Bleeding Out (8 page)

The detectives spent the morning showing Polaroids of the girl’s face to everyone at the school, but they didn’t get one good hit. She was pretty battered, though, so chances were they wouldn’t have gotten an ID anyway. Missing Persons records were no help this time. They broke for lunch around one o’clock, ordering gorditas and tacos at the taqueria next to the school. The school kids didn’t like all the heat around; they ate across the street at the burger place. Frank was feeling human again. She munched on fried pork between two soft corn tortillas, wondering why these girls were being dumped in front of schools. If it was the same guy, she reminded herself. So far they had nothing but speculation to go on. Frank glanced at her watch. She was waiting for Crocetti’s call. His prelim would tell them more about any similarities between this case and Agoura’s.

She was anxious for the ID on the vie, too. Handley had rolled her fingers, promising to have Frank paged as soon as the prints were run. She was wadding up the paper her tacos came in when her pager went off. She nudged her jacket aside with an elbow and glanced at the number. It was the coroner’s office. She returned the call.

“Hey, Lieutenant,” Handley bragged, “I’ve got a name for your girl.”

“Tell me.”

“Jennifer Peterson. DOB: 1/5/82.” Handley paused.

Frank asked, “Address?”

Handley gave it to her. She thanked him tersely and hung up. She called the operator and referenced the phone number. When Frank tried it, all she got was the answering machine. She identified herself and told the machine she had some information about Jennifer Peterson that she needed to discuss with her parents. No one picked up.

Frank grabbed Noah. “Let’s go for a drive.”

She filled him in as they drove west on Manchester Boulevard to Sepulveda. The address took them to a tired house in Culver City bordered by frayed banana trees and overgrown bougainvillea. It looked tropical despite the spitting sky and sixty-degree weather. When their knock went unanswered, they split up to talk to the neighbors. Two houses down, the harassed mother of three preschoolers told Noah that Jennifer Peterson babysat for her. Her mother’s name wasn’t Peterson, it was Wyche, Delia Wyche, and she was a nurse at Brotman Memorial. She wasn’t sure where the husband worked, but he was home a lot. Jennifer called him the grease monkey and didn’t care much for him.

Noah thanked the woman, then flagged Frank back to the car. At Brotman, a meticulously dressed man in personnel confirmed there was a Delia Wyche, R.N., on staff. Frank asked him to page Wyche’s supervisor, and he balked that it wasn’t his job. Noah grinned as Frank leaned within inches of the fey young man and asked, “Have you ever had a nine-millimeter revolver shoved up your ass?”

Maybe because he saw Noah grinning, maybe because he was suicidal, maybe because he was more ballsy than smart, he swallowed hard and retorted, “No, but I think I’d like it.”

That was absolutely the wrong thing to say. Before the clerk could even flinch Frank had his perfect Windsor knot clenched in her bad hand and twisted tight under his Adam’s apple. Noah’s smile had faded, and suddenly the clerk didn’t feel so brave.

He tried to squeak “police brutality,” but Frank tightened her grip, her blazing eyes still only inches from his. Blood started oozing through her bandage.

“Okay, funny boy. Are you going to call Mrs. Wyche’s supervisor or do I charge you with refusing to cooperate with a peace officer and obstructing justice?”

He weakly shook his head.

“You going to help me?”

He nodded.

“Good boy.”

Frank let go and the man wheeled his chair farther from Frank’s grasp. Noah pulled a quarter out of his pocket and tossed it into the clerk’s lap.

“That’s for later. After you call Mrs. Wyche’s supervisor you can call LAPD and register a formal complaint about her. But you’ll have to be patient. There’s a lot of people in line ahead of you.”

Frank turned her back and glanced at the fresh blood on her gauzed hand. Noah’s gaze followed, and he asked what she’d done.

“Cut it,” she said flatly and stepped out into the hallway. When Noah followed, he said softly, “You shouldn’t have roughed him up like that.”

Frank’s head jerked toward Noah. Her eyes were bottomless blue chasms that a man could fall into and never be heard from again.

“Don’t even start with me.”

He flashed his palms in a peaceful gesture.

“Alright. I’m just saying if something’s bugging you—”

“Nothing’s bugging me.”

“Alright. Okay.”

Frank had unconsciously turned to face her partner in a fighter’s stance, and Noah bowed his head, backing off. The LAPD’s reputation for unnecessary aggression was well-founded, but Frank’s presence was usually intimidating enough to get what she wanted out of a wit or a suspect. She rarely engaged someone physically, especially just a cluck-headed desk boy, and she was embarrassed that she’d lost her temper.

The nurse supervisor arrived, and Noah explained without detail about Delia Wyche’s daughter. The supervisor went back down the hall to retrieve her employee as Frank asked the clerk for Mrs. Wyche’s next of kin. She was promptly, silently handed a slip of paper with a name and number on it. The clerk eyed Frank warily, making sure he was well away from her reach. It occurred to her to apologize to the little bastard, but she didn’t.

Frank glanced at the clock on the wall, wondering where the hell Wyche was. Noah’d been done with his shift hours ago. Frank felt a flicker of remorse for her behavior, but that reminded her of the dream and she quickly focused on the square yellow paper in her hand. She joined Noah, who was still waiting in the hallway. He was leaning against the wall, chewing on a nail. His suit was wrinkled and a tad short at the ankles and wrists.

“Anybody have a game today?”

“Naw. Just practice.”

“You should call Tracey.”

“She won’t be home ‘til later. I’ll call after we do Wyche.”

“You don’t have to go the morgue. I’ll take care of it.”

Noah absently flapped one of his boney hands.

“It ain’t no thing. Besides,” he tried to joke, “the last thing I wanna do is leave you alone with a bereaved parent.” Frank didn’t smile. They were both relieved when the supervisor led Delia Wyche down the hallway. She took them to an office where they could talk, but before Frank had finished the introductions, Mrs. Wyche interrupted with the practiced snort of the chronically bitter.

“What’s Jennie done now?”

Frank herded the heavy-hipped woman into a seat, explaining that they had a few questions. She wasn’t avoiding telling the woman about her daughter, but it would be easier to get answers from her before she was too upset.

“Mrs. Wyche, is Jennifer Peterson your daughter?”

“‘Fraid so. What did she do?” the woman repeated suspiciously.

Frank ignored her, asking when she’d last seen Jennifer.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said offhandedly. “Maybe three, four days ago. Let’s see, it must have been Sunday because she didn’t come home for dinner. I remember because I went to a lot of trouble to make something she and Randy both like—Randy’s my husband. He’s not Jennie’s father. I made pork chops. I try to make something they both like or else one of them bitches all through dinner and ruins everyone else’s appetite. They never seem—”

Noah interrupted her.

“So you haven’t seen Jennifer for three days?”

“That’s right.”

“And you weren’t concerned about that?”

“Detective, you’ve got to understand, Jennie pulls stunts like this all the time. At first I was concerned, but when they started happening on a regular basis I just quit worrying. She always comes home sooner or later.”

Not this time, Frank thought, and asked what it was that started happening on a regular basis.

Delia Wyche gathered her patience with a large sigh and explained, “When she started running off. The first time was three years ago, right after I remarried. She and Randy don’t get along so good—she ran away to show me how unhappy she was. She did it a couple of times after that. I was worried in the beginning, but she’s always just at a friend’s house. I finally figured, let her knock herself out. I don’t have time to chase her all over.”

“Mrs. Wyche, can you tell us exactly when you last saw your daughter?”

“Well, yeah I can, but what’s this all about? What sort of detectives are you anyway?”

Frank again ignored the questions and drilled the woman with a pitiless gaze.

“Mrs. Wyche, what was your daughter doing the last time you saw her?”

Mrs. Wyche wiggled uncomfortably in her chair. When she answered, her voice was tinged with a whine.

“The last time I saw her was in the kitchen. I was doing the dishes—God forbid she or Randy should do them—and she came in to make herself a sandwich. She’d just gotten up, and she had her backpack with her. I asked her where she thought she was going, and she said to the park. Then I—”

“Which park?”

“The one off Jefferson, by all the oil derricks. It gives me the—”

“Do you mean the Culver City Park? With the ball fields?”

“I guess. It’s the one off Duquesne, right off Jefferson,” she said impatiently.

“Alright, then what?”

“I asked her about her homework, which she’d been putting off all weekend, and she asked what did I think she had in her pack? Then when I asked why she had to go to the park to study, she started bitching about the noise Randy was making in the garage.”

“What was he doing?”

“Shoot, I don’t know. He’s got an old jeep he’s always tinkering with. It hasn’t run since I’ve known him, but you’d think with all the time he spends on that thing he had it in the Indy 500 every weekend.”

She paused, searching for a glimpse of sympathy from either detective and finding none.

“You know I still don’t know what you—”

“Just a few more questions, Mrs. Wyche. What happened next?”

“I don’t know…nothing I think. I didn’t want to listen to her and Randy going at it all day so I just let her go.”

“How did she get there?”

“The bus. She takes it everywhere.”

“Did she go to the park often?”

The woman nodded, then realized Noah had referred to her daughter in the past tense. When she asked again what her daughter had done, it was with a genuine note of concern in her voice. Frank had been standing near the door, letting Noah ask most of the questions. Now she crossed the small room and sat on the arm of the empty chair next to Delia Wyche.

“Mrs. Wyche,” she said, as gently as one could say such a thing, “Jennifer is dead.”

“No,” she chuckled, “you’ve got somebody else’s Jennifer. Mine couldn’t possibly be dead.”

She turned her head, smiling at Noah as if in confirmation of this very simple error, and when he didn’t smile she looked back at Frank. The detectives could see comprehension slowly sinking in around the shock of the words. She shook her head.

“How do you know it’s Jennie?” she whispered.

“Fingerprints. But we’d like you to come to the morgue with us to confirm that,” Frank said, still gentle.

Her last sentence penetrated the shock, and Mrs. Wyche broke down in huge, gulping sobs. Noah offered the wad of tissues he always carried for such occasions, as Frank left the room to call Delia Wyche’s husband.

Foubarelle finally caught up to Frank in her office the next day. She was knocking back a bottle of water and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand, characteristically unfeminine, characteristically Frank.

“I understand we have an ID on the girl at Carver.”

Frank confirmed that, and Foubarelle complained that he always had to hear his information secondhand.

“We got with the mother at the morgue kind of late last night. I wanted to wait until she’d ID’d her but I didn’t want to disturb you.”

Foubarelle hated being bothered once he’d left the office. He didn’t press the issue.

“So what have we got?”

Frank filled him in. When she was finished, he said, “Any word on the autopsy yet?”

“Crocetti’s going to cut her. Hopefully first thing this morning.”

“He said it looked similar to that girl we found at Crenshaw.”

Frank almost snapped,
Great. Now Crocetti’s a detective,
but she checked her temper. When she didn’t respond, Foubarelle said impatiently, “Well? What do you think?”

Frank was debating how to tell him the truth without getting him too excited. She didn’t want this case, or Agoura’s, walking out the door to Robbery-Homicide. If Foubarelle was nervous about it he’d send it up in a blink. Both cases had drawn media attention, but fortunately the public didn’t seem to notice. If Frank could keep a lid on them, she’d be alright. RHD only wanted high publicity, politically sensitive cases, and Foubarelle only wanted to ditch the ones he thought might make him look bad.

“I think it’s possible.”

“Shit.” Foubarelle wiped his hand over his eyes. “Level with me, Frank. How big is this?”

Frank shrugged. Even Foubarelle had to see the deep-shit potential here. Despite her own qualms she assured him, “We can handle it.”

“That doesn’t tell me anything.”

“Are you going to toss it to RHD?”

“If we’re in over our heads, yes. If you think we can handle it, no.”

Foubarelle crossed his arms and waited for her answer. He was putting the decision in Frank’s hands. She really had to admire his spinelessness.

“It could be an impressive coup,” she countered, throwing the ball back into his court.

“How confident are you?”

“We don’t even know if this is the same perp yet. Assuming it is, he’s got to slip sooner or later. All we need is some time.”

“Give me an estimate.”

“I can’t,” Frank sighed, “you know that. But we’ve got more on him than anyone else does.”

“Oh really? Like what?”

Simply, with no trace of pretension, Frank said, “Me.”

He became a fearsome football player. Even the kids on his own team were afraid of him. He didn’t respect pain or fear and couldn’t understand it in others. The coach frequently had to take him aside and point out that they just wanted players temporarily stopped, not maimed for life. He tried to control himself, but it felt so good to let go on the field. It was the only place he ever felt safe. He was in control out there: just him and the ball and bodies to block and slam into and hurt. He loved hurting the other players, and in a contact sport
—
if he was careful
—
he could get away with it. Yet, as satisfying as it was to see a kid writhing on the field with a torn kneecap or snapped ankle, there was still something missing.