Cold Hit ss-5

by Stephen Cannell

  "Great White Mike?" My jaw dropped. He was the biggest asshole on the sixth floor. The guy actually kept makeup in his briefcase because he loved being on TV. "Guess we'll be having lots and lots of news conferences," I said.

  "Give the guy a chance, Shane."

  "White Mike will run this task force like a Vegas lounge act. At least, don't bullshit me."

  "Okay, no bullshit?"

  I waited.

  "You've had seven weeks. Nothing's happened. Now we're trying this."

  I left her office and headed down to Homicide Special. Crossing the squad room to my cubicle was a little like being the losing pitcher in the locker room after the seventh game of the World Series. I heard way too many Good trys and Not your faults.

  When I got to my desk, I had a message waiting: Call Fran 555-6890. I picked up the phone and dialed.

  When Fran Farrell answered, her voice sounded quiet, almost subdued.

  "It's Shane," I said. "You called?"

  "It's about Zack."

  "You have any idea where he is?"

  "He's here. You better come over."

  "I can't come now, Fran. I've got my hands full. Our Fingertip case just went postal."

  "You better come anyway." "Why?"

  "He tried to commit suicide. I came home and found him bleeding in my bathtub with his wrists cut. Get over here, Shane. He wants to see you."

  The house was a ranch-style, cream-colored bungalow with green trim in the Valley just off Rossmore. I parked the Acura at the curb and walked up the drive toward the front door. It was 11 P. M. I rang the bell, not sure of how I was going to handle this.

  The door was opened by a red-haired boy about Chooch's age. It had been a while since I'd seen him, but I guessed this was Zack Junior. He was rawboned, with Zack's rugged Irish looks and blue-green eyes.

  "I'm Shane. Zack Junior, right?" He nodded. "We haven't seen each other in a while," I added.

  "Mom's in the living room," he said without expression.

  I moved into the house and met Fran coming into the foyer. Young Zack disappeared down the hall. Like most kids caught up in a divorce, he didn't know which side to be on and ended up just trying to stay out of sight. Fran was wearing stretch jeans and a polo shirt. She was one of those people who should avoid stretch pants. She had a round face and an usually pleasant demeanor. I'd known her briefly when I'd partnered with Zack in the West Valley, but that experience had colored her opinion of me. There was always a hint of disapproval. She gave me a cursory hug and then pulled back and fixed me with a hard amber-eyed stare.

  "Get him out of here, Shane."

  "I'll try."

  "I can't do this. It was hard enough throwing him out the first time. What on earth was he thinking? In my bathtub? I come home with the boys and find him bleeding, with Sinatra singing on the CD."

  "What's going on with him, Fran? It's like all of a sudden the bottom just dropped out."

  She snorted out a bitter laugh. "You don't know the half of it."

  "If I'm going to help him I gotta know what's eating him up."

  "You can't help him. His problems go all the way back to his childhood. I didn't even know about most of it till his mother called a month ago. Since he got back from Florida, it's gone to a whole new place."

  "Look, Fran, I need to-"

  "I'm not getting into it, Shane. Can't and won't. Just make him go."

  "Where is he?"

  She led the way into the den at the back of the house.

  Chapter 13

  Zack was in a big Archie Bunker chair parked in front of a dark big-screen TV. He was staring out the window at a small backyard with a lit kidney-shaped pool. His wrists were wrapped. The bandaging looked professional. I knew Zack wouldn't go to the emergency room. They'd be forced to report an attempted suicide and that would be career death for a cop. I remembered he'd told me that before they were married, Fran was an E. R. nurse.

  We were standing in the threshold, but Zack was still staring out at the backyard. "Shane's here," Fran said. Her voice had the same detached, impersonal tone you'd use showing a plumber where the leak was.

  Zack was wearing a maroon bathrobe and slippers. When he turned, I saw that he had removed the splint from his nose but still looked at me around a swollen purple mess. His eyes were expressionless, like holes punched in cardboard. Fran stepped back into the hall, closed the door, and disappeared.

  "Intense," I said, as I crossed the room toward a wing chair by the window and sat on the arm. "Propped in the tub, wrists up, bleeding dangerously. Very operatic."

  Zack didn't want to look at me, and turned his gaze back toward the window.

  "What's the deal? Did that fancy Glock jam?" I said.

  "Can it. I didn't call so you could come over and piss on me."

  "Hey, Zack, what game are we playing? I'm not a psychiatrist and, obviously, I don't want to say anything that's gonna drive you over the edge, but my bullshit meter is redlined, man."

  He still wasn't looking at me.

  "How's this supposed to go now? You come over here and slash your wrists, but you don't quite get the job done and Fran and the boys come home and find you tits up in the tub with Sinatra singing, 'My Way.'

  the fuck outta here," he said, his voice a whisper.

  I stood and started toward the door, but then stopped and turned back. "Zack, I owe you a lot. You were there for me and I'm trying to be there for you, but you gotta admit, even at my worst I didn't pull a bunch a weak shit like this."

  "I try and kill myself and you call it weak shit?"

  "If you're gonna check off the ride, don't do it in a bathtub like some Valley transvestite. Screw that damn Glock into your ear and take care of business. You want my take?" He turned his eyes down so I continued: "You're hoping Fran will let you come back and this is some kinda guilt trip."

  Then his eyes filled with tears.

  "Get me outta here, Shane."

  "Done."

  I left him in the den and went to find Fran. She had washed his clothes. They were still warm from the dryer. In the harsher light of the laundry porch, I thought I saw the last remnants of an old bruise under her left eye. There was a darkening there, a faint smudge covered over with heavy pancake. I returned to the den, closed the door, and handed him the clothes.

  He started rambling. "My boy looks at me like I'm. ." He couldn't finish. "Like I'm some kinda monster."

  If he'd been knocking Fran around that could be why. But I didn't know that for sure. I didn't have any proof. I was confused and conflicted. When he finished dressing, I said, "Let's go. You got everything?"

  We walked to the car and I loaded him in. Then I went up to where Fran was standing on the front porch watching us. The strain of all this was adding years to her face.

  "Where're you gonna take him?" she asked, concerned. "I don't know if he should be alone. He could try this again."

  "Look, Fran, he's a cop. He's got access to weapons, or if he really wants to open a vein, there're sharp edges everywhere. We can put him in a psychiatric hospital, but unless he agrees to stay no civilian facility is gonna be able to hold him." She stood there with her arms crossed, her mouth growing smaller.

  "Has he been hitting you?"

  "I wish it was that easy," she answered. "I need for this to be over. I need to move on." There was finality and a brief shudder as she said it. This suicide attempt was an ending for her, a door closing.

  "He's got a brother. Don or something? He never talks much about him. Lives in Torrance, right?" I asked.

  "They don't get along much anymore."

  "I'm taking him there anyway. Give me the address and while I'm on my way, call Don and give him a heads-up. Tell him I need Zack to stay put until I can figure something out."

  She promised to call, wrote down Don Farrell's address, and handed it to me. I walked back to the car and got in. Zack was slumped against the door.

  "I'm taking you to your brother's house," I said.


  He didn't reply, so I put the car in gear and headed off to Torrance. As we pulled up onto the freeway, I turned to look at him. The overhead lights played over his face, strobing across a swollen landscape of depression and despair.

  "Have you been hitting Fran?" My voice was so soft it was barely audible.

  He sat quietly for a long time. I didn't think he had heard me. "When I was little, my father. ." Then he stopped.

  "What? What about your father?"

  "What you are and what you become is written in the Big Book before you're even born. It's in your DNA. There's no way to alter destiny," he whispered softly.

  Chapter 14

  As it turned out, John Doe Number Five from Canoga Park was really Patrick Collins from Seattle. Some off-duty officers from the day watch scored the ID by showing his picture to the homeless miscreants around the freeway on ramp. He was a regular fixture on that corner.

  I learned all this when I got to Parker Center at nine the next morning. The detectives assigned to the new Fingertip task force had already taken over an empty cube farm that was to be our new, designated area on the third floor. The space was available in the overcrowded administration building because it was about to go under construction as a computer center. Deputy Chief Ramsey had run the contractors off and temporarily given the area to us. Two dozen detectives from five citywide homicide divisions were milling about, industriously moving ladders and fighting over the few window desks left behind by the contractors. Claiming prime office space was an important first day priority in task force geopolitics. The less desirable, center of the room locations were relegated to underachieving latecomers like me.

  The detectives who were there had also commandeered the few available chairs and determined that Patrick Collins had no outstanding warrants by running him through our database, CID, and the National Crime Index computer. They had to use their cell phones because we still weren't hooked up to the main switchboard. Under all the bustle there was organized excitement here. Movie and book deals hovered on the horizon.

  A swift, connect-the-dots series of phone checks quickly confirmed that Collins was an Army medic in 1970, assigned to the Big Red One, the First Combat Infantry Division in Vietnam. Thirty years before he took up residency under the overpass he had also been a resident of Seattle, Washington, where his seventyfive-year-old parents still lived.

  As the task force milled and joked, a shrill whistle suddenly sliced through the confusion, bringing the volume down instantly. "Everybody, shut the fuck up!" an unfamiliar voice shouted from the back of the room.

  I was still standing in the threshold, carrying my murder book and Rolodex, feeling out of it, like a kid on the first day of kindergarten, when the sea of humanity in front of me parted and I was looking at a pale, narrow-shouldered man with blond-red hair of a strange orange hue. He had it chopped short and his gray eyes glared through wire-rimmed glasses. A big, black gun rig hung upside down under his left arm like a sleeping bat and screamed asshole. My guess? The ranking fed.

  "Okay," he said as soon as it settled down. "Everybody, we're meeting in the coffee room in thirty. Bring an open computer file, an open mind and a chair."

  Already, I was hating this guy. I turned to a detective standing beside me and asked, "Who's he?"

  "Dat be muthafuckin' Judd Underwood of da muthafuckin' FBI," the cop said in a theatrical whisper.

  More furniture arrived ten minutes later on rolling dollies. Somehow I ended up with the worst desk. A dented, gray metal monster with a bottom drawer that was jammed and wouldn't shut all the way. A perfect place for our sacrosanct murder book. I lost a frantic game of musical chairs and ended up standing.

  I knew a few of the other cops in the room. Mace Ward and Sally Quinn were from the Valley Bureau. Mace was a weightlifter with steroid cuts, who shot anabolics but had a furious hatred of junkies. His mild-mannered partner, Sally, resembled a kindly homeroom teacher until you noticed her kick-ass green-brown eyes that were hard and flat, and the color of bayou mud. I'd worked an Internet sting with both of them a few years ago when I was in Van Nuys.

  Ruben Bola and Fernando Diaz were a Cheech-andChong homicide team from the old Newton Division, an area so rife with violent crime it was known citywide as Shootin' Newton. It had been reorganized into part of the Central Bureau but the old station house down there was still a hot spot. Wisecracking Ruben was smooth and cool, so he was Suave Bola. Fernando was round and loud, with a chunky diamond chip crucifix, making him Diamond Diaz. There were a few other familiar faces whose names I couldn't remember. Some were playing Who Do You Know; some were wondering aloud who was going to be in charge of solving the loo phone problem. The rest of us were still trying to find a chair and an open mind to bring to the coffee room.

  The briefing started exactly on time. Judd Underwood had scrounged a blackboard from someplace and moved the vending machines out of the room. He had all five morgue photos of the Fingertip murder vics taped to it with dates and locations. While we settled in, he kept his back to the room, frantically scribbling on the blackboard like some harried criminology professor getting ready for class. Even after we moved inside pushing the few available rolling chairs, he didn't turn. For some unknown reason, under each photo, he was writing the lunar phase for the corresponding kill, which was puzzling because our unsub was on a fourteen-day calendar, not a lunar cycle.

  For those who keep track of such nonsense, Manhunter, the 1986 motion picture adapted from the Thomas Harris novel Red Dragon, was about the FBI Behavioral Science Unit and featured a serial killer who killed on a lunar cycle. In one scene, the FBI hero actually stated that the moon had a powerful effect on most nut-job killers. Not exactly earth-shaking news since Luna is both Latin for moon and the root word for lunatic. I couldn't help but wonder if Underwood was about to reenact a scene from that film.

  Finally he turned and faced us, the chalk still in his hand. "Good morning," he said, softly.

  He was such an obvious asshole, nobody answered. "My name is Judson Underwood."

  And then, so help me, just like it was the first day of school, he turned and wrote it on the blackboard.

  "D-E-R-W-O-O-D," he announced over the chalk strokes. "I'm a GS-Fourteen and the ASAC of the local FBI office here in L. A. I specialize in criminal behavioral science and serial crime profiling."

  He finished by writing GS-14, ASAC, and BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE with a flourish in chalk, then he underlined it before turning again to face us.

  "I run kick-ass units, so if you're a slacker, get ready for an ass kicking. Around here, brilliance will be expected, excellence will be tolerated, and standard work will get you transferred out with a bad performance review." He looked around the room. "Are we all square on that?" Nobody answered.

  "Good. In case any of you humps have problems with an FBI agent running a city task force, you should know I've been asked to head this show by your Director of Field Operations, Deputy Chief Michael Ramsey. I'll handle the investigation; he's going to handle logistics and communications."

  That fit my take on Great White Mike. If the case tanked, our media-savvy deputy chief would be perfectly positioned in front of the TV cameras to point an accusing finger at the entire task force, including our new, narrow-shouldered, kick-ass FBI commander.

  "To begin with, we're gonna have some rules," Underwood said. "On this task force, nobody hoards information. Everything is written down and e-mailed to me daily. All facts, wit lists, and F. I. cards are in my computer at EOW."

  For those unfamiliar with cop acronyms, F. I. stands for Field Interview, EOW for end of watch.

  Underwood cleared his throat and continued. "We're going to have full disclosure. I don't ever want to find out that some piece of this case was not transmitted, no matter how seemingly insignificant. Woe be it to the detective who neglects to include everything in his daily report. Are we all completely square on this condition?"

  Now everybody nodded. They all smiled and
looked very pleased with this rule. A few even muttered, "Thank God for that."

  But you can't fool me. It was just stagecraft. Both of the previous task forces I was assigned to had started with the full disclosure speech. From this second on, everyone in this room would be lying and hoarding like crack whores. It was a career case-the fast lane to the top of the department with big money stops at the William Morris Agency and CAA. It was a chance to become famous and add that new game room onto the den.

  "Let's begin with the givens," Underwood pontificated. "Given: we have five DBs, all males, all mid-fifties to mid-sixties. Given: all have been disfigured with their fingertips amputated at the phystal phalanx of each digit. Given: all five vics have a symbol mutilation carved on their chests, an act of homicidal rage: We now know this symbol represents an approximation of the Combat Medics insignia. The first four bodies were on a two-week clock, then it dropped to seven days.

  That roughly corresponds to Lunar Phase Three of the calendar. I'll pass out a lunar chart to help you with lunar phases. From this point forward we will run all time frames on both a lunar, as well as a standard calendar. I know technically, these murders don't appear to be lunar phase killings, but it has been my experience that the moon exerts a powerful psychological pull on abnormal psyches and that most irrational acts have metaphysical constructs."

  Right out of Manhunter. Sometimes I'm so good at reading assholes, I surprise myself.

  "Using the moon as well as a conventional calendar could yield insights," he finished. "Are we all square on this?"

  A few cops nodded but most were looking down, not engaging his eyes.

  "Okay, moving on then," Underwood said. "This last killing, Patrick Collins, shortens the time frame between events to a four-day clock. That means he's only off lunar phase by a scant two days, well within a predictable margin of error depending on TOD estimates." TOD stood for time of death.

  Underwood went blithely on. "The fourth John Doe, the one found at Forest Lawn Drive, appears to have been beaten first, then shot. What this means is, our unsub is closing to a lunar cycle as well as degenerating badly, becoming more violent and increasingly dangerous."