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  No, she thought. He couldn’t be involved. If he’d done this abominable act, it would show in his face. He couldn’t have killed someone and a few hours later sit here and consume a burrito, a taco, and a complete plate of nachos. What she saw was grief, disbelief. It was etched on his young face, shot from his eyes. Like her, he was struggling for strength, trying to see through the horror to the other side.

  “What will I do about my school?”

  Lara almost choked on her taco. She’d never thought of his school. She certainly couldn’t drive to San Clemente and back to the office every morning. “I don’t know, Josh. We’ll have to figure everything out. Tonight, let’s not worry about anything. Tonight, let’s just get by.”

  “Yeah,” he said, his eyes drifting away, gazing out the window, filling with recognizable sadness.

  Lara shoved the rest of the taco aside and looked at her nephew. Then she turned to the window and soaked up the night. Darkness and death were intrinsically compatible. Two spotlights illuminated the parking lot, but the vacant lot behind was completely black. The killer could be out there in the shadows, ready to pull the trigger the minute they walked out the door.

  Placing her hands on the Formica table, she inched her fingers toward Josh’s until she finally made contact. He didn’t pull away, but he didn’t look at her. Lara removed her hands and slid out of the booth. “Ready?” she said.

  “Who killed my mother and Sam?” he said, finally turning to face her.

  “I wish I knew, Josh.”

  “But you don’t, right?”

  “No, I don’t,” Lara answered, looking down at him. From this perspective, he looked small and helpless. His body was slouched low in the seat, his hair tumbling over his forehead and obscuring one eye. She wished she could wrap him in her arms and comfort him. What she really wanted was some miraculous way to assuage his grief and stop the pain. “Right now, Josh, we’re going to go home and get some sleep. Tomorrow I’ll start searching for the answers.”

  Running it through her mind, Lara decided the place to begin was with the victim’s boyfriend who had threatened her in the courtroom. Then she would review her past cases to see which defendants were back on the streets possibly bent on revenge. Finally, she knew they would have to sift through the pages of Ivory and Sam’s life: the pawnshop, the house in San Clemente, friends, neighbors.

  Deep in her thoughts, she headed to the front of the restaurant. Josh passed her and stepped outside. By the time Lara saw him, he was halfway across the parking lot and a man in dark clothing was walking toward him from the direction of the vacant lot.

  “No,” Lara screamed, lunging at the doors, completely panicked. Racing across the parking lot, she seized Josh from behind and toppled them both to the ground. “Don’t move,” she whispered, her heart pounding, her eyes jerking to the man she’d seen. The man glanced at them and then walked away.

  “Get off me,” Josh yelled. “You’re crazy. You’re a nut. The whole world’s crazy.”

  Lara stood and dusted herself off. “I saw that man and I became frightened,” she said quickly. “It’s late. This isn’t such a good area. I don’t want anything to happen to you. Anyway, I’m sorry I knocked you down.”

  “You’re sorry. Yeah, sure. Everyone’s sorry.” Josh stood there with a sullen look on his face while Lara unlocked the car. When they were both inside, he continued, staring straight ahead, his voice as sharp as a knife. “You know how many times I’ve heard that I’m-sorry bullshit? Every day, man. That’s all my mom used to say to me, how sorry she was about everything. And when my dad died, that’s all people said to me.” He turned and moved his face close to Lara’s. His breath was hot and sour. “Do me a favor, okay? Forget the sorry stuff.”

  They rode home in silence.

  Chapter 8

  Lara lay on the sofa, the floral bedspread from the bedroom thrown over her. She had insisted that Josh take the bedroom. He was just a child, she had determined, and he had lost his mother. Right now all she could offer him was a bed and a burrito. In a deep, fitful sleep, she heard someone tapping gently on the door. Her pulse quickened and she rolled off the sofa to the floor, certain this was it, expecting someone to start shooting at her through the door. The clock read five in the morning. She seized it and listened to it. It was real. It wasn’t just another prop.

  “It’s Officer Ringers,” a man yelled through the door. “Judge Sanderstone…”

  Her heart started pounding. Why in the world would they wake her this time of day?

  “Sorry to wake you,” the young officer said when Lara opened the door, his face haggard from lack of sleep, “but Detective Rickerson wants you to come to the house in San Clemente.” He looked away. “You know, your sister’s place. He’s been there all night and he said there are some things you should see.”

  “Now? You want me to drive there now?” Lara whispered. “My nephew’s asleep. Look, Officer, is this really necessary?” Her voice was sharp. She felt her sweatshirt and it was soaked with perspiration; damp strands of her hair fell across her face. Nightmares she couldn’t remember, she thought, pulling the wet shirt away from her body. Even in sleep, the mind kept fighting, trying to accept the unacceptable.

  “Sergeant Rickerson said so.”

  “You really think I should go?”

  “Yeah.” He looked around as if to say, What do I know, lady? I’m just following orders.

  “There shouldn’t be any traffic. Tell him I’m on my way. You’re not going to leave, are you?” she asked the officer. She didn’t want to leave Josh alone. .

  “I get off at six o’clock. They’re sending a relief. Someone will be here.”

  “Fine,” she said, closing the door in his face. She didn’t know what to do about Josh, so she left him a note and some money on the kitchen table. McDonald’s was right across the street. He could walk there for breakfast. She left him the spare key to the condo.

  It was still dark when she left, but the darkness slowly changed before her eyes to a misty morning gray. The freeways were empty, particularly heading south away from Los Angeles. Bile rose in her throat. What had they found? A body. Something more gruesome than she could imagine, more gruesome than what had already occurred. Maybe Sam had killed someone and dissected them, burying their body parts under the house, and then someone had come looking for them and killed Sam and Ivory. Her mind was boggled; she was letting her imagination run wild.

  From the moment she’d met Sam Perkins, she’d known he was nothing but trouble. She had an eye for things like that. But Ivory had been so alone and despondent, sliding into a haze of alcohol and drugs, dragging strange men home from bars. At first Lara had thought the marriage was for the best. One dirt bag was better than a dozen.

  When she arrived at the house, three cars were in front. All the lights were still burning even though the sun was up and the day was evidently going to be a clear, sunny one. She hadn’t brushed her teeth, hadn’t combed her tangled hair, and she was wearing the sweatshirt and jeans from last night. She had slept in them.

  Inside the living room, Rickerson pointed at the bedroom and she followed him reluctantly. The other officers continued working. Every drawer and cabinet in the house was open and everything out on the counters, the floors, everywhere. She cringed, stepping over an old photo album and a football trophy from years back, one of Charley’s. Ivory’s whole life was being invaded. Not only was the medical examiner about to invade her poor lifeless body, already ravaged and defiled, these strangers were snooping through every inch of her existence. The were touching her underwear, going through her toiletries: her Tampax, her Midol, her laxatives. It was disgusting, disrespectful, but Lara knew it had to be. Get yourself murdered and you’re an open book, part of the public domain.

  As she entered the bedroom, the bloodied walls pressed forward, surrounding her. She felt faint. Her body swayed back and forth, her stomach tumbling. Remnants of last night’s taco were about to come spewing
out.

  Rickerson saw her and came over, extending his arm in front of her body. “Hold on. Take some deep breaths. Don’t pass out on me. I guess I should have taken these things out in the living room. I’m sorry. I thought, though, that you should see them where I found them.”

  “I’m fine,” she said weakly.

  He opened a panel on the floorboard of the closet that was covered by a piece of cut carpet. It led to the crawl space under the house. Then he removed a large plastic storage box filled with various items. Some were clothes, others magazines and newspapers—some were photos. She tried to look at them, but her gaze kept returning to the walls, the blood, the nightmare in living color. She reached over and picked up a photo. Rickerson had spread them out on the dresser.

  Her hands started trembling. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. “God,” she said, “so he was taking pictures of her like this—the slimy bastard.” She picked up another one. Ivory was wearing a black corset or something and thigh-high black boots, the same silly boots she had worn that night when she came to Lara’s house. She was wearing a mask and holding a riding crop. They were stupid pictures. They were disgusting. To Lara, they weren’t even sexy. “So, I don’t understand the importance of this, Rickerson. Certainly not to make me drive all the way over here at five in the morning just to see my sister like this. It might be disgusting, but lots of men take suggestive photos of their wives.”

  She gave him a look that said he should know about that type of thing. He was a man. Even old Nolan had once taken a picture of her naked when they were first married.

  “Can you wait a minute?” Rickerson barked. “It’s far more than the pictures. Your sister and brother-in-law were evidently into bondage, S and M, stuff like that. Did you know that?”

  She stepped back in shock. As appalling as it was, her mind was adjusting to the bloody walls. “Of course I didn’t know that.”

  “Well, if you’ll look at these magazines and pictures, you’ll see that they were more than a little interested in this stuff. Your sister was working in the trade, advertising for clients.”

  Lara’s face turned white and her mouth fell open. The way Ivory had been dressed that last night she came to the condo…the phony breasts. “My sister was a prostitute? Is that what you’re saying?” He was holding a thin newspaper, and she snatched it from his hand. He had circled a number of small ads. She tried to read them, but the print was too small and she didn’t have her glasses. Her eyes were dry and scratchy from crying. She should have known. She shoved the paper back in his face. “I can’t read it. I don’t have my glasses.”

  Rickerson moved in close. Lara stepped back. “She wasn’t a prostitute,” he said. “Not exactly. She was a dominatrix and a submissive. Meaning, she would be whatever they wanted for a price. If they wanted to be whipped, she’d whip them. If they wanted to whip her, she’d let them. Most working girls choose either one or the other, but some play both sides of the fence to make more money. That’s evidently what she did.”

  “No,” Lara said, dragging the word out in disbelief, to the point where it almost echoed in the room. “No way. I can’t believe this. She was a mother. She had a child. Surely you’re not saying she brought strange men over here with her teenage son in the house and dressed up like this and whipped them.” She still had the photo in her hand and was waving it foolishly in the air in front of him.

  Worse than that, Rickerson thought, avoiding her eyes. He had no doubt whatsoever that this would be the most sensational case of his career. “Okay, let me just tell you what we’ve found. We’ve been working all night here.” He looked at her, expecting sympathy, approval. “We found two private phone lines in this house, one of them in this bedroom with no extensions. Several of these ads had pictures of your sister with the number to call. We verified that it’s this phone number. It rings in this room. Another answering machine had to be here to pick up these calls, but it’s gone. We think the killer took it.”

  Lara started chewing on a hangnail, her eyes darting around the room, the walls and the blood back again in full horror. “How do you know there was an answering machine?” she asked in a small voice.

  “There was a power pack and a plug that fits an answering machine. They took the machine but left the electrical cords. If you look under the bed there, you can see an indentation in the carpet where it sat. It must have been an old one, like a Record-a-Cali. Big, you know. When they first came out, they were larger than they are now.”

  Here they were discussing progressive electronics and Ivory had been selling her body to anyone that wanted it. More than her body, actually, she had been selling her will, her dignity. “Then she probably did it a long time ago and then quit. The pawnshop was floundering with the economy. She told me. Possibly she did it once or twice and then stopped.”

  “Doesn’t fly, Lara. This ad”—he raised the newspaper in her face—“was current. They renewed two weeks ago. We checked. And all these clothes and things…they’re all costumes. You know, B and D costumes. I don’t know if she had them over here to the house. She might have done out-calls. Or she could have serviced them while the kid was at school.”

  “Don’t use that word!” she spat.

  “What word?”

  “Serviced. That’s disgusting. You’re talking about my sister.”

  “Sorry, okay. Like I told you, I’ve been up all night. We had to track people down on this and call them at home. The phone company, the paper…”

  She followed him into Josh’s bedroom. Clothes were strewn everywhere, and the contents of the drawers and closet were in a pile in the middle of the room. Not only was Ivory’s life spread out for all to see, her son’s was also. She saw little army men from when he had been a small child, a few stuffed animals, a few toy trucks. Then there were motorcycle magazines and Playboys, some of the pages ripped out. Lara bent down and began picking up a few items of his clothing to take back to the condo.

  She suddenly dropped the clothes back onto the floor and fell onto Josh’s twin bed, on the bare mattress now that they’d stripped it. She placed her hand over her mouth. Then she began sobbing. She couldn’t stop. Her shoulders started shaking. It was all too much, just too much. This was all some sort of a dream, a delusion. She was cracking up, her mind unable to absorb this…the whole thing.

  Could the poor kid have done this horrid thing? Could he have discovered what was going on and possibly killed Sam and then had to kill his mother when she walked in and saw him? Rickerson was talking to her. She couldn’t concentrate on his words; they were floating around over her head somewhere like black birds or vultures.

  “…do you think? It could be that Josh came home and found your sister dead. He saw Sam Perkins over the body and went to his room for his weight. Or maybe he had it in his hand and heard noises and then saw the body, assuming Perkins killed her, which of course, he may have. Josh then bashed him to death in retaliation. That works.”

  Rickerson was talking to her as though she were another investigator. Her sister was dead and her fourteen-year-old nephew about to be accused of murder. “I don’t know about any of this, but I know that animal she was married to was behind it all. That’s all I know. Josh isn’t a killer. I’d bet my life on it.” She started walking to the door. Even if she had her own doubts about Josh, she owed it to her sister to defend him. She’d never felt so overwhelmed and horrified in her entire life.

  “You are betting your life in a way,” Rickerson said in a soft voice, almost taunting.

  “What…what are you talking about now, Rickerson?” Then she saw the clothes she wanted to take and picked them up and held them to her chest.

  “Well, you’re living with him, aren’t you?”

  She didn’t answer. She would probably have to pay to bury Sam Perkins. Now she might have to hire an attorney for her sister’s child to defend him against a murder charge, possibly for more than just killing his stepfather, which might be feasible under the
circumstances, but even his own mother, which was beyond comprehension. She shuffled to the car, tossed the handful of clothes in the backseat, and left.

  Once Lara had left, Rickerson stepped outside the house and fired up his cigar. Then he reached in his pocket and took out the stack of Polaroids that he’d found inside the box in the crawl space held together with a rubber band, ones he had not shown Lara Sanderstone. One photograph was of a young boy, naked, posing suggestively with his buttocks to the camera, glancing back over his shoulder. He couldn’t be certain, the boy was younger, but he’d bet his last nickel that he was looking at Lara Sanderstone’s nephew. He’d found other photos as well, photos of children having sex with an adult male, his back to the camera. The man might even be Perkins himself. He shook his head and looked at the sky. He had started to tell her, but then decided against it. If the district attorney did prosecute the boy, these photos could be trump cards, and she was too close to the boy to play their hand. Judge or not, this was a criminal investigation and he was holding valuable evidence.

  From the other photos he had found, along with this one, he assumed the boy had been exploited and more than likely sexually abused, how recently or to what extent he didn’t know. But it was certainly a reason to kill someone, and it might not have been just his stepfather.

  “Hey, Rickerson,” another officer yelled, sticking his head out the back door. “Someone’s on the phone for you. It’s a reporter from the Orange County Register. Do you want to take the call or not?”

  “I’ll pass,” he said, lost in his thoughts. Reporters were a pain in the neck anyway. They were going to be crawling all over his ass on this one.

  “What do you want me to tell them?”

  “Tell them it’s a black day, buddy. Their weather report was all wrong and I don’t want to talk to them. The sun’s out, but it’s just not shining. Know what I mean?” He shoved the photos back in his pocket and returned to the task.