The Pain Scale

by Tyler Dilts

  “Would you say you liked Mr. Benton?”

  “Well, I guess so. I didn’t know him that well. He worked a lot, so I knew Mrs. Benton a lot better. She was awesome.” A second wave of tears began forming.

  “That’s what everyone says about her,” Jen said. “A lot of people feel like you do.” Jen paused and let that thought take hold. “Just a few more questions,” Jen said.

  “Okay,” Joely said.

  “You said Mr. Benton never did anything that made you feel uncomfortable. Did you know that he had been accused of making advances toward one of the family’s previous nannies?”

  “No. I—” The astonishment in her expression told us everything we needed to know. “Really? I can’t believe he’d ever do anything like that. He was always so nice.”

  Jen asked a few follow-up questions to take Joely’s attention away from the bombshell and then wrapped up the interview.

  As she opened the door for us, she asked, “When you find the people who did this, will it feel any better?”

  Hearing the ache in her voice, I couldn’t bear to tell her the truth. “Yes,” I lied. “Yes, it will.”

  Five

  “WELL, ACCORDING TO the postmortem,” Patrick said, “Shevchuk died from a bullet wound to the head.”

  “Anything turn up we didn’t expect?”

  “Nope.” He sat down at his desk and reached for his mouse. “Any news on the driver?”

  “Jen’s at his autopsy right now. I’m surprised you didn’t pass her in the hall. We didn’t get an ID off the prints. Maybe they’ll find something on the table that will help.”

  Unlike me, Patrick can hold a completely coherent conversation while working on the computer. I am never sure how he does it.

  He said, “I hope so. If it doesn’t, where do we go next?”

  “Who handled the canvass of the shopping center across the street from Pavilions?”

  “Marty, I think, and some uniforms.”

  “Did he say anything about it?”

  “I haven’t had a chance to talk to him, but if he’d have found anything, he’d have let us know, right?”

  “Anything big, yeah. Maybe he found something small.”

  Patrick said he’d seen him on the way in, so I went looking and found him downstairs hitting on a uniform patrol sergeant named Gretchen Murphy, who seemed happy for the distraction from the report she was working on.

  “Marty,” I said, “you got a minute?”

  He looked at Gretchen with a put-upon expression and said, “Guess they can’t handle things upstairs without me. Excuse me for a minute?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Sure thing, Pops.”

  Marty winced and sucked air in through his clenched teeth. “Ouch.”

  Gretchen grinned and nodded at me. I returned her smile and followed Marty into the hall. “Really?” I said. “Gretchen Murphy? Isn’t she about your daughter’s age?”

  “A little older, I think,” he said matter-of-factly. His third marriage had ended more than a year ago, and he had decided that he only wanted to be involved with women who were on the job, certain that it had been his wife’s lack of understanding of the difficulties involved in police work that had been their undoing. I didn’t pretend to know better. My wife and I had been having problems of our own when she’d died in a car accident. Unlike Marty, though, I hadn’t been involved with anyone in what seemed like a very long time.

  “Did you get anything on the Seal Beach canvass?” I asked.

  “Nothing, really. The receptionist in the optometrist’s office saw a guy getting into the backseat of the SUV. White, average height, dark hair.”

  “Getting in? Did she see where he came from?”

  “No,” Marty said. “I asked her if he might have just gotten out of the front and into the back, and she just said ‘maybe.’”

  “And that was it?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s it.”

  “So far, so good,” Ruiz said. He’d met with the department brass and tried to get some idea of whether or not they’d let us hold on to the Seal Beach murders.

  “They’re not trying to hand it off to the feds?”

  “Not so far, but the wind can change pretty quick. And the feds haven’t come knocking yet.”

  “But for now, it’s ours, right?”

  “For now.”

  Jen found us in the lieutenant’s office. “Nothing new on the driver except a tattoo. The coroner thought it might be military.”

  “Well,” Ruiz said, “at least it’s something.”

  “How are we on overtime?” I asked.

  “Let’s keep it tight for now, all right?” he said.

  Outside in the squad room, Jen said to me, “You’re not going to call it a day yet, are you?”

  “I figured I’d go through all the statement cards on the canvass from Seal Beach. And I imagine somebody’s going to need to be Googling an assload of military tats before too long.”

  We got takeout from Domenico’s on Second Street and ate in my front room while we worked. Jen had minestrone and a salad, and I knocked off most of a medium ground-pepperoni pizza. The restaurant is seriously old school and has been around forever. It is the only place that I have ever found a pizza with ground pepperoni. You could get it sliced, too, if you wanted to be lame.

  The cards and notes from the canvass didn’t take me as long as I’d thought they would, so we were both on our laptops and searching through image after image looking for a match of the tattoo that had been inked on the SUV driver’s right shoulder. It was a pair of green footprints that reminded me of all those fake bigfoot tracks I’d seen when I was a kid.

  “Why do you suppose the coroner thought this was military?” I said.

  “I don’t know. Think he’s right?” she asked.

  “He usually is.”

  “Maybe we should find someone military to talk to about it.”

  “Let’s try something real quick.” I typed “green footprints tattoo” into the search box on Google. “Well, shit.”

  “What?”

  “Might be easier than we thought,” I said. “There’s a website here. Looks like the tat goes with the Pararescue division of the air force.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Some kind of special ops unit.”

  “The air force has special ops?”

  “Yep. And if we can believe pararescue dot com, the PJs are pretty badass, too.”

  “PJs?”

  “Pararescue jumpers,” I said, reading off the computer screen.

  “I guess they must be badass if they call themselves PJs,” she said.

  We poked around the Internet for another half hour or so, looking for more on the green footprints and the special air force unit.

  When we felt like we had found enough, Jen closed her MacBook, went into the living room, and leaned back on the couch. “Not as late as I thought we’d be,” she said. I had to look at the cable TV box to see the time: 8:38.

  She noticed the case leaning up against the arm of the sofa. “What’s that?”

  “Harlan Gibbs gave me a banjo.”

  “What?” she said.

  “Yeah. I told him my physical therapist said I should start playing the guitar, and the next thing I knew, he was handing me a banjo.”

  “When did your therapist tell you that?”

  “She’s been telling me for the last few appointments.”

  “Why didn’t you mention it?”

  “Because I didn’t want to actually get one. I figured if you knew about it, you’d make me do it.”

  “Since when have I ever been able to make you do anything?”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I went with, “You know what I mean.”

  She obviously didn’t, but she didn’t push the point. “Why are you telling me now?”

  “Because I’m worried about Harlan.”

  “You find out any more about his cancer?”

  “No.”
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  “Why does the banjo make you worry?”

  “He gave it to me like it was no big deal, like he just had it lying around.”

  “You don’t think he did?”

  “Hang on,” I said. I undid the clasps on the case, took the instrument out, and handed it to her.

  “I didn’t know banjos were this heavy,” she said.

  “Neither did I.” I let her handle it, make the strings twang. “You know anything about music?”

  “Not really,” she said. “Piano lessons when I was twelve. That’s about it.”

  “That seems like a good one, doesn’t it?”

  She rubbed her finger over the wood and metal, turned it over in her hands. “It does.” She examined the frets and the neck. “Looks like it’s been played a lot,” she said. “But well cared for.”

  “That’s exactly what I thought.”

  “This seems like the kind of thing that would mean a lot to somebody,” she said.

  “And I think it might be worth a lot of money, too.”

  “Is he giving up?” she asked. I hadn’t expected her to be so direct, but I was glad she was. The conversation made me think I had pegged Harlan’s behavior correctly.

  “I think he might be, and I’m not sure what to do about it.”

  “How can I help?”

  “What did you do for me when I gave up?” I asked.

  Her expression warmed. “I just ignored it and pretended like you didn’t. You came around. He will, too.”

  After Jen left, I sat on the couch and strummed the banjo softly, which was not as easy to do as it sounds. I tried to get a slow, even rhythm going, but found myself speeding up without meaning to. Each time I caught myself, I slowed down again. Then I’d find myself thinking about Harlan or Sara and the kids and the tempo would pick up. After a while, though, I started getting better at maintaining the cadence. It took more focus than I would have thought.

  I put the banjo away and went back into the dining room to go over my notes one more time. After I opened my computer and set iTunes on shuffle, the first song that came up was Springsteen’s “Atlantic City.” Not the ’82 original, but the version from Live in Dublin with the Sessions Band. And fuck me if the intro wasn’t a solo banjo that sounded like the coolest thing since The Big Man’s saxophone.

  Three

  THE NEXT MORNING, we were talking to Marty and Dave about the green footprints.

  “I’ve heard of Pararescue,” Dave said. “Supposed to be pretty tough. Go behind enemy lines and get people out. Pilots, mostly, I suppose.”

  “So they’re tough, huh?” I asked.

  “Well, it’s the air force, so they’re probably not like SEALs or Green Berets. But they’ve got a reputation.”

  “You know any of them?” Jen asked.

  “Me? Hell, no. I was in the merchant marines. I don’t know much about that stuff.”

  “I know a retired air force guy,” Marty said. “Let me give him a call. See what I can find out.”

  I mentioned what I’d noticed about the news coverage to the lieutenant.

  “Danny’s right. The press doesn’t seem to have connected Shevchuk or the SUV killing to the Benton murders,” Ruiz told the rest of the squad.

  “That’s good,” Marty said. “How do we keep it that way?”

  “Patrick’s already the lead on Shevchuk, and I want you to take point on the driver,” Ruiz told him. “We’ll keep them as separate as we can on paper. Maybe we’ll be able to keep a lid on it for a while.”

  Marty Locklin had been on the Homicide Detail for almost twenty years, and he’d been a cop for more than thirty. He was long past the point of worrying about how a big case might help his career or even his ego. His preference was for what actually comprised most of our daily work—the routine. This case had a lot more flash than he cared for. But he was a pro, so he stepped up, and he didn’t complain. He just looked at Jen and me to make sure we didn’t feel like he’d be taking anything away from us, and when we both gave small nods of approval, he said, “Sure thing, Boss.”

  Jen had lunch plans, so I used the time for something else. I’d been driving past a place on Seventh Street called World of Strings for as long as I could remember. There was an empty spot a few doors down. I parked, got Harlan’s banjo out of the trunk, and took it inside. The name of the store was appropriate. I’d never seen so many stringed instruments in one place. There were guitars, violins, basses, mandolins, and just about everything in between. They even had a few harps against the far wall. The place smelled like dust and furniture polish.

  The guy at the counter was youngish—mid-twenties—and had a flannel shirt and a long and shaggy hairstyle that looked like 1993. I wondered if he was old enough to remember Kurt Cobain. He smiled distractedly and asked if he could help me.

  I put the banjo case in front of him and said, “I hope so.” I undid the clasps and held the banjo out to him. “A friend of mine gave this to me, and I’m wondering how much it’s worth.”

  His expression fell and I could sense his disapproval. “There’s a lot more to an instrument than how much you can get for it.”

  “It’s not like that,” I said. “My friend is sick, and I’m worried he’s being more generous than he should. I have a feeling that it might be worth a lot.”

  He considered me and must have decided I was on the level. “Banjos aren’t really my thing, but let me take a look.” He sat down on a tall stool and rested it on his leg. He strummed and picked a bit, then held it up and examined it from top to bottom. “It’s a good instrument. Deerings usually are, I think. Well made, and it’s got a real sweet tone. If you look here, though, I’m not sure about this.” He held out the base and pointed at a ring around the drum head. “See this? It looks like its discolored and maybe even corroded a little bit. I’m not sure about that.”

  “Can you give me any idea at all? At least a few hundred dollars, right?”

  “Oh, way more than that, I’m sure. More than a thousand, minimum. See the woodwork here? This is good stuff.”

  “Any idea how I could find out more about it?”

  “You could bring it back when Greg is here later. Or you could leave it and I’ll ask him to take a look for you.”

  “Okay,” I said as he handed it back to me. “Thanks. I appreciate your help.”

  When I was halfway to the door, he stopped me. “Hey,” he said. “You know what? Why don’t you just call Deering?”

  “That’s a good idea. Thanks.” I wondered why I hadn’t thought of that myself. Sometimes I wish I were like a detective or something.

  My BlackBerry went off. It was another automated text from Patrick’s monitoring program. Bradley was using his card again.

  I speed-dialed Patrick.

  “Hey, Danny,” he said. “What’s up?”

  “Just got another text about Bradley’s card. Can you check it?”

  “Hang on.”

  He came back a few seconds later.

  “AMC Marina Pacifica. About ten minutes ago.”

  “He’s at the movies?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “Perfect.”

  His Panamera Turbo S was easy to spot. It was the only $170,000 car with a cognac metallic finish in the whole lot. I parked a few spaces up the row from it, and as I walked past, I pretended to tie my shoe while I slipped a GPS tracking unit housed in a magnetic case under the rear fender.

  Then I headed down to the box office and tried to guess what movie he was seeing. Based on the start times, it was most likely either Cedar Rapids or The Eagle. I figured Bradley for a Channing Tatum guy. I couldn’t imagine an Ed Helms fan driving that car of his. It was chock full of apparent aesthetic value.

  Rather than take a chance on being spotted coming in late to one of the movies, I badged the employee behind the window selling tickets and asked her the end times of each of the movies. The first one didn’t get out for an hour, so I wandered upstairs to loiter in Barnes & Noble.
I dodged the guy in front trying to sell me a Nook and found a seat in one of the comfy chairs back by the magazines. An article in Combat Handguns gave a glowing review to a 1911 .45 made by a company called Nighthawk Custom. I gagged at the price. Who would pay $4,000 for a pistol?

  A guy like Bradley.

  I went back outside twenty minutes early and waited for him. He surprised me by coming out with the crowd from the comedy. If the film had done anything to lighten his mood, though, it wasn’t apparent. He moved slowly, and his shoulders were slumped forward. His hair was unstyled, and he wore jeans and a sweatshirt. The Stanford across his chest was the only recognizable thing about him.

  He came up the stairs toward the parking lot, and I headed him off.

  “Hello, Mr. Benton,” I said, surprising him.

  He looked taken aback for just a moment, as if he had been caught doing something he should not have been doing. Almost as quickly, though, his face fell again into the same sad emptiness it had held before I spoke. He didn’t place me immediately.

  “I’m Detective Beckett,” I said. “How are you?”

  In any normal circumstances, it would have been a stupid and thoughtless question to ask—his wife and children had been murdered. How could any answer adequately address that fact? But I asked it intentionally, so it was just callous and mean.

  “I...uh...” He didn’t know how to answer. I had been hoping he’d have a practiced response. A politician’s response. One that would prove to me his insensitivity and coldness. One that would allow me to believe he’d been responsible for the deaths of Sara and Bailey and Jacob.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “You don’t have to answer.”

  I led him over to the tables outside the Starbucks, and we sat down. He looked a lot more like a shell-shocked war casualty than someone who’d just stepped out of a comedy that was pulling 86 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

  “You just see a movie?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good,” I said. “Which one?”

  He couldn’t answer. He didn’t remember.