DIVA (2 page)

Because my wife divorced me, and a little girl died that shouldn’t have.

“I hate shoveling snow.”

She gazed at him, somber-eyed. Her eyes were stunning, deep pools of emotions he couldn’t decipher, a hint of pain, then nothing.

“I bet it’s more complicated than that.”

The comment surprised him. Had she seen something in his face, some remnant of the anguish he’d felt when he decided to leave Boston? Maybe there was more to Belinda Scully than celebrity-hood. Maybe a real person lurked beneath her carefully groomed exterior: aqua eye shadow, lip-gloss, not a strand of coppery hair out of place.

He started to print her name on the Incident Report.

“Don’t put my name on that,” she said, her voice edged with steel.

“Use mine then,” Ziegler said. “I don’t care. Someone tried to kill her.”

This was getting tedious. “Can you describe the car, Mr. Ziegler?”

“No. It happened too fast. It was dark.”

“The car was dark?”

“Yes,” Ziegler said, his voice rising in exasperation. “Dark and big. A big dark sedan. We were walking along, talking the way you do after a meal, and a car came out of nowhere and homed in on us like a . . . like a
missile!
”

“Did you get a look at the driver?”

“No. I was too busy looking out for Belinda.” She shot Ziegler a nasty look, but Ziegler ignored it. “Someone tried to
kill
her.”

For the briefest instant, he saw a flash of fear in her sapphire-blue eyes. Then her carefully crafted mask reappeared. No window to the soul through those baby-blues now. She kept denying Ziegler’s assertion that someone had tried to kill her. Maybe she wasn’t so sure.

“What makes you think someone wants to kill Belinda Scully?”

Ziegler stared at the floor, clearly uncomfortable.

He’s hiding something and so is she.
They both have secrets.
Hoping to jolly it out of them, he said, “What? You think someone didn’t like her solo?”

Belinda grinned at his flip remark, as though they were conspirators. They weren’t. She wanted to flirt. He wanted to go home.

“There’s more to it than that," Ziegler said. "This is an anniversary of sorts. We have dinner together every Columbus Day, the day her parents—”

“Jake! Stop. Detective Renzi isn’t interested in hearing my life story.”

He felt the beginning of headache build behind his eyes. Then his cell phone chimed, always trouble at this hour.

It was Kenyon Miller. “Frank! Cop down in Lakeview. Where y’at?”

Cop down
. His heart hammered his chest like a drummer bashing cymbals. “At the station. Call you back when I’m on the road.”

He opened the bottom drawer of his desk and took out the leather holster that held his SIG-Sauer.

The well-dressed couple beside his desk stared at him, wide-eyed.

“Leave your contact information at the front desk, Mr. Ziegler. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

CHAPTER 2

Tires screeching, Frank barreled into the I-10 exit at sixty miles an hour and swung north on West End Boulevard, the main drag through Lakeview. Before Hurricane Katrina decimated the city in August 2005, Lakeview had been an upscale predominantly white neighborhood. Now it was dark and deserted, no street lights, abandoned homes on both sides of the street. The Katrina floodwaters had reached the eaves of some houses and shoved others off their foundations, scenes reporters likened to war-torn Kosovo, filming a sign on one flood-ravaged home that said:
I AM HERE. I HAVE A GUN
.

West End ran three miles north to Lake Pontchartrain. Thirty yards to his left Pontchartrain Boulevard ran south. Between them was the neutral ground, shrouded in darkness, cleared now of the fifty-foot mountains of debris dumped there after Katrina. Piercing the inky-black shadows of the two-lane street, his headlights revealed a boulder-sized pothole. He swerved to avoid it, got on his cell phone and called Kenyon Miller.

“I’m on West End headed north. Lay it out for me.”

“Off-duty cop goes in a convenience store to buy cigarettes,” Miller said. “He’s in civvies but carrying, you know, ‘cuz Lakeview’s a ghost town these days. He sees a kid holding a gun on the clerk and a female customer, goes for his piece and the kid shoots him. He makes it outside to his car and calls for backup. I called you soon’s I heard.”

“How’s the cop?”

“They took him to City Hospital, no word yet. What happened, one of the maggots used the woman as a shield. Him and another kid piled into a black Cadillac, probably boosted, and split. The cop didn’t dare shoot with the woman in the car.”

“You got a description on the scumbags?”

“Two black males, late teens, early twenties. Cop only saw one gun, but you never know. Gunslinger’s a wide-body in cargo pants and a hoodie, driver’s a skinny guy with dreads.”

“There’s trouble, two black kids take a white woman hostage.”

“No shit. Only black folks came back are the thugs. My wife and kids gotta stay in Atlanta with Tanya’s mother, and I’m bunking in a goddam FEMA trailer ‘cuz our house took seven feet of water and I can’t find a contractor to work on it.”

Miller called his family every night to quiz his son and daughter on their homework, trying to be a good dad, long distance.

“You can bunk with me anytime, Kenyon. I told you that.”

“Thanks for the invite, Frank, but I gotta stay close to my house, you know? Goddam looters.”

The looters came out after dark like roaches, stripping homes of plumbing, light fixtures, copper flashing, anything they could sell.

“How’s the clerk?”

“Shook up but he’s okay. The scumbag told him to stay put, fired a shot to scare him.”

“Okay, I’ll check the side streets over here. Keep in touch.” He turned right onto a street lined with gutted homes and mounds of debris piled at the curb. He rolled down his window and putrid odors filled his nostrils.

An instant flashback to Katrina: the horrible stench of raw sewage and dead bodies afloat in waist-high water, a tragedy so profound that some residents hadn’t recovered. Some never would. The first week fires burned unchecked for lack of water and the manpower to fight them. Frantic parents looted Wal-Mart for diapers and baby formula. The thugs looted pharmacies and stores with guns.

A barking dog drew his attention. He trained the cruiser’s spotlight on a house: gaping windows without glass, a crumpled carport tilted against a fence, no signs of life. Or a dog.

He drifted into the next block, heard faint sirens in the distance. Here there was only silence, unlike the desperate days after Katrina when the sound of helicopters, chainsaws and sirens filled the daylight hours. Nightfall brought inky darkness and a scary silence punctuated by gunfire. No one shaved or bathed for days, pissing in toilets that didn’t flush, living on MRE’s and water. And beer if they could get it.

More yelps from the dog. He swung left at the next street and put the spot on a two-story house with a basketball hoop on the garage. No lights in the FEMA trailer out front, but that didn’t mean it was vacant. After Katrina, he’d seen hard-eyed men with shotguns and attack dogs on the porches of Garden District mansions, protecting their property. The French Quarter had survived almost unscathed and Canal Street morphed into media alley. Secure and well fed, Geraldo, Ted Koppel and Anderson Cooper had beamed their reports around the world.

A flash of movement caught his eye. He hit the brakes and studied the dark hulk of a house, letting his eyes absorb the gloom.

There it was again, shadowy movement in the darkness. He trained the spot on the left side of the house. Saw a dark form jump out of the bushes and run toward the rear of the house, arms flailing.

The metallic taste of adrenaline flooded his mouth. He sprang from the cruiser and vaulted several trash bags on the sidewalk. Dug out his SIG-Sauer and ran alongside the two-story boarded-up house. Stopped at the back corner. Heard footsteps pound on gravel. Charged into the next yard.

Moonlight revealed a skinny kid in a hoodie, racing away from him toward the street, arms and legs pumping.

He ran faster, his lungs on fire, his thighs burning, his forty-plus legs accustomed to a daily run, not a sprint like this. He whipped around the corner of a house and spotted the kid. The kid saw him, whirled, tripped over some sheetrock and staggered.

A surge of adrenaline, a quick sprint and he grabbed the kid's arm, put him on the ground and straddled him. “Police! Put your hands on your head.”

Gasping for breath, the kid didn’t move.

“Put your hands on your head!”

The kid slowly laced dark skinny fingers around the back of the hood.

“I’m gonna frisk you. You got anything sharp that’s gonna hurt me? A knife? Any needles?” Silence. He swatted the kid’s head. “Answer me!”

“Ain’t got nuthin.”

He patted him down, found nothing hard and metallic, and searched his pockets. No weapon, no needles, no drugs, and no ID. He holstered the SIG and yanked the kid’s arm. “Get up, and don’t try anything or I’ll smack you.”

As the kid struggled to his feet his hood fell off, revealing close-cropped hair, a smooth coffee-milk complexion and a narrow face with a delicate nose. No telling about the eyes, the kid staring at the ground, lips clamped together. He cuffed the kid’s hands behind his back and marched him back to the cruiser. Halfway there, penned inside a wire-mesh fence, a German shepherd snarled at them. When they reached the cruiser, the kid tried to run.

Frank twisted his arm. “Don’t be stupid!”

“You’re breaking my arm!” A soprano voice rising to a shriek.

He studied the long eyelashes, thinly arched brows, large doe-eyes in a too-pretty face. Realization hit him like a head-on collision.

The kid was a girl.

_____

He took her to the Eighth District station, the girl not saying word-one on the way, and marched her down a hall to a funky-smelling interview room. A three-foot-square wooden table with two chairs sat in the center of the room. A fluorescent light in the ceiling made the pale-green walls look putrid. On purpose. Nothing like a nasty environment to get the thugs talking. Shit green walls, no air-conditioning, and the odor of stale urine from some moke who’d wet his pants.

He removed the handcuffs, sat the girl down and told her to stay put. His female juvy, no doubt about it. Not good. He was supposed to contact her parents and get permission to interview her, but that might take hours. Hell, he didn’t even know her name.

And the scumbag-robbers had taken a woman hostage.

He propped open the door, went around the corner to a one-way window and watched her. Rail-thin, she hunched her shoulders inside the hoodie and massaged her bony wrists. Set her elbows on the scarred tabletop, her lips moving, muttering to herself. He put a fresh tape in the camcorder, hit Record and returned to the room.

She looked up, her expression as bleak as if she were facing a firing squad, her dark eyes unfathomable. He sat down opposite her and flashed his you-can-trust-me smile. “I’m Detective Frank Renzi. What’s your name?”

Her eyes shifted away and her leg jiggled up and down, nervous knee belying her stone-face demeanor.

He let the silence build for a minute, his irritation mounting.

“Listen, Miss No-name, we know you and your friend robbed that convenience store. You’re in big trouble. Your buddy shot a cop.”

Her head jerked up. She gazed at him, eyes wide and fearful.

“What were you doing in Lakeview?”

Her face settled into a sullen mask.

“Maybe you didn’t rob the store. Maybe you were the lookout.”

She gazed at him, eyes baleful. “Don’t know nuthin ‘bout no robbery.”

“Why were you in Lakeview?”

“Ain’t no law against it, is there?”

“There’s laws against people that case abandoned houses at night looking to loot them.”

“I ain’t no looter.”

Making great strides with his hard-hitting questions, unidentified girl lobbing denials at him. He gave her an encouraging nod, not quite a smile, and said in a quiet voice, “Best thing for you to do right now is tell me your name. That’d be a start.”

“No start for me,” she mumbled, plucking at the folds of her hoodie with skinny fingers. “You just wanna pin something on me.”

“I’m your best shot at getting out of here tonight. I don’t want to put you in the lockup with the whores and the crackheads. What’s your name?”

She hunched her shoulders and gazed at him, chin cupped in her hands, a glimmer of hope in her eyes. “You can get me outta here?” Her voice rising in panic, knee jiggling faster.

“Gotta have a name to do that.”

“You gonna let me go if I tell you?”

He was on dangerous ground, threatening to charge her and not giving her the Miranda. He pushed back his chair and stood.

“Stay there while I get you a bottle of water. Maybe that will loosen your tongue. I don’t want to be here all night.”

The understatement of the year. He’d been working fifteen hours.

“You got any cigarettes?”

Smoking inside a police station these days was strictly forbidden for cops, never mind teen witnesses and suspects, but hey, whatever worked.

“Maybe,” he said. “Don’t even think about leaving that chair.”

He went to his office and took a stale pack of Marlboros out of his desk drawer. On the way back to the interview room, his radio handset crackled with chatter. But not about catching the robbers.

Maybe he had one. Maybe the wounded cop was mistaken and the second kid was this girl. Except she didn’t have dreads.

When he put the pack of cigarettes and the lighter on the table, her expression softened. She lit up, inhaled and blew a cloud of smoke.

Anxiety zinged his gut. He was breaking every rule in the book. Not that breaking rules bothered him, but if they wound up charging her, this interview would be useless in court without a Miranda warning. And if she was under eighteen, he shouldn’t even talk to her without her parents’ consent. Double trouble.