Robert Ellis - The Lost Witness

“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.

They ran across the street into the garage. Rhodes pointed at the Crown Vic backed into a space beside the guard shack. The car looked like it had been to the body shop and returned before the job was done. It was primed, but not painted-the color of dusk, the color of junk-gun-metal gray.

“I’ll drive down,” he shouted. “You can bring us back.”

They jumped in, and he fired up the engine. Hitting the strobes on the dash, he pulled onto the street and accelerated through the red light. Ten minutes later, they were rolling down the Santa Monica Freeway at a ragged eighty-five miles an hour. Bobbing and weaving their way through heavy traffic directly into the winter sun.

Lena lowered her visor. As she watched the city go by at high speed, her mind began to drift and she looked back over at Rhodes. He hadn’t said a word since they left Parker Center. She could see him thinking something over. She could see the sadness in his eyes. Rhodes was a detective-three with ten years more experience than her. But he was more than that. If the timing had been different, they easily could have become lovers.

“You okay?” she asked.

He turned and glanced at her.

“You were on the phone when I walked in. Was it your sister?”

He nodded. “They’ve set a date. Her operation’s on Monday.”

“You going up?”

“Tomorrow night,” he said. “I’ve been talking to her off and on all morning. I left a message on your machine at home. You just haven’t gotten it yet.”