Missing: The Body of Evidence (7 page)

Nancy
kicked off her shoes, undressed and wrapped herself in her dressing gown. She
stooped over the bathtub and swished the water with her fingers. It was a
little on the hot side and she adjusted the cold tap. She squeezed her favourite
strawberry-bubble bath into the tub. Bubbles started to form and the water
turned pink. She lit some candles on surfaces surrounding the bath, switched
off the light and went to sit on the toilet seat to wait for the tub to fill.

Kyle… why do men do that?
She put the toilet seat down, sat on it and waited. With the tub
full, she turned off the taps, took off her robe, hung it up and placed a toe
in the water to test the temperature. She drew air through her nostrils, to
soak in the aroma of strawberries and slipped into the bathtub. Clapping her
hand playfully in the bubbles, she relaxed and lay back. Thoughts of the day’s
events crept into her mind. However she tried to ignore what had happened
during the day, she could not relax.

She dwelt on her reaction to her colleagues,
particularly Kyle. At thirty-six, she wondered if she would ever settle down
into a relationship. Until meeting Kyle, she had been married to her job. She
wondered if her pushing him away was a result of the inner turmoil she
encountered, with her biological clock ticking. She knew that she was losing
the battle she was fighting daily, in the hope that time would somehow stop.
She began to wonder if, at her age, she could adapt to sharing her life.

Nancy glanced at the toilet seat and then
over at the toothpaste tube which Kyle always had a habit of squeezing from the
middle.
Wait a minute. When was Kyle last here?

The left side of her head hit the bathtub
side as she slipped, trying to scramble out of the tub. She grabbed her robe,
wrapped it around her, rushed to the coat stand and took her pistol from its
holster.

Someone’s been in here. I’m sure Kyle
wouldn’t have used his key without saying.
She
checked the kitchen, then the bedroom. In the bathroom, she pulled the plug in
the tub, doused the candles and returned to the living room. Nothing seemed to
be out of place. She sat on the sofa, trying to think if she’d used the toilet
since Kyle had last stayed, but couldn’t remember.
Get a grip, girl.
The
painting on the wall seemed to be slightly askew and she adjusted it. The sound
of the doorbell chiming made her jump.
Kyle?

She made her way to the door and peered
through the spy hole. She let out a sigh.
Tracy? What’s she doing here at
nine-thirty in the evening?

Nancy opened the door.

‘Whoa there, don’t shoot.’

Nancy looked at the pistol in her hand.

‘Oh yeah, sorry, come in.’

She led Tracy to the living room and
replaced her pistol in its holster.

‘The office gave me your address. I came to
say sorry if I appear to have been rude to you.’

A smile, more in the way of a smirk formed
on Nancy’s lips. She looked down, hoping Tracy wouldn’t detect her glee.

‘No problem, likewise. But you didn’t need
to come here to my apartment; a telephone call would have done it.’

‘I didn’t want to go through channels. My
boss is giving the CIA everything we’ve found, but getting nothing in return,’
said Tracy

‘What’s so secret?’

‘I’ve got something to show you.’ She
handed Nancy a report. ‘I ran a test on the gum wrapper for you. You were
right, it has traces of a sedative, and the fingerprints on the lasagne carton
match both the janitor and others we found in the apartment.’

The graph on the report Tracy had given
her, listed the names of chemicals, but they didn’t mean anything to her.

‘I’m afraid it won’t help. My hunch about
the case turned sour today.’

‘Yeah, I heard. But get this. The analysis
and checks I did show the sedative relates to a banned substance that was trialled
thirty years ago, but the paper in the archive has quite a number of redacted
paragraphs under the reports on side effects.’

Nancy turned the page and read what she
could of the drug test archive, but with so many blacked out lines, it made no
sense. Tracy leaned over her shoulder and pointed to the report.

‘What’s the banned sedative doing in a gum
wrapper in two-thousand and eleven? The other thing is, I’ve drawn a blank on
trying to find relatives of the professor to match up the DNA. We don’t even
know if the prints we found are the professor’s, or that the remains are his.
It’s like he doesn’t exist,’ said Tracy.

‘What about the telephone notepad from the
bedroom next to the phone? At least I assume that’s what it was; it was just a
mark in the dust. Did you check any of the phone numbers?’

‘Notepad? We didn’t find a telephone
notepad.’

Nancy raised an eyebrow. She sat on the
sofa, pondering on what Tracy had said earlier.
The gum wrapper the attorney
gave to the boy.

‘Hang on a minute, Tracy.’ Nancy phoned the
office and asked a detective to check the interview room for a gum wrapper.

‘Sorry, cleaning contractors have emptied
all the trash.’

Nancy replaced the handset.
Why would
they hide a banned sedative in gum, doesn’t make sense.
She turned to
Tracy.

‘I don’t know what I can do about your
findings on the gum wrapper, except make a note in the file, Logan says the
case is closed unless the Coroner asks us to make further investigations. Were
you told about the medium and the ball lightning?’

‘Yes, but it all sounds too convenient.’

She was right on that score, the whole
episode with the medium had put a wrench in the works.

Tracy continued. ‘I don’t believe in
mediums. It can’t be proved it happened that way, but I guess it is as good a
theory as any. I just don’t like the way that the CIA have been jumping all
over the case and my boss is sucking up to them. When I asked the agents about
the CIA’s interest in the professor, they just kept tight lipped.’

The last sentence didn’t surprise her. She
doubted they would give the time of day to anyone who asked.

‘I’m with you all the way. All we can do is
to hope something else turns up. Until then, were stuck with it being
spontaneous combustion, sorry, Tracy.’

‘Yeah, me too, I guess we’ll be bumping
into each other on future cases. I’ll be going now. Oh here, I nearly forgot.’
Tracy handed Nancy a computer pen drive. ‘There’s a copy of my file on there,
including all the witness statements. I don’t think we’ll be sending it on to
the Coroner’s office just yet until we can tie the remains to the professor.’

‘Look, I suppose I can try and do some
digging into Astral Chemicals, but I’ll have to do it in my own time. The boss
will chew my head off, if he finds out.’

Nancy saw her to the door. Tracy stopped
and turned to face her.

‘Astral Chemicals?’

‘Yeah, I found some salary slips in the
bedside drawer at the professor’s apartment. They went missing when the CIA
cleaned up the apartment. He must’ve worked for them, but I can’t trace the company.
Did your team take a copy of one?’

‘No.’ Tracy’s cheeks flushed. ‘Astral
Chemicals are the ones who filed to have the drug approved, but it’s listed as
a PO Box address. Take a look, it’s in the report.’

Nancy smiled at Tracy’s infallibility.

‘Let’s keep it between you and me and like
I said, I’ll do some digging.’

‘Sure’

Tracy left. Nancy returned to the living
room, and put the pen drive in her purse. She took her pistol from its holster,
went to her bedroom and placed the gun under her pillow. She was furious that
she hadn’t asked the search team to look for a notepad when they searched the
janitor’s apartment.

Nancy disrobed, slipped on a nightdress and
hung her dressing gown on the nightstand. A noise outside distracted her.
Passing the blinds at the window, she lifted one of the slats and peered
outside. Nancy watched Tracy get into her car and drive off. Another car in the
parking lot pulled out behind Tracy. A beam from one of the streetlights caught
her crystal ornament and formed a prism with the colours of the rainbow
refracted on the sill.

Nancy climbed into bed, set the alarm and
turned off the bedside light. But the torment of wondering who could have taken
the notepad deprived her of an early night’s sleep. The gentle breeze outside
swayed the branches of the trees, casting shadows in the room, and caused the coloured
lights from her crystal ornament to dance on her bed quilt. She was fascinated
by the hypnotic spectrum of lights, but they failed to distract her thoughts.

Other detectives had talked about their
personal cold-case files that stayed with them throughout their careers. In her
wildest dreams, she never thought that her first case would turn out that way.
She thought that if nothing else, she made a promise that she would not rest
until she could determine where Astral Chemicals fit into the equation. She
just worried how she could do it without Logan finding out what she was doing.

The
morning rays of sunlight penetrated the slats of the blinds covering her
bedroom window. Nancy felt groggy, sleep had been hard to come by, but she had
still managed to awake before the alarm clock offended her hearing. She reached
out and turned the alarm setting to the OFF position. Her arms rested on the
outside of the duvet. The face of David, the janitor’s son, appeared in her
thoughts. A fleeting recollection of a dream permeated at the back of her mind.

David was smiling, holding out his hand
and inviting her to join him. ‘Come with me,’ he said. There was a sense of
floating and the dream fragmented to where she was outside the cabin depicted
in the painting on her living room wall. A glance at David, and he no longer
looked angelic. His expression had the look of evil.

‘Ouch.’

Nancy flinched when she felt a sting on the
back of her left hand, and looked at the source of the irritation. There was a
small red patch on the back of her hand surrounding a small blister. A ray of
sunlight refracted through the crystal ornament on the windowsill and danced on
the duvet where her hand had been resting. Nancy ran her other hand through the
ray of light and felt the heat as her hand passed through the beam.

‘Damn.’

She threw the duvet back and hurried to the
blinds. One of the slats in the blinds had a kink; she straightened it, lifted
the blinds, picked up the ornament and walked to the living room. Nancy placed
the ornament on her computer desk and sat down. She rested her elbows with her
hands holding her head and stared at the ornament. The concave in the crystal
magnified the LG symbol on her computer. Recollections of her time as a girl
scout and her attempts at starting a fire with a magnifying glass while on a
field trip passed through her mind.
Well, I’ll be damned. I could’ve been
toast.
The notion that it could be another explanation for the freak fire
at the professor’s apartment came to mind, but she quickly dismissed the idea
on account of the time of the incident.

Her phone rang and she answered. Central
communications told her to meet Bill at McDonald’s on West Compton Boulevard at
ten-thirty, later in the morning.
South Central. My old patrol area.
It
sounded like something big was going down, as they were to meet there with the
sergeant of the gang unit, based at the LAPD substation in Compton.

Nancy dressed, and mooched around her
apartment feeling restless. The circumstances surrounding the professor’s death
was bugging her. She took her notebook from her purse, started to go through
her notes and stopped at the scribbled telephone number of the condo management
company.
Maybe they’ll have some knowledge of him.

The receptionist took the call and
transferred her to the manager. What he had to say stunned her. ‘Astral
Chemicals paid the condo charges on the professor’s apartment.’

When she asked how long the janitor had
worked for them, it was almost an aside to the conversation when the manager
mentioned, ‘Astral also pays Kelly’s condo charges.’

The number he had for Astral was the same
as on the professor’s card, but there was no address on record for the company.
The call ended, leaving Nancy even more bewildered about the case. She dialled
the number the manager gave her, but the line was dead.

The
sun was beating down as Nancy headed in her car for her meeting with Bill.
Checking her rear-view mirror, she noticed a black Toyota following her every
turn. It wasn’t the first time she had thought someone was following her these
past few days, but she soon forgot about the Toyota as it dropped a few cars
back and it turned off as she hit traffic. Heading north, along Willowbrook
Avenue, the traffic thinned out and she passed Compton High School. At the
intersection with West Compton Boulevard, she flipped on the blinker and turned
left, past the post office on the corner. A short stretch and she turned right
and parked in the lot outside McDonald’s, facing the highway.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial faced her
across the highway. The officials had tucked it away where no one could see it,
as if embarrassed by its existence. The concrete circle of pillars curved
inward and upwards almost meeting at the top. The columns formed a shape meant
to signify his ‘Climb the mountain’ rhetoric.
Compton’s some mountain of
crap to climb.
She wondered what King would make of the area, where the
street gangs ruled and you couldn’t watch a high school game of football
without security fit for a president. South Los Angeles they called the area
now, to get rid of the stigma attached to the area, but to Nancy, it would
always be South Central.

Bill’s car drew up alongside of her and he signalled
for her to drive around the back of McDonald’s. Nancy followed, surprised to
see two SWAT vans and the sergeant of the gang unit waiting for them.
Damn,
this is big.

‘Hi, Nance, looking good out of uniform,’
said the sergeant.

‘Flattery will get you nowhere,’ she said
and winked. ‘What’s going down?’

The sergeant explained that the hit suspect
on the Claytons’ at the Sunnyvale Condo she had been investigating with Bill
was down to Rico, the head of the Piru gang, and the only way to bring him in
was by force. Undercover were ready to move into position, and to take out the
lookouts at the intersection of Bliss, Aranbe and Piru Street.

‘Suit up, vests on this one,’ said the
sergeant ‘You’ll both come with us in the SWAT van.’

Nancy wasn’t about to argue, but gave her
excuses as she needed to use the bathroom in McDonald’s.

‘I’ll follow you,’ said Bill.

Entering McDonald’s, two swat team members
must have had the same idea and held the door open for her. The place was busy.
Nancy flicked the clasp on her purse, ready to produce her badge if any of the
staff challenged her. She glanced around and saw some familiar faces from her
time in uniform.

On her way back to the SWAT van, she
followed Bill out of McDonald’s. She looked ahead and sensed eyes following her
as she walked to the door. Bill stopped briefly and exchanged harsh words with
a customer and then he disappeared through the exit. Nancy picked up her pace
to join Bill and the SWAT team at the van. No one talked in the back of the van
as it set off; they all seemed to be preoccupied with either remembering their
instructions, or praying. Nancy couldn’t hold her tongue.

‘Bill, you’ve been around a lot longer than
I. Have you ever heard of a company called Astral Chemicals?’

Bill shuffled his feet, clasped his hands
and then stroked his chin stubble with his thumbs.

‘Can’t say I have, why ask?’

‘It’s the professor’s death. He worked for
Astral. They paid the professor’s and the janitor’s condo’ fees, but I can’t
trace the company.’

‘If you take the advice of someone who is
due to retire in two weeks, forget it.’

‘I can’t forget it, that’s the point.’

‘Listen, from what I hear, the CIA is
involved. Sounds to me like the professor was one of theirs and they’re
protecting their own. Astral is probably something to do with the CIA.’

He turned to her and gazed deep into her
eyes.

‘For your own good, read my lips...
for-get-it. I can’t say it any clearer.’

It wasn’t just the way he said it, but the
distant look in his eyes. It gave him the appearance that he was dwelling on
something he knew, but wasn’t about to say what it was that was on his mind.

The van stopped and the sergeant told them
to wait inside the van. She half expected a gun battle, but after ten minutes
of hailing over a megaphone, she heard the sergeant call for a round of
teargas. Five minutes later, the van door opened and the sergeant gave Nancy
and Bill the all clear to search the house. As she exited, SWAT formed a secure
perimeter. All they had arrested was one gang member, whom Nancy recognized.

‘Your mom’s gonna love you for this,’ said
Nancy

The young guy spat phlegm on the floor to
show his disgust.

‘I know you; you’ll get yours, Bitch.’

Nancy ignored him as they led him away and
she entered the house with Bill.

‘Someone’s tipped them off, the place is
clean,’ said Bill. ‘I’ll buy you a McDonald’s when we get back to the car. I
doubt well get anything from the young punk.’

‘Burger, fries and a milkshake,’ Nancy
ordered when they arrived at McDonald’s and they sat next to the window.

‘You want to get out of all this garbage,
get married and settle down in a good neighbourhood, and have kids,’ said Bill.
‘Kyle’s a good guy, you could do worse.’

‘Whoa, steady on there. I hardly know him
and besides, I’ve only just started my career as a detective.’

‘The job’ll destroy your humanity, get out
while you can, that’s my advice. Vacation for me on Friday for two weeks, then
it’s back for my retirement party, followed by spending the rest of my days
fishing.’

‘Yeah, well, just remember me, when I’m
still fishing for felons.’

Bill laughed. His gaze had the comforting
warmth of a well-worn pair of slippers. There was a time fifteen years ago,
when he had taken her to one side after a lecture he had given at the police
academy that she had thought differently. At the time, she detected a gaze of
lust, one that went hand in glove with his friendly advice, but not any longer.
She couldn’t be sure if the years had dulled the lead in his pencil, or that
his loyalties to his wife had prevented him from ever making any suggestive
remarks. All she knew was that after the years of friendship they had enjoyed,
she owed him debt of gratitude for helping her make detective.

Bill took her hand. The fire in the depth
of his eyes, belied his age. His hand was weathered and covered with liver
spots; his brow furrowed and he spoke to her like a father figure, in soft
tones.

‘Listen, I meant it when I said forget the
case with the professor. That’s one dirty pool to go fishing in without waders.’