called and tipped me on Pershing Square? Nice and close, so you could hang up the phone, turn your head, and give him a blowjob?”
She didn’t answer, and that spoke volumes.
“Who tipped Kyle?”
Ruiz opened her handbag, took out a cigarette, and lit it. “I did,” she said on a stream of blue smoke. “Damon really did call for you.”
“And you called Davis, so RHD could set up the whole thing,” Parker said. “In a public park at rush hour. An uncontrollable situation in an uncontrolled environment. I would say that trumps what I did.”
He reached out and yanked the cigarette from her lips. “Don’t smoke at a crime scene, Ruiz. Haven’t I taught you anything?”
He crushed the cigarette beneath the toe of his shoe, took it to a trash can, and threw it away.
“Parker! I’m not done talking to you!” she said, doing the high-heel jog to catch up with him. “I need to get your statement. I have to file the preliminary report.”
Parker looked at her like she smelled. “They couldn’t send a real detective?”
“I’m on the rotation until my paperwork from IA comes through.”
“Well, that’s your problem. I’ve said everything I have to say to you.”
He started to walk away again, then hesitated. “That’s not exactly true.”
Ruiz waited, stiffening for a tirade.
“I doctor scripts for Matt Connors.”
He might have told her he was a hermaphrodite. Her expression would have been the same. “What?”
“My big secret,” Parker said. “I doctor scripts and serve as a technical consultant to Matt Connors.”
“The movie guy?”
“Yeah. The movie guy.”
“Jesus!” she breathed. “Why didn’t you just tell us?”
Parker smiled a bitter, crooked smile and walked away, shaking his head. In this town, he probably would have gotten a promotion if he’d let on he was connected in the industry. He hadn’t wanted the attention. All he had wanted from LAPD was a chance to make it back from purgatory, and to do it through his own sweat and brainpower.
He could have held Renee Ruiz down and explained that to her nine thousand times, and she would never have understood.
The bitter irony was, in fighting for his own resurrection, he had ultimately revealed the fall of a woman he cared about. Yin and yang. Everything in life came with a price.
“I want my money back,” he mumbled as he approached Bradley Kyle.
Kyle stood amid a tiny forest of evidence markers, trying to boss one of the SID people around. He turned and smirked at Parker. “You really screwed the pooch this time, Parker. Or is that a poor choice of words? I hear you and Nicholson—”
Parker hit him so hard with a right cross, Kyle spun halfway around before he hit the dirt. Everyone stopped what they were doing, but no one made a move toward him.
Parker turned to Moose Roddick and said, “All the paperwork on the Lowell homicide is in my trunk. Come and get it.”
The news vans had rolled in. The choppers were swarming. They were just in time for breaking in live on the eleven o’clock news. But they wouldn’t have the story behind what had happened here. That shit would hit the fan tomorrow, and the feeding frenzy would begin.
Rob Cole was about to get another fifteen minutes of fame. The Good Man Wrongly Accused would be set free. Or, from a more cynical standpoint, an idiot too stupid to escape being framed for murder was about to be let back into the gene pool.
Parker didn’t know the whole story himself, but he was willing to bet Rob Cole was not the hero, and he knew there wouldn’t be a happy ending.
He turned his cell phone on as he walked toward his car, and hit the button for voice mail. He had one message. Ito saying he had the photograph ready.
52
Diane sat on a chair in a front corner of the interview room, her feet tucked up, her arms around her legs, her cheek pressed to her knees. No makeup, no veneer of control. Parker had never seen anyone look more vulnerable. Not in the vulnerable way of a child who trusts, but in the way of a grown woman who knows better but has no defenses left.
Parker closed the door behind him and sat on the edge of the table.
“Hi.”
“Hi,” she said in a voice so small and thin, it seemed to have come from another room.
She had stretched the sleeves of her black sweater to the point that only the tips of her fingers showed. She used the sweater to dab at the tears that fell at random. Her gaze moved from point to point around the small white room, not lighting on anything for more than a few seconds. Not touching his face at all.
“Are you cold?” he asked, already slipping off his jacket.
It wouldn’t have mattered if she had said no. He wanted the excuse to touch her. He wrapped the jacket around her shoulders and touched her cheek with his fingertips.
“Who’s watching?” she asked, looking across the room at the two-way mirror set into the wall.
“No one. It’s just us. Do you have an attorney?”
She shook her head.
“I’ll take care of it.”
“Kev, you don’t have to—”
“It’s done.”
She sighed and looked away. “Thank you.”
“So . . . you hired Eddie Davis to kill Tricia Crowne-Cole, and set up Rob Cole to take the fall,” Parker said. Drained of energy himself, he didn’t think he could project his voice any farther than the next chair. “That’s a pretty harsh sentence for having a married guy hit on you.”
She looked away and closed her eyes. The only sound in the room was the annoying buzz of the fluorescent lighting. It was late. Parker had gotten her shipped to Central Division before RHD could make a move. The territorial dispute was being left until morning. Spending the night in one holding cell was pretty much the same as spending the night in another. And no one was going to question her without an attorney present.
“It’s just us, Diane,” he said. “I’m not here as a cop. Hell, I probably won’t even be a cop by this time tomorrow. I’m just here as me. Your friend.”
“I play it through in my head,” she murmured. “It’s not me. I can’t believe it’s me in those memories. I’m too smart, too cynical. I’m too sharp a judge of character. I’ve listened to women friends cry about this guy or that guy, and the promises they made, and the excuses the women made to cover when none of it happened. And I would think,
“And then I found out. It’s some kind of insanity. The intensity, the passion, the unbridled joy. It’s like a drug.”
“What’s
“Love. The kind people write about, but no one really believes in. I always wanted to know what it was like to feel that, to have someone feel it for me.”
“Cole told you he did.”
