by Tyler Dilts
On another night, feeling as I was, I would have walked. I knew Jen wouldn’t tolerate that, though, so I followed her example. After changing into the shorts and T-shirt I’d brought with me to sleep in, I went into her garage and turned on the treadmill. It was a good one. A top-end, gym-quality Star Trac model. I set the speed to three miles per hour and started walking. There were a dozen unplayed podcasts waiting on my phone. I saw the WTF with Keith Richards that Patrick had recommended, but I listened to Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me! instead, hoping it might elicit a few laughs.
Even though my back was to the corner opposite the door—the gunfighter’s treadmill, I’d joked when I helped Jen move it into the garage—I still felt uncomfortable with earphones in both ears. The way they decreased my situational awareness was too distracting. So I tried one ear. Then I tried disconnecting them altogether and turning up the volume on the phone. That worked well enough once I knocked half a mile an hour off the treadmill’s speed. Sure, I was going slow, but burning calories wasn’t the goal. After a while, I found just the right balance of movement and focus to allow me to start letting go of the thoughts that had been racing through my mind. I knew, though, that as soon as I stopped, they’d return. So I didn’t stop for a very long time.
The first podcast had ended and I was halfway through another when I heard something outside. My gun was on the weight bench three feet in front of the treadmill, and I was halfway to it when Lauren stuck her head in the open side door.
“Hey, Danny,” she said. She must have seen the tense expression on my face. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Oh, no,” I lied. “You didn’t.”
“I was surprised to see you. I expected Jen.” She’d changed into her street clothes and carried her patrol-gear bag over her shoulder. “You crashing here tonight?” she said casually, as if finding me there was a completely normal experience.
Shit, I thought. Everybody knows.
“You heard?”
I was hoping she’d say “No” or “About what?” but she just nodded. “Kind of hard to keep an exploding car on the down low.” She looked at me with genuine concern in her expression. “You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Just going to do five or six more hours on the treadmill, then I’ll call it a night.”
After my long, slow walk, I turned in. But half an hour was all I could manage in the guest-room bed before I got up again and carried my laptop out to the kitchen table. I skimmed through everything I had on Denkins one more time and didn’t come up with anything new. Then I skimmed through all my old case files looking for potential bombers and didn’t come up with anything new there, either. I decided to listen to the new Richard Thompson album I’d downloaded a few weeks earlier. I hadn’t heard it yet, so I thought it might be enough to keep my mind engaged in something other than worrying about who was trying to kill me.
It was a good call. As soon as the first track came on and he started singing in his warm and familiar baritone, I felt myself being pulled into the music and, for a little while at least, forgetting.
I didn’t remember going to bed, but when I woke to the familiar ache in my shoulder and neck, I realized I’d somehow managed a few hours of sleep. After getting dressed, I brushed my teeth and slicked my hair back with tap water from the bathroom sink.
Jen was in the kitchen eating oatmeal and drinking coffee. My laptop was on the table and the music was still playing.
“Did I leave that going all night?”
“Yeah,” she said. “But it sounded good, so I left it playing.” She gestured to a bowl and a cup on the counter.
I took them and joined her at the table. Oatmeal was never very appealing to me, but she’d added raisins and sprinkled cinnamon on top, and I had to admit that it tasted pretty good.
We sat and listened to Richard Thompson singing plaintively about a winding road.
Jen left me alone in the squad room with William Denkins’s computer and the files I’d taken from his apartment. I checked in with Harold one more time. Still no sign of Kobe. At this point, I didn’t expect him to return. Whoever he really was, he was still first on the list of potential suspects.
Over the next two hours, I was able to learn a great deal about Denkins. He was born in Reseda in 1963, went to high school in Lakewood, then to Cerritos community college and Cal State Fullerton. He graduated in 1984 and took a year off before going back for a master’s degree in history. His MA was granted to him in 1987, as was a license for his marriage to Celeste Kelsky. Lucinda was born six months after the marriage, and the divorce came a little more than a year after that. Celeste married someone else in 1988, and she and her new husband were granted custody. Every other weekend, Lucinda stayed with her father. He taught history for eight years at a private high school. In 1999, when his parents died, his mother only eight months after his father, he inherited the apartment building on Belmont and another in Alamitos Heights. Both buildings had mortgages on them, but they were turning a small profit. Two years later he sold the property in the Heights and came very close to paying off the mortgage on the remaining building. He’d been investing in mutual funds for several years. There was a big dip in value and earnings when the recession hit, but even now his portfolio seemed to be worth close to a million dollars. The Belmont building had been appraised last year for $2.6 million. William Denkins had been a surprisingly wealthy man. The sole beneficiary of his will was his daughter, Lucinda.
Maybe Kobe had some competition at the top of the potential suspect list.
“Tell me more about your suspect,” Patrick said. “What’s his name, Kobayashi?”
“Why?” I asked.
“I’ve been all through your case files. Talked to a bunch of people. Checked with the ADAs on all of your pending court cases. Couldn’t come up with a single solid lead on anyone who might have the experience, access to the hardware, or enough motivation to pull this off.”
I thought about what he said. “You think maybe someone was hoping to stop me from discovering Denkins was murdered?”
He exhaled loudly through his pursed lips. “I know,” he said. “Sounds like a long shot.”
“Maybe not as long as it would have sounded a couple of hours ago.” I told him what I’d discovered about Denkins.
“Shit,” he said. “That’s a lot of money.”
The idea that the bomb might have been connected to my current investigation was an intriguing one. We tossed it around a bit. “So it would mean that whoever killed Denkins would have had to have known that they botched the fake suicide.”
“Who could have known that?”
“Aside from everyone at the crime scene?”
“Yeah.”
“We told the daughter and her husband the next morning that it may not have been suicide,” I said. “Around eight or so.”
“What about the upstairs neighbor guy?”
“He found out a couple of hours later.”
Patrick considered that. “What time did Jen have your car towed?”
“I’m not sure. Two or three, maybe.”
He scribbled a few notes on the yellow pad on the table in front of him. “So we’re looking at, at most, an eight-hour window when someone could have gotten to your car.”
“Unless something leaked earlier,” I said.
“Eight hours doesn’t seem like enough time.” He tapped the end of his pen on the table. “Even if there was a leak. Let’s call it fourteen hours. That’s not much of a window. Maybe if somebody took a shot at you, tried to run you off the road, something like that, yeah, maybe.”
“But?”
“A bomb?” he said. “I don’t know. Somebody’s got to realize they screwed up, come up with the completely mistaken idea that killing you will somehow magically turn a homicide investigation back into an open-and-shut case of suicide, build a bomb, plant it on your car in broad daylight, all in half a day?”
“Seems like a stretch,” I said.
He tapped the pen some more, then seemed to come to some sort of conclusion. “Let me call Gonzales. People will do some crazy shit for three and a half million dollars.”
By the time he got off the phone, Jen was back in the squad room. She’d been knocking on doors up and down Belmont Avenue asking if anyone had seen anything suspicious in the neighborhood on Friday, maybe something to do with a fifteen-year-old Camry.
“Get anything?” I asked her.
“Nothing solid,” she said. “Everybody was at work all day. One retired man said he saw ‘some Asian kid’ walk down one side of the street and back up the other like he was looking for something he couldn’t find. That’s all I got.”
“He think he could ID the guy?” I asked.
“Maybe,” she said.
“I wonder if that could have been Kobayashi,” I said.
Patrick rolled his ergonomic desk chair over to where we sitting.
“You catch that?” Jen asked.
“Most of it,” he said. “Gonzales said our guy’s a pro. Could have made the bomb in fifteen minutes if he already had the stuff on hand.”
Maybe a bomb wasn’t as outlandish an option for a spur-of-the-moment murder scheme as we had thought. “If all you have is a hammer,” I said, “everything looks like a nail.”
“So,” Patrick said. “Tell me more about this Kobayashi kid. What’s his first name?
“That is his first name.” Even though I didn’t think I needed to, I checked my note to make sure I got it right. “His last name’s Maru.”
“Kobayashi Maru?” he said incredulously. Then he just laughed.
“What?” I asked.
“You didn’t even Google it, did you?”
I shook my head.
He was still giggling. “I’ve got to go. Look it up.”
CHAPTER SIX
JULEP
I texted Julia: Dinner at Michaels in an hour or so? We need to talk.
A few seconds later she replied. Sure.
“It’s all set,” I said to Jen.
Before she could answer, an alert sounded on my phone. One of Patrick’s webcams had detected motion at my house. I could have checked it on the phone, but I wanted a larger picture, so I grabbed my iPad and opened the app, expecting to see a cat or a squirrel. So far they’d been my only visitors. But I sat up straight in my chair when the camera mounted in the tree by the sidewalk showed a man walking up onto my porch.
“Patrick,” I shouted across the room. “We got somebody.”
He and Jen rushed over to my desk and we huddled around the small screen watching the man doing something to my front door.
“What’s he doing?” Jen asked.
“I can’t tell.” Patrick squinted and leaned in closer.
The man turned toward the camera and followed the walkway back to the sidewalk.
“What does he have in his hand?” I asked as he walked out of the frame.
Patrick reached over to the iPad and backed up the image a few seconds. Just before the man turned at the corner of my front lawn, Patrick froze the image.
He put his thumb and forefinger on the screen and spread them apart to zoom in on the image. The three of us simultaneously recognized what he was holding.
Doorknob hangers.
They smiled, not quite laughing, while I sat back in my seat and sighed.
“False alarm,” Jen said, resting her hand on my shoulder.
“Look on the bright side,” Patrick added. “Maybe you’ve finally got some good restaurant delivery in your neighborhood.”
Michael’s Pizzeria on the Promenade was only two blocks from Julia’s house. It wasn’t my favorite pizza in Long Beach, but the foodies liked it. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t bad, especially if you liked things like duck confit and fontina on your pizza, or if you weren’t embarrassed to ask what the Italian words on the menu meant. I usually ordered the calzone. The crust and cheeses were excellent and it had some kind of meat in it that was kind of a little bit like pepperoni.
Jen wasn’t comfortable leaving me alone at the restaurant. “Something might happen to Julia,” she said, “and then I’d never be able to forgive myself.” She found a seat next door on the patio of Beachwood BBQ that faced my seat on the Michael’s patio fifteen yards away. Even from that distance I could clearly make out the words when she mouthed “Tell her” in exaggerated frustration.
I ordered the marinated-olive appetizer and wine Julia liked, and a few minutes later saw her walking toward me on the Promenade. Her hair was pulled back and she was wearing the faded-rose-colored dress I’d complimented her on, the third time we went out together. She didn’t seem to notice anyone on the other patio as she passed.
When the hostess greeted her at the gate, Julia pointed at me and smiled. I stood as she got close to the table and she gave me a quick kiss before sitting across from me.
“The appetizer’s on the way,” I said. “And wine. I think I got the right one.”
“Danny,” she said, her voice heavy and serious. “What’s going on?”
I tried to pretend like I didn’t know what she was talking about. “What do you—”
“Don’t, okay?” She reached across the table and took my hand in hers. “You’ve hardly talked to me in two days and now your partner’s sitting on the next patio over and pretending not to look at us. Just talk to me.”
My eyes were locked on the water glass on the table in front of me. I should have told her about the bomb as soon as I found out. Instead, I’d kept it to myself, wanting to believe that if I pretended hard enough, I could make it go away. Or that it would turn out to be a false alarm or somehow easily resolved and I’d be able to just laugh it off. The truth was that if I acknowledged the reality of the situation to her, I’d have to acknowledge it myself, too. I was too embarrassed to look at her. But I forced myself. When I saw the concern in her eyes, I couldn’t help myself. I did what she asked.
I talked.
I told her everything.
More than I probably should have. Every detail of the bombing and of Denkins’s case came spilling out of me. I went on for what seemed like minutes, only pausing briefly when the waiter delivered the olives to our table. When I was finally done, I looked at her, hoping my fear and anxiety weren’t etched into my face, and that she couldn’t see the pain twisting up my shoulder and into my neck.
I didn’t realize she was still holding my hand until she squeezed it harder.
“Jesus,” she said, her eyes warm and tender. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I said.
“No, that’s not what I mean.” Her grip loosened and she looked away.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
She bit the corner of her lip. “I’m sorry that—” She stopped without finishing the sentence. “It’s just that when you send a text saying ‘We need to talk,’ it—” She cut herself off again.
“What are you trying to say?”
“I thought you were breaking up with me.”
“You never Googled the name?” Jen asked. I hadn’t. By the time Patrick had stopped laughing and told me to look it up online, I was already running late to meet Julia, so I didn’t get to it until after dinner. We were sitting at the table on her patio, the last vibrant-orange traces of the sunset fading in the sky.
“I had a lot on my mind.” The embarrassment I felt at the oversight stung. But not as much as Patrick’s laughter had. “The criminal-records check and the DMV both came back with no hits. I just didn’t think of it.”
“Show me the video,” she said.
I spun my laptop around so she could see the screen and played the YouTube clip of the opening scene of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Less than a minute in, she leaned back as if she was trying get away from an unpleasant odor. “How long is this?”
“Three minutes and change.”
“Never mind. Just tell me what it is again?”
“The Kobayashi Maru is a test sce
nario that Starfleet puts cadets through to see how they’ll behave in a no-win situation. There’s no possible outcome in which anyone can come out on top. Kirk’s the only one who ever beat it.”
“How do you beat a no-win situation?”
“That’s the point of it. Kirk secretly reprogrammed the computer. He cheated.”
She shook her head. “You’re a nerd.”
“Not according to Patrick.”
“Raspberry Wheat.” Harlan tipped the beer bottle back and took a sip. “I don’t know how you drink this stuff. It’s like something a frat boy would pour down his date hoping to get lucky.” He’d shown up half an hour earlier claiming he’d had no idea I’d be there and that he’d just come to watch The Bachelor with Jen like they did every week.
“Don’t drink it, then,” I said. “More for me.”
I could see a quip forming behind his eyes, but he let it go. “So tell me about this case,” he said instead.
After I brought him up to speed on the Denkins investigation, he said, “That’s not the one I was asking about.”
“I know.” I popped the top off another bottle.
We sat in silence for a while. He stopped pretending to not like the beer. Before he reached for another, he said, “Must have been early eighties. Reagan was still big news and I was only two or three years out of my county-jail rotation. I was riding solo. We never did that in those days, not in Wilmington after midnight. My partner, though, got a bad taco or something and started puking out the window. So I dropped him off at the substation and went back out.”
He took another sip. Harlan wasn’t one for nostalgia, but even though his eyes met mine, I was keenly aware that his gaze was focused more inward than out. “I was down close to the harbor, just a few blocks north of the water. All that industrial-port shit, shipping containers, train tracks, oil tanks, you know. Everything was quiet, nothing going on.
“Then I turned a corner and across the street, maybe a hundred fifty yards away, I saw two cars in an empty lot. A Cutlass and a tricked-out Impala, headlights on, pointed at each other, maybe twenty feet between them. Three or four bangers on each side, standing by the cars, hanging on the open doors. Two more, right in the middle, lit up, facing off.”