Retribution (23 page)

He hated to wake her, and shook her shoulder gently. Her eyelids fluttered, not quite opening.

He bent close and kissed her cheek. "I have to leave for a while. I'll bring lunch back with me."

Charlie smiled. With a slight sigh, she burrowed back into the couch pillows and afghan, drifting away again. He pulled a long golden hair away from the corner of her mouth, not wanting to leave her… ever.

He locked himself out as he left, scanning the street. He looked up the terraced hillside and down, then got into the van.

* * *

Most of the desks were empty when he walked in, got his visitor's ID and clipped it on, the station cleared for lunch. He headed to the back to see Hubie Valenzuela, his leg aching in memory of times spent in similar police stations in other cities.

Valenzuela did not smoke, but he chewed cigars till they were pulpy messes, and had one hanging out of his thick lips now as he looked up and caught sight of John rounding a beige-hued corner.

"Ruby! Coming in to sign up for league?" The beefy officer swiveled around at his desk, shuffling papers, searching, cigar drooping.

"No, but I suppose you won't let me out of here till I do."

"How's that leg of yours? I need a shortstop this season."

John shook his head. "Good arm, no legs. You know that."

Valenzuela muttered around his cigar, found a tattered manila folder, and fetched it out. "I'll put you in right field, then. Again." He flashed a grin at John before sketching his name onto the latest roster in bold strokes. "Meet at Impy's Pizza in a coupla weeks, I'll give you a call." He bent his head to the desk, resorting papers, and then looked up when Ruby did not move away. The rest of the squad room had all but cleared.

He raised an eyebrow. "You don't wanna be in right field?"

"No, that's fine. I'm used to it." John grinned at him. "Actually, I have a favor to ask."

Valenzuela kicked around to face him. The cigar worked in his mouth, bobbing up and down. "Favor." He cleared his throat.

John looked at his computer, smiled slightly, and did not answer.

"Ermmm." Valenzuela shifted uneasily. "Ruby, you know the rules."

"It could be important."

Valenzuela sighed. "This for you?"

"Girl."

The cigar dropped from his mouth. "You've got a girl?"

"It has been known to happen, but she's not mine. Just a friend who has some trouble."

Valenzuela retrieved his soggy cigar, picked some lint off it, and jammed it back in his mouth. "Ruby…"

He held his hand up. "If I don't tell you, you won't know."

Valenzuela sighed. "Better be some girl."

John did not say anything.

Valenzuela cocked his arm to look at his watch and his eyebrow twitched in mock surprise. "Lunchtime!" he said in delight. With the toe of his shoe, he glided a bottom drawer in the desk open, leaned over, and fished out a bulging paper bag.

He stood up and said to Rubidoux, "I'm supposed to sign off at lunch. Sometimes I forget. It's a bad habit, but this is a secured area. I doubt anybody will try to use my computer anyway." He turned his back on John then, and headed away from his desk to the corridor which would make an elbow bend before reaching the lunchroom.

John waited until Valenzuela was officially out of sight before gaining the chair, sitting down and swiveling around in it until he faced the monitor. He took his notebook out of his shirt pocket and flipped it to the page where he had begun making notes. Then he brushed his gaze over the keyboard, licked his dry lips, and began to type in earnest. The light in the tower blinked as the hard drive whirled into search mode, and the various data banks he could access displayed on the monitor.

John scanned them quickly, picking out the most logical ones to tap into. The breakdown and barriers between local, state, and federal agencies into computer data banks had been slow at first, but now he could see that technology was rapidly bringing them together while maintaining the separate jurisdictions the agencies had always fought over. A few of the frustrations he had experienced as a cop had finally begun to erode away, unfortunately pressured by the mounting numbers in crime statistics. It had been neither politics nor common sense, but necessity forcing those changes. He rolled his tongue across the back of his teeth, deciding whether or not he wanted to go into the FBI violent crimes folders, hesitated, then settled for local.

He ran his fingers across his notebook, trying to sift through the details and sketches he had scribbled down, and enter them as a coherent inquiry to search the database. The computer could not make an intuitive leap from the information he was providing. Either it would find a match for the details he had gleaned from the paintings or it would not. Not finding a match did not mean the crime scene did not exist. By the same token, he told himself, finding a match did not mean that Charlie had ever been there or seen it… or precipitated it somehow.

As possibilities scrolled up on the monitor, he flinched. Endless deaths… death scenes… victims…. He felt a momentary sense of helplessness, like weightlessness, adrift in a sea of troubles which he could not solve or help or prevent. John took a deep breath to put space between himself and what he scanned, toughening himself. It did not matter then and it did not matter now. What mattered was that he cared and tried. A drop at a time into what seemed to be a bottomless bucket… it was all he could do, and have the faith that it would help. He found a few possibilities and opened them up, reading the confidential details more closely and looking at crime scene sketches and photos, trying to determine if there was a match.

The grisly details gleamed before his eyes, the computer screen somehow more harsh and jarring than he expected. He browsed it, did not find what he was looking for, left that file, and opened another.

And then another.

And then another.

He took a look at the clock and saw that he had precious little time left. He closed that file and pulled up the last real possibility he had been able to sift out.

And stared at the screen numbly, trying to read what he looked at. What if she were right… what if what she drew inspired someone who saw it to kill… what if what she saw made someone crave that splash of crimson, that jolt of anger, whatever it was that made a killer kill… The computer brought photo scans down what seemed to be infinitely slowly, one line at a time, achingly revealing its crime scene. It was almost as agonizing as watching the actual act take place and being unable to do anything about.

As brutalized flesh began to take form on the screen, the hard drive lights blinking steadily as the modem worked to download the imagery and files, Rubidoux leaned closer to the screen. Wordlessly, he found a scrap piece of paper on Valenzuela's desk and tried to sketch down the bare essentials, body placement, the artifacts considered significant that were found on the scene, pencil scritching across the writing surface, sending a chill down the back of his neck. It was what he had both hoped and feared to find.

He had a match. Or what seemed to be a match. He leaned forward and studied the main photo of the crime scene. The environment was all wrong though. This woman had been found outdoors and the details he'd taken from Charlie's painting indicated an indoor setting. Yet the body, the wound placement, the instruments of death scattered by her in the ruts of the road… He rocked back in the chair and swiveled slightly.

It was not until he paged to the actual file and forensic reports that the chill down his back turned his whole body cold.

Murdered elsewhere. Body dumped and displayed, but the feeling of investigators was that she was carefully placed just as she had been originally. Fibers found gave them an idea of the place of death, fitting in a surrealistic way, what Charlie had painted. This was not the death from the series of paintings, though.

Someone tched. John jumped as Valenzuela leaned over his shoulder.

"That was a nasty one."

"You saw it."

Valenzuela shook his head, tumbling his blue-black hair over his forehead. He stuck beefy fingers into his hair and tried to comb it back into place. "Naw. But we all talked about it. She might have been pretty, once, before somebody carved her up. She was killed in her condo and thrown off the 15. For a while, we thought she was one of a serial spree. We all felt pretty bad about her until…" He blinked, his brown eyes darkening a little.

"What?"

He shrugged. "The investigating team pulled together a bio on her. Turned out she was dealing drugs about half a block from the nearest high school, three blocks from the local elementary school." Valenzuela reached over John, and keyed in for a printout. "Lunch hour is over." He gave a thin smile. "Some people deserve to be dead."

"You know who did it?"

Valenzuela shook his head. "Never found out. A lot of blood went somewhere. She was sliced to death. Found two boxcutters in the dirt beside her, the kind you see lying around in a grocery store back room or a warehouse. Still had cardboard and tape fibers on the razor blades, besides her blood and tissue. But theory was someone used something else on most of her, cuts were pretty clean."

"Jack the Ripper?"

Valenzuela laughed coarsely. "Nah, nothing like that. No sexual mutilation. We think a pimp or pusher got even with her. I don't think anyone has even tried very hard to solve the case." He put his thick hand on the back of the swivel chair and rocked it. "Come on, before you get us into trouble."

"One more."

"You know, I thought maybe you were looking up parking tickets or something. Get up."

Ruby rose slowly. "One more, Val, we're already in."

"Ermm," Valenzuela said as they traded places. "What are we looking for?"

"Roadside. Young woman driver… looks like she might have been forced off… bludgeoned."

Valenzuela coughed, and this time the pulped cigar flew under the desk where it stayed in a damp puddle on the old linoleum floor. "Ruby, you're seeing the wrong kind of women. Was the body ever found?"

"I… don't know. You tell me."

Valenzuela looked at him. "You're talking about one of the most famous MP cases around here if it hasn't." His blunt fingers tapping loudly, he closed down the data banks and signed off his access code. "We don't even have to look in here." He stood and plowed his way across the squad room, as other police began to filter in from lunch. He drew John off to the side and pointed out a bulletin board. "Ortega Highway. We hoped she would be like Denise Huber… we'd find her body eventually. Never did."

John leaned close to look at the crime scene photos tacked up on a bulletin marked, "STILL OPEN." There were a few other scenarios up there: a small child whose nude and battered body had been found in southern Orange County; a popular church leader killed in what had probably been intended as a simple burglary; a tragic hit-and-run from several Halloweens past. But it was the Ortega Highway collage which drew him. The actual crime scene showed little, but there was an artistic rendering of enactment which caught his eye.

Nighttime, curving stretch of road, a car spun out of control. He stared at it.

Charlie's most recent paintings. She had caught the road almost exactly, the thin stands of California oak and eucalyptus on the Ortega, two-lane road, the curve. The starry night.

Valenzuela tapped it. "No body," he said. "Blood on the scene, though, and drag marks, and indications of a second car. Driver, young, white female, about twenty-two at the time."

John closed his notebook. From the make of the car, he could tell the scene was at least eight or nine years old. "How long has this one been open?"

Valenzuela rubbed his chin and shrugged. "Ten years, maybe. Want me to check on it?"

He nodded. "When you get a chance."

His buddy let out a rich chuckle, then coughed. "Like my desk is always empty and I'm always lookin' for something to do."

Ruby nodded. "I know, Val, I know. But this could be important. I'll see if I can get something from the newspaper library, too."

"You do that. Everything's on computer now, probably be faster than waiting for me." Valenzuela nudged him. "Bring the new girl to Impy's if she can play softball. Hell, bring her even if she can't!" He walked off, laughing softly to himself, unwrapping a new cigar and sticking it in his mouth.

* * *

John drove back to the house, uncertain what to tell Charlie. He had not thought he would find anything to match what she had painted. But he had… not once, but twice.

Could she be right? Could someone have admired her nightmares and then gone out and enacted them?

The world was full of sick people. Anything could be possible. He was not sure if he wanted to prove that to Charlie, if he wanted to reinforce her fear that she'd contributed to it.

Another car sat in front, at the curb, and John got out slowly. He hesitated to even head to the front door. She had been alone at the art auction… alone whenever he'd come by to help with Jagger… but that did not mean she was alone. Though when they'd made love, her response to him had been as eager as his to hers, as though she had been as lonely as he had. He stood on the front sidewalk and debated with himself whether to go in, or go home and call, and come back later.

Or if he should come back at all.
You don't sleep with your clients, idiot,
he told himself.

He heard a raised voice, and it did not sound pleasant, and he strode quickly to the door.

An officious looking man with a piece of paper in his hands faced Charlie, who looked frazzled and worn still, Jagger at her side, his lips curled, both her hands wrapped about his harness.

Before she could speak, or John could say anything, the man slapped the piece of paper at Charlie. "The dog goes. You can't find me the vaccine records, then we'll quarantine him for two weeks. It's that simple, lady. He bit someone. We have a complaint. I'm taking him."