A lie is an abomination unto the Lord
and an ever-present help in time of need.
—John A. Tyler Morgan, Comment to the US Senate
It was a foggy morning when Joey sprang awake, wondering what his mom was doing. His second thought was how Charlie was doing. Thankfully, when he looked at the lizard in the now empty ten-gallon aquarium, it was chomping away on a lettuce leaf Joey had left the night before. The lettuce looked gross and slimly, but to Charlie it appeared a good meal.
“How you doing there, buddy?” he asked the lizard.
It bobbed its head up and down, the way lizards sometimes do, as if understanding his question.
“Guess things in the new home aren’t too bad?”
The lizard continued its agitated movements.
Joey lay back in his Ferrari race car bed, putting his hands in the air on a make-believe steering wheel. “Vroom, vroom,” he said, eyes staring at the ceiling, now transformed magically into the Indianapolis speedway. Picturing Dale Searnhardt, Jr., as he called him, on his bumper, Joey turned a quick left, cutting him off. “You can’t get me. I’m going to win this race.” In his head, a checkered flag appeared and he took it by ten car lengths, sticking out his tongue to Dale in mockery.
“Hey,” Dad interrupted the vision. “Hey sport, I thought I heard a race going on in here.”
“Oh, Dad. Don’t stand there. You ’barass me.”
“Sorry. Just wondering what you wanted to do today.” It was Saturday, Joey’s favorite day, when he could do whatever he wanted.
The boy rolled out from his bed and jumped. “Chuck E. Cheese, Chuck E. Cheese!”
Mark Powers folded his arms, shifted his weight to one foot. “Again?”
“Chuck E. Cheese, Chuck E. Cheese,” came the answer.
“Can’t we do something different, sport? It’s the third time this month we’ve been there.”
“I know, but it’s my favorite.” Joey put on his puppy-dog eyes, complete with pout. “Come on, Dad, pleeease.”
“All right, you win. But next weekend, if your mom’s back, she is not taking you to Chuck E. Cheese’s. I’ll make sure of it and—”
Before Mark could finish, Joey let out a holler, jumping up and down, hands in the air. “Yay, yay, Chuck E. Cheese, Chuck E. Cheese!”
Suddenly he stopped jumping and was strangely quiet. “Dad?”
“Yes, Joey,” Mark said, his hand on the doorknob.
“Where’s Mom?”
Mark stopped and sat on the bed, taking the boy on his lap. “Now, Joey, remember we had this talk before. Mommy has a very important job. She works with the police, like we see on TV…”
The child had a faraway look. “And like my cars?”
Mark nodded. “Yes, son, like your police cars. Except she works for the police of the whole United States.”
“Uh-huh,” Joey said, remembering.
“And sometimes, because her job is so important, she has to go on trips away to make sure everything is all right where other people live. She makes sure other little boys and their dads are safe too.”
“And she has to go for a long time sometimes, doesn’t she?”
Mark nodded again. “Yes, sometimes she has to go for a long time.”
“Will this be one of those times, Dad?”
“I don’t know, son, I don’t know.” Mark tousled Joey’s hair into an even bigger mess. “Now Sport, how about I see you downstairs for some Cap’n Crunch cereal.”
“Okay.” Joey started to lift his pajama top over his head but stopped midstream. “Dad, is Mom safe?”
“I don’t know for sure, son, but I think so.”
Everything hit the fan on August 27, as far as Craig Gray was concerned. Slamming a fist down on the desk, he shouted at FBI Director Carlos Sanchez, “How in the hell did she pull this assignment?”
“Look, I don’t know. When they needed FBI, they went straight through Washington. She was assigned from Quantico. One of their best from what I hear.”
“I don’t give a damn if she’s Gandhi,” Gray seethed. “She is in our backyard, assigned to the biggest case to hit this area this year, and we weren’t informed?”
“That appears to be it.” Sanchez wasn’t going to buy into Gray’s ire. He knew the man liked to blow things out of proportion, just to get his opinion heard. This was no different. “What do you want me to do?” Sanchez turned to face the window, staring out at the federal courthouse across the street. All around downtown LA, skyscrapers seemed to cloak the human life that lived in the city. People, looking like ants, scurried in and out of towering monstrosities, moving at a blinding pace, never stopping to look at one another, interact, communicate. Sanchez wondered why he had taken this position. He liked Boston’s streets much better, the hominess, the cleanness of that city. This was a living cesspool.
“Are you listening to me?” Gray demanded.
“Yeah.” Sanchez waved his hand in the air, dispelling the man’s concerns.
Gray would not shut up. “Here’s the deal. The case is being handled by some small-time Irish homicide detective. I hear the guy’s into booze, or at least used to be. Schmuck can hardly keep a step away from the whiskey.”
“So what do you want me to do about it?”
“And she’s a woman. A woman, head of the Behavioral Sciences Unit. How is that for woman’s lib? Jesus, maybe I should start doing nails for a living, open a damned nail salon. What’s with all this role reversal crap? I don’t get it.”
“Look, she ain’t no desk jockey,” Sanchez said. “She’s a forensic pathologist. Got her master’s at Yale. Then on to Harvard Medical School. Graduated cum laude. She’s trained with the best. Hell, she’s trained the best. She’s very capable from what I hear.”
“Hello, is anybody in there?” Gray shouted, his knuckles rapping on Sanchez’s head. “Don’t you get it? She waltzes in here, backed by the FBI’s crime lab, nabs the killer. All’s well that ends well. Quantico gets another feather in its proverbial hat. ‘Put away the next friggin’ Jeffrey Dahmer.’ I can just see the headlines now. That’s our glory, Sanchez. Don’t you see, man? They should’ve called us.”
“Fact of the matter is they didn’t, and at this point we can’t get involved.”
Gray continued to rant. “And what about that Irish cop. Guy’s five years from retirement. If they solve this, he’s gonna get one hell of a career boost. He don’t need it; he’s due to retire.”
“So that’s your thunder they’re stealing is it?”
“Yeah, it’s my damned thunder. It should be anyway.”
“Ain’t right now. You ever thought of it this way…” Sanchez stopped, lit a cigar, and kept talking. “…Let’s just suppose they don’t solve it. They have killing after killing after killing of these nice young girls. Then who do you think’s gonna have egg on their face, and who do you think’s gonna come out smelling like a rose? You thought of that?”
“No, not really.” Sanchez knew that Gray was a hothead, wondered how the FBI had ever accepted him as an agent.
“Well, why don’t you squish it through that one brain cell you got up there for a minute and let me know when the light bulb comes on.”
“Come on, man. I’m just thinking about our welfare.”
“Wrong again, Gray.” Sanchez raised a thick black eyebrow. “The only well-being you ever think of is your own. You don’t give a shit about me or this department. You’ve always been a hotrod, always will be.”
“Don’t give me that psychobabble crap,” Gray said. “you gotta keep on it – make sure and monitor it. Whatever glory there’s gonna be dolled out, I want a piece of it.”
Sanchez nodded, “I’m on it.”
Gray ran his fingers through his wiry hair, beamed approval, and slammed the door behind him as he left.
One-thirty came and went. McGregor didn’t show. No phone call. Nothing. Cat sat in the lobby, flipping through the pages of a six-month-old National Geographic, her finger drumming against the wooden armrest.
“Damn, where is he?” She glanced at her watch for the third time in as many minutes. One of her pet peeves was chronic lateness. Something about it didn’t sit right with her. Maybe her military upbringing had instilled it. A respect for one’s word. When you said you’d be somewhere, you were there. In Cat’s case, you were there a few minutes early. I don’t have time for this sitting around. Right then and there, she decided she’d arrange for a rental car as soon as she got back to the hotel.
People watched as Jim McGregor’s 1992 red Toyota Corolla rolled around, coughing an acrid gray smoke from the muffler. She checked her watch again: 1:54. Then walked out to the car.
“Hop in.” McGregor’s smile was doing automatic pilot.
“I thought our agreement was one-thirty.” She stared for a moment at the gung-ho cop, knowing that he wanted to be able to brush off the fact he was almost twenty-five minutes late. “Look here, McGregor, I don’t know how you boys do it down here, but where I’m from one-thirty means one-thirty. My time is valuable. I’ve been sitting here waiting…” Cat got in the car.
“Look, before you get your panties all in a—” He remembered who he was speaking to. “Before you give yourself a fit, the reason I’m late is because we’ve got another young girl disappeared two nights ago.” They zipped down the freeway toward the Ortega Highway.
Cat felt foolish and tried to recoup her words, like spilt milk.
“Call came into Missing Persons yesterday morning. Marlin Bennett, executive in Toshiba’s middle management, out here for some seminar on the new computers they’re going to be bringing out, called in all upset like. Says his daughter, Carrie Ann, disappeared the night before. She’s only seventeen. Bright kid, finished high school ahead of her classmates. Anyways, last place anyone saw her was at a bar in Newport Beach, down Lido Island way.”
“What was she doing there?” Cat answered her own question. “Out for a night on the town?” Cat drew the obvious conclusions from the questions. Another messed up kid, growing up too fast, into sex, drugs, rock and roll, and anything else she could get her hands on. She let the warm Santa Ana winds tousle her hair as they clipped along through Mission Viejo.
“Yeah, well, sorta.” McGregor shook his head. “She hooked up with another manager’s daughter, who convinced her to go out. Then the friend left her to hook up with some other girls. Left her in the bar. Told her to get a taxi home.” He considered his words for a moment. He could see what Cat was thinking—party girl.
“She’s not that type of kid,” McGregor said.
“So what do we have right now?”
“Stevenson’s down there checking out the bar. Trying to get ahold of the staff by phone. They don’t get in till four or five o’clock. See if anyone remembers the girl, you know.”
Cat did know. She knew that in all likelihood no one would remember seeing the girl. With a thousand faces in a bar in one night, people learned to tune out faces, names. The nightclub scene in Newport, although more pricey, was the same as any other when it came to the common denominators—money and flesh. Cat felt certain no one would remember anything. Even if they did, they wouldn’t be helping out the cops with it.
“I doubt that’ll do any good.”
“I know, but we’ve got to be thorough.”
“I agree.”
McGregor and Cat sat silent the rest of the way. Cat watched as the car slipped past Irvine’s fastidiously groomed houses and high-rises. Heading south, they entered Irvine Valley, named for the famous Irvine family, the area still one of Southern California’s major crop-producing areas. Surrounded on all sides by low rolling mountains, the soil here was rich and black, the climate tepid but cool in the mornings. Crops in abundance included tomatoes, beans, cabbage, corn, peas, berries of all types. Mission Viejo gave way to the more casual mission architecture of San Juan Capistrano.
“Is that the famous mission?”
“Yes, one of the oldest buildings in Southern California. They finished renovating it a few years back as a matter of fact. Swallows still come back, year after year, although they are not always on cue for the news media.”
“Speaking of the news media, have we kept this latest missing person quiet?”
“Yeah. Nothing’s been said. It’s all under wraps as far as I know.”
“Hope that wrap doesn’t spring a leak.”
“I know what you mean.”
As they turned off the freeway, heading inland, Cat could immediately tell the difference in scenery. Gone were gas stations, McDonald’s restaurants, convenience stores. Smog seemed nonexistent. In their place were rolling hillsides, horses, residences secluded back from the road so far you just barely caught a glimpse of them. Manicured acreage gave way to less formal pastures. Cows grazed. Cat could smell the greenery.
“Reminds me of home,” she said.
“You lived on a farm.”
“Not exactly. My dad was a military man, real strict. We were moved all over, Guam, Georgia, West Virginia. At the base in Guam, when I was fourteen, we started a vegetable co-op. Staked out a little patch of earth as our own. Planted every kind of seed I could get my hands on—peppers, citrus, even pumpkin. Base thought it was a good idea, kept the kids out of trouble. We started taking care of goats, pigs. Then on Christmas, my dad brought home a near lame mare he had bought from a local farmer for a few bucks. In his way, it was a gift of encouragement, but he told me to take care of the horse or else the farmer would come back and shoot it. Anyway, I nursed that mare back to health, called her Toto. I’m boring you with this, aren’t I?”
“No, not at all.”
“At first I thought I wanted to go into veterinary school. You know what? I couldn’t stand to see animals hurt. It tore my insides out. So I switched to medicine. If Dad had his way, I would have joined the military like he did, made a career of it. But I wasn’t up to it. I knew it. He did too.”
“Your dad still alive?”
Cat looked afar off, mesmerized by dancing native yellow wildflowers that seemed to catch the slightest breeze.
“No, he passed a few years ago.”
“Cat?” He paused. “He didn’t understand you, did he?”
Cat was surprised by the question then guessed it was partly the reason why McGregor had been a homicide detective for so long. Intuition. The ability to read someone without them saying so much as a word. “No, never did. He felt I had simply thrown my life away by going into medicine. Hell, most people would be proud to see their daughters accepted to one of the most prestigious medical schools in the country. Not my dad.” Bitterness tolled through each word. “Nope, he always seemed absolutely incapable of understanding the choices that I made for myself. Maybe it wasn’t the choices themselves; maybe he just never understood the fact that I could make my own choices. The man never understood the skill required to be in the medical profession. To him, I was always a military man’s kid, tough—an athletic, lanky string bean. Had to be tough, we moved around so much.”
“Yeah, you told me.”
“Medicine was probably the last profession in the world he would have chosen for me. For starters, when I got into medical school, there were only two other women in my class. He couldn’t understand the allure of going into an all-male field. And, most importantly, he couldn’t understand how I didn’t want to be just like him. My medical profession was a constant reminder to him that I didn’t want to be just like him. That, well, that was an ego blow. The disappointment haunted our relationship to the day he died. It was as if, with time, we grew more distant, further away from each other, rather than closer. Every time he heard me referred to as doctor, he practically cringed.”
“It’s hard when a parent doesn’t accept you.”
Cat nodded. “It was like a stream of despondency that grew into a river, then a sea. In the end, we couldn’t stop the ebb flow, even if we wanted to.”
The car passed the 2,000-foot marker.
“How about your mom?”
“She died when I was five. I don’t really have too many memories of her. Just flashes here and there.”
“Car accident?”
“No, she committed suicide. I came home from school one day and found her with a gun. She had shot herself in the mouth.”
“Jesus. That must have been awful.”
“Can’t hardly remember any of it. Shrinks said I blacked it out. Made it disappear. Only memories I have of her are good ones, I assure you.” Cat looked at him flatly wondering if she should be sharing such personal details, but she decided in favor of it. McGregor had a comfortable way about him. It was good to talk about these things after so many years.
As if sensing her thoughts, he asked, “Not getting too personal am I?”
“No. Don’t worry about it. As long as you don’t sell the story to the National Enquirer.”
He laughed out loud. “I can just see it now. Headlines. ‘FBI Chief Pathologist Haunted by Mystery of Mother’s Horrific Death, story on page 3.’”
They both laughed. “After that, I don’t think anyone would take my profiling capabilities seriously again,” Cat said.
“Speaking of that, we’re here.” McGregor pulled off the road some distance above the 3,000-foot elevation. “I hope you brought some comfortable shoes.” He glanced down at her heels.
She reached into her black shoulder tote and pulled out a pair of running shoes and white socks. “Were these what you had in mind?”
“Those will do nicely up here.”
Cat busied herself putting on the shoes then stood up and looked out over the expanse. “Now where exactly did you locate the corpse?” McGregor pointed. “See that big clump of prickly pear cactus off to the left? She was just over that ridge there, behind it.”
“Let’s go.” Cat had already started off in the direction.
Within a half hour they had hiked the distance to the ridge.
Cat began speaking to McGregor once they reached closer to the site where the body had been found. The skin on the back of her neck prickled.
“Sometimes seeing the scene where a body is found tells me about the killer. Sometimes I get lucky and find things others don’t see.” She looked across the ground. “Now where exactly did you find her?”
McGregor pointed. There was a clear demarcation where the body had lain, staining the grass a darker shade of brown than what was around it. Some of the sycamore bush’s branches had been cut away to make the spot easier to see.
Cat started taking notes about everything he told her, where the body had been found, time of day. As best she could, she sketched the scene from what he was relaying to her.
“Okay, I know what you just said, but here goes the second stupid question of the day.”
His voiced joined in, drowning out her own, mimicking her. “The only question that’s stupid is the one that’s never asked.” He stood silent. “What are you doing?”
“Just taking notes.”
“But you’ve already got my notes, the forensic reports, autopsy…”
“Yes, but they cannot possibly tell me everything about a crime scene, about the crime itself.”
“Christ, maybe I understood where you were coming from in the car, but I sure as hell don’t understand this.”
“No one asked you to,” Cat said, shaking her ballpoint wildly. “Blasted thing, great place for it to run out of ink.” She fumbled, dropping the pen on the ground.
As she stooped to pick it up, something out of the ordinary caught her eye. A tiny black plastic point was sticking out of the clay-like California dirt. “What do we have here?” she asked herself as she rummaged through the bottom of her tote to find tweezers. She removed them from a clear plastic casing and picked up the black object, placing it in a plastic Ziploc bag she also produced from her tote.
“You always this prepared?” he said cynically.
“In forensic medicine, you consider every eventuality, detective, you should know that.”
“What the hell is it?”
Sealing the plastic bag, she said, “Appears to be a panel of some sort, maybe the back of a cell phone, pager perhaps. I can’t really tell. I’ll have to get it back to the lab.”
“You think it might be important?”
“With the little we have to go on right now, everything is important.”
McGregor simply rolled his eyes.
Another half hour of photographing, drawing, and retracing steps and they were done. The lab was waiting.