The Deepest Cut (4 page)

She leaned away from him, supporting herself with her hands on the floor, blinking as the world came back into harsh focus. She tipped back her head and closed her eyes, keeping the world at bay for a few more seconds. She licked her lips and lazily drew her hand down the perspiration on her chest.

He slid to lean against a cabinet, carrying her with him. He looked at her dreamily. “Wow.”

She raised her eyebrows to concur.

He pulled her forward to lie against him. “Ow.” Rolling onto one hip, he reached his hand beneath his butt and pulled out a broken piece of dried penne pasta. He lobbed it into the sink and tried to brush off the fragments.

She rested her head against his chest and sighed.

They were jostled from their afterglow by a sharp, electronic beep.

“That’s my cell phone,” he said. “There’s a new message. Can you reach my pants?”

As she slowly crawled toward them on her hands and knees, her phone on the counter started to ring.

They looked at each other.

She didn’t answer it.

After four rings, the answering machine played her outgoing message. Then they heard Sergeant Kendra Early’s voice. “Vining, you there? Pick up. We’ve got a one-eight-seven—”

Vining scrambled to her feet. She snatched her panties from where they’d landed on top of the phone. She cleared her throat before picking up. “Hi, Sarge. I’m here. What’s up?”

“Good evening, Nan. Sorry to disturb you, but we’ve got a homicide at South DeLacey and Jacaranda. The old Hollenbeck Paper Company building. Homeless guy looking for a place to sleep in a construction site there found a man who was shot to death. The deceased’s name is Abel Espinoza. He’s covered with NLK ink.”

The Northside Latin Kings gang was a well-established presence
in gang-infested Northwest Pasadena. Violence there between Latino and African-American gangs had spiked in the past few weeks, along with the temperature in the waning days of summer. The city was in the siege of a black-versus-brown gang war.

The Hollenbeck building was farther south, in the popular area of restaurants, movie theaters, and shops in restored historic buildings that was officially called Old Pasadena. Locals called it Old Town.

“Scrappy Espinoza.” Vining picked a strand of Kissick’s chest hair off her breast.

“You know him?” Early asked.

“He was one of my confidential informants when I worked gangs. Nice guy. Almost beat his pregnant girlfriend to death. Scrappy must be in his thirties. Ripe old age for a gangbanger.”

“Caspers and Ruiz are on their way, but I need you or Kissick there, too.”

Early didn’t have to add that Caspers was too green and Ruiz brought too much attitude to be trusted to handle the scene without adult supervision. Early was slow to anger, but Vining could tell she was ticked off. “I couldn’t get ahold of Kissick at home or on his cell. I called your cell and got no answer. Glad I got you on your land line. Thought I was going to have to tell the watch commander, ‘Sorry, Lieutenant I’ve got two senior detectives on call, but I can’t reach either one.’”

Vining remembered that her cell phone was in her bedroom.

“That’s part of the reason I like being the boss, so I don’t have to go out to homicide scenes in the middle of the night.”

Vining knew better than to offer a lame explanation.

Early spoke loud enough for Kissick to hear. “Do you know where Kissick is?”

He winced.

“No, Sarge, I don’t.” Vining dropped the tone of her voice with the last syllable so she wouldn’t sound hesitant.

There was a long pause, which Vining and Kissick both interpreted as Sergeant Early weighing whether Vining was telling the truth. They had been careful to keep their private lives private, but there were rumors.

“Get in touch with him, if you can …” The sergeant layered in another pregnant pause. “This might be retaliation for the murder of Titus Clifford on East Colorado, which was retaliation for the drive-by shooting at the Carrillo family party. Which was retaliation for the one before that and the one before that… Now it’s spread to Old Town. We have to get control before this gang war blows up the city.”

FOUR

C
LAIMING THAT HER BATHROOM IN THE MASTER SUITE WAS A
mess, Vining brought Kissick towels and a disposable razor so he could shave his stubble and take a shower in the guest bathroom. He didn’t want to take the time to go to his house in Altadena to change, so he had to put on the khakis and rumpled shirt he’d been wearing when he’d come over. He always kept a spare sport jacket and tie in the car. Vining couldn’t help him in the wardrobe department, as she’d long ago carted to the Dumpster any personal items her ex-husband, Wes, had left behind when he’d walked out on her and Emily twelve years ago.

Kissick set off on the eight-mile drive to Pasadena from Vining’s home in the hilly Mt. Washington neighborhood of Los Angeles. It was best to arrive separately at the crime scene. While romance between PPD officers was not forbidden, neither of them wanted to be targets of smarmy gossip. Vining in particular was leery, having had her fill of low remarks, ostensibly said in jest, and with cutting nicknames, called out with a playful wink.

She quickly showered and put on slacks, a tailored blouse, and comfortable, thick-soled shoes. From its nightly resting place beneath her pillow, she retrieved her friend, her Walther PPK. Sitting on the
straight-backed chair at her desk, she secured the Velcro strap of the ankle holster onto her right leg, and tucked in the Walther.

Standing, she took her badge from the desk and hooked it onto the front of her belt. While she did so, she looked at the artifacts she’d arrayed across her bedspread earlier that evening, before Em had found the bloody shirt and all hell had broken loose.

She indulged in her obsession behind her closed bedroom door. She’d taken out the oddball collection from where she kept them hidden, like contraband, in the back of a dresser drawer. Each was a gift from T. B. Mann, each either fashioned or procured by him for them— his women.

For us,
Vining thought.

An elite sorority of which no woman wanted to be a member.

Fortunately, she’d remembered the artifacts were displayed in her bedroom when Kissick had suggested they move their tryst there. He and the PPD knew about some of the items. Others belonged to that growing part of her life that Vining kept secret.

On the bedspread were three pearl necklaces. Each had a pendant set with a different semiprecious gemstone surrounded by small fake diamonds. There were two notes, handwritten in fountain pen on panel cards. And there were photocopies of four charcoal drawings. Both notes and one of the necklaces, the one with a large pearl in the pendant, had been personally and mysteriously delivered to Vining.

The pearl-on-pearl necklace she’d worn publicly, but no one besides Emily knew that it was a gift from T B. Mann. It had shown up in her mailbox six years ago with a panel card attached to it with a ribbon. On the card, neat handwriting said:

At that time, she had just been vindicated in the on-duty shooting death of Lonny Veltwandter, a has-been rock star, in an incident that brought her considerable notoriety. She became hero to some, a villain to many. She received gifts—and hate mail— but the pearl-on-pearl
necklace with its simple yet ominous message was the most lavish and curious offering.

Only years later would she realize that the necklace had been from T. B. Mann. Vining’s high-profile shooting had drawn his twisted attention. By the gift of the necklace, he was anointing her, welcoming her into his elite circle, in which the rules— and the endgame— were defined by him. She had certainly not known then that he would spend the next several years carefully, methodically preparing another prize for her: death by his hand.

The second note on a panel card had been left for her at L.A. County General Hospital’s psych ward after the puzzling, silent waif Nitro had slipped into the wind. The message on this card was more ominous:

Kissick had been with her when she’d received that one, so it was not a secret.

The other two necklaces were secrets. Big ones. She had stolen them and had told lies to many people, including Sergeant Early and Kissick, in her fervor to possess them. One necklace had belonged to the only other victim of T B. Mann whom Vining had yet identified: Tucson P.D. detective Johnna Alwin. Its pendant had a garnet surrounded by a circle of small cubic zirconias. Alwin had been wearing the necklace when she’d been murdered. It was still splattered with her dried blood.

The third necklace had been Nitro’s. It was shabby, with peeling fake pearls and a scratched fake sapphire surrounded by tarnished and missing rhinestones. This necklace intrigued Vining the most. Its age and condition made her wonder whether this was where it had all started. She surmised that if she could crack the secret of this necklace, she would crack the secret of T B. Mann.

The four drawings had been in Nitro’s possession when he’d been apprehended by the Pasadena P.D. in Old Town. The originals were in a spiral pad locked away in the PPD’s Evidence Section. The drawings were skilled. The artist, talented.

One accurately depicted in loving detail the Johnna Alwin murder scene. Alwin had been stabbed to death in a storage closet in an office building. Another showed Vining after T. B. Mann had plunged the knife into her neck. The third showed an unidentified woman in uniform, a Ranger Stetson on her head. Silhouetted in the foreground was a man aiming a gun at her. A giant rock with a distinctive domed shape was in the background.

The fourth was the most grisly. A nude woman was tied by her ankles from the rafters of what looked like a tumbledown barn. Blood dripped over her face and onto the ground from a gash in her neck.

Each piece of Vining’s collection evoked terror, blood, and death. Yet, she indulged in this secret habit of taking them from the dresser drawer, removing them from their bags and boxes, and displaying them. Sometimes, she’d pick one up and hold it between her hands with her eyes closed, as if, given the chance and a safe, quiet place, the object might reveal its secrets.

Vining’s artifacts filled her with both heartache and sweet longing, like the cremated remains of a loved one kept on a shelf in the house, shrink-wrapped and locked inside a cedar keepsake box. If she just got rid of them, she’d be free of the constant reminder of what they represented. She should take the necklaces and notes to the Pasadena P.D. and book them into evidence. But then she would no longer have them, these paltry traces of T B. Mann. They were just pathetic crumbs, robbed of flesh, blood, and soul, but at least they were hers to keep. Tangible links to him.

Revealing her collection would be the same as scattering her loved one’s ashes into the ocean. She’d have to do it eventually, but she wanted to hold on to them a little longer, until she had crept yet closer to him. She was breaking the rules, but felt deep in her gut she was doing the right thing. Shining a light too brightly into his lair would send him scampering through a hole, again escaping her. She knew what she was doing. She was drawing him out. He was getting closer. While there was a limit to what she would do to get him, she didn’t exactly know where the line was. She trusted her instincts to pull her back before she plunged over the edge.

She didn’t ask herself the follow-up question: When her instincts warned her to go no further, would she listen?

She gathered the necklaces, cards, and drawings. She lingered when slipping her own pearl necklace into its satinette bag.

Instead of storing it, she unfastened the clasp and put it on. Until a few months ago, she hadn’t touched it for years, keeping it buried in the back of the dresser drawer. But lately, she’d felt compelled to wear it, and had on occasion.

Outside, the wind chimes on the terrace jangled again. Vining resisted believing in ghosts, but had to believe in this one, as she’d seen her with her own eyes.

Vining interpreted Frankie’s message. She took off the necklace and put it away.

Her cell phone pinged. Kissick’s text message said: Whr R U?