Eyewitness. Part 6

It didn't take long; that was one of the things Doug liked about her. For a moment of two she didn't say a word, just picked up her pencil and once more began to turn it end over end. Then she dropped it and murmured, "You don't think it could be a coincidence-a run-of-the-mill drive-by?"

He shook his head. "She's safe as can be for ten years , and then one day I show up and whammo ? I don't think so.

Plus, she doesn't trust cops. And she's not the type, know what I mean? " He put his weight on his hands and leaned across the desk again, his voice low and urgent. " Ann, you weren't here then, but this is just the way it was before, back then when I was working on the case with Jim Shannon" " that's right," Mabry interrupted, " I'd forgotten he was your partner. I hear he was quite a guy. What's it looking like for him, do you know? Think he'll be our new boss? "

Doug's smile came and went. "Don't know but I'm sure betting on him. n.o.body deserves it more. Anyway, back when we were working on this Rhinestone Collar case together , things like this kept happening to us. We had evidence lost, tests botched, files turn up missing. We got to wondering if the d.a.m.n case was jinxed. Once we had a tipa female caller told us she knew who the killer was, that she'd seen it go down. She wanted to meet us, so we set up a rendezvous. Shannon was sick that day, so I went alone. She never showed. Day or so later she calls again, absolutely terrified , said she'd been waiting at the meeting place when somebody fired three shots at her. I didn't know what to think, whether she was some sort of excitement junkie, or what. Anyway, we agreed to another meeting, and again-no show. Nothing. Never heard from her again after that. At the time Jim and I were pretty sure it was a nut case, but now.. "

"You think it might have been her-your San Diego witness ?"

Doug straightened up, swearing and rubbing at his neck. "I don't know what to think: '

Lieutenant Mabry said softly, "You want me to contact "G.o.d, I don't know." He turned away from her, fighting it. It being every cop's wont nightmare, that somebody he works with, depends on, trusts literally with his life, might be dirty. "Can you hold off for a little while?"

"What have you got in mind, Sergeant?"

He shut his mouth and just looked at her. After a few pregnant seconds Mabry abruptly leaned back in her chair and brought her hand down flat on her desk in exasperation "Oh, for heaven's sake, Doug, use your head. Ten years ago I was a graduate student in criminal law at the University of Was.h.i.+ngton. You're looking at somebody who had to be around here back then. That ought to narrow it down some."

He'd known that, of course, but hearing her say it eased the tension in him a little. He let go a little gust of rueful laughter by way of an apology and said, "Yeah, well, I'd like to see if I can narrow it down some more. I thought I'd try a few things... set a few traps. See what happens."

The lieutenant's eyes held a hunter's gleam. "Okay, Doug, you've got your time. But let's be careful, now, you hear? If anything happens to this lady, you know I'm going to have your handsome head on a platter. Meanwhile"

"Thank you, ma'am," said Doug with a grin and a small salute. He started out of the office, then hesitated and turned back. "Meanwhile, she's at my place. Thought you should know-just in case anything happens."

Her gaze was steady, her features immobile. "Is this one of your little traps, Sergeant?"

"What? No! Like you said, it'd have to be somebody-"

Lieutenant Mabry made a pistol out of her thumb and forefinger, pointed it at him and murmured, "Gotcha."

"This is the right place," Preacher announced, squinting first at the card in his hand, then at the neat white stuccoed duplex. "I believe that must be it, right over there."

"Her car's here," said Daisy. "Looks like she's home."

They started together up the walk. As they got closer to the duplex's front steps, JoJo began making a moaning noise and hanging back. Daisy said, "Come on, what's the matter with you?" and tried to take him by the arm.

"Ooh, I don't like this," moaned JoJo, shaking her off like a Saint Bernard evading a persistent kitten. "I don't like this. Let's go.."

Daisy and Preacher halted at the bottom of the steps. "Holy mother," said Daisy.

"This does not look good," agreed Preacher.

"Try the door," said Daisy. Preacher gave her a look, but mounted the steps and knocked gingerly on the splintered panels of the front door. "Holler," instructed Daisy.

"Maybe she's hidin', and don't know it's us " Preacher did, to no avail. He and Daisy looked at each other. " " JoJo could probably kick it in," said Daisy. They both looked at JoJo, who was walking around in rapid circles at the foot of the I steps.

"I'm afraid that would be apt to bring us unwanted a.s.sistance from the po11ce," Preacher sighed. "I suggest we try i the back door first."

They scurried around to the side of the duplex, leaving I JoJo pacing and wringing his hands in front of some pyra cant ha bushes.

"Locked," muttered Preacher a few moments later. He felt around in his pockets and pulled out a small pocketknife , unfolded a slender blade and stuck it into the lock.

"Ah," he breathed with satisfaction as he turned the doori k.n.o.b, " " haven't lost my touch. : '

"Come on," Daisy hissed at him, slapping his hand, "put that thing away. We gotta see if Mary's in there. She might be hurt-maybe dead."

A little wh11e later, after they'd looked pretty much everywhere there was to look, including under the beds, they I met in the living room. "At least we know she's not dead," ; said Preacher.

"We don't either know that," said Daisy, scowling. "We , just know she ain't here. Where do you s'pose she's at?" ; " " Perhaps we should contact the po11ce, after all,"

Preacher said with reluctance. "It does seem as though-"

"We already had a cop," snappeq Daisy,"and look what happened."

" " It does seem like an odd coincidence," Preacher said, scratching his beard, " but I find it hard to believe any cop ; was responsible for that. " They both looked in silenre at the arch of bullet holes that decorated the living room wall.

After a moment Daisy shook herself and said briskly, , "

Okay, then, he musta took her. It was her he came looking for, and she ain't here, and there ain't any blood, so he musta come here, found her and took her to L. A. with him. That's the way I see it. "

"I'm inclined to agree," said Preacher with a sigh. "It does seem like the logical conclusion."

"So, what are we going to do about it?"

" " I don't see that there's anything we can do. " Preacher opened the front door and held it for Daisy, then followed her outside. " Our Mary's gone, and that's that. "

JoJo was sitting on the gra.s.s beside the steps with his head in his hands, snuffling and rubbing his fingers back and forth over a s.h.i.+ny pink worm of a scar that could just be seen through his close-cropped black hair. Daisy Pepper went to him and began to stroke his head and neck. " " Come on, JoJo, it's okay. She's not in there. n.o.body's hurt. Get up, now. Let's go home. Everything's okay. "

The big man lumbered to his feet, still sniffling a little. Something jingled in his hand. Daisy said, " " What's that you got there, JoJo? Give it here-let me see. "

"I-I found 'em," JoJo said as he handed over the set of car keys. " " I never stole 'em. They was just lyin' there in the gra.s.s: He pointed to the tall, scraggly gra.s.s where the lawn met the bottom step.

"These are Ford keys," Daisy said, squinting hard at them. She looked at Preacher. "They gotta be Mary's: '

"One way to find out: He s.n.a.t.c.hed the keys from her hand and strode briskly across the lawn to where a maroon Bronco was parked on twin tracks of gra.s.s-pocked concrete Daisy scurried after him. After a moment JoJo followed , knuckling his eyes like a child.

"Not locked," said Preacher. He opened the door, then handed the keys back to Daisy. " " You try. "

Daisy elbowed him aside and slid under the steering wheel. An instant later the Bronco's engine cranked and roared to life. " " You drive, " yelled Preacher as he slammed her door. " JoJo, you get in the back. Come on, hurry up, before somebody catches on. "

JoJo could move with surprising agility when it was in his best interests to do so. He ran around to the pa.s.senger's side and squeezed into the back seat. Preacher climbed up after him and slammed the door just as the Bronco began to roll backward down the driveway.

"Where we goin'?" JoJo asked, hitching himself forward so he could see over e front seat.

"To find our Mary, that's where," said Daisy grimly. She was. .h.i.tched forward, too, trying to see over the steering wheel.

Beside her, Preacher relaxed back with along sigh. "It may be a wild-goose chase, I'm afraid. Los Angeles is a very j big place. Where do we even begin?"

"A cop took her," Daisy reminded him. "That's a place , to start."

Preacher snorted. "That narrows it down to twenty or thirty precincts, who knows how many thousand cops."

"She used to live in Hollywood," said JoJo.

Both Daisy and Preacher turned to stare at him, to the egtreme peril of everyone in the immediate vicinity. " " How do you know that? " Preacher demanded when Daisy had the Bronco more or less under control again.

JoJo shrugged. "She told me."

Daisy and Preacher looked at each other. "Then that's where we start: '

Doug's partner, Jeff Burnside, had been a little sulky about getting stuck with all the paperwork on the murder suicide , but he got over it when Doug briefed him in private about the Landon case. Jeez, the kid was so young he'd never even heard of the Rhinestone Collar Murder.

On the one hand, that sort of made Doug feel old, but on the other, it did make it a reasonably safe bet he wasn't the person responsible for the attack on Joy Donnelly. Even so, Doug found himself being a little bit selective about what he ! actually told his partner. Mostly history, and the fact that he had a witness in protective custody. He didn't say anything about what he and Mabry suspected; it was too soon, and he still hoped like h.e.l.l he was wrong.

Burnside had been a.s.signed one of the drive-bys, which had taken place in a mostly Hispanic neighborhood, so for the sake of community relations he'd been temporarily partnered up with Carl Rodriguez. Doug wondereqi if he had the lieutenant to thank for that arrangement. What it did was leave him pretty much free to pursue any other " " opens" he happened to see fit.

By the time he'd taken care of everything he couldn't find a way to postpone and checked out of the squad room, it was nearly noon. When he was driving out of the lot he started feeling uneasy and jittery, the way you do when you think you've left the water running at home, or the iron plugged in. Ah, h.e.l.l, he told himself, it's natural enough to be edgy about leaving a stranger alone in my house, right? And the minute he thought that, it began to seem like just about the stupidest thing he'd ever done in his life.

What had he been thinking of? The woman had been a fugitive for ten years, she was still officially a suspect in a homicide investigation, at the very least she was a key witness who'd had at least one attempt made on her life. And he'd pretty much just dropped her off and left her there at his place, all alone.

He told himself he'd covered everything. He was pretty sure he'd impressed on Joy the importance of staying out of sight, not answering the door or the phone. He was pretty sure he believed her when she'd promised him she wouldn't try to run away again. The fear in her eyes had been real enough; she might not trust him enough to tell him what she knew, but at least she was smart enough to know he wasn't the one trying to shut her up permanently. But his uneasiness only got worse. He'd been in too much of a hurry. He'd been worried about checking in with Mabry. He hadn't had much sleep. He might have overlooked something.

But he knew he hadn't. And he knew why he was worried The bottom line was, he was a cop. And no matter how much he wanted to, he knew he couldn't really trust Joy Donnelly. Or Mary Jo Delinsky. Whatever in the friggin' h.e.l.l her name was!

He probably should have stopped right then and asked himself why that fact should make him so angry and tie his stomach up in knots. But he didn't.

He had to stop at the supermarket for cat food and litter; he had no choice about that. And then, of course, the express checkout line was a mile long, and the lady ahead of him found out too late-she said-that she wasn't supposed to write a check in that lane, and did so, anyway. He'd always wondered what, exactly, was meant by the term qqgnas.h.i.+ng his teeth. " By the time he got out of that store he was pretty sure he knew.

Now he was in the middle of lunch hour, and probably the most hectic and hair-triggered traffic of the entire day. Companies and businesses might stagger going-to-work and quitting times, but the entire human race, it seemed, was beset with the same urge when the clock struck high noon. Everybody wanted food; most of them had to go somewhere else to get it and, after that, run any errands that couldn't wait until after work. And they all had exactly one hour to do it.

It was only a short distance from the market on Melrose to his house, which was on one of the unbelievably narrow, winding hillside streets north of Franklin, but to Doug it seemed a lot like a broken field run through a mine field in the midst of an artillery barrage. When he pulled up onto the short ap.r.o.n of concrete between the street and his garage , he was shaking from a surge of adrenaline.

He took the short way up, through the garage and the laundry room, up the inside stairs and into the kitchen. The house was ominously quiet. Even Maurice was still sulking under his shroud and would only mutter a surly, "Stupid bird," when Doug lifted up one corner. There was no light blinking on his message machine, and no sound at all from the rest of the house. "Ah, Joy..." he breathed, hoping and praying she was only napping.

The bathroom door was open. "The towels he'd left for her were damp and cold, the air was still humid and smelled of strawberries.

He knocked on the guest room door, listened intently, then cautiously eased it open and stuck his head inside. The bullet-scarred suitcase lay open on the bed. In the middle of it, the cat Moki crouched like a sphinx, his pale, op aline eyes fixed upon the door to the hall with almost hypnotic intensity Doug shut the door carefully, fighting for calm. It helped a little to swear, so he did, in a constant bitter stream, all the while opening every door and sticking his head into every nook and cranny in his entire house. But there wasn't any doubt at all that she was gone.

Think, he commanded himself. You're a detective, dammit -act like one.

Okay, she hadn't left left-she'd never leave without that cat. So in spite of all his warnings she'd gone out somewhere , the stupid little fool. But where? And why? Could she have gone for the cat food herself? But it was too far to walk to the nearest supermarket, and she didn't have any Transportation That was it. Wherever she'd gone, she had to have transportation, and to get transportation, she'd have to have used the phone.

Back in the living room, he s.n.a.t.c.hed up the phone, stuck the receiver between his ear and shoulder and punched redial while he pawed through the litter on his coffee table for a pen. The number twittered in his ear. " " Yellow Cab," a male voice grumbled.

For the first time in quite a while, Doug felt like smiling.

He found her sitting on a bus stop bench on Sunset, just sitting there in the hot October sun with her hands pushed deep into the pockets of her blue windbreaker. A mild Santa Ana riffled through her hair, reminding Doug suddenly, and with an acute little jolt, of the way it had tickled his lips in the night. the way it felt, the way it smelled.

She didn't even glance at him when he sat on the bench beside her. He felt only the slightest movement, the almost undetectable rise and fall of her chest and shoulders, before she said in a soft, dry voice, "I keep forgetting I'm dealing with a cop."

He'd had all sorts of stuff ready to throw at her-mad-as h.e.l.l stuff, worried-sick stuff, stero, cop-type lectures. He didn't know what made him decide to keep it all to himself, or where he got the wisdom and insight to say instead, in a quiet, mildly curious tone, "What are you doing here, Joy? "

She didn't answer right away, and again he thanked G.o.d for giving him the good sense to keep his mouth shut. When she did speak, she sounded remote and sad. "It's not like I remember it: '

"No," he said, "I suppose it isn't: '

She nodded, finally, at the square, faintly art deco building on the other side of the street. "When did they paint it purple ? It's so.. ugly." She jerked one hand out of her windbreaker pocket and brushed it angrily across the back of the bench, where black spray paint had all but obliterated an insurance company's advertising. "It's all ugly-all this graffiti and stuff. I hate it. Why doesn't somebody ckan it up? " She looked away, but not before he saw the painful little ripple of movement in her throat.

When she spoke again after a moment, it was in a sad, faraway voice. "There was a time, you know?.. when I thought this had to be just about the most beautiful place in the whole world. I loved it all, even the sleazy stuff on Hollywood Boulevard, if you can believe that. I just thought it had so much... excitement. So much energy. And the palm '; trees-oh, man, I had this thing for palm trees. I used to go i down there, south of Melrose-what's the name of that street? Anyway, the one with all the palm trees down the ; middle of it. I'd take my camera... one time I actually had this gardener take my picture with those stupid trees. I used to look at all those huge, gorgeous houses-you know, the ones from the 1920s-and try to imagine what it would be like to live in a place like that. I thought they must be just about the most incredibly rich, incredibly beautiful, houses in the world "

"I imagine they are." Doug cleared his throat. "They're still there, you know. Still just as rich, just as beautiful. The blight hasn't made it much past Melrose, yet."

She snorted softly and shook her head. "Doesn't matter.

I'm pretty sure the people who live in those houses aren't any happier or wiser than anybody else. Of course, I hadn't ; figured that out yet, back then. It was my goal, you know to live in a house like that someday. And that-" She nodded toward the purple monstrosity across the street. " That was going to be my ticket. Caesar's Garden. " She was silent for a moment, head tilted, studying the building with a critical eye. " When in the world did they turn it into a comedy club? "" "Uh... maybe two, three years ago. But they closed down Caesar's long before that. That kind of club kind of went out with the eighties, I guess, except maybe for places like Vegas. The big thing's comedy now. From what I hear, I guess they really pack 'em in: '

"Yeah..:'

Once again, Doug didn't know what inspired him. He nudged her with his elbow. "Want to go in?"

She shrugged matter-of-factly. "Can't-they're closed. I checked."

He got to his feet and held out his hand. "Come on, let's try again: When she just looked at him, he smiled and said wryly, " Hey-there are some advantages to being with a cop. "

What is it about this guy? Mary wondered as she felt her hand being swallowed up in his. Her heart was racing like a runaway train, her stomach full of b.u.t.terflies. She'd never had stage fright like this before in her life. And yet. why was it that the minute he touched her, in spite of everything , she felt. all right? As if nothing but wonderful things could happen to her now.

The Don't Walk sign was blinking. "Come on, come on," MacDougal said, giving her an impatient tug, "let's go. "

What the h.e.l.l. She heard the surprising sound of her own laughter as she ran with him across the street-the breathless giggle of a venturesome child. The child she'd once been.

A pretty young woman came to the door of the comedy club in answer to Doug's no-nonsense pounding, looking bright and cheery and all set to disappoint an eager beaver without discouraging a potential customer. When Doug took out his badge and held it up to the gla.s.s, she abruptly disappeared.

A few minutes later a man-obviously the manager-appeared instead. He was thin and balding, and had the look of an accountant whose columns weren't adding up. He opened the door warily, as if he might want to shut it again in a hurry. "Yes? What's the problem?"

"Oh, no problem," MacDougal a.s.sured him. "No problem at all. Sorry to bother you. Just hoping you might be able to help us out: He cleared his throat loudly. " "I'm Detective Sergeant MacDougal, with, uh, Missing Persons.

We've got an amnesia victim here, says this building looks familiar to her. What I'd like to do is let her come in and look around for a few minutes, if that's all right with you.

Could we do that, sir? We'll try not to disturb you in any way. We're hoping she might remember something. "

Remember? That was the last thing Mary wanted to do.

For so long she'd tried not to remember, had fought her memories is if they were enemies to be vanquished, or at least held at bay. Now suddenly she felt as if she'd been caught up in a flood and was being swept helplessly toward i some unseen disaster. She couldn't stop it, couldn't avoid it.

It was going to happen, whether she wanted it to or not.

"Sure," the manager said with a shrug, "why not?" He moved aside and waited while they stepped into the foyer, then locked the doors behind them. "Come on in. Take all the time you need."