Jonathan Kellerman - The Murder Book

"Ms. Waters, you know as well as I do that I can't guarantee confidentiality. That's the D.A.'s authority. I'm being honest, and I'd appreciate the same from you. If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about. And refusing to cooperate won't shield your husband. If I wanted to complicate his life, all I'd have to do is talk to my boss and he'd make a call, and…"

He showed her his palms.

Waters slapped her hands on her hips. Her stare was cold and steady. "Why are you doing this?"

"In order to find out who murdered Janie Ingalls. You're right about one thing. It was obscene. She was tortured, burned with cigarettes, mutilat-"

"No, no, no! None of that shock treatment, give me some credit ."

Milo's palms pressed together. "This has become needlessly adversarial, Ms. Waters. Just tell me what you know, and I'll do my utmost to keep you out of it. That's the best I can offer. The alternative means a bit more overtime for me and a lot more complication for you."

"You have no jurisdiction in New Mexico," said Melinda Waters. "Technically, you're trespassing."

"Technically, you're still a material witness, and last time I checked New Mexico had diplomatic relations with California."

Waters looked at her family again, sat back down, put her glasses back on, mumbled, "Shit."

The three of us sat in silence for a full minute before she said, "This isn't fair. I'm not proud of the kind of kid I was back then, and I'd like to forget it."

I said, "We've all been teenagers."

"Well, I was a rotten teenager. A total screwup and a stoner, just like Janie. That's what drew us together. Bad behavior- Jesus, I don't think a day went by when we weren't getting loaded. And… other things that give me a migraine when I think about them. But I pulled myself out of it- in fact, the process started the day after Janie and I split up."

"At the party?" said Milo.

Waters grabbed for another pen, changed her mind, played with a drawer-pull- lifting the brass and letting it drop, once, twice, three times.

She said, "I've got kids of my own, now. I set limits, am probably too strict because I know what's out there. In ten years, I haven't touched anything stronger than chardonnay. I love my husband. He's going places. My practice is rewarding- I don't see why any of that should be derailed because of mistakes I made twenty years ago."

"Neither do I," said Milo. "I'm not taking notes, and none of that goes in any file. I just want to know what happened to Janie Ingalls that Friday night. And anything else you can tell me about the man who raped her downtown."

"I told you everything I know about him."

"Young and nice-looking with a nice car."

"The car could've been Janie's fantasy."

"How young?"

"She didn't say."

"Race?"

"I assume he was white, because Janie didn't say he wasn't. And she would've. She was a bit of a racist- got it from her father."

"Any other physical description?"

"No."

"A fancy car," said Milo. "What kind?"

"I think she said a Jaguar, but I can't be sure. With fur rugs- I do remember that because Janie talked about how her feet sank into the rug. But with Janie, who knows? I'm trying to tell you: She was always fantasizing."

"About what?"

"Mostly about getting loaded and partying with rock stars."

"That ever happen?"

She laughed. "Not hardly. Janie was a sad little girl from the wrong part of Hollywood."

"A young guy with a Jaguar," said Milo. "What else?"

"That's all I know," said Waters. "Really."

"Which hotel did he take her to?"

"She just said it was downtown, in an area full of bums. She also said the guy seemed to know the place- the desk clerk tossed him a key the moment he walked in. But she didn't think he was actually staying there because the room he took her to didn't look lived in. He wasn't keeping any clothes there, and the bed wasn't even covered. Just a mattress. And rope. He'd put the rope in a dresser drawer."

"She didn't try to escape when she saw that?"

Waters shook her head. "He gave her a joint on the ride over. A huge one, high-grade, maybe laced with hash, because she was really floating and that's what hash usually did to her. She told me the whole experience was like watching someone else. Even when he pushed her down on the bed and started tying her up."

"Her arms and legs and her neck."

"That's where the marks were."

"What happened next?"

Anger flashed behind Waters's eyeglass lenses. "What do you think? He did his thing with her. Used every orifice."

"She said that?"

"In cruder terms." The gray in her eyes had deepened, as if an internal light had been dampened. "She said she knew what he was doing, but didn't even feel it."

"And she was blasé about it."

"At first she was. Later- a few days later, she got loaded on Southern Comfort and started talking about it, again. Not crying. Angry. At herself. Do you know what really bugged her? Not so much what he did to her, she was out of it during the whole thing. What made her mad was that when he was finished, he didn't drive her all the way back home, just dropped her off in East Hollywood and she had to walk a couple of miles. That ticked her off. But even there, she blamed herself. Said something along the lines of, 'It must be something about me, makes people treat me like that. Even him .' I said, 'Who's him?' and she got this really furious look on her face, and said, 'Him . Bowie.' That freaked me out- first the deviant, now incest. I asked her how long that had been going on, but she clammed up again. I kept nagging her to tell me, and finally she told me to shut up or she'd tell my mother what a slut I was."

She laughed.

"Which was a viable threat. I was no poster child for wholesome living. And even though my mother was no Betty Crocker, she wasn't like Bowie, she would've cared. She would've come down on me, hard."

"Bowie didn't care," said Milo.

"Bowie was scum, total lowlife. I guess that explains why Janie would do anything to avoid going home."

I thought of the bareness of Janie's room. Said, "Did she have a crash pad, or somewhere else she stayed?"

"Nowhere permanent. She'd sleep at my house, crash once in a while in those abandoned apartments north of Hollywood Boulevard. Sometimes she'd be gone for days and wouldn't tell me where she'd been. Still, the day after the party- after Janie and I had split up, I called Bowie. I despised the ground that lowlife walked on, but even so, I wanted to know Janie was okay. That's what I was trying to tell you: I made an attempt. But no one answered."

"When did you split up?"

"Soon after we got there. I cared about Janie. We were both so screwed up, that was our bond. I guess I had a bad feeling about the party- about her just disappearing in the middle of all that commotion. I never really forgot about her. Years later, when I was in college and learned how to use a computer, I tried to find her. Then after I got to law school and had access to legal databases, I tapped into all kinds of municipal records. California and the neighboring states. Property rolls, tax files, death notices. But she was nowhere-"

She picked up Milo's card. "L.A. Homicide means she was murdered in L.A. So why wasn't an L.A. death notice ever filed?"

"Good question, ma'am."

"Oh," said Waters. She sat back. "This is more than a reopened case, isn't it? Something got really screwed up."

Milo shrugged.

"Great. Wonderful. This is going to suck me in and screw me up no matter what I do, isn't it?"

"I'll do my best to prevent that, ma'am."

"You sound almost sincere." She rubbed her forehead, took a bottle of Advil out of a desk drawer, extricated a tablet, and swallowed it dry. "What else do you want from me?"