Hold of the Bone Read online

  For Doc—“Hurry, don’t be late°

  and

  For Earl—my Prince of Tides

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  The phone hums on the passenger seat. Lieutenant L.A. Franco picks it up and glances at her on-call detective’s number. Frank frowns and holds the phone to her ear.

  “Sister Shaft. Wha’s up?”

  Cheryl Lewis tells her, “Got an old one at an auto shop on Western. It’s been here a while. Ain’t much more ’an bone and rag. Forensics and the coroners are on their way.”

  “Hold on a sec.” Frank grabs a pen and tells Lewis to give her the address. Steering with her knee, she writes the number on her palm. “A’ight. Give me about twenty.”

  “Ten-four.”

  Frank checks the time before stuffing the phone in her shirt pocket. With luck, she might make the tail end of her Saturday AA meeting. Traffic on LA’s 101 Southbound is moving—but not fast enough. Frank clamps her police light onto the roof and flips the siren on. Vehicles part grudgingly.

  She swings off on Slauson Avenue, slowing through red lights and stop signs until she gets to Western Avenue. She parks behind a patrol car, where a uniform she doesn’t recognize greets her with the crime scene log. After Frank signs, he waves her through a gate in a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. Near a small excavator, a muscular black woman steps daintily around a pile of rubble, directing a vaguely Asian female photographer. Frank notes that when she was a rookie everyone working an investigation would have been a white male. Now, other than Lewis’ partner—wherever he is—she is the only Caucasian on the scene. And certainly the oldest.

  Stepping closer to the broken concrete, Frank lifts her Ray-Bans to better peer into a hole in the ground. As she kneels, the excavation blurs. Frank puts out a hand to steady herself. She hears rattling, like sticks being clacked together. Lots of them, in unison, in a rhythm she wants to shuffle to with bare feet. She gives her head a sharp shake and the noise fades. Her eyes land on Lewis’ shiny loafers and she wonders vaguely how her cop always finds time to show up at scenes buffed and creased. Frank stands carefully. The dizziness passes and she makes a note to drink more water.

  “Morning, LT.”

  “Lewis.”

  “That’s the kid over there, who dug it up.” She points her chin toward a skinny guy outside the shop talking to an older man. “He was lookin’ for a pipe and when he realized what he got into, he called his boss, that guy he’s talking with. You know the first thing he says to me? Can’t use his excavator unless we give him per diem on it.” Lewis wags her head in sorrow at the human condition.

  “City coming to dig up the rest?”

  “On their way.”

  Frank looks back at the disturbed skeleton, bones and cloth barely distinguishable from the dirt. She notes there’s little or no soft tissue to work with.

  “How long’s he owned this place?”

  “Bought it in ’98. Said it was a tool and die shop then.”

  “That body’s been there longer than that,” Frank thinks out loud. “Gonna take a while to get this sorted out and see if we got anymore in there. You talk to the owner about that?”

  “Yeah.” Lewis cuts an evil glare his way. “He say we can’t search his property without a warrant, and when I tell him I’mma slap him with obstructing justice and interfering with a homicide investigation, and for all I know he put that body in the ground, he go all quiet, then start yapping about how the city gotta compensate him for lost wages. Blah, blah, blah.”

  Frank nods. They have consent on the body, but they’ll need a warrant to search for more. “Where’s Tatum at?”

  Jerking a thumb at the unmarked, Lewis admits, “Ain’t nothin’ to door-knock here, so I got him working up the warrant.”

  Frank’s gaze slides to the car. “You sure about that?”

  Lewis squints. “That sum-bitch sleeping?”

  Both women approach the unit from the rear. They needn’t bother; Lewis’ partner is asleep, mouth wide. Frank studies him through the open window. She probably shouldn’t do what she’s thinking of doing. It’s old school, and the new breed of cops like Tatum have had all the fun bred from them. He’ll probably report her to Human Resources and she’ll have to go to Sensitivity Training. Again. What the hell, she thinks. Maybe next time, it’ll take.

  “Got a tampon?” she whispers.

  Lewis frowns, then stealthily reaches inside for her purse. She rummages quietly and produces one. Frank takes the tampon and tips her head toward the shop.

  “Go see if they got any Tapatío.”

  In LA, hot sauce is the condiment of choice, a bottle invariably in every break room in the city. Lewis returns with a full bottle and Frank douses the tampon. Spying a sweating soda cup on the console, she reaches across Tatum, dumps the contents, fills it with the rest of the Tapatío, and sets it back in place.

  “Get your camera ready.”

  Frank gently inserts the tampon in Tatum’s open mouth. Lewis chuckles and gets a couple shots before Frank raps her knuckles on the roof. Tatum bolts upright. He spits the tampon out and seeing what it is, gives half a scream before hurling it from the window. Lewis doubles over laughing.

  Pawing at his tongue, Tatum grabs the cup on the console, chugs it, then spews all over the dash. His eyes tear as he yanks on his shirttail and swabs his mouth. “What the fuck?”

  “Maybe that’ll keep you awake,” Frank tells him. “Lewis, when you’re done being Martin Scorsese, send Sleeping Beauty back to the office. Get him started on provenance for this place. Find a concrete specialist to tell us how old it is where they dug it up. I’ll be back at the station in a bit to see what he’s come up with. Oh, and Tatum? Get this car cleaned. It’s a fucking disgrace to the city.”

  Tatum searches for water while Lewis wipes tears from her eyes.

  “You need anything?” Frank asks her.

  “Not now. That made my day, LT. Hell,” she grins. “Maybe my whole week.”

  Leaving Tatum whining and spitting, they walk back to the edge of the hole.

  “Let me see your notes,” Frank says. The Ray-Bans go back on her head, partly to keep her hair out of her eyes, but mostly because Frank needs to squint to read the tiny handwriting.

  Cheryl Lewis has attitude, but she is Frank’s most thorough detective. She scans the neat handwriting, checking that Lewis has all the who–what–when–where from the owner and the kid on the dozer. The how and why will be harder. There isn’t much more they can do until after the coroner’s people excavate the body. Even then, there might not be much to work with.

  “Sure I can’t get you anything?”

  “Nah, LT.
Just them techs.”

  “A’ight. They’ll be here.”

  “In they own sweet time.”

  “I’mma take off. Holler if you need me.”

  “Ten-four.”

  Frank starts to walk away, but Lewis calls her. “Yeah?”

  Her big cop grins. “Thanks, LT. That was fun.”

  Frank replies with a nod and parting wave.

  Chapter 2

  Frank keeps the strobe going on her way to the meeting. She drives with her sleeves up and windows down, gathering the sight, scent, and sound of her beat. She notes a Latino guy selling oranges on the corner, the smell of barbecue, splash of new graffiti on a storage building, an arthritic old man shuffling on the shady side of the avenue.

  Frank is the rare cop who has spent a career at the same station. She registers day-to-day changes in the Figueroa Division, yet knows little has changed in the struggling neighborhood since big industry abandoned it in the 60s. With the jobs went the middle-class families, leaving an economic void that went unfilled until the crack epidemic of the 80s. The subsequent South-Central turf wars led to an unprecedented nationwide murder rate that peaked in the early 90s. Homicide numbers hovered around the all-time high throughout most of the decade until falling at the turn of the century to record lows. At Figueroa, Frank and her detectives have gone from a maximum caseload of 160 homicides a year to an almost giddy twenty-two.

  Twenty-three, she corrects, adding Lewis’ body. And a good thing, considering the budget cuts and reorganizations that have whittled her staff. Still, it’s the first time in Frank’s tenure at Figueroa that her detectives have what is procedurally considered a normal workload. So normal it’s boring, and though she doesn’t miss the 36- or 48-hour shifts, she pines a bit for the hectic adrenaline rush of getting called to one scene at midnight, another at 3:00 a.m., and a third at dawn.

  Grabbing a parking spot, she jogs a half block to her meeting, tiptoes up the stairs, and stands at the back door. The room is packed with bright-eyed, freshly showered people starting their weekend with a healthy shot of sobriety.

  “So that’s it for me, and now I’d like to hear from our friend in the doorway who just turned five. Frank?”

  Because she was late, she is surprised to be called on, but answers, “My name’s Frank. I’m an alcoholic.”

  About forty people chorus, “Hi, Frank.” Except for three or four of the faces turned her way, she recognizes them all. “Welcome to any newcomers and visitors. I got here late—sorry—so I’ll pass.”

  “Don’t be silly,” the man leading the meeting says. “Go on.”

  “Alright,” she agrees, embarrassed to be standing instead of sitting like the others. “If you’re new, stick around. Your life’ll change. Mine sure has. First thing that happened to me was finding the man who murdered my father. Got that old monkey off my back, and did it sober. Then I got back together with a woman who’d left because of my drinking, only to lose her a year later to cancer. Managed to get through that, too, with your help, then a little after that I had, um, a very, unexpected one-night stand.”

  The people who know her well chuckle at the understatement.

  “Yeah.” Frank can’t keep from grinning. “Ended up pregnant. That was a shock. I had the baby, but I gave her to her father to raise. He’s a great guy and does a far better job raising her than I ever could. And right now—” she thinks about her abundance of riches “—I couldn’t ask for a better life. I have a lovely girlfriend, lots of friends. My health. Mortgage is paid off, and I’m considering retirement. I’m comfortable in sobriety, but I hope not complacent. So like I said, stick around. Life gets easier. Doesn’t mean tough times won’t happen, but you’ll learn how to get through them without drinking or making them worse.”

  She calls on the woman beside her and relaxes against the jamb. Across the room, Caroline Anderson sends a wink and a smile. Frank returns them. Caroline is not only a good friend but a companionable lover. They met in this room, and after her inexplicable one-night stand with Darcy James, Frank asked Caroline to be her obstetrician. They grew close during the pregnancy and after a gentle flirtation became easy lovers. Theirs is a tender relationship with few demands; recently out of a long-term relationship, Caroline is reluctant to enter another, while Frank doesn’t need or want promises about the future, having learned that most of life occurs in the hollows between expectation and reality.

  The meeting ends at ten sharp. Everyone chips in to pick up dirty cups and coffee pots, talking loudly over each other and laughing often. Frank is blocking the door, so she waits downstairs for Caroline, receiving cologned and perfumed hugs for her five years of sobriety. Caroline steps from the building, looking fine in jeans, boots, and a snug T-shirt.

  Frank smiles and leaves the well-wishers to hook an arm through her lover’s. “Coffee?”

  “I’d love some, just give me a minute.”

  “Sure. How ’bout I grab a table and you get me a latte when you’re done?”

  “That’s all? No breakfast?”

  Frank grins and shakes her head. “Jeans are getting a little tight.”

  She crosses to the café across the street and threads past the line at the entrance to an umbrella-ed table on the back patio. Leaving the shaded seat for Caroline, Frank drops the sunglasses back into place and stretches her long legs into the sun. Stray hairs tickle her collarbone, reminding her it’s time to get a trim. That makes her think how she always had to reprimand Darcy about keeping his hair regulation length, and she checks her phone. It’s not unusual for him to ring on Saturdays to chat about their daughter, and sure enough, she’s missed his call. She returns it, listening to the phone ringing two thousand miles away.

  Conceived in a mutual confluence of grief, loneliness, and need, Destiny was quite the surprise to her perimenopausal mother. After Caroline confirmed Frank was indeed pregnant, she toyed with aborting the fetus, but the chances of getting pregnant in one shot at her age were astronomical enough to give Frank pause. The odds that she had slept with Darcy at all were so incalculable she couldn’t help but feel that their brief coupling had happened for a reason. When she told Darcy, he begged her not to abort. She wasn’t surprised; a few months earlier his beloved only child from a failed marriage had finally lost her grueling, lifelong battle with cystic fibrosis. Frank agreed to keep the baby, provided Darcy took full custody upon its birth. She’d have it for him, which seemed right in a weirdly scripted kind of way, and she’d help with money but wanted no part of the day-to-day raising.

  “Hey. How’s it going?”

  “It goes,” Darcy answers in his grumbling diesel engine voice. “You?”

  “S’all good. Destiny?”

  He snorts, “She’s your daughter. Intractable as hell.”

  “Yeah, like you’re such a pushover.”

  “We had to buy shoes last week and she saw a pair of moccasins. Had a fit until I let her try ’em on. Now I have to bargain with her every night to take ’em off and they’re the first things she puts on in the morning. That and her bone necklace.”

  “Bone?”

  “Yeah, she found some old vertebrae and strung ’em together with baling twine. She wears ’em all day and if anyone tries to take ’em off she has a fit. Didn’t I send you a picture last week?”

  Darcy sends so many videos and photos she honestly doesn’t look at them all, but she recalls one of Destiny smiling under a platinum tangle of hair, naked but for underwear and what she guesses now were the moccasins. “What kind of vertebrae we talking?”

  “I don’t know, some old possum or raccoon. They’re harmless. But here’s the queer thing.”

  Frank rolls her eyes. Darcy loves saying that to her.

  “She was crying the other night when I was trying to talk her out of ’em and when I explained that they’d be right by her bed and that she could put ’em on first thing in the morning she said that Gran’ma Marioneaux told her to never take them off.”

&n
bsp; “Who’s that?”

  “Pearl Marioneaux was my mother’s grandmother.”

  Darcy gives her time to do the math. His mother’s in her seventies. Her mother would be at least in her nineties, making her grandmother—“She’s still alive?”

  “Nope.” She hears the grin in his voice. “Been dead sixty, seventy years. When I asked Dez how she knew about Gran’ma Marioneaux, she said, ‘I knew her from before I came here.’”

  It’s not the first of her daughter’s unearthly pronouncements, but each time Frank hears one her skin prickles. Caroline sets a foamy mug of coffee in front of her, and Frank mouths thanks. While Caroline scans the movie section of the local weekly, Frank listens to Darcy explain that his great-grandmother was a full-blooded Lakota.

  “She and my great-grandfather married and got railroaded out of town and eventually settled here. You know the only two things she took with her?”

  “Let me guess.”

  “Uh-huh. Mom said she was buried in them. Caused quite an uproar at the funeral home.”

  “Great. Our kid’s channeling Sacajawea and you were worried about raising her in LA.”

  “Speaking of funny, guess who called yesterday.”

  “No idea.”

  “Marguerite.”

  “Oh, yeah? You two gettin’ chummy again?”

  “Nothing like that. Just seems since Gaby died she’s been reaching out to me more. Probably because I’m her last link to her. Who knows, maybe she’s softening in her old age. She said to say hi. Said she’s been thinking about you.”

  “Oh, yeah?” She wonders why his ex-wife is thinking about her. Marguerite James isn’t just a researcher at UCLA with a doctorate in quantum physics and half a dozen honorary titles; she is also a mambo, a Yoruban priestess who, along with Darcy, happened to save Frank’s life years ago on a case gone bizarrely sideways.

  “Are you there?”

  “Sorry, what?”

  “Your daughter. She’s starting half-day care next week.”

  “Right, right. You got my check?”

  “Yeah. It’s all paid for. Mom and Tina took her shopping last week and she’s already balking about having to wear clothes. I won’t be surprised if she gets sent home naked before lunchtime.”