Never Fear (27 page)

“No I didn't,” Danny said, taking a step away. “I don't know what you're talking about.”

“You went to the courthouse, signed in, and found a file. Do you remember? It was something to do with an old police investigation, twenty years old.”

“I don't know what you're talking about. I think you should see a doctor.”

He folded his arms across his chest and pressed himself against the wall.

“It's important that I know what's in that file.”

“Why?”

“Because the man who killed your mother also killed my brother.”

Danny exhaled sharply, then looked at me. The dull sheen of the narcotics' effects appeared to vanish from his eyes.

“So you're like me?” he asked.

For an instant I was back in the closet listening to my father pull the hangers across the rod.

“Yeah, I'm like you.”

“Do you have dreams?”

I nodded. He let his arms fall to his sides and closed his eyes.

“I remember everything,” he whispered.

He opened his eyes and they were full of tears.

“I remember the night she didn't come home. They let me stay up watching out the window for her headlights to turn into the driveway, only they never did. When she wasn't there in the morning no one said anything until the phone rang and my grandfather answered it on the second ring. That's when the secrets started—people whispering, talking about me like I wasn't in the room. But I heard everything, just like now.”

“Do you remember it, Danny?”

He spoke just above a whisper.

“I remember. It said they all fell down.”

“Who fell?”

The clarity in Danny's eyes began to slip back into the dullness of the drugs and he didn't appear to hear my question. I looked at Harrison and shook my head.

“He said that before at my house. It's like the game kids play, Ring Around the Rosy . . . but I don't know what it means.”

“They all fell to the ground, but one of them,” Danny said.

“Who didn't fall, Danny?”

“Them, one of them, wouldn't fall.”

Harrison tried to find a crack in the words that would bring some understanding but it eluded him.

“You've got to tell us more, Danny, that's not enough,” I said.

“They were all supposed to fall, but he wouldn't.”

“Why? Who wouldn't fall?” I asked.

“I told you, he, he, heheheheheeheheheheeeee!”

Harrison shook his head in exasperation.

“Don't think I didn't see that,” Danny said.

“Do you know the name Hazzard? Was he there when they wouldn't fall?”

“Hazzard's a policeman.”

“That's right.”

Danny looked at me, struggling to retrieve the information from his confused mind. “Hazzard? I remember that name. He was helping to find my mother's . . . You're a policeman.”

The words appeared to exhaust him and he slowly sank down to the floor. I walked over and knelt in front of Danny, trying to draw him back from the haze of the drugs.

“I need your help, Danny.”

“Do you remember everything, Lieutenant?” Danny asked.

The sound of the golf club striking my father jarred me like a clap of thunder.

“Almost everything, ” I said.

He put his hands to his head as if the memories inside were pounding to get out. “Me too.”

His eyes drifted across the room and he appeared to be slipping away.

“What happened to the file, Danny?” I asked, trying to bring him back.

He shook his head. “You won't find it.”

“Why won't I find it?”

“I told you, I remember everything, just like you.”

“Tell me where it is,” I said.

He pointed to his head. “Here. That's where it is.”

“In your head?” I said.

“Yes . . . that's where it is.”

He sat motionless for a moment, his eyes beginning to wander in the haze of meds. We helped him to the bed and laid him down. The muscles in his face began to relax; I could see the boy of five standing at his bedroom window waiting for the lights of his mother's car to sweep the driveway. I placed my hand lightly on his forehead.

“She loved you very much,” I said, but he was already as far away from the small dull room and his sad memories as the drugs would take him.

The sun was going down when Harrison and I stepped outside County USC. As we walked to the car I noticed a large column of smoke rising to the west of L.A. and spreading out in the shape of an anvil.

In the block walk to the Volvo, the column of smoke had begun to turn the light the deep orange and red of the sunset. There were multiple sirens wailing in the distance.

“Danny's seen that file. ‘They all fell down' is too specific; he's trying to tell us something but he can't figure it out in his mind.”

Harrison nodded. “But what?”

An LAPD black-and-white came around the corner and gunned its engine as it sped past us.

“So much for Cross's vast conspiracy rippling through the highest levels of the halls of power,” I said. “Twenty years ago cops didn't find other cops guilty in OID investigations unless there was no alternative. All it would have taken was for the IA officers not to look beyond the surface.”

“Someone must have,” Harrison said.

I nodded. “An ambitious law student working in the district attorney's office named Fisher, who found something she shouldn't have, and hid it in the only place she could think of until she figured out what to do with it.”

“And it stayed hidden until Danny and Gavin and your brother found it,” Harrison said. “Without that evidence we have nowhere to go with this.”

“And without Danny, we can't find it.”

I looked back at the hospital. The light reflecting on the windows made it appear that a fire was raging inside. The pager on Harrison's belt went off and he checked his message.

“Caltech has an image from the car.”

36

The sun had set by the time we arrived in Pasadena at the Caltech campus. The smoke that had turned the sky the color of a blood orange now hung in the wind, carrying tiny particles of ash and soot that gathered in the corners of my eyes.

As we pulled up and stopped at the computer science building I noticed a gray sedan in the rearview mirror stop a block away.

“What is it?” Harrison said.

I checked the mirror again. The figure in the car hadn't made a move to get out.

“It's possible we're being followed.”

Harrison glanced in the side mirror. “We must be doing something right.”

I opened the door and stepped out, glancing back at the sedan. “That all depends on their point of view.”

The computer specialist working on the disk from the parking garage was a doctoral candidate who appeared to be little more than twenty years old. He wore the standard uniform of the nerd genius of the school: a T-shirt that read BYTE ME, shorts, and sandals. He explained that the program he had used was originally designed for spy satellites, and then was adapted for use with deep-space pictures from the Hubble telescope.

As the image of the car began to appear on the screen Harrison tried to explain what was I seeing and how many pixels it took to create but it still made little sense to me.

“This was the first generation,” the kid said.

I stared at the image of the car passing the garage entrance.

“I'm interested in the windshield. It looked like there was something visible in the shadows,” I said.

He nodded, hit a few keys. “That's what I thought at first, but this was all I got.” He hit a few more keys and the dark shadows began to lighten.

“I don't see anything,” I said.

The kid nodded. “There's nothing there to see in the shadows. We're looking in the wrong place.”

He hit a few more keys and the image began to refocus. “What you were seeing wasn't in the shadows, it was in the glass of the windshield.”

“A reflection?”

He nodded.

“I think this is what you were looking for,” he said.

The whiz kid's eyes darted back and forth between us, and a faint smile appeared on his face. “I solved something, didn't I?”

I let the idea settle, trying to understand what exactly we had found and what it meant—how it fit into the puzzle that now covered twenty years. I pointed at the screen just to the right of center on the windshield. “What is that?”

The kid did his best to hide his excitement at having solved God knows what in his imagination.

“Yeah, this is really cool,” he said.

He worked the mouse and the keyboard again and the image on the screen shifted and gradually came into focus. The distinct shape of a hand appeared to float in the darkness, the thin white line of an unlit cigarette dangling between the fingers.

I stared at it for a moment and imagined the same hand picking up the gun that was placed against the side of my half brother's head.

“What does the cigarette say to you?” I asked Harrison.

“He's nervous. He could be trying to calm himself with a smoke.”

I stared at the fingers. The cigarette dangled loosely, the way it might if the person had a cocktail in the other hand.

“That doesn't look like nervousness to me,” I said.

Harrison nodded in agreement. The kid shifted in the chair and cleared his throat to get our attention.

“You see something else?” I asked.

He stared at the screen as if trying to decipher an image of a distant planet. “It's just an idea.”

“Go on.”

“It's not lit. When my father quit smoking, he'd hold a cigarette like that for hours sometimes.”

Harrison looked at me in surprise. “The first meeting with Hazzard, when he was standing outside watching the fire approach.”

“He had a cigarette in his fingers,” I said.

Harrison nodded. “It was unlit.”

“Would you put that image on a disk?” I asked, and got up from my chair.

The kid nodded and slipped a disk into the computer.

“It's a murder case, isn't it?” he said.

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

He looked us both over and smiled. I got the odd sensation that I was being dismantled and put back together like I was part of an equation.

“Isn't it obvious?” he said.

A flash of understanding way beyond his years played out in his eyes, then he turned back to the computer.

Obvious
, I thought silently to myself.

We carried death in our eyes, the way we moved, our language, even our dreams. And the more we tried to disguise it, the more obvious it became.

“Yes,” I said. “That's exactly what it is.”

37

Outside Harrison and I sat in the car for a moment, neither of us saying what we were now clearly thinking. A cop killed my brother, Detective Williams, and Dana Courson. The same cop who set my father up for a series of murders he didn't commit. And the only proof we had was a file that no longer existed, and an image of an unlit cigarette on a security camera.

“What do you want to do?” Harrison asked.

“You mean short of taking Hazzard's confession?”

In the rearview mirror I saw the same dark sedan that had followed us pull away from the curb and drive toward us.

“I think we must have hit a nerve,” I said.

I lowered my hand to my waist and rested it on the handle of the Glock as the sedan approached from the rear, pulled alongside, and stopped. The tinted passenger-side window slowly opened, and I saw Cross sitting behind the wheel.

“I don't like being followed,” I said.

“We're on the same side, Lieutenant. I'm just covering our backs. We need to talk.”

“Something wrong with the phone?”

Cross nodded. “You bet. There's a parking garage up ahead on the left. Follow me.”

I glanced at Harrison, then did as Cross said, following him into the dark garage.

We wound our way up to the third level and parked alongside Cross. The rest of the level was nearly empty. He slid across to the passenger seat and rolled down the window.

“You were outside the courthouse,” I said.

“I'm not the only one.”

“LAPD.”

Cross nodded. “I don't make a habit of sitting in parking garages.”

His face was lined with exhaustion. The hair under the baseball cap he wore was streaked with sweat.

“You tell me what you think you know, and I'll tell you if you're on the right track,” Cross said.

“IA investigated Hazzard for the killing of a suspect when you were both in patrol; you were his partner.”

Cross nodded. “He was cleared.”

“Did you ever see the final report?” I asked.

“No, I was a rookie. Back then you did your job and shut up.”

“You were questioned as a witness.”

“I was handed a statement and told to sign it. I never even read it.”

“What happened?”

Cross shook his head. “I don't know, I wasn't there.”

“I think the document that Victoria Fisher found had something to do with that investigation.”

He nodded.

“We need to see it,” I said.

Cross suppressed a nervous laugh. “It's gone,
whoosh
, into the ether. It never existed. It won't help, forget it.”