"Merging onto the ten."
"I'm leaving the office right now. I'll meet you there. In the meantime, keep your mouth shut."
"Where did you say we're going?" Ali asked, directing her question at Sims.
"The Riverside County Morgue," he answered. "The address is"
"I know the address," Angeleri interrupted, bellowing the words loud enough to break Ali's eardrum. "I'll be there as soon as I can. Until you and I have a chance to talk in private, you're to say nothing more. Nothing! You can talk about the weather. You can talk about the World Series, but that's it. Understand?"
"Got it," Ali answered. "I hear you loud and clear."
That was actually something of an understatement since Sims and Taylor must have heard him, too. The two detectives exchanged a raised-eyebrow look, and Sims heaved a resigned sigh. Clearly they had been having their way with her. Now the game was up. Ali's only hope was that Victor Angeleri would be smart enough to dig her out of the hole she had dug herself into before she made it any deeper.
Ali glanced at her watch. At the rate traffic was moving, it would be another two hours before they made it to Indio. And with Victor leaving the office on Wilshire that much behind them, Ali calculated that it would be hours before the attorney could catch up with them. That meant she was in for several uncomfortable hours of keeping her mouth shut.
Gradually traffic began to thin. The car sped up, but clearly Taylor and Sims had gotten the message. They made no further attempt to ask her questions about anythingincluding the run-up to the World Series. Left to her own devices, Ali spent the time trying to figure out how, in the course of one short day, she had gone from being an almost divorced woman to being a homicide suspect.
Ali checked her watch when they pulled up outside the coroner's office in Indio. She expected they'd have to wait another hour at least before Victor could possibly catch up with them. Then, after however long it took to do the identification and conduct any additional interviews, there would be another three-hour car ride back to the hotel.
Resigned to the idea that it was going to be a very long night, Ali was astonished when an immense man rose from a small waiting room sofa and hurried toward them.
"Ali Reynolds?" he asked.
Assuming this was yet another cop of some kind, Ali nodded.
"Good," the newcomer said, turning to the detectives. "If you don't mind, I'd like a word in private with my client."
"We'll be right outside," Detective Sims replied before he and Taylor returned the way they had come.
"You're Victor?" Ali asked. "My attorney?"
He nodded. Victor may have served as the attorney to some of Hollywood's "beautiful people," but beautiful he was not. Victor was a wide-load kind of guyJohn Candy widewith droopy jowls and a receding hairline. His suit may have been expensive, but it didn't quite meet around his considerable girth. In one hand he carried a scarred, much-used leather satchelstyle briefcase that was crammed to overflowing with papers.
"We left long before you did," Ali said. "How did you manage to get here first?"
"I chartered a plane from Santa Monica," he answered. He led her back to the sofa and placed his briefcase on the floor beside it. "Flew from Santa Monica Municipal to Jacqueline Cochran Regional here in Palm Springs. Believe me, at my hourly rate, it would be a total waste of your money for me to spend six billable hours driving back and forth to Indio. Now sit down here," Victor continued, indicating a place next to him on the sofa. "I need to know what's going on."
Too tired to object, Ali sat. She had been through enough emotional upheaval in the course of the day that she was feeling frayed and close to tears. When Victor reached for his briefcase, she expected him to extract either a hanky for her or else a laptop computer for him. Instead, he removed a dog-eared tablet of blue-lined paper. Reaching into his shirt pocket, he retrieved a black and white Montblanc fountain pen.
Over the past few years, Ali had come to rely on computers more and more. Somehow, though, she found it strangely reassuring to see that Victor Angeleri was not a high-tech kind of guythat when it came time to do a job, he relied on brainpower and old-fashioned pen and paper. That was exactly what Ali Reynolds needed right thennot someone blessed with good looks or glitz or style, but someone with substancesomeone who would be big enough and tough enough to take on the combined girth of Detectives Sims and Taylor and win.
"All right then," Victor said, removing the cap from his pen. "Tell me everythingfrom the beginning."
CHAPTER 4
CUTLOOSEBLOG.COM
Saturday, September 17, 2005
It's after one. I should be sleeping, but I can't. I didn't expect yesterday to be a good day. You know before it starts that the day you go to court to get a divorce isn't going to be a red-letter day or a time for celebration. But I didn't expect it to be a disaster, either. I didn't expect it to end with a trip to the morgue.
Because, although my divorce wasn't finalized yesterday, my marriage ended anyway. My husband is dead. He didn't show up for our ten A.M. court appearance because he died the night beforedied after taking an early powder from his own bachelor party and departing the premises without telling anyone else he was leaving.
After spending hours in the company of a pair of homicide detectives, I now know how Fang died. His hands and feet were bound with duct tape. His mouth was taped shut. He was placed in the trunk of a stolen car that was left parked on the railroad tracks near Palm Springs. The vehicle with him in it was subsequently struck and demolished by a speeding freight train. He was ejected upon impact and thrown into the desert, where his body was found hours later. The autopsy won't be done until much later today. My hope is that he died upon impact.
And so, since the divorce was never finalized, the authorities consider me to be his "next of kin." For the first time in my life, I had to go to a county morgue to make a positive ID.
I expected the place to be dingy and cold inside. It wasn't, but the chill I felt had nothing to do with an overly active air-conditioning unit because the air-conditioning unit was barely functioning. As I stood there in the viewing room, waiting for an attendant to wheel out the loaded gurney, my blood turned to ice. And when I had to look down into that scratched and battered but oh-so-familiar face, it was all I could do to remain upright. I didn't exactly faint when I saw him lying there, but my knees went weak. Fortunately, someone helped me to a chair.
I didn't cry, couldn't cry. Mostly because I didn't know what I was feeling or what I was supposed to feel. Fang and I were divorcing if not divorced. Our relationship was over if not ended. And yet, this was a man I had loved oncesomeone vital and strong with whom I had hoped to share the rest of my life. It makes my heart ache to know that he is gone. And yes, it makes me sick to think that his unborn childa baby due within the next few weekswill never know him at all, will grow up without ever once seeing him. That's wrong. Leaving a child fatherless is WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!
After I'd done the ID, someonea clerkgave me a paper to signa form that says what's supposed to happen to Fang's remains once the authorities are finished with them. It seemed inappropriate for me to be the one deciding which mortuary should be brought in to do that job. I've been out of Fang's life for a long timelonger, it turns out, than the six months I've been out of the house. It seemed to me that Twink amp;No, correction. Make that, it seemed to me that his fianceethe woman who's expecting his childshould be making those decisions, but it turns out the very fact that we were still legally married automatically puts me in charge. So I looked in the phone book, tracked down the name of the mortuary that handled Fang's mother's services six years ago, and called them.