Cold Hit

by Stephen J. Cannell

  This was strictly a photo surveillance.

  18

  When I got home that evening, Chooch and his best friend Darius Hall were huddled in the backyard with their heads together talking earnestly. Chooch had just been notified by the UCLA athletic department that head coach Karl Dorrell wanted to arrange a home visit. It was scheduled for the day after tomorrow at five-thirty in the evening. Delfina was in her room doing homework, so Alexa and I kicked off our shoes in the den and sipped cold beers.

  “Good news about UCLA,” she said.

  “Very,” I agreed.

  “So how was your day?”

  “Don’t go there.”

  “Don’t be an asshole.” She smiled. “I want to hear about the task force. What’s your take on the crowd Chief Ramsey picked?”

  Instead of engaging in petty cheap shots, I told her about the funeral the following afternoon.

  She was silent for a minute after I finished. “I thought you had John Doe Number Four down as a copycat kill.”

  “Might be. Might not be. Never can tell,” I said, blithely sawing the air with an indifferent hand.

  She looked at me critically. “Are you trying to get off this task force and be reassigned to this last John Doe murder?” picking off my brilliantly deceptive plan faster than a base runner stealing signs from second.

  “Naw…get off the Fingertip task force?” I lied. “How can you say that? We got invisible offices and a neat FBI leader who will tolerate nothing but brilliance. No ma’am. This is a chance to get my name in the paper. Maybe I can even sell this case to the movies, and put a second story on this house so Chooch won’t have to sleep in the garage.”

  “Don’t hedge, Shane.”

  I looked at her and shrugged.

  “Let me see if I’m reading this right. You absolutely hate task forces. You know Zack is in career trouble. With all the white light the Fingertip case is getting, he won’t last two days on that unit, so you want me to split this last murder off and move you and Zack onto it, out of the spotlight, until you can figure out what to do to save him.” Busting me like ripe fruit.

  “Listen, I agree with you about the task force,” she continued. “But we’ve been backed into this by the mayor. Tony didn’t want to do it.”

  “Then why did you put an FBI agent in charge?”

  “That was a deal we had to cut with the Eye so they wouldn’t take the case away. You know how they love a high-profile media murder. And after seven weeks, if they just take it from us, it looks like we muffed the investigation. That’s bad for Tony and for me.”

  “How do they just take it away? It’s our case.”

  “Honey, with the new organization in law enforcement, Homeland and the FBI have gained major power. They can more or less have anything they want.”

  I sat there for a long moment studying my shoes. It looked like they were due for a shine. Actually, I was due for new shoes. I wondered if I should step up from Florsheims to designer moccasins, or maybe get a pair of those butt-ass ugly Bruno Maglis like O. J.’s.

  “I need you on that case to be my eyes and ears,” Alexa said, interrupting these weighty thoughts.

  “I’m not a spy.” My feelings were hurt that she would even suggest it.

  “That didn’t come out exactly the way I wanted,” she said.

  We sat together and finished our beers without speaking. Finally she got up and went into the kitchen to start dinner.

  I wandered out and listened to Chooch and Darius in the backyard. They were talking about what they always talked about. Football. Darius was Harvard Westlake’s star running back and was also being heavily recruited by UCLA. They had already offered him a scholarship.

  “We should go as a package, dude,” Darius suggested.

  “Way cool,” Chooch answered, excitement building in his voice. “I could tell Coach Carroll I won’t go to USC unless they offer you a ride. You tell the same thing to Coach Dorrell.”

  “Keep the old backfield intact.”

  I stood in the doorway behind them and listened to few more minutes of this nonsense. I didn’t think trying to blackmail a couple of blue-chip, Division-One college coaches was the best way to earn a full scholarship from either.

  I went back into the den, switched on the TV, and caught the top of the seven o’clock news.

  “Big advancements in the Fingertip murder case,” the handsome blow-dry on Channel Nine declared triumphantly. “Today, Chief Filosiani announced the formation of a new task force. The unit will be headed by famed FBI criminal profiler Judson Underwood. Underwood is perhaps best known for his capture of the Detroit Slasher and his subsequent best-selling book, Motor City Monster. The task force will be comprised of crack members from homicide bureaus all over the city.”

  Then my artist’s rendition hit the screen. “Funeral services for the fourth victim, recently identified as Forrest Davies, will be held at the Old North Church at Forest Lawn cemetery at one-thirty tomorrow.”

  The shot switched back to the anchorman. “The funeral will mark the beginning of the second month on this horrific case where bodies have been mutilated and leads have been scarce. But tensions seemed to ease all around town today, as the details of this new, high-tech squad were revealed.”

  I wondered if our high-tech squad had any phones yet.

  19

  My briefing went off in the task force coffee room at 8 A.M. Ed Hookstratten had blanketed the media with stories of Forrest’s funeral. Chief Ramsey and Agent Underwood stood in the back until I was finished.

  “That’s the skinny, then,” Underwood said, as he walked to the front of the room. “I don’t want to overload this funeral with suits, so I’m limiting attendance to ten people. One officer only from each Homicide Bureau. Work it out among yourselves and try not to show up looking like cops. No brown shoes and white socks.” One of the few worthwhile things he’d told us.

  After the briefing, Underwood paused in front of me as the others were pushing their chairs out of the coffee room.

  “Where the fuck is your partner? I still haven’t laid eyes on that guy.”

  “He needed to get gun qualified this morning or go on suspension. It’s been scheduled for a month. He’s over at the shooting range,” I lied flawlessly.

  Underwood stared at me for a moment, then turned and followed Deputy Chief Ramsey into his office, which had now been miraculously upgraded with walls and a door.

  Once he was safely inside, the members of our elite squad circled me like a snarling pack of coyotes. I’d claimed the early lead with my bullshit funeral and was a looming literary problem.

  Twenty minutes later, as I was getting ready to head out, one of the detectives from Central Bureau, a fireplug with a swarthy complexion, named either Brendan or Brian Villalobos wandered over. He stood across from my battered desk rocking on his heels.

  “Pretty good,” he said. But there wasn’t much enthusiasm in it.

  “Thanks.”

  “You really think this dickwad is gonna show up at your dumb-ass funeral?”

  “Stranger things have happened, Brian.”

  “Brendan.”

  “Brendan.”

  Then we started staring each other down like twelve-year-olds before a schoolyard fight.

  “Okay, look…you want, maybe we can come to terms on this,” he ventured.

  “Terms? What are we talking about, Brendan?” Giving him my dull stupid look, which unfortunately, I seem to affect very easily.

  “This task force is just a crock a sixth-floor bullshit. But maybe you and I can get past that and turn it into something worthwhile if we work together.”

  “But we are working together, Brendan. That’s what task forces do.”

  “Don’t shine me up, pal.” He motioned toward the room. “This is a five-car accident. Still, there might be opportunity in all this chaos if we work it right.” He leaned closer. “What if you and I trade everything we’ve got, but just with each other
? These other humps can fend for themselves.”

  “You mean hoard shit?”

  He smiled, “I know you’re the original primary on these murders and you probably know stuff the rest of us don’t. But if you team up with me, you’re getting a skilled homicide guy with a seventy-percent clearance rate. If we end up with a book or a movie, we cut it right down the middle.”

  “Can I get back to you on that? My voice mail is loaded and I’m sort of obligated to evaluate all my offers before deciding.”

  His expression hardened. “I’m not going to let this opportunity get away. My partner is the buffalo in the checked coat over there.” He pointed at Bart Hoover. “He’s Captain Hoover’s brother. They’re filling his jacket with sexy stuff, hoping he catches this perp so he can make the lieutenant’s list. But trust me, that jerk couldn’t catch a cold in Alaska. It’s also no secret your partner is a world-class alkie. Since we’re both stuck working with lames, maybe we should unofficially team up. This funeral thing of yours has possibilities. I’m just saying, let’s cut our losses and go in on it together.”

  “Interesting idea,” I said. “But I’m not sure about the fifty-fifty book and movie split. I’ll have to run that by my creative affairs advisor. I’ll get back to you.”

  He wandered off looking dissed. Since I hadn’t scored a chair yet, I sat on my broken desk and made a few calls.

  At noon I drove out to Forest Lawn and met with Bryna Spiros, a short, dark-haired woman with a bright smile. She’d helped me on two similar occasions, knew what I needed, and led me to the small wood-framed North Chapel.

  12:15 P.M.: My photographers, Doreen and Kyle, arrived in separate L-cars. They checked out suitable camera positions. I bought some leafy flower arrangements from the worship center florist to provide them with better photo blinds.

  12:30 P.M.: The polished mahogany casket arrived on a rolling gurney and was placed in the front of the chapel. I really love the names they give these coffins. I actually saw one in the display room called the Sky Lounge. This one was a Heaven Sent. Since I have a less formal streak, when I die I want to get hammered into a That’s All Folks!

  I opened the half-lid and propped it up. Forrest was festively turned out in a black suit and gray tie, resting on white satin, all ready for his heaven-sent ride into the great beyond.

  The embalmer did a reasonable job of cleaning him up. They taped over the gunshot wound and covered it with plastic skin, although his head still showed the lopsided trauma of the wound. He had that red-tinged robust complexion found only in wax museums and on the chalky faces of the dead. His eyes were closed and someone had decided to put heavy pancake over his eyelid tatts, covering the Russian Cyrillic symbols that said: “Don’t wake up.” This time he wouldn’t.

  “I’m gonna get this guy, Forrest,” I whispered somewhat foolishly to the waxy corpse.

  12:45 P.M.: Agent Underwood arrived and sat in the back, holding his ostrich briefcase, which undoubtedly had some kind of huge exotic, square-barreled automatic inside.

  1:00 P.M.: Stewart and Campbell, dressed as grieving parents, walked into the church and were seated in the front row.

  Members of the task force started to arrive, pulling into the parking lot in their personal vehicles. A few minutes later, they wandered into the church and spread out, everyone stylin’ and profilin’. No polyester, white socks, or Kmart ties.

  Some tactical ops like to use catchy radio code names, but I always feel like an asshole triggering my mike and saying, “This is Dogcatcher to Handy-Wipe,” so I just assigned numbers. Underwood was One. I was Two. Bola was Three, and so forth.

  There were a half a dozen people in attendance who I’d never seen before. The long-lens team was busy shooting close-ups of all of them. Kyle was inside the church, behind the viewing area. Doreen was in the trees, halfway between the chapel and the parking lot with a 350-mm lens. A CD of harp music played as a few more people ambled in and sat in the uncomfortable, wooden pews.

  There was a very attractive, well-dressed, middle-aged, blonde woman in a stylish suit sitting in the back of the church looking as out of place as a debutante at a monster truck rally. Ice blue eyes, flawless skin, great shoes, and a single strand of pearls.

  At one point, before the service started, a gray-haired, pear-shaped, three-hundred-and-fifty-pound man in a brown tweed coat entered the chapel, waddled up the aisle on swollen ankles, and looked into the casket. He reached down and rubbed the pancake off of Forrest’s eyelids, then leaned close and checked the tattoos. Satisfied, he turned and limped back up the aisle and right on out the front door of the church. I triggered my mike.

  “This is Two to Six,” I whispered to Kyle using my Handy-Talkie. “You get that?”

  “Roger, Two. Got him,” Kyle’s voice answered in my earpiece.

  “Seven, this is Two. You got a huge bogie dressed in brown burlap coming out the front of the chapel.”

  “Roger, Two,” Doreen McFadden said. “I’m photogratizing his sagging ass even as we speak.”

  I moved out the side door of the chapel and watched from the steps as she tracked him from a safe distance using the line of trees for cover, gunning off shots as he got into a black Lincoln Town Car, driven by another man. The car quickly exited the park.

  “Two, this is Seven,” Doreen’s voice came back in my ear. “That town car has diplomatic plates.”

  “Get outta town…,” I murmured, wondering what the hell was going on.

  A few minutes later, the attractive blonde got up, walked to the casket and looked at the body. Then she also left. Right after that, a medium-built bald man in a blue blazer did the same thing.

  1:30 P.M.: The funeral started and the priest Bryna provided said some oft-used words. “God has seen fit to call his servant home.”

  The guy had a timid delivery and the short service droned unmercifully. By then the only people left in the congregation to hear it were all packing badges and creaking out yawns.

  2:10 P.M.: Six members of the task force carried Forrest’s Heaven Sent casket out of the church and loaded it into the hearse for the short drive to our gravesite two hundred yards up the hill. We had to keep up the charade until it was over. It was a good thing we did, because just as the priest was sprinkling holy water on the coffin, I saw a black guy in a Forest Lawn uniform taking pictures of the burial with a long lens from a grounds truck parked a hundred yards from the gravesite.

  “Six, this is Two. African American in a park maintenance outfit behind the white truck.”

  “Roger. Already got him and his partner,” Doreen answered.

  I hadn’t seen his partner.

  2:50 P.M.: The funeral was over and everybody was gone. We retrieved Forrest from the elegant, silk-lined Heaven Sent and returned him to the harsher environs of the morgue refrigerator. Then we hurried to task force headquarters to look at the digital shots Doreen and Kyle had taken.

  When I arrived, I had a surprise waiting.

  20

  Zack was standing with his back to the window. He looked awful. Bloodshot eyes, purple nose, saffron cheeks. His swollen jowls were flush with the tropical colors of sunset. Making it worse, he was holding forth in front of six detectives on the worthlessness of task forces. “You bunch a ass-wipes couldn’t find dog shit at the pound.”

  I walked over and grabbed him by the elbow. “Hey, Zack, come here. I need to show you something.”

  He pulled away. “Juss’ splainin’ what lame shit this is,” he slurred.

  Agent Orange was only a few minutes behind me. If he saw Zack in this condition it was over. But my partner was a big man who wasn’t easy to corral under normal circumstances. Drunk, he was impossible. So I screwed my heels into the floor and let him have my best right cross. He wasn’t expecting it and at the last second, turned into the punch. The sound bounced off the walls in the squad room, cracking like a leather bullwhip.

  Zack fell forward, landing across somebody’s new window desk, sca
ttering pencils, pictures and a charging cell phone. He was stunned, but not out. I reached around behind my back, grabbed the cuffs off my belt, and slipped them on his bandaged wrists. Then, with a throbbing right hand, I straightened him up. A line of bloody drool was coming out of the corner of his mouth. These last few days had taken a heavy toll. I’d just added to the mess by splitting his lip.

  I turned to the room full of startled cops wearing various expressions of jaw dropping disbelief.

  “This guy is a vet with an outstanding record. I’m begging you people to forget what you just saw. He’s going through a rough time. A divorce, a bankruptcy…cut him some slack.”

  I helped Zack to his feet.

  “Why’d ya hit me, man?” he mumbled.

  “To shut you up. Come on, we got people to see.”

  “Wha’ people?”

  I led him out of the temporary task force area into the bathroom across from the elevator, getting him inside just seconds before I heard Agent Orange in the lobby. I leaned Zack against the sink, his hands still cuffed behind him. Then I wet some paper towels and held them up to the fresh cut on his lip.

  “You gotta get outta here, Zack. Don’t come back till you’re sober.”

  “ ’S my new unit,” he said dully. “Don’t wanta get gigged on some bullshit nonperformance write-up.”

  “You’re drunk. The fed running this detail’s a total nutsack.”

  “Don’t wanta stay at my place, can’t stay at Fran’s or my brother’s. Hadda borrow his Harley. Fucker said he’s gonna report it stolen.”

  “Zack, will you shut up and come with me?”

  “Get these damn cuffs off,” he finally said, softly.

  I reached around and unhooked them with my key.

  “Where we going?”

  “To throw ourselves on the mercy of the sixth floor.

  His big Irish face creased into a frown.

  I found my wife in her office and left Zack sitting outside, breathing scotch on her assistant, Ellen.

  “What is it?” Alexa said, looking up at me as I came through the door.

  She was going over the monthly crime reports for the five detective bureaus. It was not an encouraging picture. Violent crime categories were up and clearance rates were down. That could largely be explained because there were not enough detectives to adequately cover the growing number of homicides. But commanders and deputy chiefs are notoriously deaf when it comes to down-trending job performance numbers. Alexa had to attend the bimonthly COMSTAT meeting and defend her clearance record. That meeting was scheduled for tomorrow. She looked impatient and worried.