The Blood Detail (Vigil) Read online

  The two detectives began to mosey my way, forced to dodge every speeding nitwit with a purpose who crossed into their path. It took them awhile, but they eventually broke through. Up close, they both had a put-on pleasantness about them.

  “Officer Kimble,” the good-looking one said. “Are you up for a few quick questions?”

  “I don’t know…can’t say for sure. I’ve never seen you two before.” I was summoning up every ounce of smarm I had in me. “I mean you could be just about anyone. Maybe you should show me some ID.”

  They both dug into the linings of their dampened overcoats and did my bidding, revealing matching billfolds with shiny metal badges and photographic proof they were both important peace officers I should be giving the proper deference to.

  The good-looking one made the formal introductions. “I’m Detective Mac Douglass,” he said as he put away his badge. “My partner here is Sam Racine. If you would not mind, we would like to go over some of the particulars of your rather eventful evening.”

  I grinned. “Have at me.”

  Douglass pressed the outside of his pants pockets and clicked some sort or recording device.

  “In your own words,” he said, “how would you characterize the suspect?”

  The inaneness of the question threw me. All I could do was shake my head. “I’m not sure what you mean. He killed that girl. Are you wondering if he was a nice guy or not?”

  “No, I would like to hear about any specific oddness that you noticed about him. Your partner said that she shot him twice, once directly in the chest, but he still managed to get away. She also said she heard a shot before she caught up with you, which we presume means you fired your own sidearm. The question relates to that. What was this person like, this man who can withstand multiple gunshot wounds?”

  I delayed my response, for no other reason than I was tired and annoyed. “Well, he was stinky and covered in blood and flesh. He also kept telling me how pretty I was, which I guess you could call strange, considering the circumstances. But then again, maybe it was love at first sight and this mangy cannibal just couldn’t resist me. I am fairly decent looking. Men have been know to swoon in my presence. What do you two geniuses think?”

  Racine stepped forward. It looked like he would be the one to threaten me with reprisals. “Look, lady. We have been nothing but pleasant with you. Why the grief? You’re forcing us to tell your commanding officer how uncooperative you’re being.”

  “Go ahead—tell him. I could care less. You two may have fancy badges, but you have also come at me with a very knowing question. And I am not going to help out someone whose true agenda is being withheld from me. Seriously, you could be IAD as far as I know. I did fire my weapon, as you so adroitly pointed out.”

  “We’re with a special task force,” Douglass said. “It’s a joint LAPD-FBI detail. Highly classified. I can’t go into too many specifics without breaking a billion and one regs, but this is not the first homicide of this nature we have come across.”

  The Fed angle had my immediate attention. “Now, was that so hard?” I said, sitting up straight. “When you’re both ready, you can ask me anything that you like.”

  Douglass was smiling. Racine was not.

  “Mac has already asked you a question,” he said. “How about you give the man a serious answer.”

  I fought back a chuckle and said, “In my humble opinion, the guy was drugged up. He had to have been. My shot nailed him right in the gut—but it did not slow him. I gave him a hard kick to the nuts as well, and that didn’t faze him in the slightest.” I held up my bandaged arms. “When he had hold of my wrists, I stomped the living shit out of him. Still…nothing.”

  Douglass followed up. “Your partner said he executed a standing broad jump right over you. To hear her tell it, he landed on the top of the parking eaves over there. He accomplished this in one move, with no running start. How do you explain that?”

  “I don’t,” I said, holding the pause. “But I’ll bet you can.”

  Douglass and Racine clammed up, their chests pumped out with defiance. I was more sure than ever that they knew a hell of a lot more than what they were sharing.

  “Whatever,” I said. “I may only be a lowly patrol person, but I saw what I saw, and you big bad detectives don’t seem affected by any of it. In fact, you went straight to the oddness in your questions. That tells me loads about this task force of yours. I’d say the superhuman feats are the only reason you are here. The murder is just secondary, a means to an end.”

  “You would be wrong,” Douglass said. “Very wrong.”

  Racine nodded.

  “Well, we’re certainly not seeing things from the same perspective,” I said. “All that’s on my mind at the moment is the memory I have of some freakishly tall guy devouring that poor woman over there. Let’s all remember that’s the heart of what went down here. A young woman is out riding her bike unsuspectingly and she gets dragged into the dark and is chowed down on by a psychotic. This is what’s going to haunt me—not that a perp was jumping around like he was on trampoline. There’s some reasonable explanation for that, there has to be. But the manner in which he killed her…that’s the shit that makes me tremble. There is no damn rationalization for that.”

  “Can we get back to it?” Douglass said.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Can we?”

  He ignored my dickishness and went on. “You started saying something earlier about the suspect calling you pretty. Can you be more specific with that?”

  “Yeah. He said it several times. I was ‘purty’, I smelled ‘purty’, and so on. It was like the only damn word he knew.” I shrugged again. “I mean he’s not the first guy to comment on my looks. He’s not even the first homeless guy to do it. It’s a man thing. When your blood is rushing down there, you all get weak-kneed over attractive women. You swoon, remember?”

  I caught Douglass staring at me. I stared right back until he looked away.

  “Then you would classify the suspect as homeless?” Racine asked me, his mind on his work.

  “Without a doubt. He had all the trappings and telltale signs. He was definitely not a business man, that’s for sure.”

  I heard several car doors slam in succession. I recognized the specificity of the sound. It was the black and whites. The extra uniforms were heading out.

  “How many of us do you have out canvassing?” I asked them.

  “The rest of our detail,” Racine said. “The complex is not that big. They should have it covered in a couple of hours.”

  “How many people do you have out searching for this guy? He’s been shot three times, you know. He’s probably bled out in an alley somewhere.”

  Douglass fiddled with his tie. “You’re probably right.”

  The guy started staring at me again, but I was sick and tired of staring back.

  “I’ll ask you one more time. How many of us do you have out searching?”

  “Enough. More than enough.”

  “Sorry to press,” I said. “If you don’t want to answer.”

  The conversation stalled out there. For some reason or another, Douglass and Racine thought going after this guy was futile, and not just because he was shot up by Angie and me. It was best that I drop it. I could find out more on my own anyway. A few well-placed flirtatious questions with a crime scene nerd would get me what I needed a whole lot easier than dealing with these yahoos.

  “We may need to speak with you again tomorrow,” Douglass said as he shut off his recorder. “Just so you are aware.”

  “Fine, but I’ll be at home,” I said. “I fired my weapon, so did Officer Chen. We’re going to be put on leave. We won’t be allowed to just hang out at the station until we pass review.”

  Douglass tipped his head at his partner, and Racine strolled off. Douglass inched closer to me and his entire demeanor softened.

  “We’ll back you up with IAD,” he said. “Just be as clear as possible and tell them everything, ev
en the outlandish bits. There’s no reason to lie. If you’re honest, you will be back on duty by next week.”

  “Thank you?” I said, all sarcastically.

  “Thank you is right.” He turned, walked several strides, and then spun back to me. “We are on top of this, you know. It may not seem like it, but there is method to our madness.”

  I watched him saunter off. The cryptic bullshit was not going to cut it with me. Neither were his limp attempts at charm. On leave or not, I was about to get on Douglass’ case like he wouldn’t believe. He may not have cared whether the suspect had bled out or not, but I did. That smelly prick was not getting away with killing that girl.

  Who’s Who

  I could see Angie waiting outside the ER as I walked toward the exit. When the automatic doors slid all the way open, I saw someone else—someone I hadn’t spoken to in months. The sawed-off little runt smiled at me, still thick and sturdy, with a graying buzz cut and ugly-as-ass horn-rimmed glasses. Both Angie and this long-lost pal of mine were leaning against one of the new make of cruisers, parked indifferently aside the emergency curbside drop-off. There may not have been any rain coming down any longer, but the smell of it still permeated the air.

  “Burt Kendrick,” I said, storming over to the only two partners I’d ever known. “How the heck are you, old man?” We shook hands, which left me cringing in pain. I must have left my brain back in the examination room. Burt’s grip had always been notoriously mighty, but never so much so as when one had just been diagnosed with a severely sprained wrist. I covered as best as I could, but both Angie and Burt noticed my discomfort.

  “Gracie girl. Good to see you,” Burt said as he let go of my hand. “But shouldn’t you be in a sling? You need to keep those things raised up above your heart, kiddo. That’s how they heal.” He glanced down at the fresh bandaging around my wrists. X-rays were conclusive on one, but not the other. My left wrist had a boo-boo. My right one was pretty fucked up.

  I reached back and patted my slacks with the side of my one decent arm. “The sling is here. I stowed it as soon as I got out of the doctor’s sight. I was not going to wear it while I was still in uniform.”

  “Gracie,” Burt muttered.

  Angie just shook her head.

  “What?” I said. “I’ll wear it when I change. I want to heal more than anybody. Otherwise, I won’t be able to get back to work. But a uniform and physical impairment do not mix. You both know that. I am not going to look weak for a single second in this city.”

  Burt laughed. “I see you haven’t changed. Officer Chen here tells me you’ve only gotten worse. I heard the same thing from the investigating detective. He told me you gave him all sorts of lip tonight.”

  “You talked to that asswipe?”

  “About an hour ago. He called and said you’d been hurt. He knew that I knew you and he had some questions. I was Mac’s training officer. He’s a good guy, and an excellent detective.”

  Burt had been my training officer as well. And as of that moment, he was also the only person on the force bright enough to figure out who I really was. Not that there was anything necessarily nefarious going on with me, but when I’d migrated to LA a couple of years prior, I legally changed my name to Grace Leigh Kimble. I was born Grace Anne McMartin. The Leigh came from a friend in grade school, and Kimble just popped into my head as I was filling out the paperwork. For a brief couple of seconds there I even considered changing Grace to something else as well. My father always said I was the most inappropriately named child in the universe. But my mother had picked the name Grace for me, and she loved it, so I kept it. I owed her that much.

  The name change stratagem in and of itself would have impressed Daddy—if he had ever found out about it, which he never did. He keeled over from his inevitable heart attack a year and a half after I got out here, making all the effort I put into not being myself anymore rather useless. He was, after all, the sole reason for my big switcheroo. The great Grant McMartin was, for half of his life, a Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. His eldest child, who just happened to be a girl, wanted nothing more than to become a special agent and continue on with the family tradition. You would think a father would be proud to have a child who wanted to honor him in such a way, but not my father. I even trained my heart out for years, mastering every form of hand-to-hand combat available to me in the tiny suburban Virginia village where I grew up. But from the time I was little, Daddy turned up his nose at the mere suggestion of me as a law enforcement officer.

  When I graduated from ECU with a degree in criminology, I applied for the Bureau and was unceremoniously rejected. I confronted my father, knowing he was behind the kiss off, and he gave me some rigmarole about me not having the appropriate temperament for the position. But that wasn’t the truth. He just didn’t like the idea of his baby girl being put into any kind of danger after the way we had lost my mother. I was not deterred, though. I would serve in law enforcement in one way or another. So, I applied to all the big city police departments from Philly to Miami, and was turned down and stymied at every turn. One of the decent fellows who told me no to my face said my father had sent out word about my bad behavior and penchant for violence and warned the various departments against hiring me. I had been blackballed, up and down the East Coast. Even small town departments wanted nothing to do with me, his reach extended that far. That was when I took the desperate steps that I took. I suspected my father’s influence might not have the same resonance out west. I picked the largest city in the country’s largest state and got lucky.

  Funnily enough, it was my father who had taught me how to play fast and loose with alternative identities—it was a game we played all the time when I was growing up. According to him, the trick to it was to create a doppelgänger as close to oneself as was reasonably possible. I didn’t even do that exactly. All I changed was my name, legally as I said, and I omitted the fact that my father was then currently employed as a Deputy Director of the FBI. The rest of the information I gave on my application was true. I admitted that I had changed my name, and the LAPD didn’t look any deeper than that. No one in my family had a criminal record, so all I can assume is I passed through undetected by any of Daddy’s potential pals.

  As I said, the only person to do any sort of digging beneath the surface was Burt, just as we were about to start our training patrols together. Being a junkie for such things, he recognized my father’s name right off. He mentioned it to me, and I fessed up and told him the whole story. Other than an occasional question about Daddy’s storied career, it was never a big thing between us.

  “Well, you may think highly of the guy,” I said to Burt, who had kept going on about the wonders of Detective Douglass. “But to me, your dashing pal came off as a little too disinterested. He didn’t give two shits about the dead girl Angie and I found.”

  It was still pitch black out and I took a position between Burt and Angie and we stood together against the car as patients, doctors, and late-night visitors whisked by us, making sure they avoided direct eye contact with the loitering trio of cops.

  “Maybe Mac’s got a different objective than you,” Burt said. “The man’s been detailed. Major investigations of that sort are not comparable to regular street work. The agendas and behind-the-scenes machinations can be byzantine.”

  “What do you know about this detail of his?” I asked.

  “Nothing much. It operates from downtown, and it’s fairly new.”

  “He told me it was a joint task force with the Feds.”

  “Really,” he said, the Fed connection barely registering. “I don’t know anything about that. But Mac wouldn’t say something if it weren’t true.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I get it. You’re telling me the guy’s a saint. And I guess I don’t know him well enough to disagree.” I took a breath. “What did you tell him about me?”

  “The basics. Name, rank, and service number. But he had you fairly well sussed out on his own
.” Burt laughed so hard his mouth exploded into a hacking cough. Cigarettes weren’t his only vice, but they were his favorite. Almost on cue, he pulled out a pack of Marlboro Reds, tapping the bottom like a pro. “Have you two got your stories straight for IAD?” He lit up with his Bic. “Because you need to.”

  “This is the first time we’ve spoken since they separated us at the scene,” Angie said.

  “Whatever else, make sure you are on the same page about everything, especially how and when you fired your weapons. Contradictions are the only things that could trip you up. It’s what IAD lives for.”

  All of what he said was obvious, but it was nice that he cared. I told him so. I also thanked him for taking the time to swing by.

  He puffed away. “I’m still on duty. I’d better get going.” He nodded farewell to the two of us and wandered around the front of his car. As he climbed into the vehicle, his hanging cig remained miraculously adhered to his lower lip.

  The engine started and Angie and I stepped clear. We waved one last time as Burt surged forward and honked his horn. After he was gone, the outside of the hospital became still and silent, as if blown clean by a gust of wind.

  I held my bandaged arms out, displaying them for Angie. “I can’t drive myself. I’m helpless.”

  “Over here,” she said, stepping out onto the two-lane roadway and leading me toward the open air parking lot. Our own cruiser was in the fourth spot down on the right side. Angie went around to the passenger door and opened it for me. I ducked inside, tucked in my legs, and then waited for the door to slam shut—which it did, two beats later. Beneath the dashboard, the radio was off, for some official reason, which made the interior of the car quieter than even the front of the hospital was. I’d never been a big fan of silence. I also never liked a whole lot of noise. I’m complicated that way.

  Angie climbed into the driver’s seat and backed us out of the parking spot. “What do you make of what happened tonight?” she asked me.