Last Breath (10 page)

She shut off the shower and dried her hair with a towel, left the bathroom and wrapped herself in a robe. She wandered through the bungalow.

People who knew her only from work would have been surprised by her home. It reflected a different side of her, one she kept hidden from casual acquaintances—and most of her fellow cops fell into that category. She was a collector of items that could be described either as art objects or as knickknacks. In truth, C.J. didn’t much care how they were described. She knew what she liked.

Small things mostly. Handmade, always. The older the better. She liked the feel of living among other people’s histories. She liked to run her hands over a carving board and imagine the family gatherings in which it had served as a centerpiece, or operate an antique sewing machine and think of the elegant dresses it had produced for debutante balls. She liked to hold a locket carrying the cameo of a woman she had never met, a woman long dead, and to study the frozen image of that woman’s face and live for a minute in her long-ago world.

LA was a city of mass production and relentless improvement and noisy, roaring progress, but she had made her home a sanctuary from all that.

Most of these items were inexpensive, a necessity imposed by her limited budget. She had started off haunting flea markets and swap meets, but when auction sites began appearing on the Internet, she switched to that mode of buying. She could browse through the cast-off treasures of the whole continent, and via the miracle of e-mail, she could dicker with a lady in Vancouver over a hand mirror in an ivory frame, or haggle with a gentleman in Louisiana over a set of steak knives with hand-carved teakwood handles. She had been ripped off a few times, but most of her online transactions had gone smoothly, and in the past year she had filled her home with charming oddities that pleased her.

The past year. Yes, only that long. She had pursued her hobby in earnest only after her divorce.

She stopped circling the room long enough to peek through the front curtains for a look at the dimming sky. A breeze shivered the leaves of the eucalyptus tree in her yard, and from the branches came the pleasant noise of birds. The sun was nearly gone, the western horizon purple like a bruise.

People said there were no seasons in California, but they were wrong. The winters, though not harsh, had other qualities of winters elsewhere—the shortened days, the early dusk, the settled sense of bleakness.

Or maybe it was just her mood.

She moved away from the curtains and took another look at the collectibles around her. She knew that filling her home with the bric-a-brac of strangers was, in part, an attempt to fill the emptiness of her own life.

Her marriage had been far from perfect. But when it ended, there had been nothing else for her, except her job. And the job alone wasn’t enough.

Was it enough for Adam?

Seems like a nice guy,
Delano had said.

As long as you don’t trust him too much,
she’d answered.

She had met Adam Nolan in a bar on Ventura Boulevard a month after her arrival in LA. At the time she’d had no intention of becoming a cop. Having spent four years at UC Riverside with nothing to show for it but a degree in educational psychology, she had come to the city with the vague hope of landing a teaching job at a private school.

It hadn’t taken long for her to learn that such jobs were hard to come by, and most of the teachers filling those positions had master’s degrees in their subjects. Her savings were running out, she’d made no friends in the city, she felt lost and directionless, and she didn’t know what to do.

Then she and Adam made eye contact at Happy Hour in the Studio Tavern. He bought her a margarita and said he was starting law school at UCLA.

Law school didn’t impress her, though clearly it was meant to. What impressed her was that he was polite and he didn’t push. He seemed content to just have a conversation—an actual dialogue—and when she talked, he listened attentively. Even after only a month in LA, she already knew how rare it was for anyone to listen.

They dated for two months before she slept with him. She remembered it vividly—better than he did, it seemed. They were in his Culver City apartment, and an Emmylou Harris CD was playing on his boombox, and as he took her into his bed, the song that came over the cheap speakers was “Save the Last Dance for Me.”

She had always thought of it as their special song, but Adam, evidently, had forgotten. She wondered why it hurt her to acknowledge that.

He was only the second man she’d been with, the first having been a college boyfriend who drifted away in their senior year. Adam wasn’t much more experienced, as he cheerfully admitted while fumbling with her bra strap. Their first time together went quickly—the song was hardly over before Adam was finished too. But, she had to admit, he had improved with practice.

Shortly after he began law school, she was accepted to the LAPD Academy. The idea, which horrified her parents and baffled Adam, had come to her one night as she lay awake. Why had she studied psychology? To understand fear—her own fear, the fear that had haunted her since that awful night in her childhood.

But it wasn’t enough to understand fear intellectually. Fear had to be confronted, attacked. A teaching post at a private school would be only an escape from what still terrified her. She needed to stop running. She needed to fight back.

On the day before she enrolled in the Academy, she and Adam were married by a judge in a small, simple ceremony. There was no honeymoon. They’d meant to take one later but had never gotten around to it.

The Academy training lasted seven months. After graduation she was a P-1—a patrol officer with probationary status partnered with a training officer, whose job was to help her forget everything she’d learned in class. She was assigned to Harbor Division, where she became familiar with the Vietnamese and Cambodian gangs that fought vicious battles over drugs and turf. To call Harbor a war zone was no exaggeration; the Vietnam War had never ended there.

She spent two years in Harbor, rising to P-2 rank, while Adam completed law school. She paid the bills for both of them. “I’m a kept man,” Adam would joke, but she knew it hurt his pride to take her money, just as it bothered him to know that his wife cruised the streets with a sidearm while he toted a backpack full of law books.

She worked a lot of night watches and graveyard shifts, and Adam was at school during the day and holed up in the law library most evenings. They saw too little of each other. When they were together, they seemed to have less and less to say.

C.J. blamed it on herself. Her job was exhausting and brutal, and it simultaneously wore her down and made her hard. Adam would talk about his day—classroom lectures, oral exams, mock trials. It felt like kid stuff to her after nine hours spent chasing the radio from one 911 call to the next, seeing the corpses of gang-war victims, comforting the bereaved, sneaking down alleys in response to a shots-fired report. It was real, it was electric, and Adam knew nothing about it. When she spoke of what she had seen and done, he didn’t know how to respond. After a while she knew he wasn’t listening anymore.

Then, just about a year ago, in the first week of February, she came home earlier than usual, punching out before the end of her watch because she had a fever and a queasy stomach. She entered the house—their house,
this
house, the little fixer-upper they’d bought with her salary—and walked into the bedroom, intending to lie down with a cold compress on her head.

And found Adam with a woman named Ashley, who was, as she later learned, one of his classmates.

The affair had been going on for months. Evidently Adam had found someone worth listening to, someone whose world was not so different from his own.

C.J. filed for divorce the next day. Adam fought it. He wanted them to stay together. He swore they could make the marriage work. He might even have believed it. She knew better. Yes, she could understand what he had done. At a certain intellectual distance she could even sympathize.

But she could never trust him again.

She resumed using her maiden name, a decision that seemed to upset him as much as the divorce itself. She kept the house, which she, after all, had paid for. Adam moved to a studio apartment in Venice and took a part-time job while finishing his studies.

She had kept in touch with him to some extent. She knew that Ashley had left him, that he’d plowed his energies into his schoolwork and had obtained his degree with honors.

Now it was January, the twelfth month since their breakup. She had redecorated the house and transferred to a new division, feeling obscurely that she had to make a fresh start. Adam had found work and moved to a two-bedroom condo in Brentwood.

New lives for them both.

Sure.

She knew that neither of them had gotten fully back on track since the divorce. That was why it was dangerous to get together. There was too great a temptation to revive the old relationship. It would be so easy. She had always loved him, even at the end. Loved him, hated him, distrusted him—all at the same time.

She sighed. “You’re a piece of work, Killer,” she murmured, “you know that?”

She went into the den and sat before her desktop computer, logging on to the Internet to check her e-mail. As usual, it was mostly spam. She wondered why they called it that. Perhaps because nobody liked it, but it never seemed to go away.

One message was different from the rest. It consisted of one sentence.

WELCOME TO THE 4-H CLUB.

She had heard of 4-H, of course. Some sort of club for people who raised livestock or something.

Whatever it was, she had never tried to join, and even if she had, this cryptic message was hardly the way to welcome a new member.

Must be a joke, she decided. Or maybe the rest of the message had been cut off.

She almost deleted the e-mail, but hesitated. The message disturbed her for some reason. She thought of the white van. Now this.

There couldn’t be any connection. Of course not.

Even so, she saved the message on her hard drive, though she wasn’t sure why.

She logged off and shut down her computer. Suddenly she was restless. Returning to her bedroom, she threw on some clothes, then dragged her collapsible home gym out from under the bed.

She set to work doing butterfly curls. Generally she did a minimum of fifty, with the resistance set at a moderate level. She had learned not to train too hard. A pulled muscle could hamper her activities in the field for days, even weeks. It was better to do more reps at a lower setting. Besides, she was mainly interested in toning her physique.

Finished with the curls, she readjusted her position and did leg lifts. It was more efficient to alternate upper and lower body exercises, allowing one set of muscles to recover while the other set was being worked.

She had never been a fitness maven until she enrolled in the Academy. Then she set to work on improving her physical conditioning even before the first day of class. Her greatest fear had been humiliation—she hadn’t wanted to be a washout, hadn’t wanted to find that she couldn’t complete a set of push-ups or a jog around the track, while all the other recruits handled it easily. As it turned out, she proved to be one of the fittest members of the class—a mixed blessing, since it meant that her instructors often singled her out to lead the class in an exercise routine.

Some cops gradually lost their conditioning once they were in the field. She was determined not to follow their example. In the Academy, slow reflexes or poor coordination could have cost her a few points with the instructors. On the street, the same failings could get her killed.

Suppose she had been a fraction slower when she grabbed Ramon Sanchez’s revolver ...

“Don’t think about it,” she gasped, flexing her thigh muscles in another lift.

She was alive, she was healthy, she was safe. No need to think about might-haves and what-ifs.

No need to worry about anything at all.

Treat enjoyed working out with Caitlin.

He lay on his bedroom floor, his laptop computer resting a few feet away on the smooth carpet, the video feed clearly visible. She exercised her abs and shoulders and back, and he practiced bending.

Bending—that was what he’d called it ever since childhood, when he discovered the remarkable suppleness of his limbs. In medical argot he was hypermobile; in common parlance, double-jointed—the word
double
being used in its less familiar sense of
fold
or
bend
. Some of his flexibility had diminished with age, but through daily exercise he remained limber enough to hyperextend each elbow by more than fifteen degrees, to bend his knees forward to the same extent, to touch his forearm with his thumb, and to perform other such carnival tricks.

He ran deftly through his series of stretches, working first the ankles, then knees, then hip joints, and so on, bending into pretzel shapes, tucking his legs behind his ears, enfolding himself in his thin, malleable limbs. He had to be careful not to dislocate a shoulder. As was typical of those who had inherited Marfan syndrome, his joints could easily pop out of their sockets when subjected to unusual strain.

On the computer Caitlin continued her equally rigorous program of self-improvement. Of all the things she did, her exercise regimen was the one that pleased him most. And if he could judge by the comments dropped in certain chat rooms and newsgroups that he frequented, there were others who shared his tastes.

It was funny. The two previous women had been highly promiscuous, even oversexed. Miss November, especially. She had switched bed partners on a weekly, sometimes semiweekly, basis. She invited all sorts of casual paramours into the sheets with her—overweight middle-aged men all too obviously picked up at singles bars, young studs with the hard, sculpted bodies of would-be actors who spent their lives at the gym, willowy artistic types who seemed, at times, more feminine that Miss November herself. In her bed, before the unseen camera’s eye, she performed magnificently with her various partners, executing every imaginable variation on the theme of heterosexual coupling.