Yeah, Soledad thought. Should have been. But not a word of it was.
Jealousy. That was the thought for Soledad’s drive home. Jealousy was the logical reason she’d come up with for Hayes’s report getting redacted. DMI officers were resentful that a beat cop’d done a better job investigating things than they had. So left out what he’d said—removed what he’d written—from their report.
But the jealousy theory required some serious denial. There wasn’t a cop in the PD who wasn’t territorial about his or her department. But you’d have to believe that DMI cops—grown men—would get bitch jealous of a flatfoot doing some flatfooting in the first place. And say they were, whatever, jealous or resentful of the work Hayes’d done. No reason they couldn’t just stick his work in their report, claim it as their own, and that would be that about that.
Irrelevance. That was another possibility. What Hayes had come up with, those additional incident sites didn’t merit inclusion. But to not at least reference them was sloppy police work. In her short time at DMI sloppy wasn’t something she found the cops there to be.
Reality: What Officer Hayes had offered up had been purged from the DMI report.
Why?
Did Soledad have to ask herself why?
Yeah.
Because she didn’t care for the obvious answer. The freak had died a questionable death. Probably, it was murder. So the obvious, the unsettling answer to the question why was that the people who purged the report were conspirators after the fact. Or worse. They’re the killers.
East LA was a fairly shitty place. Drugs free-flowed up and down the streets. A bromide against the better life that wasn’t so much better for the people who’d risked everything—everything being their wives, their lives, their well-being—to get to America so they could clean toilets or clean pools, stroller around rich people’s babies or hang out on street corners hoping some shifty contractor would roll by offering work at cut-rate pay before the INS came around offering an all-expense-paid trip back to their country of origin. A few weeks, a few months, a few years of that and, yeah, you’d be a hophead too. So, in East LA, there were drugs. There was everything that came with drugs: guns and gangs and stealing to get drug money and whoring to get drug money and the shooting of people because they got in the way of drug money being exchanged. It was shit cops should’ve handled. But in East LA the cops worked out of Rampart. Comparing the two, Rampart cops made East LA gangs look like castrati.
Soledad was a cop. But no matter her badge and gun, or maybe because they were of principal significance, her current proximity to East LA—looking at it on a map in her office—was as close as she cared to get to that part of town. But in her head, at least, she had to get close to it. She had some concepts to calculate.
Soledad was a cop, but she wasn’t a detective. She didn’t have years of know-how when it came to asking questions. She had instinct. She had a nurtured ability to look at things a couple of times in a couple of different ways asking each go-round: What’s wrong with this deal? Under the circumstances that’d have to pass for being a detective.
Soledad backtracked the final hours and last minutes of the mutie John Doe. His place of dying, or at least where the body was found, got an X on Soledad’s map. The action made physical her thoughts, gave her focus. Made it feel like she was doing something besides waiting for answers to come.
The Gold Line.
JD got clipped by a train crossing the track. Maybe that was enough to put down an invulnerable. Maybe this freak, maybe JD was only kind of invulnerable. Titanium skin wrapped around garden-variety innards. Gets hit by the train. Internal damage. Dies.
The Gold Line got highlighted.
But Officer Hayes had said a witness saw him drop from a window. Jump from a window? If that didn’t kill him, would a train?
And what was JD doing on the tracks? This guy wasn’t a bum scrounging for food, looking for shelter. So what was he doing on the tracks?
He was crossing the tracks.
To?
“To the river” wasn’t answer enough. To the river for what? Crossing the track to the LA River. Why go to the river?
Why go from point to point to point?
Along the way something happens. He ends up slamming into a wall. Soledad had dug up a photo of the wall. Cement. Graffiti-tagged. Now with a body-sized divot where the Doe’s invulnerable self took out a chunk of it.
And the mailbox Officer Hayes’d told her about. She had a photo of that too. The mailbox used to be a big blue stump same as you’d find on the corner of any street in Anytown, USA. It used to be a symbol of a citizen’s right to communicate in the slowest way known to man that didn’t directly involve animals. The unit was wrecked, bent, misshapen.
So . . . what? The Doe goes nuts, has an emotional meltdown, slams a wall, wrecks a mailbox, takes a run across the tracks . . .
Maybe he wasn’t just going nuts. Maybe he was scoring. In need of a score bad.
Sounds very dull for an event involving a freak.
But the first freak Soledad ever took a warrant call on was a flamethrower jacked up on crack. Maybe they were the next step in evolution, but a percentage of them, no different from a percentage of normal people—be they lowlifes living in the hardest urban centers, be they lofty talk radio hosts—just wanted to get high.
The burned clothes?
Maybe if the freak was freebasing, he lit himself up. But Officer Hayes didn’t report any paraphernalia around the body, and Officer Hayes had proven himself to be ass-kissing thorough. And who the hell freebases anymore?
Jumping from a window, running the streets, crossing the tracks, running . . . He was running.
Why do people run? ’Cause they’re getting chased.
The Doe was getting chased.
Somebody wants to kill a freak, so they give it a gas bath, flick a match at it.
Reasonable if it was some don’t-know-any-better hate group. But if it was murder, if it was the cadre, if they had targeted the Doe, wouldn’t they know he was invulnerable? Wouldn’t they know gas and fire wouldn’t do much more than scrub him clean?
With her pen Soledad drew circles on the map. Circles overlapping circles. Lines of confusion. There were bits of nonlogic, but that the JD was targeted was clear. A police report had been sanitized. The only people in position to do both were cops from DMI.
The really ugly part of all that: If it was true, Tashjian had been right.
Tucker Raddatz had a decent life. He had a decent little place in Studio City. Nice lawn. Some trees. A pool. Little but decent. He had a very decent wife: Helena. She was from Spain. Born there. Grew up in America. She was pretty. Or rather, decent-looking. Two kids, boys, seven and five. They weren’t at the age yet where everything their father did embarrassed them. They actually liked being around their dad, and on the surface, at least, didn’t seem to be moving toward a time when they wouldn’t. There was none of the gloom around the edges of Raddatz’s homelife that he seemed to slog with him in his cop life, in the life Soledad was familiar with. A palpable lack of affliction was the first thing Soledad noticed when she rolled up to Raddatz’s house. She noticed that, and she noticed Raddatz didn’t come off as being real happy to see her.
Helena didn’t pick up on the agitation. Or if she did pick up on it, could act the hell out of seeming to welcome the unwelcomed to her home. She greeted Soledad, walked Soledad out to the pool to wait while her husband finished up whatever Soledad’d interrupted with her arrival. Helena brought out some lemonade. Homemade and fresh. Offered it to cool Soledad’s wait.
And Soledad sat, sat some . . .
She’d left her sunglasses in the car. Mistake. The sunlight kicking off the water of the pool was nearly painful.
The patio door opened. Raddatz’s kids. Not him.
They jumped in the pool, the younger boy wearing orange floaties. Splashed wildly. So much happiness. So much, despite the fact they would never know a world in which a ful
l and whole city of San Francisco existed. What was such joy, unfiltered and undamaged? The bliss of ignorance? The resurrection of hope? Kids who just didn’t know better than to be happy, splash and play? That was the thing, wasn’t it: that life was malleable, able to conform itself around its circumstances? Simply: No matter how fucked-up shit was, people thrived. In example was modern history, as within modern history is when man’s come the closest to—
remained within reach of—making himself extinct. But even when Europe was mustard-gassing itself into oblivion, when Hitler was Final Solutioning everybody in sight, when it was about the Greater Southeast Asia Coprosperity Sphere, when it was all about the cold war or ethnic cleansing or the war on terror, up to the war between normals and metanormals you could still pick up the paper and read about how the local team had blown a ten-point lead and gotten eliminated from the play-offs. You could still turn on the eleven o’clock news and catch a piece about the dog or flower or auto show coming to town. There was a girl somewhere with her girlfriends all giddy with themselves as she tried on wedding dresses. There was a guy at a newsstand, eager, because the latest FHM had just rolled off the presses with a neatly airbrushed ass shot of that month’s It Girl. Even at the edge of forever there were attempts at normalcy. Forays into happiness. The human spirit conforming to chaos.
What had Tashjian called them? Acts of life.
Acts of the human spirit. Human spirit. Not the metahuman spirit. Human spirit survived. Humanity survived.
It would if Soledad had anything to say about it.
The patio door again. Raddatz. Hook off, stump showing. He crossed right to Soledad, sat next to Soledad on an adjoining lounge.
No preamble: “What?”
For a second Soledad thought about cracking wise on Raddatz not even giving her a hello. But she didn’t feel like jokes, and jokes weren’t about to buy her anything.
So getting right to it: “Know a beat cop named Hayes?”
“No.”
Lie. Didn’t even think about it. An absolute assertion needs consideration. A lie you know is untrue. What’s there to think about?
Soledad: “He’s working out of the Hollenbeck station. Same area the John Doe was found. Know him now?”
“What’s the problem, O’Roark?”
He’d gone from lying to evading.
“Here’s what I need: I need people to be straight with me. I show up at DMI, nobody wants to touch me. Then you give me the hand. You and your cadre. I know about them; the guys you keep tight. You take me out to look at a dead freak, only that’s all you do. You don’t let me in on any investigation, if there is one. Then I find out a cop’s report has been purged. Why?”
Raddatz looked off somewhere. Nowhere in particular. Just not at Soledad.
Soledad didn’t care for that. “When I said be straight with me, I meant now, not when you felt like it.”
“Or . . . ?”
“Do not fuck with me.”
The sound of the words shrieked against the air. Chop. Chop. Chop. A swinging blade that metronomed in a manner not to be ignored.
Raddatz: “I feel like, why do I feel like this is a setup?”
“You think this is more than me just asking for answers, then send me walking. Whatever the reason: I don’t fit in, I’m a pain in the ass, I’ve got no skills for this, I’m a crazy black chick . . . whatever. Don’t admit to anything, don’t say anything. But give me a way out before I get buried with the rest of you. I’ve been down IA road. Didn’t care for it. All I’m looking for is a little self-preservation.”
Raddatz looked away from whatever it was he wasn’t really looking at. Not back to Soledad, but to his two boys going nuts in the pool.
“What do you want, Soledad?” Only time she could recall Raddatz using her first name. “I don’t mean why are you here right this minute. What’s your big objective? Why’d you go MTac?”
“Could ask you the same—”
“But that wouldn’t get us any closer to anything, so I’m asking you. Why?”
“To . . .” How to say it? How to put into words what she felt, but so rarely articulated? “Save lives. To save life. Human life.”
“And that’s what’s most important, right? That the . . . the, I don’t know. The cloud of death that’s been hanging over us since San Francisco, since before that, that it gets blown away.”
Soledad looked to where Raddatz was looking, to his boys.
She said: “Yeah.”
“And would you try to carry out that objective without holding back?”
“If I could keep freaks from taking any more lives? I’d go after that any way I had to.” The statement only at its outer edges was any kind of cover for Soledad’s current career as a provocateur for IA.
“Then what we’re working toward is the same thing.”
“You and me?”
“You, me. Others who are like-minded. How are you on trust?”
“I suck at it.”
For the first time since he’d sat down next to her, maybe since they’d first crossed paths, Raddatz showed anything like lightness. With a smile: “You and me both,” he said. “But I’ve got to ask you for some. You have a problem with allocating a little trust, well, then here’s the out you were looking for.”
And for a sec Soledad considered things. Considered how many lies she was living. The cop lies. The personal-life lies. If she had any honesty left in her, anything similar to trust, if she felt it, would she know it?
“What,” she asked Raddatz, “are your boys’ names?”
“John. Jason. John’s the older one.”
“You like being a father?”
“Love it.”
“Like being married?”
“I love my wife.”
“Not what I asked. Like being married?”
That question didn’t get answered so quick.
When it did: “You get married, it’s like taking a picture. It’s two people at one point in time, and same as a picture nothing’s supposed to change. Maybe that was all right when somebody invented marriage ten thousand years ago, or whatever. Ten thousand years ago people lived until they were fifteen. Nineteen. You get married, it’s not good . . . fuck it, you’re dead in a couple of years anyway.
“People don’t typically die anymore at fifteen or nineteen, O’Roark.” Back to using her surname. “People go till they’re eighty, ninety years old. I don’t care how much you love somebody, you try going fifty or more years of navigating being who you are and who your partner’s looking to make you into.”
“Your wife, what did she want you to be?”
“A guy who cared more about living than changing the world.”
Soledad, bringing things back around to the issue at hand: “And if I can show a little, show some trust?”
“You get to witness something amazing.”
“Something . . . ?”
Raddatz, looking right to Soledad: “You get to witness the end of fear.”
There’s no cure for cancer. All the docs can do is sledgehammer it into submission. Remission. But even when it’s gone, it’s not really gone. It’s always there. A sleeper agent waiting to be activated same as an embedded terror cell. And that’s the thing: It’s waiting. It’s patient. Cancer is death. A form of it. Death in all its forms is hard to beat. Ultimately impossible to beat. Life is finite. Death’s got all the time in the universe.
Taking that into consideration, Gin’s surgery, her early phases of recovery looked good. The docs thought they’d gotten all the malignant cells out. All that science. Best they could say was they thought they’d gotten them all out. Anyway, they were happy with the probability.
Gin’d always prided herself on looking as healthy as she was for her age. Not looking young for her age. Looking young was an illusion. She was healthy and she liked looking healthy. Fit and relatively trim. So along comes the chemo. There goes her hair. And how chemo makes most patients lose weight, it worked opposite
for Gin. Gin ballooned. The thing that kept her alive distorted her nearly beyond recognition.
The ironies of life.
Soledad got all that from e-mails her mother sent. E-mails. Very complete, and completely removed from any kind of emotion.
E-mails.
And Soledad used to think a once-a-week phone call was cold.
Your husband disappears. You go to the cops, file a missing person report. Unpleasant. Unsettling. But that’s what you do. It’s what you do if you ever want to see your man again. You do that. And you pray.
For Diane Hall, filling out that report must’ve been the hardest thing in the world. She did the job with two competing hopes: that her husband would be found, but not found out.
The finding took a while. At least, it took a while for all the paperwork to line up, for the people who track bodies and names and fingerprints and dental records to realize that a John Doe cooling at LACFSC was Anson Hall, reported missing six days prior by his wife. They finally had a name to go with the body and the one other known fact regarding it. The John Doe was a freak.
Normally, a missing person comes up dead, a loved one can expect as sympathetic a dial-up as you’re likely to get from cops who make bereavement calls three or five times a week. Maybe, if things are slow, someone on the city payroll might actually swing out to the survivor’s place and deliver the news in person. As death goes, things are rarely slow in LA.
What Diane Hall got, Diane Hall got an MTac unit rolling on her house backed by a full complement of uniformed cops. A police bird overhead. Diane got ordered from her house hands up. Diane almost got shredded because she came out of her house clutching her six-year-old son rather than, as cops had ordered, with hands skyward. MTacs moved in, Diane got shoved to the ground, the muzzle of an HK pressed—jammed—against the side of her head. She and her boy got cuffed. The six-year-old got cuffed. Put into separate APCs and whisked to a secure lockup in East LA. The only part of town that allowed for a temporary holding facility of metanormals. Not coincidentally, East LA had the highest population of illegal immigrants who were just trying to get by in life, but couldn’t much complain about superpeople getting incarcerated in their backyards because if they did they were likely to get a little incarceration thrown their way prior to being shipped off to whatever country they’d border-hopped from.
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