I turned in my swivel chair and looked out my second-story window. My office sat on a small hillock above some shabbier homes in Echo Park, a burrow of Los Angeles made famous in movies and film.
For now the street below was quiet and the far horizon shimmered with more beauty than Los Angeles deserved. For all the smog that it pumped into its skies, the horizon should have been gray and black and dead, instead alive with nearly every color of the rainbow.
A corpse, at some point, had been dug up from the grave and removed. I knew there were body snatches out there. Folks who sold cadavers illegally for reasons known only to them. I suspected for illegal research projects. But such cases were damn rare.
But, as the pawn shop guy on TV says, "You never know what's going to come in through your door next."
In this case, it had been a phone call from an orphaned teenage boy presently seeking a DNA maternity test from a murdered mother he'd never met.
I sat back in my chair and closed my eyes. Behind me, through my open window, I heard a bum singing drunkenly. Unremarkably, he was singing "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall" except he was so drunk that he was adding bottles. He was currently at 132 bottles of beer on the wall, although he occasionally skipped three or four bottles ahead.
Myself, I hadn't had anything to drink in two years, not since the night my son lost his life.
I took in some air and didn't fight the pain that overcame me all over again, perhaps for the fiftieth time that day. I let the pain run its course and when I was done weeping again, I stood up from my desk, grabbed my light jacket off the back of my chair, and headed out to meet the orphaned son for the first time.
Chapter Four
We were in Echo Park, sitting on a park bench before a man-made lake. Years ago, the lake had been filled with lotus plants - more lotus plants than I had ever seen. But the plants had slowly died off and now they were gone and it saddened the heart.
There was a stigma about the park. Some thought it was dangerous, and maybe it was, at times. But for the most part, it was a little piece of green and blue in a city of concrete and graffiti. Joggers mixed with bums mixed with lovers mixed with God-only-knew-what-their story was. A melting pot of physical fitness, homelessness and drugs.
And one curious private investigator and a very lost sixteen-year-old boy.
We were sitting side by side, although his backpack was tucked between us. The evening sky was mostly clear, with only a small patch of something gauzy and amorphous high above. The trees around us rustled in the breeze. The breeze carried the smell of pond decay. Across the street, boys played basketball at a park. Most were shirtless, and most were covered in tattoos. As I watched, a fight nearly broke out, but only a few choice words seemed to be the extent of it.
His name was David and he was shy. I was shy, too, and the two didn't combine for a lot of random chit-chat. We had said our greetings and were now sitting quietly on the bench.
I finally started things off. "Hot day."
"Yeah."
"The nights aren't any better."
He nodded.
"How long have you been in L.A.?" I asked.
"A few months now."
"Where did you live before?"
"San Francisco."
I nodded. Funny how life was often serendipitous. My last major case had taken me to San Francisco.
"What brought you down here?"
"My birth mom."
"Who are you staying with?"
"My aunt and uncle."
"Who were you living with before coming down?"
He looked away. "My father."
"Your adopted father?"