He hoped she found the happiness she was searching for in New York, but somehow, he doubted that she would. Sadness seemed to cling to her like mist to the ocean.
Oh well. He’d done what he could.
Like she’d said, it was time to let go of the past.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
It was another scorching day in downtown LA, up in the high nineties, but inside the Grand Ballroom at the Hollywood and Highland Entertainment Complex, all was cool. Sitting towards the back of the packed auditorium, directly below an air conditioning vent, Nikki wished she’d brought a cardigan. Today was Detective Johnson’s medal of valor ceremony, and she’d flown in specially, more to honor a promise than from any desire to be there. It was painful coming back to LA so soon, but at least she would manage to kill three birds with one stone on this trip: Johnson’s ceremony, the Kovak parole hearing, and the final trip to her attorney’s office to sign the sale papers on her Brentwood house. After this, she could fly away and never look back. In theory anyway.
‘We’re here today to celebrate an act of extraordinary courage,’ the Chief of Police, Brian Finnigan announced proudly from the podium. ‘Members of our police force are called upon to perform acts of courage every single day in the line of duty. And all of those acts are worthy of recognition. But occasionally, an officer steps outside the bounds of his, or her, normal service …’
He droned on in this vein for a number of minutes to a rapt audience, almost all of them either cops themselves or their families. Beside him on the podium, Mick Johnson sat looking awkward and heavier than ever in his tight-fitting formal uniform, with his stomach spilling over the belt and his broad chest looking as if it might burst, Superman style, through his starched shirt at any moment, sending the buttons flying around the room like bullets. Poor man, thought Nikki. He deserved the medal and was proud of his honor, but would clearly far rather have received the thing anonymously in the mail. Aware of the media presence – anything connected to the Zombie Killings and the Rodriguez Krok Ring, however tangential, brought them out of the woodwork like maggots – Nikki had signaled to Johnson earlier, making him aware of her presence, but after that slunk back into the shadows. Dressed to disappear in a shapeless, gray-black shift dress and dark glasses, with no make-up on and her longer, grayer hair tied back in a messy bun, she was unrecognizable as the glamorous Dr Nikki Roberts people remembered from the TV news reports.
While the commissioner rambled on, her mind wandered.
It was only three weeks since she’d moved out of Gretchen’s place, but already it felt like years. The day she left, all the LA channels ran the breaking news story that the prime suspect in the Zombie Killings, Brandon Grolsch, had finally been tracked down to an apartment in Fresno. Sordid details of his affair with Valentina Baden had already begun to emerge, and the live-action cameras were all trained with an expectant hush on the Fresno apartment as the police broke in.
In the days prior to that, Charlotte Clancy’s remains had been found at long last, in a shallow grave on the outskirts of Mexico City, their whereabouts divulged by Carter Berkeley as part of his plea deal for turning state’s witness. The news had been full of tearful, angry images of the Clancy family, furious that Carter had received only a four-year sentence for his role in laundering Rodriguez’s drug money and covering up their daughter’s death, while Dr Haddon Defoe, a far more minor figure in the Los Angeles ‘Krok’ ring, received a ten-year term. Even worse was the media’s fawning adoration for Anne Bateman, the beautiful young violinist who had been married to Rodriguez and claimed to have had no prior knowledge of any of his crimes. Anne’s trial would not begin for some months, the list of charges against her being longer and more complex than some of the other players involved.
But for Nikki, the day they found Brandon Grolsch was the hardest, and the most personal. Nikki and Gretchen watched together from Nikki’s bedroom, standing over her half-packed suitcase, as armed police broke down the door of Brandon’s apartment and entered. Nikki held her breath and waited. She was still watching when, an hour and a half later, the same men emerged bearing a body bag on a stretcher. Brandon was dead from an apparent overdose. Over the course of the afternoon it emerged that his corpse was already partially rotted when the cops found it. That he’d likely been dead and undisturbed for several days, if not weeks.
Nikki sank down on the edge of the bed, feeling suddenly faint.
‘You shouldn’t let it get to you,’ Gretchen told her. ‘He tried to kill you.’
‘I know.’
‘You can’t save everyone, Nik.’
‘I know that too.’
The problem was that, apparently, Nikki couldn’t save anyone. If she’d succeeded with Brandon, if she’d only been able to help him, Lisa Flannagan would still be alive. So would Trey – maybe.
That last day at Gretchen’s place got even worse at dinner, after Adam got home.
‘Guess what?’ Adam asked innocently, kissing both his wife and Nikki on the cheek as they all sat down at the table with the kids.
‘I heard today they’re gonna make a movie about the Zombie Killings.’
‘Cool!’ Nikki’s godson Lucas piped up excitedly. ‘Is Aunt Nik gonna be in it? Who’s playing her?’
‘You’re not serious,’ Nikki looked aghast at Adam.
‘Totally serious,’ he said, helping himself to a large bowlful of Gretchen’s Thai beef salad and a cold beer. ‘There’s already a three-parter script in the works at Warner. Part One’s the Charlotte Clancy case, set in Mexico City in the early 2000s. Part Two flashes forward to the Flannagan and Raymond murders, with some of the Krok wars thrown in. I’m guessing your character would have to be central in there.’
‘Awesome!’ the Adler children exclaimed in unison.
‘And Part Three covers Rodriguez’s LA drugs ring and how it got smashed, ending with Willie Baden’s murder and a big shoot-out scene at the warehouse. That’s more of a Michael Bey, Fast & Furious type vibe, I think, while the first two scripts are a little more slow burn. Like Traffic. Did you ever see that movie? With Michael Douglas?’
Nikki sat frozen with shock. Gretchen’s husband was a sweetheart. Adam would never knowingly try to upset her. Yet he seemed strangely oblivious to how awful it was to talk about these murders as if they were entertainment. As if Lisa and Trey and Brandon and even Nikki herself were fictional characters, to be polished and airbrushed and regurgitated onto the screen for general public amusement.
‘I know you don’t even want to think about this right now,’ Adam plowed on. ‘But this could actually be great news for you, Nikki. If these pictures get off the ground, or even if they don’t and they never get past the development stage, people are gonna be beating down your door to act as a consultant, maybe even to exec produce. Those gigs can be really lucrative.’
That dinner was the moment Nikki’s last ounce of hesitation or regret at leaving LA left her. This city was insane and rotten to the core. Even really good people like the Adlers became tainted by it after a while. As for Nikki, she wasn’t so much ‘tainted’ as immersed, covered in a stench of corruption and violence and death and lies and filth so strong that she didn’t know if she would ever fully get rid of it.
A ripple of applause broke her reverie. Suddenly she was back in the auditorium. Detective Johnson. The medal ceremony.
‘And now, without further ado,’ the commissioner was saying, ‘it is my duty, my honor and my pleasure to present the LAPD Medal of Valor to Detective Michael Johnson of the Homicide Division. Detective Johnson, please stand.’