“Turkey and Swiss for me, ham and cheddar for you,” I said.
“Looks great,” Bailey said. “I do miss that silver tray, though.” Her cell phone rang. She looked at the number on the screen.
Bailey answered the phone. “Keller here.”
That was pretty formal for her.
Suddenly she dropped her feet to the floor and grabbed the desk. Her face looked pale. “When?”
She listened, and I stood up. What? I mouthed. But Bailey wasn’t looking at me.
“How?” she asked.
I was ready to pull out my hair. What the hell was going on?
When Bailey ended the call, her expression was thunderous. “Chase Erling,” she said. “Someone attacked him on the transpo bus.”
90
“Someone shanked him when they were loading up the bus for court,” Bailey said.
“I thought they had him as ‘special handling.’”
“Yeah, so did I,” Bailey said, hands on her hips. She stared out the window.
“We got the guy who did it?” I asked.
“Oh yeah,” she said. “He’s looking at about a hundred years to life himself-”
“Figures.” He had little to lose.
“And he’s a skinhead,” she continued. “Nazi Low Riders.”
We stared at each other as the significance of what she’d just said settled in the air.
“Lilah,” Bailey said simply.
Though I’d come to the same conclusion, I didn’t want to believe it.
“How could she possibly manage to get to someone in the jail that fast?” I demanded.
Bailey shook her head. “They just told me the skinhead claims he heard the guy was a chomo.”
Chomo. The slang for child molester. It was a skinhead credo that they had an obligation to kill any known child molester on sight, and it was a badge of honor to carry it out.
There was nothing whatsoever in Chase Erling’s file that indicated he was a child molester.
“Bullshit,” I said.
“Definitely,” Bailey agreed. “But it’s great cover for the skinhead, and who’s going to bother proving that Erling wasn’t a perv?”
No one. The Low Rider would enter a fast guilty plea and get carried into prison like he was Cleopatra.
“She used them as the fall guys for Zack’s murder-,” Bailey said.
“And now she’s done it again,” I said with cold fury. “What would it take to bribe a cretin who’s already doing one hundred years to life?”
“Nothing.”
We sat in silence for several minutes. The skinhead would never admit he’d been put up to it. And, for all I knew, he really believed Erling was a chomo. It wouldn’t have taken much to convince him-just a few well-chosen words. I couldn’t say I minded Erling’s death. What I did mind was the giant fuck-you it came with.
“Chase Erling was our only way of getting to Lilah,” I said.
Bailey nodded, her expression stony. “And now there’s no way we’ll find her. She’s in the wind.”
91
Lilah took one last glance around the empty office. She’d made sure every inch was scoured. There’d be no trace left of her. She’d always known this day would come, one way or another. What she hadn’t been prepared for was Chase. Hotheaded, yes. Impulsive at times, yes. But going after that prosecutor? Suicidal. Now, in hindsight, Lilah realized the screwup in Venice had affected him more deeply than he’d let on. And she couldn’t afford to leave him behind. He was too big a liability. Loyal as he was, she knew better than to believe he’d never crack. She sighed heavily as she closed the door for the last time. Somehow, everyone always failed her in the end. She should be used to it by now. No one was as strong, or as smart, as she was.
The car was waiting for her at the curb. She looked around and saw the street was deserted, then gestured to the driver. “In there,” she said, pointing to the luggage just inside the entranceway. The driver nodded, opened the back passenger door for her, waited while she got seated, and closed it behind her before trotting up the walkway.
Lilah pulled out her phone and called Maxwell Chevorin. “I’m on the way out. Is it ready?”
“All set. Only the pilot knows the destination, and he works for me.”
“I’ll be in touch as soon as we land,” she said.
Chevorin seemed satisfied with that. She ended the conversation and closed the phone, her expression grim. Now she was beholden to him-not something that sat well with her. It gave him too much power. She tapped the back of her cell phone, thinking about how to even the score. A little smile lifted the corners of her mouth as a possibility came to mind. Half an hour later, the driver pulled onto the tarmac.
Lilah boarded and buckled up. Within minutes, they’d ascended over Van Nuys Airport and climbed into the clouds. She couldn’t stay gone forever. But she couldn’t come back until she’d eliminated the threat. Lilah pulled out her throwaway phone.
92
“They’ll probably pronounce him in the next half hour or so,” Bailey said.
I clamped my jaws shut to keep from screaming in frustration. Chase Erling had been rushed into surgery, but it was a doomed effort-the kind they make out of duty, no real hope involved. The skinhead had managed to stab him five times in the head and torso.
My office phone rang. I snatched it up angrily. “Yeah.”
It was the mail room. A package-another response to my subpoena for records-had come in. Arturo, the mail room clerk, offered to drop it off on his way out. “Great, thanks,” I said with no interest whatsoever. Lilah’s medical records were of little import now.
When Arturo dropped off the slim package, I barely glanced at it. But after a moment I absently tore open the manila envelope and read the document.
“What?” Bailey asked, seeing my expression.
“Lilah was almost five months pregnant when Zack was killed,” I said.
Dr. Aigler had been the last to see Lilah and Zack at the clinic. It’d been his pleasure to give them the happy news that she was four months pregnant. But two weeks later, Lilah had canceled her prenatal checkup. When the office had called to reschedule, she’d said she was changing doctors-she’d send them the address of his office so they could forward the records. So the office had packaged her file and set it aside, ready for mailing. Which was why, when my subpoena was served, it’d taken a little longer to find it. They’d never heard from Lilah again.
“Didn’t she get arrested right after the murder?” I asked.
Bailey shook her head. “Not for a while. I can check, but it was at least three or four months.” She frowned. “And she definitely wasn’t pregnant when she went into custody.”
“According to Audrey’s records, Lilah never went back to work after the arrest.” I stared out the window. “She might’ve been able to find a doctor who’d abort it-”
“Wouldn’t be easy, though.”
“No.”
“So what happened to that baby?”
I leaned back in my chair, and we fell silent. But in the next moment, Bailey and I simultaneously stopped and stared at each other. Like a blast of cold wind that blows away the fog, the revelation left a view that was crystal clear. Finally, the last piece of the puzzle clicked into place.
“If she’d had that baby with Zack still around-,” Bailey began.
“She’d never be free of him,” I finished.
Bailey nodded.
“She did it. Lilah killed Zack.”
My cell phone buzzed in my hand. It was a text message.
Did anyone ever tell you that one month after Romy disappeared, a parking citation was issued to a red pickup truck just twenty miles away from your home? And that a black dog was in the cab?
Or that six months after that, a man in a red pickup truck was given a speeding ticket up in Eureka? And that his “daughter” was asleep in the backseat?