Bad Memory Read online

  13

  PRYCE

  Sunday afternoon. Even though it was his day off, Pryce was back behind his desk at Hollywood Division, three murder books spread out in front of him. None of them were his cases, but all had been weighing heavily on his mind since the night before.

  The first one documented the slayings of Megan Meeks and Lucas James in Hundred Acres. A town he had been to only once or twice and an investigation he knew nothing about—other than being absolutely sure the work would have been carried out to the best of their ability by Holten and his team.

  Pryce picked up his cell phone, scrolled through his recent call list, and tapped the number he was looking for. The call went straight to voice mail. He didn’t leave a message, decided he’d try again later. He set aside the Hundred Acres murder book.

  The other two files were more recent but still had to be retrieved from cold storage.

  Charlie Holten’s name was printed neatly in black marker on one of the yellowed sticky labels. On the other was the name Angel Henderson. A street kid turned prostitute who was widely believed to be the reason why Holten had ended up dead on a July night in 1997. The girl had been murdered less than a year earlier.

  Holten had first come across Angel Henderson when he was a vice cop and she was a six-month-old baby. He’d carried her from a crack house following a drug bust, red faced and screaming, tiny fists punching air thick with gun smoke and residue. Her mother had been shot and killed during the raid. Not by Holten’s bullet, but he’d felt some sort of connection to the child he couldn’t explain as he’d held her in his arms. After she was placed in a children’s home, he called regularly for updates and bought her a small toy each Christmas as she grew from a baby into a little girl and then an adolescent.

  When she was fourteen, Angel Henderson walked out of the group home where she’d spent most of her life and never returned. Claimed by the streets of West Hollywood and those who prowled them after dark. Holten spent his days working cases and his nights searching for Angel Henderson. Using contacts, chasing leads, getting nowhere. After three years, he found her. Naked and beaten to death, her broken body tossed in a dumpster just off La Cienega Boulevard like a piece of trash.

  What was known of her final hours was typed, hole punched, and filed in the depressingly slim three-ring binder lying open in front of Pryce now.

  The first confirmed sighting on the night she died was early evening at Duke’s on Sunset. A modest greasy spoon with a big reputation, the joint was always busy; there was always a line for food at all hours of the day and night. The $6.95 breakfast special it served until four a.m. was a big favorite with the regulars, but Angel Henderson wasn’t eating the breakfast special. She was sitting at a table by the window, sharing a burger and fries with a skinny redhead with bad skin.

  Angel was a knockout compared to her friend, according to those who’d seen the pair eating dinner. Afro curls burned blonde by drugstore bleach, a black fishnet cropped top hinting at a lacy padded bra underneath, silk harem pants slung low on the hips, a flat belly decorated with a diamante piercing. Her less memorable dining companion was never tracked down by the cops.

  A couple hours later, Angel was spotted again, this time smoking a cigarette outside the Whisky a Go Go, on the corner of Sunset and Clark, right next door to Duke’s. There was a live band playing that night, and the place was heaving, so no one could say for sure whether Angel had been drinking in the bar or not. But more than one person had placed her on the sidewalk outside, after midnight, with a black guy in his twenties. Colored beads fastened to the ends of skinny, floppy dreads, baggy jeans belted halfway down his butt over designer boxers, an oversize baseball shirt, and two-hundred-dollar sneakers. Identified by witnesses as DaMarcus Jones, Angel’s sometime boyfriend and occasional pimp and small-time gangbanger.

  A guest at a motel on La Cienega later reported being roused from sleep around two a.m. by loud yelling from the street outside his first-floor window. He’d pulled back the curtain and watched as a young woman, probably in her late teens or early twenties, screamed and shoved at a white man in his midthirties. He had a stocky build and a shaven head and was wearing a short-sleeved white shirt and dark pants or jeans.

  The couple were grappling with each other under the sodium glow of a streetlight, the deserted street still slick from an unexpected shower earlier in the evening. Illuminated like two actors in a spotlight on an empty stage. He was trying to haul the girl down the hill, south toward Santa Monica Boulevard, and she was trying to escape from his grasp. They appeared to be embroiled in a domestic dispute fueled by too much liquor. The motel guest had gotten bored after a while, dropped the curtain, and returned to bed.

  It was the last known sighting of Angel Henderson alive.

  The homicide investigation didn’t land on Holten’s desk—it wasn’t his case—but he took an interest anyway. Too much of an interest, according to some, who said his obsession with the girl was what got him killed. Holten’s murder was officially still unsolved, the case technically still open, but it was widely believed he’d been the target of a hit organized by DaMarcus Jones.

  Pryce looked up from the murder book as his partner, Vic Medina, slumped into the seat at the workstation facing his own. Medina was dressed in his trademark outfit of Levi’s jeans, tight white tee, black leather jacket, and Ray-Ban shades propped on top of long, dark hair. He nodded at the files on Pryce’s desk.

  “Working on your day off?” he asked. “Can’t keep away from the place, huh?”

  “I could say the same about you, Vic.”

  “Found myself at a loose end today and figured I might as well do some work. What’s your excuse for working a Sunday?”

  “Women trouble.”

  Medina raised an eyebrow. “You’ve not had another fight with Angie, have you? Don’t tell me you’re back on the couch again?”

  Pryce shook his head. “Nope. An argument with Dionne this time. She has a boyfriend.”

  Medina winced. “Already? Ouch. Must make you feel old, pal. You run a check on him yet?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Vic. He’s just a kid.” Pryce smiled. “But his folks came up clean.”

  Medina grinned. “Nice work.”

  Pryce’s smile disappeared. “I had a fight with Jessica too. Well, a heated exchange. Last night after dinner. Let’s just say the evening didn’t end well.”

  “Jeez, Jase. You know what your problem is? You’ve got too many women in your life, that’s what. What did you fight about?”

  Pryce told Medina about Jessica’s decision to investigate the events surrounding the Devil’s Drop murders, how his old partner was the one who had put Rue Hunter away for double murder, and how he and Jessica had clashed over whether the original investigation should be reexamined. He also told his partner how the whole business had gotten him thinking about Charlie Holten’s murder again, more than twenty years after it happened.

  It was a topic he and Medina didn’t really talk about. Pryce had always believed being the partner of another cop was a bit like being in a marriage. You had your ups and downs, spent a lot of time in each other’s company, got to know all the little things that made each other tick, and, ultimately, you had each other’s back.

  Often, as was the case with Pryce, there would be other partners along the way, like ex-wives lurking in your past after remarrying. Pryce had two before Medina came along—Charlie Holten and Rebecca Jensen, a detective he’d worked alongside for almost nine years before she’d transferred out from Hollywood to Topanga after being promoted to LT.

  Pryce also knew, when one of those pairings was ended by a bullet, it was the one any subsequent partners found the hardest to live up to, the biggest boots to fill. He understood how tough it must have been for Medina having to follow in the footsteps of a ghost. Vic had joined the LAPD a good while after Holten’s death, knew he’d met a violent end, but the details of the shooting weren’t something he and Pryce had discussed at
any great length in the more than a decade they’d worked together.

  Until now.

  Pryce slid the Angel Henderson murder book across his own desk toward Medina, gave him the background on Holten’s loose association with the teenager during her formative years, how he had taken an even bigger interest in her following her death. Medina read the file, which didn’t take too long because the investigation had gone nowhere.

  Then Medina said, “Tell me about Holten and the night he died.”

  Pryce let his mind take a trip back in time to the midnineties and one of the worst periods he had ever experienced in his personal or professional life. The murder of Charlie Holten had had a heavy influence on both for a long time.

  “Charlie was found behind the wheel of his car,” he said. “Stopped at traffic lights, engine still running, both front windows rolled down. A single bullet to the forehead. The shooting happened on an empty street in Echo Park, out by Dodger Stadium, just before midnight. No witnesses.”

  “Sounds like an execution to me.”

  Pryce nodded. “I wasn’t given the case, of course. Charlie was my partner, so I was part of the investigation. I was interviewed twice by a couple of guys by the name of Hunt and Adams, both of them way before your time. They wanted to know about cases we were working together, Charlie’s movements in the days leading up the murder, what his mood had been like, and so on. The case we’d been working at the time was a domestic homicide. Guy had offed his wife after finding out she’d been screwing around with a coworker. It didn’t feel like the domestic 187 had anything to do with Charlie’s shooting. As you said, it looked like an execution. Clean and professional.”

  “You’re an astute guy, Jase,” Medina said. “Did you have any inkling beforehand something might be wrong? That Holten might have gotten himself involved in something?”

  Again, Pryce nodded. “I told Hunt and Adams that Charlie had seemed preoccupied for a few days. Like he was here, in the squad room, but he was a million miles away at the same time. Like he had something big on his mind.”

  “Did you ask what was bothering him? Did he talk to you about it?”

  “Sure, I asked,” Pryce said. “He told me he had something to sort out. Wouldn’t say any more about it. We were pretty close so, if he didn’t want to talk about it, I figured it was probably to do with his wife, Maggie. I knew they hadn’t been getting on for a while. Then, after the shooting, I got to thinking about the letter.”

  “What letter?”

  “I’m not sure when it arrived exactly. Maybe two or three days before the shooting. Delivered right here, to the office. More of a small parcel, really. Brown padded envelope, handwritten address on front. I remember Charlie pulling out a single sheet of paper, unfolding it, reading it; then all the color draining from his face. When I asked if he was okay, he said yes, shoved the note back into the envelope, and stuffed the package into the inside pocket of his sports coat.”

  “Any idea who the letter was from?” Medina asked. “What it was about?”

  “It was never found,” Pryce said. “Hunt and Adams looked into the whole marriage thing, whether Charlie could have had a secret mistress, if the letter was a possible blackmail attempt. I didn’t think so. They checked out his call records, both incoming and outgoing. Office phone, home landline, cell phone. Nothing set alarm bells ringing. The mistress theory was quickly dismissed.”

  “What was your theory?”

  “I always thought it was something to do with Angel Henderson.”

  “Why?”

  “When Charlie was found in his car, he was a few blocks from a patch of wasteland. Nothing there but some derelict warehouses that had been shuttered for years. It was one of the places he would meet his snitches.”

  “You think the letter was arranging a meet?”

  “I think it was a trap.”

  “Set by?”

  “DaMarcus Jones.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He’s been in the joint since ’99,” Pryce said. “A rap sheet with more entries than your little black book. Doing time for murder, attempted murder, and armed robbery after a liquor store raid went bad. The only way he’s leaving the big house is in a pine box. Like Charlie with Angel Henderson, I took an unofficial interest in his investigation. Met with DaMarcus Jones two or three times shortly after his incarceration. No joy.”

  “What happened with the Holten investigation?”

  “Officially, it’s still open and subject to once-yearly reviews. Unofficially, no one’s busting a gut anymore. Everyone thinks DaMarcus Jones is our guy, and he’s never seeing daylight again. Different crime but still doing the time.”

  “What do you think?”

  Pryce shrugged. “He never confessed.”

  They were both silent for a few minutes.

  Then Medina said, “I don’t think you’re here on your day off to escape Dionne and all the boyfriend stuff.” He nodded at the murder books still spread out in front of Pryce. “I think you want to take another proper look at the Holten case.”

  Pryce shrugged again. “Maybe.”

  Medina said, “Okay, I’m in.”

  Pryce stared at his partner in surprise.

  “Seriously? You want to get involved?”

  “Sure, I do. And it sounds to me like another visit with DaMarcus Jones is long overdue.”

  14

  JESSICA

  She was back in the prison in Chowchilla.

  The stench of bleach and sweat filled her nostrils again. The smell of her own fear was stronger this time because Jessica wasn’t in the visitation room. She was locked in a cell. A six-by-eleven-foot space designed for one person. But there were two of them. Rue Hunter stood in the corner, a needle hanging from her arm, blood dripping from her fingertips. She was laughing. Outside the cell, there was a rhythmic banging. Someone was calling Jessica’s name.

  She opened her eyes.

  It took a few seconds for them to adjust to the gloom, to register she was safe in her trailer and not trapped within the concrete confines of the Central California Women’s Facility. Jessica needed a further moment to register the banging hadn’t ended with the dream. She grappled for the cell phone lying next to her on the bed to check what time it was, to see how long she had slept. She stabbed at the home button. Nothing happened. The phone was out of juice.

  Another bang.

  Jessica lifted the shade covering the window next to the bed a few inches and peered outside. Sylvia Sugarman was standing on the doorstep, a food tray in her hands.

  “Jessica?” the woman called. “Are you in there? You okay, sweetheart?”

  “Shit.”

  Jessica rolled off the bed, grabbed the empty liquor bottle, and threw it in the trash can under the sink. She picked up her pants and tee from where she’d dropped them on the floor earlier and pulled them on as she made her way to the door. Jessica threw it open as she was zipping up the pants.

  “Sorry, Mrs. Sugarman, I was asleep. Didn’t hear you knocking.”

  Sylvia liked to be called Mrs. Sugarman instead of Sylvia. She told Jessica once she thought it made her sound more refined, a little bit classy. And, according to Sylvia, Hundred Acres was badly in need of some class. It was the same reason why she drank her afternoon liquor from a crystal tumbler and always wore a full face of makeup even when she had no plans to leave the house.

  Sylvia, fully made up as always, poked her perfectly coiffed head around the doorway. Jessica caught a whiff of her perfume. Something French, heavy and heady.

  “I’m not interrupting anything, am I?” Sylvia asked, looking around. “The shades have been down all afternoon. I thought you might have had company.”

  “No, not at all. I was having a nap.” Jessica stepped aside. “Come on in.”

  Jessica thought Sylvia looked disappointed as she squeezed past and dumped the tray on the dinette table and slid into one of the cracked leather seats.

  “Chicken cass
erole and pecan pie,” she said. “I knocked earlier, was going to ask if you wanted to join me in the house for dinner, but there was no response. You must have been dead to the world. And please don’t take this the wrong way, sweetie, but you look like shit.”

  Jessica smiled. “You’re not the first person to tell me that today. Rough night. Didn’t get a whole lot of sleep. I guess I made up for it this afternoon. What time is it anyway?”

  Sylvia waved her hand. “Who knows? Around six maybe?”

  “Wow, I must have slept hard.”

  “Must have been a really rough night. How’s that young man of yours, by the way?”

  Jessica ignored the question. “Are you in a rush to get back to the house? I was actually hoping to have a chat with you. I wanted to pick your brains about a case I’m working.”

  Sylvia perked up. “One of your cases? Sounds interesting. Pick away.”

  “Thanks, I will. Can I get you something to drink?” Jessica opened the refrigerator and looked inside. “I have soda, water, beer. Or I could make you a coffee if you’d prefer?”

  “Any ice?” Sylvia asked.

  “Um, sure.”

  “If you’re planning on cracking the seal on that bottle of whiskey on the counter, I’ll have a large Scotch on the rocks. It’ll help me sleep later.”

  Jessica rinsed out a tumbler, then opened the Talisker, poured a healthy measure, and dropped some ice cubes into the amber liquid. If she was a betting woman, she’d wager it wasn’t Sylvia’s first refreshment of the day and wouldn’t be the last either, insomnia or not. She walked over to the table and handed the drink to the older woman.

  “Sorry, no crystal tumblers.”

  Sylvia winked. “Oh, I don’t mind slumming it occasionally, sweetheart. Just don’t tell anyone.”

  Jessica grabbed herself a Diet Coke from the refrigerator, found a fork and spoon in the kitchen drawer, and slid into the seat facing Sylvia. She peeled the Saran Wrap from the casserole dish and savored the aroma of the food before digging in. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast at Randy’s.