by Tyler Dilts
Apartments 2B and 2C were both dark. As we walked slowly toward Solano’s door, the floor below us creaked and the railing rattled. We stopped before the last window and listened. The curtains there were closed as well. Nobody lived in the el Ray for the view.
The only sound coming from the apartment was a dull monotone that sounded like someone talking on the TV or the radio. It wasn’t loud enough to tell for sure which it was.
At the end of the landing, there was a good five feet between Solano’s door and the railing. The doorknob was on the right, so if someone cracked the door or used a safety chain, one of us could hide against the wall on the other side of the door. I gestured for Patrick to move into that space. He did and I knocked.
“Mr. Solano!” I said, rapping on the door. “Police. We need to talk to you.” I gave it a few seconds and knocked again. “Mr. Solano, it’s the police. We need to talk to you.” After the second round, I heard someone moving inside, and a shadow partially blocked the sliver of light along the curtain’s edge.
The door cracked open about an inch. An eye peered around the edge of the jamb. There was a solid safety latch, the sort that hotels use, spanning the small gap.
“Mr. Solano?” I asked, holding open my badge holder so he could see my ID.
On the other side of the doorway, Patrick had his back to the wall and his hand under his coat on the grip of his Glock. I was careful not to look directly at him and give away his presence and position, but in my peripheral vision I could see him give his head a single shake.
“Sir, I need to ask you a few questions about Jesús.”
The man in the apartment said, “Okay. What?” His voice was soft and flat, and I couldn’t see enough of his face to get a read on his expression.
“Sir, can I come inside?”
He took a quick look at something behind him inside the apartment, then looked back at me. “I’ll come out,” he said.
The door closed, and we heard him flip the latch back against the doorjamb. I moved my hand inside my jacket to where the grip of my pistol hung under my left shoulder, and I very briefly made eye contact with Patrick. I relaxed slightly as the door opened, knowing he had me covered.
The man who stepped out in front of me was thickly muscled and tall. He had a goatee and a shaved head and wore a long-sleeved black dress shirt buttoned all the way up. I took a few steps backward, and he moved with me. The light from the window hit the side of his head, and, though I couldn’t be sure in the dim light, there appeared to be some neck ink peeking out of the top edge of his collar.
“What’s going on with Jesús?” he asked. “Is he in some kind of trouble?”
“Honestly, Mr. Solano, we don’t know. We need to talk to him about his brother.”
“His brother.” The big man pondered that for a moment. “Pedro?”
“Yes, Pedro. You looked like you had to think about that name.”
“He has other brothers. And I haven’t seen those two in years.”
“Other brothers with different mothers?”
“Yeah. So?”
“I’m just asking for the record, sir. These details could be important. You say it’s been years since you’ve seen Jesús? Have you had any contact with him at all?”
“No, nothing.”
“Well, then, thank you, sir. Would you give me a call if you hear anything at all from him?”
“Yes, of course.” He exhaled and his posture softened. He thought he’d made it.
He started to turn toward the door.
“Just one other thing, Mr. Solano.”
The man’s jaw clenched, and he transferred his weight to the balls of his feet. The look on his face was one I’d seen a thousand times before. He was trying to figure out if I believed he was the man he was pretending to be.
“Could I see some ID?”
I was able to set my feet and get my left arm up to block the punch, but he still connected with enough force to knock me off balance and drive my guard into my side hard enough that I lost some wind.
Patrick moved in with a kick to the back of his calf that dropped him to one knee.
I threw a hard right cross downward into his face, which seemed to have little effect.
Patrick moved in to take him to the ground with an arm bar, but the big man muscled his way out of the hold and thrust himself up and back.
The move startled Patrick and caught him off guard. He reached around the man’s neck and locked his forearm into a solid choke, but the two of them had built so much momentum that they were going to hit the railing.
I was afraid they were so tall that they’d topple over it, so I rushed forward to try to stop them.
I never had the chance.
The railing gave way as if it had been made of balsa wood, and then they were gone.
12
ZIPLOC BAG, QUART-SIZED, CONTAINING: COMB, NAIL CLIPPERS, ADVIL (FOUR INDIVIDUAL-DOSE PACKETS).
When I got to the edge of the landing and looked down, I was surprised to see Patrick alone on the ground. He saw me above him and yelled “That way!” He gestured toward the back of the building, and I turned just quickly enough to see a dark shape turn the corner and move out of view.
Patrick looked up at me and said, “I’m okay! Go!”
I took off as fast as I could to the front of the building. As I reached the top of the stairs, I saw the black shirt run out the front gate. Taking the steps three at a time, I gave chase. He turned the corner at the end of the block, and by the time I got there, he was gone. I ran in the direction he had gone and stood in the middle of the intersection looking down each street for a flash of movement or a shape, but there was nothing to see except oncoming traffic. On the sidewalk, two teenagers put their heads down and pretended I wasn’t there.
Gasping for breath, I called in a 911-officer-needs-assistance and turned around to run back to Patrick.
To my surprise, he was standing up. Wincing, but up on both feet.
“Help’s on the way,” I said. “How bad is it?”
“Ankle’s messed up, but I can stand on it. Shoulder hurts worse.”
I had watched him go over and knew he’d gotten lucky when his hand found the railing and caught it with a grip strong enough to slow his fall and to peel the big man off of him. Before the railing gave way completely, it had provided enough support for him to flip himself completely over and drop to the ground feetfirst.
“That fucker, though, the only thing that broke his fall was the wall. Just grunted and got up and ran.”
We heard the approaching sirens, so we headed to the front of the building with our hands up and our badges held high.
Patrick’s left arm was bent at the elbow, though, and his fingertips barely reached above his shoulder. It hurt too much to go any higher.
I said, “On a scale of one to ten, with ten—” I stopped midsentence when the headlights of a Riverside Police cruiser lit us up.
Two uniforms popped out and pointed their guns at us over the opened car doors. “Stop!” the driver yelled.
We did. They saw our badges.
“I’m Danny Beckett. I made the 911 call. This is my partner, Patrick Glenn.”
They relaxed, but not completely. The cop on the passenger’s side holstered his pistol and came toward us. “Can I see your IDs?”
We held them out for him to take a look at. More units were pulling up outside. An ambulance rounded the corner.
I told the responding officer that a suspect was fleeing on foot in the area, and he called it in. By the time the paramedics were examining Patrick, a helicopter was circling the neighborhood and making pass after pass with its spotlight.
“We need to check out the apartment,” I said. “The man we came to see could be bleeding on the floor inside.”
“The sergeant’s on his way. We’ll let him decide how to handle it.”
I didn’t agree, but we were out of our jurisdiction and had no authority. “What’s your name?”
>
“Rosales.”
“I’m Beckett.” I held out my hand and he shook it.
Patrick was sitting in the back of the ambulance. “They don’t think anything’s broken, but my shoulder’s dislocated and my ankle’s starting to swell up. I’m trying to talk them out of taking me to the ER.”
“You should go,” I said. “Don’t take any chances.”
“What’s going on upstairs?”
I told him.
“Well, I’ll go to the hospital, but not until we see what’s inside.”
The next five minutes felt like fifty. When the sergeant arrived, he got the rundown from the first responders, went upstairs to talk to the two uniforms watching the door, and then called someone on his cell phone before he decided to check in with Patrick and me.
He was short and wiry, and his hair and mustache were so dark and monochromatic that they must have been dyed. The brass nametag on his chest read F. Berry.
“You’re Long Beach?” he said to us.
“Yes, sir, sergeant,” I said. “We are Long Beach.”
“That’s quite a drive just to take a shit in someone else’s yard.”
“That wasn’t our intention. We just wanted to ask a guy some questions.”
“Sure, if you say so.” He eyeballed us so hard that Patrick and I deliberately avoided making eye contact with each other. If we had, one or both of us would have laughed in his face. Berry was the kind of cop you can find in significant quantities in any large police department. They get used to people doing what they say because they somehow managed to pass a test that put some stripes on their sleeve, and they confuse the deference that comes to them by way of their rank with some kind of genuine respect or earned authority, and most often they remain completely oblivious to the mockery and derision that always surround them, lurking just out of earshot.
“What are we going to find inside?” he asked.
“I don’t have any idea.”
“We’re going to wait for SWAT.”
“Don’t. The man who attacked us was an imposter. Roberto Solano could be bleeding out on the floor of his apartment. If you don’t want to take responsibility, I’ll go in right now.”
“Oh,” Berry said, his voice thick with condescension. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes,” I said with as much earnestness as I could muster, “I would.”
“I’ll back him up,” Patrick said.
“Great, that’s just great.”
“Please, go in. If there was another suspect inside we’d know by now.”
“Sarge,” Rosales said, “I don’t think we should wait.” He spoke with an edge of experience in his voice that his sergeant would never lay claim to because it was the voice Berry mistakenly believed he already possessed.
Berry looked at the officer, then back at me, and then once more at the officer. Then he spoke as if he had made the decision himself. “Take whoever you need and go check it out.”
Rosales looked at me. “You guys are Homicide?”
I nodded.
“Looking for a missing kid?”
“Yeah.”
“Come on upstairs.” Rosales rounded up two more uniforms and led us up to Solano’s apartment.
“Let us go in,” he said to me. “Soon as we clear it, you can check it out.”
“Thanks,” I said.
It took them all of about ninety seconds, and then they were back out on the landing. I moved toward the door and looked inside.
The man I assumed to be Solano was in the middle of the living room strapped to a dining chair with heavy-duty plastic cable ties and duct tape. He was slumped over, and his face was bruised and swollen and dripping blood onto the worn rust-colored carpet.
I looked at Rosales. There were small dots of blood on the index and middle fingers of his right hand from checking for Solano’s pulse. He wiped them on his pant leg and shook his head.
“Still warm?”
He nodded.
I fought the urge to cross the threshold. But if there’s one thing every homicide cop knows, it’s that you never violate someone else’s scene.
The Riverside detective who caught the case was a long-timer named McDermott. After he apologized for Berry, I gave him a detailed statement about our case and told him I’d copy him on all the reports.
“You have any other leads on Jesús?”
“None yet. I’m hoping he ran. If there’s an upside to this, it’s that if they had anything solid on him, they wouldn’t be torturing his father.”
“That’s true. I’ll let you know if we come up with anything about the Solano boy. Might come across someone who knows something about him.”
A uniform approached us. “Detective McDermott?” she said.
“Yeah?”
“We think we might have the suspect’s car. A witness on the next block saw a man run across the street and get into a Ford Fusion. We got a description and a partial plate. It was reported stolen from Long Beach Airport this morning.”
“Well,” McDermott said, “looks like the ball’s back in your court.”
While I was waiting for Patrick at the ER, I called Ruiz and Jen to update them.
Ruiz had already heard from the Riverside PD brass and was more concerned about Patrick’s condition than anything else. I told him it didn’t look bad and that I’d update him when we were on the way home.
Jen didn’t take the news as well.
“Fuck,” she said when I told her how the incident outside Solano’s apartment had gone down.
“It’s okay,” I said to her.
“No, it’s not. I knew I should have gone with you.”
“Why? So you could have gone over the railing, too?”
The silence that greeted that comment caused me to regret my choice of words.
I said, “I just meant that I don’t like to think about something like that happening to you.”
She was still quiet. I wasn’t sure if I’d insulted her by suggesting that she wouldn’t have handled the altercation any better than we had, or if it was something else.
“I know it probably wouldn’t have,” I said, “but thinking about you getting hurt bothers me.”
“It’s okay, Danny.”
“It is?”
“Yeah. But you know I wouldn’t have gone over that railing, right?”
A nurse wheeled Patrick out into the loading zone outside the ER, his arm in a sling and his ankle wrapped with an elastic bandage. He had a large ice pack slung over his shoulder.
I opened the passenger door and heard Patrick say, “Thanks for everything, Kelly.”
“You’re welcome. Now get in the car,” she said as she squeezed his shoulder and smiled at him. “You’ve got a long drive.”
When he closed the door, I said, “She’s cute.”
“She’s a really good nurse.”
“Call Jen,” I said. “She thinks it’s her fault you went over the railing.”
“How could it be her fault?”
“She said if she had been here, she could have handled him.”
“When the two of us couldn’t?”
The traffic light at the hospital’s exit was red, and it gave us the time to exchange a glance in which we both acknowledged silently that, in all likelihood, she was right.
When I parked the unmarked cruiser in the alley behind my duplex, the clock on the dash read 4:15. It was Saturday, so on the off chance that I was able to sleep, I wouldn’t have to get up early. At that point, though, the likelihood of a restful early morning seemed remote. I was wired from the events of the night before, and my mind was racing with the implications of the murder of Jesús and Pedro’s father and the man who killed him.
The stolen car almost surely meant that the man Patrick and I had fought on the walkway outside of Solano’s apartment was from Long Beach. Honestly, I would have assumed that even without the evidence. The murders on Ohio and in Riverside were too much to be a coincidence. T
hey were related, and the connection was Jesús.
I tried his cell phone again, but it went straight to his voice mail.
“Jesús,” I said. “This is Detective Danny Beckett again. I know you need help. You’re not in any trouble. You did the right thing. Call me. Wherever you are. I’ll come to you. Maria needs you. Let me help.”
When I cut the connection, I felt like I’d just drunk-dialed someone after a bad date. I’d meant to be reassuring, to give him the sense that calling us was his best and safest option. Instead, I sounded desperate, as if I needed him more than he needed me. For all I knew, that was true. And whoever was gunning for him had a strong enough desire to keep him quiet when there was no evidence at all that he’d said anything to us. Would he really be safer if he contacted me? Or would that put him even more at risk?
That morning I felt as lost as I had at any time since we first responded to Bishop’s murder. Our first instincts, that the three boys had burned the homeless man in some kind of twisted attempt to gain notoriety and street cred, seemed to be more and more off base. I’d wanted to understand what motivated them and to know if there was something at work beyond their sociopathic urges. Now that it seemed that there was more to the case than we had initially suspected and that they were not the only ones responsible for the immolation, I felt no sense of relief.
Very few murders are purely the result of psychopathy or sociopathy. Most are committed because of money, because of power, or because of sex. There’s almost always a motivation that can be tied back to one of those basic desires or to some combination of them.
It was only just now striking me that my initial drive to find some baser cause for the three boys’ actions was the wrong thing to hope for. I wanted this crime to make sense, and now that it seemed that there might very well be something more complicated at work, I knew that what I should have wished for was that simple, original instinct—that this was an act of violent insanity and that to try to make any more of it would only lead to more suffering.
But there was more to it, and I knew that I had to figure out what it was. I decided then to see if I could get anyone from Gang Enforcement to come in to the station the next day and help me try to identify Roberto Solano’s killer.