The Collector. Cameron Cruise

Bushard and I have an interview with a vital witness for the Tran murder.” She glanced anxiously at Seven. “No promises, but this could be the break we need.”

      Suddenly, all worries of a 60 Minutes segment vanished from the mayor’s porcelain face. “Well, goodness gracious.” Condum-Cox attempted a smile. “Proceed, of course.”

      Seven grabbed his jacket, following Erika’s lead. “This might take a while.”

      “Not a problem,” the mayor said. She waved them off, turning to the chief and the crestfallen Pham, who would be staying behind.

      Outside, the sun felt warm on Seven’s face. “So,” he asked Erika, knowing full well she’d just bailed his ass. “What’s our hot date?”

      She pulled on her Christian Dior sunglasses. They weren’t even fakes. She said spending money on shit like that made her feel rich.

      “Starbucks.” Looking more like a starlet than a homicide detective, she headed for the car, a tan Crown Victoria. “I don’t know about you, but I could use a latte.”

      

      Erika ordered a vanilla latte—nonfat, decaf, sugar-free.

      “What’s the point?” Seven asked, grabbing his double espresso from the barista.

      “A girl’s gotta watch her figure.”

      “Right,” he said, holding the door open so that they could sit outside. “What are you, a size two?”

      “Puhleeze!” She sat down at one of the cement benches. “Size four. That size two shit is for anorexic models with boob jobs.” She leaned forward, showing a hint of cleavage exposed by her button-down shirt beneath her jacket.

      She cocked a single brow and lowered her voice to theatrical huskiness. “These babies are real.”

      “No kidding?” He held back a smile, trying not to give her the satisfaction of cracking up.

      She winked. “I figured you’d know the difference, cowboy.”

      This time he did laugh. Ricky had been a plastic surgeon in Newport Beach before the AMA suspended his license. He’d had stories. The fact was, a boob job here was about as ubiquitous as a Lexus or a Mercedes on the 405 Freeway.

      Seven took a sip of his espresso. “What’s going to happen when there’s no secret-weapon witness that we conveniently had to interview? Urgently? The chief is going to chew your ass.”

      She rolled her eyes. “Give the man some credit. The chief knows what’s up. Dr. Rrrruth—” she rolled the German R “—may pull the strings, but that doesn’t mean the chief has to like it.”

      Seven shook a finger at her. “You know, for someone who rocketed up the ranks by strategic ass-kissing, you sure don’t know what’s good for your career.”

      “The key is strategic. I’m no Pham.” She wrapped her hands around the latte. “The sad fact is, he’d actually be a good cop if he wasn’t so busy climbing over bodies to score points.”

      Seven took a minute, focused on the espresso, waiting for the levity to dissipate. Eventually, he told her, “I wish you hadn’t put it on the line like that with the mayor.”

      Again, she gave a roll of her eyes. Erika had an arsenal of facial expressions, like a sexy raised brow or a killer smile. “But I did, so let’s forget it, okay? Now, help me come up with something the chief will like.”

      He’d been thinking about the case all night, unable to get that image of Mimi Tran out of his head. He and Erika had been going over their notes from the witness interviews, the mother and daughter who had found the body, as well as neighbors. That’s when, like some celebrity evading her paparazzi, the mayor had made her entrance, the chief in tow.

      “It’s a blank slate right now,” Seven said.

      “Yeah?”

      Erika grabbed a notebook from her purse, one of those mailbag types that could carry the kitchen sink if she needed. He’d seen smaller suitcases.

      “Blank slate,” she said, slapping down a pen on the notebook for good measure. “At your service.”

      He shook his head and picked up the pen. That was the problem with him and Erika: their curious meeting of the minds. They were a good fit.

      He gave her a hard stare. “I wasn’t kidding. I don’t want you going down with the ship, okay?”

      Which was exactly what would happen. He wasn’t fooling anyone. Since Ricky hit the six o’clock news, Seven’s own life had gone upside down. And he wasn’t near getting his act together. Now, murder and the mayor had landed on his doorstep for good measure.

      “I said forget it. Now here—” she placed a dot at the center of the page and wrote “Tran” over it like a label “—is our murder victim.”

      She drew several lines radiating outward and labeled the first one “occupation—psychic.”

      “We start with Mimi Tran’s client list.” She drew several more lines radiating from there, each presumably representing possible clients and suspects. “We have her laptop and her PDA.”

      “There was also a desk calendar back at the crime scene.”

      “Exactomundo.” Erika tapped the page. “So we find out who saw her last and why.”

      Going back to the center, she drew another line. In capital letters, she wrote “BLACK ARTS.”

      “The bird?” he asked.

      “It wasn’t exactly a scene from a Disney movie, now was it?”

      “Oh, I don’t know. You ever see Snow White?” He gave an exaggerated shiver. “That queen.”

      He drew his own line and wrote “Fucking Bizarre.”

      She smiled. “That, too.”

      “Maybe we look for someone who thinks Mimi Tran shouldn’t be dispensing doom and gloom.”

      “She gives some really bad mojo to a client. They begin to think they can erase the prophecy by getting rid of Tran.”

      “As good a motive as any,” he said.

      Erika drew another line and put a big question mark at the end. “The bead inside the bird’s beak. It was weird. When I held it up to different light sources, incandescent or fluorescent, it changed color. Like somebody turned on a switch, blue to red. No blurry transition, like those mood rings in the seventies. And then there was this sharp white line down the center, making it look like a cat’s eye.”

      “Remember the symbols on the wall?” Over her question mark he wrote “All-seeing Eye.”

      Erika cocked her head. “Could be.”

      Hurriedly, he drew another line radiating out from the question mark, now in the mode. “And those wooden idols on the desk, they looked old. Museum quality. Maybe the bead is some sort of artifact?” He wrote the word as he said it, in capital letters.

      “Something looted from an archeological site? Maybe sold by dealers on the black market?”

      “Like the Getty.”

      Just recently, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles had hit the headlines. And not in a good way. There’d been quite a brouhaha concerning the Italian government’s claim that the Getty’s newest collection of masterpieces had been looted from ancient ruins and laundered—just like drug money. Most controversial were pieces like the Morgantina Apollo. The black market made it almost impossible to ascertain the history of these important pieces because, by necessity, the laundering process destroyed evidence about the origins of the artifact.

      Museums like the Getty were credited with stimulating the illegal trade in antiquities. In an unprecedented move, the Italian government had