The Deepest Cut (9 page)

The car’s back door opened and a small, older Chinese woman dressed in a trim light blue pantsuit stepped onto the street. Her silver hair was peppered with black and neatly coiffed in a simple short style. She spoke to her daughter in Chinese.

Zhang responded in a tone considerably more respectful than the one she’d used with the PPD. Zhang introduced Vining. “This is my mother, Wan Li.”

Li bowed to Vining. “A pleasure to meet you, Detective Vining.”

Vining returned the bow, though the gesture did not come naturally. “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Li.”

The older woman gave her a stare, surprising Vining with its intensity. Mrs. Li pointed at Vining’s shoulder and smiled.

Vining looked at her shoulder and saw that the butterfly was still there. She raised her hand to brush it away, but before she could, it took flight on its own.

Mrs. Li watched it flutter away into the darkness and said, “A ghost follows you, Detective Vining.”

“A ghost?” Vining said with surprise.

Still smiling, Mrs. Li nodded, clasping her hands in front of her chest. “You have not made this ghost happy, so it follows you.”

Zhang spoke to her mother in Chinese.

Mrs. Li turned back toward the car, but then watched as the butterfly again flew near and lit on Vining’s shoulder. She bowed to Vining. “I hope to meet you again, Detective.” She bowed again, lower, in the direction of the butterfly. She got inside the car and Ken closed the door.

Vining tried to ignore the butterfly, which she could see out of the corner of her eye. She felt embarrassed and exposed, in a way that recalled a recurring dream of hers. In the dream, she’s going about her day and everything is fine, but everyone is treating her strangely. Then she suddenly realizes that she’s dressed only in her underwear.

Zhang said, “I hope my mother didn’t offend you. We Chinese take our ghosts seriously. They need to be attended to. Appeased, so that they don’t trouble us, the living.”

“No offense taken. What about you, Mrs. Zhang? Do you see a ghost following me?” Vining’s question came out sounding harsher than intended. She was still embarrassed by the stupid butterfly that had drawn this unwanted attention to her.

“I don’t have that talent.” Zhang’s response matched the tone of Vining’s question. “But I do not discount my mother’s capabilities.”

Ken opened the passenger door for his mother and she got inside.

Vining handed her a business card. “I’ll be in touch, Mrs. Zhang.”

Zhang set the card on the console without looking at it.

As Ken was closing the door, he asked Vining, “Are you Emily’s mother?”

The question surprised Vining. “Yes, I am.”

The question also surprised Zhang, who put her hand against the door, stopping Ken from shutting it.

“She’s in my photography class.”

“You go to the Coopersmith School?”

“Yes. I’m a senior. Actually, Emily and I are working on a school project together.”

“A project … Are you?” Vining detected a spark in his eyes when
he said Emily’s name. Judging from the way Zhang was looking at her son, she discerned the same thing.

Neither mother was pleased.

“In our digital photography class.” He was beaming, more lively than he’d been all night.

Zhang snapped, “Lincoln Kennedy, time to go.” She slammed the car door.

Vining walked the young man to the driver’s door. “Ken, do your mother a favor and make sure she doesn’t come back here in the morning.”

“I’ll remind her.” He didn’t sound hopeful.

Finally finding a private moment with him, Vining asked, “Do you know who China Dog is?”

His eyes darted away and he didn’t answer.

“We’ll eventually find out the truth, Ken. It will be easier on your mother and you in the long run if you tell us what you know now.”

They were startled when the Mercedes’s horn blared.

Through the window, Vining saw Zhang leaning onto the driver’s seat, watching them, her red lips frozen. Zhang again pressed the car horn.

Vining had a long list of human peccadilloes she despised. Near the top, perhaps only slightly below homicide, was having a car horn honked at her.

“I apologize, Mrs. Vining … Detective … But I have to leave.” Ken got inside the car, turned over the ignition, and sped off.

Vining stood in the street. Through the rear window, she saw Zhang’s elderly mother turn around, watching her, until the car turned the corner and disappeared.

When they were gone, Vining angrily stared at the butterfly on her shoulder. She raised her hand to swat it, but lost her nerve. Instead, she growled through clenched teeth, “Leave me alone.”

The butterfly lifted off, fluttered in front of Vining’s eyes, and spi-raled away.

NINE

A
T ALMOST SEVEN O’CLOCK THE NEXT MORNING, VINING DROVE
into the PPD garage off Ramona Street. A young female officer, about to be late for the Day Watch briefing, tailgated Vining’s Crown Victoria past the gas pumps until she had room to swerve around and speed on.

Vining found a parking place next to Kissick’s car. When she got out, she saw the woman running toward the back door, her uniform in dry cleaner’s plastic slung over one shoulder and a new handbag in the latest style slung over the other. Even though Vining was just thirty-four, she envied the young officer’s youth and energy, meanly reveling in the knowledge that there was no way she’d be on time.

Vining had gotten only a couple of hours’ sleep. She was tired, physically and mentally. Tired of having her life directed by forces outside her control. By gangbangers and their generations-long blood feuds. By peers with not-so-hidden agendas. By her primary harbinger of ill will— T. B. Mann. By her personal hobgoblins, which felt out of her control, which had arrived on the heels of T. B. Mann’s perforation of her life. Sometimes she wondered whether they’d been there all along and T. B. Mann had simply shoveled the first mound of dirt to uncover them.

That was fatalistic, sad thinking, and she forced herself to stop.
Move on. A good night’s sleep, a weekend without spilled blood, and she’d be good as new.

She could have grabbed a little more shut-eye in the sleep room off the PPD’s women’s locker room. She kept a blanket and pillowcase in her locker for that purpose, not caring to use the communal bedding, but she’d had her fill of nights like that during this murder wave and needed her own bed. At home earlier, she’d put on a navy blue suit with subtle pink pinstripes that she’d worn only once, to a school event of Emily’s. She paired it with a pale pink cotton shirt fresh from the cleaners. She’d finally given in to sending her shirts out. She no longer had time to wash and iron them— even the “no iron” ones needed pressing— and they never turned out as nice when she did them at home.

Around three o’clock that morning, she and Kissick had left the Hollenbeck Paper building and had gone to the home of Scrappy’s mother, Renalda, in the Kings Court housing project in Northwest Pasadena. They weren’t the first to break the bad news. Word had spread fast through the NLK network. The detectives had arrived at the upstairs apartment to find it filled with Scrappy’s relatives and homeys. Renalda’s face was tear-stained, but she was stoic. Scrappy was her second son lost to gang violence. Scrappy’s girlfriend, Monica, was inconsolable, wailing as she carried their infant son, Abel, whom the family had already doomed to the gang lifestyle by giving him the moniker Li’l Scrappy.

Renalda insisted that after Scrappy’s last stint in prison, he was clean, off drugs and living a legit life. His parole officer had gotten him a job with a Chinese man named Marvin, standing on street corners, holding advertising signs. It paid minimum wage, but it was the first real job Scrappy had ever had. With pride, she’d given them one of Scrappy’s Aaron’s Aarrows pay stubs.

When Vining asked Renalda if Scrappy had ever referred to Marvin Li as China Dog, the woman suddenly didn’t know anything. She also didn’t know anything about anyone who might have threatened Scrappy. She didn’t know anyone who was in a gang, even though her apartment was filled with men, boys, women, and girls who were covered with gang tattoos. Many of the people there were known by the
PPD. Vining and Kissick had interviewed some in relation to other crimes.

Elsewhere in the city, Alex Caspers, Cameron Lam, and officers in Lam’s gang unit were questioning members of the NLK’s longtime rivals, Vario Pasadena Rifa, and the black gang that was most likely to seek retribution for the Titus Clifford murder, the Crooked Lane Crips.

Predictably, on the record, no one knew anything. Officers were surprised when, off the record, the most reliable confidential infor mants had no information about who was good for Scrappy’s murder. Gangbangers always bragged about their exploits to their homeboys. After thoroughly jacking up the familiar suspects and coming up with nothing, the PPD began to think that Scrappy’s murder was not part of the recent cycle of gang violence. They needed to expand their horizons.

Even as she began the new day, Vining felt worn down. With each homicide she worked, she sacrificed a small part of herself. She still cared for the victims and their families. She was still on fire to see justice done. But she felt less. Each murder touched her heart, but didn’t resonate quite as loudly. She’d seen this among veteran cops. Even after twelve years with the PPD, she’d never thought it would happen to her. But it was happening. She recognized its vital importance: She’d never survive otherwise. She only hoped that, like an oyster producing a pearl in response to the intrusion of a grain of sand, something good would come of the slow callus growing over her heart. She knew her experience brought heightened instincts and focus to her Job— so important it always had a capital J in her mind. She prayed she wasn’t on the way to becoming Jaded.

Gang murders were especially draining. The endless cycle of violence. The perpetuation of the lifestyle across generations. The gangs’ fierce stranglehold on entire neighborhoods and terrorization of its honest, hardworking citizens. The police tried to break the backs of gangs using every legal tool possible— injunctions, RICO, and going after them where they lived by filing code-enforcement violations. The PPD also tried to be proactive, involving community and clergy,
creating healthy ways for kids to spend their time. Sometimes they busted heads and took names.

The PPD’s efforts to hammer the gangs would eventually force down the recent spike in violence. Inevitably it would then pop up in a neighboring city.

Officers just getting off Morning Watch, the graveyard shift, were spilling out the station’s back door, jogging down the short set of cement steps.

Vining went up the steps and past the normally locked back door that was held open by the officers who were leaving. She walked up a flight of bare cement steps to the second floor, carrying her soft-sided briefcase. In her purse was the satinette bag with the pearl-on-pearl necklace that T. B. Mann had given her. She had almost put it on last night. Again, this morning, she’d felt drawn to wear it. Instead, she’d put it in her purse. Sometimes she carried it that way, a weird talisman.

The note that T B. Mann had written on the panel card was also in the satinette bag:

She’d scrutinized it, comparing it to her memory of the China Dog 187 tag, looking for the similarities in the handwriting that last night had seemed blatant to her. She could compare the note on the panel card to Kissick’s photos of the China Dog tag, but decided it was pointless. In the cool light of day, she saw that her obsession with T B. Mann was getting the best of her. Worse, it was starting to show. She regretted having shot off her mouth about her harebrained handwriting analysis at the crime scene.

The public entrance of the 1989 Mission Revival-style police department was off Garfield Avenue. The polished wood and glass-paned doors opened into the lobby, which had a soaring three-story atrium and an open staircase and catwalk. The floor and stairs were paved in brick-colored fired tile with a sprinkling of colorful patterned tiles. Simple Mission-style wood benches lined the walls. Morning sun streamed in through tall arched windows.

Vining liked to walk down the open staircase and across the lobby. It was a calming environment. Still, much more potent magic was needed to soothe the souls of the people she saw sitting on the benches waiting to speak to a detective.

Now walking down the second-floor corridor, she passed cases that held antique badges and toy police cars donated by a retired lieutenant. At the end of the hall was the Detectives Section. She opened the door and passed through the small waiting area furnished with a plain, slightly worn couch. A pay phone was on the wall. Behind a counter were the desks of the two staff assistants who had not yet arrived for work.

Beside the locked door that led to the back office, Vining moved a magnetic tag on the In/Out board next to her name to show she was in. She saw that Kissick was already there. She checked the cubbyhole for her mail, then unlocked the door and entered a large space honeycombed with gray cubicles. She passed the coffee room and the conference room. Whiteboards lining the wall there and large pads on easels were covered with details about the recent spate of gang-related murders and assaults.