I didn’t regret the deaths of Frankie Balls and his men, but I was distraught at having been exposed in front of Skye. I headed east for a while before turning north into the mountains. I took Frankie Balls’s Ford into the wilderness and parked at the head of a trail off Piuma Road in Monte Nido. I couldn’t risk being seen in a dead man’s car and had no idea whether the carnage at Ocean Beach Pool had been discovered. If it had, this car would be as hot as the sun. I needed to lie low while I figured out my next move.
The stars watched me ride a rainbow of emotions, red anger, orange regret, yellow confusion, green shame, indigo frustration, and violet sorrow. Most colors brought tears, slamming the steering wheel, and kicking the footwell. When the storm cleared, I found what would pass for peace.
I turned on the radio and tuned it to KNX News and Talk. Unsurprisingly, the chatter was all about the West Coast Ripper and his gruesome crimes. Green shame tinted the world, but I kept listening to the velvet-voiced anchor talking to her guest.
“So, you think these crimes are the work of a psychopath?” she asked.
“We don’t tend to use that term in my field. Sociopath, perhaps, but certainly someone with troubling mental health issues,” the guest replied.
“You’re listening to KNX News and Talk. I’m Laura Booth and I’m joined by Colin Washington, clinical psychiatrist and consultant to the FBI. Thank you for being with us, Colin.”
“My pleasure,” the shrink replied.
“Are you concerned about the most recent development?” Laura asked.
“The disappearance of the detective?”
“Yes. For those of you who don’t know, the detective leading the investigation, Rosa Abalos, was reported missing earlier today,” Laura revealed. “Do you think her disappearance is coincidence?”
“I wouldn’t like to speculate,” Colin replied. “But I have known criminals become fixated with the law enforcement officers pursuing them.”
I hadn’t thought things could get any worse, but here was a truck bearing down on me, ready to dump a load of misery on my shoulders. I prayed the cop was okay and that her disappearance had nothing to do with me.
Frankie Balls had finally revealed how we were connected, and that left me in little doubt these deaths had something to do with what had happened to Freya Persico.
I took Frankie Balls’s wallet from my pocket and pulled out his driver’s license to discover his name wasn’t Frankie Balls, but Mark Francis Batch.
I tapped his real name into my phone, and seconds later Google presented me with a series of search results. The top hits were all news articles, and I clicked on the one ranked highest, a piece on the ABC7 News website.
Frankie hadn’t been lying.
Mark Francis Batch of Venice Beach was today sentenced to eighteen months in prison for theft. Batch had been stealing supplies of liquor from his employer, the Sundown Inn, Malibu, for a period of three years and selling the stolen liquor to a criminal gang in central Los Angeles. The theft came to light following the investigation of the death of Freya Persico, who was killed in a car accident. Police looked into Batch’s role in the incident as he was alleged to have served the drunk driver who caused the crash, despite knowing the man would be driving.
There had been a time during my prosecution for Freya’s death when I’d searched the internet obsessively, looking for anything and everything on her, hoping to find some nugget that might help keep me out of prison. But there were no stories of drug use or alcoholism that could help make her partly culpable. This piece about Frankie’s role had been written after I’d been tried and sentenced, so I hadn’t seen it before.
Freya Persico’s name was highlighted in the article, so I clicked the link and was taken to another feature written after my sentencing. It was a profile piece that gave an obituary, described my trial, and interviewed her friends. Two things were noticeable. The first was the lack of comment from Freya’s family. The second was a throwaway remark from the doctor who’d tried to resuscitate Freya at the hospital.
“The death of a young person is always a tragedy,” said Emily Gray, MD, of Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. “But hopefully some good will come from the lives Freya saved through her death. Her organs will give hope to people who would otherwise have none.”
My hands shook as I typed the names of my four victims into the search bar along with the words organ transplant. I received an immediate hit. Alice Polmar had been profiled by a local newspaper, and the article mentioned she’d recently received a new kidney.
“The donor was a young woman who was tragically killed in an automobile accident in California,” Alice Polmar said in the piece. “And I will be forever grateful to her and her family.”