by Marcia Clark
My cell phone buzzed in my sweatshirt pocket, and I unfolded it and quietly answered, “Yep.”
“Are you in a library?” Graden asked.
“No, Bailey and I are on a stakeout… sort of. What’s up?”
I was momentarily distracted by a low-flying seagull that was swooping in for the kill on a half-eaten Oki-Dog someone had left on the lid of the Dumpster.
“The Feds cleared out for the day. Some big drug bust down near the border. I was thinking you might want to come over and see what we found in the motel.”
Suddenly I was a ball of energy. “What time?”
“I’m guessing that means yes,” Graden replied, amused. “I’ll call you when it looks like it’s about to get quiet enough.”
“Sounds perfect,” I said, and we hung up.
As I closed my phone, Bailey cocked an eyebrow, having overheard. “It’s good to know the king, huh?”
I nodded. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that a group of skinny young boys and girls with shaggy hair, tight jeans, and small T-shirts had gathered at a table close to the sidewalk. One of the boys stepped back and put his foot on the chair to tie his green-and-purple Converse sneaker, and I glimpsed an older man in dark glasses sitting in the middle of the group.
A black mustache drooped over his mouth, which sagged down at the corners, and his hair—too black to be natural—was gathered into a ponytail. He was tough-looking in a way that went beyond his black long-sleeved henley and leather vest. He seemed guarded, yet he exuded an aura of dominance that showed in the way the teens moved around him.
I watched as he leaned over to the girl on his right and held out a crumpled pack of cigarettes. The girl took one, and as the man drew closer to light it, a creepy feeling washed over me. I slowly took out my cell phone, scrunched down in my seat, and snapped his picture. I tried for a second shot, but a bushy-haired boy had moved into the gap and blocked my view. I sat and watched the group for a few more seconds, then turned to Bailey and saw that she too had spotted them, although her face was pointed off to the left.
“You got him?” she asked softly.
“Think so,” I said as I held my phone under the table to look at the image. Other than the mustache, he fit Hector Amaya’s description. “Think it’s him?”
“Could be,” Bailey replied. “Can’t see his neck, though.”
“Want to push in closer?” I asked, thinking that if we could see the tattoo, we could bust him. I knew that busting him now would mean we’d have to get Hector Amaya to come out front with his story. But that was a problem I’d just have to deal with later.
“Better wait. I don’t want to cause a scene with all those kids around him.”
I nodded. Then it occurred to me that we could skin this cat another way. I quickly hit my speed dial.
“ ’Lo?” Luis croaked.
Not even noon yet—way too early for the shot-caller of the Sylmar Sevens to be verbal. I didn’t even want to think about what had kept him out all night. “Luis, wake up. This is urgent. Does Hector have a cell phone? I’ve got a picture he has to look at for me, like, five minutes ago. Can you handle this?”
Inmates weren’t supposed to have cell phones, but an impressive number managed to get them anyway.
Luis yawned loudly, then said, “Send me the picture. I’ll take care of it.”
“I mean it. I’m in a hurry, Luis.”
“Okay, okay, jus’ send it to me, will ya?”
“It’s coming now,” I said, then sent him the photo.
“Heads up,” Bailey said quietly, beginning to stand.
I looked over and saw that our target had stood up to talk to a young blond girl behind him, letting us see that he was just under six feet tall, medium weight. I figured Bailey and I could take him—especially if he didn’t have a gun. I didn’t have an ID from Hector yet, but I had a hunch and I was willing to bet on it. I stood up, and Bailey and I started to move slowly through the tables toward him, trying to act casual. For the second time since I’d been forced into it, I was glad to be wearing my vest. I put my hand into my coat pocket and wrapped it around my .357, just in case.
We were less than ten feet away when one of the boys at the table said something to our target and jerked his head in our direction. The man looked over his shoulder, and for a brief moment he and I locked eyes. Then the group suddenly closed around him. Sensing the need for urgency, Bailey and I started to push through the tables, abandoning any effort at stealth. By the time we got to his group, he was gone. I quickly scanned the area. Off to my right, I spotted him moving fast through the parking lot, toward the gas station next door.
Bailey and I gave chase, running full-out, legs and arms pumping. As I ran, the vest compressed my chest, making it hard to breathe. I wanted to call for backup, but there was no time. He headed for the gas station and disappeared into the mechanics bay. Still running, I pointed the area out to Bailey. If we didn’t take cover, we’d be perfect bull’s-eyes. She nodded and gestured for us to get in position at either end of the station.
I ran to the far end and stopped just outside the wall of the bay, gun held in both hands in front of me, pointed at the ground. Still gulping air from the sudden manic sprint, I tried to quiet my breathing. Across the way, I saw that Bailey stood near the wall between the office and the mechanics bay, her gun down at her side. I heard men’s voices, but none sounded out of breath or amped up. Puzzled, I hazarded a look inside. Two men in coveralls were bent over the engine of an old Mercedes—no ponytail, no vest. Bailey and I exchanged a look across the garage.
I glanced around the station. A woman was pumping gas into a new red Corolla, and a man in a white T-shirt and motorcycle helmet was screwing the gas cap on his tank. I looked back inside the mechanics bay. A car was up on the lift, and I noticed something dangling from the window. I badged the mechanics and barked, “Police.” Not exactly true, but this was no time for technicalities. “Bring that car down.”
The shorter and balder of the two stared at my gun for a moment, then quickly punched the button. When the car got within two feet of the ground, I saw what it was: a leather vest. At that moment, the roar of engines being gunned hard turned me toward the pumps—just in time to see the motorcycle speed out. I ran and nearly bumped into a young guy with big black hoops set into his earlobes who’d come out of the office right behind me. He frantically yelled out, “Hey!” at the receding motorcycle.
I ran to the sidewalk to see if I could get an idea of which way he’d headed, and Bailey joined me one second later. I pocketed my gun as we watched the motorcycle recede into the distance, heading south on Fairfax.
“That guy stole my bike!” he yelled.
I handed him my cell phone. “Call the cops.”
He looked from me to Bailey, perplexed, then took it and said, “Thanks.”
I nodded and turned to Bailey, who was staring down the street. “Shit,” she said, echoing the mildest of my thoughts.
I leaned back against the gas pump, and Bailey continued to stare off in the direction the motorcycle had gone, her hands on her hips, her expression grim. The hoop-eared guy returned my phone, then walked off, shaking his head. I dropped it back into my pocket.
“He ran the minute he saw us.”
Bailey nodded.
“He recognized at least one of us,” I said.
She nodded again. “Seems so.”
“Unless the sight of women always makes him run—”
“Or he made us as cops.”
I glanced at Bailey. “Not likely.”
She looked me up and down. “True.”
“I’m willing to bet he’s the one who did my car, and the one who fired the shots at us.”
Bailey thought for a moment. “Makes sense.”
“And you know what else?” I asked.
“No. What else?” she said flatly.
“This means our play worked,” I replied. “When he saw the Times story about us having a
suspect in custody, he figured it was safe to crawl out of his hole.”
Bailey nodded.
“That’s something,” I said.
Bailey nodded again.
“You know, the way you go on and on is a problem sometimes,” I said.
Just then, my cell phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out and looked at the number.
“Yeah, Luis?” I said.
“Hector says tha’s the guy.”
40
He was “the guy” all right. In more ways than one, based on what I’d seen at the Oki-Dog. I didn’t know when or even if the cops would catch up with him for stealing the bike. Vehicle theft was not a high-priority crime. And I couldn’t tell the cops how I knew the AB guy had set up the burglary in the Palisades, because that information had come courtesy of my clandestine and highly illegal visit with baby gangbanger Hector. The good news for Hector was now we wouldn’t need him to go public with his story—we could bust our AB guy for auto theft. Assuming we could find him.
“Can you try to find out who this guy is without getting noticed?” I asked Bailey.
She nodded. “Soon as I drop you off.”
But I was impatient. Now that we were closing in, I didn’t want to just wait; I wanted to do something. So when Bailey dropped me back at the Biltmore, I immediately sat down to e-mail Clive the photo of our AB guy. If I was right, and the guy was involved in Susan’s rape somehow, he might show up in a database somewhere. Clive had ways of getting into such child-molester databases, and he worked fast.
When I logged on, I was surprised to find that I had a message from Clive waiting for me in my in-box. “Per your request, I’ve attached photos that look like the kind that were taken of your victim. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do.”
I sent the AB guy’s photo to Clive with a request to find out if the suspect showed up anywhere. Then I opened the attachment from Clive’s e-mail. There were seven photos of young boys, all around the same age as Kit. As I looked closely, I saw that they all had the same background as Kit’s photo—the lighting, the dimensions of the seemingly unfurnished room, and something else: a black vertical line. I started to focus in on that detail, then got a sudden jolt when one of the faces sprang out at me: it was Dante.
I felt the adrenaline rush I always got when the pieces of a puzzle started to fit. If Dante saw this picture, it might trigger the memory of who took it and where. I called him, nervously pacing as I willed him to pick up. Instead I got his voice mail. Frustrated, I left a message telling him to call me immediately. Then I returned to the photos to study the background detail again. I went from photo to photo. There it was, in every single one. I pulled up Kit’s photo, just to make sure—I was right; it was there too.
I took out my magnifying glass to get a closer look and pored over every millimeter of the line in the background of each photograph. One by one, over and over. But there wasn’t enough detail to tell what it was—the photographs were surprisingly grainy and unprofessional-looking.
Whatever it was, it had to have been part of the room, not just a random shadow or developing artifact. This was proof positive that all of the photos had been taken in the same place. With a little luck, Dante could tell me where that was.
I wished I’d kept the original photo of Kit, but I hadn’t wanted to risk getting Graden in trouble, so I’d sent it back to him through Bailey. As I paced, my cell phone—now off vibrator mode—played the refrain from “Love Street” by the Doors. I’d downloaded the tune in a fit of boredom during one of our stakeouts at the Oki-Dog, though I had to admit it was a little on the nose.
It was Dante. Eager for answers, I got right to the point.
“I found a photo of you on the Net. I’m going to send it to you right now. I need you to tell me what you remember about it,” I said.
Dante blew out a long breath, and there was silence on the line for a few beats. Finally he said, “Send it.”
I told Dante he’d have the photo in five seconds, then hung up and sent it. My phone rang twenty seconds later.
“That photo of me, I don’t remember it at all. And it’s kinda weird-looking, not like the usual stuff we do,” Dante said, his voice puzzled.
I’d hoped for more, though I wasn’t surprised. He’d warned me before that he washed out memories of his photo shoots. But the fact that the photograph was out of the norm was an important little nugget. It didn’t do much for me now, but it might at some point. I told him I’d stay in touch, and we hung up. I remembered an earlier text message from T’Chia, Kit’s girlfriend. She’d decided to come clean, and told me Kit had bragged to her not long before he died about being into some big-money deal. She’d figured it had to do with dope, which she didn’t want to hear about, so she hadn’t asked for any details.
It wasn’t such a big revelation. With Kit’s nude photo in Jake’s pocket, blackmail had been in the center ring right from the start. The question was, who was Kit blackmailing?
I started to pace again and stepped out onto the balcony. The sun was nearly gone, but remnants of the light lingered like a shimmering cloak trailing behind a departing king. The sky above the horizon had begun its infusion of purples and indigos that would seep down into the glow and envelop the last rays of sunlight.
All in all, it hadn’t been such a bad day, productivity-wise. We’d lost the AB guy at the gas station, and I couldn’t yet say whether he was the rapist, but I had to be right that he was the one who’d vandalized my car and taken shots at Bailey and me. And now that he’d seen us go after him, he had to know we were on to him. This was as safe as I was going to get until we locked him up.
My cell phone played “Love Street” again. I enjoyed the song for a moment, then answered.
“I never realized how packed this place is,” Graden said without preamble.
“What place?”
“The evidence room. Next time some defense attorney whines about all the shit we forgot to do, I’ll show him around this joint,” he remarked dryly. “Anyway, you still in the mood to check out what we’ve got?”
I’d barely hung up before I was out the door and on the street, headed toward the Police Administration Building. I moved briskly, wondering if it would be pushing my luck to ask Graden to check out the photo of the AB guy and see what he could find.
His door was open, and he was standing at the conference table to the right of his desk. Strewn across the table were bags with evidence tags. I knocked on the door frame, and he looked up and motioned for me to come in.
“It’s a lovely evening for sifting through evidence of a homicide, don’t you think?” he said with a grin.
“Is there ever a bad time?” I asked, smiling.
“It’ll be a bad time if anyone sees you in here, so close the door.”
I did as he said and walked over to the table.
“They basically cut out the entire carpet and pulled off every piece of lint, flint, and loose change they could find. And, of course, every possible surface was examined for DNA, then dusted for prints,” Graden said, scanning the table.
“And?” I asked.
“No dice on the prints or DNA—”
“Damn,” I said, disappointed.
Graden nodded, agreeing. “We door-knocked the motel for witnesses.”
“I’ll bet that was fun,” I said dryly.
“The junkie down the hall from the room thinks he saw a guy walking out of the motel right after the shots were fired, but he can’t remember size or weight, just said the ‘dude wasn’t big and wasn’t small.’ He didn’t see his hair, so we don’t even have the hairstyle or color. And he didn’t see what room the guy walked out of, so this mystery man may not even be related to the case,” Graden said, shaking his head.
“So I guess you’re about ready to make an arrest,” I replied.
“Yeah, we’re on the brink,” he said, shaking his head again. He gestured to several plastic baggies in a box at the corner of the table. “I�
��ve gone through it all. That’s what they found on the carpet.”
I looked through them one by one. Loose change, a lighter, some cigarette butts, burnt matches, a single cheap earring. Nothing exciting. “I’m not seeing much here,” I said, sighing.
“I know,” Graden agreed. He opened his drawer and took out a bag of what looked like M&M’s and offered it to me. “Consolation prize? And what’s probably going to be your dinner.”
I looked at the bag. “It seems different somehow,” I said as I dumped some candy into my hand.
“It’s their latest development. Not on the shelves yet.”
I looked at Graden. “It’s a free sample, right? They give you this kind of stuff because of your video game.”
“Guilty,” he admitted.
“This is shameless swag,” I said, amused.
“Which doesn’t bother me because I am shameless.” Graden grinned. “But it’s pretty good, no?”
I nodded, thinking that it wasn’t, actually. It was supposed to be coconut-flavored, but it tasted kind of soapy. I handed the candy back to him, then turned to the table and sifted through a few more evidence bags. “What’s this?” I held up a plastic baggie with a sparkly round… something.
“I’m thinking it probably fell off a hooker outfit,” he replied.
That fit. “And what about those?” I asked, pointing to the cigarette butts. “No DNA?”
“Not much, and what we did get didn’t match either Jake or Kit or anyone in the database.”
I sighed, feeling defeated. “What about the bathroom? Find anything in there?”
“Nothing you want to hear about,” Graden said. “But I do have something for you.”
I gave him a sidelong glance. “Careful. Remember, I’ve got a permit now.”
“If you shoot, you won’t get to hear this,” he said, returning my mock warning look. “One of the senior ballistics experts is a buddy of mine from a big gangland murder a couple of years ago. You might’ve heard of it. Some bangers went out for retaliation and shot up the wrong apartment. Wound up killing a little boy who was asleep in his bouncer.”