“Don’t give me that bullshit,” Rutledge said. “I’ve got a son-in-law for a lawyer, and I know a little bit about how this all works. I’ve seen nothing.”
Ben leaned back in his chair and stared at Rutledge. He was six feet tall, strapped with sinewy muscle that extended up his neck, his face the sort of chiseled mask of invincibility all men tried to wear sometime in their lives. His face was upset now, though, his brow furrowed, his lips pulled back, showing teeth. He’d just admitted he didn’t have the guts to face up to what he knew was the truth.
“This other boy and his family,” Ben said. “You know what happened to them?”
“They moved somewhere south,” he said. “Dana Point, I think.”
“Anyone else know about this settlement?”
“The higher-ups at the district office,” Rutledge said. “There were a few rumors among the teachers.”
Jesus. What was the law worth if it was used to keep people quiet about what they all knew? What was his job worth if that was the law?
“All right, Bryce,” Ben said, nodding to the eggs and cold chorizo. “Enjoy your lunch.”
Ben was three steps toward the door when Rutledge spoke up.
“You get anything solid,” he said, “anything you can nail to the wall, I’ll tell what I’ve seen.”
Ben nodded and walked out into the heat and blowing dust.
—
WHEN BEN ARRIVED at the station on Monday morning, the parking lot was mobbed with news vans. Reporters slapped their palms against the cruiser windows, wanting a statement. Inside the station, the mayor, dressed in a linen suit and apricot button-down, was seated in Hernandez’s office. Hernandez stood behind the desk, his hands in his pockets, his chin pushed against his neck—the demeanor of a man who didn’t like what he was being told.
“Don Johnson’s on site,” Carolina said, nodding toward the mayor. “Doesn’t look like good news.”
“Politics is always shit,” Ben said.
Ben checked his messages: The owner of the skate shop wanting to press charges against the boys who stole the boards. They’d scraped up the tails. Jesus. A reporter from The Orange County Register wanting information on the Night Prowler investigation.
When the mayor left, wafting cologne through the room, Hernandez called Ben and Carolina into his office.
“This came in the mail this morning,” Hernandez said, handing Ben a plastic evidence bag. Inside was an unfolded piece of college-ruled paper, a note typed across the page.
Dear Detectives and Police Men,
You cant cach me. I’m evrywhere. I’m on the street corner, I’m in yor office, I’m in yor house. I’m the thing you cant get rid of. You cant cach me. I’m in the places you dont want to look.
“Postmark?” Ben said, handing the letter to Carolina.
“Santa Elena,” Hernandez said. “Saturday.”
“Sent the morning after the killing?”
“Appears that way,” Hernandez said.
“He’s still in town,” Ben said.
“Got this, too.” He handed each of them a cassette tape. “Marco picked it up at Viral Records. Made copies. L.A. County’s got people trying to decipher it; think the lyrics might be some kind of code.”
“This guy’s not making a secret out of this, is he?” Carolina said.
“He wants us to know,” Ben said. “It’s a power move that way.”
Carolina set the note on Hernandez’s desk. “What does he mean? Where don’t we want to look?”
“Someplace obvious,” Ben said. He picked up the letter and reread it.
“I don’t know,” Hernandez said. “But let’s get on it.”
When Carolina left, Ben stood and set the letter on the desk.
“Stick around a minute,” Hernandez said. Ben sat back down.
“This is a suicide,” Hernandez said, dropping Lucero’s case file on the desk in front of him.
“That doesn’t take care of the serial.”
“The serial’s random,” Hernandez said. “But serial plus dead kid looks like a crime spree.”
Ben nodded: The mayor was shutting the case down. “Investors,” he said.
“ME’s report will be in tonight,” Hernandez said. “Besides, we need all our resources on the serial.”
Ben opened the report and saw that the box had been marked suicide. All Hernandez needed was Ben’s signature. Sign it, file it away. Some screwed-up kid kills himself. It happens. No one to blame but the kid. Sign it and it all goes away. The master-planned illusion intact.
“What was the deal with you and Coach Wakeland the other night?” Hernandez said.
Ben scanned Natasha’s report—bullet penetrated the meninges, causing traumatic damage to the cerebral cortex and corpus callosum, ischemic cascade resulted.
“He asked too many questions,” Ben said. “Had to remind him that I was the one doing the asking.”
“Didn’t you swim for him years ago?”
Ben nodded once, flipped the pages, and found a ballistics report. No one told him the report had come in.
“Had some kind of falling-out, right?”
“I blew states,” Ben said. “He didn’t like that.”
Ben glanced at the report: .45 caliber. Purchased Chula Vista, down near the Mexican border, 1977.
“Unfinished business, huh?” Hernandez said.
“Just lost my patience, Chief.”
Hernandez’s secretary called him over: L.A. Times on the phone, wanting a quote about the investigation.
“Keep it professional, Ben, especially with pillars of our little society,” Hernandez said. “And drop that file on my desk before heading out.”
10
BEN STOOD ON THE EDGE of the field and watched the afternoon sun stretch the pickers’ shadows, darkness that collapsed into the dirt when they bent to the fruit. The wind was up, electricity sparking the air—it tingled his fingertips, tasted metallic on his tongue. Ben saw his man hunched over his wheelbarrow, pushing it down the row.
“Santiago,” Ben said when he got to him.
Santiago Rodrigo Torres, DUI; picked up three years before for driving a landscaping truck while under the influence, 0.11, barely over the line. Santiago stood up, three strawberries in his gloved hand, and looked at Ben for a moment before tossing the rotten fruit in the wheelbarrow.
“You going to arrest me?”
“That depends on you.”
“Depends on me?” he said sarcastically. “You’ll find a reason if it suits you.”
“The gun was yours,” Ben said. “You think we weren’t going to find that out?”
The color drained from his face. “The gun belongs to the foreman,” Santiago said. “He just put it in my name.”
“It would be easier to believe that,” Ben said, “if you’d been straight up with me from the beginning.”
Santiago glanced toward the mountains that hovered above the band of smog like the hulls of ships. “He likes to keep a low profile,” Santiago said. “You know?”
The foreman was a runner, a coyote for the big man. Either he was smuggling people over—stuffed in car trunks, sardined in hidden compartments in vans—or he was working with the smugglers, buying illegals from them to work in the fields. If the shit went down with immigration, the foreman was safe, the owners of the fruit packaging company were safe, but men like Santiago took the fall.
“The foreman got me my papers,” Santiago said. “I owed him.”