chapter twenty-eight

Shin sped back south to Nokia PD. Jo was flying private back to Ciudad L.A. right after the funeral reception, so I drove her to the airport.

“You worried about the hearing?” Jo said before we’d turned the corner away from the church.

“Hmm.”

“It’ll be fine.” She squeezed my knee. “I’ve hired your PR rep too. Sasha Gilels. She’s good. We do a fair amount of business with her at the firm.”

“If you think it’s necessary.” The streets blurred as I accelerated.

“I thought we already settled that.” Jo pushed her Raybans down on her nose as she gave me that appraising look.

I nodded. She didn’t need to remind me that my name was already all over the news, and not in a good way. I updated Jo on my recent conversation with the PR woman at the television station, detailing the anonymous caller who was listed as having sent the crash footage.

“We’ll find anonymous,” Jo said, smoothing a few wayward tendrils of blonde hair. “Don’t worry.”

I knew “we” included Craig, and I wasn’t too keen on owing him a favor, but Jo was family. Maybe it wasn’t all bad to have her brother around.

I pulled some music down from the cloud for our drive: The Glass Leopards’ electro-version of Lou Reed’s Pale Blue Eyes. The original on vinyl had a home in my collection, and I liked it better. Reed’s flat, untrained voice, and the scratches on the vinyl gave the song about remembering an old love a rawer haunted quality. But this wasn’t bad.

I dropped Jo at the airport and waited until her plane skimmed the sky. Then I turned the nose of my Porsche south toward C.L.A. I planned on going straight home and getting in gear for Monday’s IAC hearing, but I found myself driving past Gabriel Lee’s Clara Vista beach house.

Lee’s body had been cremated with an “immediate family-only” funeral and no memorial service. That was unusual for Asian families and unfortunate for me. I’d wanted to pull a Raymond and see who else turned up at the scientist’s funeral. I especially wanted to keep a sharp eye on the grieving widow.

Mrs. Lee was the only person of interest who’d had an obvious reason to want both her husband and Britney dead, and she’d lied when I’d questioned her earlier about Dr. Lee. She had opportunity and motive, but Shin was right. I had no hard evidence to connect her with either death.

Still mouthing the song’s lyrics under my breath, I slowed outside Lee’s gray Craftsman style bungalow. A “For Lease” sign had sprung up on the lawn overnight. Mrs. Lee’s Mercedes and Raymond’s Yamaha were gone. Stacks of neatly tied garbage bags were piled high on the curb next to overflowing trash bins set out for pick-up.

Mrs. Lee had moved fast on closing out her husband’s life.

A couple of hastily tied bags on the top of the pile of discards had spilled open, disgorging pops of color and shiny bits in the afternoon sun. Maybe Raymond had packed these.

In any event, trash on the curb is public property.

I parked and got out of my car to investigate. The first open bag held Dockers, a few outdated silk ties, button-down shirts, and toiletries. Another entire bag was crammed full of Berkeley and Genesys company T-shirts and New Balance sneakers in different stages of wear.

Nothing that hinted at any relationship with Britney Devonshire.

I pushed aside an old shirt with the toe of my shoe and felt my pulse race. I reached down for the discarded phablet peeking out from under the pile of clothes. The screen was smashed, but the phablet body was intact, minus a few scratches.

My excitement evaporated when I saw the memory chip had been lifted. I tossed the phablet back on the pile and started to nose through some of the other discards on the off chance that the chip had fallen in there somewhere. It hadn’t.

An old homeless scavenger at the end of the street caught my attention. The woman was dragging an overstuffed garbage bag toward an empty shopping cart somebody had upended and abandoned. Scars on the metal near the wheels showed where the pilfered carts’ GPS monitors had been knocked off.

As I headed over, she stopped at the back of the cart and reached down to touch the metal. Then, still dragging the garbage bag, she circled round to the front of the cart and stopped again. She stared at the cart and reached out again, touching it like it was something she should know how to use but didn’t. Then she circled round again. The woman made two more rounds in the time it took me to close the distance. She was stuck in a loop of endless rotation.

On approach, it hit me the woman wasn’t old. She just moved with that hesitant shuffle you see on the elderly. Up close I could see her full lips and unlined skin. With a shock, I revised my estimate of her age down to somewhere between late teens and early twenties.

Which led to one depressing conclusion: Alzheimer’s X.

Her gray sweat pants were stained, and her tangled black hair hadn’t been cut in a while. Makeup free, the woman wore a faded purple plaid shirt under a green Genesys tee that was two sizes too big. Discards from Lee most likely.

“Hey, Miss, you all right?”

She was mumbling something over and over. The girl looked at me. Confusion in her eyes gave way to fear, and then a sudden expression of recognition.

“Jesus, mi hermano!” She grabbed my arm like a drowning child clinging to a lifeline.

I didn’t try to correct her. Better to play along than try to convince an Alz-X victim I wasn’t her brother, let alone the Lamb of God. Her stolen cart wasn’t the only thing without a tracker. Alzheimer’s robbed the brain of its GPS. Whoever she was, she was lost, and her fear was real.

I had no sooner scanned the girls’ barcode into my phone to see if I could find a home address, when a beat-up Buick scratched the curb as it came to a screeching halt. The car disgorged a forty-ish woman wearing a frantic expression.

This woman had dark pouches under her worried coffee-colored eyes. Her black hair was streaked with silver like the tinsel on a discarded Christmas tree a week after the holidays ended.

“Isobel,” she yelled, putting herself between me and the girl as Isobel dropped my arm.

I already had my badge out.

As the older woman looked from the gold badge to my face and back at the badge again, the muscles of her face relaxed. She closed her eyes and exhaled a deep breath that was more like a sigh.

“Gracias,” she said, taking my left hand in both of hers and pressing her face to it.

I felt the warm salt tears streaming down her face on my hand as she held it.

“I work two jobs, officer,” the woman said. “Sometimes I get so tired. I fell asleep.”

“It’s okay,” I said, patting her hand, and gently pulling back my own. “It’s okay.”

“No.” She shook her head. “It’s not. Isobel.” Her voice trembled on a higher note. She tenderly pushed a stray strand of tangled hair out of the girl’s face. Shifting her battered pleather purse onto her other shoulder, the mother started to peel her daughter’s hands off the shopping carts finger by finger.

I stared at Isobel with her mismatched clothes and uncombed hair. The ghost of a pretty girl was just discernible in the frightened ruin that stood before me. God, I hated this plague.

Grooming was one of the first things Alzheimer’s X patients forgot. Day by day, the disease was stripping her of memory. She was forgetting what ordinary things like keys and phones and grocery carts were for. Soon she’d forget how to speak altogether, and finally how to swallow. Her personality would empty out with the memories, and only the vacant husk of a ravaged body would be left behind. Most families prayed their loved ones caught pneumonia before the end game. It was a better death.

I reached into my jacket pocket where I squirreled away contingency cash. I stuck a twenty into the mother’s purse as she helped her daughter into the Buick and drove away. They needed more than prayers and my twenty, but that’s all I had.

I stood there on the sidewalk long after they’d disappeared around the corner. Then I turned back to the abandoned garbage bag and started to rummage through the junk. Sure enough, Isobel had played magpie with the Lee discards. Under the pile of pilfered Genesys T-shirts and crockery, there were some of the scientist’s souvenirs from various casinos. I pushed aside a little blue and white ceramic clamshell. It rattled. I picked it up and turned it over, weighing it in my hand. There was a coin-sized slit along one of the seams in the back. I shook the figurine and smiled when it rattled again.

I dropped the clamshell on the tarmac and let it smash. There in the midst of the shattered bits of clay, a little silver disk shone bright as a mirror with an Apple logo. It was the flash-dot jacked from Lee’s phablet. Bending down, I pocketed the silver circle of memory.