Red Man Down (9 page)

‘I think she made that part up,’ Oscar said. ‘I don’t remember losing any gloves.’

‘Nice leather ones? I bet they cost a packet.’ As she made the turn onto South Stone, she said, ‘What I
can’t
understand is how you two ever got started.’ She was thinking about the contempt on Angela’s face when she thanked him for lunch. ‘I couldn’t see any chemistry there at all.’

‘Well … she was maybe thirty pounds lighter in those days. And the night we went dancing she had on a low-necked dress, and, you know, she did have a very nice rack.’

‘God,’ Sarah said, parking the Impala, ‘I had to ask.’

I
nside the station, walking toward the elevator, Oscar said, ‘I’m going to write up my report of Angela’s interview right away. Can I get you to check it before I turn it in?’

‘Sure,’ Sarah said. She left him there and headed for the stairs. These days, her crowded home life often forced her to skip workouts. She was trying to compensate by climbing every set of stairs she encountered.

Ollie Greenaway, walking into the lobby as she reached the bottom step, called out, ‘Ah, there goes the Queen of the Risers, climbing again.’ Like all her mates in the investigative division, he thought her stair-climbing habits were amusingly retro, something like canning pickles or spinning one’s own yarn. ‘Hang on, Sarah, I’ll walk up with you. We’ll tighten up those glutes together, by golly.’ He reached her in a few long strides and clattered upstairs with her, chuckling.

‘You’re in an unusually good mood,’ Sarah said. ‘You just find a clue or something?’

‘Not yet, but maybe any minute now. I just got a message to call Moses Greenberg ASAP.’

‘Oh, well, he always wants everything ten minutes ago. Don’t tell me he’s changing his opinion about the Lacey killing.’

‘Beats me. Why do you care?’

‘I’d just like to see us get that poor Spurling kid off the hook. Less than a year out of the academy and he has to shoot a guy? Pretty tough.’

‘Aw, come on, Sarah, you can’t go around feeling sympathy for this bunch of yahoos, you’ll wear yourself out. The thing to do is find out what the Spurling kid’s worst faults are and keep telling yourself it serves him right.’

Reaching the top step, Sarah stopped for a deep breath. ‘You know,’ she said, still thinking of what Cifuentes had said about Angela, ‘amazingly enough, I believe that’s only the second worst thing I’ve heard in the last ten minutes.’

‘You see? What other workplace affords this level of amusement?’ Ollie went on to his cubicle, smiling benignly.

Passing Delaney’s open door, Sarah saw that Banjo Bailey, the pint-size firearms and toolmarks criminalist from the crime lab on Miracle Mile, was curled in a chair in front of the sergeant’s desk. He moonlighted in a bluegrass band and groomed himself to look appropriate in bib overalls and loggers’ boots. Evidently he thought the lab could tolerate a few idiosyncrasies but the band needed validation. Right now he was caressing his soul patch and handlebar mustache as he read from a report form, looking like some unlikely cross between Santa’s helper and Mephistopheles.

Whatever he was saying appeared to have Delaney’s full attention. Hoping to slide on by and let the day’s commotion cover her tracks with Cifuentes, Sarah kept her head down and avoided eye contact. Delaney saw her anyway out of a corner of his eye, and waved her inside.

‘Hey, Sarah, where you been?’ Luckily he was too full of his own fresh news to wait for an answer. ‘Come in and listen to this. You’re going to like what Banjo’s got to say.’

‘The three bullets from Spurlock’s Glock, no surprises there,’ Banjo said, reprising quickly for Sarah. ‘They were all pretty beat up from going through the wire thief. But because he was standing when they hit, none of them dug into the asphalt – just laid on top till we picked them up. So I’m going to get pictures good enough to show they’re our ammo and they all match.

‘The fourth bullet, the one the crime-scene techs dug out of the edge of the street – it was just a fantastic piece of luck the way it landed, right in the middle of a pothole patch that the street crews had just finished. Nice soft tar, mostly. That bullet looks like it was preserved in a bowl of Jello. I don’t get to look at much used ammo like this, looka here.’ He showed her the picture he’d brought along.

‘I mean, it’s like the textbook example for lands and grooves. Can you see the right-hand twist?’

‘Plain as day,’ Sarah said, and passed it to Delaney.

Banjo would have no problem, he said, showing that this bullet came out of the barrel of the Sig-Sauer the suspect had used – ‘I guess I’m supposed to say allegedly used, huh?’ – to shoot at the cop.

‘Well, but you’ve tested the gun, right? You know it was fired?’

‘Yes. The gun that was found at the scene was fired. So I guess we can dispense with the “allegedly” nonsense, huh? But I’m curious … the Sig’s a surprisingly elegant weapon for this bozo, isn’t it? Your average wire thief, most of them are losers, just trying to raise a few bucks for their next fix.’

‘But this wasn’t your average wire thief; this was Ed Lacey.’ Delaney reminded Banjo about the shocking two-year-old case, the role-model officer turned suddenly into a hapless screw-up who wrecked his squad car and got fired from the TPD. ‘The Sig’s a popular weapon amongst expert shooters like Lacey used to be. He probably kept one for his personal use after he left the police.’

Probably the only thing he saved out of all that wreckage
,
Sarah thought but didn’t say. She wasn’t going to admit to knowing what she knew about the Angela-keeps-all divorce, unless she had to. If Delaney found out she’d done Cifuentes’ interview for him, he’d be pissed. And really, why did he need to know? They’d brought back the info, shouldn’t that be good enough?

‘An ex-cop, I’ll be damned.’ Banjo curled his mustache ends, thinking. ‘That makes the other thing I wondered about seem even harder to explain.’ He curled into a smaller ball and twisted the end of his long braid.

Watching Banjo turning himself into a sofa cushion, Delaney lifted his eyebrows to Sarah, shrugged, turned back to Banjo and said, ‘
What?
’

‘Well, see … the angle …’ He drew them a diagram on a piece of scratch paper. ‘All the reports say he fell straight down from where he was shooting, here beside the pickup. But if that’s where he fired from, and he’s such a crack shot, how come the bullet ends up way out here in the mended pothole?’ He drew a dotted line across the driveway to the edge of the street. ‘I mean, not even close.’

Delaney did some hemming and scratching and finally stated the obvious. ‘He was in a hurry, of course.’

‘Not as much as the guy he was shooting at. He had the advantage of knowing what he was going to do.’

‘He’s right, boss,’ Sarah said. ‘Spurling thought he was making a routine arrest until his suspect pulled a gun out of a most unlikely place.’

‘Yet he still put three bullets in the kill zone,’ Banjo said. ‘Very impressive. Even granted Spurling’s better than average—’

‘Which he sure as hell is,’ Delaney said.

‘But even so, how come the man who used to teach kids like Spurling how to do that can’t come even close to that level now?’

Delaney tortured his ear a while longer before he said, ‘Meth takes you down fast.’

‘Uh-huh,’ Banjo said. ‘Well, think about it.’ He unwound himself and got up. ‘I’ll add this report to the case file before close of business today.’

‘Very good,’ Delaney said, and as Banjo walked out, he said, ‘Sarah, how are you doing with the background checks? You got enough evidence yet to support a claim of PTSD, or some such reason why Lacey went nuts?’

‘I’ve done several interesting interviews that all seem to contradict each other in some ways. If it’s OK with you, I still know some of the trainers at the academy, and I’d like to run down there and see what they say. It won’t take long and I’ve got time right now.’

‘Fine. Go ahead.’ Was he cool? Did he watch her curiously as she went out?
Now don’t start getting paranoid over this one little thing.
She hurried to her own cubicle, feeling slightly wired.
A few yoga stretches to chill out and I’ll be ready to go.

Her email dinged with a new message. Checking, she found Oscar’s account of ‘his’ interview with Angela. Except for substituting his name for hers at the beginning of most questions, it was accurate, but awkwardly worded in spots and with a couple of mistakes in punctuation. She fixed those places and sent it back.

Two minutes later, he walked in on the last of her stretches and stood by her desk like a good schoolboy waiting for teacher. Sarah unwound and said, ‘What?’

Oscar moved her pencil mug nearer the lamp and lined up the stapler precisely with the edge of her desk. ‘I saw you in Delaney’s office. You haven’t told him we did that interview together, have you?’

‘No, of course not. Will you leave my desk alone and quit looking guilty? It’s not a crime for detectives to co-operate!’

He went away looking worried, but at least he went away. Sarah tucked her fresh notebook into her belt and trotted out of the building, past detectives tapping at keyboards. They still called it ‘catching up on paperwork,’ although every word of it was out in the ether and with luck would stay there and never cause ink to soil paper.

Sarah had trained at the old academy on West Silverbell, which at that time (before the recent now-busted housing boom) had seemed ‘way out in the boonies.’ The new school wasn’t just around the corner, either; it had co-opted a nice big site on South Wilmot to share with the fire department. Handsomely appointed and proud of its stature as a training facility for smaller towns statewide, it boasted views of two big prisons and the miles of open desert many inmates probably dreamed of escaping to – but electronic surveillance and razor wire had relegated prison escapes to the stuff of dreams and old Elmore Leonard novels.

She had phoned on the way and landed a coffee date with Yuri, one of the driving instructors. He met her in the lobby, grinning all over his little pointed face. His last name was Kuznetzov; his parents were Russian immigrants. His features greatly resembled Vladimir Putin, but because of his cheerful expression and frequent smiles people often spent days after they met him asking themselves,
Who does he remind me of?

‘I’ve got half an hour till my next class,’ he said, leading her to the break room. ‘But Charlie’s out on the field with the other group. Want to see what a fancy setup we got now?’ He led her along a shining hall to a big window. Across a wide pebbled field divided into long lanes by hundreds of orange traffic cones, a school car with two passengers on the front seat was driving fast along a straightaway. While Sarah watched, the driver, who had been one second late starting the sharp turn at the end of the row, had to watch the orange cones flying as he plowed them down.

And then you so want to quit and swear
, Sarah remembered.
But the instructor is already yelling, ‘No, no, don’t slow down! Go right on to the cul-de-sac!’
She watched as the car drove to the other end of the field, where the wide, curved track led along the slope, till it debauched abruptly at the other end onto a flat where two side-by-side lights flashed alternately red and green. The student had half a second to decide which lane to take, and about twice that much to stop the car before he hurled them both over the speed bump.

‘Handsomer than when I did it,’ Sarah said, ‘but essentially the brake-squealer hasn’t changed at all, has it? How has your neck survived all those quick stops for so many years?’

‘Ah, well,’ Yuri chuckled, leading her back toward the coffee, ‘you remember how you all used to call me “The Mule”?’

‘I didn’t know you knew that.’

‘Oh, sure. They still call me that behind my back and I guess they must be onto something – my neck’s OK.’

‘It’s just … it’s so hard at first, it felt like we had to have somebody to blame or we couldn’t bear it. Although come to think of it, all the way through, it’s just as hard. But you get used to it.’

‘Yup. You know that place in the Bible where it says, “Many are called but few are chosen”? I bet those old monks didn’t know they were describing a police training academy, did they?’

‘That’s one of the things you don’t get used to: the ones who try so hard and still don’t make it. We’d put in those hellish long days and come back to the dorm, and somebody would be kicking the wall and swearing because he just got news he flunked a test the second time. One day it was Annie, the best friend I’d made in the course, packing her bag and trying to hide the fact that she was crying.’

‘And then about halfway, it changes, doesn’t it?’

‘You see yourself surviving where others fail, and you start to think you might be one of the “few who are chosen.” I asked my mother once, “Did I change at the academy?” because, you know, so many things felt different. And she said, “Are you kidding? Everything about you changed – even the way you drive a car.”’

‘Well, I should hope so. That’s the whole point, isn’t it?’

‘Mom says cops drive as if they own the street.’

‘Well, they do, in a way. Have to, to do the job.’

‘Mmm. You heard about what happened to Ed Lacey?’

Briefly looking as depressed as the President of Russia, Yuri said, ‘Damn shame. Everybody’s talking about it out here, of course. We’re kind of—’ He ducked his head in what she remembered was a characteristic gesture. ‘It sounds kind of stuck up to say it, I guess, but we think of the training crew as kind of the elite within what’s already a special group, you know?’

‘Well, you are. We all know that. Did you ever see any signs, while he worked with you, that Ed was overstressed, or … going to pieces in some way?’

‘Absolutely not. That’s why there’s so much talk – we just can’t believe … He was good at his job. Sure, there’s pressure, we need to show good numbers, but … Ed seemed to enjoy his work; he was proud of what good cops we turn out.’

‘Delaney said he was solid as a rock.’

‘I agree. I can’t even guess at what happened. Well, I better get ready.’ He got up. ‘Take a look at the firing range on your way out, it’s got all the bells and whistles.’