Red Light

by T. Jefferson Parker

  After doing the math and thinking it over, Jesse Acuna finally sold the land and everything on it to Orange Coast Capital for 4.2 million dollars.

  Merci found nothing about cops being blamed for the beating until the following year, when the anniversary articles all came out.

  Acuna, speaking from his new home in San Juan Capistrano, told the local newspaper that he believed the men who came to make an offer and threaten him that day last spring had been "the police." He thought this because he was sixty-four years old at the time, a Mexican farmer in a world of white Republicans, and he knew cops. He knew what they looked like, how they acted and how they walked and talked, how they thought.

  In answering the reporter's six million dollar question, Acuna admitted that he'd never seen those men before or since the Fourth of July, 1969. His attackers wore masks. The article carefully noted that Acuna had no evidence to substantiate his attackers as police, just his own observations and opinions about the men who had driven a white Mercedes-Benz into his life one hot spring morning and shared a pitcher of orange juice with him in the courtyard.

  The reporter had gone back through the original police interviews and found not one instance in which Acuna had speculated that his attackers were policemen.

  At this, Acuna shrugged and "stared off at his small garden with his one good remaining eye."

  Merci thought: I might not tell the police if I thought my attackers were policemen, either.

  Merci continued forward, noting the way the rumor grew, until the ACLU was calling for internal investigations and the Los Angeles Times was treating Acuna's opinion as if it was in all likelihood true. The county's other large daily—the Santa Ana Register—was far less convinced. Their editorials said that Acuna's story wasn't substantiated, and they'd take it seriously if it ever was.

  The Register subtly insinuated that Jesse Acuna might have suffered brain damage in the beating, thus coloring his recollection of faces and events.

  The Times said that if Acuna's story was born of brain damage from the beating, then law enforcement should be eager to remove the cloud of suspicion from over its own head.

  The then-small Orange County Journal weighed in with a call for justice for men and women of all races and colors, enthusiastically ignoring the cop accusation altogether.

  Cesar Chavez appeared, neither endorsing nor rejecting Acuna's story, but using the unrest as a focal point for promoting the United Farm Workers Union. His talks on the Fullerton and UC Irvine campuses drew thousands.

  Merci remembered a rally she went to around that time. A much smaller rally. Mom and Dad took her. It was outside, in the parking lot of a new church. It was very hot—summer or early fall. The rally was to give the police a vote of confidence, and it was sponsored by the local membership of the John Birch Society. There were picket signs and buttons with pictures of a man's face and the word LIAR. She could remember the bumper stickers that were given out: Support Your Local Police.

  The thing that made it all stick in her mind wasn't any of that, the tremendous wind that blew that day, out of the desert toward the sea, so strong that picket signs were torn from their sticks and blew around like leaves. Her mother got furious when she discovered Merci with some other kids atop the fellowship hall hurling signs that would fly flat as boomerangs fifty yards then bank up abruptly when they hit the gusts then skip out over the new tracts of houses and pinwheel corner-by-conner across the sky like it was hard.

  Jesse Acuna signs, she thought. She'd never realized that until now.

  At any rate, the ACLU and the Times lost. The Federal Ninth Circuit Court heard arguments, then declined to order Orange County police or Sheriff Departments to supply personnel photographs of employee so Acuna could search for the men who'd threatened him.

  By then it was nearly two years after the beating, and the article of the circuit court's decision was one small column in the Regis, "Local Notes" section, and on page B-22 of the Times.

  History had closed another of its small, colorful, but not hugely significant chapters.

  The headline of that day's Journal was:

  Bugliosi Argues Accused Manson Followers "Deranged"

  Shortly after that, Merci discovered, two police forces and the Sheriff Department had voluntarily supplied photographs for the farmer examine, but Acuna didn't find his men.

  She rolled her chair back, stood, walked to a window and stared out at the clear, windy day. The storm was gone and the sky was a pale, foreign blue. It looked wrong, like it had blown in from somewhere. Iceland? The trees in the quad outside the library were stripped from the wind and black from the rain. Yellow leaves on the concrete. She wondered why college campuses always had so many flyers everywhere—ranks of white and yellow and pink sheets with phone-number strips cut into the bottoms, plastered to the railings and kiosks, soaked and torn by the storm.

  She'd enjoyed her years at Fullerton. Psych major, emphasis in criminal justice. Plenty of imbeciles in psych, she'd found, a catchall for do-gooders with low ambitions and petite IQs. But she got to read a lot of good books. And spend a lot of time alone. Or with Ben, her kind-of boyfriend. Ben could chugalug two twenty-four ounce Fosters in a row without throwing up. Joined the Forest Service, never called, never wrote. Good days, really, and just a few thousand years ago.

  She kept looking out the window, then covered one eye. The colors were still good, but the distance went to hell. No perspective.

  Might be hard for Acuna to find his torturers with just one eye, she thought.

  Even with two.

  But she wouldn't have put much stock in Acuna's theory, even if he'd had three good eyes.

  Why cops? Back in '69, it was always the cops. The cops were pigs. All those cartoons with the hogs tucked into tight little uniforms, beating with their big billy clubs and blasting away with their enormous revolvers. Cops were the first scapegoat for every violent, whining victim, right? You got struck by lightning, bitten by a snake, had a bad dream, you could always blame it on the big, bad pigs.

  So Jesse Acuna didn't like cops, that was fine. Merci wasn't in love with every one of them, either. It didn't mean they beat him over half to death with baseball bats when he came out of his chicken coop July 4.

  He said it because he believed it. They printed it because he said it and it made good copy. It fit the political sway of the day. And it was probably just bullshit.

  But Patti Bailey knew the truth, or claimed she did. One of her johns let it slip. And Patti Bailey was living in a hotel rumored to be a cops-and-girls playground.

  She went back, printed it all out, thanked Sir Arthur and asked a favor of him. She wanted to draw a line between Bailey, Acuna and the cops.

  "Crooked cops in Orange County, circa nineteen sixty-nine," she said. "I want to know all about them."

  He gave her a sly smile. "Give me a day, Sergeant."

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  It was almost six when she got back to headquarters, Friday night coming on, most of the plainclothes already gone for the weekend but the uniforms of the night shift looking brisk and fresh and ready to go eight.

  Good news on the message box: The phone company would provide the numbers, names and addresses of Aubrey Whittaker's outgoing and incoming calls for the week leading up to her murder. Give them until Monday afternoon.

  Gary Brice at the Journal had "some things for you," please call back at her convenience.

  Mike had left two more messages for her to call him as soon as she could.

  Evan had left another message about wanting to talk. Merci noted the lack of a wiseguy tone in O'Brien's voice. It made an impression her because he rarely said anything without it.

  O'Brien was down in the lab, using a magnifier and an ultraviolet light to examine a white sheet of paper with a black shoeprint on it. The purple of the ultraviolet played off his face, gave him the look of a low-budget alien.

  "What have you got there?" she asked, pulling up a stool next to him


  "To me it looks suspiciously like the shoeprint from Aubrey Wittaker's kitchen."

  So much for Evan's serious message.

  "Why the black light?"

  He looked at her. A very small grin. "No reason whatsoever. A reason is what I was searching for."

  "And that passes for science down here?"

  "Lady Dick, I wanted to see what the ink would do in the UV, if it might bring up something we can't see without it. It didn't, but here, have a look anyway."

  Evan was mid-twenties, lean and wiry, with a freckled face that often seemed amused. Red-brown hair and a button nose. Single. Drew women without knowing it, Merci had noticed. Sometimes she saw a solemnity come over his bright green eyes, like there was something serious that occupied his thoughts between amusements. She knew little about his personal life and was happy to keep it that way. He was the most thorough, organized and intelligent CSI she'd ever worked with.

  She thought enough of O'Brien to write a letter of recommendation to Personnel earlier in the year, endorsing him as a candidate for deputy. Three other deputies had written in his favor also. Evan had been typically wry about his chances of acceptance, describing himself as a three-to-one underdog because of a mild epileptic condition. It was easily controlled by medication, but a condition nonetheless. "They won't give a spaz a gun," he'd told her. "Even though you might. Besides, they need good Igors down here in the lab. Pay us less, work us harder."

  Merci assumed Evan would get in because, as a working CSI, he was conspicuously well qualified. He was young and fit. And it didn't hurt that his father had been a deputy in good standing—just as Clark's standing had helped her, and Pat McNally's standing had helped Mike. But the hiring committee had passed on Evan, just as Evan had predicted they would.

  Merci had been typically pissed off about that because she believed in him. And because the higher he went the more important an ally he could become.

  It bothered O'Brien considerably less. A bunch of them went out for beers the night of the announcement, with Lynda Coiner nursing a similar rejection due to poor uncorrected eyesight. Coiner ended up crying on Mike McNally's shoulder. Mike had been good with her, doting on her like one of his bloodhounds. O'Brien had laughed and cracked acid-wise all night and had driven Coiner home. Merci believed the rejection had hurt him because he'd never once said anything else about it, a reaction typical of the human male, and a quality she admired.

  "All I see is a shoeprint, Evan."

  "That's all it is. End of experiment."

  He clicked off the UV lamp and rolled back on his stool.

  "What's up, Evan?"

  He shook his head and she saw the humor leave his face. He to deep breath, let it out slow. "There's some evidence missing. Evidence from the Whittaker scene."

  "Explain."

  His look was sharp but his voice was calm. "It might have been misplaced around here. We're busy, it happens. It might have gotten through out. That happens, too. We're not perfect. I've looked at every inch this lab. So has Lynda. It's gone."

  Merci waited, met his now humorless green eyes. "What was it'

  "Fibers from the kitchen floor. Prints from the kitchen cabinet. A friendship card from the bedroom dresser we kept for a handwriting sample. We got forty-nine items of evidence out of that apartment. We've got forty-four of them here. Two fibers, two print cards and handwriting sample—vaporized."

  Merci thought it through. It wasn't the first time that evidence gone missing. It always showed up somewhere. That, or the collection logs were the problem, dicks and techs and criminalists and CSIs coroner's investigators and DA investigators and autopsy hacks pitching in to produce an occasional overlap, duplication or omission, It was a wonder that it didn't happen more often.

  More to the point, was the missing card one of the several sent by Mike?”

  "Well, Evan. It'll either show or it won't."

  "It's the won't part I don't like."

  He looked hard at her, then stood up and took off his lab coat pulled a sport jacket off the hanger and slipped it on.

  "You're going to have to ask me a question, Sergeant Rayborn. Because I don't say things like I need to say to you right now, unless I have to."

  "I'll do that then."

  "All right. Look, I'm not supposed to know that Mike McNally's prints were all over Whittaker's apartment. But I know everything that goes on in this lab. I haven't said one word to anyone, except to you— right now. I won't. That's not the problem. The fact of Mike McNally's prints isn't the problem. It's his problem. It's yours. I just work here."

  He waited then, eyeing her with something that looked like anger.

  It took her a moment, but she got it. She understood the question she needed to ask. "Mike been hovering around down here again?"

  O'Brien nodded yes, put his hands out and up as if trying to stop something coming at him—her words, she figured—then turned and went out.

  • • •

  Ten minutes later Merci was walking through the parking structure with a sharp alertness and a dull anxiety inside. The wind whistled in and bounced off the concrete at her.

  Parking structures were on her to-fear list now, anything to do with cars, because that's where the Purse Snatcher had gotten her—in her own car, her own county-issue detective's Impala. She still dreamed of things that jumped from backseats. She walked up next to the car, used a flashlight to check the backseat, opened the door, then looked into the backseat again. Okay. All right. Don't be stupid.

  She drove surface streets to the UCI Medical Center. It wasn't far out of her way home. The wind swayed and shook the streetlights.

  The last thing she wanted to do was to be a bother to anyone, but she wanted Zamorra and Janine to know she cared enough to at least come by.

  In the gift shop she bought a small, overpriced flower arrangement. She also bought a card and wrote a cheerful, get-well message inside.

  She checked with the desk and got directions to the neuro ward. The neuro-ward nurse gave her the room number and pointed her down a hall.

  Merci heard it before she got to the right room—low, muffled moans rising to high-pitched screams that sounded miles away. She wondered if they built hospital walls and doors thick just for that reason.

  She stopped outside Janine Zamorra's room. The door was shut. Merci felt a cold weight falling in her stomach, like an anchor racing down through dark water. Her arms and legs went heavy. It was more wail than a scream. A woman's. More in terror than in pain. In helplessness. Like she was seeing something horrible coming but couldn't get away from it.

  The nurse came up behind her so quietly Merci's first thought was of the nine.

  "I can take the flowers," she said.

  Janine Zamorra had gone silent. Merci could hear a man's voice low and soothing, no words.

  Merci looked at the nurse's face and saw nothing but shame and fear tucked under a facade of authority.

  "I'll make sure she gets them."

  Then another low moan, gaining intensity as it became a wail. Like an animal makes, Merci thought. An animal caught by other animals.

  "What's going on in there?"

  "She's stable. You should go."

  The nurse held out one hand for the vase, and the other she clamp firmly on Merci's arm. She was a small woman, but strong, and she began to pull.

  Upon being touched, Merci Rayborn's instincts were not violent but they contained the possibility of violence. And not for the first time in her life she realized the hideous insufficiency of such urges, the absolute certainty that the nine or a baton or a chokehold or a set of sharp plastic cuffs would do nothing at all to relieve Janine Zamorra's terror. Merci, who had once believed she had the answer to almost everything, realized again, to the embarrassment of her soul, that she had the answer to almost nothing.

  And certainly not to this.

  She handed the nurse the flowers and walked out. Janine's moan was on the rise as the neuro-ward doors
swung shut behind Merci and sealed it off.

  • • •

  Mike's truck was in her driveway when she got home. Inside, she found him sitting in the living room with Clark, watching the TV. Tim, Jr., was on his lap.

  Her son studied her like he always did when she came home, a wide-eyed stare that seemed to gather so much. Then Tim slid off Mike's lap and waddled toward her, his mouth a big smile, nonsense syllables bubbling out. She knelt down and he crashed into her and she gathered him up in her arms. He smelled sweet and good like always and she could see the flames from the fireplace reflected in his bright gray eyes. Clark had put him in a fuzzy red jumpsuit with white plastic soles on the feet. Merci loved jumpsuits that warmed his whole perfect body, wished she could buy a few in her size.

  She nodded at Mike and her dad, then carried Tim into her bedroom where she could say nonsense syllables back at him, and get herself changed. This was one of her favorite parts of the day: home to The Men, change out of her trousers and boots, get the H&K off her shoulder and the backup .32 off her calf, blubber back and forth with her son. It was a time when her heart felt huge but light. But tonight it just felt big and heavy.

  When she came back out Clark was in the kitchen and Mike was still in front of the television. His face was thick from yesterday's Scotch.

  "Can we talk, Merci?"

  "Let's go out back."

  She got big down jackets for her and Tim, matching ones she'd found in a mail-order catalogue, with black and yellow panels and hoods if you needed them. She bought matching everythings, which Merci knew was silly but did anyway—something to do with uniforms, colors, them and us.

  They walked out onto the patio. The security system went on and blanched the yard in a cold white light. The cats eyed them.