A Cold and Broken Hallelujah

by Tyler Dilts

  “Yeah,” I said. “Never seen one of those on the street before.”

  “Neither have I. Could be something.”

  I didn’t think about it until it didn’t happen, but I had half expected one of us to make some sort of joke about upscale homeless or social-climbing vagrants. But neither of us did. We maintained a degree of seriousness that was unusual for us that far into a crime-scene investigation. It’s not so much that the tone lightens or that we take the work more casually, but as we work the scene and become more and more familiar with the details, a kind of familiarity and ease set in. And that’s when the gallows humor becomes a part of the dynamic. We try to make each other laugh so we won’t get lost in the darkness. But for some reason, that wasn’t happening here. Later I would wonder if Jen sensed something in me, a distance or a reticence, that was making me hold back on the banter. I wondered if I saw that in myself.

  One of the crime-scene techs, a twentysomething named Kyle, called me over to a spot a few yards away from the body. “Did you see this?” he asked, squatting down next to a cell phone on the ground.

  “I didn’t get a good look at it yet. Why?”

  “One of them had this in his hand when the patrol units got here,” he said. “Probably dropped it when they tried to run.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “It looks like the camera app was open. He might have been recording it.”

  That was good news. The case against the three suspects was already a good one. If we had video of the incident, that would make it just about as solid as it could be without a victim ID.

  “What do you think about looking at it here?” I asked him. I knew the ideal method would be to take it back to the lab to check for prints and other physical evidence before they started to check for any data the phone might hold.

  The suspects’ DMV and school IDs confirmed that they were minors, and California law dictates that if we take juvenile suspects into custody, we have to either formally arrest them or let them go in six hours—so we were up against a ticking clock.

  “Well, that’s your call,” Kyle said. “But I’d really like to get it back to the lab first.”

  I thought about it. If there was video, it might be a big help in the suspect interrogations, but with a case this solid, I worried about anything that might go wrong with the evidence. Despite his youth, Kyle had worked enough of my cases for me to know he was good at his job. I trusted his opinion.

  “Okay,” I said. “Think you can check it before your shift’s over?”

  “Sure thing, Detective.”

  I looked over to the perimeter. Just about as far away from the body at the center of the crime scene as she could be, a young uniform leaned on the front fender of a squad car with one towel draped around her shoulders and another in a mound on the hood of the Police Interceptor. She’d removed her uniform shirt and Kevlar and wore only a damp white undershirt. I’d been watching her, glancing in her direction every now and again, and this was the first time I’d seen her alone.

  “Hey,” I said as I approached.

  She looked at me and when she realized that I was the lead homicide detective on the scene, she stood up straight. Almost at attention. She was fresh out of the academy, from our first class of new recruits after a five-year hiring freeze—but as I got closer, I could see that she looked older than most rookies. I made her age as late twenties.

  “Relax,” I said. She didn’t, but she tried to look like she was at ease and leaned back against the fender again. “What’s your name?”

  Her academy conditioning kicked in and she looked at the ground. “Boot.”

  “Not anymore.” I repeated my question, but she still didn’t answer. “Look, you dove into the LA River and took down a killer. That was no rookie move.”

  “He was just a kid.”

  “A kid who’d just burned a man to death because he thought it would be fun to watch. You did good.”

  “Lauren Terrones.”

  “Well, Officer Terrones, why don’t you tell me what happened and then you can head back to the station and change into some dry clothes.”

  She nodded a weak affirmation but didn’t say anything. I watched her and tried to judge the best way of opening the interview.

  “This your first barbecue?” As soon as I saw the expression on her face, I knew I’d made the wrong calculation. I thought if I treated her like a vet, she might be more likely to open up. But she wasn’t ready for the gallows lingo yet. It was too soon for her to start depersonalizing. “Burn victims are hard,” I said.

  She nodded and tried to pay attention, to make sure she came off as a good student, the solid rookie sucking up a lesson from the grizzled vet. Something about her earnestness got to me.

  I decided to go out on an entirely different limb. “My wife burned to death,” I said. “A car accident. She survived the impact. It was the fire that got her.” As soon as I spoke, I felt that I’d shared too much personal information too soon. I’d never used my wife’s death like that before, and I wasn’t sure where the impulse had come from. But if I let myself think about it, the interview would go so far off track I’d never get it back.

  “Oh my god,” she said.

  “It was a few years ago.” I tried to spin it back into a reasonable thing to say in the situation. “I’ve never been able to look at a fire victim the same way since. Sometimes I overcompensate.” She hadn’t expected the candor. “Like that ‘barbecue’ crack.”

  That did it. She loosened up, her defenses came down, and when she looked at me her eyes were filled with an empathy that had pushed out the agitation and intensity and left no room, at least for the moment, for them to take hold again. I could probably count on a few minutes of clarity.

  “Tell me what happened,” I said.

  She ran it down for me, and I had only a few follow-up questions. Her account lined up with what everyone else had said and with everything else we knew. By the time we were through, she was still relatively calm, but the distraction was beginning to wear thin.

  Stan had been watching us from a few yards away, just out of her field of view, and when he saw that our conversation had nearly run its course, he came over.

  “Thanks, Lauren,” I said.

  “You’re welcome,” she said.

  “Here comes your FTO.”

  “Get in the fucking car, Boot,” Stan said with even more gravel in his voice than usual. When the rookie was a few steps ahead of him, Stan looked back over his shoulder and gave me a nod. I gave him one back.

  I’d only spent two hours at the scene. Even though I felt like I had a good sense of things, I wanted to get to the suspects and make sure we had them booked within our limited time frame. Ordinarily, I’d never leave a scene in progress, but I trusted Jen to make sure everything got done right.

  Kyle told me they were ready to load up the shopping cart.

  “Let me take one more look at it.” If we got an ID on the victim, it would probably be from something in the cart.

  Even though it had fallen onto its side, almost nothing had spilled out—only an old Powerade Zero bottle half-filled with water and a relatively recent Time magazine shouting “A WORLD WITHOUT BEES” in white-and-yellow caps on a black background. The magazine had apparently been tucked into the top of the cart; one corner of the cover, with its familiar red border, had torn off and remained lodged there. Everything else was secured with a fleece blanket that had been folded to the size of the cart’s open top and held in place with three crisscrossing bungee cords. There was a similar setup in the child seat: a dark-blue bath towel and a single cord. I’d never seen so neat an arrangement in a homeless person’s cart before. In an odd way I was almost envious of the organizational discipline required to keep things so orderly. Even the cart itself was in far better shape than most I’d seen on the street. Whoever our murder victim was, he was obviously conscientious when it came to keeping track of and maintaining his possessions. I wa
nted to believe he took a kind of pride in this, that it meant something to him to maintain his belongings so carefully, that it indicated something about his character, something hopeful about him and how he faced his hopeless situation. I didn’t realize it then, but what I really wanted to believe, deep down, in the part of myself that I didn’t like to look at or even acknowledge, was that this fastidiously organized shopping cart somehow made the dead man more worthy than the many transients I passed on the street every day and didn’t even see. I wanted to believe that the way he’d maintained this stolen basket made him real enough, human enough, to warrant our attention, and that closing this case and acknowledging this single victim’s humanity would somehow be enough to assuage us—the cops, the bystanders, the system—of all of the guilt we should have been feeling at his plight and that of so many more like him.

  I wanted to give him a name.

  2

  FLEECE BLANKET: MEDIUM BLUE, FRAYED AT ONE CORNER, THREE DARK STAINS NEAR SAME CORNER, RECENTLY LAUNDERED.

  “Morning,” I said to Lieutenant Ruiz, the Homicide Detail commander, as he came into the observation room. I was getting ready to begin the interrogations. The suspects had been separated and placed in individual interview rooms. “You’re in early.” He was—it wasn’t even three a.m. yet. I’d meant the statement as a joke, but either he didn’t get the intended humor or he decided to ignore it.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Figured I’d try to get a jump on the media attention. Things squared away at the scene?”

  “Jen’s on top of it. Still a bit of evidence to be collected. Got patrol helping with the canvass. Not expecting much on that front until everybody wakes up. We’ve already got statements from the uniforms who responded and a guy from the trailer park, and it looks like we might have smartphone video, too. This one’s tight.”

  “Anything on the victim?”

  “Nothing you probably don’t already know. Apparently homeless, no ID. He had a shopping cart. We’re hoping we find something in there to help, or that maybe the canvass will turn up someone who knew him. How about the suspects?”

  “We’ve confirmed their IDs.”

  He handed me three sheets of paper with the suspects’ IDs and any background that had been discovered on them so far. There wasn’t much there.

  “Why’d they do it?” he said. We both knew that at that point his question could only be rhetorical.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe just trying to make their bones.”

  “Could be,” I said. “They got everybody’s attention.”

  “We’ll keep working on background.” He looked at his watch. “How much time do we have?”

  I looked at mine, too. “A little less than three hours.”

  “Why don’t you get in there,” he said. “Anything big comes up, I’ll let you know.”

  I watched all three suspects on the live video feeds in the observation room. Omar Guerra, at seventeen the oldest and the suspected ringleader, seemed calm and collected. His sheet was the only one with priors: two arrests for minor gang-related offenses, but nothing that had stuck. He was reclining in the chair, his head against the wall behind him, eyes closed. I wondered if he might have dozed off. The other two, though, weren’t holding up as well.

  Francisco Carillo was at the other end of the spectrum from Omar. He couldn’t sit still. He rubbed his hands together, bounced his feet, bobbed his head up and down, side to side. At one point he stood up and paced back and forth in the small room, then looked right at the camera with the laser-eyed focus of a surprised cat, and then sat back down as if he thought getting up might somehow put him in even more trouble.

  Between those two extremes was suspect number three, Pedro Solano. He was nervous and fidgety, too, but without Francisco’s pent-up, caged-animal energy. Pedro’s head was down, so I couldn’t get as good a read as I would have liked on his face or his expression, but at one point he raised his hand to his cheek as if he might have been wiping away a tear. That made my decision for me. Pedro would be number one.

  In the bathroom I washed my face, combed my hair, rinsed my mouth out with Cool Mint Listerine, and put on a tie. On the way back to the interview room, I detoured to the vending machines and bought two Cokes, a Snickers, some M&Ms, and a bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos. I turned the video recorder on and opened the door.

  “Pedro?” I said. Before I was even all the way into the room, I’d already gotten a nod of agreement. The room was small, no more than eight by eight, and had a table pushed back into the corner with a chair on each of the accessible sides. Pedro was sitting with his back against the far wall, his left arm resting on the table. I pulled the other chair out and around to face him and sat down directly between him and the door.

  “How are you?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer, but I didn’t expect him to.

  “I know it’s been a long night. You thirsty?” I slid one of the Cokes toward him. “I got some snacks, too. Here you go.” I pushed the candy toward him, too.

  He looked at it, then at me, then back down at his hands in his lap, but he didn’t reach for anything.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Go ahead.”

  He resisted the impulse for a few more seconds, then reached for the Coke and took a long drink from the can. Then he tore open the Snickers wrapper and dug in as if he hadn’t eaten in hours. Which, of course, he hadn’t.

  “You are hungry. Is that going to be enough? You want me to go grab you a sandwich or something?”

  He looked at me, finished chewing, swallowed, and then said, in very small voice, “No, that’s okay.”

  “You need anything else?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Okay,” I said. I put a handkerchief down on the table, knowing he’d think I meant for him to use it to wipe his hands and mouth. Really, though, I wanted him to have it when he started crying.

  “You go to Poly High, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How do you like it there?”

  “It’s school,” he said, as if the idea of liking school was as absurd as the idea of a fish liking fresh air.

  “But you go there with Francisco and Omar, right?”

  “Francisco, yeah. Not Omar anymore.”

  “No?” I said. “Where does Omar go?” I knew the answer. He’d had his student ID in his pocket when he was booked.

  “He goes to Saint Anthony’s now.”

  “Really, since when?”

  “The middle of last year.”

  “Why’d he transfer?”

  Pedro was quiet. He didn’t want to rat out his friend.

  “I’ll see it in his file in a couple of hours anyway.”

  He still didn’t want to talk. He was too loyal.

  “That’s okay. We’ll come back to that one later. You guys are tight, right? You and Omar and Francisco.”

  Nothing. He took a drink of the Coke, and I waited for the silence to start to work its way through his armor. It was a lot thinner than he believed.

  “I know you guys are tight. I understand that. You’re alone, you’re fucked. All you have is your crew.”

  I could see his chin move. An embryonic nod.

  “So it’s all about your crew. You gotta back your brother’s play. No matter what.”

  He actually moved his head this time.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Of course you do.”

  Another agreement. Time to press a little harder.

  “But we know this was Omar’s play. No doubt about that.”

  His eyes went down to the hands in his lap again.

  “The thing is, for me, for us, it’s not the same—what you did and what Omar did. It’s not.”

  I let that sink in for a few seconds.

  “Omar knows you’re gonna stand up. Francisco does, too. He just told me you were the one with the stones.”

  Pedro looked at me. I could see a little sprout of pride in his eyes.

  “Yeah
, of course,” I said. “What else is he gonna say?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But he is saying something else, though.”

  “What?”

  “I probably shouldn’t talk about it.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t think you’re gonna like it.”

  “What did he say?”

  “You sure you want to know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s saying that he didn’t have anything to do with this thing tonight. That it was all you and Omar.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. He’s saying that he even tried to stop you guys.”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  I couldn’t tell if he meant that Francisco didn’t say that to me or that he didn’t try to stop them, but it didn’t really matter. Pedro was buying it.

  “The thing is, Pedro, I know he’s lying. I’ve seen your school records.” I hadn’t, of course. It would take days or weeks and a court order to get them. But he didn’t know that. “I know what people say about you. I know you didn’t put this thing together. I know. But nobody else here knows you. They’re gonna believe Francisco. They’re gonna believe him unless you tell me what really went down.”

  For a few seconds, I thought I had him. He looked at me with a purpose in his expression, and his mouth began to move, but he stopped himself before any sound could escape. In his lap he interlaced his fingers and wrung them together, and he just stared down at his clenching hands.

  I knew I’d lost him.

  Still, I tried for another half an hour to coax and cajole him into opening up. But even though I’d gotten him right up to the line, I couldn’t convince him to step over it.

  The handkerchief was still on the table. I reached over, picked it up, and folded it twice. Then I gave it to him.

  As he rubbed at his eyes and nose with it, I was surprised by the delicacy in his movements. I hadn’t noticed how small his hands were.

  “Pedro told me how it went down. You and Omar talking him into it, how he didn’t even want to be there.”