Shadow Man

by Alan Drew

  “You tell anyone about it?”

  “No,” Rutledge said. “I figured they were arguing about the scholarship, about coming back to the team.”

  “But…?”

  Rutledge stared at the untouched chorizo and eggs.

  “It looked like a different kind of argument,” he finally said—embarrassed, it seemed.

  The kid’s out for a joyride with a teacher in Newport Beach, Ben wanted to say, and you don’t say a thing to anyone?

  “Listen,” Rutledge said, shooting Ben a look. “The man’s married with kids, for Christ’s sake.” He rapped his knuckles once on the tabletop, as though checking its solidness. “I’ve known him for twenty—”

  “Years,” Ben said, nodding. “I know.” He leaned back and let out a breath. “I knew this cop in L.A., in narcotics. We weren’t close, but we worked a couple cases here and there. Eighteen years on the force, and no one knew he was dealing in West L.A., from Santa Monica to Bel Air. Hooking up television stars and their kids, getting the stuff in South Central and jacking up the price ten miles north. Would have gotten away with it, too, if a washed-up movie star’s kid hadn’t OD’d on bad heroin. He was a nice guy. Had a wife and two sons, a Labrador retriever, let the guys use his condo in Mammoth for free.”

  Rutledge was staring at the table, nodding slightly. “There was a settlement with the other kid, the one who took the bottle of aspirin.”

  “What was his name?” Ben said.

  “I can’t tell you that,” Rutledge said. “The settlement was confidential. But I think you should know he’s out there.”

  “How long ago?”

  “Enough years to make it feel like history—six or seven,” Rutledge said, lifting his cap and rubbing his palm across his damp forehead. “After this kid was out of the hospital, he started talking, to the therapists at the alternative school. Started throwing accusations Lewis’s way.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Like I said, I was the kid’s old homeroom teacher. They called me to the district office to be grilled by the lawyers. Lewis talked to me about it, too. We went out one night, got some beers, and he spilled his guts to me. Said the boy was taking it out on him that he was kicked off the team because of bad grades. Said the boy had a lot of problems and needed someone to blame. I mean, why would he talk to me about it if he was trying to hide something?”

  “You want me to answer that question?” Ben said.

  Rutledge shook his head and looked away.

  “What did the lawyers want to know?” Ben asked.

  “If I’d seen a change in the boy’s demeanor. If he had confided anything to me about a teacher—” He stopped and swallowed. “About a teacher doing things.”

  “Had he?”

  “No,” Rutledge said, a strength coming back into his voice. “No, never. I would have said something if he had.”

  Rutledge picked up his fork and stabbed it into the eggs but set it back down without taking a bite.

  “What happened then?” Ben said.

  “They settled out of court. The district paid up. Lewis never said another word about it.”

  “Confidentiality.”

  Rutledge nodded. “You think I’m a fool, right?”

  Ben let that question hover between them for a moment. Most men could answer that question for themselves, if they were honest about it.

  “Would you testify,” Ben said, “to what you saw with Lucero—the incident in the locker room, the argument in Balboa? Give an official statement?”

  “I didn’t see anything.”

  “It’s circumstantial,” Ben said, “but it’s something.”

  “Lewis is a friend.”

  “Is this friendship unconditional?”

  Rutledge waited a minute to answer, had to think about it. “It’s nothing and you know it,” Rutledge said.

  “Does Wakeland know about your girlfriend?” Ben said.

  Rutledge’s eyes flashed.

  “Is that why you won’t test—”

  “My wife knows about Paula,” Rutledge said firmly. “That’s our business and it’s not illegal.” Rutledge put his elbows on the table and looked Ben straight in the eyes. “I don’t want to ruin a man over nothing.”

  “You can’t believe it’s nothing.”

  “I believe that what I saw can be interpreted any number of ways.”

  He was right, but it didn’t let him off the hook.

  “It’s the interpretation you choose that matters,” Ben said.

  “Don’t give me that bullshit,” Rutledge said. “I’ve got a son-in-law for a lawyer, and I know a little bit about how this all works. I’ve seen nothing.”

  Ben leaned back in his chair and stared at Rutledge. He was six feet tall, strapped with sinewy muscle that extended up his neck, his face the sort of chiseled mask of invincibility all men tried to wear sometime in their lives. His face was upset now, though, his brow furrowed, his lips pulled back, showing teeth. He’d just admitted he didn’t have the guts to face up to what he knew was the truth.

  “This other boy and his family,” Ben said. “You know what happened to them?”

  “They moved somewhere south,” he said. “Dana Point, I think.”

  “Anyone else know about this settlement?”

  “The higher-ups at the district office,” Rutledge said. “There were a few rumors among the teachers.”

  Jesus. What was the law worth if it was used to keep people quiet about what they all knew? What was his job worth if that was the law?

  “All right, Bryce,” Ben said, nodding to the eggs and cold chorizo. “Enjoy your lunch.”

  Ben was three steps toward the door when Rutledge spoke up.

  “You get anything solid,” he said, “anything you can nail to the wall, I’ll tell what I’ve seen.”

  Ben nodded and walked out into the heat and blowing dust.

  —

  WHEN BEN ARRIVED at the station on Monday morning, the parking lot was mobbed with news vans. Reporters slapped their palms against the cruiser windows, wanting a statement. Inside the station, the mayor, dressed in a linen suit and apricot button-down, was seated in Hernandez’s office. Hernandez stood behind the desk, his hands in his pockets, his chin pushed against his neck—the demeanor of a man who didn’t like what he was being told.

  “Don Johnson’s on site,” Carolina said, nodding toward the mayor. “Doesn’t look like good news.”

  “Politics is always shit,” Ben said.

  Ben checked his messages: The owner of the skate shop wanting to press charges against the boys who stole the boards. They’d scraped up the tails. Jesus. A reporter from The Orange County Register wanting information on the Night Prowler investigation.

  When the mayor left, wafting cologne through the room, Hernandez called Ben and Carolina into his office.

  “This came in the mail this morning,” Hernandez said, handing Ben a plastic evidence bag. Inside was an unfolded piece of college-ruled paper, a note typed across the page.

  Dear Detectives and Police Men,

  You cant cach me. I’m evrywhere. I’m on the street corner, I’m in yor office, I’m in yor house. I’m the thing you cant get rid of. You cant cach me. I’m in the places you dont want to look.

  “Postmark?” Ben said, handing the letter to Carolina.

  “Santa Elena,” Hernandez said. “Saturday.”

  “Sent the morning after the killing?”

  “Appears that way,” Hernandez said.

  “He’s still in town,” Ben said.

  “Got this, too.” He handed each of them a cassette tape. “Marco picked it up at Viral Records. Made copies. L.A. County’s got people trying to decipher it; think the lyrics might be some kind of code.”

  “This guy’s not making a secret out of this, is he?” Carolina said.

  “He wants us to know,” Ben said. “It’s a power move that way.”

  Carolina set the note on Hernandez’s desk. “What
does he mean? Where don’t we want to look?”

  “Someplace obvious,” Ben said. He picked up the letter and reread it.

  “I don’t know,” Hernandez said. “But let’s get on it.”

  When Carolina left, Ben stood and set the letter on the desk.

  “Stick around a minute,” Hernandez said. Ben sat back down.

  “This is a suicide,” Hernandez said, dropping Lucero’s case file on the desk in front of him.

  “That doesn’t take care of the serial.”

  “The serial’s random,” Hernandez said. “But serial plus dead kid looks like a crime spree.”

  Ben nodded: The mayor was shutting the case down. “Investors,” he said.

  “ME’s report will be in tonight,” Hernandez said. “Besides, we need all our resources on the serial.”

  Ben opened the report and saw that the box had been marked suicide. All Hernandez needed was Ben’s signature. Sign it, file it away. Some screwed-up kid kills himself. It happens. No one to blame but the kid. Sign it and it all goes away. The master-planned illusion intact.

  “What was the deal with you and Coach Wakeland the other night?” Hernandez said.

  Ben scanned Natasha’s report—bullet penetrated the meninges, causing traumatic damage to the cerebral cortex and corpus callosum, ischemic cascade resulted.

  “He asked too many questions,” Ben said. “Had to remind him that I was the one doing the asking.”

  “Didn’t you swim for him years ago?”

  Ben nodded once, flipped the pages, and found a ballistics report. No one told him the report had come in.

  “Had some kind of falling-out, right?”

  “I blew states,” Ben said. “He didn’t like that.”

  Ben glanced at the report: .45 caliber. Purchased Chula Vista, down near the Mexican border, 1977.

  “Unfinished business, huh?” Hernandez said.

  “Just lost my patience, Chief.”

  Hernandez’s secretary called him over: L.A. Times on the phone, wanting a quote about the investigation.

  “Keep it professional, Ben, especially with pillars of our little society,” Hernandez said. “And drop that file on my desk before heading out.”

  10

  BEN STOOD ON THE EDGE of the field and watched the afternoon sun stretch the pickers’ shadows, darkness that collapsed into the dirt when they bent to the fruit. The wind was up, electricity sparking the air—it tingled his fingertips, tasted metallic on his tongue. Ben saw his man hunched over his wheelbarrow, pushing it down the row.

  “Santiago,” Ben said when he got to him.

  Santiago Rodrigo Torres, DUI; picked up three years before for driving a landscaping truck while under the influence, 0.11, barely over the line. Santiago stood up, three strawberries in his gloved hand, and looked at Ben for a moment before tossing the rotten fruit in the wheelbarrow.

  “You going to arrest me?”

  “That depends on you.”

  “Depends on me?” he said sarcastically. “You’ll find a reason if it suits you.”

  “The gun was yours,” Ben said. “You think we weren’t going to find that out?”

  The color drained from his face. “The gun belongs to the foreman,” Santiago said. “He just put it in my name.”

  “It would be easier to believe that,” Ben said, “if you’d been straight up with me from the beginning.”

  Santiago glanced toward the mountains that hovered above the band of smog like the hulls of ships. “He likes to keep a low profile,” Santiago said. “You know?”

  The foreman was a runner, a coyote for the big man. Either he was smuggling people over—stuffed in car trunks, sardined in hidden compartments in vans—or he was working with the smugglers, buying illegals from them to work in the fields. If the shit went down with immigration, the foreman was safe, the owners of the fruit packaging company were safe, but men like Santiago took the fall.

  “The foreman got me my papers,” Santiago said. “I owed him.”

  “How’d the boy get ahold of it?”

  “Some of these people around here aren’t so nice,” he said. “I was showing Lucero how to use the gun, just in case. Sometimes they take people, strong boys, to work in other places. I didn’t want that to happen.”

  Ben nodded. Trails zigzagged through the Santa Ana Mountains, coyotes running folks through the night to drop-offs at the dimly lit edges of cities.

  “You let him keep it?”

  “No,” Santiago said. “I don’t like the gun. I only pull it out when I need it.”

  “He knew where you kept it, though.”

  “Sí.”

  “It’s a good story, Santiago,” Ben said. “And I believe it, but not everyone will.”

  Santiago glared at him. “I’ve got responsibilities,” Santiago said. “People depend on me.”

  “I get it,” Ben said, “but some people don’t give a damn, especially about a Mexican with a prior. There’s a dead kid, it’s your gun—simple math.” Ben hadn’t signed the report yet. Left it on his desk at the station and headed over here. Maybe it was a suicide, probably was, but this wasn’t just some depressed kid, his circuitry gone haywire. This kid was pushed to do it; Ben knew it. “This serial killer complicates things, too,” Ben continued. “There’s some pressure to haul someone in soon.”

  “I got kids,” Santiago said, terrified now. The cops could do anything they wanted—Santiago knew that.

  “I need to see Lucero’s mother,” Ben said. “Entiende usted?”

  Santiago toed a rotted strawberry for a few moments and then finally nodded.

  —

  AT THE CAMP, Santiago made him wait outside the door. He needed to talk to her first, Santiago said, to explain the situation, to assure her that Ben wasn’t here to deport her or her daughters. Sidewinders of dust blew down the alleyway between plywood homes. A few stragglers waddled down the field rows, but the streets of the camp were empty. Doors were tied shut, blankets yanked across window openings. People were watching him from inside, their eyes flashing between wooden slats, blanket ends snapped aside to get a glance.

  Ben’s head throbbed now, his body hopped up with anxiousness. He watched the line of tiled rooftops of the housing complex on the other side of the field. New suburban homes—a whole other world. He followed the rooflines of the last street—one, two, three, five—and settled on the peak of what he knew was Wakeland’s house. Four hundred yards away, a five-minute walk. Ben wondered if Wakeland had ever stood on this dusty street, enveloped in the sugary rot of oranges, and looked back, imagining how badly Lucero would want to run across those four hundred yards and get the hell out of this world.

  Santiago scraped open the door to the house. “Please don’t talk about the other boy,” Santiago whispered. “She doesn’t need to think bad of him in his death.” The mother couldn’t speak English, Santiago explained. He would have to translate. “She’s frightened,” he said, and Ben could see that Santiago would keep any pain from her, if he could. “She hasn’t slept in five nights.”

  “I’ll be soft about it,” Ben said.

  Lucero’s mother sat in the corner of the room, on an upturned plastic milk bin. A flickering veladora candle of the Virgin Mary illuminated the deep circles of her eye sockets. It was the same woman from the other day, the one he thought he heard crying the morning they found Lucero. There was a terror in her eyes that unsettled him. It was shocking, even to him, the hostility of her world right next to the placid order of the city.

  “Where are the children?” Ben said. The little girls he saw the other day weren’t in the small room.

  Santiago just shook his head. He had shuffled them out the back while Ben waited, Ben guessed, taken them to one of the other plywood shacks to be safe. Even if she was going to be arrested, their mother wanted them here, not in Mexico. That’s how bad it was back home.

  “Where’s her husband?” Ben said. She wore a simple silver ring on her left hand. />
  “Back in Chiapas. He went home to see his sick mother and he never came back. Almost three years ago.”

  “They heard anything?”

  “Nada.”

  “You’ve been taking care of them, right?”

  Santiago nodded and looked at the ground, a gesture Ben took as respect for the absent husband.

  The mother’s name was Esperanza. Ben smiled at the woman, gesturing to another upturned milk bin, asking if he could sit. She glanced at Santiago and then nodded.

  “I’m sorry about your son,” Ben said in awkward Spanish once he was sitting. “Lo siento.”

  She stared at the dirt floor.

  He explained through Santiago why he needed her to identify Lucero. The body had to be claimed by a family member, or it would be used for medical purposes or buried in an anonymous grave. He explained that she and her children would not be sent back to Mexico. She would be allowed to claim his body, bury him here, if she wished, or send him back home to Chiapas.

  “The state will pay for it,” Ben said. “If they don’t, I will.”

  Esperanza glanced again at Santiago and nodded. Ben pulled out the forensics photo of Lucero’s empty face from his coat pocket, the one taken from the right side that didn’t show the damage to his skull. What if he’d been asked to do this with Emma? God, he wouldn’t survive it. She took the picture in her shaking hand, and Santiago put his hand on her shoulder. She looked at it for a long time, until a cry leapt from her throat.

  “Sí,” Esperanza said into her hand. “Sí.”

  Santiago took the photo from her, but she snatched it back. They waited in silence while she stared at the picture, as though she was trying to burn the shape of his face into her memory. Doubtful anyone had cameras here. Doubtful she had any pictures of the boy at all.