Magic Line (19 page)

And the rest of the heist went exactly as he had planned. The screwdriver he'd lifted out of a janitor's closet in the hospital slid into the slot and cracked the disks. The motor roared to life and he was out of the parking slot and down the ramp. Driving south on Campbell Avenue toward the money, he sang a little tuneless march under his breath,
Tada rump-ump-ump, tada rada dah dah!
It was the action song he and his gang used to sing on Oklahoma Street back in the day when he was Rolly, before he'd been split off from himself and the top half, the part he let people see, went back to being Robin.

Sometimes he still let himself remember how much fun that gang had been, ready for anything. After they tuned up on some nice weed, before they headed out to spray paint a wall, boost a car, whatever, he'd sing out, ‘Hey, Rolly's jolly! Let's go do it!' And they would jump into the cars and sing that silly marching song all the way to the caper.

SIXTEEN

‘
S
arah,' Ray Menendez said. ‘Can I talk to you?'

‘Sure.' She typed another whole sentence while she waited for him to start. When he didn't she said, ‘What?'

‘I got a problem.'

‘What?' She turned to look at him finally and found herself staring at his belt buckle. He was standing very close to her desk, talking softly to the top of her ear. She stood up, looked straight into his eyes and said, ‘What's wrong with you and why are we whispering about it?'

‘I can't find my radio.' He was still mumbling.

‘Why tell me? It's probably in your car.'

‘I looked in my car. Several times. Also in my house, and all the drawers in my desk. I've pulled everything out of my briefcase twice.'

‘I still don't— Can we please sit down?' Watching him wring his hands in front of her desk she said, ‘Can you remember when you saw it last?'

‘Tuesday morning, shortly after two.'

‘You mean in the house in Midvale Park?'

‘That's where we were. Yes.'

‘Oh, crud.'

‘I had it when we started looking for the money.' he said. ‘I remember setting it down on a closet shelf in the bedroom so I could turn over a chair. After that . . .' He made one frantic attempt at self-justification. ‘We were all so tired!'

‘I know.' It didn't change anything. ‘When did you notice it was missing?'

Ray shrugged helplessly. ‘I never even thought about it Tuesday afternoon, I was too – you know how we all were: walking dead. But I've been looking for it steady since yesterday morning. I'm sure it's in that house.' He rocked in her spare chair, his face a mask of misery. ‘Delaney's going to kill me.'

‘Oh, come on, it's not that bad.' It was, though. A department radio, out in the world lost, breached all communications. If they couldn't find it they'd have to re-key . . . She couldn't even finish the thought. ‘We just have to go down there and . . .' She stopped, took a breath. ‘We just have to get a judge to reinstate the search warrant and then go down there and . . .' They looked at each other for a few seconds. Then they both stood up and walked toward Delaney's office. ‘You explain your problem,' Sarah said. ‘I'll sell him on the answer.'

The first two minutes went well. Delaney walked out the door of his office as they walked up to it, closed his phone and stopped in front of them looking . . . not excited – Delaney didn't do excited – but . . . pleased.

‘I just got a call from Phil Cruz at the DEA,' he said. ‘The paper called him to ask if he had any comment on the drugs-and-money story, and he's interested to hear more details of how that went down. I told him you were primary on the case, Sarah, and he asked if you could come down for a chat. You know him, right? So will you give him a call and set something up?'

‘Sure. But before I do that, boss,' Sarah said, ‘Ray's got a problem and we need your OK to go fix it.'

The next five minutes were not much more painful than a root canal, Ray said later. They were safely out of the building by then, with their renewed warrant, headed toward the house in Midvale Park. Sarah had accepted Delaney's logic, that if she was going to ask a judge to reopen a search warrant on a crime scene, which she pretty much had to do, goddammit, owing to the boneheaded carelessness of this poor excuse for a detective here, she had better damn well go along and preserve the integrity of the evidence. Because if any of this came back to bite them later at trial . . . his phone had been blinking with another call for some time and he let the threat hang in the air, waved them away and answered it.

The Midvale Park neighborhood had the dead quiet of a block where all the parents worked, and children who weren't in school got carried to grandmothers and sitters. In the park two blocks from Spring Brook Drive, the merry-go-round was silent and the empty swings were still. There was already graffiti on the raw boards that blocked the windows of the crime scene house – one more blight in an already struggling block. An absentee landlord wasn't answering phone calls or messages, Sarah knew. The SUV had been towed from the garage, and papers filed for the forfeit of house and car.

‘Gloves and booties,' Sarah said, pulling forward a box of both. They put them on in the car. Sarah found a small manila envelope in her purse and shook out a ring of keys. ‘Let's see, two locks,' she said, and isolated the ones for the front door.

‘If my radio's not here I'm going to open a vein,' Ray said.

‘Not on this property you don't,' Sarah said. ‘I've seen enough of this place to last me forever. Let's do this quick and quiet and be gone before anybody knows we're here.' Her brain kept composing a scenario in which somebody tipped a reporter, who arrived with a photographer in time to do a story on sloppy police work.

The flags and tape, all the litter of the crime scene had been cleared away. A stained front step and the scars from bullet removal were the only reminders of a crime scene. Sarah turned the two keys and Ray opened the door and pushed past her, impatient. Coming in from bright sunshine Sarah was blind for a few seconds and stood still, pulling the door shut behind her. The house was dark, drapes drawn, power turned off. The disgusting smell was fainter, but still there.

She followed him across the stained floor, along the hall that turned a corner to the bedrooms. In the second one he pulled open the closet door, peered along a shelf and said, ‘Hah!' He came out holding a radio, with his patented Latin-lover smile at full gleam. ‘Oh, baby,' he said, kissing it, ‘I love you so much.'

‘Well, good,' she said. ‘Now we can— What?' He had set the radio back on the shelf, crossed the two steps between them and grabbed her. Shushing her with his finger on his lips, he pulled her back toward the closet.

‘Saw somebody . . . edge of the window.' His whisper was so quiet, she barely heard. She looked, saw nothing but window, turned her head an inch toward him with a tiny shake. Wordless, he pointed toward the window and tugged her toward it. As she got closer to the wall, suddenly she saw it.

On the outside, a knot had fallen out of the cheap lumber boarding up the window. In here, there was a half-inch gap between the venetian blind and the wall. If she stood on tiptoe she could see most of the backyard through the hole in the board. Ray, stooping behind her, had almost the same view.

A young man was wriggling through a gap in the wooden fence at the far end of the yard. While they watched, he sucked up and got through, stood still a moment pulling a sliver out of his arm, and walked across the backyard toward the house. He passed right across the little hole and out of her line of sight.

Holding her breath, Sarah pulled on the cord that worked the blind, saw the slats turn silently. She eased right and got a fresh view. If he looked right at her he might see her, but he wasn't looking at the window. Curiously his head was turned toward the standpipe behind the dying cactus. Why would a service man be squeezing through a hole in the fence? Wait – he straightened and her heart gave a jump. He was cleaned up and in different clothes, but his face was the unforgettable face that had looked up at her from under a bloody corpse in the room behind her three days ago, asking who she was.

She tugged on Ray's sleeve and whispered, ‘Ex-Dead-Guy!'

‘Wait.' His whisper had hardly any breath behind it now, was almost as quiet as thought. ‘See what he does . . .'

The man bent toward the control box set into the ground beside the standpipe. It looked the way all outdoor control boxes looked, had the standard beige plastic cover with an etched label that read, ‘Irrigation Control Valve.' The man squatted by the box, reached under the edge of the plastic lid, got a grip on the cover and lifted it off.

As he was lifting the lid off the box, while he was still squatting, Sarah tugged Ray's sleeve, whispered, ‘Now!' and sprinted for the front door, hearing Ray behind her. They had to go all the way around the front; the back was nailed shut. Ray had longer legs and pulled ahead. Sarah was right behind him, getting her Glock out, as they rounded the back corner of the house.

But he had heard them; he was gone. The cover lay beside the box, upside down. Across the yard, a small board trembled by the hole in the fence where she had seen him enter the yard. They ran to it. Sarah squeezed through, heard Ray struggling behind her, hurling obscene threats at broken boards. In the next yard, a shirt on one of the clothes lines still swayed. She pelted past it toward the empty street, Ray pounding right behind her. On the sidewalk they whirled in circles, looking. There was no one in sight.

‘How could he— Let's try that way,' Ray said, pointing east on Chardonnay.

‘Go ahead,' Sarah said. ‘I'll go get the car.' She ran back toward it, holstering her weapon, looking everywhere. She could see Ray's running figure in the rearview as she started the motor. Between them, out of a side street she hadn't been aware of, a late-model Taurus crossed Chardonnay and drove south. She squinted – could that be him? Something about the shape of the driver's head seemed right. She leaned on her horn, made a tire-squealing U-turn and barreled toward Ray. He stopped and turned back when he heard the horn but he was almost to Oak Tree Drive. She slid to a stop beside him, turned the siren on as he closed the door. She had turned the corner onto Oak Tree Drive and was racing south before he had his belt on.

‘Get on the radio and call for help,' she said. ‘I'll see if I can cut him off.' She hit the siren and floorboarded the gas pedal for a block, turned right on two wheels and looked both ways at the next two cross streets. There was no late-model Taurus in sight.

They rendezvoused with the two cars that came to help, gave them a quick description of car and driver. The three cars drove a twenty-block grid for a quarter of an hour before they gave up. Sarah pulled into a patch of shade and parked, feeling her heartbeat slow.

Ray sat with his hands hanging limp between his knees. The air in the car was heavy with the sullen silence of failure. Finally Ray said, ‘Well, that was fun. But please, Sarah, can we go get my radio now?'

Sarah yelled at the top of her lungs, ‘Oh, piss on your damn radio!' The outburst shocked them both so much they just stared at each other for an echoing interval. Finally Sarah said, ‘Oh, God, Ray, I can't believe I said that to you,' and in a bizarre reaction to the stress and frustration of the last half hour, simultaneously they began to laugh. The release was so welcome they couldn't stop – they howled, roared, pounded on their knees, giving vent to the craziness of this week in their lives. Their hilarity fed on its own noise until it shook the car.

Then, rather suddenly, the air went out of their silly balloon. They came back to earth, shook their heads in embarrassment, and got back to business. Sarah drove quietly back to the house on Spring Brook Drive while Ray called the duty sergeant and put out a Need to Locate notice with a good description of the wanted man and a partial one of the vehicle – neither of them had seen the license number. As he finished, Sarah parked at the curb in front of the house and said, ‘Let's leave your radio where it is for a minute and see what's in that control box he opened.'

She grabbed her briefcase because it had her camera in it and led the way around the end of the house. Behind her, Ray said, ‘There's my lady with the babies, watching us out her picture window. Josephina.'

‘Pretend you can't see her.'

‘Too late. We already waved. Josephina and I are buds,' he said proudly. Knowing he had found his radio was such a satisfaction he had already forgotten the man who got away and was back to bragging about his street smarts.

They stood together in the dried-up yard, alongside the dying cactus, and stared down at the open box. ‘I don't get it,' Ray said, ‘It's a standard lash-up for outdoor watering systems. Low-voltage lines coming in here from that timer on the wall. They connect to this solenoid—'

‘Right, and then these two wires go to the valve that controls the flow on these two water lines. Same thing I've got at home. But what's this mound of gravel doing beside the pipes?' She pushed some of it aside. ‘Something black here.' She scooped up the rest of the gravel. ‘What is it?'

‘It's a cap,' Ray said, authoritatively.

‘You don't say.'

‘Yes. A screw-on cap for something that shouldn't be here, that I never saw before and can't explain.' He looked at her brightly. ‘You got any fresh gloves on you? These are getting kind of ragged.'

‘Of course,' Sarah said, ‘all detectives carry gloves.' She patted her pockets, found a pair and handed them over. He put them on and tried the lid. ‘Turns easy. Usual threading.' When he had the cap off he peered into a dark interior space. ‘I guess hardly anybody keeps live snakes in jars underground, huh?'