Private (Private 1)

“It was a plain black van,” Christine said. “It stopped in a cross street off Hyperion, and when I looked again, two guys had grabbed this girl. Like, it only took a second? And she was like having a fit or something. They swung her into the van, and then one of them got into the driver’s seat and they drove off. I told the police what the driver looked like.”

“Wendy Borman was zapped with a stun gun,” Justine said. “That was the fit you saw. And your mom didn’t see anything?”

Christine shook her head. “I wasn’t sure what I’d seen myself. It could’ve been a commercial between my thoughts—that’s how fast it was. I froze, and when my mom turned to see what I was looking at, the van was gone. She didn’t believe me—or didn’t want to.

“But when it was all over the TV, she finally called the police. My mother believed the TV but not me.”

Kids were passing the table, staring at the woman in a business suit having a deep discussion with a kid at their school.

“Tell me about the boy—the one whose face you saw.”

“In the drawing the police made, he looked kinda like Clark Kent in the Superman movie. But he didn’t exactly look like that. His nose was a bit pointy? And his ears stuck out? I mean—they definitely stuck out.”

“Did you see the license plate number on that van? Even one or two numbers would give us something to work with.”

The girl paused, eyes flicking up and to the left, searching her memory.

A class bell rang then, loud, jangling. Kids got up en masse, and a couple of them brushed Justine’s arm and knocked over her briefcase on their way to the trash bins and out the door.

Christine said, “There was a decal on the rear window. It said ‘Gateway.’ Like that computer company? But there weren’t any cow spots.”

“You told this to the police?”

“I think so. My mother was freaked out. She couldn’t get me away from the police fast enough.”

Justine looked at the girl, and for a moment, the girl held her gaze. “See if you can draw that decal,” Justine said. She passed over her PDA and stylus.

The girl sucked hard on her lower lip as she sketched an oval shape and the word Gateway in graduated letters.

“I think this is it. I don’t know why I remember so well, but I do.”

Justine stared at the crude drawing. The logo looked like that of a private school in Santa Monica called Gateway. When she had worked for the city’s psych ward, she used to drive past Gateway Prep when she did sessions at Stateside, aka the California State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

She still vividly remembered her patients, the ones who burned down houses, killed their siblings, shotgunned their parents, and lit up schoolyards with explosives. It had been devastating and demoralizing work that had taught her about the mental workings of some of the most heinous humans on earth.

Justine had thought then about the contrast between Stateside and Gateway Prep, only a mile apart geographically, worlds apart in every other way. Now she thought about the Gateway decal.

There was no mention of a Gateway decal in the Wendy Borman murder book.

The decal was news. The facial characteristics were news. Maybe she was getting somewhere. If these were the same boys.

“Could you identify this boy if you saw him again?”

“I could never forget his face.”

“Christine, thank you.” Justine gave the teenager her card. “Call me if you think of anything else. The next time we meet, we won’t be strangers.”

Chapter 70

THIS WAS ANOTHER reason Private was the best place for Justine to work, or investigate a murder. Processing DNA took an eternity at the city lab because of the length of the line and the sheer volume of cases. At Private, it would take twenty-four hours from the git to the go because the forensic lab was Private’s, and because Wendy Borman was job one.

The basement level was blazing with artificial light at four in the morning. Sci’s crew had been working for twenty hours straight, running swabs over Wendy Borman’s clothes, which had been stored in the LAPD evidence room for five years.

The clothing had been packaged correctly after Borman’s body was discovered, but the rain and garbage had already contaminated the evidence. Still, more sensitive equipment and a new form of capturing trace had emerged since the murder. It was called “touch DNA.”

Sci believed in happy endings, and his optimism drove him across the desert of repetitive tasks, inconclusive results, and negative findings.

He had ordered the Borman clothing to be swabbed under the left arm of the jersey shirt and in the fold of a sock, places that hadn’t been soaked by the rain.