Zero to the Bone Read online

  “Are you okay?”

  Cassie stood a dozen yards distant, the Rott clutched to her side, her expression both serious and afraid. When I nodded she edged closer, carefully, as though approaching a wounded but still dangerous beast.

  “You really lost it,” she said.

  “No, this isn’t losing it.” I stood, my thigh quivering with the effort, and tossed the branch aside. “This is just exercise.”

  “Better a tree than someone’s head, I guess.” She took another step closer, the carefully drawn line around her eyes unbroken by grief, her arms wrapped around her thin chest and her mouth held tight in a thin, straight line.

  “You’re crying again,” she said.

  “Of course I’m crying. Normal people cry when someone they like dies.”

  “Normal people,” she said and paused, thinking it over, “don’t go around beating the crap out of dead trees.”

  The Rott crept close enough to touch, head low and tail wagging cautiously, and when I reached to stroke him he banged against my leg. I told her she had a point and hiked toward the ridge, the strength returning to my legs with each step, my momentary exhaustion emotional as much as physical.

  “Who do you think killed her?” Cassie walked closely behind, taking each step as though the ground might drop out from beneath her.

  “I have no idea, not yet.”

  “Are you going to look for her killer?”

  “That’s the police’s job.”

  I’m sure she noticed my shrug, as though I wasn’t sure of my answer.

  “You’ll follow the story? For the paper?”

  “A story like this, a dead-body-in-the-brush story, normally it’s one issue and out because, really, who cares? Once the girl is dead, she’s dead. We’ll only do a follow-up if the police publicly point to a suspect or arrest somebody.”

  “Who do you think killed her?”

  Her morbid curiosity unnerved me.

  “How do I know who killed her? This shit happens all the time. Every month somebody finds a body in the mountains or desert around here, every week some kid riding a bike or playing on the lawn gets gunned down by gangbangers, every day somebody beats, stabs, or shoots somebody to death, bodies stuffed in closets, suitcases, the trunks of cars, people shot down in their own bedrooms or stabbed in their kitchens, assaulted on the street by total strangers, beaten, robbed, raped, crumpled up and tossed aside like trash in the gutter, and those are just the fatalities; that doesn’t even count the dozens of people who don’t die, who survive their wounds to linger on in one pitiful shape or another.”

  Cassie called for me to wait up, trailing so far behind I doubt she heard much of what I’d said. I paused at the crest of the hill, the canopy of oaks billowing down to the meadow. She stopped a dozen feet below and looked up at me, bone-white forearm shading her eyes from the bright blue sky.

  “I was thinking you might know someone more specific,” she said.

  “That’s the whole point. How can I be specific when death is everywhere? Christine was wild but she wasn’t stupid, no more than other girls. Do you think she realized the guy who asked her out was going to kill her? That’s why you have to be careful. What happened to Christine? That’s the price of running wild in the world.”

  “Some guy asked her out? Who?”

  “Somebody who claimed to be a producer.”

  “So you do know a little more than you’re saying,” she observed, and stepped up the hill as though she hadn’t heard anything more than what she wanted to hear.

  Frank was gnawing on a foot-long sub, scribbling notes on a legal-sized pad propped on the hood of his Honda, when I hiked around the curve. Cassie dawdled far behind, lost in her own Gothic, death-obsessed world. “I’m sorry it was Christine,” he said as I heeled the Rott. “I didn’t know her, of course, but I’m sorry for you.”

  “You want the flash card?” I asked, referring to the removable memory chip that stored the digital camera’s photographs. “Or would it be okay if I stopped in tomorrow to transfer the images?”

  “Tomorrow will be fine.” He turned his back to the car, leaned against the front fender, said, “We could hear you banging on that tree a hundred yards away. You scared the shit out of our eyewitness, thought you were a crazy woman.”

  “That was nothing,” I said. “That was just my normal homicidal PMS rage. You should be glad you don’t have to deal with hormones that make you temporarily insane.”

  “I count my blessings every day.”

  I thought about whether or not I should ask about Sean, whether it would clue Frank something was going on between us, then decided I should just go ahead and act as though nothing had happened.

  “You mean Detective Tyler?” Frank jutted his chin toward the access road. “He’s up there.”

  “His case?”

  “Jurisdictional issues. This is LASD turf.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “Since when did you get to be on first-name basis with a cop?”

  “Why does LASD get it?” The Los Angeles Sheriffs Department patrolled the coastline between Pacific Palisades and the Ventura County border. “The video wasn’t shot out here. I mean, where she was killed, that’s who gets jurisdiction, right?”

  “But where was she killed? The video doesn’t show one way or another. It’s just a room.” His eyes tracked over my shoulder. “A case like this, cross-jurisdictional conflicts, possession of the body is nine-tenths of the law.”

  Cassie collapsed against the Honda’s passenger door as though worn out by the hike and stared up at Frank. “Nina says you’re going to drop the story. Why would you want to do that? It’s a great story. Beautiful dead girl, bloodsucking killer rapist, I’d think readers would eat that up.”

  Frank stared her down, asked, “What do you care, you little ghoul?”

  Cassie beamed as though she’d just been called the most beautiful young woman in paradise. “I care a lot, you fat fuck,” she replied. “Christine was my friend.”

  “First of all, ‘fat fuck’ is cheap alliteration. You should be writing headlines for Scandal Times.” Frank crossed his arms over his chest and leaned forward, scowling. “Second, I never said I was going to drop the story.”

  “Don’t encourage my niece to swear,” I said. “She doesn’t need it.”

  “You were swearing yourself just a minute ago,” Cassie said.

  “No, I wasn’t. I never swear.”

  She looked at me like I’d lost my mind or lied, or maybe both.

  “I don’t think Christine was this guy’s first,” Frank said.

  “You think it’s a serial killing?” Cassie asked. “What makes you think that? Is he collecting trophies?”

  “I didn’t say serial killing,” Frank said, wagging a corrective finger. “I said he probably wasn’t her first. A couple of weeks ago a girl with bruises on her throat was found wandering naked in the desert near Palmdale, with no idea how she got there.”

  “How does that connect?” I asked, not getting it.

  “The cops suspect ruffies.”

  “Rohypnol, that stuff is nasty,” Cassie said with too much authority.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “You think I’m not supposed to know stuff like that? That I’m too little?” She crossed her arms over her chest, offended. “I started seeing that stuff in the seventh grade, all the date-rape drugs, particularly Vitamin K.”

  “Vitamin K?”

  “Slang for Ketamine,” she said. “Kids use it to get high.”

  “So maybe she took it recreationally, or one of her so-called friends gave it to her,” I said. “Isn’t that more likely?”

  “You’re right, probably doesn’t mean anything.” Frank smiled, suddenly cheerful. “But it’s almost summer, readers are going to want a story they can take with them to the beach, and when you can cross genres like this, movie starlets and murder, it makes great beach reading.”

  6

  FRANK’S INTENTION TO continu
e following the story animated Cassie during the ride south to the airport, the loaner car rolling with the curves along Pacific Coast Highway as she calculated the possibility that Christine had been victimized by a serial rapist and the certainty that Frank wouldn’t let her killer get away with it, declaiming in a thin, high voice that the press coverage would pressure the police to catch the bastard if she didn’t find him first, as though she planned to join the Scandal Times staff as a combination research assistant and amateur sleuth. Her reaction worried me. Frank could be a crack investigative journalist when the desire moved him, but I didn’t think his interest was all that genuine. He wanted a hot story to sell newspapers, not the truth. Cassie gave far more credence to his interest than experience and common sense warranted. If the story didn’t develop over the next day or two, he’d drop it. That would disappoint her, but life is full of disappointments. I didn’t worry about her disappointment. Her emotional detachment and morbid curiosity, that worried me.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “The way you reacted when I told you Christine was dead, I never would have guessed you knew her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You didn’t cry, you didn’t even look shocked. You went from hearing she was killed to wanting to find out who killed her without any of the emotional steps in between.”

  “Like what steps?”

  She was curious. She really didn’t know.

  “Like grief. I’m not sure you really care. Don’t you feel sad?”

  “I’m not like you.” She leaned back hard against the passenger seat, offended. “I don’t beat the crap out of dead trees and think it solves anything.”

  “Maybe it didn’t solve anything, but I feel better.”

  “Maybe this makes me feel better.” She bit at the edges of her purple thumbnail. “Are you going to look for the guy who did this to Christine?”

  I shrugged.

  “It’s like you get angry and then you forget about it. What’s the good in that? And you tell me I don’t care? At least I care enough to want to do something.”

  “I’m a tabloid photographer, not a detective.”

  “You think the cops should handle this? Is that what you think?” She made a face to let me know what she thought of that idea. “You used to be hard core.”

  “What happened to Christine is terrible,” I said.

  “She was your friend!” Cassie shouted. “She modeled for your photographs and took care of your niece! We have to avenge her death.”

  “You have to go back to school,” I said.

  She made a sound in the back of her throat, sounded like a growl.

  “Do I want to find whoever did this?” I nodded, once. “Frank wants to follow the story. That’s a good start. We’ll follow the story.”

  We rode a while in silence, the sun firing bright orange as it arced toward the sea. The Rott, made uncomfortable by the tension between us, stirred at Cassie’s feet and attempted to clamber onto her lap. She pushed him back onto the floorboard, then remembered to give him a scratch as consolation. “Do you remember when we first met?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I said. I’d tracked her to an abandoned missile base north of Los Angeles, hoping to convince her to leave, and when she refused, I hit her with a right hook and dragged her out.

  “You were really hard core then,” she said. “You really kicked ass.”

  “I’m trying to mature a little.”

  “If you mature any more, I’ll think you’re dead.”

  I glared at her.

  She gave me a big, smart-ass show of teeth. “If I find the asshole who killed Christine?” She mimed a pistol with her right hand and pulled the trigger. “Bang!”

  I tried to remember how I’d felt about death at her age, hoping it might help me understand her reactions, but I was far more innocent at fifteen than my niece—or her mother. My sister had run away from home at sixteen, uncertain of what awaited her on the road but knowing she couldn’t live with the old man’s violence anymore. She’d hoped for a little excitement, I guess, and got it quickly enough, landing in the Las Vegas hooking scene, where her youth made her a prime commodity until her eighteenth birthday turned her legal but far less exotic. She stayed in the trade for several more years, moving on whenever the cops busted her for soliciting, from Vegas to Phoenix to Houston to Dallas, until she hooked up with a con artist who saddled her with Cassie and introduced her to a drug dealer who married her, convinced Cassie was his kid. A couple of years later, the dealer decapitated two of his slow-pay accounts with a ceremonial samurai sword and left enough evidence at the scene to make his arrest, conviction, and execution a simple legal formality. My sister had acquired a taste for the con by then, mostly small-scale sleight-of-wallet jobs involving drunken men, and she drifted up and down the coast, Cassie in tow, until one night in Portland she met Hank Bogle, a man accustomed to taking what he liked and he liked her. They lived in larcenous bliss for a little more than three years before a bungled bank job sentenced her to three to five years in Coffee Creek Correctional Facility and strapped Hank Bogle to a ten-year ride in the Oregon State Penitentiary.

  Cassie entered the terminal at LAX oddly cheerful, but as we wound our way through the long lines to the Southwest ticket counter her chatter ceased and she fidgeted with her hair, sweeping it back or twisting it in knots, checked and rechecked her ticket and student identification, and rifled through her overnight bag for one thing or another, a constant flutter of seemingly meaningless activity. I figured she suffered from anxiety, her jitteriness no more than a case of pre-flight nerves, but after she collected her boarding pass from the ticket counter she said, “I’m moving in with Gramps.”

  “Nice fantasy,” I said, not taking her seriously.

  “I’ve almost got it worked out with my caseworker.” She nodded emphatically. “Gramps is filing for custody here, too. Says he’ll adopt me if that’s what it takes. Says the courts will grant him custody because he’s a blood relative.”

  “You can’t move in with him,” I said. “Your mother ran away from him because he beat her. Wait until your caseworker hears that.”

  “He’s changed. He’s not like that anymore.”

  “He’ll always be like that,” I said.

  “You won’t adopt me, so you got no say.”

  She clutched her boarding pass like a badge and scurried into the line snaking toward the baggage x-ray machines, aware that no one without a boarding pass was allowed past that point and our argument would end.

  “You know I can’t adopt you.” I said.

  “Why not?”

  I couldn’t figure why she asked. She knew the answer.

  “Because I’m on parole,” I said.

  The man before us in line glanced back over his shoulder.

  “You mean you’re a criminal,” she said, stating a fact. “Like my mother.”

  I glowered at the man in front of us, told him to mind his own business. His head snapped forward like it was attached to a string.

  “You know all the shit you accuse me of?” she asked.

  “Don’t swear,” I said.

  “Like swearing, that, too.” Her voice scratched higher, like nails on chalkboard. “You lecture me about running wild in the world, getting myself into some dangerous shit, but you did the same things yourself. So you got no right to criticize me!”

  I didn’t know whether I was dealing with typical teen rebellion or something deeper, her reaction to Christine’s death connected to the death of her mother and feelings of abandonment. “I’m not criticizing you,” I said.

  “You were just telling me I couldn’t go live with Gramps!”

  “I warned you about him. Nothing more.”

  “And you criticize my language!”

  “Have I ever told you I was perfect? Of course I criticize your language. Swearing is ugly. Sorry if that offends you. It’s not like I’m saying you’re a bad person.”

  “You fucked up your li
fe so you think you can tell me how to run mine?”

  “That’s kind of the point of being your aunt, isn’t it?” What she said hurt me but I kept my voice low and level, refusing to play to her emotions in that public place. “I’m older. I’ve made lots of mistakes. And so I want to protect you from making the same mistakes I made. I’m not trying to criticize you so much as warn you what’s likely to happen. Swearing makes you look cheap and vulgar. Running wild in the world can hurt or kill you. You’re fifteen years old. The things I did that got me into so much trouble? They happened when I was over twenty. I didn’t have anybody advising me what could happen. I’d like things to turn out a little better for you.”

  “But I don’t want to run wild anymore!” She grabbed my arm, panicked now because only one passenger remained between her and the x-ray machines. “I’m tired of running away from foster homes. That’s why I want to live with Gramps.”

  The security officer directed her to set her bag on the conveyor belt, place any metal objects on her person into the plastic tray, and step through the metal detector. “I’m going back to Phoenix just long enough to collect my things,” she said, as she dropped her pack onto the conveyor belt. “Then I’ll come back and spend the summer with Gramps.”

  The metal detector bleeped when she passed beneath the arch. A matron stepped forward to wand her down one side and up the other, the detector emitting a high-pitched whine when it passed Cassie’s stomach. The matron scowled in puzzlement and placed her hand flat on my niece’s black velvet blouse near the abdomen.

  “I’ve got a pierced belly button.” Cassie lifted the tail of her blouse to show it. “Sorry, I should have guessed it was gonna set the thing off.”

  The matron nodded and pointed her toward the back of the conveyor belt. My niece grabbed her pack and ran, turning once on her way to the gate to wave goodbye.