City of Fire (15 page)

She knew that she was shaking. She also knew that she had never once fired her gun in the line of duty. That she had never killed a human being.

She grabbed the keys and checked the lock. Satisfied that the house was secure, she switched her light back on and retraced her steps into the front yard. As her car became visible in the mist, she thought about the drive home. Caffeine might not be working anymore, but that hot shot of adrenaline she’d just swallowed sure seemed to do the trick.

SHE heard the phone ringing from the counter between the kitchen and living room before she pulled the key from the lock.

Lena swung the front door closed, tossed the unread copy of the Saturday paper on a chair, and rushed across the room in the darkness. As she grabbed the cordless handset, she switched on a small table lamp set beside the phone’s cradle.

“Channel Four,” Novak said.

“I just got home. Hold on.”

She spotted the remote on the counter, hit the
POWER
button, and heard the TV fizz from the other side of the couch. When the screen lit up, she toggled up to Channel 4.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Just watch.”

Lena had missed the opening, but the story appeared to be a condensed version of the Nikki Brant murder. As the newsreader ran down the case, the station cut to close-up shots of the death house. The images must have been taken sometime after the investigation team had left the location and reopened the street. Recorded in daylight, the camera was set on the curb with strands of crime scene tape stretching across the frame.

Listening to the summary, Lena was surprised by the amount of detail the writers had been able to collect. It didn’t sound like a leak. The station had obviously jumped on the story and mirrored their own investigation. They had an approximate time of death. They knew where Nikki Brant
grew up, went to school, and how she met her husband. They’d found out where she worked and knew that she was pregnant. But they also knew about her marriage difficulties and that the murder had been particularly bizarre. For some reason, the report stopped short of its own obvious direction and didn’t point the finger at James Brant. Lena wondered if it was a result of Buddy Paladino working the press this afternoon with his cell phone.

She got her answer when the picture cut to a live feed. The newsreader’s case summary had only served to set the table for an exclusive interview by a reporter in the field. But the conversation wouldn’t be with Brant’s smooth-talking attorney. Instead, the reporter had uncovered a witness. A neighbor, George Smythe, who claimed that he’d seen James Brant park his car in the lot at Rustic Canyon Park and slip into the woods at 1:00 a.m. on the night of the murder.

Lena walked around the couch for a closer look at the witness.

Smythe was sitting in a chair on the front deck of his house, the community center in soft focus behind him. He was introduced as a screenwriter. Although Lena had never heard of or seen any of the films he wrote, Smythe lived across the street from the park and looked to be in his midthirties with light features and an intelligent face. As he spoke about sitting on the deck that night and watching Brant pull into the lot, she sifted through her memory of the preliminary reports and field interview cards she’d added to the murder book over the past twelve hours.

“I didn’t think anything of it at the time,” Smythe was saying. “When I woke up, his car was gone.”

The picture cut to another live shot from the parking lot. This time the camera was handheld, and Lena knew what they were going for. A shot of the death house through the trees from the murderer’s point of view. Unfortunately for the producers, the fog was so thick that the image didn’t render beyond a blurry, smoked-out screen. When they cut back to the studio, Lena muted the sound and spoke into the phone.

“We canvassed the entire neighborhood, Hank.”

“Maybe he wasn’t home at the time.”

“He was home,” she said. “An FI card was filed by a West L.A. officer knocking on doors. Smythe never mentioned that he saw Brant. I read his statement on the card. It’s in the murder book.”

“It probably didn’t register until he thought it over. I just wish we’d talked to him first. It might have been enough to hold Brant until Monday. He wouldn’t be on the streets.”

Deciding that this was as good a time as any, Lena told Novak about her encounter with Brant at the house. She didn’t embellish what happened, and she didn’t leave anything out. After she finished, Novak didn’t speak for a long time. When he finally did, all he wanted was verification that she was okay.

“What do you want to do about Smythe?” she asked.

“Rhodes worked the neighborhood when we left on Friday. He may have spoken to someone who knows Smythe. I think we should let him handle it in the morning.”

“You want me to make the call?”

“I’ll take care of it,” Novak said. “You deserve a decent night’s rest. Everybody does.”

“Hank?”

“What?”

“When did you know?”

“That it was Brant?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m not really sure,” he said. “This one’s not exactly off the lot, Lena. I guess the answer is late. Too late to have made a difference.”

He hung up. Lena clicked off her phone, then the TV, thinking it over. Novak sounded as disappointed as she was.

Too late to make a difference.

She unzipped her boots, pulled them off her aching heels, and tossed them onto the floor. She felt ragged. A notch or two beyond the dial. Still, she wasn’t sure she could really sleep. The shaking had stopped, but that anxious feeling in her chest had followed her home.

Too late to make a difference. The concept felt like a snake bite.

She got up and switched on the tuner, scanning through the albums loaded in her CD player before the murder. Classical probably wouldn’t be enough, and rock might sharpen the edge. Nothing jumped out at her as the way to go. She needed a jazz fix. But listening to CDs seemed too isolated, and 88.1 out of Long Beach was too far away to make the twisted climb through Hollywood Hills.

Her audio system was connected to the Internet via a cable modem. Firing up the monitor, she scrolled through her bookmarks until she found WRTI, a station she liked out of Philly. According to the playlist, a retrospective on partnerships would begin at the top of the hour. Ellington and Strayhorn. Parker and Gillespie. Until midnight, it would be Larry Coryell on guitar. Side 2 from
Barefoot Boy.

Her brother had the album on vinyl, but she hadn’t listened to it for a long time. When the music started, she adjusted the volume and headed for the kitchen.

Three bottles of chardonnay were left in the fridge from a case she’d bought six weeks ago at a warehouse on San Fernando Boulevard. Popping the cork, she poured a glass and took two quick sips. It was a good wine, Chardonnay–Les Pierres from Sonoma-Cutrer, and it tasted clean and particularly fine right now. As she savored the wine and listened to Coryell’s haunting rhythm build, she noticed the light blinking on her answering machine. She hit
PLAY
, recognized the caller, and would have smiled at the irony if she hadn’t been so tired. Tim Holt had been her brother’s best friend, played keyboard in the band, and cowrote many of their songs. She hadn’t heard from him in nearly six months.

“Hey, Lena, this is Tim. It’s been awhile. I’ve been out of town, but I’m back now and thought I’d try giving you a call. Maybe we could grab a bite to eat this week. I’d like to meet up and talk.”

The phone number he gave was new and she jotted it down. His voice sounded strong and she thought maybe he
was clean again. But she also guessed that Holt wasn’t calling just to catch up. Since her brother’s death, there had been many calls. Over the past couple of years they usually ended with a request to reopen the studio. Like her brother, Holt was convinced that the place offered a special sound. Lena wanted to help and felt guilty that she couldn’t. She considered Holt a good friend, but she wasn’t ready yet. The idea of hearing music, the thought of walking into the garage and seeing someone else on guitar, someone other than David at the mike, stirred up too many memories and brought back too much pain.

She finished off the wine, then filled a second glass to the top. Crossing into the bedroom, she peeled off her clothes, turned the shower on, and stepped beneath the warm spill. It was a long shower. One that lasted until the hot water ran out. Slipping into a T-shirt, she worked the hair dryer for as long as she could stand the noise. Then she carried her wineglass over to the bed and set it down beside her gun on the table. She cracked the window open, reminding herself as she always did to fix the small rip in the screen before switching off the lights. As she got under the covers and leaned against the cherry-wood headboard, she sipped her wine and looked outside. She was feeling it now. The grapes, the music, maybe even a deep sleep lurking at the end of the tunnel.

But the view from the window beside her bed was remarkable. Almost heavenly. The clouds had swept in from the ocean blanketing the city and filling the basin to the tip of the hill like a bowl of soup. The surface was below her, stretching as far as the eye could see and appearing soft but sturdy enough to walk on. Above the base of clouds, the full moon dangled hypnotically from a clear sky over the Westside.

She had never seen the marine layer roll in below eye level before. She had inherited the house, the room, even the bed she slept in, from her brother. She remembered him saying that he once saw this, too. That he stayed up all night, watching the moon burrow into the clouds from this very window, and waiting for the sun to pop through from the other side, on this very bed.

She took another sip of wine. Then another. Setting the glass down, she rested her head on the pillow and gazed outside again.

It wasn’t her confrontation with Brant that was keeping her awake, she decided. It was the fact that he tried to beat the box. That he thought he could lie and get away with it. When she caught him trying to break into the house, his explanation had come so effortlessly. So smooth and fast.

He wanted a change of clothes, he said. All he wanted was clean underwear and a fresh shirt.

Lena rolled over on her side, her face bathed in moonlight, thinking about the truth. She closed her eyes as a loose plan for tomorrow began to take shape, her mind untethered and ready to drift. She would get a couple of hours’ rest, she told herself. Then wake up early and drive out to the death house for another look on her own.

LENA slung her briefcase over her shoulder, pausing a moment by the car to take in the death house through the web of yellow tape. The trees were swaying from a cold offshore breeze, the sun leaking through the leaves and spilling as if from a kaleidoscope onto the lawn. But her eyes were fixed on the Sunday paper on the front doormat. It seemed so odd seeing the paper lie there. She wondered what the person was thinking when he delivered it to the crime scene. Maybe he heaved it from the car without looking, or maybe he made the delivery as some kind of sick joke.

She checked her watch. It was 7:25 a.m. Somehow she’d managed to get five hours of dreamless sleep and felt revived. She was ready, she decided, mentally prepared for what lay ahead.

She crossed the street and stepped beneath the tape. When she reached the front door, she dug into her pocket and fished out the key ring. Brant had taken the car key with him last night. Six keys remained, and she worked through them until the lock finally clicked.

She pushed the door open and heard the hinge creak. Then she picked up the newspaper and stepped inside, greeted by the oppressive smell of Nikki Brant’s tainted blood. In spite of the chilly air, the foul odor had permeated the entire house. Lena ignored it, closing the door and setting the newspaper down on the kitchen table, along with her briefcase.

Brant had tried to break into the house last night, claiming that he only wanted a change of clothes. The more Lena
thought it over, the more his explanation troubled her. But what was he looking for? His computer had been taken to Parker Center. The murder weapon was already logged into evidence, and the investigation team had spent most of Friday searching the house.