Guilt by Association (12 page)

Jennifer bit the inside of her lip and nodded silently. I could see she was holding back tears. She didn’t want to cry on
a stranger’s shoulder—or maybe anyone else’s either. The decor told me that Jennifer wasn’t the sharing type.

“Are you a lawyer?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No, I’m a psychologist.”

That would not have been my first guess. I deliberately kept my expression neutral. “Do you have your own practice?”

“I’m not that kind of psychologist. I do testing for research. Right now I’m working on the data for the next edition of the
DSM
.”

This, I could totally see—as a researcher, Jennifer didn’t treat patients; she compiled the data that would be used to figure
out how to treat patients. The
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders
is a sort of bible for the mental-health profession. Shrinks who testify for the defense at trial often refer to it when
they’re trying to tell the jury why the defendant wasn’t responsible for the rape, murder, and burning of a dozen women in
their eighties. I love this kind of testimony the way Keith Olbermann loves Bill O’Reilly.

“I got the impression you and Jake were close,” I said.

My impression didn’t come from what he’d said, because Jake never offered any personal details. It was more in the way he’d
spoken of his sister, the warmth and real affection in his voice when he said her name.

“We were,” Jennifer said as she looked up at the photo on the mantel. “When we were growing up in New York, we did a lot together.
Even shared an apartment in the East Village for a while—before it got all hipped up and expensive.”

Her gaze drifted off as she smiled at the fond memory.

“Did you move out here with your folks?”

Jennifer blinked quickly, and I saw that my question had brought her down to earth with a thud.

“No. Jake and I… we got tired of the cold, and we both liked the idea of California. So we saved up and moved out here together.”

She looked down at the floor and swallowed. I’d known this meeting would be painful, but the tightness in my throat told me
it had outstripped my expectations. I gave Jennifer a moment to recover, then asked, “How long ago was that?”

“Ten years ago. He put himself through law school; I got a scholarship and majored in psychology. We still had dinners when
we could, but we both got busier and busier, so we saw less of each other…” She trailed off as she paused again to collect
herself, then continued. “By the time he joined the DA’s office and I got this job, we’d see each other maybe once a month
for dinner or something.”

I watched her remember and nodded, encouraging her to continue.

“But, you know, he was still there for me. No matter how busy or tired, he was always there when I needed him.” Suddenly Jennifer,
her features twisted with pain, burst out, “And he wasn’t some sick child molester! I don’t care what anybody says, it’s a
disgusting lie!”

She covered her face, bending over and sobbing. I moved toward her and put my arms around her. She leaned into me and cried
as though it were the first time anyone had offered her any sort of comfort. Maybe it was.

I smoothed her hair and gently rubbed her back.

“I know,” I said. “Jake wasn’t that guy.”

I hoped. More than ever, I wanted to squash all the doubts—mine and everyone else’s. Meeting Jennifer had made me doubly determined
to prove Jake’s innocence. I explained that I intended to dig into the case to find out what had really happened. “So do you
know anything about his personal life? What he did in his spare time?”

“Spare time?” Jennifer gave a short, mirthless laugh. “We didn’t believe in it. Like I said, we had dinner once a month. We’d
go out or I’d make dinner here.”

She noticed me looking toward the small, immaculate, and fairly untouched kitchen and added, “Mostly we ate out.”

I nodded with a little smile. “I live in a hotel, and the part I like the most is room service.”

“That would be wonderful—no dishes, ever,” she said, and smiled. It was a nice smile. I wanted to help her keep it.

“You didn’t know of any friends or people outside the office he hung around with?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t think he had any. I don’t,” she said quietly.

I was struck by the naked honesty of the statement. These two were classic loners who’d barely been able to stay connected—even
to each other. For both, the only real bond they’d had was to their
jobs. And now Jennifer didn’t just feel alone; she really was alone. Her isolation was complete. I felt what she was going
through as though it were me—probably because, in so many ways, it
was
me.

I tried to get some additional information, but after a few more minutes of fruitless inquiry, I admitted defeat. Jennifer
had given me all she had, and right now she was engulfed in a grief that went beyond the pain of Jake’s death.

I told her that I’d be in touch and that she should call me any time she felt like it. She said she would. I didn’t believe
her. That was okay; I’d keep checking in on her until she saw that I meant it—or told me to stop. I said good-bye and squeezed
my eyes shut as I hugged her at the door.

I walked to my car, planning the lunches I would set up for her with the deputies in the unit. They were sharks at work, but
they’d show up for Jennifer. I turned left onto the freeway and headed back downtown in traffic that wasn’t horrible. It wasn’t
until I neared the Broadway exit that it occurred to me she hadn’t once mentioned their parents.

I sat at a stoplight
at the intersection of Temple and Broadway and watched the mix of workers and witnesses make their way through the crosswalk
to the courthouse. The last stragglers were a pregnant mother and her toddler boy, the latter stopping to pick up a gum wrapper
that was glinting in the sun.
“No, papi, es sucio,”
she chided as she grabbed his hand and pulled him, toes dragging along the street, toward the sidewalk.

The light changed, and I pulled through the intersection. As I turned right onto Spring Street, heading for the employee parking
lot, the memory that had begun to tweak me during my meeting with Jennifer finally emerged from the shadows. I pulled into
a spot and let it play out.

I’d just come back from court after a long session wrangling over discovery with four of the biggest chowderheaded defense
attorneys I’d ever had the misfortune of meeting. I’d stopped in Jake’s office to do some venting and found him hunched over
his desk, head down, talking intently into the phone.

“Don’t worry,” Jake said, his tone softly reassuring. “I’ll take care of it, okay?”

He listened a moment, then looked up and saw me
standing in the doorway. He mouthed, “I’ll meet you,” as he gestured toward my office.

I nodded and moved on. A few minutes later, Jake came in, shaking his head.

“Sorry. I was just talking to my IO on that stalking murder,” he explained. “He’s kinda new, needs some hand-holding.”

“Sure,” I replied.

But I’d known it was a lie. I’d recognized the number on the display screen of his phone. It was for Central Juvenile Hall.

I hadn’t understood why he’d lied, but I’d let it go. There were plenty of innocent reasons for Jake to talk to someone in
juvenile hall, some of which might well have required secrecy. Like, for example, a juvenile witness who was cooperating with
the prosecution and in danger of gang reprisal. I’d still found it weird that Jake didn’t trust me with that information,
but I’d figured he thought it was better to be safe than sorry.

Now, of course, there was another, far more sinister possibility to consider. The memory, and what it might mean, was deeply
disturbing. How could I have been that wrong about Jake? How could I have missed seeing a side of him that was so despicably
perverted? I wanted badly to prove that it wasn’t true, that the call hadn’t meant anything. But that would require some digging,
and I didn’t know of a safe way to do that.

Angry and frustrated, I turned my thoughts to Kit Chalmers. I thought there might be a little more wiggle room for us to look
around in his life without getting caught, but not much. And it wasn’t as though I had nothing else to do. I was under a lot
of pressure to move forward on the Densmore case, and then there was the rest of my caseload. The press of having too much
to do closed in on me, and I had to force myself to relax, slow down, and think.

I looked around for cops, then, holding my cell phone in my lap, I flipped it open and dialed Bailey’s number.

“Meet me in my office,” I said. She hung up without bothering to reply.

I stopped in the snack bar for coffee, and by the time I got back to my office, Bailey was already there, her feet up on the
side table under the window, staring down at the street below.

“What took you so long?” I said as I dropped my purse on the floor next to my desk and flopped into my chair.

Bailey turned her head to face me without changing her position. “You meet with the sister?”

I nodded and filled her in. She grunted. “So all possibilities are still open—and she ruled out nothing. Fantastic.”

Then I told her about Jake’s phone call with someone at juvenile hall.

Bailey raised her eyebrows and fell silent. “We can’t check phone records without getting noticed,” she said finally.

“Yeah.”

“Could be completely innocent,” she added.

“Could be.”

We both sat quietly for a moment as we shared the same thought: we couldn’t rule out the ugly possibility that the phone call
might have been evidence that Jake had a suspicious interest in fringe children.

There was nowhere to go with this train of thought at the moment, so I changed the subject to something I hoped would prove
more productive. “Did you run the gangbanger kid, Luis, on the Densmore case?”

“I did. Had to kick some rookie ass to get the job done, but, of course,” Bailey said as she brandished a sheaf of papers,
“that’s not a problem for me.”

Not only was it not a problem, but I knew that Bailey actively relished the chance to call out the slackers.

She began to read: “Busted for possession of marijuana when he was twelve, arrested for burglary when he was fourteen.” Bailey
paused for effect. “No convictions.”

“Really?” I said, incredulous. Bailey nodded, equally disbelieving. It was so easy to get convicted in juvenile court that
the only surprise was when someone didn’t.

“Busted last year for possession of cocaine, claimed the stuff was left in his car by someone else—”

I raised my eyebrows at the common “some other dude did it” defense. Bailey nodded her acknowledgment and continued. “Pled
guilty anyway for two days’ detention, basically time served.”

“And no one ever took a buccal swab for his DNA?” I asked.

Bailey shrugged. “It was all chicken-shit stuff.”

“Still,” I said, annoyed. Every rapist had to start somewhere. Who said it couldn’t be with a bust for cocaine possession?
“He still on probation?” I asked.

Bailey continued to read, then replied, “Yep. Hang on.” She shuffled through the papers. I signaled to her that I was going
to the restroom, and she waved me away.

When I got back, she was dropping her cell phone into her jacket pocket. “We’ve got a meeting with the probation officer in”—she
consulted her watch—“half an hour.”

I nodded. If we went right away, we could just make it. The only problem was that when I’d left Glendale after my interview
with Jennifer, I hadn’t had an appetite, but now my stomach was feeling hollow. “I’ll need to grab something from the snack
bar on the way down.”

I called Melia. “Would you let Eric know that I’m going out to Pasadena with Bailey on the Densmore case?” I asked. I especially
wanted it noted that I wasn’t working on Jake’s case, for extra brownie points.

“Uh, yeah,” Melia said absently.

I’d probably interrupted her in the middle of swooning over the bios of the cast members in Hollywood Men, a popular beefcake
strip show. “Gustavo likes walks on the beach at sunset…” Ordinarily I wouldn’t have cared, but this time it was important
that she have the information ready in case there were any more visits from Vanderhorn.

“Melia, it’s important. Focus, okay?”

When she finally sounded as if she was half there, I repeated the message, then asked her to read it back. After I spelled
the name “Densmore” for the third time, I thought she got ahold of it. I hoped for the best, picked up my briefcase and coat,
patted the pocket to make sure my .22 was still there, and gestured to Bailey that I was ready.

We made it to Pasadena so fast I barely had time to finish my chicken Caesar wrap. I wiped my mouth with the pathetic excuse
for a napkin provided by the snack bar and checked my face in the mirror for crumbs. By the time I was done, Bailey had parked.

The nondescript building could have been any standard government-issue structure, with cinder blocks and ugly green institutional
paint. Bailey flashed her badge, and the bored-looking receptionist waved us on and buzzed us through the security door.

Luis Revelo’s probation officer was a heavyset black man with an open, friendly face, casually dressed in a powder-blue polo
shirt and khakis. According to the sign on his desk, we were speaking to someone named Tyrone Jackson.

He signaled for us to have a seat while he finished scanning his file on Revelo. After a few minutes, apparently satisfied
he’d plumbed its depths, he closed the file, rocked back precariously far in his chair, and said, “Luis didn’t give me any
trouble. No new busts, no dirty tests.” He looked from me to Bailey. “So what else can I do for you?”

“When did you last see him, Mr. Jackson?” I asked.

“Tyrone,” he corrected as he flipped to the end of the file. “We had a meeting scheduled for January twenty-fourth, but according
to my notes, he never showed up. Said he was sick, so I gave him a pass on that one.”