Terri said, “Oh,” the PanOpts up and off her head before she knew what she was doing. She sat perfectly still, finally palming and rubbing her eyes, trying to stop that skipping sensation, her brain doing loops, contradicting itself for the second time in one night. Using both hands, she slid the shades back on, finding herself in front of the Swap Meet parking lot at 5:29 and twelve seconds on Monday, January 3. With the finality of a roulette ball landing in its slot, the sightline led to a space between two parked cars. The figure in the green-and-blue-checkered hoodie squatted just below the line, having crawled up and paused before continuing, scanning the street for witnesses by sheer reflex. The shades and dust mask had already been removed and pocketed, and as the face of Stacy Santos, late daughter of the District Attorney, peered out across South Figueroa in one-fortieth real time, her eyes seemed to meet Terri across the expanse of days, the shock on one face perfectly mirroring the shock on the other.
II
GHOSTING
For almost as long as Terri had been a detective, LAPD headquarters sat on West Temple Street, in the crook of the Hollywood and Harbor freeways, less than one football field outside her own jurisdiction. All cops attempted to refer to the building as West Temple, but more and more it was just called The Temple, usually with a slight shrug and a smile to acknowledge the cheesiness of that nickname. From the outside, it looked like one of the no-name warehouses out by the airport, mirror-windowed shipping hubs surrounded by spooky, deserted parking lots. Even the simple steel plaque announcing LOS ANGELES POLICE DEPARTMENT sat low and squat, looking like an oversized grave marker.
A somber blue arrow bid her inwards through the cool lobby and down a long hall to the Chief’s office. She placed her PanOpts in a breast pocket, snapping this shut before knocking with one knuckle. The door opened itself into a surprisingly austere antechamber: one small cloth couch, a reception desk, another unostentatious doorframe bordered only by the flags of America and California, a window looking back out onto a perfectly still parking lot. She stood for a moment, not sure what she was supposed to do, who was watching her, thinking about all the perpetrators over the years who’d seemed dazed upon surrendering their shades and encountering the world as it truly was, flat and unadorned.
Laughter leaked from the next room, and then the inner door opened and Assistant Chief Reynoso—young, Jamaican, linebacker-huge—leaned out, looking back over his shoulder, saying, “Next time, he’s buying the whole goddamn platter.” He turned and used the knob hand to usher her in. Chief Blanco stood behind her desk with a benevolent smile, directing Terri into one of two leather chairs. She had a flashback of getting called into the principal’s office.
Reynoso perched himself on the ledge of the window frame behind Blanco, folding his arms, his face passive and unreadable. Both had dressed casually, and Terri took a moment to remember it was Saturday, that most people nurtured lives beyond their profession.
Blanco had come to head the force in the wake of scandal, and if she was known for anything as a Southland celebrity, it was for not being a celeb, for declining the spotlight in politically stark contrast to her immediate predecessor. Oddly, she had far more presence than any chief in living memory, being a stern, physically large woman, well over six feet tall, with broad shoulders and an imposing bustline. Before Terri had made detective, every anonymous jab at Blanco had turned this chest into freakish caricature, enlarging and dehumanizing the woman. Although Terri couldn’t remember seeing any of these critiques after the chief had become Chief.
“So,” Blanco said. “Quite some detecting there.”
“Just one of those, you know, needle in a haystack moments.”
Blanco smiled, just as unreadable as her second in command.
“My first question has to be, you’ve checked into this? There’s no—I mean, absolutely none—question of mistaken identity or footage integrity?”
“None. Once I had the face, it was pretty easy to tag Stacy Santos on the scene. She gets to the swap meet twenty-eight minutes earlier, disappears inside, gets picked up again at the southwest and southeast entrances twice, then crosses into the lot and loses herself in the tour buses on the northeast side. It’s all in my report. Getting her particular drones is another haystack-needle situation, and probably not crucial. I ran some basics on her traffic the week before. Before that, she was at college.”
“At UC …”
“Palm Desert. So the only real question is where she got the gun.”
“And motive. Because this is, of course, a fairly batshit set of circumstances.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Any ideas?”
“On motive? Before Stacy entered the picture, I had some general theories about Mr. Jhadav. I can’t imagine any would surprise you. He was the shooter on Froggy Sarin, who was,”—she was about to say a “nobody,” then caught herself—“a low-level street thug with probably a minor future in the junior SSKs. Certainly not anyone with enough juice to get on taskforce radar. Jhadav shot him just before New Year’s.”
“So he shot one, she shot one.”
“That’s where it stands.”
“And besides my office, who else have you told?”
“No one.”
Terri took in the pause and thought, Fuck It, taking the PanOpts from her shirt pocket and leaning forward to place them on the desk with a quiet clack. The red light was off: she wasn’t recording their conversation. It was an over-the-top gesture, despite the many times she’d heard of officers and detectives doing precisely this, in situations probably far more trivial. Folded, her shades looked suddenly absurd, cheap.
Blanco dipped her head and smiled to acknowledge the gesture. Reynoso hadn’t altered his own slight smile. He might as well have been a wax statue.
“Okay. Good. You get the hazards of this situation. And your partner? Don’t be offended, but do you trust him?”
“I do.”
“Does he know about this?”
“Not yet.”
“Okay. So. That still leaves the question of porousness. Outside this room, the only living person who knows about this is the mayor. I haven’t even told Juan Santos yet. I’m sure you can appreciate what a delicate situation this is. This Tournament of Roses thing is probably going to get worse before it gets better. Santos’s office can keep on for a while during his bereavement leave. It would be politically … complicated … to go ahead and announce this new situation with his daughter without proper context.”
“Context,” she said by way of agreement, the word perhaps coming out challenging.
Reynoso cleared his throat and said, “There’s no reason to go public with this information until we at least have a motive. Why did she do it? Was she in trouble? Was it somehow self-defense? Maybe Jhadav was somehow threatening or extorting her? Maybe he’d attacked her in the past, done a rape? Like she had some post-trauma and decided to take matters into her own hands? And did she get popped by one of his buddies? That seems like the probable here.”
Terri kept her impulse to defend Farrukh in check.
“So,” Blanco said, with no hint of precisely how she wanted this steered. “What do we do about this?”
There it was, as overt as the PanOpts lying face up on the desk. An actual backroom deal in which Terri had actual leverage.
“I had an idea. One of our cold cases from two years ago was from a young woman about Stacy’s age who was shot in similar circumstances, in Everett Park … laundry room, single shot through a small window. I mean, it’s not really cold, we know it was the boyfriend. But no one came forward, there was a lot of foliage, and the guy had enough shimmy in his alibi that we couldn’t do anything on it. There are enough similarities here that we could play this as a possible serial killing. I mean, it’s weak, but with a nudge from your office, I could get attached, work the Santos thing from this angle, and go, you know, on the low.”
Reynoso chuckled in approval, “Goin’ on the low.”
&
nbsp; “And Zack,” the Chief said, surprising her with a first name. “How does he fit into this?”
“How should he fit?”
“Are you comfortable leaving him out of The Loop? For now? You could always say it was on my orders.”
“I could.”
“And what do you want in return?”
“I’m sure there will be some resource issues down the line.”
“Obviously overtime is no issue.”
Terri smiled. Getting her overtime back had never crossed her mind.
She left the Temple only twenty minutes later, but it felt like she’d been inside for hours. For one thing, she must’ve been sitting tensely, because a terrible ache had settled in her shoulders and neck. Then there were the clouds, which had parted suddenly, brightening reality beyond the lobby’s tinted windows in a way that felt a little like another hangover, glints coming at her from the row of expectant cars waiting curbside to ferry the upper echelon of the department to expensive lunches.
She turned her phone on halfway across the lawn, hearing a message from a Central officer who’d located one of Farrukh’s coworkers. A cop car double parked itself and popped open a door. Stepping inside with a little spring, she realized she was back on the clock, back on the mighty teat of sanctioned OT after only a week in the desert, appreciating the grand irony of this. She was probably the only detective in a twenty thousand-person organization who’d been willing to detect for free.
The car drove her to Lincoln Park, one of the rare eastside success stories below Pasadena. Up until last year, the space had been an open-air refugee camp, its drab lake known as the Ganges of Hollenbeck Area, refugees frolicking and pissing and doing laundry in it, a total mess. But some whipped-up civics group had staged a countersiege of the grounds over the course of just a few months, and their efforts had reached enough of a critical mass that the force had been obliged to offer matching effort, redeploying to an area they’d written off a decade earlier. She’d been irritated at the shift when it happened, the spillover of humanity slopping into the rest of the city, foot traffic coming under the Alhambra Avenue Overpass and raising the overall shit level in Northern Central Area for her and everyone else. In all likelihood, her own neighborhood would’ve been rendered unlivable if it weren’t for the mighty barrier of the San Bernardino Freeway.
She saw now that it was a halfway decent park again, regretting her default to cynicism. Even if civic space was zero-sum, it was nice to have somewhere people could bring their children. As she shot past the park’s southern border, there were flashes of paddleboats and bobbling kites and then a glimpse of a baseball game. The car swung into a lot near a colorless assortment of two-story municipal operations buildings, rolling to a stop near a small crowd gathered in one leafy corner. An officer was already walking over as she stepped out.
“That’s him.”
A miserable-looking, middle-aged refugee sat on the curb at the edge of the lot. He was leaner and darker than Farrukh, legs bent and splayed, arms behind his back. On either side stood two tiny girls, barely more than toddlers in pigtails and faded pink saris, both in different stages of hysterical bawling. Behind him, the low, sloping hill rippled with the wild, waist-high prairie grass that overtook lots and sidewalks every winter, so that he appeared perched on the outer lip of civilization.
“Jesus, you cuffed him?”
“He’s a murder suspect, right?”
“The guy’s a resource,” she said, walking over, reading the byline over his head as she said, “Mr. Bhanghoo, I apologize for this mix-up.” She hoisted the man to his feet, always surprised, when making physical contact with refugees, at both their lightness and lack of body fat. It was a well-muscled arm. No name accompanied either of the squalling girls, so far off the grid they might as well be space aliens.
“Please. I have my daughters. I’m on a schedule. It’s very important I make the rest of my deliveries,” he said through a thick, over-enunciated accent, inadvertently doing a spot-on impression of Zack’s own impression of every refugee ever. Bhanghoo motioned toward a jerry-rigged three-wheeler with pedals and no visible motor, stacked high with paper lunch boxes the officers had left baking in the sun. She winced.
“Excuse me one moment,” she said, striding over to the nearest uniformed cop, a young redhead guy with no apparent interest in this scene.
“What were you guys thinking, cuffing him out here?” she said with quiet rage. “And what the fuck were you planning on doing with his two kids?”
“We called social services. I don’t know why they haven’t shown up yet.”
“Social. Un-fucking-believable. Cancel that. Now. You,” she said, pointing to the other cop, both of them probably half her age. “Get those cuffs.”
Chastised, one officer fumbled behind Mr. Bhanghoo while the other pointed and gestured into space as if manning a switchboard in an old-timey movie. The two girls tapered off to whimpers, hypnotized by the young cop’s frantic, indecipherable hand gestures. Mr. Bhanghoo whimpered softly.
The wind shifted and Terri rotated, like a dog hearing a high note. A strange roar came from somewhere just past the municipal buildings, and as the noise intensified and swelled, she realized the roar was human. She was hearing screams: an entire crowd, screaming in near unison. A feeling close to pure dread settled over her, froze her in place, even as she glanced from one officer to the next, then to the cuffed and miserable refugee, wondering, Am I the only one hearing this? She lifted a trembling hand and flipped through View options to rise up, over the park, gazing down at her small, insignificant assemblage of people and finally seeing, just past the building complex, the baseball diamond teeming with life, the cheering crowd already settling down. She dropped back to ground level, shaken not only by the initial sensation but by a dual realization that something had inexplicably unrooted her, that she’d allowed a beam of pure horror to shoot through her body. She closed her eyes for a long moment, willing herself to calm down, resisting every urge to walk back to her car and sit to collect herself.
When she opened her eyes again, Bhangoo stood in front of her, rubbing his wrists. Another volley of whoops and laughter swelled and faded in the distance. The two officers conferred off to the side, their uniformed authority still absorbing the tiny girls, one of whom stood sucking on a pair of glistening, fat little fingers. She heard the redhead cop say, “Log it, tag it,” his soft voice conveying the wound of a professional drubbing at the hands of a higher up.
Bhangoo moaned again, even though he hadn’t opened his mouth. Their eyes met in confirmation and both turned away from the officers and the girls, back to the source of the moaning, which she now realized was in the foliage, not far from where Bhangoo had sat. Something low stirred in the underbrush. Thinking of dogs, she instinctively placed one hand over her holster.
A strand of reeds rustled and then a dark human face popped out at knee level, like a practical joke. The face was shiny with grit, another filth-drenched dirt man who raised his head and snuffled up the power to use his vocal cords.
“Please …”
She stared mutely, as if the terror from just a moment earlier had manifested itself in the dark underbrush.
“Please,” the man croaked. “Please. Please. Doctor.” He reached a hand toward her, almost close enough to clutch at a pant leg.
She swallowed and heard herself say, “Sir, let me just deal with one situation at a time, and, and, and then we’ll have someone attend to you.”
“Doctor,” he said, struggling in the scrub. She glanced over at Bhangoo and, seeing an extra dread on his face, looked back down to the man in the weeds. The other arm was outstretched now. This limb ended at the wrist, and where a smooth stump should have been, there was instead a swollen bulb of wet pink and dark purple, the wound flecked with white foam. She stared long enough to register that this moving whiteness was made of maggots, looking back to Bhangoo, whose face seemed to convey that he had reached the same conclusio
n: don’t let the girls see.
She felt this impulse violently. In the lifetime of hardship and calamity ahead of them, these two kids didn’t need one extra image of horror imprinted on their tiny brains. She nodded violently away from the trees and the inhuman figure below as they both turned, seeing the smaller of the two girls was already looking behind her, staring without understanding, and as the other sensed her sister’s shifted focus and turned as well, their father had already crossed the three steps between them, palming both faces with each hand, hurrying them back toward his three-wheeler.
“Hey,” one of the cops yelled, reaching out.
“Let him go,” Terri said, reaching into her side pocket. “Mr. Bhangoo. Hold up.”
He didn’t turn and acknowledge her until he’d reached the bike, looking back as he hurriedly lifted both girls and placed them in the narrow space behind his seat, eyes bugging out, obeying his instinct to flee.
She produced a pair of disposable glasses. “Take these,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady. “This goes to me direct. Call me within twenty-four hours, or, you know, this unfortunate situation could happen all over again.”
He looked past her shoulder and then met her eyes with a look of incredulity, as if to say, How? As he mounted up and sped off, she turned back to the two baffled officers and said, “Are you guys blind? Call a fucking ambulance already.”
The South Garcetti Street workstation was her closest bet for a fruitful run-in, someplace where she could sit and sift through the best way to contact Babylon Johnson and have it seem halfway casual. Stacy Santos was his case, and she figured it would be easier to try him herself, rather than have Chief Blanco contact him from on high and make Terri’s involvement seem something more than informal. Entering the workstation, she found one huddle of a dozen cops, recognizing Dena Cruz and Matt Chessy and Diego Q, everyone sitting together but working separately.
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