chapter thirty-five

Initial questioning of Raymond Lee went nowhere. We had seventy-two hours to hold him before charging or releasing him in connection with the murder of his father. Witness testimony and circumstantial evidence linked him to the nano-bot that caused the crash, but a good lawyer, like the one Raymond’s mother had hired, could poke holes in that easy. We needed Pink to pick Ray out of a line-up.

My phone pinged. I looked down to see the floating face of the desk sergeant.

“There’s a Mercedes Delblanco wants to talk to you, detective,” the sergeant said. “Should I put her through?”

Mercedes Delblanco—the name pinged too. She was the Latina with the raven-wing hair from Sandy Beaches Gentleman’s Club and Britney Devonshire’s best friend.

“Put her through.”

“Detective Piedmont?” Her voice was a hoarse whisper. The base from some pop song pounded its way through the blue-gray walls littered with graffiti behind her head. She was speaking on her glove phone from inside a stall in the ladies’ room of the club.

Mercedes leaned in so close to the phone’s wide angle lens that the face floating before me was suddenly distorted like it had been stretched tight—over a globe. Under the fluorescents of the ladies’ room, I saw her eyebrows had been plucked to oblivion and redrawn with a single arch of black ink like a butterfly’s antenna. Mercedes’ lips were painted violet, but there was a gap between the edge of the natural lip and the hard outline of deep purple. It reminded me of little girls who couldn’t color within the lines.

Mercedes scrutinized my face too. What she found satisfied her enough to continue. “You’re the cop who came to the club. The one handling Brit’s case. Britney Devonshire?”

“How can I help you?”

The image shifted vertiginously as she leaned down and peered out from under the stall. Hers were the only pair of feet in the bathroom.

“You know the Lotus Eaters in East Hollywood?” she asked, jerking the camera up again as she stood up.

“The vaping lounge on Vine and 3^rd?” That was the boutique marijuana shop that had paid Britney Devonshire for her derma ad.

She nodded. “Meet me there in a half-hour.”

“Come downtown,” I said. “I’m in the middle of . . .”

She shook her head violently. “If Sandy knew I talked to you . . .” She glanced at me, then turned her eyes away. “I could be next.”

“Make it an hour,” I said. “See you there.”

Forty minutes later, I strode into The Lotus Eaters, a vaping lounge with clouds of steam twirling in pirouettes overhead and Wi-Fi at every table.

It took me a second to recognize the woman sitting in the back was Mercedes. She wore a gray hoodie over black yoga pants. The garish makeup was gone, the blue-black hair pulled straight back from her face tied into a knot at the nape of her neck. Makeup-free Mercedes looked ten years younger. She spotted me right away and gestured to the seat opposite with a sidelong glance.

I took the seat and ordered a cup of expresso from the auto-server on the table. “You want anything?”

Mercedes shook her head and took a hit from the dragon-headed hookah planted at her feet. When she pursed her lips and exhaled a cloud of cherry-vanilla-scented steam, she looked like a cute baby dragon herself.

“What is it Sandy doesn’t want you to tell me?”

Mercedes took another quick hit and wrapped the edges of the hoodie around her a little bit tighter. “That Brit didn’t O.D. on Green Ice like they said. She was murdered.”

I waited until the human server suddenly at my elbow set my expresso down on the table and left. The coffee’s aroma did battle with the sweet cherry-vanilla. “I know,” I said, tasting the dark rich liquid. “But I need proof.”

“I’m telling you,” Mercedes said, her face flushed. “No way she O.D’d. No way. Brit didn’t use. Not for a long time.” Mercedes crossed her short but shapely legs, the knee bobbing up and down in counterpoint to the rhythm of the trance music playing in the lounge.

“Proof,” I said again. “How can you know for sure she didn’t inject the ice herself?”

“Cuz Sandy got us both drug tested every month. Brit was clean. She wouldn’t have been cleared to sell if she failed the test.”

“Sell?” I leaned forward, cupping my hand tight round the expresso’s white ceramic. I wasn’t surprised that Sandy Rose had lied to Shin and me about the club’s drug tests being random, but this was something else again. “Was Brit hooking for Sandy?”

Mercedes opened her mouth to say something, then closed it. Her knee started to bob faster. She looked round the lounge like she expected her employer to pop out at any moment. “Not hooking, just selling. Eggs.”

“Eggs?” The trance music in the lounge wasn’t that loud, but I thought I must have heard her wrong.

“Yeah,” she said. “There’s good money in the fertility biz. It’s legal, mostly, but Sandy’s not down with us doing side deals.” She paused and shivered, turning her head back towards me.

“Britney was an egg donor.” I sat back in my chair. “The tracks,” I said, remembering Britney Devonshire’s dead body draped in her bathtub. “The tracks on Britney’s hips. Fertility drugs?”

Mercedes’s knee stopped bobbing. “Yeah,” she said. “Brit showed me how to shoot up the hormones so the marks don’t show when we dance.”

There had been three sets of tracks on Britney’s corpse—the red dot on her forearm that marked the latest, lethal shot, the recent tracks on the dead girl’s hips versus the older ones between her toes or under her toe nails. Finally they made sense.

“So you girls were the egg donors,” I said. “Sandy made the arrangements. Who’s the buyer?” At Frank’s funeral Raymond Lee had said something about not knowing any of those women. His cryptic line started to make another kind of sense.

“That fertility clinic,” Mercedes replied. “Baby Mine.”

The company’s inane smiling baby logo flashed to mind. Baby Mine sat next to Genesys Pharma in Sun Valley. Genesys—Dr. Lee’s employer. Lee was a genetic researcher, a guy who needed eggs for his work. One stop shopping.

“How much does it pay?”

“Depends,” she said. “Smart pretty Asians get the most. Blonde college girls after that.” Mercedes snorted in derision. “Everybody who isn’t Asian wants that Ivy League prom queen look.”

“Ballpark, how much money are we talking?”

“Depends on how many good eggs you make that month with the drugs,” she said. “Girls eighteen to twenty-four get sixty to one hundred K each cycle. Less for older girls. You can’t donate more than twice a year though.”

If ten or twenty girls from the club were paid sixty to one hundred thousand for two cycles, how much did Sandy clear? I started the rough calculation. “You mentioned a side deal.”

She nodded. “There was this guy, the scientist.”

“Dr. Lee?” I pulled up a picture on my phone and held it out for her.

Her chin jerked up and she nodded. “Yeah, that’s him. He approached me and Brit about doing this deal on the side. Said he’d pay cash up-front and our boss would never be the wiser. I told Brit not to cross Sandy. That she’s in bed with some bad people, gangs, but Brit didn’t listen. She needed money, and she said she had insurance.”

“Insurance?” Britney had blackmailed Lee. With what exactly? Had she threatened to tell his employer about the off-book deal?

Mercedes shrugged. “She wouldn’t explain. Just smiled like that cat in Alice In Wonderland. Brit agreed to do the deal. The next thing I know she’s dead, and you show up at the club asking questions.” She took another long deep pull on the hookah and exhaled a plume of steam long and full as a mare’s tail. “Sandy can’t know I told you.”

I reached over, took her phone hand, and bumped my direct line into her contact list. “Call me anytime, day or night. Do you have someplace you could go? If you need to move fast? Family or friends out of town?”

She nodded.

“Now would be a good time to visit them.” I paid the bill and started to leave.

Mercedes remained sitting for a second longer. Her eyes had gone steely. “I hope you get them,” she said. “Those murdering bastards. Britney was my friend. I don’t have many friends.”

I nodded. At the door, I paused and looked back. Mercedes had already disappeared out the rear exit. The door closed behind her with a soft click.

What had Britney and Lee gotten themselves into? And how did Harvey Pink, Raymond Lee and his mother fit into this mess? Another rabbit hole had just opened up.