The Gods of Guilt

by Michael Connelly

  “Look, Lorna, that kid is a complete incompetent. I had to expose that because if I didn’t, I was going to look just as incompetent when Forsythe mopped the floor with him. Besides, someday he’s going to thank me for that. It’s better he get his shit together now than somewhere down the line.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Yeah, whatever. You know something, Earl never gave me any shit about how I run my cases.”

  “And look what happened to him.”

  That hit me like an arrow in the back.

  “What? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on, Lorna, don’t lay that shit on me. Don’t you think I already carry enough guilt about it?”

  I was actually surprised it had taken her two months to get to this.

  “You knew you were being followed. They put a tracker on the car.”

  “Yeah, a tracker. So they would know where I was going. Not so they could kill us. That was never on our radar. They put a tracker on the car, not an IED, for chrissake.”

  “You should’ve known when you went up to see Moya they would know you figured everything out and were a danger.”

  “That’s crazy, Lorna. Because I didn’t figure everything out. Not then and not now. I’m still flying by the seat of my pants on this case. Besides that, the day before, Cisco said they weren’t seeing anything, and I’d made an executive decision to pull the Indians back because they were costing us a lot and you were on my back all the time about the money.”

  “So you’re blaming me?”

  “No, I’m not blaming you. I’m not blaming anybody, but obviously somebody missed something because we were not in the clear.”

  “And Earl got killed.”

  “Yeah, Earl got killed and so far they’ve gotten away with it. And I have to live with making the call to pull back on the surveillance, not that it would have changed anything.”

  I raised my hands in an I-give-up gesture.

  “Look, I don’t know why this all comes to the surface right now, but can we stop talking about it? I’m in the middle of a trial and I’m juggling chain saws. All of this doesn’t really help. I see Earl’s face every night when I try to go to sleep. If it helps you to know he haunts me, well, he does.”

  We rode in silence for the next twenty-five minutes until finally we pulled into the parking lot behind the loft on Santa Monica. I could tell by the number of cars in the lot, including three beat-up panel vans, that our staff meeting would have musical accompaniment. Under the house rules, bands were allowed to practice in their lofts after four p.m.

  Lorna and I said nothing as we rode the freight elevator up. Our shoes made angry sounds on the wood floor. They echoed across the empty loft as we headed to the boardroom.

  Only Jennifer Aronson was already there. I remembered that Cisco had said that he had something to do first.

  “So how did it go?” Aronson asked.

  I nodded as I pulled out a seat and sat down.

  “Pretty good. Things are in play. I was even able to suggest to Forsythe that he let Lankford vet the new witness list.”

  “I meant the trial. How was Fulgoni?”

  I glanced at Lorna, aware of her sympathies for Sly Jr.

  “He served his purpose.”

  “Is he off yet?”

  “Yeah, we’re finished with him for now.”

  “And so you gave the new list, and what happened?”

  Jennifer had prepared the new witness list, making sure that every new name had some connection to the case so that we could argue its place on it. That is, every name but one.

  “Forsythe objected all over the place and the judge gave him till tomorrow morning to respond. So I want you there, since you know the names better than me. Are you clear in the morning?”

  Jennifer nodded.

  “Yes. Will I be making the response or just whispering to you?”

  “You respond.”

  She brightened at the thought of going up against Forsythe in court.

  “What about if he brings up Stratton Sterghos?”

  I thought for a moment before responding. I heard someone riffing on an electric guitar somewhere in the building.

  “First of all, there is no if about that. Sterghos is going to come up. When he does, you start to answer and then you sort of look at me as if to ask if you’re saying too much. I’ll step in then and take it from there.”

  The new witness list I had submitted was a carefully constructed part of our defense strategy. Every person we had added had at least a tangential connection to the Gloria Dayton case. We could easily argue for his or her inclusion and testimony. However, the truth was, we would actually call few of them to testify. Most of them had been added to the list in an effort to cloak a single name: Stratton Sterghos.

  Sterghos was the depth charge. He was not directly or indirectly connected to Dayton. He did, however, live for the past twenty years across the street from a house in Glendale where two drug dealers were assassinated in 2003. It was in the investigation of those murders that I believed an unholy alliance was somehow struck between then–Detective Lee Lankford and DEA agent James Marco. I needed to root that alliance out and find a way to tie it in with Gloria. It was called relevance. I had to make the Glendale case relevant to the Dayton case or I would never get it to the jury.

  “So you’re hoping Lankford does the vetting and comes up with Stratton Sterghos’s connection,” Jennifer said.

  I nodded.

  “If we get lucky.”

  “And then he makes a mistake.”

  I nodded again.

  “If we get luckier.”

  As if on cue, Cisco entered the boardroom. I realized that the big man hadn’t made a sound as he had crossed the loft. He went to the coffeepot and started pouring a cup.

  “Cisco, that’s old,” Lorna warned. “From this morning. It’s not even hot.”

  “It will have to do,” Cisco said.

  He put the glass pot down on the cold burner and swallowed a gulp from the cup. We all made faces. He smiled.

  “What?” he said. “I need the caffeine. We’re setting up on the house and I could be up all night.”

  “So everything is set?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “I just checked it out. We’re ready.”

  “Then let’s hope Lankford does his job.”

  “And then some.”

  He started pouring more of the dead coffee into his cup.

  “Let me just make a fresh pot,” Lorna said.

  She got up and came around the table to her husband.

  “No, it’s fine,” Cisco said. “I can’t stay long anyway. Have to get up there with the crew.”

  Lorna stopped. There was a pained expression on her face.

  “What?” Cisco asked.

  “What is this you’re doing?” she asked. “How dangerous?”

  Cisco shrugged and looked at me.

  “We’ve taken precautions,” I said. “But . . . they are men with guns.”

  “We’re always careful,” Cisco added.

  I now realized where the heated discussion between Lorna and me in the car had come from. She was worried about her husband, worried that the fate that had befallen Earl Briggs would come to her house next.

  33

  Cisco called me at midnight. I was in bed with Kendall, having snuck out my back door and once again taken a cab over the hill to meet her. The protection of Moya’s men was twenty-four/seven, but I left them behind whenever I met Kendall because she objected to them and didn’t want them near her. As had become our routine during the trial, we’d eaten a late dinner at the sushi bar after she closed her studio and then returned to her place. I was deeply asleep and dreaming of car crashes when Cisco called. It took me a moment to adjust to where I was and what the call meant.

  “We’ve got them on tape,” Cisco said.

  “Who exactly?”

  “Both of them. La
nkford and Marco.”

  “Together, same frame?”

  “Same frame.”

  “Good. Did they do anything?”

  “Oh, yeah. They went inside.”

  “You mean they broke in?”

  “Yep.”

  “Holy shit. And you’ve got it?”

  “We’ve got it all and then some. Marco planted drugs in the house. Heroin.”

  I was almost speechless. This couldn’t be any better.

  “And you got that on tape, too?”

  “Got it. We got it all. Do you want us to break it all down now? Pull out the cameras?”

  I thought for a moment before answering.

  “No,” I finally said. “I want it to stay. We paid Sterghos for two weeks. Let’s keep it all there. You never know.”

  “You sure? Do we have the money for that?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. No, we don’t have the money.”

  “Well, you don’t want to stiff these guys.”

  I almost made a joke about how we had been stiffing the Indians since Columbus got here, but decided it was not the time for an attempt at humor.

  “I’ll figure something out.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll see you in the morning. Will there be something I can see?”

  “Yeah, I’ll download it all to Lorna’s iPad. You can watch on your way in.”

  “Okay, good.”

  After we disconnected, I checked my text file to see if I’d gotten anything from my daughter. I had been sending trial updates each night, telling her how things were going and the major highlight of each day. They had mostly been negative reports until the defense phase began. Now the highlights would be my highlights. The dispatch I had sent her while riding over the hill in the taxi had been about the points I’d scored with Valenzuela and Fulgoni on the stand.

  But as usual there was no return text or acknowledgment of any kind from her. I put the phone down on the bedside table and laid my head back down on the pillow. Kendall’s arm came around my chest from behind.

  “Who was that?”

  “Cisco. He got some good stuff tonight.”

  “Good for him.”

  “No, good for me.”

  She squeezed me and I felt how strong she was after many years of yoga.

  “Go to sleep now,” she said.

  “I don’t think I can,” I said.

  But I tried. I closed my eyes and tried to avoid returning to the dream I’d just come out of. I didn’t want that. I tried to think about my daughter riding a black horse with a lightning bolt running down its nose. In the vision she wore no helmet and her hair was flowing behind her as the horse she rode galloped across an unfenced field of tall grass. I realized just before drifting off that the girl in the vision was my daughter of a year earlier, at a time when we still spoke regularly and saw each other on weekends. My last thought before succumbing to exhaustion and sleep was to wonder if she would always be frozen at that age in my dreams. Or if I would get experiences with her upon which I could build new dreams.

  Two hours later the phone buzzed again. Kendall groaned as I quickly grabbed it off the bedside table and answered without looking at the screen.

  “What now?”

  “What now? What the hell you think you’re doing treating my son like that in open court?”

  It wasn’t Cisco. It was Sly Fulgoni Sr.

  “Sly? Look, hold on.”

  I got up and walked out of the room. I didn’t want to disturb Kendall any further than I already had. I sat at the counter in the kitchen and spoke in a low voice into the phone.

  “Sly, I did what I had to do for my client, and now’s not the time to talk about it. Fact is, he got what was coming to him, and it’s too late and I’m too tired to talk about it.”

  There was silence for a long moment.

  “Did you put me on the list?” he finally asked.

  That was what he was really calling about. Himself. Sly needed a vacation from federal prison, so he demanded that his name be put on the amended witness list. He had decided that he wanted to take the bus ride down from Victorville and spend a day or two in L.A. County Jail just for the change of pace and scenery. It didn’t matter that there was no need for testimony from him in the La Cosse trial. He wanted me to manufacture an argument for his inclusion on the list and transfer down. If I succeeded, I could then always tell the judge I changed my mind and strategy and no longer needed him. He’d be sent back to Victorville after his little vacation.

  “Yes,” I said. “You’re on the list. But it has not been accepted yet. It comes up first thing today, and it doesn’t help you waking me up like this. I need my sleep, Sly, so I can be sharp and win the argument.”

  “Okay, I got it. You get your beauty sleep, Haller. I’ll wait to hear from you and you better not fuck me over on this. My son doesn’t know any better. He got a good lesson today. Me, I don’t need any lessons. You get me down there.”

  “I’ll do my best. Good night.”

  I disconnected before he could respond and went back into the bedroom. I was going to apologize to Kendall for the second intrusion but she had already fallen back asleep.

  I wished I could so easily do the same. But the second call irreparably broke the sleep cycle and I moved restlessly in the bed for most of the remainder of the night, only nodding off an hour before I was supposed to awaken for the day.

  That morning I called a taxi so Kendall could sleep in. Luckily, I had started leaving clothes at her house and I dressed in a suit that wasn’t that fresh but at least was different from the one I’d worn the day before. I then snuck out of the house without waking her. Lorna was already waiting for me in the Lexus when the taxi pulled up to my house shortly after eight. Moya’s men were there, too, in their car, waiting to escort us downtown. I took two minutes to go up to the house to get my briefcase and then came back down and jumped into the car.

  “Let’s go.”

  Lorna abruptly pulled away from the curb. I could tell she had not yet given up her anger with me.

  “Hey, I’m not the one who showed up ten minutes late,” she said. “I was the one who was on time and had to sit and wait—not to mention waiting with the two cartel goons that give everybody the creeps.”

  “Okay, okay. Let’s just drop it, all right? I had a rough night.”

  “Aren’t you lucky.”

  “I don’t mean it that way. I had Cisco waking me up and then Sly Sr. called to chew me out and I ended up with, like, three hours total. Did Cisco put the video on your iPad for me to look at?”

  “Yes, it’s in the bag in the back.”

  I reached between the seats to the backseat, where her purse was on the floor. It was the size of a grocery bag and it weighed a ton.

  “What the hell do you have in this thing?”

  “Everything.”

  I didn’t ask for further explanation. I managed to pull the bag up to the front seat, open it, and find her iPad. I put the bag on the floor between my feet, lest I pull a muscle leveraging it into the back again.

  “It should be right on the screen and ready to go,” Lorna said. “Just hit the play button.”

  I opened her iPad case, lit the screen, and saw the frozen image of the front door of a house I knew to be the home of Stratton Sterghos. The camera angle was from below and the quality was not great, as the only illumination came from a porch light next to the door. I assumed Cisco’s people had used a pinhole camera hidden in a potted plant or some other porch ornament. The view was from a side angle so that if anyone approached and knocked on the door the camera would capture their profile.

  I hit the play button and watched for a few seconds as nothing moved or happened on the screen. Then a man stepped onto the porch, hesitated, and glanced behind him. It was Lankford. He then turned back and knocked on the door. He waited for the door to be answered. I waited, too.

  Nothing happened. I knew no one would answer the door but it was a tense m
oment just the same.

  “Which way do you want me to go today?” Lorna asked.

  “Just hold on a minute,” I said. “Let me watch.”

  The video was without sound. Lankford knocked again with more force. He then looked back off camera and shook his head. Seemingly at the direction of someone offscreen, he turned and knocked again, even harder.

  No one answered. A second man stepped up on the porch and moved to Lankford’s right side so he could look in through the window next to the door. He cupped his eyes as he leaned against the glass. His face was hidden until he leaned back, turned to Lankford, and said something. It was James Marco.

  I froze the screen so I could just look at them. It was an image I knew would cause a sea change in the case. It was perfectly reasonable and acceptable that Lankford would show up at the front door of a man listed as a defense witness on a case he was assigned to for the District Attorney’s Office. But the confluence of Lankford and DEA agent James Marco on that front porch changed things exponentially. I was looking at digital evidence that tied Marco to Lankford and the events surrounding the murder of Gloria Dayton. At minimum, I felt I was looking at reasonable doubt.

  I spoke to Lorna without taking my eyes off the screen.

  “Where’s Cisco now?”

  “He came home, gave me that, and went to sleep. He said he’d be in court by ten.”

  I nodded. He deserved the the chance to sleep late.

  “Well, he did good.”

  “Did you watch the whole thing? He said watch it to the end.”

  I pushed the play button. Lankford and Marco grew tired of waiting for the door to be answered and walked off the porch. I waited. Nothing happened. No action on the porch.

  “What am I looking—”

  Then I saw it. It was barely a shadow on the other side of the porch, but I saw it. One or both of the men walked down the side of the house.

  The video then jumped to another view—this one from a camera in the backyard pointed toward the rear of the house. I noticed that the time count jumped backwards ten seconds. I watched and waited and then I saw two figures emerge from both side yards of the house and meet at the rear door. Under the light over the door I could make out their faces. Again it was Lankford and Marco. Lankford knocked on the door but Marco didn’t wait for an answer. He squatted down and went to work on the doorknob, obviously attempting to pick the lock.