The 3rd Woman
Jonathan Freedland
THE FIRST TWO MURDERS WENT UNNOTICED. BUT THE NEXT WAS HER SISTER…A terrifying yet unputdownable thriller from No. 1 bestselling author and award-winning journalist Jonathan Freedland.SHE CAN’T SAVE HER SISTERJournalist Madison Webb is obsessed with exposing lies and corruption. But she never thought she would be investigating her own sister’s murder.SHE CAN’T TRUST THE POLICEMadison refuses to accept the official line that Abigail’s death was an isolated crime. She uncovers evidence that suggests Abi was the third victim in a series of killings hushed up as part of a major conspiracy.SHE CAN EXPOSE THE TRUTHIn a United States that now bows to China, corruption is rife – the government dictates what the ‘truth’ is. With her life on the line, Madison must give up her quest for justice, or face the consequences…
Copyright (#uda5d8073-74b2-5eb3-9de4-9548ed7144a4)
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street,
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2015
Copyright © Jonathan Freedland 2015
Jonathan Freedland asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2016
Cover photographs © Nikaa / Arcangel Images;
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007413690
Ebook Edition © JULY 2015 ISBN: 9780007413706
Version 2015-12-22
Dedication (#uda5d8073-74b2-5eb3-9de4-9548ed7144a4)
For my sister Fiona, 1963–2014.
A woman of strength, wisdom, laughter and constant love
Table of Contents
Cover (#u1473dc4c-7261-53b7-87a5-45f768124d54)
Title Page (#ufd60f60e-e0b1-557a-a7c9-8ddfcf53c84b)
Copyright (#uac30da58-c71c-58ac-892d-5a18858511c9)
Dedication (#u78723b56-b5c2-5c18-837e-e1a040890374)
Prologue (#ua912ab7e-b23d-55f5-a3c8-f580e5f8d8b1)
Chapter 1 (#uae29a586-1e6c-5243-aa2f-91684a9fd345)
Chapter 2 (#uc61d3baf-99da-56db-9640-316ef2af6bc5)
Chapter 3 (#u944a86fe-89f2-5f52-8f87-753dc1efe211)
Chapter 4 (#uf0c33783-550a-593f-9d29-3bb1c15ae191)
Chapter 5 (#u325a94e4-88b5-5546-8af1-73238d126ec8)
Chapter 6 (#u3ccc288e-b1e3-5811-ac79-ac5e4eea1d0e)
Chapter 7 (#u4f572147-9b65-55b0-a6bf-5a7f66f2c353)
Chapter 8 (#u653f7b0c-8495-51e9-9a35-b925d37d2ad3)
Chapter 9 (#uf2c49e8d-c20b-5332-99a9-1b1016f37222)
Chapter 10 (#ud0d43590-416d-585a-ae08-1414b37ea6c0)
Chapter 11 (#ud1103a59-028b-5f67-861c-6dcd1cdaa75c)
Chapter 12 (#ub8113128-c662-5708-801e-bfc3289babcd)
Chapter 13 (#u4e9e4ab1-707a-5714-b1ab-e6d51edb2e5c)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 50 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 51 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 52 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 53 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 54 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 55 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 56 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 57 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 58 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the author (#litres_trial_promo)
Writing as Sam Bourne (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#uda5d8073-74b2-5eb3-9de4-9548ed7144a4)
It was the last day of January and the New Year was approaching. The city of Los Angeles had been winding down for more than a week. The only place still humming was the airport, as the expats headed home, crossing the ocean to see devoted fathers, doting mothers and the occasional abandoned wife. Offices were closing early: with no one on the end of the phone and no deals to be made, there was little point staying open. It was the second break in six weeks, but this one felt less wanted and somehow involuntary, the way a city falls quiet during a strike or a national day of mourning. Still, the red lanterns hanging from the lampposts and trees gave the city some welcome cheer, especially after dark.
Not that it gave her much comfort. The night had never been her time. She had always been a child of the early mornings, up with the sun. She lost interest in the sky once it was no longer blue. She was the same now, even in winter, running out into the morning as soon as it had broken.
Which was another reason why she hated having to do this. Working in this place was bad enough, but the time was worse. These were hours meant for sleep.
But she managed to be cheery to the girls when she said goodbye, throwing her clothes into a tote bag and slinging it over her shoulder in a single, well-practised movement. She gave the guy on the door a smile too even though her jaw felt strained from a night spent in a fixed expression of delight.
Walking to her car out in the lot, she kept her eyes down. She had learned that lesson early enough. Avoid eye contact inside if you could, but never, ever meet anyone’s eye once you were outside.
She aimed the key fob at the car door but it made a useless, dull click. Three more goes, three more empty clicks. The battery on the damn thing was fading. Opening the car door manually, she got in, taking care to lock the door after her.
The drive back was quicker than usual, thanks to the New Year emptiness. She put on a music station, playing oldies, and tried to forget her evening’s work. She looked in her rear-view mirror occasionally, but besides the smog there was precious little to see.
At the apartment building, she had her key in hand and the entrance door opened smoothly. Too tired to close it after her, she let it swing slowly shut. All the same, something made her glance over her shoulder but in the dark she saw nothing. This was why she hated working late at night: she was always jumping at shadows.
When the elevator opened on her floor and she nudged the key into the apartment’s front door, he was ready for her. She had heard no sound, her first awareness of his presence being the gloved hand over her mouth. Her nostrils sought out the air denied to her mouth, filling instantly with the scent of unwashed leather and sweat. Worse was the breath. The urgent, hot breath of a stranger against her neck, then dispersing around it, as if enveloping her.
She tried to call out. Not a scream but a word. If her mouth had not been gagged it might have come out as ‘What?’
All of that was in the first second. But now, in the moments that followed, there was time for fear. It sped through her, throbbing out from her heart through her veins, into her brain, which seemed to be filling with flashing red and yellow, and then into her legs, which became light and unsteady. But she did not fall. He had her in his grip.
She felt him use his weight to push the apartment door, already unlocked, wide open, his shove splintering wood off the frame. Once she was bundled inside, he closed the door – deliberately not letting it slam.
Now the scream rose, trying to force its way through her chest and into her throat, but it came up against the leather hand and seemed to be pushed back into her. She felt his left hand leave her shoulder and move, as if checking for something.
Instinctively she tried to wriggle free, but his right arm was too strong. It held her in place, sealing her mouth at the same time.
Now she heard a ripping noise: had he torn her clothes? The first, primeval, terror had been of death, that this man would kill her. But the second fear, coming in instant pursuit, was the horror that he would push his brute body into hers. She made a wordless calculation, a bargain almost: she would withstand a rape if he would let her live.
But the sound she had heard was not of torn clothing. She saw his left hand hover in front of her face, a piece of wide, silver-coloured masking tape spanned between its fingers. Expertly, he placed it over her mouth, leaving not so much as a split-second in which she could emit a sound.
Now he grabbed her wrists, containing them both in the grasp of a single hand. Still behind her, still not letting her glimpse his face, he pushed her towards the centre of the room, in front of the couch. He shoved the coffee table out of the way with one foot, then tripped her from behind, so that she was face down on the carpet with pressure on her back, a knee holding her in position.
This is it, she thought. He’ll rip my clothes off now and do it here, like this. She told herself to send her mind elsewhere, so that she could survive what was to follow. Live through this, she thought. You can. She closed her eyes and tried to shut down. Live through this.
But he had not finished his preparations. A strip of black cloth was placed over her eyes, then tied at the back. Next, this man – whose face she had not seen, whose voice she had not heard – flipped her over, firmly but not roughly. Perhaps he had sensed that her strategy for survival was to co-operate.
One wrist was pulled above her head, so that she looked like a child demanding the teacher’s attention. A moment later, the wrist was encircled by a kind of plastic bracelet. Loose at first, but then she heard that distinctive zipping sound she remembered from childhood, the sound of a hardware-store cable tie. Her father would use them to bundle loose wires together, keeping them neat behind the TV set; they were impossible to break, he said. Now this man did the same to her right wrist. She was lying on the floor, gagged and blindfolded, with both her arms stretched upward and tied to a single leg of the couch.
She willed her mind to transport itself somewhere else. But the fear was making her teeth chatter. Nausea was working its way up from her stomach and into her mouth. Please God, let this be over. Let this end, please God.
It was all happening so fast, so … efficiently. There was no rage in this man’s actions, just purpose and method, as if this were a safety drill and he was following an established procedure. One of his hands was now on her right arm, except the touch was not the rough leather she had felt over her mouth. It was light, just a fingertip, but not human skin. Sightless, she could not be sure of the material, but the hand was close enough to her face that she could smell it. It was latex. The man was wearing latex gloves. Now a new terror seized her.
He gripped her wrist again and then she felt it, the sharp puncture of a needle plunged into her right arm. She cried out, hearing only the sound of a muffled exclamation that seemed to come from somewhere else entirely.
And then, in an instant, the fear melted away, to be replaced by a rapid, tingling rush, a wave of blissful comfort. She felt no pain at all, just a deep, wide, unexpected happiness. When the tape was removed from her mouth, she let out no scream. Perhaps she had succeeded in sending herself far away after all, onto the Malibu beach at dawn, where the sand was kissed by sun. Or into a clear-blue ocean. Or into a hammock on a desert island in the South Pacific. Or into a cabin in mid-winter, the amber glow warming her as she lay on the rug before a fire that popped and crackled.
She heard the distant sound of the cable tie being cut loose, its job now done. She sensed the blindfold coming away from her face. But she felt no urge to open her eyes or move her arms, even though she was now free. Every nerve, every synapse, from her toes to her fingernails, was dedicated instead to passing messages of pleasure to her brain. Her system was flooded with goodness; she was a crowd assembling on the mountain top at the moment of the Rapture, every face grinning with delight.
Now she felt the lightest, most fleeting sensation between her legs. A hand was peeling back her underwear. Something brushed against her. It did not penetrate. It did not even bother her. Rather something still and smooth was resting there, against her most intimate place. She felt her skin kissed by silk petals.
A second passed and she was in the sealed, safe hiding place before any of that, floating in the fluid that could nourish her and support her and where no one could disturb her. She was in her mother’s womb, utterly content, breathing only love and love and love.
Chapter 1 (#uda5d8073-74b2-5eb3-9de4-9548ed7144a4)
Normally Madison Webb liked January. If you grew up used to golden California sun, winter could be a welcome novelty. The cold – not that it ever got truly cold in LA – made your nerves tingle, made you feel alive.
Not this January, though. She had spent the month confined to a place of steel and blank, windowless walls, one of those rare corners of LA compelled to operate throughout the Chinese New Year. It never stopped, day or night. She had been working here for three weeks, twenty shifts straight, taking her place alongside the scores of seamstresses hunched over their machines. Though the word ‘seamstresses’ was misleading. As Maddy would be explaining to the LA public very soon, the word suggested some ancient, artisan skill, while in reality she and the other women were on an assembly line, in place solely to mind the devices, ensuring the fabric was placed squarely in the slot and letting the pre-programmed, robotic arm do the rest. They were glorified machine parts themselves.
Except that machines, as she would put it in the first in a series of undercover reports on life in an LA sweatshop, would be treated better than these people, who had to stand at their work-stations for hours on end, raising their hands for a bathroom break, surrendering their phones as they arrived, lest they surreptitiously try to photograph this dingy basement where, starved of natural light and illuminated by a few naked lightbulbs, she felt her eyesight degraded by the day.
Being deprived of her phone had presented the most obvious obstacle, Maddy reflected now, as she fed a stretch of denim through the roller, ensuring its edges aligned before it submitted to the stitching needle. She had worked with Katharine Hu, the resident tech-genius in the office and Maddy’s best friend there, to devise a concealed camera. Its lens was in the form of a button on her shirt. From there, it transmitted by means of a tiny wire to a digital recorder taped into the small of her back. It did the job well, giving a wide-angled view of everything she faced: turn 360 degrees and she could sweep the whole place. It picked up snatches of conversation with her fellow seamstresses and with Walker, the foreman – including a choice moment as he instructed one ‘bitch’ to get back to work.
With nearly two hundred hours of recordings, she knew she had enough to run a story that would have serious impact. The camera had caught in full the incident nearly a week ago when Walker had denied one of Maddy’s co-workers a bathroom break, despite repeated requests. The woman’s pleas had grown desperate, but he just bellowed at her, ‘How many times do I have to say it, shabi? You been on your break already today.’ He used that word often, but calling a woman a cunt in a room full of other women represented an escalation all the same.
When the other workers started yelling, Walker reached for the night-stick that completed his pseudo-military, brown-and-beige polyester uniform, the kind worn by private security guards in supermarkets. He didn’t use the weapon but the threat of it was enough. The crying woman collapsed at the sight of it. A moment or two later a pool of liquid spread from her. At first they thought it was the urine she had been struggling to contain. But even in this light they could see it was blood. One of the older women understood. ‘That poor child,’ she said, though whether she was referring to the woman or the baby she had just miscarried, Maddy could not tell. She had been near enough to film the whole scene. Edited, it would appear alongside the first article in the series.
She was writing in her head at this very moment, mentally typing out what would be the second section of the main piece. Everyone knew already that sweatshops like this one were rife across California, providing cheap labour, thanks mainly to migrants who had dashed across the Mexican border in the dead of night, to make or finish goods for the US or Latin American markets. That wasn’t news. LA Times readers knew why it had happened too: these days the big Chinese corporations found it cheaper to make goods in LA than in Beijing or Shanghai, now that their own workers cost so much. What people didn’t know was what it was actually like inside one of these dumps. That was her job. The stats and the economics she’d leave to the bean-counters on the business desk. What would get this story noticed was the human element, the unseen workers who were actually paying the price. Oh, that sounded quite good. Maybe she should use that in the intro. The unseen workers—
There was a coughing noise, not especially loud but insistent. It came from the woman opposite her on the production belt, an artificial throat-clearing designed to catch her attention. ‘What?’ Madison mouthed. She glanced up at her machine, looking for a red light, warning of a malfunction. Her co-worker raised her eyebrows, indicating something about Maddy’s appearance.
She looked down. Emerging from the third buttonhole of her shirt was a tiny piglet’s tail of wire.
She tried to tuck it away, but it was too late. In four large strides, Walker had covered the distance between them – lumbering and unfit, but bulky enough to loom over her, filling the space around her.
‘You give me that. Right now.’
‘Give you what?’ Maddy could hear her heart banging in her chest.
‘You don’t want to give me any taidu now, I warn you. Give it to me.’
‘What, a loose thread on my shirt? You’re ordering me to remove my clothes now, is that it, Walker? I’m not sure that’s allowed.’
‘Just give it to me and I’ll tell you what’s allowed.’
That he spoke quietly only made her more frightened. His everyday mode was shouting. This, he knew – and therefore she knew and all the women standing and watching, in silence, knew – was more serious.
She made an instant decision, or rather her hand made it before her brain could consider it. In a single movement, she yanked out the tiny camera and dropped it to the floor, crunching it underfoot the second it hit.
The foreman fell to his knees, trying to pick up the pieces: not an easy manoeuvre for a man his size. She watched, frozen, as the tiny fragments of now-shattered electronics collected in his palm. It was clear that he understood what they were. That was why he had not shouted. He had suspected the instant he caught sight of the wire. Recording device. His instructions must have been absolute: they were not tolerated under any circumstances.
Now, as he pulled himself up, she had a split-second to calculate. She had already got three weeks of material, downloaded from the camera each night and, thanks to Katharine, safely backed up. Even today’s footage was preserved, held on the recorder strapped to her back, regardless of the electronic debris on the floor. There was nothing to be gained from attempting to stay here, from coming up with some bullshit explanation for the now-extinct gadget. What would she say? And, she knew, she would be saying it to someone other than Walker. There was only one thing she could do.
Swiftly, she grabbed the security tag that hung around the foreman’s neck like a pendant, whipped it off and turned around and ran, past the work benches, heading for the stairs. She touched Walker’s tag against the electronic panel the way she’d seen him release the women for their rationed visits to the bathroom.
‘Stop right there, bitch!’ Walker was shouting. ‘You stop right there.’ He was coming after her, the thud of each footstep getting louder. The door beeped. She tugged at it, but the handle wouldn’t open. She held the damn card against the panel once more and this time, at last, the little light turned green, accompanied by another short, sharp and friendlier beep. She opened the door and stepped through.
But Walker had been fast, so that now his hand reached through and grabbed at her shoulder. He was strong, but she had one advantage. She swivelled to face him, grabbed the door and used all of her strength to slam it shut. His arm was caught between the door and the frame. He let out a loud yowl of pain and the arm retracted. She slammed the door again, hearing the reassuring click that meant it was electronically sealed.
Leaping up the stairs two at a time, she clutched at the rail as she reached the first landing and pulled herself onto the next flight, seeing daylight ahead. She would only have a few seconds. Walker was bound to have alerted security in reception by now.
Maddy was in the short corridor that led to the entrance of the building. From the outside it resembled nothing more than a low-rent import–export office. That was in her article, too. If you walked past it, you’d never know what horrors lay beneath.
She breathed deep, realizing she had no idea what to do next. She couldn’t breeze out, not from here. Workers were allowed to exit only at prescribed times. They would stop her; they’d call down to Walker; they’d start checking the computer. She needed to think of something. Her head was pounding now. And she could hear sounds coming from below. Had Walker got the downstairs door open?
She had the merest inkling of a plan, no more than an instinct. Flinging the door open, her voice rising with panic, she bellowed at the man and woman manning the front desk. ‘It’s Walker! I think he’s having a heart attack. Come quick!’
The pair sat frozen in that second of paralysis that strikes in every crisis. Maddy had seen it before. ‘Come on!’ she shouted. ‘I think he might be dying.’
Now they jumped up, barrelling past her to get down the stairs. ‘I’ll call for an ambulance!’ she shouted after them.
She had only a second to look behind the desk, at the grid of cubby-holes where they kept the women’s confiscated phones. Shit. She couldn’t see hers. She thought of simply rushing out there and then, but she’d be lost without it. Besides, if they found it once she’d gone, they’d instantly know who she was and what she’d been working on.
Commotion downstairs. They’d be back up here any second. She moved her eye along the slots one last time, trying to be methodical while her head was about to explode. Calm, calm, calm, she told herself. But it was a lie.
Then at last, the recognizable shape, the distinct colour of the case, lurking in the corner of the second last row. She grabbed it and rushed out of the door, into the open air.
The sound of the freeway was loud but unimaginably welcome. She had no idea how she would get away from here. She could hardly wait for a bus. Besides, she had left her wallet downstairs, tucked inside her now-abandoned bag.
As she began running towards the noise of the traffic, working out who she would call first – her editor to say they should run the story tonight or Katharine to apologize for the broken camera – she realized that she had only one thing on her besides her phone. She unclenched her fist to see Walker’s pass now clammy in her hand. Good, she thought. His photo ID would complement her article nicely: ‘The brute behind the brutality.’
Seven hours later the story was ready to go, including a paragraph or two on her ejection from the sweatshop and accompanied online by several segments of video, with greatest prominence given to the miscarriage episode. ‘How LA sweatshop conditions can mean the difference between life and death.’ Use of the Walker photo had taken up nearly an hour’s back-and-forth with the news editor. Howard Burke had worried about naming an individual.
‘Fine to go after the company, Madison, but you’re calling this guy a sadist.’
‘That’s because he is a sadist, Howard.’
‘Yes, but even sadists can sue.’
‘So let him sue! He’ll lose. We have video of him causing a woman to lose her baby. Jeez, Howard, you’re such—’
‘What, Maddy? What am I “such a”? And tread carefully here, because this story is not going anywhere till I say so.’
There was a silence between them, a stand-off of several seconds broken by her.
‘Asshole.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘You’re such an asshole. That’s what I was going to say. Before you interrupted me.’
The exchange that followed could be heard at the other end of the open-plan office.
Burke’s frustration overflowing, he drove his fist through an office partition, which newsroom historians recorded was the second time he had performed that feat – the first some four years earlier, also prompted by a clash with Madison Webb.
It took the intervention of the executive editor herself to broker a compromise. Jane Goldstein summoned Maddy into her office, making her wait while she took evidence from Howard over by the newsdesk. Clearly she had decided it was too risky to have them both in the same room at once.
It gave Maddy time to look at the boss’s power wall, which was a departure from the usual ego mural. Instead of photos with assorted political bigwigs and worthies, Goldstein had displayed a series of framed front pages of the biggest story she – or any other American reporter since Ed Murrow – had ever covered. She’d won a stack of Pulitzers, back when that had been the name of the biggest prize in US journalism.
Maddy’s phone vibrated. A message from a burnt-out former colleague who had left the Times to join a company in Encino making educational films.
Hey Maddy. Greetings from the slow lane. Am attaching my latest, for what it’s worth. Not exactly Stanley Kubrick, but I’d love any feedback. We’ve been told to aim at Junior High level. The brief is to explain the origins of the ‘situation’, in as neutral a way as possible. Nothing loaded. Tell me anything you think needs changing, especially script. You’re the writer!
With no sign of Goldstein, Maddy dutifully clicked the play button. From her phone’s small speaker, the voiceover – deep, mid-Western, reliable – began.
The story starts on Capitol Hill. Congress had gathered to raise the ‘debt ceiling’, the amount of money the American government is allowed to borrow each year. But Congress couldn’t agree. There was footage of the then-Speaker, banging his gavel, failing to bring order to the chamber.
After that, lenders around the world began to worry that a loan to America was a bad bet. The country’s ‘credit rating’ began to slip, downgraded from double A-plus to double A and then to letters of the alphabet no one ever expected to see alongside a dollar sign. That came with a neat little graphic animation, the A turning to B turning to C. But then the crisis deepened.
On screen was a single word in bold, black capital letters: DEFAULT. The voiceover continued. The United States had to admit it couldn’t pay the interest on the money it owed to, among others, China. In official language, the US Treasury announced a default on one of its bonds.
Now there were images of Tiananmen Square. Beijing had been prepared to tolerate that once, but when the deadlock in Congress threatened a second American default, China came down hard. A shot of the LA Times front page of the time.
Maddy hit the pause button and splayed her fingers to zoom in on the image. She could just make out the byline: a young Jane Goldstein. The headline was stark:
China’s Message to US: ‘Enough is enough’
A copy of that same front page was here now, framed and on Goldstein’s wall.
At the time the People’s Republic of China was America’s largest creditor, the country that lent it the most money. And so China insisted it had a special right to be paid back what it was owed. Beijing called for ‘certainty’ over US interest payments, insisting it would accept nothing less than ‘a guaranteed revenue stream’. China said it was not prepared to wait in line behind other creditors – or even behind other claims on American tax dollars, such as defence or education. From now on, said Beijing, interest payments to China would have to be America’s number one priority.
Maddy imagined the kids in class watching this story unfold. The voice, calm and reassuring, was taking them through the events that had shaped the country, and the times, they had grown up in.
But China was not prepared to leave the matter of repayment up to America. Beijing demanded the right to take the money it was owed at source. America had little option but to say yes. There followed a clip of an exhausted US official emerging from late night talks saying, ‘If China doesn’t get what it wants, if it deems the US a bad risk, there’ll be no country on earth willing to lend to us, except at extortionate rates.’
Experts declared that the entire American way of life – fuelled by debt for decades – was at risk. And so America accepted China’s demand and granted the People’s Republic direct access to its most regular stream of revenue: the custom duties it levied on goods coming into the US. From now on, a slice of that money would be handed over to Beijing the instant it was received.
But there was a problem: Beijing’s demand for a Chinese presence in the so-called ‘string of pearls’ along the American west coast – the ports of San Diego, Los Angeles, Long Beach and San Francisco. China insisted such a presence was essential if it was to monitor import traffic effectively.
Now came a short, dubbed clip of a Beijing official saying, ‘For this customs arrangement to work, the People’s Republic needs to be assured it is receiving its rightful allocation, no more and no less.’
The US government said no. It insisted a physical presence was a ‘red line’. Finally, after days of negotiation, the two sides reached a compromise. A small delegation of Chinese customs officials would be based on Port Authority premises – including in Los Angeles – but this presence would, the US government insisted, be only ‘symbolic’.
Archive footage of a CBS News broadcast from a few months after that agreement, reporting Chinese claims of smuggling and tax-dodging by American firms, crimes they suspected were tolerated, if not encouraged, by the US authorities. Beijing began to demand an increase in the number of Chinese inspectors based in Los Angeles and the other ‘string of pearl’ ports. Each demand was resisted at first by the US authorities – but each one was met in the end.
Next came pictures of the notorious Summer Riots, a sequence that had been played a thousand times on TV news in the US and around the world. A group of Chinese customs men surrounded by an angry American crowd; the LAPD trying to hold back the mob, struggling and eventually failing. The narrator took up the story. On that turbulent night, several rioters armed with clubs broke through, eventually killing two Chinese customs officers. The two men were lynched. The fallout was immediate. Washington acceded to Beijing’s request that the People’s Republic of China be allowed to protect its own people. The film ended with the White House spokesperson insisting that no more than ‘a light, private security detail’ would be sent from China to LA and the other ‘pearls’.
Maddy smiled a mirthless smile: everyone knew how that had turned out.
She was halfway through a reply to her former colleague – ‘Think that covers all the bases’ followed by a winking emoticon – when she looked up to see the editor striding in, three words into her sentence before she got through the door.
‘OK, we run the Walker picture tomorrow.’
Short, roundish and in her mid-fifties, her hair a solid, unapologetic white, Goldstein exuded impatience. Her eyes, her posture said, Come on, come on, get to the point, even before you had said a word. Still, Maddy risked a redundant question. ‘So not tonight?’
‘Correct. Walker remains unnamed tonight. Maybe tomorrow too. Depends on the re-act to the first piece.’
‘But—’
Goldstein peered over her spectacles in a way that drew instant silence from Maddy. ‘You have thirty minutes to make any final changes – and I mean final, Madison – and then you’re going to get the fuck out of this office, am I clear? You will not hang around and get up to your usual tricks, capisce?’
Maddy nodded.
‘No looking over the desk’s shoulder while they write the headlines, no arguing about the wording of a fucking caption, no getting in the way. Do we understand each other?’
Maddy managed a ‘Yes’.
‘Good. To recapitulate: the suck-ups on Gawker might think you’re the greatest investigative journalist in America, but I do not want you within a three-mile radius of this office.’
Maddy was about to say a word in her defence, but Goldstein’s solution actually made good sense: if a story went big, you needed to have a follow-up ready for the next day. Naming Walker and publishing his photo ID on day two would prove that they – she – had not used up all their ammo in the first raid. That Goldstein was perhaps one of a tiny handful of people on the LA Times she truly respected Maddy did not admit as a factor. She murmured a thank you and headed out – wholly unaware that when she next set foot in that office, her life – and the life of this city – would have turned upside down.
Chapter 2 (#uda5d8073-74b2-5eb3-9de4-9548ed7144a4)
LA tended not to be a late night town, but the Mail Room was different. Downtown, in that borderland between scuzzy and bohemian, it had gone through a spell as a gay hangout; the Male Room, Katharine called it, explaining why she and her fellow dykes – her word – steered clear of it. Though now enjoying a wider clientele, it still retained some of that edgier vibe. Unlike plenty of places in LA, the kitchen didn’t close at eight and you didn’t have to use a valet to park your car.
Maddy found a spot between a convertible, the roof down even now, in January, and an extravagant sports car with tinted windows. The high-rollers were clearly in; maybe a movie star, slumming it for the night, plus entourage. She considered texting Katharine to suggest they go somewhere else.
The speakers in her car – a battered, made-in-China Geely that had been feeling its age even when she got it – were relaying the voices of the police scanner, announcing the usual mayhem of properties burgled and bodies found: the legacy of her days on the crime beat. She stabbed at the button, found a music station, wound up the volume. Let the beat pump through her while she used the car mirror to fix her make-up. Remarkably, despite the stress, she didn’t look too horrific. Her long, brown hair was tangled: she dragged a brush through it. But the dark circles under her green eyes were beyond cosmetic help: the concealer she dabbed on looked worse than the shadows.
Inside, she had that initial shudder of nerves, known to every person who ever arrived at a party on their own. She scanned the room, looking for a familiar face. Had she got here too late? Had Katharine and Enrica come here, tired of it and moved on? She dug into her pocket, her fingers searching out the reassurance of her phone.
While her head was down, she felt the clasp of a hand on her shoulder.
‘Hey, you!’
It took her a second to place the face, then she had it: Charlie Hughes. They’d met straight after college.
‘You look great, Maddy. What you doing here?’
‘I thought I was going to be celebrating. But I can’t see the people I’m meet—’
‘Celebrating? That’d be nice. I’m here to do the very opposite.’
‘The opposite? Why?’
‘You know that script I’ve been working on for, like, years?’ Charlie was a qualified, practising physician but that wasn’t enough for him. Ever since he’d been hired as a consultant on a TV medical drama, Charlie had become obsessed with making it as a screenwriter. In LA, even the doctors wanted to be in pictures. ‘The one about the monks and devils?’
‘Devil Monk?’
‘Yes! Wow, Maddy, I love that you remember that. See, it does have a memorable title. I told them.’
‘Them?’
‘The studio. They’ve cancelled the project.’
‘Oh no. Why?’
‘Usual story. Sent it to Beijing for “approval”. Which always means disapproval.’
‘What didn’t they like?’ God, she could do without this. She gazed over his shoulder, desperately seeking a glimpse of her friends.
‘Said it wouldn’t resonate with the Chinese public. It’s such bullshit, Maddy. I told them the most particular stories are always the most universal. If it means something to someone in Peoria, it’ll mean something to someone in Guangdong. The trouble is, if they won’t distribute, no one will fund. It’s the same story every time—’
She showed him glazed eyes, but it made no difference. He was off. So lost was he in his own tale – narrative, he’d call it – that he barely looked at her, fixing instead on some middle distance where those who had conspired to thwart his career were apparently gathered.
With an inward sigh, Maddy scoped the room. The group that caught the eye had occupied the club’s prime spot, perhaps a dozen of them gathering against the wide picture window that made up the far wall. Their laughter was loudest, their clothes sparkling brightest. The women were nearly all blonde – the exception was a redhead – and, as far as Maddy could see, gorgeous. Cocktails in hand, they were throwing their heads back in laughter, showing off their long, laboriously tonged hair. The men were Chinese, wearing expensive jeans and pressed white shirts, set off against watches as bejewelled and shiny as any trinket worn by the women. Princelings, she concluded.
She hadn’t realized the Mail Room had become a favoured hangout for that set, the pampered sons of the Chinese ruling elite who, thanks to the garrison and the attached military academy, had become a fixture of LA high society. Soon these rich boys would be the officer corps of the PLA, the People’s Liberation Army. PLAyers, the gossip sites called them.
The redhead was losing a battle to stay upright, tugged down by her wrist to sit on the lap of a man whose broad grin just got broader. He ran his hand down the woman’s back, resting it just above her buttocks. She was showing her teeth in a smile, but her eyes suggested she didn’t find it funny.
Maddy contemplated the tableau they made, the Princelings and their would-be princesses, their Aston Martins and Ferraris cooling outside. She was surprised this place was expensive enough for them. Now that they were here, it soon would be.
Charlie broke into his own monologue to wave hello at one of the PLAyers.
‘Is he an investor?’ Maddy asked, surprised.
‘I wish,’ Charlie sighed. ‘He’s a patient. The thing is …’
Suddenly she caught sight of Katharine standing at full stretch in a corner, her mouth making an O of delight, waving her to come over. Maddy gave Charlie a parting peck on the cheek, mumbled a ‘Good luck’ and all but fled to Katharine and Enrica, standing in a cluster with a few others around a small, high table congested with cocktails.
She slowed down when she saw him. What on earth was he doing here? She thought it was going to be a night with the girls, or at least men she hadn’t met, ideally gay. A night off. She gave Katharine a glare. But it was too late. He was already there, glass in hand, with his trademark embryonic smile. The beard was a new addition. When they lived together, she had always vetoed facial hair. But that was nearly nine months ago and now she saw it, she had to admit, it suited him.
‘Leo.’
‘Maddy. You look as stunning as ever.’
‘Don’t be slimy. Slimy never suited you.’
‘I was being charming.’
‘Yeah, well, charming never suited you either.’
‘How would you like me to be?’
‘Somewhere else?’ She lowered her voice. ‘Seriously, Leo. I thought we were going to give each other some space.’
‘Come on, Maddy. Let’s not ruin your big night.’
‘How do you know about that?’
He nodded towards Katharine, then took a sip of his drink. The budding smile had blossomed in his eyes, which never left her. They were a warm brown. In the right mood, when his interest, or better still his passion, was engaged, they seemed to contain sparks of light that would careen around the iris, bouncing off each other. They were brightening now.
‘What did she tell you? K, what did you—’
He reached for her wrist. ‘Don’t worry, she didn’t tell me anything. Just that you’ve reeled in a big one. Big enough to win a Huawei.’
‘Katharine doesn’t know what’s she’s talking about,’ Maddy retorted. But her shoulders dropped for the first time since she walked in here. She couldn’t hide it: she’d been thinking this story had the potential to win a Huawei prize from the beginning, before she’d even written a word. It had just what the judges liked: investigation, risk, its target corruption – at just that mid-level where its exposure did not threaten those at the very top. In more than one sleepless hour, she had worded the imaginary citation.
‘But you do, Maddy. And your face is telling me I’m right. You’ve landed a biggie.’
‘Don’t think you’re going to get me to tell you by flattering me, because it won’t work.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I know you, Leo Harris. I know all your tricks. Leaking my exclusive to everyone else, so it makes no impact—’
‘Not that again.’
‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to let you ruin this evening. I’m in a happy mood and I’m going to—’
‘OK, just tell me one thing.’
‘No.’
‘Does it affect the mayor in any way at all?’
‘No.’
‘Do I need to worry about it in any way at all?’
‘No.’ She paused. ‘Not really.’
‘Not really? And I’m supposed to be reassured by that?’
‘I mean, only in the sense that it’s happening in this city. And,’ she tilted her chin towards her chest and dropped her voice two octaves, ‘“Everything that happens in this city concerns—”’
‘“—concerns the mayor.” You see, Maddy, you do remember me.’
She said nothing but kept her eyes trained on his, brown and warm as a logfire. Seeing his pleasure, his tickled vanity, the thought came out of her mouth before she was even fully aware of it. ‘You’re such an asshole, Leo.’
‘Let me get you a drink.’
He turned and headed towards the bar, leaving Maddy to the gaze of Katharine, simultaneously quizzical and reproachful. Her friend and colleague, shorter, older and always wiser in such matters, was wordlessly asking her what the hell she was doing. By means of her eyes alone, she said, I thought we’d talked about this.
Leo was back, handing Maddy a glass. Whisky, not wine. I know you. She downed it in one gulp.
‘So,’ he began again, as if drawing a line under the previous topic. ‘I tell you what would win an instant Huawei.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Inside the campaign of the next Governor of the great state of California. Unprecedented access, fly on the wall. In the room.’
‘Are you offering me access to Berger’s campaign?’
‘No. I’m telling you what you could’ve had if you hadn’t broken up with me.’
‘Leo.’
‘All right. If you hadn’t decided we should have a “break”.’
‘We decided.’
‘Whatever. The point is, the mayor’s going to win, Maddy. He’s the most popular mayor in the history of Los Angeles.’
‘Well, I’ll just have to live with that, won’t I?’
He shrugged. Your loss.
They were joined just then by an improbably tall, slender woman perched on four-inch heels, wearing a dress which appeared to be slashed to the waist. Her skin was tanned and flawless. She was, Maddy decided, either a professional model or twenty-three years old. Or possibly both. When she spoke, it was with an accent that suggested an expensive education.
‘Aren’t you going to introduce me, Leo?’ The woman’s smile was wide and white. She gave Maddy a look of unambiguous warmth, as if they were destined to be friends for life.
‘This is Jade,’ Leo mumbled.
A long moment passed before Madison extended her hand and, realizing Leo was not going to do it for her, offered her own name. The three smiled at each other mutely before Madison finally turned and said under her breath, ‘Goodnight, Leo.’
He whispered back, ‘Don’t break my balls, Maddy.’
‘I don’t want to go anywhere near your balls, Leo. Have a good night.’
It was after midnight when Enrica announced that it was past her bedtime and that, unless Katharine wanted to deal with a woman no longer responsible for her actions, she needed to take her home. As Maddy followed them down the two flights of stairs, Katharine steadying her wife as she negotiated each step, she imagined what Leo would make of this sight: the lesbian couple, one Chinese-American, the other Latina, both committed Angelenos. It was a wonder he hadn’t cast them in a Berger campaign ad ages ago.
Now, in the dead of night, Maddy was experiencing what was, to her, the rare sensation of having done what she had been told. She had gone out and gone back home and not phoned the desk once. She had not bothered Howard or complained. She had not tried to tweak the odd sentence here and there. Nor had she exploited the fact that she knew all the relevant codes to go online and make the changes herself – an action that would squarely fall into the category defined by Goldstein as ‘her usual tricks’. Sure, she had looked at the website a dozen times, she had checked Weibo, which was now humming with the story. But, by her standards, she had exercised remarkable restraint.
She stood in the shower, unmoving, not washing, letting the water envelop her. Prompted, perhaps, by the sensation of warmth on her skin, she found herself tingling, her hands’ movements turning to caresses. Unbidden, came Leo – not the look of him so much as the sense of him, his presence. And the memory of his touch when he had been close to her, right here, in this shower, his body next to hers.
And yet she lacked the energy for what would ordinarily come next. What she wanted most of all was to fall into a deep, restoring sleep. But what else was new?
The water was turning cold. She stepped out, grabbed a towel and wandered into the living room. Or ‘living room’ as she would put it, in heavy quotes, were she writing a profile of somebody whose apartment looked like this. She assessed it now, with the detached eye of an observer. Outside lay the neighbourhood of Echo City, one part funky to two parts rundown. Inside, a large table, big enough to seat six or eight, entirely covered with paper, two laptops and a stack of filled notebooks, none arranged in any order except the one known exclusively to her. A couch, both ends taken up by piles of magazines and more papers, narrowing it into a seat for one.
Off to one side, through an open archway, the kitchen area, deceptively clean – not through fastidiousness so much as underuse. Even from here she could see there was a veneer of dust on the stove. The explanation lay in the trash can, filled almost exclusively by take-out cartons, deposited in a daily stream since she’d been on this story – and, she conceded to herself, long before.
For a moment Madison pictured how this place looked when she and Leo lived together. No tidier, but busier. Fuller. She enjoyed the memory, interrupted by that cut-glass accent. This is Jade.
She glanced down at her phone. So busy writing all afternoon and into the evening, she’d repeatedly ignored it when it rang. She’d not even checked her missed calls. But here they were: two from Howard, one from Katharine, both now obsolete, six from her older sister, Quincy, and one from her younger sister, Abigail.
She instantly thumbed Abigail’s name and hovered over the ‘Call’ button. It was late and Abigail was no night owl. On the other hand, she was a teacher at elementary school: blessed with a job that allowed her to turn off her cell when she went to bed. No risk of waking her up, no matter how late. Maddy perched on the end of the couch, still in her towel, and pressed the button. It rang six times and then voicemail, her sister’s voice so much younger, so much lighter, than her own.
No one leaves messages on these any more. But go on, you’ve come this far. Let me hear how you sound.
Maddy clicked off as soon as she heard the beep. She looked at the others, at Quincy’s six attempts. That suggested low-level incandescence rather than full-blown rage. Maddy wondered what she had done wrong to offend her older sister this time, what rule or convention or supposedly widely understood sisterly duty she had violated or failed to comprehend. She would not listen to the voicemail, she didn’t need to.
Her skin dry now, she followed the promise of sleep into the bedroom. Letting the towel fall off her, she slipped into the sheets, enjoying their cool. She had a dim awareness that she was following at least two elements of the recommended advice to insomniacs – a good shower and clean bedclothes. Such advice was in plentiful supply. She had been deluged with it over the years. Go to bed early, go to bed late. A bath, rather than a shower. Steaming hot or, better still, not hot. Eat a hearty meal, pasta is especially effective, at nine pm, or six pm, or noon, or even, in one version, seven am. A cup of warm milk. Not milk, whisky. Give up alcohol, give up wheat, give up meat. Stop smoking, start drinking. Start smoking, stop drinking. Exercise more, exercise less. Have you tried melatonin? Best to clear the head last thing at night by writing a to-do list. Never, ever write a to-do list: it will only set your mind racing. People are not clocks: they need to be wound down before sleep, not wound up. Thinking before bed was good, thinking before bed was very bad. One thing she knew for certain: contemplating all the myriad, contradictory methods of falling asleep could keep a person up at night.
Indeed, here she was, shattered, her arms, her hands, her eyes, her very fingertips aching for sleep – and still wide awake. None of it worked. None of it had ever worked. Pills could knock her out, but the price was too high: groggy and listless the next day. And she feared getting hooked: she knew herself too well to take the risk.
She had been up for twenty hours; all she was asking for was a few hours’ rest. Even a few minutes. She closed her eyes.
Something like sleep came, the jumble of semi-conscious images that, for a normal person, usually presages sleep, a partial dream, like an overture to the main performance. She remembered that much from her childhood, back when she could rest effortlessly, surrendering to slumber the instant her head touched the pillow. But the voice in her head refused to fall silent. Here it was now, telling her she was still awake, stubbornly, maddeningly present.
She reached for her phone, letting out a glum sigh: all right, you win. She checked the LA Times site again, her story still the ‘most read’. Then she clicked on the scanner app again, listening long enough to hear the police reporting several bodies found around town. One was not far from here, in Eagle Creek, another in North Hollywood.
Next, a long article on foreign policy: ‘Yang’s Grand Tour’, detailing how the man tipped to be China’s next president had just returned from an extended visit to the Middle East and analysing what this meant for the next phase of the country’s ambition. The piece was suitably dense. Sure enough, it came close to sending her off, her mental field of vision behind her lidded eyes darkening at the edges, like the blurred border on an old silent movie. The dark surround spread, so that the image glimpsed by her mind’s eye became smaller and smaller, until it was very nearly all black …
But she was watching it too closely, wanting it too much. She was conscious of her own slide into unconsciousness and so it didn’t happen. She was, goddammit, still awake. She opened her eyes in surrender.
And then, for perhaps the thousandth time, she opened the drawer by her bed and pulled out the photograph.
She gazed at it now, looking first at her mother. She would have been what, thirty-eight or thirty-nine, when this picture was taken. Christ, less than ten years older than Maddy was now. Her mother’s hair was brown, unstyled. She wore glasses too, of the unfashionable variety, as if trying to make herself look unattractive. Which would make a kind of sense.
Quincy was there, seventeen, tall, the seriousness already etched into her face. Beautiful in a stern way. Abigail was adorable of course, gap-toothed and smiling, aged six and sitting on Maddy’s lap. As for Maddy herself, aged fourteen in this photograph, she was smiling too, but her expression was not happy, exactly: it contained too much knowledge of the world and of what life can do.
She reached out to touch her earlier self, but came up against the right-hand edge of the picture, sharp where she had methodically cut it all those years ago, excising the part she didn’t want to see.
Later she would not be able to say when she had fallen asleep or even if she had. But the phone buzzed shortly after two am, making the bedside table shake. A name she recognized but which baffled her at this late hour: Detective Howe. A long-time source of hers from the crime beat, one who had been especially keen to remain on her contacts list. He called her once or twice a month: usually pretending to have a story, occasionally coming right out with it and asking her on a date. They had had lunch a couple of times, but she had never let it go further. And he had certainly never called in the middle of the night. One explanation surfaced. The sweatshop must have reported her for assault and Jeff was giving her a heads-up. Funny, she’d have thought they’d have wanted to avoid anything that would add to the publicity, especially after—
‘Madison, is that you?’
‘Yes. Jeff? Are you all right?’
‘I’m OK. I’m downstairs. You need to let me in. Your buzzer’s broken.’
‘Jeff. It’s two in the morning. I’m—’
‘I know, Madison. Just let me in.’ He was not drunk, she could tell that much. Something in his voice told her this was not what she had briefly feared; he was not about to make a scene, declaring his love for her, pleading to share her bed. She buzzed him in and waited.
When he appeared at her front door, she knew. His face alone told her: usually handsome, lean, his greying hair close-cropped, he now looked gaunt. She offered a greeting but her words sounded strange to her, clogged. Her mouth had dried. She noticed that she was cold. Her body temperature seemed to have dropped several degrees instantly.
‘I’m so sorry, Madison. But I was on duty when I heard and I asked to do this myself. I thought it was better you hear this from me.’
She recognized that tone. She was becoming light-headed, the blood draining from her brain and thumping back into her heart. ‘Who?’ was all she could say.
She saw Jeff’s eyes begin to glisten. ‘It’s your sister. Abigail. She’s been found dead.’
Chapter 3 (#uda5d8073-74b2-5eb3-9de4-9548ed7144a4)
Jeff waited while she threw on the first clothes she could find before leading her to his car. He spoke throughout, telling her what he knew but she digested almost none of it. The only words she heard were the ones that replayed themselves over and over. It’s your sister. Abigail. She’s been found dead.
She was plagued by pictures of Abigail as a child. No matter how hard she tried, she could not see her sister as an adult. One image recurred more than any other: Abigail aged five or six, clutching the doll Maddy herself had once played with, that had, like everything else, been handed down from sister to sister to sister. And in her head, variations on a sentence that would not quite form itself: I let you down, Abigail. I let it happen again. It was never meant to happen again.
They had been driving less than ten minutes when Maddy suddenly sat bolt-upright, heart pounding. It took a moment for her to understand. Even if only for a few seconds, she had fallen asleep. Microsleeps, they called them. They happened to all insomniacs. She knew she was especially vulnerable after a shock; it could prompt her system to shut down. It had happened once in college, after some jerk she had fallen for dumped her, the pain sending her into brief unconsciousness.
Arriving at LAPD headquarters helped. Like a muscle memory, she knew how to walk and talk and carry herself here. She shook off Jeff’s attempts to guide her like the walking wounded, a hand on her waist. She made for the entrance, determined to function like Madison Webb, reporter.
Later she would struggle to remember the exact sequence of those next few hours, even though individual moments were etched in her memory. She remembered pleading with Jeff, asking him to pull whatever strings he could to break the usual protocol and allow her to visit the coroner’s office. Once there, she would never forget the grey-white sheet pulled back to reveal the frozen mask of her sister’s face, her lips a faded purple now, though Maddy had been told they were cold and blue when Abigail’s housemate had found her. Nor would she forget the way the doctor on duty had lifted her sister’s right arm, as casually as if it were the limb of a mannequin, gesturing to a fresh needle mark. And she would never forget his words, dully announcing to her the provisional verdict based on the state of the body when found: that the deceased had died of a drugs overdose, specifically caused by a massive injection of heroin into the bloodstream.
A silent, glared rebuke from Jeff had prompted the physician to apologize for his use of ‘the deceased’ about a woman who until a few hours ago had only ever been known as Abigail – a vital, joyful, beautiful force of nature. But there was no room in Maddy’s heart for anger about that. She was too numb to feel anything as direct as anger. Besides, she had covered enough murders to know that that was how death worked. You could be energetic, smart and sexy, an Olympic athlete or a Nobel-prize-winning genius, but it made no difference: within a moment you became meat on a slab. The staff in the coroner’s office spoke and acted the way they did because that was all they were looking at. They couldn’t see Abigail. They could only see a corpse.
Finally, Jeff ensured Madison got to meet the detective assigned to the case, Barbara Miller, a former partner of his. Brisk and businesslike, she gave them an initial briefing, describing the way Abigail’s body had been discovered: lying straight on the floor, on her back. An initial, brief search of the apartment could not confirm any forced entry. There were a few marks on the neck and back, but nothing that suggested a struggle.
It was past four in the morning when Maddy left, Jeff still at her side.
‘Thank you,’ she said, her voice a whisper.
‘You don’t have to thank me. You’ve just had the most terrible shock a person can have.’
‘I don’t believe it, you know.’
‘I know. It’s impossible to take in.’ He opened the passenger door for her, touching her elbow as he eased her into the seat.
‘I mean, I don’t believe it. Not a single fucking word of it.’
‘Of what?’
‘What your friend the detective was implying. In there.’
‘What was she implying?’
‘Come on, Jeff. No “confirmed” sign of forced entry. “Nothing to suggest a struggle.” I used to write that shit. We all know what it means. It means your friend thinks this was an “accident”.’ Maddy indicated quote marks with her eyebrows.
‘I don’t—’
‘I’ve seen that look you guys get when you talk about this stuff. She’s made up her mind that this was some kind of druggie sex game that went wrong.’
‘She didn’t say that.’
‘She didn’t have to. No forced entry, no struggle: it means consent. But I’m telling you, I know my sister, Jeff. I know who she is. She teaches elementary school, for Christ’s sake. She is not a fucking junkie.’
Jeff said nothing, so Maddy said it for him. ‘She was murdered, Jeff. Not killed by accident. Murdered. Someone murdered my baby sister.’
Then the words she thought but did not say out loud: I will find out who did this to you, Abigail. I broke one promise to you, but I will not break this one.
Chapter 4 (#uda5d8073-74b2-5eb3-9de4-9548ed7144a4)
She woke from two hours of not-quite sleep – the fitful dozing that was often the closest she got to rest – with a momentary pause. It lasted less than a second, the most fleeting delay before she realized that the sense of a great, grave weight sunk onto her chest was not the product of a dream that would slip away, but of memory. She had remembered what had happened in the night, and her spirit sank with the recognition that it was no illusion or confusion, but real. Abigail was dead. She had not been able to save her.
She had refused Jeff Howe’s offer to sleep on her couch, which meant she had to drive herself to Quincy’s house in Brentwood. The long downhill ride along Huntley Avenue, the twists and turns, made her nauseous. Though she suspected that had less to do with the winding road – which was, in fact, remarkably free of the potholes that were standard in all but the richest, and usually expat Chinese, neighbourhoods of Los Angeles – and more to do with sickening anticipation of the duty that faced her.
The dashboard clock told her it was just before seven. Quincy would be up now, getting the kids ready for school.
She walked around the single BMW – an SUV – in the driveway. That meant Mark was already at the office. Some role in finance she struggled – or, rather, had not bothered – to understand. The dawn start was becoming rarer in LA these days: most began work later and carried on into the evening, so they could be on Beijing time. But it was a relief. She would need to be alone with Quincy.
She pressed the doorbell once and waited. She could hear her nephews squabbling, then her sister’s voice: ‘Juanita! Will you get that?’
The live-in maid; Maddy had forgotten about that. It still surprised her, the notion of anyone in her family being able to afford staff. When they grew up under the same roof, they could afford nothing.
The door opened to reveal Juanita’s pursed lips. Suddenly, and for the first time, Maddy thought of what she looked like: sleepless and in stained jeans with a sweater holed below the armpit. Was the Mexican-Catholic maid judging her appearance – or would she have got that look of disapproval no matter how she was dressed, thanks to a sustained campaign of propaganda from her employer?
‘Hello, Juanita,’ she managed, stepping inside. ‘Is Quincy around?’
‘We’re in here!’ her sister called out, her voice full of capable good cheer, the mom busy with her brood.
Maddy thought of asking Juanita to call Quincy out so they could speak alone, but thought better of it. So, bracing herself, she entered the kitchen that was as big as her entire apartment, large enough for the boys to be throwing a softball to each other in one area, their play barely disturbing their sister as she sat, eating cereal, at the breakfast bar. Quincy was stationed at what she called ‘the island’, making waffles.
‘Hi, Aunt Maddy,’ said the younger of the two boys, raising a mitt in greeting. His child’s smile stabbed at her heart. He was not much older than Abigail in the photograph.
Quincy looked up from the stove. ‘What happened to you? You look awful.’
Maddy moved over to her sister, dropping her voice. ‘We need to talk.’
‘I know,’ Quincy said, pulling at a wide drawer which noiselessly slid out to offer a vast range of cutlery. ‘That’s why I’ve been calling you. You know Mom has an appointment today, don’t you? At Cedar Sinai? Mark arranged it, with a specialist he knows. The thing is, I can’t take her. And it’s very much your turn, isn’t it? Why don’t you put these on the table? It’s so nice to see you. The kids haven’t seen you for ages.’ She handed her three plates and a small jug of maple syrup.
Maddy took them and put them straight down. ‘Quincy, it’s not that. It’s something terrible. We have to talk. Away from here.’
Into the vast living room, the silent black of the enormous TV screen that filled one wall reflecting them as they faced one another. Quincy’s brow was furrowed into a frown that said: What have you donenow?
‘It’s Abigail. The police called me in the middle of the night. She was found … They found her. She’s dead, Quincy.’
‘What?’
‘Don’t make me say it again.’
‘What are you talking about? I saw her on Sunday. She was here. She had lunch with us.’
‘They say it was a heroin overdose.’
‘Heroin? Abigail? Why would you say these things, Maddy? What’s wrong with you?’
‘I wish it wasn’t true. But I’ve seen … I’ve seen her. I was there a few hours ago, at the coroner’s office. It’s not a mistake.’
Once Quincy surrendered to the truth, she crumpled. As she did so, she instantly managed to find what had eluded Maddy all night: tears. Quincy held her arms open to be hugged by her younger sister, and they stood together, Maddy’s face growing wet from tears that were not her own.
‘You should have told me,’ were the first words Quincy managed.
‘I couldn’t do it over the phone.’
‘You should have come here earlier. I should have known.’
‘I couldn’t wake you up in the middle of the night. It would have terrified the children.’
‘It wasn’t right that you had to know this on your own, Maddy.’ After a few seconds, she spoke again. ‘And where was she?’
‘Like I said, in her apartment.’
‘No. I mean where?’
Maddy hesitated, picturing the image supplied to her at the coroner’s office and now seared into her mind: of Abigail, laid out on the floor. She should tell her. Quincy had a right to know. If Maddy had had to endure it, then they both should. Quincy had even said as much, that it was wrong for Maddy to carry this knowledge alone. Instead she said, ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure.’
At that, Quincy started sobbing again. Her son, Brett, was calling for her.
‘I’m really sorry, but there’s something I need to ask you,’ Maddy began. ‘About Abigail.’
Quincy stood up. ‘I’m going to go over to Mom’s now. I think we should go together.’
‘No. I can’t.’
‘What do you mean, you “can’t”?’
‘I can’t, Quincy.’
‘Don’t tell me you’re going to work. Jesus.’
‘Of course I’m not! For God’s sake. But I need to find out what happened to Abigail. None of it—’
‘Are you kidding? Let the police do that. Right now, you need to be with your family.’
‘I can’t do it, Quincy. I’m not going over there.’
‘Christ, Maddy. I don’t understand you at all, do you know that? At a time like this, your place—’
‘Look, just tell me. Did Abigail do drugs? Is that possible?’
‘Abigail? Abigail? I can’t believe you’d even ask that. Of course not.’
‘OK. Because what this means—’
‘Where would she even get drugs from? She didn’t mix in those kind of circles. And nor do I.’
‘What the fuck is that supposed to mean?’
‘Shhh. The children!’
‘No.’ Madison raised her voice louder, deliberately shouting out the word most likely to anger her sister. ‘What. The. FUCK is that supposed to mean?’
‘Nothing, Maddy. Nothing. We’re all in shock. Ignore it, just ignore—’
‘Are you saying that I mix in those kind of circles, that I hang out with junkies? Is that what you’re saying? You can be a real shabi sometimes, you know, Quincy.’
‘How dare you use that language in this house!’
‘I can’t believe it. You’re blaming me!’
‘I’m not. Of course I’m not, Maddy. I’m just saying that you, you know, sometimes showed Abigail a more urban lifestyle than—’
‘More urban?What the hell is that supposed to mean? You mean because I don’t live in Crestwood fucking Hills with an SUV and a Merc?’
‘I think you should leave. I need to tell our mother that her daughter is dead.’
That stopped Maddy cold. She felt the rage ebb, leaving only exhaustion behind. ‘I’m sorry, Quincy. I’m not thinking straight. I’m just so …’ The sentence faded away.
Quincy looked at her with eyes that were raw. ‘OK. But you’re meant to be this great investigator, so brilliant at finding out the truth. But you don’t even know the people right in front of you, do you? You think you’re this big media star, Maddy, but guess what: you don’t always know everything. Not about me. Not about Mom.’ She paused, considering whether to continue. ‘Not even about Abigail.’
Chapter 5 (#uda5d8073-74b2-5eb3-9de4-9548ed7144a4)
She felt an extra rebuke in the fact that she didn’t have a key. Quincy probably had one, entrusted to her by Abigail in case of emergency. If Abigail had locked herself out or gone on vacation without turning the air-con off, who was she going to call? Madison didn’t blame her younger sister. Truth is, she’d have done the same in her position: rely on the one you can rely on.
You don’t always know everything. The words had stung her, replaying themselves as she had driven away from Quincy. So typical that, even now, her elder sister had managed to find a way to make Maddy feel excluded, as if she were somehow on the edge of the family, not privy to a knowledge shared by the other three women. Occasionally, Maddy felt that way, somehow lacking a clear place in the sibling line-up. Quincy was the eldest, Abigail the youngest but what was she? The middle sister? There wasn’t even a name for that.
In her head and even, for one moment, out loud in the car – alone in the driving seat – Madison had rehearsed her comeback. Truth is, Quincy, it’s you who doesn’t know everything. In fact, Quince, you know nothing. Thanks to us, you never did. You don’t have the slightest idea what happened that day, do you?
It was then that it struck her. With Abigail gone, and her mother in the state she was in, Madison was the only one left who knew. The only one left who remembered. The sensation of it left her queasy, as if she were at a great height looking down, her knees ready to buckle. It was like that thing they taught her in college, when she did a philosophy class: if a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it, does it make a sound? If you are the last living soul to remember an event, did it even happen?
She considered the elevator but took the stairs, emerging onto the third floor to see the familiar yellow-and-black tape, barring her path to Abigail’s front door. There was no one around to enforce it, but Madison halted all the same. The door was ajar and there were voices coming from inside. Madison stared at the door frame, noticing some scarring close to the lock. Leaning in, she could see that a very small part of the surround had splintered, so that two or three painted wood shards jutted forward. Was that fresh damage or had it been done weeks earlier? She could not be sure. An initial, brief search of the apartment could not confirm any forced entry.
‘Hello?’ she called out, still on the wrong side of the police tape. The voices inside stopped. A few moments later, the door opened wider to reveal a young, fair-haired police officer bulked out by his uniform. Over his shoulder, four paces back, stood Abigail’s room-mate, Jessica. When she had first met her, whenever that was, Madison had marvelled at her bouncing hair and California Girl energy; she and Abigail looked as if they’d walked out of an orange juice commercial. But now Jessica’s shoulders were rounded and her hair was limp.
‘I’m Abigail Webb’s sister,’ Madison said, replying to the man’s unspoken question. ‘I won’t touch anything,’ she added as she lifted the tape and walked through the front door. By way of confirmation, Jessica stepped forward and opened her arms. Madison let herself be hugged, unsure whether she was receiving solace or administering it.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Jessica whispered, her cheeks wet against Maddy’s hair.
‘I’m sorry it was … I’m sorry you had to be here when …’
Once they had parted, Madison stepped back and looked at Jessica. She seemed crushed, as if the weight that had fallen on her had been physical. The police officer hovered nearby. They were still no more than a yard from the front door.
Maddy didn’t want to ask her sister’s friend to say it all over again, to make her re-live the moment of horror from several hours earlier. But she did, all the same.
Jessica started talking. ‘I walked in, put on the light and there she was. Lying on her back. She was still and she looked … so strange.’ Jessica’s voice faltered. ‘Her lips were blue. And her hair was real clammy.’
‘Did you know straight away that she was dead?’ Maddy said.
‘I wasn’t sure. At first I thought maybe she was breathing. Like tiny, faint breaths. I put my face by her mouth, to see if I could feel anything. And maybe I did. But it was just once. I waited and I didn’t feel it again. And she was so cold …’ Jessica’s chin began to tremble.
Maddy pressed on. ‘And you called the police right away?’
‘Not right away. I tried talking to her. You know, “Abigail, wake up. It’s me.” I might have slapped her, I can’t remember for sure. Her cheek was so cold.’
They talked for a moment or two longer when the police officer interrupted them. ‘Miss?’ He was looking at Jessica. ‘Do you know this gentleman?’
They both turned around to see an older man, his face covered by a smog mask, filling the door frame.
‘Daddy,’ Jessica said, moving towards him. Only then did Madison notice the overnight bag packed by the front door.
Jessica turned around and said, ‘I’m sorry, Madison. But my parents say it’ll be best for me if I leave town for a few days. They think I need to be home.’
‘Of course,’ Maddy said, attempting to smile. ‘Thanks, Jess.’ She had heard Abigail refer to her that way, but it sounded wrong coming from her. As Jessica followed her father out of the door – explaining to him that he didn’t need to wear the mask indoors – Madison called out to her once more. ‘I’m sorry it had to be you.’ Maddy knew as she said it that it could hardly have been anyone else. Certainly not her: she hadn’t been inside this apartment for months. It might even have been a year.
Once Jessica and her father had gone, the police officer turned to Madison and murmured a quiet ‘OK’, as if to say this visit had no doubt been tough but her time was nearly up.
‘I want to go into my sister’s room.’
‘I got very strict instructions, Miss. I’m not—’
‘I know about your instructions and I know the rules. I’m allowed in, so long as you’re present at all times to make sure I don’t remove anything. The place has been photographed and dusted for prints already, right?’
‘Yes, but have you checked this with—’
‘If you have any problems at all, call the Chief of Police. Tell him this is what Madison Webb has requested.’
It was a gamble, but a low-risk one. She had met Doug Jarrett a few times, though he was hardly a contact: he’d been appointed to the top job just as she was leaving the crime beat. For all that, she reckoned her name was well-enough known around the LAPD that had this officer called her bluff and telephoned headquarters – which he wouldn’t – she’d be OK.
He dipped his head in assent and she led the way, passing the living area and kitchen until she pushed open the door to the room that belonged to Abigail.
She stepped inside and was hit instantly by a wave of love and nostalgia that almost floored her. In just a few seconds, she was flooded by all things Abigail. On the bed were a couple of ethnic-style cushions Abigail had picked up on a trip to Santa Fe during her sophomore year. In the corner, the guitar she had taken up as a wannabe hippie in the eighth grade: Maddy only had to glance at it to hear again the sound of her sister strumming, out of time, to ‘Nowhere Man’. On the wall, the familiar collage of postcards of recent art exhibitions. On the night table, a copy of the latest novel by the young Nigerian literary sensation whom Maddy had heard interviewed on NPR in the middle of the night. The book was opened and face down, suggesting that Abigail – unlike all the journalist bullshitters Maddy knew – was actually reading it. The bed was rumpled, each crease a reminder that not long ago a living, breathing person had slept in it.
The room too was messy, a pile of exercise clothes and underwear in one corner. On the desk was a pile of children’s exercise books: all yellow, each one methodically laminated by hand. She opened one to see an infant’s scrawl.
E is for England. England has a Queen. It rains a lot. They call soccer football.
And below it, Abigail’s unmistakable hand in bright red.
Good job, Oscar! You’ve made E Week really fun.
Next to it, she had drawn a smiley face.
How strange that those children saw Abigail as their teacher; to Madison she was barely more than a child herself. She could see her younger sister in the tiny bathroom of their house in Beverlywood, an eleven-year-old girl styling her long fair hair with a pink hairbrush, trying, she said, to look like Maddy.
With effort, she could picture Abigail as a student, sweeping her hair back before heading out for a run round Circle Park: Abigail had gone through a phase of running barefoot, her hair trailing behind her. And Maddy remembered Abigail chewing on a plastic pen top, moving the hair away from her temple in concentration.
But the image that bobbed up again and again was the one she tried to push deep below the surface.
Madison looked at the framed mirror above the desk. She ignored her own reflection and looked instead at everything tucked into the edges, all the way around the border. More arty postcards – a Klimt and a Sargent – the odd note and several photographs. One in particular pulled her up short.
It was a picture of a man Maddy had not seen in years. So long, in fact, that she had almost forgotten his face. But there he was, broad-faced, his hair dark brown with only the odd strand of grey, his jaw strong, coming forward just enough to suggest a fighter: her father, a man so patriotic he had named his three daughters after American presidents. (Abigail was the closest he could get to Abe Lincoln.)
On the opposite side of the glass was a picture of similar vintage of their mother, young and kitted out in the fashion of the times: leggings, T-shirt slipping off the shoulder, big hair. Above it, two more. One of Quincy and Abigail together, at Abigail’s graduation. The other a picture Maddy had not seen, though she instantly remembered the occasion: Thanksgiving at their mother’s house five years earlier, Abigail and Maddy caught in a moment of genuinely unstoppable laughter, their faces hurting with the pleasure of it. Their mother must have taken the photograph; Quincy was in it, looking on and smiling but not caught up in the delirium.
There were other pictures. One with Jessica in college; another with Greg, a boyfriend of that era. And there, at the top right, something she had very nearly overlooked: a scribbled note. Only now did she realize that the scribble was her own.
Abigail, you have nothing to fear. You are smart, capable, energetic and light up any room just by walking into it. That school will be SO lucky to have you. Knock ’em dead. Maddy x
Madison stared at the note for far longer than it took to read it. She could scarcely remember writing it, though it could only have been ahead of Abigail’s interview at the elementary school, which made it about three years old. Harder to absorb was that Abigail had kept it. It had been dashed off, the work of a few seconds. It was, Madison could see now, written on a Post-it. And yet Abigail had treasured it all this time.
Madison looked around, conscious of the policeman watching her, knowing his patience could expire at any moment. On the desk was a box spilling over with costume jewellery, alongside some loose items of make-up. It was no tidier than Abigail’s childhood bedroom.
Something about the disorder hit Madison hard. It was the disorder of day-to-day life, of objects grabbed and put down in a hurry, of the random rush of someone alive. Yet here they were now: as still and silent as exhibits in a museum, never to be moved or used again. They were lifeless because they belonged to someone now dead. Madison felt as if a thick, toxic cloud were growing and spreading through her chest.
She took a last look around, seeing more confirmation of Abigail’s deadness in every item: shoes tucked under the bed, a small shelf of novels, a hair-scrunchy next to the lamp. Each glimpse despatched a sharp stab of pain. She would quickly check the closet and leave.
Inside were more clothes than she was expecting; so many hangers on the rail that she could barely move them along. There were a couple of skirts she guessed Abigail wore for school, but the rest was strictly for going out: a succession of sparkling tops, different pairs of pants, including at least two pairs in leather, sheath dresses and skirts that were more micro than mini.
She thought of Quincy, blaming Madison for introducing Abigail to – what had she called it? – an ‘urban lifestyle’ and reflected it was true in a way. Just after Abigail had graduated college, she had stayed with Maddy for a few months while she found a job and somewhere to live. They had gone out together, Maddy introducing her younger sister to her crowd at the Times. Madison had had to expend a lot of energy that summer, diverting the attentions of reporters far too old, unattractive or married for her baby sister.
Abigail had not dressed like this then, neither of them had. Madison pulled out one hanger at random: a jacket with a high-end European label she recognized only from the fashion pages. She brought it closer to her eyes, to check it was genuine rather than one of the knock-offs you could pick up in Santee Alley. The stitching was usually the giveaway. Judging by that standard, this one was real. She put it back and saw another: equally expensive, equally authentic.
Quincy’s voice was back inside her head. You don’t always know everything. Not even about Abigail.
‘Is there something you’re looking for, Miss? Remember, there’ll be some effects returned to you by the coroner’s office.’
‘Thanks,’ she said, opening and closing drawers, hesitant to rifle through her sister’s underwear. ‘I’m nearly done.’ She took a last look around, aware that everything in this room had once touched the skin of her young, beautiful sister – and that it never would again.
But what made her head throb was the puzzle she had just glimpsed, the puzzle her sister had left behind.
Chapter 6 (#ulink_e627a233-6a47-5a3b-bf08-be48b7c7661d)
Back in her apartment, she all but had to push Jeff out of the door. He had been waiting for her, sitting in his parked car, for God knows how long. He wanted to see how she was doing, he said, make sure she was OK. She allowed him to come up, accepted his offer of coffee, bought not made, and allowed him to place a portion of youtiao on the table, the sticks of fried bread which he knew she liked. But she would not let him comfort her any longer. She told him she needed to rest. He raised a sceptical eyebrow at that, which she ignored. She hoped he would believe that grief would succeed where meditation, Temazepam and the latest supposedly cure-all import from Shanghai, the saliva of a swallow, had all failed.
Once the door was closed, she cleared the desk, which meant lifting the piles of transcripts and documents about LA’s secret warren of sweatshops off the table and putting them under it, where they could not distract her. She paused as she remembered Jane Goldstein’s parting request for a follow-up story. Then she took a sip of coffee and powered up her trusted Lenovo laptop.
There, lodged in the corner of the screen, was the outline of her Day Two piece, drafted during the long stretch of sleepless nights when she worked at the sweatshop. Of course it was insane for her to think of her job now. Her inner Quincy was adamant: Don’t tell me you’re going to work. Easy coming from Quincy, who identified herself as an ‘SAHM’ on that hideously smug mothers’ website: Stay at Home Mom. Besides, this story was almost written. It made no sense to leave it sitting here on the machine. All it required was a quick read-through. If she sent it over now, that would buy her time with Howard and Jane: she could then spend the next day or two undisturbed, getting on with what really mattered. She’d give it half an hour, no more.
Forty-five minutes later the piece was done. Not as polished as she would have liked; the newsdesk would have to check some of the numbers. But it would do. She pressed ‘Send’ and hoped no one would look too closely at the time-stamp on the email or work out when, exactly, and under what circumstances she had written it. She sought to suppress the rebuke that was rising within her and whose target was herself.
Enough of this, she told herself. This navel-gazing would do Abigail no good. She had to focus on what mattered. The first thing she looked up was ‘heroin’. She read rapidly through the medical and science sites, about the physiology of an overdose, the chemical and neurological reactions. She didn’t know precisely what she was looking for – just that she needed confirmation of her iron certainty that, if Abigail did have heroin in her bloodstream, she had played no part in putting it there.
Every word she read triggered a memory of her once-beautiful sister reduced to a body on a slab, the pale skin drained of all life, her lips edged with frozen blue. She had read enough to know that a heroin overdose brought no pain, just a kind of instant, weightless bliss, but that did not stop her imagining the fear that must have gripped her hopeful younger sister as she understood that she was entering her final moments.
But had Abigail understood that? Nothing that suggested a struggle. Maddy recalled the words and, above all, the expression on the detective’s face as she had said them. How dared she imply that Abigail had been some kind of willing participant in her own death? Of course it was murder, of course it was. Madison just had to get the police to realize it. And soon: she had covered enough homicide cases to know that speed was critical. They always talked about that ‘golden hour’, the period immediately after a homicide has been discovered when detectives are able to gather the most, and the best, forensic evidence from a crime scene. Maddy feared that time had been and gone. That while they played around with their absurd sex-game theory, valuable evidence might be vanishing.
But she could not quite shake off Quincy’s words. You don’t always know everything. Quincy had insisted that Abigail did not do anything so ‘urban’ as drugs, but that did not exclude the possibility that she was daring in other ways. Did Abigail have a dark side hidden only from her, but known to the others? Maddy had always imagined it was only she who had sexual secrets, who had made countless bad choices. She had always assumed that Abigail was as wholesome as Quincy was straitlaced. But maybe she was wrong. And how to explain the high-end clothing she had seen in the closet, each item far beyond the reach of an elementary school teacher’s budget?
Her phone vibrated. She glanced down: Detective Jeff Howe again. High probability that he was merely ‘checking in’ – his phrase – making sure she was OK, even though next to no time had passed since he had last been here. But there was a chance he was calling for the reason she had asked: to convey information. She pressed the green button.
‘Hi Madison. You OK?’
‘Yes,’ she replied, hoping her terseness sounded sad rather than impatient, even though the latter was the truth.
‘I’ve seen the coroner’s report.’
‘Right. Can you—’
‘Not the whole thing. Only a summary, by the looks of things. But I’ve got the concluding section.’
‘And?’
‘There were signs of pressure on the neck, suggestive of a chokehold. And indications that she was held, with some force, by her head, around the temples. Probably from behind.’
The thought of it, the picture of it that materialized instantly, made her unsteady. A kind of queasiness rose through her, as if she were dizzy. To visualize with great clarity her sister grabbed and held by a stranger, the fear that she knew would have consumed Abigail at that moment, the word chokehold – all of it made Madison nauseous. The sensation was physical.
But she forced the sickness away, as if she were pushing bile back down her throat. She would force herself to think, not to feel, to process what she had just heard the way she imagined Barbara Miller and Howe’s fellow cops would: as information. As data: nothing more, nothing less. Judged like that, as the detectives would judge it, she told herself these latest findings were interesting and useful, but hardly destructive of the police’s rough sex hypothesis. That Abigail had been nearly strangled did not mean she had been nearly strangled by a stranger. If anything, this evidence could be held to strengthen the LAPD’s working theory of the case, confirming that the rough sex was really rough. Madison said nothing of this. Only, ‘What else?’
‘No needle retrieved from the scene.’
‘Are there pictures?’
‘None I’ve seen.’
‘Jeff, don’t spare me because you think I can’t handle it. I can—’
‘I’m not sparing you. I told you, I haven’t seen the complete report.’
‘All right, I’m sorry. Please. Go on.’
‘No needle. And just one needle mark. No others.’
‘Which confirms Abigail was no junkie,’ Madison said, irritated by the betraying quaver of her voice.
‘Actually,’ Jeff replied, ‘there’s a note on that. Saying needle marks can often close up within weeks.’
‘For God’s sake, Jeff, Abigail was not a drug user.’
‘I didn’t write this report, Madison. I’m just the jerk risking his job to tell you what it says.’
‘You’re right. I’m sorry.’ She swallowed, girding herself for the next and obvious question. ‘Jeff, I have to ask.’
‘Yes?’ he said, though he knew.
She closed her eyes, bracing herself for what she would have to say as much as for what she might have to hear. She sought to smother her inquiry in the language of forensics, as if that might take the edge off. ‘Was there any sign of sexual contact? Any … exchange of bodily fluids? Anything like that?’ Her voice petered out.
The policeman answered quickly. ‘No sign at all, Madison. None.’
Madison thanked Jeff again – aware of the obligation that was building between them – and hung up. Only then did she let out a long, deep exhalation, one she had not wanted him to hear. Thank God for that. For that small mercy at least, thank God. Whatever hell Abigail had endured, she had not been raped. In that instant when Jeff first told her Abigail had been found dead, that had been Madison’s starting assumption.
But that only made the horror more baffling. At least a sex crime had an obvious, if grotesque, motive. But how was she to make sense of Abigail’s death now? Perhaps the LAPD would cling to its sex-game theory all the same, but it struck Madison as a strange kind of sex that involved no contact. No, she was certain. This was no accident. It was murder. But the question remained, sharper now than ever: why would anyone want to kill her sister?
Chapter 7 (#ulink_f4aff261-a7f5-5c75-9b60-9523e8fdc1db)
The crowd was glowing in dawn sunshine, the faces turned upward. They were happy, some clutching flags bearing the stars and stripes. The faces at the centre made up the standard LA crowd: black woman, Hispanic man, Korean children, younger white woman and finally, because you had to have a white male somewhere, a white-haired, seventy-plus man, smiling a benign, grandfatherly smile. But dotted among them was a departure from the usual formula: a noticeable number of Chinese, including several young men. They were smiling too. Not wide grins, but gentle, summer-evening smiles – relaxed, content, as if marvelling at the good fortune of it all.
The music swelled, an informal, slightly ragged choir of voices that climaxed on the phrase, ‘California, You’re My Home’.
Leo Harris reached for the remote and watched it again, this time on half-speed. He wanted to examine the faces at the margins, those the viewer would not notice on the first or second airing but would process all the same, if only subliminally. He was glad to see a couple more Latinos and what he guessed was a Jewish man. An older white woman: good. More Chinese. Seated, he turned to the young woman standing by his right shoulder and said only: ‘Blacks.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘African-Americans. You’ve only got one.’ He paused the video, frozen now on the image of a beautiful black woman, her long hair in tight spirals, clutching a miniature flag. ‘She’s great, but we need more. That’s ten per cent of our vote, remember.’
‘But I thought you said—’
‘That’s true. So use a child or an older man. No one’s frightened of them. Doesn’t have to be real old. Just not young. Bit of grey in the sideburns, that’ll do it.’
He turned back to the screen, playing the rest at normal speed. He sang along to the line: ‘California, You’re My Home’. Then, as the last word faded, he intoned in a voice not quite his own, ‘“I’m Richard Berger – and I approved this message.”’
He stood up. ‘OK, where’s Susan?’
A nervous flutter passed through the room as the heads of those people relieved not to be Susan turned and looked for her. She was at the back, her head down, every few seconds swiping the page on her tablet. Leo guessed she was absorbed in poll numbers.
‘Hey, Susan. Can we talk slogan?’
She glanced up, then returned to the illuminated page before her. ‘Sure.’
‘Can you remind me what we agreed would be the theme of this spot?’ He was speaking across the room.
‘Unity, harmony, all that.’ She didn’t look up.
‘Er, yeah. That’s the theme of the campaign. I mean this particular spot.’
Now at last she lifted her head slowly, as if to say, I am a senior figure in this operation. I will not jump at your command like the rest of these candy girls in their skinny jeans and fitted tops. I will take my time if I want to. The words she spoke out loud were: ‘We can all get along.’
‘Correct. We can all get along. No matter who we are. But with one group in mind especially.’ Pausing for a response and not getting it, Leo gave what was meant as a prompt, watched by the rest of the room. There were about a dozen of them, almost all young, including those who were not interns, written off, in the brutal vernacular of the trade, as mere muffins: sugary snacks for the delectation of the older hands. Susan Patinkin, campaign veteran, was the only person present over the age of forty. ‘The clue is on the screen.’ He rewound, freezing on an image which included two Chinese men. Neither were in uniform, but both were of military age.
Susan looked, then sighed. ‘Your point is?’
‘My point is that, yes, this ad is saying we can all get along. Even those guys.’ With his back to the screen, so that he could still face Susan, he gestured towards the Chinese faces. ‘But what’s wrong with this picture?’
No answer from Susan, so now he looked around. ‘Anybody?’
A hand went up. Young guy in a T-shirt decorated by a chimp in headphones, doubtless involved with social media. Leo had no idea of his name. He pointed at him instead. ‘You.’
‘They’re not singing?’
Leo hurled his pen at him, forcing him to duck. ‘For fuck’s sake! Am I really the only person who can see the problem here?’ He turned back towards the screen, spooled to the final few seconds, halfway through the final refrain. The choir was in full voice.
‘… you’re my home!’
‘OK.’ It was Susan, sheepish at the back of the room.
‘Thank you!’ Leo said to the ceiling, his hands spread like a preacher at the pulpit. ‘Yes, Governor Richard Berger will bring harmony to the state of California. Yes, he will ensure the people of this state will get along with each other and even with the garrison. Yes, there will be no riots on his watch. But that doesn’t mean he wants these guys to stay forever. He doesn’t want California to be their home.’
Susan had now abandoned the data logs on her tablet. ‘California, We Love You.’
‘Better.’
She had another go. ‘California, Place of Harmony.’
‘Too Chairman Mao.’
There was silence. Eventually Leo turned to the woman who had been at his shoulder, taking notes during the viewing, and who was, as it happened, wearing a tightly fitted top: knitted, cream-coloured and, Leo clocked, unable to hide a pair of very generously shaped breasts. ‘Collect four suggestions for alternative tag lines to run on this spot. Then focus-group all five.’
He was already at the door, giving a curt nod to Susan as he passed her, when the assistant called out. ‘Focus-group five? But you said we needed four. What’s the fifth?’
‘Richard Berger. Bringing California Together.’
There would be another year of this, Leo thought. All right, closer to ten months, but it would be like this every day. In fact, days like this would seem like a breeze come the fall. He remembered what Bill Doran used to say, his face cragged and scarred after more than thirty years on the road: ‘Campaigns are never tiring – unless you lose. Then they hurt like hell.’
As Leo boarded the jet that would take him and Mayor Richard Berger to Sacramento – squaring the Democratic delegation in the state assembly, ensuring they endorsed early and often – he allowed three thoughts to circulate. First, he had no intention of losing. He would sweat from now till the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November to ensure his boss was installed in the Governor’s Mansion. Second, he already regretted his own, populist suggestion that the mayor, as the Democratic candidate, should eschew the private jet offered to him by donors and fly commercial whenever possible. Make no mistake, come Memorial Day, if not earlier, Leo would be invoking that ‘whenever possible’ clause and the wiggle room it very deliberately allowed.
Third, he was thinking of Bill Doran. He knew that was bad form, or ‘malpractice’, to use Doran’s preferred word. It was a violation of one of Bill’s own commandments: never let them get inside your head. Normally, Leo observed that stricture without effort. But this time was different. His adversary, his opposite number on the rival campaign, was the very man who had taught him the fundamentals of political combat. If Leo were to win in November, he would have to turn his first boss and ongoing, if occasional, mentor into a loser.
That they would clash one day, he had always known. They were on opposite sides of the aisle. It was only through a freak accident that they had worked together in the first place. It was Leo’s first campaign. He had signed up straight out of college as an unpaid volunteer for a millionaire Democrat-turned-independent, who had hired Bill Doran – the best known Republican consultant in the state – to underline his new, bipartisan credentials. It was a gimmick that had ended in disaster: the candidate was crushed, despite the expensive advice he had hired.
But it had been the best possible education for Leo. Doran spotted him early, deeming him ‘the brightest of the bunch, no contest’. He let him sit in on strategy meetings way above his pay-grade, patched him into conference calls with the candidate, allowed him to hear Doran alternately soothe or rev up ‘the talent’ before the cue came to walk out on stage at a rally or fundraiser. ‘You can do this. You’re going to be the next senator from the great state of California.’ All bullshit, but necessary.
Soon Doran was beckoning Leo to come forward and look over his shoulder when the data came in, the charts and spreadsheets filled with numbers gathered by pollsters crawling over every corner of California. Doran taught Leo to look first for Ventura County, specifically the 26th Congressional District. ‘That’s a toss-up seat, Leo. If you’re ahead there, you’re ahead.’
As for TV spots, Doran was the master. There was no one with a better grasp of the visual campaign. What looked right, what looked wrong. No detail escaped him. To this day, more than nine years later, Leo could not look at a TV ad for anything – from soda pop to Depends undergarments – without seeing it through the eyes of his former mentor. When they last met for a drink, after running into each other during a straw poll event in Bakersfield four months ago, he had sat back and listened, astonished to discover that Bill Doran’s supply of political wisdom was still not exhausted. The man himself, however … well, that was a different story.
Leo buckled up. The boss was next to him, still on a call to a radio station in Oakland. ‘I agree, Trisha. That’s one reason why I’m running. I want to be able to look every Californian in the eye and …’
Leo made a mental note. Save the ‘every Californian in the eye’ for the tax pledge. Don’t waste it on other stuff, blurs the message.
He gazed out of the window, the candidate having been placed in the aisle: ‘No point flying commercial if people don’t see you flying commercial.’ Leo thought about the Mail Room last night, enjoying the images his memory reflexively served up for his perusal. He caught himself as he realized it was not Jade or her long neck and backless dress that he was picturing but the maddening, repeatedly insulting Maddy Webb. His reflection in the porthole told him he was smiling.
‘Trisha, I’m glad you asked me that. I know in my own area …’
Good. Berger was learning. Leo had told him: fight the habit of the last years and stop mentioning Los Angeles by name. It only turns off voters upstate. Downstate too, for that matter. Anywhere but LA, in fact.
He could see the mayor was on his last question. Quick check of the phone before take-off. He scrolled through his messages. One from an old friend.
Just heard. Can’t believe it.
Just heard what? He couldn’t stand it when people played enigmatic. Total power trip, lording over you the fact they had caught some nugget of knowledge that you lacked. He would not succumb. He would not send the words his pal wanted to hear: ‘Can’t believe what?’
It was bound to be about the food export story. There were new figures showing Californians were exporting so many of their staples – oranges, strawberries and avocados among others – they were running short themselves. He checked his watch. Yep, this was about the time the numbers were due for release.
But he checked Weibo to be sure. He scrolled through, but stopped short.
Tragic news about @maddywebbnews’s sister. Thoughts and prayers are with her family.
And then:
What a senseless waste of precious life. Hearts go out to @maddywebbnews #tragedy
That came with a link to an LA Times story:
Abigail Webb, 22, an elementary school teacher from North Hollywood, was found dead early Monday in what police now believe was a likely homicide. An LAPD spokesperson would give few details, but sources indicate the cause of death was a heroin overdose. Despite an initial examination of the dead woman’s apartment which could find no confirmed signs of forced entry, detectives say a later probe of the scene found damage suggesting a break-in. Ms Webb is the younger sister of the award-winning LA Times reporter, Madison Webb.
Leo read the words several times over, believing it less and less each time. He and Madison had been together for just short of a year, but he had seen Abigail at least a dozen times. She was the first member of her family Madison had let him meet. He liked her: she had all the fizzing energy of Madison and none of the taidu,the attitude. Perhaps a bit too wide-eyed for his tastes, but her enthusiasm was contagious. He and Maddy had been to see a show at the Hollywood Bowl on a double date with Abigail and a short-lived boyfriend, dropped soon afterwards. But once those two were up and dancing, Maddy and even Leo – usually too shy and world-weary for such things – had felt compelled to follow.
Now he thought about it, Madison was different around Abigail. The cynicism receded; she was gentle. She smiled more. In their moments together, the older looking out for the younger, he realized he had caught a glimpse of the mother Maddy might one day be – a thought which he had never articulated at the time and whose tenderness shocked him.
He read the weibs again. He was scrolling further down, as if he might see a message voiding the others, announcing a mistake. He kept scrolling.
‘Leo, you better shut that down. Take-off.’
He said nothing, but turned off the phone all the same and stared right ahead.
They were fully airborne, the plane straightened, before the mayor spoke. ‘You mind telling me what this is about? You look like shit.’ Getting no answer, he pushed on. ‘You’ve seen some numbers and you don’t know how to break it to me, is that it? This that Santa Ana focus group? I’m not worried. Wait till we’re on the air in—’
‘It’s nothing to do with the campaign.’
‘You don’t care about anything but the campaign, so tell me: what’s the problem?’
Leo turned his face to look at his boss for the first time. ‘There’s been a murder. Woman, early twenties, found dead in her apartment in North Hollywood. Suspected heroin overdose.’
Berger hesitated, letting his eye linger, as if he were assessing a job applicant rather than his most trusted advisor. ‘OK.’
‘We need to get out ahead of this one, Mr Mayor. We have to make sure that this is investigated with the utmost thoroughness.’ His own voice sounded strange to him, too formal.
‘We always do that, Leo.’
He tried to steady himself, took a sip from the water glass on the tray in front of him, which appeared to have arrived by magic: he had no memory of anyone giving it to him. He told himself to get a grip. Focus.
‘LAPD are only calling it a “likely” homicide. Which means they’ve got some doubts. But the victim’s sister’s a journalist. She’s going to be demanding answers. High-profile, award-winner, big following on Weibo. That means this case is going to be noticed. People are going to be watching the Department, the DA, to see how they handle it.’
‘Sure.’
‘And they’ll be watching you. You don’t want to be going into the summer with a big, unsolved murder on the books.’
‘So what’s your advice?’
‘I think that when we land your first call should be to the Chief of Police, ensure this case is a priority.’
‘As soon as we land, huh? That urgent.’
‘I think so, yes.’
‘Anything else you want to tell me?’
Leo turned back towards the window, the city below now little more than a blur. He pictured Abigail and then he pictured Madison. He shook his head.
‘Anything else you ought to tell me, Leo?’
‘No.’ He paused. ‘Like what?’
‘You sure you don’t have a conflict of interest here?’
Leo hesitated, so Berger spoke again. ‘I know who the victim of this murder is, Leo. The police department of this city – sorry, of the area – do still talk to me. I know her sister is your ex, so there’s no need to bullshit me, OK?’ His gaze lingered into a stare until eventually he looked away, towards the window, watching the earth below swallowed up by clouds. When he turned back, he was wearing an expression Leo had not seen before, one that unnerved him. ‘As it happens, I agree with your advice,’ the mayor said. ‘We need to get out in front on this one. In fact, I’d go further. You need to make this story go away. And, most important of all, you need to keep me out of it.’
Chapter 8 (#ulink_f5aa88a3-61ee-5a4c-b288-f5b596f4c958)
The phone had been buzzing all day and was buzzing again now, vibrating its way across her desk. Maddy glanced down at the screen and decided she would treat this the same way as the rest, that she would not pick up.
She had ignored Weibo altogether, or rather she had avoided the continuous flow of messages directed at her. She did not want to read words of condolence, no matter how touching or heartfelt. She had, however, taken a look at Abigail’s timeline: so far it consisted of tributes and declarations of shock – many of them addressed to Abigail herself. She skimmed her sister’s Facebook page too, filling up with messages in a similar vein. But for herself, she wanted none of it.
She had made two exceptions. The first was a call from Katharine, saying that Enrica was on her way over with a vat of soup and that she would not take no for an answer. At that moment, Enrica had grabbed the phone, proving she was not in fact on the way, and said, ‘Darling, don’t even talk to me. Just let me into the kitchen. I’ll be silent, I’ll be invisible. But you have to eat.’ Maddy had conceded, but just hearing her bereaved friend’s voice had apparently proved too much for Enrica. She sent something like a howl down the phone, which brought Katharine back on. ‘She loves you so much, that’s all.’
The second call was from Quincy. Maddy had stared at the phone for at least six rings before finally deciding to pick up.
She offered no pleasantries, but asked straightaway about the conversation between Quincy and their mother. ‘How was it?’
‘Well, it’s done.’
‘Did she understand?’
‘I think so. She asked after you.’
‘After me?’
‘First thing she said. “Is Madison OK? She’ll know what to do.”’
‘She doesn’t know what she’s saying.’
‘I’m not so sure, you know. With her, I’m not so sure.’
‘Do you think it was right to tell her? Maybe we should have spared her. Or maybe we should have asked Dr Glazer first.’
‘If you felt that way, Maddy, you should have told me. Or come with me. Otherwise you don’t get to have an opinion.’
‘I’m not … I’m not arguing with you.’ Madison sighed, turning her mouth away from the phone so that her sister would not hear her exhalation. ‘I’m grateful you did it, Quincy. You’re braver than me.’ She said it and it sounded right, even though she knew it was partly a lie. And for a second she remembered the secret that, brutally, she now held alone, the event that existed in the memory of no one but her.
She felt a wave of tiredness, one of those that seemed to taunt her. She knew that if she did not surrender to it immediately, closing her eyes this instant, the moment would pass. Perhaps this was how surfers felt on the ocean, confronted by the rare perfect wave that seems to say, ‘Ride me now or lose me forever’.
‘Yes, well. It’s done.’
‘And she understood it was Abigail. Did you need to explain that?’
‘I think she understood. I said it was peaceful, that it was an accident.’
‘Maybe we should have said she’d gone travelling or something.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Madison. It’s everywhere already. When I went to see Mom, they were showing a picture on the local news. That’s why we had to tell her. Better coming from us, or rather better coming from me, than the TV.’
‘What picture?’
‘From the high school yearbook.’
‘Jeez.’ There was a silence down the line. ‘Quincy, you still there?’ Another pause and then her sister’s voice.
‘I think it’s because of you.’
‘What, the picture? I would never—’
‘I don’t mean you gave it to them. I mean this interest in Abigail. It’s because of you.’
‘I’m not sure that makes—’
‘Of course it is. It’s all over Weibo, tributes from journalists and news people. And on the Times website: “Abigail Webb, sister of the award-winning LA Times reporter.”’
‘Is that what it says? I had no hand in that, Quincy, I promise.’
‘Well, the damage is done. You can’t change your precious career, can you? That’s why I’m going to the school now, to pick up the kids. I’ve got to get to them before Facebook does. Though I’m probably too late.’
But those were the only two calls she took. The rest, Maddy let pass. Once or twice, she checked her texts: messages of sympathy and shock from friends, colleagues, from Howard on the newsdesk, scolding her for filing in such circumstances (adding that they planned to run the piece tonight and she should call if she had any suggestions for accompanying graphics), even from Jane Goldstein herself. And a couple from Jeff Howe, unreturned because they were apparently offering no news. ‘Just wanted to check in, see how you’re doing. If there’s anything …’
She thought about resting but was too agitated even to attempt it. She was aching all over, the bright, pulsating centre of the pain as always radiating out from, and homing in on, her lower back. All she could see was Abigail on that slab.
The pacing back and forth in front of the window was providing nothing except the illusion of respite. Maddy returned to the computer, to look again at the tabs she’d left open. One was on the pharmacology of a heroin overdose:
Heroin is an opiate, similar to morphine but more potent, quicker-acting and more addictive. It acts as both an analgesic (pain suppressor), and an anxiolytic (anxiety suppressor), as well as producing a feeling of euphoria.
There was information on the signs that any doctor would look for if presented with a person suspected of an overdose: weak or no pulse, delirium, drowsiness or disorientation, low blood pressure, shallow, slow or laboured breathing, dry mouth, extremely constricted ‘pinpoint’ pupils, discoloured tongue, lips and fingernails turned blue, muscle and stomach spasms and constipation.
Jessica had seen the strange colour of Abigail’s tongue and had reported the blue of her lips – though, poor thing, she had assumed those were things that happened to every dead body. Abigail had been her first corpse.
It struck Madison that Abigail would have been just as clueless. Thank God, she had seen no such horrors in her short, bright life. That stuff had been left to Maddy, who had seen enough nastiness for both of them. She had done her best to spare her younger sister.
But she had not done enough.
The subject will typically pass out very rapidly in what may feel like a euphoric, rapturous rush. The breathing will slow, they will become cold and sweaty, the hair can become matted with sweat, excess saliva may exit the mouth, so that the subject can appear to be drooling, although the mouth will also be dry. Eventually, the breathing stops entirely and later the heart will follow.
None of that was any comfort now, but Maddy filed it away for later use: the meagre solace that her sister did not die in pain.
There was a bit more – about how heroin could elude an initial examination by a coroner because the key chemical agent disperses within the body after death – but none of it helped. She headed to the search window on the machine and typed the words ‘heroin’, ‘death’ and ‘Los Angeles’.
A raft of news stories appeared. New figures released by the Health and Human Services Department, the opening of a rehab clinic in Burbank, academic research on methadone by UCLA. She refined the search adding the initials, ‘LAPD’.
That turned up some brief stories from the Metro section of the LA Weekly:
A batch of heroin linked to a number of fatalities is believed to have claimed the life of a known drug user in South Central LA. The 33-year-old man died suddenly at a property on Normandie Avenue shortly after 5pm Wednesday. Police are not treating the death as suspicious and have referred it to the coroner for an inquest. ‘The deceased was a known drug user and his death follows a number of other deaths of drug users in the region in recent weeks,’ said a police spokesperson.
There was the story of a mother in Vermont Square who had narrowly escaped eviction after a court found that she had knowingly allowed her twenty-seven-year-old son to store heroin and crack cocaine in his bedroom. Another about an addict jailed for dealing drugs to a cop. And one more about a successful, undercover police operation that had ‘smashed’ a drugs ring operating out of Boyle Heights.
The problem was in that first story: known drug user. That there was a whole netherworld of dealers, addicts and corrupt cops, themselves addicts; of skeletal teenage girls selling their bodies to pay for the next fix; of men who would roam the city looking for coin boxes, on payphones or parking meters, to smash, hoping to disgorge enough quarters to pay for another bag of powder – that this Hades existed in the streets and alleys of this city, she already knew. It had been part of her beat. After child abuse stories, it was the area of crime reporting she hated most.
But that was not Abigail’s world. No one could have been further from it. Quincy’s words from early this morning – You don’t always know everything – resurfaced once more, as they had all day. Whatever Quincy had meant by that, it surely didn’t extend to Abigail sinking to the level of those lowlifes.
Madison stared at the screen, suddenly aware that she didn’t even know what she was looking for. She sprang back up and paced again, her teeth crunching down on the top of the plastic pen she had been chewing for the last half-hour.
Drug addicts who’d died of drug overdoses were not going to help. She needed to find people like Abigail, those who were avowedly non-junkies who had nevertheless died that way.
But how? As she walked around the room, she thought of the story she would write reporting what had just happened to her sister. What would the headline say?
She rushed back to her seat and typed the words in the search window:
Mystery heroin death
A string of items appeared, one linking to a novel, another to a TV movie, a third to a story in London three years earlier. She added another word to her search. California.
Now the page filled with news stories, including several from the other end of the state and from two or three years earlier. She eliminated those, confining herself only to deaths that had taken place in the last year. Her first click was on the San Diego Mercury Tribune, from nine months ago.
The widow of a San Diego man has filed an unprecedented complaint against the state’s drug rehabilitation program, alleging that he was given an incorrect and excessive dose of the transition drug methadone which led to his …
No. She tried another one. Once more, the problem was a tainted batch of heroin.
She clicked on a third, nearly a year earlier, in Orange County. This told of a grief-stricken father baffled by his daughter’s apparent suicide by heroin overdose. ‘I always thought she loved life too much to kill herself,’ he told reporters.But, in the sixth paragraph, he admitted his daughter had been depressed for several months. Not so baffling after all. She clicked on.
Finally she came across an item in her own paper, just a few paragraphs long, from two weeks earlier.
Padilla family threaten to sue coroner over woman’s death
A Boyle Heights family is demanding the coroner’s department reopen the case of Rosario Padilla, a 22-year-old woman registered as a suicide after she was found dead from a drugs overdose. Mr Mario Padilla, the dead woman’s brother, refuses to accept that his sister took her own life, insisting that ‘she never took drugs in her life, not one single time’.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the coroner’s office said, ‘We very much respect Mr Padilla’s grief at this very difficult time. It is very common for close relatives of those who have died at their own hand to struggle to come to terms with the loss. Our thoughts and prayers are with the entire Padilla family.’
Madison could feel a throbbing in her brain. Not a headache, but rather the opposite. A surge of energy or whatever chemical it was that kept her awake even after days without sleep.
She opened a few more tabs, cross-checked the information she had, then sent it to her phone. She grabbed her keys and a coat and left the apartment as it was, not turning out so much as a single light. For the first time since her sister’s death, Madison Webb had an idea.
Chapter 9 (#ulink_2a8cac8a-606e-5567-b428-ac71e1d3398c)
‘This is all about the sister, right?’
‘Give me a break, Barbara.’ They were at police HQ, round the back by the fire escape – the only area now allowed to smokers, a category that included Barbara Miller, and reliably the best place to catch her.
‘I don’t mind, Jeff. Just admit it. You want me to give you details of a sensitive police investigation so that you can share them with the sister of the deceased who you just so happen to have a hard-on for.’
Detective Jeff Howe smiled in appalled disbelief. ‘You’re unbelievable, Barbara, you really are. Just help me out here. The family is distraught.’
‘I don’t blame them, honey. That’s quite a scene they found in there.’
Jeff eyed her carefully. Though three years younger than him, she had always acted the older. An African-American who had come up the hard way, she spoke with a shrug in her voice as if she had seen it all before. No armed robbery, no drugs bust and only the rarest homicide ever struck her as a surprise. A father who stayed with his kids, a man who didn’t whack his woman around the head when drunk or high, now that was a novelty.
‘What’s that supposed to mean, Barbara?
She let out a jet of smoke. ‘Pretty girl on her back. Nothing taken, nothing broken. That’s what I mean.’
‘For Christ’s sake, we’re not back on this, are we? She had heavy bruises on her neck and on her temples. The lock was damaged because someone had forced their way in.’
‘Because? Because? That new partner of yours rotting your brain, sweetheart? You need to go back to detective school, my friend, if you’re coming out with that shit. We can say the lock was damaged. We can say that suggests someone forced their way in. We don’t get to because just because we want to. No way.’
‘All right. So why don’t you tell me what explains those marks on the door frame?’
‘Could be anything, you know that as well as I do. Could be a domestic. Could be an ex-boyfriend, trying to bust his way back in. Could even …’ She didn’t complete the sentence.
‘Could even what, Barbara?’
‘She could even have done it herself. On her way in.’
‘What, Abigail?’
‘Say she was wasted from wherever she’d just been, all right? Maybe she couldn’t find her key, pushes at the door a little bit, gives it a shove.’
‘You think she was high before she even got home?’
‘Look, I don’t know, Jefferson. That’s my point. We don’t know what happened here. You especially. Which is exactly how it should be. This is not your case, remember.’
‘OK. Just tell me, do you accept this is a homicide?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘OK. So why are you still hinting this is some kind of sex thing? We know for a fact there was no penetration, no sign of sexual contact at all.’
‘OK. But that just makes the “forced entry” scenario a little harder to explain, don’t you think? How many cases d’you know where a stranger busts into the apartment of some gorgeous girl and doesn’t lay a finger on her? Not many, right? Look, all I’m saying is I’m not sure you know what some of these white girls get up to. I thought, since your divorce and all, you might be out there a bit more, if you know what I mean. But let me enlighten you. There’s a whole scene, darling. What’s that word for them everyone keeps using? Baimufei?’
‘Baifumei. But Abigail wasn’t like that. She wasn’t some pampered rich girl. She taught elementary school. They grew up in Beverlywood.’
‘Yeah and Zong Qinghou grew up on a salt farm.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning, people change.’
Jeff kicked at a loose cigarette butt and then pulled himself up to full height, to signal a change in direction. ‘All right. We’re not going to agree. It doesn’t matter what I say anyway, because, as you say, this is not my investigation.’
‘See. It’s not true we don’t agree. We agree on that.’
‘OK, OK. Forget me. Take me out of it. A young woman is dead here. She left a family behind who have no idea how it happened. We owe it to them to find out who did this.’
‘That’s my job, sweetheart. You don’t need to tell me that. Besides, I’m getting all the pressure I need already.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Sutcliffe says this is a “priority”.’
‘And where’s he getting that from, do you think?’
‘I don’t need to think. I know. He told me.’ She used the index finger of her smoking hand to point upward.
‘The Chief of Police?’
‘Uh-huh.’ She took one last, extra-long drag on the cigarette.
‘What’d he say?’
‘Just that Jarrett wants results. Doesn’t want to let this case fester.’
Jeff looked through the chicken-wire fence that cordoned off this unofficial yard. The question formulated itself in his mind, though he did not say it aloud: Why would he care? ‘So what have you got to go on?’
‘Come now, Jefferson love. I told you: we can’t talk about this one.’
‘I know, I know. What I meant was – and then I’ll leave you alone, I promise – perhaps I can help. Maybe there’s some open cases I can look at, make a connection. Remember Menendez?’
‘Oh no you don’t, Jeff.’ Her expression suddenly hardened. ‘Don’t you dare start doing that.’
‘I just mean, there may be some useful—’
‘I’m serious, Jeff. Don’t go wading into what you don’t understand. This case is being handled in a particular way which, trust me, you really don’t want to mess up.’
He fixed his gaze on Barbara. ‘What kind of “particular way”?’
‘Don’t try that. I’ve already said way too much. Especially to you.’
‘Especially to me? Why would you not—’
‘I’ll give you a clue. Hard-on.’
‘Madison?’
‘Madison Webb of the LA Times. Yes.’
‘She’s the sister of the victim.’
‘Who also happens to be a reporter and the object of the most notorious infatuation in the history of the LAPD. Everyone knows you want to get up close and personal with that girl, Jeff. The dogs on the street know that. So do me a favour. Butt out.’ She forced her features to relax, to project nonchalance. ‘Besides, we don’t need your help, thank you very much. Steve and I can handle this one all by our pretty little selves. Don’t think he doesn’t want to kick your ass.’
‘Who, Steve?’
‘You’re not the only one with ambition around here, honey.’
‘Of course,’ said Jeff, nodding his comprehension. The new man always needs to prove himself, to get a win.
‘Gotta show that he’s just as good as you. I want that too, I don’t mind telling you. Don’t want people thinking, she can’t solve a case unless she got that skinny white boy with her.’ She gave him a punch on the shoulder, her first friendly gesture.
‘All right.’ Jeff attempted a smile. But he could see that, for all the banter, the panic in his former partner’s eyes had not gone. For the first time since he had known her, he knew Barbara Miller was hiding something.
Chapter 10 (#ulink_55f4278e-15b4-5a66-819c-5f2ae0231f67)
She was driving south on the 5 when she realized she didn’t know what day it was. She had been in such a blur since that phone call, she had lost track of time. For most insomniacs that sensation, at least, was not so unusual. When you have no nights, it can be hard to keep a grip on the days.
But in LA, as she had learned through direct experience, it could be costly. Get caught driving on, say, a Thursday in a No Thursday vehicle and you’d get more than a lecture about smog and pollution from the Highway Patrol. They could revoke your licence on the spot. You had the right to appeal, but while you did you were off the road. Appealing was all but pointless anyway. There was no case you could make, short of a life-and-death medical emergency – and even then the court would ask why you didn’t get a taxi or hitch a ride. Keeping the smog out of southern California was a state priority. Everyone mocked it, but the slogan that launched the scheme was now engraved into the Californian collective memory. School kids could sing the jingle even now: Everyone can drive sometime when no one drives always.
She had to work her way back to getting kicked out of the sweatshop, reconstructing the sequence event by dreadful event, before she realized with relief that today was still Monday. It was late afternoon and, as it happened, smoggy. The driving restrictions had succeeded in making people mad but not, it seemed, much else. For days on end, the city would still be wreathed in thick white cloud. At dawn, it could look like a morning mist. Except it would refuse to disperse or burn off as the sun came up. Instead it would linger, squatting there in the bowl of the city, refusing to budge, sometimes so dense you could stand on one side of the road unable to see what was on the other. Some blamed the slashing of the old clean air standards, shredded years ago in the name of maintaining America’s competitiveness. The US authorities said the responsibility lay with ‘Asia’, insisting that the smog came in on springtime winds from the east. On the street, less fastidiously, people blamed China.
It didn’t smell, but it played havoc on your lungs. These days even Maddy had a smog mask, though she kept it tucked away in the glove compartment.
The phone rang, its sound quickly transferred to the speakers. She glanced down to check the caller ID, but the phone was in her bag. She took a second, weighing the chance of dodging a call from a sympathetic friend against the risk of missing Jeff or one of his police colleagues bringing new information, before deciding the latter was too great. She pressed the button.
‘Hi there, is that Madison?’ The voice young, chirpy. Valley.
‘Who’s calling?’ Maddy said, wary and driving slower now, peering through the oncoming smog, the headlights on even in the afternoon.
‘Hi, I’m from the Los Angeles Times? We haven’t met?’
‘Hi.’
‘I just want to say how sorry we all are about your loss? Everyone here sends condolences?’
‘OK.’
‘We’re just trying to put together something about Abigail for Metro …’
A surge of irritation passed through Maddy, the first cause being that ‘Abigail’. Don’t you dare speak about her as if you knew her, as if she were your friend.
‘… you know, just some details, maybe an anecdote about what she was like.’
It took a second or two for Maddy to process what she had just heard. Then she said, ‘Are you seriously trying to interview me about my sister? Is that why you’re calling?’
‘Well, it’s not … I wouldn’t call it an interview, just maybe something you’d like to …’ The reporter at the other end of the line suddenly sounded very young.
‘Who put you up to this?’
‘Put me up to … I’m sorry, I don’t understand?’
‘Who told you to call me?’
There was another pause and then: ‘The news editor. Howard? He thought it’d be OK to call you? I’m really sorry, is this a bad time?’
‘You’re damn right it’s a bad time. And you can tell Howard Burke that next time he wants to know about my family he can damn well have the balls to call me himself.’
‘I’m sorry, I just …’
Maddy could hear the nervousness in the woman’s voice. Suddenly she felt a jolt of familiarity. It used to be her on the end of that phone. She had done it a dozen or more times, especially when she first started out on the police beat. Calling the victim’s family, perhaps the most gruesome part of the job, harder even than seeing the body – and Howard had made her do it. After the first or second time, he hadn’t needed to ask. It became routine. She was more adept at it than this one; she knew not to sound perky, not to sound like a girl who had just spotted a bargain at the mall. She had a bereavement voice, which breathed sincerity. But now, sitting alone in her car, on a smog-bound, jammed freeway, she was not sure that put her on any kind of higher moral plane. In fact she knew it didn’t. She was just better at it.
She apologized to the woman and promised to text her a line or two later.
Forty minutes later and she was at the house – or as near to it as she could get. There was no room to park: both sides of the road were filled. She checked the note she made, to be sure she was in the right place. But there was no mistake.
There was a small crowd by the front door which, as she got nearer, she could see was an overspill from inside. She slowed down, making an instant assessment of the people there: poor, but dressed in their most formal clothes. It was the mud she spotted on two pairs of dark leather shoes that settled it. Rosario Padilla had died nearly three weeks ago. In homicide cases it often took that long to release the body from the morgue and return it to the family. These people must have just come from the funeral.
She nudged and excused-me’d her way in, working herself up the steps onto the porch and through the screen-door into the house. Once in, she heard the hush. Someone was making a speech. She stood behind a knot of middle-aged Latinas, all nodding as they listened. Before them, next to a mantelpiece covered in family photographs, was a man she guessed was her own age. Dark and in a suit that seemed too small for him, he was speaking with great intensity.
‘And her faith was important to her. My aunts will tell you, Rosario was the one who actually wanted to go to church.’ The women in front of Maddy turned to smile at one another at that. ‘I hope that faith is a comfort to her now. Because I’ll be honest with you, and I didn’t want to say this there, at the cemetery. But I’m finding it hard to believe right now.’ His voice choked, a show of weakness that made him shake his head. An older man placed his hand on his shoulder.
Maddy had seen plenty of moments like this: a father comforting the brother of the deceased, the extended family wiping away their own tears. It was familiar to her, yet it struck her with new force. Soon she would not be watching this scene, from the back. She would be there, at the front: she, Quincy and her mother, the mourners. Quincy would doubtless demand one of them do what this man was doing right now: deliver a eulogy at the wake, offering a few words about the life of Abigail. She realized her eyes were stinging, but the tears did not come.
He stopped speaking now, held in a long, silent embrace by his father. The mother was hugging the aunts who were hugging her back. The rest were shuffling on the spot, uncertain where to put themselves, waiting for a moment to speak to the family.
Maddy held back, examining more of the photographs on the walls, trying to work out how each of those she could see here related to each other. Eventually she found herself next to the brother. She extended a hand.
He took it, showing her a puzzled brow. ‘Are you one of Rosario’s friends?’
‘No, I’m not. Though I wish I was. She sounds like a great person.’
‘She was.’
‘I’m here because I lost my sister too.’
‘OK. Um, I’m sorry.’
‘It just happened actually. In quite similar circumstances to Rosar—’ She stopped herself. ‘To your sister. Is there somewhere we can talk?’
He led her first into the kitchen, but that was packed even more tightly than the living room. The hallways were jammed too. Finally, he ushered her out back, into a tiny concrete yard. There was no option but to stand close together, their faces near. He introduced himself as Mario Padilla. She said her name was Madison Webb.
‘Hold on a second, I know that name.’ He checked his phone, scrolling down, as if looking for something.
‘Is there something wrong?’
‘Here we are. I knew I’d seen that name. You’re a reporter, right?’
Her answer sounded like an admission of guilt. ‘Right.’
‘You wrote that thing about the sweatshops. I saw that. That was good. Those guys need to be exposed.’
‘Thank you.’
‘But I’m confused. According to this,’ he held up the phone, ‘your sister died last night.’
‘Yes.’
‘And you’re here? At my house? Shouldn’t you be with your family or something?’ Seeing Maddy’s face fall, he rowed back. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t mean to judge you. But this is hard. You need to give yourself time.’
She wanted to say that there was no time, that the golden hour had already passed, that that had been his mistake: he had waited till it was too late and now he was hurtling down the dead-end of a lawsuit against the coroner. She even felt an unfamiliar urge to tell him that there was no family to speak of, just Quincy and a mother who … But she would say none of these things. Instead all she managed was, ‘I know I do. But I also want to know what happened.’
‘And you think talking to me might help?’
‘It might. I know you think the coroner got it wrong, that your sister did not kill … did not die by accident.’
‘There’s no way. A heroin overdose? Rosie? That’s just crazy.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘Because Rosie lived in this house, same as me. I saw her come home every evening and leave for work in the morning.’
‘What work did she do?’
‘Catering company. In accounts. Good job, but didn’t pay so great. I told that to the police. Smack costs. It’s expensive. If they think she was some kind of addict, how do they think she was paying for it?’
‘What did they say?’
‘They didn’t give me a straight answer, because there is no straight answer except “We got it wrong, she wasn’t on drugs.” Tried to tell me addicts get very good at deceiving people, even their loved ones.’
‘Especially their loved ones.’
‘That’s right! That’s exactly what they said! They say that to you too?’
‘Not this time. But I’ve heard it often.’ When he gave her a quizzical look she explained as concisely as she could, as if it were a mere aside, that she used to cover crime. Then, ‘And you don’t buy it?’
‘Course I don’t. We know our own family, I bet you’re the same as me. You can’t keep nothing secret in a family.’
There was so much Maddy could say to that, but she wouldn’t have known where to start. Instead she said, ‘Was there anything else that didn’t fit? In your lawsuit against the coroner, what’s the case you’re going to make?’
‘We’ve got letters from doctors and all that, saying she was healthy. She’d had an exam like a month before: no sign of any of that shit. So we’re going to say that. But the main thing is the arm.’
‘The arm?’
‘Rosario was found with a needle hole in her right arm.’ He tapped the crook of his right elbow to show where. ‘Now, I’ve never injected myself with anything. But I’m guessing this is how you do it, right?’ He mimed the action of pushing the plunger of a syringe into his arm.
‘Right,’ Maddy said, with a glimmer of what was coming next.
‘I’m using my left hand. That’s the only way I can do it. I can’t be doing this,’ and now he mimed administering an injection into his right arm with his right hand, his wrist forced into an impossible contortion. ‘If the hole is in the right arm, then it has to be done with the left hand. Ain’t no other way.’
‘OK.’
‘But why would you do that? It’s much easier for me to inject into my left arm.’ He mimed that, to show her how much easier. ‘That’s what anybody would do.’
‘Unless they were left-handed.’
‘Exactly. Unless they were left-handed. Which Rosario was not. Same as me, same as everyone except my dad. We’re all right-handed.’
‘And you said this to the police?’
‘Course. But they gave me the same bullshit. “Addicts will inject wherever they can inject.”’
Maddy nodded, taking in what she had heard. ‘So a healthy woman, with no history of drug use, is found dead with a single needle mark in her right arm and a massive dose of heroin in her system.’
‘That’s it.’ He looked back into the house, at the crowd filling the corridor. ‘Same with you?’
‘Same with me. Although, as it happens, my sister was left-handed. So theoretically …’
‘And is that what the police are saying to you? They saying she did that to herself?’
‘Not quite. And where was your sister found?’ This was the more polite version of the question she really wanted to ask: in what state was your sister found?
‘That’s what’s so crazy about this. She was in the hallway. Just there.’ He pointed towards the front door. ‘Just kind of stretched out. On her back. Arms at her side.’
‘And this was late at night?’
‘Nearly one in the morning. More than two weeks ago. She’d been out.’ Madison remembered the police estimate of Abigail’s time of death: shortly after one am. Abigail too had been out.
‘And do you have any idea why she would be in the hall?’
‘No I don’t. Even if you think my sister was some kind of junkie, which she was not, she’s waited this whole time to get home. Why wouldn’t she wait the extra two or three seconds it would take to get to her room? Or even the bathroom? The only reason it’d be out here, is someone followed her home, followed her into the house, did this thing to her – and that someone didn’t want to get caught.’
Maddy paused, looked back towards the front door, as if taking in what Mario had just said. ‘And did she look as if she had been … hurt in any way?’
‘That’s it, you see. Police said there was “no sign of a struggle”. Couple of scratches here and there, but they said she could have got those anywhere.’
Maddy girded herself for what she was about to ask. ‘Did the police suspect anything else had happened to your sister?’ She let the question hang in the air, the weight on the words ‘anything else’.
His head sunk onto his chest. ‘No. I’m grateful for that. No.’ He looked up, his eyes conveying a question.
‘No,’ Maddy replied. ‘Nothing like that either … All right,’ she said finally. ‘Thank you for telling me all this. It sounds like we’ve suffered something very similar.’
‘Tell me, Miss Webb. Do you think the person who killed Rosario killed your sister? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘I don’t know.’ He looked at her with great need, an expression she recognized. It was the face she had seen in the mirror a matter of hours ago, her own need for answers reflected back at her.
He showed her out, leading her to the front door. ‘You should have a mask on,’ he said.
She wheeled around, feeling very suddenly exposed. Had her emotions been that obvious, written all over her face?
‘For the smog. I told Rosario that all the time. “You gotta wear a mask when it’s like this.”’ He paused, staring into the street, ignoring the couple touching him on the shoulder by way of a goodbye as they left the wake. ‘I was worried about her.’
And then, as if remembering himself, he reached into his pocket for his phone. ‘I just realized, I never showed you a picture.’
‘Oh, I’d love that.’ This too was a familiar ritual. Every homicide Maddy had ever covered, the family always wanted to tell you stories or show you photos, to make sure you understood what they had lost. He swiped a few images, then settled on one he liked, turning the screen towards Maddy, angling it in the light.
‘See,’ he said. ‘She was a beautiful girl.’
Filling the frame was a standard, college graduation photograph, a smiling young woman in mortarboard and gown. Maddy nodded her agreement that she was indeed lovely looking. But that was not what struck her with great force, settling at last the question that had nagged at her since she had embarked on that computer search nearly three hours ago. She had seen this picture online, but had assumed it was some kind of mistake. Because the woman before her, beaming from the screen of her grieving brother’s phone, was not what she had expected. In striking contrast with her brother and her aunts, Rosario Padilla had long blonde hair and skin as fine and pale as alabaster.
Chapter 11 (#ulink_6667eb13-0b5b-5875-92d4-abaf1b7d81c8)
Who would dominate? If you had to bet, you’d say it was the guy in the Dead T-shirt, longish hair. If they were testing ketchup or soda, he’d be the alpha dog, no doubt about it. But for this? Not so sure. Maybe the woman, overweight, polyester pants; you’d bet on her having strong views. Or the older man, retired accountant maybe. Or a dentist. If this were a jury, he’d be the foreman: prissy, stickler for the rules, president of his condo residents’ association. You’d stake your wages on it. But this was not a jury. Way more unpredictable.
The man at his side leaned in to whisper. ‘We’ll do a dummy first,’ he said before straightening up again. They were both standing, gazing through a large, rectangular window, like engineers behind the glass in a recording studio. Except no one was making music on the other side. Instead, this scientifically selected sample of the California electorate were being paid ‘expenses’ to give up an hour of their early evening to sit in a semi-circle of hard chairs in a specially equipped room in a hotel off the 605 near Anaheim. They had come on the promise of ‘an exciting opportunity to be involved in the early stages of marketing a brand-new product!’ As always, no one had warned the members of this particular focus group that the product in question was a new political message.
Bill Doran remembered the days when these were a novelty. The first one he witnessed seemed to him a revelation, the tool that would transform the trade plied by him and his fellow political consultants, that travelling band of mercenaries who rented out their smarts and experience to the parade of shallow, shiny inadequates and deviants who hankered after public office in the United States. Now focus groups were part of the established order. If anything they were under threat, dismissed as old school by the kids who seemed to base every judgement on the latest meme coursing through Weibo.
Bald, barrel-chested and thick-necked and, as such, a long-time standout among the bespectacled, chess-club dweebs of the political consultant community, Doran checked his phone while the dummy was underway, a question about the pizza that had been offered and chowed down by the group. ‘I knew it,’ said the Deadhead. ‘I told my pal, Joe, I said to him, “I bet it’s pizza”. And boom! It’s pizza.’ The man chuckled to himself and Doran adjusted his expectations, predicting that this was not a man his fellow focus-groupers were likely to follow.
‘All right, thanks everyone,’ the facilitator was saying, a studiedly informal man in dark jeans and a pressed white shirt. ‘Moving on. First of all I want to show you a very short film. Then I’m going to be asking for your responses to a few statements. I’ll read them out and you just tell me what you think, OK? Just like we did with the pizza, all right? Everyone happy?’ There was nodding around the semi-circle, except from the Deadhead as he slowly realized he had, in fact, lost his bet with Joe.
Doran watched as the film played on the other side of the glass, a short video primer explaining the Chinese presence on US soil. Apparently aimed at twelve year olds – The story starts on Capitol Hill … –it was ideal for this audience. Not that Doran was looking at the screen. His focus remained fixed on the faces in front of him.
Less than three minutes later, the focus group facilitator was rising from his chair. ‘Thank you, folks. Now, as promised, I’m going to read you a series of statements and I want to get your reaction. OK, here’s the first one. “The only troops on California soil should be American troops.” Anyone want me to read that again? OK, here goes. “The only troops on California soil should be American troops.”’
There was some spirited nodding and a rambling few sentences of assent from both the polyester trousers and the Deadhead. But then the dentist (or accountant) said, ‘We all agree with that, sure. In an ideal world, we’d only have American troops here. We all want that. But it’s not going to happen. The Treaty’s the Treaty. It’s signed, sealed and delivered. Nothing we can do about it.’
‘It’s too late,’ nodded a woman who, Doran guessed, had been recruited to represent the suburban married female demographic, the one they had called ‘soccer moms’ back when he was starting out in this business. Quaint, that phrase seemed now.
Doran checked his watch. Precisely twenty-three seconds after the idea had been floated the obvious rebuttal had followed: nice idea, but impossible. He watched as the rest of the group fell into line behind the accountant. The Deadhead attempted a rallying speech: ‘But we don’t have to accept that! Washington and Lincoln didn’t just accept the British being here, did they? They fought back!’ But, though no one corrected him on his history, his argument found no takers. Brief as it was, this little episode would be useful ammunition next time he got pressure from Ted Norman and his band of ultras in the state party, demanding the candidate adopt a more muscular nationalist position. He could tell them, ‘That’ll work – for precisely twenty-three seconds.’
‘All righty,’ cooed the facilitator, scribbling a note. ‘How about this one? “This is our country. We’ve accepted the Chinese presence here, but it’s got to be on our terms.” Shall I repeat that? Here goes …’
Much more support for that. It took a full minute and a half before anyone asked what, exactly, ‘our terms’ meant. Doran and the pollster looked at each other. Suitably vague, instantly consensual, apparently commonsensical: you couldn’t ask much more from a campaign message.
‘Let’s do a couple more. OK, this one’s a little longer. “The Chinese are here now, but that doesn’t mean they should be here forever. The new Governor of California should try to renegotiate the Treaty.”’ Lots of enthusiasm for the first sentence, Doran noted, but confusion on the second. The word renegotiate needed some work. That would never fly in a thirty-second TV spot. He heard his own voice, nearly a decade ago, tutoring the young Leo Harris: ‘Avoid Latinate words wherever possible, go Anglo-Saxon every time. No one wants to have intercourse. They want to fuck. Same with politics. It’s not financial institutions. It’s banks.’ Harris was such a good pupil, he had remembered it all. Motherfucker.
‘And here’s our last one. “The Chinese army are here. But they don’t have a blank cheque. They can’t do what they like. They need to follow our rules and obey our laws.”’
Every head nodding.
Doran felt his phone buzzing. Cupping his hand over the mouthpiece, he turned his back to the two-way mirror, making sure the pollster – whom he had long suspected was leaking to the LA Times – could not hear the conversation.
‘What can I do for you, Elena?’ It was the candidate, the underdog challenger for the governorship of the great state of California. Though the voice was not the one known to millions of viewers of Fox News, where she had become a favourite. There she was sharper, more acidic, obligingly playing to her network billing as ‘the tough-as-nails former prosecutor’. In person and now on the phone, her voice was smoother and calmer. (One of the tasks Bill had set himself was to encourage Elena Sigurdsson to behave on camera the way she did in person. That was always harder than it sounded, but in Sigurdsson’s case there was an extra difficulty: the Republican base, including the Ted Norman crowd who’d made sure she bagged the nomination, liked the persona of the ball-breaking former DA of LA County and she was reluctant to let it go.)
‘I won’t have any numbers from here for a while. But I can give you a readout based—’
‘No,’ Sigurdsson said. ‘I have some news for you.’
‘OK.’ This was worrying. You never wanted candidates to have their own information stream. Ideally you’d remove their smartphones altogether, citing security reasons. ‘How intriguing! Fire away.’
‘You know about this murder story, the sister of the journalist?’
Doran had seen a single weib mentioning it, which he had glided over and failed to absorb. ‘Sure.’
‘I’m hearing Berger’s nervy about it.’
‘Really? Why would he care?’
‘Not sure. Seems he’s putting the squeeze on the Chief of Police. Wants to get this done.’
‘“Seems”?’
‘The Chief of Police has declared it a priority. Putting pressure on his team.’
‘And he’s said this publicly, the Chief of Police?’
‘No, but that’s what I’m hearing. From my people at LAPD. They reckon it must mean he’s getting heat from the mayor. For Christ’s sake, Bill, is there a problem here?’
He was, he realized, challenging her. Some candidates liked that, but they were a minority. Even the ones who told interviewers the last thing they wanted was to be surrounded by yes men wanted to be surrounded by yes men. They needed the reassurance. He had given Sigurdsson more credit than that, but perhaps she was the same as the rest.
An awkward thought eeled its way into his mind. Was he showing her less respect because she was a woman? She had brought political information to him and he hadn’t simply accepted it but had doubted her. Would he have done the same with a man?
Who the hell cared? He had been right to doubt her, hadn’t he? She had jumped to conclusions – that Berger was nervy – on the basis of nothing her opponent had actually said or done, nothing even that the Chief of Police had said or done but just some watercooler talk she’d picked up from her cop friends. Not good enough. He had been right to push her. Worrying about sexism was Leo Harris, Democrat, political correctness bullshit. He scolded himself for breaking one of his own rules: never let them get inside your head.
‘I’ll look into it. That could be very useful. Thank you, Elena.’
‘If Berger’s sweating, that’s an opening. You said it yourself, he hasn’t shown us many weaknesses.’
Doran hung up, dissatisfied with both himself and his candidate. His assumption was that she was wrong. There was no reason for a mayor to worry about a single death in his city. That the victim’s sister was a journalist certainly raised a flag: the police would need to do their job properly, otherwise she could make some noise. But that was a long way off.
Still, Sigurdsson wouldn’t have got everything wrong. If the cops were telling her they were feeling some pressure, they probably were. Such pressure could originate in a dozen places. Could be Berger, over-anxious about his campaign, could be the Chief of Police himself. Or someone neither of them had even thought of.
Chapter 12 (#ulink_2b4fbf32-b6b9-5a70-934d-8ce6f413b221)
The Great Hall of the People was a landmark. The building itself was nothing special – an entrance on South Wall Street next to a vintage clothes store – but everyone knew it, thanks to the green-uniformed sentries who guarded the door, alongside two outdoor flame-heaters, in oversized peaked caps and retro People’s Liberation Army fatigues.
Maddy had only been once, but she remembered it. Beijing kitsch was the theme: heroic posters of Mao, waiters in workers’ caps, and on one wall a giant TV screen, the pixels usually flooding red, projecting patriotic slogans. Even from her vantage point in the car parked on the other side of the street, she could see the words ‘Innovation, Inclusiveness, Virtue’ in bold yellow and in English, against the rippling flag of the People’s Republic.
She guessed the place was heaving now, the long, long tables – styled after the dining hall of a Mao-era peasant farm – packed and spilling over. The Great Hall filled up early every night, serving Chinese fusion – dim sum with Waldorf salad, roast duck served with fries – to couples and irony-chasing twentysomethings before nine, then giving way to business types grabbing a midnight bite after their morning calls to Beijing and Shanghai. The food was surprisingly good for what was essentially a theme bar, good enough that even Chinese expats were known to eat here, though maybe they came for the irony too.
She stayed low in the driver’s seat, eyeing Barbara’s car, the same one the detective had once shared with Jeff Howe.
Jeff. Even the name induced a pang of guilt. The very worst thing you can do, she knew, with a man like that was to offer false hope. In fact, that was not the very worst thing. The very worst thing was to give him false hope and somehow become obligated towards him. She had managed to do both.
She had been driving back from the Padilla house, still reeling from the discovery that Rosario belonged in that category the California bureaucrats called ‘white Hispanic’ – that she, like Abigail, was a blonde. It was hardly conclusive but, coupled with the fact that Rosario, like Abigail, had no history of intravenous drug use, it should at least be of interest to the police. It might be a lead. Maddy had covered enough homicides to know that the mere possibility that they were looking for a man who had killed a similar-looking woman in a similar way would be worth checking. At the very least she should telephone Detective Barbara Miller, pass on this nugget of information – which might or might not be of relevance – and then she could leave it to them. Only then did Maddy spell out to herself what that would mean: that her beloved baby sister was the victim of a serial killer.
She had pulled over at the next rest-stop, then dug into the pocket of her jeans to extract the already crumpled business card Miller had given her when they met. The conversation had been short, the bare minimum, Maddy suspected, that would allow Miller to check the box marked ‘family support’.
Shit.
The card was the standard one, giving the general number of the LAPD switchboard. But Miller had scribbled a number on the reverse. At the time, Maddy had assumed that this would be the detective’s personal cellphone number. Except now she looked and could see that Miller had simply written on the back the same switchboard number that was printed on the front.
Maddy wondered if that was generic unhelpfulness, designed to keep any outsider at bay, or whether this was bespoke bullshit, tailormade for her. Perhaps Miller feared journalistic meddling in her investigation, but she was denying Maddy the treatment all other victims of such a serious crime would regard as their right.
Madison had let her head fall into her hands. She was so unbearably tired that the interior of the car was revolving around her. But she had to pass this information on.
The LAPD switchboard was the twenty-first-century labyrinth of the ancients: no one got out of there alive. If she was to make contact with Miller, she would need her cell.
She got out of the car, so that she could pace around it. There on the cracked asphalt, standing by a tall weed that had grown through a crack, was a trucker, baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, taking a break. He nodded in her direction. She turned away, aware that a return nod could well be interpreted as a friendliness she did not mean and that could only delay her.
She realized what it looked like. The windows of her car open, Maddy pacing around in her skinny jeans and tight sweater, albeit one with a hole below the armpit. That was the trouble with being a woman her age and not physically repulsive: you had actively to signal your lack of interest and non-availability. Otherwise any activity that for a man would be regarded as normal, human behaviour – including taking a break from driving to get a breath of fresh air – would be read as a come-on.
The trucker was still smiling, refusing to take the cue and look away. Had this man appeared before or after she got here? Was it possible he had turned off the freeway when she had? Because she had? Had he been there the last twenty minutes, watching her make her phone calls, waiting for her?
Suddenly she was seized by a feeling she had not known before, a kind of vicarious fear. She was imagining the terror that must have grasped her sister in her final moments, the fright that must have shaken her as she understood that she was about to die. Had Abigail too been pursued by a man like this? Had he followed her home, chased her up the stairs and, just when she thought she was safe and that she had eluded him, had he caught up with her, jamming his hand in the door just before it was slammed shut, shoving it open and forcing his way inside her apartment? And then …
Maddy realized she was breathing too heavily. Audibly. She looked over towards the baseball cap and, to her relief, saw that he was back in his cab, about to set off. Clasping the top of the car door, she allowed herself three more deep breaths and resolved to get a grip.
And that’s when she turned to Jeff.
‘I need Barbara Miller’s cell,’ she said, her voice tight and short. Striving to give him no more misplaced encouragement, she sounded terse and somehow entitled instead. She took the number and could almost visualize the debt that was mounting between them.
He told her that Miller was clamming up, that she was nervous about him leaking any information on the investigation to a journalist. Madison needed to be very careful with whatever he told her, otherwise he would be exposed and compromised. It had to stay private, just between them.
Then he asked her to hold, returning sixty seconds later. That same hint of eagerness – of a man handing over the quid in expectation of the quo – in his voice.
‘I’ve just checked on the tracking system here. Barbara and Steve are at the Great Hall bar, downtown,’ he said.
‘I know that place. What are they doing there?’
‘It seems a girl matching Abigail’s description was seen there last night. With a young white male; possibly left with him. There’s a witness who says they heard an argument between them. There’s CCTV footage apparently. Miller and Agar are looking at it right now.’
So here she was, waiting in her car across the street. She worked through her options. Dash in, wade through the throng and find the security room, interrupting Barbara and Steve while they viewed the CCTV pictures? Disaster. They’d have her down as a stalker, shadowing their investigation, making it impossible to do their jobs. She could write the official complaint they would make herself. Besides, she would glean no information that way. They, and whoever was showing them the footage, would immediately clam up, demanding she tell them why and how the hell she had tracked them down there. Jeff would be disciplined – and would never tell her anything again.
And yet whatever it was they had just found out, she needed to know.
Waiting. Never her first instinct, but the only viable course for now. She would watch and wait.
Ten minutes went by, then another five and finally she could see movement by the door that suggested people coming out rather than in. Steve emerged first, talking into his cellphone. Barbara followed. Maddy sunk still lower into her seat, regretting that she was not wearing a top with a hood.
She watched the pair of detectives drive away, their vehicle unmarked, save for a white-on-black ‘W’ on the licence plate: the symbol that connoted permission to drive every day of the week. Maddy counted to ten, pressed the three digits that would keep her hidden from caller ID software, then dialled the number she had already searched and loaded onto her phone.
Three rings, then: ‘Great Hall of the People.’ The accent American, the voice male, young, bored.
Involuntarily, she closed her eyes, less to steel herself for what she was about to do than to focus on it, to concentrate all her energies on the task at hand. She lowered the pitch of her voice and spoke.
‘This is Detective Miller, my colleague and I were there just a moment ago. Sweetheart, could you put me through to the manager please?’
A short delay then a new voice, female and brisk. Damn. Women, Maddy had found, were less credulous than men. But there was no going back.
‘Hello there. My colleague and I were with y’all a few moments ago, viewing the security footage?’
‘Yes.’
‘I think there’s something we may need to review again. I wish I could come back myself, but we don’t have much time. I’m sending over one of my junior colleagues to see you, her name is Madison Halliday. Is that OK, honey? Nothing complicated, just show her what you showed me.’
She held her breath, her eyes still closed. She was wincing.
Eventually the manager spoke. ‘Is there something wrong?’
‘Nothing wrong, sweetheart. Just need a second look.’
Another delay and then, ‘OK. How long will she be?’
‘Not long at all. I’ve put Officer Halliday on it because she’s in the area already. With you in the next few minutes. Thanks, honey.’
She had been nodded through, thanks to a glimpse of the LAPD badge she had never removed from her pocketbook, kept there well over a year since Katharine had knocked it up for her, reluctantly, using a 3D printer. Madison had solemnly promised that it was for one time only, that she had no other way of doing that story – on a sex trafficking ring operating out of Long Beach – and that she would destroy it as soon as the story was done. But a fake police ID belonging to a fictitious Officer Madison Halliday was too good an asset to throw away. Without telling Katharine, Madison had saved it for a rainy day. Like today.
So the woman she guessed she had spoken to earlier stayed with a phone cradled in her neck by the reservations lectern, serving as a traffic cop for a line of would-be diners, merely glanced up, clocked the badge, then mouthed and gestured her towards a downstairs room marked ‘Private’, next to the men’s and women’s bathrooms.
Inside was a bank of four television monitors, each one flicking at intervals between different angles and locations. She could see the long tables, the bar, the kitchen, a series of what looked like small lounges, bathed in the white light of karaoke screens, and the basin area of what she supposed was the women’s bathroom. So, she noted, cameras even there.
In a chair, eating a salad out of a plastic box, was a young, white man whose scraggly beard could have denoted either hipster or loser, it was hard to tell. Maddy decided it was he who had first picked up the phone when ‘Barbara’ had called a few minutes ago. That suggested a general dogsbody rather than a ‘head of security’. Whether that was good news or bad, it was too early to tell.
‘Hi there,’ she said, her voice self-consciously higher and lighter than normal, as if to stress that she was absolutely not the same person he had spoken to earlier. ‘I’m here to review again the footage from last night?’
He munched on a fork loaded with spinach leaves, a cherry tomato squirting from the left side of his mouth and onto his shirt. He nodded, too full of food to speak, then keyed a few strokes at his computer. A second or two later, the central and largest monitor was showing a sequence on fast rewind, jerky figures moving off and on stools, taking glasses from their lips and putting them down on the counter.
‘What are we looking at?’ Maddy asked, doing her best to sound no more than professionally curious.
‘This is the bar camera,’ salad boy said, about to take another bite, nodding towards the screen for emphasis. He pressed another button, the picture now displaying the timecode and the rest of the on-screen data that had been missing until then: 12.13 am, today’s date. ‘This is what your … this is what those guys were looking at before.’
The camera was above the bar, mounted, judging from the angle, high up on the right-hand wall. It revealed the bar staff in full face, two of them, but she could see the customers in profile only. At this moment it showed five people sitting on stools, three men and two women. Laboriously, starting at the left and moving rightward, Maddy fixed on each one in turn. Middle-aged man, possibly white; middle-aged man, Asian, could be Japanese, Chinese, Korean; both turned on their stools to face a woman in a black mini-dress, sheer sleeves, hair fair, almost silver on the screen, though that could be the lights. The picture was not sharp enough to be sure, but to Maddy it looked like a classic late night scene: two businessmen hitting on an attractive single woman. The men at least were smiling; the woman had a glass in her hand.
Next to the female drinker, though visible only in profile, was a younger man: white, mid-thirties, hair brown and cut short, well-built. He was talking to the last figure on the screen who, because she was seated at the curve of the bar, had her back to the camera. Distracted by the little ménage á trois at the other end, Maddy had not noticed her at all till now.
‘Can you freeze the picture? Just here.’
Maddy looked hard. The young woman was dressed in a fitted, sparkling top. Yesterday she’d have said that was not Abigail’s style at all. But a few hours ago she had seen items in Abigail’s closet that were just like it. The hair was the right colour, blonde, though you couldn’t tell if it was Abigail-blonde, full of the sun and fresh air, or the bottled variety. It was definitely the right length though. Still, the similarity ended there. This woman’s hair was dead straight, falling in a sheet, as if it had been ironed flat. Abigail never wore her hair like that.
‘The other guys looked at this too. It’s Abigail.’
The name, spoken by a stranger, broke Maddy out of her trance of concentration. She turned to the technician, still gesturing with his fork at the frozen image. She was about to snap at him, when she remembered who she was supposed to be. She was Madison Halliday, junior police officer on an errand. She was not Maddy Webb, sister. She looked back at the screen, telling herself that this was what happened in murder cases. The victim became public property, often referred to simply by their first name – especially, it had to be said, when the victim was young and female. She could picture the headlines and TV captions she had seen over the years. The search for Tanya’s killer. Will we ever know who killed Amanda? It was a journalistic tic, and she was no less guilty of it than the rest of them.
‘Is that what, um, my colleagues said too? That that’s Abigail?’
‘Yep.’ He took another bite. ‘And me too.’
Maddy stiffened. ‘You? What do you mean?’
‘Well, I’m not here all the time. But she’s one of the regulars. I mean, was one of the regulars. Sorry. It’s just so weird.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘Someone being here and then the next day, they’re gone. I know they say death is part of life, but—’
‘No, I mean I don’t follow about her being one of the regulars.’
‘I explained it to your friends before. She was a regular here. In the KTV area, in the bar. Couple of nights a week, at least. Anyway, look. This is the bit I think you’re meant to look at.’
Maddy could hardly take in what she was hearing, his words ricocheting around her head, rebounding against the echo of Quincy all those hours ago. You don’t always know everything, Maddy. Not even about Abigail.
But now the monitor was showing her younger sister at a slightly clearer angle, because Abigail had turned a few degrees to speak to this man whom Maddy had branded a soldier of some kind. He was smiling, then giving a large nod. From the way Abigail’s back was moving, she would guess they were having an amicable conversation. Maybe flirting.
But then his posture stiffened. He leaned forward, said something that prompted Abigail to stand up and walk away. She disappeared out of shot on her right, then briefly appeared a half-second later in the far left of the screen, as if she had walked round the bar, past the soldier, though without looking at him, and out. The man downed his drink, scoped the room, once to his right, then to his left – where the middle-aged trio were still making each other smile – once more to his right, before placing a dollar bill on the counter and leaving too. According to the CCTV timecode that did not stop ticking, he followed Abigail out of the bar less than thirty seconds later. Out of the bar, out into the cold, LA night – and out, it seemed, to pursue Abigail.
Chapter 13 (#ulink_f9ab94fa-cce7-533e-b004-938fa1efd7a5)
Leo Harris had sent texts, several direct messages via Weibo and, heaven help him, an email. Short of sending smoke signals from the Hollywood Hills, he didn’t know what more he could do. But Maddy had ignored them all.
It was, he reflected now – still wearing his suit, his feet up on the coffee table, his back slumped into the couch – not just sympathy for an ex-girlfriend in mourning. The term stopped him. Was she even an ex? Was that the right word, given what had happened to them? They had never had the break-up conversation; they had never really broken up. They had tried to ‘take things to the next level’ – they had moved in together – but that had not worked out and suddenly they were no longer together at all.
He never understood that dynamic, though he knew it was real. It was the same in politics. Pundits were always saying of this or that initiative that it was high risk because, if it failed, there was no going back to the status quo ante. He would nod along, but truth was, he never completely got it. Why couldn’t they go back? OK, so they tried something else, it didn’t work out, back to square one. But no, square one would be blocked off, suddenly deemed inaccessible. The conventional wisdom was adamant on this point: advance and fail and there was no going back. In an election campaign and in romance, the same stubborn rule held. But he couldn’t tell you why.
Nor could he give a precise answer to the specific question of why living together had failed. He had been the one to push for it and while Maddy never quite said no, she did not quite say yes either. He had turned up at her apartment one Sunday morning with two lattes and thirty flat, self-assembly cardboard storage boxes: no more talking, let’s just get you packed up. He figured he would learn the lesson of their first night together. He had not asked her out on a date: if he had, she would only have said no. Instead, after some City Hall event, he had simply leaned in and kissed her. That’s how they had started: no process of deliberation, just action.
But it had not been easy: even staying the night was tricky with a woman who didn’t know how to sleep. For all that, he never lost his conviction that they would find their rhythm eventually. He had imagined coming home to Madison, turning the key in the lock and finding another person already there, the apartment already warm. He had even, God help him, imagined a child – a miniature bundle of their combined energy, talent and neuroses. A little girl probably, gorgeous but crazy.
Yet now he and Madison were barely in touch. Even at this moment, as she was reeling from the most unspeakable blow, he found himself unable to find the right words. No one should lose a loved one that young,was what he had left on her voicemail. Her laughter will live on. You’ll always hear it. That’s what he had texted. Trouble was, everything sounded like a presidential address following a natural disaster. He might have been in Vanity Fair’s list of Hottest Politicos Under Thirty-Five, but he already felt as if he’d been doing this too long.
Anyway, it wasn’t just sympathy for Madison that had lodged inside him. Guilt was gnawing at him too. Leo had seen the reported time of death and he had worked out, just as he felt sure Maddy had worked out, that at or very close to the moment when the beautiful life force that was Abigail Webb was being snuffed out, he and Maddy had been engaged in their usual dance: two parts combat to one part flirtation.
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