The Pain Scale (20 page)

I’ve always worked too much. And I got even worse when my wife died. Work has always been a kind of refuge for me, and after Megan’s accident, I dived headlong into it. My injury and subsequent leave left me facing something I had little experience with and little interest in—free time.

Even with surgeries and all the medical attention I required, I was left with a seemingly infinite amount of time. I grasped and groped for ways to fill the emptiness.

I embraced digital technology. Got a Kindle. Got a giant Vizio flat screen. Got an Xbox. Really learned how to use iTunes. Read more books than I had in years and joined Goodreads so I’d have someone to discuss Ross MacDonald and Neal Stephenson with. Realized Netflix made the wasteland much less vast and watched every episode of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Wire
, and
Fringe
. Discovered a passion for video-game violence. An assault rifle with a chainsaw for a bayonet? Fuck yeah. Downloaded so much music that it would take more than a month of continuous play to listen to it all. Found myself more excited about mixes than I had been in seventh grade when I got a dual-cassette boom box for Christmas
and made them for everyone I’d ever met. Jen listened to them all. Dave asked me if I was hitting on him.

And all of those things waited for me on the weekends. As much as I enjoyed them, and even got lost in them, they reminded me of the pain. One of the things I welcomed most about the Benton case was its size and scope. It was the first time since I’d been back that I’d been on a case big enough to justify working through the weekend.

I couldn’t really bear the thought of taking a day off.

But there was one weekend tradition—a relatively recent development—that I was looking forward to.

Megan, who had very different literary tastes than I, once said, “It is a truth universally acknowledged in Long Beach that a hungry person in possession of an appetite for Mexican must be in want of Enrique’s.”

You might not guess from its location in a mini-mall on PCH, sandwiched in between a vitamin store and a Botox clinic, but Enrique’s has always been a popular lunch and dinner spot. A few weeks earlier, they started serving breakfast as well. On my second visit, I asked if they could add carne asada to the potato, egg, and cheese breakfast burrito, and when they did, it turned out to be the greatest and most wonderful thing that ever happened in the entire universe. I’m not exaggerating.

I’d been there every time my schedule allowed since then and ordered the same thing every time. Michelle, Enrique’s wife, told me on the fourth or fifth visit that they’d made a special button on the register for my order. It was the proudest day of my life.

If that weren’t enough, there was never a crowd in the mornings. Dinner—at least between the hours of five and seven—always required at least a half an hour wait. Not breakfast. I figured that would change, though, when word spread.

Blissfully stuffed full of burrito and lemon-herb potatoes, I wobbled out of Enrique’s and back into reality.

That afternoon, my BlackBerry vibrated. I had a new text. It was Patrick’s automated reply—Bradley had, for the first time since the murders, used a credit card. I didn’t know where, and I wasn’t close enough to log in to Patrick’s program and find the location. While I was still trying to figure out what to do, I received another text, this one actually from Patrick himself. It read,
Bradley’s out. He spent $28.75 at Whole Foods on PCH
.

I wondered if there was a way I could make it there from my duplex by the time he got back in his Porsche and out of the parking lot. There wasn’t.

Thanks
, I wrote back. He’d probably be home by the time I could get there.
Too far
.

Next time
, he wrote.

I noted that since I’d joked about proofreading my texts, Patrick hadn’t used a single abbreviation. Had he always done that? I couldn’t remember. Maybe he really was that adaptable.

In Ruiz’s office Monday morning our suspicions were confirmed. “The deputy chief’s making some noise about turning the Seal Beach crimes over to the FBI.”

“On what grounds?” I asked.

“He’s saying the weapon and the MO make it look like a Homeland Security issue.”

“Funny how they never say that when MS Thirteen winds up with military hardware,” I said.

“Do you know if it’s coming from the congressman?” Jen asked.

“No,” Ruiz said, “but I’m guessing that it is. Danny’s right. There’s not enough to justify federal jurisdiction without someone pushing hard for it.”

“Who else would do that?” Jen asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s pretty ugly. Maybe the department brass just wants to get it off their hands.”

“Could be,” Ruiz said. “We should know more later. Young and Goodman are coming in for another update. See if you can get anything out of them.”

Patrick went over the Shevchuk murder with Goodman and Young, and then we walked them through the chase and everything that came later. It was the first time we’d seen them since I had taken Goodman to The Potholder. He nodded a lot and asked a question or two but didn’t really say much of anything else. I wondered if my attempt at ingratiation had done any good. He was dressed more casually than we’d seen him previously, in khakis, a blue button-down, and a pair of brown New Balances. I recognized them because I had a pair of the same ones.

“Nice shoes,” I said.

“Thanks.”

“Think you guys might be able to help at all with the ID on the M4? The basic serial number check came back clean, but we’re thinking maybe we might be able to trace it to the source.” I wasn’t actually hoping for any help, but I was hinting at an implication of a possible government connection in the rifle’s history and watching to see if either agent picked up on it.

It seemed to go right past Young. He said, “We can put in a request with ATF, but I doubt they’ll get back to us any quicker than they’ll get back to you.” That may or may not have been true, depending on how they put in the request and on other mitigating factors, such as whether or not they dropped the congressman’s name.

Goodman, though, saw what I was implying and studied me as I studied Young. I thought about just laying our cards on the table and asking him about their intentions with the case. And maybe a few other things, too. How much are you telling the congressman? What’s his intent? Is he looking to make things right or to cover them up? I suspected the two agents could shed a bit of light on the situation. But I seriously doubted they would willingly tell us anything.

When they’d packed up their briefcases and left, Jen and I sat down in Ruiz’s office.

“You get anything off of them?” he asked.

“Not really,” I said. “Goodman knows we’re suspicious of their involvement, but he’d have to be pretty dense not to.”

“Like Young,” Jen said.

“No sense of where they’re going to go with this?”

“Not really,” I said. “You get anything from upstairs?”

“I’m meeting with DC Baxter and the chief of D’s after lunch. We’ll see what they have to say.”

“Good luck,” Jen said.

“Anything come back from the Shevchuk scene?” Jen asked Patrick.

“Nothing yet,” he said.

“We don’t know if the feds are going to try to grab it. We didn’t get anything off the two feebs, either,” I said. “And Ruiz hasn’t heard from the brass yet. Where do we go next?”

“What do we have if we lose Shevchuk?” Jen asked.

“We can go at Turchenko again,” I said. “With his partner dead, maybe he’ll be willing to give something up.”

“Assuming there is anything to give up,” she said.

“The DVD,” Patrick said. “Maybe we should try to figure out everywhere that Bradley’s been sticking his dick.”

“So where do we start?” Jen asked.

“Well, we could try the art professor and the nanny again, or we could start running down people from the video,” I said.

Patrick said, “Let’s do both. You guys start with people we know, and as soon as I get back from Shevchuk’s autopsy, I’ll get online and see what I can find on the cast of the epic deposition.”

We made a call to the Bentons’ most recent nanny, Joely Ryan, and set up an appointment to talk to her later that afternoon.

The CSULB website informed us that Catherine Catanio had lunchtime office hours, so we decided to drop in unannounced.

There was a student in her office asking about an assignment, so we loitered outside the door.

“It just seems like a lot of reading for one week,” the young man said. “I thought it was art class.”

“It’s art
history
,” Catherine said with a surprising amount of patience. “As I said on the first day of class, it’s a lot more than just looking at pictures.”

That shut the student up.

“Is there anything else?” Catherine asked.

“No,” the student said.

Jen and I could hear the shuffling of a backpack being loaded and zipped shut. As he came out, we got our first look at him. He wore a blue oxford shirt tucked into his jeans, and his light-brown hair was neatly trimmed. I expected something a bit more slovenly from the conversation we’d overheard. Maybe he was a frat boy.

I stepped in front of the open door and tapped my knuckles lightly on the faded yellow paint.