Dad had specialized in invertebrate genetics but collected shells, skins, skulls, shards, and other bits of organic antiquity, their tiny, highway-bordering house outside of Phoenix crammed with detritus and relics, smelling like a neglected museum. A kind man, a caring father. Petra’s mother had died birthing her, but never once had Dad showed any resentment, though she was certain he must have felt something. She’d certainly punished herself, turning into a wild, angry teenager, setting up confrontations till Dad had been forced to send her to boarding school and she could luxuriate as a victim.
His will specified cremation, and she and her brothers had complied, tossing his ashes over a mesa in the dead of night.
Each one of them waiting for the other to say something.
Finally, Bruce broke the silence. “It’s over, he’s at peace. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
Dad, the tissue collector, reduced to gray particles. Maybe one day, millions of years in the future, some archaeologist would find a Kenneth Connor molecule and hypothesize about what life had been like back in the twentieth century.
Now here was this lump of dead flesh, right next to her, fresh and pathetic.
Petra guessed the woman’s age at twenty-five to thirty. The tight jawline said not too much older; no tuck scars behind the ears that she could see.
Good cheekbones, judging by the right side. The entire left side was crimson mush. Probably a right-handed killer, the head rolling to the right as he cut her.
Except for Freshwater, her twenty-one previous cases were the typical stuff: bar shootings, one-jab knifings, beatings. Stupid men killing other stupid men.
The ugliest had been the Hernandez wedding, a Saturday affair in a VFW hall near the border of Rampart Division, the groom killing the bride’s father at the reception, using a brand-new pearloid-handled cake knife to slit the older man from sternum to groin, just filleting him as his new eighteen-year-old wife and a hundred other people watched in horror.
Some honeymoon.
Petra and Stu found the groom hiding out in Baldwin Park, served the warrant, brought him in. A nineteen- year-old gardener’s assistant, the knife hidden in a fertilizer sack in the back of his boss’s truck, the idiot.
Look, Dad, I solved it, no heebie-jeebies.
She imagined her father’s surprised smile at the trajectory of his shuddering, phobic baby.
Efficient.
She swallowed morning air. Sweet; you could smell the pines. Suddenly, she was tired of waiting around, itching to do something, learn something.
Finally Stu walked away from Dr. Leavitt and passed behind the tape into the outer region of the parking lot, where the police and coroner vehicles had grouped. Being his usual methodical self, telling the techs what to do, what not to do, what to take back for analysis. The coroner drove away, and the morgue attendants stayed behind, listening to rap music in their van, the bass thumping.
Everyone waiting for the photographer and K-9 units to arrive so the body could be taken away and the dogs could check out the wooded area above the parking lot.
Stu talked to a uniform, barely moving his lips, profile noble, framed by sunlight.
Chief Bishop. If he didn’t get a big movie role first.
Two weeks into their partnership, he’d taken out his wallet to pay for lunch at Musso and Frank and she’d seen the SAG card, next to a frequent-flyer Visa.
“You’re an actor?”
His Celtic skin reddened and he closed the wallet. “Purely by accident. They came to the station a few years ago, filming a Murder Street on the Boulevard, wanting real cops as extras. They bugged me till I finally agreed.”
Petra couldn’t resist. “So when do your hands and feet go in the cement?”
Stu’s swimming-pool-aqua eyes softened. “It’s an unbelievably stupid business, Petra. Incredibly self- centered. Do you know how they refer to themselves? The industry. As if they’re manufacturing steel.” He shook his head.
“What kind of roles have you had?”
“Minor walk-ons. It doesn’t even cut into my routine. A lot of the filming goes on at night, and if I’m still in town, leaving later makes the freeway ride shorter. So I don’t really lose any time.”
He grinned. It was protest-too-much time and they both knew it.
Petra smiled back wickedly. “Got an agent?”
Stu turned scarlet.
“You do?”
“If you’re going to work, you need one, Petra. They’re sharks, it’s worth the ten percent to have someone else deal with it.”
“Ever get any speaking parts?” Petra was genuinely interested, but also fighting back laughter.
“If you call ‘Freeze, scumbag, or I’ll shoot’ speaking.”
Petra finished her coffee, and Stu worked on his mineral water.
She said, “So when do you write your screenplay?”
“Come on, give me a break,” he said, opening the wallet again and taking out cash.
But the next week he took a part as an extra out in Pacoima. Everyone in L.A., even a straight guy like Stu, wanted to be something else.
Except her. She’d come to California, after a year of state college in Tucson, to attend the Pacific Art Institute, got a fine arts degree with a specialty in painting, and entered the workplace with a husband sharing her bed. Nick had a great job designing cars at the new GM future lab. She earned chump change illustrating newspaper ads, sold a few of her paintings out of a co-op gallery in Santa Monica for the price of supplies. One day it hit her: This was it; things were unlikely to change in any big way. But at least she had Nick.
Then her body failed her, Nick showed his real soul, or lack of, leaving her baffled, broken, alone. A week after he walked out, someone broke into her apartment and stole the few valuable things she owned, including her easel and her brushes.
She sank into a two-month depression, then finally dragged herself out of bed one November night and drove around the city, limp, deadened, defenseless, thinking she should eat. Her skin looked terrible and her hair was starting to fall out, but she wasn’t really hungry; the thought of food made her sick. Finding herself on Wilshire, she turned around, headed for home, spied an LAPD recruitment billboard near Crescent Heights, and amazed herself by copying down the 800 number.
It took her another two weeks to call. The police commission said the department had to actively recruit women. She got a nice warm welcome.
Entering the academy on whim, thinking it a stupid, incomprehensible mistake, she’d surprised herself by liking it, then loving it. Even the physical-fitness challenges, learning to use her flexibility rather than brute strength getting over the Wall. Avoiding the turtle squad and learning she had good reflexes, a natural talent for using leverage to floor hand-to-hand opponents.
Even the uniform.
Not the wimpy powder-blue top and navy pants of the cadet, the real one, all navy, all business.
She, who’d bucked so many boarding school fascists over issues of rank conformity, ended up attached to her uniform.
Lots of the guys in her academy class were buffed jocks and they had their blues tapered to second-skin tautness, emphasizing biceps, deltoids, latissimi.
Boys’ version of a push-up bra.
One night, impulsively, she’d customized her own uniform, using the old chipped Singer sewing machine she’d brought with her from Tucson, one of the few things the burglars had left behind.
She was five-seven, 132 pounds, with slim legs, boyish hips, big square shoulders, a butt she thought too flat, and a small but natural bust that she’d finally come to appreciate. Growing up with a father and four brothers, she’d found it valuable to learn how to sew.
She worked mostly with the shirt, because it bagged around her waist, and with those hips she needed some shape. The result had flattered her figure without flaunting it.
