by Tyler Dilts
The next thing he knew, David was holding him by the shoulders and telling him to be quiet, that it was okay, everything was all right.
Slowly, he began to calm down. His breathing returned to a more normal rhythm, and he started to cry.
“It’s okay,” David said again. How many times had he said it? Ten? Twenty?
Jesús was embarrassed because of the tears and wiped his face on his hand and then found himself not knowing what to do with his fistful of snot. David went into the bathroom and brought back a box of Kleenex.
“You okay?”
Jesús nodded.
“I think maybe I should call my mom.”
“No, don’t. I’ll just go, okay? You’ll get in trouble.”
“I won’t. She’ll be cool, I swear.”
Jesús didn’t say anything, and David took that as acceptance.
When she got there, less than an hour later, she held Jesús in her arms and let him cry and cry.
He couldn’t remember ever feeling that safe before.
14
DUCT TAPE, 3M BRAND, ONE ROLL: PARTIALLY USED, APPROX. 1/3 REMAINING.
Jesús told Jen and me the story in the car on the way to the station.
“You hungry?” I asked him. He and I were both in the backseat of Jen’s RAV4.
“No,” he said. “David’s mom made bacon and pancakes.”
“She seemed really nice.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Have you talked to my mom?”
“No, not yet. We’ve been trying to get her on her cell phone, but she hasn’t returned any of my calls.”
He looked out the window without answering.
“Do you know where she is?” I asked.
“No.”
“She disappeared with your sister after the shooting.”
“You didn’t keep track of her or something?” he said. “Aren’t you guys supposed to do that?”
I could see the smile in Jen’s eyes in the rearview mirror.
“Yeah, we are. That was somebody else’s case, though. We didn’t know it might be connected to the thing with Pedro until last night.”
“What if they shot them too?” He pulled the seat-belt strap across his chest away from his body and twisted it in his hands.
“They didn’t.”
“How do you know?”
“We’re homicide cops. We know about everybody who gets shot in Long Beach.”
“Is there a lot of people who do?”
“Yeah. But we know about all of them.”
That seemed to relax him. I hadn’t been dishonest with him, but I still felt my conscience nagging at me. We do know about all of them, I thought, eventually.
“When we get to the police station, there are going to be other people who need to talk to you, but we’ll be there, too, okay?”
He looked at me as if he wanted to say something, but he pinched his mouth into a slit and just nodded.
“What’s on your mind, Jesús?” I said.
“I’m scared.”
“It’s going to be okay.”
Jen’s eyes caught mine again and I knew she was thinking the same thing that I was. We were both hoping I hadn’t lied to a frightened teenage boy whose father’s murderer was, in all likelihood, at that very moment hoping to kill him too.
Patrick met us in the squad room. He had a trace of a limp that I probably wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been looking for it, but his left arm was still in the sling he’d left the hospital with the night before.
Jen gave him a sympathetic wince when she saw it. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “It wasn’t your fault. We’re two fully grown detectives. We can handle things.” It was clear from the tone in his voice that he didn’t find any more veracity in that statement than she did.
Ruiz was in his office with a social worker from Child Protective Services who was there to help break the news to Jesús about his father and to evaluate any other needs he might have.
The lieutenant came out and I introduced him to Jesús.
“How are you, son?” He still had faint traces of the Rio Grande in his voice from his days as a Texas Ranger. Otherwise he never would have been able to get away with that “son” appellation in his greeting.
“Okay,” Jesús said.
Ruiz spoke with a warmth in his voice that I’d only heard him use on rare occasions when talking to a victim’s next of kin. “I need you to come into my office for a minute, okay?”
Jesús hesitated.
“You want me to come with you?” I asked.
He looked at Ruiz, then at me. He shook his head, and Ruiz led him across the room and into the office, gently closing the door behind them.
With all the activity, it didn’t seem much like a Saturday after all.
When they came out of the office, Jesús didn’t seem too shaken with the news of his father. “You okay?” I asked.
“Yeah.” He lifted his shoulders slightly in half a shrug. “I barely remember him. He hasn’t talked to us in years.”
“But you tried to call him yesterday.”
“I didn’t know what else to do.”
“I’m sorry,” I said to him.
“Thanks. Now what do we do?”
Jesús, Jen, Patrick, and I set things up in the same conference room where we’d talked to Henry Nichols. We wanted to make the boy as comfortable as possible.
“What happened to your arm?” Jesús asked Patrick.
“I got in a fight,” Patrick said.
“Did you win?”
“Not this time, but there’s going to be a rematch.”
We spent a long time talking. Jesús took us back several months to his initial meeting with Omar and Francisco.
“I thought they were bad news the first time I saw them. They think they’re all big time with their sleeves and everything. But I knew they were going to get Pedro in trouble. Guess I was right.”
He wanted to talk. It had been building up in him since before Bishop’s murder. He had watched his brother going off the rails and felt powerless to help him and afraid to reach out to anyone else. Now that he knew he’d been correct in his predictions, his inaction was troubling him.
Jen said, “There is no way this is your fault. No way at all.”
That seemed to comfort him for a little while, so we tried to nudge him in the direction of talking more about the buildup to the murder.
“I didn’t really know what was going on, right up to the day it was supposed to happen. Pedro told me the other guys wanted me to hang out with them and help them with something, but he didn’t say what they wanted me to do. I didn’t want to do it, but Pedro kept saying that it would be really good for us—the family, he meant. I was worried about how things were going with Maria and my mom, but Pedro kept saying that this would set us up.”
“What did you think they were going to do?”
“I don’t know. I knew it would be bad. Maybe breaking in someplace or something.”
“When did you get out?”
“Not until it was almost time to go. We were at Omar’s house. They have a fancy place, kind of by the beach? Pedro said they wanted me to film something on this cool new Galaxy he got. I like to make videos sometimes. My phone won’t do them, but last year Pedro got a pretty good Android that had video. Sometimes he’d let me use it.”
“And that’s what he wanted you to do on Tuesday?”
“Yeah, but I didn’t know what they wanted me to shoot.”
“How did you find out?”
“I was in the bathroom. I was in there for a while, and when I came back, I heard them talking about how were they going to carry the gas. So I knew they were going to burn something.”
“But you didn’t know what?”
Jesús shook his head.
“What happened then?”
“I asked what they needed gas for. ‘You’ll see,’ Omar said. That scared me even more.”
They were already on the way when Jesús asked Pedro what was really going on.
“This is a really big deal,” Pedro said. “Don’t screw this up. It’s gonna be really good for us.”
“What are we going to do?” Jesús was almost crying, and he knew Pedro could hear it in his voice.
“We’re gonna do a favor for somebody Omar knows. It’s a really big favor.”
“It’s bad, isn’t it?”
“Somebody saw something they shouldn’t have. We’re gonna fix it.”
“What are you going to do, Pedro?”
“We’re gonna fix it.”
“With gas?”
Pedro stared through the windshield at the taillights of the BMW in front of them.
“I don’t want to do this.”
“Don’t be a pussy.”
“You shouldn’t do it either.”
“We don’t got no other choice.”
“Mom’s going to get a new job.”
Pedro looked at him with the saddest expression he’d ever seen on his big brother’s face.
“Please, Pedro, let’s just go home, okay?”
“Too late for that.”
Jesús asked again. But Pedro did that thing he always did when he was done talking. His face became a stone-like mask, unmoving and emotionless.
Jesús knew his brother had said all he would, and if he kept trying, Pedro would just get pissed off. And that would make things even worse.
They were getting close to downtown. Jesús knew what he had to do. When Pedro slowed down at the red light at Ocean and Alamitos, Jesús put one hand on his seat-belt buckle and one on the passenger’s side door handle. As soon as they rolled to a stop, he released the seat belt and flung open the door. Before Pedro could do anything, Jesús was already running past the gas pumps at the 7-Eleven on the corner.
He kept going until he couldn’t run any longer. Around the corner and halfway up the block on First, he stopped and leaned over with his hands on his knees to catch his breath. He looked behind him to see if Pedro was following. It didn’t look like it. Just in case, though, he cut back to Ocean at the corner, figuring that if Pedro went looking for him, he’d guess that Jesús would head straight for home. He wouldn’t go back to Ocean. Pedro wasn’t smart enough for that.
“What did you do then?” I asked.
“I walked up Ocean, then cut over on Junipero and walked home.”
We pressed him for more details. But he wasn’t able to add much to what he’d already given us. We now had confirmation that Bishop’s murder was more than just three kids with sociopathic tendencies. We knew that Omar, Francisco, and Pedro were out to make their bones killing a man who’d witnessed something he shouldn’t have. Another answer that led us to another question. That’s the nature of police work. You keep answering the questions until there aren’t any more to ask. Then your case is either closed or it’s cold. We had Bishop’s killers. We could close the case with what we already had on our plates. People would start pressing us to do that before too long. But that wasn’t enough. Those three teenage wannabes didn’t kill Bishop. They were just the weapon. I wouldn’t be able to rest until I knew who aimed them at him and pulled the trigger.
“What’s going on with his mother?” I asked Ruiz.
“When we try to call, it goes straight to voice mail.”
“Battery’s dead. Wherever she is, she can’t find a charger.”
“That’s what I figured.”
I called Patrick over. It was hard to tell if his limp was almost gone or if he just wanted us to think it was.
“Can we get a GPS location on a cell phone with a dead battery?”
“Probably. A phone usually shuts down before the battery’s completely drained. You know the carrier? Depending on which company it is, we should at least be able to get the location of the phone when it died.”
“Want to see if you can get the info on Felicia Solano’s phone?”
“Does it need to be admissible?” Patrick always asked because after spending six years in Computer Crimes, he was usually able to hack his way into just about any information anywhere online. But there was always the question of how much we were able to do without a court order. It wasn’t as clear-cut as most of our procedures. The technology changed so rapidly that we had to work to keep on top of the latest rulings. One misstep with the wrong digital information could derail a case. Something that was fair game one day might be illegal the next.
Because the lieutenant was standing right next me, I answered, “Yes?”
Ruiz nodded and Patrick headed back to his desk.
“Is Jesús going to stay with the CPS woman?”
“She’s agreed to keep him here for a few hours, while we try to find his mom.”
If I hadn’t been worried about Jesús’s little sister, I probably would have recommended that she get him into the system as soon as she could. But I didn’t want to risk him being separated from Maria for any longer than he had to be. I knew being apart wasn’t doing either one of them any good.
Ruiz managed to convince the lieutenant of the Gang Enforcement section to authorize OT for one of the detectives to come in and help me try to identify the man who’d killed Roberto Solano. Brad Hynes was one of the oldest members of the detail. I didn’t know him well, but we’d been in uniform at roughly the same time and had worked a few cases that were tangentially connected. He was one of the many department cops I knew well enough for a wave or a how’s-it-going in the hallway, but our conversation never went much deeper than that.
“How’s it going?” I said even though we weren’t in the hallway.
“Well, it’s Saturday and I’m at a desk, but otherwise I can’t complain.” The tone in his voice told me he didn’t mind being here. I wasn’t sure if it was just because of the overtime or because he, like me, didn’t have anything better to do on a weekend afternoon. “What do you need?”
“I’m looking to ID someone from a murder last night.”
“We had a murder last night? Surprised I didn’t hear about it.”
“Not Long Beach. Different jurisdiction.”
“Where?”
“Riverside.”
“But you think he’s local?”
“Found a vehicle stolen from Long Beach Airport, figure it’s our guy.”
“And you got a solid description?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Who’s your wit?”
“Me. Saw him myself. Had a few words with him before we knew what he did.”
“Let me fire up the computer. What did he look like?”
“Latino. Midthirties. Big. Six-four, two-fifty. All muscle. Bald with a Fu Manchu and I think some neck tats. At least one on the right side.”
“Could you see what the design was?” His fingers were clicking on the keyboard.
“No. He had a collared shirt. I only saw a bit of it. Looked pointy, like the top of a triangle. Couldn’t tell if it was words or an image. Just the dark ink.”
I waited for him to finish typing and for the computer to pull up possible matches.
“Sound like anybody you know?” I asked.
“Could be a lot of guys,” he said. “Bald’s in these days.” A few more seconds, and the database kicked back a list of names. “Looks like about three dozen. How do you want it? Go straight to the photos?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Here,” he said, rolling to the right in his desk chair. “You go ahead and advance them yourself.”
I moved into the place he’d just moved out of and leaned in. The killer’s face was in my head, but I’d worked with enough eyewitnesses to know that memory is rarely as reliable as we believe it to be. I clicked through the photos quickly to see
if anything would be an instant match for the image I remembered. I gave each photo two or three seconds before I moved on to the next. I’d take each one in as quickly as possible. They were so similar that it often seemed like I was looking at different pictures of the same face, until some difference would register—the spacing of the eyes, the curve of the nose, the squareness of the chin—and I’d click through to the next. I made it through all thirty-seven possibles without any of the faces setting off alarm bells in my head.
Hynes knew what I was doing, and he seemed as disappointed as I did when I got to the last one and shook my head.
“Take it slower this time,” he said.
I did. The second time through I found five possibilities. We made a list of them with their known gang affiliations, and Hynes added his own thoughts about the three he’d had direct experience with.
I studied the list and the photos. At that point, though, I knew I’d be doing calculations about the likelihood of each suspect and that would be influencing my perceptions. Hector Salazar, for instance, with his bounces for second-degree murder and aggravated assault and ties to MS-13, seemed more likely than David Escalante, who’d only gone down once for less than a year on an intent-to-distribute charge. And, of course, it might have been none of them at all.
Still, I had a list of names, so that was something.
By the time I got back upstairs to the squad room, I had a message from the detective from Riverside, Mike McDermott. I called him back.
“Just finished with the autopsy,” he said.
“Find out anything interesting?”
“It doesn’t look like our guy meant to kill Solano. At least not as soon as he did. You remember the duct-tape gag?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Well, at some point, he popped Solano in the nose hard enough to break it.”
“Solano suffocated?”
“Yeah.”
I’d actually seen it before. If an assailant does too good a job and makes a gag airtight, the victim can only breathe through their nose. A broken nose will cause the sinuses to swell and fill with mucus and blood, cutting off the airways. With the mouth blocked, asphyxiation can occur in only a few minutes. Sometimes the assailant figures out what’s happening, sometimes they don’t.