Conklin led Holly to a plaid tub chair and sat on the couch across from her. She was babbling incoherently when I went down the hall in search of children.
I found two youngsters in the smaller of the two bedrooms, hiding between a bed and the wall. They popped up when I called, “Hey there.”
I thought the little girl was about four. The boy looked eight. The little girl looked me in the eye, then sucked in a deep breath and screamed before crawling under the bed.
The boy dried his face with his T-shirt and sputtered, “Are you the police?”
“You called us, right?”
I showed him the badge hanging from a chain around my neck.
“I’m Sergeant Boxer, but you can call me Lindsay. What’s your name?”
“Leon. Leon Restrepo. That’s Cissy.”
“Do you know how many people are in the house?”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell me?” I asked.
He pointed out to the living room. “Her. Him. Me and Cissy.”
“Is Holly your mother?”
Leon nodded his head. Tears started flowing down his cheeks.
“Okay, Leon. Okay. Can you tell me what happened here?”
“She’s always hating on him,” the little boy said. “She’s always threatening to shoot him, and my dad, he always says, ‘She’s just talking.’ But she killed him, didn’t she?”
“No, no, your dad is alive, but he’s hurt.”
“Oh, man, this is so bad.”
Leon fell across the bed and cried like he would never stop. Between his sobs, he cried, “I love my dad,” he said. “I love my dad so much. Please don’t let him die.”
Chapter 29
I opened the front door to our apartment on Lake Street, and Martha came tearing around the corner from the living room. She threw her front feet hard against my solar plexus and sang her special welcome-home anthem.
I stooped, kissed her, ruffled her coat, and followed her back to the room where my husband was rising from his big chair, coming toward me, arms open.
“Maria Teresa just left. Julie’s had her bottle and her bath and she’s sleeping,” he said, giving me the biggest hug. “She made chocolate pudding for us, and, yes, I took Martha for a good long stroll.”
“Thank you, Joe. What a day I’ve had.”
“Did you eat?”
“Hah. No.”
“Come on, my sweetheart. I’ll heat up some meat loaf and you can tell me all about it.”
I looked in on Julie, who was sleeping like a lamb. Without warning, I flashed on her first months, when Joe and I were afraid that she might die—a memory that was too, too awful. I shook the thought away.
I straightened Julie’s blanket, kissed my fingers, and touched her cheek. I whispered, “Sweet dreams, baby girl.”
I turned to see Joe waiting for me outside her door.
“I turned off my phone,” he said. “And I unplugged the landline.”
“I should turn off my phone, too, right?”
“How about it, Linds? Go off duty. We need some quality time, you and me.”
Turning off my phone was the easiest thing I’d done all day.
Joe served up meatloaf and green beans on a blue-and-white plate at the dining table, and he joined me in having a glass of Merlot. I asked for a refill, then attacked a bowl of pudding.
I took a long bath while Joe sat on the toilet seat and we talked together about my day of corporate go-nowhere interrogations, Yuki and Brady’s magical honeymoon, and a scene of bloody awful domestic violence. He told me some good news. He’d been tapped for a consulting job, home-based, laptop variety.
We went to bed early in our blue bedroom with soft city lights glowing through our windows. It was a blessing to make love and not think about the phone ringing.
And throughout it all, little Julie slept.
Chapter 30
I was in the gym, huffing and puffing on the elliptical, when a hulking guy in a tan overcoat clumped across the red carpeting and approached me. I knew the elephant in the room. Knew him as well as I know myself.
“Boxer, hate to interrupt.” He grinned. He leered.
“This is a no-shoes zone, Jacobi.”
Warren Jacobi is my long-term friend and former partner. We spent about ten years of day, night, and overtime shifts catching gang shootings and homicides by various means, including bathtub electrocutions and angel-of-mercy-spree executions, to name but a few.
When I was promoted to lieutenant, Jacobi teamed up with Conklin. Later I demoted myself out of the bureaucratic nightmare of squad management, and Jacobi took the lieutenant’s chair. Not too long after that, Brady became lieutenant, and Jacobi, who had more street experience than all of us together, and who was suffering from old gunshot injuries and was also closing in on retirement, was bumped up to chief of detectives.
As chief, Jacobi was the go-to guy while Brady was on his honeymoon. I didn’t think the gym visit was a social call, but I got off the elliptical and gave him a sweaty hug anyway.
“What brings you here, bud?”
“I’m just a messenger, Boxer.”
What the hell? What kind of message got the chief of detectives out of the office? I pulled back from the hug and scanned the creases in his face, his hooded gray eyes. Had Joe called him? Had something happened to Julie?
“Spit it out, Jacobi. What’s wrong?”
“Take it easy, Boxer. It’s nothing personal. You didn’t answer your phone.”
I said, “So, okay. What brings you to Body Beautiful?”
He laughed. “I’m signing up so I can gawk at the spandex girls review.”
“Funny.”
“Okay. I’m running an errand for the FBI.”
“Oh. I guess my workout is over.”
“Yeah, good guess. Get dressed so we can talk in private.”
I took a quick shower, dressed PDQ, and met Jacobi in the lobby of the health club. We went out onto Folsom Street and leaned up against the building.
Jacobi said, “There was a fatality in LA about an hour ago. A guy was having a breakfast burger in his car in the parking lot of a fast-food joint when his stomach exploded. He was killed instantly. The glass blew out, blinding a pedestrian. There were other injuries, but only the one fatality.”
“This happened at a Chuck’s?”
“Correct. Chuck’s, Marina del Rey. Here’s the phone number of the FBI agent who called me. Jay Beskin. We’ll get along with them better if we play nice. You want to work this case right, okay, Boxer?”
I told Jacobi that motherhood had brought out the sweetheart in me. He smirked, like yeah, right. We said good-bye and I called my current partner.
“Saddle up,” I said. “I’ll meet you at the Harriet Street lot, ASAP.”
Chapter 31
Conklin and I took seats opposite Michael Jansing in his office/Chuck’s Prime museum of ads and artifacts.
Jansing, Chuck’s chief executive officer with the hay-colored hair and narrow blue eyes, glared at us over engraved plexiglass cubes, slabs, and obelisks on his desk, all trophies awarded for fast-food advertising.
I said, “Do you understand me, Mr. Jansing? The FBI is investigating another death by Chuck’s as we speak. Do you want to help your company and cooperate with us, or should we just back off and let the Feds take you in and treat you to enhanced interrogation?”
Jansing got up from behind his desk and went to the doorway.
He said to his assistant, “Caroline, get Louis, would you?”
Jansing returned to his desk.
“My lawyer.”
“That’s fine,” said Conklin. “If that makes you more comfortable.”
“Listen, I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?” I asked.
“I’m sorry. Our head of legal has something to tell you,” Jansing said.
A stooped man came through the doorway. He wore a corporate gray suit and a comb-over with a dark metallic sheen, and he had nicotine stains on the fingers of his right hand. I recognized him as one of the players at the executive Ping Pong meeting we’d attended.