L.A. Requiem

by Robert Crais

  “In other words, you've got nothing. There's no physical evidence, and you guys are trying to hang it on Dersh because of an FBI profile.”

  The hazel eyes stayed with me, but she shrugged. “No, we're trying to hang it on Dersh because Krantz is feeling heat from upstairs. Bishop gave him the Task Force a year ago, but he doesn't have anything to show for it. The brass are screaming a shitstorm, and that means Bishop can't carry Krantz forever. If another body drops, and Krantz doesn't have a suspect, he'll be out of the job.”

  “Maybe they'll give it to you, Dolan.”

  “Yeah. Right.” She looked away.

  I thought about Dersh and his Kenyan coffee. Dersh, with the bright paintings and his house smelling of Marks-a-lots. “What about you? Do you think it's Dersh?”

  “Krantz thinks Dersh is the shooter. I think Dersh is a legitimate suspect. There's a difference.”

  I took a breath and nodded, still trying to figure out what to do. “The criminalist's report suggests the shooter was driving an off-road vehicle or an SUV. Remember the homeless guy I told you about?”

  “Krantz may be a dud, Cole, but not all of us got into Robbery-Homicide on a pass. I took a ride up there yesterday, but couldn't find Mr. Deege. Hollywood Division uniforms have been told to keep an eye out.”

  I suddenly felt better about Frank Garcia and what I would tell him.

  “Well, okay, Dolan. I'm going to sit on it.”

  “You're not going to tell Garcia?”

  “No. The only person I'll tell is my partner.”

  “Pike.” Her eyes suddenly sparkled, and the bad girl was back. “Christ, wouldn't Krantz love that. Joe Pike knows his big secret.”

  I held out my hand. “Nice doing business with you, Dolan. I'll give you a call later about talking to Frank.”

  Her hand was cool and dry and strong. I liked the way it felt, and felt a faraway stab of guilt that I liked it a little too much.

  She squeezed once, and then I opened the door to get out.

  “Hey, Cole.”

  I stopped.

  “I didn't like passing you those bum reports.”

  “I know. I could tell.”

  “That's good work you did, putting all this together. You would've made a good cop.”

  I let myself out of her Beemer. She watched as I walked away.

  14

  • • •

  I reached my office just after seven, but I did not stay there. I gathered the interviews with Dersh and Ward, then walked across the street to a bagel place I like. I ordered Nova lox on a cinnamon-raisin bagel, then took a seat at a window table. An older woman at the next table smiled a good morning. I wished her a good morning back. The older man with her was reading a paper, and didn't bother with either of us. He looked snotty.

  It was an ideal place in which to consider multiple homicide.

  I went to the pay phone by the rest rooms, and called Joe Pike. He answered on the second ring.

  “I'm at the bagel place across from the office. Karen Garcia was the fifth victim in a string of homicides going back nineteen months. The police know that, and they have a suspect.” If you're going to say it, you just have to say it.

  Pike didn't respond.

  “Joe?”

  “I'll be there in twenty minutes.”

  I reread Dersh's and Ward's interviews while I waited, all the while thinking about Eugene Dersh. Dersh didn't seem like a homicidal maniac to me, but maybe they said that about Ted Bundy and Andrew Cunanan, too.

  Both Dersh's and Ward's versions of events agreed that it was Dersh who had suggested the hike at Lake Hollywood, but differed importantly about why they had left the trail to hike along the shoreline. Ward stated that it was Dersh's idea to walk along the shore, and that Dersh picked the spot where they left the trail. The police called this being “directive,” as if Dersh was directing the course of events that led to their finding the body. But where Dersh was clear and decisive in describing their actions, Ward seemed inconsistent and uncertain, and I wondered why.

  The elderly woman was watching me. We traded another smile. The elderly man was still lost in the paper, neither of them having shared a word in the entire time I had been there. Maybe they had said everything they had to say to each other years ago. But maybe not. Maybe their silence wasn't two people each living separate lives, but two people who fit so perfectly that love and communication could be derived by simple proximity. In a world where people kill other people for no reason at all, you want to believe in things like that.

  When Joe Pike walked in, the old man glanced up from his paper and frowned. There goes the neighborhood.

  I said, “Let's walk. I don't want to talk about it here.”

  We walked along the south side of Santa Monica Boulevard, heading east into the sun. I gave Pike the sheet with the five names.

  “You recognize any of these names?”

  “Only Karen. These the other vics?”

  “Yeah. Munoz was first.” I went through the others, giving him everything that I'd learned from both Samantha Dolan and Jerry Swetaggen. “The cops've been trying to connect these people together, but they haven't been able to do it. Now they're thinking the guy picks his victims at random.”

  “You said there's a suspect.”

  “Krantz thinks it's Dersh.”

  Pike stopped walking, and looked at me with all the expression of a dinner plate. The morning rush-hour traffic was heavy, and I wondered how many thousands of people passed us in just those few minutes of walking.

  “The man who discovered the body?”

  “Krantz is under the gun to make a collar. He wants to think that it's Dersh, but they don't have any physical evidence putting Dersh to the killings. All they have is some kind of FBI profile, so Krantz has a twenty-four-hour watch on the guy. That's how they picked me up when I went over there.”

  “Mm.”

  The passing traffic was reflected in Pike's glasses.

  “This thing has been top secret since the beginning, Joe, and the cops want to keep it that way. The deal I made with Dolan is that we'll respect that. We can't tell Frank.”

  Pike's chest expanded as he watched the traffic. His only movement. “Big thing not to tell, Elvis.”

  “Krantz may be a turd, but Dolan is a top cop, and so is Watts. Hell, most of those guys are aces. That's why they're in Robbery-Homicide. So even if Krantz is half-cocked, the rest of them are still going to work a righteous case. I think we have to give them time to work it, and that means keeping quiet about what's going on.”

  Pike made a quiet snort. “Me, helping Krantz.”

  “Dolan needs to ask Frank about the four other vics and look through Karen's things. Will you talk to him?”

  Pike nodded, but I'm not sure the nod was meant for me.

  We walked again, neither of us speaking, and pretty soon we came to Pike's Jeep. He opened the door, but didn't get in.

  “Elvis?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Could I see those?” He wanted the interview transcripts.

  “Sure.” I gave them to him.

  “You think it was Dersh?” Like if it was, you wouldn't want to be Dersh.

  “I don't know, Joe. The always reliable but overworked hunch says no, but I just don't know.”

  Pike's jaw flexed once, then that, too, was gone.

  “I'll talk to Frank and let you know.”

  Joe Pike climbed into his Jeep, pulled the door shut, and in that moment I would've given anything to see into his heart.

  Pike wanted to see Eugene Dersh.

  He wanted to witness him in his own environment, and see if he thought Dersh had murdered Karen Garcia. If it was possible that Dersh was the killer, then Pike would ponder what to do with that.

  Pike knew from the police interview transcripts that Dersh worked at home. All LAPD interviews started that way. State your name and address for the record, please. State your occupation. Pike's instructor at the academy said
that you started this way because it put the subject in the mood to answer your questions. Later, Pike had been amazed to learn how often it put the subject in the mood to lie. Even innocent people would lie. Make up a name and address that, when you tried to contact them weeks later, you would find to be an auto parts store, or an apartment building packed with illegals, none of whom spoke English.

  Pike pulled into a Chevron station and looked up Dersh's address in his Thomas Brothers map. Dersh lived in an older residential area in Los Feliz where the streets twisted and wound with the contours of the low foothills. Seeing the street layout was important because Krantz's people were watching Dersh's place, and Pike wanted to know where they were.

  When Pike had the names of the streets bracketing Dersh's home, he used his cell phone to call a realtor he knew, and asked her if any properties were for sale or lease on those streets. The police would establish a surveillance base in a mobile van if they had to, but they preferred to use a house. After a brief search of the multiple listing service, Pike's friend reported that there were three homes for sale in that area, two of which were vacant. She gave Pike the addresses. Comparing the addresses with Dersh's on the map, Pike saw that one of the homes was located on the street immediately north of Dersh's, and kitty-corner across an alley. That's where the police would be.

  Pike worked his way across Hollywood, then wound his way into the quiet of an older neighborhood until he came to Dersh's small, neat home. Pike noted the two-story dwelling just off the alley that would be the police surveillance site. In the flicker of time as he drove past the mouth of the alley, Pike saw the glint of something shiny in the open second-floor window. The officers roosting there would have binoculars, a spotting scope, and probably a videocamera, but if Pike kept Dersh's house between them and himself, they wouldn't see him. In a combat situation, those guys would fast be a memory.

  The neighborhood was easy. Small houses set back from the street, lushly planted with trees and shrubs, showing little clear ground between the houses. No one was clipping flowers in their front yards, no housekeepers were peering from their living-room windows, no strollers were passing, no yapping little dogs.

  Pike parked at the curb two houses west of Dersh, then disappeared between the shrubs of the nearest house, one moment there, the next gone. In that instant when he allowed himself to be enveloped by leaves and twigs and green, he felt an absolute calm.

  He moved along the near house, staying beneath the windows, then crossed between the trees into the prickly shrubs that surrounded Dersh's house. He neither touched nor disturbed the plants, but instead moved around and between them, the way he had done since he was a boy.

  Pike eased to the corner of the living-room window, snuck a fast glance into a bright room, caught movement deeper within the house, and heard music. Yves Montand, singing in French.

  Pike followed the west wall of the house through a small stand of rubber trees planted with ferns and pickle lilies, passing beneath the high window of a bathroom to the casement windows of Dersh's studio, where he saw two men. Dersh, the shorter of the two, wearing jeans and a Hawaiian shirt. Had to be Dersh, because the other man, younger, was wearing a suit. Dersh moved as if this place were his home; the other moved as a visitor. Pike listened. The two men were at a computer, Dersh sitting, the other man pointing over Dersh's shoulder at the screen. Pike could hear Yves Montand, and catch occasional words. They were discussing the layout of a magazine ad.

  Pike watched Dersh and tried to get a sense of the man. Dersh did not appear to be capable of the things that the police suspected, but Pike knew you could not tell by appearances. He had known many men who looked and acted strong, but had cores of weakness, and he had known men who seemed timid who had shown themselves capable of great strength and of accomplishing terrible things.

  Pike drew even, steady breaths, listening to the birds in the trees, and remembering the Karen Garcia with whom he had spent so much time, and how she had died. Joe considered Dersh, noting his finger strokes on the keyboard, the way he held himself, the way he laughed at something the other man said. He thought that if Dersh had killed Karen Garcia, he might end the man. He would lay open the fabric of justice, and let it be Dersh's shroud. He could do such a thing now, even here in the daylight as the police watched.

  But after a time Pike eased away from the window. Eugene Dersh did not seem like a killer, but Pike would wait to see what evidence the police produced. Seeing the evidence, he would then decide.

  There was always plenty of time in which to deliver justice.

  School

  “We did eight hundred push-ups every goddamned day, some days over two hundred chins, and they ran us. Christ, we ran ten miles every morning and another five at night, and sometimes even more than that. We weren't big guys, like badass football linemen or any of that, you know, Rambo with all those pansy protein-shake muscles bulging. We were skinny kids, mostly, all stripped down and hungry, but, hell, we could carry hundred-pound packs, four hundred rounds, and a poodle-popper uphill at a run all goddamned day. You know what we were? We were wolves. Lean and mean, and you definitely did not want us on your ass. We were fuckin' dangerous, man. That's what they wanted. Recon. That's what we wanted, too.”

  —excerpt from Young Men at War: A Case by Case Study of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, by Patricia Barber, Ph.D. M.F.C.C. Duke University Press, 1986

  Gunnery Sergeant Leon Aimes stood on the low ridge overlooking the parched hills at Camp Pendleton Marine Training Depot just south of Oceanside, California, scanning the range with a pair of Zeiss binoculars that had been a gift from his wife. He'd been pissed as hell when he'd opened the box at his forty-fourth birthday and seen what they were because the Zeiss had set back the family three months'pay. But they were the best viewing glass in the world, none finer, and he'd gone to her later feeling like a dog to apologize for carrying on. These Zeiss were the best, all right. He would use them hunting blacktail deer this fall, and, a year from now, after his posting as a Force Recon company instructor, when he returned to Vietnam for his fourth combat tour, he would use them to hunt Charlie.

  Aimes sat in a jeep with his best drinking buddy, Gunnery Sergeant Frank Horse, the two of them wearing black tee shirts, field utilities, and Alice harnesses, both of them smoking the shitty cigars they'd bought down in TJ two months before. Horse was a full-blood Mescalero Apache, and Aimes believed him to be the finest Advanced Infantry Instructor at Camp Pendleton, as well as an outstanding warrior. Aimes, though African-American, had once been told by his grandmother that he had Apache blood (which he believed) and was the descendant of great warriors (which he absolutely knew to be true), so he and Horse often joked about being in the same tribe when they'd had a little too much tequila.

  Horse grinned at him around the cigar. “Can't see'm, can you?”

  Aimes rolled his own cigar around in his mouth. Three hundred acres of coastal desert rolled out below them, dipping down into a little creek bed before rising again to another finger ridge half a mile away. Somewhere out in those three hundred acres was a young Marine that Horse thought had the warrior spirit. “Not yet, but I'm lookin'.”

  Horse smiled wider and nodded at nothing in particular. “He's right under your goddamned nose, Leon. Hell.”

  “Bullshit he is. If he's out there, I'll find him.” Leon Aimes scowled harder and imagined a huge checkerboard laid upon the land. He carefully searched each block on the board, noting clumps of manzanita and puppy grass as he ran a mental comparison to see if anything had moved in the minutes since he'd last scanned the terrain. He could find no trace of movement, yet he knew that somewhere out there a young Marine was slowly creeping toward him.

  Horse drew deep on the stogy, making an exaggerated deal out of it, and blew a great plume of smoke into the breeze. “Been here damn near two hours, pard.” Really rubbing it in. Really digging at Leon. “You know he's good, else you woulda found him by now. We gonna keep the boy out there all
day, or has this turned into something about you instead've something about him?”

  Finally, Gunnery Sergeant Leon Aimes sighed and lowered the glasses. His friend Frank Horse was a wise man as well as a warrior. “Okay, goddamnit, where is he?”

  Horse's eyes crinkled, like he'd won some kinda goddamned bet with himself, and Aimes could tell from the smile that Horse liked this boy, all right. Horse pointed off to their left and ahead of them with his cigar. “Heading three-four-zero. See that little depression about three hundred meters out?”

  Aimes saw it at once without even lifting the glasses. The barest of shadows. “Yeah.”

  Horse reached behind them for the bullhorn. “He came up through that little cut in the creek bank out there off to the right and has been working his way up.”

  Aimes spit a load of brown cigar juice, pissed. “How in hell did you see'm?”

  “Didn't see shit.” Horse spit his own load, then looked over at his friend. “That's the way I told him to come.”

  Their eyes met and Aimes smiled. “Get the boy in here, an' let's talk to him, then.”

  Horse keyed the horn and called out across the range. “This program is terminated, Private. Come to your feet.”

  The little depression three hundred meters out on heading three-four-zero did not move. Instead, a loose collection of twigs and burlap and dirt slowly rose from the earth off to their right and less than two hundred meters away. Horse's cigar nearly fell out of his jaw, and Aimes burst out laughing. Aimes clapped his old friend on the back. “Three-four-zero, all right.”

  “I coulda sworn …”

  “Lucky that boy wasn't gonna shoot our old asses.”

  Then the two combat veterans were beyond the laughing, and Aimes nodded. Horse keyed the mike again. “Get in here, Private. Triple time.”

  Running up to them across the broken ground, Aimes thought that the ghillie suit made the private look like some kind of matted Pekinese dog, all its mats bouncing up and down. Aimes said, “He in good shape?”