by Tyler Dilts
“Yeah,” he said. “But nobody will notice until next month at the earliest.”
For the first time in hours, I thought I saw a bit of uncertainty in Patrick’s face. While he’d been working, he was all confidence and assuredness. Give him something with wires and a Wi-Fi signal and he was unshakable. Now that the next step wasn’t quite so clear, though, an unanswered question hung between us. What next?
I knew the surveillance setup was overkill. If it hadn’t been my house, how many cameras would he have used? Three? Four? I thought about what I would do in his shoes. If someone came at him or Jen. Or even Ruiz or one of the other members of the homicide detail.
There wouldn’t be enough webcams in the world.
Jen met Patrick and me for an early dinner at Lola’s on Fourth Street. The restaurant was terrific, but I’d been in a long-term monogamous relationship with Enrique’s, an older, more mature Mexican place. Lola’s was young and sexy, but I always felt a pang of guilt when I ate there. Especially when I enjoyed it, as I usually did.
It was a few minutes before five o’clock, so we didn’t have to wait to score a booth inside. Things got busy on Saturday nights. People would eat at one of the trendy restaurants along Retro Row, the strip of hipster heaven that was anchored on one end by Portfolio, one of Long Beach’s oldest coffeehouses, and the other by the Art Theatre, an independent cinema that had been around for almost a century. I usually avoided the cool parts of town, but the food was good at Lola’s and the movies were good at the Art, so I wasn’t a stranger here. And I had to admit that since Julia and I had been together, I’d developed a higher tolerance for the buzzier parts of the city. I was even starting to like hanging out in the East Village.
I dug into the chips. The food there was always good, but they had a creamy green dipping sauce that was absolutely amazing. Salsa verde, they called it, but I preferred referring to it as green crack.
“I got the phone records for Denkins and Kobayashi and the search warrant for the upstairs studio,” Jen said.
“Thanks,” I said. “When can we execute the warrant?”
“Ruiz didn’t authorize any more overtime for Denkins,” she said.
“So we’ll have to wait until Monday.” I didn’t want to delay any longer than we had to. If Kobayashi came home, he’d have a chance to clean up and get rid of any potential evidence. I picked up my phone and sent an e-mail to Harold Craig asking if his neighbor had returned.
The server came for our order. I went with the spicy carne asada and a beer. Jen and Patrick each chose one of the specials and iced tea.
Patrick hadn’t heard about our case, so we gave him the rundown. “I don’t think I ever saw a left-handed self-inflicted gunshot wound.”
“I’ve seen two,” I said. “Both while I was still in uniform. Both of those guys were actually lefties, though.”
“And your guy, Denkins, he wasn’t.”
“No.”
Patrick thought about it. “Think you would have caught it if whoever set it up put the gun in his right hand?”
I wanted to say yes, of course I would have. But I didn’t. It wasn’t true. The murder probably would have gone down as a suicide if I hadn’t seen Denkins’s handwriting on the tablets on his desk. I shook my head. “No.”
“Good catch, then, I guess,” he said.
We were silent for a moment and I knew they were asking themselves the same question I was. How often do we miss them? How many murders slip past us without us being any the wiser to the truth of the situation? None of us gave voice to our thoughts, though. I ate more chips and looked for the server. We needed more crack.
Harold replied to my e-mail. I hadn’t expected an answer so soon. Kobayashi hadn’t come back. I’m starting to worry about him, he wrote. So was I.
“What’s next?” I asked Patrick.
“Headed back to the mechanic. Gonzales said they’d be wrapping up the scene soon, so I want to check in with him. And I need to talk to a few of the neighbors who the uniforms flagged on the initial canvass.”
“Somebody see something?” Jen asked.
“Don’t know,” he said. “We think the bomb came in with the car. The security camera didn’t catch anyone on the lot after closing. They do a lot of custom work after hours, so there’s really no pattern in the evenings, and no way to know if anyone’s there without checking. Because the explosion didn’t happen until everybody was long gone, we think maybe he visited before setting the bomb off.”
I tilted my beer bottle back and drained the last few drops. They didn’t help. “So he doesn’t want to kill anyone but me?”
“That’s one theory,” he said.
“What are the others?”
“I’ll let you know when we come up with them.”
“Maybe someone who works at the garage?” Jen said.
“We’re checking all the employees out,” Patrick said. “But at this point that seems unlikely. If it was someone with a grudge against somebody else at the shop, they could have done a lot more harm to the business by putting the bomb someplace else. Not in the car. That actually reduced the damage to the building.”
I thought about it. “We need to figure out when they planted the bomb.”
Patrick nodded. “I do, yeah.”
He changed the pronoun to singular. I wondered if he did it on purpose. “The car was on the street across from the crime scene all night and most of the day,” I said. “Before that, it was in Julia’s parking garage for a couple of hours. The only other places it’s been parked long enough for anyone to mess with it in the last week are my house and the station.”
“Is there a camera in Julia’s garage?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
He thumb-typed a note into his phone. “I’ll check it. Gonzales said the bomber knows what he’s doing. He wouldn’t plant it any earlier than absolutely necessary, because there are too many things that can go wrong on a moving vehicle. No more than forty-eight hours, he said. Probably less than twenty-four.”
“It’s not going to be the station,” I said. “So either at Julia’s or on Belmont across from the Denkins scene.”
“Yeah,” he said.
I said, “I’m going back there tomorrow.” I’d be off the clock, so the warrant would have to wait, but there were still a few things I wanted to take a look at. “Want me to knock on some doors and see if anyone noticed anything with my car?”
“No,” Patrick said. “I got it.”
We were close to finished with our food when Patrick got a text message. He read it and said, “That’s Gonzales. Have to go meet him.”
“Go ahead,” Jen said. “I’ve got this.”
As Patrick was leaving, he stopped at the door and looked at me over his shoulder. I couldn’t really read his expression, but there was something in it that seemed pensive and worried.
Jen took a credit card out of her wallet. A free dinner was apparently one of the perks of being an attempted-murder victim. “I should have gotten something more expensive,” I said.
After she’d taken care of the check, she said, “We need to talk.”
“About what?” I asked.
There was a subtle change in her voice. She was using the calm-but-firm tone she adopted when she was going to tell me something she thought I wouldn’t like. “Patrick’s not the only one on the clock this weekend.” She gave that a moment to sink in. “Ruiz doesn’t want us to leave you alone for a while.”
I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Part of me was glad. I had tried not to think too much about what I’d do after dinner, but hadn’t been very successful. Would I be too rattled or pumped up with anxiety to get any work done? Or even to sleep? What would I be thinking about all night? Would I be able to focus on anything other than the bomber? On the other hand, I felt oddly obligated to resent being told I needed a babysitter. It occurred to me that I hadn’t even considered going to Julia’s as I’d planned. I knew, more instinctually than co
nsciously, there was a chance I’d be putting her at risk. The same was true of Jen.
“I think he’s wrong,” I said.
“Of course you do.” She did a respectable job of masking her inevitable exasperation with a good, thick layer of patience and understanding. “Mind if I ask why?”
“Because I don’t want anybody else to get killed by a bomb meant for me.”
She hadn’t been expecting anything that sincere. “I understand that. It’s maybe a good reason not to see Julia tonight. I get it.”
“So why should I feel differently about putting you at risk?”
Jen looked at me as if I’d just asked a very stupid question. “Because I’m getting overtime.”
Jen gave me the choice of where to stay that night—her house or mine. Normally I would have felt more comfortable in my own home. And I might have even then. But practicality weighed out. She had a guest room. If I chose my place, she would have to sleep on the couch. And it didn’t even fold out.
She followed me to the duplex to pick up a change of clothes, and I showed her the process of checking the camera feeds. To fast-forward through all of them took almost three minutes. But that was only a few hours of recording. I wondered how cumbersome the process would be when I had to scan through twenty-four hours’ worth of footage.
I wanted to work when we got to her house. And I did, but I didn’t have access to either the paperwork from Denkins’s apartment or his computer. So I went through my own notes again, as well as Jen’s notes from her canvassing of the neighborhood. I wanted to get a better sense of who he was, because the more I knew about him, the more leads I’d be able to develop. After reviewing all the notes and case files I had on my MacBook, I realized there wasn’t much else I could do.
Julia was waiting for a call from me and I was putting it off as long as I possibly could. I still had no idea what to tell her. That wasn’t exactly true. I did know what to tell her, I just didn’t know how.
I went out into Jen’s backyard and sat at the teak table under the pergola. The landscaping had been impressive when she’d moved into the house, but it was even better now. Her father, Owen, was an avid hobbyist gardener, and he had seen a great array of possibilities of the kind that his own house had never afforded him. Since he’d recently retired from a thirty-year-long career at Toyota, he had an abundance of time and energy on his hands.
I didn’t know the names of any of the plants, but there was a professional feel to the arrangements. A small patch of grass was surrounded by lush flowering bushes of several different varieties. There was a banana tree in one corner. One of those trees with the big white flowers that smell good was diagonal to it. Straight across from me, in the farthest corner, was an old oak with branches that projected out over the other plants. It seemed almost out of place among all the tropical greenery. Owen had wanted to remove it, both because of the aesthetics and because its roots were pushing up the cinder-block back wall and it was beginning to crack. Jen wouldn’t let him. The whole yard felt secluded and peaceful.
At the other end of the yard, opposite the garden, were Jen’s garage and the small guesthouse behind it. Her tenant was a young LBPD uniform named Lauren Terrones, who’d just completed her rookie year on the force. Jen told me she’d been working nights.
I was looking at the row of rosebushes along the back edge of the patio when Jen came out. She was wearing running shoes, shorts, and a tank top, with a workout towel slung over her shoulder and a bottle of water in her hand.
“Call Julia,” she said and continued past me and into the side door of the garage. The light came on, and a few seconds later, I heard the motor on her treadmill hum to life. As the rhythmic thumping of her stride slowly gained speed, I picked my phone up off the table and thought about how I would tell Julia what I needed to tell her.
Forty minutes later I was still sitting there when Jen came back out of the garage, her dark hair matted to her forehead with sweat.
“What do I say?” I asked her.
CHAPTER FIVE
HAVE TO EXPLODE
It was after nine when I finally sent Julia a text message.
I’m sorry, it said, Patrick caught a big case today and I’ve been backing him up. Haven’t really been able to think about anything else.
The fact that it wasn’t really even a lie made me feel even more cowardly than I already had.
That’s okay, I understand. Of course she did. She always understood. Dinner tomorrow?
Yes. Definitely.
I hope you sleep well.
You too. I paused for a moment, then added, I miss you. I hit “Send” as quickly as I could. I didn’t want to give myself enough time to think about that last sentence.
After what seemed like a very long time, she answered. I miss you too. Goodnight ☺
Jen was in the living room watching something on HGTV and drinking some kind of tea. “Did you talk to Julia?”
“Yeah,” I said, knowing she could hear in the single, unenthusiastic syllable how disappointed I was in myself.
“You want something to drink?” I was grateful to her for changing the subject. “I could make another cup. Or maybe a beer?”
“I’m okay,” I said, sitting on the couch next to her. I looked at the TV screen. “Which one is this?”
“The one you said you liked. Fixer Upper.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, recognizing the sandy-haired doofus who remodels houses with his much more grown-up and professional wife.
“How’s your pain been today?” she asked.
Among the many things you learn when you suffer from chronic pain is how little anyone really wants to hear about it. They’ll ask you, of course, how you’re doing, but you quickly realize that, no matter how much you’re hurting at the moment, the only socially acceptable response is “not too bad.” But I knew with Jen I could always tell her the truth. And that’s why she always made it a point to ask. Not because she didn’t know. She was remarkably perceptive of the physical signs of my pain. One of the first things the doctors teach you when you’re diagnosed is how to rate your discomfort on the pain scale, with one being “no pain” and ten being “the worst pain I can imagine.” For a brief time, Jen and I played a kind of game in which she’d guess the number based on my behavior. The novelty quickly wore off when it became clear she got it right every time.
“Pretty bad,” I said. “I was busy enough for most of the day to deal with it, but it’s going to be a rough night.”
“You take a Vicodin?”
I shook my head. According to my pain-management specialist, the new research was showing that opiates were not as effective for long-term treatment as doctors had previously believed. So I’d spent the last several months trying to wean myself off of them. I discovered that they weren’t helping as much as I’d thought they were. But they were helping some. And when you hit eight or nine on the pain scale, even a slight help is better than none at all.
“No,” I said. “Not yet. I’m figuring I’ll need one tonight, though.”
“Anything I can do to help?”
I shook my head.
We watched the TV for a while. Chip, the doofus, was gleefully sledgehammering a kitchen wall in his eternal quest for the magical open floor plan.
“There’s something else I should mention,” she said.
“What?” I asked.
“I actually spent a long time talking to Ruiz today.” She took a sip of her tea. “He’s worried about Patrick.”
“About Patrick? He’s not worried about me?”
“He’s always worried about you.” It was hard to imagine Ruiz expressing worry about anyone, least of all me.
“Why?”
“The captain was hesitant about letting someone on the squad investigate the bombing. He was worried it might be too close to home.”
“Who did he want to work it? The Sheriff’s Department?”
“That was discussed, yeah. But not even the captain want
ed to cede jurisdiction to the county. They talked about a few other possibilities. Ultimately, though, the lieutenant talked him into the joint assignment with the bomb-squad guys and Patrick leading the investigation.”
“So why is Ruiz worried? Patrick’s got a great record. His closed-case rate is right up there with ours.”
“He’s not worried about his competence. He’s worried about it blurring too many lines. About conflict of interest. About a cop investigating a crime against a friend.”
I didn’t bother adding that from the victim’s point of view, that doesn’t always seem like a bad thing. “The lieutenant’s worried that Patrick won’t be able to compartmentalize things effectively?”
“Well,” Jen said. “He’s more worried that you won’t let him.”
“Aha,” I said. “So it is me Ruiz is really worried about.” I grinned at her. She wouldn’t smile back.
Jen went to bed around eleven. I thought about trying to sleep. Even though I was tired, I knew I wouldn’t be able to quiet my mind enough to rest. I went through what I had on Denkins’s case again, but I was just spinning my wheels. Without the files and his laptop, I’d done all I could.
I typed a text message to Julia, but didn’t send it. If I had, it would have just resulted in a situation in which I’d have to come clean with her and tell her what was going on. That was a bridge I still wasn’t ready to cross.
I wasn’t the gym rat my partner was. Most of the exercise I got was from the stretching-and-strengthening routine prescribed for my pain by my physical therapist, or from the long walks I’d take several nights a week. Years ago, when my insomnia was much worse, I’d taken to walking my neighborhood late at night, sometimes for hours at a stretch. The quiet and the peacefulness made it seem almost like a different city, one that I shared with far fewer people than that place in the sun. Often, in those days, I thought I preferred the night, when it felt more appropriate to be solitary, to be quiet, to withdraw. But in the time since, I’d felt myself being pulled back into the daylight. By Jen, mostly. But also by Patrick, by Harlan, and, most recently, by Julia.