Okay, blurb alert! This one got a little out of control so it's several parts but it takes place not long b/f the beginning of that endlessly long story "Glimmer of Twilight". I hope you enjoy it and thanks for reading and the feedback!
C.J. decided not to sit around the phone waiting for him to call.
She made that decision after she had left the office building in Century City and headed out to do some quick errands before heading on home where she would spend a couple hours finishing up some work on a couple of cases before heading out to have some fun with her friends. A new act had opened up at the club on the Sunset Strip and she had been looking forward to it all week.
Chris had flown in for the week from where she now worked in Houston with her husband, Dan who had come out to attend a seminar on technology associated with security systems. He had invited Matt to go with him but Matt had nixed that invitation preferring to spend his time brooding over his broken engagement to Elizabeth.
After all, she had just passed his empty office before heading home, and saw the chair pulled slightly out from behind his desk and the same stack of files sitting there gathering dust. His helicopter sat on the landing pad outside the suite and his collection of fancy cars remained parked undisturbed in the garage.
She had called and left messages for him several times on his cell phone and even at his house in Malibu but none of them had been returned.
This morning, she had seen his face on the society page of the daily newspaper with an attractive socialite with lightly teased hair coiffed in a bun and who clung on his arm, posing for the photographer while Matt's eyes gazed past the photographer. So he was back in circulation again, she thought, at least she knew he hadn't decided to drink himself to oblivion at home or take out one of his sports cars and wrap it around a palm tree in Beverly Hills. She knew that the decision to break it off with his latest fiancée hadn't come easily to him or even to both of them. The pain that had etched his handsome face the last time she had seen him told her that. That and the fact that she saw something else in his body language, that he appeared poised for action but for flight. Not like him at all, she ruminated over and over in her head, until she stopped herself from that useless exercise.
After all, in a way his cluelessness had helped her because she had secrets of her own. That while he had been wrapped up in a whirlwind of reunion and recommitment with Elizabeth before it all came crashing down; she had been working for the feds. But she never could have said no to their request to help them after they explained to her at a clandestine meeting in some unremarkable looking square building in West L.A. that Matt's company had been flagged by Homeland Security as a terrorist front for fundraising. It hadn't taken her long to realize that this had happened because the foundation had received several sizable donations from another foundation that had been flagged perhaps erroneously perhaps not.
She hated lying to him even though it had been purely by omission because he hadn't been around enough to be suspicious enough to ask any questions. But that was the extra work she had to do at home before she could go out and have some friends with Chris and other friends.
Still, what if he called…and then she shook her head because for one, she had her cell phone with her and also because why did she always fall in this pattern of sitting around, waiting for him to call and notice her?
She packed her cell but put it on silent and then went to get dressed, prepared to put all this drama aside for a few hours of fun.
Matt looked at the glass of Scotch dubiously. After all, he hadn't been a stranger to the alcoholic beverage certainly not in recent days. He had after all, done a lot of drinking after his engagement had been broken, because the alcohol helped him to do this thinking without really feeling. This had been exactly where he had wanted to be, away from the office, away from his coworkers and friends, most especially her.
His best friend since they were kids growing up in a ranching community in Texas.
He sighed, putting the glass down. He hadn't touched any liquor in well…24 hours now and he had no plans to drink this glass, merely to contemplate it. He hadn't really gotten drunk and he hadn't really felt hung over, he just had felt numb, waiting for the emotions that he expected to come to hit him all at once.
But they didn't.
He thought he would feel more grief about saying goodbye to the woman he purportedly loved enough to get married. What about feeling saddened, angry that his best laid plans hadn't worked out, or second guessing his decision to let her go? He didn't really feel any of that except maybe some lingering sadness.
What he felt like most of all was a failure. He felt like he had never done anything in his life, never met any challenge or pursuit that he hadn't excelled at or owned. After all, he had been this great football quarterback who had led his Rice University team to a Cotton Bowl win and himself to the Heisman Trophy which sat somewhere back at his father's estate back in Texas. He had aspired to and had become one of the world's most successful business tycoons, his company on the fast track to the Fortune 500. His face on the cover of many of the industry's magazines and even Time as one of the top up and coming success stories. He had handed off his enterprise to charity and into Murray Chase's capable hands and had flirted with investigation as a hobby and then after expanding his operations with C.J. and later Roy, had seen it grow exponentially.
But despite all these successes, Matt knew that none of them rivaled the importance of family. Trophies gathered dust, up and coming success stories became yesterday's news and companies rode out tides that ebbed and flowed with time, tiny specks of sand sharing a beach with millions just like them. But family, now that was something that endured the test of time, something that would cheat death and endure from one generation to the next.
Matt hadn't known his own father, his biological one, until just a few days before the man had been snatched away him for ever after saving his life. His adopted father had loved him like his own flesh and blood and had gone to his grave with no regrets, never knowing that Matt had learned the truth about his own parentage.
That left Matt with his uncle, the one who had been estranged with his father and his recently rediscovered cousin that both men had rescued from a hellish prison camp in a foreign country.
When Elizabeth had returned into his life, he had grabbed onto her in a way he hadn't any other woman and he still didn't understand why. She had been one on a long string of women he had relationships, serious or more casual, during his adult life. He had looked at her, had seen someone beautiful, someone vulnerable who clearly needed him. Someone who would be home waiting for him at the end of the work day.
It only came out later that she had fears of her own, of being lost in his own chaotic lifestyle and ultimately having to surrender to something potentially more destructive to their relationship than a mistress.
Had he loved her, he asked himself. He thought he really had but with the liquor finally leaving his system, he began to wonder if what he craved hadn't been this woman but what she represented, the potential for the family life that eluded him. The one success he didn't own, the one most important piece of him that was still missing. But what he had needed wasn't someone who couldn't accept him for what he was and what he did, but someone who would be the partner in all things, secure enough to have her own identity and life but wanting to build something together with him as well.
And that just wasn't Elizabeth. But was there a woman out there who would be what he sought, he just didn't know so he had stopped thinking about it and started dusting off his Rolodex and started calling women again to hit the social scene with him. Putting all thoughts of his dreams of a family with just one woman aside at least for now. But during the times he couldn't distract himself through action, his mind returned to the questions that gnawed at him.
He sighed, and reached to pick up the newspaper that he had picked up but hadn't yet read. His eyes narrowed as he read an article on page one of the Los Angeles Times about the latest missing woman. A young vibrant woman with long dark hair who had just vanished the previous night, and hadn't been seen since marking the return of the shadow of a killer.
The one who marked his victims that were found with the mark of what appeared to be a mosaic of different animals, the name of which escaped Matt.
He reached for the phone.
C.J. had left the house to head to the Sunset strip to find this club. Chris had called her saying that she would be meeting here there. The traffic had been light so she had made good time which didn't leave her too much time to sit in idling traffic ruminating over the events of the past few days since Matt's aborted wedding.
She had been thinking about her own mixed feelings that Matt's marriage had been called off, his engagement kaput. What she had felt had been sadness for him laced with an undeniable vein of relief. Then the guilt would come for having felt that relief. After all, she had once told him in what she had been so sure were their final moments on this earth that she loved him. Then months had passed where she had been burned by a murderous lover, shot by a religious cultist and had suffered a bout of amnesia which had left her trapped in a detention center in some remote town in Arizona. It hadn't been all bad because she had met and befriended two of her fellow inmates Fran and Rhonda and both of them were creating new lives for themselves in Houston. Rhonda had been in L.A. recently to tie up a few loose ends and would be heading back with Chris and Dan.
She looked over at the elegant card sitting in the seat beside her. It had been left in her mailbox this morning, just like others she had received from some mysterious person without a face. She had grown used to receiving them as it had been happening since she had been working as a public defender in Houston before coming out here to join Matt. This one had said what most of them had, that this unidentified person would be seeing her soon, scribed in elegant calligraphy. She had then found herself reflexively reaching for the newspaper and there it had been waiting, the article on the latest missing woman in L.A. who had last been seen not far from Sunset.
There had been too many of those disappearances of young woman with dark hair and only a few of them had been offered up by the ocean's tides. The others perhaps remained swallowed in its depths on two separate coasts.
She just wanted to forget all that for a little while, to forget work and the fact that she had two bosses now with one attempting to investigate the other. She wanted to forget her guilt over her feelings about the broken engagement and that she had hidden a couple things from Matt.
All that could wait, because right now she wanted to kick back and enjoy some good music with her friends without a care in the world.
"So there are no leads on this missing woman either?"
The man, Lt. Hoyt, sighed on the other end of Matt's phone call.
"Just that she was last seen partying with some friends at the Blue Moon near midnight," Hoyt said, "and said she would find a ride home."
Matt ran his hand through his hair. No doubt any Good Samaritan that had offered a young, slightly intoxicated woman a lift had been anything but in reality. Still, Matt had that unsettling feeling that he was missing something more complicated than that predicable scenario. The spate of missing women had baffled him as it had some of the LAPD's most experienced investigators not to mention two lieutenants who had been good friends of his as well. Vince Novelli had taken all his questions about the cases into retirement with him in Miami and Hoyt had inherited them when he had been reassigned to fill Vince's spot which had of course led him into a trajectory leading to a collision with Matt. They had both survived that and a lot more to become very close friends.
"Did they search the beaches?"
"Yeah, but nothing's washed up yet," Hoyt said, "and we both know most of these women never turn up at all."
Oh yeah, Matt knew that all too well. He had seen enough cases written about in the newspaper, talked about by officers he knew and he had looked at the few faces, whether family photographs or simply composites, of the women and he had seen something very familiar in all of them. Something that didn't just nag him but it filled him with jolts of what he hadn't wanted to admit was something as elemental as fear. Something primal, from so deep inside of him he couldn't even guess at its origins, but this morning, the woman's photo caught at her graduation from college had just sucked the air right out of his lungs.
From looking at a woman who was a stranger to him or was she?
Because somehow he knew her, he knew them all without having ever met them. And the fact that these instincts had no clear explanations terrified him although he would never admit it even to himself.
"I don't think she will either…"
He couldn't think of anything more to say, anything to add to the conversation that had been taking place in installments for years now. Nothing anyway that would help Hoyt or other officers solve it and find the faceless killer.
"There was one witness…a homeless woman probably drunk as a skunk who saw a woman like this leaving with two men…"
The prickling started again on the back of Matt's neck.
"Wearing Armani suits and did she hear them say anything," he asked.
Hoyt sighed again.
"No she didn't…and no way to know if they sounded foreign."
Clearly Hoyt remembered that other case from two years ago where a similar eyewitness account had surfaced of another young woman leaving with two men who sounded foreign as if they were from some Central or South American country.
That woman had been swallowed up by the earth as far as the law enforcement authorities had been concerned.
Matt said goodbye and hung up the phone, then picked up the newspaper again and looked it for a long moment before tossing it aside again.
Score one more for the silent predator who stalked and killed women, he thought, unless the police were super lucky and caught a break, a misstep in the killer's streak of murders which hadn't happened yet in over a half decade.
And inside Matt, somewhere, he felt a clock was ticking.
C.J. smiled as she walked in and saw them sitting at a table, some distance from where the band would be playing. Rhonda waved her to come on over and she did that, sitting down in a chair while Chris sipped her drink and Rhonda nibbled on some pretzels.
"So you really heading back to Houston," C.J. asked.
Rhonda nodded.
"Fran's looking for a counselor at the center and I'm thinking of going back to school."
"Really, that's a great idea…"
Rhonda shrugged.
"I'm not going to spend years becoming a fancy kickass lawyer but I might get a MSW eventually."
Chris smiled.
"Houston's a great place to do all that," she said, "It's great for other things as well."
Rhonda laughed.
"Oh there she goes rubbing it in that she's met this great guy and we haven't."
C.J. ordered a beer from the waitress.
"I haven't been looking," she said, "I'm still trying to fix my radar to better detect murderous sociopaths."
Rhonda winced.
"Oh come on, Robert was what one in a million, that's just bad luck," she said, "There's plenty of great guys out there. I mean they're not Matt…"
C.J. sighed and Chris looked at her.
"I'm not hung up on Houston," she said, "He's off somewhere recovering from his broken engagement, he's back on the social circuit and no matter what I might feel for him, he doesn't feel the same."
Rhonda tried to be helpful.
"He didn't marry Elizabeth."
"No he didn't but that was for other reasons," C.J. said, "They were too different and they couldn't reconcile those differences and fortunately they found that out before they hit the altar….well at least almost made it."
"This opens it up for you," Rhonda said, "Go on make your move."
Now C.J. began to feel the annoyance fill her again.
"No way," she said, "It's not like that between us, we're close friends and nothing more. That's how I view him and that's how he views me…"
"How do you know that," Rhonda pushed.
"Because when a guy tells a woman that he loves her while they're both hitting the sheets in your bed, that's a pretty good indication of where his feelings lie."
Rhonda's jaw dropped.
"Get out of town," she said, "He did that?"
C.J. composed herself quite nicely as experience had taught her.
"Yes he did and there were extenuating circumstances but it's just not in the cards for us and it isn't for good reasons," C.J. said, "and I don't want to discuss them here."
Rhonda's brows lifted.
"Where's Romeo anyway, still drowning his sorrows?"
C.J. took a big sip from her beer when it arrived.
"I don't know and it's not my business," she said, "It's not like we've been in touch anyway since the aborted wedding."
Chris and Rhonda looked at each other. C.J. looked at both of them, sharply.
"Are we here to rehash the cancellation of the wedding of the month or to enjoy ourselves?"
Rhonda raised her hand.
"I vote the latter and that we put the former on hold at least until the last song."
C.J. nodded deciding she could live with that. God knew she rehashed that wedding day that wasn't enough times in her head when the world around her fell silent.
The music started and they all relaxed into the beat and rhythm letting everything else fade into the background.
Not seeing the influx of newcomers into the club including the two men dressed in Armani who sat down near the bar.
