As she set the vase onto the desk, she noticed that some of the petals had been bruised by the fall.
Wounded petals.
Bruised innocence.
She thought back to the incident that had brought all the flowers into her family’s life. An awkward drop of guilt splattered inside of her.
The arrangement will never be the same again.
Never the same.
As she left the room, she shut the door harder than she needed to, then hurried down the hallway to pick up Tessa from the site of the accident.
12
While I waited for Lien-hua and the police, I took some digital pictures of the scene with my cell phone and emailed them to the dispatcher to forward to the responding officers. It used to be that we had to wait for a photographer to show up at the scene of an accident or a crime.
Not anymore.
Welcome to the twenty-first century.
I noticed that the transient’s tooth was still embedded in my arm.
Without letting Tessa see, I pried it loose. It hurt more than I thought it would, and my fingers were quivering a little as I dropped it into my pocket and snugged up the elastic cuff of my windbreaker to stop the bleeding.
A few minutes later, three police cars and an ambulance pulled to the curb, and as if on cue, Lien-hua arrived and parked just behind them.
I noticed the eyes of all the male-and female-officers following Lien-hua as she crossed the street. I wasn’t surprised. After all, she carries herself with Oriental poise, has an elegantly beautiful face with a slight nose and high cheekbones, and is, to put it mildly, very, very fit. Of course, she’s also brilliant, cool under pressure, single, and, at thirty-two, just four years younger than me.
Overall, she’s one of the most stunning women I’ve ever met. But as she approached, I tried not to think about all that, and instead, after a quick greeting, I focused on explaining to her what had happened. One of the EMTs gave me a tube of antibiotics for my arm, and I pulled back my sleeve as we approached Tessa, who was sitting on the curb halfheartedly snapping a rubber band against her wrist and occasionally writing something in her notebook.
After a moment, Lien-hua sat beside her. “Hello, Tessa.”
Without looking up. “Agent Jiang.”
“Are you doing OK?”
Snap. “Don’t psychoanalyze me or anything. I just want to go to bed.”
Lien-hua dragged a slender finger across the sidewalk. “Fair enough.” Then she stood and offered her hand to Tessa.
I finished smearing some of the antibiotics on my arm and twisted the cap back onto the tube. “Tessa, I asked Lien-hua to stay with you for a little bit while I finish up here.”
Snap. Snap. “I don’t need anyone to stay with me.”
When Lien-hua saw that Tessa wasn’t going to take her hand, she lowered it.
“Please.”
She set her jaw, got up, and huffed over to Lien-hua’s car.
Snap. Snap. Snap.
I need to talk to her about that rubber band thing.
Once Tessa was out of earshot, I told Lien-hua, “It’s been a rough night, but I think she’ll be OK. I’ll see you at the hotel, all right?”
“Sure.”
I touched her elbow softly. “Hey, thanks for coming.”
“You’re welcome,” she said. “I’m glad I could be here for you.”
Her words tumbled through my head, meaning more to me than she could have possibly meant them to. “Yeah, me too.”
Then she climbed into the car beside Tessa, and a police officer whose face looked like a block of meat with thick stubble glued to its base called out, “Where do you think you’re going?” An old scar crawled across his cheek and dragged one of his lips down into a sneer. His arms were two tattooed pythons hanging out of his shirtsleeves. He wore a detective’s badge.
“They didn’t see what happened,” I said.
He looked at me suspiciously. “And you are?”
“Patrick Bowers. I’m a federal agent. FBI.”
As I pulled out my ID, he studied my outfit, apparently taking note of my jeans, running shoes, and T-shirt. “Fed, huh? If you’re an FBI agent, where’s your wingtips and dorky little tie?”
I almost asked him where his doughnut and dinky little mustache were, but I wasn’t sure that would be the best way to jump-start our friendship. Instead, I just showed him my federal ID.
Lien-hua had waited, but now I nodded for her to take off. The detective didn’t seem interested in the two women anymore. He looked over my ID, working his jaw back and forth. “So, now the Feds are involved in this too?”
“Involved in what?”
He handed me the ID. “Look, if you’re gonna come in here and start some kind of turf war-”
I read the name off his badge. “Detective Dunn, I wasn’t sent in to investigate anything. I’m only here because I was the witness to John Doe’s suicide. Is there something going on I should know about?”
He stepped close enough for me to smell his garlicky breath.
“This is my city. The next time you and your pencil-pushing lawyer buddies from Quantico decide to stick your nose into an ongoing investigation, at least have the courtesy to go through the proper channels.”
“I’d suggest you back away,” I said. “Now.”
He backed up slowly.
“What ongoing investigation are you talking about, Detective?”
“Don’t insult me. You know or you wouldn’t be here.” He rubbed at the sandpapery stubble on his cheek. “So, you the photographer too? Little snapshots of the trolley you’re emailing to everyone.”
This guy was something else. “Your badge says you’re a homicide detective. I was a detective in Milwaukee for six years and I know that dispatch wouldn’t send you here to work an eyewitness cor-roborated suicide, at least not until foul play was suspected. What’s going on here?”
He grinned. “Oh. I see. You want to play it like that. Well, you’re the hotshot federal agent. Why don’t you work that out for yourself?”
“Well, you know, Detective, that sounds like a good idea. I believe I will.”
His voice stiffened. “So, the guy who called this in, you didn’t happen to get a good look at him, did you?”
“Mid to late thirties, blond hair, no sideburns, slight goatee.
He was seated the whole time, but his head was near the ceiling of the maroon 2003 Ford Mustang he was driving, so height was maybe six-three or six-four. He used a Nextel phone, had a bald eagle tattoo on his left forearm but no other visible body markings or jewelry. The Mustang has a scratch approximately twenty centimeters long on the front panel, driver’s side. Arizona plates number B73-” Dunn just stood staring at me. “Are you writing this down?” I asked.
“Are you making this up?”
“No,” I said, looking past him to the profile of Petco Park against the skyline. “This is what I do.”
During the last two hours, Creighton Melice and the brunette, who’d told him her name was Randi-with an “i”-had shared drinks at a downtown wine bistro and visited two nightclubs. Now, he was aiming the car toward the shipyards while she fussed with her hair in the car’s flip-down mirror. “So, where are you staying, Neville?” “I have a place down in Chula Vista.”
Creighton loved how she’d gotten into the car by her own choice.
He hadn’t been sure that she would, but it ended up being just that easy. Open the door. Let her climb in. Close the door. It was so much better when it happened that way. So much more satisfying.
Creighton kept an eye out for cops. You could never be too careful. He stopped at a light.
“You said you’re new to Diego,” she said, flipping the mirror up. “What brought you here?”
“A film project I’m working on. I tend to move around a lot.”
“How long are you planning to stay this time?”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“On how long it takes to tie things up here.”
The light clicked green, and he turned onto the street that led to the warehouse with the cameras.