She chose two frames that showed Alex and Michelle beaming with great smiles and slipped them carefully into one of the hotel laundry bags she’d brought with her. She knew it would be good for Alex to have them around. Then she advanced slowly through the house, trying to get some kind of idea of what Michelle was like and what Alex’s life there was like. She checked out the kitchen and scrutinized Alex’s drawings on the walls and the mosaic of postings on the fridge door, even looking inside the fridge to see what kind of things Michelle stocked, what Alex was used to.
As the fridge closed, she glanced out the French doors into the backyard, where something snagged her attention. Small patches of color, on the lawn. Alex’s toys. She went outside, and a bittersweet smile dimpled her cheeks. The small, four-inch Ben 10 figurines Alex had asked her for were all lying there, untouched. She knew they were them, as Alex had shown her the images he called up on the tiny screen of his Omnitrix wristband, and she’d also done a web search and had Alex point them out to her online. Tess visualized Alex playing with them when the intruders had burst in, and felt a pang as she pictured Michelle and Alex running frantically, trying to escape. She shook the image away and picked up the toys, then went back inside.
She checked out Michelle’s bedroom, then her study, where she found herself looking around the bookshelves, inspecting their contents to try to form a mental picture of what Michelle was like, what interested her. She had a lot of work ahead of her. If Alex was now part of her life, Tess knew that she owed it to him to try to get to know as much about his mother as she could. She would need to find ways of doing that, but a start would be spending more time going through her things and talking to her friends and family.
Not yet, though. It was all too soon for that.
Her eyes drifted across to Michelle’s desk, where Reilly had told her the missing laptop had probably sat. The desk was fairly tidy, with a couple of stacks of papers and bills arranged on either side of the empty, central space. She was about to step away when she noticed a drawing sticking out of one of the piles. She moved the other papers off it and found a small stack of drawings, more of Alex’s works, four of them.
Tess studied them curiously, trying to figure out what they depicted.
The first one showed some kind of tribal setting, with dark-skinned figures and huts and lush greenery around them under bright blue skies. The second was of another dark-haired figure surrounded by what looked like cacti that had red flowers sprouting out of them. The third was of a figure walking on ground that was bright orange, like it was on fire.
The fourth one showed two figures, one on either side of the sheet, drawn in the comedically surreal style young children had: an elongated, jelly-bean-like shape for a torso, sticks for arms and legs, circles for hands and feet, short stick-like lines for fingers and toes. She smiled and was about to put it down when something about it kept her from doing that. One of the figures, the one on the left, seemed to be holding something, aiming it at the one on the right. It was barely recognizable, but it read like a gun. The figure’s torso had been colored in darkly. The figure on the right, though, was what had caught her eye. It was smaller and had brown hair, wide eyes, and a big, open mouth, like it was shouting. It was also holding something in its hand: something that looked like a tiny stick figure. Tess pulled the drawing into the light for a clearer view. The figure had a squiggle that looked like a depiction of brown hair, and green over its legs.
Something about the image seemed oddly familiar, while the overall effect was, for some reason, unsettling. Then she understood. With the drawing in hand, she went back into the hall, found the bag she’d put the toys in, and rummaged through it before pulling out the figurine of Ben himself. He was a young teen with brown hair and wore a white shirt and oversize green cargo pants. Tess eyed the drawing again and felt pretty sure that the object in the hand of the figure on the right was the Ben figurine. Which meant the person holding it had to be Alex.
But if that was the case, had he also drawn a larger, dark-clothed figure holding what could be a gun at him?
Tess felt a prickle of concern as her imagination shot off in all kinds of directions, then she forced herself to stop and brushed the thought away, chiding herself for letting the setting and the circumstances of her being there get the better of her. He was a kid, and kids played with toy guns. She was reading too much into it.
She put the toy back in the bag and went about collecting the things she and Alex had talked about: more toys, his blanket, and his pajamas—Ben again, of course—some clothes, his Buzz Lightyear toothbrush, and a few picture books. She also took the four drawings with her.
Half an hour later, she was back in the police cruiser, heading back to the hotel.
17
It was around three in the afternoon by the time I left Villaverde in the parking lot outside his office on Aero Drive, got into my trusted LaCrosse, and headed downtown to look at some more tough-guy stares. Villaverde had called one of the SDPD homicide detectives from the car during our drive back from LA and given him the heads-up about what we were looking for so they’d have time to coordinate with ATF and have the database keyed in accordingly and ready for me by the time I got there.
The more I thought about it, the more I thought this could be a real opening. It felt right—these guys weren’t black or Latino, and if you were looking for a crew of white bruisers in Southern California, a biker gang was a good place to start. I was starting to feel pretty good about our chances, despite the face that SoCal was rampant with one-percenters, which was what members of OMGs, to stick to the hip abbreviations—outlaw motorcycle gangs, not the more popular OMG that’s usually followed by four exclamation marks or a smiley face—called themselves. Most even wore a “1%” patch on their colors. The term was supposed to refer to something some upstanding official from a national motorcycle association had once said, something about ninety-nine percent of motorcyclists being law-abiding citizens, but the association in question had long since denied anyone there ever having said that and it seemed to me that it was the outlaws themselves who had just plucked the number out of their own ass and were using it to talk up their mystique and their exclusivity. Given the swamp of mug shots I was about to trudge through, I thought that term had to be way off the mark, at least as far as Southern California is concerned.
The ride downtown looked pretty straightforward, as per Villaverde’s instructions—south on the 15, then west on Route 94. I didn’t even bother using the in-car GPS. The freeway was running smoothly, with sparse traffic in both lanes. Barring the unexpected, the drive didn’t look like it was going to take more than half an hour.
The unexpected, though, wasn’t about to give me a break on this trip.
Its latest incarnation came in the shape of a maroon sedan with two silhouettes inside that seemed to be maintaining too constant a gap behind me. Now I don’t usually abuse my badged status by storming down freeways at autobahn speeds just to pick up my dry cleaning, but on this occasion I was keen to get to the mug shot gallery and see how generous a mood it was in. I was probably running fifteen miles per hour or so above the speed limit, and the car—a decade-old Japanese model, possibly a Mitsubishi, though I couldn’t really tell—was keeping up with me, although holding back about five or six car lengths. The good thing about traveling at that speed is that if someone wants to follow you, they’re going to have a tough time putting a small buffer of cars in between them and you, and so it was with these guys. I’ve had cars innocently trail in my wake before, of course, their thinking being that if there were to be a speed trap, I’d be the sacrificial lamb that would hit it first and get stopped while they’d sail on, but this didn’t feel like one of those. I guess my inner goon-dar had been cranked up to eleven ever since Michelle and I walked out of that hotel room, and over the years, giving it the benefit of the doubt hadn’t served me too badly.