Page 25

Dinah

Freddie is waiting at the Beverly Hills station when I walk in, Styrofoam coffee cup in hand. I eye him as I climb the steps to the entrance turnstiles. I pull out my key card and swipe it, and am buzzed in. “He’s with me,” I say to Olga, who nods and flashes Freddie a big smile.

“What are you doing here?” I push through the second interior door and into the stairwell.

“Wanted to talk about the case,” he says, jogging up the stairs as if they weren’t built at a ridiculous angle guaranteed to suck the life out of your chest. “APB turned up Jessica Bishop’s car.”

“Where?” At the second stairwell landing is a framed photo of Oley. I touch it out of habit as I round the turn and head up the final flight of steps.

“LAX, long-term parking.”

“Okay. You check flights?”

“Yeah, there was already a flag on that. No flights.”

“You check the bus terminal there?”

“Yep. Same.” He holds open the door to the hall, and I take it, weaving through the maze until I come to my office door.

Pulling my keys lanyard off my neck, I unlock the office door. “Maybe she got an Uber from there. Took it to the border.”

“Or maybe her kidnapper ditched it there, and—” He pauses in the doorway. “Damn, Marino. Nice digs.”

“It’s an office,” I say dryly, but part of my chest puffs up at his reaction.

Joe hired an interior designer to outfit the space.

While everyone else has cheap desks and stacks of files and boxes everywhere, I have a custom-built credenza that takes up the entire back wall.

It has a fish tank, a section for manuals and books, hidden file drawers, a mini-fridge, and a large whiteboard and bulletin board.

My desk’s surface is spotless, with a wireless lamp on one corner and a pen caddy on the other.

There is one leather chair in the corner for guests, though I rarely have any.

“Sit.” I point to the chair. “You still think she was kidnapped?”

“There’re six lots at LAX. She picked the one lot that doesn’t have a camera at the ticket gate and parked on the far end, out of views of the spotlight cams.”

“So she’s at the north end.” I sink into my chair and drop my purse on the floor. “I agree: not ideal.”

“I did an inventory of cars at the north end, from oldest to newest. Want to take a guess at how many belong to missing women?”

My stomach clenches. “Not really.”

“Fourteen.”

“Are you thinking sex trafficking?”

“Or a serial killer.”

I drop my head back and laugh. “Come on, Freddie. We just wrapped up the Bloody Heart Killer.”

“A city can have two serial killers at the same time.”

“How long ago is the oldest missing woman?”

“Six years ago.”

“Damn, how rarely does that lot tow?” I don’t like the look in his eye.

It’s fiery, like how Oley used to get when he saw the Krispy Kreme “Hot Now” sign lit up.

A man on a mission. Why couldn’t I have gotten a trainee who was skating through on the bare minimum and asking about law enforcement discounts?

Instead, I have someone imagining up a serial killer and doing audits on airport parking lots.

“Well?” He rubs his palms together like he’s really onto something. “What do you think?”

“Define missing .”

“What?”

“You said that there are the cars of fourteen missing women in that lot. I’m curious if we’re talking runaway teens or dental hygienists in happy marriages who’ve suddenly disappeared.”

“Well, I haven’t had time to dig into all of them yet—”

“How many pretty girls under twenty-five?” I interrupt.

“I don’t know,” he hedges, and I’m pretty sure he knows exactly how many there are.

“Guess,” I order.

“Nine or ten.”

I roll my eyes. “It’s sex trafficking, Freddie. Come on. You know it is.”

“No, I think it’s more than this. Jessica is too clean.

No evidence at the house—not a scrap of it.

Her phone’s dropped off the grid. No pings, no digital trail, no activity.

Her car gets left in one of the only places in town where it won’t be noticed or flagged for a ticket or towing, and no cameras.

” He stands, and I don’t like the agitation, the way he runs his hands through his dark hair and pulls at the strands.

He’s in training. His second or third month.

This is his first missing woman, who might not even be missing.

He’ll have to toughen up or else he’ll never survive.

I think of Blythe Howard, my first missing woman, who hadn’t been missing—not at first. Her baby had been found in a library parking lot’s trash bin. The tiny infant had ligature marks around her neck that the coroner’s office believed were made by an extension cord.

I had a meltdown over the case. My detective’s badge was barely out of the wrapper, and the DA was refusing to press any charges against Blythe, citing insufficient evidence.

I became obsessed with the crime scene, the mother’s background, the autopsy details .

.. I started neglecting my other cases, my relationships; everything fell to the side in my outrage at the crime against this helpless baby.

My lieutenant had referred me to the staff psychologist, who was also fairly green in his field.

I rapped my knuckles against the shrink’s eighth-floor-office door, bristling with indignation and ready to snap off his head at the first indication that there was anything wrong with caring about a murdered infant.

Then Joe opened the door and smiled, and I knew, right there in that moment, that he would make everything okay. That he would be different from every other man I’d ever known. That he would listen and not judge. That he would take care of me.

And he did. He wrapped his words around me like a warm blanket, one that held me to his chest and rubbed my back and whispered in my ear that everything was going to be okay.

And eventually, it was, though Blythe was never prosecuted, and ran off in the middle of the night a week before I finally got a warrant for her arrest.

Too bad Freddie won’t experience the same level of treatment for his new-detective neuroticism.

His psych eval will be with Joe’s replacement, a chain-smoking New Yorker who constantly invites me to join her bocce ball team.

I visited her once for a mandatory eval after I discharged my weapon at a scene.

It was a complete waste of an hour of both my time and hers.

I refocus on Freddie. He’s standing in front of my fish tank, staring at Pickles the eel, who’s gaping at him in hopes that he’ll drop a pellet into the water.

“Listen to yourself. Sometimes the scene is clean because there is no scene.” I spin in my chair so that I’m facing him and tick off the reasons on my fingers.

“No bruising on Reese Bishop’s neck or body.

No needle marks. No one was forcing poison down her throat.

No foreign fingerprints on her coffee cup or in the kitchen.

No disturbances in the neighborhood, and the neighbors didn’t see anything strange.

No sign of a struggle in the home or in the daughter’s bedroom.

There’s literally nothing suspicious about this, Freddie.

No offense, but I have other cases to deal with. ”

“I talked to my TO about it,” he says stubbornly.

“Good for you. So glad you interrupted Ron’s hospital stay for this. What’d he say?”

“He said to check the time stamps. See what time the daughter’s car got to the airport. Cross-reference that with the Me ’s time of death.”

Not a bad suggestion. I pick up my phone and scroll through the digital file, clicking on the autopsy report.

Time of death is listed between 6:00 a.m. and noon on Tuesday.

A wide-ass range, if any hypothesis is going to be made based on Jessica Bishop’s travel.

Still, I ask, “When was Jessica’s car left at the airport? ”

“7:15 a.m.”

“It tracks. Also tracks with her killing her mom, waking up, and finding her dead and freaking out ... really any of our proposed scenarios, with the exception of her being on vacation in Tijuana and oblivious to all of this.” I place my phone on the desk. “I don’t know what that solves.”

“Well, it gives us a better idea of her movements.” He hunches his shoulders forward as he tucks both hands in his pockets. “Aren’t you worried about her? Think of it like she was your daughter.”

“Oh, don’t give me that shit. It’s a big city, Freddie. Do you know how many lost women we have right now? Do you?” I raise my brows.

“A lot.”

“Over four hundred. Is her phone still on the move?”

He shakes his head, and if there is a way for a human to deflate, he’s doing it now. “No, it’s disappeared. But I’m telling you, Dinah, this is a professional. He knows how to kill a phone, how to hide his tracks.”

“Suspicions aren’t enough in this business,” I say a little more gently.

“You have to pick and choose what you bring to the DA. You bring them shit, they’re going to remember that and be tougher on your next one.

” I think of the baby, of my impassioned plea to the DA to arrest Blythe Howard.

“Trust me. There’s not enough here. But you did good legwork on this. Great job.”

He scowls and slouches back in the seat. “How is it a great job? You think Jessica thinks we’re doing a great job?”

I stand and grab my keys. “Come on. Let’s take a field trip. I want to show you something.”