Alien Nation #1 - The Day of Descent (29 page)

“Anything missing?” Angie asked as she stood in the doorway and looked around. Sikes could tell she was already seeing the small room in more detail than he had the first time he had looked. “As if anyone could tell in this mess.”

“Nothing obvious is gone. But then that’s what I thought at Petty’s house until I tried to look at the computer.”

Angie walked over to the desk, studied the computer’s keyboard, then pressed a single key on it. The computer chimed, and in a few moments the screen began to glow.

“You know about computers?” Sikes asked as he joined her at the computer screen.

“They’re the future, rook. But don’t tell that nut Grazer that I said so.”

They watched the screen. Nothing came up on it. “This is just what happened at Petty’s,” Sikes said. “It wouldn’t do anything because the hard disk had been erased.” He began to search the desk’s single row of drawers.

Angie knew what he was looking for. “Any disks?”

Sikes rummaged through the bottom drawer. “Nothing. Let’s check the shelves.”

Their search wasn’t helped by the chaos in the crammed bookcases, but eventually the two detectives satisfied themselves that there were no computer disks hidden among the jumbled stacks of journals and papers and books.

Sikes began to feel a sense of frustrated panic grow in him. “Whoever killed Petty must have traced the material back to Amy,” he told Angie. “We should get a black and white over to her place right now.”

Angie handed him her notebook. Two wide elastic bands made it open to the latest page. “You’re still jumping to a couple of sweeping conclusions, but I agree, let’s play it safe. Call it in.” Sikes pulled the desk phone out from behind two mounds of file folders and called Dispatch. When he hung up he was ready to head back to his car. Quickly. He kept picturing Amy dead in a parking lot, just like Dr. Petty. But Angie wasn’t ready to go. She stared at the framed photographs on the wall between two bookcases, just above the chair Sikes had sat in the day before.

“This her?” she asked, pointing to a photograph of Amy standing in a group of four other people. The picture had apparently been taken on a mountaintop somewhere. Behind the group was only clear blue sky, and all four were dressed in sweaters and heavy jackets.

Sikes took a quick look at the photograph—an 8 x 10 color print. It was the same one he had seen yesterday. They all were. “Yeah, that’s her. We should get moving.”

“Slow it down, rook. The uniforms will get there way before we will. Have you ever seen this guy before?” She pointed to one of the figures beside Amy in the photograph.

Sikes was almost bouncing he was in such a hurry to leave, but he took a look at the person Angie indicated. “I, uh, I don’t know,” he said. Then he looked more closely. “But . . . he does sort of look familiar.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Angie said. She lifted the photo from the wall, turned it over to see if anything had been written on the back, then looked at the picture again. “I know I’ve seen him before. What do you think? An actor or something?”

“Yeah, sure, maybe,” Sikes said. That was one of the odd things about living in L.A.—the place was crawling with not-so-famous actors whose faces were vaguely familiar, though their names were not. Walking into a supermarket could be like walking into a high school reunion. A familiar face would suddenly jump out of the crowd, though it was impossible to say where or when it had been seen before.

In this case the person in question was a Caucasian male, about fifty, Sikes guessed. Dark hair, dark eyebrows, clean features that even he recognized as handsome. And there was a pleasant sense of quiet and calm to him, too. Everyone else in the photo, even Amy, was smiling broadly. In contrast, the mystery man had only a slight smile but appeared to be having just a good as time as the others. Whoever they were. “So she knows a movie star,” Sikes said impatiently. “Is it important?”

“That’s the fun about being a detective, Sikes. You never know what’s important till the fat lady’s locked up.” She put the photograph under her arm and started for the door. “We’ll stick it up at the station, maybe run it by someone at the
Times.”

“You can just take it like that?” Sikes asked.

Angie frowned. “It’s not
evidence,
Sikes. It’s the picture we’ll need if we have to put out an APB. Maybe we’ll get a better one at her place, but why waste time?”

“Right,” Sikes said. But he felt that was just what they had been doing.

Amy Stewart didn’t have a
place
in Santa Monica. She had a house. Correct that, Sikes thought as he walked through the gate in the high, nondescript fence that edged the property, it’s a mansion.

“Not bad for a student,” Angie said as she walked up the path at Sikes’s side. The house was an ultramodern assemblage of three large cubes joined in an apparently haphazard but curiously balanced pattern. The cubes were faced with strips of dark-stained wood—some sides striped diagonally, others checkerboarded. Elaborate plantings of dwarf and standard palms and monstrous bird of paradise plants erupted from the corner of each cube, as if the house were a gift freshly burst free of its multicolored wrapping.

Sikes stared at the spiky plants enviously. He had once been part of a task force that had broken up a stolen plant ring. Ten-foot-tall plants could cost more than he made in six months. He started up the wide wooden steps that led to an inset porch where two uniformed officers waited. There was an elaborate wall sculpture to one side of the porch—various angled pieces of heat-stained metal down which several trickles of water ran, creating an almost musical rush of splashing in a tiny rectangular pool.

“It’s got to be her parents’ house,” Sikes said.

“Or her boyfriend’s,” Angie suggested. Before Sikes could respond to her barb she addressed the officers. “You check all the windows?”

“No sign of life,” the younger of the two said. He had a fresh, eager look to him, and Sikes vaguely remembered he had had that look once himself, back in his first year with the department. “We can see in through about half the ground-floor windows. No indication that anything’s amiss. But there is a large dog run out back, and no dogs.”

Angie studied the front door. She and Sikes had known that no one was home here as soon as they had radioed in for a report from the officers sent to check the house. She looked at the two officers again, then held out the photograph she had taken from the office wall. “Either of you two recognize this guy?”

The officers peered at the photograph. The older of the two pushed back his hat to reveal a few silver tufts of hair against a freckled brown scalp. Sikes recognized the pattern—young cop with old, passing on the tradition.

“He’s someone from television, isn’t he?” the rookie asked. “Wasn’t he on a sitcom or something?”

“Naah,” the old hand said. “He’s from the movies. Been in war pictures, back in the old days when they still made ’em.”

“But you’ve seen him before?” Angie asked.

Both officers decided that they had, though neither knew where.

Angie put the photograph under her arm again and turned to Sikes. “Okay, Sherlock. I’ve heard that you had an interesting childhood. Can you get us in here without causing too much damage?”

“Without a warrant?” Sikes asked.

“I don’t know about you, but given what we found in her office, I’d say there’s a chance that Stewart might be facing the same kind of trouble that Petty faced. That’s clear and probable grounds provided we go in looking only for signs of foul play.”

“Uh,” the rookie uniform said, “there’s a Westec sign out front on the wall.”

“Then one of you go out front to meet them when they get here,” Angie said. “And find out if whoever lives here said anything about going on vacation.” She nodded at Sikes. “Let’s go.”

Sikes and Angie walked around the odd-shaped house to check all the possible entrances, and Sikes settled on a back patio where he would only have to break one small pane of glass in a pair of French doors. A shrill siren sounded as soon as they stepped inside, but both ignored it as they did a quick room-by-room search. There was nothing out of place, no signs of struggle. It was just a house where, judging from the closets and the enormous sacks of Dog Chow in the kitchen, one woman and two very large dogs lived. And none of them was home at present.

By the time Sikes and Angie left the house to check out the attached garage, a Westec Security car had arrived with a private guard. The guard, helpfully accompanied by the two police officers, went into the house to shut off the siren, then started taking down badge numbers for his report.

There was a convertible BMW in the garage, stone cold. Angie considered the car for a moment, then told Sikes to use one of the gardening shovels on the wall to smash the lock on the car’s trunk. It took five swings. The trunk was empty.

Sikes had no idea what to do next other than to issue a missing person report. But Angie patted his shoulder and had him follow her out to the Westec guard to ask who was on file with the company as the person to be notified in case of an emergency at this address. The guard went to his car radio, and the answer came back from his head office in seconds. Sikes recognized the phone number that went with the name. It was the Astronomy Department at UCLA. The contact was the professor for whom Amy worked as a student assistant and tutorial leader.

“Shit,” Angie said. “Full circle.”

“What’s that mean?” Sikes asked.

“What do you think it means? It means our leads have run out.”

“So what do we do now?”

Angie chewed on one arm of her sunglasses as she watched the uniformed officers stretching yellow police crime-scene tape over the empty pane in the French doors as a temporary repair. “That depends. We have to ask ourselves what we’re facing here.”

Sikes didn’t understand her uncertainty. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? Amy’s missing because she’s either already been murdered or because she’s running for her life.”

A look of pity came to Angie’s face. “You’re thinking with your pants again, rook. That’s only
one
possibility. The other is that we’re dealing with someone who’s covering her tracks.”

Sikes snorted in disbelief. “Amy? That’s crazy, Angie.”

“She pulled a pretty good vanishing act.”

“She’s afraid she’ll be next!”

“Why didn’t she come to the police?”

Sikes waved his arms as if he were trying for lift off. “What good can the police do if the poor kid’s being hunted by her own government?”

“Sikes, do you honestly believe the government had anything to do with Dr. Petty’s death? Over some UFO a billion miles out in space that’s supposedly going to disappear in another week? Let’s get real here. Either Stewart is genuinely certifiable or she’s made up the whole story to disguise the real motive for Petty getting hit.”

“Or,”
Sikes said angrily, “she really
did
photograph something out there, and someone else really wants to kill her for it!” Sikes was still finding it difficult to consider Amy Stewart a likely suspect in Randolph Petty’s murder.

But the more worked up Sikes became, the more composed Angie appeared to be. “Uh-uh, Sikes, this isn’t the fifties. Remember E.T. phone home? To boldly go? May the force be with you, and all that junk? People
want
there to be real flying saucers and real little green men. Hell, if Stewart actually took photos of a real UFO, she’d be able to sell them for a fortune, and the government would probably be giving her a medal, not trying to silence her.”

Sikes looked at the expensive house Amy lived in on her own. “Well, maybe she doesn’t need a fortune.”

“Now you’re thinking like a detective!” Angie said approvingly. “You met her. You talked with her. What
does
this woman need? What drives her? Why would she lie about any of this? Why would she think she was telling the truth? If she’s a victim, why would anyone be after her? What could she have that’s important or dangerous? And
if
she’s the murderer, then why would she kill Dr. Petty? Quick, Sikes, before you can think about it—go with your first reaction. Why would Amy Stewart kill Randolph Petty? A man and a woman. A young astronomer and an old astronomer. Why, Sikes?”

Young and old, Sikes thought. Like himself and Theo Miles. Two uniformed cops. Like himself and Angie Perez. A teacher and a student. He stared at Angie. She was right. He’d been influenced by personal reactions again. Amy Stewart might be Petty’s killer. He did what she told him a cop had to do—make the connection. So he made it personal. Why would I kill my teacher? he asked himself. He thought of how angry Angie made him. The way she pestered him with questions. But that’s part of the learning process, Sikes thought. I expect that. And any student would expect that, especially one who works in a university.

“C’mon, Sikes, let’s have it,” Angie prodded. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

Sikes shook his head, everything a jumble, worse than Stewart’s office. It’s not her questions, Sikes thought. It’s not the fact that she can see through me, knows more than I know.

Angie was at his elbow, urging him on. “If you’re stuck, Sikes, then whatever you’re thinking about, turn it around. Come at it from the other side.”

Okay, Sikes thought, I
wouldn’t
kill Angie because I respect her. But what if I
didn’t
respect her? Why wouldn’t I respect her?

“Turn it around, Sikes.”

I respect her because she gave me a break, Sikes thought, and he suddenly felt as if he had hit upon the core of the problem Angie had set for him. He understood what was inside him that made him
like
Angie so much—the shooting back of Mann’s Chinese. He had done good work for her that night, followed procedure straight from the book and contributed to the perp’s arrest and conviction. And Angie had given him the credit he deserved. He had gotten his commendation. She had included him in her report. She hadn’t taken anything away from him. She hadn’t—

“One of them stole something from the other,” Sikes said.

Angie encouraged him to continue. “Go with it.”