Run the Risk

by Scott Frost

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s good. She’ll be safer the higher her profile.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “One last thing. Does she know about the threats?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Sorry about this, Lieutenant. I don’t have kids but I can imagine what it must—”

  “You can’t actually.”

  “No. I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s okay. I appreciate your concern.”

  “If we don’t find her at the Starbucks, we’ll have a squad wait at your house just to be safe.”

  “Anything you can tell me about the callers?”

  I was looking for the thing she hadn’t thought of, the overlooked detail on a written report. I was looking for straws to grab hold of.

  “Both calls were apparently made by adult male Caucasians.”

  She paused for a moment. I could almost hear her forming the words in her head.

  “I know I don’t need to tell you this, Lieutenant, but it’s probably just smoke,” Officer James said.

  “And I don’t have to tell you that when it’s not someone blowing smoke, when the anger boils over and the trigger is pulled, it’s always an adult male Caucasian, isn’t it,” I said.

  “That’s not really my—”

  “No, it’s mine. Thanks, Officer James.”

  Harrison was sitting on the edge of Traver’s desk when I stepped out of the office. The look in his eyes told me he saw that something was wrong, but being unsure of his place either in the job or with me, he let it go. I started walking through the squad room toward the door.

  “Where we going?”

  “There’s a body in the arroyo.”

  “Is it connected?”

  My mind was still on Lacy and the word “connected” knocked me off balance for a moment.

  “Connected?”

  “To Sweeny?” Harrison said.

  I shook my head.

  “As supervisor of the Homicide unit I look in on every body found if there appears cause for Homicide’s involvement. They don’t normally stack up this quickly.”

  “What don’t?” Harrison asked.

  “Bodies,” I said.

  “Do I really need to—”

  “As my partner, it’s your job to come with me.”

  Harrison nodded reluctantly, the muscles in his jaw flexing in and out as he clenched his teeth. I noticed a hint of color leaving his face as we started down the marble stairs.

  “Out of curiosity, Harrison, why did you become a cop?”

  He narrowed his focus, his eyebrows gathering up as he came closer to an answer. There are times when words seem to have the same effect as a weapon and I regretted asking the question. I’d just asked him to go someplace he didn’t want to travel to, at least not with me. I wanted very much to be walking down the stairs with uncomplicated Traver instead of Harrison.

  “It’s not my business,” I said.

  “If I’m your partner, I guess it is,” he said.

  “Forget it. I shouldn’t have asked. We all have our reasons. Most of the cops I know just wanted steady work that wasn’t boring.”

  We reached the next landing without speaking, almost as if a sheet of glass separated us. As we made the turn onto the next flight, he broke the uneasy silence.

  “I wanted to catch the man who murdered my wife,” he said flatly.

  I took the next step and then stopped. For all the obvious reasons, most pointedly my own inability, I didn’t need to be a mother to another person at that moment. More often than not, when someone tells you about a tragedy they’re seeking something in return. In women I find it’s a validation of their emotions that they haven’t been able to get from the men in their lives. With men it’s usually sympathy, understanding from a relative stranger that they couldn’t expect from those closest and best able to give it. I looked in Harrison’s eyes and saw that he wasn’t seeking anything. He was putting a statement of fact out on the table. A cold, terrible truth.

  “I didn’t catch him,” he added self-mockingly. He even smiled slightly at his own absurd, naive thinking. “The things we don’t know.”

  “I have several volumes full myself,” I said.

  It did explain his difficulty with bodies, not an inconsequential problem for getting the job done in Homicide. He was also smart enough to know that I was going to ask my next question, so I assumed he already had an answer.

  “If this assignment is a problem for you—”

  “It’s not.”

  He said it with the confidence of a man disarming a bomb that could take his life with the slightest slip of the hand. Our eyes met for a brief second, long enough to tell me that the wound he carried was no longer a crippling one. I turned and started down the rest of the stairs, the intense green of his eyes staying with me a few moments longer. It was a feeling that was surprisingly unnerving. Jesus, what the hell is that about? Do not even think about it, I said silently to myself. Do not, for a second, think about it.

  5

  FOUR MILES SOUTH of the Rose Bowl, Harrison and I turned into the arroyo at the old stone gates of the Casting Club. The branches of coastal oaks hung over the road like large, outstretched fingers. Acorns popped under our tires. Yellow mustard seed bloomed in bright patches up and down the arroyo’s sloping green hillside.

  At the floor of the arroyo was a stone building known as the Casting Club, a vestige of Pasadena’s more genteel days when displaced Easterners tried to relive their days on Catskill streams by dressing in tweed, smoking pipes, and casting flies into the club’s fishless shallow cement pool.

  “I always wondered what this was,” Harrison said as we rounded the turn at the bottom and pulled onto the gravel where the gathered squads and ME vehicles were parked.

  “It’s where men used to get away from their wives,” I said.

  I glanced across the seat at Harrison and regretted saying it almost before it left my mouth. Harrison turned toward the graceful lines of the stone building, studying it as if he were reconstructing it stone by stone.

  “I never understood those kinds of relationships,” he said without a trace of self-pity.

  I couldn’t imagine anything but those relationships, but I kept my mouth shut.

  THE BODY was half floating facedown at the south end of the pool, ten feet from the edge. The pool itself was maybe 120 feet long, forty feet wide. Where the body lay put it about 150 feet from the steps of the clubhouse. I scanned the perimeter of the pool and then over to the gravel parking lot, which was separated from the pool by a line of thick brush six feet high.

  “No lights. Would have been dark down here last night,” I said instinctively, as if I were talking to Traver.

  Harrison looked at me, unsure whether my words required a response.

  “Dave and I do that,” I said. “Think out loud.”

  “Like an old married couple,” Harrison said, smiling slightly.

  “Not like my marriage.”

  In the pool the ME began wading out in knee-high rubber boots to have a look at the body. Harrison’s eyes held the scene without turning away as the ME lifted the stiff body enough to take a look at the face.

  “Male Hispanic.”

  I glanced at Harrison, grateful it wasn’t a woman. The victim was wearing jeans, leather loafers, and a red sweater over what looked like a white polo shirt.

  “Seems unlikely a man would drown in twelve inches of water,” Harrison said.

  “Unless he was unconscious when he fell in,” I said.

  A detective named Foley, who had caught the call, walked up with Tolland, the patrol sergeant. Foley was my last investigator who wasn’t executing the search warrants at Breem’s and Finley’s. He was about five-six with the build of a high-school wrestler, which he had been in the distant past. He had close-cut brown hair and a Gable-like mustache he had grown for a nonspeaking role of a detective sitting at his desk drinking coffee in an Elmore Leonard movie
. His gift, if you could call it that, was a steady, blue-collar type of work ethic. He might not dazzle you with his insights, but he always worked a scene thoroughly and tracked down leads like a Labrador retriever. He glanced at Harrison and nodded as the ME began going over the victim, narrating as he went, as if it were a nature documentary.

  “No wallet, keys . . . pants pockets empty . . . shirt pockets appear empty, no ID. No visible signs of bodily trauma.”

  The ME pulled the body over to the edge of the pool and rolled him over in the water. It was like turning a waterlogged piece of wood. The man’s arms were turned at the elbow straight out from the shoulder, his fingers bent as if he had been clawing at the water’s surface. He had a black mustache, neatly trimmed. His dark hair was cut short and just as neat. The ME tested the flexibility of the wrists.

  “Rigor is nearly full.”

  He leaned in close and took a look at the man’s face.

  “Appears to be bruising just above the left eyebrow; skin appears undamaged except for slight hemorrhaging. No other facial trauma, no presence of blood on the body or in the water. There’s a gold band on left middle finger, looks like a wedding ring, no watch, no other jewelry. Estimate approximate age as forty-five to fifty.”

  “He’ll be missed by somebody,” Foley said.

  “Male, married Hispanic in his forties, he probably has kids,” I added.

  “Found an empty bottle of tequila in a paper bag behind that bench,” Tolland said.

  Foley held it up already bagged for evidence.

  “Who found him?” I asked.

  “The guy with the fishing pole, about seven-thirty,” he said, motioning toward a white-haired man in his sixties standing by a squad, holding a fishing rod.

  “Any unaccounted-for vehicles?” I asked.

  “Nope,” Foley said. “He either walked here, got a lift, or came with somebody. Looks like the guy got hammered, fell, and hit his head as he went into the water.”

  “If there’s water in the lungs,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Foley said.

  “After the storm cleared last night there was no wind,” Harrison said.

  We all turned to him. I didn’t know where he was going with this, but he had me. I was curious to see if he could go over a potential homicide scene the same way he could dismantle a bomb. Foley looked like an annoyed high-school teacher.

  “What’s that got to do with anything?” Foley asked.

  “Look at his legs. They’re submerged from the hip down, dragging on the bottom. Only way he could have drifted out that far is if he would have been blown by a strong wind.”

  Harrison glanced at me as if to see if he had stepped out of line. I motioned with my eyes that he most certainly had not.

  “He could have walked out that far and hit his head when he fell,” Foley said.

  Harrison studied the body for a moment, then shook his head.

  “He looks like he goes maybe one-fifty?” he asked the ME.

  The ME cocked his head and nodded like he was juggling numbers. “Give or take, yeah.”

  “Then he didn’t hit his forehead on the bottom unless he did a swan dive off that bench,” Harrison said.

  “How do you figure that?” Foley asked.

  “At one-fifty he didn’t carry enough mass to penetrate the water with enough force to strike the bottom—not unless he dove in. The water would have dissipated the energy. He would have slapped the surface and at most kissed the bottom.”

  Foley looked at Harrison like he had just spoken Chinese. “What the hell are you, Mr. Wizard?”

  I looked at Foley and nodded.

  “That’s exactly who he is,” I said.

  “Well, shit on me,” Foley said.

  Harrison walked over to the bench where the bottle of tequila was found. He knelt down and studied the ground for a moment, then looked out toward the pond.

  “Don’t tell me, you’re Daniel Boone, too,” Foley said.

  “Eagle Scout,” Harrison said.

  “Fucking beautiful.”

  “He could have fallen out here, struck his head on the cement, staggered into the water, and passed out,” Harrison said.

  “But?” Foley said, sensing more was coming.

  “What happened to his wallet and keys?” I asked.

  “So he got jacked, then whacked on the head, he fell into the water and they took his car,” Foley said.

  “Why didn’t they take his ring? A petty thief wouldn’t leave it behind.”

  “Maybe they couldn’t get it off his finger, maybe they got scared and took off.”

  “Maybe they didn’t want anyone to know who he was,” Harrison said.

  Foley looked at Harrison impatiently. “Now why would someone jacking a wallet and a car give a shit about that?”

  “Maybe for the same reason they tried to make it look like an accident with the tequila,” I said.

  “Which is?” Foley asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Maybe it’s a crime of passion?” Foley said sarcastically.

  “I doubt your idea of passion and mine are the same, Foley,” I said.

  The ME leaned in close to the body and lifted the collar of his shirt to examine the neck.

  “There’s a gold-beaded chain here.”

  Foley took out a pack of cigarettes, removed one, tapped it on the back of his hand, then stuck it in his mouth without lighting it.

  “You are making this way too complicated, Lieutenant, if you don’t mind me saying.”

  “I got an ID,” the ME said.

  He lifted a chain from around the victim’s neck with his fingers. “Couldn’t see it under the shirt and sweater.”

  “What?” Foley asked.

  “Dog tags.”

  “So we got a soldier,” Foley said.

  The ME looked at the tags and shook his head in surprise. “He’s a major in the Mexican army. Hernandez. What the hell is a major in the Mexican army doing here?”

  Harrison and I immediately looked at each other, thinking the exact same thing at the exact same moment.

  “He missed the dog tags,” Harrison said.

  “It’s gold, he must have thought it was jewelry and left it.”

  “How long would it take to ID a foreign national?” Harrison asked.

  “Weeks, if we identify him at all,” I said. “And by then, whatever he’s intending to do will be over.”

  “That’s why he didn’t want us to know his ID,” Harrison said.

  I stared at the body for a moment thinking we had missed a piece of the puzzle. Then it struck me.

  “You said bombers don’t like to be intimately involved with violence,” I said. “It’s why he couldn’t have killed Finley. Could he have done this?”

  “Drowning is a benign form of violence.”

  “A bump on the head and he goes for a swim,” I said.

  Harrison nodded.

  “There’s another possibility.”

  “What?”

  “He doesn’t fit any of the profiles and is much more dangerous.”

  “He?” Foley said. “Who the hell is he?”

  The line connecting the dots from Finley to Sweeny to the bomb that blew Dave into next week had just been drawn straight to the casting pond. There is no such thing as coincidence, not when murder is the result. Breem’s flower trucks had come from Mexico. The explosives had come from the Mexican military. The middle-aged father whose life ended facedown in a pool where men practice catching trout was a major in the Mexican army. Dot to dot to dot, and here we are. Wherever the hell that left us. I turned to Foley.

  “Consider this a murder scene.”

  Foley’s eyes moved back and forth between me and Harrison like the guest at a dinner table who doesn’t get the joke.

  “You want to tell me what the hell is going on?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said, looking down at the body. Death and the water had softened the contours and age lines on the
man’s face. His eyebrows and mustache were the color of freshly ground pepper. I tried for a second to imagine what his voice had sounded like. Was it deep? Resonate? Did he talk in rapid bursts of sentences or slow, graceful arcs of words? Did he like to laugh? What was his wife’s name? Did he have a daughter? Did he understand what was happening to him as he fell face first into the shallow water of the pond?

  “The same person who made the bomb that nearly killed Dave killed this man.”

  Connecting this man to an attempt on Traver’s life immediately brought Foley up to speed, even if he didn’t understand the hows and whys of it.

  “You tell me what you want, Lieutenant,” Foley said.

  “I want to know everything about this man before and after he crossed the border.”

  Foley nodded. “If there’s water in his lungs and we get nothing more than a bump on his head from the autopsy, it’s going to be hard to prove this is a homicide.”

  “It’s not this one I’m concerned about,” I said.

  “You want to tell me what does concern you, Lieutenant?” Foley said.

  “The next one,” I said.

  “The next one?” Foley asked.

  I walked over to the edge of the pool and looked down at the red sweater the Mexican major was wearing. It was so obvious to me that I was stunned I hadn’t thought of it before. I turned and looked back at Harrison.

  “What was it you said about a bomb used as a political or terrorist act?”

  Harrison thought a moment, replaying the conversation in his head. “They take place in public places—train stations, restaurants, wherever.”

  “What if this, and the bomb in Sweeny’s, were just attempts to cover up another act?”

  “What?”

  “Something that hasn’t happened yet.”

  “Another killing?”

  “An act of terror.”

  “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “That makes two of us,” Foley said.

  “We have two people dead for no apparent reason, and an exotic explosive designed for one purpose, to explode in places where it won’t be detected.”