“I’m a student, not stupid. Unless a judge tells me I have to, you get nothing confidential out of this office.”
Color began to creep upward from Kyle’s starched white collar. “Do you want us to solve your father’s murder, Ms. Lowell? Or is there some reason you’d rather we didn’t?”
“Of course I want it solved,” she snapped. “But I also know that I now have to look out for my father’s clients and for the best interest of his practice. If I just hand over privileged information, that could open my father’s estate to lawsuits, compromise ongoing cases, and could very well keep me from my chosen profession. I don’t want to be disbarred before I even take the bar exam, Detective Kyle. This has to be done by the book.”
“You don’t need to compromise yourself, Ms. Lowell. Names and addresses aren’t privileged,” Parker said calmly, pulling her attention away from Kyle. “And it’s not necessary for us to access your father’s files. The criminal records of his clients are readily available. When was the last time you spoke with your father?”
He saw more value in trying to get Abby Lowell on his side than in bullying her into an adversarial position. She wasn’t some weak, hysterical woman, terrified of the police, which was what Kyle wanted her to be. She had already dug in her heels, put a chip on her shoulder, and dared him to knock it off.
She rubbed a slightly trembling manicured hand across her forehead and let a slightly shaky sigh escape, showing a tiny crack in the armor. “I spoke with Lenny around six-thirty. We were supposed to meet for dinner at Cicada. I got there early, had a drink, called him on my cell phone. He said he might be a little late,” she said, her voice tightening, her dark eyes filling. She blinked the tears back. “He said he was waiting for a bike messenger to pick something up.”
“Did he say what?”
“No.”
“Late in the day to call a messenger.”
She shrugged. “Probably something he needed to get to a client.”
“Do you know what service he used?”
“Whichever could pick up and deliver the fastest and the cheapest.”
“If we can find out which service, their dispatch office will have the address the package was going to, maybe a vague description of what was in it, and the name of the messenger they sent,” Parker said. “Do you know if the messenger ever arrived?”
“No. I told you, when I last spoke with Lenny, he was waiting.”
Parker glanced over at the safe, frowning.
“That would be stupid,” she said, reading his mind. “Like you said, his dispatch office will have the messenger’s name.”
Which could very well not be real, Parker thought. Bike messengers weren’t known for being stable, family types. They tended to be loners, oddballs, living a hand-to-mouth existence. The way they raced the downtown streets—balls-out, no fear for life or limb, no regard for themselves or anyone else—it wasn’t a stretch to imagine more than one of them was hopped up on something.
So some down-on-his-luck junkie messenger shows up for a package, gets a look in Lowell’s open safe, decides to elevate his social standing, kills Lowell, takes the money, and vanishes into the night, never to be seen again. The guy could be on a bus to Vegas while they stood around talking about it.
“It’s not my job to draw conclusions, Ms. Lowell. I have to consider all possibilities.
“Who called 911?” he asked, turning again to Jimmy Chew.
“The ever-popular anonymous citizen.”
“Anything around here open or inhabited?”
“Not on a night like this. There’s a 76 station and a bail-bonds place down the street, on the other side. And the 24/7 Laundromat.”
“Go see if anyone at the Laundromat has anything to say.”
“They’re closed.”
“I thought you said it was called 24/7.”
“It’s raining,” Chew said, incredulous. “Me and Stevie cruised past around six-fifteen. The place was locked up tight. Besides, they quit being open twenty-four after their night clerk was robbed and raped six, eight months ago.”
Kyle smirked. “Great neighborhood you work, Parker.”
“Killers are killers, no matter what neighborhood you’re in, Bradley,” Parker said. “The only difference is, you can’t make the news off the murders here.”
He turned back to Abby Lowell. “How were you notified of your father’s death, Ms. Lowell?”
She looked at him like she thought he might be pulling something on her. “One of the officers called.”
Parker looked at Chew, who held up his hands in denial, then looked at Chew’s partner, who shook his head.
“Someone called you. On your cell phone,” Parker said.
Abby Lowell’s eyes bounced from one man to another, uncertain. “Yes. Why?”
“What did the caller say to you?”
“That my father had been killed, and could I please come to his office. Why?”
“May I see your cell phone?”
“I don’t understand,” she said, hesitantly pulling her phone out of a pocket in her trench coat.
“LAPD wouldn’t tell you something like that over the phone, Ms. Lowell,” Parker said. “An officer or detective would have come to your residence to give you the news.”
Her eyes widened as the implication sank in. “Are you telling me I was on the phone with my father’s killer?”
“What time did you get the call?”
“Maybe twenty minutes ago. I was at the restaurant.”
“Do you have a call list on that thing?” Parker asked, nodding toward the phone she clutched in her hand.
“Yes.” She scrolled through a list of commands and brought up the screen that listed calls received. Her hand was trembling. “I don’t recognize the number.”
“You didn’t recognize the voice?”
“No. Of course not.”
Parker held his hand out. “May I?”
Abby Lowell handed him the phone. She couldn’t jerk her hand back from it quickly enough, as if it had just been revealed to her that the thing was in fact a live reptile. Parker checked the number, hit the button to call it back, then listened as it rang unanswered on the other end.
“Oh, my God,” Lenny Lowell’s daughter breathed. She pressed a hand to her lips and blinked away the gathering tears.
Parker turned back to Chew. “Track down the owner of the Laundromat. Find out who was working and what time they closed. I want that person located. I want to know if there was a single living being in proximity of this office between six-thirty and seven-fifteen. If a rat crawled by the back door and someone saw it, I want to know.”
“Roger that, boss.” Chew flipped Kyle’s smirk back at him as he went to speak to his partner.
Parker went to the vic’s desk. The old Rolodex was closed. He flipped the cover up with the tip of a pen, then turned to the Latent Prints tech. “Cynthia, I want every print you can lift off this thing, inside and out. Every frigging card, but priority on this one.”
Abby Lowell’s. Beneath her name was her home number, her cell number, her address.
“Go ahead and cover the bases for us, Parker,” Kyle said tightly as he stepped in beside Parker behind the desk. “But don’t get too cozy. If the word comes down from the mountain, you’re out.”
Parker stared at him for a second, then a new voice called from the front office. “Parker, please tell me your DB had a heart attack. I need a nice simple ‘natural causes’ so I can go home. It’s raining.”
Diane Nicholson, coroner’s investigator for the County of Los Angeles, forty-two, and a long cool drink of gin to look at. She took no shit and no prisoners—an attitude that had earned her the fear and respect of cops all over the city. No one messed with a Nicholson crime scene.
She stopped just inside the door to Lowell’s private office and looked down at Lenny Lowell. “Oh, shit.” This
