by Larry Darter
“Thanks,” Drew said. “But, she was a relative we don’t suspect for murder, so it wasn’t a tough interview.”
“True, but besides asking all the right questions, you connected with the woman on the level where she wanted to help you if she could,” Ortega said. “In my opinion, that is what separates good murder cops from the bad ones.”
Ortega hopped on the 101 and headed south towards Venice Boulevard and West Bureau. Neither detective spoke much on the drive. Ortega didn’t know quite what to make of Howie Drew. He seemed like a competent young detective, but Ortega believed Drew must have seen some awful shit either as a cop or in the military. He was one of those guys who seemed to have a thousand-yard stare even inside an eight-by-eight-foot room. Drew revealed little in the way of emotions behind the dead-eyed look. He had shown no nervousness while conducting his first official homicide interview, albeit one associated only with a next of kin notification. While Ortega didn’t consider Drew to be arrogant or self-important, it was clear that he didn’t feel intimidated by Ortega’s greater experience. Drew projected the persona of a guy who believed he belonged in homicide, even though he had yet to pay his dues.
Ortega hadn’t been thrilled when Lieutenant Celia Walsh, the West Bureau’s detectives commander, had told him he was getting a new baby murder cop as a partner. Ortega had hoped to finish his last eleven months working solo and had told Walsh as much. She reminded him that the LAPD was not a democracy, and he didn’t get a vote. Walsh had then repeated that all new homicide detectives needed the benefit of being supervised by an experienced one. Howard Drew, she said, would learn from Rudy Ortega. End of discussion.
Ortega parked the car in the lot. Drew collected from the trunk the cardboard box containing the documents and personal effects he had collected from the scene. The detectives went inside to the squad room. Drew dropped the box on his desk, which was next to Ortega’s.
“We’re at a real disadvantage with the Christmas holidays, Youngblood,” Ortega said. “Tuesday morning, we have to hit the ground running with this. We have to start building momentum.”
“Want me to start on the list of friends, relatives, and acquaintances for the interviews?” Drew said.
“No, it’s already after six on Christmas Eve,” Ortega said. “We’re not on call tomorrow, so let’s enjoy the rest of the holidays. Go home. We’ll pick it back up on Tuesday morning.”
Drew nodded. Both detectives signed out, and Ortega left the squad room after wishing Drew a Merry Christmas. Drew sat down at his desk. He had no family or friends waiting on him at home or anywhere else.
He removed the papers from the cardboard box, stacked them on his desk, and dropped the box on the floor. Drew then opened a blank spreadsheet on his computer and started working up the list of friends, relatives, and acquaintances, initially pulling names off the Christmas card envelopes and other personal correspondence he’d removed from the box. He found envelopes or correspondence for all the individuals Shirley Sutton had mentioned, along with others she hadn’t. When he came across an envelope for a Christmas card sent to Fiona Silverman by William Hurst, on a whim, Drew opened the browser on his computer and typed Hurst’s name into the Google search bar. After hitting return, Drew felt his pulse quicken when he saw a plethora of returns to links to articles about the disappearance of William Hurst’s wife Valerie in 2001.
After reading several articles published between 2001 and 2004 by New York City newspapers and magazines, it was clear that the NYPD and local prosecutors had suspected Hurst had murdered his wife and disposed of her body. Drew also found articles that revealed Fiona Silverman had helped to provide Hurst an alibi at the time of his wife’s suspicious disappearance. It seemed she had given the police an affidavit swearing she had been with Hurst when they believed his wife had gone missing.
There were also numerous quotes in the news articles from Silverman where she had proclaimed Hurst’s innocence. One article characterized Fiona Silverman as William Hurst’s press spokesperson throughout the investigation. Thanks in no small measure to Silverman’s efforts, the New York authorities had never charged Hurst with a crime. They had also uncovered no physical evidence and had never found the body of Valerie Hurst. It was as if she had vanished off the face of the planet.
Of particular interest to Drew was a batch of newly published online articles that revealed New York authorities had recently determined Valerie Hurst hadn’t disappeared from the Hurst’s Manhattan apartment, as both William Hurst and Fiona Silverman had led them to believe. Instead, the police now believed that she had disappeared from the couple’s marital home in Lewisboro, New York. As a result, a Westchester County prosecutor had reopened the investigation into the disappearance of Valerie Hurst.
One article had a quote from the prosecutor in which she had stated that Fiona Silverman was on the shortlist of witnesses she intended to re-interview. According to the article, New York authorities had planned to travel to Los Angeles to interview Silverman in January 2020. But someone had shot Silverman to death in her Benedict Canyon home within weeks of the planned interview. Did William Hurst have secrets he feared Fiona Silverman might not have kept, Drew wondered? Had he taken her off the board to be sure?
Drew looked at his watch. It was only seven-twenty, not too late. He picked up his phone and called Shirley Sutton. When she answered, Drew identified himself. He told Sutton he had a few more questions about something he had learned after leaving her house earlier. He then went over the basic facts of the 2001 investigation of the Valerie Hurst disappearance and the decision of New York authorities to reopen the investigation.
“Do you know anything about that?” Drew said.
“Not much,” Sutton said. “I never even thought about it when you were here earlier. All I know is that Fiona was always adamant that Bill had nothing to do with his wife’s disappearance.”
“Is it true she was an integral part of the alibi that deflected suspicion from him back when it occurred?” Drew said.
“Yes, she was Bill’s biggest defender,” Sutton said. “Fiona still lived in New York back then. She’s told me she was with him the night his wife disappeared and knew Bill had nothing to do with it.”
“It just seems a little too coincidental that someone murdered Fiona just weeks before the New York prosecutor planned to come out here to re-interview her,” Drew said. “Like maybe she knew something about Valerie Hurst she hadn’t revealed back then. And, someone feared she might reveal it now.”
“Assuming for a moment, detective, that Bill killed his wife and Fiona helped him cover it,” Sutton said. “Even if that were true, which I’m positive it’s not, Fiona wouldn’t have told the New York authorities anything different from what she told them in 2001.”
“How can you be so certain about that, Ms. Sutton?” Drew said.
“Have you ever heard the term omertà, detective?”
“I can’t say that I have,” Drew said.
“As practiced by the La Cosa Nostra, the Italian-American Mafia, omertà is a code or vow of silence and code of honor. It places importance on silence in the face of questioning by authorities or outsiders, non-cooperation with the police, the government, or outsiders. It also means willfully ignoring and generally avoiding interference with the illegal activities of others, like not reporting crimes to law enforcement.”
“Okay, so?” Drew said.
“Fiona wasn’t exactly proud of her family’s mafia heritage, but she had adopted much of the mafia code. She was a firm believer in omertà. “Bill Hurst was Fiona’s closest friend, her soul mate. To her, Bill was the same as family. Had Fiona watched Bill kill his wife and dispose of her body, she would never have told the authorities and would never have testified against him had the police arrested him.”
“So, her story was not subject to change, whether or not she told the truth back then,” Drew said.
“No, it wouldn’t have changed no matter how many times the authorities
re-interviewed her,” Sutton said. “Bill Hurst knew Fiona better than anyone. He knew her feelings about omertà. He would know Fiona would never have betrayed him or any secrets he may have. In other words, Bill Hurst had no motive to murder Fiona.”
“All right, Ms. Sutton,” Drew said. “Thank you for your time. I’m sorry for bothering you again on Christmas Eve.”
“No bother, detective,” Sutton said. “I hope you’ll call anytime when you have any updates. Merry Christmas, detective.”
“Thank you, ma’am. Merry Christmas to you.”
Drew hung up feeling a little less confident than he had ten minutes earlier that William Hurst had killed Fiona Silverman. That didn’t mean he hadn’t. But Sutton had sounded so certain her cousin had fully embraced the mafia code of silence and would never have ratted out a friend. Especially not a friend like William Hurst. The only question was, had Hurst been as confident about it as Shirley Sutton was?
Drew went back to his spreadsheet. He moved back and forth between it and the department’s internal database to check addresses and obtain the telephone numbers for friends of Fiona Silverman he identified from her personal documents and correspondence files.
At around ten-fifteen, Drew copied the spreadsheet list to a thumb drive and shut down his computer. He returned the documents and personal items on his desk to the cardboard box. After grabbing his jacket off the back of his chair, he tucked the box under his arm and was ready to leave for home. As he passed Ortega’s desk, something caught his eye. Next to a photograph on the desk of Ortega’s wife and family was a badge-shaped engraved acrylic plaque on a stand. Drew recognized the words on the plaque: No greater honor will ever be bestowed on you as a police officer or a more profound duty imposed on you than when you are entrusted with the investigation of the death of a human being.
Drew knew the words were part of what was known as The Homicide Investigator’s Creed. He also knew the second paragraph of the creed by memory: It is your moral duty, and as an officer entrusted with such duty, it is incumbent upon you to follow the course of events and the facts as they develop to their ultimate conclusion. It is a heavy responsibility. As such, let no person deter you from the truth or your personal conviction to see that justice is done.
The words of the creed had motivated Drew to aspire to become a homicide detective when he’d first read those words years ago as a patrol officer. Drew didn’t take it lightly that homicide detectives spoke for the dead. At that moment, he reaffirmed his commitment to Fiona Silverman. He would let no person deter him from the truth or his personal conviction to see that justice was done for her.
Chapter 4
After stopping off on the way home at Trejo’s Cantina on North Cahuenga for tacos to go, Drew arrived at his apartment on Wilcox Avenue at eleven-thirty. He grabbed a plate from the cabinet, dumped the tacos from the bag onto the plate, and opened a bottle of Fat Tire. He carried the food and beer over to the dining room table, where he wolfed down the late dinner of tacos and drank the first beer of the evening. Once he had cleared the table, he plopped the cardboard box onto it and opened another Fat Tire. After he had removed all the documents from the box and spread them out, Drew took his usual spot at the table. He opened his laptop and loaded the spreadsheet list he had copied to the thumb drive before leaving West Bureau.
After the second beer, Drew was dead tired but knew he wouldn’t be going to bed anytime soon. He got up from the table and brewed a cup of coffee on his Keurig. While the coffee was streaming into the cup, he slotted a country and western disc called Dynamite! in the Bose player on the shelf beside the table. It was Tami Neilson’s 2014 album, perfect for late-night work. After adjusting the volume to mid-range, he grabbed the coffee, sat back down at the table, and continued going through the cache of documents.
There had been so many cowboy shitkickers in Drew’s old army unit back in Iraq that he had been continually inundated with country-western music. He had hated it at first, but in time it had grown on him. By the end of his second tour, it was all he ever listened to. Maybe he found country-western songs appealing because the lyrics came closer to describing his real-life experiences than any other music did. Tami Neilson, a Canadian-born, New Zealand-based country singer and songwriter, was a recent Drew discovery. There was something he really liked about the spirited, fiery charm of the antipodean rockabilly singer. The opening track of Dynamite!, “Walk Back to Your Arms,” had an echoed backing of vocal responses and a deep, doomed tone of resignation with a haunting mood that gripped like a countrified Amy Winehouse. In “Cry Over You,” a ballad that weighed love against tears and finds it wanting, Neilson gave it the full Patsy Cline, and it sounded real, not merely retro.
Whenever Drew found another name of a friend or acquaintance in Fiona Silverman’s papers, he added it to the list he was compiling. By the time he had worked through the last of the correspondence files, there were over fifty names on the list. The files had also listed addresses for most of the people. Next, he turned to Silverman’s old-school address book. There he found another two dozen names to add to the log, along with missing phone numbers for people already on the list. Drew’s objective was to complete the register of Silverman’s friends and acquaintances before bed. That way, he could focus the following day on separating the list into a local group, and a group made up of those who lived in distant cities and other states. Then Tuesday morning at work, he would be ready to schedule the interviews.
By 3 A.M. Christmas morning, Drew had finished his exhaustive list of Fiona Silverman’s closest friends and acquaintances. He listened to the final strains of “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” from the album Rancho California, the 2014 debut by Calico the Band, an all-female vocalist’s country and western band from Los Angeles. The “Calico” in the band’s name stood for “California Country.” The duo of Kirsten Proffit and Manda Mosher accentuated Gram Parsons’ hippie country-rock with burnished harmonies reminiscent of Fleetwood Mac with a hint of the jangle pop of ‘80s college rock. Like Tami Neilson, Calico the Band was another of Drew’s recent discoveries whose music he liked a lot.
After closing the laptop and shutting off the Bose player, Drew went to his bedroom. He got undressed, switched off the light, and into bed, hoping he could get some sleep. Sleep for Drew after Iraq had been fleeting. He considered it a good night when he could get five or six hours of it, especially good on the nights the dreams didn’t come.
The city of Ba’qubah contained thousands of densely packed buildings in thousands of city blocks so close together that there were only a couple of feet between them in places. The place is scary as hell. It is hell. As Sergeant Howard Drew’s dismounted fire team inches down the narrow alley, pounding their way into the homes of suspected insurgents, minus an occasional burst of gunfire, things seem eerily calm. Then the small arms fire intensifies. Suddenly Drew’s squad has a real fight on its hands.
As the fire team bounds from one property to the next, they are snipped at from the adjacent buildings’ rooftops and windows. Battle lines merge as friend and foe exchange gunfire with one another from mere meters apart. Bullets ping off the Strykers, eight-wheeled armored fighting vehicles, corkscrewed into the narrow alley providing suppressive fires from behind Drew’s team of dismounts. Bullets ricochet errantly off the steel in every direction. Periodic explosions rumble the ground.
Drew thinks to himself, “How did I end up here?” A panicked call for help crackles over the troop net, quickly reminding him there are more pressing matters to attend to now. “Officer down!” Pondering philosophical questions will have to wait until another time and place. It was Staff Sergeant Kenny Mukoyama’s voice on the radio, the squad leader, and Drew’s best bud. The uncharacteristic panic in his friend’s voice unnerves Drew. Mukoyama, a Japanese-American from San Francisco, is a fearless warrior. The other guys in the squad call him Kamikaze Kenny because of his audacity in battle. Drew orders his team up the alley in answer to Kenny’s call for help
.
When Drew catches sight of him, Mukoyama is trapped in a fusillade of bullets and exploding RPGs. The squad leader stands his ground, fully exposed, firing back like a madman as AK rounds snap all around him. Mukoyama gets hit and goes down.
Drew runs straight up the alley through a maelstrom of bullets and explosions. He grabs hold of a strap on Mukoyama’s body armor vest and pulls his friend to cover behind a mound of rubble. Drew pulls his knife and cuts away Kenny’s blood-soaked trousers, locating each bullet wound by tracing it back to the dark profusions of blood gushing from each tear in the fabric. Mukoyama is in terrible shape. He doesn’t appear to be breathing and is pale as a ghost. Drew sees he has taken a bullet to the femoral artery in the upper half of the right leg, just beneath the thigh. He’s been shot at least a half dozen times, and in all the worst imaginable places. AK rounds zing off the rubble pile as a medic runs up to assist. He tries to pinch off the head of the femoral artery wound by fastening a tourniquet above the top. Drew notices Mukoyama has taken a bullet to the left calf. A large slab of flesh there is dangling from the bone. Drew reaches for a compression bandage. Mukoyama has been hit so many times it is like trying to plug a disintegrating dam. Suddenly, the world erupts in an ear-splitting roar and a flash of heat.
When Drew came awake in his bed about 6 A.M., he sat bolt upright. The sheets of his bed were soaking wet. The dream had made him sweat. He threw off the damp covers and stumbled to the bathroom, where he washed his face with cold water from the tap. The dreams always brought back the worst of his memories from the war.
Drew opened the sliding door and stepped out onto the patio balcony. He leaned against the metal railing, looking down at the lights of the sleeping city. It was Christmas Day. The warm wind dried the sweat on his skin until it felt like a salty shell. Tears replaced the sweat in his eyes. Drew choked back a sob.
