Kill the Messenger

21

Ruiz was long gone by the time Parker returned to the station. He wanted to be pissed off, but he couldn’t manage it. It was important to have a life away from the job if you wanted to stay sane on the job. He’d learned that lesson the hard way, so consumed by his rise to stardom in Robbery-Homicide that when that train came off the tracks he hadn’t known what to do or who he was. He’d invested everything in his career.

It would have been nice to go home himself, take a steam, put on some jazz, have a glass of wine, order in some wonton soup and Mongolian beef from the restaurant down the street. He had a script to read, and notes to make. And sleep sounded like a good idea too.

He had a great bed and a view of Chinatown’s neon lights for when he didn’t want to or couldn’t sleep. He could stare out those windows and lose all track of time. A three-dimensional abstract of the streets four stories below. He found the colors soothing, or maybe it was the juxtaposition of vibrant light and sound on the streets with the quiet dark around him in his haven, his cocoon.

He wouldn’t be going home soon. There were too many things he needed to know, and he needed to know them quickly. His instincts had already been on point with this case, and that sense was only getting keener. The oddities of the break-in at Abby Lowell’s apartment—and with Abby Lowell herself—were rubbing against the grain.

She was a study in contradictions. Courting sympathy, giving the cold shoulder, vulnerable, tough as nails, victim, suspect. All applied. The hell she didn’t know what her burglar was after. She was after it herself.

Lenny Lowell’s death was no random act of opportunity. And what the hell would a bike messenger, assigned by the luck of the draw, have known about this mysterious something Lowell apparently possessed that was worth killing for? The money gone from the safe—provided there had ever been any, and they had only Abby Lowell’s say-so on that point—had been nothing but a bonus for the killer.

A simple robbery didn’t send a perp on to his victim’s daughter to toss her apartment and threaten to kill her. Parker’s instincts told him the words scrawled on Abby Lowell’s bathroom mirror had an implied “unless” to them. Next you die . . . unless I get what I’m after. Which implied the assailant believed Abby Lowell knew what he was after.

And why had the mirror been broken? How had the mirror been broken? The damage had been done after the message had been written on it. Abby Lowell hadn’t had a mark on her, nor had she said anything about a struggle in the bathroom, the mirror getting broken, someone bleeding.

She said the guy told her he’d done some work for her father. What was that about? The Emily Post etiquette rules for murderers? Hello, here’s who I am, my references, my connection to you. So sorry, I’m going to kill you now. What crap.

And the guy drives away in a Mini Cooper.

Parker reminded himself the Volkswagen Bug had been the car of choice for serial killers in the seventies. Cute cars were nonthreatening. How could anyone driving a Bug be a bad person? Ted Bundy had driven a Bug.

Parker ran the partial plate from the Abby Lowell break-in through the DMV, and waited, impatient. He made himself a cup of tea, paced while it steeped. Kray’s trainee, Yamoto, was at his desk, studiously working on a report. Ruiz was probably out salsa dancing with the sugar daddy who kept her supplied in Manolo Blahniks.

Girl most likely to marry money. Parker wondered why she hadn’t done so already. She probably figured she had a better shot at a big fish if she went up the career ladder to a better class of crime. Make Robbery-Homicide, become high-profile, start hanging out with political and Hollywood types, and boom: rich husband.

On impulse, he picked up the phone and dialed the number of an old friend who worked Homicide in South Central.

“Metheny,” a gravel-choked voice barked on the other end of the line.

“Hey, Methuselah, you got it under control down there?”

“Kev Parker. I thought you died.”

“I kind of wished I had there for a while,” Parker admitted.

Metheny growled like a bulldog. “Don’t let the motherfuckers get you down.”

“I had that one tattooed on my dick. How’d you know?”

“Your sister told me.”

Parker laughed. “You old son of a bitch.” He had partnered with Metheny a thousand years ago when Parker had been cutting a swath through the food chain to get to Robbery-Homicide. Metheny liked him anyway. “You got any contacts working Latin gangs in your neck of the woods?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“I’ve got a trainee did some task force work down your way. I’d like to find out how she was.”

“Trying to get in her head or her pants?”

“Her head is scary enough for me. Her name is Ruiz. Renee Ruiz.”

“I’ll see what I can find out.”

They traded a few more insults and hung up. Parker turned his attention to the results of his DMV search.

Of Mini Coopers registered in the state of California, in the Los Angeles area, seventeen matched the possible combinations of numbers and letters Parker had offered for the search. Of those, seven were listed as being green, five black. None of them were registered to Jace or J. C. Damon. None of them had been reported stolen.

The detectives at Abby Lowell’s break-in would be looking for the car too, though Parker doubted they would get to it until the next day. Their case was basically a B&E. No serious violence. They wouldn’t be excited enough to stay late—unless it was just to spite him.

Parker couldn’t let them go hunting first. Maybe they were good at what they did, and they would pull it off without a problem. But he thought it more likely they would go charging through the clutch of Mini Cooper owners like stampeding cattle, bolting the lot of them, tipping off Damon. He couldn’t risk losing his suspect because of stupidity and territorial bullshit.

He dug a map of the city out of his desk drawer and spread it across Ruiz’s desk, then took his Thomas Guide and began locating the addresses of the Mini Cooper owners. He marked the places on the map. None were in the immediate vicinity of the mailbox rented to Allison Jennings and passed on to J. C. Damon.

Working his way outward from that location, Parker found one of the owners lived in the Miracle Mile area, not far from Abby Lowell’s apartment. That car was registered to Punjhar, Rajhid, DDS. One was in Westwood, near UCLA. One was registered to a Chen, Lu, who lived in Chinatown—on his way home.

He plotted all twelve, and stared at the map with his splotches of red ink like bloodstains scattered over the city. Which car did Damon have access to? Where the hell did he live? Why was he so secretive about it? He didn’t have a record. And if he had one under another name, who in his day-to-day life would know? If he was living under an alias, the only way he was going to be found out was to be arrested or have his fingerprints turn up at a crime scene. They had the partial prints from the murder weapon, but not enough to get a hit running them through the system.

Maybe the kid was a career criminal. Or maybe he was hiding from someone. Whatever the reason for all his secrecy, Damon was driving around in somebody’s Mini Cooper. And if he hadn’t killed Lenny Lowell, why would he search out Lenny’s daughter? How would he know anything about this missing something everyone wanted so badly?

And why had Robbery-Homicide shown up at that scene?

Parker put his head in his hands and rubbed his face, his scalp, the corded muscles in the back of his neck. He needed fresh air, and he needed answers. He put his coat on and went outside in search of both.

The clock had struck rush hour two hours ago. The streets were nose-to-tail cars, everyone in such a hurry to get somewhere that no one was getting anywhere. A few people came out of Central Bureau and headed for cars—stragglers. The shift had changed a couple of hours ago, and the business day was over. Things would soon be settling down for the night.

Parker walked to his car and slipped behind the wheel. This one was the workhorse, a five-year-old Chrysler Sebring convertible. He drove it to work, drove it to crime scenes when he was on call. Time off the job was for the bottle-green vintage Jag, his beautiful, sexy, secret lover. He smiled a little at that. Then the smile faded as he remembered Ruiz asking him about the car. She’d heard rumors, she’d said.

He dug his cell phone out of his coat pocket, dialed Andi Kelly, and opened with: “What have you done for me lately, gorgeous?”

“Jesus, you’re a pushy son of a bitch. I have priorities other than you, you know. Cocktail hour is at hand, my friend. I have a date with a seventeen-year-old.”

“Still pounding down the scotch, huh?”

“How do you know it isn’t a young man?”

“Because you’re too smart to tell me if it was. Seventeen isn’t legal, not that you didn’t already know that.”

“Besides which, it would be gross,” Kelly declared. “I’d be old enough to be the kid’s mother. That’s way too Demi Moore for me. I’ve never been interested in boys, anyway, only men,” she purred.

Parker cleared his throat. “So? Do you have anything for me?”

“My memory isn’t so good before dinner,” she said. “Meet me at Morton’s in West Hollywood. You’re buying.”