The Lost Witness (2 page)

When the window went blank, she tried to turn off what was happening and concentrate on her iPhone. She tried to use the music to gather strength. If she could just pull herself together and get
moving again, she’d dial 911 and call for help. Maybe even push the door open and jump the hell out.

She listened to the music and tried to focus. She knew that the singer’s legal name was Derek Williams, but he went by the number 187. His brother Bobby had changed his name to XYZ. She
liked their voices. She liked them a lot. But about a mile or two down the road, 187 stopped singing, and so did XYZ. The track finally ended and the music ran out. . . .

L
ena Gamble poured herself a fresh cup
of coffee and walked it around the counter to the table in the living room. As she
sat down, she took a first sip through the steam and gazed out the window at the city. It was two o’clock in the afternoon. The piping hot brew tasted rich and strong, with just enough kick
to revive her. She had taken the day off and had done nothing but read the newspaper and listen to music. It was the first day she had worked at doing nothing in a long time and she was reveling in
the vibe.

The repairs to her house were finally complete, and she was celebrating. The roof that had blown away in the Santa Ana winds eight months ago had been replaced—the work guaranteed for
fifteen years. The ground cover around the house had been pushed back twenty yards in case of another wildfire. And her brother’s furniture—and all of the evidence that went with
it—had been removed and replaced. Yesterday the painters finally cleared out. All that remained was the smell of fresh paint and polyurethane. Nothing was left but silence. Emptiness. That
feeling that she wished David was still with her. Still here to live and play his music in the small home they once shared on top of a hill overlooking Hollywood and the city of Los Angeles.

She turned and looked into the bedroom. Through the far window she could see the two-story garage on the other side of the drive. Just after moving in her brother had converted the space into a
state-of-the-art recording studio, attributing the success of his band’s third CD to the acoustics. But that was all over now. The studio had been dark for nearly six years. As her eyes fell
away from the building, she wondered about the word
closure
—who invented it and why. It was one of the few words that had no meaning for her. No definition or purpose.

Lena realized that the reason she was probably thinking about all this was because last night had been the first night she hadn’t slept in the upstairs guestroom since she closed the Romeo
murder case and solved her brother’s homicide. It had taken an entire bottle of wine to block out the memories and knock her down. But she’d slept through the night in her new bed
without dreams, or nightmares, or any of the ingredients that taunted her and seemed to go with the word
closure.

She had been dealt the low card. She knew that. Her brother’s murder had been senseless. Something she would walk with for the rest of her days. But now it was time to turn the next card
over. Time for a new table and another game. Time to fight the urge to cash out.

She pushed aside the newspaper, opened the slider, and stepped onto the porch. The winds had picked up, drying out the city after ten straight days of heavy rain. In spite of the sun raking the
basin from downtown to the ocean, the temperature probably wouldn’t climb out of the forties. Still, the view from the top of the hill this afternoon was stunning. The entire city appeared
clean and polished, glistening in a wet light. Although she didn’t heat the pool, vapor was rising out of the water and drifting toward the sun in a flush of color. She couldn’t keep
her eyes off it. The peace. The illusion of peace in the city so many people wanted to call their home.

She wondered how long the illusion would last. There had already been 478 homicides in Los Angeles this year. With only eighteen days left on the calendar, she wondered if they’d beat five
hundred and expected that they probably would. Over the past eleven months, the prison population had reached 173,000 and become the twenty-fourth largest city in the state. Bigger than Pasadena,
even though it was a city without a name, a football game, or even its own parade.

She wondered if the illusion of peace had the power to last.

The heat clicked on, the newspaper sailing off the table from the outdoor breeze. Lena stepped inside and shut the slider. As she picked up the paper, she noticed a photograph she’d missed
on page three of the California section. A mansion in Beverly Hills was under a foot of snow. After thinking about what happened in Malibu last week, she started reading the article and realized
that the photograph wasn’t a result of the storm and hadn’t been doctored by a special-effects house in Burbank. The snow was part of the city’s grand illusion, manufactured and
blown over the house and yard because the owner was rich and he wanted to give his kids a white Christmas. Instead of spending the holiday in the mountains, the house and yard would be sprayed with
new snow every day at a cost of ten thousand dollars a pop. Lena did the math. The price tag for a white Christmas in Beverly Hills topped out at a cool $120,000. By all appearances, the illusion
everyone knew as L.A., and the insanity that went with it, remained intact.

Her cell phone began ringing from its charger on the counter. Turning over the newspaper, she got up and checked the display before picking up. It was her supervisor, Lt. Frank Barrera from the
Robbery-Homicide Division, calling on her day off.

“Good news, bad news,” he said. “You cool, Lena?”

“I’m good. What’s up? I can barely hear you.”

“Hold it a second. Let me close the door.”

Barrera was whispering. Lena spotted her coffee on the table and took another sip as she thought it over. Her supervisor’s desk sat out in the open at the head of the bureau floor. If he
needed to close a door, that meant he was in the captain’s office and didn’t want to be overheard.

For the past eight months, Lena had been fed a steady diet of Officer Involved Shooting cases. OIS investigations were time consuming, involved a lot of paperwork, and had nothing to do with why
she loved being a cop. Even worse, the orders to pull her out of the normal case rotation were coming directly from the chief’s office on the sixth floor. Lena understood that it was
political fallout, that she was being punished for how the Romeo murder case shook out. That the last domino to fall had worn a badge, and the department’s reputation had taken another hit.
But what troubled her most was that the OIS cases didn’t seem to have an end. The new chief Richard S. Logan, his adjutant Lt. Ken Klinger, and the bureaucrats on the sixth floor
couldn’t seem to let it go. After all this time she still didn’t have a partner. And she was beginning to worry that the rumors sweeping through the division might be true. That the
barrage of OIS cases would never end because they were waiting her out. Trying to make things hurt until she asked for a transfer, or even better, decided to quit.

Barrera came back on, his voice clearer but still anxious.

“Something’s come up,” he said. “A dead body in Hollywood.”

“Why me?”

“Because you’re close. The victim was found half a block north of Hollywood Boulevard. There’s an alley between Ivar and Cahuenga.”

“Behind Tiny’s.”

“That’s right. The alley behind the dive bar.”

Lena had started to reach for a pen, but stopped. There was no need to write down the location. She had worked out of Hollywood both as a cop and a detective before her promotion to the elite
Robbery-Homicide Division last February. She knew the neighborhood, even the bar and alley off Ivar. The crime scene was in the heart of the city, just one block west of Vine.

“Do we have a name?” she asked.

“I don’t have any details. All I know is that Hollywood’s already at the location, and that they’re gonna pass the case over to us.”

Barrera was an ally. Catching the tremor in his usually steady voice, she sat down on a stool at the counter. Homicide investigations were usually handled by detective bureaus at the local
level. For a crime to bounce up to RHD, the case was either high profile or particularly egregious.

“Why us, Frank?”

“It’s bad, Lena. Real bad. It’s a girl and she’s all fucked up.”

“So, after eight months I’m back in the rotation because I’m close.”

Barrera cleared his throat. “That’s the bad news. That’s the reason I called, Lena. The order came directly from the chief. I thought it was another OIS case like all the rest,
but this time it’s different.”

“Why?”

“That’s what got me thinking. Either he’s getting pressure from outside to use you, or it’s some kind of . . .”

Trap, Lena thought. Her lieutenant didn’t need to finish the sentence. She got it. The chief wanted her out and was hoping something might push her closer to the door. This case could be
the fucking door.

“What about a partner?” she asked.

“You’re on your own. I’ll make Sanchez and Rhodes available if you need them, but you’re flying solo. Your orders are to report directly to the chief and his
adjutant.”

“Klinger?”

“Yeah, Klinger. I just e-mailed you a copy of the chief’s schedule for the day. He wants to be briefed after you’ve had a look at the crime scene. Doesn’t matter what
time it is. He wants a report in person as soon as you’re done. Even if you’ve gotta wake him up in the middle of the fucking night, you need to show your face. You need to be
there.”

“I’m okay with that.”

“Lena.”

“Yeah?”

“I talked it over with Rhodes and told him not to bother you. But he’s thinking the same thing I am.”

“And what’s that?”

“This smell’s like yesterday’s catch.”

She turned away from the window and noticed that her fingers were trembling slightly.

“When I picked up, Frank, you said good news, bad news. When does it start to get good?”

He laughed, trying to cheer her up. “The crime scene’s in Hollywood. You used to work with Pete Sweeney. He’s your old partner, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, Sweeney and Banks got the call. They already know it’s your case. They’ll work the day with you, then back off. You cool?”

She nodded, then remembered that she was on the phone. She was thinking about the sixth floor at Parker Center and looking through the doorway at her gun on the bedside table. A Smith &
Wesson .45 semiautomatic. The sun was low in the December sky and had moved to the other side of the house. She could see the rays of light feeding through the window, her pistol awash in red and
gold. She had killed a man this year, in the line of duty. A shot made as she reached the end of the road. She thought about it every day, that view into the abyss.

“I’ll be fine,” she said.

Barrera lowered his voice. “Good,” he said. “Then go slow. Go safe. And keep me in the loop.”

L
ena tossed her briefcase
on the passenger seat, jumped into her Honda Prelude, and fired up the engine. Adjusting the
heat vents, she flipped the radio and found KROQ. But before she could even get the volume turned up, her cell phone began vibrating and she checked the display again. This time the news would be
wall-to-wall bad. The call was coming directly from Chief Logan’s office at Parker Center.

“This is Lieutenant Klinger, Gamble. Are you at the crime scene yet?” She shrugged. Klinger had to know that Barrera just made the call to her, so this wasn’t about
information. This was about something else.

“I’m leaving now, Lieutenant.”

“You need to hurry, Detective. Shift to a higher gear.”

This is the way it would be, she thought: Klinger and the sixth floor watching everything she did from a spot somewhere over
her shoulder. She wanted to tell him that there was no place in a murder investigation for micromanagers or know-it-alls. That crimes were created in the imagination and that’s where they
were solved. But she didn’t say anything at all. As she listened to Klinger repeat just about everything Barrera had said ten minutes ago, she realized how little she knew about the man.
Their paths rarely crossed. Klinger was about forty with fifteen years on the force. From what she’d heard around the division, he considered himself an expert at crime detection even though
he had little if any experience as an investigator in the field. Instead, Klinger spent most of his career working outside Parker Center for the Internal Affairs Group, renamed by Chief Logan and
placed under the supervision of the Professional Standards Bureau. There wasn’t a working cop in any division that didn’t have a natural distrust for IAG no matter what they called it
these days. And Lena was as surprised as everyone else that the chief made Klinger his adjutant when he took the job. The chief may have been drafted from another city, but he had to be aware that
the morale of the department was in play. No matter what Klinger’s talents might or might not be, it didn’t seem like the right move.

Her mind surfaced. Klinger had asked her a question, but all she caught was attitude.

“You there, Gamble? You still with me?”

“I’m here, Lieutenant.”

“Then answer the question. Do you have a copy of the chief’s itinerary or not?

“I’m all set,” she said.

“Then you know how to find us no matter what time it is. Get to the crime scene, Detective, and report back ASAP. The chief’s keeping a close eye on this one. He wants to be kept up
to speed on every aspect of the investigation. Is that clear? Every report. Every lead.”

“Is there something I should know, Lieutenant?”

He hesitated a moment, as if he hadn’t expected the question and was working from a script. “Every case matters,” he said finally. “This is no different than any other
investigation, Gamble.”

Lena understood what Klinger was saying because she lived it. But something in the adjutant’s voice didn’t ring true. Not by a long shot. It suddenly occurred to her why the chief
might be paying so much attention to this one.