Come Twilight (10 page)

No one was in the squad room in the early afternoon when I decided it was time for lunch. Before I’d met Julia, and before someone was trying to kill me, I spent a lot of time alone. Having a meal or going to the movies by myself had never been a big deal to me. I never thought too much about it. A certain degree of introversion has always felt right to me, and, honestly, I liked it that way. It suited me. It was comfortable. But in the last few days I’d had pretty much constant company, as per Ruiz’s dictate. There had been so much on my mind with both cases that I hadn’t really had a chance to be bothered by the lack of time to myself. The lieutenant had been smart. I was used to spending a lot of time with Jen. When one of us caught a case, it wasn’t at all unusual to spend most of our waking hours together for days at a stretch. If he had assigned the babysitting duty to anyone else, even Patrick or Marty or Dave, I’d be bristling and looking for escape opportunities every chance I got.

I decided to eat at The Potholder Too, the second location of one of Long Beach’s most popular breakfast mainstays. It was only a block away from the station, and an omelet for lunch always seemed like a good idea to me. The more I thought about it, the hungrier I got. And the better I felt about having the chance to be by myself for a while.

The walk was a short one. Out the back into the parking lot, around the building, right on Broadway, and just down the block. Door to door in less than five minutes. How many times had I done it? Fifty? Seventy-five?

As soon as I got outside and felt the sun on my face, the pang in my stomach that I’d attributed to my hunger grew deeper. My sense of situational awareness intensified as I scanned the lot. I watched the uniforms and the suits coming and going. Most of the faces were familiar. I scrutinized the ones that weren’t, assessing potential threats, one by one.

I’d dealt with threats to my life many times. I had no idea why, but now for some reason I was feeling a kind of vulnerability I never had before.

“Hey, Danny,” a voice said to my right.

I turned too quickly.

“You okay?” It was Stan Burke, a patrol vet who I’d known for years. He’d been one of my field-training officers when I was a rookie.

“I’m sorry, what?” I said.

“You all right?”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I’m fine.”

He didn’t look like he believed me. “I heard about what happened. Hell of a thing.”

I nodded. “That it is.” I noticed I was breathing. “Just heading out for lunch.”

“Where you going?”

“Potholder.”

“Want some company?” he asked.

To my embarrassment, I did.

CHAPTER EIGHT

CADILLAC RANCH

“I thought there would be more blood.” Lucinda sounded far away when she called. We’d released the crime scene so she could begin to sort through her father’s things.

“Sometimes there’s not that much,” I said, remembering her father’s slumped-over body. A few drops had found their way onto the sofa. I wondered if she’d looked closely enough to see them.

“I’m calling because of the funeral,” she said.

“How can I help?”

“I was wondering about his computer and his phone?”

“What about them?” I asked. We’d be able to get them back to her eventually, but it would likely not be for quite a while.

“The contact lists? He knew a lot of people, a lot of tenants, I don’t know who they all are.”

“We need to hang on to his things for now, but I can get you copies of the lists.”

“Thank you,” she said. “That would be a big help.” There was a tired sadness in her voice. She seemed to be genuinely grieving, but I couldn’t help but question whether figuring out who to invite to the service was the only reason she wanted his devices. They also held a lot of other information about his finances and would be useful to her if she’d been involved in his death and was trying to stay ahead of our investigation. I was betting she didn’t know how much information we’d taken from both his hard and electronic files. The more she was in the dark in regard to that, the better off we were.

“He also had an address book. I’ll copy that for you too, okay?”

“Brown leather with his initials on the cover?”

“That’s the one.”

She tried to say something, but her voice broke into a sob. While she cried I listened. I like to think I’m a good judge of people’s tears. It comes with the job. Even over the phone, hers struck me as genuine.

When she was able to compose herself enough to speak, she said, “I gave that to him for his fiftieth birthday. He loved it.”

“I’m sure he did,” I said. “It’s a really beautiful piece of craftsmanship.” I thought about the book. It was nice, but I couldn’t imagine I’d call it beautiful under other circumstances.

“Thank you,” she said.

I told her I’d drop the copies off as soon as I could and ended the call.

It was far too early to draw any conclusions, but I began to wonder how close she was to her husband.

“Jesus,” Dave said across the squad room. He and Marty were huddled behind Patrick’s desk, staring over his shoulders at something on the screen of his iPad.

“What are you guys looking at?”

Dave glanced at Patrick, who nodded.

“You should come over here,” Dave said.

“What is it?”

“It was your car,” Marty said.

They made room for me behind Patrick. Before I got a good look at the image on the screen, Patrick started side-scrolling through photographs. “You should start with this one,” he said.

I looked down at the screen and saw a straight-on side view of my Camry. The front and rear ends were both relatively intact, but the same couldn’t be said for the middle. Where the driver’s door should have been was a gaping hole. It looked like a giant shark had opened its jaws wide and taken a huge bite. The driver’s seat was completely gone, as were the steering wheel, much of the dashboard, and a significant portion of the roof. What remained was a jagged mess of metal and plastic, upholstery and fabric, all twisted and blackened by the explosion. Part of the passenger’s seat was pressed against the door on the other side, and all the windows had blown out. What remained of the roof bulged upward like the top of a botulism-tainted can.

It suddenly became difficult to think of anything other than what would have happened if I’d been inside when the bomb exploded. There wouldn’t have been much of me left. My shoulder and arm tightened and I leaned into the pain.

“You would have been even deader than we thought,” Dave said.

Marty clapped me on the back. “Bet no one’s ever been so grateful for a bad spark plug.”

“ATF confirmed that it was a South African land mine.” Patrick checked his notes. “A Mini MS-803. It’s like a smaller version of the claymore.”

I was still looking at the photograph. “That’s the small one?”

Patrick nodded. “The feds thinks we might get lucky with the source. They found another one of the same model, undetonated, a few weeks ago.”

“Where’d they find it?”

“Some Serbo-Croatian crew in the valley,” he said. “We’re running them down now. Looking for possible Long Beach connections.”

“Keep me in the loop, okay?” I’d worked several cases involving eastern European gangs in the last few years, but none with any known connections that fit.

“I will,” he said. Then he added, “As much as I can.”

Back at my desk, I found a voice mail from Ethan. “Only one set of prints from the Kobayashi Maru apartment,” he said. “But no matches to anything in the databases. Maybe we’ll get a hit on the DNA.”

Maybe,
I thought. And maybe Kobe would turn out to be one of those Asian Serbians we always hear so much about.

“Somehow it never occurred to me that I’d have to get a new car,” I told Julia on the phone. After a pit stop at home to pick up fresh clothes, I was settling in for another evening at Jen’s house. The days were getting shorter, but dusk was still hanging in the air.

“What do you think you’ll get?”

“I don’t want a new car,” I said. “I want my Camry.”

“It was pretty old. Didn’t you say it had a lot of miles on it?”

“Two hundred fifty-seven thousand.”

“Danny, I don’t know much about cars, but I know that’s a lot. You even said you didn’t think it would last much longer.”

“I know. It’s just that I thought it would go from natural causes.”

I thought I heard her stifling a laugh. “What are natural causes for a car?”

“I don’t know. A cracked engine block? Transmission cancer?”

She went ahead and laughed out loud.

“I know how it sounds,” I said. “One of my first homicide cases was a ninety-three-year-old lady. Grandmother, great-grandmother, big family, everybody loved her. A stray bullet from a drive-by went through the living-room window right into her chest. I could never shake that. To live so long and then die just like that. It didn’t feel right.”

“Would it have been better if she had to suffer for months with some debilitating illness?”

“No,” I said.

“Is that what you’d want?”

When I realized we weren’t really talking about my car anymore, I said, “You like your Subaru, right?”

I used to listen to the BBC Overnight broadcast on KPPC, one of the local public-radio stations, when I couldn’t sleep. There was something I found relaxing about the British voices reporting stories that were vaguely interesting. It had just the right balance. If my insomnia was particularly bad, I could focus and pay attention, and that would distract me from the thoughts running incessantly through my head. If it was a calmer night, though, I could let my attention drift and the voices became a kind of white noise that was just strong enough to hold the silence at bay and lull me into a kind of sleepless relaxation. I’d often find myself struggling to maintain that state at two a.m., when the programming transitioned from the BBC to
Morning Edition
. The American voices were never quite as calming.

More recently, I’d taken to listening to podcasts. I got sucked in quickly and before I knew it had subscribed to more than a dozen.
Mystery Show
had become a particular favorite. It was kind of a parody of our cultural obsession with the mystery genre, undertaking a new and admittedly minor investigation with each episode. How did a book written by an author friend of the host, Starlee Kine, wind up being photographed in the hands of Britney Spears? Could she find the owner of an unusual belt buckle that had been at the bottom of a friend’s junk drawer for years? How tall was Jake Gyllenhaal, really? What struck me about
Mystery Show
was the way Kine would follow the threads and loose ends that inevitably arose as she looked for clues and doggedly pursued lead after lead to the people whose stories, while not directly connected to the main narrative, imbued the case with genuine humanity. Julia and Harlan had both come into my life the same way.

But that night I’d tried listening for a while and found myself unable to summon the small degree of focus and concentration needed to pay attention. I’d keep zoning out and realizing I’d missed thirty seconds or a minute or more. I’d hit the little counterclockwise-circular-arrow icon to back up again and again until I found something I remembered. The fourth time I went all the way back to the
Stamps.com
pitch, I decided to give up.

It was long past midnight. If I’d been home I would have gotten dressed and gone out for a walk. Of course, I knew walking around Long Beach alone in the middle of the night, even in a neighborhood as nice as Jen’s, wasn’t the wisest of moves, but in terms of self-destructive cop behavior, it ranked pretty low on the scale.

I kept thinking about that afternoon in the parking lot. Something so simple, walking a block up the street to the Potholder, something I’d done so many times before. But I froze. Or at least I would have if Stan hadn’t come along. What would I have done if he hadn’t showed up when he did? Would I have a taken a few deep breaths, gotten a hold of myself, and strolled off to lunch? Or would the anxiety have gripped me so tightly that I wouldn’t have been able to overcome it? What would I have done? Could I have even made it back up to the squad room, or would I have humiliated myself by losing my shit right there in front of everybody?

I’d been in dangerous and life-threatening situations before without being rattled at all. When I’d been in uniform, I’d faced bigger and more tangible dangers on practically a weekly basis. Where was this fear coming from? It was true that I’d never had to deal with so direct and sustained a threat as the one the bombing represented, but how could I be afraid of walking alone to lunch?

The photos of my car were working their way into my mental feedback loop, too. There was no way I would have survived if I’d been in the car. What would it have been like? It’s standard procedure for homicide detectives to tell victims’ families that their loved ones had died instantly. That’s one of the many lies that we’re not only allowed, but often encouraged, to tell. And it’s a good lie. It brings comfort. No one wants to know that their loved one was in excruciating pain and very likely aware that they were dying for seconds or even minutes before they expired. My death from the explosion probably would really have been instantaneous. That didn’t make it any less disturbing.

I sat up in the guest bed and wondered how pissed off Jen would be if I went out for a walk. After a few minutes, I realized that she wouldn’t be pissed off at all if she didn’t know. But it didn’t matter, anyway. I knew I had to walk and I had to do it by myself. Not only because my nighttime walks were so ingrained in my routine, but because, after my near–anxiety attack, I needed to prove to myself that the afternoon incident had been a one-off experience, an aberration, and not something that I was going to let affect me any more than it already had.