Edge of the Knife Read online

  Edge of the Knife

  by A.D. Miller

  Text Copyright © 2017 A.D. Miller

  All Rights Reserved

  For W.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 1

  The police found her on a street in Vista Hills, thirty miles from Los Angeles, lying in the landscaped median. A passing driver had noticed an arm among the ornamental roses. When the coroner’s investigators arrived, they found Nyman’s card in the torn pocket of her jeans.

  “Can’t park here, sir,” a woman said as Nyman got out of his car.

  The woman was wearing nitrile gloves and a blue jacket with the coroner’s seal on the arm. A group of Vista Hills officers stood in a ring behind her, guarding a taped-off area that included the median and part of the northbound lane.

  Farther away, behind a security fence, rose a Spanish Colonial house, silent except for the whir of early morning sprinklers.

  Nyman shut the door of the car and stood beside it. He was a thin man in his late thirties, sharp featured and dark eyed, with the ashen look of someone recovering from an illness.

  “I was told to park here,” he said. “I got a call asking me to come out.”

  “You’re Nyman?”

  “That’s right.”

  The woman nodded. “I’m Ruiz. Stay there and don’t get in anybody’s way. We’re about to move the body.”

  She turned and ducked under the tape, joining a pair of men in blue jackets who were kneeling on the ground beside a gurney. On top of the gurney, already partly zipped up in a white vinyl bag, was the dead woman.

  Her eyes were open and staring. Fragments of a pair of horn-rimmed glasses were tangled in her hair. One of her hands, as the men arranged her arms inside the bag, stood out briefly against the vinyl, the fingers long and brown and delicate.

  Nyman turned away and looked in the opposite direction, over the top of his car. A line of palms ran along either side of the road, leading back toward the shops and office parks at the center of town. Swimming pools glinted among the houses in the hills.

  A voice said: “Stand back, everybody.”

  The blue-jacketed men were wheeling the gurney—covered now by a nylon sheet—to the removal van. Ruiz followed behind them, shorter than the men but solidly built, with strong square features and black hair starting to gray.

  She peeled the gloves from her hands and said to Nyman: “We’ll talk in my car.”

  It was six-thirty in the morning but the inside of the car was already hot. Through the passenger window, Nyman watched the men lift the gurney into the van and shut the doors. Beside him, Ruiz took a pen and notebook from her pocket and said:

  “So how long have you known her?”

  Nyman kept his gaze on the van. “Less than twenty-four hours. Only since yesterday afternoon.”

  “She was a client?”

  “Not really. More of a potential client. It was a hit and run, you think?”

  “Tell me about yesterday afternoon,” Ruiz said. “She came to see you? Or you went to her?”

  “She came to me.”

  He had an office, he said, in a strip mall on Sepulveda. Late in the day, if there were no clients to talk to, he’d go to the restaurant next door and sit alone at the bar, watching the cars come and go in the parking lot.

  Yesterday he’d watched Alana Bell climb out of an old Toyota and walk to the door of his office. She was twenty-four or twenty-five, as tall or taller than Nyman, with wide brown eyes and lines of tension around the mouth and jaw. Her horn-rimmed glasses and Pacifica shirt gave her the look of a student.

  She tried the door, found it locked, and was turning back toward her car when Nyman left the restaurant and met her on the sidewalk.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Just taking a little break.”

  He told her his name and held out his hand. She hesitated before taking it, looking from his hand to his eyes.

  “I thought you were supposed to be older,” she said.

  “My partner was the older one. He retired a few years ago.”

  “But you do the same kind of work?”

  “I take the same kind of clients, if that’s what you mean,” Nyman said. “But my methods are a little different.”

  Anxiety was deepening the lines in her face. “This thing I need help with—it’s something that has to be handled very carefully. There are people who’d be very angry if they knew I was even talking to you.”

  Nyman glanced at the other cars in the parking lot. “In that case,” he said, taking the keys from his pocket and leading her to the door of his office, “we’d better go inside.”

  The words Moritz Security and Investigations were stenciled on the door. The office was a single narrow room with a set of wine-colored chairs, a map of the city, and an old steel tanker desk. There were no photos on the walls, no personal effects. He showed her into a chair and offered her coffee.

  She didn’t seem to hear him. She’d taken a business card from the desk and was looking at it skeptically, running a finger over the faded lettering. The name Joseph Moritz was printed in the center of the card. Below it, in smaller type, was Nyman’s name.

  He poured two cups, handed one to Alana, and walked to the window. “All right,” he said, leaning against the sill, “what is it you wanted to talk to me about?”

  She looked down at her lap and fidgeted with the card, her fingers trembling as they folded and refolded the little square of paper. Nyman said nothing and waited patiently, listening to the traffic on Sepulveda and the wail of a distant siren.

  When she finally spoke, her voice was low. “Have you lived in L.A. very long, Mr. Nyman?”

  He took a drink and nodded. “Most of my life.”

  “And you understand how things work? The way things get done here—politically speaking?”

  “I wasn’t aware anything ever got done.”

  She gave a grim smile and tucked the card into her pocket. “I used to think I understood it. Coming where I come from, I thought I had it all figured out. The truth is a lot more complicated.”

  “Complicated how?”

  She sat up straighter in the chair and turned to face him. The skin of her left cheekbone, he noticed, was mottled by a bruise.

  “I can’t pay you anything,” she said abruptly. “I’ll tell you that up front. I get my stipend in a month, and I can pay you then, but right now I’m broke.”

  �
�Stipend for what?”

  “Teaching. Or assistant teaching. I’ll be a T.A. in a class at Pacifica next semester.”

  He asked her what she was studying.

  “Public policy, but I didn’t come here to talk about that. I need help, Mr. Nyman. And I promise I can pay you in August.”

  The siren outside was getting louder, triggering car alarms on the street and rattling the glass of the window at Nyman’s back.

  “Sometimes there’s a misunderstanding about how the payment works,” he said. “I don’t expect you to give me everything up front. You could give me a small retainer now and the rest in August.”

  Alana shook her head. “I’m sorry. I just spent my last dollar on rent.”

  “Then what about giving me a credit card number to keep on file? As a kind of guarantee?”

  Surprise widened her eyes. “I would think my promise,” she said in a cold voice, “would be enough of a guarantee.”

  Nyman finished his coffee. In a voice that was equally cold, he said that he’d like to help, but he wasn’t in a financial position to take clients on faith.

  “I can tell you’re upset about something, but investigations take time. I can’t spend time on yours and run the risk of never getting paid. It’s happened too many times before.”

  She nodded. “So you’re not even interested in what I have to say. That’s what you’re telling me.”

  “No. I’m saying I can’t do anything without some kind of guarantee. That’s standard practice.”

  “Mmm. I see.”

  Nyman kept his gaze on the empty cup in his hand. With another nod, Alana got to her feet and walked to the door.

  Without looking at her directly, he said: “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah. I’m sure you are.”

  She let the door bang shut behind her. Nyman went on leaning against the windowsill for a time, then went out the door himself. He paused on the sidewalk and shaded his eyes against the sun.

  Alana shut the door of her car with another bang and started the engine. Her face, caught in a shaft of sunlight as she backed out, was bright and wet with tears. He watched her turn out of the lot and drive toward the freeway.

  Eight hours later she was dead.

  Chapter 2

  “And you didn’t see her again after that, Mr. Nyman?”

  “Not alive, no.”

  Ruiz nodded and wrote something in her notebook. The heat inside the car had increased, dampening the back of Nyman’s shirt and putting a sheen of sweat on his face and neck.

  “What about yourself?” Ruiz said. “Mind telling me where you were last night?”

  He gave her the address of the Green Door. “I went home around two.”

  “Other people saw you there?”

  “Half a dozen, at least. Some of them might’ve been sober. I can give you their names.”

  “Maybe later. Right now, if you don’t mind, I’ll ask you to follow me down to the office. The D.M.E. might want you to make a formal identification, depending on the family situation. Would you be willing to do that?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Good. I’ll see you there, then. You know the way?”

  “I’ll look it up.”

  He got out of Ruiz’s car, got into his own, took the phone from his pocket, and pretended to look up directions. After Ruiz had driven away, he put the phone back in his pocket and walked across the street to the Spanish Colonial house.

  Its sprinklers were still whirring, filling the air with mist. He pressed an intercom button and looked up at the jacaranda that rose behind the gate, its branches thick with pale blue flowers. After several rings, a woman’s voice said:

  “Yes?”

  He leaned forward. “Morning. I’m looking for Alana Bell. She around today?”

  “Bell? No, this is the Collinson residence.”

  “Is it really? My mistake. What about the neighbors, then? Know of any Bells around here?”

  After a pause, the woman said: “Who is this?”

  He ended the call. Making a note of the name Collinson, he got into his car and drove down to L.A. under a brightening summer sky.

  * * *

  The coroner’s office was in the old county hospital on Mission Road, a red-brick building surrounded by freeways. The noise of traffic followed Nyman up the front steps and into the lobby.

  A security guard watched him through a glass window. She listened sleepily as he explained his business, then told him to have a seat and make himself comfortable: Investigator Ruiz was very busy today.

  He sat down beside a stack of gossip magazines. Walled in white marble, the lobby was dominated by a pair of unmarked doors and a large wooden staircase, the steps of which had been painted black. To the right of his chair, in the gift shop, a clerk was arranging a display of coffee mugs, each printed with the seal of the coroner’s office.

  Twenty-five minutes went by. Occasionally the unmarked doors opened and someone came out from the interior, letting in a draft of cold air. Despite the coldness Nyman’s back was still damp with sweat and an unnatural flush had spread along his cheekbones.

  “It’s all right,” the guard said, watching him through the glass. “Lots of people feel queasy their first time here.”

  Nyman said that it wasn’t his first time. “I was here nine months ago.”

  “Oh yeah? On business?”

  “No. Not on business.”

  The guard frowned. “You mean—?”

  “Personal, yes.”

  The guard lowered her gaze and became interested in her paperwork. A phone rang, but she ignored it. Nyman was reaching for his cigarettes when he heard the sound of footsteps above him.

  A small procession was making its way down the staircase, led by Ruiz. Behind her came a middle-aged woman who could’ve been mistaken at a distance for Alana Bell. She was moving with difficulty, her arms supported by the two men who walked on either side of her. One man was about her own age and looked like her brother or cousin. The other had a fringe of gray hair and a county nametag.

  Looking down from the staircase, Ruiz saw Nyman and made a gesture that told him to stay where he was. Leading the woman to the unmarked doors, she said something in a voice Nyman couldn’t hear, nodded to the man with the nametag, and stood aside as he led the little procession through the door.

  “Sorry about the delay,” Ruiz said, coming over to Nyman. “Looks like we won’t need you after all.”

  “That was Alana’s mother?”

  “Mother and uncle, yeah. Notifications Unit tracked the mom down at home. She’s a schoolteacher in Watts, apparently.”

  “Do you think she’d be willing to talk to me?

  “To you? Why?”

  “I’d just like to talk to her.”

  For a moment Ruiz looked confused. Then, shaking her head, she told him not to take it personally. “So far this looks like a random hit and run. Accepting the girl as a client wouldn’t have made any difference.”

  He asked her why she thought it was random.

  “Because that’s what it is, nine times out of ten. Somebody drunk or high.”

  “But no one witnessed it?”

  “Not that we’ve heard from. Vista Hills P.D. are knocking on doors.”

  “What about the neighborhood? Did she have any reason to be there?”

  Ruiz gave him a chilly smile. “Look, I appreciate you coming down here, but this isn’t a collaboration. Any details that need to come out will be released through Public Services. You can take your questions to them.”

  She said a curt goodbye and walked in the opposite direction, passing through the doors Mrs. Bell had passed through.

  Nyman looked at his watch, then went across to the gift shop, where the clerk had finished with the mugs and was breaking down a cardboard box.

  “Something I can help you with?”

  Nyman picked up a baseball cap that was stitched with the chalk outline of a corpse. “Ever worry about the people who b
uy this stuff?”

  The clerk shrugged. “Depends on why they buy it. Most of them are tourists.”

  “What about the people who come here to identify a body? Do they always leave by the main doors?”

  “Pretty much. Unless the cops are with them. Why do you ask?”

  “Just curious.”

  Nyman went out the main doors and paused on the steps. Across the courtyard, on Mission Road, a city bus was sidling to the curb with a whine of brakes. It let out three or four passengers, closed its doors, rumbled off again, and revealed the Jack-in-the-Box that stood across the street. Nyman strolled down the steps.

  The restaurant was filled with a breakfast crowd. He bought coffee and hash-browns and took them to a table by the window, where he had a view of the coroner’s office.

  “You work over there or something?”

  The voice came from the next table, where a man was studying Nyman intently. The man was spare and blond and dirty, with tattered jeans, a heavy wool-lined jacket stained with sweat, a sun-ravaged face that showed the shape of the skull beneath the skin. On his wrist was a tag from the county hospital.

  “Work over where?” Nyman said.

  “Coroner’s place. I seen you come out of there. You one of the doctors that cuts people up?”

  “No.”

  “You’re a doctor, though?”

  “No.”

  “You look like a doctor. I can always tell what people look like. Or a scientist, maybe. I knew a guy who was a biologist.”

  “I’m not even a biologist.”

  “Look, man, you think you could talk to the other doctors about what they did to me at the hospital? They got no right treating me like that. When a man’s sick, don’t you think he ought to get some medicine? You know what they did to me over there?”

  “Something unpleasant?”

  The man pulled his chair closer to Nyman and started telling a story that got more elaborate as it went on. Nyman listened politely until a few minutes after nine o’clock, when Alana Bell’s mother and uncle came out of the red-brick building.

  With an arm around her shoulders, the uncle led his sister down the steps and over to a Buick that was parked in a visitor’s spot.

  Wishing the blond man luck, Nyman left the restaurant and jogged to his car.