by Daniel Pyne
“I could download and scan everything to my desktop,” he said, as he resumed tacking up another set, parallel to the first, for her perusal, “better resolution, infinite zoom . . .”
Riley shook her head. “I like how I can move through them.” She leaned into one photograph and then another, using the loupe to enlarge the odd detail. “Look at this hand. The way the fingers curl, like he’s hiding something.” She parked in front of a wide shot of Willa’s father, Albert, frozen in the act of trying to collect his granddaughters from their father’s lifeless corpse.
Next to it, closer view, Albert has lured the girls away, he’s holding their hands. There’s no sorrow in his expression. His eyes almost black.
“He’s glad Charlie’s dead.” Riley noticed. “Absolutely no remorse.”
Finn had his doubts. “Pictures can lie.”
“Sontag says photographs don’t explain, they acknowledge.”
“More Sontag?”
“Yes.”
“You mocking me?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She looked over at him innocently.
Finn pointed his chin at the picture of Albert. “That’s just a fragment in time.”
“Okay, but look.” Finn couldn’t, because Riley had the loupe; she gestured anyway from a close-up of Willa looking off-frame left to a different close-up of Albert, seemingly looking right back at her, connecting them by inference. “Look at her eyes, look at his body language: Like, he knows what she’s done, he doesn’t much like it, but she’s going, ‘Please don’t stop me.’” She sat back. “A silent communication, daughter to father. She’s totally falling on the grenade for him.”
Finn frowned. “Dad shot Charlie?”
Riley caught him staring at her in a way that left him feeling exposed. “What.”
“Um.” Finn didn’t quite agree with her theory, but, “Can we scroll back and talk about why someone inside the department, one of your brothers or sisters in blue, doctored the pictures of where you got shot?”
In Finn’s pocket, because he’d neglected to terminate it, Riley’s phone hummed. Lennox was calling back. Riley shot Finn a scolding look and he sheepishly handed the phone to her, unwilling, he tried to explain, not exactly truthfully, to be a party to her domestic hurricane. But instead of answering, she pried the battery out, dropped the phone on the floor, and rolled over it, back and forth, until it cracked and was ruined.
“Maybe there’s no connection,” she said. “Maybe it’s two separate and unique events, my shooting, Charlie’s killing, connected only by the variable that is you.”
Finn couldn’t decide if she believed that or just wanted him to believe it. He felt the throb of his eye swelling, the whole side of his face ached; a trip to the bathroom had disclosed a lurid bruise, leaching down purple and yellow.
Riley resumed where she had been interrupted. “You’re the photographer, picture this: Charlie Ko, a sweet, hapless guy, first-generation Korean-American whose wife became a warrior, so he, left behind, maybe feeling the challenge to his masculinity, developed a weakness for softer girls and hard drugs. Picture him side-lit, deep shadows, sinfully easy on the eyes, an eggplant-colored silk suit he can’t afford on Willa’s salary, showing off the perfect orthodontia his parents spent a fortune on, gliding through the glittery ripples of hotties and hipsters at an upscale waterfront club.”
Finn shook his head, stubborn. “I want to hear about Sunken City.”
“He found both,” Riley continued about Charlie, ignoring Finn’s question though she seemed pleased that he wasn’t giving up on it, “in a bad little rich girl named Mallory Koenig, while his wife, our Willa, femme-patriot, was chasing Islamofacists around the Fertile Crescent, a zillion miles away.”
“Mallory? The witness from—”
Impatient: “Yeah. Pale waif, five-four on her tiptoes, probably can’t remember her natural hair color, perky silicone implants. That kind of heroin chic that went out of style in the nineties, gift-wrapped in linen or whatever, spike heels and a Hermès Baccara clutch.”
“She seems nice,” Finn said, dry.
“Backseat blow jobs, sexy kisser—lots of tongue—and just like that Charlie was all tangled up in this nickel-dime neighborhood drug ring I had stumbled on while trolling for bigger fish.”
“Undercover.”
“It was casual, he didn’t even know at first that what she had him doing was dealing. She’d slip a night’s supply of white powder and pills from her purse into his pocket, and while Mallory danced with the skinny-jean hipster neckbeards, not holding, blameless, out on the main floor, Charlie was over in some dark corner selling eight balls or Molly to horny bros and party people.”
“If you knew all this,” Finn said, resigned to let her spin out her tale, “why didn’t you just bust them a long time ago?”
“I needed a snitch. Mallory, Charlie, they’re chum bait. You put them in jail and two more losers show up waving their hand, ready to step in. I was chasing this shadow, Mallory’s supplier—he calls himself Mr. Rogers—from the old kids’ TV show? Because what with the Mexican cartels and the Vietnamese syndicate and the Mongols biker gang, the southland narco-economy getting so damn crowded a man’s got to diversify his neighborhood, Mr. Rogers has moved way past the party drugs into trafficking in human beings. Guatemalan black-market babies, contract sweat labor for the rag trade and high tech, underage girls for Fullerton pimps or Asian hostess clubs, and indentured domestic servants for certain Orange County elite.”
She took a breath. “Charlie had no idea what he’d stepped into, and when finally he did, discovered he couldn’t get the stink off.”
Her color rose, her voice took on a different tone; Finn saw the pure cop in Riley, passionate, unrelenting. The job was at her core, fundamental; legs had nothing to do with it, Lennox was so wrong.
“I got super close,” she said. “Twice we raided pop-up hostess clubs on Charlie’s call and found them empty. Girls gone, but with the K-pop still playing, cigarettes smoldering, ice not even melted in the drinks.”
“Somebody tipped them off?” Finn now saw where it all looped back to the bad cop.
“Maybe.” Riley maneuvered herself under a print still clipped to a line, reached high, snagged it with two fingers and plucked it free. “Willa came home and everything went sideways.” It was a photograph of Gunny Ko, after the crime, in a nakedly candid moment Finn had stolen from her: tucked in on herself, hands bound, small against the condo wall.
“Couple of months ago, I watched as Willa—no makeup, hair pulled back, combat fatigues, decidedly unglamorous—came out of the belly of a plane having mustered out from another so-called advisory tour in Kabul. Mobbed by her girls. But looking across the tarmac at Charlie, who hung back, already slouching his retreat, because he’d been fucking Mallory Koenig blind just two hours earlier in the backseat of her car.”
Riley’s voice grew husky. “They argued right there in the parking lot. Willa, ballistic. Kids wide-eyed and quiet, in the car with Albert. The wild of it is, Charlie wanted her back. He owned what he’d done. He was just weak.”
“What did Willa want?”
Riley stared at the picture in her hands. “Well, he was beautiful, wasn’t he? Exotic. He treated her, when he was with her, like an empress. I mean, yes, okay, Charlie worked her, too. But is that not too reductive? So elegant, and gentle, even in the face of her fury, he never touched her in anger. Loved her as completely as he completely betrayed her.”
When she looked up at Finn, Riley’s eyes were filling with those annoying tears he knew she hated. “And I let it unfold. Because I needed my goddamn informant.” She thumbed at the corner of one eye. “And what can you say to a girl, anyway, guy like that, she feels like she’s won the lottery when she’s with him and he’s not too high?”
—
FINN
WAS QUIET for a while. He watched as Riley moved again among the pictures, collecting a few selects and then rearranging them in a new order, illustrative of her theory of the crime as she told it. “So. Now picture Willa’s kids, at the playground, on the climbing structure the day after Mom got back. Albert is watching them, protective, but with one jaded eye always on his daughter and Charlie, who were off to one side, on a bench, deep in marital crisis, Charlie doing almost all the talking, believably contrite, pleading his case. Willa in tears. And Albert seething.”
It was her version of Mason’s sculpting, and Finn understood where Riley was going with this. “How did her dad get ahold of her gun?”
“Charlie told me Willa gave it to her dad, for protection. She smuggled it off base because she was worried that Charlie’s drug dealing would blow back on her family. She’d just spent three years watching innocent Afghans get caught in crossfire. It wasn’t going to happen on her watch.”
Finn was not convinced. “And you believe her father killed Charlie why?”
“Didn’t want them back together. Albert’s old-school.”
“Racist.”
“No. Well, I’m sure there’s some of that, but no. A morals-and-standards thing. He’s ex-military himself, his wife was this ballsy federal agent who got killed back in ’99, Ensenada, I think, a shootout with the Arellano Cartel. Willa is Albert’s everything. And Charlie Ko was messing with his daughter’s heart.”
Finn imagined it: Charlie and Albert, condo living room, big blowout argument, Albert has the gun, pulls the trigger—Finn looked at the photograph of Charlie, dead on the floor, all bled out. “Is this how you always roll? Like, flash judgments that cherry-pick whatever evidence you need to prove your point?”
“I didn’t roll at all until recently.” Riley’s eyes flickered impatience, stung. “And you took the pictures.”
“Yeah, but what if they never actually looked at each other the way you say? Or looked, but didn’t really see?” Finn gestured between single stills of Willa and her dad. “Maybe I just caught them at the exact instant where their gazes crossed. Willa’s looking to her children, Albert’s turning to talk to a cop just out of frame. But the eye-lines match, out of context. You see what you want to see.”
Finn waited for the argument, but Riley seemed willing to consider that she had it wrong. For a while she didn’t say anything, and moved the pictures around again, and tacked up, off to the side, a wide-angle Finn had taken of the entire tableau: Albert, Willa, cops, kids, body. “Is that how you remember it?”
“Like you said, I just take the pictures. I don’t try to understand them.”
Riley faced him. “I don’t believe that.” But when Finn chose not to respond, she didn’t pursue it. “Well, in any case, Willa Ko didn’t kill her husband.”
“How can you be so certain?”
“Bullet casings,” Riley said. Finn, who was not a cop, didn’t have the slightest idea what she was talking about. “Gun with a clip, like Willa’s, the empty casings eject,” she explained. “We find them afterward, scattered around the crime scene, unless the shooter remembers to pick them up.”
“Okay.”
“They aren’t in any of your pictures from the scene, official or otherwise.”
Finn was confused. “So Willa took them.”
“No. I asked her. She said she didn’t. I implied we had already found them, and she wanted me to believe that, yes, she’d left them there.”
“Because she thinks her father committed the crime.”
Riley just nodded.
“Okay.” Finn pretended to think about this, but hadn’t let go of his original question. The mystery in which he was most interested was Riley. “So what were you doing out in Sunken City the night you got shot? And why did those pictures get doctored?”
But Riley had pivoted away, turned her back to Finn, to stare at the new mosaic of photographs she’d tacked to the wall. “Who’s the detective here, Finn?” she said, then answered for him, “Me, I’m the detective.”
Finn saw no reason to dispute it.
—
“I’LL NEED A NEW PHONE. One of those throwaway ones, where you buy a chunk of time.”
“I’m, what, your assistant now?”
She didn’t take the bait. “You’ve got that friend who can get us in the crime lab, yes?”
Finn hedged, “Yeah. But—”
“—Forget about Mexico.” Riley’s shoulders stiffened. “He didn’t doctor your photos.” She was motionless. She didn’t elaborate, she didn’t turn.
—
“SHE WANTS TO SEE what Forensics found in the victim’s pockets.”
“What’s going on with your eye?”
Finn mumbled something about whacking himself with the camera and Joaquin shot him a doubting look, but Finn gave back nothing as his friend led him down the narrow aisles of old wire-front lockers, looking for a number scrawled on a Post-it. The property room was cramped, never intended to hold so much detritus of misbehavior, and smelled foul, the overhead lights old-school fluorescents, hideous blue-white tubes that cast everything in a glaring bleak hue of shame.
“Everyone in the lab’s making bets on how many weeks it’ll be before Lennox skins and guts you for stealing his woman,” Joaquin said under his breath.
“She doesn’t belong to him,” Finn schooled him. “People aren’t property.”
“I took the under on two.”
Finn cut a dark look in Joaquin’s direction and Riley’s voice came thin and filtered through the cell phone Finn held out in front of them in his hand like a virgula divina: “What?”
“Nothing,” Finn assured her.
She was with them via FaceTime on the tiny screen, and he was dowsing for her, still kind of puzzled and pleasantly annoyed by how easily she was able to convince him to do things he would never have done before he met her. “Why does your friend keep whispering?”
“You clear this with Homicide?” Joaquin said.
“Why would we need to?” Riley countered from the phone. “We’re just looking. Not going to mess with anything.”
Joaquin shot Finn another dubious sidelong look that Finn ignored, but that Riley was somehow able to read.
“What.”
“Nothing,” Finn and Joaquin both said, too quickly, as Joaquin stopped short and keyed open a cache filled with the physical evidence collected at the site of Charlie Ko’s murder. Bagged and tagged and sealed and carefully labeled, case number on everything. From his pocket Joaquin pulled on a pair of latex gloves, just in case, and Finn lifted and aimed the phone so Riley could see, streaming back to the desktop computer in Finn’s loft, the items Joaquin retrieved from the locker. Keys, wallet, credit card, loose change, lip balm, a couple of crumpled receipts. A small bulging brown crime lab envelope that Joaquin squeezed open to show the two empty brass bullet casings inside.
Riley laughed. “Magic,” she said to Finn.
Finn understood that these had not been in evidence the last time Riley visited. “Not really helpful, though,” he pointed out.
“No,” Riley said, then explained, “The night he got killed, Charlie left me a voice mail. Said he had something important to tell. That’s why I was in Sunken City to meet Mallory, I thought she knew what . . .” Her voice went thin, and Finn could hear how difficult it was for Riley to talk about the shooting, still.
“I took her picture,” Finn said, and thought it useless until Riley asked where it was. “One of the flat drawers,” Finn told her, unable to remember which one.
“I had hoped she knew what Charlie wanted to tell me.”
“She was the bait,” Finn said. “They used her to get you out there.”
The video feed was quiet, which told Finn that Riley had long ago come to the same conclusion. He zoomed his phone camera in on the bin as Joaquin rumm
aged through what remained. “Anything else of interest?”
But the chat window was empty; Riley had disappeared from frame, and all Finn and Joaquin could see on the phone was a slice of Finn’s loft kitchen, a short run of the photographs hung from clothesline, a blank stretch of wall and ceiling.
“Riley? You still there?”
They heard her voice, hollow with the loft’s naked echo, tinny through the phone, but couldn’t decipher it. They waited, and for a long time she didn’t say anything. There was a dull rumbling that Finn guessed was Riley rolling around his loft in her chair. Joaquin made a face. Finn tried to ignore him.
“What are you seeing?”
“It’s not what I’m seeing, it’s what I’m not seeing,” she said, still out of frame, but her words clear.
Finn and Joaquin stared at the empty feed.
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“His phone, Finn.” Riley came back into frame. “A player like Charlie never goes anywhere without his phone.”
“True dat,” Joaquin quipped. “Nobody ever goes anywhere without their phones.”
“And it’s the first thing Homicide would have looked for. If it’s not there in Property, they didn’t find it.” Riley let this settle. “So where is it?”
7
CONCENTRATE. She was looking but not seeing. Finn’s photos reeled before her in a wall-mounted slide show:
—Charlie, dead.
—Willa, inconsolable.
—Albert and the little girls, bursting in.
—Puzzled faces reeling toward their dad.
—Cops and Albert gently pulling them away.
—Carly, sobbing in her mother’s arms. Jade, lost, fists clenched, clutching a dark object—
—There.
Riley swung her chair around sharply, and rolled to Finn’s photo cabinets because she’d misplaced the loupe. One of the many consequences of the chair and the legs was a tendency for things in her lap to disappear; she couldn’t feel them go, and, once gone, she couldn’t search all the dark nooks and hiding places where things tend to tuck away.
