A Cold and Broken Hallelujah

by Tyler Dilts

  Francisco was a nervous ball of energy. He couldn’t sit still. Containing himself in the chair across from me seemed to take a Herculean effort on his part. His Nikes were bouncing up and down on the floor in a hectic arrhythmia, and the back of his chair was touching the edge of the table, making it jitter as if a mild earthquake were rattling the building.

  “Francisco?”

  His eyes, pupils dilated by the stress response, finally met mine.

  “Just take a few deep breaths, okay?”

  It took a few seconds for the words to sink in, but when they did, he took a deep, quavering breath and let it out.

  “Good,” I said. “Good. Again.”

  I took a deep breath myself and exaggerated the physical motions, expanding my chest, lifting my head, and easing my shoulders back. He followed along with me.

  “That’s good, just keep breathing.”

  I silently counted to ten as we inhaled and exhaled. By the time we finished he was still visibly agitated, but he was calmer than he had been.

  “Okay,” I said. “That’s good. Did you hear what I said a minute ago about Pedro?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that what happened? You and Omar forced him into this thing?”

  “No.”

  “Tell me. Tell me what really happened.”

  “It was all Omar.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Omar, he . . .”

  “He what?”

  Francisco didn’t continue. He started trembling again and we took ten more breaths. It helped to calm him, but I’d found his line in the sand, too.

  That was all I was able to get out of them. It came as no surprise that both Pedro and Francisco were more afraid of Omar than of anything I could do to them.

  Omar was still reclining in the chair with his head against the wall and his eyes closed, pretending to sleep, when I came in and closed the door behind me. I put a cup of water on the table in the corner and pulled the other chair around to face him. He made a show of not acknowledging my presence.

  “How’s it going, Omar?” I said as I sat down and slid my chair in closer to him. He wore Timberlands and khakis under a white T-shirt and black hoodie. Slowly, with every ounce of cool he could muster, he pulled his head away from the wall, opened his eyes, sat up straight, and said one word: “Lawyer.”

  That surprised me, but I didn’t let it show. I nodded, stood up, took the water off the table, and closed the door softly behind me as I left.

  The lieutenant met me in the hall with a guy in a pricey suit. “Detective Beckett, this gentleman is here to see Mr. Guerra.”

  “Wow, that was fast,” I said.

  “My name is Hector Siguenza. I’d like to see my client.”

  “Sure thing.” I led him back down the hallway and opened the door of the interview room. “Go on in.”

  Omar scowled at the lawyer and said, “Where’s my uncle?”

  “Fuck you,” Siguenza said to him. “That’s where he is. Fuck you.”

  The teenager’s jaw hung slack; he looked like he was at a loss for words. I’d have to find out who his uncle was.

  The man in the suit looked at me. “I need to talk to my client.”

  “Of course,” I said and left them alone in the interview room.

  Ruiz was waiting in the hall.

  “We know who his uncle is?” I asked.

  “Yep. Benicio Guerra.”

  Guerra was a big-time criminal defense attorney who’d started on the street and transformed himself through a decade in prison into an apparently upstanding citizen. No one really believed he’d gone legit, but no one had been able to pin anything on him.

  “No shit? Benny War? So that’s how he got a guy in a thousand-dollar suit here before the sun came up.”

  On the way back to the squad room, I checked my watch. We still had two hours until the deadline to file charges. Before I could sit back down at my desk, my cell phone rang. I checked the display: it was Kyle, the crime-scene tech. “What’s up?”

  “You gotta see this.”

  “See what?”

  “The video from the smartphone.”

  “What’s on it?”

  “Everything, man. All of it.”

  I made it downstairs faster than I ever had before.

  3

  SHOES, TWO PAIRS: NEW BALANCE 1123 RUNNING SHOES, WELL USED AND STAINED, SIGNIFICANT WEAR ON OUTSIDE EDGES OF HEELS, MEN’S SIZE 12; MERONA LOAFERS, BROWN, GOOD CONDITION, MEN’S SIZE 10.

  The video begins with Omar Guerra in the fluorescent nighttime glare of a parking garage, taking a two-gallon red plastic fuel can out of the trunk of a relatively new Honda Civic.

  “Gimme the cups,” he says as he unscrews the can and extends the nozzle. From off camera, a hand extends a Super Big Gulp into the frame. Omar removes its plastic cover and carefully fills the cup. They repeat the process and the camera spins around to show Francisco, with one arm in the customary selfie position and the other holding a gasoline-filled cup. Omar raises his own cup in a gesture that almost looks like a toast.

  There’s an expression on his face I can’t quite read. It could be anything from a gleeful grin to an uneasy grimace. I wonder what he’s thinking in that moment.

  Omar hands his cup to Francisco and carefully screws the cap back on the gas can, puts it away, closes the trunk, and makes a point of setting the car alarm.

  The picture cuts out, and then we see Omar’s back as he walks out of the parking structure.

  “That’s the Pike,” I said, immediately recognizing the oceanfront shopping and dining complex.

  “Yeah,” Kyle replied. “Right between Bubba Gump’s and the Aquarium of the Pacific.”

  “Surprised they parked so far away from the scene.”

  “What is it?” he asked. “Maybe a quarter of a mile?”

  “Probably about that. I’ll check it later.”

  On the video, they keep walking along the path toward the harbor.

  I expect them to take a right and cut toward the river sometime soon.

  Omar’s phone chimes, and he reads a text message to Francisco, who is still holding the camera. “Pedro’s over by the trailer park. He found the guy.”

  Another cut in the video, and now they’re just passing the California State University Chancellor’s Office and getting close to the Golden Shore RV Resort.

  Kyle and I knew what was coming, but it was still a shock.

  Omar and Francisco are walking along the bike trail, and the camera pans forward to find another boy waiting for them close to a short wall with a motor home on the other side. He waves when they see him.

  “Pedro!” Omar says, nearly shouting. As they get nearer to him, Pedro gestures toward the mouth of the river, and the three of them begin to move faster, as if they fear their target might get away. “Where’s Jesús?” Omar says.

  I paused the video and made a note: Jesus? Fourth suspect?

  After I hit “Play,” Pedro shakes his head and raises his hands.

  By the time the victim’s distant figure appears in the frame, the boys are practically running. The picture begins to shake erratically from the motion. They close in on him, and he looks over his shoulder. It seems to take a few moments for him to realize they are coming after him. When he does, he turns and begins to shuffle more quickly up the bike path. The boys close in on him swiftly, and when they’re only a few yards away, he turns around and pushes his cart directly into their path. It does nothing to slow them down.

  They catch up to him, and Omar shoves him to the ground. As he struggles back to his feet, panting and stooped with fear, he says only, “Please” in a voice so soft it’s barely audible.

  The three boys are in a semicircle around him, shifting their weight on the balls of their feet, as if the old man were capable of some kind of superhuman burst of speed or dexterity and they need to guard against his inevitable escape.

  Omar makes a noise that might be a laugh. There�
��s a brief pause in which the other two boys look at their leader, as if they can’t quite believe this is really going to happen, and then Omar makes his noise again and throws his cup of gasoline on the unsteady man. Francisco follows suit, and then Omar drops his empty cup and strikes a match, and the man bursts into flames.

  Omar’s visceral excitement is palpable and seems inexhaustible. It only edges into panic when the lights and siren of the squad car on the bridge pull him back from his reverie and remind him of where he is.

  After we finished watching the video, I said, “Is there a shot of the victim’s face anywhere in there that might be good enough to help us?”

  “I’ll go through frame by frame, but I don’t think so. Too dark.”

  Even without the ID, it was enough. With nearly an hour left before our deadline, we charged all three of them with first-degree murder.

  Things were settling down by the time the morning light glowed gray in the eastern sky outside the Homicide Detail’s lone window at the far end of the squad room. I spent another hour preparing the initial inquiry for the California DOJ’s Missing and Unidentified Persons Unit. Because law enforcement never met an acronym it didn’t like, everyone referred to it as MUPS.

  It was just past seven when Patrick Glenn, one of the other homicide detectives, came in and sat down.

  “Long night?” he asked.

  “Nah,” I said as I headed toward my desk. “I’m just getting warmed up.”

  “You caught the case last night, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How you holding up?”

  I wasn’t sure what he meant. It wouldn’t occur to me until much later that I wouldn’t be the only one connecting our homeless victim’s death by fire to that of my wife. “Fine,” I said. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “No reason.” He had a good enough poker face that I didn’t think any more about it. Rather than give me time to make the connection, he pretended to be engrossed by something on his computer screen. “You get that link I sent you?”

  “No. What link?”

  “It’s not work related. I sent it to your Gmail.”

  “Been at this all night. Haven’t had a chance to check. What is it?”

  “Watch it. You’ll like it.”

  “I will. Could you help me out with something?”

  Patrick grinned. “Sure. Just give me their names.”

  He had the least seniority of anyone on the detail. Before Homicide, he’d been in Computer Crimes. Every time I caught a new case with any loose threads, I went to Patrick to ask him to check out the suspects’ digital footprints. It wasn’t laziness on my part, he was just much better at it than I was and regularly came up with things I’d miss. I was always good with the quid pro quo, though. “Can I bring you back something for breakfast?”

  The Potholder Too, a greasy-spoon breakfast joint across the street from the police department headquarters, had opened the year before, replacing the mediocre Mexican restaurant that had operated there for as long as I could remember. I got my usual—the Rancher, an omelet filled with corned-beef hash and bacon—and had begun to think about the case when Lauren, the rookie from the crime scene, came in with Stan. I didn’t really feel like company, and I could have kept my head down in my notes and they would have found another table, but instead I smiled and waved them over. I didn’t want her to think that detectives are all assholes. We pretty much are, but she didn’t need to learn it from me. Stan was still in his uniform, but she had changed into jeans and a sweatshirt. In her street clothes she looked different than she had at the scene. I might not have recognized her if she hadn’t been with her FTO. But it had been a long night for all of us. She was probably just tired, and even though I’d never admit it, I probably was, too.

  “How you guys doing?” I asked as they sat down.

  “Peachy,” Stan said for both of them.

  I looked at Lauren, inviting a comment, but she only managed a weary half smile.

  “What’s the case looking like?” Stan asked.

  “Tight. Don’t see any problems.” I was feeling good about it. We hadn’t even finished breakfast and things were already lining up. Except for two big questions. “Need to identify the victim and try to figure out a motive. Ruiz authorized some patrol hours. You two interested in some overtime?”

  “Yes,” Lauren answered quickly. I couldn’t tell where the enthusiasm came from.

  Stan gave her a stern look. “You sure you’re up for that? Ten minutes before we sat down you said you were going to sleep all day.”

  “I’m up for it.” She looked at me as if for validation of some kind.

  “You can go home for a couple of hours and get some rest. We won’t be ratcheting things up until this afternoon.” I looked at Stan. “You in?”

  “Have I ever turned down overtime?”

  The waitress came back to the table. Stan ordered a Baja omelet while Lauren studied the menu. “The Sailor?” She asked the waitress, “There’s no meat in that, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  She still didn’t seem happy with that option. “I think I’ll just have some coffee.”

  “Eat something,” Stan told her.

  “Toast,” she said. “Sourdough.”

  Stan eyeballed her and was about to say something, but I caught his attention and gave my head a slight shake. There’s nothing wrong with a bland diet after a tough crime scene. At least not when you’ve only got a few weeks on the job.

  We finished our breakfast, and they left me with my files.

  It wasn’t very complicated. We had a solid case with the video recording of the crime. We had the reports of the cops on the scene and the witness at the trailer park. We knew they did it, and we knew how they did it. We’d work on getting more information about the suspects—motive, background, that sort of thing. We’d try to turn the other two against Omar and attempt to find the Jesús mentioned in the video and determine if he’d been involved in the crime. We’d do everything we could to strengthen the case, but really, everything else would be just like wrapping paper and bows. We already had the gift.

  Except for one thing. The identity of the victim. That was the one big question. Maybe we’d get lucky and ID him through missing-persons reports and medical records, maybe the autopsy would give us something, maybe a DNA match would come through, maybe a witness could identify something in his possessions that would give us an answer.

  Back in the squad, after Jen had wrapped up the scene and headed home to get a few hours of sleep, I found Ruiz in his office checking on the morning news shows. He flipped back and forth, and we saw that both KTLA and KTTV led with the murder-by-fire of a homeless man in Long Beach. Neither station gave the story more than ninety seconds. That was good for us. The media always make an investigation more complicated. With any luck, we’d only get one more publicity bump if the video got out, and that would be it. If there was an upside to the lack of identification of our victim, it was that as long as he remained unknown, the media wouldn’t regard the story with any interest. Without a past, they wouldn’t consider him a worthwhile subject. If he’d been a cute middle-class white girl, we’d have had to beat them off with sticks.

  “That wasn’t too bad,” I said after KTLA cut to a story about the recent resurrection of the Twinkie.

  “You get any calls from reporters looking for statements?” Ruiz asked.

  “Nope, and I hope I don’t.”

  “Well, if we can keep the video quiet, you might get your wish.”

  I knew that was true. No matter how gruesome the crime itself, the public never really cares when the murder victim is homeless. But if the footage of the murder got out, everyone would want to watch.

  By nine o’clock in the morning, the thermometer was already close to the triple digits, and the sun reflecting off the concrete of the LA River channel was making me regret my decision to check out the bike path upstream from the crime scene in the daylight. I knew I
wouldn’t get as far as I had hoped to, but I decided to see how much distance I could cover before the impending sunstroke made me turn back.

  It wasn’t very far. A few hundred yards. I stopped beneath the Ocean Boulevard overpass to cool off for a minute in the shade. Someone else had the same idea. There was a small man in tattered, stained jeans and some kind of Converse knockoffs leaning against one of the concrete support columns. He was caked with the ground-in dirt and grime of several weeks on the street, and he had removed his thinning T-shirt and draped it over an olive-drab surplus duffel bag that looked old enough to have seen action in World War II. I couldn’t tell if he had an extreme farmer’s tan or if the portions of his body usually covered by his shirt were simply considerably cleaner than his arms and face. Either way, there was stark contrast.

  “How’s it going?” I asked him.

  He didn’t answer. He just gave a kind of noncommittal nod and looked back down at the ground between his feet. The uniforms had done a canvass before the sun had come up and hadn’t found anyone along the path for at least half a mile. That wasn’t a surprise. Nobody who’s lived in a bad part of town for very long ever heads toward a crime scene. No, the smart traffic always flows in the other direction. I wondered how long he had been there.

  “You know what happened down there last night?” I gestured toward the harbor.

  He still didn’t speak, but at least he was looking at me. There was something in his eyes that I couldn’t figure out—a hesitance, a trepidation, maybe even a fear, that gave me a sense of empathy for him.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’m a cop.” I wasn’t sure how he’d take that. There was a good chance that he’d be as leery of a police officer as he would of the killers themselves. In fact, I thought, it was more of a likelihood. Most people in his position would have a lot more to lose at the hands of a cop than they would from a couple of teen wannabe gangbangers.

  “A man was killed. We think he was homeless.”