Come Twilight
Authors: Tyler Dilts
OTHER TITLES IN THE LONG BEACH HOMICIDE SERIES:
A King of Infinite Space
The Pain Scale
A Cold and Broken Hallelujah
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2016 by Tyler Dilts
All rights reserved.
No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer logo are trademarks of
Amazon.com
, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781477827673
ISBN-10: 1477827676
Cover design by David Drummond
For Jeff and Kim
CONTENTS
Napalm smells best in the evening
It’s not worth believing what you heard
CHAPTER ONE
TELL ME
Thirty-one hours before my car exploded, I was at Julia’s condo on the Promenade downtown. I still hadn’t gotten used to spending so much time in a place that once would have made me uncomfortable in its luxury, but Julia made it feel like home.
It was a Thursday night and we were getting an early start on a weekend-long
Downton Abbey
binge. She’d been wanting to watch it for a while but hadn’t ever managed to make the time. I’d never seen it because it was
Downton Abbey
.
We were three and a half episodes in when my phone rang. I was next up in the homicide rotation, so that meant I was on call. There was an apparent suicide in Belmont Heights.
I told Julia that I had to go to work. I’d been a homicide detective for nearly a decade, and she’d been a social worker for several years before she became a photographer, so she had some understanding of my job. But she still wasn’t quite used to death being so ever-present in my life, and I could see the sadness in her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I said as I got up. “Why don’t you go ahead and keep watching.”
“You don’t like it?” she asked, surprised.
“No, I do.” It pained me to admit it, but I did.
“Then I’ll wait for you.”
“Okay, thanks,” I said, glad she’d offered. I would have made the request myself, but I wasn’t sure if we’d reached the point in our relationship when it was appropriate to ask her not to watch something without me.
The last time I’d been called out while staying at Julia’s, I’d needed to go home to get a fresh suit. When I told her about it later, she suggested I leave a spare in her closet. So the charcoal Men’s Wearhouse special that was number five in my work rotation was waiting for me. After a quick shower, I brushed my teeth and dressed.
She handed me a travel mug filled with fresh coffee when I went back into the living room.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll probably be all night.”
“I know, Danny.”
“I should still be able to make tomorrow night, though.” Julia had a few photographs in a show at a small gallery in the East Village. We’d planned on dinner after the Friday-evening opening.
She kissed me good-bye and I looked into her green eyes, crinkling at the corners with her smile, and I touched the single dimple in her left cheek. For the first time in years, I would rather not have gone to work.
When I started my Camry and drove out of the parking garage, something didn’t sound right. The engine was running rough and the car seemed sluggish. I drove for a block and decided I could probably make it to the crime scene. It was only two and a half miles. I felt a twinge of the chronic pain in my wrist creeping up my arm.
When I got there, my partner, Jennifer Tanaka, was already waiting.
“That was quick,” she said. “I thought you were going to be at Julia’s tonight.”
“Just came from there,” I said.
She looked at what I was wearing. “Fresh suit.”
“So?”
“You have that in your car?”
“No.”
She raised her eyebrows and smiled.
A little before nine, someone had reported a gunshot. Because it was a slow night, a patrol unit arrived less than ten minutes later. The responding officers investigated and found the body.
The crime scene was in an eight-unit apartment building near the corner of Belmont Avenue and Second Street. It was one of the old, well-maintained, pre-WWII buildings that were in high demand on Long Beach’s booming rental market.
“The call came from a woman upstairs in the back,” the uniform told me on the sidewalk. “She said she only called because the noise sounded like it came from the apartment below her, number six.”
I looked at the building. There were four units in front—two on the first floor, two on the second. Probably two bedrooms each. “Four apartments in front, four in back?”
“Two in back, two over the garage.” He looked curious. “How’d you know how many?”
I pointed at the mailboxes. They were numbered one through eight. Number six had a small label beneath it that read “MANAGER.” He nodded.
“You talk to any of the other neighbors?”
He gestured toward the lower-left door. “The couple in this one asked what was going on.”
“What did you tell them?”
“Just that we had a crime scene and were investigating.”
“Good,” I said.
He walked me along the south side of the building to a small porch, three steps up. There were two doors—the one on the right led up a staircase to the top floor, the other directly into apartment number six.
“You go inside?” I asked.
“Yeah. We came downstairs, knocked. There was no answer, but the door was unlocked. I opened it, saw him there, went straight to him to see if he needed an ambulance, checked the bedroom and bathroom to make sure no one else was here, then came right back out and called it in.”
“Thanks,” I said.
I went up to number six and looked inside. The victim’s body lay slumped on a couch that divided the large living room in two. In front, a flat-screen TV, an upholstered chair with a matching ottoman, and a coffee table. A big bookcase and a desk tucked into the corner. On the far wall were two doorways, one leading into the kitchen and the other into the hallway to the bedroom and bathroom. From the porch I took several photos on my phone before heading back to the front of the building to find the crime-scene technician.
I looked around. It was a slow night, even for a Thursday, so we had at least three cars more than we needed. Because of the location of the victim’s apartment in the back of the building, it was easy to contain. We just needed a few people at the front gate and one or two in the alley in back.
“How’s it look inside?” Jen asked.
“Seems pretty straightforward. Give me a couple of minutes with the body, then come in and take a look before the ME gets started.”
I went back inside. The first pass through had been to get an overview. This time I’d look closer and start picking apart the details.
First, the body. We had a preliminary ID. The apartment belonged to William Denkins. DMV records told us he was a fifty-two-year-old white male, five foot ten, one hundred ninety pounds. The victim seemed to fit the description. I squatted at the corner of the couch, careful not to touch the coffee table, and looked him in the face. He had graying brown hair, a little thin on the top. His upper body had fallen against the arm and backrest, and his head was resting on his shoulder, a lime-green pillow wedged between his elbow and the dark-beige fabric of the couch. There wasn’t much blood. One thin line ran down from his temple, collected in the corner of his closed left eye, then continued on to the edge of his mouth, stopping at his slightly parted lips. His left arm hung down to his side, a Smith & Wesson Chiefs Special still gripped loosely in his hand.
On the coffee table in front of him was a nearly empty bottle of Glenlivet scotch and a single glass. The only other things on the table were a phone and two remote controls.
I stood and went to the desk in the corner. He kept it neat and well organized. The screen on his notebook computer was dark, so I tapped the backslash key with my latex-covered index finger. It lit up and displayed his Gmail inbox. No unread e-mails.
A wallet and a set of keys sat in a shallow tray on the upper-right corner of the desk, and on the opposite side were two lined yellow notepads, a smaller one on top of a full-sized eight and a half by eleven. Without moving them, I could read the grocery list on the top pad and a good portion of what looked like a building-maintenance to-do list underneath.
I looked back over my shoulder at the body, then back down at the writing on the pads.
“Fuck,” I said out loud.
I went outside, found Jen, and brought her back.
“What am I looking for?” she asked.
“Check out the body, then look at the desk,” I said.
She studied him for a few moments, then went to the desk. She saw it even more quickly than I had. “That handwriting doesn’t look left handed.”
“No, it doesn’t,” I said, bracing myself for a longer night than I had expected. “I think we might have a murder here.”
The sky was brightening with the first hints of the sunrise when I hit the drive-through at the Dunkin’ Donuts on Seventh Street and picked up a dozen assorted and two large coffees. Up until a few months ago, I’d spent most Friday mornings having breakfast with my friend Harlan, a retired LA County sheriff’s deputy. Like me, he was an early riser. Unlike me, he was an excellent banjo player. Several years earlier, my left hand had been nearly severed while apprehending a suspect. The incident left me with near-constant chronic pain that stretched from my hand all the way up to my shoulder and neck. When a physical therapist suggested I take up music to help alleviate the pain and recover the dexterity in my injured hand, Harlan had given me a gift, a Deering Saratoga Star. It was a much finer instrument than I needed or, in fact, deserved, and when my learning curve had proved to be a bit shallower than he and my therapist had hoped, Harlan had bullied me into lessons with him. We traded our Friday breakfasts for donuts and banjos.
My car was still across the street from the crime scene, where I’d left it, hoping I’d be able to get it to a mechanic later in the day. I parked the unmarked cruiser I’d checked out at five that morning in front of Harlan’s house, and he opened the door and started barking at me before I even made it to the porch.
“Where’s your banjo?”
“Caught a case last night. I can only stay a few minutes.”
He eyeballed me through the screen door while I balanced the donuts in one hand and coffee in the other. “You going to open up for me?”
“Depends. What kind of case was it?”
“The callout was for a probable suicide.”
He pushed the screen open and stood back to the side so I could squeeze past.
“Poor soul,” he said, his voice weighted with sadness. “He hear you practicing?”
I refused to give him the satisfaction of my laughing, even if I had to fight the urge.
We sat at the table and opened the box of donuts. Buttermilk for him, cruller for me.
“Probable, you said?”
“Yeah. GSW to the left temple, Chiefs Special in his left hand.”
“Ten percent of people are left handed. They never shoot themselves?”
“His handwriting didn’t look left handed.”
“In the suicide note?”
“No note. But he had a bunch of stuff with his handwriting on it piled all over his desk.”
He finished his donut and took a long pull from his coffee cup. “Doesn’t sound very ‘probable’ to me.”
“I know. I’m on the way to make the notification to his daughter. I’ll find out for sure.”
I took my coffee and another cruller for the road. He walked out onto the porch with me. Any other time he would have given me shit or tried to get in a dig of some kind. Instead, he just patted me on the shoulder and gave me a nod. He was an old cop and he knew where I was going.
Jen and I were waiting in an unmarked cruiser outside Lucinda Denkins’s house at a quarter past seven. Jen had squeezed in a few hours of sleep while I was finishing up at the scene. Back at the station, I had spent twenty minutes on a cot and showered before putting on the fresh suit I keep in a locker for all-nighters.