Buried Evidence (44 page)

She should have grown up the way he had, he thought with bitterness, having to steal to buy his brothers and sisters food, his mother beating him relentlessly until his back had become permanently scarred
.

Switches—that was what his mother used to beat him with—big, skinny sticks torn from the tree out back. First it was the closet, the dark stinking closet. He had sat in there for hours and cried, beating the door until his hands were bloody and raw. But when she opened the door, it was worse because she had the switches. Over the commode…she made him bend over the
open, reeking toilet with his shirt off. And she whipped and whipped him, screaming that she wouldn’t stop until he quit crying. She had been a liar. Even when he quit crying, she never stopped. She didn’t stop until blood dripped from his back onto the filthy, cracked linoleum. Then she made him mop it up, scrub and scrub until it was clean
.

He could still smell the awful stuff she had put on her hair. The stuff to make it red. It smelled so awful that his eyes would burn. He had loved her long black hair that hung all the way to her hips—before the switches and the beatings. He used to braid it for her. He’d stand behind her on a stool and gather it gently in his hands
.

After she made her hair red, she started staying out all night and sleeping all day. She stopped making them food. Sometimes she’d walk in the door with a sack and they thought it was food, but it wasn’t. She’d throw a few dollar bills on the table and leave every night. He’d walk alone to the store and try to buy enough for them all to eat, but he never had enough money
.

M
ARK OSBORNE
had taken Tuesday off, as his mother was ill in San Diego. Hope Carruthers was eager to make at least some progress toward resolving the Forrester homicide by the time the detective returned to work the next day. This was her first major homicide investigation, and she wanted to prove that she could handle such a difficult assignment.

Due to the pressure from various high-placed officials, the crime lab in Los Angeles had pushed the Forrester homicide to the top of their list of priorities. The medical examiner’s officer, however, didn’t care whose body they had on ice. They could perform only so many autopsies in one day. In a city the size of Los Angeles, if the medical examiner’s office succumbed to demands from anyone other than their own director, the end results would be worthless in a court of law.

“The fingerprints,” Hope said, speaking to the expert at the lab. “Surely you’ve done a work-up on those by now. The killer
left at least one complete set of prints that could be seen with the naked eye. My guess is he left prints all over that garage.”

“Hold on,” Chan Lee said, “I think I do have something for you.”

Hope tapped her fingernails on her desk while she was waiting. At least the hit-and-run had been cleared. Whoever had killed Forrester had put one case to bed. John Forrester had been tanked to the gills the night of his death, so in that respect alone, Hope had ruled out Shana Forrester as a suspect. Then the night before, a young couple had appeared at the station after seeing Forrester’s picture in the newspaper, advising that they had seen him the night of the accident at the Ralph’s supermarket only a few blocks from the Baskin-Robbins where the accident had occurred.

“Detective Carruthers,” Lee said, coming back on the line, “we do have a positive match on the fingerprint samples. The man’s name is Marco Curazon. He’s in the system as a recent parolee. Would you like me to give you his federal ID number?”

“Yes,” she said, scribbling it down on a yellow pad. “Let us know as soon as anything else develops.”

Hope immediately put in a call to the number she had for Lily Forrester, but all she got was her voice mail. She tried contacting her at the D.A.’s office in Santa Barbara and was told that she’d requested a leave of absence. Lily and her daughter’s suspicion that Marco Curazon had been stalking them had not been a figment of their imagination. Unfortunately, no one had been able to do anything about it until Curazon committed another crime, a situation that occurred all too frequently.

Hope assumed that John must have surprised Curazon while he was hiding out in the garage. She had no doubt that his intended victim had been Shana. The girl had narrowly escaped another meeting with her attacker. From the number and ferocity of the stab wounds inflicted on her father, Curazon’s appetite for violence had surpassed the crime of rape.

She called central dispatch, instructing them to enter Curazon into the national system, emphasizing that he was armed and dangerous. They would also notify the parole authorities, although
the only assistance they generally provided at this stage were possible leads garnered from other parolees.

Hope placed her head in her hands. She was concerned that Lily and her daughter had stopped answering their phone because they were attempting to avoid the media. Typing in the address she had for Lily into her computer, she printed out the directions and grabbed her cell phone, deciding to drive to Santa Barbara herself.

As the detective made her way out of the building, her tendency to favor her left leg was more pronounced than most days. When the weather changed, the steel plate the doctors had inserted to repair the damage from the gunshot wound expanded, making walking even short distances extremely painful. She refused to take pills beyond aspirin. She’d seen too many injured officers become addicted to either painkillers or alcohol, some even resorting to street drugs. Her own role as a victim caused her to identify with Shana Forrester. She knew if Osborne had been on duty, he would have insisted that she merely contact the local authorities in Santa Barbara. In that respect, Hope was glad he wasn’t around. The Santa Barbara police would be notified to be on the lookout for Curazon by the dispatchers, but she personally wanted to tell Shana that they had identified the man who had murdered her father.

Once Hope was in her police unit and on the freeway, she couldn’t stop thinking of the night of the crime, how Osborne had left a nineteen-year-old girl alone in an interview room for three hours, only to walk in and tell her that her father had been murdered. She admired the detective as an investigator, and had learned a great deal in the short time they had worked together, yet in some areas his personality bordered on cruelty. Perhaps, she told herself, his insensitivity had grown out of years of working homicide. She was determined that she would never become hardened to the feelings of others simply because she had chosen to enter law enforcement.

Hitting a wall of rush-hour traffic, she decided what the hell, and slapped her light on top of the unmarked car, watching as the speedometer hit eighty, then ninety, slowing down only when
she reached the outskirts of Santa Barbara. Just as she’d roared past Ventura, the sky had opened up and it had started pouring. She’d heard on the news that they were expecting a major storm sometime that evening. It looked as if it had arrived earlier than predicted.

Lightning zigzagged across the sky, followed immediately by a loud clap of thunder. Her father had been a simple, wise man. He’d owned and operated his own landscape business. She’d grown up in El Paso in a comfortable home, and her father had managed to put all five of his children through college, a substantial feat that had never been accomplished by anyone else in the Cortez family. She remembered when she was a child and how terrified she used to be when it thundered. Her father would lovingly pull her onto his lap, telling her that thunder was only the sound the gods made when they went bowling.

Flicking on her dome light, Hope checked for the exit leading to Lily’s house. The area she lived in was heavily wooded, and there were very few streetlights. She circled around for at least fifteen minutes, then suddenly stopped and backed up, realizing she had driven past the address twice without noticing. The rain was coming down in solid sheets. Pulling into the driveway, she saw lights burning in the rear of a large Tudor mansion. The house didn’t appear to have a garage, therefore, Hope assumed that they must have converted it into a guest cottage. Two cars were parked in the driveway, both of them covered. On the opposite side of the house, closer to the guest house, she saw another car, but with the rain it was difficult to make out the model. The car looked new, so she assumed it was Lily’s and not that of a caretaker.

Hope pulled into the driveway and parked. She wondered if she had an umbrella in the trunk. Rubbing her hands together to warm them, she gazed at the big house, thinking it must be worth at least a million if not more. She knew Lily was divorced, and even though a prosecutor’s salary was slightly higher than a detective’s, she wondered how she could afford such an expensive home. Retrieving the newspaper she had tossed in the backseat
that morning, she stepped out, placing the paper over her head rather than try to find an umbrella.

The rain was coming down so hard now that even the walkway leading to the front of the house had turned into a slippery mess of mud. She almost fell several times, and wondered why there weren’t more lights along the walkway. A strange sensation came over her. She stopped and turned around, seeing something moving near the guest cottage. She reminded herself that she wasn’t in Los Angeles. Santa Barbara wasn’t that populated, at least not in this particular area. She could have seen a coyote, or a possum, some type of wild animal. Foxes were fairly common in the area, someone had told her once.

Turning back toward the front of the house, she heard another noise. Opening her purse, she pulled out her gun and released the safety, letting the newspaper flutter off in the wind.

It all happened in what seemed like seconds. Curazon charged her like a linebacker, knocking her to the ground. Her gun flew out of her hand. He sat on her chest, pinning her hands over her head. She screamed, staring up at the same horrid image Shana Forrester had seen the night she was raped.

D
etectives Jameson and O’Malley walked out the front entrance of the Ventura county government center at approximately four o’clock Tuesday afternoon, a signed warrant for the arrest of Lily Forrester in their hands. “Are you certain you want to drive to Santa Barbara tonight in this rain?” O’Malley asked, standing under the overhang for the building. “Forrester may not even be at her place. Since she’s not answering her home phone, Fred, why go on a wild goose chase? A stretch of the 101 freeway just outside of Santa Barbara washed out last year.”

“You really are over the hill,” Jameson said, scowling as they hurried to their car, both of them huddling under the same umbrella. “Do you know how long I’ve waited to bust this broad, O’Malley? I’d drive five hundred miles to see the look on her face when we slap a pair of handcuffs on her.”

“What do you think about her daughter strolling into Butler’s office and trying to convince him she killed Hernandez?”

Jameson snorted. “Proves my point, doesn’t it? Not only did Lily do the deed, if you ask me, both her and her daughter are psycho. Butler had to call security on the girl. He was sure she was going to attack him.”

Locating their unmarked Chrysler in the parking lot, they ducked inside, then continued their conversation. “Frank Pearlman thinks it might be a major problem,” O’Malley told him. “We’ve got to track down some of those witnesses you promised him, as well as that tape you made of your conversation with John Forrester. Pearlman is afraid of putting the kid on the stand.”

“We’ll find it,” Jameson said. “Just because Cunningham couldn’t find some of the evidence doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. I know the tape is there, because I saw it. Besides, I called from
the department phone. All the calls are recorded. It just takes a long time to find what you need. As soon as we track down Lily, we can start picking through the evidence boxes again.”

When they finally made their way to Santa Barbara, not only had the storm increased in strength, Jameson turned too fast and they got stuck in a ditch about a block from Lily’s residence.

“You’re the biggest jackass I’ve ever met,” O’Malley said, getting out to push the car. “I told you we should have waited until tomorrow morning.”

“Just push,” Jameson said, grunting. “I thought this was supposed to be a fancy neighborhood. There’s potholes in the street, no lights, and I feel like I’m lost in some kind of maze.”

O’Malley stopped, opened the trunk, and removed a rag to wipe his hands. He pulled his jacket away from his body, his clothes soaked. “This car isn’t going to budge,” he told his partner. “You’re going to have to get a tow truck out here.”

“Call the local P.D.,” Jameson said, “tell them to send a truck from their yard and pull the car out. According to my directions, the house is only a block away. By the time we pop Lily, we’ll be ready to head back to Ventura and book her into the jail.”

Keith O’Malley shined his flashlight in Jameson’s face. “You son of a bitch,” he shouted over the rain. “You purposely planned it so she’d have to spend the night in jail.”

Jameson smiled. “I’m really God, right? I planned the storm and everything.”

“No, idiot,” O’Malley said, deciding he never wanted to work with Jameson again. “That’s why you forced me into coming up here this late.”

A gust of wind swept down from the canyons, and Jameson’s umbrella disappeared. He pulled his jacket closed around his body and continued walking.

T
HE STORM
had given Hope a momentary reprieve.

She had been certain Curazon was going to kill her when he first attacked her, but the torrents of rain had caused his knife to fall out of his waistband. He released one of her hands, feeling
on the ground, thinking he would either find his blade or her gun. Because he had moved several inches forward, Hope raised her right knee and slammed it into his groin. Curazon’s abdominal muscles contracted from the pain. He seized a handful of her hair. Hope managed to shove him off her and scramble to her feet. While Curazon was shouting profanities and rolling from side to side on the soggy grass, a flash of lightning illuminated the sky, and she suddenly saw her gun on the stone pathway a few feet away.