Goodman had been part of it. And Haddon. And Carter. And the Badens.
And the one man Nikki had hated all along; the one person she’d been certain was a liar and a bigot and corrupt – Detective Johnson – he’d been the one good apple in the whole, rotten barrel.
He saved my life.
She was still staring at the ceiling when her surgeon came back in.
‘How are you doing?’ he asked. Mistaking Nikki’s tears for physical pain, he started to apologize about withdrawing the morphine. ‘I know it hurts like hell, and I’m truly sorry. But right now it’s important, vital, that you really feel it. That you stay connected to reality, no matter how hard that is.’
‘I understand,’ said Nikki, tears streaming down her face.
And for the first time in many months, she did.
CHAPTER FORTY
Two months later …
‘Aunt Nikki! Aunt Nikki! Look at me!’
Lucas Adler, Nikki’s godson and the oldest child of her BFF Gretchen, balanced precariously on the handlebars of his (moving) bike on only his hands. Arms outstretched, ten-year-old legs thrust ramrod straight in the air, he looked like a broken neck waiting to happen.
Thank God he’s riding on grass, thought Nikki, watching nervously from the back porch as her budding acrobat godson hurtled across the Adlers’ enormous lawn. She’d been staying with Gretchen and Adam for two months now, in one of the countless guest rooms at their Beverly Hills estate. It was as nice a place to recuperate as she could have wished for: a beautiful, luxurious home but also a happy one, full of kids and laughter and noise and company. Plenty to distract her from her own, brooding thoughts, on the days when she cared to be distracted. And on the days when she didn’t, Gretchen was there, refusing to take no for an answer, dragging Nikki up and out of her depression with a no-nonsense firmness that had quite probably saved Nikki’s life.
‘You’re alive, Nik,’ Gretchen never stopped reminding her. ‘You survived. There’s a reason for that.’
‘I didn’t survive,’ Nikki would answer. ‘I was saved. There’s a difference. Saved by a man who stands for everything I don’t. A racist, sexist, deceitful …’ She never seemed to run out of adjectives when it came to describing the loathsome Mick Johnson. And yet part of her knew that the anger pouring out of her towards the cop who saved her life was really anger at herself. For having misjudged him, at least in part. Just as she’d misjudged so many others.
‘Well, I don’t care if he lives under a bridge and eats billy goats,’ Gretchen replied robustly. ‘Anyone who saved your life is a good guy in my books. And besides, Nik, this isn’t about him, it’s about you. What are you going to do with the rest of your life? Because as much as we love having you, you can’t sit around on our porch reading the newspaper for the rest of your life.’
That much was true. At Gretchen’s prompting, Nikki had closed down her practice and given up her lease on the Century City office. She’d also put her and Doug’s Brentwood house – ‘that mausoleum’ as Gretchen called it – on the market.
‘You’re rich, you’re beautiful, you’re healthy, you’re educated,’ Gretchen insisted, thrusting listings for yet more swish New York condos under Nikki’s nose while she packed the kids’ lunchboxes one morning. Nikki moving to New York for a ‘fresh start’ had become a minor obsession with Gretchen, who Nikki was starting to suspect might be living out some sort of escape fantasy of her own. ‘You’re still young, Nik.’
‘I’m not young!’ Nikki laughed. ‘And neither are you.’
‘Well, we’re not old,’ Gretchen countered, slathering yet more peanut butter and jelly onto slices of crustless bread. ‘You don’t want to be alone for the rest of your life.’
Don’t I? Nikki wondered.
Watching Lucas deftly lower himself from his handstand and successfully plant his butt back on the saddle with a punch of triumph, she smiled and gave a thumbs up sign before returning to her newspaper.
Today was the first day of Haddon Defoe’s trial. The charges were money-laundering and corruption. Apparently, ever since Doug’s death, and perhaps even earlier, Haddon had been using his and their charity to channel Luis Rodriguez’s drug money, 90 per cent of it profits from the Krokodil trade. If prosecutors were to be believed, he’d earned millions of dollars in kickbacks, as had the other members of the LA ‘ring’, including the Badens. Willie had made a fortune laundering Rodriguez’s cash before he was murdered, funneling funds into everything from shopping center developments across Southern California to his beloved football team. As for Valentina, her connection to the cartel stretched back decades, with her charity, Missing, profiting from abductions and sex-trafficking, and acting as a front for illicit, even murderous, activity, just as Derek Williams had suspected.
It went deeper than that, though. According to prosecutors, Mrs Baden was a deeply troubled individual, and may even have had a hand in her own sister’s disappearance all those years ago. Old family friends had come out of the woodwork to speak openly about Valentina’s obsessive jealousy of her sister, María, who had evidently always been the more beautiful of the two sisters. Like so many other Americans, Gretchen couldn’t get enough of the story. Valentina’s trial wouldn’t begin for months at the earliest, if it happened at all. Since Willie’s murder, she’d been ‘resting’ at a secure psychiatric facility near Oxnard. But her trial-by-tabloid was already well underway, and utterly gripping.
Williams was right about so much, Nikki thought sadly. He totally called it on Missing. More importantly, he’d been the first person to blow the whistle on Rodriguez’s secret life and the waves of corruption and conspiracy that rippled out from it. But it was the FBI who were taking all the credit for that, the same way they were claiming to have ‘solved’ the mystery of Charlotte Clancy’s disappearance – now officially classified as murder.
In death as in life, thought Nikki, Williams was robbed of recognition. Poor Derek.
Nikki had attempted a complete detox from all media coverage of the trials. But with the LA Times devoting multiple pages to the story every day, and every cable news show leading with it, it wasn’t that easy simply to switch off. Not often did LA reporters get their teeth into a case involving quite so many of the city’s elite, from politicians to bankers, surgeons to cops, philanthropists to lawyers and even judges; not to mention the sensational ‘foreign meddling’ angle, with Russians and Mexicans fighting a deadly turf war on US soil. It certainly made a change from the usual inane showbiz gossip. It wasn’t only Gretchen who was addicted to the latest twists in the story. The entire city of LA was gripped.
‘Hey!’
Nikki jumped as Gretchen snuck up behind her, reaching over her wicker recliner and snatching the newspaper out of her hands.
‘You promised not to look, remember?’
‘I know,’ said Nikki. ‘But it’s Haddon’s trial. His picture’s all over the