Red Light (42 page)

This one's for you,
Mike.

• • •

Thirty minutes later
she stood in front of the door to Aubrey Whittaker’s apartment. The ocean air
was damp and cold against her face. She closed her eyes for a moment and
imagined the scene again. The visitor standing in the dull yellow porch light,
the knock on the door. Aubrey looks out. Seeing someone for whom she's willing
to open the door. She opens it. Her look of surprise. The muffled
wwhhpp
of the silenced gun as she falls and he follows her in, steps around her, drags
her out of the way…Inside, Merci shut the door and looked out the peephole: an
exaggerated yellow ellipse, Christmas lights twinkling in the great illusory
distance.
She saw him. She recognized him. She knew him. She opened to the
door to him.

Merci hit the
entryway light, then the kitchen lights, then the living-room lights. She
looked through the blinds at the ocean, the black surge breaking into white on
the beach, the lamps of a squid boat forming a tiny patch of light on the sea.

Back in the kitchen,
Merci went to the little breakfast bar, lifted the cordless phone and listened.
Still on. She played the messages on the recorder. There were three new ones
since she'd last heard them: one a recorded sales pitch from an insurance
agent; one from a dentist's receptionist, confirming a three o'clock
appointment for the next day; one from Bobby at the Cadillac dealership with
information about scheduled maintenance.

She turned over the
receiver unit, saw nothing unusual. Then she knelt beside the bar and looked
up. The sheetrock was visible where the tiles ended, an eighteen-inch overhang
that ran for probably five feet. Nothing.

Another
line?

In the bedroom, Merci
pushed away the bed to find the phone jack. And she found what she was looking
for, a small box with one tan line plugged into the phone jack, another one
running down the wall to the floor, where it disappeared into the carpet. She
pulled up the carpet and followed the line to the sliding glass door of the bedroom
deck. It went outside through a very small, neat hole. Recently drilled she
saw: There was still drywall dust on the plywood flooring.

On the deck outside,
leaning over and using her flashlight, she could see the line as it traversed
down the side of the building toward the alley.

A
minute later she was in that alley, shaking a little in the cold December air
as she traced the beam of her flashlight down the line. It disappeared behind a
downspout that ran from the rain gutter to the ground. She knelt again. She
trained the beam on the bottom of the spout. It made a ninety degree turn just
before it hit a planter overflowing with big margarita daisies. Merci reached
through the branches and put her fingers around the back of the spout. She felt
around for just a second, then brought out the end of the tan line.

Two
jacks.

For a tape recorder,
she thought. A voice-activated tape recorder wired to the phone line. You could
check it just by driving up and parking here in the alley. Take the tape. Put in
a fresh one. Drive away. It would take less than one minute.

Merci shivered as a
cold puff of wind blew a swirl of mist at her. A drop of water fell from the
roof and ticked to the cement.

Aubrey,
she thought, you were never quite alone.

She went around to
the front of the building and climbed the stairs. She stood at the front door
and imagined the scene again. This time without Mike. She substituted a generic
male, putting some nice clothes and a pleasant face on him to make her opening
the door more likely.

Question: If a
stranger had knocked on Aubrey's door, why had she opened it?

Because he had a good
line? He'd have to, because Aubrey Whitaker would have been anything but
gullible with regard to a man, late at night, knocking on the door of her home.
But Alexander Coates, concerned neighbor who could differentiate between
footsteps, hadn’t heard any conversation at all.

No,
she thought: Try again.

She
went inside, shut the door and looked through the peephole

Why?

Why
did you open it?

She looked through
the peephole again, and she thought of Hess, what he'd told her about seeing,
and she knew.

She
knew.

The light wasn't
on. He'd unscrewed the bulb before he knocked. She'd seen only the shape of a
man. Mike had just left after their dinner. She thought it was him, coming back
for something he'd forgotten and opened the door. Ten minutes later, after the
struggle, on his way out, he screwed the light back in, so we'd assume she had
recognized her caller.

Shivering
again, her legs unsteady, she went back inside the apartment and turned off the
porch light. Then she hustled down the stairs to her car and got her
crime-scene kit from the trunk. She stood in front of Aubrey's door again and
waited for the bulb to cool. She pulled on a pair of fresh latex gloves and
worked off the top the light fixture. It was a glass hexagon with a peaked
brass lid and a solid ball at the top. There was no screw to hold it; it had
just been set in place. All she had to do was tilt it up, lift it by one
corner, and set it into a paper evidence bag.

With the fixture lid out
of the way, she reached up and in, finding the neck of the bulb, way down by
the metal. Still warm. She held it firmly and twisted. Eight quarter-turns
later it was loose and light in her hand, and she set it into another bag.

• • •

She called Zamorra from
her car. The cell was patchy and he was hard to hear. Janine was still in the
coma, she thought he said.

She told him what
she'd found at Whittaker's, how perfectly it could fit into a frame. Maybe Mike
was right. She didn't say it but she wondered if he could be innocent.
Innocent.
The idea moved around inside her like an immense blessing. A
blessing as large as her willingness to feel it.

"But
Merci, who put the nix on the Title 3 wiretap?"

"Mike
did."

"That makes me
wonder. He'd put a nix on it all right, if his private intercept was already
installed."

"Think about
what I found, Paul. Someone with a line into Whittaker's apartment could learn
enough to frame Mike. And all he had to do was unscrew that bug light before he
knocked. Easy. She'd think it was Mike, coming for something."

He was silent for a
minute. The cell signal hissed and popped. "It's good to hope,
Merci."

"I'm
going to call you in one hour."

"I'll be here."

Back home she checked Tim
and brought the monitor back from her dad's room. Clark didn't even stir.

She poured a tall
Scotch on ice and walked the house in stocking feet as quietly as she could,
listening to the creak of the floorboards and the groanings of the old furnace.
She called Zamorra but got a busy signal. Tried again and another. Once
more—still busy.

She
thought about Mike.

She
told herself not to think about Mike.

If he was guilty, her
world would be torn apart—it already had be But if he was
innocent,
her
world would be torn apart in ways she hadn’t yet even imagined.

Stop.
Rest. Sleep.

Instead, she paced.
Once around the house again, staring out windows at the orange trees and the
cold winter sky.

By midnight she was
in bed, lights on, staring up at the ceiling unable to sleep. She banished all
thoughts of Mike, all thoughts of Bailey case. She banished all the clatter of
lies and half-truths assumptions and contradictions. She thought of Tim Hess
and Tim, and a pink house on a beach in Mexico. Little Tim was trying to catch
sand crabs. Merci was standing a few yards away and when she looked past her
son she could see his father on the porch in a hammock, reading a book. He
looked up and waved.

And finally she fell
backward into the black.

• • •

At 4
a.m
.
she awoke in a sour sweat. A disturbing dream. In it, she was standing in
Mike's backyard, by the kennel gate, asking him the key. Mike held a silenced
.45 at his side, kind of hiding it, like he was ashamed to be seen with it. But
Mike was not Mike, he was her father.

She
sat up on the bed as the dream blended into recent memory.

The
memory became a scene she could watch: She gets the food, she goes to the
backyard and realizes she doesn't have the key.

Damn, I forgot the kennel key.

Something
wrong then, but what was it?

She pictured Evan
standing with her out by the kennels, the light shining down on his freckled
face. He looked so small, huddled in the duster.

Wasn't that a gray sport coat he was wearing under it?

She
checked her notebook entry after Zamorra's initial findings from the San Diego
lab.
Dark gray, purple and sea-green fibers in
it.. .
in the struggle, the garment got caught on the corner of
the drawer.

She checked the
Whittaker file and confirmed that identical fibers had gone missing from the
lab, along with the fingerprint cards from the kitchen.

When she pictured
Evan O'Brien standing in the light of Mike's backyard, helping her feed the
dogs, she saw his dark gray sport coat under the duster. Green and purple
accent fibers? She couldn't say. But was Evan wearing that coat the night they
processed Whittaker's apartment?

No. She could
remember him that night, just over a week ago, in his Sheriff Department
windbreaker, jeans and athletic shoes. No sport coat on Evan.

But there were
probably two million gray sport coats in Southern California.

She sat on the
living-room couch and closed her eyes. Back to Mike's place again. The memory
was still bothering her so she looked again.

She carries the bag
of kibble from the pantry to the door. She hikes the bag onto one knee, using
her free hand to work the slider. She steps into the cool canyon night. She
goes toward the yapping dogs. She realizes she's forgotten the key.

Damn, I forgot the
kennel key.

Mike comes back with
the key.

Evan comes back with
the key.

Something wrong,
still, but what?

She asked herself why
Evan O'Brien would kill Whittaker, and pin the murder on Mike? No matter how
she turned the question, it didn't make sense. What profit was in it for him?
What had Mike McNally ever done to Evan O'Brien?

It was five-thirty
when her phone rang again.

"Merci, it's
Zamorra. I'm still at the hospital, but I got the CAL-ID run from San Diego a
couple of hours ago. I had to do some follow-up to make even half-sense of it.
Ready?"

"Shoot,
Paul."

"The
prints in Whittaker's kitchen belong to Jim O'Brien. I had them run the cards
again—same answer. "She said nothing.

"I talked to the
San Bernardino Medical Examiner. O'Brien's suicide wasn't mysterious. The
identification was easy and unquestioned. A routine case. He killed himself.
But last week he was in Aubrey Whitaker's apartment."

Her thoughts were
racing, but she slowed them down, tried to them one at a time.

"Give
me the case number on the suicide," she said quietly. " And the name
of the first officer on scene."

• •

It took her half an
hour to track down Deputy Sean Carver of the Bernardino Sheriff Department. His
voice was young and a little slurred as he explained that he'd just gotten up
for work.

He clearly remembered
the Jim O'Brien scene. He'd met Jim a couple of times at Sheriff Department
functions, and O'Brien struck him a boozy old-timer just waiting out the days.

"He called us
before he pulled the trigger," said Carver. "So I pretty much knew
what I'd find. It was bad. They're all bad, I guess."

"No
doubt in your mind it was suicide?"

"None. The
coroner confirmed it. O'Brien had gunshot residue on his hand, prints all over
the gun. Been drinking, too. Lots."

Mercy thought for a
moment. "Nothing at all out of the ordinary? Nothing?"

Silence.
Then a sigh.

"All
right," he said.

"Okay,"
she agreed—to what she didn't know.

"One
thing. It's been bothering me for five years."

"Unbother
yourself with it."

"We got there
just before the Coroner's Investigation Team and Fire and Rescue people.
O'Brien was dead—no doubt of that. We didn’t disturb the scene or the body,
except to see if he was still alive. Then I walked the house. Just a house. A
house that wasn't used much. But in one of the bedrooms there was an envelope
leaning up against the pillow. It was my first year on patrol. I was young. I
didn't know if envelope was related to the suicide or not. So I left it where
it was. Didn't touch it. Went by the book. I told my partner about it, and he
looked at it and said to tell the Watch Commander. I told the Watch Commander
about it, I told the coroner's guys about it, I told the Homicide guys about
it."