A Cold and Broken Hallelujah

by Tyler Dilts

  When he came out, cradling his paper grocery bag to his chest with one arm instead of using the handles, he found me leaning against his driver’s side door.

  “Detective Beckett,” he said with the expression of a constipated man working too hard on a toilet. “What a pleasant surprise.”

  “Hey, Benny.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “I just wanted to say hi.”

  “Hi,” he said.

  When I didn’t say anything, he put the bag down on the trunk of his car, adjusted it carefully, and watched to make sure it wouldn’t slide off. “And?”

  “Stay away from Jesús.”

  “What?”

  “Jesús Solano. Hands off.”

  “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Okay then. I’ll stay away. Anything else, or can I go now?”

  “I’m not sure you’re being sincere.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake. Can you just get to the point?”

  “He wasn’t involved. He doesn’t know anything.”

  “All right.” He was starting to lose his patience.

  So I kept pushing. “Keep your goon away from him.”

  The teardrop scar under his eye twitched. “Or what?”

  He didn’t realize he’d just crossed the line. “Or everybody’s going to know your son’s looking at death row.”

  Anger flashed in his eyes and, just as quickly, disappeared. “So you know about that?” He shrugged, but it wasn’t as casual as he wanted me to believe. “It was only a matter of time before the DNA came back.”

  “How’s your brother going to take the news?”

  “Like he handles everything else. Exactly the way I tell him to.” I could see the tension in his jaw. It wasn’t as much as I had hoped for, but it was a start.

  Still leaning against his door, I eyeballed him hard and said, “That’s not actually the threat anyway.”

  “No? What is?” He sighed and feigned exasperation. Benny was used to being the one making the threats, not the one receiving them. “I suppose you’ll never stop until you find some real dirt on me? You’ll never rest until you figure out a way to put me back inside? Something like that?”

  “No,” I said, knowing I had to raise the stakes if I wanted him to take me seriously.

  “What then?”

  “If anything happens to Jesús, I’ll kill you.”

  I held his gaze long enough for him to realize that I was serious. He needed to believe that I’d go to any length to protect Jesús. And I needed to believe it too.

  His eyes narrowed, and in them I saw the Benny who’d done eight years and broken off a shank in an old man’s liver. And even as I saw him, I knew that he saw me.

  I stood up, the Jag rocked slightly on its suspension, and the bag of groceries slid down the sheet metal and off the edge of the trunk. Something glass shattered when it hit the pavement.

  25

  SPEED STICK REGULAR DEODORANT, TWO-PACK, ONE STICK PARTIALLY USED.

  It would take two or three days to get everything set up, so in the downtime I went through the shopping-cart inventory again, looking for something I might have missed or that I hadn’t given enough thought to before, something that might connect to something else or lead me down a new path. What hadn’t I thought of yet? What was there on the list that could help me figure out who Bishop was?

  Could any of the clothes tell me anything? There were no logos or any distinguishing marks. They were mostly store brands from Walmart and Target and places even lower on the consumer food chain. The lab hadn’t found traces of anything other than Bishop himself on them. The same was true of the grooming and personal-care items. Nothing unusual about any of it.

  That left only the other miscellaneous items. I felt like we’d accounted for the CDs and that the books had been a dead end.

  What about the keys? Other than one—an ignition key to an old Volkswagen with the VW logo stamped out of the metal head—they were generic. Doorknobs and deadbolts. One padlock key. None with any distinguishing characteristics. The locksmith had confirmed my suspicion that there was really no way to trace them. In that way, they were similar to Bishop’s postmortem dental records—useful only if we could find something to test them against. If we had a door, we could match a key to a lock, but without it, they were of no use at all.

  I looked again at the photo of the key chain. The fob had a blue design on white background sandwiched between two scratched and chipped clear-plastic panels. When I examined it more closely, I realized what the design was: the silhouette of a bucking horse.

  There was nothing in the notes about the design. I might even have been the first person to look closely enough at it to determine what it actually was.

  A blue horse. I wondered what it might be connected to, so I started Googling. “Blue horse” got about 544 million hits. That narrowed it down.

  Blue Horse was the name of the first album by the Be Good Tanyas. I had a few of their songs in my iTunes, so I started playing them and listened to “Song for R” while I read through the other results.

  There was a Blue Horse Saddlery in Los Altos. There was Bluehorse Associates, which was a pioneer in sustainability metrics. There was the Blue Horse Lounge in Ceres, California, which only managed to average two and a half stars on Yelp. There was Blue Horse Charities and Blue Horse Kona Coffee and Blue Horse Rescue and Blue Horse Repertory and the Blue Horse Inn. There was even an episode of Gunsmoke called “Blue Horse.” I spent forty minutes clicking on links and searching for anything resembling the logo on the key chain and didn’t see anything at all that came close.

  I switched to images and looked at hundreds of blue horses of every imaginable form, and clicked on the “Show more results” button at the bottom of the page until the results field contained almost no blue horses at all, just random images that seemed completely unrelated to the search term.

  The final image on the page was a photograph of a woman with bright-red hair in a white dress on a sad-looking mount that had somehow been painted or dyed a pale blue. I felt bad for that horse.

  There was nothing that matched the keychain.

  I remembered then that a few months earlier, Patrick had shown me how to use Google image search. I dug around in the menu until I found it. I clicked on the little camera in the search field and then clicked on the button that allowed me to upload the photo of the key chain. When I had it uploaded, I hoped for a break and clicked again. No matches.

  Shit.

  Did that mean that there were no matches because the blue horse silhouette was nowhere to be found online, or was it only because it was a photo of a keychain when what I really needed to search for was the image itself? I had no idea. I made a note to myself to ask Patrick for help as soon as I had the chance.

  I sat there for a few minutes trying unsuccessfully to come up with another strategy. The time displayed in the upper right corner of my MacBook screen told me that it wasn’t even two a.m. yet. Fuck it, I thought. Patrick answered on the third ring.

  “You up?” I asked.

  “No, I’m not up. Who is this? Danny? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. I just need a favor.”

  “What is it?” He was alert and focused. It doesn’t take long, once you’re assigned to one of the major detective details, to learn to wake yourself quickly in response to a middle-of-the-night phone call.

  “I’m trying to do a Google image search and I need some help.”

  There was a very long silence.

  I said, “Don’t hang up.”

  “You called at two in the morning to get help with a Google search?”

  “Yes.”

  There was another long silence.

  “Don’t hang up.”

  He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly and loudly. “What do you need?”

  I told him.

  “That’s just basic image editing. You can’t d
o that?”

  “Uh . . .”

  “Okay, just send me the photo.”

  He hung up.

  I sent him an e-mail with the picture of the key fob as an attachment. Less than three minutes later he sent me a blank reply with a new attachment titled “seriously?.jpg.” I opened it. He’d edited the photo to isolate the image of the blue horse in such a way that it no longer even looked like the photo it had been. Now it resembled nothing so much as a piece of old blue clipart. I saved the file to my desktop, opened the Google image search window again, and uploaded the new file.

  There was a hit.

  The blue horse was the logo of the Bishop Union High School Broncos.

  “Bishop,” Jen said. “I never even thought of the town.”

  “Neither did I. Ever been there?”

  “That’s the place where you have to put tire chains on your car when you’re going to Mammoth, right?”

  Mammoth Mountain was five hours north of LA on the other side of the Sierras from Yosemite and a prime destination for serious Southern California skiers who weren’t satisfied with the smaller and less impressive resorts closer to the city. I’d never been much of a skier, but I’d been there on three or four occasions with Megan and her sister and brother-in-law, who’d spend the day on the black diamond runs while I took beginner’s lessons on the children’s slope for an hour or two before I’d give up and wander around the town or see a movie.

  But the town of Bishop was far less memorable. It was one of those places that I only ever think of as being on the way to someplace else. Like Baker or Barstow or Bakersfield. We have a lot of those that start with Bs.

  By eight, I was on the phone with someone named Pam at the Bishop Police Department. The website had told me the PD had fourteen sworn officers and a handful of administrative support staffers. Pam was, apparently, at the top of the civilian employee pecking order.

  “So,” she said to me, “all you have is the keychain with the high-school logo on it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “That and the fact that the only name anyone here seemed to know him by was ‘Bishop.’ Figure that’s way too much to be a coincidence.”

  “I would certainly have to agree with you.” From the sound of her voice, I figured her for early fifties, with a long stretch of service to her organization. She seemed to know the procedures cold. “What would you like us to do?”

  “I know you’re a small department. You have enough manpower up there to stay up to date with MUPS?”

  “Oh, yes. Because we are so small, we make sure we’re on top of that. Never can tell when we’ll need help from the state.”

  “Do you happen to know if your cold cases are on file as well?”

  “Back to 2000. Before that’s hit or miss.”

  I took that as good news. If Bishop was indeed from the town and had gone missing before the turn of the century, his case might never have been entered into the system. If that was the case, it might mean there was useful information and explain why it didn’t turn up in the MUPS search.

  “Pam, if I were to send you a set of prints, do you think someone could check it against your older files?”

  “How far back would you like us to go?”

  Until you get a hit, I thought. “As far as you can.”

  “Well, that could take a bit of work. I’ll have to get the chief to approve it.”

  “Would it help if I got a request from my boss?”

  “No, let me just run it past him after he’s had his coffee. Get him to sign off on it and expedite it so the request doesn’t sit in a pile until we have a slow day.”

  “I’d really appreciate that.”

  “Happy to help. You send the prints, and I’ll let you know what he says.”

  I sat at my desk doing paperwork until she called me back at a quarter after ten.

  “Oh, he grumbled and went on and on about it like he does, LA this and LA that, but he put Lewis on it, so it’ll get done right.”

  “Thank you, Pam. I owe you one.”

  Late that afternoon my iPhone chimed with a new e-mail. At the next stoplight I looked down and saw the notification on my lock screen that told me it had been sent from an e-mail address that I didn’t recognize. When I opened my inbox and looked more closely, though, I realized it was from an @bishoppd.org address. I hadn’t been expecting such a quick response.

  Before I could open it, the phone rang. It was Pam. I pulled over to the curb and stopped the car just in time to prevent the call from going to my voice mail.

  “Beckett,” I said.

  “Hello, Detective, this is—”

  “Pam. How are you?”

  “Good. I think I have some good news for you.”

  “Did you just send me an e-mail?”

  “We found a match for those prints.”

  For weeks I’d been trying to figure out who Bishop really was. Not just to help make the case, but because I needed to know, I needed to determine not just his identification, but his identity. Why? What made him different from a dozen other John Does whose murders I had investigated? That question had been darting around the edges of my awareness since the very first night by the river. The fact that he died by fire, as Megan had, was certainly part of the complex equation, but I think I knew even then that there was more to my need. Even as I was about to learn his real name, I still didn’t quite grasp the significance of what I’d been doing all along—idealizing him, transforming him into some kind of a mythic figure, denying the truth of who he really was, who he must have been. Again, I asked myself why he was different, or more accurately, why I needed him to be. I still couldn’t figure it out.

  26

  BUNGEE CORDS, FIVE: ASSORTED LENGTHS AND COLORS.

  Bishop’s real name was William Fischer, DOB 8/26/51. He’d been a resident of Bishop, California, for most of the 1980s. He had a wife, now deceased, and a daughter. He’d never been listed as missing, but he had an arrest record that included three domestic disturbances, two DWIs, a drunk and disorderly, and a misdemeanor charge for battery.

  Pam had sent me his record. I looked at the photos from his arrests. It was hard to tell that he was the same man from the photo Henry had given us. I had to look closely at the bone structure, the shape of his nose, the set of his eyes. But the more I studied the face, the more certain I became. It was him.

  With the solid ID, I was able to find a half a dozen more arrests spread across California throughout the early ’90s. Based on the dates, it appeared he left Bishop sometime in ’88 or ’89. Then he apparently headed to the coast, where he was picked up for assault in Santa Cruz. The charges were dropped. The first vagrancy hit was in ’92 in Salinas. He spent a few days in the city lockup and was released on his own recognizance. He drifted south over the next few years. The most recent arrest had been in Oxnard in ’96. No charges were filed in that case either.

  I would have expected to get a fingerprint match from at least one of those incidents, but they were relatively minor infractions in small towns like the city of Bishop, so it wasn’t too great a surprise that none of his prints had found their way into the federal database.

  That was the last record I could find of William Fischer. I’d need to follow up on everything I found in regard to the arrests. But first I’d need to find his daughter, Rose.

  With the help of public records and the DMV, I had an address and a phone number for her in less than an hour.

  When I told Jen I had Bishop’s daughter, she asked, “How are you going to handle it?”

  “I’ll call.”

  I did. It went straight to her voice mail.

  Her message was short and direct. “This is Rose. Leave a message.” Her voice was indistinct—neither particularly high nor low, and there wasn’t much affect to it. Nothing that gave me any sense of her personality.

  “Hello, Ms. Fischer,” I said. “My name is Danny Beckett. I’m a detective with the Long Beach Police Department. I may have some informati
on regarding your father.” I left my number and asked her to call me back as soon as she could. “You can call anytime. Thanks for your assistance.”

  “Thanks for your assistance?” Jen said.

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “She hasn’t assisted you with anything yet.”

  “I’m thanking her in advance. That way she’ll feel compelled to call back.”

  “You don’t think news of her father is a good enough reason?”

  We bickered over the inconsequential comment because we didn’t want to address anything real. The emotional rush I’d felt when the ID came through was beginning to wane. I knew better, but on some basic level I’d hoped that discovering Bishop’s real name would somehow magically fill the emptiness, that it would grant me some sort of grand epiphany that would bring sense and order and closure to the last few weeks of unanswered questions.

  Instead, it was only a name.

  And a rap sheet.

  Now, I realized, I was transferring that burden to a dead man’s daughter, hoping she’d somehow be able to fill the gaping hole that was not knowing, hoping she’d finish the story. I was doing what I’d done all my life—trying to understand the people I’d lost. My father, Megan, and every victim whose death I’d ever investigated. Why would I expect to find the answers here?

  It was after nine when I got the return call. I had already added her number to my contacts so I’d know who it was before I answered. That was the thing I liked most about cell phones. Caller ID. Those three or four seconds between the moment the call comes in and the moment I answer have become so necessary to me that I feel disadvantaged when I answer a call from a number I don’t recognize or when the display reads “Unknown.” But I knew who was calling. I knew what I was going to say and how I was going to say it.

  “Detective Danny Beckett,” I said in what might have been the softest tone I’d used with that particular combination of words.

  “This is Rose Fischer.” There was a familiar nervousness in her voice. No one associates messages from detectives with good news. That usually comes across in people’s voices when they return our calls. If they return our calls. “I’m sorry to get back to you so late.”