Ruiz go with him instead of chasing after Bradley Kyle like a cat in heat. From there he had gone to Diane’s Craftsman bungalow on the Westside.

“Fifty-five-gallon drum, and forty gallons of acid,” he said matter-of-factly. “Keep the drum in your basement, leave it for the next homeowner, who leaves it for the next one after that.”

Most women would probably have been appalled that he had that kind of stuff in his head. Diane just nodded absently.

The story running was about jury selection for Cole’s upcoming trial, and a recap of the whole sickening mess—from the discovery of Tricia Crowne-Cole’s body; the funeral with Norman Crowne sobbing on his daughter’s closed casket, his son leaning over his shoulder, trying to comfort him; all the way back to her wedding to Rob Cole. An incongruous photograph: Cole posing like an Armani tuxedo model, Tricia looking like maybe she was his older, dowdy sister who had been left at the altar. She would have been better off.

“Look at this clown,” Diane said as they ran file footage of Cole starring in his short-lived TV drama, the aptly named B.S.: Bomb Squad. “Looking like he thinks he’s somebody.”

“He used to be.”

“In his own mind. That guy is all about one thing: himself.”

There was never any gray area with Diane. Rob Cole was an instant ON button for her opinions. She had worked the murder scene more than a year ago now. She and Parker had had numerous variations of this conversation since. Every time some new phase of jurisprudence kicked Cole’s name into the headlines again, she resurrected her ire and outrage.

“I met him at a party once, you know,” she said.

“The memory is as vivid as if I had been there myself,” Parker remarked dryly. She must have told him a hundred and ten times since the murder. Somehow the mere mention of Cole’s name shut down her short-term memory.

“He hit on you.”

“He told me he was trying to put together a new series and maybe I could help him out with the research. The main character was going to be a coroner’s-investigator-slash-private-eye. What crap.”

“He just wanted to get in your pants,” Parker said.

“With his wife standing not ten feet away,” she said with disgust. “He’s only got eyes for me. He’s the bad boy. He’s all charm. He’s the big white grin.”

“He’s the guy all the guys want to be and all the women want to go home with,” Parker said.

“He’s a jerk.”

“I guess you still haven’t signed on to the ‘Free Rob Cole’ Web site,” Parker said, bringing his hand up to massage the back of her neck. The muscles were as taut as guy wires.

She scowled. “People are idiots.”

Parker slid his arm around her. She sighed softly as she let her head fall against his shoulder.

“No argument there,” he murmured. “No matter how rotten, how guilty a criminal may be, there are always people who don’t want to hear it.”

“Like I said. And these are the same people who can’t get out of jury duty. Cole will end up being the new millennium’s Ted Bundy and have some dumb-as-dirt woman marry him from the witness box in the middle of his murder trial.”

Parker didn’t give a shit about Rob Cole. LA was a “what have you done for me lately” kind of town, and aside from being accused of murder, Cole hadn’t done anything noteworthy in a decade. One production deal after another had gone down the drain. Starring roles had tapered off to guest roles of diminishing importance on episodic television, and a slew of forgettable movies of the week for those powerhouse networks: Lifetime and USA.

Parker’s attention was on the file footage of Cole being brought into Parker Center by a posse of Robbery-Homicide hotshots, Bradley Kyle and his pal Moose among the pack. Cole, red-faced and bug-eyed with anger, a drastic contrast in mood to his corny trademark fifties vintage bowling shirt; the Robbery-Homicide boys stone-faced in sharp suits and ties, mirrored shades hiding their eyes. Everyone costumed and playing their parts to the hilt.

“Why were Kyle and the Hulk there tonight?” Diane asked.

Parker shrugged as if it didn’t matter to him. “I don’t know. I didn’t invite them.”

“You think the dead guy was connected to something big and juicy?”

“The Lenny Lowells of the world are the Lenny Lowells of the world because they can’t hook on to something big and juicy even if they trip and fall in it.”

“He tripped and fell in something. And it killed him. Something smelly enough for the Parker Center boys to come sniffing.”

“It’s my case until my captain tells me it’s not,” Parker said. “Then I’ll walk away.”

Diane laughed, a throaty, sexy sound that moved her shoulders on its way out. “You liar. You wanted to run Bradley out of there like a tiger protecting its kill.”

“Well, I do hate the guy.”

“You’re entitled. He’s a prick. I hate the guy too. Everybody hates the guy. I’ll bet his mother hated him in utero,” she said. “But that’s all beside the point. I just don’t get what RHD would want with the murder of a bottom-feeder like that lawyer.”

“I don’t know,” Parker said as the Headline News anchor jumped from the Cole story to a story about the sudden surge in sales of vintage bowling shirts in Los Angeles. “But I’ll find out. Crack of dawn, I’m finding that bike messenger.”