Latent. See if they can get a match with anything off the murder weapon. Then call Massachusetts. Then look for any local Allison Jenningses. Then get on the computer and see if you can find any crimes similar to the Lowell homicide in LA over the past two years. And call the phone company for the local usage details on Speed Couriers.”
Ruiz looked perturbed. “Anything else, Master?”
“Start going through the calls. Maybe this Damon kid doesn’t have a phone, but maybe he does. And get the phone records for Lowell’s office and for his home.”
“And what will you be doing while I’m doing all of this shit?”
“I’m going to talk to Abby Lowell. Find out how she got her name in the paper. She’ll like talking to me more than she’d like talking to you.”
“What makes you so sure of that?”
He flashed her the famous Kev Parker grin. “Because I’m me, doll.”
With Ruiz out of his hair, Parker drove directly to Lenny Lowell’s office. He wanted to walk through the crime scene and around the street in daylight, without the distractions of the uniforms and the criminalists, a trainee, and the Robbery-Homicide goons. He found it centering, calming in a macabre sort of way, to spend time in the place where a victim had died.
He wasn’t sure he believed in ghosts, but he believed in souls. He believed in the essence of what made a being, the energy that defined a person as being alive. Sometimes when he walked a scene alone, he believed he could feel that energy around him, lingering. Other times there was nothing, emptiness, a void.
He had never paid attention to such ideas in his former life as an RHD hotshot. He had been too full of himself to sense much about anyone else around him, alive or dead. One good thing he had gained in his loss: awareness, the ability to step back from himself and see a clearer picture of what was around him.
The neighborhood was no more attractive in daylight than it had been at night, in the rain. Less so, actually. In the stark light of a gray morning, the age and dinge and tiredness of the place couldn’t hide.
The little two-story strip mall where Lowell’s office was located looked to have been built in the late fifties. Hard angles, flat roof, metal panels of faded color—pale aqua, washed-out pink, puke yellow. Aluminum frames around the windows. Across the street, the 24/7 Laundromat squatted, a low brick building with no discernible style.
The better scum defense attorneys had offices in Beverly Hills and Century City, where the world was beautiful. This was the kind of place where the lower end of the food chain hung their shingles. Though it seemed to Parker that old Lenny had been doing pretty well for himself.
Lowell’s Cadillac had been towed away from the back door of the office, taken away to be checked for evidence. The car was new but had been vandalized. His home address was a condo in one of the new downtown hotspots near the Staples Center. Pricey stuff for a guy whose clients used the revolving door at the bail bondsman’s office.
Parker wondered why the killer would have risked smashing the Cadillac’s windows if all he had wanted was to steal the money in the safe.
Was it an act of punitive rage? A former client, or a family member of a client who hadn’t beaten the rap, and blamed Lowell? Had the motive for the murder been revenge and the money a bonus? Or had the killer been after something he hadn’t found in the office? If that was the case, this murder was a much more complicated affair. Besides the money in his safe, what could a guy like Lenny Lowell have that would be worth killing for?
Parker unsealed the crime-scene tape and let himself in the back door of the office. The smell of stale cigarette smoke clung to the fake wood paneling, and had been absorbed into the acoustic-tile ceiling, dyeing it an oily yellow. The carpet was flat and utilitarian, and a color chosen to camouflage dirt.
There was a bathroom on the left. The criminalists had gone over it, dusting for prints, plucking hairs out of the sink drain, but they had found no trace of blood. If the killer had gotten Lenny Lowell’s blood on him, he’d been smart enough not to try to clean himself up here.
Lowell’s office was next. A decent-size space now awash in paper, and fingerprint dust residue, and bits of tape marking evidence locations on the rug. The lawyer’s blood had soaked into the carpet in a barely discernible stain (another selling point for the manufacturers: hides large bloodstains!). Drawers had been pulled out of file cabinets, out of the desk.
“You’re disturbing a crime scene,” Parker said.
Abby Lowell, sitting behind her father’s desk, startled and gasped, and banged her knee trying to stand up and back away.
“Oh, my God! Oh, my God, you scared me!” she scolded, her splayed hand pressed to her chest as if to keep her heart from leaping out.
“I have to ask what you’re doing here, Ms. Lowell,” Parker said, taking a seat across the desk from her. The arm of the chair was speckled with blood. “We seal crime scenes for a reason.”
“And do you make funeral arrangements?” she asked, gathering her composure around her again like the cashmere sweater she wore. “Do you know where my father kept his life insurance policy? Will you call the company for me? And what about his will? I’m sure he has one, but I have no idea where it is. I don’t know if he wanted to be buried or cremated. Can you help with that, Detective Parker?”
Parker shook his head. “No, I can’t. But if you had called me, I would have met you here and helped you look. I would have known what you touched and what you moved. I would have known if you had taken something other than your father’s will or his life insurance policy.”
“Are you accusing me of something?” she asked, sitting a little taller, arching one dark, elegant brow.
“No. I’m just saying. That’s how a crime scene works, Ms. Lowell. I can’t care that the victim was your father. It can’t matter to me if you think you have a right to come into this office. My job is very clear to me. The second your father ceased to breathe, he became my responsibility. I became his protector.”
“Too bad for my father you weren’t here to protect him from being killed. And by ‘you’ I don’t mean you personally, I mean the LAPD.”
“We can’t predict when and where a crime is about to happen,” Parker said. “If that were the case, I’d be out of a job. And frankly, you would be ahead of us in expectation of being able to protect your father. You knew his habits, you knew his friends, you probably knew his enemies. Maybe you knew he was into something that could have gotten him killed.”
She looked incredulous. “Are you now saying it’s my fault some thug broke into my father’s office and killed him? You’re incredible. How insensitive can you be?”
“You wouldn’t want to find out,” Parker said. He took his hat off and crossed his legs, settling in. “You didn’t seem all that sensitive yourself last night, if you don’t mind me saying, which you probably do. You walk into a room, your father is posing for the big chalk outline. You seemed more upset that your dinner plans had been disturbed.”
“Why? Because I didn’t fall down weeping? Because I didn’t become hysterical?” she asked. “I’m not the hysterical type, Detective. And I do my crying in private. You don’t know anything about my relationship with my father.”
“Fill me in, why don’t you? Were you and your father close?”
“In our own way.”
“What way was that?”
She sighed, looked away, looked back. The relationship, like most relationships, was more complicated than she wanted to attempt to articulate—or more complicated than she expected him to understand.
“We were friends. Lenny wasn’t much of a father. He wasn’t around. He cheated on my mother. He drank too much. His idea of quality time with me when I was a child was to drag me along with him to the racetrack or to a bookie bar, where he would promptly forget I existed. My parents divorced when I was nine years old.”
“Why didn’t you hate him?”
“Because he was the only father I had. And because, for all his faults, Lenny wasn’t a bad guy. He just couldn’t live up to expectations.”
Restless under scrutiny, she got out of her father’s chair and started a slow pace back and forth in front of his bookcases, arms crossed, eyes scanning the few things that hadn’t been knocked from the shelves in the ransacking. She was model gorgeous in the sapphire sweater and matching skirt, a pair of very nice black boots on her feet. “I was angry with him for a long time after he left. Mostly because I was stuck with my mother.”
