Vertical Coffin s-4

by Stephen J. Cannell

  "So what?" She snapped. "Look Shane, my ass is on the line too. I'm having daily meetings with the undersheriff. My boss wants results, and all you're doing is moving backwards."

  I shook my head. This was exactly what I'd been afraid of. Some silk from sheriff's IAD, who'd never worked a murder, telling me what to do.

  "Is this just you wandering around on the outer edge of the crime scene again?" Jo interrupted. "Because if it is, I think we need to seriously refocus."

  "There's not much we can do until we get those shell striations matched. Let's just see this through."

  We both went to defense postures, leaning back and crossing our arms. She was definitely not in agreement, her face impassive but angry. The sleeves of her gray cloth jacket bulged at the biceps.

  Again, I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd seen her before. Where was it? I wondered.

  "We found it," one of the academy trainees yelled. Jo and I pushed away from the hood of my car and trudged up the lawn again toward the crowd of young cadets.

  They had uncovered a staircase that led into what looked like a basement. There was ash and rubble all the way down to a lower level door. One of the female cadets was at the bottom of the stairwell, still digging with a shovel, throwing the last spadeful of sodden debris up. It landed all around the spot where we were standing. Then she scrambled up, her face smudged with soot, but she was grinning. This was a high-profile investigation, and she was thrilled. This was why she had signed on- exactly what the recruiting poster promised.

  Join the tradition. Become an L. A. County sheriff. Wear the star. Shovel shit.

  We looked down the staircase. It was a mess. The ash at the bottom still soggy from the fire hoses.

  "I'll take you up on that slicker now," I said to Robyn.

  She smiled and instructed a cadet to run to her car and get two. He returned a minute later carrying yellow panchos with lasd stenciled on the back. I handed one to Jo, put the other over my head. Once we were rigged, we started down the steps. The door at the bottom of the stairs had burned right off its hinge. I picked it up and set it aside, then we went into the underground room.

  The flashover heat from the fire had been so intense it scorched everything down there. The basement contained a laundry room, a tool area, and a few metal closets. The clothes had burned off the wire hangers. The plastic on the Black amp;c Decker power tools had melted.

  But there was no bomb shelter.

  We all stood and looked at the scorched remains in the concrete block basement.

  Jo said "What now?"

  "I don't know," I replied. "The neighbors claimed he was pulling dirt out of here. He told them he was digging a bomb shelter in the basement. So where is it?"

  "Smiley was a lying head case," Jo answered.

  "But his neighbors weren't lying. Where'd the dirt come from, if it wasn't from a bomb shelter?"

  Again we fell silent. Then Robyn DeYoung said, "You through with us? Can I send these 'cruits back to the barn?"

  "Yeah, I guess. Thanks, guys."

  They all waved, then started to pack up their gear. But something wasn't right. Just before they headed back to the academy vans, I stopped them.

  "Wait. Hold on a second. Help me pull this stuff away from the walls first."

  Several cadets came down and helped move the tool bench. It was heavy, almost two hundred pounds, and took three of us to slide it to the corner of the room. Next we moved a metal closet. Nothing. Last, the washer and dryer. When we pulled them away from the wall, I saw where the dirt had come from.

  Vincent Smiley had dug a hole in the wall under the drainage line hidden behind the washer. It was a foot up from the floor and measured about three feet in diameter. Just large enough for a man to crawl through.

  Chapter 26

  TUNNEL RAT

  Of course, Jo Brickhouse wanted to be our tunnel rat- the one to go through the hole.

  "I'm not the CHCO, remember?" she said, her attitude temporarily replaced by excitement. "Look, Scully, I'm smaller. If that tunnel narrows down you're gonna get stuck in there."

  I'm sure it was one of the few times in her life that Jo Brickhouse had admitted to being smaller. But she had a point.

  "Okay, but take a Handy-Talkie. Talk to me all the way to the bomb shelter."

  "Of course. You think I'd even consider doing this without you bitching in my ear and barking instructions?"

  I went back to the car and picked up two Handy-Talkies and a flashlight, then jogged back to the basement area.

  The female cadets were all standing around Jo Brickhouse, staring at her. They were impressed. This buff, hot-looking lady sheriff had just backed off the big, dumb L. A. cop. She was going to crawl through that tunnel alone, prepared to face untold dangers in some underground cavern. You could feel the adrenaline and hero worship flowing back and forth among the six young women and Jo. The male cadets were harder to read, but were probably thinking, Whatta pussy this L. A. cop turned out to be.

  Finally, Jo was ready. She triggered the Handy-Talkie.

  "Radio check," her voice screamed from my belt.

  I took my unit off and turned down the volume, then spoke into it: "Okay, we're hot."

  She leaned toward me. "This is more like it."

  She looked at her audience once, then dropped down on her hands and knees and looked into the hole.

  "Better take this."

  I handed her the flashlight I'd brought from the car. She eased halfway into the tunnel, paused, then continued all the way in.

  After she disappeared we were left standing around looking at the mouth of the hole. Me and my two dozen disapproving helpers.

  "That's one brave lady," one of the female cadets said.

  "Just hope she doesn't run into the gopher who dug that thing," I said.

  They looked at me for a moment, trying to make sense of it. "Kidding," I added.

  That remark lost me the few remaining points I had left. It was bad enough that I was afraid to go through the tunnel, but how could I make jokes about heroic Sergeant Brickhouse at a time like this? I'm telling you, it's hard to be an enlightened male. I usually end up wrong.

  I looked at my watch. Two minutes. I triggered the Handy-Talkie. "How's it going?"

  I could hear the squelch as she triggered her unit, then heard her grunting with effort as she elbow-crawled along.

  "Gotta… It's kinda… can see…"

  Then static-then nothing.

  We waited some more. The cadets all had worried expressions as we stared at the hole. Robyn DeYoung was sitting on the bottom step of the basement stairs looking interested but skeptical.

  "I triggered the unit again. "Come in. What's going on? You okay?"

  All I heard back was static.

  "One of us should go in after her," a dark-haired female cadet said, starting to cinch her slicker tighter.

  "No-she's okay. It's just that we've lost range on the Handy-Talkie. These units aren't too good transmitting through solid matter."

  "I'll go in and look for her," a blonde cadet volunteered.

  "… find… in… light…" I heard Jo say through a wall of static. We were all staring at the round, dark hole like a team of anxious proctologists.

  A minute later Robyn De Young stood. Now she looked concerned. "She's been in there over five minutes."

  "I guess I'd better go in," I said, and reluctantly belted my slicker.

  "Won't be necessary, Hoss."

  Everyone spun around. Jo Brickhouse was standing on the stairs behind us, backlit by the morning sun, spiky blonde hair dusted over with dirt.

  "How'd you get there?" I said.

  We all scrambled up the stairs and back into the burned out house.

  "Come on, I'll show you."

  She led the way across the backyard toward a four-foot-high grape stake fence. She grabbed the top of the fence and easily jackknifed up and over-a perfect, gymnastic parallel bar move. Nothing to it. I tried to duplicate
the maneuver, but parallel bars are not my event, unless they've got Coors signs in the windows.

  Eventually, most of us landed on the other side of the fence and followed Jo, who was winding her way down into an overgrown gully behind the house. She stopped and pointed to the other end of the hole.

  "No bomb shelter. Just a tunnel. Starts in the basement, comes out here."

  Finally everybody had climbed down to where she stood and we all studied this opening with varying expressions of confusion.

  "You sure you didn't miss a fork or anything in there?

  "This is it," Jo said. "The tunnel follows the washer drain pipe most of the way. The last fifty feet or so, the pipe goes right, but he dug straight through to here."

  One thing I had come to learn working crime investigations is that even the most confusing things usually have some kind of central logic. If they appear not to, then what you have to do is rearrange the facts until the correct pattern emerges.

  As I looked down at the tunnel I knew that I was working the wrong theory. We definitely had some pieces way out of order.

  Chapter 27

  TRUCE AT DUPAR'S

  Twenty minutes later, Robyn De Young and her two dozen cadets drove off. We were standing down by our cars and Jo Brickhouse was combing the dirt out of her hair, with her fingers.

  "Come on, let's grab some lunch," I said.

  She followed me in the sheriff's black-and-white to DuPar's Restaurant off Vista Del Sol. We found a booth by the window and ordered. I got a hot Reuben sandwich, she had the seafood salad and a latte. We sat staring at each other like enemy generals, across a white vinyl battleground littered with napkins and scratched flatware. This wasn't working.

  Finally she leaned forward. "Look-I think we need to start over."

  I agree.

  "I took a department course in human relations once," she said. "They taught us that a good way to improve a strained relationship is by acknowledging each other's strengths."

  "You first," I said, sounding petulant and small.

  "Okay. You were right, checking the edge of the Nightingale crime scene. We found the shooter's position, got the casing and footprint casts. That stuff could've been missed or destroyed. And going back and finding that basement tunnel might be important. I'm not sure what it proves-if anything. But you're right, it's definitely weird."

  "Okay, thanks."

  "Now you," she prompted.

  "Okay. You seem very organized and thorough."

  "That's all?" She wrinkled her brow in disappointment.

  "And going through that tunnel alone was a gutsball play. You showed a lot of courage."

  She smiled. "It was kinda gutsball, wasn't it?"

  I nodded, and she began tearing open half a dozen packets of Equal and dumping them into her latte. I couldn't believe how much artificial sweetener she used.

  She looked up and caught me staring. "So let's hear your next big theory, Scully." Looking down again, stirring her sweetened blend. "I can hear lots of shit grinding up there in the old gear box, but nothing's coming out your pie hole."

  Cute.

  I took a moment, then leaned back and sighed.

  "Okay, you probably won't like this, because nobody else does, but I don't buy the death by cop thing. Here's my reason and my timeline, so check me for flaws."

  She pulled out her spiral notebook, flipped it open, and clicked the point down on her pen.

  "Vincent Smiley has a bad childhood. He doesn't get along with his mother. Maybe she sexually abuses him, maybe she just yells a lot. Whatever the reason, he's got anger problems. For some reason, his parents pull him out of Glendale High and he's home-schooled for most of his high school years. He gets a GED, goes to junior college, then decides he wants to be a cop. Maybe so he can push people around and prove he's a real man. Next, he applies to the LAPD and fails. Emerson says he has mama problems, sexual identity problems, and can't relate to women. But somehow, even with all these deficits, he bullshits his way onto the Arcadia P. D. Finally they get wise and throw him out as a probationer, probably for all the same reasons. Now he's pissed. The cops dissed him, so he hates cops; but he also wishes he was one. He becomes a military nut and a survivalist. Hacks into a secure Marine Corps Web site called Cactus West."

  She wrote that down.

  "He even buys a dog and names it Eichmann. All that lines up with what Tad Palmer told us."

  She nodded. "So far we're on track. But what's with the Marine Corps Web site?"

  "I don't know yet. Our computer people are trying to penetrate the site." She nodded, so I went on. "After dear old Mom and Dad hit the slab, Smiley cashes in their death benefits and buys a three-to five-hundred-thousand-dollar home up on Hidden Ranch Road."

  "Do we know he used his parents' insurance?"

  "I'm guessing. It's what Palmer said, but you're right, we should check that out. Otherwise, where does this guy who doesn't work get enough money for a place like that? If it's not insurance, maybe it's hooked to some other kind of nastiness."

  She kept making notes as I continued. "Okay, so he's up there in Hidden Ranch, walking around, pretending he's a cop, and at the same time saying he hates them. Basically acting nuts. Sometime last year ATF says they got a complaint and braced him on a suspected weapons charge. They claim when they talked to him he was docile, and it turned out he was clean. No weapons in the house. So they let him go. Didn't even bust him."

  Jo was scribbling notes.

  "Now, a few weeks ago something happens. For some reason, Vince goes into overdrive. He's still showing the phony badge, only now he says he's working on the antiterrorist squad. But he's such a loosely wrapped package, nobody believed him. To prove it, he takes some of his neighbors into his garage and shows them his weapons stash. Palmer and the Bellinghams get spooked, call the sheriff's department, and find out there's no Vincent Smiley on the county roster. So they make a complaint to the ATF for automatic weapons and impersonating.

  "ATF looks the complaint over and says we already braced this jerk-off once and it turned out to be an air ball. Since they think he's docile, they kick the impersonating beef over to the sheriff, figuring if the LASD finds guns in there, so much the better. But on second thought, SRT isn't completely sure, so when Emo calls to tell them he's serving the warrant, they give him a little covert ATF backup and wait to see what happens. Emo walks up and knocks on the front door, Smiley opens up, and it's welcome to Dodge City. The fed SRT van is just around the corner. They hear the gunfire and roll, which explains how they got there so quick. But Smiley knows it's coming, so he's waiting for them, all dressed in Kevlar with a gas mask. Next we have Waco in the foothills."

  I looked up at Jo. "So far, is all that pretty much the way you have it?"

  "Pretty much," she said, putting down her pen and sipping her latte. "Eat your sandwich, it's getting cold," sounding like somebody's mother now.

  I took a bite and swallowed it. "Okay, so now he's pinned in that house and he's greasing off lead-core three-oh-eights. The guy's dog is in there with him. After half the cops in Southern California are finished raining shit through the windows and burning the place down, he ends up dead in the bathtub, looking like a pot roast somebody left in the oven. His dog is downstairs, also cooked. Roof falls in, end of incident."

  I took another bite of the Reuben and looked at her again. "All of that still seem right?"

  "Yep. At least as far as we know."

  "Okay, then here's what's wrong."

  I took a deep breath. "Smiley obviously had this all carefully planned. He shows Palmer and Bellingham the stash of bullets, the grenades, the AK-forty-sevens and boxes of C-four. Smiley's gotta know it's gonna freak these guys. They have children. He's gotta know they're gonna call the cops."

  "Probably."

  "He's gone to all the trouble of spending two months last summer digging an escape tunnel out of the basement to the gully below. He could have easily crawled through there and gotten
away, but he didn't. He crawled into the bathtub instead and let the whole fucking house fall on him."

  "Makes no sense, does it?"

  "Only if we put him down as a mental. And all the rest of this is too organized, too planned for a real head case. Why go to all that trouble to build an escape hatch and then not use it?"

  "Maybe he was overwhelmed by the fire," she offered. "Maybe it went up faster than he planned."

  "I was under that porch with Sonny Lopez when the house was burning. Smiley was downstairs at the end, running around shooting. The house was completely ablaze. He had to know it was about to come down. I did. It was hot as hell. I could barely stand it, and I was outside. He could have easily gone to the basement, pulled the washer away, crawled through the hole, and gotten out of there, but he chose instead to die a horrible, painful death. Why?"

  "Maybe he just lost it."

  I frowned at her. "Come on, you don't like this any better than I do."

  "Okay, you're right. But it's still a dead end. Excuse the pun. I think all the stuff about SRT, and how they got there so quick, is good. We can write that up. It adds to our investigation; but everything about the tunnel and why he didn't use it is irrelevant. Vincent Smiley is in the morgue. Where does all that take us?"

  She waited patiently for my answer, so I finally told her why I couldn't let go.

  "When I first started working homicide it was the last year that John St. John worked as a consultant for the LAPD. He used to come around and talk to us, tell all the new humps how to work cases, how to follow the evidence trail."

  "Jigsaw John?" she said, remembering the legendary LAPD homicide detective who had retired after he took a bullet in the back fifteen years ago.

  He'd moved to Oregon, but back then he still rented his services out on big cases. He especially liked to work with and train young detectives.

  "John told me once, when you have a twister like this, where the logic doesn't track, it's usually one of two things that are causing the confusion. One: because you're looking at the timeline wrong. Something important is out of place. Or two: because there's a factual piece missing."