The Pain Scale (31 page)

She hesitated for a brief instant and almost blinked. “Fairly well,” she said, apparently not recognizing the hairline crack in her composure. “He works with his father a lot.”

“Is it true he’s going to be running for congress himself?”

“We’re not supposed to say anything about it, but I guess at this point, there’s nothing to hide, right?”

I held her eyes and gave her a sad half smile. “Right.”

“Yes. He was going to run for the thirty-seventh district next year.”

“Was?”

“Well, I don’t know for sure. I guess it’s way too early to know for sure.”

“You said that when we spoke before. Has anything changed?”

“Not that I know of. But Bradley now...” She didn’t finish the thought, and it was a few seconds before she went on. “With what happened to Sara and the kids...”

“Of course. Did you like Sara?”

The half blink again.

“Yes,” she said. “Everybody did. She was the nicest person in the whole family.” She cast her eyes down. I couldn’t tell if the action was caused by grief or guilt or something else.

“Did you know her well?”

“I guess so.”

“How often did you talk to her?”

“Every two or three weeks. She’d bring the kids to see their grandpa, or at an event or something. The family’s very friendly with the staff.”

Jen and I had talked about how to present the video, about whether to confront her first and then show it to her or to show her the clip first and hit her with the accusation. We’d decided to play it by ear.

“Would you take a look at something?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said.

I flipped open the MacBook on the table and played Oliver’s recording.

I watched Molly watch the screen.

As Sara and Catherine spoke, the color slowly faded from Molly’s face. By the end of the clip, her eyes were wet.

I offered her a tissue and said, “Tell me about Bradley.”

She did.

“He didn’t rape her?” the lieutenant asked.

“No, but she has a slam dunk sexual harassment lawsuit,” Jen said.

“She slept with him once because she was afraid of losing her job, then he wouldn’t leave her alone?”

“That’s right,” I said. “She was about to quit working for the congressman when Sara found out.”

“But there weren’t any repercussions from that?”

“Not according to Molly,” I said. “She kept waiting for something to happen, but it never did.”

Jen said, “She thought Sara protected her.”

“Really?” Ruiz asked.

We both nodded.

“Anything really new, or does it just reinforce what we already know?” he asked.

“Nothing completely fresh,” I said, “but we’ve got serious leverage. If Bradley’s got any political aspirations left, we can end his hopes with one phone call.”

“But you’re right,” Jen said. “Everything is still circumstantial.”

“We know Shevchuk, Turchenko, and Tropov were contractors, and we know Bradley had a serious motive. But we can’t connect them yet.”

“Keep working it till you can.” Ruiz picked up his pen and turned his attention to the paperwork on his desk.

We knew that was our exit cue.

Dave Zepeda was in the squad wrapping things up for the day. He was involved in the case, but not as deeply as the rest of us. We thought his relative distance might give him some perspective that we couldn’t find. I gave him a summary of what I thought he knew and ran down what little new information we had.

“I’m completely fuckin’ lost,” Dave said.

“What part don’t you get?” I asked.

“What part? The whole damn thing. Russians, politicians, Ukrainians, special ops, Jolly Green Giants. Come on. You think anybody could follow this?”

He wasn’t just being difficult. One of the most important aspects of any homicide investigation is shaping the evidence into a cohesive narrative. People—lieutenants, captains, district attorneys, juries—need a story, and it has to be clear and easy to follow. We knew laying it out for him would be our first stab at selling the story to an audience.

I rolled our large dry-erase board to a good angle for Dave to see from his desk. Across the top edge, I wrote the names of the first victims—
Sara, Bailey
, and
Jacob
—in blue ink.

“Okay,” I said, “here’s where it starts. Three victims.” Along the right edge of the board, I made a tight column in black that read, top to bottom,
The Congressman, Bradley, Kroll, Campos, et al
. “They were related to some very powerful people. At this point, we don’t have any evidence linking any of the names on the right to the crimes. There is a motive, though.”

Jen picked up the ball. “There are rumors that Bradley Benton the Third had been considering a run for congress, either succeeding his father or running in an adjacent district. We know Sara was planning to divorce Bradley because of infidelity and possibly even some criminal behavior. There was a floor safe stolen from the crime scene that contained hard evidence that would have been very damaging to Bradley both in the divorce and in his campaign.”

“So anyone in the column on the right had a reason to want the contents of the safe,” Dave said.

“Exactly.” I picked up a red marker, and underneath the first set of names, I wrote
Turchenko
and
Shevchuk
. “Here’s what we know. These two, the Ukrainians, committed the actual murders. They’ve got records. Mostly petty Eastern European organized crime stuff, but some violence. Not hard to buy this escalation. And we’ve got conclusive physical evidence and a confession. Rock solid.”

Dave said, “So you could close it there.”

“We could.” I still had the red marker in my hand. Below
Turchenko
and
Shevchuk
, I scrawled another name. “But these two didn’t act alone. Turchenko claims they were hired by another guy. A Russian smuggler named Anton Tropov.”

“That’s the guy who Danny almost took his head off with the shotgun, right?”

“Not quite,” Jen said. “That was Yevgeny. This is Anton. They’re cousins.”

“Cousins?”

“Yeah, but Yevgeny’s not in this,” I said. “Not as far as we know.”

“All right,” he said. “So Anton, the Russian, hires the two Ukrainians to take out the Benton family.”

“Right.”

“But he doesn’t have a motive.”

“No,” Jen said.

“Maybe he wanted the safe. Blackmail the Bentons.”

“Could be. But how would he know about it?”

“Good question,” Dave said. “You sweat him about it?”

“No, Anton’s gone. We can’t find him. And now there are new players in the game.” In green, the only color I had left, I wrote
Shooter
and
Driver
on the left edge of the board. Then I drew a red line through
Driver
.

“Damn,” Dave said.

Jen agreed. “Yeah.”

“The shooter killed Shevchuk; then when the driver botched the getaway, he killed him, too.”

Dave thought about it. “Maybe Anton hired a couple of button men so the Ukrainians couldn’t roll on him. Now he’s trying to stay out of the heat.”

“Possibly.” Careful not to write over any of the names, I drew a line connecting the column on the left to the column on the right. “But maybe not. This is entirely circumstantial, but the
congressman and Kroll, his chief of staff, both served in the air force special ops unit.”

“Pararescue,” Jen added.

“The green footprints,” Dave said. “So you think someone in the column on the right hired all these goons to make the evidence in the safe disappear?”

Jen and I looked at each other and then back at him.

He made a little whistling noise and said, “That’s a real clusterfuck. You should pin it on Anton and the Ukrainians and call it a day.” He stood up and put on his coat. “I’m going home. You two have fun with that.”

After work that evening, I had an appointment with my physical therapist.

During our session, Brookes made approving noises and nodded every now and then. When we finished, she said, “What have you been doing? You seem looser. There’s less tightness in your neck and shoulder.”

“Just the usual. The regular exercises. I think work is helping.” I thought for a moment about going into detail about the specific ways in which it was helping, but I still wasn’t comfortable talking about it.

“Has the pain level been lower overall since the last time you were here?”

“A bit, yes.” As long I have innocent murder victims to think about.

“Did you get a guitar?”

“Well—”

“You better not say no.”

“Kind of.”

“What does that mean? How do you kind of get a guitar?”

“I didn’t get a guitar, I got a—”

“I knew it.”

“I got a banjo.”

“A banjo? Who gets a banjo?”

“A friend gave it to me.” I explained to her about Harlan, about his illness, about the gift.

“He’s right,” she said.

“About what?”

“The banjo. It will work.”

Outside of her office, in my car, feeling relaxed and with my pain only a low hum in the background of my awareness, I thought about calling it a day. Going home and relaxing. Maybe watching one of the Netflix DVDs that had been gathering dust on the shelf under the TV for the last few months.

It didn’t take long to convince myself that even though that sounded tempting, it would be better not to allow my awareness to drift too far away from the case. I decided I’d treat myself to carne asada at Enrique’s and then get back to it. I left messages for Patrick and Jen, asking if they’d like to join me.

As I drove east on Broadway, I thought about where to go next. We needed to talk to Bradley. If there’d been even a slight chance of getting a crack at a real interrogation, I would have jumped at it. But in his condition and with his level of legal representation, there was no way we were going to get that kind of crack at him.

Still, after I turned off PCH onto Loynes and into the shopping center where the restaurant was located, I gave Campos a call.

“Detective Beckett, hello,” he said. “It’s been so long since I’ve heard from you I was starting to get worried.”

“Thank you for your concern, Julian. I’m calling to see how Bradley’s doing.”

“Still struggling quite a bit, I’m afraid. But he is improving. Not a great deal, mind you, but some.”