“You and your partner went into some kind of SWAT situation without backup?”
“Not my partner. Me.”
“Alone?”
“Yup.”
“Christ, when you said you had a death wish-” He cut himself off. “Sorry, that didn’t come out too well.”
“It came out fine. You’re right. It was a stupid thing for me to do. Except, see, there was a child involved. And I thought he’d be safer if I went in alone.”
“Isn’t SWAT trained to handle these things?”
C.J. looked away. “Their training doesn’t always work out so well in the real world. I didn’t want a bloodbath in there.”
“Bloodbath?”
“It happens.” She had never told him what she’d seen at Harbor Division, and she wasn’t going to share it with him now.
“I thought SWAT were the elite, the pros.”
“They are. But… well, sometimes things go wrong. You know, everybody says this city is a war zone, and they’re right. But maybe we shouldn’t fight on those terms-or at least we shouldn’t be so gung ho about it. These SWAT guys-you haven’t seen them. They get all dressed up in their paramilitary duds, and they go in with their machine guns and their flash grenades, and civilian casualties become acceptable losses…”
She realized she was babbling and shut up.
“Is the kid okay?” Adam asked after a short silence.
“He’s fine.”
“And you?”
“Didn’t lose any fingers”-she waved her hands at him to demonstrate-“or toes, or any other vital parts.”
“You shouldn’t take risks like that, C.J.”
Someone has to, she almost snapped at him, but she knew her anger was inappropriate, an aftereffect of stress. “Well,” she said lightly, “it turned out all right, anyhow. You know, I hate talking shop. Let’s change the subject.”
“Fair enough.” Adam finished his latte and set down the mug. “How about Emmylou Harris?”
“Emmylou Harris?”
“You still like her?”
“Sure,” she answered warily.
“Well, she’s playing at a club in the Valley. Some honky-tonk cowboy saloon, the kind we used to go to. How about it?”
She was grateful to have an excuse. “Sorry, I can’t. Tonight’s my volunteer work, remember? Every Wednesday night, at the junior high, the at-risk kids program-”
“I’m not talking about tonight. I meant this Friday.”
“Oh.” Her excuse evaporated.
“Come on, let’s do it. You and me, sipping some brewskis, listening to some C ’n’ W from the pre-Shania era.”
Her heart sped up a little, and she realized that what she felt was fear. “That sounds almost like a date.”
He sensed her alarm and tried to wave it away. “No, not a date. A little reunion, that’s all. You know, for old times’ sake. Frankly, I wouldn’t have brought it up, except there’s nobody at the firm who goes in for country-western, and I hate going to a show alone.”
Is that it? C.J. wondered. Or is it that you hate being alone, period?
“Maybe she’ll play our song,” she said quietly, watching Adam closely to gauge his reaction.
“As I recall”-his expression was bland-“our song was ‘She’s Always a Woman.’ That’s in Billy Joel’s repertoire, not Emmylou’s.”
“I didn’t mean our, uh, official song. I meant the other one. The one that was playing when-never mind.”
Had he really forgotten? Or was his studied blankness only a mask to hide what he was feeling? There was a time when she had thought he couldn’t deceive her, but events had proven her wrong.
“So it’s not a date?” she asked, returning to the main issue.
Adam lifted his shoulders a little too casually. “Just two pals out on the town.”
“Two pals,” she echoed.
“Right.”
“Who used to be married to each other.”
“There’s no law that says you can’t be friends with your ex. I’m an attorney, I ought to know.” That smile again. What was Tanner’s word? Rakish. “Anyway, I want to catch up on what’s been happening in your life. And I, well, basically I want to brag some more about my career. So you want to do it?”
Some part of her wanted to say no, but she couldn’t decide if it was her more sensible self or merely the dull, cruel side of her that nursed a grudge.
“Well,” she said finally, “as long as you understand-”
He held up both hands in mock surrender. “I understand. Just friends.”
“Okay, then.”
He flashed another smile, his teeth very white against the tanned planes of his face. “I’ll call you with the details later this week. It’ll be fun, C.J.”
“Fun,” she repeated. She hoped so.
Adam insisted on paying for the lattes. Outside the coffee shop, she said good-bye to him.
There was no hug when they parted. He sketched a salute, a habit he’d picked up the first time he saw her wearing a uniform, and she returned it with a smile. Then he disappeared down the street, and she stared after him and wondered if she should have listened to the inner voice that had wanted to turn him down.
But he couldn’t possibly think there was any chance of reconciliation… could he?
Well, one night with Adam wouldn’t kill her. And she had always liked his company, even if, in the end, he’d shown himself to be someone other than the man she’d thought he was.
Her car was in the station house parking lot. She walked back to the station and entered through the lobby.
Delano was still at the desk. He smiled when she came in. “That’s your ex, huh, Killer?”
“None of your business, but yeah.”
“I was talking to him before. Seems like an okay guy.”
“He is an okay guy. As long as you don’t trust him too much.”
11
Autopsies weren’t the only things Walsh hated. Running a meeting was another. He sometimes wondered why he had ever accepted a promotion to the rank of Detective-3. What he loved was being out in the field, and now, in his supervisory capacity, he rarely had time to investigate a case personally. Then again, at fifty-two, he supposed he had better leave the legwork to the next generation.
At the moment he was surrounded by representatives of that generation, who crowded three desks pushed together to make a single long table in the Robbery-Homicide squad room at Parker Center, the LAPD’s downtown headquarters. He had called a meeting of the Hourglass Killer task force, or at least its core members. Over the past two months, since the abduction of Nikki Carter, the task force had grown to include liaison personnel from the Homicide Bureau of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department-Carter’s body had been dumped in an auto graveyard in East LA, territory which was under the Sheriff’s jurisdiction-as well as miscellaneous bureaucrats from the County Probation Department and the State Department of Corrections.
So far the FBI had been kept out of it, except for the obligatory psychological profile of the killer supplied by the Behavioral Science Section at Quantico.
If everybody connected with the investigation had been assembled, the squad room would have been filled to capacity. Walsh restricted most meetings to the LAPD Robbery-Homicide detectives who did the heavy lifting on the case.
Today’s meeting had been scheduled to start promptly at 4:00 P.M. Naturally it was almost four-thirty when the last stragglers wandered in. Walsh knew he ought to dress them down for their tardiness, but he had never been much good as a disciplinarian. He had reared three kids without once raising his voice, and he figured he could handle a half-dozen Metro detectives with equal self-restraint.
“Okay,” he said, silencing the chatter around the table, “now that we’re all here, we can get started.” Crisply he summarized the autopsy of Martha Eversol. “Anything new on the tats?” he asked when he had finished, directing his inquiry at Detectives Stark and Merriwether, who were working that angle.
“Nothing much,” Stark answered. “We’ve visited every tattoo parlor in town, and I mean every goddamn one. No hourglass patterns. A lot of snakes, flags, hearts with arrows through them.”