Vigilante

by Stephen J. Cannell

  “Good shit,” I said dryly.

  “You don’t like me much, do you?” he said softly.

  I let that hang there.

  He took another moment before he smiled and said, “It’s okay; a lot of people feel that way. It sort of comes with this gig. Because of what I do, it can get sorta pronounced, but there’s a deeper reason than just fame or jealousy. Wanna hear?”

  “Sure.”

  “If you make people think they’re thinking, they will love you. But if you really make them think, they’ll hate you. Since I really make people think, I have picked up a fairly long list of enemies. The good news there is, a nonthinking enemy is usually very easy to deal with.”

  The boat lurched again. Nash was ready this time, but I almost went down. My bottle of water flew from my hand and rolled across the room. I started after it, but Nash waved me off.

  “Leave it,” he said, and took a step closer, forcing me to turn back and focus on him.

  “Do you know where we are right now?” he said.

  “The point of no return?”

  “I was thinking more about where we’re standing. Our location on this ship. Ever since I was a boy, the mysteries and social crimes perpetuated in this cabin have fascinated me.”

  Oh, brother.

  “HMS Bounty was rebuilt by King George of England and sent all the way to Tahiti to get breadfruit plants to take to the West Indies for cultivation. Do you know why?”

  “Haven’t a clue.”

  “It was a cheap food source, which could be used to feed American plantation slaves. So at its heart, the mission the Bounty was rechristened to perform was a gross social corruption. But in the end fate had other plans.”

  He moved closer to me. His eyes were wide and shining. There seemed to be a glazed insanity hiding behind that cherubic face and Cary Grant costume.

  “Commander Bligh was just thirty-three and something of an innocent,” Nash continued. “He’s been portrayed in books and film as a terrible tyrant. But if you read the ship’s logs as I have, actually Fletcher Christian was the real malcontent. Christian had once been Bligh’s protégé. Christian organized a mutiny with eighteen out of forty-two crew members. After it was over and he’d taken the ship, only these original mutineers wanted to remain on the Bounty, while all but four of the loyalists boarded a leaking, unsafe lifeboat and went with William Bligh. They preferred to set off across thousands of miles of open ocean with their courageous captain rather than remain behind with the treacherous Mr. Christian.”

  I had no idea what we were actually talking about. I was pretty sure it had nothing to do with Fletcher Christian or the mutiny on the Bounty.

  Nash paused, then asked, “Why do you suppose Fletcher Christian took the ship? What caused him to put his saber to William Bligh’s throat and force him into a lifeboat with only a sextant and a watch to navigate with? Can you discern the reason?”

  “The goal gradient phenomenon?” I answered.

  “You’re a lot smarter than you look,” Nash said. “Exactly right. William Bligh, if you read his logs, was a great commander. A great sailor and leader. Fletcher Christian was a young officer stuck in middle management, bored, unhappy, and filled with malaise. This is what spawned his moment of corruption. It’s the same situation I battle every day.”

  Nash crossed the cabin and picked up my water bottle, then dropped it into the trash. When he turned back, he was smiling again.

  “Our municipal police and politicians are the Fletcher Christians of modern society. They want control, but not responsibility. They’re staging a mutiny against the laws of democratic justice. Like Bligh, I’m backed up at the rail with a saber at my throat, offering you a chance to get in my leaking lifeboat. To sail a courageous voyage to help me free society from these lawless tyrants.”

  “So you’re cast as our misunderstood commander, sent to prison by a bunch of ungrateful pricks because of a rigid management style?”

  He stood there, his brow furrowed, angrily flexing the muscles in his jaw.

  “The way I see this, it’s all part of the same fabric,” I continued. “We can talk about corruption and the broken-window theory, or the goal gradient phenomenon, but that’s just camouflage. What this is really about is revolution against social order and the real joke is you’re getting filthy rich while you’re doing it.”

  He was standing opposite me, his eyes shadowed in the dark cabin, staring malevolently.

  “A man can’t take everything and be everything at the same time. It creates isolation and that causes failure,” I said.

  He pinned me with a withering gaze, then said, “If you’ll excuse me, I have other guests to entertain.” He turned abruptly and walked out.

  CHAPTER

  36

  While I was at sea learning about broken windows and social corruption, Hitch had spent the day doing scut work on our two cases, trying to set up interviews with Lita Mendez’s balky neighbors and putting together a victimology profile on Hannah Trumbull. It had left him in a prickly mood.

  One of the most important parts of a homicide investigation is establishing victimology. Neighbors and friends often know things about a victim that can be surprisingly helpful. I once worked a case where a neighbor told me the vic couldn’t wear cotton because it gave her a skin rash. The dead woman’s body was found in a motel lying on cotton sheets. But the neighbor had explained that when the victim traveled she always took silk sheets in her luggage to remake hotel beds. That information led us to realize the killer had obviously not known the woman well and was unaware of her allergy. He was trying to make it look like a suicide and had purchased new sheets to get rid of his semen stains. We were able to trace the sheets to a nearby Walmart, and a credit card led us to the killer. You never know where a case-breaking lead might come from.

  The problem with Hannah’s victimology was the murder was more than four years old and over time memories for detail fade.

  The problem with Lita’s death was nobody on her block wanted to talk to us. Hitch was visibly frustrated by the time I dropped into my chair at Homicide Special a little past 2:00 P.M. and propped my feet up on a wastebasket.

  “That was an interesting day,” I said.

  “Can’t have been as much fun as having forty neighbors bitch you out.”

  “Palgrave thinks Nash is good people. Marcia told me to watch my back and Nix threatened me.”

  “Just another rollicking good day with the animals,” Hitch replied.

  “There was a moment there down belowdecks in the captain’s cabin when Nix started acting like a fifty-one-fifty,” I said, referring to the police code for a head case.

  Hitch looked surprised. “You think he’s nuts?”

  “I’m not sure.” I recounted Nix’s rant on William Bligh and how he saw the HMS Bounty as a metaphor for his career.

  “At the end we had a real Jack Nicholson moment,” I concluded.

  Hitch sat back and pondered it. Then he said, “So that’s all you took away? That a guy who we already know is an egomaniac also has delusions of grandeur?”

  “Yeah, kinda.”

  “Already knew that,” Hitch said, and picked up the phone sheet he was working his way through.

  “Well, maybe there’s one other thing,” I said.

  He glanced back up.

  “It’s more of an impression than anything else. I was trying to goad him with the Lee Bob Batiste bust and he said something that came off strange.”

  “Yeah?”

  “He said Bobby was illiterate and semi-educated.”

  “He probably was.”

  “He didn’t say ‘Lee Bob’; he said ‘Bobby,’ like he was friends with him.”

  “Now you are grasping. You can’t believe Nash intentionally blew that bust.”

  “I didn’t say that. It just hit me funny.”

  My phone rang and I picked it up. “Detective Scully,” I said.

  “Shane, it’s Sue Shepherd. I’m
sitting in the patio behind the Bradbury Building. You wanted to know when Captain Madrid or her husband was eating here. Well, they’re on the patio right now, having a late lunch.”

  I checked my watch. Two thirty-five.

  “Thanks, Sue.”

  I disconnected and got to my feet. “Grab your coat. Let’s go.”

  “What is it?”

  “Fill you in on the way.”

  We made it to the underground garage in two minutes and took Hitch’s car because I wasn’t sure the Acura hadn’t been bugged. On the six-block drive to the Bradbury Building I filled Hitch in.

  “Since we can’t get a body warrant, I asked an investigating officer I know at the Bradbury to keep an eye on the cafeteria. She just called. Lester and Stephanie are on the patio having a late lunch.

  “Wanta do a Dumpster dive?”

  “Got a better plan?”

  “As long as you do it, I think the idea smokes.”

  We pulled in behind the building and moved carefully toward the patio dining area.

  “Listen, I guess I should mention that Lester showed up outside my house this morning and tried to warn me off his wife’s investigation.”

  “All we need now is Internet posts of us with strippers,” Hitch said.

  “I think we should treat Lester with extreme care. If we blunder in there and start clocking these two, it could get nasty.”

  “I’m testifying on that Quadry Barnes case anyway, so I’ve got a reason to be here. I’ll go get a sandwich and sit out there, keep an eye on ’em. You wait in the Porsche. I’ll call you on your cell and keep you posted.”

  So that’s what we did. Hitch went through the food line and took a seat at a small patio table. I went back to the car. He called once to tell me Stephanie and Lester were still seated at a table by the Biddy Mason wall, talking in low voices.

  Ten minutes later Hitch called me again.

  “You’ll never guess what I just noticed,” he said.

  “What?”

  “They’re both drinking from paper coffee cups with that same brown flower decoration like the one we found near Lita’s driveway.”

  “Where’d those cups come from? We checked the cafeteria.”

  “I don’t know, but I’d hate to end up filling out one-eighty-seven complaints on these two.”

  “Just hang in there. Watch those cups. Don’t let them out of your sight.”

  “Duh…,” he said, and hung up.

  Five minutes later my phone rang again.

  “They’re bussing their table now. Haven’t made me yet. Oops … spoke too soon.”

  I heard Stephanie Madrid’s voice coming over my cell speaker. “Have you started following me around now, Detective?”

  “No, ma’am,” Hitch said. “Just here doing my third depo on that damn Quadry Barnes deal.”

  Then a minute later I heard his cell phone being picked up and he was back.

  “They’ve left,” he said. “Come on. There’s a crime kit in my trunk. Take what we need. I’ll go protect the evidence.”

  I took two pairs of latex gloves and some evidence bags out of his crime kit and made it to the patio area in about ten seconds. Hitch had already located the cups in a trash can and was keeping other people from dumping their lunch clutter on top. I put on one set of gloves and handed a second pair to Hitch. Then I stuck my hand in the barrel, pulled the cups out one at a time, and passed them to Hitch. Both were identical to the one we found at Lita’s house.

  “We need evidence bags,” Hitch said.

  “Got ’em.” I pulled them out of my coat pocket and he dropped the cups inside. “Let’s go talk to Food Services.”

  We found the Hispanic guy who supplied the cafeteria and the coffee rooms on all six floors of the Bradbury and showed him the cups inside our clear plastic evidence bags.

  “These aren’t in the main cafeteria,” Hitch said. “You know where they came from?”

  “The exotic blends machine up on four,” he said.

  “Exotic blends?” I asked.

  “Yeah, we’ve got a machine up there for the senior staff in the Advocates Section—captains, commanders, and lieutenants. It’s got all kinds of blends, Brazilian, Caramel Mocha. You know, expensive stuff.”

  We thanked him and hurried back to the car.

  “This ain’t gonna end up good,” Hitch said.

  “I know.” Then, because we were heading to the forensic lab at Cal State where our electronics surveillance unit was located, I had Hitch drop me at the PAB so I could pick up my car and follow him there.

  CHAPTER

  37

  The LAPD has had a major face-lift in the past few years. Besides the PAB downtown and the Hollenbeck Station, the Hertzberg-Davis Forensic Science Center at Cal State Los Angeles is fully operational. It’s a five-story brick and terrazzo building with inward-leaning sides, which makes it look like a long, rectangular pyramid with the top third cut off. The LAPD shares the 209,000-square-foot space with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, a fact that causes a little elbowing in waiting lines but on balance is a big improvement over our old space.

  The Forensic Science Center has specially equipped areas for ballistics and firearms identification as well as forensic biology. The old DNA facility had space for about eight people, but with the ever-increasing demand for biological evidence, by the time we moved, there were almost forty CSIs camping out in the hallways. It was an overcrowded hive of squashed-together scientists, all buzzing angrily, about to sting. Over here everyone had wide smiles and they served you coffee.

  Hitch and I handed over the two cups and gave instructions to run them for a match against the cup we found in Lita’s driveway. We asked for our results ASAP.

  I went to the ERT area to check on our footprints. I found a young guy named Adam Rush who pulled the results up on his computer.

  “Lotta Blackhawk! Warrior, light assault, lace-ups,” he told me. “They’re real popular in Patrol, so we’re starting by checking those against the cops who were on the scene.” He clicked to another shot.

  “And here’s Waldo,” he said, pulling up another footprint. “This guy doesn’t fit the others. Sole pattern is from a rubber Baffin outdoor boot. Size thirteen. It doesn’t lace up, so no cop would be wearing it. You can see it’s got a triangle-shaped nick in the left heel and some pronounced tread scuffs. Also, the dust we recovered on the footprint has traces of ammonium polyphosphate, which is a chemical used to put out fires. Not sure what that means yet.” He printed me out a copy of the boot print and I left, feeling like it was progress. A tiny bit of physical evidence.

  I called Alexa and gave her a heads-up on what was going on, ending our conversation by asking her to call Forensic Biology and put a little command staff oomph behind our request.

  Hitch was still filling out the paperwork for our DNA, so I used the time to visit the Electronic Surveillance Department. I got one of the lab techs to go out in the parking lot with me and wand the Acura for bugs. I was pretty sure I’d picked up something at the marina, and I had. There was a little satellite voice transmitter with a GPS function buried inside the Acura’s rearview mirror. I had to make a decision as to whether to leave it there or to have the bug removed. If I took it out, it would alert Nash that I had found it and that might change his behavior. In the game of chess I was playing, knowledge was power, so I left it where it was.

  When Hitch came downstairs I showed him the Baffin boot print and told him about the bug in the Acura. He was buoyed by the size 13 rubber boot and agreed it was a good idea to leave the bug where it was. If we rode in the Acura, we’d have to keep our discussions off the case.

  “This is our unsub,” Hitch said, still looking at the boot print in his hand. “He went to Lita’s house to kill her. He knew it was going to get messy, so the guy wore rubber boots.”

  I agreed. We caravanned back to the PAB and closed out the day making phone calls.

  I drove home at six and
went out to the backyard to watch the moonlight on the water. Alexa wasn’t home yet and I was feeling lonely and a little afraid for my future.

  I hadn’t spoken to Chooch in at least a week, so I dialed his cell. He was in midterms at USC and didn’t sound like he had much time to talk, but he did let one gem slip.

  “Listen, Dad, next semester I’m thinking about taking Introduction to Police Science,” he said unexpectedly.

  “You’re a finance major. What’s a finance major need with police science?”

  “You and Mom are cops. I just want to understand what you do. How can that hurt?”

  “It just seems like it’s not something you’ll need, is all.”

  “Todd McNear, my left-side tackle on the scout team, took it last semester and he says it’s really interesting and kind of easy. Never hurts to pile up a few easy credits to pump up the GPA.”

  My alarms were ringing. Chooch has a 3.5 average while playing Division I football at USC. DI ball’s a huge time commitment, and even so, he’d been an academic All-American for three years straight. His GPA was fine. I wasn’t keen on the idea of him taking police science. I didn’t know where it might lead.

  “Listen, Dad, I gotta get back to this review sheet. Call me on Sunday.”

  “Right. Love you.”

  “Love you too.”

  After he hung up I sat there watching the moon on the water and tried to keep my mind off the possibility of my son being wooed into a law enforcement career. I guess you naturally set higher goals for your children than yourself. I had visions of him using his finance degree to run a large multi-national corporation or something. I chose police work because of who I was and a need for an identity back when I didn’t have one. It was a perfect choice for me, but I had larger ambitions for Chooch.