near UCLA. One was registered to a Chen, Lu, who lived in Chinatown—on his way home.
He plotted all twelve, and stared at the map with his splotches of red ink like bloodstains scattered over the city. Which car did Damon have access to? Where the hell did he live? Why was he so secretive about it? He didn’t have a record. And if he had one under another name, who in his day-to-day life would know? If he was living under an alias, the only way he was going to be found out was to be arrested or have his fingerprints turn up at a crime scene. They had the partial prints from the murder weapon, but not enough to get a hit running them through the system.
Maybe the kid was a career criminal. Or maybe he was hiding from someone. Whatever the reason for all his secrecy, Damon was driving around in somebody’s Mini Cooper. And if he hadn’t killed Lenny Lowell, why would he search out Lenny’s daughter? How would he know anything about this missing something everyone wanted so badly?
And why had Robbery-Homicide shown up at that scene?
Parker put his head in his hands and rubbed his face, his scalp, the corded muscles in the back of his neck. He needed fresh air, and he needed answers. He put his coat on and went outside in search of both.
The clock had struck rush hour two hours ago. The streets were nose-to-tail cars, everyone in such a hurry to get somewhere that no one was getting anywhere. A few people came out of Central Bureau and headed for cars —stragglers. The shift had changed a couple of hours ago, and the business day was over. Things would soon be settling down for the night.
Parker walked to his car and slipped behind the wheel. This one was the workhorse, a five-year-old Chrysler Sebring convertible. He drove it to work, drove it to crime scenes when he was on call. Time off the job was for the bottle-green vintage Jag, his beautiful, sexy, secret lover. He smiled a little at that. Then the smile faded as he remembered Ruiz asking him about the car. She’d heard rumors, she’d said.
He dug his cell phone out of his coat pocket, dialed Andi Kelly, and opened with: “What have you done for me lately, gorgeous?”
“Jesus, you’re a pushy son of a bitch. I have priorities other than you, you know. Cocktail hour is at hand, my friend. I have a date with a seventeen-year-old.”
“Still pounding down the scotch, huh?”
“How do you know it isn’t a young man?”
“Because you’re too smart to tell me if it was. Seventeen isn’t legal, not that you didn’t already know that.”
“Besides which, it would be gross,” Kelly declared. “I’d be old enough to be the kid’s mother. That’s way too Demi Moore for me. I’ve never been interested in boys, anyway, only men,” she purred.
Parker cleared his throat. “So? Do you have anything for me?”
“My memory isn’t so good before dinner,” she said. “Meet me at Morton’s in West Hollywood. You’re buying.”
22
Jace parked Madame Chen’s car in the narrow space reserved for her behind the office. He wiped down the interior with wet paper napkins, trying to erase any sign he’d been behind the wheel, or touched a door, or left a handprint on a seat. Then he stood beside the car for he didn’t know how long, trying to decide what to do next.
A thick fog had rolled in off the ocean and settled into the nooks and crannies of the city, a milky filter softening the lines of buildings, diffusing the yellow light glowing in windows. He felt like he was a character in a dream, like he could be gone in the blink of an eye and no one would quite remember him.
Maybe that was what he was supposed to do—go underground completely. That was what Alicia would have done. She would have packed them up without a word, moved out in the middle of the night. They would have popped up like toadstools in another part of town, with new names and no explanation why.
Jace had wondered why, many times. When he was Tyler’s age, he had dreamed up all kinds of stories about his mother, always painting her as the heroine. She was protecting her children from one kind of danger or another. As he had grown older and wiser, more savvy about life and the streets, he had wondered all the time if Alicia had been evading the police.
Why, he couldn’t imagine. His mother had been a quiet, kind person who had made him cry after she caught him shoplifting just by telling him how disappointed in him she was.
“Why don’t you want to come into the light, JayCee?”
Madame Chen came into focus as she spoke, as if she had just magically appeared beneath the dim light over the office door.
“I have a lot on my mind,” Jace said.
“Your thoughts are heavy like stones.”
“I’m sorry I’m so late with your car, Madame Chen.”
“Where did you go to fix the bicycle? The moon?”
Jace opened his mouth to answer, but his voice stuck in his throat like a ball of dough. He thought again of the day his mother had caught him stealing.
“I have to talk to you about something important,” he said at last. “In private.”
She nodded and went back inside. Jace followed, head down. She motioned him to a hard wooden straight- backed chair beside her desk, and kept her back to him as she made two cups of tea from the ever-present hot pot perched precariously on the window ledge above the cluttered desk.
“They have no phones on the moon, I suppose,” she said matter-of-factly. “Moon men have no families worrying about them.”
“I’m in a bad situation, Madame Chen,” Jace said.
“You are in trouble,” she corrected him, turning to face him. She couldn’t hide her reaction. The color left her face, her small mouth formed an O of shock.
He had tried to clean up with some paper napkins and a bottle of water he got out of a vending machine outside a Mexican market in Los Feliz. Water didn’t wash away cuts or bruises or swollen knobs of flesh. He knew he looked like he’d been on the wrong side of a prizefight.
Madame Chen said something in Chinese, her voice soft and frightened. Her hand was shaking as she set a cup on three square inches of desktop not covered in paperwork. She lowered herself to her chair. Jace could see her gathering her composure, trying to come up with a strategy for a situation completely beyond her experience.
“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me everything.”
Jace tried to take a deep breath and let it out. His body reminded him not to do that. He had gone round and round in his mind trying to decide what to tell her, what not to tell her, what would be safer for her, for Tyler.
“You might hear some things about me,” he said. “Bad things. I want you to know they aren’t true.”
She arched a brow. “You think so little of my loyalty that you would say this to me? You are like a son to me.”
If her son was living a secret life under half a dozen aliases. If her son was wanted for murder and assault. If her son had someone trying to kill him.
Madame Chen had no children. Maybe she stuck with him because of that, Jace thought. She had no frame of reference.
“The attorney I was delivering a package for last night was found murdered after I’d been in his office. The police are looking for me.”
“Bah! They are crazy! You would never kill a man!” she said emphatically, offended at the idea. “You did not kill him. They cannot put you in jail for something you didn’t do. I will call my attorney. Everything will be fine.”
“It’s not that simple, Madame Chen. They probably have my fingerprints from the office.”
“Why would the police think you would kill this man?” she asked, calmer. “What motive would you have to do
