by Tyler Dilts
He was quiet a moment. I said, “Drugs?”
“Maybe. Guns. Money. Never found out for sure. I called in for backup and instead of waiting like I should have, I hit the siren and lights and gunned it right toward them. They were in their cars and smoking the tires before I got halfway there. But one of the guys in the middle didn’t make it back in time. He stumbled and fell. Still trying to get back to his feet when I skidded to a stop next to him and got out. Yelled at him to freeze. He didn’t, of course. Managed to get up and take off, so I went after him. He was kind of fat and slow, so he wasn’t hard to catch. Made it about thirty feet before I tackled him.”
Harlan had a distant look in his eyes. I could almost feel him being pulled farther and farther back into the memory. “What happened?” I asked.
“You know those concrete parking-block things? The ones that catch your front tire so you don’t go too far into the next space?”
I nodded.
“He went face-first into one of those. Fractured the frontal bone and the orbital socket, the whole side of his face. Messed him up pretty bad. They had to take out what was left of his eye.”
That was the kind of thing cops dread. Most of us have similar stories of an occasion when things got away from us, when what should have been a routine incident suddenly turned into something much, much worse. Still, I knew there was more to what Harlan was telling me. I wanted to speak, but I didn’t want to interrupt him. There was a kind of anxious anticipation welling up in me. I both wanted and didn’t want to know where his story was going.
“His name was Marcus Wilson. Twenty-three when he lost his eye, but already an up-and-comer with one of the harbor Crips sets. We didn’t have anything to charge him with. He got out of the hospital a couple weeks later and went right back to work, eye patch and all.”
Harlan opened another beer. I did, too.
“Cynthia was still little, wanted a puppy. We promised we’d get her one if she did her chores or was good in kindergarten or something. I can’t remember what her end of the deal of was. But she came through, and so did we. Got her a golden retriever, practically a puppy. Had those huge feet, though, so we knew she’d get big. Even let Cindy name her. She called her ‘Licksey.’ You can probably guess why. I thought that was a bit on the nose, but Ellie wouldn’t let me overrule her. So it stuck.” He let himself smile at the memory, let himself relish it.
“A couple of months went by. I pretty much forgot about Wilson. Dog had to have been at least forty pounds by then. One day I’m out on patrol, and I get a call on the radio from dispatch telling me I need to go straight home. Right away.”
“Oh shit,” I said.
“Ellie’d gone grocery shopping. When she got home she found Licksey in the backyard in a puddle of blood, all cut up. Fucker who did it took her right eye. At least Cindy was at school. We got it all cleaned up before she came home. Had to run the hose for an hour until the red all washed away and soaked into the dirt. Told her the dog got out and was hit by a car.”
He took a long pull from his bottle.
“The next morning when I got up and went outside, I saw somebody had taken their finger and written a message in the dust on the back window of my car. Said ‘I got my eye on you.’”
“Jesus. What did you do?”
“Moved to Orange County.”
“That end it?”
“I don’t think Wilson ever found the new house,” Harlan said. “But no, that didn’t end it. Every couple of weeks, I’d get a letter at the station with no return address, or a phone message, or a piece of paper stuck under the windshield wiper of my cruiser. They all said the same thing—‘I got my eye on you.’ Slowed down after a while. A month or two would go by. Then three or four. Every now and again I’d run across some banger in Wilmington or Carson and out of the blue he’d say, ‘Wilson got his eye on you, man.’ I’d almost be able to forget about it, and then there it was again. ‘I got my eye on you.’ And every damn time I’d remember Licksey lying there dead in that puddle of blood.”
“How long did that go on?”
“Until Wilson got shanked in the shower at San Quentin.”
“When was that?”
“Nineteen ninety-eight.”
What was that? Seventeen years? I tried to wrap my mind around it. “Why’d you tell me this?”
Looking at the empty bottle in his hand, he said, “Because we’ve all got targets on our backs.” The corners of his mouth turned up into a sad, bemused smile. “Also, it’s not as bad as you think it is to live in Costa Mesa.”
After he left, I went inside and found Jen on the sofa reading a book. She looked up at me. “I hope you don’t mind that I called Harlan. I thought he might cheer you up.”
I decided to let my soft chuckle speak for itself and went to bed.
I didn’t sleep.
CHAPTER SEVEN
EPITAPH FOR MY HEART
Between them, Marty Locklin and Dave Zepeda had more than thirty years’ experience working homicide. They were the old guard, the grizzled vets. Last week they’d been in North Division, investigating a complicated gang-related triple murder, so that morning in the squad room was the first time I’d seen them since the bomb went off.
“Heard you guys had your hands full,” I said. “How’d it go?”
“You know,” Marty said. “Thirty people at the murder scene, nobody saw anything.”
“Twenty-eight of them were in the can,” Dave said.
“What about the other two?” I asked.
“Screwing in the bedroom.” Dave laughed. It sounded loud that early in the morning. It wasn’t unusual for so many witnesses to claim they hadn’t seen anything. The truth was that they had far more to fear from the gang members in their midst than they did from law enforcement. If I was in their position, I would have said I was taking a shit, too. Snitches don’t get stitches. They get shot in the face.
“You guys get anything at all?”
“No,” Marty said. “But you know how it works. Somebody else will try to cut himself a break on some other charge and we’ll get the shooters that way.”
“Or we won’t,” Dave said. It was easy to mistake Dave’s attitude for indifference. I knew him well enough to know that he hadn’t succumbed to the apathy that often comes when long-time detectives begin wistfully anticipating retirement. He was just a realist who understood that there was always some luck involved in closing any case. Marty and he had earned their pragmatism. They both liked to sell themselves as lazy, burned-out old farts, but I’d never seen either one of them slack on an investigation.
Neither of them said anything about the explosion or my car, so I didn’t, either. They must have heard. I just figured they knew I’d be sick of talking about it by then.
“Oh, Ruiz said to tell you not to go anyplace,” Marty said. It seemed like an afterthought.
I hadn’t seen him in his office when I came in. “He’s here already?”
“Yeah.” Dave leaned back and slurped his coffee. “Had to go upstairs and talk to the brass about something.”
I opened my laptop and started reviewing my e-mail.
“Crap,” Dave said. It sounded like he was talking to himself.
“What’s wrong?” Marty asked.
“I’m out of staples. You have any?”
While I looked back down at my computer screen, I could hear Marty making desk noises. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”
Not waiting for Dave to ask, I pulled open the top drawer on my desk and looked inside. It only took a fraction of a second for me to recognize the gray, claylike block with a burner cell phone wired to its top.
I yelled “Bomb!” and tried to stand and back away from my desk.
But my thigh hooked itself under the arm of my chair and I wound up lifting it off the floor, stumbling backward, and falling sideways on top of the backrest and rolling onto the linoleum. As I struggled to untangle myself and get away from the desk as fast as I cou
ld, I heard Dave and Marty cackling behind me.
With the realization of what they’d done, the fear began to dissipate, but a simmering humiliation flowed into its wake. Before I could draw my weapon and shoot them both, Ruiz returned.
“Get up off the floor and come into my office,” he said as he walked past me without looking down.
I got to my feet, righted my chair and slid it back toward the desk, and followed him.
“Close the door and sit down,” he said. “How’s it going?”
“Not bad,” I said. “You?”
“All right.” He nodded unironically. “Here’s the thing. I’m going to pull you off the Denkins case.”
“Why? Jen and I are making progress. We’ve got a warrant to execute this morning.”
“I know,” he said. “Patrick thinks there might be a connection to the bomb.”
“But that’s a long shot. The window of opportunity—”
“I talked to Walsh. He said the bomber knows what he’s doing. If he had the supplies on hand, he could have rigged it in half an hour. It’s a feasible theory.”
That was the same thing Gonzales had said to Patrick. I remembered what he’d told me about Walsh taking credit after they’d swept my apartment, and I filed it away.
“Feasible’s a long way from solid,” I said. “Why would they use a bomb? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Still,” Ruiz said, “if there’s even a possibility they’re connected, you can’t be anywhere near the investigation.”
I knew he was right. He usually was. But I wasn’t convinced there was anything to the theory. “Look,” I said. “At this point, there’s nothing even close to solid. It’s just speculation. Don’t take me off Denkins yet. If Patrick comes up with anything that backs up the connection, I’ll let it go. But until then, let me keep working it.”
He looked at me. His elbows were on his desk, forearms forming a triangle, fingers interlocked at its top point, and as his eyes narrowed over his hands, I realized he hadn’t really intended to take me off the case. At least not yet.
“Okay,” he said. “But if Patrick comes up with a solid connection, I’m going to have to hand it off.”
He’d given me a small win, something to make me feel a sense of relief. But why?
“Things going all right with Jen? Staying at her place?”
“So far it’s okay. Why didn’t you tell me she’d be babysitting me?”
“Because we both know how you would have responded if I did.” He was right. I would have argued with him and resisted all the way. Jen had never even discussed it with me until it was already happening. She knew how to work me better than anyone.
“She talked to you about letting Patrick do his job, right?”
“Yeah.”
“You’ve got to stay out of his way. It’s his case. I know you don’t like it, but you’re the victim here. When’s the last time you invited a victim to help investigate their own case?”
I wanted him to think I was letting that sink in, so I didn’t answer.
“Stand back, Danny. If you don’t, they’ll pull us off the case altogether. I had to fight the captain to begin with. You trust Patrick, right?”
“Of course,” I said. I couldn’t help but admire Ruiz’s technique. He’d pulled three agreements in a row out of me and sapped me of my instinctual need to challenge his authority.
“Good,” he said. “What was that with Marty and Dave out there?”
“They put a fake bomb in my desk drawer.”
He nodded. I couldn’t read his expression.
“Assholes,” I said.
He nodded again. “It was a long weekend for them. They were up in Glendale all day yesterday.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because somebody had to liaise with the ATF, try to track the source of the land mine that was in your bomb.”
I wasn’t sure what bothered me more. The fact that now I couldn’t stay pissed off at Dave and Marty or the fact that my boss had just used “liaise” as a verb. “So,” I said, “am I the only one in the squad who wasn’t on the clock all weekend?”
Ruiz nodded. “Victims don’t get overtime.”
Harold Craig opened his door a few inches and peeked out at us as Jen and I climbed the stairs. I nodded at him as we passed. He’d replied to an e-mail I sent early that morning. Kobe still hadn’t returned home.
Bill Denkins had conveniently labeled his master keys, so it was easy to find the one we needed. With Jen and Ethan, the crime-scene technician, behind me, I opened the door to Kobe’s studio apartment.
I’m not sure what I expected to see, but there wasn’t much. The studio was small, with a kitchen to the right of the door and a living/sleeping area to the left. In the back corner, behind a well-worn futon on a low pine frame, was the door to the bathroom. There was hardly any furniture. A small flat-screen TV on a flimsy stand, with a video-game console beneath it, a makeshift milk-crate nightstand, and a pale-green upholstered chair, small and worn, in front of the window.
It wasn’t clean, really, just empty. Kobe had left little behind. In the kitchen, there were only two cups, a bowl, a handful of mismatched utensils, a few paper plates, and an almost-used-up roll of paper towels. The refrigerator held a Styrofoam take-out container full of pad thai and a quart of milk that, according to its expiration date, was still good for two days. The only other food was a box of cherry Pop-Tarts with one package gone.
“How long had he lived here?” Jen asked.
“A year and a half,” I said.
The closet was close to empty as well. A hoodie, a pair of jeans bunched up in the corner on the floor, and a mismatched pair of socks. In the bathroom were a toothbrush, a nearly empty tube of Colgate, and a container of Tums. One lonely and threadbare towel hung over the shower curtain rod.
“Not quite the cornucopia of evidence we were hoping for,” Jen said.
“So the question is, did he take a lot with him, or is this just how he lived?”
We’d been careful about what we touched. “Ethan?” I said.
He was young. Every new crime-scene technician I worked with seemed younger than the last.
“Yes?” he said.
“Think you can find us some fingerprints and DNA?”
He smiled pleasantly. “I don’t think that should be a problem at all.”
We went outside and let him work.
From the landing, I saw a man with a garden sprayer on the other side of the concrete-block wall that ran in front of Denkins’s door and the next apartment building, the one that faced out on Second Street.
I pointed him out to Jen. He was tall and lean and wore olive-colored pants and a beige work shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Aviator glasses and a floppy boonie hat protected his head from the sun. “Think that might be the manager?”
“Maybe,” she said.
I went halfway down the steps and spoke to him over the top of the wall. “Excuse me, sir?”
He stopped spraying, put the tank down, and turned. “Yes?” he said.
Midfifties, I guessed, hard and stiff, the kind of man who wouldn’t take kindly to kids on his lawn. I held up my badge. “I need to ask you a few questions.”
He exhaled heavily. “Come around the back,” he said. “I’m not going to shout over this wall.” His voice was thick with irritation, but he hadn’t shouted yet.
I went through the back gate and around the garages and met him. He hadn’t moved.
“What do you want?”
“My name is Danny Beckett,” I said, extending my hand.
He looked down at it, but his arms remained at his sides. “You’re the one left the business card on my door.”
Jen had actually left the card, but I didn’t see any reason to go into the details of the canvass. “Yes.”
“It fell down in between the screen and the decorative grating on the front. Had to fish it out with a coat hanger.” His posture was straight and stiff. I
could imagine him playing the asshole drill sergeant in a war movie. A Vietnam War movie.
“I’m sorry about that,” I said.
“I tried to get it out with my hand, but that was going to stretch the screen out and ruin it.” His scowl was so pronounced that I almost laughed. It was clear I needed to find a balance between strength and deference for him to take me seriously.
“Sir, do you know what happened to William Denkins?”
He nodded. “They say he killed himself.” There was no doubt about the contempt he felt for whoever “they” were.
“You don’t think so?”
“Bill was soft, sure. But he wasn’t a pussy. He didn’t kill himself.”
“You’re right about that,” I said.
The lenses in his sunglasses masked it, but I could still see a sense of smug satisfaction in his expression.
“I knew it,” he said so softly that I thought the words were more for himself than for me. “You know who did it?”
“Not yet,” I said. “Were you close to him?”
“He was a friend, yeah.”
“You’re the manager here?”
“For twenty-two years.”
“What’s your name?”
“Acker. Kurt Acker.”
“How well did you know Bill?”
“Well enough.”
I let the silence hang. Most people get uncomfortable when there’s a dead spot in conversation with a cop. This is one of the most useful tools in a detective’s repertoire. Acker was stubborn, though. He lasted almost thirty seconds before he spoke.
“He didn’t know what the hell he was doing when he took over that building. I watched him. Fuckup after fuckup. He was too proud to ask for help.”
“But you helped him anyway?”
“He hired an incompetent painter. I held my tongue as long as I could. But they barely prepped anything at all, and what they did was shoddy as hell. Somebody had to say something.”
“That was nice of you.”