Chasing Darkness by Robert Crais Page B

smiled.
    â€œI gotta get outta here anyway. Hot date and all.”
    â€œSure.”
    â€œListen—”
    Her face softened, then she lifted my hand, turned it palm up, and touched the hard line of tissue that ran across four fingers and most of the palm, cut when I was fighting to save Ben Chenier’s life.
    â€œYou think you have scars, mister?”
    She touched the side of my chest where Reinnike put me in the hospital with a 12-gauge shotgun. Number-four buckshot and two surgeries later.
    Starkey smiled.
    â€œYou oughta see my fuckin’ scars, Cole. I got you beat all to hell.”
    The bomb that killed her in a trailer park.
    She dropped my hand.
    â€œDon’t watch the news, man. Just forget it.”
    â€œSure.”
    â€œYou’re not going to forget it.”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œMaybe that’s why I love you.”
    She punched me in the chest and walked out of my house.
    That Starkey is something.
    I put on the TV to get ready for the news, then took out a pork chop to thaw. Service for one. I drank a beer standing in the kitchen, offered myself another, then returned to the television when the news hour rolled around. Earnest news-jock Jerry Ward looked Los Angeles in the eye and intoned in his best understated delivery: Murders solved by bizarre discovery in Laurel Canyon .
    Then Jerry arched his eyebrows.
    When Jerry arches his eyebrows, you know you’re in for something bizarre.
    I had plenty of time to grab another beer. The lead story was a visit by the president, who had arrived in town to survey the recent fire damage. The second story reported on rebuilding efforts and the decreasing chance of more fires in the coming days. News of the fires segued nicely to the bizarre discovery of Lionel Byrd. I was probably on my third beer by then. Or fourth.
    Jerry gave the story almost three minutes, intercut with a clip of Marx at his press conference. During the clip, Marx held up a clear plastic evidence bag containing what appeared to be the actual album, and described the “portraits of death” as “trophies taken by a deranged mind.” The only victims mentioned by name were the most recent victim, a twenty-six-year-old Pasadena native named Debra Repko, and Yvonne Bennett. My stomach tightened when I heard her name.
    The Bennett mention was a simple statement that Byrd had been charged at the time of her murder, but the charges were dropped when conflicting evidence surfaced that apparently cleared Mr. Byrd. Neither I nor Alan Levy was mentioned. I guess I should have been thankful.
    Marx looked pretty good with his full-dress uniform and his finger in the air, proclaiming the city safer, as if he had personally rescued another victim instead of finding a rotting corpse. He declared he was personally offended by Byrd’s release when he had been brought before the altar of justice in the Bennett case, and promised to do everything in his power to ensure such outrages never happened again.
    I said, “Wow. Altar of justice.”
    Marx was flanked by a city councilman named Nobel Wilts, who congratulated Marx on the fine police work. The woman I had seen across the street from Byrd’s house was interviewed in a ten-second clip, saying she would sleep easier tonight; and the mother of Chelsea Ann Morrow, the third victim, was interviewed at her Compton home. I wondered how the cameras had gotten to the mother and the neighbor so quickly, since the press conference had happened within the past hour or so. Marx or Wilts had probably tipped the media so they could set up for the prime-time coverage.
    When the story changed to a toy recall, I brought the remains of my beer out to the deck.
    The winds blow fiercest at sundown in a last furious rush to the sea, and now the trees filling the canyon below me whipped and shivered. Grey eucalyptus; scrub oak and walnuts; olive trees that looked like dusky green beach balls. Their branches rattled like