Jonathan Kellerman_Petra Connor 01 (27 page)

CHAPTER

Feeling guilty and useless but making sure to look
calm and sharp, Stu tightened his tie and put on his suit jacket. Five hours of phone calls; no cases resembling Lisa Ramsey’s. Or Ilse Eggermann’s.

He didn’t know what to make of the German girl’s murder; wasn’t getting any help from the Austrian police or Interpol or the airlines. Tomorrow he’d try U.S. customs and passport control. Asking them what? To keep an eye out for Lauch? Good luck. He stared at the Viennese mug shot. A conspicuous-looking guy, but it was beyond needle-in-the-haystack.

Maybe Petra was having some luck with Ramsey.

Maybe not. It was hard to care . . . he cleared his desk and locked it, walked across the squad room. Wilson Fournier was on the phone, but just as Stu passed, the black detective hung up scowling and reached for his own jacket. Fournier’s partner, Cal Baumlitz, was out, recuperating from knee surgery, and Fournier had been working alone for days and showing the strain.

“New call?” said Stu, forcing himself to be social.

“Poor excuse for one.” Fournier was average-size and slim, had a shaved head and a bushy mustache that reminded Stu of one of the actors he’d seen on
Sesame Street
back when he’d worked nights, had mornings to spend with his kids.

Fournier hitched his holster and collected his gear, and the two walked out together. “Life sucks, Ken. You and Barbie get Lisa
Ramsey, celebrities up the ying, and I get an end-of-shift, maybe-prowler/rapist/burglar gig with stupid overtones.”

“You want Ramsey?”

Fournier laughed. “Yeah, yeah, I know fame has its price.”

“What kind of a maybe-prowler/rapist?”

Fournier shook his head. “The rapist thing is crap—’scuse me, deacon, manure. We’re supposed to be working homicide, for God’s sake, and on this one, no one got hurt, let alone dead, so why’s it my business? Meanwhile, I’ve got four open 187’s and pressure from the boss. Goddamn brain-dead chief and his community policing manure.”

A few steps later, just to be polite, Stu said, “What exactly happened, Wil?”

“House on North Gardner, two lesbians come home from a week in Big Sur, find someone’s been in their kitchen, scarfed food, used the shower. They walk in on it—the shower’s still going—freak, run screaming out the front door, and the perp rabbits out the back.”

“What was burgled?”

“Food. Part of a pineapple, bologna, some soda. Big bad burglary, huh?”

“So where’s the rape?”

“Exactly.” Fournier gave a disgusted look. “Lesbians. A big pile of mail at the front door. Gone an entire week, do they think of putting a stop on it? Or leaving some lights on? Or getting an alarm or a Rottweiler or a poison snake or an AK-47? Man, Ken, what kind of folks still think they can count on us to do a damn thing about crime?”

CHAPTER

Routine. Am I a suspect?

Was he playing with her?

She called Stu at the station. He’d checked out an hour ago, and when she tried his house, she got no answer. Out with Kathy and the kids? Must be nice to have a life.

Back in L.A., she bought some salads at a mom-and-pop grocery on Fairfax, ate them at home while watching the news—no Ramsey info. She tried Stu again. Still no answer.

Time to simulate a life for herself.

Changing into acrylic-spattered sweats, she put on Mozart and squeezed paint onto her palette. Hunched on a stool, she worked till midnight. First the landscape, which was responding a bit, she felt in the groove, that hypnotic time contraction. Then another canvas, larger, blank and inviting. She laid on two coats of white primer, followed by a luxuriant layer of Mars black, and, when that dried, began a series of hastily brushed-in gray ovals that became faces.

No composition, just faces, scores of them, some overlapping, like fruit dangling from an invisible tree. Some with mouths parted innocently, all with pupilless black eyes that could have been empty sockets, ghostly discs, each one portraying a variant of confusion.

Each face younger than the last, a reverse aging, until she was painting nothing but children.

Perplexed children, growing on an invisible child tree . . . her hand cramped and she dropped the brush. Rather than get psychological about that, she laughed out loud, switched off the music, snatched the canvas off the easel, and placed it on the floor, face to the wall. Stripping naked and tossing her clothes on the floor, she took a long shower and got into bed. The moment the lights were off, she was playing back the interview with Ramsey.

Almost positive the guy was manipulating.

Not knowing what to do about it.

She woke up Wednesday morning still thinking about it. The way he’d flicked on the garage light, showing her the Mercedes, as if daring her to probe further. All those sympathy ploys—blood sugar, cataracts. Not much night driving.

Poor old guy, falling apart. But there was one health problem he’d never bring up.

One that could motivate some serious rage.

And still no lawyer, at least not out in the open. Some kind of double bluff? Ask the wrong question and in come the mouthpieces?

Or was he just feeling confident, because he had the perfect alibi?

Don’t get sucked into it, no frontal assault. Go for the flanks. The underlings. Find Estrella Flores, have a chat with the charter pilot, though that wouldn’t prove anything—there’d been plenty of time to get home, leave, pick up Lisa, kill her. Last but not least, Greg Balch, faithful lackey and likely perjurer. Petra was certain Ramsey had phoned the business manager the minute she drove off, but sometimes underlings harbored deep resentment—Petra remembered the way Ramsey had turned on Balch during the notification call. Balch standing there and taking it. Used to being a whipping boy? Put a little pressure on, ignite some long-buried anger, and sometimes the little people turned.

She reached her desk at 8
A.M.,
found a note from Stu saying he’d be in late, probably the afternoon.

No reason given.

She felt her face go hot; crumpled the note and tossed it.

The flight manager at Westward Charter confirmed Ramsey and Balch’s Tahoe trip and the 8:30
P.M.
Burbank arrival. Ed Marionfeldt, the pilot, happened to be in and she spoke to him. Pleasant, mellow, he’d done tons of trips with
The Adjustor,
no problems, nothing different this time. Petra didn’t want to ask too many questions for fear of making Ramsey the prime suspect. Even though he was. She could imagine some defense attorney using Marionfeldt’s testimony to illustrate Ramsey’s normal mood that day. If it ever got to a trial—dream on.

A phone call to Social Security verified that Estrella Flores was indeed legal, her only registered address Ramsey’s Calabasas house.

“So any checks would go there?” she asked a put-upon SSA worker.

“She hasn’t filed for benefits, so there are no checks going out.”

“If you get a change of address, would you please let me know, Mr. . . .”

“Vicks. If it comes to my attention I’ll try, but we don’t work with individual petitions unless there’s a specific problem—”

“I’ve got a specific problem, Mr. Vicks.”

“I’m sure you do—all right, let me tag this, but I have to tell you things get lost, so you’re best off checking in with us from time to time.”

She called Player’s Management. No one answered; no machine. Maybe Balch was on his way up the coast to Montecito. Taking some downtime to obliterate evidence at the boss’s request.

Next came the Merrill Lynch broker. Morad Ghadoomian had a pleasant, unaccented voice, sounded prepared for the call.

“Poor Ms. Boehlinger. I suppose you want to know if she had any financial entanglements. Unfortunately, she didn’t.”

“Unfortunately?”

“No entanglements,” he said, “because there was nothing to tangle.”

“No money in the account?”

“Nothing substantial.”

“Could you be a little more specific, sir?”

“I wish I could—suffice it to say I was led to expect things that never materialized.”

“She told you she’d be investing large sums of money but didn’t?”

“Well . . . I’m really not sure what the rules are here in terms of disclosure. Neither is my boss—we’ve never dealt with a murder before. We do get deceased clients all the time, estate lawyers, IRS reporting, but this . . . suffice it to say Ms. Boehlinger only came by my office once, and that was to fill out forms and seed the account.”

“How much seed did she sow?” said Petra.

“Well . . . I don’t want to step out of line here . . . suffice it to say it was minimal.”

Petra waited.

“A thousand dollars,” said Ghadoomian. “Just to get things going.”

“In stock?”

The broker chuckled. “Ms. Boehlinger’s plans were to build up a sizable securities account. Her timing couldn’t have been better—I’m sure you know how well the market’s been doing. But she never followed through with instructions, and the thousand remained in a money market fund, earning four percent.”

“How much did she say she was going to invest?”

“She never said, she just implied. My impression was that it would be substantial.”

“Six figures?”

“She talked about achieving financial independence.”

“Who referred her to you?”

“Hmm . . . I believe she just called on her own. Yes, I’m sure of it. A reverse cold call.” He chuckled again.

“But she never followed through.”

“Never. I did try to reach her. Suffice it to say, I was disap-pointed.”

Financial independence—Lisa expecting a windfall? Or just deciding to get serious as she approached thirty by banking Ramsey’s monthly support check and living off her editor’s salary? A surplus of eighty grand a year could add up.

A reduction in the eighty would have upset Lisa’s investment
plans.

Had Ramsey balked after Lisa got a job, threatened to take her back to court, and was that why she hadn’t followed through?

Or was it something simple—she’d chosen another broker?

Not likely. Why would she have left the thousand sitting there with Ghadoomian?

Was money another issue between the Ramseys?

Money and thwarted passion—no better setup for murder.

She spent an hour on the phone talking to civil servants at the Hall of Records, finally located the original Ramsey divorce papers. The final decree had been granted a little over five months ago. No obvious complications, no petitions to alter support, so if Ramsey had balked, he hadn’t made it official.

Then a message came through to call ID Division at Parker Center, no name.

The civilian clerk there said, “I’ll put you through to Officer Portwine.”

She knew the name but not the face. Portwine was one of the prints specialists; she’d seen his signature on reports.

He had a reedy voice and a humorless, rapid delivery. “Thanks for calling back. This could be either a major-league screwup or something interesting, hope you can tell me which.”

“What’s wrong?” said Petra.

“You sent us some material from the Lisa Boehlinger-Ramsey crime scene—food wrapper and a book. We obtained numerous prints, most likely female from the size, but no match in any of our files. I was just about to write you a report to that effect when I got another batch, supposedly from another case—burglary on North Gardner, latents from a kitchen knife and some food containers. I had a spare minute, so I looked at them, and they matched yours. So what I need to know is was there some kind of mix-up in the batch numbers, the forms getting screwed up? Because it’s bizarre, two batches coming from Hollywood, one after the other, and we get the exact same prints. We caught hell about our cataloging last year. Even though we’re careful, you know how much stuff we process. We’ve been bending over backwards, meaning if there is a problem on this one, it’s on your end, not ours.”

How could a guy talk so fast? Enduring the speech, Petra had dug her nails into her palm.

“When was the burglary?” she said.

“Last night. A Six car handled it and referred it to one of your D’s—W. B. Fournier.”

Petra looked over at Wil’s desk. Gone and checked out.

“What kind of food containers were printed?”

“Plastic orange juice jug, the prints were on the paper label. And a pineapple—that was interesting, never printed a pineapple before. There’re some other samples supposedly coming, says here a Krazy Glue tape from stainless steel plumbing fixtures, and a bottle of shampoo, also tape from . . . looks like a refrigerator, yes, a refrigerator. Sounds like a kitchen burglary. So what’s the story?”

“I don’t know a thing about the burglary. All we sent you from Ramsey were the food wrapper and the book and the victim’s clothing.”

“You’re telling me this other material isn’t yours?”

“That is exactly what I’m telling you,” said Petra.

Portwine whistled. “Two sets of prints from the same person, two different crime scenes.”

“Looks that way,” said Petra. Her heart was racing. “Do you still have the Ramsey batch—specifically, the book?”

“Nope, sent it down to evidence yesterday at seventeen hundred hours, but I did keep a copy of the prints. Some pretty distinctive ridges, that’s how I noticed the match.”

“Okay, thanks.”

“Welcome,” said Portwine, grudgingly. “At least we don’t have a problem.”

She left Wil Fournier a note to get in touch. Still no message from Stu, and he didn’t pick up his cell phone.

After driving downtown to Parker Center, she smiled her way into the employee parking lot and went up to the third-floor evidence room, where she filled out a requisition for the library book. The evidence warden was a dyed-blond black woman named Sipes who was unimpressed by the fact that the victim was L. Boehlinger-Ramsey and pointed out to Petra that she hadn’t written in the case number clearly. Petra erased and rewrote and Sipes disappeared behind endless rows of beige metal shelving, returning ten minutes later, shaking her head. “That lot number hasn’t been checked in.”