Jonathan Kellerman - Heartbreak Hotel

I said, “H.c.? Your hard case?”

He laughed. “Good guess. Hot chick. That’s what I’ve been calling Blondie when I asked them to check.”

“Possibly not futile” was enough to get him speeding back to the station.

Detective II Melanie-Anne Howe worked in the big room where every D but Milo operated. Her desk was in the center, neatly organized, as was she: a medium-sized brunette around forty with a round, freckled face, Cupid’s-bow lips, and brown eyes slightly blurred by black-rimmed hipster eyeglasses.

She said, “Sorry for not getting back sooner, I was on vacation, just caught up with my messages.”

“Have fun?”

“Disney cruise with Bob and three kids? Entire week, I got to have two Margaritas and one I couldn’t finish because the baby started throwing up right after she went to bed.”

She wrinkled her nose, picked up a blue folder lying next to her computer.

Thin file; too bad. Milo frowned.

Howe said, “Yup, not much unfortunately — it’s too loud in here, let’s find a place.”

A place was out on the sidewalk where Howe lit up a cigarette. “Basically, I quit. Basically, I cheat. As in three puffs and you’re out, Mr. Winston.”

She demonstrated, dropping the smoke on the sidewalk and grinding it dead with the toe of a medium-heeled pump. “When I got back I found your note and thought maybe. Even though my case never went anywhere and we’re talking two months ago.”

Her hands flexed. “My victim’s memory was hazy in the first place and she was no angel. Officially that doesn’t matter but yadda yadda, we know how it really is, try finding a D.A. wanting to put a stripper on the stand in a he-said-she-said. Top of that, the second time I talked to her, she’d changed her tune completely, shut down and refused to cooperate. I tried a third time and she went AWOL, dead phone, not at her home address or at work.”

I said, “Voluntarily?”

Howe’s eyebrows rose. “Yes, she’s alive and kicking. Literally. Switched from a club in Commerce to one near the airport but I’m not pursuing it.”

Milo said, “New job, new phone. Think she shut down ’cause she’s scared?”

“She is scared, Milo, but not the way you might think. I was gentle with her, woman-to-woman, she was totally into filing charges if it got that far. Then, no dice and she told me why. Something she’d neglected to mention at the beginning: She has a rich boyfriend, some computer geek she gave a lap-dance to, knows nothing about it. In between interviews, she moved in with him, is petrified he’ll find out.”

Milo said, “Lap-dance leads to true love and he thinks she’s a choir girl?”

Howe said, “With a geek, who knows? They can be like raw meat to girls in the know. You’ve probably got a technical term for that, Doctor.”

I said, “Raw-meat-itis.”

Melanie Howe laughed. Then she told us the story.

Vicki Elena Vasquez, twenty-two, performing, variously, as “Fatima,” “Selena,” or “Madrilena,” had arrived in L.A. thirteen months ago after a youth misspent in Texas and Louisiana. Arrests for DUI, shoplifting, and petty theft, but clean since she’d turned Californian and began earning decent money taking off her clothes in sweaty dumps mislabeled as gentlemen’s clubs.

A little over two months ago, after a double shift at the City of Commerce skin-palace, she’d driven to a hipster bar west of downtown called Brave Losers, a place she’d been once before with “other girls, I don’t remember who or when.”

Two Zombies into the early-morning hours, she’d struck up a conversation with a “hot blond chick and a hot dude,” neither of whose names she could recall ever knowing.

Nor could she remember leaving with the couple.

“They roofied me or something.”

She’d woken up in an unknown place at an unknown time, tied to the posts of an unfamiliar bed, with the man’s penis up her anus and the organ of “a fat dude sitting on me” in her mouth. At the same time, the blond woman performed cunnilingus on her “but did it rough, like teeth, she hurt me. All of them did. I thought I was gonna die.”

At that point in the narrative, Melanie Howe’s notes documented, “V is crying and exhibiting signs of extreme anxiety: twitching, blinking, scrunching her face.”

As Vasquez realized what was happening, she tried to protest and was slapped hard in the face. Then someone’s hand, she couldn’t be sure whose, grasped her neck and exerted pressure until she began to lose consciousness.

“I didn’t want to die so I let them do what they wanted.”

The triple rape continued “for a long time,” until the assailants got off her and told her to forget them if she didn’t want to die. The good-looking man then slapped her face several times, the woman pinched her nipples, and the fat man smacked her rear and said, “Nice place to visit but I wouldn’t wanna live there.” She was then blindfolded tightly and pulled into a shower where several hands scrubbed her, “poking and rubbing deep inside everywhere. It hurt.”

Her vision still obstructed, she was dried off. A piece of cloth landed on her shoulder and she was ordered to get dressed. The cloth was the black Zara micro-dress she’d worn to the bar and after much effort she managed to get into it. Her underwear, stockings, and shoes were left behind as she was dragged outside and shoved into the backseat of a car. A silent ride of unknown duration ensued until the vehicle stopped and she was shoved out onto a hard surface.

She lay there woozy, stunned, and terrified until she heard the car drive away and managed to remove the blindfold — her own black stockings. She was in an alley. Her purse lay a few feet away. Two hundred dollars, her share of the cash tips she’d earned that evening, was gone, but her credit cards and cellphone were in place.

“Considerate rapists,” said Milo.

I said, “Smugness. They’re telling her, go ahead, call for help, we couldn’t care less.”

Melanie Howe said, “It did puzzle me, why leave anything? But now that I’m hearing it, you’re probably right, Doctor. Anyway, she 911’d and because it was an alley it took a while to find her.”

Milo said, “Alley, where?”

“That’s the thing, she didn’t know. Dispatch finally got her to use the phone and GPS. East Brentwood, apartment district, Westwood, just north of Wilshire. She got taken to the health center at the U. I was on that night, by the time I got there the rape kit had been done. Totally negative for semen, foreign blood, any kind of fluid. So they used condoms or the shower did the trick. That was a letdown but I was encouraged because initially she seemed to be a good victim, able to describe them enough to work up sketches. Also, the modus was pretty specialized, we don’t see many mixed-gender gangbangs. Between that and how calculated and callous it was, I figured a similar would show up somewhere. Fortunately, the drawings got done. Unfortunately, she changed her mind.”

She opened the file, showed us three faces.

Crude and ill-defined renderings, way below Shimoff-quality and in another context, probably useless. But once you’d seen Gerard Waters’s and Henry Bakstrom’s photos, the connection was easy.

The female suspect was another story, just another proto-blonde. Not as pretty as in Shimoff’s rendering. This artist had drawn her slightly off kilter, probably unintentionally.

Milo showed Howe the mugshots.

She said, “Oh, God. If I’d had these to show her she might’ve stuck with me. Then again, with Geeky in the background, probably not.”

“Think showing them to her now could pull up more info, Mel?”