The Crime Writer

I pulled one of my novels of suitable thickness from my vanity shelf and rammed it beneath the kitchen table to even out the legs. I dressed in sweatpants and a ripped T-shirt I'd had since college, picked up the trash that LAPD had left alongside the house, swept up the entry, taped over the shattered panes in the front door, and vacuumed up the broken glass.

I circled my desk, sat down, shoved the armrests of my chair out a click, grabbed a Bic pen and slid it behind my left ear. My notepad I placed to my left. I set the murder book to my right, beyond the mouse pad, and removed the lab records, police reports, investigative notes, and coroner's report and spaced them evenly across my desktop.

Dirk Chincleft ain't got shit on me.

I'd done the first wave of research. I knew the characters. I had a premise. I'd unearthed a few leads. So I pulled up to my desk and did the only damn thing I'd ever done passably.

I wrote.

I woke up with IVs taped to my arms, a feeding tube shoved through my nose, and my tongue pushed against my teeth, dead and thick as a sock. My mouth was hot and tasted of copper, and my molars felt loose, jogged in their beds from grinding. I blinked against the harsh light and squinted into a haze of face, too close for casual a man straddling a backward chair, strong forearms overlapped, a sheet of paper drooping from one square fist. Another guy behind him, dressed the same rumpled sport coat, loose tie offset from open collar, glint at the hip. Downgraded to bystander, a doctor stood by the door, ignoring the electronic blips and bleeps. I was in a hospital room.

With consciousness came pain.

Chapter 12

I woke bright and early, with a renewed sense of purpose. My home telephone line was still dead, so I retrieved my cell from the office. I called the coroner's office, talked to a clerk I'd paid in the past to smuggle me sample reports, and asked him if he could get me the Broach autopsy.

He said, "You're a murderer. Fuck off and don't ever call me again." Then he hung up.

I went downstairs, made a $138 cup of espresso, and toasted Gus on the back deck. "You and me, we're just players in this crazy game called life."

Gus, a discerning critic, scurried up the Mexican fan palm at the edge of the lawn.

I called a DNA analyst I knew in the medical examiner's office. She didn't take my call, though I heard her stage-whispered rebuff through the admin assistant's imperfect clasp over the mouthpiece.

My first manuscript had received seventeen rejections before a sale. I figured the odds here to be slightly better. I returned to the murder book and rechecked all the names of cops, criminalists, coroners, and clerks, even deciphering the scrawled signatures at the bottoms of the chain-of-custody forms. The only familiar name was the one I'd started with. Aside from the detectives, Lloyd Wagner would know Genevieve's case better than anyone, having handled everything from recovering my voice-mail messages to matching the knife with the wound. And he'd processed Kasey Broach's body as well. Given our rapport, I hoped that if I could talk to him for a few minutes, I might convince him to give me a little of his time.

I got his voice mail at the lab and on his cell and his answering machine at home. Given that he'd reported my last message to the detectives, I didn't want to leave another. I closed the phone, rubbed my temples, drank another cup of espresso to wash down my Dilantin.

If I couldn't get someone inside the case, I could at least try for someone with an inside track to the case. Cal Unger, my main consultant when it came to matters Chainer, was a divisional detective out of the West L.A. Station. His job had none of the glamour if such a word can be used in this context of the cases hooked by the Robbery-Homicide Division downtown. RHD detectives pulled serial killers, bank robbers, and media-intensive cases like mine. They had citywide jurisdiction, better resources, and sharper suits. Cal a Coors man all the way had closed some key divisional cases and had been bucking for a promotion to RHD for a while now. It was not lost on me that of the myriad hours he'd given me over the past few years, most of them had been spent talking about Robbery-Homicide.