Memory of Murder

“Yours are-”

“Blue-I know.” She made an impatient gesture. “It’s possible, you know. For brown-eyed people to have blue- eyed children. If they both carry the recessive gene.”

Alan nodded. “True.” But not likely they’d have a child with eyes as vivid a blue as yours.

“Anyway, what does it matter?” She opened her car door and tossed her purse onto the passenger seat, then turned back to him, her fair skin flushed with anger. “Do you think I care whether or not Richard Merrill is my biological father? Is that what you think this is about? If it was, I could find out easily enough, couldn’t I, through DNA. That man-” she nodded at the photograph in his hands, and her voice quivered “-is my dad in every way that counts. I’m not doing this for me, I’m doing it for him-because he doesn’t deserve to be shut out of what life my mother has left. And I’m doing it for her, because she doesn’t deserve to spend the time she has left being terrified of the husband who adores her. Do you understand?”

“Yes, I do,” Alan said, and meant it. He understood very well what she wanted; he just wasn’t sure he could give it to her.

“So? Are you going to help me?”

He let out a gusty breath, looked down at the photo in his hands. Lord, help me, he thought. He shook his head, but said, “I’ll see what I can find out. Can I keep this?”

“Oh-of course. Yes. Sure.” She held herself still, but he could almost feel her vibrating with suppressed hope. “Anything I can do to help…”

“We’ve got the approximate when-roughly forty years ago, right? It would help a lot if we could narrow it down as to the where. What we’re doing is looking for a needle in a haystack, in a whole damn field of haystacks. It would be nice if we knew which haystack to start looking in.”

She gave a shrug and a helpless little laugh, and something about the sound of it made him wonder if, behind those sunglasses, she might be crying. “How do I do that?” Her voice was barely a whisper. “You saw her…heard her.”

“Yeah, I did. And just talking to us, she remembered a detail that seemed to be new to her, didn’t she? That thing about floating. You said you visit her just about every day, right? See if you can get her to talk about her life before the trauma. Maybe she’ll remember some little thing that will help us pinpoint where this thing happened. Can you do that?”

She nodded, quick and hard. “Yes-okay.”

“Good. Meanwhile, I’ll start running what we have through our various databases. See if anything pops up. Okay?” He waited-one hand on the top of the car door-while she slid behind the wheel and put the key in the ignition. The engine fired, and she settled back in her seat and looked up at him.

“Thank you,” she said. Just that.

He couldn’t even see her eyes. But something about her mouth…the hint of a flush beneath her skin, a touch of pink on the tip of her nose. He felt a thickening in his throat, a tightening in his chest, and for a long moment couldn’t make himself look away. Couldn’t seem to move. The moment stretched, then snapped with a sizzling he could feel in his scalp, like the warning tingle just before an electric shock, the one that makes you jerk your hand away just in time.

“Okay, then,” he said. “I’ll call if I find anything.” He took a card and a pencil out of his jacket pocket, jotted his cell phone number on the back of the card and handed it to her. “You do the same.”

She nodded. He shut the car door, then stepped back and watched her back out of the parking spot and drive away. He looked down at the photograph of Richard Merrill in his hand, and felt excitement stir and his pulses quicken. And wondered whether it had more to do with the possibility of a very cold case, or a very warm and desirable woman.

Back at his desk, Alan scanned the photo of Richard Merrill and entered it and all the information Lindsey had given him on her parents into the system, started a data search, then turned his attention to writing the reports on the Marchetti case.

His plan was to finish the report and get a head start on the weekend, since it was his weekend to have Chelse. He’d been thinking about maybe taking her to Sea World or the zoo while the weather was holding so fine. Chelse loved the zoo, always had-Sea World, too-but the way she was growing up, Alan figured it was only a matter of time before she started thinking she was too old for that stuff. He hoped it wouldn’t happen, but was realistic enough to know it always did.

Maybe, he thought, he’d get lucky and Chelse would stay her daddy’s little girl forever. Maybe, like Lindsey Merrill, she’d still think he walked on water when she was forty. Although he considered the odds of that weren’t good, being as how he only got to spend every other weekend with her. It was hard to admit, even to himself, how much he looked forward to those weekends. How much he looked forward to not going home to his empty house.

Even more so this weekend, he realized. For some reason.

He found himself wondering whether Lindsey liked the zoo. Or Sea World. His mind flashed on an image of the three of them-him, Chelse and Lindsey-strolling the wide, eucalyptus-shaded avenues of Balboa Park. Just a flash, and then his mind said, Nope. Bad idea. Are you nuts?

All the same, he was glad it was Chelse’s weekend. And, he reminded himself, if anything interesting popped up in her parents’ backgrounds, he would have a real reason to call Lindsey.

Maybe Sunday.

As it turned out, none of the things he’d planned on doing with his weekend came to pass. He didn’t take Chelsea to the zoo or Sea World, didn’t see her at all, in fact. Nor did he go home to his empty house, call Lindsey Merrill, or even check back to see what his search had turned up. Because the shooting of Juan Miguel Alviera was only the opening salvo in what came to be called, in the news media, at least, the East Village War.

At six-thirty Friday evening, two carloads of Alviera’s homies from the Eastside Diablos armed with automatic weapons shot up a fast-food restaurant where the suspected perpetrators of the Alviera homicide, members of the rival East Village gang known as the Calle Reyes Amigos, were enjoying dinner. One of the Amigos was killed, the other escaped unharmed. Seven innocent bystanders were wounded, three seriously. And the city’s barrios-which had been enjoying steadily declining gang violence rates since the horrendous highs of the early 90s, thanks to the combined efforts of the SDPD’s gang suppression unit, the DEA and the FBI-erupted.

All patrol personnel, plus the gang and homicide units, were called out in force in an effort to nip the flare-up before it could escalate into all-out war. Alan called Chelsea’s mother to tell her he wouldn’t be able to take her for the weekend, and prepared to bed down on the couch of a friend who lived in the central city. Chelsea’s mom wasn’t happy about having to cancel the plans she and her current husband had made to go away for the weekend, and made sure he heard all over again each and every one of the reasons why she’d divorced him in the first place, and why nobody in their right mind should ever marry a cop. But what could he do?

On Saturday, the Amigos retaliated against the Whataburger shooters by crashing a wedding of one of the shooter’s sisters, at which the shooter was the best man. The hail of automatic weapons fire did manage to take out the best man, and also sent the groom, three wedding guests, and the six-year-old flower girl-the bride’s niece-to the hospital with major injuries.

Whether it was the shock of that tragedy-augmented by photos splashed all over the media, of the little girl in her blood-soaked flower girl’s dress-or the SDPD sweep that hauled in off the streets every known affiliate of the two rival gangs that could be found, by Sunday night things had settled down. The thinking behind the sweep was, by the time the collars had all been sorted out and processed-most back to the streets of their respective neighborhoods-passions would probably have cooled off some. At least for the time being.

Sunday night, home for a shower and change of clothes, Alan called the hospital to check on the flower girl. He was told she was “critical but stable-holding her own.”

Lindsey couldn’t decide what to do. At least a dozen times she’d picked up the card with the penciled phone number on the back and stared at it. And a dozen times had put it back on her desk without dialing. She’d done it so many times, the number was now etched in her memory. Why couldn’t she bring herself to call him?