City of Fire (51 page)

She took another sip of coffee, still groggy from the ordeal. Still unable to shake that amped-up feeling in her stomach. Still plagued with nightmares and unable to sleep.

She’d completed her paperwork over the weekend. Martin Fellows’s body parts were examined by Art Madina and deemed officially dead. Burell’s missing body part was located and examined and appeared even more dead. Although Harriet Wilson remained in critical condition, her doctors had become hopeful, citing her strength of will. And Rhodes had been lucky, too. The bullet missed his lung. He was released from the hospital and convalescing at home. When the coroner’s office delivered Novak’s autopsy report to RHD, the papers were quietly slipped into a three-ring binder, along with the horrific photos SID downloaded from Martin Fellows’s camera.

Her partner’s last moments had been recorded for posterity, but no one other than Barrera had the courage to look.

She checked her watch. Novak’s funeral was scheduled for tomorrow morning. The sixth floor had written another speech for her, ordering her to commit the words to memory. The new chief would introduce her, then follow her speech with one of his own. But Novak’s ex-wife was holding an unofficial service this afternoon. A tribute to the father of her children. It was due to begin in an hour at a funeral home on the Westside. Everyone in the unit would be there, but she wondered about Rhodes. Over the weekend she went out to retrieve his cigarette butt from the planter. Brushing the leaves away, she found more than twenty butts stubbed into the soil and didn’t know what to make of it. She wanted to
talk to him. Confront him in a place with lots of people around. She hoped he was well enough to show.

She dumped her coffee in the trash—it wasn’t working anymore—and walked over to the parking garage. As she drove to Santa Monica, she was thinking about her bag of loose ends and the evidence she’d collected. The slug she’d dug out of her bedroom shutter and the videotape revealing the blood spatter from her brother’s murder at home. It was all about timing, she decided. Finding the right time to confront Rhodes and present the evidence to someone she could trust. The question was who?

By the time she reached the funeral home, the memorial service was already under way. But as she hurried down the hallway and opened the door, she didn’t see anyone and became confused.

It wasn’t a sitting room. Instead, it looked more like a movie set designed to mimic a basketball court. She closed the door, continuing down the hall. When she opened the next door, she found another set designed to look like a golf course. A man dressed in a black suit was wheeling a bronze casket onto the putting green beside a bag of clubs.

“You look lost,” the man said. “And I’ll bet you’ve never been here before.”

“I’m looking for the Novak family.”

“One door down,” he said with a smile. “He’s in the captain’s room.”

The captain’s room.

She cringed at the thought, but managed a nod and walked down to the end of the hall. She spotted Novak’s name printed on a card and set on an easel. Then she swung the door open, saw the room filled with people, and found a seat in the back row.

It was another bizarre movie set. One that included a row-boat and a fake pond. Novak was lying in his open casket dressed in his fishing clothes and wearing an old Dodger cap. His tackle box was inside the casket, along with his rod and reel. Instead of music, sound effects were playing and
she could hear ducks quacking and flies buzzing through the air. A pastor was standing behind the podium, talking about the ultimate fishing trip. It was somewhere in the sky, he said, and the fish were biting.

Lena looked at Novak’s ex-wife sitting in the front row and wondered if she was out of her mind, then back at her partner’s wooden figure posed like a doll in the casket. It was an image she wished she hadn’t seen. Another glimpse at hell she didn’t want to remember but wouldn’t forget.

She turned away, noticing an open bar and a table filled with taco chips and salsa, burritos and refried beans. As her eyes darted through the crowd, she found Lieutenant Barrera in the second row. Two seats over, her eyes locked on Rhodes.

She took a deep breath. His left arm was in a sling, but he was here. She kept her eyes on him until the service ended and everyone headed for the bar. But before she could get out of her seat, she caught Novak’s daughter staring at her from the front row. She was wearing a black dress and a thin gold chain around her neck. Even from a distance, Lena could tell that she was stoned.

She didn’t want to talk to the girl and turned away, looking for Rhodes in the crowd. But as she walked down the aisle, she could feel Kristin approaching like a magnet, reaching out and clutching her arm.

Lena turned and gave her a long look with Novak’s corpse directly behind them. She caught the nervous smile, Kristin’s right hand fiddling with the gold chain.

“I wanted to talk to you,” the girl said.

Lena tried to get rid of her anger but couldn’t. And she needed to talk to Rhodes before he took off, not Kristin Novak clinging to her on a trip through yesterday.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Lena said.

“Me, too.”

“And you’re higher than a kite.”

The girl frowned. “Why are you being so mean?”

Lena turned away, spotting Rhodes on the other side of the room. He had stepped away from Barrera and was watching
her. When someone tried to approach him, he shook him off.

“I’m not mean,” she said to the girl. “You’re stoned.”

“Maybe I needed something to get through this.”

Kristin was nervous, still playing with that gold chain. And something was attached. A disk in the shape of a heart. When the disk flopped out of the girl’s dress, Lena’s eyes zeroed in on the object.

It wasn’t a heart. The girl was wearing her brother’s guitar pick. She could see the one-of-a-kind image etched into the piece of fourteen-karat gold. The moon climbing out of a bed of grapelike clouds and smoking a rocket ship.

It took her breath away. What it implied cut to the bone.

Her eyes rose to the girl’s face. Her dilated pupils and idiotic smile.

“Where did you get this?”

The smile burgeoned. “From a friend.”

“What friend?”

“Someone I fucked a long time ago. Someone who liked to fuck me up the ass. I took it as a keepsake.”

The room began to spin. Time doing its back-and-forth and dragging her worn-out being away for one last ride into the black. Novak’s daughter would have been sixteen at the time. She had a drug problem and Novak was deeply worried about her. She was a fan of her brother’s music.

The dots connected in a single instant. All the dots. Her bag of loose ends was finally empty. So empty she couldn’t bring herself to believe it.

She thought about the blood she’d found in her bedroom. Her brother’s blood splashed all over the headboard and walls. David had left the club that night with a woman who never came forward. He hadn’t died making a drug deal in Hollywood. He was gunned down in bed.

Past conversations with her partner began to stream by. One after another. Hints that something was wrong. Hints that she never picked up because they had no foundation and were beyond the pale. She could recall the way Novak had tried to convince her early on that Romeo was responsible
for the girl’s murder at Tim Holt’s place, cut against his back step when even he realized that it didn’t make any sense. The look on his face, the fear and pain that wouldn’t let go when she told him that Molly McKenna had been an innocent teenager, a young girl who’d broken into Holt’s house ahead of the killer and had no relationship with Holt at all. Novak said he wanted to retire in peace. Trade his gun in for a life where he didn’t have to watch his back anymore and could sleep with both eyes closed. She could see it now. All of it. Novak wanting to get rid of the David Gamble murder case so no one would follow him to Seattle.

It felt like a knockout. A blow so devastating she wasn’t sure she could trust it or get up off the floor.

“Are you okay?” the girl asked.

“What do you remember about that night? The night my brother fucked you up the ass.”

The girl blushed and flashed another idiotic grin. Lena no longer felt any sympathy for her. She hated her.

“Nothing,” the girl said. “I was really high. I must’ve passed out.”

She said it as if she was proud. As if she had achieved something significant in her life. As if she knew things nobody else did. Lena could have told her that it was retro amnesia, but she didn’t give a shit.

Her eyes were pinned on that necklace. She grabbed it and snapped the chain away from the girl’s neck. Ignoring the stunned look on Kristin’s face, the silence in the room and the people staring at her, Lena gazed at the man in the moon etched into the gold. He was laughing at her. Winking at her. Smoking that rocket ship like a cigar. When the girl’s mother approached her, she told her to fuck off. Loud. So even Novak might hear it on his fishing trip. Then she closed her fingers around the moon’s face and hustled out of the room.

SHE didn’t want it to be true. Didn’t want to play any part in the big lie. Didn’t want to admit that she might have shared something with the man who’d deceived her and murdered her brother.

By the time she climbed the stairs to Novak’s apartment, she was so tuned up she broke the door down with a single kick.

Not Rhodes. Novak.

Working beside her. Showing her the way. The thought rippled through her brain with edges sharp as glass.

She looked around the living room, ignoring the fragrance of her partner’s body and the pictures of his ex-wife and daughters. The apartment was sparsely furnished but appeared comfortable. When she checked the kitchen and snapped open the fridge, she found a half gallon bottle of cheap vodka and realized that Novak was drinking again.

She slammed the door closed and walked out. When she hit the bedroom, she spotted a pile of receipts on the table and sat down on the bed. Most of them were for gas. But two or three were from a diner over on Lincoln she knew he went to for the meat loaf.

She was feeling nauseous. She shook it off, her eyes ripping through the room until they landed on the wastebasket. She dumped the contents on the bed, sifting through the candy wrappers and junk mail. When she found a wad of paper beneath the refuse, she scooped it up and carefully unwrapped it. The small piece of discarded paper was another receipt. But
it wasn’t for food or gas. This one was from a music store over on Sunset.

She looked at it. Read it. Novak had bought a copy of Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony the day before Holt was murdered.

It felt like a chunk of her heart just died. Reaching into her pocket for her cigarettes, she lit one and turned on the lamp. She checked the date and looked at the title again. She knew that Novak didn’t like classical music. All he ever listened to was country.

She walked back into the living room and opened the armoire. His CD collection was neatly laid out in the bottom two drawers. Skimming through the titles, she flipped the CD player on and opened the tray. Nothing but country.

She took another pull on the cigarette, her hands trembling. She could hear someone climbing the stairs outside. Someone wearing boots. It was Rhodes.

He stopped in the doorway, and she looked him over.

“You knew.”

“It was a guess,” he said in a low voice. “Something I didn’t want to come true.”

It settled into the room. Deep and heavy and dark as night.

“When?” she asked.

“I knew that Tim Holt didn’t commit suicide, Lena. The minute we got there I knew something was wrong.”

“Then why did you push it through?”

He shrugged. “I didn’t know who made the kill. All I knew was that it had to be someone close. Someone over the edge. I wanted him to think he got away with it. I didn’t want to give him a reason to hurt you.”

A moment passed, Lena thinking about what Rhodes just said. She saw a plate on the table and stubbed her cigarette out. Then she passed over the receipt for the CD.

“Novak murdered Holt and the girl,” she said.

Rhodes remained silent, taking it in. She saw the glint and sparkle in his eyes mixed with equal cuts of disappointment
and pain. She liked looking at his face, she decided. More now than before.

“We’ve already got the CD in evidence,” he said. “Matching the bar code won’t be very hard. You got the pick?”

She nodded, pulling it out of her pocket and handing it to him.

“For what it’s worth,” he said, “I don’t think Novak meant to kill your brother. The more time you spent working together, the more it tore him up.”

“We don’t work together anymore,” she said. “And that doesn’t account for Holt’s murder or Molly McKenna.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

He turned the pick in his hand, examining the image in the window light.

“I knew this was important,” he said. “But I couldn’t figure out how it played. Not until about twenty minutes ago when I saw you rip it away from the kid’s neck.” Rhodes passed it back, along with the receipt. “Novak was crazy about his daughter, Lena. Especially back then when he only thought she was fucking up. He used to follow her around at night and pull her out of bars.”