The 3rd Woman. Jonathan Freedland

months ago.

       The widow of a San Diego man has filed an unprecedented complaint against the state’s drug rehabilitation program, alleging that he was given an incorrect and excessive dose of the transition drug methadone which led to his …

      No. She tried another one. Once more, the problem was a tainted batch of heroin.

      She clicked on a third, nearly a year earlier, in Orange County. This told of a grief-stricken father baffled by his daughter’s apparent suicide by heroin overdose. ‘I always thought she loved life too much to kill herself,’ he told reporters. But, in the sixth paragraph, he admitted his daughter had been depressed for several months. Not so baffling after all. She clicked on.

      Finally she came across an item in her own paper, just a few paragraphs long, from two weeks earlier.

       Padilla family threaten to sue coroner over woman’s death

       A Boyle Heights family is demanding the coroner’s department reopen the case of Rosario Padilla, a 22-year-old woman registered as a suicide after she was found dead from a drugs overdose. Mr Mario Padilla, the dead woman’s brother, refuses to accept that his sister took her own life, insisting that ‘she never took drugs in her life, not one single time’.

       In a statement, a spokesperson for the coroner’s office said, ‘We very much respect Mr Padilla’s grief at this very difficult time. It is very common for close relatives of those who have died at their own hand to struggle to come to terms with the loss. Our thoughts and prayers are with the entire Padilla family.’

      Madison could feel a throbbing in her brain. Not a headache, but rather the opposite. A surge of energy or whatever chemical it was that kept her awake even after days without sleep.

      She opened a few more tabs, cross-checked the information she had, then sent it to her phone. She grabbed her keys and a coat and left the apartment as it was, not turning out so much as a single light. For the first time since her sister’s death, Madison Webb had an idea.

       Chapter 9

      ‘This is all about the sister, right?’

      ‘Give me a break, Barbara.’ They were at police HQ, round the back by the fire escape – the only area now allowed to smokers, a category that included Barbara Miller, and reliably the best place to catch her.

      ‘I don’t mind, Jeff. Just admit it. You want me to give you details of a sensitive police investigation so that you can share them with the sister of the deceased who you just so happen to have a hard-on for.’

      Detective Jeff Howe smiled in appalled disbelief. ‘You’re unbelievable, Barbara, you really are. Just help me out here. The family is distraught.’

      ‘I don’t blame them, honey. That’s quite a scene they found in there.’

      Jeff eyed her carefully. Though three years younger than him, she had always acted the older. An African-American who had come up the hard way, she spoke with a shrug in her voice as if she had seen it all before. No armed robbery, no drugs bust and only the rarest homicide ever struck her as a surprise. A father who stayed with his kids, a man who didn’t whack his woman around the head when drunk or high, now that was a novelty.

      ‘What’s that supposed to mean, Barbara?

      She let out a jet of smoke. ‘Pretty girl on her back. Nothing taken, nothing broken. That’s what I mean.’

      ‘For Christ’s sake, we’re not back on this, are we? She had heavy bruises on her neck and on her temples. The lock was damaged because someone had forced their way in.’

      ‘Because? Because? That new partner of yours rotting your brain, sweetheart? You need to go back to detective school, my friend, if you’re coming out with that shit. We can say the lock was damaged. We can say that suggests someone forced their way in. We don’t get to because just because we want to. No way.’

      ‘All right. So why don’t you tell me what explains those marks on the door frame?’

      ‘Could be anything, you know that as well as I do. Could be a domestic. Could be an ex-boyfriend, trying to bust his way back in. Could even …’ She didn’t complete the sentence.

      ‘Could even what, Barbara?’

      ‘She could even have done it herself. On her way in.’

      ‘What, Abigail?’

      ‘Say she was wasted from wherever she’d just been, all right? Maybe she couldn’t find her key, pushes at the door a little bit, gives it a shove.’

      ‘You think she was high before she even got home?’

      ‘Look, I don’t know, Jefferson. That’s my point. We don’t know what happened here. You especially. Which is exactly how it should be. This is not your case, remember.’

      ‘OK. Just tell me, do you accept this is a homicide?’

      ‘Yes, I do.’

      ‘OK. So why are you still hinting this is some kind of sex thing? We know for a fact there was no penetration, no sign of sexual contact at all.’

      ‘OK. But that just makes the “forced entry” scenario a little harder to explain, don’t you think? How many cases d’you know where a stranger busts into the apartment of some gorgeous girl and doesn’t lay a finger on her? Not many, right? Look, all I’m saying is I’m not sure you know what some of these white girls get up to. I thought, since your divorce and all, you might be out there a bit more, if you know what I mean. But let me enlighten you. There’s a whole scene, darling. What’s that word for them everyone keeps using? Baimufei?’

      ‘Baifumei. But Abigail wasn’t like that. She wasn’t some pampered rich girl. She taught elementary school. They grew up in Beverlywood.’

      ‘Yeah and Zong Qinghou grew up on a salt farm.’

      ‘Meaning?’

      ‘Meaning, people change.’

      Jeff kicked at a loose cigarette butt and then pulled himself up to full height, to signal a change in direction. ‘All right. We’re not going to agree. It doesn’t matter what I say anyway, because, as you say, this is not my investigation.’

      ‘See. It’s not true we don’t agree. We agree on that.’

      ‘OK, OK. Forget me. Take me out of it. A young woman is dead here. She left a family behind who have no idea how it happened. We owe it to them to find out who did this.’

      ‘That’s my job, sweetheart. You don’t need to tell me that. Besides, I’m getting all the pressure I need already.’

      ‘How do you mean?’

      ‘Sutcliffe says this is a “priority”.’

      ‘And where’s he getting that from, do you think?’

      ‘I don’t need to think. I know. He told me.’ She used the index finger of her smoking hand to point upward.

      ‘The Chief of Police?’

      ‘Uh-huh.’ She took one last, extra-long drag on the cigarette.

      ‘What’d he say?’

      ‘Just that Jarrett wants results. Doesn’t want to let this case fester.’

      Jeff looked through the chicken-wire fence that cordoned off this unofficial yard. The question formulated itself in his mind, though he did not say it aloud: Why would he care? ‘So what have you got to go on?’

      ‘Come now, Jefferson love. I told you: we can’t talk about this one.’

      ‘I