Michael Prescott - Last Breath

’86-never apprehended. In 1982-”

“Okay.” Walsh raised his hand. “We don’t have to go back that far. Bottom line is…”

“Nada,” Sotheby said again with stubborn pessimism.

“Any clue how he got access to the strip mall so he could dump the body there?” Boyle asked Walsh.

“We’re still working on that,” Walsh said, aware that everyone present knew this answer meant no.

“Security guard check out okay?”

“He looks clean. West LA is handling that angle. Checking out the building’s owners, the guard-anybody who had a key.”

Merriwether asked if there was any hope on the hair-and-fiber front.

“Nothing new,” Walsh said. “Martha Eversol was covered with some of the same gray rayon fibers we got off Nikki Carter, but they’re too generic to help nab this guy. They’ll help convict him when he’s caught, at least.”

“If he’s caught,” Sotheby said.

“When,” Walsh repeated.

No one disputed him this time. But no one met his gaze either.

Time to wrap up. Walsh leaned forward.

“All right, everybody. We know what today’s date is. We know what it means.”

There were a few unnecessary glances at the calendar on the wall, where Wednesday, January 31, was circled in red.

Nikki Carter had been abducted on November 30th. Martha Eversol, on December 31. Always the last day of the month.

“Tonight’s his night to howl,” Walsh said. “We don’t know where he’ll strike, but we know it’ll be within the next eight hours. There are extra squad cars on the streets, extra plainclothes officers working bars and nightclubs. Stark and Merriwether, I want you covering the club where Nikki Carter disappeared. Lopez and Boyle, you cruise the neighborhood where Martha Eversol was rear-ended.”

“He won’t return to the scene,” Stark said. “He’s too smart,”

“You’re probably right. But we’ll do it anyway. Maybe we’ll catch a break. Christ knows, we need one.”

Nobody could argue with that.

C.J. noticed the white van on Western Avenue as she headed north into the mid-Wilshire district. It was two car lengths behind her, visible in her rear-view mirror.

There was nothing unusual about the van, except that she recalled seeing a similar vehicle pull away from the curb outside the Newton Station parking lot when she left.

Probably a coincidence. No reason to think the van was following her or anything.

As she guided her Dodge Neon onto Pico Boulevard, she watched her rearview mirror to see if the van duplicated the maneuver. It did not.

“Getting paranoid, Killer,” she admonished herself. In private she sometimes used the nickname her fellow cops had bestowed on her, even though she disliked it.

She cruised west on Pico, planning her evening. Quick shower, bite to eat, some reps on her exercise machine, then the twenty-minute drive to Foshay Junior High School at Exposition and Western, a bad neighborhood. She was always mildly amazed when she emerged from the school and found that her car had not been stolen. Of course, it was only a matter of time until the little Dodge became another Grand Theft Auto statistic.

Oh, well. The risk was worth it. She really believed she was making a difference in the kids’ lives. Some of them anyway.

Take Andrew Washington, a small, wiry teen with smoldering eyes and fidgety hands. He glared at her nonstop during her first few visits as she sat amid a circle of kids and talked about the dangers they faced every day-the drug dealers trying to get them hooked, the gangbangers urging them to wear the colors, the petty temptations of shoplifting and vandalism.

Most of these kids had yielded to such temptations and influences already. Some had done time in juvenile camps. But they weren’t altogether lost. If they had been, they wouldn’t have been showing up three nights a week, talking with C.J. on Wednesdays and with two other off-duty cops on Mondays and Fridays. The talks were the price they paid for use of the gym afterward-basketball games, played indoors, safely out of range of drive-by shootings and the other insanities of the city.

Andrew looked too small to be good at hoops, but she learned later that he had a mean jump shot and quick hands. She was sure she wasn’t getting through to him. His angry stare seemed to say. Talk all you want, you white bitch. It don’t mean shit to me. Then one night another kid asked her what was the most scared she had ever been. Her audience expected her to talk about some experience on patrol, but instead she told them about the boogeyman. They listened silently, and even Andrew’s eyes regarded her with a flicker of interest.

When they were leaving for the gym, Andrew stayed behind. “That shit you told us about when you was a kid-that for real?” She assured him it was. He looked away. “Something sorta like that happened to me,” he said. “Came home from school one afternoon, and there was a guy in the house. Fucking psycho off the streets, busted in through a window, stealing our stuff. Could see he was crazy. Had that look, you know? His face was all one big beard and fuzzy hair with eyes stuck in it. I hid in the closet, curled up real small, but he hears a noise and comes looking. I throw some dirty clothes over me. He looks in, don’t see me. Shit, if he’d done seen me, he woulda fucking wasted me, I know it.”

“What happened?”

“Guess hearing the noise spooked him. He booked out of there. Didn’t take nothing.”

“What did your mom say?” She knew he lived alone with his mother.

“Never told her.”

“You didn’t want her to worry?”

“Nah, that ain’t it. She wouldn’t never have believed me, is the thing. Just like your folks didn’t believe you.”

“People don’t take kids seriously,” C.J. said in a low voice.

Andrew nodded gravely. “That’s how it is.”

He had not glared at her after that.

So yes, she was helping. She was reaching a few of them.

At La Brea she turned north, stopping a few blocks from her house to pick up a few items at a market run by a Korean man who had been a dentist in his own country. She moved quickly through the familiar aisles, dropping fresh vegetables into her basket, paying at the checkout stand.

She was putting her groceries into her car when a glint of reflected light from down the street caught her attention.

A white van was parked at the corner.

She studied it. The driver’s window was rolled down. The light she’d seen must have come from inside the van.

Reflected light. Binoculars, maybe, or a camera’s telephoto lens?

She steadied herself. There were a lot of white vans in the city. This might not be the one she’d seen behind her on Western.

The van bore no commercial markings, but it had the windowless rear compartment typical of commercial vehicles. The kind of van a delivery person might drive.

So why was it sitting there at 4:45 on a weekday afternoon, with the window open, and a lens-if it had been a lens-trained in her direction?

She decided to walk over and find out.

But before she could, the motor rumbled to life, and the van pulled into traffic.

She stared after it, hoping to catch the plate number. The plate was blue on white, a California tag, but she had no chance to read it. The van had already disappeared into a stream of vehicles.

If she were still in the midst of divorce proceedings, she might have thought that Adam had hired a private eye to follow her and dig up dirt. But the divorce was finalized months ago. Anyway, there was no dirt, and Adam knew it.

She shrugged. “Maybe the paparazzi have finally gotten around to discovering me.”

As jokes went, it wasn’t much, but it allowed her to pretend she wasn’t worried. She kept a smile on her face as she drove the rest of the way home.