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on my cell phone. He said he might be a little late,” she said, her voice tightening, her dark eyes filling. She blinked the tears back. “He said he was waiting for a bike messenger to pick something up.”
    “Did he say what?”
    “No.”
    “Late in the day to call a messenger.”
    She shrugged. “Probably something he needed to get to a client.”
    “Do you know what service he used?”
    “Whichever could pick up and deliver the fastest and the cheapest.”
    “If we can find out which service, their dispatch office will have the address the package was going to, maybe a vague description of what was in it, and the name of the messenger they sent,” Parker said. “Do you know if the messenger ever arrived?”
    “No. I told you, when I last spoke with Lenny, he was waiting.”
    Parker glanced over at the safe, frowning.
    “That would be stupid,” she said, reading his mind. “Like you said, his dispatch office will have the messenger’s name.”
    Which could very well not be real, Parker thought. Bike messengers weren’t known for being stable, family types. They tended to be loners, oddballs, living a hand-to-mouth existence. The way they raced the downtown streets—balls-out, no fear for life or limb, no regard for themselves or anyone else—it wasn’t a stretch to imagine more than one of them was hopped up on something.
    So some down-on-his-luck junkie messenger shows up for a package, gets a look in Lowell’s open safe, decides to elevate his social standing, kills Lowell, takes the money, and vanishes into the night, never to be seen again. The guy could be on a bus to Vegas while they stood around talking about it.
    “It’s not my job to draw conclusions, Ms. Lowell. I have to consider all possibilities.
    “Who called 911?” he asked, turning again to Jimmy Chew.
    “The ever-popular anonymous citizen.”
    “Anything around here open or inhabited?”
    “Not on a night like this. There’s a 76 station and a bail-bonds place down the street, on the other side. And the 24/7 Laundromat.”
    “Go see if anyone at the Laundromat has anything to say.”
    “They’re closed.”
    “I thought you said it was called 24/7.”
    “It’s raining,” Chew said, incredulous. “Me and Stevie cruised past around six-fifteen. The place was locked up tight. Besides, they quit being open twenty-four after their night clerk was robbed and raped six, eight months ago.”
    Kyle smirked. “Great neighborhood you work, Parker.”
    “Killers are killers, no matter what neighborhood you’re in, Bradley,” Parker said. “The only difference is, you can’t make the news off the murders here.”
    He turned back to Abby Lowell. “How were you notified of your father’s death, Ms. Lowell?”
    She looked at him like she thought he might be pulling something on her. “One of the officers called.”
    Parker looked at Chew, who held up his hands in denial, then looked at Chew’s partner, who shook his head.
    “Someone called you. On your cell phone,” Parker said.
    Abby Lowell’s eyes bounced from one man to another, uncertain. “Yes. Why?”
    “What did the caller say to you?”
    “That my father had been killed, and could I please come to his office. Why?”
    “May I see your cell phone?”
    “I don’t understand,” she said, hesitantly pulling her phone out of a pocket in her trench coat.
    “LAPD wouldn’t tell you something like that over the phone, Ms. Lowell,” Parker said. “An officer or detective would have come to your residence to give you the news.”
    Her eyes widened as the implication sank in. “Are you telling me I was on the phone with my father’s killer?”
    “What time did you get the call?”
    “Maybe twenty minutes ago. I was at the restaurant.”
    “Do you have a call list on that thing?” Parker asked, nodding toward the phone she clutched in her hand.
    “Yes.” She scrolled through a list of commands and brought up the screen that listed calls received. Her hand was