Several hours later, having fed and taken Dakota out for a brief walk, Kate sat down at the breakfast bar with a mug of freshly made coffee and opened her computer. To the creamy voice of Rita Coolidge singing “Higher and Higher” emanating from the radio next door, she surveyed the day’s usual dozen or so emails. Most if not all would be spam and she skimmed them, index finger rhythmic on the delete key. But the finger froze as one leaped out at her from a familiar address: Grant@PeeryandHromadko.com. Aimee, using her work computer at the law firm where she had worked for years as a paralegal. Messages seldom came from either her work or private email, and those that did usually pertained to some query about the condo recently transferred to her ownership. The subject line read Maggie.
Kate, I got a call last night from Patton. She doesn’t have your new cell number or email address. I didn’t give them to her, just told her you’d changed them and would be contacting her. I don’t like being in this position, so please do so with her and your other friends, Kate. She called to ask if you and I and Rainey, Ash and Tora could all get together for a remembrance of Maggie and the Nightwood Bar next week on the anniversary of her death.
I’m happy to host it here at the condo of course. Or we could meet there if it’s better for you. Since you’re the one with her ashes, your choice whether you bring Maggie here or we come there or somewhere else if you prefer. I hope you’re looking after yourself.
Aimee
“Goddammit.” Sitting back on the barstool she glared at the bookcase and the shelf containing the urn. “Did you have an ashy hand in this, Maggie?” she snarled.
She could not bear to go to the condo. Nor did she want anyone close to her coming anywhere near this place. But she could not imagine taking Maggie anywhere else. Hey, she reminded herself, next week you might be dead.
Dead would certainly solve the problem. A lot of problems. For starters, Aimee, permanently lodged in her heart and her bloodstream. Alcohol. The always clawing want of alcohol. Her nightly dreams. This place and Maggie’s ashes would then go to Aimee with the stipulation that her ashes and Maggie’s be scattered together wherever, the four winds, for all she cared. So what was actually keeping her here? Why was she even waiting for Ellie Shuster?
In one word: Aimee. She’d done enough damage to Aimee without adding suicide to the list. She knew, far better than most, that suicides often left nuclear devastation in their wake. A problem solver for the deceased bequeathed haunting guilt and endless agonizing to shocked partners and family and friends over what action they might have taken to intervene, to prevent this most irrevocable, most final of acts.
She looked back at the message, the other names it contained: Patton, Ash, Tora, Rainey. Rainey’s partner, Audie, a case in point, dead by overdose a decade ago; mourned yet unforgiven to this day by Rainey for truncating their lives together by first deciding that she would forego radiation and chemotherapy, then believing she would spare them both her protracted dying from late-stage breast cancer.
Again she looked at the message. Your friends, Aimee had written, not our friends. The condo. Not my condo or our condo. Just…the condo. Calla Dearborn might call this a sign of transition. A good thing, a good sign, she supposed. Then why did she feel such unease about this particular transition? Wasn’t it exactly what she wanted?
Ash, Tora, Patton, Rainey. Still here, still in her life. All of them from the Nightwood Bar, that multicultural lesbian haven tucked away on a hillside behind a motel on La Brea but long since gone, its denizens having drifted away like feathers pulled away into the wind. Away from the dim, smoky, convivial twilight realm they had once shared, to live their lives more freely, openly, within redrawn lines of a more accepting world. Including, of course, Andrea.
Her mood turned melancholy as memory surfaced of the woman who, unlike Audie, had survived breast cancer. Andrea Ross, recovering from a double mastectomy when Kate met her at the Nightwood Bar. In retrospect, their briefest of brief but piercingly beautiful affair had been healing for them both. So much better that Andrea too had vanished into the winds of change before Kate had fallen down a bottomless well of love for her.
Dakota rose from her dog bed, shook herself, settled down again, and Kate smiled at her, glad again for her easy companionship. She surveyed the bookshelves where Maggie’s ashes resided, bookshelves filled with volumes of a different kind of companionship: Maggie’s lesbian novels and many she herself had chosen, her virtual community. Patton, Rainey, Ash, Tora—these four loyal friends were her very necessary tangible community. She focused again on Maggie’s urn, wistful, reflecting that friendships seemed more essential now than ever. Unlike the unconditional love from a parent or the entirely conditional partnership of a lover, friends like Maggie were safety nets to catch and hold easy the foibles and mistakes of a lifetime, the sorrows. To regret that a mere four friends remained from the glory days of the Nightwood Bar was to say that only gold nuggets remained from a mining claim.
Only yesterday she had discovered that a community of women her own age had formed in companionship and mutual support in a patch of Desert Hot Springs. If she formed a friendship with Natalie Rostow—and she sensed that a friendship could be a reality if she pursued it—she would be on the periphery of another promising mining claim.
She sipped her coffee, wondering about this sliver of possibility amid all the jeopardy she faced, then put down the mug with a grimace. Caffeine—such a weak-kneed substitute for the sharp, rich bite and spreading comfort of Cutty Sark. She needed help again, support. Time to get another bracing appointment with Calla Dearborn. Get herself to another meeting. Call her sponsor.
Even if she were to succumb to her urges to put a bullet in her brain, she had a loose end, a very loose end, to tie up beforehand. Now that she had an angle, however oblique, toward resolving the April Shuster homicide and moving it out of the cold case files to a closed case. A final gift to her three-decade home at LAPD.
She picked up her cell phone, smiling as Olivia Newton John ooh-ooh-oohed into “You’re the One That I Want.”
“Captain Carolina Walcott…is not available,” singsonged the mechanical voice. Nor had Kate expected her to be. She left a message identifying herself and the case her call pertained to. Not five minutes later Walcott returned her call.
“Always good to hear from you, Kate,” she said hurriedly, and Kate heard the echoing sound of voices as if she were striding along a crowded hallway. “I’m on my way back from a press briefing at the PAB, then I’ve got a conference call. There’ll be time to talk once I’m back in my office.”
“Of course, Captain. At your convenience. Thank you.”
Walcott’s agenda, her mandated presence at the Police Administration Building, reminded Kate of why she had never wanted to advance beyond a D-3. Politics, crisis management, bureaucratic bullshit, she’d never had any ambition or stomach for any of it. The higher you climbed the more exposed you became, and she’d spent much of her public life wanting less visibility than she inevitably suffered when cases of hers attracted the media. Maggie had called her on it as she called her on everything, saying that her craving for privacy was nothing less than a rationalization of the closet. If so, then so be it. Past history.
Walcott, she thought, shaking her head in wonderment. No one navigated the rancid politics and internecine warfare of LAPD’s hierarchy with more savvy and skill than Captain Carolina Walcott, or wore the LAPD uniform with more authority. Assertive posture that rose from muscular hips and thighs into ramrod shoulders, a jutting jaw and tight lips and an aquiline nose that suggested descendancy from the mating of an owl with a hawk. Dark, penetrating eyes in a coffee brown face that warned you to be plain and straight with her because she would see clear through your bullshit. For the final captain in her police career, she could not have had a more admirable commanding officer than Carolina Walcott.
Kate got up from the breakfast bar, tucked her gun into the belt of her jeans and pocketed her cell phone and notepad, grabbed her coffee. Alerted, Dakota rose and trotted over to her. Kate guided her onto the back deck, holding her collar as she made herself comfortable in an Adirondack chair. Surveying the vista of desert scrub and Joshua trees out of habitual caution, she let herself simply absorb the ambiance of another pleasantly warm breezy day in the desert, inhaling the chalky smell of sand and the aromas of plant life rising in the heat of the sun, savoring the solitude and tranquility where she had sight lines only to far distant neighbors. Pilar’s radio reached her just faintly; it projected out the front of her house. Back here the quiet was mostly broken by the crackling of brittle stems of desert brush in washes of wind.
She released Dakota’s collar, patted her head. “Can I trust you not to run off?”
The dog gazed at Kate with her assessing, spectral blue eyes, shook herself, trotted from the deck down into the sand, chose a patch to squat and relieve herself, returned to lie down at Kate’s feet.
Her phone vibrated in her pocket. Too early for Walcott. Maybe Cameron?
The caller ID read Silverlake Haven. She braced herself as she answered.
“It’s Marla, Kate. Loretta passed about an hour ago. Very peacefully.”
She felt only relief. But she asked intently, “Was her son—”
“Larry got here. We called him when her vitals declined. She was gone not fifteen minutes later.”
Neither of them commented further. It was all too common at Silverlake Haven, death occurring immediately after a loved one’s arrival as if the dying person were willing the presence of love to be in the room as the final impetus toward release from life.
“Thank you for telling me, Marla.”
“Another reason I called—Monique. She’s in a coma, I don’t believe she’ll last the night. She asked us to give you a message. Just two words: thank you. Said more fervently than you can imagine. What did you do for her?”
Kate could hear the approval in her voice. “Just the usual, Marla,” she said easily. “Heard her confession.”
“Well, it helped. She seemed much at peace with herself when you left. Will you be in again soon? We have someone else asking for you. A guy, a vet from the Vietnam era.”
“A vet? Why isn’t he at the VA?”
“I wondered too. But his family want him here and are paying out of pocket for it.”
Kate shook her head. Silverlake Haven was a good facility, but they would be paying out of pocket through the nose. Without insurance or Medicare coverage, the Ritz Carlton would hardly be more expensive. This dying vet, though…she could be of value to him, offer something of herself, having shared one of the most transformative times in either of their lives. “Tell him I’ll be there in the next day or so,” she said. She hoped. “Thanks for the call, Marla.”
Placing the phone on the table beside her, having decided to jot the major points of her agenda with Captain Walcott, she picked up her notebook. APRIL, she wrote in caps as a heading. APRIL. She looked at the word. APRIL. Stared. New pieces began falling into place. With Dakota snuffling in sleep beside her, she sat back and thought. Made more notes in point format alongside her agenda with Walcott.
Two hours later, with the music from next door silenced, Pilar having made a noisy departure in her ancient Camry, Kate moved back into the house with Dakota.
She was sitting in the living room armchair with a fresh mug of coffee, deep in thought, gazing sightlessly toward the distant San Bernardino Mountains, when Walcott finally called.
Kate’s mood turned mellow, reminiscent as she picked up the phone. She could so easily picture the captain in her office, seated behind a desk smothered in files and reports, heavy glass cat paperweights compressing and identifying each stack, each of the cats a different color and in a different pose. Her personal favorite had been the snarling black marble feline that sat atop the largest pile, the one Walcott termed garbage-in. Behind the captain on a credenza would be a half dozen gold-framed photos of her husband and two sons, these flanked on either side by handsome teak woodcuts of Toni Morrison and Martin Luther King.
“Sorry, Kate,” she said. “You know how it is.”
“I do, Captain. I appreciate you finding the time to call me back.”
“I just wish it were about anything but the April Shuster case,” she said crisply. “I’ve got twenty minutes or so before the next storm blows in. First off, how are you doing? Keeping safe?”
“I’m okay. About Shuster, if you’re wondering why I’ve gone so far up the chain of command about a reopened case with detectives assigned, it’s the circumstances. Ellie Shuster is literally on my doorstep, she put her last note directly in my mailbox. I have to figure it’s her final one.”
“Dear God. Look, Kate. We can put you in protective—”
“Thanks, and I’ll think about it,” she interrupted, to circumvent wasting time on a discussion she did not want. “I do have new information and what I think is a solid theory. I need your help to check it out, see how solid it really is.”
“I’m listening.”
“I fully understand why Joe Cameron is in your bad books, but he’s just taken a look at the murder book—”
“He’s not been on my shit list for some time, Kate. I’m more and more thinking Joe’s the most sensible guy I know for taking himself out of this cesspool. You were here for the best of it.”
“Right,” she said, smothering a laugh. “It was a picnic.”
“Riiiight,” Walcott repeated, and Kate could hear the smile come into her voice in the drawn-out syllable. “Talk about words bypassing my brain—all you had were the Watts riots, Rodney King, O.J. Simpson, the Ramparts mess—just one clusterfuck after another.”
Walcott had not mentioned—nor did she need to or perhaps want to—the comet that had struck Wilshire Division, the drive by shooting of the Notorious B.I.G. and the associated murder of Tupac Shakur, a disaster that had miraculously missed the two of them while smashing other careers and reputations, and that would forever swirl amid the infamous legends of LAPD. But all the breakdowns Kate had witnessed were, by her lights, inevitable. Any objective observer could simply compare the nation’s two largest cities and draw the logical conclusion from NYPD’s seventy-seven precincts to LAPD’s twenty-one divisions; NYPD’s thirty-five thousand sworn officers to LAPD’s nine thousand. LAPD had never been anything but the thinnest of thin blue lines, creating never-ending crisis management for a beleaguered chain of command responsible for the policing of a city sprawled over one of the world’s largest metropolitan areas.
“Just so you know,” Walcott continued, “my last briefing with the case detectives on Shuster was a couple of months ago. Let me tell you what I know first, Kate. Carlson and Wiggins have their spotlight on Stella Hayden’s father, what’s his name—”
“Mathew.”
“Right. Their theory is Mathew found Stella’s diary. Went ballistic over how a lesbian daughter would go down with his followers and April has to be to blame for corrupting any daughter of his. So in a frenzy he grabs the cross from her parents’ bedroom and smashes the devil out of her. Maybe he shows his daughter what he’s done, maybe she finds April herself. Either way, with or without his knowledge, she kills herself.”
“All very plausible, yes,” Kate said and chose not to say that it did not explain the missing bloody clothing.
“A few more items to finish the current theory. Stella’s diary incriminates April’s mother, she’s arrested. April’s father believes she did it, the cross he found in her jewelry box is even more evidence, and Mathew Hayden is just fine with all of it because if the mother been a better disciple of God then April wouldn’t have been possessed by the devil and corrupted his daughter. After the trial, with all the bad press over the girls’ deaths his church is kaput in this country, so off they go to Uganda to get a fresh start for the cult. Just so you know, we’ve tried tracking the three of them since the acquittal, but it’s been twenty years and they may have changed their names, and besides that, no one in Africa gives a damn about our little murder. If Mathew ever brought himself back here, we could test for a match to the other DNA we found on April’s body. Without that, all we have is a maybe plausible theory.”
Kate took her cue about the case detectives’ due diligence. “After thirty years on the job,” she told Walcott, “I know a dead end when I see one.”
“So what have you got? This case is such a bastard, I’d be glad to entertain anything.”
“What I have is all due to Joe. He looked at the murder book with those fresh eyes of his, saw a crucial detail everybody missed.” Carefully, consulting her notes, she described the anomalous nature of the “Miss Hall” he had picked out in Stella Hayden’s diary and the revelation of her as the school therapist.
“Bloody hell!” Walcott exploded. “She’s a therapist? Fucking hell!”
Kate held the phone away from her ear as more expletives ensued. Walcott, a former homicide detective, knew as well as she did what a key source of information had been missed.
“Kate, is this a tip you’re offering or have you had contact?”
“Contact. I know Marietta Hall from a case previous to Shuster. She was a key interview then too.”
“She gave you information? Without a subpoena?”
“I was persuasive,” Kate said lightly, hoping Walcott would let her move on from the topic.
“You must have been. Any therapist I ever interviewed, it was like trying to extract the secrets of the confessional out of a priest. So what are you telling me?” Walcott’s voice had lowered with intensity.
“Some framework first.” Again she consulted her notes. “A teacher, I’ll get her name if we need it—” She had all but kicked herself when she realized she hadn’t followed up with Marietta for this detail. “—this teacher reported to Marietta about April appearing isolated and visibly troubled. So Marietta approached her with a story about various students talking to her about their lives and would April like to have a conversation. The fact that she came to Marietta speaks for itself, how desperate she must have felt. They had three separate sessions and then she fled when Marietta told her she was mandated by school policy to advise the parents if they continued. A week later she was dead.”
Kate picked up her fresh mug of coffee and in the pause Walcott asked, “Did she say who she was afraid of?”
“She was afraid of everybody, Captain. She was in a vise, caught between two forces, a homophobic religion she fervently believed in and a female best friend—her only friend—in love with her.”
“Was she…Had she acted on…”
“Was she lesbian? It’s not clear in the diary what April might have felt or did—Stella was way too hung up on just her own teenage emotions. From what April told Marietta, I’m guessing she had to be on that pathway or she wouldn’t have been so conflicted. So we have a fifteen-year-old girl convinced she’s already condemned herself to hell for a physical relationship with Stella Hayden—or that she will be if she acts on what she really wants.”
“Well, Stella didn’t help matters any,” Walcott muttered. “That diary…God, talk about obsession…Did your therapist suggest anything about this Stella maybe being bipolar?”
Kate was shaking her head as she said, “No way would she know. With only three sessions with April, she didn’t see any of the evidence we saw. And Stella had her own demons, Captain, given the father she had. She—”
Walcott interrupted impatiently, “I assume the therapist told her there was nothing wrong or unnatural about a lesbian orientation?”
“Of course. Emphatically. Even back in those days. But she couldn’t make a dent in fifteen years of daily immersion in homophobic rants.” Kate consulted her notes for the phrases she’d written down. “Why I’m calling is the other advice Marietta gave April. I believe it’s absolutely key to all this. She agreed with April’s mother, who strongly advised April to bring other friends into her life, male friends as well as female.”
Walcott asked cautiously, “What exactly are you telling me here, Kate?”
“April was killed only a week later. The most likely scenario is she took that week to think about this advice and maybe her mother even reinforced it. Then she told Stella she wanted to step away from their relationship in favor of other friends, possibly including a closer walk with God. I would imagine them having a violent argument. That Stella didn’t, couldn’t win. You’ve seen the crime scene photos—”
“Yes. As savage a killing as I’ve ever seen,” Walcott said, and Kate could imagine the grimace on her face from the tone of voice.
“Rage, from losing her grip on what made her life worth living. It explains why she went into the Shusters’ bedroom for that crucifix—she wanted their crucifix—and she confronted April. Ripped off the crucifix she had around her neck, then smashed April to death with the bronze cross. Rinsed it and slapped it back on the wall, and more in stone-cold vengeance than in any attempt to frame her, put April’s necklace in her mother’s jewelry box. Went back to her side of the duplex and into her own bedroom, didn’t bother to change clothes, maybe she even wanted April’s blood on her. Which would explain why we never could find any bloody clothes. She slashed herself in so many places that any wounds in her hands from hitting April with the crucifix looked like part of the suicide.” Kate concluded, “That’s what I have, Captain.”
Walcott was silent for some moments. Then said slowly, “It fits, Kate. It does. Assuming all this is true, we have a new primary suspect who’s dead and now we have an even worse problem of proof. Stella was so obvious a suicide the ME had no reason to retain anything for testing. We have no way of matching Stella’s DNA to the foreign DNA we found on April.”
“But we do.” Kate realized her voice had risen, told herself to cool her excitement. “That’s the main reason I’m calling you, Captain, for your direct intervention in this. Stella’s DNA is right there with the April Shuster case evidence. From the day of the murder everyone working on the case had only photocopies of Stella’s diary because it was key evidence—it’s been preserved in its paper packaging except for when it was produced as an exhibit in court to prove its existence. It was too much to include in the murder book, so I used my phone to make copies from it when I was in the evidence room. Only April’s bloody clothing and test samples from the crime scene were ever tested. Same thing for the Innocence Project, that’s what they tested too—and we only verified their tests. But Stella’s diary was under her pillow where she died and has a cover soaked in Stella’s blood.”
Walcott hissed a breath. “Kate, I’ll move heaven and earth to get that test done. If you’re right about this, you’ll be the first to know and the news networks and Corey Lanier will be next.”
Corey Lanier. Kate rolled her eyes. How fitting. The persistent-as-a-mosquito veteran LA Times police beat reporter, her bȇte noir in cases past. She’d never broken Kate down for comment on any of her cases, but never for lack of trying. She would probably relish tracking her down for one last bite.
“God I hope you’re right. It all fits, and I’m betting you are.” Walcott continued, “There’ll be immediate news bulletins on a case this notorious. April’s mother will know who killed her daughter as soon as we can get the news out there.”
“Thank you, Captain.” While it would answer the question of who had murdered April Shuster, she doubted it would make much difference to Ellie Shuster about culpability for her incarceration.
“Please thank Joe for me, tell him he’s welcome if he would ever want to visit. Never mind, I’ll call him myself when I get some time. One more thing, Kate. Don’t blame yourself for anything. In this murder, that therapist is a needle—not in a haystack but in a goddamn wheatfield. This is no one’s fault. It took the case cooling off for years for someone to see something so miniscule.”
Walcott clicked off.
Kate dropped her phone on the counter and her head into her hands. I would have seen it.
She raised her head to look at her Marietta Hall notes. She would be visiting the woman again soon, and if she was right about the DNA on April’s body belonging to Stella Hayden, then at all costs she needed to figure out a way to prevent Marietta from climbing into the same pit she occupied. Forever racked by the image of two simple dots that if joined together would have led to the proper blood tests and saved Ellie Shuster nineteen years of anguish, imprisoned with her seething rage.
She picked up her phone, texted Cameron: Call when you can for news.
God, she wanted a drink. “Dakota,” she called, “let’s go for a walk.”
But Cameron called back instantly. “I’m in transit—”
“Where to?”
“The station. So I’ve got maybe ten minutes. What news? Are you okay?”
“I’m okay.” She brought him up-to-date with a condensed version of her two conversations, Marietta Hall and Captain Walcott, concluding with, “You’ll be glad to know you’re back in Walcott’s good books. You’ll be hearing from her.”
“Let’s see…” he muttered vaguely, distractedly, as if he hadn’t heard this last statement of hers. “She’ll for sure get that diary hand-delivered to serology. They’ll need what, at least an hour for extraction…The test for quantity, the same…PCR, that’s the one that takes the time…electrophoresis…analysis, the final report. What the hell time is it now, Kate?”
“Just after four.” She could only surmise that he did not want even a glance at the clock in his car to interrupt his thought process.
“With Walcott throwing all her weight behind this—and you just know she’ll be claiming the life of one of our own is hanging on it—it’ll go straight to the head of the line. I figure tomorrow afternoon, Kate.”
“Good to know, Joe.” She’d already factored all this in and come to a similar estimate. She might be four years gone from LAPD, he might be far more up to date on the current science, but the major variable when it came to lab tests had never changed in every major city: backlog.
“Smartest thing you ever did was call her. But wow, Kate. If there’s a DNA match, the case detectives will want your head on a post when they hear.”
“After they’ve boiled me in oil,” she agreed. But saving them embarrassment over a break in the case that did not circle them in was not worth the stakes. They would have done their own due diligence, reviewed the diary, reinterviewed Marietta Hall, followed procedure. In their place she would do the same. Afterward, they might not have taken their confirmation any higher than lieutenant, which meant the comparison test sitting in line at the serology unit for days, weeks—even months, for all she knew. She’d had no real choice; she’d absolutely had to involve Walcott.
“How’s Dakota doing?” he asked in a jarring change of subject.
“She’s good,” she said warmly, welcoming the topic. “Can’t ask for a better friend. She looks out for me, asks for what she needs but doesn’t try to tell me what to do.”
He chuckled. “I won’t take that personally.” He asked, casually, as if it were the idlest of queries, “Would you be keeping her if you could, if, say, her owner was okay with it?”
“I would, actually.” She didn’t have to think about it. “I already consider her a friend.”
“She’s yours.”
Having suspected this from the moment Dakota had greeted her at the door of her house, she still felt a leap of joy. She asked, perfunctorily, “What about the owner?”
“He can be persuaded.”
She held no doubt that he had chosen the dog especially for her from a rescue organization and had rolled the dice from there, trusting that his fabrication about her caring for Dakota for a few weeks would be enough to develop a strong bond. It had taken only a day. “Thank you, Joe. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this. All of it.”
“Everything you’ve done for me, we’re nowhere close to even, Kate. How about I come over tonight?”
“Dakota’s still not enough protection?” she joked.
“I figure there’s one more day till Ellie Shuster finds out who really did this. I’m thinking maybe it’ll shift things, change the equation.”
It wouldn’t. She’d had months and months to think through the probabilities. Why would it? Even so it would be good to have him here while she strategized her next moves, given this development and what she’d further deduced. “I’d be glad to have you, Joe. We’ll give Dakota a good long walk.”
“Great. I’ll bring some Pollo Loco.” He clicked off.