As she mulled it over, she realized how many of her own memories had been triggered by the victim. Her mother walking out on them after her brother was born. Her father’s early death and what it meant to be orphaned at sixteen. Grabbing her younger brother and fleeing Colorado before the Department of Human Services could get them. Arriving in Los Angeles. Living out of their father’s car until she found a job and made enough money to rent an efficiency apartment smaller than Jane Doe’s. Going to sleep hungry once or twice a week in a city where the streets were paved with gold.
Lena looked through the slider at the vast basin below Hollywood Hills. It was a clear night, and she could see the lights of the city shimmering from downtown all the way to the Pacific Ocean. She found the Santa Monica Freeway in the distance. The traffic was so thick, the lights so fluid, it took on the appearance of a fifteen-mile-long lava flow.
The connection was loneliness, she decided. Living life on her own. Floating through time on a raft. Seeing the sharks in the water and doing whatever it takes to survive. She had handled herself differently than Jane Doe. She had made her own choices-and her memories, no matter how bleak on the surface, were good ones. Yet the connection was still there because it felt like they had started out in the same place. They had been spoon-fed from the same empty bottle. She didn’t understand why the chief assigned her the case, but knew deep down in the marrow of her bones that no matter how bad things got, how cold the trail grew, she would never let this one go. The woman laid out on a gurney at the morgue was her client. No matter who she was. The connection was irrevocable and she wouldn’t let go.
Her mind surfaced, her eyes focusing on the TV and a news broadcast that had just begun. Although she knew that Jane Doe’s murder wasn’t the first story, it took a moment to figure out what was going on. A live remote had been set up from somewhere on the Westside. From what Lena could tell a man had bought his wife a new Lexus for Christmas. After pulling into his driveway, he attached the large red bow the dealership had given him to the roof. As he adjusted the ribbon from inside the car, a chunk of ice the size of a basketball fell out of the sky, crushing the vehicle and killing the man. Nothing was left except the big red bow and a story that would probably run for most of the night. The house and driveway were flooded with camera lights. The reporters that came with the cameras were fighting off grins and struggling to put on their game faces.
Lena turned up the sound. A scientist from Caltech was being interviewed from his office in Pasadena over a shot of the police line and pile of rubble in the driveway. Either it came from a passing jet, he was saying, or the more likely theory-the chunk of ice was really an atmospheric meteorite, the tragedy a result of global warming.
Christmas in the Palisades. .
If the murder was broadcast at all, it would be so brief no one would notice.
Lena tossed the remote on the couch and walked around the counter into the kitchen. She didn’t watch much television, particularly since the networks had been invaded by the pharmaceutical companies, bludgeoning their audiences with all those idiotic TV ads the same way candy, cereal, and fast-food makers tried to brainwash kids. Watching television these days carried unmeasurable risks, yet no one cared enough to say anything.
She opened the fridge and looked around, but still felt too unsettled to eat. Moving to the pantry, she spotted the case of wine on the floor and reached for a bottle. As she opened it on the counter and poured a glass, the wine triggered another series of memories, this time good ones. It was a bottle of Pinot Noir from Hirsch Vineyards, and the price was way out of her league. The case had been a gift from someone she met at a restaurant downtown, a stranger she shared a meal with last month while sitting at the chef’s table in the kitchen. Lena had become friends with the chef at Patina exactly one year after moving to Los Angeles. It had taken a year for her to realize that the easiest way to a full stomach was working at a restaurant, and she lucked out when she got the job. Ever since her graduation from UCLA, the chef had invited her into the kitchen and served what was undoubtedly the best food she had ever tasted. The invitations came two or three times a year and had never stopped. Last month she sat at the table with a developer whom she had read about but never previously met, the man most people considered the prime mover in reshaping the City of Angels. Because Lena had majored in architecture, they had a lot to talk about. After the dinner ended, the man asked her to pull her car around to the kitchen door and threw the case in her trunk. When she tried to object, he laughed and told her that he was a new grandfather of twins. His wife was helping his son and daughter-in-law at the house. He didn’t smoke cigars anymore, so she had to accept the wine as his gift.
It had been an act of generosity and grace from someone who loved the city as much as she did-the kind of thing you don’t hear about very often. As she sipped the red wine and savored its clean, smooth taste, she felt her stomach glow and finally began to relax. After a second sip, she returned to the living room and opened her briefcase.
Before leaving Parker Center, she had stopped by SID and picked up a second eight-by-ten photo of the victim pulled from her driver’s license. Lena would meet with Steve Avadar from Wells Fargo Bank in the morning. But she also wanted to show Pamela McBride the photograph on the outside chance that her daughter and Jane Doe knew each other. Although Jane Doe’s knowledge of the identity she stole was crystal clear, Lena still considered the possibility unlikely. This was a case about people feeding off people who couldn’t fight back. The law of the technological jungle. The iJungle. The me-jungle. The fuck-everybody-else-jungle. As she thought about the mother’s scrapbook, more than enough information had been published in the newspapers for Jane Doe to get started. If she had any computer savvy at all, it would have been easy to fill in the blanks over the Internet. Still, the idea needed to be checked out and crossed off the list.
She took another sip of wine and looked at the TV. A commercial had just ended and they were cutting back to the newsroom. After the picture faded up, she saw a graphic that included Jane Doe’s photograph and the help-line number.
They were doing the story.
As the newsreader summarized the case, Lena realized why the station wanted so much lead time with the photographs. They had set up another remote, not on the Westside covering a crushed Lexus, but in an alley just north of Hollywood Boulevard. And this time there wasn’t even a hint of a smile on the reporter’s face. It was all business as the man stood beside the Dumpster where Jane Doe’s body had been found.
The station had done their homework. They knew the condition of the body even though the details had never been released. They cut to a series of shots from last night. The camera operator must have paid off someone because he found a position on a rooftop and recorded the body being loaded into the coroner’s van. They even included a shot of Lena walking away from the crime scene, along with a brief history of her role in the Romeo murder case.
She didn’t care about the leak or about being singled out. They had spent five entire minutes on the story and ended it with the two photographs set side-by-side-the victim and her killer. Lena couldn’t have hoped for more.
The phone began to ring. Moving to the counter, she switched on the small table lamp and read the name off the Caller ID screen. It was Rhodes.
“I think Barrera did good,” he said. “Tonight was the right time to release the story.”