Robert Crais - The Forgotten Man

– bang -

– one shot pounded home low to the right of his sternum, missing his heart but ripping his arteries and lungs. The kinetic energy dumped into his body staggered him. A hydrostatic shock wave pulsed through his tissues along the wound channel, rupturing the cells nearest the wound and surfing the blood in his arteries straight to his brain. The spike of pressure blew out capillaries and shorted his senses; he went blind, deaf, and unconscious in a heartbeat, and he dropped in his tracks like a boxer stepping into a powerhouse hook. A larger gun-a.45 or.44-would have killed him instantly by rupturing the vessels in his brain with a hundred simultaneous strokes, but with the smaller gun, his consciousness slowly returned as Diaz found the alley. Pain and fear would have boiled up with his returning senses, and he had screamed and thrashed as she described. His vision and hearing returned. He was able to think again, and speak, even though he was dying. Someone had shot him, and then he was dying, but he hadn't told her who, or why-the most important thing in the world to him was to tell her he was my father and that he was trying to find me. To make up the lost years.

I bent to touch the ground.

Why me?

I searched the ground around the Dumpsters. The cops had been over it, but I looked again, searching a few feet in one direction, then the other, then along the far wall, trying to remember if the police had recovered a shell casing. I searched the sills of the delivery doors opposite the Dumpsters, found nothing, then worked my way back across the alley, looking into the cracks and pocks in the tarmac. The detectives and the criminalist had searched these same areas, but I looked anyway. Chipped tarmac, jagged brown glass that had once been a beer bottle, and weathered paper were spread evenly where the criminalist had left them. I let myself down into a push-up position to look under the first Dumpster, and saw a bright rectangle partially wedged between the Dumpster's left rear wheel and the wall. It seemed too obvious a thing for the police to have missed, but maybe the cleaning crews had dislodged it from a less obvious place when they sprayed down the area.

I pushed the Dumpster aside, then picked up the card at its edges. It was a plain blue plastic card with a white triangle pointing off one end beneath the words INSERT HERE. A magnetic strip ran the length of the card on the opposite side. I was pretty sure it was a key card like they use in hotels. The name of the hotel and the room number weren't printed on the card because you don't want a stranger knowing which room the key opens, but I thought the information might be readable on the magnetic strip. There might even be fingerprints.

I could have brought the card to Central Station and left it for Pardy and Diaz, but I didn't want to wait three days for results. I phoned an LAPD criminalist named John Chen. John and I had worked together in the past, but when I reached his office at the Scientific Investigations Division, they told me he had the day off. Perfect. I hung up, then phoned a detective I knew on the Hollywood Station Juvenile Section named Carol Starkey. Starkey had been a bomb technician with LAPD's Bomb Squad until some bad breaks made her change jobs, so she knew almost as much technical stuff as Chen.

When Starkey answered, she said, "You finally calling to ask me out?"

"No, I'm calling to see if you can recover information off a key card for me."

I explained about the card, the body, and what I was doing.

She said, "No shit? You think this guy is your father?"

"No, I don't think he's my father. I just want to find out what's on the card."

"Call Chen. Chen knows how to do that."

"Chen has the day off."

"Hang on."

She put me on hold. While I waited, I stacked the garbage bags the man in the pink shirt had piled around my car into a huge mound against his door. Pissy.

Starkey came back on the line.

"Chen will meet us at SID in an hour."

"I thought he had the day off."

"Not anymore."

I hung up, then checked my watch. It had been almost nine hours since John Doe #05-1642 had been murdered. The key card was about to open a door to his identity, and to far more than I wanted to know.

LAPD's Scientific Investigation Division shared its location with the Bomb Squad, where Carol Starkey had spent three years strapping into an armored suit to de-arm or destroy improvised explosive devices while everyone else hid under a tree. You've seen bomb techs in the news. They're the men and women dressed in what looks like a space suit, bent over a box or a backpack that's loaded with TNT, trying to render it safe before it explodes. Starkey was good at it, and loved it, until it finally went bad. Starkey and her supervisor were killed on the job, blown apart in a trailer park by a keg of black powder and nails. The medics brought her back and the surgeons stitched her together, but they wouldn't let her go back to the Squad. She worked in Criminal Conspiracy for a while, and now she worked on the Juvenile desk, but she still missed the bombs. Some woman, huh?

Starkey was leaning against a dark blue Bomb Squad Suburban when I pulled into the parking lot. She was in her early thirties, with a long face, limp hair, and a dark gray pin-striped suit that went with her attitude. She was smoking.

I said, "Those things will kill you."

"Been there, done that. Chen's inside, sulking 'cause I made him come in."

"Thanks for setting this up, but you didn't have to make the drive. I know you're busy."

"What, and miss the chance to flirt with you? How else am I gonna get you in the sack?"

Starkey is like that. She turned toward the building, and I followed, the two of us threading our way between parked cars.

She said, "So what's the deal on the vic? You don't think he's related?"

"No, I don't think he's related. He was just obsessed or confused. You know how people get, like stalkers when they fix on a movie star. That's all it is."

"Lemme see that picture."

I had told her about the morgue shots, but I was irritated she wanted to see. She looked at the pictures, then me, then back at the pictures. It left me feeling vulnerable in a way I didn't like. She finally shook her head and handed them back.

"You don't look anything like this guy."

"I told you."

"He looks like a praying mantis and you look like a rutabaga."

"This is what you call flirting?"

Starkey squeezed between a couple of cars that were parked too close together, then waited as I walked around. She seemed thoughtful as we continued on, and maybe embarrassed.

She said, "Listen, maybe I shouldn't've joked about it. I didn't know about you not knowing your father. I can see how this would be weird for you."

"It's not weird. I'm not doing this because I think he's my father."

"Whatever."

"Don't make more out of it than there is."

"Tell you what, let's change the subject while we're still speaking to each other. Have you heard from Ben? How's he doing down there?"

Starkey had helped in the search for Ben Chenier. We met on the night he disappeared.

"He's doing well. We don't talk as often as we used to."

"And the lawyer?"

The lawyer was Lucy Chenier.

"We don't talk as often as we used to."

"I guess I shouldn't have brought that up, either."

"No. I guess not."

Starkey badged our way past the receptionist, then led me along a hall toward a sign that read TECHNICAL LABORATORY. SID was divided into three parts: the Technical Laboratory, the Criminalistics Laboratory, and the Administrative Unit. Chen, like the other field criminalists, worked freely between the Tech Lab and the Criminalistics Lab, though he could and did refer to specialists when needed.