The First Cut (7 page)

“So I said, ‘Oh?’ Frankie wasn’t missing yet. I’d just seen her the day before. Her paper was there that morning, but when she works late, she sometimes doesn’t take it in until the evening. I figure I’ll call Frankie’s cell phone after this gal leaves. Her face was red and she was sniffing, like she’d been crying. So I ask her if she’s all right. She says she’s fine and the tears roll out from beneath these big sunglasses she has on. I ask her if she wants something to drink and she says no. She’s having a hard time trying to turn the bolt lock and I notice she has Frankie’s set of keys. Frankie had this key ring shaped like a tiny pistol. The little thing for the bullets rolled around and everything. Said her dad gave it to her. He’s a police officer, too, you know.”

“What did this woman look like?”

“I told Detective Schuyler about it and he showed me the drawing of the woman Frankie was seen with at that club by the airport. This could have been the same woman. Instead of the heart-shaped sunglasses, she had on these big square ones that covered half her face and she had black hair that went past her shoulders. Looked like a wig. I didn’t pay that much attention to what she was wearing, you know how they dress these days, but when I thought about it later, it seems to me that she had on gloves. Leather gloves.” Mrs. Bodek tilted her chin to make sure Vining got the significance.

“Then what?”

“She went down the stairs, muttering to herself, and out through the front gate. I called Frankie’s cell phone and left her a message about it. A couple of days later, the police show up, telling me Frankie’s gone missing.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Bodek. You’ve been very helpful.” Vining started heading down the stairs. She turned back. “Did you hear what the woman was muttering?”

Mrs. Bodek raised both hands. “Nonsense. Gibberish. Who can understand how they talk these days. She said, ‘This is vujaday. This is seriously vujaday.’” She shrugged.

Vining shrugged as well.

S I X

R
UIZ DROVE FRANK LYNDE HOME.

Kissick coordinated patrol officers into teams for knock-and-talks around the neighborhood and interviews with the film production crew.

Vining thought she’d also be knocking on doors, one more pair of feet on the street, but Early told her to get into the car, an indication that Early wanted to chat. Vining wasn’t surprised.

They stopped at Goldstein’s Bagels before returning to the station, going to the La Cañada Flintridge store since the Old Pasadena location had been forced to close.

“Raised their rent too high,” Early said. “Had to make room for more high-end retailers. The city planners call it gentrification. I call it a shame that they’re eroding the character of the city for the glory of people who max out their credit cards.”

“Right.”

“Best we grab something to eat while we can. Going to be a long day and night. Plus you’re running on empty anyway.” Early’s small glance revealed to Vining what the sergeant had not said.

Cops notice everything. Even when they aren’t looking, they’re looking. Being watchful was second nature to a cop. That included watching one another, especially in a department the size of Pasadena’s, where everyone knew everyone else, at least by sight. An officer who was having problems, showing signs of distress, would not go unnoticed for long. Everyone had a bad day. Most cops eventually burned out, either becoming apathetic, letting everything go, or becoming aggressive, refusing to take the smallest amount of crap. That was predictable, expected, and acceptable within a range. But for a cop who was going over the deep end big-time, who had gone from a known quantity to the X factor, the stakes were too high to do nothing.

Vining was holding to her story about feeling wobbly that morning because she hadn’t eaten enough. She claimed she hadn’t yet settled into her old routine. The story was flimsy. She knew it and Kissick knew it. Didn’t matter. She was sticking to it and she knew he’d back her up for now. What could they do, call her a liar? Being a cop was all about putting up barriers—between the Job and home life, between one’s emotions and the ugliness of what the Job brings day in and day out. There was no need for her to reveal the panic attacks to anyone in the department. There was no need for anyone, including her daughter, to know how much the attacks frightened her.

They made her feel damaged. Damaged beyond her control.

The panic attack today had taken her by surprise. She thought she had corralled her fear of being inside strange homes. Put it in a box. Tied it with a ribbon. Here it is, my phobia. And now I’m setting it on a shelf where it can’t affect me. Today was the first time she’d seen a homicide victim since her assault. Had this phobia been hiding beneath her other, more obvious one? Would seeing any corpse provoke a panic attack or had the source of this one been more specific? A tortured and slaughtered female cop streaked with dried blood.

She couldn’t shake the image of Frankie’s dead eyes flashing to life and her chapped lips speaking to her. To her.

“I am you. I am not you.”

Her rational mind insisted that the incident on the hillside had been pure hallucination. Fantasy. Imagination. Nothing more.

On the drive back to the station, Vining pursued something that Early had said.

“You said we’re going to have a long day and night. Thought I was Residential Burglary under Sergeant Cho.”

“This is going to be a big investigation with all eyes on us. Not just L.A.; this will be news in Timbuktu, the way things go these days. It’s more than Kissick and Ruiz can handle by themselves. You’re the logical choice to be on the team and we’ll need more than just you. I want to break this thing and fast, for our sake. For Frank Lynde’s sake.”

“Kissick wasn’t sure she was Frank’s daughter.”

“That’s Kissick’s style. He was sure. He was just waiting.
You
were sure.”

The searing look she gave Vining was a test to see if her opinion about the dead woman’s identity was solid.

“It’s Frankie Lynde,” Vining said.

“The coroner will have a positive I.D. any time now. Detective Schuyler should have done a lot of our homework for us. Kissick’s calling him to arrange a meeting.”

“Now we have the body. Let’s hope she gives up her secrets.”

While Early waited for the gate to roll back at the Ramona Street garage entrance, several reporters who knew enough about the station to go there instead of the front entrance rushed the car. Early accelerated past them.

“So it starts.”

S
ITTING AT HER NEW DESK IN THE SECTION OF THE CUBICLE WARREN ALLOCATED
to property crimes, Vining wrapped the remaining half of the bagel, cream cheese, turkey, and sprouts sandwich in wax paper and shoved it to the corner. She’d ordered something healthy-sounding only because Sergeant Early was with her. The bundle in wax paper was the sole item on her desk. The drawers held only pens and pads of paper. She’d neglected to bring a mug or any personal items. After she was injured, Kissick had boxed up the handful of things in her cubicle—drawings and crafts done by Emily and family photos—and delivered them to her house. For safekeeping, he’d said. After she’d pressed, he confessed that Ruiz had moved into her cubicle. The box was still unopened in a corner of her family room where he’d set it that day. She’d bring it back tomorrow.

Something made her look up. She saw Officer Alex Caspers peering at her over the top of the adjoining cubicle.

“Pretty fucked up, huh?”

“What’s that?”

“Finding Frank Lynde’s daughter nude and cut up.”

“Where d’ya hear that?”

“Come on…” He made a sucking noise with his teeth. “Shame. She was real good lookin’. Tall, like you.”

He was giving her the hungry-eye look like he’d done earlier that morning. She would like nothing better than for him to vacate the area and the planet, but she was intrigued.

“Did you know her?”

“Met her at the last service awards luncheon or whatever they call it. Frank got an award for twenty-five years on the force. He introduced Frankie to me. Real stand-up guy, Frank. I called Frankie at her precinct, but she and I couldn’t find a time to connect.”

I wonder why.

“I hear she was pretty wild.”

Vining gave the woman credit for some discretion in her men. “We don’t know for sure it’s her. Whoever it is, that’s a hell of a way to talk about the dead. A little respect?”

“How is that being disrespectful? She knew she was a piece of ass and liked hearing it.”

Vining shook her head and stood. On her way to get coffee, Caspers answered his phone.

“Hey, peckerhead. You coming to the party tonight?”

She went to the coffee station on a table at the rear of the suite and pulled a Styrofoam cup from the stack. There was tension in the air. The calm before the storm. The investigation was in the works, but Vining was not privy to details. She was hanging around, waiting to be given something to do, as if it truly was her first day on the job. Kissick had returned and was busy on the phone. She knew he was waiting for Detective Schuyler to come up from Hollywood LAPD with materials from his missing person investigation. Ruiz was still with Frank Lynde off-site, waiting out the time until they had an official I.D. on the body.

She knew Lynde already suspected the worst. Adult women don’t disappear of their own volition.

“But we don’t run away.”

The notification would be a strange relief for Lynde. It would end his time in purgatory.

Vining thought of the calls made to her family after she had been attacked, that ringing phone dreaded by loved ones of police officers. Kissick had made them, calling Vining’s mother and her ex-husband, Wes.

“Nan’s been hurt on the job. She’s alive but her condition is serious.”

It was a white lie. Her condition had been critical.

Emily claimed to know the moment of Vining’s attack. She was reading by the pool at her father’s house when she felt coldness in her extremities and couldn’t breathe.

After Vining had been resuscitated, she’d lain in a coma for three days.

Vining believed she wasn’t T. B. Mann’s first victim. The belief had no basis in fact, but she couldn’t shake that deep-in-her-bones instinct. He had seemed so assured, intentionally coming close to getting caught. They had found a police radio scanner in the house on El Alisal Road. He had tracked her movements and the status of her backup. There had been a realtor’s open house in that location the weekend before Vining was attacked. Kissick, who had handled the investigation, speculated that Vining’s assailant entered the house then and unlocked a window through which he later entered. Vining had worked patrol in that neighborhood on Sundays for several weeks, picking up overtime. T. B. Mann couldn’t be positive that Vining would be the officer to respond to his call, but it was likely to be her. It was Vining’s theory that he had patiently stalked her, maybe for months, working out the timing, location, and circumstances until all the elements converged in that one brilliant and catastrophic moment.

Had he pressed the envelope farther with Lynde?

She couldn’t jump to conclusions. That sort of thinking made for a shoddy investigation. She had to keep her mind open. Otherwise, Kissick and Early would spot it and she would be working on residential burglaries.

During her long months of recuperation, Vining had researched female law enforcement officers in the United States who had been killed on duty. There had been twenty-six over the past ten years. Most deaths had occurred in major metropolitan areas. Made sense. Big-city police forces tended to have female officers.

A guy on parole for murder shot one, a New York City cop, with her own gun while she was at the scene of a domestic violence incident. Another was shot during a bank robbery in Washington, D.C. One was stabbed in a drug sting gone bad outside Austin, Texas. Two were killed responding to calls regarding suspicious circumstances. Four were killed while arresting a suspect. Three were killed during routine traffic stops. Two were murdered when their home problems followed them to work, one in Atlanta by a husband and one outside San Diego by a boyfriend. Vining couldn’t see how women who could kick butt in their work lives had let that happen. Love. Killed because of love.

Eleven died in vehicular accidents, the number one killer of police officers.

Then there was Johnna Alwin of the Tucson Police Department. The memorial page on the TPD Web site said she had been ambushed and murdered and little else. Vining called the TPD and asked to speak to the lead investigator. She was put through to Lieutenant Owen Donahue. She told a half-truth, saying she was investigating an ambush of a Pasadena, California, police officer who was brutally attacked but survived. She was searching for similar crimes, trying to determine if the assault was isolated or if they were looking at a serial killer.

Donahue was grudgingly accommodating. Alwin was a detective working undercover to bust a doctor, an internist, who was selling restricted prescription drugs out of his office. Three years ago on a Sunday afternoon in January, Alwin received a call from her informant, Jesse Cuba, a janitor in the doctor’s building, saying he had information. It was Alwin’s day off, but she called the watch commander and reported that Cuba wanted to meet her in the medical building where he worked. Cuba was a heroin addict on parole for possession. Alwin had met him on the fly and alone before and considered him harmless.

When Alwin didn’t return, a patrol car was sent out. The officers found her in a storage closet in the basement. She’d been stabbed seventeen times.

Donahue told Vining that he wouldn’t be much help to her because they’d solved Alwin’s murder. Jesse Cuba was found dead of a heroin overdose in the seedy motel room he rented by the week. In his room, police found Alwin’s purse and jewelry. The purse had Alwin’s blood on it. Other suspects didn’t pan out. Case closed. Donahue wished her well with her investigation.

Vining hung up. There was no reason for her to second-guess Tucson’s investigation, but something about the case bothered her.