City of Fire (43 page)

“What about her name?” Lena asked. “Do all her friends call her Harry?”

“Everybody except Martin.”

“Why doesn’t Martin?”

“I’m not sure. He’s the boss. He goes by the book.”

“What’s he call you?”

Tomoca turned to her. “Number Three,” he whispered.

“Why Number Three?”

“We don’t get along very well.”

“What about Martin and Harry?”

“I’m the third wheel,” Tomoca said.

Novak coughed. Lena glanced at him, catching the look as he pulled out his notebook and pen. While she spoke with Tomoca, her partner would listen and take notes as he looked around. She turned back to the biologist.

“Have they got something going?” she asked.

Tomoca laughed. “They like each other. Martin has a crush on her, but I’m not sure it goes both ways.”

“Why do you say that?”

Tomoca shrugged. Lena thought about the cane Harriet Wilson kept by her bed.

“Does it have something to do with her disability?” she asked.

“Harry’s got a limp, but I wouldn’t call that a disability. She’s a knockout.”

“Would you mind if I had a look inside her desk?”

“Go ahead. We keep company secrets locked up in the filing cabinets over there.”

Lena looked around the lab for Novak. She had seen him make a quick sweep of the room. Now he was standing by the glass doors, gazing into the greenhouse. She moved around the desk and began sifting through the drawers. Everything seemed innocuous enough. When she found the woman’s day planner, she opened it on the desk.

“Who runs the greenhouse?” Novak asked.

Tomoca swiveled his chair around. “We do.”

“Do you keep maintenance records?”

Lena looked up from the day planner. It wasn’t Novak’s question. It was the way he asked it. The precision in his voice.

“Maintenance is handled by a variety of outside firms,” Tomoca said. “We keep records of their hours so accounting can check them against their invoices.”

“What about Global?” Novak said. “Did you have any trouble with the plumbing last month?”

“We’ve had a lot of problems with the irrigation nozzles. It would be on my computer. Let me check.”

Lena turned sharply, her view of the greenhouse obscured by Novak’s back. But as one of the men wearing blue overalls knelt down, she got a look at the company logo embroidered on his shirt. Teresa Lopez worked for Global Kitchen & Bath, a plumbing supply house located in Whittier. When they’d gone through the company files and pieced together her last week of life, there was no record of Lopez ever working for the Dreggco Corporation.

“I found it,” Tomoca said. “March third. It was a freebie, so it never went to accounting. We had a problem and Martin told me to call Global. I guess they were afraid of losing the contract. Someone stopped by to help us out.”

Novak finally turned away from the greenhouse and shot Lena a look, his eyes sparkling. Teresa Lopez had been murdered on March 3.

“Would you remember who?” Novak asked.

“Not really. That’s the problem. Global always sends somebody different out.”

Lena turned back to Tomoca, measuring her breathing. The lab had gone electric. The air, thin as on a mountaintop.

“How about printing us a copy of that,” she said.

The biologist nodded. When the printer fired up, he shut the program down and another window popped up. Tomoca was logged on to the Internet. He had been eating lunch and going through e-mails when they came in.

“Do you spend a lot of time on the Web?” she asked.

“No more than I have to.”

“Do you know a woman named Candy Bellringer?”

Her question had a certain punch to it. Tomoca blushed, fighting off a smile and averting his eyes.

“Why are you embarrassed?” she asked.

“Because you’re talking about Harry,” he said quietly. “You’re asking about her secret.”

“Then you know about the Web site.”

He nodded. “Harry thinks it’s still a big secret. She wears that wig and makeup and thinks nobody can tell who she really is.”

“Who else knows?”

“Everybody.”

It hung there. Now she knew why Bellringer’s hits on the Web site were coming out of L.A. Everybody in the company was watching her. Everybody knew.

She turned back to Tomoca. “What about your supervisor? It sounds like he’s wrapped a little tight.”

“Martin was the last to find out.”

“How did he take it?”

“Not very well,” Tomoca said. “He got angry and everybody laughed.”

Lena thought it over for a moment, then leaned forward. “So Martin had a crush on Harry. Who gave him the news that she was living a double life?”

“The same guy who found the Web site. The guy who spread the news.”

“And who’s that?”

Tomoca grimaced. “James Brant.”

A long moment passed as Brant’s name settled into the room. A stillness. A motive for murder finally revealed. She met Novak’s eyes. They had found the nexus. The core. The white heat burning at the end of the road.

She turned back to Tomoca, her voice easy and dead calm. “You told us Martin’s at lunch. Any idea where he went? He might be able to help us find Harry. We’d like to speak with her as soon as we can.”

Tomoca didn’t say anything. Instead, he got up from his desk, walked over to Harry’s lab table, and yanked open the top drawer. When he returned, he tossed a menu on the desk.

“Martin eats at the same place every day. The Pink Canary. It’s that Italian place at the beach.”

“He goes with Harry,” Lena said.

“No. I think he meets a friend.”

“Who?”

Tomoca shrugged. “I don’t know his name, but I’m pretty sure it’s a guy.”

“How will we know it’s Martin?” she asked. “What’s he look like?”

Tomoca thought it over, then returned to his computer and clicked through a number of windows until he reached the company’s Web site. Glancing at the home page, he highlighted the words
WHO WE ARE
. A moment later, a photograph rendered on the monitor. A team shot of every employee standing in front of the building. Lena consumed the image in a single bite as the molecular biologist pointed at the screen.

“He’s that tall guy on the end,” Tomoca said. “The one with the shaved head.”

HE was sitting at a table set for two beneath a palm tree. He was alone.

In spite of the dark glasses, Lena could feel his eyes on her as they moved down the sidewalk toward the diner. Not on Novak. He was craning his neck and staring at her, almost as if he couldn’t control himself. Almost as if they were the only two people in a world that had stopped spinning and flamed out.

The feeling was incredibly uncomfortable. Something that gained momentum with each step she took, digging beneath her skin and infecting her soul.

Romeo. Ten feet away. Staring at her as if she was prey.

They entered the Pink Canary and grabbed a pair of seats at the counter. When Lena gazed into the mirror and found Martin Fellows, she realized that he hadn’t turned away. He was still eyeing her through the window.

“You catching this?” she whispered.

“I’m catching it,” Novak said. “I wonder where his friend is.”

She glanced about the diner, checking faces and trying to pick out the one that might fit. It was a loud place, filled with regulars from the neighborhood. A man was standing against the wall, waiting to use the restroom. Another was by the cash register.

She turned back to the mirror, zeroing in on Martin Fellows. There was a rawness about the odd-looking man. A
visible edge. Even though he was seated and fully dressed, she could tell that he was in extraordinarily good shape. She measured the width of his shoulders, his biceps, the muscles in his neck. His strength was too well defined to come from sports. It had to come from a gym.

“How do you want to handle this?” she said.

“I want to see who he eats lunch with.”

“I mean after that?”

“I don’t know. The clock’s ticking. Harriet Wilson could still be alive, but we don’t have enough to make the arrest.”

The words hung there. Out in the open and clear enough to see. Their identification of Romeo was pieced together by circumstance. A mutated gene, delta 32, had kicked off the process. Someone in Romeo’s family tree had survived the Black Plague, so they knew they were looking for a Caucasian. The rest came from bits and pieces of statements from rape victims, but no hard evidence linked the sexual assaults to the murders that had begun last month. Now they had the Dreggco Corporation and its connection to Charles Burell’s Web site. If James Brant had told them what he’d done to Fellows the night they interviewed him, she and Novak would probably have been sitting here a day or two sooner. But that wouldn’t have changed anything. They would still be facing the same problem. They had their man. And now they needed his DNA.

Someone tapped a pen against the counter. It was the waitress, an old, round woman sizing Lena up and stealing peeks at her badge and gun.

“You two working or are you gonna eat lunch?” the old woman asked.

Novak ordered a Diet Coke and said he hadn’t looked at the menu yet. Lena thought about coffee, but was too revved up and ordered a glass of water instead.

“The water’s no good here,” the waitress said. “You can still wash clothes with it, but you can’t drink it. Bottled water’s the only thing we’ve got. That okay with you?”

Lena nodded. When the waitress left, she looked back at
the mirror. Fellows had begun eating his lunch. And it wasn’t a sandwich, but something that required a fork. If he left it behind, they could rush it down to the lab.

“There’s something going on with his sunglasses,” she said.

“They’re not the kind you’d find at a drugstore, are they.”

“More like a doctor’s office after an eye exam.”

“But he didn’t come from a doctor’s office,” Novak said.

The door to the restroom finally swung open and a man stepped out. He appeared to be about thirty with a lean figure and long, dark hair. As he stood in the middle of the floor and looked out the window, Lena followed his gaze—not to Fellows, but to a young woman skating down the sidewalk on Rollerblades. Once she vanished, the man returned to his seat at the counter.

Novak shook his head and gave her a look. Then the waitress returned with their drinks.

“Can I ask you a question?” he said to the woman.

“Take me, I’m yours,” she fired back.

Novak winced, then pointed at Fellows’s reflection in the mirror. “Somebody told us that guy eats lunch with a friend.”

The old woman gazed into the mirror. “Who are you pointing at?”

“The guy with the shaved head.”

She found his image, then crinkled her nose. “Two Lunch?”

“That’s what we heard,” Novak said.

“Well, you heard it wrong. Two Lunch doesn’t have any friends. At least no one I’ve ever seen.”

“Why do you call him Two Lunch?” Lena asked.

“Because he’s got a big appetite and he likes my food. We might laugh at him more than we should, but he’s not bothering nobody and we leave him alone.”

The old woman walked off. Lena glanced at Novak, then swiveled her stool around and looked directly out the window. Fellows had shaken a pill onto his palm and was studying it. After a few moments, he decided he didn’t want or need the med and returned it to the bottle.

“If I don’t take my medication,” she whispered, “then I’m not sick.”

“What are we dealing with, Lena?”

“Someone with issues.”

Novak’s eyes narrowed and his jaw stiffened. “He’s on the move.”

She jerked her head around and saw the empty table. Fellows had packed his lunch and was hurrying up the sidewalk. Novak threw a $5 bill on the counter and they rushed for the door.

“We may not have enough to arrest him,” Lena said, “but we’ve got enough for a search warrant.”

FELLOWS ripped open the leather briefcase and fished out a plastic bag. He needed to prepare a needle, and he needed to do it quickly. He was parked across the street and he could see Lena walking up the alley with that horrible man.

“He’s a detective,” his friend and spotter said. “He’s her partner.”