Missing: The Body of Evidence Read online

  Nancy’s ego deserted her, taking a stage left as Logan and Kyle ambled away, leaving her isolated. Her posture slouched. Eyes burned a hole in her as she shuffled to her desk, but she ignored her colleagues’ gazes. She checked public records and conceded it was Kelly’s son. Kyle joined her at her desk and knelt down.

  ‘Listen, Nance, great job. Just forget it and move onto the next case. I’ve had it happen to me many times, so I know what you are going through. Now, how about tonight, and this weekend away we need to arrange?’

  The weekend was sounding like a good idea, but Nancy didn’t feel up to meeting that evening. He was right; she thought a weekend charging her batteries was just what she needed.

  ‘Weekend sounds good, but I’ll give a rain check on tonight. Maybe tomorrow, eh?’

  ‘Sure.’ Kyle squeezed her hand, smiled and walked away. Nancy walked to the interview room and gave the attorney the all clear.

  ‘Was David a patient of the professor? A witness said something about taking him back the night before the fire?’

  ‘Don’t push it,’ he said and brushed past her.

  She watched as the attorney and the boy walked down the corridor and collected Mr. Kelly.

  The young boy turned and looked at her, his eyes pleading. Don’t let them make me do it, she thought she heard him say, but his lips didn’t move.

  ‘Damn, I need to call it a day.’

  Chapter 14

  Nancy kicked off her shoes, undressed and wrapped herself in her dressing gown. She stooped over the bathtub and swished the water with her fingers. It was a little on the hot side and she adjusted the cold tap. She squeezed her favourite strawberry-bubble bath into the tub. Bubbles started to form and the water turned pink. She lit some candles on surfaces surrounding the bath, switched off the light and went to sit on the toilet seat to wait for the tub to fill.

  Kyle… why do men do that? She put the toilet seat down, sat on it and waited. With the tub full, she turned off the taps, took off her robe, hung it up and placed a toe in the water to test the temperature. She drew air through her nostrils, to soak in the aroma of strawberries and slipped into the bathtub. Clapping her hand playfully in the bubbles, she relaxed and lay back. Thoughts of the day’s events crept into her mind. However she tried to ignore what had happened during the day, she could not relax.

  She dwelt on her reaction to her colleagues, particularly Kyle. At thirty-six, she wondered if she would ever settle down into a relationship. Until meeting Kyle, she had been married to her job. She wondered if her pushing him away was a result of the inner turmoil she encountered, with her biological clock ticking. She knew that she was losing the battle she was fighting daily, in the hope that time would somehow stop. She began to wonder if, at her age, she could adapt to sharing her life.

  Nancy glanced at the toilet seat and then over at the toothpaste tube which Kyle always had a habit of squeezing from the middle. Wait a minute. When was Kyle last here?

  The left side of her head hit the bathtub side as she slipped, trying to scramble out of the tub. She grabbed her robe, wrapped it around her, rushed to the coat stand and took her pistol from its holster.

  Someone’s been in here. I’m sure Kyle wouldn’t have used his key without saying. She checked the kitchen, then the bedroom. In the bathroom, she pulled the plug in the tub, doused the candles and returned to the living room. Nothing seemed to be out of place. She sat on the sofa, trying to think if she’d used the toilet since Kyle had last stayed, but couldn’t remember. Get a grip, girl. The painting on the wall seemed to be slightly askew and she adjusted it. The sound of the doorbell chiming made her jump. Kyle?

  She made her way to the door and peered through the spy hole. She let out a sigh. Tracy? What’s she doing here at nine-thirty in the evening?

  Nancy opened the door.

  ‘Whoa there, don’t shoot.’

  Nancy looked at the pistol in her hand.

  ‘Oh yeah, sorry, come in.’

  She led Tracy to the living room and replaced her pistol in its holster.

  ‘The office gave me your address. I came to say sorry if I appear to have been rude to you.’

  A smile, more in the way of a smirk formed on Nancy’s lips. She looked down, hoping Tracy wouldn’t detect her glee.

  ‘No problem, likewise. But you didn’t need to come here to my apartment; a telephone call would have done it.’

  ‘I didn’t want to go through channels. My boss is giving the CIA everything we’ve found, but getting nothing in return,’ said Tracy

  ‘What’s so secret?’

  ‘I’ve got something to show you.’ She handed Nancy a report. ‘I ran a test on the gum wrapper for you. You were right, it has traces of a sedative, and the fingerprints on the lasagne carton match both the janitor and others we found in the apartment.’

  The graph on the report Tracy had given her, listed the names of chemicals, but they didn’t mean anything to her.

  ‘I’m afraid it won’t help. My hunch about the case turned sour today.’

  ‘Yeah, I heard. But get this. The analysis and checks I did show the sedative relates to a banned substance that was trialled thirty years ago, but the paper in the archive has quite a number of redacted paragraphs under the reports on side effects.’

  Nancy turned the page and read what she could of the drug test archive, but with so many blacked out lines, it made no sense. Tracy leaned over her shoulder and pointed to the report.

  ‘What’s the banned sedative doing in a gum wrapper in two-thousand and eleven? The other thing is, I’ve drawn a blank on trying to find relatives of the professor to match up the DNA. We don’t even know if the prints we found are the professor’s, or that the remains are his. It’s like he doesn’t exist,’ said Tracy.

  ‘What about the telephone notepad from the bedroom next to the phone? At least I assume that’s what it was; it was just a mark in the dust. Did you check any of the phone numbers?’

  ‘Notepad? We didn’t find a telephone notepad.’

  Nancy raised an eyebrow. She sat on the sofa, pondering on what Tracy had said earlier. The gum wrapper the attorney gave to the boy.

  ‘Hang on a minute, Tracy.’ Nancy phoned the office and asked a detective to check the interview room for a gum wrapper.

  ‘Sorry, cleaning contractors have emptied all the trash.’

  Nancy replaced the handset. Why would they hide a banned sedative in gum, doesn’t make sense. She turned to Tracy.

  ‘I don’t know what I can do about your findings on the gum wrapper, except make a note in the file, Logan says the case is closed unless the Coroner asks us to make further investigations. Were you told about the medium and the ball lightning?’

  ‘Yes, but it all sounds too convenient.’

  She was right on that score, the whole episode with the medium had put a wrench in the works.

  Tracy continued. ‘I don’t believe in mediums. It can’t be proved it happened that way, but I guess it is as good a theory as any. I just don’t like the way that the CIA have been jumping all over the case and my boss is sucking up to them. When I asked the agents about the CIA’s interest in the professor, they just kept tight lipped.’

  The last sentence didn’t surprise her. She doubted they would give the time of day to anyone who asked.

  ‘I’m with you all the way. All we can do is to hope something else turns up. Until then, were stuck with it being spontaneous combustion, sorry, Tracy.’

  ‘Yeah, me too, I guess we’ll be bumping into each other on future cases. I’ll be going now. Oh here, I nearly forgot.’ Tracy handed Nancy a computer pen drive. ‘There’s a copy of my file on there, including all the witness statements. I don’t think we’ll be sending it on to the Coroner’s office just yet until we can tie the remains to the professor.’

  ‘Look, I suppose I can try and do some digging into Astral Chemicals, but I’ll have to do it in my own time. The boss will chew my head off, if he finds out.’ />
  Nancy saw her to the door. Tracy stopped and turned to face her.

  ‘Astral Chemicals?’

  ‘Yeah, I found some salary slips in the bedside drawer at the professor’s apartment. They went missing when the CIA cleaned up the apartment. He must’ve worked for them, but I can’t trace the company. Did your team take a copy of one?’

  ‘No.’ Tracy’s cheeks flushed. ‘Astral Chemicals are the ones who filed to have the drug approved, but it’s listed as a PO Box address. Take a look, it’s in the report.’

  Nancy smiled at Tracy’s infallibility.

  ‘Let’s keep it between you and me and like I said, I’ll do some digging.’

  ‘Sure’

  Tracy left. Nancy returned to the living room, and put the pen drive in her purse. She took her pistol from its holster, went to her bedroom and placed the gun under her pillow. She was furious that she hadn’t asked the search team to look for a notepad when they searched the janitor’s apartment.

  Nancy disrobed, slipped on a nightdress and hung her dressing gown on the nightstand. A noise outside distracted her. Passing the blinds at the window, she lifted one of the slats and peered outside. Nancy watched Tracy get into her car and drive off. Another car in the parking lot pulled out behind Tracy. A beam from one of the streetlights caught her crystal ornament and formed a prism with the colours of the rainbow refracted on the sill.

  Nancy climbed into bed, set the alarm and turned off the bedside light. But the torment of wondering who could have taken the notepad deprived her of an early night’s sleep. The gentle breeze outside swayed the branches of the trees, casting shadows in the room, and caused the coloured lights from her crystal ornament to dance on her bed quilt. She was fascinated by the hypnotic spectrum of lights, but they failed to distract her thoughts.

  Other detectives had talked about their personal cold-case files that stayed with them throughout their careers. In her wildest dreams, she never thought that her first case would turn out that way. She thought that if nothing else, she made a promise that she would not rest until she could determine where Astral Chemicals fit into the equation. She just worried how she could do it without Logan finding out what she was doing.

  Chapter 15

  The morning rays of sunlight penetrated the slats of the blinds covering her bedroom window. Nancy felt groggy, sleep had been hard to come by, but she had still managed to awake before the alarm clock offended her hearing. She reached out and turned the alarm setting to the OFF position. Her arms rested on the outside of the duvet. The face of David, the janitor’s son, appeared in her thoughts. A fleeting recollection of a dream permeated at the back of her mind.

  David was smiling, holding out his hand and inviting her to join him. ‘Come with me,’ he said. There was a sense of floating and the dream fragmented to where she was outside the cabin depicted in the painting on her living room wall. A glance at David, and he no longer looked angelic. His expression had the look of evil.

  ‘Ouch.’

  Nancy flinched when she felt a sting on the back of her left hand, and looked at the source of the irritation. There was a small red patch on the back of her hand surrounding a small blister. A ray of sunlight refracted through the crystal ornament on the windowsill and danced on the duvet where her hand had been resting. Nancy ran her other hand through the ray of light and felt the heat as her hand passed through the beam.

  ‘Damn.’

  She threw the duvet back and hurried to the blinds. One of the slats in the blinds had a kink; she straightened it, lifted the blinds, picked up the ornament and walked to the living room. Nancy placed the ornament on her computer desk and sat down. She rested her elbows with her hands holding her head and stared at the ornament. The concave in the crystal magnified the LG symbol on her computer. Recollections of her time as a girl scout and her attempts at starting a fire with a magnifying glass while on a field trip passed through her mind. Well, I’ll be damned. I could’ve been toast. The notion that it could be another explanation for the freak fire at the professor’s apartment came to mind, but she quickly dismissed the idea on account of the time of the incident.

  Her phone rang and she answered. Central communications told her to meet Bill at McDonald’s on West Compton Boulevard at ten-thirty, later in the morning. South Central. My old patrol area. It sounded like something big was going down, as they were to meet there with the sergeant of the gang unit, based at the LAPD substation in Compton.

  Nancy dressed, and mooched around her apartment feeling restless. The circumstances surrounding the professor’s death was bugging her. She took her notebook from her purse, started to go through her notes and stopped at the scribbled telephone number of the condo management company. Maybe they’ll have some knowledge of him.

  The receptionist took the call and transferred her to the manager. What he had to say stunned her. ‘Astral Chemicals paid the condo charges on the professor’s apartment.’

  When she asked how long the janitor had worked for them, it was almost an aside to the conversation when the manager mentioned, ‘Astral also pays Kelly’s condo charges.’

  The number he had for Astral was the same as on the professor’s card, but there was no address on record for the company. The call ended, leaving Nancy even more bewildered about the case. She dialled the number the manager gave her, but the line was dead.

  Chapter 16

  The sun was beating down as Nancy headed in her car for her meeting with Bill. Checking her rear-view mirror, she noticed a black Toyota following her every turn. It wasn’t the first time she had thought someone was following her these past few days, but she soon forgot about the Toyota as it dropped a few cars back and it turned off as she hit traffic. Heading north, along Willowbrook Avenue, the traffic thinned out and she passed Compton High School. At the intersection with West Compton Boulevard, she flipped on the blinker and turned left, past the post office on the corner. A short stretch and she turned right and parked in the lot outside McDonald’s, facing the highway.

  Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial faced her across the highway. The officials had tucked it away where no one could see it, as if embarrassed by its existence. The concrete circle of pillars curved inward and upwards almost meeting at the top. The columns formed a shape meant to signify his ‘Climb the mountain’ rhetoric. Compton’s some mountain of crap to climb. She wondered what King would make of the area, where the street gangs ruled and you couldn’t watch a high school game of football without security fit for a president. South Los Angeles they called the area now, to get rid of the stigma attached to the area, but to Nancy, it would always be South Central.

  Bill’s car drew up alongside of her and he signalled for her to drive around the back of McDonald’s. Nancy followed, surprised to see two SWAT vans and the sergeant of the gang unit waiting for them. Damn, this is big.

  ‘Hi, Nance, looking good out of uniform,’ said the sergeant.

  ‘Flattery will get you nowhere,’ she said and winked. ‘What’s going down?’

  The sergeant explained that the hit suspect on the Claytons’ at the Sunnyvale Condo she had been investigating with Bill was down to Rico, the head of the Piru gang, and the only way to bring him in was by force. Undercover were ready to move into position, and to take out the lookouts at the intersection of Bliss, Aranbe and Piru Street.

  ‘Suit up, vests on this one,’ said the sergeant ‘You’ll both come with us in the SWAT van.’

  Nancy wasn’t about to argue, but gave her excuses as she needed to use the bathroom in McDonald’s.

  ‘I’ll follow you,’ said Bill.

  Entering McDonald’s, two swat team members must have had the same idea and held the door open for her. The place was busy. Nancy flicked the clasp on her purse, ready to produce her badge if any of the staff challenged her. She glanced around and saw some familiar faces from her time in uniform.

  On her way back to the SWAT van, she followed Bill out of McDonald’s. She looked ahead and
sensed eyes following her as she walked to the door. Bill stopped briefly and exchanged harsh words with a customer and then he disappeared through the exit. Nancy picked up her pace to join Bill and the SWAT team at the van. No one talked in the back of the van as it set off; they all seemed to be preoccupied with either remembering their instructions, or praying. Nancy couldn’t hold her tongue.

  ‘Bill, you’ve been around a lot longer than I. Have you ever heard of a company called Astral Chemicals?’

  Bill shuffled his feet, clasped his hands and then stroked his chin stubble with his thumbs.

  ‘Can’t say I have, why ask?’

  ‘It’s the professor’s death. He worked for Astral. They paid the professor’s and the janitor’s condo’ fees, but I can’t trace the company.’

  ‘If you take the advice of someone who is due to retire in two weeks, forget it.’

  ‘I can’t forget it, that’s the point.’

  ‘Listen, from what I hear, the CIA is involved. Sounds to me like the professor was one of theirs and they’re protecting their own. Astral is probably something to do with the CIA.’

  He turned to her and gazed deep into her eyes.

  ‘For your own good, read my lips... for-get-it. I can’t say it any clearer.’

  It wasn’t just the way he said it, but the distant look in his eyes. It gave him the appearance that he was dwelling on something he knew, but wasn’t about to say what it was that was on his mind.

  The van stopped and the sergeant told them to wait inside the van. She half expected a gun battle, but after ten minutes of hailing over a megaphone, she heard the sergeant call for a round of teargas. Five minutes later, the van door opened and the sergeant gave Nancy and Bill the all clear to search the house. As she exited, SWAT formed a secure perimeter. All they had arrested was one gang member, whom Nancy recognized.