by Daniel Pyne
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
Finn shifted the beam away from her, to the shattered window, which glittered like diamonds on the floor, and then across to the facing apartment, where the cop named Mexico was disarranged awkwardly on the floor in front of the gaping window of that vacant loft space, his semiautomatic rifle just beyond one outstretched hand, black blood already pooling under him from a wild scatter of holes Riley had put in him.
It was a crime scene. And as Riley watched, Finn picked up a camera and went to work.
—
FLASHCLICK.
The empty loft and its bloody contents resolved itself and found some welcome coherence in his viewfinder. He saw everything in terms of light and composition, stripped of any connection to him, any emotion he might have struggled with. He was a camera.
By the time the first responders to Riley’s 911 arrived on the scene, Finn was already in the building across the alley, photographing Mexico and his ambush staging area.
Body. Gun. Casings. Blood.
Through the broken window he could look back into and witness a scene he’d seen play out hundreds of times, surreal now in his own personal space. Cops and crime technicians in throwaway booties and latex gloves. The yellow evidence flags. Riley, in her damaged chair, was talking to Lennox and another Long Beach detective. She was wrapped in a reflective thermal blanket, ruddy scuff marks swelling on the side of her face where she fell.
EMTs worked on Mallory, who was unmarked but concussed, sitting up, mute, a bandage holding an ice pack to the back of her head, hands twisty-cuffed in front of her, eyes fixed and unfocused.
As she spoke with Lennox, Riley’s eyes found Finn’s. He felt his heartbeat shuffle the way it had when he first saw her, and not for the first or last time wondered how he’d ever found the courage to cross the bar.
11
“SO YOU AND HER, this is gonna be a thing?”
“I don’t know.”
Joaquin had the forlorn look of a tween whose single parent was starting to date and which, considering Joaquin’s lush new pelt of hipster neckbeard, seemed, to Finn, disingenuous at best.
“It’s a fluid situation. Don’t worry, you and me, we’re still good.”
“I’m not worried.” Joaquin grazed on beer nuts and looked around the Palace grumpily.
Finn said, “Maybe this is the summer you learn to surf. Doesn’t Diana, the blood-spatter crim, have that whole posse of femmes who shred?”
“I looked it up,” Joaquin said, and Finn, for a moment, had no idea what he was talking about. “When upper-level large-scale air flow along the complex topography of the Southern California coastline comes onshore by way of the Channel Islands, it gets turned around inland by the mountains that ring the basin and causes an obdurate counterclockwise circulating low-pressure vortex, accompanied by a southerly shift in coastal winds.”
“Oh,” Finn said. “We’re back to that?”
“A soul-crushing increase in the marine layer. And a thickening of the coastal stratus. A schizophrenic spin cycle of gray and gloom, followed by fleeting wanton late-day sunshine, reset and repeat.”
“It usually clears up after the Fourth.”
“It can happen anytime between April and September, or drag on continuous from April to September, but peaks in June, yes.”
“I’m gonna talk to Lennox about my camera,” Finn said, eager to change the subject. “Should I be worried he’ll try to kill me?”
“You’re not worth the hassle,” Joaquin said. “All that paperwork and mandatory incident review by the police commission. Plus there are at least half a dozen single women at City Hall that I know of who would gladly magic the Lennox baby wand.”
“The what?”
“But,” Joaquin continued, returning deftly to his theme, “here’s the thing to remember, Finn: It turns counterclockwise.”
Finn asked, “What does?” He knew, though.
“The eddy. It’s why it always feels so melancholy, dude. Nostalgia. Our substitute for regional history. What is it Gatsby says? ‘Boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past’?”
“I didn’t like Gatsby.”
“You never read it.”
“I did,” Finn said. “In tenth grade. But you know me and mysteries.”
Joaquin nodded, sardonic. “I thought I did.”
—
“CHAIN OF CUSTODY works pretty well, but to say that it leads to justice, or truth, is a lie that we, collectively, in law enforcement, kinda just let slide.”
They were alone in the Homicide bull pen. No witnesses. Finn watched Lennox flick his Clayton Kershaw bobblehead paperweight to make it shake.
“Truth and justice are two different things. And neither is absolute.” For example, Lennox explained, casual, not apologetic, it was patently unfair, yes, but Finn’s former Nikon Df was going to stay behind the wire mesh in property until the investigations into the Charlie Ko murder and the Sunken City shooting were completed. The Internal Affairs inquiry alone, the detective noted, could take many months.
Finn said, “You broke into my car, stole my camera and my laptop, and doctored my photographs.”
He expected an explosion of denial. Lennox just tilted his head as if to say: So? “I doctored the crime scene,” Lennox clarified. “I used your camera to take new pictures of it.”
“Why?”
Lennox didn’t answer for a while, but when he did, he first jumped way back to when Riley had left him in her angry wake, following their Willa Ko interview dustup, after which he had gone up into his office to sit with his gnawing discomfort that she could be right about everything. “I was like, what the fuck?” he explained to Finn. Lennox was a man for whom life had always run like a rotary engine, steady, smooth, no maintenance required. Homicide had always been his destiny; his dad was a cop, his uncle, his brother. And Riley, he said, had always been the one he’d marry. Since the moment he set eyes on her in the third grade. Life was locked in.
But it was after formally proposing to her at the Palace, he admitted, that something had snapped. Before her shooting. And then she spun out of his orbit, started to dissect him whenever they were together, “like she was looking for something she wasn’t seeing.” And, later, like she was seeing through him, he said, or past him, or worse. “For whatever it was I didn’t have. It felt pretty shitty.” But Lennox wasn’t a complainer, and she was the one.
“Always,” he insisted.
“Did she know that?” Finn asked, but Lennox wasn’t listening.
Hard copies of the forensic crime scene photos from the Charlie Ko killing were on his desk, he said, along with the small envelope containing the bullet casings that had been in the evidence bin but not, as Riley had pointed out to him, in the photographs Finn had taken.
He had flipped through his murder book for a while, the notes and the statements and the timelines all a blur.
Finally he pulled up the day’s duty log on his computer and saw that Mexico had checked in. He gathered together the photos and the casings and walked out into the Homicide bull pen but didn’t find the big detective at his desk, so he asked the new girl, from bunko, with the lesbian haircut whose fucking name he could never remember—Poplowski’s partner—where Mexico was and she said Donnie got a call and took off.
Jenson. Jennings? Something with a J, he was pretty sure. “Unless that was her first name.”
Finn just listened.
Anyway, Lennox had returned to his own office, then, tired, but relieved, he told Finn. He decided he’d talk with Mexico as soon as the detective came back to the station, but this would give him time to prepare, so he could do it carefully, because he still didn’t quite believe Mexico was on the dole. “For one thing, a cop would never kill Charlie in the condo, he’d have been way smarter than that, even Mexi
co.” But a discussion would have taken place, Lennox wanted to be able to tell Riley that he’d tried.
“And then the call came in about the shooting.”
“At your loft, yeah.”
Finn waited. Lennox had talked himself in a circle, Finn’s question still unanswered.
“The Cartier watch at the Sunken City scene was hot,” Lennox said. “It raised certain questions about how Riley got it that I didn’t want asked. So I contrived to disappear it from where she got shot.”
“You thought she was the bad cop.”
“Was, wasn’t, I figured it was best not to expose her to closer scrutiny,” Lennox hedged.
Finn thought about this for a few moments. “Tampering with evidence is a felony.”
“So is receiving stolen property,” Lenox countered, “accepting bribes, protecting criminals, obstruction of justice, accessory to the distribution of controlled substances, and the trafficking of people. Just for starters.”
“You really believed she’d done all that?” Lennox said nothing. “You didn’t trust her.”
Finn thought, He still doesn’t.
Lennox said, “The job of being a modern cop has a lot of moving parts.”
“She was undercover.”
“Was she?”
Finn wasn’t sure how to take this, didn’t know enough about Riley’s cop life before he entered it to make a judgment on what she’d done, or what rules she may have broken. He remembered the man he’d met on the green line platform. Partner? Partner in crime? It wouldn’t have surprised him if she’d broken all the rules, and unlike Lennox, he assumed that her reasons for doing so would be sound. No. Airtight.
Lennox looked so uncomfortable Finn felt sorry for him. But he understood something else, suddenly, and allowed himself a slow grin. “This is how cops try to say I love you.”
“I’m not giving her up to you.”
“I don’t know her very well, but I’m pretty sure she’s not something that can be taken or given,” Finn pointed out.
Lennox bristled. “You know what I mean. She . . .” He thought better of whatever he was going to say, and announced instead, “We have history, me and her. You can’t erase that.”
“Depends on who wrote it,” Finn observed.
Lennox looked away. “Well, she did what she did, I did what I did. Eventually IA will come ask you questions about both of us. You gonna make a big deal out of it?”
Finn shrugged, ingenuous. “Out of what?”
—
WILLA SAT with her public defender in the interview room, civilian clothes, nervous, waiting with an expression that a disinterested observer might have thought heartbreaking if she didn’t already know that this was going to turn out okay. A faint reflection of Riley stared back at Riley in the one-way mirror window glass, seeming to watch Riley as Riley watched the door open and Willa’s little girls charge in. They attacked their mom with ebullient hugs and frog kisses while Albert hung back in the doorway, smiling at his family reunited.
Riley said, “It’s easy,” and turned her chair away from the one-way window to face the observation room. “You make me a Homicide cop. I sign the waiver.”
The room, in this case, consisted of the district attorney, the city attorney, and Homicide lead detective Terry Lennox.
“The doctored photos, the ones that cast a cloud over my shooting, the activities of Sergeant Mexico, and the sanctity of forensic evidence used to indict and convict God only knows how many other criminal cases . . . it all goes away. Win-win. Cast the late Detective Don Mexico as a heel or a hero, I don’t care.”
“I’m good with that, actually,” the city attorney said.
Lennox said, “I bet you are,” and affected his neutral, good-cop expression, which Riley knew well from many hours she’d watched him work witness interviews and suspect interrogations. It veiled his righteous rage. “But what if she’s not—and I’m on the record saying she is not—capable of handling the physical demands of a job she just took like a hostage?”
Riley said, “She’s right here, Terry. If you need to talk to her.”
“He makes a good point,” the DA told the city attorney, but the latter wasn’t impressed.
“And this undercover operation she ran,” Lennox continued. “Nobody downtown even seems to know much about it. No oversight.”
Riley and the city attorney traded blank looks. He was African-American, in a smart linen suit, and if Finn had been in the room with them he might not have even recognized the man to whom, on the metro platform between Harbor and Century, he had given Riley’s journals and collection of envelopes filled with bribes. “She caught a killer. She bailed out both of your ivory asses,” the city attorney said. “Saved us ten years of appellate nightmares, and about a gajillion dollars in potential cop-malpractice civil settlements. Could be bipedal locomotion for cops is overrated.”
The DA squirmed. “Look, could we—”
“—Finn Miller can be my legs,” Riley said.
Lennox squeezed his eyes shut like he felt a headache coming on. The DA found some dirt under his thumbnail. The city attorney opened his briefcase.
“And I’ve still got hands,” she continued drily. “Which means I can manage a firm grip on a venti soy macchiato and a cronut just like all the other bros in the bull pen.”
The city attorney murmured, “Maybe better,” amused. He slid some waivers in front of Riley and had her sign them before Lennox and the DA could delay it any longer.
“Sweet. Welcome back, Detective.” He parked the documents, snapped his briefcase shut, and ushered the grim, unhappy district attorney away.
Lennox let the door close and lingered behind while Riley looked one more time with satisfaction into the interview room, now empty of Willa and her family.
“Happy now?”
“I don’t know. I’m still in a wheelchair, Terry.” She looked up at him and dug in the pocket of her jeans for the engagement ring she’d been keeping there, and thinking about, for days now, ever since the hospital had returned it to her. She held it out for Lennox. “You should have this,” she said. “It’s beautiful. Save it for someone who deserves it.”
His swagger took the hit. “You can hang on to it awhile longer if you want,” he said, low, a little husky. “Things keep changing. You know. Circle of life.”
She laughed. “Lion King, Terry?”
Lennox flushed red. She flipped the ring on the table, between them, and it landed flat and skittered.
Lennox stared at it, and then said to her, his voice hard, “Do you know what you’re gonna get? You’re gonna get all the worst cases, the shit, the ones that make no sense, the ones that can’t be solved. One after the fucking other. Piling up on your desk. By the time you come up for your six-month review, you won’t be able to see over them.”
“Is that supposed to scare me?”
With malice, Lennox said, “Yes.”
“I earned this. I paid for it.”
He took the ring and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Have it your way.” He started to go, but paused, not looking back, offering her just the back of his head, and the razor burn from another cheap haircut. “You’re on your own now.” He walked out.
Through the door that he left open, she could hear the thrum of life in the building: bodies slurring by, police business, normal. Riley took a deep breath and wheeled herself out into it.
—
FINN MILLER WAS waiting for her. Slouched against the corridor wall, backpack lumped at his feet. He’d watched the lawyers leave, then Lennox storm out. It made sense to him, somehow, that Riley would be the last one out of the room, and it was all he could do not to smile. All these unanswered questions hung between them, swirling, like Joaquin kept saying, trapped between the islands of their past and the rocky ridges up ahead; or maybe just fram
ed and frozen in time, to be archived, understood or ignored, mysteries. He didn’t care. There was so much time.
“What’s it like outside?” she asked him.
“Oh, you know.”
She swerved past without looking up, as if denying that he was there, or maybe still unwilling to accept the possibility that he could be there, would be there for her, but nevertheless expecting he would shrug on his camera bag and catch up with her, walk beside her, keep pace with her as best he could, so that they could make their way together.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Despite many factual touchstones, I don’t pretend to be a stickler for police procedure, so any technical errata or liberties taken in the unfolding crime stories of the eddy are all mine. Similarly, the Los Angeles, Long Beach, and San Diego of my fiction are constructs of my imagination: not meant to be documentary, but aspiring to be true. That said, I was helped with granular details of an assistant U.S. attorney by the fine screenwriter and former federal prosecutor Barbara Curry. Teal Sherer generously shared with me her life with wheelchairs, spinal injury, and paraplegia. Erich Anderson provided key psychological and historical insight into San Diego, as well as an early read that helped convince me I wasn’t crazy to pursue this triptych. Michael Convertino was mostly responsible the glorious bonobo diversion, Scott Shepherd an invaluable sounding board for ’50s L.A. noir, and Susan Sontag’s essays “On Photography” was an inspiration for the work of Finn Miller. I am, as always, deeply indebted to all the other usual suspects, including my fabulous agent, Victoria Sanders, the editorial genius of Benee Knauer, David Rosenthal, and all the excellent people at Blue Rider Press.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DANIEL PYNE’s screenwriting credits include the remake of The Manchurian Candidate, Pacific Heights, and Fracture. He made his directorial debut with the indie cult film Where’s Marlowe? Pyne’s list of television credits (writing and showrunning) spans from Miami Vice to the current Amazon TV series Bosch. His previous novels are Fifty Mice, Twentynine Palms, and A Hole in the Ground Owned by a Liar. He lives in Southern California.
