“Oh. Same side of the street.”
“North side,” murmured Jarsdel, making another note. “And what were you wearing at the time?”
“Wearing? Why do you care?”
“In case we get a witness who identifies you as having been standing near the body, we want to be able to rule you out as a suspect.”
“Okay, I was wearing this, what I’m wearing now.”
“You go jogging in combat boots?”
“I…uh…changed my shoes.”
“But the rest is exactly what you had on?”
“Yeah.”
“You didn’t take a shower when you got home?”
“No, man, it’s like I said—I been trying to keep away from reporters all morning. Haven’t had two seconds to myself.”
Jarsdel made more notes.
“Are we almost done?” asked Sparks.
“Almost. Out of curiosity, have I seen any movies you’ve worked on?”
Sparks sighed. “I don’t know, have you?”
“I meant can you name a few for me?”
“All the stuff I do these days is straight to streaming. Nothing you’ve heard of. Promise.”
Jarsdel smiled. “Okay. Let’s get back to your route. I’m still confused—you leave here, then what? Take me through it.”
Sparks turned to Morales. “Christ, I thought you guys just wanted to ask a couple questions. How much longer’s this gonna take?”
Morales didn’t answer, and Jarsdel jumped back in. “Where do you usually go?”
“I don’t know, man. I just go. I don’t think about it. Why is this important?”
“You don’t remember which way you went this morning? How about when you came out this gate? Did you make a right or a left?”
“A right.”
“A right. And when you got to Hollywood Boulevard—a right or a left?”
“Another right.”
“Another right,” Jarsdel repeated. “And for how long? When did you turn off?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because otherwise, you would’ve seen the body much sooner. You would’ve run into it on the first half of your run, not on the second half, right?”
“I guess.”
“So?”
“So what, man?”
“What was your next move? Where did you go so you didn’t see the body until you were heading back? Side streets? Help me out.”
“You’re twisting my words around.”
Jarsdel creased his brow. “I’m sorry. How am I doing that?”
“Look, I’m not a thousand percent positive exactly when I saw the body, okay? Maybe I saw it on the first half and then called it in on my way back.”
“You saw a dead body and decided to finish your jog before calling it in?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
Morales spoke for the first time. “It’s not what my partner would call ‘a minor distinction.’”
“Jesus.” Sparks rubbed his face with both hands, shaking his head.
Jarsdel leaned closer and spoke in a low, almost soothing voice. “Is it maybe possible you weren’t out jogging?”
Sparks continued shaking his head, then, shoulders slumped, stopped to look up at his apartment building. Jarsdel was pretty sure he was hoping he could somehow teleport back inside or wind back the clock to before he’d decided to venture out that morning.
“I don’t wanna talk anymore.”
“Listen,” said Jarsdel in the same coaxing tone. “We’re homicide detectives. Long as your morning errands didn’t include killing someone, it’s of no interest to us whatsoever.”
“This is none of my business anymore,” said Sparks. “I did my part.”
“I’ll tell you something,” Morales said. “You’d be doing a good thing, helping us find out who did this. I honestly don’t care what you got going on. What is it? Girls? Narcotics?” Sparks flinched a little, and Morales pressed on. “Okay, so let’s say you got a habit. You’re out on a buy, you see something. Why you’re there doesn’t matter. What matters is you’re there, and you can help us. Obviously you care, or you wouldn’t have called it in. That gives you some major points with me. That other shit? Forget it. Let’s talk about what you saw.”
Jarsdel gave the last little push. “There’s no way you’re gonna get in trouble talking to us. We’re after people who commit murder. You talk to us, and you become one of the good guys.”
Sparks nodded, his eyes focused on a spot somewhere between the two detectives. “I got problems. Got cut rigging this chainsaw effect a few years ago…” He let them see his right forearm, where a network of pink scars dimpled the pale flesh. “A fucking chainsaw. Guys were supposed to take the teeth out of it, right? Stupid, so goddamned stupid. So now I’m addicted to Oxy.” He shrugged. “If I don’t take ’em, I can’t use the arm at all. Gotta use the arm to work, you know? That’s my situation. Anyway, I’m in real bad pain early this morning. Wakes me up, covered in sweat. I call my guy, and he meets me over by the Metro station.”
Jarsdel scribbled furiously. “Corner of Hollywood and Western?”
“That’s the one.”
“And what time are you talking about here?”
“I’d say about five, maybe quarter after.”
Jarsdel and Morales exchanged a look. That fit with their timeline.
“You don’t believe me?” asked Sparks.
“No, that’s not it at all,” said Jarsdel. “What’d you see?”
“I’m headed back toward the apartment, and this van pulls up ’bout a hundred feet away. Tires screeching and everything. Scared the hell out of me—thought they gotta either be cops or some dudes after my Oxy, so I duck into a doorway to hide. But I don’t hear any shouting or even talking or anything, and then there’s this racket, like they’re moving something, so I peek out to take a look. I see a guy jump back into the van and take off.”
“Would you be able to identify him?”
“No way. Split second.”
“Was he white? Black?”
“White, I think.” He added, before Jarsdel could ask, “Wearing dark clothes. Didn’t get a good look at his face, but he was a young guy. You could tell by the way he moved.”
“Any facial hair?”
“I’m telling you I barely saw him.”
“He drive away in your direction?”
“No. Pulled a U-turn.”
“Can you describe the van?”
“Either white or cream-colored, I couldn’t tell.”
“Any idea on the make or the year?”
“I don’t know a whole lot about cars, but I can tell you it was a Dodge Ram. Had the chrome ram’s head thing on the hood.”
“Anything else? Dents or scrapes? Maybe a cracked window?”
“Not that I saw.”
“Just a plain white van? No logos or anything?”
“Nope.”
“What about a license plate? You get any of it?”
“No.”
Jarsdel put away his notepad. “Why’d you wait so long to report it?”
“I don’t know,” said Sparks. “Guess I didn’t want to get busted for the whole Oxy thing. Told myself I’d call if no one else did. Then it’s getting up to six o’clock, and I still don’t hear any sirens. Couldn’t believe it. Dead guy right in the middle of the sidewalk. And then I’m thinking about that coyote and all the damage it’s doing, and I figured I should let you guys know.” He shook his head at the memory. “I’ll never forget that shit. I mean, I’ve got a strong stomach, but whatever those guys did to him…” His eyes widened in alarm. “Hey, wait a second. What if someone comes after me now I talked to you?”
“You don’t have to worry about that,” said Jarsdel. “Your identity will be kept conf
idential.”
“Confidential? What about all those reporters?”
“All anyone knows is you’re the one who called it in. Everything you’ve just said stays between us.”
Despite Jarsdel’s assurances, Sparks grew pale. He leaned on the gate with both hands. “I’m so fucking stupid. So stupid. I’m a dead man.”
“Mr. Sparks,” said Morales. “You’re completely safe, okay? We’ve never had any of our witnesses harassed in any way.”
Jarsdel knew that wasn’t true, but he also saw the necessity of calming Sparks down. They might want to talk to him again, maybe even subpoena him. “You have my word,” said Jarsdel. “Your name will be kept out of it.”
Sparks wasn’t mollified. “Can I go?”
“Yes, sir. And thank you.” He handed Sparks his card. “If you think of anything else, no matter how small, please get in touch. You’ve been a huge help.”
Sparks waved his hand as if clearing away a foul smell, then slouched back into the building.
“Okay, Prof,” said Morales. “What’s next?”
“That was good, right?” said Jarsdel. “I mean, the way we played off each other. It felt pretty natural.”
“Uh-huh.” Morales’s lips twitched. “What’s next?”
“I guess maybe have the red-light camera on Wilton checked for any traffic infractions this morning between four and seven. Follow up on anything resembling a van.”
“What if he didn’t run the light? Then what?”
“Some of those cameras are also equipped with radar. Woulda got him if he was speeding.”
“Not bad,” said Morales. “But it won’t work.”
“Why not?”
“Disconnected.” He smiled at Jarsdel’s confusion. “You don’t keep up with local politics much, do you? Traffic cameras being phased out. Cost more to run than they bring in. They’ll hang on to the carpool and HOV cameras, but that red-light shit? Just decoration before somebody takes ’em down.”
“Are you sure? I talked to a West Hollywood sheriff’s deputy a couple weeks ago, and he said—”
“Yeah, that’s WeHo. WeHo’s not in our jurisdiction. I’m talking about the contract between LAPD and the camera company, and that expired six weeks ago. They still got a few operational in Santa Monica and Beverly Hills and WeHo, but who cares? Doesn’t do us any good.”
Jarsdel considered for a moment. “What about Caltrans cameras? You know, the ones where you can watch the live feeds to see how backed up the freeways are?”
But Morales was already shaking his head. “They don’t record anything, just give real-time info on traffic conditions and accidents.”
Jarsdel felt himself growing frustrated. “Okay, any time you want to put an idea out there, feel free.”
Morales shrugged. “What can we do? Nothing to canvass—just a bunch of businesses, and they were all closed. We got a witness, but all he can tell us is he saw a van with maybe a white dude in it. We won’t know anything new till Ipgreve gets back to us on the autopsy. You oughta chill out, Professor.” Morales turned and began heading back down Winona.
Jarsdel caught up with him easily. “I really wish you’d stop calling me that.”
“You do, huh?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Not up to me, man. S’what everybody calls you. Even Gavin.”
Jarsdel hadn’t known that, and the news stung. If even his commanding officer didn’t take him seriously, probably no one else did either. He considered defending himself to Morales, pointing out that he’d gone through the same academy, had the same training, endured the same grueling years of patrol duty before passing the detective’s exam—that who he’d been before getting his badge didn’t matter and said nothing about his worth as a police officer.
But even in his head, it sounded ridiculous. Of course it mattered, especially to those who’d given over their lives—and, with guys like Morales, literally their limbs—to the force. Jarsdel knew that the more he insisted he be accepted, the more he’d sound like a poseur, a dilettante. The best thing to do was work hard and close cases.
And that’s exactly why Morales wants you to take lead on this, he thought. Because it’s a loser, and he knows it.
Jarsdel hoped that wasn’t true, but even if it was, he also had a feeling that the case’s very strangeness might be the key to its own unraveling. He saw his investigations as huge, tangled knots of fiber. Most other cops he knew used the jigsaw puzzle analogy, working at accumulating evidence piece by piece until a picture emerged. But for Jarsdel, it was the opposite. He wasn’t interested in collecting but in eliminating, tugging here and there until he found the golden thread, the one that—when painstakingly teased from the rest—could unwind everything. Jarsdel believed this approach produced the cleanest results, freeing the investigator from the sway of preconceptions and biases, the dizzying noise that could obscure clear thinking as sure as if it had presence and weight.
They turned right onto Hollywood, following Sparks’s earlier route, and made their way back toward the police barricade. Traffic cops were doing their best to funnel cars onto side streets, but the 1920s-era grids couldn’t accommodate the onslaught of twenty-first-century traffic. Jarsdel’s head began to ache from the miasma of car exhaust, the din of braying horns, and the ever-present, ear-rattling pulse of the news helicopters.
There was no stillness in the city. It was a constant, churning stew of action and reaction, as if the people’s drives and passions were in a way linked to the volatile, unquiet land itself. The land that, carried along the scar of the San Andreas fault, moved inexorably northward up the continental plate, its passage marked by cataclysmic bursts of seismic energy. There was no changing its violent destiny. It was already shaped and mapped out by the tremendous forces at work below the surface. Los Angeles would one day become an Alaskan suburb, appearing off the coast of Anchorage in about seventy-five million years. Not that long, geologically speaking.
But none of that mattered to Jarsdel. He understood impermanence, understood it better than most people ever could, holding in his mind the histories of entire civilizations from Mesopotamia to Byzantium—was an expert, so to speak, on the triumph of entropy, corruption, and rot. He also believed impermanence was a psychological trap, a facile excuse not to care. And he also knew that, despite the insistence of cynics and doomsayers, things were getting better. Jarsdel had nearly the whole of recorded human history to draw on and could prove that somehow, incredibly and despite impermanence, the consciousness of his species was evolving. As the gross world was buffeted and rent by whim or disaster, a collective inner world of love and compassion was growing. Its architecture was incomplete, but it was being sustained and augmented moment by moment, year by year. Victories could not be measured by mere physical structures. Even the most vaunted—the Acropolis, Chichen Itza—would one day be worn down to little more than sand castles. No, victories could only be measured by the human heart, whose capacity was boundless. The poor, tortured body that had mobilized hundreds and gridlocked thousands more represented a last gasp, a recidivist spasm in an old and dying way of life.
As he ducked into his car, he caught another glimpse of Brahma and smiled. There was some stillness in the city after all. I’m here to make it right, he thought, repeating his promise. To be among those who renew the world.
Chapter 3
LAPD’s Hollywood Division was headquartered in a station just south of Sunset, about two miles from the morning’s crime scene. It was a drab, tired-looking building, an exemplar of mid-1960s civic architecture, but not without its peculiar charms. The squad room, otherwise as functional and joyless as that of any big-city police department, proudly displayed a few movie posters along with its forest of bulletins and official placards. And instead of a fountain or memorial wall as a tribute to fallen officers, the station had its own Walk of Fame—the names
of the dead captured in a row of coral terrazzo stars laid into the cement out front.
Still, despite its unassuming appearance, Hollywood Station was indispensable to the neighborhood. From the slopes of Mount Olympus, an enclave of multimillion-dollar homes, to the tattoo parlors and S&M dungeons of Melrose, it served as the responsible adult in the room, a stern but fair referee in the endless, often fatal contact sport of urban survival. There was no such thing as a typical call in Hollywood. Officers might begin a shift by taking a complaint from an entertainment lawyer whose wine cellar had been burgled and finish the day with a trio of MS-13 gangsters who, upon discovering a homeless man who’d castrated himself, proceeded to kick him to death in a fit of disgust.
The division operated within the jurisdiction of the vast West Bureau, whose boundaries stretched all the way to the Pacific Ocean and included nearly a million souls. Tully Jarsdel owed his early promotion not to his superiors at Hollywood Station but to the head of West Bureau, Deputy Chief Cynthia Comsky.
As a rookie, Comsky had worked a foot patrol in Hollywood during the bad years, the eighties and early nineties, when murder rates spiked to levels unseen in Los Angeles since it had been a frontier oil town. She’d served as assistant watch commander during the riots, keeping a clear head amid the madness, and her deployment strategies had been instrumental in stemming the tide of destruction. She rose to patrol captain by 2000 and division commander by 2005. By that time, homicides were on the decline, falling eventually to record lows.
But the slowdown in violent crime had unforeseen consequences for the division. Hollywood Homicide, which had for decades been among the city’s most effective arms of law enforcement, was dissolved, the eight seasoned detectives reassigned. Most were absorbed by Olympic Division, where West Bureau’s murder investigations were consolidated. The rest transferred downtown to the elite Robbery-Homicide Division—RHD—which was assigned the city’s highest-profile cases.
The ceasefire didn’t last. Crimes against persons were back up again—not to the dizzying heights they had reached during the bad years, but enough to make the police commission and the city council take notice. It had been Deputy Chief Comsky’s idea to revive Hollywood Homicide, but as with any decent sequel, she proposed a neat little twist.
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