Come Twilight (Long Beach Homicide Book 4)

by Tyler Dilts

  “You’re in the hospital,” she said. “You have a head injury.”

  I tried to sit up, to get out of bed. There was something attached to my arm. I looked at it. She leaned forward and gently pushed me back down. I felt the pillow against the back of my head.

  “But I know who did it,” I said.

  “That’s good,” she said, reaching across my body and fishing for a heavy gray cord. There was a handle with a button on the end. I recognized it. That was how you called for help.

  She pushed the button with her thumb. “They wanted me to let them know when you woke up.”

  I nodded.

  “I know who did it.”

  “Who?” she said.

  When I tried to tell her, though, the certainty I’d felt only a few moments before had vanished, leaving nothing in its place. Only an emptiness that felt unimaginably vast and desolate. It was only when she wiped the tears from my eyes that I realized I was crying.

  Two hours later, most of the confusion had passed and I was able to recall what had happened. Most of it. A doctor had come in and given me a neurological exam. I had a concussion and several bruised ribs. He was concerned about the potential for a subdural hematoma. They’d need to watch me for a while.

  The first thing Jen said when she came in was, “Dumb shit.” She was angry. That’s how I knew I probably wasn’t going to die. Julia told me Jen had been there most of the night, only leaving to join Patrick when the doctor told her the CT scan didn’t show any signs of major damage or intracranial bleeding.

  “How’s he doing?” Jen asked Julia.

  Julia told her everything the doctor had said, then smiled at me and said, “I’m going to run down to the cafeteria, okay?”

  I nodded.

  “What were you thinking?” Jen asked.

  There was no good answer, so I pretended it was a rhetorical question.

  I started to tell her what I remembered.

  “Save it for Patrick,” she said. “He’ll be here soon.”

  We sat in silence. I tried to read her. She was angry. With me, of course, but also with herself. I knew she would hold herself responsible for what had happened to me, even though it was completely my fault.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “You should be. I told you to go straight to my place.”

  “He could have got me there, too.”

  “No, he couldn’t. Lauren was off yesterday. Home. I called her and asked her to keep an eye out for you. Otherwise I never would have said okay to you going alone.”

  “I don’t know. She’s still a rook—”

  “Shut up. She would have had your back. And she’s not a rookie anymore.” She wasn’t just upset. She was angry. I hadn’t seen her like this often. She was very good at keeping things in check.

  “Look, Jen, I’m really—”

  “Stop, just fucking stop.” She looked out the window and I could see that she was thinking through something. After a long silence, she looked like she came to a decision and turned back to face me again.

  “You need to grow up. There are people who care about you. Do you have any idea what you put us through last night?”

  When she saw my blank stare, she told me.

  Jen’s testimony the previous day should have been straightforward and relatively quick. The case was an attempted murder-suicide, but after shooting his ex-wife, the man had second thoughts. Jen had been surprised it even went to trial. The evidence against him was so overwhelming, she had expected a plea deal. But the defense attorney was stringing things out so much, she was worried she’d have to come back the next day. The judge curtailed him, though, so they were able to wrap things up by the end of the day.

  When she read the text message asking about going straight to her house, she checked with Lauren to make sure she was home and, against her better judgment, gave the go-ahead.

  Then she phoned in a take-out order from Enrique’s. Carne asada, chicken enchiladas, and tacos. She sent a group text saying she’d be bringing dinner. The only reply came from Lauren.

  By the time she got home, she’d started to worry. She checked in with Julia to see if she had heard anything, then called Patrick, who was alone in the squad room.

  “Is Danny still there?”

  “I think he left a little while ago, but I’ll check around,” Patrick told her. “Make sure he’s not somewhere else in the station.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “I’m going to go check his place.”

  She got back in her RAV4, drove for five long minutes, and parked on Roycroft. The cruiser from the motor pool was there and the back door was unlocked.

  “Danny?” she called when she went inside. Some papers had fallen off the table, and a dining chair had been pushed back away from the table.

  Were these signs of a struggle?

  Yes, she realized, they were. It hit her in the stomach first, and as she felt it rising into her chest, she swallowed hard to push the apprehension back down.

  She called Patrick back. Told him what she’d found.

  “I’m on the way,” he said. “I’ll bring a crew and tell the lieutenant.” He didn’t need to tell her he’d put out a BOLO, too.

  Jen tried the phone again. Instinctively, she put her hand on the grip of her Glock and spun around when she heard the ringing in the bathroom. She went in and found the phone. Someone had been in the shower recently. The walls and sliding glass were still peppered with drops of water, and the towel hanging over the top rail was wet.

  She saw the iPad on the table, thought about potential trace evidence, and decided that the video was more important. She’d never seen the icon for the app that linked to the surveillance cameras, so she started opening anything that looked unfamiliar. On the fourth try, she found the right one. It wasn’t hard to figure things out. The feeds from the two cameras covering the front of the duplex were clear, except for me pulling up to the curb, checking the same iPad she was holding, and then getting out and heading inside, so she switched to the one pointing out my bedroom window at the backyard.

  She kept moving and she saw him. It was clear he knew about the camera because he wore the hood of his sweatshirt pulled up over his head and he turned away from the lens as he jogged across the lawn.

  She switched to the garage-mounted camera and watched him from behind as he peeked in the bedroom window and then went around the side of the building. When he’d seen what he was looking for, he came back and went to the back porch.

  He crouched down and began working on the doorknob. He was too far away for her to see much detail, but even still she knew he was working at picking the lock. It took him a minute and a half for the first lock, which she assumed to be the doorknob, and almost two for the other, the deadbolt. And then he disappeared inside.

  She watched the time signature as she fast-forwarded. Five minutes sped by in accelerated time and she knew he was waiting for the shower to stop. She checked her watch. The footage she was watching had been recorded fifty-three minutes earlier.

  They could be anywhere now, she thought.

  Then she saw it. The man in the hoodie dragging an unconscious body across the porch, one hand in each armpit, as my feet clunked down the three stairs to the concrete below. He pulled his awkward load across the lawn and disappeared.

  She looked up from the screen as flashing red lights lit up the living-room picture window that faced out onto Roycroft.

  Then Patrick was knocking on the front door with two uniforms behind him.

  Before he could say anything, Jen said, “Somebody grabbed him. One guy. Dragged him out through the backyard and into the alley.”

  “How did Danny look?”

  She didn’t answer. No matter what she feared, it was standard procedure to assume a kidnapping victim was alive until there is definitive proof otherwise.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll get him.” Patrick got back on his phone and called Ruiz to tell him they had confirmation of a kidnapping.<
br />
  Jen played back the video for him. The kidnapper looked like he was a bit under six feet tall, weight 170 or so. Athletic build. Patrick slowed the playback and froze on a frame of the kidnapper midway across the backyard, just as he was moving toward the edge of the camera’s field of vision.

  “He knows where the camera is,” Patrick said. “He’s making sure we don’t get a good shot of his face.”

  Jen looked again at the table and chair. At the papers on the floor.

  “I think Danny was coming from the bedroom or the bathroom. He was in the shower. Walks up the hallway. The hoodie’s waiting for him.”

  “Where?”

  Jen looked around again. “The kitchen. It’s the only place for a good ambush.” She showed him. The arched opening was the size of a standard door and there was two feet of empty wall to the side. It would give an attacker a good place to hide. Unlike the opening from the hallway into the dining room, which was larger and had a bookshelf next to the jamb that wouldn’t provide much concealment.

  She had Patrick walk past the kitchen door and she grabbed him from behind in slow motion. It was clear to both of them that the likely trajectory of my body would be into the table in the same direction as its displacement. The chair and the papers supported the theory.

  Jen called the crime-scene tech over. “Get pictures of everything. Bathroom, bedroom, hallway, kitchen. And get everything here.” She swept her hand to indicate the dining table and the area around it.

  She went into the bathroom and found the phone on the counter.

  There was a call from an unknown number that synced up with the time on the video when the kidnapper was on the back porch. He’d been making sure his target was really in the shower.

  “Why would he shower here?” Patrick asked. “Why not just wait until he got to your place?”

  “Because I have a low-flow shower,” Jen said. She remembered the day last year when she’d stood in my bathroom and used a pocketknife to remove the flow limiter in the new showerhead the landlord had just installed. As she explained it to Patrick, she felt a twinge of guilt rising in her chest. Why hadn’t she just switched one of hers out for this one? She knew how much it helped the pain. She knew it would be days at least before the threat was neutralized. If she had, she thought, she might have prevented this. She pushed the thought out of her head. Replaced it with anger. At the kidnapper. At me.

  Patrick’s phone rang. It was Ruiz. He was on the way.

  Jen went outside and huddled with several patrol officers. She told them to start knocking on doors and asking if anyone had seen an unusual vehicle in the alley within the last few hours.

  They stood on the lawn and waited. For the techs inside. For Ruiz. For the patrol officers to report back. For anyone who could give them something, anything, that would tell them what to do next.

  Jen’s phone rang. It was one of the uniforms on the next street over. Someone had seen something.

  She hurried around the corner and found the officer four houses down from the corner. If it didn’t line up with the duplex on Roycroft, it was very close.

  The woman who lived there was older, late sixties or early seventies. Jen guessed she was retired. The uniform introduced her as Mrs. Rosenfeld.

  “Can you tell me what you saw?” Jen asked.

  “Yes, I was just taking my trash out. We keep the bin in the alley. And there was a white van parked on the other side.”

  “Show me,” Jen said.

  Mrs. Rosenfeld led her around the side of the house and across an immaculately maintained yard to the back gate. The old woman unlatched it and pushed it open. “Right there,” she said, pointing ten yards up the alley at the back of my garage.

  “Do you know what kind of van it was?” Jen asked.

  “White, like the gardeners use.”

  Jen’s gardener used an old Ford Ranger. “You’re sure it was a van? Not a pickup?”

  “Young lady, I might be old, but I know the difference between a van and a pickup truck.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. Do you happen to know what kind of van it was?”

  “It’s harder to tell the newer ones apart.”

  “How new was it?” Jen asked.

  “Oh, not brand new. A few years old. Five, maybe? It was dirty, but it didn’t look too bad.”

  “Did it have windows on the sides?”

  “No,” Mrs. Rosenfeld said. “It looked like a work truck. Like Edgar used to drive.”

  “Edgar?”

  “My husband. He was an electrician. Died in ’05.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Was the truck as old as Edgar’s?”

  “It’s been fifteen years since he had his truck. Did I say it looked fifteen years old?”

  “No, ma’am, you didn’t.”

  “It was newer than that. I could still tell the difference between the Fords and the Chevys in those days.”

  “Is there anything else you can remember about the van, Mrs. Rosenfeld? Any marks or dents? Any writing? The license number?”

  “No, it was just plain white. I didn’t have my glasses on so I couldn’t see the license plate.”

  “And it was still parked there then when you went back into the yard?”

  “Yes. I was only out long enough to dump the trash. Honestly, I didn’t pay that much attention. We get trucks and things back there quite a bit, with the service people and the gardeners and everyone.”

  Jen thanked her for her help. She told the uniform to keep knocking and hurried back to find Patrick so he could add the late-model white van to the BOLO.

  She found Ruiz first, though, and told him what she’d learned. He called in the update himself.

  “What was he doing here by himself?” he asked.

  “He wasn’t supposed to be here. He was supposed to go straight to my house.”

  “Why was he in a position to make that call himself?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, biting down on her anger. “Because he’s a grown-ass man?” She stormed off, her right hand clenched into a fist, looking for something to hit.

  An hour and a half later they had knocked on every door on the block. They didn’t find anyone else who had seen the white van. The techs had found some trace evidence that might be useful down the line if they ever had a suspect, but nothing of any immediate usefulness.

  Patrol units had pulled over a dozen white vans. None of the stops yielded anything other than angry drivers.

  Jen made the call she’d been dreading. Julia answered immediately, and Jen knew she’d been waiting for a call since she’d talked to her earlier.

  “Danny’s been abducted,” Jen said.

  After a long silence, Julia said, “What does that mean?”

  Jen told her what had happened since they’d last spoke.

  “Oh god.” Her voice was quiet.

  Jen felt the panic. She knew. She was feeling the same thing.

  “What should I do?” Julia asked.

  “There’s really nothing you can do except wait. I’m heading back to the station. It will be easier to monitor things there.” She thought about Julia, alone, staring helplessly at the cell phone, waiting for news. Already worried she was making a mistake, she added, “Do you want to meet me there, or should I pick you up?”

  When Julia got into the RAV4, Jen could see she had been crying.

  “Why was he alone?” Julia asked.

  “I was late getting out of court. He didn’t want to wait for me. He was supposed to go straight to my house.”

  Jen stared out the windshield as she drove. She couldn’t look at Julia. She was afraid to see the accusation in her eyes. “It was my fault.”

  “What?” Julia said.

  “I should have stopped him, made him wait for me.”

  “Stop it,” Julia said.

  “Stop what?”

  “Blaming yourself.” There was a firmness in her voice that Jen hadn’t heard before. “It’s not your fault.”
/>   Jen didn’t reply.

  “It’s not anybody’s fault except the man who abducted Danny.”

  Even though she didn’t want to hear it, Jen listened.

  “Danny made a mistake. He shouldn’t have done what he did. But it wasn’t his fault, either. He was in pain. So he took a shower in his own house. How could that possibly make it his fault that he was abducted?”

  Before she’d transferred to Homicide, Jen had worked in Sex Crimes. By the time she’d been on the squad three months, she’d lost track of the number of times she’d had to school someone about victim blaming. She was blaming me for my own kidnapping.

  Still, though, if I had just done what she’d told me to, if she had made me listen to her, I would have been sitting on her couch right now with Julia watching Downton Abbey.

  Jen checked in with the watch commander as soon they were inside the station. There was no news. Ruiz was back, too. She wondered if she should apologize for her crack at the scene.

  Shit, she thought, as the realization that she had just thought of my home as a crime scene swept over her. She was depersonalizing. “Stop,” she whispered.

  “What?” Julia said.

  “I’m just trying to keep a handle on this,” she said.

  “Me too.” Julia reached out and touched Jen’s arm. “Me too.”

  Jen listened to Patrick on the phone. “I feel like I should be out there.” He was still at the duplex in case any of the crime-scene techs pulled off a miracle with a new piece of evidence everyone had missed.

  “I know,” Jen replied. “Keep me updated, okay?”

  Patrick said, “Check it again anyway” to someone there, then spoke to her again. “I will.”

  She was in the squad room with Julia, just outside of Ruiz’s office. He was talking to someone on the landline and had another call going on the speaker of his cell phone.

  Jen knew there was nothing she could do but wait. The entire department was on high alert. The SWAT Hostage Rescue Team was standing by, ready to roll, and every available patrol unit was scouring the city looking for the van. She should have stayed at my place. There wouldn’t be any more for her to do there, but she’d be closer to things. Well, she thought, she might not actually be closer, but she’d feel closer. But when she spoke to Julia and heard the fear in her voice, Jen knew she couldn’t leave her alone. As impotent and powerless as she felt, she was keenly aware of how much worse it would be for Julia.