Disturbance Read online

  “Oh, thank you. But how much—?”

  “Not a cent.” He paused. “I was very fond of O’Connor myself. I know he’d want you to have it.”

  “Thank you,” I said and couldn’t manage to say more.

  He put a hand on my shoulder and said, “You let me know if I can be of any help to you. I mean that. We were always proud of the work you and your colleagues did. I’m so very sorry we couldn’t continue.”

  And I knew, perhaps in a way I hadn’t known before, that he was telling the truth, that if he could have found a way to continue publishing the Express, he would have done it.

  He told me he’d leave word with Geoff to let me into the building whenever I wanted to pick up the desk, provided I could do so within the week.

  “You’re keeping Geoff on?”

  “For as long as we can,” he said.

  John walked upstairs with me. “Thanks for sticking up for me,” I said.

  “What are editors for?”

  I could hear the bitterness beneath that. “John—”

  “Oh, never mind me. I should thank you for giving me a chance to light into him. Not one tenth of what I’d really like to say to him, but you have to take your opportunities where you find them.”

  “Come to church later on,” I said. “I think there will be a choir there singing that same song.”

  I heard laughter from the newsroom. Ah, gallows humor. I was going to miss that. As we walked in, I heard the tail end of the next rude joke, and more laughter.

  “You guys should have been downstairs just now,” John said and told them how much Wrigley wanted for my desk.

  That led to impolite speculation on what Wrigley planned to do with the money.

  I finished packing up my desk. As I gathered my notes from unfinished stories, I found myself wondering who would tell the story of Las Piernas now. Who would write about Marilyn Foster, or the woman in the car trunk? Those stories were sensational, so maybe someone at the television or radio stations would. But sensational murders are a very small part of what goes on in a city of half a million people.

  How would the people of Las Piernas find out about the high school baseball games, or how much the new school uniforms might cost? Who would warn them that a fee hike was being proposed for use of the biggest local park? Or tell them that the mayor was using taxpayer money for family vacations? That their state assembly representative didn’t really live in the district and had defaulted on the mortgage for his sham address?

  And what the hell was I going to do with myself all day?

  ELEVEN

  Frank was enjoying his last day of his week’s vacation by doing some gardening. At least I didn’t walk in to find him surrounded by dancing girls, which would have been a real kicker to a day from hell. Apparently he heard my car, or the dogs tipped him off to my arrival, because he was coming into the house just as I opened the front door.

  “Hi, honey, I’m home!” I called out. “Possibly forever.”

  There was a brief silence while he processed that, then he said, “Fired or laid off?”

  I laughed. A little hysterically, but I laughed. “When I go out, I do it in style. They’re shutting the whole place down. I would have preferred fired.”

  “Oh, Irene,” he said and opened his arms. I went right into them, not caring if I got dirt on my work clothes. What the hell did it matter? Are they work clothes if you’re out of work?

  After a while, he said, “We’ll be okay, you know.”

  I did know. We had been preparing for this day for several years, and seriously planning for it financially during the last two. I was in a better position than most of my colleagues. My husband had a good-paying job that would provide health insurance, and enough time in with the LPPD to avoid any layoffs that might someday come to his department. We didn’t have kids who were depending on us. I had sold the house I owned before I met Frank, and managed to do that at the height of the Southern California real estate bubble, so we had savings. We didn’t owe anything on Frank’s house, and neither of us was the acquisitive type, so we didn’t have much in the way of other kinds of debt, either. We had enough for the upkeep and taxes on some mountain property Frank had inherited, and no other big obligations.

  “Yeah,” I said quietly. “I know. But I also know that you have days when you want to leave the department, and now I’m afraid you’re trapped there.”

  “No, don’t ever worry about that. I’m fine. If I need to change jobs, I’ll find a way to do it.”

  “The universe is expanding.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “It’s something Ethan said to me. God. Poor Ethan. What’s going to happen to him?”

  “Do you seriously doubt he’ll land on his feet?”

  “No … I just hope he doesn’t get too bruised on the way down.”

  We went through a litany of the people I was closest to at the paper. Stuart Angert had taken his retirement months ago. Mark Baker’s kids had just finished college, and I’m sure there was some debt there, but his wife had a good job, so maybe they’d be okay. Like the rest of us, Lydia had been expecting this possibility, but she and I—and many others—were without definite plans for future employment. Her fiance, Guy St. Germain, was an executive with the Bank of Las Piernas, and since it was one of those local banks that hadn’t gone in for shaky lending practices, Guy’s job was secure. He made enough to support them both, but I couldn’t picture her being happy with idleness. I had no idea what John’s situation was. I’d asked him once, and he’d told me not to worry about him.

  “A useless command,” I said now.

  “Yes,” Frank said. “And I admit I’m worried about you.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. You…. In a lot of ways, you define yourself as a reporter, and I hope you’ll get to keep working as one. But what worries me is that you identify so strongly with the Express itself. You grew up reading O’Connor’s stories—”

  “That reminds me, we’re getting his desk.”

  “Your desk from work?”

  “Yes. Is that okay?”

  He smiled. It was one of those you-are-crazy-but-that’s-what-I-love-about-you smiles. I’ll take one any time.

  “Sure,” he said, “but you’re proving my point. You’ve been doing this work for a long time—”

  “Don’t remind me how long.”

  “A long time now,” he said. “And except for a couple of years here and there, you’ve worked at the Express most of your adult life. Being a reporter for that paper was what you dreamed of doing as a little kid, and you got your dream. That’s not something a lot of people can say about their work lives.”

  “No. I’ve always been lucky. Except at cards. So I won’t try to become a professional poker player.”

  “What a relief. That was what I was working up to, of course.”

  “Okay, I get it. I’ll stop trying to dodge the point you’re making. You’re right, but …” I broke off, tears finally threatening.

  “Hey, it’s all right,” he said, pulling me closer. “My real point was, go easy on yourself. You’ll find what it is you’re going to do next. Or it will find you.”

  “Aren’t you afraid I’m going to sit here eating bonbons all day?”

  “I’m more afraid you’ll run yourself into the ground. Or decide to redecorate.”

  That made me sit up. “You know, I do want to paint the guest room.”

  He sighed dramatically.

  “What? I’m just talking about painting.”

  “It is never—never—just painting.”

  He was right, of course.

  Two weeks went by. I did some serious drinking with my fellow former co-workers that first evening, was given an unpleasant reminder about hangovers the next morning, and called it quits. I realized that Ethan—who went to an AA meeting that night—and most of the other people I wanted to spend time with weren’t going to step into the bar.

  I s
ent off resumes to any media within commuting distance, knowing damned well they weren’t hiring, but I was unable to surrender to this new state of aimless existence without a fight.

  One of the hardest things, at first, was being cut off from the constant flow of information that was part of life in the newsroom. Waiting for local television news to come on and then listening to its four-sentence coverage of city stories was making me crazy. I felt a frustrating sense of isolation.

  The police were facing their own frustrations. The woman in the car trunk remained a Jane Doe. There was no ID in the trunk, and her fingerprints didn’t turn up any matches with criminal records. Ben’s work had determined that she was between eighteen and twenty-five years of age and had suffered a stab wound to the temple with a slender object, possibly an ice pick. There was another, similar wound to her heart, one that had been much harder to find beneath the paint. Bruising indicated she had been bound and gagged at some point. Toxicology tests were still pending. No DNA other than her own had been found on her remains. Ben believed she had been thoroughly washed before she was painted, and painted after she was dead.

  The coroner’s office had submitted her DNA to the federal database for missing persons cases, but Ben told me that so few jurisdictions were making use of it and so few families knew about it, he didn’t have high hopes of a hit.

  The Marilyn Foster case hadn’t progressed any further, either.

  The police had no leads on the identity of the killer or killers. They were interviewing some of the people who posted on the Moths’ blog, but that didn’t seem to be getting them anywhere. Nor did they have any leads on who turned on the hoses in the middle of the night, but they did believe there was a connection between that and the killings. Which was of no comfort to me.

  So I didn’t go out too much during those two weeks.

  Frank helped me pick up O’Connor’s desk. At first it was in our living room, taking up more of one wall than I expected it to, until I could make space for it in the guest room. Frank kept telling me just to take it easy for a little while.

  Ethan helped me move everything out of the guest room and paint it. “Least I could do after staying here rent free,” he said. He helped me keep Cody and the dogs occupied while the floor was refinished. I gave away the desk we’d had in there, along with a small table, which made room for O’Connor’s desk.

  At the end of the second week, Ethan helped me put the furniture back into the room. He ran his fingers over the top of the desk. “He smoked?” he asked, looking at a burn mark.

  “No, at least not in the years I knew him. The desk belonged to Jack Corrigan before it became O’Connor’s.”

  “Wow. O’Connor’s own mentor.”

  “And one of my teachers when I was in J-school.”

  “How old is this thing?”

  I laughed.

  “I didn’t mean it like that!”

  “I’m not sure how old it is—John Walters and Stuart both thought it was from the early nineteen thirties. It could be older than that. Maybe I’ll visit Helen Corrigan and ask her. She and Jack were at the paper at the same time.”

  “I remember the story Hailey wrote about her.”

  Hailey Freed, who had been one of the first laid off. “What do you hear from Hailey these days?”

  “She’s selling drugs.”

  “What?”

  “Pharmaceuticals. It’s one of the family businesses. Her grandfather’s, I think. He gave her a job going around to doctors’ offices as a salesperson. She’s really good at it. Making big bucks.”

  “Does she like it?”

  He hesitated. “Not sure. She likes being good at it, and likes having money. But—I don’t know. It’s always hard to tell with Hailey.”

  “And what about you?”

  “I’ve got some plans. And an idea for a business,” he said but wouldn’t tell me more. When I started to pry, he suddenly remembered that he had promised to go next door to visit Jack.

  So I sat alone at my old desk. At O’Connor’s old desk. At Corrigan’s. I touched an ancient ink stain from a fountain pen. I pulled out one of the slides, could see little worn places where typewriters had sat upon it. Thought of all the words written at this desk.

  I felt tired. I had finished my big project of sprucing up the guest room and finding a place for the desk. Now what? Sleep?

  I folded my arms on that worn surface, laid my head down, and closed my eyes. I wanted to dream away a world that no longer cared about those words. I fought against a sense of loss so deep, it would have taken a hundred funerals to bury it.

  I’m of Irish descent, and I was at a desk that had belonged to two men who were sons of immigrants, each a bit closer to the ould sod than I. So perhaps I can be forgiven for saying that a feeling came over me—others may prefer to say that, between my never-distant fears and an abundance of sentiment brought on by all that reminiscence, I was overwrought. They can explain it that way if it makes them happy. For me, a feeling came over me.

  I didn’t hear voices or see a vision or anything like that. But I thought of Corrigan, one of the most determined individuals I’ve met in my life, and remembered how he’d helped O’Connor when O’Connor’s sister had gone missing in 1945. Her grave was found five years later, and O’Connor had taken his grief and forged it into a relentless campaign to ensure that missing persons cases and the unidentified dead weren’t forgotten in Las Piernas. O’Connor had died solving one of those cases.

  And the notion came to me that this legacy, of which I was one small part, wasn’t dead. It wasn’t about a building or a piece of newsprint on a driveway. It was about the story, whatever that story might be. Every story was a gift.

  I had a story. I needed to go after it. It was as simple as that.

  I needed to find out who that woman was, that young woman who had been left in that shabby tomb at the end of my street. Who had been hurt and frightened, who had been demeaned even in death.

  I might not solve her murder, but I was going to do my damnedest to name her.

  But how?

  And almost as soon as I asked myself that, I knew that my search for her name had to begin with another name, one the city had already nearly forgotten: Marilyn Foster. I got up from the desk and made a phone call.

  TWELVE

  Dwayne Foster had a story of his own, of course. One advantage of not having a deadline was that I had the leisure to let him tell it. By turns he was angry with the police, then cognizant of the fact that they couldn’t work miracles, full of half-formed plans for everything from pulling up stakes and moving to another part of the country to staying and delivering his own form of justice to the killer.

  After he wound down a little, we started going over some questions I had. On the night Marilyn disappeared, he had come home at about half past midnight. Dinner had been waiting for him as usual. Marilyn’s habit was to go to bed between ten-thirty and eleven. Police said computer records showed she had been online at about nine-thirty.

  “I just want to make sure I’m not making any assumptions about Marilyn’s routines and habits. Did she ever go for long walks at night?”

  “No. Even though this is a safe neighborhood—” He broke off, then started again. “Even though we used to think this was a safe neighborhood, she was afraid to do that. Being diabetic, she didn’t like to exercise alone, because, well … she was good about her meds and all that, but she wasn’t always good at gauging what she needed to eat to avoid going too low on her blood sugar. So just to be on the safe side …” The word seemed to catch on him like a small, sharp hook, and he looked away. He took a breath, then went on. “She had routines at the gym, and her trainer there was someone who knew about diabetes and what to do and all that. Sometimes we went walking together before I left for work, but if you’re asking if she could’ve been walking around alone in the neighborhood at midnight or whenever it was, no ma’am.”

  “I’m just trying to figure out the logistics.
Her car was gone, but her purse and phone were here. Any woman I know would have taken her purse and phone if she was driving somewhere at night, even—perhaps especially—in an emergency. There were no signs of forced entry. So one of two things happened—she went out of the house and encountered someone there, or she invited someone in who then forced her to go out to the car.”

  “The police said something like that. They had me give them a DNA sample, then took our trash. Said that if she had given him something to eat or drink, his DNA might be on something. But unless it’s someone she met at the dentist’s office, or one of the neighbors, I just don’t know why she would have let anyone in, or gone outside in the middle of the night.”

  “From all you’ve told me, it sounds as if your wife was a helpful person. If a young man came to the door and said he’d been in a car accident, and had already called the police but he needed her to help him with his injured, pregnant wife until they got there, would she step outside to take a look? Or if he pretended to be crying and asked her if she could please tell him whose dog he had just hit?”

  “I see what you’re saying. Only there’s no wife or dog or whatever.”

  “Right. Or he’s wearing a uniform, or—whatever—does something to gain her trust. If she was taken between nine-thirty and midnight, then there’s a chance it really wasn’t all that late when he first arrived. None of your neighbors saw anyone come here that night?”

  “No. But I’m not really surprised. No one around here pays much attention to anyone else. The police asked them all—over and over again. Someone said they heard a car, assumed it was mine. Frankly, I think that lady is lying and just wanted to be part of the drama—you know what I mean?”

  “Yes. Maybe if we look at this from another angle—he arrived here somehow, on foot or was dropped off. Maybe he was given a ride by someone who had no idea what he was up to but dropped him off here.” I paused. “But anyone who was innocent and unaware would have spoken up by now if they’ve heard the news.”

  He shook his head. “I think about that all the time now—all the news stories about missing people that I never paid much attention to. Stories about murders. I didn’t really care, so maybe no one really cares about Marilyn.”