by Tyler Dilts
When he came in, I waved him over to the table. He looked sharp and alert. His suit was either freshly cleaned and pressed or an identical match to the one he’d been wearing when we’d met at the station.
“What’s good here?”
“Anything with grease.”
He ordered an omelet, too. “The Irisher.” Potatoes, cheddar cheese, and bacon. Another of my favorites. It made me want to trust him. Yogurt and berries or egg whites would have concerned me.
“I’m sorry I was kind of a dick at the squad.”
He let the stern facade he’d been projecting ease and raised an eyebrow. “Your partner tell you to do this, or your lieutenant?”
“Neither one. This is all me.”
He wasn’t buying it.
“But I am trying to head them both off at the pass.”
That satisfied him enough for us to ease into a few minutes of small talk about Long Beach. He’d worked a joint task force investigating harbor smuggling a few years before but hadn’t met anyone from Homicide until this case.
When the food came, I said, “Now, there’s some apparent aesthetic value.”
He took the bait, but I couldn’t tell if he knew it was bait. So I told him the story of how the phrase had entered the LBPD lexicon.
“A couple of months back, two uniforms picked up a guy with a camera taking pictures of the Edgington oil refinery. They figured he must have been some kind of terrorist, because why else would he be taking pictures of a dump like that? Turns out he’s just a reporter, but when they asked him what he was doing, he said he was an artist.”
Goodman let out a little chuckle at the word.
“So, of course, that was enough to freak the unis out even more. One thing leads to another, and finally the chief has to make a statement. Says that it’s the responsibility of the LBPD to question anyone taking photographs ‘of no apparent aesthetic value.’”
“And next thing you know...” he said.
“Right. Every cop in town is using it to describe anything from the crappy evidence in his investigation to how his wife’s ass looks in those pants.”
We’d fallen into an easygoing rapport. Just two old cops shooting the shit. Of course, the “No apparent aesthetic value” line had peaked in its popularity weeks ago, and the first time I had ever uttered the phrase was in the station with Goodman and his partner.
After we traded a few more war stories, I asked him how the congressman was doing.
“Seems to be holding up well. Mrs. Benton, too. The son’s a basket case, though.”
“That’s what it looked like to us. The lawyer won’t let us get close to Bradley. Anything you can do about that?”
“I’m not really as deep in that circle as you probably think. I just give the congressman a report every day. Usually not even to him. Kroll gets it. But I’ll see what I can do.”
We finished eating, and he asked me for directions to the courthouse, which I was fairly sure he didn’t really need.
On my drive downtown, I saw a small Craftsman for sale that I thought had real potential. There were no more flyers in the box on the signpost, so I wrote the real estate agent’s name and the address down in my notebook and made a mental note to tell Jen about it.
As I was telling Jen about breakfast with Goodman, Ruiz called us into his office.
“Have you seen this?”
It was a video recording of the Bentons playing at a park I didn’t recognize. The kids were next to each other in two swings, and Sara was taking turns pushing them. First Bailey with her left hand, and then Jacob with her right. She’d found a perfect rhythm, and her smile was as wide and bright as those of the children.
“We don’t have this,” I said. “Where did it come from?”
“Channel Four. It led every local news segment this morning.”
“Where’d they get it?”
“Go find out,” Ruiz said.
Before we were even back at our desks, Jen was on the phone. Her first call was to a sergeant in Media Relations.
“Hank? This is Jennifer Tanaka from Homicide. You gave Lieutenant Ruiz the new video of the Benton family from Channel Four?”
She listened as she sat down and began scribbling on a yellow legal pad on her desk. “And that’s the producer?” She wrote some more, made vaguely affirmative verbal noises, and hung up.
“Want to go to Burbank?”
“Where’d you get the video?” I asked the assistant producer a second time. Her name was Marisol Vargas. She was midthirties, with a bad face job that left her cheeks too high and her mouth too tight. When she’d introduced herself using a heavy Latino accent for her name and an uptight Brentwood parlance for everything else, I couldn’t help but wonder if, at some point, she’d aspired to be on-air talent and had settled for this.
“As I said, Detective, I’m not at liberty to reveal our source.” Her eyes didn’t move when she spoke.
“Who is?”
“Please, you must understand that journalistic ethics prevent us from sharing that information.”
“Is this your decision,” Jen asked, “or is someone else ultimately responsible?”
“It’s really not going to make any difference, Detective.” Marisol seemed to be enjoying taking a stand on moral grounds. She behaved as if she were the only thing standing between jack-booted thugs of the LBPD and the First Amendment. “Whoever you ask is going to tell you the same thing.”
“Oh, we’re done asking,” I said. “Now we just need to know who’s getting arrested for obstruction of justice.”
I thought that made her eyes widen half a millimeter or so, but it might just have been wishful thinking.
She left us alone in the office we’d been speaking in. We weren’t sure if it was hers or someone else’s—there wasn’t a name on either the desk or the door.
“Want to sit?” I asked Jen. There was a couch opposite the desk.
“No,” she said. Neither of us wanted to be seated when we met whoever Marisol was bringing back into the room.
After ten minutes, I said to Jen, “How much longer should we give them?”
“I think we’ve given them long enough.”
I smiled and we both took our badges and left the office. There was a row of cubicles that followed the hallway in the direction Marisol had gone when she’d left us.
The first person I saw was a guy who looked like he was fresh out of college.
“Marisol Vargas,” I said to him with as much dick in my voice as I could muster. “Where did she go?”
He looked down the hallway, then back at me. “I’m not sure. Let me just call—”
“No. Stay here. Don’t leave your desk.”
We started off toward the bigger offices in the back, badging everyone we passed. As we approached the end of the row of cubicles, I said very loudly, “Marisol Vargas.”
She stepped out of an office at the end of the hall, and even though she had no discernable facial expression, her body language told me I’d rattled her.
“Stop there,” I said.
I could feel their eyes widening around me as I reached under my coat for my cuffs.
“Extend your hands,” I said in the tone I usually reserve for rousted gangbangers.
“What?” she said. “I don’t understand.”
Just as I flicked open the first bracelet, a short balding man began speaking in the office she’d just come out of. “Wait!” he said, joining us at the doorway. “What’s this about?”
“You know what it’s about,” Jen said. “Marisol had plenty of time to fill you in while she left us waiting. Your news organization is obstructing justice. You have material evidence in an ongoing homicide investigation. Was withholding information your decision?”
His mouth opened, and he raised his eyebrows. No Botox for him. Too old-school. I made sure he was looking at his own wrists while I held up the cuffs.
“I think there’s been some kind of misunderstanding,” he sa
id. “Won’t you have a seat?” When neither of us moved, he added, “Please?”
“Did you think they’d cave that easy?” Jen asked as she drove us south on I-5 toward Long Beach.
“Of course. They’re local TV news. Have you seen the shit they put on in the mornings? The BBC they are not.”
The producer had given us the name of the man who’d sold them the video of Sara and the kids. They hadn’t bothered to do any background on him or get anything from him other than a cell phone number and an e-mail address.
I called Patrick. “Did you hear about the video on the news this morning?”
“Yes. The lieutenant told me you guys were on it. Get anything?”
“A name. Oliver Woods.” I spelled it for him, then gave him the phone number and e-mail address. “See what you can do.”
By the time I’d made a fresh pot of coffee in the break room, Patrick had found some basics on Oliver Woods. We had all of his personal information and knew that he didn’t have a criminal record.
“I got you into his Facebook account,” Patrick said. “Here you go.” He put a notebook computer down on my desk with a Firefox window open to Woods’s profile.
He had dozens of video clips, hundreds of photos, and thousands of friends. This was going to take a while.
I started by clicking on the Friends tab under his profile picture, which was standard fare—a modest smiling face in front of a woodsy background. Scrolling down the long list of names and photos, the first familiar name after Sara’s I came to was Catherine Catanio. I made a note. We’d need to talk to her again. On my quick perusal, I didn’t see any other familiar names or anything connected with the case. The Info section told me he had studied art history at Cal State Long Beach and UC Irvine. Apparently he moved in the same academic circle as Sara and Catherine. He didn’t seem to have any other connection to the Bentons, though, so it seemed odd that he’d have a video of the kids playing in a park.
I searched through the videos he’d posted on the off chance that I would find the clip that he had sold to Channel 4 or another of Sara or the children. But I didn’t.
“Woods might be a dead end,” I said.
Before Jen could reply, her phone rang. She answered it, listened a moment, then started knocking on her desk to get my attention. I listened to the rest of her end of the conversation. “No, that’s great...And the ID is positive? Could you spell that?” She scribbled on a legal pad on her desk as she spoke. “That’s fantastic. Thanks.” She hung up her phone and shot me an odd stare.
“What is it?”
“We got a match on the DNA.”
“What the fuck?”
“I know,” she said. “It’s only been three days.”
It was scientifically possible for DNA results to come back in as little as seventy-two hours. We both knew that. In reality, though, we routinely waited months for the information.
“What’s the quickest you’ve ever seen results come back?” I asked.
“Two weeks.”
“What case?”
“About five years ago,” she said. “Remember when the mayor’s niece got raped?”
“And we got these in three days.”
We both stood up and took the walk to the lieutenant’s office. His door was open, and he looked up when we came in.
“What?” he said.
We told him about the DNA.
“Somebody’s got their fingers in our pie,” he said.
“Whoever it is, they’re one step ahead of us,” I said.
He looked like he had something in his mouth that he didn’t like the taste of. “Nothing we can do about it. Work the lead.”
An hour later, we gathered the squad in Ruiz’s office for a rundown.
“We’ve got a match on the DNA,” Jen said.
“Bullshit,” Dave said. “How could there be a match already?”
“Divine intervention?” Marty asked.
“Congressional,” I said.
Jen passed a mug shot around the table. “Oleksander Turchenko.”
“Turchenko? What is that?” Patrick asked. “Russian?”
“No,” I said. “Ukrainian.”
Jen continued. “He’s been here eight years, arrested nine times. Extortion, assault, attempted rape. Nothing but misdemeanors have ever stuck, so he hasn’t done any real time.”
“How’d he manage that?” Ruiz asked.
“Looks like good lawyering,” I said.
“So he’s mobbed up?” Dave asked.
“Must be,” Jen said. “But we don’t know yet with who. With all the Eastern European outfits around the port, they’re almost as hard to keep straight as the Latinos.”
“Checked with OCD yet?” Ruiz asked.
“No,” I said. “We wanted to bring you up to speed before we headed downstairs.”
“Let me call Lansky,” Ruiz said. He picked up the phone and dialed the Organized Crime Detail’s extension.
They were notoriously tight-lipped when it came to sharing information, especially on their open cases. And given the fact that most criminal organizations were ongoing enterprises that stayed in business after all but the most significant and sweeping police operations, most of the OCD’s investigations stayed open indefinitely. The players sometimes changed, but the organizations rarely did. A little grease from the lieutenant would go a long way toward helping us get a handle on the crew we were dealing with.
“Mike,” Ruiz said into the phone, turning his Texas good-old-boy charm up to full-tilt boogie, “I need a little favor.”
Across the table sat Mike Lansky, the Organized Crime Detail’s own lieutenant, and one of his detectives, Efram Kennedy. Lansky was tall and thick, with a high-and-tight haircut that always looked a little too jarhead for the expensive tailored suits he routinely wore. Kennedy, on the other hand, was small and wiry, with a twitchy energy about him that made the department’s running gags about OCDs—obsessive-compulsive detectives—seem less like jokes and more like casual observations. I didn’t like him the same way I didn’t like Chihuahuas. He always made me feel vaguely queasy and irritated. But Lansky kept him on the leash, so he wasn’t as annoying as he might have been.
“Turchenko’s affiliated with a family outfit,” Kennedy said. “Uncles and cousins once removed and such. Ukrainians, mostly, but a few Russians, too. They’re not too hierarchical, and they’ve got a bit of independence from the shot callers.”
“Who runs them?”
“A Russian named Tropov.”
An alarm bell rang in my head. A hard-core button man with the same name had tried to shank Jen with a screwdriver a year earlier when we arrested him for suspicion of murder. She saved his life by being forgiving enough to talk me down when I was about to take his head off with a Remington 870 riot gun.
“Yevgeny Tropov?” I asked.
“No,” Kennedy replied. “Anton. His cousin.” He did something with his mouth that made him look like a rodent. “But your pal’s in it up to his knees with these winners.” A sound came out of his nose that I thought was some sort of laugh.
“Efram,” Lansky said, “settle down and go over the rest of the file with them.”
He did, and just like that, we were on our way to the first arrest in the Benton case.
Turchenko’s last-known address was a small house in a run-down neighborhood on the border of Long Beach and Wilmington. We didn’t bother with that one, though, because Lansky and Kennedy had more up-to-date intel on him and his whereabouts. For the last month and a half, he’d been living in a down-market condo north of downtown that belonged to one of his many cousins.
Marty, Dave, and three uniforms met us in the lobby of the building. Bob Kincaid, a deputy district attorney, had expedited the arrest and search warrants on Turchenko and the condo, and we were about to execute them. We rode in two elevators to the sixth floor and circled up and down the hall from the door to unit 608. Fortunately, we didn’t bump into any residents on the way up.
Nobody likes seeing a gang of cops with shotguns and a portable battering ram in their lobby.
Jen dialed Turchenko’s landline on her cell and snapped it closed when he answered. She nodded, and we moved down the hall and flanked the door.
With my back to the wall, I reached to the side and pounded on the door. “Police!” I yelled. “Open up!”
We gave him about three seconds; then I motioned for the uniform with the ram. He heaved back, swung it forward, and the door burst open and slammed against the wall.
Zero
IF DR. BALLARD had been there, red hair and freckles gray in the dull light of the hallway, to ask me about my pain, I would have had to think before I answered. Then I would have said, “One.” I knew much of the relief had to do with the adrenaline rush, but that wasn’t all of it. It was being on the job. Or as Jen had referred to it, being back in the saddle. This, I thought, is what I need to be doing.
And then I pushed through the splintered doorframe and started screaming.
“Oleksander Turchenko!”
We didn’t need to go far. In front of us, on a decades-old rust-colored couch, a man sat in a wife-beater tank top and NASCAR boxer shorts eating Fruity Pebbles from an enormous olive-green plastic bowl. He didn’t bother to stop chewing, but he did divert his attention from The View to the crowd forcing its way into his living room. He swallowed, milk running down his chin, then sat still. Only the fact that he didn’t even glance down at the Sig P226 on the coffee table in front of him saved his life.
“Turchenko?” I asked, the muzzle of my Glock not more than seven feet from his chest.
He gave us a slight nod.
“Put the bowl down on the couch next to you, then put your hands on top of your head.”
He did.
“Now push the table toward me with your right foot.”
As he extended his leg, the table inched away from the couch toward the middle of the room. I stepped forward, still watching him over my front sight, and picked up the Sig.