After Image, page 13
At the front desk, I ask the receptionist to let Ruiz know I’m here. She dials his extension, but after a minute, she hangs up the phone and shakes her head.
“Sorry, hon. I think he’s left for the day.”
My stomach sinks. I need to talk to him. If the key chain alone isn’t enough to reopen the investigation, surely this other information is. Stepping away from the front desk, I pull out my phone and begin a text to Ruiz. The receptionist eyes me as she shuffles some paperwork on her desk. I wonder if she recognizes my voice from the old days, when I called the station so often that the front desk people were instructed to always put me through to Family Liaison, never to the detectives.
Just as I’m about to dial Ruiz’s number, the double doors next to the front desk swing open, and he walks out with another detective beside him. Both of them carry cardboard file boxes under their arms. Ruiz’s shirt is rumpled and unbuttoned at the collar. As he passes the reception desk, his eyes at first pass over me, and then he stops short as he registers my presence. “Natasha? What’re you doing here?”
“I need to talk to you,” I say, aware that I sound desperate.
I can see the other detective sizing me up, trying to get a read on who I am. He’s tall, maybe six five, and he’s holding the file box as if it weighs nothing. He raises his eyebrows at Ruiz. “See you tomorrow, I guess?”
“Yeah, see you tomorrow,” Ruiz says. Then he turns back to me, frowning. “What’s up? Has something happened?”
Suddenly, I find myself tongue tied. On the walk here, I’d rehearsed exactly what I was going to say, how I would lay out the details Greg told me last night. But now I can’t seem to put the words together. What comes out is: “I talked to Greg.”
“What?” His voice echoes across the lobby, and the receptionist looks up, startled. He lowers his voice. “Jesus Christ, Natasha, what were you thinking?”
“I was thinking no one else was going to do it,” I say, an edge in my voice.
Ruiz sets down the file box on one of the reception chairs. “Natasha. You know Greg is still a serious person of interest in this case. You cannot just go talk to him.”
My jaw tightens. “Well, I guess I just did.” I sound like a stubborn child. “Why shouldn’t I? He was my friend, too, you know.” Which is not exactly true. “I talked to him, and I think you should know what he told me.”
Ruiz looks furious, but he’s not going to let his frustration out here, not in front of the receptionist, who’s now eavesdropping with interest. “Look, can we take this outside?” He picks up the file box and gestures to the entry doors.
Silently, we walk out of the station and onto the sidewalk, where Ruiz pulls me to one side of the front steps. Tension vibrates from his body. “You didn’t mention the flash drive to him, did you?”
I don’t say anything, but he can see the answer in my face.
“Damn it, Natasha!”
“What?”
Across the street, four lanes of traffic away, there’s an ordinary little neighborhood, squat stucco houses with sago palms dotting the front yards. People living their everyday lives.
“Don’t you get it? This is exactly why I wanted you to stay away from Greg. From anyone involved in the case.” I start to speak, but he interrupts me. “Just listen for a minute. What if Greg did kill Allie? What if he did, and it’s got something to do with the flash drive? You’ve just alerted him to the fact that you know about it. Didn’t you think what you might’ve done to our case? What might’ve happened to you?”
I flush, feeling stupid. He’s right, and I know it. “So what should I do?” I snap. “Nothing? I’d leave it to you if I thought you were going to do anything.”
At that, Ruiz flinches.
None of this is going the way I planned. “Look, if you’d just let me say what I came here to say,” I continue in a softer voice. “Greg told me things last night. Things he never told the police. Don’t you want to know what they are?”
Ruiz tilts his head back and looks up at the cloud-studded sky. Several people pass us on the station’s front steps, their footsteps scraping against the concrete. Finally, he looks at me and says, “Yes, damn it. I do.”
CHAPTER 25
At Gina’s, Ruiz listens in silence as I relay what Greg told me. Methodically, he stirs sugar into his decaf coffee. Three packets. Finally, he says, “And Greg says he didn’t know what the essay was about?”
“No,” I say. “He never read it.” I lean forward. “But at least one other person did.”
He sets his mug down without taking a sip. “Nuh-uh,” he says, at the same time I say, “Macnamara.”
“Ruiz,” I say. It’s important that he listen to me. “He definitely read that essay. He knows what’s on the flash drive.”
Ruiz points a finger at me. “Natasha. Do not even think about going to talk to Macnamara.”
Heat rushes to my face. That is exactly what I want to do. “Will you do it, then?”
He scrunches his empty sugar packets into tiny wads. “You know it’s not that easy. I’ve got to clear it with my supervisor, make the case for why this investigation takes priority over the other cases I’m working right now.” He grabs another sugar packet out of the ceramic jar and taps its edge insistently against the tabletop.
“You said yourself that finding out what’s on that flash drive is important,” I say. “And as far as I can see, Macnamara’s our only chance of doing that.”
He frowns. The fluorescent lights cast an unhealthy glow over his face. “Maybe. Yes. Let me think.”
I can hardly sit still. Ever since last night, a frantic energy has been running through me, burning through the numbness of the past year. “Look, if you’d been the one to talk to Greg last night, would he have told you any of what he told me?”
Ruiz tosses the sugar packet to one side.
“He wouldn’t have said one word,” I say. “Not without his lawyer there. And if his lawyer was there, he’d just advise Greg not to talk to you. Greg would’ve completely shut down, just like the last time.”
Ruiz folds his arms across his chest.
“He would’ve,” I insist. “And even if you do end up getting approval from your supervisor and you talk to Macnamara, what’s he going to tell you?” Macnamara, I’m sure, doesn’t have any friendly feelings toward the LAPD. After his relationship with Allie came to light, he’d lost his job at LACSA. But that was only the beginning of his problems. The media attention, the #professorpredator tweets . . . Eventually, he moved out of LA altogether.
Ruiz grimaces and looks beyond me, at the other tables in the diner.
“But he doesn’t have any reason not to speak to me,” I continue. “I’m not a threat to him. I’m just Allie’s sister.” I’ve been thinking this over all day. “He knows me. And I think he’ll talk to me. Just like Greg did.”
Ruiz turns his head back to me. “It’s not as simple as you’re making it sound.”
He hasn’t shot the idea down completely, though.
After a minute, as if he’s working something out in his head as he talks, he says, “Let’s say you do talk to him. No information you get from him will be admissible in court. Even if he up and confessed to you that he murdered Allie—we couldn’t use it.”
“I know that. But whatever he tells me—it’ll be information you didn’t have before, right? Like what Greg told me. It could point you where to look for new evidence.”
Absently, he takes a sip of his coffee and stares at the TV screen on the wall. Allie’s case was his first high-profile investigation, and his first high-profile failure.
“Look,” I say, knowing I’m pushing my luck, “no one would have to know anything about this. I could just drive down to San Diego—”
That snaps his attention back to me. “How the hell do you know he’s in San Diego?”
The forums have kept me informed. “He moved back from Connecticut last year. He’s working for some educational software company down there. Under a different name. He goes by James Macneice now.”
Ruiz presses his lips together. “Okay, you’ve figured out that much. But you can’t possibly have an address.”
I look down at my lap. On the forums, there’s a user—PI-Leo—who’s diligently followed Macnamara’s every move since the investigation went cold. Last night, I messaged him, told him I was a journalist doing an in-depth piece on the case. I may have given him the impression I was Neil Agarwal at the LA Times. PI-Leo, thrilled to foster a real connection to the case, was only too eager to help me out.
“You have an address, don’t you?” he says.
I nod.
Ruiz slumps back in the booth. “Fuck. You’re going to go no matter what I say, aren’t you?”
“What if it isn’t the worst idea in the world?” I ask. “What if it’s actually a good idea?” I don’t usually push like this. Usually, I do what I’m told.
Ruiz does his best to dissuade me, he really does. But after ten minutes of back-and-forth, he can tell he’s getting nowhere. And something else has begun to creep into his expression. I notice he’s rubbing his forearm, the one where the tattoo is etched into his skin. And I remember the day I first saw it, when I first found out what it meant.
CHAPTER 26
June 2015
Ruiz arrived at Gina’s in a terrible mood. As soon as he walked in the door, I could tell something was wrong. He didn’t smile when he saw me, and his greeting to Diane was clipped, cheerless. When he slid into the booth across from me, his face was fixed in a furious expression.
“What is it?”
“Don’t ask,” he said sharply. Then, when he registered my surprise, he sighed. “Sorry. It’s been a hell of a day.”
“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry. Do you . . . ?” If he’d been a friend, I’d have asked him if he wanted to talk about it. But he wasn’t a friend, not really.
Ruiz fiddled with the plastic menu for a moment or two. Diane usually came and took our order right away, but today she was busy with a table of six on the other side of the diner. Finally, Ruiz closed his menu with a snap, saying, “Do you want to get out of here? I could really use something stronger than coffee.”
“Oh—uh, okay.”
He was already getting up to leave, and I scrambled to follow him. I was so used to Ruiz being polite, predictable. This new side of him made my nerves jangle.
We walked to his car, and then, hardly speaking a word, he drove us to a bar on PCH that had low ceilings and even lower lighting. As he ordered drinks at the bar, I leaned against the counter, looking at our reflections in the mirror behind the liquor bottles. We were almost the same height, but he carried himself differently—with a kind of authority that must have come from years of being a cop. Whereas I slouched, trying to make myself as inconspicuous as possible.
After we got our drinks, we settled into a table in a dim corner near the back exit. As I peeled the label off my beer bottle, Ruiz took a big sip of his whiskey.
“So, do you want to talk about it?” I ventured. “Your day.”
He set his drink down, shaking his head. “You don’t want to hear about that.”
“Try me,” I said.
The bar was empty except for us. Afternoon sunlight filtered through a dirty window and cast a golden light over the tables and chairs.
He leaned back in his chair. The tension running through his body was so strong it seemed like a visible effort for him to sit still. He took another drink of his whiskey, almost draining the glass. “Remember I told you once that someone in my family was murdered?”
I nodded.
He pushed up the shirtsleeve on his left forearm, exposing the tattoo that I’d noticed once or twice before. “Carmen. My mother. She was thirty-two when she was stabbed coming home from work. She bled out on the street, no one around to help.”
8-11-99. Ruiz would’ve been, what, thirteen?
“Everyone knew it was her asshole ex who’d done it. He was the type of guy who’d punch her just for looking at him the wrong way. She’d just gotten up the nerve to leave him, and he wasn’t happy about it.”
“Did they catch him?”
He snorted. “Catch him? The guy was a fixture in the neighborhood; they could’ve picked him up anytime. But there was no evidence connecting him to the scene. No DNA, and they never found the knife that killed her. So no, they never caught him.” He clenched his hands together.
I knew that Ruiz had joined the force at twenty-one, become a detective at twenty-seven. I was starting to understand now why he’d been so driven, so focused.
Ruiz signaled to the bartender for another round of drinks, although I’d barely made a dent in my beer.
“What happened, after . . . she was killed?” I asked. “You and your sisters, you would’ve been just kids.”
He ran a hand over the top of his head. “Yeah. Luckily our grandma was able to take us in. Otherwise, we would’ve been put into foster care, separated, most likely.”
“So you stayed in your neighborhood?”
“Yeah.” His face was grim. “My mom’s ex stuck around for a few more years. When I was sixteen, he moved away, but I kept tabs on him. Waited for him to get busted for something else. A guy like that, he doesn’t stop hurting women. But there’s been nothing anyone could pin on him. And today . . .”
A trickle of dread ran down the back of my neck. “He hurt someone else?”
Ruiz shook his head. “No. No, that motherfucker died. Peacefully in his bed. An aneurysm. I bet he never lost a single night’s sleep over what he did to my mom.” His knees shifted under the table, making the glasses in front of us rattle.
Ruiz had never talked to me like this before.
“You know what the stupidest thing is?” he said. “All this time, I thought I was going to be the one to do something about him. I was going to put that asshole in jail. And when that started to look like less and less of a possibility, I’d daydream about other ways of making him pay. I’d find him myself, in a dark alleyway. I’d bring a gun. I’d know how to do it in a way that wouldn’t leave any evidence.”
Maybe I should’ve been shocked. But all I could think was: I understand. It was a daydream I might’ve had myself.
He laughed suddenly, sitting back in his chair. “Christ, I sound psychotic.”
Without thinking, I reached out and squeezed his hand, which rested on the table between us. He gave a start, and immediately I regretted the gesture. The invisible line between us—I’d crossed it.
I’d just begun to pull my hand away when he grasped my fingers, squeezing them tightly. For a moment, we sat like that, looking down at our clasped hands. And then the bartender arrived, sliding fresh drinks across the table. Quickly, we broke our grip, and the moment became ordinary again. But I could still feel the texture of his skin against mine. There was a cut on the edge of his hand that had only just started to scab over, and its roughness had brushed against the tips of my fingertips.
CHAPTER 27
I shift in my seat in the vinyl booth, my trousers sticking against the cheap material. I wonder if the scar on Ruiz’s hand is still there, faded over time.
Ruiz drains the rest of his coffee, then signals Diane for the check. “Fuck it,” he says, pulling his wallet out of his pocket. “If you’re going to see Macnamara, I’m going with you.”
“Are you serious?”
He frowns. “At least if I’m there, I can make sure you don’t do anything too monumentally stupid. You can’t go putting yourself in a situation like you did last night. And—”
Diane comes over and slides the check onto the table.
“And what?” I ask.
After Diane moves away, Ruiz says, “And, I’ve always had a bad feeling about Macnamara.”
But it’s something more than that, isn’t it? I think again how different he looks from the Ruiz I knew four years ago. He doesn’t yet have the look that Golanski had, that weathered lack of surprise at the world, but it’s coming. Perhaps the one thing standing in the way of that detachment is his anger, which comes out only in flashes.
Ruiz slaps a few bills down on the table, then pulls on his jacket. “If Macnamara did something to your sister, there’s no way in hell I’m going to let him get away with that. Let him live the rest of his life like it doesn’t matter what he did.”
CHAPTER 28
On Saturday, I sit on the front steps of my apartment building, waiting for Ruiz to pick me up. The morning sun slices through the buildings to the east and makes stripes of light on the street. I wrap my arms around my knees, trying to control my nerves.
At six this morning, I woke up and couldn’t go back to sleep. With too much time on my hands, I spent hours painstakingly selecting my outfit, straightening my hair, doing my makeup.
What’s all this for? Allie asked. Ruiz or Macnamara?
It’s not for anybody, I told her. It’s just for me. But I’m not sure I convinced her. Or myself.
When Ruiz’s Jeep turns the corner and noses its way down the street, I stand up, shivering. As he pulls up to the curb, I walk over and open the passenger-side door. He’s wearing jeans, a hoodie, and a baseball cap. As I slide into the car, I find myself noticing little details I didn’t last week. The dust gathering on the dashboard. The clutter in the center console: a few charger cords, some coins, a woman’s necklace. A girlfriend’s necklace?
“Ready?” he says.
I nod, and he pulls out into the street, glancing behind him at the traffic. We’re both quiet as he navigates his way toward the freeway. It’s a restful quiet, I tell myself. But I’m beginning to fidget. We have two hours alone in a car ahead of us. What will we talk about?
“That’s a pretty necklace,” I say, to break the silence. Although the necklace isn’t pretty, really. The round pendant is big and chunky. I run a finger over the gold chain trailing over the edge of the console.
