by Tyler Dilts
“Danny?” The voice was familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. “This is Brad Hynes. Down in Gang Enforcement.”
“Hey, Brad.” I tried to place him. There was a Brian on the squad too, and they were both big guys with dark hair and mustaches. Actually, now that I thought about it, that description fit about eighty percent of the squad. “What can I do for you?” I asked.
“Jen Tanaka’s not still around is she?”
“Nope. She called it a night. I was about to do the same. Something I can help you with?”
“Not sure. Maybe. Got a kid down here, Rudy Nguyen, one of her cards in his wallet.”
“What’d he do?”
“Nothing, really. We’re holding him on suspicion. Found him driving a car registered to Milo Tran.”
“Should I know him?”
“He’s high up in one of the Westminster Viet crews. We’ve got an APB out on him. That’s how we picked up the kid.”
“You sweat him so far?”
“Not too much. We wanted to give Tanaka a heads-up before we go at him hard.”
“You think he can help you?” I asked.
“I doubt he’s got much to give up. If he did, Tran wouldn’t have had the kid toolin’ around in his Lexus.”
“So you kick him loose, you’re not really going to lose anything?”
“Nah. We’ve impounded the car. Anything we get’s gonna come from that. We’ll just book him, hold him overnight, then kick him tomorrow. Shake him up a little bit. Unless Tanaka wants to reach out.”
“You know what? I’m sure she would,” I said. “She’s got some family stuff going on right now, though. Do me a favor, would you? Ride him hard awhile, see if you can shake him up a bit. I’ll come down and take him off your hands in about an hour.”
“You got it. See you then.”
I knew I should call Jen, but I didn’t.
Outside in the parking lot, Rudy slumped in the passenger seat of my Camry. When I had picked him up from the interview room in Gang Enforcement, I could tell he’d been crying, so I had gone easy on him, asking only if he remembered me. He nodded, so I thanked Brad for the heads-up and led Rudy by the elbow out to my car.
“You gonna tell Sensei Jen?” Rudy looked all of about ten years old as he spoke.
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” he said, his eyes staring down at the floor between his feet. “That’s how come I asked.”
“You’ve got bigger things to worry about.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know why they were busting your ass back there, right?”
He didn’t say anything. I went on. “Milo Tran’s into some bad shit, Rudy. You don’t know the half of it. You think you do, but you’re wrong. Driving around in his car makes you an accessory after the fact.” This was the first lie I told him. “That’s a felony.”
“It is?”
“Yeah, it is. You ready for your first strike?”
“I’m still a minor.”
“That doesn’t float anymore, Rudy. Not with felonies, and not with gangbangers. They’re cracking down. These days just about every gang felon over sixteen’s getting tried as an adult.” That was lie number two. I wanted to scare him, but I was also trying to see how deep he was in. The more of my shtick he bought, the cleaner he was.
“You shittin’ me?” he said.
“Would Sensei Jen shit you?”
“No.”
“Well, I’m her partner, so I won’t shit you either.”
He eyeballed me, like a carpenter taking measurements. Then I saw it in his eyes. He believed me.
“Besides,” I said, “if I did, she’d kick my ass.”
He smiled. It was the first time I’d seen him do that.
“You know I’m doing you a solid here, right?”
He nodded.
“I’m gonna need some payback on this.”
Another nod.
“I know this won’t be easy,” I said, “but whatever you have to do, you go to class. I don’t care what it is, if it’s for your mom, for your brother, even for Milo Tran. Whatever you do, you go to class. That’s how you square this with me.”
He looked at me again. I couldn’t read him this time. “Okay,” he said, finally. I turned the key in the ignition.
Across the street from Beth’s house, the blue luminescence of a TV screen glowed in the darkness behind the windows that looked in on Harlan Gibbs’s living room, but I didn’t turn my head in that direction as I got out of my Camry and walked to Beth’s front door. The crime scene tape was gone, and before long, another tenant would move in. What would they know about the woman who’d lived there? What would they ask? What would they even want to know?
I didn’t bring the key, so I just sat down on the porch with my elbows on my knees and stared at the oil stains on the concrete in front of the one-car garage.
“Hello, Detective,” Harlan Gibbs said, limping up the driveway.
“Mr. Gibbs,” I said, nodding toward his leg. “Are you all right?”
“Hip acts up every once in a while.”
“Pull up a brick,” I said.
He sat down next to me on the porch. “I saw the story on the news.” He looked up at the sky, took a toothpick from his pocket, and worked it in between his incisors. “Father did it, did he?”
“That’s the story.”
“And you’re just sitting here reflecting on a job well done,” he said. Then he was quiet a moment. “How’s it feel?”
“Like shit.”
“I’ll bet.”
“You must know the feeling. Thirty plus on the job.”
“I surely do.” There was no awkwardness in the long silence that followed.
“Have any idea who really did it?” he asked.
“No more than the last time we talked.”
“Any possibility it really was the old man?”
“A small one.”
“But doubtful?”
“Yes.”
“What are you going to do now?”
I looked at the lines spiderwebbing across his eroded profile. “Can I ask you something personal?”
“First time I ever heard a detective ask that question.” He let out a snort that seemed to come from somewhere deep down in his rib cage. “Go right ahead.”
“You had feelings for Elizabeth, didn’t you?”
He scratched the crown of his head as he answered. “Probably make me sound like a dirty old man, but yes sir, I did.”
“For what it’s worth, I don’t believe it makes you sound that way at all.”
“She had a quality about her that—” He cut himself off midsentence and swallowed hard. “She understood that there’s darkness in the world, but she managed to keep herself…in the light.” He turned away from me and brought a hand to his face. “I don’t mean to say I ever…”
I put my hand on his arm, thinking his description of Beth would have been as apt for Megan. “I know you didn’t.”
He nodded, sat quietly a moment, and then said, “Don’t get old, son. You only wind up one of two ways—bitter asshole or sentimental fool. And the hell of it is, you never even get to choose.”
TWENTY-THREE
The next morning, just after dawn began to glow in the eastern sky, I went outside in my shorts and T-shirt to retrieve the Press-Telegram, the cold concrete biting at the soles of my bare feet. Geoff’s story, it turned out, was worthy of neither my initial enthusiasm nor the trepidation I’d felt when Ruiz changed his mind and reassigned Jen and me to the mop-up instead of Marty and Dave.
The story rated only about two column inches on the bottom corner of page six, in a sidebar to the continued-from-page-one story about the colonel’s suicide. Having no solution at all to the case must not have been sensational enough, I guessed. But a military hero who pimped his daughter more than twenty years ago and finally killed her to shut her up scaled off the chart. It didn’t matter whether or not it wa
s true.
I don’t know how I would have felt if I’d known the case would be making headlines again only a week later.
“How’s it going?” Marty asked me as I walked into the squad room. He was the only one there, but the day’s first pot of coffee was already more than half-gone. He’d turned the TV on too, but had kept the volume low. On the small screen, Matt Lauer was interviewing an African-American hip-hop singer who’d recently started showing up in movies. I couldn’t remember her name.
“Been at it a while?” I asked Marty, filling a cup for myself.
“Only about an hour or so. Caught a case yesterday afternoon.” He shuffled a stack of papers on his desk. “Self-inflicted GSW. Just want to make sure it all adds up before we put it to bed.”
I looked at my watch. It was five past seven. “Things still dicey at home?”
“Dicey? No. I wouldn’t say that. Everything’s settled. I’m apartment hunting after work tonight.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Me too. You come up with anything on those knives yesterday?”
“Nothing. Going to finish them up today, though.”
“You got to do the legwork. You never know where you’ll catch a break,” he said.
My cell phone rang. I looked down at the caller ID display and saw Jen’s number. “No,” I said. “You never do.”
“You should have called me,” Jen said, her voice even. I couldn’t tell how upset she was. I think that was her intent.
“I know,” I said. “The gang guys wanted to know right then.” I exaggerated a bit, though I wasn’t sure if it was for her benefit or mine. “They were going to book him on suspicion of some crap or other, so I had to make a judgment call. I thought it was better to err on the side of keeping his jacket clean.”
“I suppose it was.”
“What would you have done?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I want to say I would have let him learn his own lessons. But I probably would have caved.”
I wondered about that. That’s why I didn’t call her the night before, even though I knew I should have. I was afraid she wouldn’t reach out and that she’d regret it later. Either way, it would eat at her. “So I did the right thing?” I asked.
“I suppose.”
“At least he’ll be in class.”
“That’s good,” she said. “But you should have called.”
We spent most of the day running down kukri buyers, but still had no luck. Pat hit the same stone walls that Jen and I did. At half past three, he was in his office squeezing a racquetball in one hand and punching the keyboard with the other. Even with one hand, he was still typing faster than I’d ever been able to manage with two.
“No luck, huh?” he asked.
“Nope,” I said. “Got a couple of shops say they’ll provide credit card records, but I’m not holding my breath.”
“Same here. One hard ass said we’d need a court order or a subpoena, though. Should I talk to Kincaid?”
“Can’t. Case is closed, remember?”
“Well, that’s fucked.” He bounced the ball off his monitor screen and faced me. “Now what?”
“I wish I knew,” I said.
I sat in my car, parked behind a new Starbucks, and watched people walking back and forth in the messy, palm-treed sprawl of the parking lot. My eyes kept drifting back to the ginormous AMC 20 sign that dominated my field of vision. The new George Clooney movie had just opened, and it was easier to think about that than to watch Daryl Waxler’s empty Range Rover. I’d come to stake him out, to follow him around for a while. Maybe even to have another chat with him. Anything to get a fresh read. We were running low on suspects.
But I kept remembering that day in his office. He didn’t seem like a killer—just a sad, scared man. I remember the look on his face when he talked about his wife’s battle with breast cancer, about losing her, about the rough ride he’d gone through with D.J. afterward, and about the shock and pain of Beth’s killing. Of course, he could have been lying. It wouldn’t be the first time I wanted to believe an honest-sounding story coming from an apparently kindhearted suspect. But if he were the murderer, then he was one of the best I’d come across. Maybe he was a criminal mastermind after all. Or maybe just another smooth-talking sociopath.
“Fuck this,” I whispered to myself as I twisted the key in the ignition. Hanging a left into the thickening southbound traffic on PCH, I turned on the radio. The tail end of All Things Considered came on, but I couldn’t bear to listen to another story about violence in the Middle East, so I hit the CD button. Johnny Cash sang “Bird on a Wire,” his baritone voice so rich and intense, so deeply connected to the melancholy longing of the song, that it was hard to believe Leonard Cohen had beaten him to it.
I had an updated copy of the murder book with me, a ten-by-thirteen manila envelope loaded with dozens of crime scene photos tucked into the cover of the binder. I planned to spend the evening going back to the beginning. Again. On the way home, I stopped for a cup of coffee at yet another Starbucks on Pacific Coast Highway.
The patio outside was filled with high school students who were ignoring the open textbooks on the metal tables in front of them to talk on cell phones and smoke cigarettes.
I ordered a venti-sized mocha. There was a seat open in the corner by the front window, so I could sit with my back to the wall and a view of the door. Ray Charles covered “Ring of Fire” on the sound system. I smiled at the coincidence. The man at the next table saw my expression and nodded at me as I took my chair. I made the mistake of nodding back.
“How are you?” he asked.
I mumbled a noncommittal reply and flipped the binder open. “Taking some work home, are you?”
I didn’t answer him, but some deep-rooted resistance to simple and straightforward rudeness compelled me to acknowledge his question with another nod.
“What kind of work do you do?” he asked. I looked at him. He was a pleasant-enough looking little guy, fortyish, thinning at the hairline and thickening at the waist. His smile was so big it had the effect of making the rest of his face appear too small for his head.
“I’m a cop.”
“Really?” He seemed impressed.
“Yeah.”
“Wow. That’s terrific. You guys do terrific work. And people don’t appreciate it nearly as much as they should.”
“Thanks,” I said and turned my head back down to the report in the open book, hoping to ease my way out of the conversation. It didn’t work.
“No, really,” he said. “It’s quite a thing to be able to live a life of service.”
I felt the weight of my automatic hanging under my arm. I thought about unholstering it, but I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to use it on him or on myself.
“Are you a religious man?” he asked.
“I take it you are.”
“Yes sir, I most certainly am.”
“Can I ask you something?” My curiosity seemed to please him.
“Certainly.”
“They say when you’re born again, you have a personal relationship with Christ. Is that right?” As I spoke, I slid the manila envelope out of the murder book and undid the metal clasp.
“Yes, that’s true,” he said.
“Really?”
He nodded.
“Would you do something for me?”
“What?”
“Next time you talk to him,” I said, pulling the sheaf of photos out and fanning them across his table like a magician performing a favorite card trick, “ask him what kind of vicious fucking deity lets something like this happen.”
His eyes went from the pictures of Beth’s butchered body to me and back again. As the weight of what he was seeing took hold, a great sadness filled his eyes, he stifled a gag, and something solid caught in his throat, making his Adam’s apple rise. I wondered if he was swallowing his own vomit. After his third breath, he looked me directly in the eyes and said, “The world
can be a cruel place.”
“Yes,” I said, “it can.”
I stared at him and left the pictures on the table until he got up and left. As I watched him waddle through the door, I was glad that he hadn’t said anything about God’s will or “His special plan” or Divine Providence because, in all honesty, I didn’t feel like breaking his jaw anymore.
Jen and I spent the next three days running criminal background checks on the names of any kukri buyers we could get our hands on from the local retailers. When we’d run out of names, we came up with four possibles, but we eliminated all of them with another half an hour or so of digging.
“Now what?” Jen asked me.
“I’d really like to get in Waxler’s face. Tail him for a couple days. Let him know we’re watching. See if we can rattle him.”
“You know we can’t. Not as long as the deputy chief considers the case closed.”
“I know,” I said. “Shit. We can’t even fuck with Tropov without tipping off the brass.”
“So where does that leave us?”
“The school. How many times have you been over all the interview reports?”
“Only once,” she said.
“Same here.”
“Let’s go through them again.”
“Maybe do some reinterviews,” I added.
“How many are there total?”
I didn’t need to look at my notes. “Two hundred seven.”
She looked up at the clock. It was a quarter to four.
“First thing tomorrow?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Pizza or Chinese?”
“I hope you’re happy, Beckett.” I stood in front of a urinal in the fifth-floor men’s room, and since I had nearly finished the business that brought me there, I was, at the very least, relieved.
“Actually,” I said, looking over my shoulder at Efram Kennedy from the Organized Crime Detail, “I am rather content. Happy might be stretching it a bit.” It was the first time I’d seen him since he disappeared from the task force after the first meeting. I shook, zipped, and flushed, hoping he’d be willing to leave it at that.
Of course, he wasn’t. The running joke about his unit among the other detectives was that the detail’s acronym—OCD—was no coincidence. As if in an effort to be true to the label, Kennedy was wiry and twitchy, with a nervous energy that always made me irritable whenever I found myself in the same room with him. I didn’t like him the same way I don’t like Chihuahuas. He said, “Tropov’s gone, you know.”