Waters shrugs. “Whatever. But I need protection.”
“Protection?” Mills asks.
“Yeah,” the guy says without making eye contact.
“Can you elaborate?” Chang prods him.
“I said I need protection because this guy is dangerous, OK? I mean, he’s a dealer. He supports himself by selling drugs. He associates with bad people. And he threatened me . . .”
Mills takes a seat at the table. Powell leans against a wall.
“With?” Mills asks. “What did he threaten you with?”
The guy turns his palms upward with another shrug. “I think he said, ‘I’ll fucking kill you if you ever say a word.’”
“People say things,” Powell chimes in.
The guy sneers at her. “He was serious,” he says matter-of-factly. “I know he’s done some other damage in the valley, so I don’t doubt him. Can I have protection?”
Chang interjects and says, “Obviously, we’ll consider that, depending on what you tell us. But it’s more complicated than just getting you a 24-hour babysitter with a badge.”
“What do you do for work?” Mills asks him.
“I’m a waiter.”
“You share this house with anyone?”
“Another waiter and bartender where I work,” he says.
“He works at The ScottsView,” Chang says.
The ScottsView is an aging golf and tennis resort that has seen better times and bigger crowds. Its elegance has faded along with the paint and the carpets. It’s still popular with tourists, but not the upscale type. Ralph Waters at The ScottsView is typecasting.
“So, you owe this secret friend money for drugs. The money’s forgiven if you help on this art gallery caper,” Chang says. “Have you ever worked with explosives before?”
Waters nods. “I’ve built fireworks. Legal ones. I’ve built some for him.” That’s bullshit, Mills observes. Homemade fireworks are not legal. “Are you by any chance a member of the Church of Angels Rising?” Mills asks.
“What? No. What does that have to do with anything?”
“Viveca Canning was on the church’s board of directors,” Mills tells him. “You were breaking into her vault.”
“Well, I know nothing about that,” Waters insists. “This was just a favor, an arrangement, rather, between me and my dealer to settle up.” The guy fidgets, and then he starts bawling. The breakdown took longer than Mills had expected, but it’s happening. A pure collapse. A cyclone of overwhelming fear and overwhelming dread makes landfall and the suspect loses his shit. Mills, weirdly, senses a cyclone of his own in his gut, and suspects it has something to do with Kelly, Trevor, and the barometric pressure of disease.
“Can I make a deal?” the suspect says between sobs.
“Not with us,” Chang says. “With the county attorney. But we can get that ball rolling, if you want . . .”
“Would I get off?”
“Doubt it,” Chang replies. “You’re facing some serious charges. But if you plead to lesser, I’m sure there’d be reduced sentencing . . .” “The minute I end up in jail his thugs get to me,” Ralph says, evidently an avid viewer of Netflix and HBO.
“Is this guy in a gang?” Chang asks.
“Nah,” Waters says. “But he has a circle.”
“I’m beginning to think you’re full of shit,” Mills says. “You’ll pardon my language. But I just don’t think you did this for a friend. I think you did this for you. I think you had something to do with Viveca’s murder, and I think you’re trying to distract us.”
“Me too,” Powell says with an oomph in her voice.
“And me too,” from Chang as well.
The guy looks up and shakes his head vigorously, so much his cheeks look they’re pulling Gs. His mouth, too, the way its stretches across his face like a fat elastic band. “What the fuck?” he cries. “I just told you everything. I told you I did it for a friend to pay back a drug debt. What else do you want?”
“We want his name,” Mills says, pounding the table once for each word.
“Or we’re back to square one, Ralph,” Chang adds. “You said you had nothing to hide.”
“Without his name, you’re just a punk liar,” Mills says.
“And not even a good one,” Powell tells him.
“Without a name, you have no credibility,” Mills persists. “Good luck with the county attorney. Good luck with the judge. Good luck with the jury. I see you like to gamble.”
“Huh?”
“The tattoos.”
“So what? The Indian Casinos. Poker. Blackjack. Whatever.”
“Well, you’re taking a big gamble with your life.”
“You don’t know nothing about me.”
“I know a slacker like you isn’t going to hold up in prison, buddy,” Mills says. “You think your friend’s thugs are dangerous? Wait ’til you meet your cellmates.”
Ralph slams his head on the table and sobs again. Between the wretched tears, he coughs up a name. “Gabriel,” he says. “I don’t know his last name. But it’s Gabriel.”
Mills wants to shut his eyes and let that sink in. He wants to let the truth bubble in his veins until he gets high off the drip. But he doesn’t. Instead, he sidles up to Ralph Waters and says, “You’re lying. You know his last name. But that’s OK. I know it too.”
The man lifts his head from the table, his face a red, snotty mess. “What?” he snarls.
Mills sits there and nods, does nothing but nod. That’s when Ralph Waters, still handcuffed, thinks it’s his cue to leap from the chair and make a run for the sliding glass doors at the opposite end of the room. Mills is on him in seconds and tackles him to the floor. “I wouldn’t try that again, idiot. You’re handcuffed. Remember?”
Lt. Chang asks a colleague to sit with Waters while she confers with Mills and Powell in another room. They walk into a bedroom that smells of weed and probably hasn’t seen sunlight or a vacuum since Christmas. “Who’s our guy?” she asks Mills.
“Gabriel Norwood,” Mills replies. “Son of Gleason Norwood. Church of Angels Rising.”
Chang’s eyes go wide and stay that way. “Seriously?”
“Yep. I’m not quite sure how or why he fits, but that’s the only Gabriel who comes to mind,” Mills says. “I think we need to get before a judge tonight. Tomorrow morning, latest. You’ve read this guy his rights, so everything he told us sticks and the judge needs to hear it. I want to search Gabriel’s place ASAP. Can your squad handle the surveillance video from AJ’s?”
Chang nods.
“We’re never going to pull all this shit together tonight,” Powell says. “I doubt we’ll get our warrants before the morning.”
“So be it,” Mills says. “But the sooner the better.”
“Between both our resources, we’ll be fine,” Chang says. “I can get one of my guys before a judge in the morning. Can you spare anyone?” Before Mills can answer, Powell says, “Me. He can spare me.” “Perfect,” Chang says. “In the meantime, we’ll bring Waters in, get him processed. I’ll have someone call over to AJ’s.”
Mills thanks her. “Great work,” he says. “And great working with you.”
“You think it’s him?” the lieutenant asks. “You think that Gabriel kid is your perp?”
“I’m not a psychic,” he says. “But I’m a damn good guesser. And if he didn’t kill Viveca Canning, he knows who did.”
On the way back to headquarters, Powell is fidgety and spastic, her nerves jangled. Mills says she should go home and drink a bottle of wine. She says she’d rather arrest Gabriel Norwood first. She’s afraid he’ll flee.
Mills shakes his head. “You’re just being neurotic. He has no reason to flee. Ralph Waters’s arrest isn’t public record yet. Waters’s one call from jail isn’t going to be to Gabriel Norwood.”
“But still . . .”
“But still nothing,” Mills insists. “We can’t go arrest him on the basis that Ralph Waters gave us a first name.
But if the surveillance video shows Waters dropping Gabriel Norwood off at AJ’s after the break-in, well then, bingo, we’re in.”
“And if it doesn’t . . .?”
“You’re worrying for the sake of worrying,” he chides her. “If it doesn’t, there are other ways to convince the judge. Plenty of dots we can connect between Gabriel and the Cannings . . .”
That seems to mollify her, and she’s quiet the rest of the way back. Mills needs the quiet. Back at headquarters, he grabs a few files from his desk and heads home in the muted dusk. Until now, it’s been a noisy day. The city has barked and whined and rumbled, all of it baking like an urban casserole under the Phoenix sun. The construction site, as well, was a hot, heavy metal concert of excavation. Which reminds him about exhumation. And the body of Clark Canning. But this is supposed to be a quiet ride home.
And . . . shit. Just shit. It’s 11:30 p.m., and Mills is chastising himself for forgetting the one thing he was supposed to remember. He needs to try Trevor again. All day he had put off making another call. He had found excuses and delays and distractions. He was not acting like a father. He was acting like a fucking chicken. He had come home, taken a nap, gotten up for dinner with Kelly. He had read a chapter of Don Quixote, and then he had taken a shower. Now he stares at himself in the bathroom mirror and says, “You, shit-for-brains.”
He dries himself off, slips into a pair of sweats, and dials from the couch in the living room.
“Hi Dad,” his kid says, like it’s noon.
“You’re up?”
“Just eating dinner,” Trevor says.
“At 11:45?”
“I know what time it is.”
Mills knows what age his son is. And Mills tries to imagine himself at nineteen. Reckless is all he can come up with.
“Look, Trev, I’ve been needing to talk to you about something serious. Is this a good time?”
“Good as ever. Should I be nervous?”
“That’s the whole point of this phone call. You should not be nervous,” Mills tells him. “Mom is sick. But we have everything under control. We felt we owed you a call before her surgery on Friday. We want to keep you in the loop.”
Mills can hear the kid’s television go mute. “Wait. What? Mom’s sick? What do you mean?”
This is what it’s like to go through these things.
This is what it’s like when the abstract becomes concrete.
This is what it’s like.
Here, telling his son, rolling out the details, part clinically, part parentally, this is what it’s like when shit becomes real. He explains Kelly’s diagnosis. He tries to stay as faithful to all the medical and scientific terminology, while also explaining and interpreting it for his son. He didn’t expect this would bring as much pain as it’s bringing to his chest. He didn’t expect the stubborn lump in his throat.
Trevor is silent, interminably. Just muted, like the television. Mills hates this, having to imagine the shockwaves and how they rattle his only child. He listens to Trevor’s unabashed silence and understands that his son can’t think of what to say, or how to react, or what comes next. And Mills says, “Look, we think she’ll be okay. She has these great doctors who are very optimistic. We just wanted you to know because we don’t like secrets.”
“But you kept a secret, Dad. You just told me she had surgery last week. Why was that a secret?”
“We didn’t want you to worry.”
“I’m worried.”
“We didn’t have enough to tell you,” Mills says. “We had more questions than answers.”
“Should I come home for this surgery?” Trevor asks. “It’s not a problem getting off from work, you know.”
“Honestly, kid, I don’t think that’s necessary. She’d love to have you there, but she’s going to be in surgery and recovery all day. You’d only get to see her for a minute,” Mills explains. “Maybe just head home for the weekend. Spend the weekend with her.”
“I’ll drive up Friday night,” Trevor says. “Maybe I can at least be there to say goodnight after her surgery.”
“That’ll work,” Mills tells his son. “You doing well? Still liking the job?”
Then the kid becomes a kid again. Mills can hear it in the shaky straining of Trevor’s voice and the sniffle back of tears when his son says, “She’s not going to die, right?”
“She’s going to be fine, Trevor.”
A sharp breath from Trevor. “OK. OK. I’ll be home this weekend.” “Feel free to call her tomorrow. Wish her luck on the surgery,” Mills suggests. “I’m sure she’d love to hear from you.”
“Yeah. OK.”
It’s 12:21 when they hang up. Thursday morning.
Mills contemplates angels as he crawls into bed and curls up to his wife. She’s one, for sure. But he’s thinking more about the angels of faith and mythology. He’s compelled to consider them because he wishes one to intervene and take the cancer away. He’s compelled to reject them because the Church of Angels Rising has made a sham, a scam of the divine. He’s rolling around the world, tossing and turning in bed, beckoning angels, battling angels, from one gallery to another. Today he’ll meet an angel. If there’s a God, he’ll meet an angel and he’ll arrest an angel. The angel, Gabriel Norwood.
All that has to happen is that everything has to fall into place and it has to happen like clockwork.
That’s all. No wiggle room. No room for error.
He’s running scenarios through his head, screening different versions of Gabriel’s motive. None make sense. The film loops over and over again, and in each loop Gabriel bears a different face. He transforms. He morphs. And, here, in this cloud of exhaustion, Mills remembers that he’s not met the son. So, these versions of him are shifting hybrids of Gleason and Francesca. Gabriel Norwood had been excommunicated from the church. Maybe Viveca had been the one to call for his ousting. Maybe it’s revenge. Maybe this. Maybe that. He can’t sleep.
36
That was easy. The sleep deprivation notwithstanding, the morning was judicial butter. Judge Marielle Santos-Schwartz granted warrants like she was handing out door prizes.
“I’d like you all to come with me,” Mills tells the squad. “Gabriel is under surveillance. Scottsdale will call when they’re ready. I think we all need to be at the scene. We can assist in the search, maybe observe Gabriel, maybe chat with him.”
Faces around the room are nodding and eager. Mills recognizes the look; the rattle of adrenaline shines through their eyes. This is what a team looks like when it anticipates winning.
Judge Marielle Santos-Schwartz had attached one condition to the arrest warrant: the successful identification of Gabriel Norwood getting out of Ralph Waters’s vehicle in the AJ’s parking lot, as detected by the supermarket’s surveillance cameras.
At twenty-two minutes past noon, Mills’s team gets this confirmation from Liv Chang in Scottsdale:
Surveillance video provided by AJ’s shows Ralph Waters’s car pulling into the lot and idling five rows in. This coincides with precise travel time between the gallery and supermarket. The video catches a man emerging from Waters’s car and walking a few paces before the lights of another vehicle indicate the man has unlocked it. The man, who can’t be identified, then gets in the vehicle and backs out. But the tag of that car matches a registration coming back to Gabriel Norwood. The judge likes it. We like it. Give us another hour or so. I think we’re close.
He reads the email aloud to the squad, and Powell rubs her hands together as if she’s about to dig into a twelve-ounce porterhouse, cooked rare with extra blood on the side.
“It’s going to be a long fucking hour,” Preston says.
During that long fucking hour, Mills dials Jake Woods to bring him up to date and to discuss some cross-jurisdictional issues. Woods sounds both sufficiently relieved and magnanimous when he tells Mills he’ll “take care of everything.” During that long fucking hour, he also dials his wife to see if there’s a verdict yet. There is
n’t. If her voice is any indication, her nerves are jangled. “I really expect one this afternoon. This isn’t rocket science.”
“Are you scared?”
“About the verdict? Are you serious?”
“About tomorrow.”
“I don’t want to talk about tomorrow until tomorrow.”
“Good enough,” he says. “But can I tell you I love you today?” “You just did.”
“And?”
She groans. “I love you today too. Bye, Alex.”
Twice during that long fucking hour he almost dials Liv Chang to say: “Hey Liv I’m running out of people to call just to keep my mind off waiting for your call. Could you hurry the fuck up?” But he doesn’t.
The long fucking hour turns into an hour and forty-five minutes. But who’s counting? The squad had dispersed, and now, for the love of Christ, he finally gets a text from Chang.
And then they’re out the door, Preston riding with Powell, Myers with Mills.
The drive will take about thirty-five minutes. Even breaking the speed limit. The address is fairly far north in Scottsdale and out to the east.
When they get on scene, the idea is to blend in. Norwood only needs to know they’re additional law enforcement. They’re extra sets of eyes, more shuffling feet. He doesn’t need to know anything else for now. Phoenix? Scottsdale? What’s the difference? They blend in. While Preston and Powell assist tangentially with the search, Myers begins the task of taking notes. Mills wanders through the home, a McMansion with a stone front, dark hardwoods, leather and granite everywhere. Essentially, a clone of every other upper-middle-class home in this pretentious but not quite affluent neighborhood. He finds Chang and two officers in the family room toward the back of the house. There’s a fireplace, more leather, and a view of the sparkling pool.
“I’m telling you I wasn’t there that night,” the suspect groans.
Valley of Shadows Page 34