“You think she was blackmailing Fontaine,” he said finally.
“It would explain why he lied to us.”
“It would explain a lot of things.”
She filled him in on her meeting with Steve Avadar, working her way through the victim’s weekly deposits until she reached the check from Western Union and the kid stealing money from the ATMs one small piece at a time. The kid she believed had witnessed the abduction and walked into the lobby at Parker Center to deliver the package.
“So, our witness is a thief with a guilty conscience,” Rhodes said.
“Or a greedy Good Samaritan. We need to pull the surveillance video from the lobby. He made the delivery late yesterday morning.”
“I’ll get things started. When are you coming in? Klinger’s been asking for you.”
“As soon as I run Jane Doe’s photo by McBride’s mother.”
“There’s no need,” he said. “I just got off the phone with her. She saw the news last night and talked to most of her daughter’s friends. The TV stations posted the pictures on their Web sites so everybody can see them now. Her friends don’t know her, either. It’s a dead end.”
Lena tossed it over without responding. She hadn’t expected a connection between Jane Doe and the real Jennifer McBride and thought that there was enough information out there for the victim to have stolen the identity outright. Still, there was always that feeling of hope flickering in the background. Hope that she might be wrong and the answers would come more quickly. She had thought it would turn out this way, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t disappointed.
“What about the help line?” she asked.
“Three people called to order pizza. It’s a downhill ride from there.”
Lena shifted lanes and made a U-turn at the corner, heading for the 10 Freeway.
“I’ll see you as soon as I can,” she said.
She closed her phone and slipped it into her pocket. Over the past few years it had become increasingly difficult to find witnesses willing to speak up. The trend began with gang crimes and new rounds of witness intimidation that included kidnapping, torture, and often times, murder. As the word spread through news stories and the worst of hip-hop, fear gripped the city and the witness pool for all sorts of homicide investigations began to dry up.
Snitches wear stitches.
For Lena those three words were more than the code of the street. They were a warning beacon, a reminder of how frail a society can become. How easily ignorance and nihilism can take root when so many people have stopped watching.
She tried to shake off the bad vibes-tried to keep her mind off the personal reasons why the one witness they knew about probably wouldn’t step forward. After hitting the Fourth Street ramp and accelerating onto the freeway, she found the left lane and switched on her CD player. Flipping over to the last disc, she thought about Klinger, skipped to track 2 and hit play. The cut she wanted to listen to was called Stop, a digital remaster of the album Super Session, recorded by Al Kooper, Mike Bloomfield, and Stephen Stills nine years before she was even born. She had discovered a vinyl copy in her brother’s recording studio and liked it so much she bought the CD. That was six months ago, and the album still held a spot in her five-disc player. As the music started, she settled back in her seat and felt her body relax some.
The case was beginning to take shape. With Fontaine uncovered and the discovery of the cash in the victim’s bank account, the investigation was finally beginning to move forward. Yet, she couldn’t help thinking that something was wrong. She hadn’t slept well last night, tossing and turning in spite of the wine. She didn’t understand why the detectives from Internal Affairs were parked outside her house. Why they would risk their careers by tapping her phone. And she wasn’t sure she should mention it to anyone until she had a better read on why they were really there. Why did Klinger and Chief Logan feel the need to keep such close tabs on her? Why did someone from the sixth floor-probably Klinger himself-call the press on the night Jane Doe’s body was discovered in Hollywood? Why did he want to make sure that everyone knew her name was attached to the case?
The more she thought it over, the more worried she became that she was missing something important. That she had become lost in the details of a complicated investigation and wasn’t seeing the big picture. The key ingredient that made it all move.
By the time she reached Parker Center, she could feel the dread following her into the elevator. She rode up to the third floor and found the bureau empty, a picture of Fontaine from the DMV on Rhodes’s desk. Hiking up the back steps to SID, she spotted Henry Rollins, a forensic analyst from the photographic unit, working at a computer terminal equipped with a double set of flat-panel monitors. The overhead lights were off, the room darkened.
“What are you doing here on a Saturday?” she asked.
He grinned, but looked tired. “I’ve got your video up,” he said. “I’m cutting the shots together. It’ll only take a second.”
Lena entered the room, pulling a chair over and handing him the DVD Avadar had given her.
“Video from the ATMs,” she said.
“We’ll run them side by side.”
“Where’s Rhodes?”
“He walked out to make a phone call.”
Rollins turned back to the pair of twenty-one-inch monitors, streaming through a series of shots so quickly that the images didn’t register as anything more than digital noise. He was creating a time line and pulling shots already previewed from an open window on the second monitor. The shots were no bigger than thumbnails and hard to see. As Lena moved closer, she realized that Rollins was doing more than just piecing together surveillance video from the cameras hidden in the lobby. He had taken the extra step and pulled shots from the cameras overlooking the street outside Parker Center.
She sat back in the chair and watched him finish the time line, then quickly download the video clips from the bank. She had never worked with Rollins before, but knew him because of their mutual friendship with Lamar Newton, the crime scene photographer assigned to the case. Rollins was young and lean with bright eyes and a dark complexion. He was just three years out of graduate school from UCLA. Although he never talked about it, Lena had heard rumors that the police departments in New York, Chicago, and Miami had tried to lure him away with offers of a signing bonus. According to Newton, Chief Logan had become involved and convinced Rollins to stay in Los Angeles. At the time bidding wars for new recruits were rare, but now the practice was commonplace.
Rhodes entered the room and grabbed a chair. “Are we close?”
“We’re almost there,” Rollins said.
Rhodes turned to Lena. “I just got off the phone with Tito,” he said. “Fontaine’s hired a couple of bodyguards.”
“He saw them?”
“Yeah. From the neighbor’s house. Two guys taking a smoke break in the backyard.”
“What do you think it means?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Tito’s gonna knock on Fontaine’s door and see if he wants to talk about it.”
Their eyes met, that feeling of dread still working through her body. When she finally turned back to Rollins, he moved the cursor to the start of the time line, hit the spacebar on his keyboard, and both videos started rolling. As they watched, Lena couldn’t help thinking that the edited sequence felt more like a finished work than raw surveillance footage. And there was something spooky about the images, almost as if she was watching a crime unfold before her eyes. Rollins was cutting from camera to camera, following the messenger’s progress from the moment he exited the underground garage one block up and started walking down North Los Angeles Street. Although the camera angle was high, the images were in color and far clearer than the video from the ATM machines playing on the second monitor. Lena could see the package underneath the messenger’s arm. She could see him turning his face away and looking at the ground as he passed two cops on the sidewalk.