Oh, well. The risk was worth it. She really believed she was making a difference in the kids’ lives. Some of them anyway.
Take Andrew Washington, a small, wiry teen with smoldering eyes and fidgety hands. He glared at her nonstop during her first few visits as she sat amid a circle of kids and talked about the dangers they faced every day-the drug dealers trying to get them hooked, the gangbangers urging them to wear the colors, the petty temptations of shoplifting and vandalism.
Most of these kids had yielded to such temptations and influences already. Some had done time in juvenile camps. But they weren’t altogether lost. If they had been, they wouldn’t have been showing up three nights a week, talking with C.J. on Wednesdays and with two other off-duty cops on Mondays and Fridays. The talks were the price they paid for use of the gym afterward-basketball games, played indoors, safely out of range of drive-by shootings and the other insanities of the city.
Andrew looked too small to be good at hoops, but she learned later that he had a mean jump shot and quick hands. She was sure she wasn’t getting through to him. His angry stare seemed to say. Talk all you want, you white bitch. It don’t mean shit to me. Then one night another kid asked her what was the most scared she had ever been. Her audience expected her to talk about some experience on patrol, but instead she told them about the boogeyman. They listened silently, and even Andrew’s eyes regarded her with a flicker of interest.
When they were leaving for the gym, Andrew stayed behind. “That shit you told us about when you was a kid-that for real?” She assured him it was. He looked away. “Something sorta like that happened to me,” he said. “Came home from school one afternoon, and there was a guy in the house. Fucking psycho off the streets, busted in through a window, stealing our stuff. Could see he was crazy. Had that look, you know? His face was all one big beard and fuzzy hair with eyes stuck in it. I hid in the closet, curled up real small, but he hears a noise and comes looking. I throw some dirty clothes over me. He looks in, don’t see me. Shit, if he’d done seen me, he woulda fucking wasted me, I know it.”
“What happened?”
“Guess hearing the noise spooked him. He booked out of there. Didn’t take nothing.”
“What did your mom say?” She knew he lived alone with his mother.
“Never told her.”
“You didn’t want her to worry?”
“Nah, that ain’t it. She wouldn’t never have believed me, is the thing. Just like your folks didn’t believe you.”
“People don’t take kids seriously,” C.J. said in a low voice.
Andrew nodded gravely. “That’s how it is.”
He had not glared at her after that.
So yes, she was helping. She was reaching a few of them.
At La Brea she turned north, stopping a few blocks from her house to pick up a few items at a market run by a Korean man who had been a dentist in his own country. She moved quickly through the familiar aisles, dropping fresh vegetables into her basket, paying at the checkout stand.
She was putting her groceries into her car when a glint of reflected light from down the street caught her attention.
A white van was parked at the corner.
She studied it. The driver’s window was rolled down. The light she’d seen must have come from inside the van.
Reflected light. Binoculars, maybe, or a camera’s telephoto lens?
She steadied herself. There were a lot of white vans in the city. This might not be the one she’d seen behind her on Western.
The van bore no commercial markings, but it had the windowless rear compartment typical of commercial vehicles. The kind of van a delivery person might drive.
So why was it sitting there at 4:45 on a weekday afternoon, with the window open, and a lens-if it had been a lens-trained in her direction?
She decided to walk over and find out.
But before she could, the motor rumbled to life, and the van pulled into traffic.
She stared after it, hoping to catch the plate number. The plate was blue on white, a California tag, but she had no chance to read it. The van had already disappeared into a stream of vehicles.
If she were still in the midst of divorce proceedings, she might have thought that Adam had hired a private eye to follow her and dig up dirt. But the divorce was finalized months ago. Anyway, there was no dirt, and Adam knew it.
She shrugged. “Maybe the paparazzi have finally gotten around to discovering me.”
As jokes went, it wasn’t much, but it allowed her to pretend she wasn’t worried. She kept a smile on her face as she drove the rest of the way home.
Her house was a bungalow with a detached one-car garage, where she parked her Neon. She lugged her groceries to the front door, and after some fumbling with keys, got the door open and stepped inside.
In her cramped little kitchen she put away her purchases. She thought of the van again. Here in her home, she found it ridiculous to imagine that anyone could have been following her, spying on her. She must be still worked up from the Sanchez incident. A hot shower was what she needed.
Nevertheless, before heading into her bedroom, she checked and double-checked the locks on the front, rear, and side doors. A sensible precaution, she told herself, though ordinarily she was not so wary in daytime.
Finally she was satisfied that the house was secure.
“You’re all alone, Killer,” she said aloud, chiding herself. “Nobody is watching you? Got that? Nobody.”
13
Treat arrived home just in time for the 5:00 P.M. news. He had expected to be the top story, and he wasn’t disappointed.
He stood in front of the Sony Trinitron in his living room, his windows shuttered, the lights off. The phosphorescence of the picture tube painted the room in bright colors at first, as the newscast began with its two comely anchorpersons at their desk.
Then the taped report began, and the screen dimmed with a shot of a strip mall in the predawn darkness.
The mall, closed pending renovation, was on Sepulveda Boulevard south of Pico. Every morning for the past month. Treat had driven past the mall on his way to work. Today he saw a crowd of squad cars parked outside, and he knew his latest work had been discovered at last.
LAPD cruisers, roof lights cycling, threw scintillant stripes of blue and red across the camera lens. In the background was the sad little mall, where his most recent victim lay undisturbed until today. Treat wondered who found her. A night watchman alerted by the odor? The smell must be fairly noxious by now. Or perhaps some wandering street person seeking shelter-they were always finding their way into sealed buildings, as resourceful as Treat himself.
It hardly mattered. He had known that she would be found eventually. By now, enough time had passed to ensure that her remains would yield no clues to the task force hunting him.
Now the news camera was moving forward, drifting, restless as a shark, among the squad cars, its lens focused on the strip mall wrapped in crime-scene ribbon.
At the time of Treat’s reconnaissance this morning, the authorities had not yet brought out the body. It would have taken a good long while, he knew, for the criminalistics team to take the photographs and make the measurements, collect the raw data that would be filed away in a report in the cold steel drawer of a file cabinet, just as the subject of that report would be filed away in another drawer in another cabinet, this one in the morgue.
The report cut to later footage, recorded after sunrise-the body’s emergence from its tomb. It had been stuffed inside a bag, and he saw nothing but its outline. Still, he was glad the shot was included in the report. Seeing it on TV made it more real.