Alien Nation #1 - The Day of Descent (28 page)

T
WELVE HOURS AFTER
his meeting with Theo Miles, Sikes was ten minutes from UCLA, already feeling as if he was in the principal’s office and that Angela Perez was the principal.

She sat beside him in his Mustang, held tilted back to the late morning sun, sunglasses glinting painfully bright, a smile on her lips as the wind blew through her fluttering short hair. She looked like someone on vacation, but she was interrogating her new partner like the ten-year veteran detective she was.

“How many computer disks did Stewart pass over to Petty?” she asked. The questions had been nonstop for the entire drive.

“I don’t know,” Sikes said. That had been his typical answer for the entire drive.

“Where did she pass the disks over?”

“I think at the university. Petty shared an office there with—”

“No one’s interested in what a detective
thinks,
Sikes. What do you
know?”

“I didn’t ask her.” From the corner of his eye he saw Angie staring at him.

“What’s the matter with you? You miss writing parking citations so badly you want to start wearing a uniform again?”

Sikes kept his hands firmly on the steering wheel, telling himself he would not punch any part of his car while Angie was in it.

Then Angie asked her first question that didn’t specifically pertain to police procedure. “You fall for this Stewart or what?”

Sikes winced. First Miles, now Angie.
Did
he have Amy Stewart’s name tattooed on his forehead?

Sikes’s lack of a response was answer enough for Angie. “Jesus, Sikes. You do anything about it?”

“No!”
Sikes said, far too emphatically, he realized.

“But you want to, don’t you?” Angie shifted in her seat as if she were suddenly uncomfortable. “What got into you, Sherlock? I thought you were a straight shooter. Got that photo of your wife in your locker. A kid, even.”

That was too much. Sikes swerved the car into the right lane and took the first turn off Sunset, ignoring the blaring horns behind him. The Mustang squealed to a stop on a residential street in Bel-Air. He yanked on the emergency brake, switched off the ignition, then twisted in his seat to face his partner. Only then did he realize that he had nothing to say.

“Yesss?” Angie asked. “You think I’m digging around too much in your personal life?”

“Yeah,” Sikes said as he realized she was right. “That’s it.”

“You think what goes on between you and your wife is off-limits? You think I have no right to concern myself with your romantic and/or hormonal interests? That I should just mind my own you-know-what business?”

Sikes felt some of the indignation ease out of him like a slow leak in a tire. Angie was as good as Theo. She knew what he was going to say even before he knew it himself. Was he really that transparent?

“You got anything to add, or you want me to keep this going for the both of us?” Angie asked.

Sikes summed it up. “What goes on in my personal life has nothing at all to do with how I do my job.”

Angie took off her sunglasses and stared at Sikes as if she were about to book him for murder one. “You get this straight, rook. You’re not a shoe salesman. You’re not a car mechanic. You’re a
cop.
And
everything
you do in your personal life has to do with how you do your job. You get too happy, too depressed, too horny even, and you start getting distracted—and that makes you ripe for making a mistake. Shoe salesmen can make mistakes. They just go back and get the right size and color. But when a
cop
makes a mistake, somebody can get hurt or killed. And that could be a citizen on the street. Or that could be your partner. Am I making myself clear?”

Sikes looked up at the thick mass of leaves rustling in the tree he had parked beneath. “I’ve got my life,” he said, “and I’ve got my job. And—”

“And if you try to tell me that they’re two different things, you’ll be working forensic accounting with that sphincter Grazer so fast you’ll think it’s yesterday.”

Sikes knew if he tried to say anything more he’d be yelling. So he kept his mouth closed. He didn’t have to take this crap. He could always ask for a transfer.

“C’mon, Sikes. Don’t be looking at me like you’re already writing up your transfer request.”

Sikes gave up. He punched the steering wheel. Was
every
detective on the force some kind of mutant mind reader?

“Think of old man Petty,” Angie said unexpectedly. “He was
murdered,
Sikes, and we still don’t know who did it. How do you feel about that?”

Sikes scowled. “It sucks.”

“Damn right it sucks. But this is your baby. You’re doing the digging. You still want to make the case, don’t you?”

“Damn right.”

“You try to stop thinking about it, but you can’t, can you? You drive home, and you see Petty in his car. You try to sleep at night, you see Petty’s house, you go over those letters you got from the computer. That’s not a
job,
Sikes. That’s a calling. That’s your goddamned
life.
And if you’re trying to tell me you think it’s anything else, you’re not being honest with me, or yourself, or anyone else in your sorry little circle of friends.”

The only sound on the street was the distant rush of traffic behind them on Sunset and the wind through the leaves overhead. Sikes kept his hands on the steering wheel, squeezing and relaxing his grip, squeezing and relaxing.

“You know I’m right, don’t you?”

Sikes had had enough. He shook his head and slumped in his seat. “How do you
know?”
he asked. “It’s like everyone else but me can read my mind or something.”

“Look at me, Sikes.”

Reluctantly Sikes turned to his partner.

“It’s called being a detective. You understand that? It’s called being honest with yourself, being in touch with yourself”—she touched her fist to her chest—“listening to what your gut tells you as much as what your eyes see and your ears hear. Because when you do that, when you listen to what’s inside, you’re going to find out that
everyone’s the same.
Everyone. We all have the same needs and the exact same motives. The only thing that makes us different is what triggers us to act on those needs.

“Trust me, Sikes. If we find the guy who nailed Petty, when you talk to him and get him to tell you why he did it, you’re going to
understand
it. You’re going to listen to him, and you’re going to look inside yourself, and you’re going to know why it is we humans do the god-awful things we do. And if you really understand it, the only thing you can do is try to stop it.

“That’s in you, Sikes. I saw it in the parking lot behind Mann’s the first time I met you. Something in your past—whatever that was, whenever it happened—it made you a cop. You can’t be anything else but a cop. So the only choice you have is to walk away from what you’re supposed to be and live your life like you’re half asleep and never going to wake up, like most of the other people who stumble through life, or to accept the inevitable and bear down and become the best cop you can be.”

Angie held her sunglasses in one hand and wiped at the bridge of her nose with the other. “Christ, I should be able to give out course credits for a speech like that.”

They sat in silence.

“So we going to be okay, Sikes?”

Sikes glanced at her, studied her eyes. He asked himself what
he
would be thinking now. He surprised himself by knowing the answer. “You wouldn’t be wasting all this effort on me if you didn’t think I was worth it, would you?”

Angie smiled beatifically. “You read my mind, Sikes.” She put her sunglasses back on and leaned her head back against the headrest.

Sikes restarted the engine.

“Of course, you still screwed up the Stewart interrogation,” Angie added.

“Thanks. I already figured that one out for myself,” Sikes said as he made a U-turn and headed back onto Sunset.

“But not to worry,” Angie said. “We’ll take it from the top, and this time you let me do all the talking. Maybe I’ll even give you an extension on your deadline.”

“Whatever you say, Professor.”

But when they arrived at the Royce Physics Building Angie didn’t have much talking to do. Amy Stewart was gone.

The Astronomy Department had one overworked office assistant on the third floor who was attempting to keep up with the normal flow of work as he answered Detective Perez’s questions while also trying to entice a shorthaired kitten with tightly curled orange and cream fur back into the cardboard box that sat open on the floor beside the counter. The label on the box announced: I’M GOING HOME. Beneath it, the name SAMPSON had been handwritten.

The nameplate on the assistant’s desk read: JOHN K. OHLIN. He looked young enough to be a student, though the cut of his dark blond hair and fashionably draped jeans seemed well beyond the student budgets that Sikes remembered. He also was acting as if he would rather be anywhere else than behind the desk in Royce Hall.

From behind the mounds of files on his desk, John put another phone call on hold and hung up the handset. “I can’t give out her home address. The university has a strict policy about that.” John bent down to push Sampson away from his leg and toward the box. The kitten’s response was to purr madly and leap up the assistant’s leg. He made it all the way up to John’s shoulder. John sighed in defeat and turned back to Angie.

“You just told me that Amy Stewart missed two tutorials this morning,” Angie said patiently. “You told me that she’s never missed a tutorial before.” Sikes stayed in the background to let her work. Besides, he was more of a dog man himself.

“Not without phoning in to cancel them,” John said, checking the record book.

“Doesn’t that worry you?” Angie asked.

John shrugged. Sampson swayed but held on. “Yeah, but she’s an astronomer. They all keep these weird hours. Up all night and that sort of thing.” The phone rang and he answered, taking a message for an absent professor.

“Did Randolph Petty have an office here?” Angie asked when John had hung up again.

“Yeah, he shared it with three other part-timers.”

“You know Dr. Petty was murdered, don’t you?”

“Yeah, that was terrible. Never know, do you?” John looked at the flashing lights on his multiline phone. He lifted the receiver and went to press down a button.

But Angie leaned forward and rested her knuckles on the only two clear spots on the desk. Sampson regarded her with interest, as if measuring the distance to another empty back. “So where were you on the night Dr, Petty was killed?”

John screwed up his face at Angie’s persistence, but Sikes could see that Angie had finally gotten John’s attention. “Why would you want to know?” the assistant asked. He placed a restraining hand on the kitten.

Angie looked over her shoulder at Sikes. “What about you? You thinking what I’m thinking?”

Sikes had no idea what Angie was thinking, but he wasn’t about to interfere in whatever it was that she had planned. “Absolutely,” he said.

Angie stood away from the desk. “Okay, John, I’m afraid you’re going to have to come with us.”

“What?”

“You figure it out. Dr. Petty gets killed, and you won’t tell us if you have an alibi. Now Amy Stewart’s missing, and you’re not helping us track her down. It looks awfully suspicious to me.” She held her hand out like a surgeon waiting for a scalpel. “Sikes? Cuffs, please.”

Sikes automatically fumbled under his sports jacket for the cuffs on his belt. He couldn’t be certain, but it looked as if Angie were risking a harassment charge. There was no way that the assistant could be considered a suspect just for following university policy. Besides, any judge would issue a warrant over the phone to obtain Stewart’s address from university records. Then Sikes saw the look in Angie’s eyes as he slapped the cuffs into her waiting hand.
He
knew what procedure was, and
Angie
knew, but the important point was that
John
didn’t.

Angie rattled the cuffs. “You carrying anything besides the cat I should know about before I search you?”

“Are you
serious?”
John still held onto Sampson and the phone receiver as he stared at the two detectives.

Angie began walking around John’s desk. “There’s a murderer loose. It doesn’t get much more serious than that.”

John looked at the dangling cuffs as if he were about to be hypnotized by them. He hung up the receiver swiftly, swung a protesting Sampson down into the cardboard box, and latched the lid shut. He straightened up. “Uh, what if I give you her address? Confidentially.” A warning yowl rose out of the box.

“I’d consider that a sign of cooperation.”

“I’m only subbing this week for a friend,” John said as he flipped hastily through his Rolodex. He pulled Amy Stewart’s card off the metal rings and handed it to Angie. The cardboard box at his feet began rocking back and forth.

Angie read it. “Did you try calling her at this number?”

John nodded, putting out his foot to keep the cardboard box from tipping over. “I just got her machine.” A small orange-and-cream-striped paw punched a hole in the side of the box.

Angie copied the information from the card into her notebook. She handed it back to John. “Looks like you could use a set of cuffs yourself,” she said with a nod at the box. “Stewart lives out in Santa Monica,” Angie said to Sikes. “You ready to roll?”

“Let’s check out her office first.”

Angie frowned. “For anything in particular?”

Sikes shrugged. “First time I was in it I don’t think I was looking at it the way I should have been.”

“Fair enough,” Angie said. She thanked the assistant for his help, then let Sikes lead the way down the hall to Amy Stewart’s office. Behind them the assistant sighed with audible relief to no longer be the focus of Angie’s attention. Sikes knew how he felt.

Amy Stewart’s office appeared to be unchanged from Sikes’s first visit. The clutter was about the same. All the pictures were still on the wall. And the computer was still on the tiny desk, though its screen was completely blank, without even the image of a watch face slowly moving across it.