“Insurance for a rainy day?” Gus asked.
“I don’t know,” Eve said, “but it does make me wonder where the bulk of their money was going. None of these guys was living large. In fact, they all seemed to be just scraping by.”
“Maybe there are more accomplices out there,” Gus said. “Meaning a bigger split of the pot after each job.”
“If so, we haven’t got a lead on any of them yet,” Eve said. “Nor do we know what ties the three men together.”
“They are all in the morgue.” Duncan closed the desk drawer. “Let’s seal the place up. CSU will come by later to take the computer, watches, and shells.”
Gus gestured to the shoes on the closet floor. “The shoes might give you something. I once cracked a murder case because a piece of gravel stuck in the treads of the suspect’s Nikes was unique to the victim’s garden. The suspect had claimed that he’d never been to the house, so how did the gravel get there?”
“Good idea,” Duncan said. “We’ll bag the shoes at all three homes. Thanks for the tip.”
Eve didn’t think it was a useful tip and assumed Duncan was just being polite to his friend.
Gus put his arm around Duncan’s shoulders. “I want you to finish your career on a win.”
“Finishing alive is a win,” Duncan said.
Gus laughed. “Ain’t that the truth.”
Eve and Duncan stopped in at the Bay Cities Italian Deli up the street for two of their famous Godmother sandwiches-to-go, then ate their dinner as they drove up Pacific Coast Highway, their windows rolled down so they could smell the ocean even if they couldn’t see it in the darkness.
They rode in silence. The violence of the morning felt to Eve like it had happened years ago. She’d been constantly busy and on the move since the shootings, so she’d easily avoided thinking much about them, except for her interview with the Officer-Involved team.
But now, as she drove up Malibu Canyon toward Calabasas, the gruesome images were coming back to her. Twice in the last few weeks she’d seen a man’s brains blown out in front of her and she knew from painful experience that if she didn’t find some other aspect of the case to obsess over, for the next week or so the gore would play on an endless loop in her mind whenever she slowed down, particularly when she tried to go to bed.
The sheriff’s black Expedition was parked in the station’s back lot when they arrived, his driver sitting behind the wheel, the engine running and wearing sunglasses in case, Eve supposed, the glare of the moon was too hard on his eyes. The deputy’s name was Rondo and she’d never heard him speak.
Eve parked and the first thing Duncan did when he got out was knock on the driver’s side window of the Expedition and wave at Rondo.
“How do you drive with those sunglasses on at night?” Duncan asked. “Are they infrared so you can see in total darkness? Are they computerized to display some kind of cool digital readout?”
Rondo remained still and expressionless, which seemed to please Duncan as they continued on into the station.
“Why do you go out of your way to irritate that man?” Eve said.
“I want to remind him that he’s not invisible.”
“It’s his job to be invisible.” The sheriff had lots of confidential conversations in the back seat of that Expedition, on the phone and with guests, and Eve figured Rondo didn’t want to make his boss self-conscious about the deputy who was overhearing it all.
They went inside and walked down the hall toward the squad room. The door to Captain Moffett’s office was open as they passed and he called out to them.
“Ronin, Pavone, could we have a moment?”
The “we” meant Moffett and the sheriff, who sat in one of the two chairs in front of the captain’s desk.
Sheriff Richard Lansing was in uniform, which he wore the way his father, a preacher, wore his faith. He was in his fifties and, in Eve’s view, more of a politician than a cop, using his badge as a stepping-stone to higher office. But those aspirations were in doubt. The department had been embroiled in one scandal after another since the day he took office, a situation Eve had leveraged to her benefit to get to Lost Hills.
The sheriff was both Eve’s benefactor and her adversary, and she knew his support for her depended entirely on whether it helped him or not. The angry expression on his face tonight, though, suggested that his support had evaporated.
“Come in, close the door, and sit down,” he said.
Eve and Duncan did as they were told, settling on the couch.