by David Freed
“Eighty-four Robert, suspect in custody.”
“You’re under arrest,” Deputy Old Spice said as he led me back to the patrol car.
“Can I ask what for?”
“Does the name, ‘Raymond Sheen,’ ring a bell?”
“You mean the same individual who tried to kill me?”
“He said you tried to kill him.”
I was too beat to laugh.
Twenty-one
My left thumb was fractured. Fortunately, an X-ray showed the break didn’t require surgery. After my hands were swabbed for gunshot residue, medical staff at the downtown San Diego Central Jail cleaned out my cuts and slapped on a cast that went midway up my left forearm. They gave me a thorough neurological exam to assess the severity of my concussion and an MRI for my leg, concluding it was merely sprained.
Then they tossed me in the slammer.
Aside from being in jail, I was convinced that I had hit upon a brilliant solution to affordable national health care: get busted for a crime you didn’t commit.
I had hoped I might be put in a cell with Bunny the Human Doberman and his cousin, Li’l Sinister. Granted, they were perverse and prone to violence, but they were entertaining, and I’ll take entertaining over dangerous anytime. Unfortunately for me, my cell mate turned out to be the very definition of dull. He was a husky African-American chap in his early thirties with some sort of tribal tattoo on the right side of his face, who sat on the concrete floor with his knees drawn up to his chest, staring catatonically into space. The steel door locked behind me as I entered. He pretended not to notice.
“Welcome to the Rock,” I said in my best Sean Connery, which is much worse that my best Humphrey Bogart, which some who’ve heard it have suggested should be banned as a crime against humanity.
Bad celebrity imitations aside, Chatty Cathy wouldn’t even look up at me. Nor did he respond when lunch arrived a few minutes later—two peanut butter sandwiches on white bread and a disposable paper cup of cherry Kool-Aid. Not having eaten anything since the day before, I wolfed down both sandwiches in short order, then asked if he was planning to eat his.
“You touch my food,” Chatty Cathy said, still refusing to look at me, “and I’ll gut you.”
I had considered asking him to sign my cast, but that offer was definitely off the table.
A JOWLY, sad-eyed deputy who reminded me a little of Huckleberry Hound escorted me into an interview room where Detective Alicia Rosario sat behind a gray steel metal desk, text messaging on her cell phone. The room was Modern Inquisition. Soundproof cork tiles lined the walls and ceilings. Two large eye screws were bolted to the floor beneath an unpadded metal chair opposite the desk. Deputy Hound directed me to sit, then strung my ankle chains through the eye screws while Rosario waited for him to finish locking me down. He gave my chains a good tug to make sure they were secure, then left, pulling the door closed behind him.
“Long night?” Rosario said.
“You have no idea.”
She yawned. “I’ve been up since two this morning, no thanks to you.”
“What are friends for?”
Behind her, facing me, was a large mirror. I knew it was one-way glass, and that there was probably a video camera recording us on the other side.
“For the record, you’ve been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder. You’ve already been advised by the arresting deputies of your legal right to counsel and you’ve waived those rights. Is that correct?”
“Yup.”
“I need you to say it a little more formally.”
“Yes, I’ve been advised of my rights to legal counsel and I waive those rights.”
Rosario sat forward in her chair, her ballpoint pen poised over a legal pad. “OK, how about we take it from the top?”
“From the top, and for the record, I didn’t try to kill Ray Sheen. He tried to kill me.”
I laid it all out for her. How Sheen’s company was designing weaponized, hummingbird-size drones for the government. How I’d gone to Castle Robotics looking for the mysterious C.W. Lazarus, whose truck had been spotted near my airplane, how the plane’s engine had been tampered with, and how I’d wound up in a self-storage unit with Sheen and Frank Jervis, before Jervis keeled over with The Big One.
“Hold up a minute.” Rosario looked up at me from her notes with her eyes narrowed. “The engine on your airplane? What’re you talking about?”
I told her about the FAA’s preliminary findings, and about the pickup truck registered to Lazarus that had been spotted suspiciously close to the Ruptured Duck the night before I’d crashed. I told her that a man wearing a baseball cap and coveralls was seen from a distance climbing out of that truck, opening up the engine compartment, and doing evil things to the Duck.
“Why didn’t you tell me about all this before?”
“I was sort of busy.”
She gave me a knowing look and asked if I had a witness.
“His name’s Al Demaerschalk.”
“Spell it.”
I spelled it.
“What’s Mr. Demaerschalk do?”
“He used to be a pilot. He had a stroke. He’s in the hospital. They don’t think he’s gonna make it.”
Rosario tossed down her pen and glared at me. “And you were going to tell me all this when?”
“I’d hoped to track down Lazarus myself.”
“To do what? Have a friendly little chat with him?”
I shrugged.
“This isn’t the Old West, Logan. We have laws. And you just broke one: willfully withholding evidence in a felony investigation.”
“If you were a pilot, you’d understand.”
“Understand what? Wanting to tee up some guy because he jacked up your ugly old airplane?”
“Hey, let’s not get personal here.”
She folded her arms and sat back. “Look, if somebody did sabotage your plane with the intent of committing great bodily injury, that’s a crime. I’m a sworn peace officer, Logan. I get paid to investigate crimes. You don’t.”
“You can get mad at me all you want, Alicia. I’m just trying to help you out here.”
“Help me out? How is this helping me out? Tell me, please. I’d really like to know.”
I told her how Ray Sheen had taken a paternity test posing as Greg Castle so that Castle could deny having impregnated Ruth Walker.
“How does that help me?” Rosario said.
“Dorian Munz was right about Greg Castle fathering Ruth Walker’s baby. If he was right about that, could be he was right that Castle was upset because Ruth wouldn’t get an abortion. Could be he was also right about Ruth having dirt on Castle’s company. Either way, it would’ve given Castle the motive to murder her.”
“Sheen told you he took a paternity test for Castle?”
“Basically.”
“You told the arresting deputies you hit him and that’s why you crashed.”
I nodded.
“And that’s when he started shooting at you?”
Another nod.
“Any idea what he was shooting at you with?”
“A .45, firing ACP ammo.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because Automatic Colt Pistol rounds make a very distinctive sound when they’re coming at you.”
“What sort of sound?”
“Like fabric tearing.”
“I take it you’ve been shot at before?”
I shrugged. Maybe yes, maybe no.
Rosario sighed in frustration, not sure how to read me, and jotted a few notes.
“Why not bring Sheen in here and compare everybody’s versions of events?” I said. “We can see who’s telling the truth.”
“We’re not sure where Mr. Sheen is right now. He called in a complaint against you, then said he’d be unavailable until he had confirmation you were safely in custody. He said he feared for his life.”
“The guy tunes me up with a Louisville Slugger, kidnaps me, drives me
out toward the desert intending to put a slug behind my ear, and he’s in fear of his life? Go interview Greg Castle. He knew what Sheen was up to last night. So did Frank Jervis, Castle’s security chief.”
“Mr. Sheen said you shot at him.”
“With what?”
“State records show you have a .357 Colt Python registered in your name.”
“Which is currently up in Rancho Bonita, under my bed. Search my apartment. You have my permission.”
Rosario wrote some more notes. Her poker face gave away nothing.
“Look, if I were a ‘sworn peace officer,’ I’d start by connecting the dots between what happened to Janet Bollinger and what happened with my airplane.”
Rosario’s cell phone played the refrain from that icon of bad ’80’s rock, Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’.” She picked it up and read a text message that prompted her eyebrows to arch. She got up abruptly and headed for the door.
“Don’t go anywhere.”
“Oh, I’ll be here.”
If I were further along the path of enlightenment, I would’ve tried meditating. Jail, after all, is the ideal environment for contemplative introspection. But all I could think about was my ex-wife, and her snide reaction had she seen me decked out in chains and county-issued overalls.
It’s said that most men think about sex every seven seconds and are virtually incapable of distinguishing love from lust. I won’t argue with that. Sitting there, though, I found myself yearning for nothing more than Savannah’s smile. If that’s not love, I don’t know what is. But I couldn’t think about any of that now, not if I was going to figure a way out of my predicament.
Why had Sheen kidnapped me? Why had he shot at me? I replayed the DVD in my head from the night before.
It began and ended with C.W. Lazarus.
Sheen lied about not knowing who Lazarus was. Things had taken a definite turn toward Crazy Town after I’d intimated a connection between the slaying of Janet Bollinger, Lazarus’s truck, and the sabotaging of my airplane. Lazarus was the Holy Grail. He had to be. Find him, I told myself, and all things would be illuminated.
The door to the interrogation room was flung open. Rosario strode in, along with her partner, Detective Lawless, whom I assumed had been watching me the entire time behind the one-way glass. He began unchaining me.
“This is your lucky day, Logan. You’re being released.”
“To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“You tested negative for gunshot residue. We also have witnesses who’ve come forward essentially corroborating your version. We’re trying to find Mr. Sheen.”
My lucky day, indeed.
“We just need to get some paperwork out of the way,” Rosario said, “then we’ll get you out of here.”
“Any chance the good taxpayers of San Diego County could spring for another peanut butter sandwich? I’m starting to OD on Taco Bell.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Rosario said.
I tailed her out the door and down a concrete corridor, past several holding cells, including the one in which I’d cooled my heels. My sullen cell mate, Chatty Cathy, was still sitting on the floor, knees to his chest, still staring at nothing.
“Happiness is a choice,” I said.
He flipped me off without looking up.
Rosario punched some numbers into an electronic keypad, unlocking a steel door that led into a long hallway flanked by the wood-paneled offices of ranking sheriff’s administrators.
“Who were the witnesses?” I asked.
“The investigation’s ongoing. I’m not allowed to discuss those kinds of things.”
“I had a feeling you might say that.”
Rosario held the door open for me when we reached the end of the corridor. I thanked her.
“Para eso están los amigos,” she said with a little nod as I walked past her.
What are friends for?
I grasped the meaning of her words: the witnesses were likely among the same illegal migrants who’d saved my life the night before. I mouthed them a silent gracias.
Rosario escorted me through a covered sally port and into the jail’s out-processing center, where my personal items were returned to me.
“We towed your rental car,” the detective said. “I’ll drive you over to the impound lot after you’ve changed back into your street clothes.”
“Thanks, Alicia.”
“It’s Detective.”
“Detective.”
Rosario was right about one thing. She and her partner were paid to solve crimes. I wasn’t. I should’ve turned in my rented Escalade, taken the train to LA, and begged Savannah to take me back. But then Hub Walker called. He was weeping.
“I didn’t know who else to call.”
“What is it, Hub? What’s wrong?”
“My wife,” he said, barely able to get the words out. “She’s disappeared.”
Twenty-two
Walker paced the patio in his bathrobe, clutching a half-empty quart bottle of Jim Beam. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. He was drunk with worry. Or maybe just drunk.
“I’ve been trying her phone all day. She would’ve called if she got sidetracked. She’s never done anything like this before in her life. It’s not like her.”
Walker’s granddaughter wandered past where I was sitting at the patio table. She was wearing inflated water wings and her Little Mermaid swimsuit.
“Hello, Ryder.”
The little girl jumped feet-first into the deep end of the pool without responding, bobbed to the surface, and began dog paddling, water splashing everywhere. Walker barely noticed her. He plopped down in the chair next to mine and gulped a swallow of bourbon.
“I drove all over town this morning, looking for her.”
“You called the police?”
“They said they couldn’t take a report. Said she had to be gone twenty-four hours at least.” He gestured to the cast on my arm. “What happened to you?”
“Tripped on some stairs.”
He seemed not to hear me, absorbed in his own worries.
“It’s gotta be Ray Sheen,” he said. “He’s behind all of this. I know it. I can feel it.”
I wanted to believe that Walker was beyond reproach. He seemed legitimately upset. But all I felt was a vague queasiness that his wife’s sudden absence was the latest tangle in a web of deceit, and that a war hero I once idolized was somehow complicit in all of it.
“What makes you think Sheen had anything to do with your wife being gone, Hub?”
He glanced over his shoulder, waited until Ryder paddled to the far end of the pool, out of earshot, then looked back at me, struggling to keep his emotions in check.
“Sheen and Crissy have been carrying on for years.”
“You know that for a fact?”
He nodded. “She left the computer on by accident one night a month or so back. I saw some emails. Crissy told him it was a mistake. She wanted to end it. Sheen didn’t. He blackmailed her, threatened to tell me all about it if she broke it off.”
“Did you confront her?”
Walker shook his head and gulped more whiskey. “Like I said, she was the one who wanted to end the affair. I figured she would eventually. Then we could get back to normal, like things used to be when we first got married. I know she’d never leave me. She loves this house too much.”
I wondered whether Savannah and I would have still been together, had I embraced Walker’s arguably admirable laissez-faire attitude after discovering she and Arlo Echevarria had been carrying on behind my back. Maybe. Maybe not. Every relationship is different.
“I can’t swim!” Walker’s screaming blasted me from my reverie. He was on his feet, running toward the far end of the pool. “She’s drowning! My granddaughter!”
Ryder was hovering motionless at the bottom of the deep end, arms floating ethereally in front of her body, the two inflatable water wings lapping on the surface above.
I dove in, my eyes
and cuts stinging from the chlorine, crooked my good arm around her waist and kicked our way to the edge of the pool. Walker pulled her out and sat her on the brick pool decking as I quickly hauled myself out of the water.
She lolled, lifeless as a rag doll. Her lips were periwinkle. Walker whacked her on the back a couple of times with the flat of his hand. There was no response.
“She’s not breathing! I don’t know what to do!”
I did. Every Alpha operator was certified in combat life-saving. We learned how to stanch arterial bleeds using live pigs that our instructors would anesthetize, then blast with shotguns to approximate battlefield injuries. Performing basic CPR on a child was a cakewalk by comparison.
I laid her on her back, positioned the heel of my right hand on her breastbone, and began pushing down on her chest. After thirty rapid compressions, I lowered my right ear close to her nose, my cheek over her mouth, hoping for the whisper of breath. None came.
“Ryder! Ryder, it’s Grampa! Wake up, baby girl! Please, wake up! Please!”
I tilted the little girl’s head back, pinched her nostrils, and forced the air from my lungs into hers. Her thin rib cage rose and fell. One rescue breath, then another. That’s all it took.
She coughed up water. I rolled her on her side. More water came out of her mouth and nose. Then she began wailing.
Walker scooped her up, hugging and rocking her in his lap. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” he kept repeating, as much to me as to his maker.
I sat back on my knees, dripping wet and relieved, when the patio door slid open. Out stepped Crissy Walker.
“What happened?”
“She’s fine, she’s fine,” Hub said. “Just had a little accident is all.”
Crissy hurried past me and swept Ryder into her arms.
“Are you OK, honey?”
Ryder nodded and burrowed her wet face into Crissy’s chest, soaking her outfit. She was wearing gold high heels and a form-fitted, pale lavender skirt suit that showcased every reason why she’d once been Playmate of the Year.
“Where the hell have you been?” Hub demanded. “I’ve been calling you all day.”