Michael Connelly - Chasing the Dime

"Did he find her?" Pierce blurted out.

Langwiser immediately held her hand up to quiet him.

"Is that Mr. Pierce there? I didn't know we had him listening in, Janis. Speaking of tricks, that was nice of you to tell me."

"I didn't have to."

"And I didn't have to tell him about the second recorder once I told him the conversation was being recorded. So shove that up your ass. I gotta go."

"Wait. Did you find Lucy LaPorte?"

"That's official police business, ma'am. You stay in your loop and I'll stay in mine.

Good-bye now."

Renner hung up and Langwiser closed her phone.

"I told you not to say anything."

"Sorry. It's just that I've been trying to reach her since Sunday. I wish I could just find out where she is and whether she's okay or needs help. If anything's happened, it's my fault."

There I go again, he thought. Finding my own fault in things, offering public admissions of guilt.

Langwiser didn't seem to notice. She was putting away her phone and notebook.

"I'll make some calls on it. I know some people in Pacific that are a little bit more cooperative than Detective Renner. Like his boss, for example."

"Will you call me as soon as you find out something?"

"I have your numbers. Meantime, you stay away from all of this. With any luck, that call will scare Renner away for the time being, maybe make him second-guess his moves.

You're not out of the woods on this yet, Henry. I think you're almost in the clear but other things could still happen. Keep your head down and stay away from it."

"Okay, I will."

"And next time the doctor comes in, get a list of the specific drugs that would have been in your system when Renner recorded you."

"Okay."

"Do you know when you are getting out of here yet?"

"Supposed to be anytime now."

Pierce looked at his watch. He'd been waiting almost two hours for Dr. Hansen to sign him out.

He looked back at Langwiser. She looked ready to go. But she was looking at him like she wanted to ask something but wasn't sure how to ask it.

"What?"

"I don't know. I was just thinking that it was a long jump in your thinking. When you were just a boy, I mean, and you thought your stepfather was the reason your sister left."

Pierce didn't say anything.

"Anything else you want to tell me about that?"

Pierce looked up at the blank television screen again and saw nothing there. He shook his head.

"No, that's about it."

He doubted he had gotten the line by her. He assumed that criminal defense lawyers dealt with liars as a matter of course and were as expert at picking up the subtleties of eye movement and body inflection as machines designed for it. But Langwiser simply nodded and let it slide.

"Well, I need to go. I have an arraignment downtown."

"Okay. Thanks for coming to see me here. That was nice."

"Part of the service. I'll make some calls while I'm driving in and let you know what I hear about Lucy LaPorte or anything else. But meantime, you really need to stay away from this. Okay? Go back to work."

Pierce held his hands up in surrender.

"I'm done with it."

She smiled professionally and left the room.

Pierce detached the phone from the bed's side guard and was punching in Cody Zeller's number when Nicole James stepped into the room. He put the phone back in its place.

Nicole had agreed to come by to drive Pierce home after he was checked out by Dr.

Hansen and released. She silently registered pain as she studied Pierce's damaged face.

She had visited him often during his hospital stay but it seemed as though she could not get used to seeing the stitch zippers.

Pierce had actually taken her frowns and sympathetic murmurings as a good sign. He would consider it to have been worth all the trouble if it got them back together.

"Poor baby," she said, lightly patting his cheek. "How do you feel?"

"Pretty good," he told her. "But I'm still waiting on the doctor to sign me out. Almost two hours now."

"I'll go out and check on things."

She went back to the door but looked back at Pierce.

"Who was that woman?"

"What woman?"

"Who just left your room."

"Oh, she's my lawyer. Kaz got her for me."

"Why do you need her if you have Kaz?"

"She's a criminal defense lawyer."

She stepped away from the door and went back closer to the bed.

"Criminal defense lawyer? Henry, people who get wrong numbers usually don't need lawyers. What is going on?"

Pierce shrugged his shoulders.

"I don't really know anymore. I got into something and now I'm just trying to get out in one piece. Let me ask you something."

He got off the bed and walked up to her. His balance was off at first but then he was okay. He lightly touched her forearms with his hands. A suspicious look came across her face.

"What?"

"When we leave here, where are you taking me?"

"Henry, I told you, I'm taking you home. Your home."

Even with the puffiness and the road map of stitches, his disappointment was visibly evident.

"Henry, we agreed to at least try this. So let's try."

"I just thought…"

He didn't finish. He didn't know exactly what he thought or how to put it into words.

"You seem to think that what happened with us all happened so quickly," she said. "And that it can be fixed quickly."

She turned and headed back toward the door.

"And I'm wrong."

She looked back at him.

"Months, Henry, and you know it. Maybe longer. We hadn't been good together in a long, long time."

She went through the door to look for the doctor. Pierce sat on the bed and tried to remember the time they were on the Ferris wheel and everything seemed so perfect in the world.

Blood was everywhere. A trail of it across the beige rug, on the brand-new bed, on two of the walls and all over the telephone. Pierce stood in the doorway of his bedroom and looked at the mess. He could remember almost none of what had happened after Wentz and his sidekick monster had left.

He stepped into the room and bent down next to the phone. He gingerly lifted the receiver with two fingers and held it a good three inches from his head, just enough to hear the tone and determine if he had any messages.

There were none. He reached over and unplugged the phone and then carried it into the bathroom to attempt to clean it.

Dried blood was splashed across the sink. There were bloody fingerprints on the medicine cabinet door. Pierce had no memory of going into the bathroom after the attack.

But the place was a mess. The blood had dried hard and brown and it reminded him of the mattress he had seen the police remove from Lilly Quinlan's apartment.

As he used wet tissues to wipe off the phone as best he could, he had a memory of going to a movie called Curdled a few years earlier with Cody Zeller. It was about a woman whose job was to clean up bloody crime scenes after the police were finished with the onsite investigation. He now wondered if there was really such a job and a service he could call. The prospect of cleaning up the bedroom was not attractive to him in the least.

After the phone was reasonably clean he plugged it back into the wall in the bedroom and sat down with it on an unstained edge of the mattress. He checked for messages and again there were none. He thought it unusual. He had not been home for nearly seventy-two hours, yet there were no messages. He thought maybe Lilly Quinlan's page had finally been taken off the L.A. Darlings website. Then he remembered something else. He punched in his number at Amedeo Technologies and waited for the call to ring through to Monica Purl's desk.

"Monica, it's me. Did you change my phone number?"

"Henry? What are -"