Where’s Roland?
I didn’t recognize her—I was certain I’d never seen her before.
Short gray hair. Mid- to late fifties. Dark, leathery skin lined from years of sun damage. A cigarette sagging between her lips. She glanced up and down the street before turning her frown on me and gesturing inside. “Get your ass in here before somebody sees you.”
My body didn’t want to move, my arms and legs stiff.
I’m not sure what I expected to find in my search of Roland Eads’s house, but another person complicated the matter.
Significantly.
Her frown deepened. She pinched the cigarette between her fingers, threw it on the faded doormat, stamped it out. “Damn it, get in here!” She surveyed the street, her neighbors, her teeth clenched.
I closed the car door, crossed the street, and stepped through the lingering smoke into the mobile home.
Behind me, she closed the thin door and twisted the dead bolt. “Christ, you’re all over the news. What a shitstorm. Where the hell is Roland?”
“He’s still in LA,” I told her. Having no idea what she was talking about, I needed to improvise.
“He’s okay, though, right? Nothing happened? I worry about that boy.”
“He thought it would be better if we didn’t stay together. He said the police would be looking for the both of us.” It seemed like the logical answer. Why else would Roland stay behind after breaking me out of LAPD? “He told me to meet him back here. I must have beat him.”
She pulled back the curtain again, looked across the street. “Car like that, it’s no wonder. You couldn’t find something a little less conspicuous? What is that, a Porsche?”
“Yeah. A Porsche.”
She shook her head. “Not registered to you, I hope. You’re not that dumb.”
“It’s registered under one of my parents’ LLCs, not my name.”
“You should dump it, first chance you get. You’re pushing your luck driving something flashy like that.” She dropped the curtain and turned back to me. “How far behind you is he?”
“I don’t know.”
The frown finally faded and she sighed. “Are you hungry? I imagine you’re famished. When was the last time you ate?”
I thought about that and realized I hadn’t eaten anything in nearly twenty-four hours. “Not since yesterday,” I told her.
As if in acknowledgment, my stomach growled, a low, deep rumble.
The interior of the mobile home was larger than I’d expected, but I could still smell stagnant dishwater in the sink in the tiny kitchen. A sixty-inch television filled much of the living-room wall, too large for the small space. Although muted, the television was tuned to one of the twenty-four-hour news networks.
The woman followed my gaze. “The local news in LA has been running stories on you practically nonstop. Nothing on national yet but I keep flipping back.”
From a small built-in table near the kitchen, she picked up the television remote and switched to KNBC out of Los Angeles. My driver’s license photo popped up next to some reporter I didn’t recognize. On the opposite side of his perfectly combed hair was an image of Roland Eads and me in the hallway at LAPD. I thought it came from a camera near the elevators but I couldn’t be sure.
She set the remote down on the table about a foot away from a chrome-plated nine-millimeter pistol; a box of ammunition was beside the gun. Then she went to the refrigerator and started rooting around inside. “I’ve got ham, roast beef, and American cheese. Will that work?”
“Sure.”
“Ham or roast beef?”
“Can you do both? I’m starving.”
My eyes hadn’t left the gun.
She lit another cigarette, then scooped up several items from the refrigerator, including a jar of mayonnaise, and set everything on the counter. She pulled a plate from the cabinet above her on the left, parked the smoke in the corner of her mouth, and began to assemble a sandwich. “You can turn the sound back on if you want. I just got tired of listening to them drone on. They don’t know much.” Her voice dropped into a bit of a singsong as she said, “Michael Kepler killed Alyssa Tepper. Michael Kepler escaped LAPD custody with the help of his attorney. Michael Kepler, Michael Kepler, Michael Kepler.” She paused for a second, slicing the sandwich. “They found the warehouse. Looks like the television crews got there about the same time the local yokels were wrapping up.” She whistled. “The feds were there, U.S. marshals. Roland said this would be big, but I don’t think anyone expected all that.”
I took up the remote and pressed the mute button, bringing back the audio. The camera zoomed in, the image shaky, shot from outside the Stow ’n’ Go complex. I spotted Detective Garrett Dobbs. He was talking to a pretty woman with chestnut hair pulled back in a ponytail. Although she wore jeans and a white tank top, she was clearly FBI.
“That’s Special Agent Jessica Gimble,” the woman told me from the kitchen counter. “The reporter put her name out there about an hour ago, but nothing else. I ran her through Google but got nothing.” She waved a hand at the screen.
I returned the remote to the table, setting it much closer to the nine-millimeter than it had been. My little finger brushed the cold metal.
She turned from the counter and set a plate down on the table in front of me, then went back to the refrigerator, retrieved a can of Coke, and set that beside the plate. “Sit, eat!”
I pulled out the chair and sat. I didn’t eat the sandwich as much as inhale it. The can of Coke I downed in large gulps.
She stubbed out the remains of her cigarette in a filthy MGM Grand ashtray and stared at me in awe. “My God, it’s like you’ve never eaten.”
My eyes drifted over to a stack of unopened letters piled on the far end of the table. Bills, Publishers Clearing House ads. I lifted the empty Coke can and shook it. “Mind if I have another?”
“Yeah, sure.”
When she stood and went to the refrigerator, I glanced at the topmost envelope. It was addressed to Erma Eads.
“Erma, did Roland tell you why Alyssa Tepper had to die?”
When my eyes danced over to the nine-millimeter on the table, I forced them back on her.
She popped the top on the can of Coke with a satisfying hiss and placed the can in front of me. She glanced at the gun too. “Roland didn’t give me a lot of detail on that,” she said. “Only told me it had to happen. No other way to see this through.”
I took a sip of the Coke. “Aren’t you going to eat?”
Her eyes darted over the gun again, then she smiled. “I’ll wait for Roland.”
On the television, the reporter was in the middle of describing my escape route from the LAPD building when he stopped midsentence. From the corner of my eye, I caught him placing a finger on his left ear, no doubt listening to a voice in his earbud. When he looked back up at the camera, his face had gone solemn. “We have a report of a car fire earlier in the day near the fish market, and we’re going to cut over there live—sounds like there may be a connection.”
The screen flickered and a shot of the parking lot behind the old Edward Hotel came up. The camera focused on a redheaded reporter straightening the collar of her blouse speaking to someone off-screen. When she realized she was live, she dropped her hand and stared into the camera.
I didn’t hear what she said. I was too busy studying the smoldering remains of the car parked behind her.
Roland Eads’s car.
When the reporter said the victim found in the passenger seat of the Ford Escort had been executed with a single shot to the head, both Erma Eads and I dived for the nine-millimeter in the center of the table, sending the television remote skittering.