My Lost Daughter (19 page)

But Lily knew a person under the influence of narcotics wasn't rational, and as far as love went, the only thing an addict loved was the drug they were using.

There were numerous ways to use meth. A person could snort it, smoke it, or inject it. Shana had always hated needles so she assumed she either snorted it or smoked it. If she smoked it, though, where was her pipe?

She went through the apartment and ran her palms over all the hard services, then brought anything that even vaguely resembled a
powdery or crystal substance to her mouth, forcing herself to taste it. All she got was an icky taste and a mouthful of dust. She found a bottle of mouthwash in Shana's bathroom, gargled, and then returned to her task.

Lily finally collapsed shortly after two o'clock, curling up on the sofa in the living room. She stared at the pile of stuff she'd dug out of the seat cushions: four hair clips, three empty condom wrappers, part of a mold-covered cheeseburger, five dead cockroaches, two paper clips, one ballpoint pen, an empty beer can, and a few rubber bands. No drug paraphernalia and no drugs.

Of course, Shana knew Lily was coming, even though she had pretended to have forgotten. But Lily also knew her daughter, and cleaning had never been her strong suit. She would have missed something, maybe not something as major as a syringe or a pipe, yet some evidence of drug use would have been left inside the apartment.

A short time later, Lily sat up on the sofa, too restless to sleep. Shana must have been doing drugs somewhere else, and her best guess was Brett's apartment. That might be why she'd been so frazzled. She was probably going through withdrawals and decided if she had to detox, she might as well do it in a hospital, where they could give her something to help her get through it.

Brett must have been Shana's drug source, the little prick. No wonder she never brought him home to meet her mother. Then when they broke up, Shana was hung out to dry. As hard as it was to accept, everything she had seen tonight fit the profile of a meth user: Shana's manic behavior, her rapid mood changes, the inability to sleep, her unrealistic expectations about her relationship with Brett, even her desire to distance herself from Stanford and Lily.

She started to check Shana's computer to see if she could find an address for Brett, but she stopped herself. No one had forced Shana to use drugs, and having her boyfriend's address might tempt Lily into paying him a visit. The last time she had paid a visit to someone who'd hurt Shana, it had ended in disaster. But had it really?

Bobby Hernandez had been involved in the McDonald/Lopez case, the brutal murder of the two Ventura high school students, the same case Lily had been prosecuting when she was transferred from homicide and made supervisor over the sex crimes division. A tree limb had been shoved up the girl's vagina, and the gang had played target practice by shooting off the poor girl's nipples. The crime itself was the embodiment of evil.

The only way Lily had been able to reconcile herself to what she had done was to perceive it as an act of divine intervention. Hernandez had deserved to die, but the police had not placed him as one of the murderers. If she had not killed him, even if she'd done so for the wrong reasons, he would have escaped punishment and gone on to kill again. Hernandez had also killed the prostitute, so he had taken at least three lives. How many people he had actually killed they would never know.

Lily believed in evil. No one in her position could believe otherwise. Hearing about a crime on TV or over the Internet wasn't the same as prosecuting or adjudicating it. Mothers killed their children, children killed their parents, husbands killed wives, and wives murdered their husbands. More frequently than in the past, otherwise decent individuals suddenly went on killing sprees that took the lives of untold numbers of innocent people for no reason except madness and sheer evil.

Inside every person was a door, Lily believed. Most people, by means of their upbringing and basic morality, tried to keep this door closed to anything even moderately evil. It was one of the reasons human beings frequented churches and temples, to surround themselves with people who shared their beliefs in a higher power and as a form of protection against the evil entities that sought to tempt them. Lily knew her Catholic upbringing had helped to shape her viewpoints, but she also believed a person who willfully put narcotics into their system opened the door to evil. Sadly, that person was now her daughter.

The first thing to know was who and what it was you were fighting, and Lily knew this particular adversary far too well. Marco
Curazon had defeated her and hurt Shana beyond belief. He had not only defiled her, he had robbed her of the person she loved the most in the world—her father.

Lily began to dive into the past, remembering one of her last conversations with Shana's father before Marco Curazon murdered him in the garage of his L.A. condo. As hard as she tried, Lily had not shed a single tear. Yes, he had fathered her child, but he had done horrible things in the weeks leading up to his death.

How had a man who'd once coached Little League fallen so far down in life, particularly with a daughter who worshipped him? And how could Marco Curazon, a man who'd been convicted of two counts of aggravated rape, be back on the street after serving only seven years in prison? Shana had been terrified and righteously so, as Curazon had managed to track her down, fully intending to rape her again. While in prison, many sex offenders became even more fixated on their victims. By a stroke of fate, Curazon had not found her precious daughter.

2000
SANTA BARBARA, CALIFORNIA

“
I'm in jail.”

Lily had picked up the phone in her office, expecting to hear Shana's voice. She had left several messages on her machine that morning, but Shana had yet to return her call. “John?” she said. His voice was so strained, it took time before she recognized it.

“You have to help me. They just arraigned me.”

Lily's adrenaline surged. “Where's Shana?”

“I guess she's in school.”

“Good Lord,” she said, “why didn't you speak to her? She called me last night in a panic. She was certain Marco Curazon was stalking her. That's why I called the police.”

“You don't understand,” John said, knowing she thought the police had mistaken him for Shana's prowler. “I went out to get ice cream. When I got back to the duplex, the police were already leaving. The man Shana saw must have been a neighbor.
Please, Lily, she's okay. I was arrested later. I don't know . . . I think, it was around midnight.”

“But Shana doesn't know you're in jail.”

“She was asleep. She's been under so much stress lately, I didn't want to upset her. I thought the police would release me last night after they booked me. I had no idea they were going to arrest me and haul me into court this morning.”

When Lily had learned he was drinking again, she'd feared another arrest for drunk driving. A DWI wasn't a lightweight offense these days, and John already had a prior conviction. “How high was your blood alcohol?”

“They didn't arrest me for drunk driving.”

“Oh,” Lily said, dismayed. “Then what . . .”

“Vehicular manslaughter.”

She almost choked on her own saliva. “You killed someone?”

“Maybe I didn't do anything,” he shot back. “Maybe I was just standing outside having a nightcap. You should talk. What happened to that guy? You know . . . what was his name? Hernandez, right?”

The receiver dropped out of Lily's hands.

“Is something wrong?” Lily's assistant was standing quietly in the doorway. As she tiptoed into the room, her concern for her boss intensified. “Are you sick?”

“I-I'm . . .” Lily tilted her head toward the woman's voice, but she couldn't force the words out of her mouth.

“Your ex-husband is on the phone. He says it's urgent . . . that he got disconnected during an important phone conversation. If you don't want to speak to him, I can . . .”

“No,” Lily said, frantically snatching the phone off the floor. Hearing only a dial tone, she gave her assistant a blank stare.

“Mr. Forrester is on the other line.”

“Thanks,” she said, waving her out of the room.

John was accusing, desperate. “You hung up on me. They don't allow you fifteen phone calls, you know. This is a damn jail, Lily! I called you for help.”

“I didn't hang up on you,” she said, knowing she had to defuse the situation immediately. “A judge called me regarding a case I'm handling. All I did was put you on hold until I answered his question.”

“Don't shovel that shit at me,” John barked. “You're just stalling, trying to show
me what a big shot you are, that even judges come running to you. I don't care who the hell calls you. If you know what's good for you, you'll get your ass down here.”

Lily's right leg was jumping up and down. She had to place her hand on it to hold it in place. Was Bobby Hernandez stalking her from the grave? Until a person took a life, they could never understand the gravity of that action. She was forever tied to a dead man. Some nights she paced until dawn, feeling as if she were handcuffed to the rotting corpse of Bobby Hernandez.

“Didn't you hear me?” John yelled. “How many times do I have to tell you? I'm in the Los Angeles County Jail.”

“I understand you're in jail. Exactly where are you in the jail? Are you in booking? Are you in an interview room? I'm trying to determine if anyone can hear what you're saying.”

The line fell silent. A short time later, a garbled male voice rang out in the background. “The only person who can hear me is this weirdo standing beside me. I think he's from Iran.”

“You're using a pay phone, then?” Lily was suspicious because Santa Barbara was long distance and John had not called her collect.

“First the cops interrogate me, now you,” he told her. “Trust me, this guy doesn't speak English. Even if he did, he wouldn't know what we're talking about.”

Lily lowered her voice. “Why would you bring up Bobby Hernandez?”

“Because I know the truth. Shana and I both know you killed that man. You killed him because you weren't wearing your glasses and mistook him for the rapist. You laid in wait for him and then blew him away. That's premeditated murder.”

Lily's muscles locked into place. “Bobby Hernandez was a murderer. He was on his way to becoming a serial killer.”

“That's not the point.”

“That's precisely the point,” Lily said, slamming her fist down on her desk. “Hernandez developed a taste for killing. He decided it was more exciting than taking drugs and robbing people. He killed Peter McDonald and Carmen Lopez with his gangster buddies. They bashed the boy's head in, raped the girl repeatedly, and then shoved a tree limb up her vagina, rupturing her abdominal wall.”

“I didn't say the man deserved to live,” John told her. “Have I ever accused you or threatened to turn you in?”

Lily had no choice but to lie. “I didn't kill him.”

“Hey,” he said, “you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours. Isn't that the way the world works these days?”

Lily bit down on the inside of her mouth. Why had he waited all these years to confront her? Knowing John, she had to consider that he might be bluffing. But John and Shana did know things. He knew that the night of the rapes, she hadn't come home until the following morning. And Shana had walked into the garage, catching her mother squatting near the rear of her Honda as she wiped off the black Magic Marker ink she'd used to alter her license plates. In one particular instance, Lily had even blurted out the truth. John had been ranting that he wanted to kill the man who'd violated his daughter. Without thinking, Lily told him it wouldn't be necessary, that she'd already killed him. Since John hadn't taken her seriously, she had recanted and told him her statement was nothing more than fantasy. He knew she was popping Valium to get through the day, so she felt confident that he'd believed her.

“What do you want from me?” Lily asked point-blank.

“You're an attorney,” he told her. “I'm going to need someone to represent me. Do you want Shana to find out her father's in jail? She's already devastated that Curazon is back on the streets. That sick bastard . . . he raped my baby. She was just a little girl.”

“Calm down,” Lily said, hearing him whimpering. “Did the judge set bail?”

“Yeah,” he told her. “A hundred grand.”

“A hundred thousand!” Lily had expected a lower amount, but vehicular manslaughter carried almost the same weight as second-degree murder. Under those circumstances, bail in this range might be justified. Her original assumption, however, was that the district attorney in Los Angeles had arraigned John on a number of charges. Most defendants were either too frightened to hear half of what was said during their arraignment, or they had difficulty deciphering the legal jargon. In order to charge John with vehicular manslaughter, John had to kill someone with his car during the commission of a felony. “What exactly did you do?”

“You mean what they said I did?”

Now they were going to play this game, Lily thought, having heard the same evasive tactics spewing out of the mouths of hundreds of criminals. She was tempted to bail him out just so she could drive him to a dark alley and smash both his kneecaps with a baseball bat. He didn't mind accusing her of murder on a jailhouse phone, but he wasn't about to admit his own guilt. “Just tell me what crimes the police are alleging you committed.”