“Did you see her very often?”
“About once a week. Usually for Sunday dinner.”
“Did she ever come with a friend?”
“A boyfriend?”
Lena nodded.
“No. She never did. I always thought it was odd. A girl with her looks. There should’ve been a line around the block, but there never was.”
The woman’s voice died off and the room became so quiet that Lena thought she could hear the sound of the candle burning on the mantel. She looked at Rhodes staring back at her and caught the gentle nod. This was the right time to tell her. The right moment. She tried to put the words together in her head. Find some way of saying it that wouldn’t feel like a knockout punch. In the end she realized that it was hopeless, that she couldn’t protect the woman from what she was about to learn.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you this,” she said. “But your daughter Jennifer has been murdered. She’s dead.”
The woman didn’t move or say anything for a long time. Instead, she stared at Lena, studying her face. After a while a tear dripped down her cheek. Then another.
“If there’s anything we can do,” Lena said. “Anything at all.”
McBride’s mother finally turned away. “It must be some kind of mistake,” she whispered.
“I’m sorry. There’s no mistake. It happened Wednesday night. Her ID was missing. It took us this long to find you.”
Another long moment passed. Lena could see the woman struggling to put it together.
“But I’ve known she was dead for two years,” the woman said.
Lena’s eyes snapped across the room to Rhodes, then rocked back.
“What do you mean you’ve known for two years?”
The woman began to tremble, her voice barely audible. “There was a bank robbery in North Hollywood two years ago. Three men wearing ski masks. Jennifer was at the bank. I thought you came here tonight to tell me that you finally caught them. The three men who shot Jennifer.”
12
If fuck-ups could be measured, if records were kept on a fuck-up’s size and weight and the number of people ruined or lost, this was the mother load.
Lena and Rhodes legged it around the corner onto the bureau floor at Parker Center. It was a Friday night in mid-December and no one was here. She spotted Barrera’s jacket on his desk chair. Rhodes pointed to the captain’s office, the overhead lights still burning. When they reached the door, they found Barrera at the conference table with an open three-ring binder and a can of Diet Pepsi. He looked up as they entered. Lena could see the worry in his eyes.
“That background check was good,” he said. “It may have been total bullshit, but everything about it was good.”
He turned around the binder and pushed it across the table, then got up from his chair like he had just been served rotten food. Lena didn’t say anything, her eyes zeroing in on the binder. It was a murder book. They had made the call to their lieutenant as they sped back into town. Barrera had been able to pull the files on the bank robbery in North Hollywood-the case so grisly that it had been bumped up to RHD a long time ago. She scanned through the case summary, but already knew the details because Pamela McBride had shown them press clippings from her scrapbook. Her daughter had been twenty-three when the robbery went down. Making a deposit while on a lunch break from her job at a local ad agency. She had been shot in the back as she tried to run away. Even though the three men wore ski masks and couldn’t be identified, the bank manager and two tellers were led into the vault and murdered as well. One shot each with a.38 revolver to the back of the head.
“Where’s Tito?” Rhodes said.
Barrera loosened his tie and opened his shirt collar. “Upstairs working with SID. We have a decision to make. If we release the video the witness sent us in the next thirty minutes, the stations have agreed to run the story on the eleven o’clock news.”
Lena glanced at her watch. It was 9:00 p.m.
“How are they making out?”
“I checked an hour ago,” Barrera said. “I don’t think it’s going very well.”
“Are they trying to enhance the entire video or a single frame?”
“They’ve pulled a frame, but it’s still blurry. I wouldn’t be able to ID the son of a bitch if he was my brother.”
“What about the driver’s license,” Rhodes said.
“It went to Questioned Documents after it was dusted for prints. Irving Sample says it’s legit.”
Irving Sample began his career as a document analyst for the Secret Service. When he took a job teaching at U.C. Berkeley, the department actively recruited him to move to Los Angeles and run the unit. Sample had played a key role in Lena’s last case. If he called the driver’s license legit, then there had to be some other explanation.
“I’ve got some calls to make,” she said. “Can I take the murder book?”
Barrera nodded and they broke up, Lena and Rhodes heading for their desks on the floor. Any closer look at Joseph Fontaine would have to wait until tomorrow. Tonight was about favors. Cashing in on past relationships because it was a Friday night. Rhodes knew someone at the DMV. Lena had only worked out of Bunco Forgery for six months while in Hollywood, but managed to make some friends.
She opened her computer and switched it on. While she waited for the machine to boot up, she dug into her briefcase and pulled out the credit report and rental application the victim’s landlord had given them. The documents were one year old, but even at a glance Lena could tell that Jones had made a thorough sweep of his tenant in apartment 2B. All three credit agencies had issued reports. Jane Doe No. 99, aka Jennifer McBride, had a checking account and credit card over at Wells Fargo. A little less than ten thousand in cash. A little more than five hundred on the card.
Lena flipped over the credit report. When she picked up the rental application, she noticed a blemish on the paper and tilted it into the light. The victim’s rent was two grand a month. She paid first-month, last-month when she signed a one-year lease. But it looked like she had also paid a one-month security deposit. While Lena and Rhodes were upstairs searching the victim’s apartment, her landlord had been working overtime with a bottle of Wite-Out making the security deposit disappear.
Lena felt a tinge of anger flicker in her belly. She had seen it before and knew that she would see it again. Life sinking to its lowest mark. Life finding the drain. Jones wiped out the security deposit, hoping that no one would notice. The little man with the damaged eyes was two grand richer and feeding off the dead.
Two grand richer for a while.
She took a breath and exhaled. Rhodes sat at his desk on the other side of the room, taking notes while speaking with someone on the phone. Pushing the papers aside, Lena checked her Internet connection and logged on to AutoTrackXP. She typed Jennifer McBride’s name into the search window, along with the address on Navy Street that appeared on her driver’s license. When she hit ENTER and the information rendered on the screen, she confirmed that Barrera’s background check had been righteous. But also, she could see what Jones missed with just a credit check-no matter how complete.
Jane Doe hadn’t just borrowed Jennifer McBride’s name. She’d ripped her entire identity out of the record books and glued it on her back.
Lena grabbed the murder book and opened it to Section 11, combing through the real Jennifer McBride’s background information. Then she checked it against the rental application and compared both with the search made on the Internet.
The real Jennifer McBride opened her first and only checking account at a small independent bank in the Valley. The same bank she died in two years ago. She rented an apartment in Burbank. As Lena looked at the address she figured it was about a ten-minute drive to her mother’s home in Van Nuys. But after her death, everything went dark. Anyone looking at the data would have assumed that she moved back home. Then, one year later, another Jennifer McBride surfaced. A new account was opened at Wells Fargo. A new apartment rented in Venice. A new phone number and a new driver’s license issued for a new life that wouldn’t last very long.