"Yeah, but "
"Doctors use it to try and predict who will make it and who won't. If a case is deemed hopeless, then generally, treatment isn't advised. Obviously, if you don't treat a four or a five, you're gonna get a pretty shitty outcome. In other words, the scale itself can skew the results. You understand what I'm saying?"
"Yeah, I guess."
"A couple more things to remember. When it comes to head injuries, nobody knows anything. The brain is a damned complicated organ and we don't understand exactly how it works. We have to remember that a person with a brain injury is a person first, and a patient second. Alexa is precious, so we're never gonna quit on her, okay? And that could affect her survival and recovery rate."
"I understand. Thanks."
"I'm not through. The next thing I want you to remember is, no two brain injuries are exactly the same. The effects vary greatly from person to person."
I hoped he wasn't just trying to make me feel better.
"The effects of a brain injury depend on a zillion factors," he continued, "including location, track of the bullet, severity of the injury, as well as the age and health of the person involved. I had a patient last year who was a gunshot victim with a transverse injury. He was twenty-eight and in great shape. He was a four GOS when I got him. Thirty-two days later I shipped him home. Yesterday he was shooting baskets behind his garage."
"Please make her better, Luther. I can't live without her."
"Yes you can, Shane. Just like I learned to live without Levonda."
"What do I do?"
"You hit your knees, babe. Get the Boss working on it." So Chooch and I went down to the little chapel on the first floor, and prayed.
Chapter 21.
ROMER IS A good doc." Luther Lexington was standing in the hall outside the trauma ward speaking with Chooch and me. It was four-thirty that same afternoon. He was tall, with a muscular build, and had played halfback at Cal State in the eighties. Now he was the chief of neurosurgery at UCLA and, according to the Internet search I'd done two years earlier while investigating his daughter's case, was regarded as one of the foremost neurosurgeons in Los Angeles. A perfect inner-city success story, until his only daughter was killed by that stray bullet.
"Can she come back from this, Doctor Lexington?" Chooch asked.
"You and your dad have some tough decisions to make. I just completed a preliminary exam and checked her chart. She's not in good shape, but there is some positive stuff. As I already told you, we're lucky the bullet didn't cross the midline. But right now she's not responding to stimuli and her brain waves are not good."
I was confused. "But you said "
"I know what I said, Shane. I also said nobody knows anything. We can make all the skill moves and treat her with the best procedures and we will but the outcome is in God's hands."
"I want to transfer her to UCLA," I said. "I want you to take over the case."
"The only difference between this hospital and mine is I'm more familiar with the doctors I would put on the team at UCLA. But that has to be weighed against the risk of moving her. If we Medivac Alexa by ambulance or even helicopter, there's an hour, maybe more, where if she suffers a secondary brain insult, she'll be between ICUs and very vulnerable. But in the end, it's your call."
"I want home field advantage. I want her with you in a place you're familiar with, with doctors you choose."
"Okay, but I can't move her for a day or so, until she's more stable. For now we'll monitor her, keep her intracranial pressure down, watch for infection. In a day or so we can make another evaluation and see where that leads us."
"Luther, thank you for being here."
"Hey, Shane, you didn't have to keep working Levonda's case. You never quit until you found those guys. That's worth a lot to me."
"It was my job."
"And now, Alexa is mine."
I shook his hand with both of mine.
"You two need to take turns sleeping here for the next day or two," he said. Then he wrote a number on the back of his card and handed it to me. "Here's my cell. I have it on me all the time. Anything changes you call, no matter what time it is. I'll visit her three times a day and check in with you."
Then he tried to get the worried look off Chooch's face by talking football. But Chooch was still frowning when Luther left.
"You got the first shift, son," I said.
I needed to get my hands on that answering machine tape before somebody wrote a warrant for our house and I lost it to Mike Ramsey's investigation. Then I had to drop off Stacy Maluga's pager at the Electronic Services Division.
As I drove across town toward Venice, the afternoon sun was blazing, pushing July temperatures into the mid-nineties. I parked the Acura in the alley behind my garage. I entered the house, checked the answering machine, and retrieved the old message from Luther, as well as several new ones from friends offering condolences. There was one from my incoming partner, Sally Quinn, expressing support and concern. I listened to Alexa's inexplicable confession and that horrible gunshot. Then I rewound the tape and removed it, replacing it with a fresh one.
I grabbed a plastic container out of the kitchen cabinet, put the tape inside, snapped on the rubber lid and carried it outside where my barbeque sat. I dug a hole in the ashes, buried the container, smoothed it over, then replaced the grate. After that I locked up the house, set the alarm and got back into the Acura. It was five o'clock.
My drive across town was now impeded by Friday rush hour traffic. As I drove, I dealt with priorities and tactics. I needed to get Stacy Maluga's pager worked on, but the sound techs in the electronics division at Mission Street would be unlikely to help me, especially after I stole that fingerprint card and the AFIS printout. By now everyone in the LAPD knew I was off the reservation. That meant, to get what I wanted, I'd need some help from one of my close group of department buddies.
I ran the list and finally settled on Sally Quinn. I had supported her transfer into the Homicide Special Division two months ago and we were scheduled to become partners in a week. I knew she was grateful to me for championing her transfer into the elite murder squad, but she would be damaging her career if anybody found out she had cooperated with what I was going to ask of her. Still, she was my best bet. I dialed her at Valley Homicide where she was busy cleaning up the last details on her old caseload before moving over to join me at the Glass House.
"Sally, it's Shane."
"Jeez, I left a message on your machine. I'm so sorry, man."
"Yeah. Yeah, I got it. Thanks."
"Is she . . . ?"
"Not good. The next forty-eight hours will tell us a lot." I cleared my throat and moved on. "Listen, Sally, I need your help on something."
"Name it."
"I need you to take a pager I have and hook it to one of your open cases, one where a judge wrote you a broad search warrant. I need the warrant so the guys in ESD will wire this thing up with a bug. I can't do it myself 'cause I'm not too popular down there right now."
There was silence on the other end of the line.
"Listen, Sal. I wouldn't ask you, but this has to do with who shot Slade and Alexa. It's really important."
"You've gotta drop this, Shane. You've gotta let the primaries handle it. It's all over the department what you've been doing."
"Sally, I didn't call to get a lecture. You're either down for this or you're not."
There was a long pause while she considered it. "Where are you?" she finally said.
"I'm heading to Mission Road right now. I'll be there in ten minutes."
"It's gonna take me three quarters of an hour to write the paper and get over there."
"God bless you, Sally."
"If He was blessing me, I wouldn't have gotten this call," she said softly, and then hung up.
I used the time to scroll through the numbers logged on Stacy Maluga's pager, pulling them up on the little LCD screen. There were forty numbers with no names or messages suspiciou
s, since the pager had both voice mail and text messaging features. Most of the drug dealers I'd busted had pager screens that looked like this. People involved in crimes didn't want to leave electronic trails. That meant most of these people who had left numbers for Mrs. Maluga were probably up to no good.
Forty minutes later, a tan detective's car pulled into the lot and Sally Quinn got out. She had red-blond hair and was stocky, with short legs, a compact torso, and a freckled face that made her look younger than she was. She was frowning as she walked over to my car.
"Thanks, Sally."
"Hey, Shane, I'm only here because we're about to be partners, and I feel bad about Alexa. But it's a gonzo move. If this is the way our partnership is gonna go, then maybe I'm gonna have to revisit it."
"You need to know something else before you get involved," I said. "This pager was obtained during an illegal search, which Chief Ramsey is aware of. I'm going to plant it without a warrant, so it's gonna be an illegal tap."
"Will we be able to get adjoining cells? Can I pick out the wallpaper?"
"If you wanta back off, I'll understand."
"Gimme it." She held out her hand and I dropped the little gadget into her palm. Then she turned angrily and walked across the street, disappearing into the building through a side door.
While I waited, I called Rosey. He wasn't in, but I left a message that I needed to see him and that it was important. He called back ten minutes later. We picked a bar we both knew, called Miserable Harry's, that was a dive but geographically handy, halfway between us on Main Street. We agreed to meet in an hour.
Sally Quinn reappeared at six-fifteen and crossed to my car. The July sun had started to sink behind the buildings to the west. "It will be done in five hours," she said, as she reached the Acura. "I told them to send it over to our new digs at the Glass House."
"Thanks."
"Right," she said angrily. Then she turned and walked across the street with short, choppy strides, got in her car, and drove away.
Chapter 22.
MISERABLE HARRY'S HAD sawdust on the floor and angel dust in the bathroom. Guys who didn't shave stopped talking as I entered. There were three active billiards tables, all with cash on the rails. The serious pool shooters were leaning over polished mahogany, lining up their cushion shots. The serious heroin shooters were in the men's room toilets, slapping up their veins. I found Rosey in a back booth with another huge black police officer. Since both were in sergeant's uniforms, they had flushed the dope dealers into the bars up the street.
I slid into the open seat and Rosey introduced me to the cop with him.
"This is Dario Chikaleckio," he said. "He's vice-president at Oscar Joel Bryant."
I knew about this guy. There'd been a story about him in our police department news magazine, The Blue Line. The article said he'd been adopted at birth by an Italian family from Pasadena. The Chikaleckios were social activists who had taken in and raised a rainbow family of over twenty kids, often having ten or twelve at a time in their big house in South Pasadena. When he was eighteen, Dario had changed his name from Washington to Chikaleckio out of love for his adopted family, thus becoming the LAPD's only black cop with an Italian name. Dario was one of those wide muscle guys. His traps were so big, his arms wouldn't hang straight at his sides. He bulged and flexed as he sat next to Rosey, looking at me through rimless glasses.
"I need some help," I said.
"What you need is to stop running around screwing up a high-profile murder investigation," Dario butted in.
"Do we really need this guy?" I said, staring hard at Rosey.
Rosey then said, "Ballistics just matched Alexa's gun to the shooting. It's all over the Glass House and you can bet somebody will leak it to the news in a matter of hours. These media activists are cranking up the pressure. It's already affecting the rank and file." Then he looked over at Chikaleckio. "Tell him about the morning roll call in Devonshire."
"I had a regular Mason-Dixon line in there," Chikaleckio said. "Black cops all huddled up on one side of the room, white guys on other. The old wounds over Rodney King are tender. We don't need no more 'Gorillas in the Mist' B. S. Assholes like Reverend Leland Vespars will try and make this about race to raise money for his Harmony Coalition. He'll be on us like a quart of blue paint. And you're just makin' it worse, Scully. You need to go home."
"Alexa's computer was stolen out of my house yesterday. The chief has directed me to get it back."
Rosey leaned forward, looking at me carefully.
"I swear, Rosey. I'm under Ramsey's orders."
"This man is playing you, Rosencamp," Chikaleckio said.
"I've known Shane for twenty years," Rosey replied. "He's not a liar. Hear him out."
"They're already calling Alexa a racist on TV," I said. "Rosey, you've known her since the Academy. You know she's not a racist. Whatever's going on here, she didn't kill Slade execution-style and then try to commit suicide. There's another explanation."
"Why did he come to you, Rosey?" Dario asked.
My friend didn't answer.
"I'll tell ya why," Chikaleckio continued. "If he gets the president of the Oscar Joel Bryant Association working with him to prove Alexa's innocence, it's like we're endorsing him. We'll be saying the black cops on the department don't believe she killed Slade. It's a media play. He's using you, man."
"Shut up and let me think," Rosey said. It was quiet for a moment before Rosey said, "If there's one thing this town doesn't need, it's allegations that the head of the Detective Bureau is a race hater when she's not."
Dario sat quietly, staring at me before saying, "It ain't about you or your wife, Shane. It's about cops of color not getting a square shake in the field, with the promotion board, or down at PSB. There's not a police force in America where you don't have this same double standard."
"If OJB is gonna stand for anything, we gotta be who we say we are or none of it matters," Rosey argued. "All these black activists want is more strife 'cause it gets them airtime, money, and votes. They want us to all be victims because if we aren't, what the hell do we need them for?"
Dario leaned forward. His gun leather creaked as he put his muscled forearms on the table. "Who stole Alexa's computer? Tell us what happened." I could hear the skepticism in his voice.
I told them about Jonathan Bodine. How I hit him with my car and ended up taking him home with me. After I was finished, they both just sat there, staring.
"We're supposed to risk lookin' like assholes 'cause a this homeless guy and a computer, which may have nothing on it?" Chikaleckio said.
"Last night, right after they found Slade in her car, I dropped by Alexa's office. I went into her computer. All of her e-mails had been purged. But in her Special Ops files, one had been transferred. It was labeled 'Operation Dark Angel.' "
Rosey perked up. "Dark Angel . . . that was David Slade's nickname in the Academy."
I nodded.
"That doesn't mean that file's on her computer," Dario said.
"Her office computer said: File transferred to AHC. There's no AHC acronym in the department directory, but I've been thinking about it, and I believe it stands for Alexa's Home Computer."
We all sat in silence.
"One crazy homeless guy in a city of ten million?" Rosey finally said.
"I was hoping you could make it an off-duty project. Get some of the guys at OJB to help. I need to sweep the cardboard condos on the Nickel, from Alameda to Main. Check the parks and SRO hotels. This guy doesn't leave a forwarding address. His street handle is Long Gone John 'cause he's a thief and moves around a lot. I'd do it myself, but I'm just one person and I also need to stay close to Alexa right now."
I told them what he looked like, and described Chooch's Harvard-Westlake sweatshirt. After I'd finished, Rosey looked at the muscle-bound sergeant sitting next to him.
"We gotta do this, Dario," he said.
It took a while, but after several minutes, Chikaleckio finally agre
ed.
Chapter 23.
I RELIEVED CHOOCH at ten o'clock. Nothing new on Alexa, but I made arrangements with him to return the following morning. He told me that Luther had called the ER and planned to move Alexa to UCLA tomorrow if she remained stable. Then he hugged me and headed back to the USC football dorm.
I stretched out on the sofa in the trauma ward and watched the story of Slade's murder evolve on TV. My wife had graduated from a victim to a person of interest. As Rosey and Dario feared, the ballistics match from her gun had all but sealed a guilty verdict in the media.
"Questions keep coming back to one fact," a concerned CNN news anchor said. "Why would the head of the Detective Bureau's gun and handcuffs be used as instruments in the death of her own detective?" This was followed by a shot of David Slade at fifteen, looking angry, all decked out in gang colors, scowling under a blue head wrap.
i 20
"David Slade grew up on the mean streets of Compton, California," the anchor continued. "Despite poverty and numerous brushes with the law, he had aspirations for a better life. Early gang affiliations threatened his future, but he tore himself out of that downward spiral and at age twenty-one, joined the LAPD."
Now Slade's handsome, clean-cut Academy shot replaced the scowling, angry one to demonstrate his magnificent transformation.
"Slade became a force for good, maintaining a residence in Compton where he gave back to the community and served as a role model for other gang-influenced children. All of this was tragically snatched away yesterday in one dreadful moment of violence."
Shots now appeared of Slade slumped forward in Alexa's car on Mulholland.
"... dead in the front seat of his commanding officer's personal car. Shot with her gun, restrained with her handcuffs."
Now a shot of Alexa appeared. They'd chosen one of those macho firing range photos the department takes. In the picture Alexa was wearing a black flack vest and plastic shooting goggles; her hair was pulled back under an LAPD ball cap. She was crouched low in a Weaver shooting stance, her 9mm clutched in both hands, looking mean and determined.
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