As Lena crossed the lobby at Parker Center and started around the security line, one of the two cops behind the front desk called out her name. He lifted a package in the air, an eight-by-ten manila envelope.
“A messenger dropped it off five minutes ago,” he said. “You saved me a trip upstairs.”
“Thanks.”
She glanced at the return address but didn’t recognize the name. McBride. Navy Street. Venice Beach. None of it registered.
Stepping into the elevator, she hit the button to her floor, and took another look at the package. It was a padded mailer and she didn’t think the contents felt like a book or CD. When the doors finally closed, the elevator shook and groaned and vibrated all the way up to the third floor.
Parker Center, aka the Glass House, was due to be leveled sometime in the next five years. Lena tried not to think about it because there was nothing she could do to make it happen any faster. Still, every time she stepped into an elevator, the question of her own personal safety crossed her mind. Parker Center hadn’t survived the last earthquake, but city officials were saying that it did-pretending that it did. The replacement cost of the building was more important to city government than the safety of the people who worked here. At least that’s the way it appeared to Lena as she did the math. The Northridge earthquake had rumbled through Los Angeles almost fifteen years ago. The department would get a new building, but only after the people working here waited it out for a grand total of twenty years. For some, that was a life sentence. The length of their entire careers.
The doors opened and the thought vanished. Lena walked down the hall and around the corner, passing the lieutenant’s desk at the head of the bureau floor. The Robbery-Homicide Division was comprised of twenty-four desks pushed together in four groups of six. Today was Friday, less than two weeks before Christmas, and it looked like just about everyone had left for lunch. Stan Rhodes was the only holdout, waving at her as he spoke with someone on the phone. She didn’t see Lt. Barrera at his desk, or his computer, and guessed that he was working in Captain Dillworth’s office across from the interrogation rooms. Captain Dillworth was taking an off-season Alaskan cruise with his wife, hoping to see the glaciers and polar bears before the ice melted and all the animals drowned. Although the crime logs had been moved upstairs to the Cold Case Unit, the only conference table on the entire floor was in his office, so he never locked the door.
Lena slid behind her desk, grateful that the bureau was nearly empty. She glanced out the window, still thinking about her conversation with Ramira. What he implied seemed so over the top. The chief and his adjutant may have given her a rough time last night, but that’s all it was. That’s all it had ever been for the past eight months. A steady diet of rough time. Not once had she ever sensed that it was anything more than that. Not once had she ever thought that she couldn’t wait them out and survive with her career intact. She could still see Ramira measuring her after he finished. The fire in his nervous eyes.
She wondered why something so ridiculous was still on her mind. Why she found it troubling enough that it had followed her all the way to her desk.
She checked the time, then reached for her laptop. She still had fifteen minutes before her meeting. As the computer booted up, she found the tab on the back of the mailer and tore open the package. Holding the envelope to the window light, she gazed inside. And that’s when she felt her pulse quicken.
It was an ID. Someone’s driver’s license. And there was something else caught in the corner of the mailer. At first, she thought it might be a key ring. But as she spread open the bubble wrap, she realized that it was a small storage device about the size of a cigarette lighter. Someone had sent her a USB flash drive.
She reached down for her briefcase, fishing out a pair of gloves. Pushing her laptop aside, she dumped the license and flash drive onto her desk. Then she flipped the ID over and zeroed in on the photograph. She noted the long blond hair. The soft brown eyes and high cheekbones.
Jane Doe No. 99 was no longer Jane Doe No. 99.
Her name was Jennifer McBride. And Art Madina had been right. If a reconstructed view of the victim’s face had been necessary, it would have revealed a beautiful young woman.
Lena checked the return address on the mailer against the driver’s license. Whoever sent the package used the victim’s address. Jennifer McBride lived in an apartment on Navy Street, and had celebrated her twenty-fifth birthday less than two weeks before her death.
“Why are you wearing gloves?” Rhodes asked. “Is everything okay?”
She looked up. Rhodes was holding the phone against his chest and she could see the concern on his face. His partner, Tito Sanchez, had entered the room and was standing beside him.
“Where’s Barrera?” she said.
Rhodes’s eyes flicked to the captain’s office in the alcove behind her, then moved back.
“Something’s happened,” she said.
Maybe it was the way she said it. Maybe it was Rhodes’s instinctual ability to read her, their rekindled friendship, and that feeling in her gut that the case was about to lift off a blank page. Either way, Rhodes got rid of his call and within a few minutes, all three men were huddled around her desk. She brought them up to date, describing the location of the body dump in broad strokes. As she filled them in on the results from the autopsy, she pulled her computer closer and pushed the flash drive into the USB port. Then she clicked the drive icon and waited a beat to see what was inside.
It was a single file-a video file. Sanchez killed the overhead lights. Then everyone leaned closer as it began to play on her laptop.
The images were recorded at night and so degraded, Lena felt certain that the camera had been a cell phone. By all appearances, the photographer was more than nervous, hiding between two parked cars and unable to hold the lens still. The entire video only lasted five seconds, then looped back to the start and began playing again.
She could see a car parked in the shadows about twenty-five yards away. A building stood in the distance with a neon sign on the roof. A man with blond hair was tossing something in the Dumpster by the car, then turning toward the lens and bending over a large object on the ground. The man’s face was blurred beyond recognition. The sign on the roof of the building, lost in digital noise. But as the shot ended, the last frame flashed a bright white. And in that instant, the large object on the ground took on definition.
The man was leaning over Jennifer McBride’s body.
“Jesus Christ,” Barrera said. “We’ve hooked a witness.”
“Or they’ve hooked us,” Rhodes said. “You think that was her purse going into the Dumpster?”
Lena glanced at McBride’s license on her desk, then looked back at the screen as the video recycled to the beginning and the man tossed the object into the trash.
“That’s her purse,” Barrera said.
Lena agreed, her eyes riveted to the screen. When the man turned back toward the camera, she clicked the pause button on the media player and the image froze. The man’s face remained out of focus, but it was there. And he was wearing something around his neck. Something that glistened in the darkness. A medallion of some kind.
Barrera moved closer to the screen. “Madina thinks he’s a surgeon?”
“Someone with military training,” she said.
He shook his head, his face losing its color. “A doctor back from the war.”
Barrera’s voice died off. Lena could guess what he was thinking. After the autopsy, she had talked it over with Madina. If they were searching for a doctor with military experience, there was a good chance the man had passed through USC Medical Center. Since the beginning of the Iraq War, the Department of Defense had been training medical teams in the hospital’s emergency room. Because of the city’s high crime rate, this was the closest a surgeon could get to real combat experience. Saturday nights at the trauma center had all the living urgency of a mass-casualty war zone. More than two thousand people were carried into the hospital with knife or gunshot wounds every year.
USC Medical Center might be a step in the right direction, but they would need more than a guess or a hunch before they made it. Some way of narrowing down the man’s identity.
Barrera glanced back at the video on the computer. “It looks like that could be a restaurant in the background. Any ideas where this is?”
“It could be anything,” Sanchez said. “The quality eats shit.”
Rhodes nodded. “We need to get this upstairs and see what SID can do with it.”
Barrera stepped back, chewing it over and looking at Rhodes. “You and Tito are in court this week. You’re on the same case, right?”
“We’re due back at the courthouse in an hour.”
“Who’s the prosecutor?”
“Roy Wemer,” Sanchez said.
Lena glanced at her watch. “And I’m ten minutes late for a meeting with the chief.”
“About what?” Barrera asked.
“The autopsy.”
“Forget it,” he said. “We’ve got a victim and an address. You and Rhodes are on your way to Venice. Tito, you’re going to the courthouse on your own. I’ll run the video upstairs and check this driver’s license, then talk things over with the chief. Anybody got an issue with that?”
Sanchez shook his head. “Shouldn’t be a problem. I’m the lead anyway. I’ll let Wemer know.”
Lena gave Sanchez a look and knew that he meant it. Even more, she knew that he was used to it. Rhodes’s sister had breast cancer. Over the last three months, Tito had been covering for him, working overtime while Rhodes took days off to drive up to her farm in Oxnard.
“What about the witness?” Rhodes said. “This video’s only five seconds long. Whoever recorded it probably saw the whole thing from start to finish. And why is the envelope addressed to Lena? Why isn’t there any postage?”
Barrera turned to her. “This didn’t come through the mail room?”
“A messenger dropped it off at the front desk.”
“I’ll check on it,” he said. “Now let’s get started. Let’s do it.”
Lena met Rhodes’s eyes. Everyone was in sync. But as she packed up, her thoughts returned to the victim-how she lived and who she was. Whether or not she had parents who might be waiting for her. A husband, or even a child. What it would be like to tell Jennifer McBride’s family that she had been murdered. That their loved one had been mutilated by a madman.
Lena didn’t need to eat lunch to keep going.
She jotted McBride’s address on a piece of scratch paper, then looked over at Rhodes. He had returned to his desk for his keys and was getting into his jacket. He looked rough and ready and all wound up, just like she was. She could see it on his face.