by Tyler Dilts
I found Dave and Jen just outside the crime-scene tape. He was eating a chocolate-frosted buttermilk donut. She wasn’t eating anything at all.
“Any good?” I asked him.
“No, not really.” He finished it with one huge bite. After he managed to swallow the whole mouthful, he said, “So what do you think?”
“Dumpster’s pretty close to PCH,” I said. “Why not just drive up the alley where there wouldn’t be a chance of anyone seeing anything?”
“Good question.”
“When do they empty the Dumpster?”
“Truck came this morning while the uniforms were still blocking off the scene,” he said. “They sent it away.”
“So whoever dumped the body knew the collection schedule.”
“That’s my bet.”
Maybe-Jerry came over. His mood hadn’t improved. “You guys finished now?”
“Yep,” Dave said, layering his words with smug satisfaction. “What’s your hurry, anyway? I’ve never seen anybody so anxious to climb into a Dumpster before.”
I found Ethan loading his equipment into the LBPD Crime Scene van.
“Thanks,” I said to him.
“No problem.”
“You didn’t need to break protocol, though.” I told him that because I didn’t want to encourage him to approach established procedure lightly, but the truth was that I was glad he had. If he hadn’t, Kobe’s body might have slipped past us. And I needed to see him. To witness his murder scene. He’d been so central to Bill’s case that even though I knew next to nothing about him, his loss was still palpable. He might have been able to lead us to whoever had killed Bill. It was possible he still could, depending on what his killer had left behind.
Ethan’s eyes widened with sudden worry. “I didn’t mean to, it’s just we had all the photos already and Jerry was ready to hop in there and start moving things around anyway, so I told Detective Zepeda that I thought it might be the guy you were looking for and he said to go ahead and do it.”
“It’s okay,” I said.
“I just did the thumb and forefinger. Hardly moved anything at all.”
“Stop worrying. Thank you. If you had waited, it would have been another day or two before anyone even made the connection.”
He looked relieved.
“It was the right call. You gave us a head start that could make a real difference. Good work. I owe you one.”
When his relief transformed into outright happiness, I figured I’d gone too far.
“This changes things,” Jen said as we drove on PCH toward downtown. “Can you imagine Lucinda or Joe putting three slugs in the back of Kobe’s head and dropping him in a Dumpster?”
“No,” I said. “Not really.”
“It’s no coincidence they disposed of the body when and where they did,” she said. “If the guy who called it in hadn’t been looking for the breakfast Dumpster-diver special, the body would have made it all the way to the landfill before anyone found it. Could have been days or even weeks before anyone could trace it back here. They might have even gotten away with it.”
Everything she said was true.
“Maybe Kobe wasn’t running because of Bill,” I said. “Maybe he was into something else and just bolted when he saw the cops showing up.”
“That’s possible,” she said. “But it’s a long shot.”
As had become my habit, I lowered the passenger’s visor and checked the traffic behind us. I saw a white Accord that could have been the same one I’d seen before. If it really was a tail, they’d chosen a good vehicle. The Accord is one of the most popular cars in California, and white is the most popular color.
“You see that Accord behind us?” I said.
Jen checked her mirror. “Yes. We’re seeing a lot of white Accords these days.”
“I know, but humor me, okay?”
She turned right off of PCH onto a small side street called Henderson. To our surprise, the white Accord followed.
“Now what?” Jen asked.
“Pull over.”
She did, and the Accord drove past us. I eyeballed the driver. He looked midtwenties, possibly Latino, wearing a white long-sleeved oxford.
Jen said, “Six Tom Victor Zebra Two Four Four.”
I wrote the plate number down and said, “Follow him.”
She pulled away from the curb and fell in behind him. He continued north on Henderson. We were in Wrigley, a neighborhood that ran along the east side of the Los Angeles River all the way north to the 405. For the last ten years, everyone had been expecting it to be the next big gentrification hot spot, but the rich people never showed up.
I called in the plate number. It belonged to a white Accord, but the owner was a fifty-seven-year-old woman named Dolores Webber who lived in Irvine.
Jen said, “Why is somebody driving her car randomly around Long Beach?”
“Maybe he stole the plates from another white Accord.”
“I don’t like this.” She checked the rearview mirror. “He could be trying to lead us into something.”
“Like an ambush?” If my car hadn’t exploded a few days earlier, I would have found that funny. I looked over my shoulder. There was no one behind us.
“I’ll call in for backup.” I did, and then called Patrick.
When he answered, I told him what was happening.
“What does Jen think?”
“She’s worried.”
He thought about it for a few seconds. “I’m in the car and heading back to the station, but I’m twenty minutes away. Stay with him unless something looks really wrong. Try to keep the backup out of sight and see where he leads you.”
We followed him through the residential neighborhood all the way up Henderson until it ended at Burnett. He turned right and then took the first left on Eucalyptus to continue north. There hadn’t been anything suspicious about his behavior, other than not exceeding the speed limit, since we’d started following him. Five minutes earlier, I was ready for a gunfight. Now, though, I was beginning to second-guess my suspicions.
A patrol unit notified us that it was traveling parallel to us on Magnolia and asked for instructions. I told them to keep heading north and wait for word from us.
The Accord crossed Willow, but we got stopped by cross traffic. It was hard to tell, but it looked like he might be slowing down so we wouldn’t lose him. He could only go straight for a few more blocks.
When he got to Thirty-Third, he turned left and pulled to the curb in front of a big new building I hadn’t seen before. It looked like an office building, with big red letters reading “PBBC.” As we got closer, I could read the smaller black letters next to the large ones. They said “Pacific Baptist Bible College.”
The driver got out of the car and looked around, as if he was unfamiliar with the area. He had a nine-by-twelve clasp envelope and some loose papers in his hands.
Jen shot me a look that I didn’t quite know how to read and got out.
“Excuse me,” she said to the young man. She held up her badge and said, “Hi, we noticed you driving slowly through the neighborhood and wondered if everything was okay.”
He looked surprised and maybe frightened. “Yes, it’s okay. I was on my way to drop off my application and I got a little lost, is all. I don’t know Long Beach very well.”
Jen introduced herself and asked his name.
“José,” he said.
“Who is Dolores Webber?” she asked.
That threw him, but he answered quickly. “She’s my aunt.” He realized how we made the connection and added, “Oh, she loaned me her car. It was going to take two hours each way from Santa Ana on the train and the bus.”
Jen looked at me. I shook my head.
“I’m sorry I was going so slow.” He shuffled through the papers in his hands and held out a Google Maps printout for us to see. “I was trying to read this while I was driving. We don’t have GPS. I should have pulled over. Am I going to get a ticket?”
“No, no ticket,” Jen said.
José looked as if the weight of the world had been lifted off his shoulders. “Thank you so much. I’m sorry. I’ll be more careful.”
“You’re welcome. Good luck with your application.”
“God bless you,” he said.
We headed back to the car.
“Excuse me?” José said behind us. “You don’t happen to know where Admissions is, do you?”
I called Patrick and told him what happened. He seemed disappointed. Sure, it would have sucked if we’d been led into an ambush, but it probably would have cracked the case.
Another false alarm. Everything was setting me on edge. I was jumping at shadows and seeing danger everywhere. I had to get a handle on things, or my growing paranoia would make me useless.
We weren’t far from Bixby Knolls, so I suggested Jongewaard’s Bake-n-Broil for lunch. They have a good chicken potpie. I knew from experience that it would probably be enough to smother my feelings.
When we got back to the station, Jen had to go to court and left me in the squad room to go over with Dave the notes I had on Kobe. He wasn’t back yet, so I went through them again myself to make sure there was nothing I could add or elaborate on. There wasn’t much there, only a few pages that consisted primarily of Harold Craig’s statement.
My phone chirped with a text message from Julia. Thank you ☺
I wasn’t sure what she was thanking me for. You’re welcome, I replied. For what?
The flowers. They’re beautiful.
Flowers, I thought. I hadn’t sent any flowers. Halfway through composing my reply, Dave came in the squad room and I put my phone down.
I intercepted him and asked if they’d found anything else at the scene.
“No wallet, no watch, no keys,” he said.
“He wear a watch?” I asked. Watches were old school. Most people, especially if they’re under thirty, check the time on their phones these days.
“There was a little bit of a tan line on his wrist. So either a watch, or some kind of bracelet. Looks like they took everything. Make it look like a robbery, or harder to ID him. Or both.”
“No phone?”
“That’s the interesting thing. He had a phone.” Dave had something he wanted to tell me, but he also wanted to make me fish for it.
“Why didn’t they take it?” I asked.
“Because they didn’t search him good enough. It was tucked in his underwear. Right up against his nutsack.”
“Why would he do that?”
“That’s the big question,” Dave said. “I’m thinking he had another one. Probably an iPhone. They found that, didn’t think they needed to keep looking.”
“What about the one in his underwear?”
“It’s just a cheap basic model. Probably a burner.”
“You check it to see if there was anything on it?” I asked.
He nodded. “No texts, no voice mail, no call history. Probably deleted them, if they were ever there at all.”
“What was there?”
“A contact list.”
I opened the folder and showed him the names we’d found on the Post-it in Kobe’s apartment. “Any of these look familiar?”
He pulled his reading glasses out of his pocket and put them on. Then he leaned over and read from my notes. “Yep, those are all there. And K. Maru.”
“That’s Kobe,” I said. “Are there more in the phone?”
“Just one,” he said. “Winters. That mean anything to you?”
“So,” Ruiz said, “you think the cell-phone contact connects the son-in-law to Dave’s victim, the upstairs neighbor?”
Dave and I were sitting in the chairs facing the desk. Jen was standing behind us.
“Yes, I do.” We’d gone over everything in detail with him.
“And you think the others on this list of aliases might be in danger, too?”
“They could be. Maybe Kobe was killed because of his proximity to Bill Denkins. Maybe it was because he saw something someone didn’t want him to see that night—it’s possible.”
“But?” Ruiz said.
“It seems like too much of a coincidence.”
“How do you know ‘Winters’ isn’t just another alias and not connected to the restaurant at all?”
“It doesn’t fit with the others. It’s not an obvious reference to a character in pop-culture fantasy like the others are.”
“But you said you thought it was connected to Game of Thrones.”
“I do think that, but it’s a different kind of connection.”
We’d started losing him as soon as we mentioned Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. His eyes glazed over with Mass Effect and I hadn’t been able to unglaze them. If Patrick were there, he might have been able to do a better job translating nerd into English. I was struggling.
“Honestly,” Ruiz said, exhaling through his nose and spreading his hands palm up over his desk. “I’m not sure why you’re telling me this right now.”
We hadn’t actually tried to articulate everything for each other, and we should have before we attempted to explain it to Ruiz, but it wasn’t that important that he understood the specifics of the popular-culture references in the aliases. What we were really looking for was strategy. We found ourselves in a position in which it seemed like we needed to prioritize one murder over the other. If we brought Joe in for questioning about Kobe before we’d made a solid case against him for the murder of his father-in-law, we might undermine our ability to make that case. On the other hand, the longer we looked at Joe, the less likely we’d be able to find Kobe’s killers and the greater risk there was to the people using the other aliases on the list.
I slowed down, more for myself than for Ruiz, and explained it as carefully as I could.
“Damn,” he said. “I’m inclined to say ‘a bird in the hand’ and all that. You’ve got two-thirds of a solid case against the son-in-law. The smart money says pursue that first, but there might be three more people at risk.” He raised his hand to his face and scratched at his chin. After a few moments of contemplation, he said, “Don’t prioritize. Not yet. Keep working them both and don’t let either one sink the other.”
“How do we do that?” I asked without a trace of snark or irony in my voice.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I figure out the strategy. The tactics are on you.”
Two hours later we had a game plan. Dave had written one warrant request to gather metadata on the cell numbers in the contact list from Kobe’s phone, and another to monitor any activity on them moving forward. We decided to hold off on interrogating Joe, but I made arrangements for Lucy to come into the station for an interview the following morning. I’d be fishing, but I’d have to plan the questions very carefully in order to gain as much information as possible without alerting her to our suspicions about her husband.
I was at my desk, working on the line of questioning I planned to use, when Patrick came over with his iPad wanting me to look at some photos.
“What are they?” I asked.
“Faces. Just tell me if any of them look familiar.”
He showed them to me one at a time. A mix of Caucasians and African American males who ranged in age from early twenties to midforties. Some were mug shots, some were taken on the street, some looked like they’d been pulled from social media. As he scrolled through them, I took my time with each one and studied the features of the face, searching my memory for hints of recognition. Out of fourteen pictures, only one looked vaguely familiar. One of the black men. He had a scar running up the left side of his nose.
“Where do you recognize him from?”
“A case, I think. Maybe a year and a half, two years ago? I couldn’t tell you his name.”
“You remember which one?”
“Jen was the primary. It was an Insane Crips thing, somebody popped one of them outside the Target up on Cherry. I remember this guy because of the scar and because he was willing
to talk to me.”
“Was he involved?”
“No,” I said. “Just a witness. He gave us a description of the getaway car.”
“Anything come of it?”
“No. Case got closed because an ADA on another murder got somebody a better plea deal in exchange for information.”
He nodded and flipped the cover of the iPad closed. “Okay,” he said. “Thanks.”
“Who are the other guys?”
“Three of the white guys are connected to that Serb crew I mentioned. They move a lot of weapons. The others are guys they’ve done business with.”
“You’re trying to link them to me?”
Patrick stood halfway up and looked at the lieutenant’s office. I knew Ruiz wasn’t there. “Yeah,” he said. “The mine in your car was manufactured in the same lot as the one the ATF guys already found. It’s a good bet they were smuggled in together. We’ve got to tiptoe around all this, though, because they’re putting together a federal case to take the whole operation down.”
“They stonewalling you?”
“No,” he said. “But we know there’s a lot of information there that might be useful, and they won’t jeopardize what they’ve got in the works.”
“Not even for an attempted murder on a cop?”
He shook his head. “They lost an undercover guy in the lead-up to the original raid. As far as they’re concerned, that trumps everything.”
I could understand that. But it left Patrick stumbling around in the dark. And it left me someplace I still didn’t want to think about.
The question I didn’t want to ask wouldn’t go away, so I let it out. “You find anything that might be a link to the Denkins case?”
“No, but Kobe’s murder might change that.”
“That’s what I was thinking. Three shots in the back of the head.”
Patrick was on the same page. Bill Denkins’s murder was a botched fake suicide. Kobe’s looked like a professional hit. People who put the gun in a right-handed man’s left hand before they pull the trigger for him aren’t the same kind of people who use .22-caliber pistols for executions and know when the trash truck is going to empty the Dumpster.