“Who else?”
“Maybe a certain gentleman with a Browning and a few grenades?”
“So you heard about that.”
“Who hasn’t? Even in southern California it’s the kind of story that gets on the news ahead of the sports report.”
“On a slow day maybe.”
He finished his soup.
The waitress returned with the beer.
Connie poured the Tsingtao down the side of the chilled pilsner glass to minimize the head, took a sip, and sighed.
“I’m sorry,” Mickey said sincerely “I know how much you wanted to believe you had a family.”
“I did have a family,” she said. “They’re just all gone.”
Between the ages of three and eighteen, Connie had been raised in a series of state institutions and temporary foster homes, each more abysmal than the one before it, requiring her to be tough and to fight back. Because of her personality, she had not appealed to adoptive parents and could not escape by that route. Certain of her character traits, which she saw as strengths, were considered attitude problems by other people. From the youngest age, she had been independent-minded, solemn beyond her years, virtually unable to be a child. To act her age, she literally would have had to act, for she had been an adult in a child’s body.
Until seven months ago, she had not given much thought to the identity of her parents. There seemed to be no percentage in caring. For whatever reason, they had abandoned her as a child, and she had no memory whatsoever of them.
Then one sunny Sunday afternoon, when she went skydiving out of the airfield at Perris, her ripcord jammed. She fell four thousand feet toward brown desert scrub as arid as Hell, with the conviction that she was dead except for the actual dying. Her chute deployed at the last possible moment to allow survival. Although her landing was rough, she was lucky; it resulted in only a sprained ankle, abraded left hand, bruises — and a sudden need to know where she’d come from.
Everyone had to exit this life without a clue as to where they were going, so it seemed essential to know at least something about the entrance.
During off-duty hours, she could have used official channels, contacts, and computers to investigate her past, but she preferred Mickey Chan. She didn’t want her colleagues getting involved with her search, pulling for her and curious — in case she found something she didn’t want to share with them.
As it turned out, what Mickey had learned after six months of prying into official files was not pretty.
When he handed her the report in his stylish Fashion Island office with its 19th-century French art and Biedermeier furniture, he said, “I’ll be in the next room, dictating some letters. Let me know when you’re finished.”
His Asian reticence, the implication that she might need to be alone, alerted her to just how bad the truth was.
According to Mickey’s report, a court had removed her from the care of her parents because she had suffered repeated severe physical abuse. As punishment for unknown transgressions — perhaps merely for being alive — they beat her, shaved off all of her hair, blindfolded her and tied her and left her in a closet for eighteen hours at a stretch, and broke three of her fingers.
When remanded to the care of the court, she had not yet learned to speak, for her parents had never taught or permitted her to talk.
But speech had come quickly to her, as if she relished the rebellion that the mere act of speaking represented.
However, she never had the opportunity to accuse her mother and father. While fleeing the state to avoid prosecution, they had died in a fiery head-on collision near the California-Arizona border.
Connie read Mickey’s first report with grim fascination, less shaken by its contents than most people would have been because she had been a cop long enough to have seen the likes of it many times — and worse. She did not feel that the hatred directed against her had been earned by her shortcomings or because she had been less lovable than other kids. It was just how the world worked sometimes. Too often. At least she finally understood why, even at the tender age of three, she had been too solemn, too wise beyond her years, too independent-minded, just too damned tough to be the cute and cuddly girl that adoptive parents were seeking.
The abuse must have been worse than the dry language of the report made it sound. For one thing, courts usually tolerated a lot of parental brutality before taking such drastic action. For another— she had blocked all memories of it and of her sister, which was an act of some desperation.
Most children who survived such experiences grew up deeply troubled by their repressed memories and feelings of worthlessness — or even utterly dysfunctional. She was fortunate to be one of the strong ones. She had no doubts about her value as a human being or her specialness as an individual. Though she might have enjoyed being a gentler person, more relaxed, less cynical, quicker to laugh, she nevertheless liked herself and was content in her own way.
Mickey’s report hadn’t contained entirely bad news. Connie learned that she had a sister of whom she’d been unaware. Colleen. Constance Mary and Colleen Marie Gulliver, the former born three minutes before the latter. Identical twins. Both abused, both permanently removed from parental care, eventually sent to different institutions, they had gone on to lead separate lives.
As she sat in the client chair that day a month ago, in front of Mickey’s desk, a shiver of delight had swept along Connie’s spine at the realization that someone existed with whom she shared such a singularly intimate bond. Identical twins. She abruptly understood why she sometimes dreamed of being two people at once and appeared in duplicate in those sleeping fantasies. Though Mickey was still seeking leads on Colleen, Connie dared to hope she was not alone.
But now, a few weeks later, Colleen’s fate was known. She had been adopted, raised in Santa Barbara — and died five years ago at the age of twenty-eight.
That morning, when Connie learned she had lost her sister again, and forever this time, she had known a more intense grief than at any time in her life.
She had not wept.
She seldom did.
Instead, she had dealt with that grief as she dealt with all disappointments, setbacks, and losses: she kept busy, obsessively busy— and she got angry. Poor Harry. He had taken the brunt of her anger all morning without having a clue as to the cause of it. Polite, reasonable, peace-loving, long-suffering Harry. He would never know just how perversely grateful she had been for the chance to chase down the moon-faced perp, James Ordegard. She had been able to direct her rage at someone more deserving of it, and work off the pent-up energy of the grief that she could not release through tears.
Now she drank Tsingtao and said, “This morning, you mentioned photographs.”
The busboy removed the empty soup bowl.
Mickey put a manila envelope on the table. “Are you sure you want to look at them?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“You can never know her. The pictures might bring that home.”
“I’ve already accepted it.”
She opened the envelope. Eight or ten snapshots slid out.
The photos showed Colleen as young as five or six, as old as her mid-twenties, which was nearly as old as she had ever gotten. She wore different clothes from those that Connie had ever worn, styled her hair differently, and was photographed in living rooms and kitchens, on lawns and beaches, that Connie had never seen. But in every fundamental way — height, weight, coloration, facial features, even expressions and unconscious body attitudes — she was Connie’s perfect double.