City of Fire (6 page)

“If you agree,” he said, “then why can’t I see her? I want to know what happened.”

“We do, too, Mr. Brant. The sooner you realize that, the better off we’ll all be.”

He thought it over, his eyes losing their focus and turning inward again. “I’ve already told Tito everything I know. I came home and found her … like that.”

“He told us. It must have been extremely difficult. We appreciate everything you’ve done to help.”

Sanchez had already filled them in on his conversation with Brant. It had been part of the plan. While everyone else kept their distance from within the confines of the crime scene, Sanchez sat with Brant hoping to become his next best friend. James Brant was twenty-eight years old and worked as the chief bean counter at the Dreggco Corporation, a fledgling biotech company located just south of Venice Beach. Lena had been right. Money was still an issue in their lives. Brant had won the job and title because of his youth and willingness to defer most of his salary in favor of a piece of the action. The Dreggco Corporation was banking on its research. If their
work panned out, everyone would reap the rewards. If things went south, Brant would leave with enough experience to move on at a higher salary. According to Tito, it sounded as if the company had hit on something and was about to be flooded with cash in a buyout scheme. Brant told Tito that he had been working all-nighters for more than a week. That the deal hinged on the numbers. Although things were good with Nikki—they had only been married for two years—it hadn’t been easy. They lived on her salary, which wasn’t much because she taught at a small art college on the other side of Glendale. The mortgage on their home didn’t leave room for anything but the necessities.

“I loved her,” he said. “Things were perfect until this.”

“Perfect?” Lena asked.

He met her eyes and held them. “Perfect,” he repeated. “Until now.”

“Mr. Brant, I need to show you something and it isn’t going to be easy.”

Brant seemed to know what was coming. He reached for the top of the door with his right hand as if grabbing hold of the ropes in a boxing ring. He looked punch-drunk, as if maybe he didn’t have enough left to make the last round.

“Show it to me,” he said.

Lena glanced at Novak, but her partner’s eyes were glued on Brant. Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out the Polaroid. It was a close-up of Nikki Brant’s face poking through the rip in the grocery bag. As Lena held it out, she measured Brant’s reaction. His eyes didn’t hit the photo and slide off as if trying to forget a memory. Instead, they met the image of his wife’s fate and appeared to crumble.

“Is this your wife, Mr. Brant?”

He rocked his head up and down, unable to speak, then started shaking. After a moment, he closed his eyes, wilted onto the front seat, and cradled his head in his arms. The cries came in deep, long stretches, followed by breathless gasps for air that ripped at Lena and jabbed at her.

She slid the Polaroid into her pocket, stepping away from the car with Novak.

“You think he’s legit?” she asked.

When her partner nodded, she nodded back, feeling nauseous.

It was part of the job, but that didn’t make it any easier. Showing Brant the photograph seemed both absurd and exceedingly cruel. She eyed him through the windshield and listened to him weeping. It was the sound of agony, wisping through a quiet neighborhood in the woods. The sound of someone hitting the wall without any traffic noise to dull the thud. She knew the tone and cadence from personal experience. It was the indelible sound of paradise lost.

THE wood-plank fence stood six feet high. Lena grabbed the top, lifted her legs over the boards, and hopped down on the other side. A gravel path led through the trees toward the tennis courts and community center up the hill. She checked the ground before taking a step forward. Satisfied that she wasn’t contaminating an extension of the crime scene, she headed up the path toward Rustic Canyon Park.

She still felt nauseous. She needed distance. A breath of fresh air and the chance to clear her mind, if only for five minutes. But she also wanted a look at the Brants’ house from the parking lot on the hill.

The path circled around a grove of trees, passing a set of concrete steps on its way to the ocean half a mile due west. Lena veered to her left, climbing up the stairs to the community center. The pool remained closed for the season. No one was playing tennis in the drizzle. When she reached the top, she checked the lot and found it empty. But the view was pretty much what she expected. A straight shot through the trees to every backyard in the neighborhood.

She moved away from the steps, scanning the ground for debris and searching for any indication that the predator responsible for this hideous crime had been here. Spotting a trash can, she lifted the lid and peered inside. The plastic liner appeared new, the container, empty.

When she closed the lid, a squirrel shot out of the underbrush, racing across the lot toward a tree. Ten feet up the trunk, the animal stopped and turned. Lena followed its gaze
over to the building and saw a coyote hiding behind the corner. As she walked back to the top step and sat down, the wild dog trotted to the bottom of the hill and silently cantered past the Brants’ backyard.

Her eyes drifted over the fence.

Stray bands of sunlight were leaking into the smoky fog, igniting the moisture and causing it to glow. In spite of the spectacle, she had a bird’s-eye view of the house. As she thought it over, she wondered if the doer had sat on this very step. It didn’t amount to anything more than a distant feeling, but it was there as she took in the view. She could see an SID tech studying the garden below the bedroom window. He had been at it for fifteen minutes and told Lena on her way out that he hadn’t found anything. She could hear the sound of power tools coming from the house as two more techs ripped up the bathroom plumbing. Because the blood evidence was limited to the bedroom and the doer hadn’t left a trail, it was a safe guess that he’d cleaned up before leaving.

But the concept made her feel even more uneasy than she already was. The idea that the doer took the time to clean up instead of bolting the moment he committed the murder indicated a certain measure of confidence, even arrogance. That he clipped off the woman’s second toe and took it with him pointed to the outer reaches of madness.

Someone switched on a light in the house directly before her. She looked through the window and saw the man she’d met with the white dog at his kitchen counter pouring a bowl of cereal. Next door she noticed an old man reading the paper on his sunporch. To the right of the Brants’ house, an older woman was pretending to water her garden in the rain while sneaking peeks at the crime scene tech on the other side of the fence.

It was an established neighborhood in a remote location. A neighborhood that was aging.

Lena let her mind drift, trying to imagine what it must have been like before the murder. She had seen the photographs of the victim. She saw her face and body. Nikki Brant was a beautiful young woman. Although there were curtains
in the bedroom, the large panes of glass in the living room had been left bare. If the doer sat here trying to make a decision, if the seed of the crime began with rape, he had a wide-open view and Nikki Brant would have been his obvious first choice.

The breeze picked up, the branches rustling overhead. She saw Stan Rhodes enter the backyard and reached inside her pocket for her can of Altoids. Popping a mint into her mouth, she watched Rhodes scan the property. His jacket was off, his sleeves rolled up to the elbow. Rhodes didn’t have the bulky figure of someone who belonged to a health club and sat at a machine performing the same mind-numbing exercises over and over. Instead, his body had the smooth elegance of a long-distance runner—lean, long, and trim. His brown hair was rich and dark. He had a strong chin, a smart face, and Lena could still remember what she was thinking the day she first met him.

Bad timing.

Rhodes had been seeing the same woman for more than two years. Lena had met someone new three months before, and though it had its ups and downs and eventually blew up in her face, the relationship felt pretty good at the time.

She smiled at the memory. The bad timing.

Their attraction for each other had been immediate. When they spoke about having an affair, Rhodes told her that his relationship was on the rocks and that he had never been more willing. But as Lena thought it over, she couldn’t go through with it. She didn’t want to be the cause of a breakup, and mixing her job with her personal life seemed too complicated. She had just become a cop and hadn’t even finished her rookie year. They hadn’t seen each other or spoken since. And now that they could, it seemed as if he was deliberately ignoring her. Their desks were on the same floor, facing each other less than half a room apart. Over the past two months, she hadn’t caught him looking her way even once. It seemed so forced, so rigid and absurd. She felt awkward whenever he was around, often wondering if she’d read it wrong and made a mistake. Until today, she thought.
Until he’d stepped out the front door of the death house and looked at her as if everything between them was okay again.

She stood up and stretched her legs, then moved quickly down the steps, anxious to get back to the crime scene. As she climbed over the fence and hopped down on the other side, Rhodes was still in the backyard. He looked at her with those dark eyes of his and moved closer.

“Anything?” he asked.

“He could’ve sat in his car and picked her out,” she said. “It reads like a menu.”

He turned and gazed at the back of the houses. When he spotted the old man in the sunporch, Rhodes smiled and got it. His hand brushed against her shoulder, and they crossed the lawn to the house.

“We’re okay, aren’t we?” he said.

She met his eyes and nodded. In spite of the horror of the crime—whom it hurt and what it left behind—she hoped they could work together like this.

LENA’S eyes snapped across the white carpet between the books laid out on the floor, following the spots leading to the desk in the study. There were two, so small and colorless that she hadn’t noticed them when she’d first entered the house and taken a cursory glance at the room.

She stepped aside as a tech entered the foyer with an ultraviolet light and headed down the hall toward the bedroom. Then she dropped her notepad on the floor and slipped beneath the crime scene tape stretched across the doorway. Inching forward on her stomach, she worked her way down the carpet until she reached the first drop.

She felt her heart flutter in her chest and tried to get a grip on herself.

It was semen. And it hadn’t dried in the cool, moist air.

She arched her back and leaned forward. As she studied the carpet beneath the desk, she spotted a third drop hidden in the shadows at the base of the chair. Her eyes rose to the computer and lingered there as she thought it over. When she heard someone enter the foyer, she turned and saw Novak moving toward the doorway.

“Have you seen a thermostat?” he asked. “Gainer’s trying to guesstimate the time of death. They’re gonna move the body.”

“On the wall behind you,” she said. “But the temps are in my notes. What’s he saying?”

Novak knelt down and grabbed her notepad. “Between one and three. She’s just beginning to harden up.”

Lena took a deep breath, staring at the carpet and mulling over the implications of her discovery. The horror that it implied. She turned to Novak, back-paging his way through her notes. He was studying the diagrams she’d made of the bedroom as if the lines and measurements might provide a certain degree of order to a world that had been ripped off its axis and thrown down the hill.

“They’re on the first page,” she said.

He nodded, jumping ahead in the book until he found them.

“We’ve got a problem, Hank.”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

He had something on his mind and wasn’t listening to her. After writing the temperatures down on a blank sheet of paper, he tossed her notepad on the floor.