‘Was anybody here? D’you see anybody waiting here earlier?’
The girl looked up at him blankly, her pupils dilating like the pulse of a dying star. Trey tried her semi-comatose friend. ‘Please!’ He could hear the desperation in his own voice and it scared him. ‘I’m looking for someone. It’s really important.’
The second girl sat up suddenly, like a robot whose batteries just got replaced. ‘Looks like you found them, sugar!’ she grinned. ‘Behind you!’
Trey turned, just in time to feel the crackle of the Taser burning into his chest. The pain was excruciating. He fell backwards, slamming his head on the concrete.
Then everything went black.
CHAPTER NINE
‘Two pairs.’
Lou Goodman laid his tens and eights down on the Formica table. Mick Johnson, his partner, was addicted to heads-up poker. Goodman had learned the game to try to bond with the older man. It hadn’t worked, so far, but Goodman kept trying.
‘Straight.’ Johnson cracked a smug smile, laying out his six-through-ten. ‘Guess that means the breakfast’s on you.’
And the heart attack’s on you, my friend, Goodman thought, watching his partner begin to attack his second enormous stack of Denny’s pancakes, drowning in syrup and whipped cream.
The two detectives had escaped the station together to compare their progress, or lack of it, in the Lisa Flannagan murder case. Flannagan’s former lover, the billionaire Rams owner Willie Baden, still hadn’t returned from his vacation home in Cabo San Lucas. Conveniently, he’d been in Mexico the night Lisa was killed, vacationing with his loyal, long-suffering wife Valentina, and the couple were no doubt planning to stay there until the salacious press coverage about his and Lisa’s affair died down. Goodman had told Johnson about the connection between Valentina Baden and Brandon Grolsch’s mother, Frances. But a cursory call to Valentina’s charity offices had yielded nothing of use, which left the detectives with little option but to await the Badens’ return.
Meanwhile Johnson had drawn a blank with the dead girl’s family (no siblings, both parents dead, and an aunt in Reno who hadn’t seen Lisa since she was six) and Goodman was no further ahead in establishing whether Brandon Grolsch was dead or alive, never mind how his DNA came to be under Lisa’s fingernail. Like his parents, none of Brandon’s old friends or girlfriends had heard from him in eight months, and Goodman’s calls to all of the various rehabs and drop-in centers known to have treated Brandon in the past yielded nothing. Though it pained him to agree with Nathan Grolsch on anything, it did seem increasingly likely that Brandon was, indeed, dead. Unfortunately, ‘likely’ wasn’t good enough.
The only other clue they’d managed to find turned out to be a damp squib. There had been a lot of excitement when one of the techs recovered pieces of Lisa’s clothing from the stretch of freeway close to where the body was dumped. But when the lab reports came in they were inconclusive; the unusually heavy rain around the time of Lisa’s death had washed away any useful DNA traces. That left them with only the baffling fingernail cells to go on. So far there’d been no sign of Dr Roberts’ missing raincoat, the one she claimed to have lent Lisa the night she died, nor of the murder weapon.
All in all, it wasn’t exactly a triumphant start.
‘I don’t trust that psychologist broad,’ Johnson observed, as he did every time they discussed the case, pushing the cards aside and shoveling forkfuls of pancake into his open mouth. ‘I think we should talk to her again.’
Goodman frowned. Johnson’s growing obsession with and dislike of Dr Nikki Roberts, the victim’s beautiful therapist, was almost as disheartening as their lack of evidence.
‘Talk to her again and say what?’ he asked, exasperated.
‘We could ask for her notes,’ Johnson mumbled, spooning more cream onto his stack. ‘Session notes. With the victim.’
‘Not without a warrant, we couldn’t,’ said Goodman. ‘Doctor–patient information’s privileged.’
Johnson snorted derisively. ‘She’s not a doctor! She’s a frikkin quack. That lady has about as much medical training as the tarot card readers on Venice Beach.’
‘That’s simply not true, Mick,’ Goodman replied. ‘I don’t understand why you hate her so much.’
‘You wouldn’t,’ the fat man grumbled.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Goodman asked.
‘She’s attractive,’ Johnson said simply. ‘You like attractive women.’
‘And you don’t?’
Goodman pushed aside his cold coffee. He thought everything about Denny’s was disgusting. He couldn’t understand why so many of his colleagues seemed to love t
he place. ‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘it doesn’t matter whether she’s attractive or not. The point is, she has nothing to do with this. She’s a distraction, a sideshow. We need to focus on speaking to the Badens and we need to find Brandon Grolsch.’
Johnson grunted noncommittally. His ringing phone interrupted the sullen silence. ‘Yello?’
Goodman watched him slowly put down his fork and stop eating. He was listening intently to whatever was being said on the other end of the line. After what seemed like an age he said an abrupt, ‘OK. We’re on our way now,’ and hung up.
‘What was that about?’ asked Goodman.