“Don’t shoot me, Maggie.” Remy was walking toward her with a weary smile. His unruly black hair was starting to corkscrew, even in the dry LA air, and she wondered what it looked like in the humidity of Louisiana. His dark, inkblot eyes were cupped with purplish pouches. The fine blue suit he’d been wearing last night was a rumpled mess, and he hadn’t bothered to shave.
“From the looks of you, it might put you out of your misery. Did you catch any sleep?”
“An hour standing up, maybe.”
“What’s the news from last night, anything good?”
He shrugged his ambivalence. “Uncooperative witnesses. A million different fingerprints to sort through and run, maybe one of them will pop this time around. And the field unit actually found fibers in that shithole that match some from the crime scene in April.”
A fresh flow of darkness began seeping into Nolan’s soul as unbidden images from last night unrolled in a gruesome, mental cinema. “That’s something.”
“It might be, if we can find the source.”
“Did you ID her?”
“Stella Clary. Twenty-seven, from Lodi, no next of kin.”
Alone in a world of suffering. At least she had a name now. Stella Clary wouldn’t be totally forgotten; she would always exist in the sad, dark place in her heart reserved for victims. “Nobody saw anything?”
“Are you kidding?” he scoffed. “You were there. Nobody at the Aqua was sober enough to see their own reflection in a roomful of mirrors.”
“Any clues he was operating somewhere else before LA?”
“The MO doesn’t match anything in the violent crime databases.”
“Three victims in three months is a brisk pace for a serial that’s just starting out. And these killings are high risk, in public spaces. It’s like this guy is at the end of his run, can’t control his urges anymore. Or he’s anxious to get noticed.”
“He’s getting plenty of notice. The press gave him a name this morning, did you see that?”
“Yes.”
“At first I was pissed as hell, but maybe it’s not a bad thing. It’ll feed his ego and maybe he’ll get cockier than he already is. Sloppy.”
“One a month. Do you think he’ll keep to his schedule?”
Remy sighed. “Serials are creatures of habit. He might not be capable of deviating. But I don’t plan to wait and find out. The task force is on this around the clock now.”
“What about the feds?”
“They’re sniffing around, offering their support, but the captain hasn’t officially brought them on board yet. I have no problem with it, but the decision is up to him.”
“Al and I are here for you if you need some extra eyes.”
“I appreciate that. I hope you drank the rest of the champagne when you got home.”
She had, and quickly because it had fuzzed the images of Stella Clary’s butchered body for a little while. Long enough to get to sleep. “I felt obliged.”
“Good. When you open champagne, you always throw away the cork.” His expression softened. “I didn’t have a chance to ask yesterday.”
“About what?”
“How you’re doing. I haven’t seen you around much since the visitation.”
Her thoughts rewound to that dreadful, surreal day at the funeral home in Reseda. She remembered the countless faces of colleagues and strangers, friends and family, all swirling in and out of her field of vision like images in a carnival funhouse mirror; her mother blotting her eyes with a mangled tissue while her grim and steadfast father greeted mourners in the receiving line; Max’s fiancée weeping as she sat in a large carved chair, looking small and defeated. The furniture had outraged her. It was too dark, too oversized, like ponderous wooden weights specifically designed to further drag down wounded spirits.
“I’m okay. Thanks for being there, Remy.” She felt his eyes but didn’t meet them.
His phone chirruped a text alert and he stared at his phone for what seemed like a long time. “We just got a hit on prints from a vodka bottle we found in Clary’s room,” he finally said.
“Good. Go.”
He pocketed his phone. “The drink offer is always open, Maggie. No pressure.”
Not a good idea, getting tangled up with Remy Beaudreau of Homicide Special Section. A horrible idea. “Catch your killer, and we’ll celebrate.”
Chapter Ten
MELODY SLID HER GREEN VW BEETLE into her designated slot in the empty communal carport of her apartment building. There were only six units here, and all of her neighbors had day jobs, although she had no idea what those jobs were. She rarely ran into any of them except sometimes on weekends. It was perfect—most days, she could almost imagine it was her place alone.
She checked her rearview mirror before she got out, a precautionary measure that was hardwired into her as much as breathing was. Nobody there. Not her potentially homicidal boyfriend; not some freak from her past or the Monster of Miracle Mile; not some homeless man taking up temporary residence beneath the lemon trees by the breezeway, which happened on occasion. It was safe, safe for now, but she still clutched her pepper spray as she got out of the car.
A little dose of selective fear is a good thing, a necessary thing. You just have to decide when it’s important to be afraid of something, dear girl.
Great advice from Aunt Netta, who’d been a veritable font of axioms. She hadn’t been afraid of much, certainly not her cherished ’57 Thunderbird convertible that had ultimately ended up being her coffin in a bad accident on the 405 on a lovely spring night. As gruesome as it all was, Melody thought that Netta would have been pleased by the way she’d left this world, in her precious, cherry-red buggy, top down, radio blasting, her gray hair flying in the wind right up until the time the semitruck had crashed through the median into oncoming traffic and onto her. Even if the ’57 had been outfitted with airbags and roll bars and every other modern safety feature, it wouldn’t have changed Aunt Netta’s outcome.
Another of her maxims came to mind, that there were two ways out of every trouble, and the right way sometimes isn’t the one you think of first. But there had been no way out of that kind of trouble.
Melody often wondered what her world would look like now if she’d been able to live out her adolescence happily with Aunt Netta instead of getting shunted off to her last known living relative, the sack of shit who Social Services called her father. There was no question it would be much better. She’d definitely be a college graduate by now, a music major; that had been Netta’s dream for her. Maybe she’d even be happily married with a kid or two. That semi hadn’t just taken one life. But at least she still had one, and she wasn’t going to squander it feeling sorry for herself.
Teddy, the caretaker and dilettante gardener, was hacking away at an unruly rosemary hedge in the courtyard. It filled the air with a heady menthol smell that somewhat neutralized the skunkiness of marijuana that perpetually emanated from him. He wore his hair in ratty dreadlocks and was wiry and sun-cured, a piece of human jerky. He could have been as young as thirty or as old as fifty, but Melody suspected he fell somewhere in between. “Hey, Teddy.”