Donald Chang took us down in the elevator to a parking garage filled with vehicles save for a section cordoned by a mesh gate. Behind the mesh was a wall lined with storage lockers.
Chang unlocked the gate and one of the lockers and stood back. “The two in front are Adriana’s, everything else is our stuff.”
Milo drew out a cardboard wardrobe and a carton of the same material, around two feet square. Both boxes had been sealed cleanly with packing tape and neatly labeled
Chang said, “Can’t tell you what’s in there, Lilly packed. Do you want to go upstairs to look at them?”
“Thanks, but we’ll take them back to L.A.”
“Forensic procedure and all that? Makes sense. Good luck, guys.”
Milo gave him a card. “In case you or your wife remember something.”
Chang tugged a mustache end. “I don’t want to demean the dead but my opinion is Adriana was a bit odder than you just heard from Lilly.”
“How so, Dr. Chang?”
“My wife sees the good in everyone, puts a gloss on everything. The way I perceived Adriana she was a total loner, no life at all other than caring for May and cleaning like a demon.”
I said, “Except for that one time the red car picked her up.”
“Yes, that would be the exception, but outliers don’t necessarily say much, do they?”
Milo said, “When she got back from the date she looked okay.”
“Nothing stood out but bear in mind that neither of us was psychoanalyzing Adriana, our priority was that May stay calm during the drive home.”
Another mustache tug. “I certainly don’t want to put Adriana down just because she stuck to herself, lots of the people I worked with in computer sciences at Yale were like that. And I’m not complaining about her work, as Lilly said Adriana was a dream employee, great with May. But once in a while, I wondered about her.”
“Wondered about what?”
“Her being too good to be true. Because I’ve observed people like that-the ones who come across totally dedicated to the job, single-minded, no outside life. Sometimes they’re fine but other times they end up cracking. I’ve seen it on high-pressure wards, your saintly types can turn out to be horrid.”
I’d learned the same lesson working my first job as a psychologist: the plastic bubble unit on the Western Peds cancer ward where I finally figured out the most important question to ask prospective hires:
Milo said, “So you were waiting for the shoe to fall, huh?”
“No, I’m not saying that, Lieutenant. Not even close, I liked Adriana, was pleased with the order she brought to our lives. I’m just a curious person.” He smiled. “Maybe overly analytic. I didn’t want to say any of this in front of Lilly. She was totally enamored of Adriana, hearing about the murder was pretty traumatic for her. I know she looked fine to you but two hours ago she was sobbing her heart out. It’s an especially soft heart, my wife likes to believe in happy endings.”
I said, “You’re a bit more discriminating.”
“Maybe I’m just a distrustful bastard by nature, but when Adriana flaked on us-what we thought was flaking-Lilly was surprised but I wasn’t.”
Milo said, “You figured something stressed her out.”
“I figured she was like everyone else: Something better comes up, you bail.” Chang smiled again, wider but no warmer. “That’s a California thing, right?”
We placed the boxes in the back of the unmarked and headed back to L.A.
Milo swerved into the carpool lane and kept up a steady eighty-five per, jutting his head forward, as if personally cutting through wind resistance.
At Del Mar, he said, “Adriana goes on her one and only date with someone in a red car. So maybe the SUV little Heather saw isn’t relevant. Hell, what’s to say any of it’s relevant?”
I said, “Something drew Adriana to that park.”
“Something drew her to L.A., amigo. I’d say a better gig but bailing on the Changs for extra dough doesn’t sound in character.”
“A friend in need might have lured her. Someone with a baby.”
“It was Mama in a red car, not a date?”
“Mama in a red car who called Adriana for help because something scared her. If those fears were justified, Adriana could have lost her life because she got too close to the situation.”
“Bad Daddy.”
“Major-league monster Daddy who murdered the mother of his child and the child, held on to the baby’s skeleton as a psychopathic trophy. That ended when he read about the bones in Holly Ruche’s backyard and decided to ditch his collection nearby. Mom had already been taken care of and Adriana, suspicious after her friend disappeared, followed him. Unfortunately, he spotted her.”
He drove for a while. “Charming scenario. Too bad I’ve got nada to back any of it up.”
“You’ve got Adriana’s personal effects.”
“There was anything juicy in those boxes, the Changs-being trained observers-would’ve noticed and said something.”
“That’s assuming they snooped.”
“Everyone snoops, Alex.”
“Not busy people.”
“Okay, fine. I’ll burn some incense to the Evidence Gods, pray a hot lead shows up in the boxes. I was a less pro
“Everything goes straight to the lab?”
“Hell, no,” he said. “Finders keepers, but I’m doing it by the book.”
We got off the freeway at Santa Monica Boulevard at 1:36 a.m. For all its rep as a party town, most of L.A. closes down early and the streets were dark, hazy, and empty. That can stimulate the creepers and the crawlers but Milo’s police radio was calm and back at the station the big detective room was nearly deserted, every interview room empty.
He used the same room where Helene Johanson had cried, dragged in an additional table and created a work space. Spraying the surfaces with disinfectant, he gloved up, used a box cutter to slit the wardrobe open, emptied the contents.
Clothing. More clothing. A peer at the bottom evoked a disgusted head shake. He examined the garments anyway.
A couple more bland dresses similar to the one Adriana Betts had died in, two pairs of no-nonsense jeans, seven nondescript blouses, cotton undergarments, T-shirts, a pair of sneakers, black flats, cheap plastic sunglasses.
“No naughty secret-life duds, amigo.” He sniffed the garments. “No secret-life perfume, either. Adriana, you wild and crazy kid.” Shutting his eyes for several moments as if meditating, he opened them, repacked the clothes, sealed the box and filled out a lab tag.
The smaller box yielded a hairbrush, a toothbrush, antacid, acetaminophen, a blue bandanna, and more garments: two pairs of walking shorts and a wad of white T-shirts. Milo was about to put everything back when he stopped and hefted the shirts.
“Too heavy.” Running his hands over each tee, he extracted a shirt from the middle of the stack and unfolded. Inside was a brown leatherette album around six inches square, fastened by a brass key clasp.
“Looky here, Dear Diary.” He pressed his palms together prayerfully. “Our Father Who Art in Heaven, grant me something evidentiary and I’ll attend Mass next Sunday for the first time in You know how long.”
The clasp sprang free with a finger-tap. A pulse in his neck throbbed as he opened the book.
No diary notations, no prose of any sort. Three cardboard pages held photographs moored by clear plastic bands.
