Terminal (A Lomax & Biggs Mystery Book 5) (7 page)

“And what did Rubsam and Apovian say?”

“They think I’m a crazy old man.”

“It’s hard to argue with that,” Terry said. “But what was their official response?”

“‘Not enough probable cause for a warrant.’ I went ballistic.
Probable cause
? What the hell do they need—a Titleist logo imprinted on the victim’s brain? They blew me off and told me the case is wrapped up.”

“And what would you like us to do?”

“Unwrap it,” Eli said. “If you don’t mind another dead body on your plate, I’d appreciate it if you looked into this one.”

“After all the nice things you said about me and Mike this morning, we’d look like total jerks if we turned you down,” Terry said.

Eli shrugged. “That may have crossed my mind when I was buttering you up.”

“It worked,” Terry said. “We’ll do it.”

“Thank you. I’ll get you Yancy’s paperwork.” He started to leave and then turned back. “One more favor,” he said. “Mike, you’re good with computers. Mine is acting up. Can you give it a quick look?”

“He’s better at tech stuff than I am,” I said, looking over at Terry.

“No, no, you do it,” Terry said. “I still haven’t bought Marilyn an anniversary present. Why don’t I meet you back at the office in an hour?”

He left, and Eli and I started down the hall towards his office. “What’s wrong with your computer?” I said.

“Not a damn thing, Mike. What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing.”

“Then what the hell were you doing in Doug Heller’s office yesterday?”

CHAPTER 14

I’D BEEN TOTALLY
sandbagged, and the best I could come back with was, “Me? What are you talking about?”

“I may be a crazy old man, but I pay attention to details. You told me last week that you had your annual department physical. Then it turns out yesterday you were back there again. Under ordinary circumstances I would never have known, but when your name and rank are at the top of a murder/suicide file, the news is definitely going to cross my desk. So let me repeat the question—why were you back in Doug Heller’s office yesterday if you passed the physical last week?”

“What happened to the crotchety old rabbi who gave up his congregation because he hated dealing with other people’s problems?”

“Those people were whiners. This is different. You’re not complaining. I’m meddling. Answer the question.”

“I don’t really have any answers. Doug didn’t like my white blood cell count, so he called me in and helped himself to some more.”

“And that’s all he said?”

“I was trying to pry more information out of him when the bullets started flying, and I had to run down the hall and watch a man blow his head off. After that, I didn’t really give a shit. I just let him draw some more blood, then Terry and I made
shiva
calls
to the widows of the two guys you just cut open.”

We got to Eli’s office, and he shut the door behind us. “Did he tell you the white blood count number?”

“He called me this morning. I went from 18,000 to 22,000. As long as you’re meddling, do you mind telling me what’s the big deal?”

“Over ten thousand is a red flag. Twenty-two thousand is sinister. He’s going to tell you to see a hematologist.”

“He already did. I have an appointment at five o’clock with a Dr. Abordo.”

“I know Herand Abordo. He’s top drawer. He’ll take some more blood and do a bone marrow biopsy.”

“What’s he looking for?”

“He’s checking you for the Philadelphia chromosome. It’s pathognomonic.”

“Path… what?”

“Pathognomonic. It means characteristic of one particular disease. Sometimes your doc can run a test, and something will come up, but it can translate to any one of a dozen different conditions. The Philadelphia chromosome is different. If that shows up, then Heller will know exactly why your white blood cell count is out of whack.”

“And what’s that?”

“I already told you more than I should have. Why don’t you wait for the results of the bone marrow biopsy?” He handed me a folder. “Here’s the file on Wade Yancy.”

I handed it back to him. “First things first, Eli. What does it mean if I have this Philadelphia chromosome?”

“Oy,” he said, letting it trail off into a long sigh. “It would be an indicator that you have CML.”

“You’re making it sound harmless—like this episode of
Sesame Street
is brought to you by the letters
C
,
M
, and
L
. Give me the nasty medical terms that go along with them.”

“He’s checking you for Chronic Myeloid Leukemia.”

I felt my knees buckle, and I sat down. “He thinks I have leukemia?”

“He doesn’t
think
you have anything. He’s trying to rule out CML. But even if you tested positive, it’s not the kind of leukemia that means a death sentence. It can smolder on for years without presenting, and if you get symptoms, there are treatments.”

“You’re trying to make it sound like it’s the fun, good leukemia that all the popular kids get, but I’m not buying it.” I picked up Wade Yancy’s file. “Tick tock. I guess I better get to this in a hurry.”

“Cut the theatrics, Mike, and listen to me. You haven’t been diagnosed with leukemia—good, bad, or otherwise—so do me a favor. Don’t throw yourself off that bridge until you get to it.”

“Do
me
a favor, Doc. Don’t mention this to anybody—especially Terry.”

“Understood. Just tell me one thing—how do you feel?”

“This little talk of ours has scared the shit out of me, but the truth is I feel great. Best I’ve felt in a long time.”

“Good. Then don’t worry,” he told me.

What he didn’t tell me was that feeling great didn’t rule out Chronic Myeloid Leukemia.

CHAPTER 15

I DROVE BACK
to the station, grateful for the alone time. I kept running the letters
CML
through my head, but mostly I focused on
L
. Leukemia.

There was only one cure. I hit the number-one button on my CD player, and kicked the volume up. I took a deep breath and smiled. It’s hard to be bummed when George Harrison is singing “Here Comes The Sun.” “What did Eli want?” Terry asked me as soon as I got back to the office. “And if you have any respect for me, please don’t attempt to perpetuate that hocus-pocus about computer repair. I have a graduate degree from the Acme School of Bullshit Detection, so you have two choices. You can either tell me to go fuck myself, or you can tell me the truth.”

I didn’t hesitate. I told him the truth. All of it—which wasn’t a lot.

“Does Diana know?”

“She knows I was at the doc’s, but I played it down. No sense getting her crazy till some of the blanks get filled in.”

He nodded. It wasn’t judgmental. Just a nod.

“Thanks for telling me,” he said. “Let me know if you need anything. Y’know—like time off. Or a kidney. Whatever.”

We looked over the file on Wade Yancy. The accident report was textbook, and except for Eli’s protestations, there was nothing to indicate foul play.

We put the phone on speaker, called the West LA Division, and asked for either Detective Apovian or Rubsam. We got Apovian, and as soon we told him what we wanted, he got his hackles up.

“What do you know about the victim?” he demanded. “Did Eli give you anything besides a list of broken bones and a bunch of medical gobbledygook?”

“It’s a coroner’s report,” Terry said. “Medical gobbledygook is a requirement. Why don’t you tell us what you know.”

“Wade Yancy was a honcho at a drug company—Vice President of Brand Development, or some fancy title like that. Basically he was in marketing. The company makes the drugs, Yancy was in charge of peddling them. He made good money—more than enough to buy top-shelf liquor, and apparently he drank his fair share of it. He had a wife, two daughters, belonged to a church, and as far as we could tell, he had no enemies. Everybody liked him. Zero motive.”

“What about life insurance?”

“His wife gets a lump sum equal to about three years of his salary,” Apovian said. “From my experience, nobody kills the goose that’s been laying the golden eggs.”

“What can you tell us about the driver?” I said.

“His name is Bruce Bower. He’s an accountant. He didn’t know the victim, and there’s no record the vic knew him. They lived a few miles apart, but it was like they were from two different planets. That night, Bower went out for ice cream with his old lady. The road was dark, Yancy was sloshed, he bent down to pick up some dog shit, and you don’t have to be a detective to figure out the rest. Road karma. It happens about five thousand times a year across this great land of ours, and Los Angeles is proud to contribute our fair share of the body count.”

“Eli thinks he got whacked on the head with a golf club,” Terry said.

“So he said.”

“Did you look for a set of clubs in Bower’s house or his car?”

“Not yet,” Apovian said. “My partner and I decided to wait for Search Without Probable Cause Day. Let me give you guys a reality check. Everything’s a homicide with Eli, but as far as I can tell, the only connection between the driver and the victim was three thousand pounds of Japanese car. There’s nothing in the accident report to suggest that we keep beating this dead horse.

“On the other hand, we have a thirty-two-year-old widow whose seventy-five-year-old husband
accidentally
drowned in his own pool, leaving behind a twenty-million-dollar estate; a pair of gangbangers who were standing on the wrong side of a drive-by; a liquor store owner who thought he could stop an armed robbery with a baseball bat; not to mention a shitload of paperwork from cases we already solved, but refuse to go away. So to answer your question, Detectives, no, we don’t have the time to find out if Bruce Bower plays golf. If you do, you have our blessings to have at it.”

He let out a long, loud exhale.

“Sorry,” he said. “You caught me on a bad day. The captain put me and Rubsam on a double shift, and I slept on a cot at the station last night. I’m two hundred and forty-seven days away from pulling the pin, and I’m hoping my wife and kids will recognize me when I retire. I’m not usually this big a dick. For the record, I’ve never bagged a case because my plate was too full. I think Eli is wrong. Everything I see screams accident, but I’ll have a uniform run the Yancy file over to you. We good?”

“We’re good,” I said, and we hung up.

“Eli is wrong about one thing,” Terry said. “This guy’s not an asshole. He’s just another double-shift cop trying to work a triple-shift job.”

CHAPTER 16

“APOVIAN CALLED IT,”
Terry said after we’d gone through the file on Wade Yancy. “There’s nothing in here that looks like evidence of a crime.”

“You think Eli got it wrong?”

Terry shrugged. “It’s possible. It’s also possible that Bruce Bower got away with murder, but we can’t prove it, because we can’t search his house, and if we showed up and started grilling him, the murder weapon—if there ever was one—would disappear faster than you can say ‘Jimmy Hoffa.’”

“So what do we do?”

“We decide which one of us is going to tell Eli that there is no warrant in his future. I vote for you.”

“Thank you for your support, Detective Biggs. And I in turn vote for you.”

“What are you guys voting for?” It was Muller, our resident geek.

“We were just trying to decide which one of us should tell Kilcullen he’s depriving the squad of three of our five most important food groups,” Terry said.

“Do you believe that?” Muller said. “The man just unilaterally banned sugar.”

“I don’t know if I can function without my daily Skittles fix,” Terry said. “And this is just the beginning. Who knows what
he’ll take away next—drugs, alcohol, Internet porn? What do you want, kid?”

“I’m here to tell you guys that your cop instincts are bordering on brilliant.”

“Old news,” Terry said. “You’ll have to be more specific.”

“I went through the LUDs on Cal Bernstein’s cell phone, and guess what—he made multiple calls to a burner phone.”

“A burner?” Terry said. “Dude, you’ve just upgraded Lomax’s hit man theory from dumb-as-shit to not-as-stupid-as-he-made-it-sound.”

“Don’t jump the gun,” Muller said. “A lot of regular law-abiding citizens carry burner phones.”

“And a lot of smart computer cops know how to trace burner phones,” Terry said. “Did you come up with anything?”

“The only thing I came up with is that whoever owned this phone knew how to cover his tracks.”

“Which means Bernstein was calling an untraceable burner phone, which is definitely not what a lot of regular law-abiding citizens carry.”

“That’s why I said your instincts are bordering on brilliant. The problem is I don’t know how to find out who owns the burner.”

“Try calling it and leave a message,” Terry said. “Something crafty, like, ‘Hi, this is LAPD. Could you please stop by our office and help us wrap up a homicide investigation?’”

“Who did Bernstein call the day of the murder?” I asked.

“He made six calls. Three traceable and three to the burner.”

“He was probably checking in with the guy who hired him,” Terry said. “Who are the other three?”

“One to his daughter in Charlotte, North Carolina, and another one to his son in New York City. Both of them were under ten seconds, like maybe he just left a quick voicemail. But the last call he made went on for sixteen minutes.”

“The security cameras in the parking lot caught Bernstein sitting in his car for eighteen minutes,” I said. “Who did he call?
His wife?”

Muller looked down at his phone log. “No. It was a local number. Belongs to a guy in Brentwood. Bruce Bower.”

Terry and I looked at each other. He picked up the folder that Apovian had just sent us. The entire Wade Yancy file wasn’t much thicker than the envelope it came in.

“
Bruce Bower
?” he asked, reading the name off the top page. “Bernstein’s last call was to Bruce Bower? B-O-W-E-R?”

Muller nodded.

“Congratulations, Boy Wonder,” Terry said. “I think you may have just stumbled onto the answer to a rabbi’s prayers.”