A Trace of Death ☹☹🕵️‍♀️🕵️‍♂️

CHAPTER ONE

Monday

Late Afternoon

Detective Keri Locke pleaded with herself not to do it this time. As the most junior detective in the West Los Angeles Pacific Division Missing Persons Unit, she was expected to work harder than anyone else in the division. And as a thirty-five-year-old woman who’d only joined the force four years ago, she often felt like she was supposed to be the hardest-working cop in the entire LAPD. She couldn’t afford to look like she was taking a break.

All around her, the department buzzed with activity. An elderly Hispanic woman was sitting at a nearby desk, giving a statement about a purse snatching. Down the hall, a carjacker was being booked. It was a typical afternoon in what had become her new normal of a life. And yet that recurring urge was eating at her, refusing to be ignored.

She gave in to it. She stood up and wandered over to the window that looked out on Culver Boulevard. She stood there and could nearly see her reflection. With the dancing glare from the afternoon sun, she looked part human, part ghost.

That was how she felt. She knew that objectively, she was an attractive woman. Five foot six and about 130 pounds—133 if she was being honest—with dirty blonde hair and a figure that had escaped childbirth relatively unscathed, she still turned heads.

But if anyone looked closely, they’d see that her brown eyes were red and bleary, her forehead was a knotted mass of premature lines, and her skin often had the pallor of, well, a ghost.

Like most days, she was wearing a simple blouse tucked into black slacks and black flats that looked professional but were easy to run in. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. It was her unofficial uniform. Pretty much the only thing that changed daily was the color of the top she wore. It all reinforced her feeling that she was marking time more than really living.

Keri sensed movement out of the corner of her eye and snapped out of her reverie. They were coming.

Outside the window, Culver Boulevard was mostly devoid of people. There was a running and biking path across the street. On most days in the late afternoon, it was choked with foot traffic. But it was relentlessly hot today, with temperatures in the high nineties and no breeze at all, even here, less than five miles from the beach. Parents who normally walked their kids home from school took their air-conditioned cars today. Except for one.

At exactly 4:12, just like clockwork, a young girl on a bike, about seven or eight years old, pedaled slowly down the path. She wore a fancy white dress. Her youngish mom trailed behind her in jeans and a T-shirt, with a backpack slung casually over her shoulder.

Keri fought the anxiety bubbling in her stomach and looked around to see if anyone in the office was watching her. No one was. She allowed herself to give in to the itch she’d tried not to scratch all day and stared.

Keri watched them with jealous, adoring eyes. She still couldn’t believe it, even after so many times at this window. The girl was the spitting image of Evie, right down to the wavy blond hair, the green eyes, even the slightly crooked smile.

She stood there in a trance, staring out the window long after the mother and child had disappeared from sight.

When she finally snapped out of it and turned back to the bullpen, the elderly Hispanic woman was leaving. The carjacker had been processed. Some new miscreant, cuffed and surly, had slid into his spot at the booking window, an alert uniformed officer standing at his left elbow.

She glanced up at the digital clock on the wall above the coffee machine. It read 4:22.

Have I really been standing at that window for ten solid minutes? This is getting worse, not better.

She walked back to her desk with her head down, trying not to make eye contact with any curious co-workers. She sat and looked at the files on her desk. The Martine case was largely wrapped up, just waiting for a sign-off from the prosecutor before she could dump it in the “complete until trial” cabinet. The Sanders case was on hold until CSU came back with its preliminary report. Rampart division had asked Pacific to look into a prostitute named Roxie who had dropped off the radar; a co-worker had told them she’d started working the Westside and they were hoping someone in her unit could confirm that so they didn’t have to open a file.

The tricky thing with missing persons cases, at least for adults, was that it wasn’t a crime to disappear. Police had more leeway with minors, depending on the age. But in general, there was nothing to prevent people from simply dropping out of their lives. It happened more often than most people would expect. Without some evidence of foul play, law enforcement was limited in what they could legally do to investigate. Because of that, cases like Roxie’s often fell through the cracks in the system

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