“I thought you were going to call me yesterday,” Chief Blanco said with a flat tranquility Terri found impossible to read in audio only.
“Yeah, that,” she said, feeling utterly buffaloed, lost, unable to think up any plausible reply.
“And now I see you’ve intimidated a prisoner in an unrelated case.”
“What?”
“You questioned Torg Skarpsvärd yesterday morning.”
“Yeah, but there wasn’t any …”
“You didn’t think to obtain my go-ahead?”
“Go-ahead? This was done in the course of my mainline investigation. And who said anything about ‘intimidation’?”
“Skarpsvärd is filing a dismissal because he said his council wasn’t present during questioning.”
Terri weighed hanging up, aware that the entire premise of the phone call—she should have answered in the first place—was flawed. “He … well, I guess if we’re being technically accurate …”
“If we’re being accurate, a lethal psychopath is probably going back out on the streets because you couldn’t be bothered to follow the simplest of protocols.”
She considered replying that there would be more safe people inside the prison system, thought better of it, and instead said, “Can I call you back later this afternoon? I’m actually following up on several vital leads as we speak.”
“Actually, you’re no longer following up on anything. I’m taking you …”
“Oop, wait, hold on, I have to call you back!” She raised a hand into the call box and actually hung up before she gave herself time to reconsider.
She lowered her hand, seeing it flutter for the first time since this entire mess had ensnared her. The tremor of adrenaline hadn’t kicked in during the whole time she’d been betrayed, or inside the skyscraper, or even when she’d been shot at. It took this direct threat to her livelihood for it to activate. She sat motionless, paralyzed, watching another incoming call cycle through three more attempts, each going to her Dupe. She felt fluttery, hollowed-out, her mind doing that awful stammer-loop of doubt and self-assurance.
“Hey.”
Travis Contreras had said this, but he was looking away from her, to a trio of uniformed male cops who stood off to her left.
“Anybody seen Mutty?”
“Naw, I haven’t seen ’im,” one of the officers, the largest, said with exaggerated loudness.
“Yeah … I wonder where he could’ve gotten to?”
All four turned to face her.
“How’s about you, Detective? Any insights into where Mutty could’ve gotten to?”
She stared.
“It’d be a goddamn shame if anything were to happen to that guy because some dumb ass had to make some sort of a political point with her case.”
“Whaddya say, Detective?” The largest officer stepped toward her. “Pretty fucked up, huh? For a cop to actually be that careless?”
Someone yelled something else as she fled out to the parking lot, the phone ringing and ringing and ringing.
She had the car drive her in an aimless circle, changed her mind three blocks later and decided to see Carla, thinking of those Thin Man movies, cops having to cross physical space to confer. The scene at the workstation had been raw, stingingly so, but not really worse than her worse average weekly street scene. Terri found she’d arrived at a spot where her choices were clear, and she craved structure, lack of ambiguity, freedom from limbo. All she could do was to stay on the case and crack it, to use whatever leverage she had to clear her own name, to make everyone see the big picture, or at least the few puzzle pieces she’d been made privy to. It was simple. She’d probably be dead if she couldn’t do that, the thought coming to her flat, an intellectual assessment made without sensation. And yet when she pulled into the forensic science division, a fear gripped her that Carla had seen her coming. Carla would be down below, waiting to haul off and stab her with one of a dozen sharp esoteric instruments lying around her office.
Instead she found Carla animated, clearly waiting for her arrival.
“I thought about what Zendejas told you. About the ‘chain of shit extending back into the mists of time.’”
She nodded, realizing Carla had tapped into Terri’s shades and watched the conversation from Friday morning.
“So I went back to see if I could find whoever it was this Froggy guy killed with the same gun. I thought about the shades trace you tried. Did you know you can do the same thing for weapons?”
“I asked Pearly about that. Pearly’s Dupe. He said it couldn’t be done.”
“Yeah, well. If you know how to tell the Basement what to do, you can pretty much do anything. I’ve done all kinds of custom traces. I went back to the shooting, on the bridge, stitched together three scenes as your guy walked, like this,” she said, holding an imaginary gun in her left hand, just behind her hip.
“My thought was that I could get some distinguishing marks on the weapon, try a trace, see if anything came up in the backlog.”
“If the Basement can do that, why isn’t that done?”
“It’s rare that it works. Manufactured guns have to have some seriously identifying scratches to track on physical characteristics alone. Not that it matters, because when I pulled up the gun, there was the serial number, right on the chassis. It never got filed off.”
“No.” Terri licked her lips in recall. “We would’ve seen that. In the Farrukh shooting.”
“Stacy Santos had two fingers covering the serial when she shot. Used her ring finger for the trigger. She’d probably never fired a gun before.”
“Then what about when Froggy himself got shot?”
Carla shrugged. “Tony Collazo probably didn’t know enough to stitch together the serial number from multiple vantage points. Overseer oversight. Or who-gives-a-shittedness oversight. Anyway, you’ll never guess who the gun is registered to.”
“Christ. This case? The Pope?” Terri said, trying to come off conversational but already feeling that deep trench of fear open up again.
“One Dio Sarin. He bought it himself, in Riverside, three weeks ago.”
“How?”
“Walked into a gun shop and paid cash. The kid might’ve been low-level SSK, but he put in his paperwork for a green card. Took the time to get a driver’s license and everything.”
“Huh. So … not a chain. Just four links.”
“Actually five and counting. I found the shooter on Nuestro Quintiglio.”
“You did this all since I left this morning?”
“It wasn’t that hard, once I had that serial. You didn’t catch her in the Basement because all those raised foundations around his house made a nice getaway channel. But she spent some time walking around with the gun sticking out of the back of her pants. All I had to do was narrow the search. First I found a Browning HP grip sticking up out of the back of her jeans. Two blocks later, she was walking with it out in the open, striding up Crenshaw Boulevard with the thing swinging from one hand. She dropped it in a tight alley with no good coverage, presumably for the next person to come get it.” Carla’s neutral expression didn’t give away any hint of pride in the morning’s accomplishments.
“So this shooter …” Terri said, steadying herself on a wall, “What’s her name?”
“Lucy Cardenas.”
“Walking around with a gun in the open like that … is this Lucy Cardenas a crazy?”
“Kind of. She’s an AMAST follower. Remember them?”
“Ouhhhgggh … ‘Azusa Ministry of something or other.’ The soap guy one?”
Carla nodded and cracked a knuckle. “That’s them.”
She’d seen their work for years, colorful parodies of the various melanoma clinic ads, imploring citizens to Fight Sin Cancer. For a long time, she’d thought they were a mainstream church with a decent sense of humor. But then she’d seen their logo, a ghostly galleon with three bare, bloody crucifixes for masts. Sometime in the last decade, they’d gone from be
ing a quaint, one-note joke to a franchise, with distinctive, bright blue-and-white branches all over southern California. Then Zack had showed her footage of the group’s founder, John Crosley, a handsome young preacher who cried tears of soap bubbles. She got a little nauseous whenever she thought of his followers, laughing with childlike zeal as they washed their hands in the sudsy lather leaking out of his face.
“And you have an address? Am I rounding her up?”
“There’s no urgency. She’s down in front of City Hall. Probably seen a hundred different protests at this point. I ran her backward in the Basement. A guy in a gorilla costume shot her last Monday. She’s been dead for the last five days.”
For some reason, the full significance of the gorilla-man attack, the imagery of it, didn’t click until she was in the car. Then she doubled over laughing. It was perfect: there probably wasn’t a single protest outside city hall that didn’t involve at least one joker in a pilgrim or superhero or Biblical costume. A rampaging primate was the next logical step. He’d come up from the toilet tent half a block away, done the deed, and slipped back to execute a perfect costume change. Nobody would’ve given a giant ape a second glance.
Just the thought of all that forensic canvassing—recreating exactly which bottom feeders had come and gone from that tent five days ago, finding and then interviewing each and every one—made her dizzy with fatigue. The car pulled onto the off-ramp, bringing her past a brilliantly lit baseball diamond on Arcadia, a flash of kids practicing, a major city asserting its normality. Zack called as she disembarked at City Hall. He went straight to Dupe.
Terri was only half disguised. She’d slipped on a dust mask below her PanOpts. Meaning, she’d be identifiable as cop, but not as herself, the hope being that she could get to the body before her PanOpts raised too many red flags. A lone authority figure in a riled-up protest was always a security risk, and she knew several cops, officers and detectives, who’d walked into some severe beatings in circumstances very similar to this.
A blocky pedestrian footbridge covered this portion of Main. Most times of day, the spot was shaded, as if providing a dank breeding ground for the 24/7 protests it sheltered.
Every time she’d attempted to deduce the gripe of the day, the effort had left her confused. Everyone decried “gridlock” on the refugee question, as if a clean solution to the entire mess were merely a management issue. It’d become a constant of Southland politics for the last twenty years: group after group emerging from the woodwork to condemn shadowy “elites” that benefited, through increasingly nefarious, complex, and Rube Goldbergesque schemes, from the ongoing and chronic refugee skyscraper nightmare. Knowing she’d regret it, Terri raised a hand and riffled through the lower civilian layers, finding one that showed all local protest boxes. Over one large man’s head, she read,
Isn’t it curious that we know more about Nuestro Quintiglio in two days than we do from two weeks of cover-up at the Tournament Of Roses?
In the comments below this, someone had just posted,
why is NO ONE questioning why a man with NO MOTIVE would want to kill the DA’s daughter????????!!!!!!!!
She groaned and looked longingly down the street, in the direction of Jazz Hands, one infinity away.
Finding a body seemed like an easy task. And yet the shifting mob made close-range visibility bad. Two separate crowds claimed each side of Main, each abutting the very edge of the busy street. It was surprising someone didn’t get pushed straight into traffic. She crossed to the east side, only realizing halfway across that the vehicles routing around her said far more about her being cop than her choice of shades. She could already feel the first eyes on her, the surrounding air probably blooming with fresh totem poles of abuse.
Terri made a beeline for the back of the crowd, but fifteen feet in, she saw two bare feet sticking out from under a dark coroner’s blanket. She pushed her way through the swarm, up to the head of the body, only then seeing that the blanket actually did say Los Angeles Coroner with a little cartoon tombstone. A voice in the throng roared, “We deserve what?” The crowd chanted back, “An-swers,” and a hand shot up from under the blanket as if in rigor mortis, a clenched fist raised high, some outraged citizen who probably didn’t know or care that the surging mob had engulfed his or her protest.
The crowd thinned thirty feet away from the street, people dispersing around her, news of a cop’s arrival having transmitted in real time. A gaggle of street people sat along the far wall of City Hall’s eastern campus, utterly detached from the clang of consternation all around them. She inspected the row and saw one hooded figure slumped in the middle, a hand outstretched in petition. Terri squatted on her haunches and tipped up the hood, hit by that familiar stink of perfumed meat. The woman’s face was ashen, the face of a dead body. Below this, a dingy charm necklace read John 9:25. A hobo man sat next to the corpse, almost touching it.
“You didn’t smell this?” But the dust mask and the chanting crowd muffled her.
She stood, pinging for backup. It was the ultimate comedy death, having a guy in an ape suit come up and pop you and no one give your dead body a second thought. This dust mask was turning into a good thing; no one in the crowd could see her chuckling, lest the protest shift to focus on her and her lack of sensitivity.
Waiting, she called Zack back, first setting her voice to filter out the crowd noise, making it sound as if she were alone somewhere in a car or a room. He answered on the first ring.
“Hey, I was getting worried.” There was a slight note of surprise in his voice.
“I’m right here.”
“And where’s that?”
“Around. Around town.” She wasn’t going to mention the ambush, instead letting it ride out in silence.
“Oh-kay. Well, you’ll never guess what I found out.”
“Yeah, what’s that?”
“That shithead lawyer? He’s representing Mutty’s shooter now.”
“Do tell,” she said, feeling a physical relief as she saw the red-and-blue flash from two blocks away.
“You don’t sound surprised. How’d you already know?”
“No, that’s exciting.” She weighed hanging up, the chat feeling masochistic.
“Look, Terr. I know this is some difficult shit you’re in. You think I don’t know that? I’m trying.”
“Uhn-huh.”
“Seriously, what else do you want me to do? You want me to come meet you? Just give me a place, I’ll be there.”
“You hold down the fort on the home front, Zack. Make sure Hyperion doesn’t get scalded.”
“Wait, what? Out by the airport?”
Not sure what to make of this, she said, “Hyperion Waste Eatment almost getting it. From the other day.”
“Oh yeah, I think I saw something about that on the news.”
She didn’t know how to reply to this. The first pair of uniformed officers were already weaving through the crowd, generating an upsurge of boos and catcalls in their wake.
“Goodbye, Zack.”
She followed the crowd’s nearly unified gaze as the group followed the officers over to her position, everyone staring expectantly at the three of them now, like they were going to bust into some street theater themselves. A fresh chant started at the periphery, back by the curb. She pointed down to the corpse. The bum who’d been sitting next to the body stood quickly, uncomfortable with attention. As he turned to skitter off, she saw his dreads had fused into one rounded lock, a hair helmet.
“The body’s been down for five days. If the shot went through her, the bullet could easily have gotten moved or blown around since then. So I want a thorough sweep.”
The chanting intensified, and the closer of the two uniforms, twenty-something, female, clearly intimidated by the crowd, leaned in, cupping one ear.
Terri repeated herself, yelling through the dust mask. Finally she said, “Fuck it,” pulled down the mask and repeated the order a third time.
The cop nodded
and the crowd noise intensified. She looked up, seeing shock radiating out from her own recognized face. A blurry, smeared boo sounded from the throng, maybe two hundred strong. A chant started, Nuestro, Nuestro, Nuestro …
She looked back at the officers, who seemed dazed, grabbing the closer one, the woman, and motioning rudely to the body again. The crowd surged forward, two protesters falling into her and then backing up again. She instinctually placed a hand over her holster as someone yelled, “Another one?”
“You kill another?”
In her upper-left view, she pulled up her car and furiously triple-tapped the icon. An elbow pushed her from behind, knocking her down, and Terri caught herself with both hands, scraping her palms, hearing the car honk in rapid bursts for everyone to clear out. The honks mixed with shouts as the car bullied its way through the crowd. She could see headlights through a thicket of legs. Twenty feet away, it sounded an alarm, 130-decibel bursts that hurt, the last tapering off as the car trundled up and flung its door open, Terri scampering in, the two cops clambering in after her, a jungle of arms and fists pounding on the windows like a bad dream she must have had at some point in her life.
At midnight, palms still smarting, Terri waited on Broadway for the downtown Feeler team, perched against the sloped hood of a passenger car she’d rented with her own money. She’d spent the evening in this car, circling the city, fitfully napping, waking every ten minutes with a fresh suspicion, some new configuration of puzzle parts that might make the last forty-eight hours seem plausible.
City Hall blazed with light, its cherry-topped ziggurat affirming civic authority. All around her, Saturday nightlife surged, tipsy twenty-somethings bar hopping, stumbling under trees that had grown large around their host streetlights, seeming illuminated from within. Below the tidal drone of surface street traffic, she heard synchronized crickets.
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