chapter forty-four

The next day, after Jo had left for the office, I called San Diego from our suite in the Beverly Hills Peninsula hotel and checked in on my mother. She and her friend Maria were finishing up breakfast. Sitting on the edge of the hotel bed, I chomped down on a piece of rye toast from room service and watched my mother brew her second pot of coffee. My mother’s breakfast plate was untouched. Lit by the morning sun streaming in her kitchen window, she looked faded and thin, like a photo left too long in the sun. Whatever I thought of Piedmont Sr., my mother had loved him.

“I’m fine, Eddie,” Mom’s floating image said. “You don’t have to worry about me.”

“I know,” I lied. “I really called to tell you the big news. You’re gonna need a new dress, Mom. Get something nice. I’m buying.”

She stared at me, frowning for several beats, before her expression lightened. “You’re finally getting married!” It was the first time a smile had reached her eyes in a long while.

I nodded. “There’s more.” I told her the good news about the baby. By the time we disconnected, I was happy to see Mom deep into plans for making her granddaughter a wardrobe that would last the kid through high school.

As for myself, I planned to spend the day with the wrap-up on the Devonshire case files after I swung by the house to check on the restoration work. Barely an hour had passed when I rolled into the drive of the Venice house.

Craig’s cleaning crew had been hard at work, clearing out detritus, re-hanging paintings and generally putting things to right. As I looked around the room, the painting hanging over the fireplace grabbed my attention. An abstract oil by Xervenka Zentos, one of Jo’s favorite contemporary artists, the design was a patchwork of sea greens and grays with flecks of gold shrouded in the depths of receding plains. Staring at the canvas, something struck me. The abstract looked different—wrong.

There was a smudge on the lower right-hand side of the painting that didn’t belong. Odd how the painting’s jagged lines, the patches of green and gray, and ink black shadows suggested a different mood when the eye was drawn to the wrong focal point by that oily smudge.

Some soiled glove on a clean-up crew member, I thought. No art critic, he wouldn’t have known what the abstract was supposed to look like. So, he hadn’t noticed the smudge—right there in front of his face.

That smudge—I felt the familiar tingling on the back of my hands and neck I get when something overlooked suddenly comes together in a case.

Flipping my Nokia Handy on, I rushed to pull up the blood spot from the Devonshire 51 file. Leaning in so close my nose almost brushed the pixels, I scrutinized the tiny piece of genetic flotsam and jetsam.

The partial prelim resembled a standard identification barcode. But where the dark vertical lines of a barcode are sharp, the black lines of the partial were fuzzy—like smudged charcoal. Nothing odd there.

Then I saw it—a tiny dark line, almost a shadow, at the very bottom of the code that I’d never taken note of. Too small to make out with the naked eye, I magnified it fifty, then one hundredfold.

Each hair on the back of my neck prickled as individual letters in the smudge became legible.

I could just make out the letters and numbers: D-3331110. I felt the old rush.

Not an exact match—Lee’s file name started with the letters AI, not D. But the block of numbers he’d choked out before dying, the seven-digit series I’d initially taken for a phone number, the same series repeated in Lee’s encrypted file with a different prefix, AI, was right here staring me in the face. Serial number identifiers? Lee’s file had to be linked to this blood spot, but how, exactly?

I pushed a call through to the crime lab, and left word for serologist Jim Mar, marking the message urgent. The case may have been cleared, but I still wanted to know how all the pieces fit. Something kept nagging at me.

I texted Shin an update on my way back to the hotel.

I’d planned to spend the rest of the afternoon on the file, merging Frank’s notes with Shin’s and mine for the official record. I had just started to google the numbers with the AI and D prefixes when Jo walked in on all the excitement. I’d forgotten we’d planned to celebrate our future.

“Let me jump in the shower,” I said. “I’ll be ready in ten.”

“Take your time. I want to change too.” Jo’s voice was lightly teasing. “Maybe I’ll join . . .”

She paused in mid-sentence, shook her blonde head and smiled. “What do patents have to do with your case?”

“Patents?” I followed her gaze to my search.

With her well-manicured index finger Jo pointed to the numbers AI and D-3331110.

The air in the hotel felt electric.