27
“Both of you, stay where you are. Do not move. You, on top, place your hands slowly on the back of your neck.”
The cops had gotten their game plan together and had assembled in a loose ring around us, one of them giving the orders over a bullhorn. They were being careful, but I didn’t get a sense of knife-edge tension off them. They didn’t know exactly what the situation was, but for now it probably looked like a couple of crazy chicks with a wild hair up their asses.
I laced my hands on the back of my neck, as the guy in charge had said. It didn’t seem like they’d seen the outline of the Beretta; the tail of my T-shirt covered it up.
They closed in. I heard footsteps crunching, then a voice behind me, a voice unaided by a megaphone. “You are under arrest. Lower your hands slowly behind your back so I can cuff you. Miss, be quiet.” That was to Brittany, who was still shrieking. She gulped and took a breath.
The cop behind me started doing the Miranda thing. He got as far as “to remain silent” before Brittany realized the weapon she had at her disposal and used it.
“She’s Hailey Cain!” she yelled. “She killed those people in San Francisco! She killed a cop!”
Holy shit, I heard one of the cops say, and they all stiffened, as though they’d walked up on a rattlesnake in the grass.
“She killed two people! She just told me she did! Get her off me!”
“I didn’t kill anyone, but I am Hailey Cain,” I said clearly to the ring of raised weapons around me. “I’m not running anymore, and I won’t resist arrest.”
“She confessed to me! She wants to kill me because I know what she did!”
“Miss, be quiet,” the voice behind me said. “I’m going to cuff you now, Miss Cain. You so much as twitch and I will shoot you.”
“I’m carrying a piece on my lower back; you’ll feel it when you cuff me,” I said, still speaking loudly and enunciating clearly to be heard over Brittany’s accusations
“Stay very still. You on the ground, please be quiet.”
I felt his hands on my back, moving, finding the gun and disarming me. The helicopter was directly over us, and the downdraft was making my hair blow crazily; probably less than half of it was still in its ponytail. Underneath me, Brittany’s heartbeat was so forceful I could feel it in my legs.
“Are you carrying any other weapons?”
“No.”
I shut my eyes while he searched me to find out. He wasn’t gentle. Eyes still closed, I said, “She was the one who killed the cop and Violet Eastman.”
“Liar!”
The cop: “You should stay quiet.”
“Get her fingerprints and you’ll see,” I said.
He took one of my wrists in his hand, clicked the steel bracelet of his handcuffs around it, then pulled my other wrist down and did the same. Then he ratcheted them tight. Really, really tight. Then he started the Miranda rights again. “You have the right to remain silent!” he yelled over the helicopter’s noise. “If you give up the right to—Will someone get on the blower and call off that damn chopper already!”
“It’s not us, it’s probably news,” said another officer.
The arresting officer decided he needed to preserve his vocal cords more than I needed to hear my last two rights, and he hauled me to my feet, his grip tight on my arm. I saw him for the first time: white guy, short brown hair, neatly trimmed mustache. That guy you see on Cops all the time. Deputy Newton, his name tag read. He was with the L.A. Sheriff’s Office.
As soon as my weight was off Brittany, she jumped to her feet, surprisingly quick for everything she’d been through. She almost laughed in relief. “Oh, thank God,” she said. “I was so scared.”
The circle of police officers was all men, a fact not lost on Brittany. She gave them a breathless, tentative smile.
“I’m sorry, miss,” another officer said, “but we’re going to have to take you in, too. You were operating that vehicle with reckless disregard for—”
“I didn’t mean to! She was chasing me!” Brittany interrupted. “I didn’t mean to, it wasn’t my fault! Oh, please, can’t you just—”
One of them moved in, reading Brittany her Miranda rights. She glanced around the circle, as if seeking the most sympathetic pair of eyes. Then she said, “I think I need to go to the hospital.”
“—in a court of law,” the cop continued.
“I hit my head on the dashboard, really hard, I’m seeing double.”
“There’s a nurse who can do an assessment at jail intake,” he told her, and then took out his handcuffs.
When it sank in that she was really going to jail, Brittany began to cry.
28
Deputy Newton took both of us to a prisoner-transport van and shackled us to opposite benches, out of reach of each other. He said, “I’ll be right back. You girls just stay there and don’t move a muscle,” and jumped down to the ground.
When we were alone, no cops in earshot, no audience to play to, Brittany looked at me and said, “Why are you doing this to me?”
At that moment I gave up on ever truly trying to understand her. Because on some level she considered that to be a legitimate question. Somewhere in her mind, she was the victim; I’d made this happen.
Then movement outside the van caught my eye, a little bit of commotion, a raised voice. I looked over to see Joel Kelleher approaching. He had changed out of his college-volunteer clothes and was recognizably a cop again in a dark blue LAPD T-shirt, black jeans, and boots, a badge on a chain around his neck. His wasn’t the raised voice. That was my friend Deputy Newton. “—without a compelling reason. Hey, are you listening?” he was saying, trailing behind with a reddening, frustrated face. He couldn’t keep up, and Joel wasn’t slowing down for him any. He vaulted up easily into the back of the van. Brittany stared at him, her mouth slightly open, recognizing the “volunteer” who’d rung her doorbell earlier and understanding the extent to which she’d been fooled. “You bastard,” she said, and started to cry again.
Joel looked at me without any sign that we’d ever met. “Hailey Cain, I’m Officer Joel Kelleher with the Los Angeles Police Department. I’m here to take you into custody.”
“You can’t do this,” Newton said, still outside the van.
“Actually, I can,” Joel said. “They gave me the authority to transport prisoners when they swore me in.”
Newton said, “You know what I’m saying. We’ve arrested her, we’ve Mirandized her—”
“Not completely,” I said helpfully.
“—and we’ve arranged for transport to the jail. There’s absolutely no reason for this.”
“None except that I’m the only officer here I know for sure won’t have her fall down a flight of stairs in handcuffs as soon as she’s out of sight of reporters,” Joel said.
“That’s offensive.”
“And painful, which is why I want to keep it from happening,” Joel said. “Look, if you have any more questions, talk to Magnus Ford, under whose authority I’m doing this. You have heard of Ford, I assume?”
Newton closed his mouth, and his eyes narrowed slightly. Joel knelt down by my side.
Newton found his voice. “No matter whose authority, I’m reporting you for this.”
“For taking a prisoner to custody?” Joel said. “That’ll excite IAD. Listen, I’m not stealing your collar. I’m only taking her in.” He nudged his chin at me. “That woman”—looking over his shoulder at Brittany—“is the one you really want to be photographed perp-walking into central lockup. That’s the AP photo you’ll show your grandkids. When all this shakes out, you’ll thank me.”
Though the big game was finished, the turnstiles kept rolling over: More official-looking vehicles had arrived, and there were several knots of uniformed and plainclothes officers around, plus a few in suits who could have been pretty high up the command chain. Joel walked me through a gauntlet of hostile gazes to the unmarked white sedan I’d seen him driving earlier.
Once I was in the backseat, still handcuffed, and he was behind the wheel, he said, “You’re not going to central lockup. I’m taking you to a sheriff’s substation until all this settles down. I know the guy in charge. He’s a good man. No one’s going to mess with you.”
“Okay,” I’d said. “Thank you” wasn’t right here. He wasn’t doing it as a favor for me personally. It was just a practical concern.
Then I said, “Do you always talk like that to other officers, like you did to Newton? In the Army someone with your kind of mouth would constantly be losing privileges and working chickenshit details.”
“He wasn’t my superior.” Joel glanced at me in the rearview. “I have a hard time remembering you were at West Point. It just doesn’t seem very you.”
“Things were a lot different then. I was different.”
Joel didn’t pursue that. He was looking out the window at the ongoing mop-up of the scene and said, “I’d better get us out of here.”
He turned the key in the ignition, and the engine rumbled to life. Then, rather than make a U-turn, Joel cocked his chin over his shoulder and reversed all the way to the road under the malevolent eyes of his peers.
29
Dry east-county landscape rolled past outside the windows of Joel’s car, and I watched it with a placid feeling, as if it were something on film, a peaceful interlude in an otherwise chaotic movie. I didn’t know where we were headed and didn’t care.
I leaned forward. “Joel?”
“Mmm?”
“Are you allowed to talk about the case at all?”
“What do you want to know?”
“Was Brittany’s student-ID picture on the news? Is that what made her run?”
“The photo was on the news, yeah,” he said. “Whether that was the reason she ran, I don’t know. You’d know better than me—you were obviously watching the house. Where were you, by the way? I didn’t have any sense you were around.”
“I was up the tree in the front yard.”
“Jesus.” I saw his head move slightly, as if he were about to turn and look at me, but then he didn’t. He said, “That’s crazy. You were fifteen feet from the front door, maybe less? That’s a dangerous place to survey from.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You saw me, then?”
“Yeah.”
“I was going to come back after I took the flyer to the lab. I was supposed to stake out the house, not just to watch her but to look out for you,” he said. “When I heard on the radio about a couple of women in a high-speed chase, I didn’t automatically think of you, until they were running footage on KTLA. I remembered the motorcycle parked on Brittany’s street. Plus, it looked like you, with the new brown hair.” Then he changed the subject. “It wasn’t too smart for Brittany to have that picture taken and her real face linked with your name.”
“You have to look at it from her point of view. She expected to bilk Eastman and disappear. She never planned to commit two murders and get her stolen identity onto the front page of newspapers. There wasn’t supposed to be anything near that level of scrutiny.”
“I guess not,” Joel said.
His cell phone buzzed, and he picked it up. “Kelleher.” He listened briefly. “Yeah, we’re about five minutes or so out from the substation, everything’s fine.”
Ford, obviously.
“That might not be the last phone call you get,” Joel said. “I made some friends today.” He slowed for an isolated intersection where the signal light hung from a cable over the road. Then he said, “Interesting. Can I tell her? … No, I’m not.… Okay. See you soon.”
When he’d disconnected, I said, “Tell me what?”
“The thumbprint off the flyer, it got a hit,” he said. “It was in several places in the Eastman home. That’s not in itself enough to exculpate you. We can’t just let you walk.” He paused. “The good thing is, Magnus thinks we can hold you on the charges related to the chase—the speed violation and reckless endangerment—and not anything connected to Stepakoff and Eastman. San Francisco hasn’t charged you yet.”
“Really?”
“Prosecutors work a little slower than cops. You were the only suspect, yeah, and everyone was hung up on finding you, but the lawyers were still preparing their case. Anyway, it’s useful to have the other charges against you—I know it doesn’t seem like a good thing to you, probably, but it’s better than being charged with two homicides, which someone might’ve had to do if we didn’t have anything else to hold you on.”
“Mmm,” I said, noncommittal. He was right, I wasn’t exactly feeling grateful about that. I moved on to something else. “So am I ever going to meet Ford?”
“That’s hard to say. The man does keep to himself.”
“What is it with this guy? Is he just a brain floating in a vat of preservative fluids, with some kind of voice-simulator box?”
Joel laughed. “No, he’s a real guy.”
“Is he horribly disfigured?”
“Nope, not disfigured. If you passed him on the street, he wouldn’t really stand out.” Then he said, “I never heard of him until my lieutenant told me I was being taken off my regular detail, in Special Weapons and Tactics, to work with the guy, at his request. When I found out the work was a lot of covert investigative organized-crime stuff, I asked him, ‘What made you want to pull someone off the adrenaline-cowboy squad to do this?’ He says, ‘You don’t think you’re up for it? I can get someone else.’ I never talked myself down in front of him again.”
“Harsh.”
“Straightforward,” Joel corrected. “Anyway, I don’t ask Magnus a lot of questions about himself. He asked me about my background and all, but he’s not the kind of guy who makes you feel like it’s a two-way street.”
The sheriff’s substation was a one-story building of pinkish gray stucco with a Joshua tree out front. I could hear the firecracker-like pops of a firing range somewhere beyond the building. Joel parked and killed the engine. At that moment his cell rang again.
“Ford’s a demanding boss,” I commented.
He was looking at the screen. “It’s not Magnus, it’s my girlfriend.”
“Girlfriend?”
“Fiancée, actually,” Joel said. “I’ll call her back later. Come on, let’s get you processed in, so I can get going.”
“Sorry,” I said, “I’m making you late for supper, is that it?”
“Yup,” he said, “and two cold bottles of Stella Artois.”
He put his hand on the door handle, but I leaned forward. “Wait a minute,” I said. “I’ve been wanting to tell you something.”
“If this is something about Eastman and Stepakoff, it should wait until—”
“No,” I said. “It’s not that.”
“Yeah?” He waited.
I’d figured out what it was I should have told him about fear, back in the Eastman house, and this was maybe my last chance to say it. I wanted to say that fear isn’t a barrier to courage, it’s a source material. The brave people I knew—and I couldn’t include myself among them, not honestly—created their courage out of fear.
“Hailey?” Joel prompted.
“Yeah, sorry,” I said. “I wanted to say, you remember in San Francisco, when you told me about how you had to repress a lot of fear to do your job?”
He said, “No.”
That stopped me short. The question hadn’t really been a question, just a reminder. I tried again. “In the Eastman house,” I prompted him. “You were going under from the Ambien, and you said you had to swallow a lot of fear to do what you do, and no one else on the job talked about that kind of thing. Remember?”
He shook his head and studied me with his hazel-green eyes. “Sorry, no,” he said. “It must have been the drug talking. That just doesn’t sound like me. I really don’t have a problem in that area.”
After a moment I said, “Sorry. I must have misunderstood.”