The Lost Witness (38 page)

A moment passed. Those first jittery peeks inside the darkened apartment. Then the team quickly filed in with their weapons raised.

Lena glanced at Rhodes, instinctively moving toward the stairs. Listening, watching. The waiting tearing her up inside.

After five long minutes, Thomas reappeared in the doorway and waved them up. Lena’s first thought as she tore up the steps was that Cava had been killed before they got here. That the word
had been out all morning that they located him, and that no one involved at any level could afford to take the chance that he might talk. When she reached the front door, Thomas pulled off his
helmet like the operation was over and gave her a look.

“You need to see this,” he said. “Follow me.”

Her heart almost stopped beating. She entered the darkened apartment, noting the sparse furnishings as she and Rhodes followed Thomas past the kitchen into the bedroom. All ten SWAT team members
were huddled around the bed. Thomas cleared a path for them. As the bodies parted, she looked down and saw Nathan G. Cava lying on top of the bed.

But he hadn’t been murdered, and the surgeon-turned-hit-man wasn’t dead.

Instead, Cava was listening to music with a pair of headphones on and his eyes closed. Lena could hear the sound leaking into the quiet room. It was a blues cut and a good
one—“Bobby’s Bop,” from an import album by Ronnie Earl and the Broadcasters called
Hope Radio.

“He won’t budge,” Thomas said. “He’s out.”

Rhodes pointed to the bedside table. Six or seven empty auto-injectors were piled up beside a fresh pack of five more. Cava was binging on morphine. The auto-injectors were identical to the two
they found on Fontaine’s desk.

His eyes opened.

Everybody in the room flinched.

Then six rifles and four shotguns slid forward an inch or two from the man’s face. Cava didn’t appear to see them. He didn’t even move. He just aid there, listening to the
blues and holding on to the great White Nurse in a state of bliss.

L
ena looked at Barrera standing before the window.
He was smoking a cigar and watching the last rays of orange sunlight
clip the hilltops to the north. Directly west the marina layer was already flooding into the basin.

“You’ve got everything, right?” he asked.

“I’m all set.”

They were in the captain’s office. Alone on the floor. The air fraught with electricity. Cava was waiting in one of the interrogation rooms across the way, his cosmic bliss winding down
from a six-hour discharge. A doctor had examined him at his apartment and signed off on his condition. For the past hour, Cava had been alone in the small room—handcuffed to a chair with
nothing to do. By now the walls were closing in on him. The ground, fertile.

Barrera turned from the window. “If you need anything, I’ll be right outside the door.”

Lena nodded. She appreciated his concern, but they had gone over it at least ten times. And there had been more than enough time to pin down who Cava really was, collect props, and prepare for
the interview.

She gathered her files, then picked up a pair of new slip-on sneakers. Because the interrogation rooms were built almost fifty years ago and didn’t include one-way mirrors or observation
rooms, the session would be recorded by SID on the fourth floor. Although Klinger was still missing and Chief Logan remained eerily silent, Rhodes would oversee the recording to make sure that no
one was eavesdropping from above.

The phone rang. Barrera grabbed it and listened, then hung up and turned to Lena.

“Rhodes,” he said. “They’re ready. Tape’s rolling.”

She met his eyes, then walked out of the office heading for the interrogation room. When she pulled the door open, Cava looked up from his chair against the rear wall.

“Would you like a cup of coffee, Doctor?”

He stared at her for a moment, surprised. “Sugar, but no cream,” he said in a quiet voice.

Lena left her things on the table, then poured two cups of coffee at the counter by the fax machine, added sugar, and returned to the room. As she closed the door and sat down, she could feel
Cava’s eyes on her. He seemed reserved, catlike. She pulled her cell out and flipped it open. When the screen lit up, she switched off the power and returned the phone to her pocket.
Cava’s eyes slid across the table to his coffee. Lena watched him lift the cup. His hands were trembling, and he seemed aware that she had noticed.

“Where are my medications,” he said. “And what happened to my shoes?”

She pushed the sneakers across the table. “These should fit. They’re size ten.”

He pulled them closer and examined them, then noticed the lack of shoelaces. “You think I’m gonna hang myself?”

She shrugged and it seemed to anger him.

“The pair you took from me were Bruno Maglis. They cost four hundred dollars.”

“These cost twenty-three,” she said.

He shook his head, then dropped the sneakers on the floor and slipped them over his socks. Lena used the time to open her files and lay them out on the table. As she made a few adjustments, Cava
rattled the handcuffs.

“You think that I don’t know what you’re doing,” he said.

She turned to him, but remained silent.

“You think I haven’t sat in your chair before and done the same thing? You think that I’m really gonna talk to you? You think that I’m that stupid?”

He was nervous. She could see it. And he was spent. His eyes were glassy. Like a window in a gutted house, she could see the damage on the other side.

“How did you find me?” he asked.

Lena ignored the question and stared at him for a moment. “You’re not a real doctor, are you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Sure, you went to med school, Cava. But you almost flunked out. You’ve never worked at a hospital and you’ve never had any patients. You’re a loser, Cava. And I’ve
seen your military file. You’re not even a real spook. You’re only half a spook. The only reason the army took you into the medical corps is because no one else signed up. They were
desperate. After they ran out of good guys, they came to you. They took one look and knew that you’d do their dirty work for them.”

Cava laughed. “Nice try, but it won’t fly. No matter how strung out I am, you will never break me down. Never ever, bitch. I’m gonna walk on this. You’ll see.”

“You’re too sloppy to walk, Cava. You do too many drugs and you’re too far in. You only see what you want to see.”

“I’m connected. And I’m gonna walk out of here in these lousy shoes. I’ll drop you a line from paradise when I get there.”

Lena pushed her coffee aside. She didn’t need it.

“But you don’t live in paradise, Cava. You live in a world where it’s cloudy every day. I went through your medications. You need pills to do everything that you do in this
world. You take a pill to get up and another one to go to sleep. You need medication to eat, take a leak, get it up, or turn your stupid iPod on. You even take something because you can’t
blink your eyes on your own. You’re a parasite. A follower. A scavenger and a user. You see a situation and you take advantage of it. You work it, exploit it. You don’t mend things, you
kill them. And I can see it in your eyes, Cava. Your dead fucking eyes. You dig it. Killing turns you on.”

Cava leaned back in the chair, stunned by the barrage. “That’s not true. Now tell me how you found me?”

Lena ignored the question again. It was time to walk the murderer down Memory Lane. She sifted through the pictures she had selected with Barrera and Rhodes and began setting them down on the
table. First up were snapshots of the Taser they recovered and the Cock-a-doodle-do.

“You don’t even need to talk,” she said. “Just sit back and relax.”

“Fuck you.”

She set down a series of pictures from the crime scene inside the garage on Barton Avenue, and the alley behind Tiny’s a half block north of Hollywood Boulevard. Jennifer Bloom was finally
on the table, stuffed inside a garbage bag with her lost eyes squared up to the lens. Everything was here: the makeshift operating table, the buckets filled with the victim’s blood.

“We know that you shot her five times with the Taser. Twice in the parking lot, then three more times in the garage you rented. We know that you bled her out, cut her up and dumped her
body in Hollywood.”

“Could have been anyone.”

“Like I said, Cava, you’re a loser. You’re sloppy. You’re in over your head.”

She laid down two additional snapshots. The first was taken at Cava’s apartment at the time of his arrest. A close-up view of the shoes he had been wearing that included the Phillips head
screw still embedded in his right heel. The second, the footprint SID picked up from the garage that made it a perfect match. Then she added three more. Joseph Fontaine slumped over his chair with
a bullet in his head. Greta Dietrich sliced and diced and packed up in the basement freezer. And finally, Denny Ramira, an award-winning journalist, sprawled out on his kitchen floor beside a bag
of groceries with a meat thermometer puncturing his heart. When she remembered the shot of Ramira’s dog, Freddie, hanging from the stairway, she threw that on the table, too.

A moment passed. A long stretch of silence.

Four people. Four murders. Four corpses and a small dead dog.

The scope of the crime, the photographs, cut to the bone.

Lena returned to her chair and sat down, watching Cava examine the photos. “Do you really think that you’re gonna walk, Cava? Are you so deluded that you think there’s a way
out of this? That somehow your friends can explain this away and get you off the hook? You’re the only one who’s expendable. The only one without power or standing. You know
what’s gonna happen better than I do. You’re a soldier and they’re gonna throw you into the wind and run for cover. Look at these pictures. Think about the story they tell.
What’s a jury gonna say when they see them?”

His dead blue eyes rocked back and forth over the photos, then rose up from the table and found her in the room.

“The question isn’t how long you’ll be in prison,” she said. “It’s the circumstances that you need to worry about. They’re special. You’re gonna
die, Cava. They’re gonna stick the needle in your arm and you’re gonna die. The last execution I witnessed didn’t go very well. Someone screwed up and it took half an hour for the
guy to die. It looked like it hurt.”

He was still staring at her with those bloodshot eyes. His face had lost its color and he was perspiring. When he spoke, his voice was so hoarse she could barely hear him.

“You’re good at this,” he said. “Now tell me what you want.”

“The man who’s writing the checks. Dean Tremell and everyone else who’s in on it.”

“What do I get in return?”

“Have I shot straight with you?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’d say you’re a straight shooter. Do you have the authority to make the deal?”

“Everything’s been approved.”

“What do I get?”

“Life in prison without the possibility of parole. Any place in the federal system you choose within the continental United States. A guarantee from the governor of the State of California
that you will be looked after by the medical staff and receive any medications that you require.”

“Sounds like paradise,” he said.

“Beats tying a sheet around your neck and ending up in a hole in the ground.”

He paused a moment, reviewing the photos as he considered her proposition. His eyes lingered on the shot of Ramira. Then he found the reporter’s dog in the pile and looked at it for a long
time. Most juries liked dogs.

“I’m gonna need to think this over,” he said.

Lena nodded. “You’ll be taken to Men’s Central Jail for the night and placed in isolation. You can think it over and we’ll talk tomorrow morning. The offer’s good
until then.”

Lena gathered the photos, returning them to her files. As she got up to leave, Cava tried a third time.

“It’s not like I was hiding,” he said. “But it had to start somewhere. How did you find me?”

She turned from the door and looked at him, thinking about Denny Ramira and the investigation that had cost him his life.

“We’ll talk tomorrow,” she said.

M
aybe it was the stars, the planets, or even some weird moon
thing that crazy people talk about. Some sort of perfect
astrological alignment that he didn’t understand and couldn’t see because the clouds covered the sky. Maybe he had an angel looking over his shoulder. A halfwit angel who took him on as
a test case or lost a bet. After all, there had to be a reason why they called this place the City of Angels.

Or maybe this was the moment. The big one when the door opened and the rest of your life winked at you from the other side.

Nathan G. Cava watched Parker Center fade into the night, then turned to the two cops sitting in the front seat. He hadn’t caught their names when they cuffed his wrists behind his back.
And he hadn’t bothered to ask who they were as they led him out of the building to an unmarked car for what everyone believed would be his last ride as a free man.

They were older guys. Seasoned veterans. At the end of their shift and making the trip before they went home. Cava didn’t want to know their names because they were part of the moment,
too.

The car stopped at a red light on North Alameda Street. Men’s Central Jail was a brief five-minute drive somewhere up the road. The cops weren’t talking to each other, so Cava had to
become still.

Maybe it was just the morphine, he thought—some small amount that remained in his system, relaxing his muscles and joints and making his body extraordinarily pliable tonight. Maybe it was
his will to live. His will to spend the rest of his days as a free man under the sun. Or, the secret that he had kept from Lena Gamble and every other cop that he wasn’t as stupid as they
thought. That all his money was safe and secure because he never kept it anywhere near his apartment.

Cava didn’t care either way. All he knew was that he had a chance. One last chance to squirm through the door before it slammed shut.