The Pain Scale

by Tyler Dilts

  “So what do you make of it?” Ruiz asked.

  “He knew about the tattoo,” I said. “So he’s getting information somehow.”

  “We have a leak?”

  “I doubt it,” Patrick said. “Probably looking in our computer files. The case-management system would be pretty easy to hack. Maybe listening to our phone conversations as well. Do you remember if you texted or e-mailed anything about the tattoo?”

  “I sent myself a link to the website I found the footprints on,” I said. “So I could access it here without having to search for it again.”

  “That’s probably where they got that, then. E-mails and texts are the easiest to track. Don’t even need eyes—just set up a list of search terms to flag and the computer will do all the work for you. They can do the same thing with your hard drive, but that gets a little more complicated.”

  While the idea of the FBI or some other branch of Homeland Security prying into our case files didn’t sit well with any of us, we knew we were powerless to do anything about it.

  “Did you get any kind of a read off of him?”

  “He’s slick,” Jen said.

  “We knew that already,” Ruiz said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Jen built up a good rapport with him. And I bought that line he gave to Jen, about her understanding. He knows every detail of our case, but I don’t think he knows anything else.”

  Ruiz examined me.

  “What?” I said.

  “Coming from you, that’s a surprise.”

  “Why?”

  “I figured you’d have some kind of ‘all politicians are sociopaths and can therefore lie undetectably’ argument all ready to go.”

  “Actually, you’re right,” I said. “Can I change my answer?”

  When Jen and I sat down at our desks, I said, “I don’t like knowing they’re watching us.”

  “It’s nothing new. Not since the Patriot Act.”

  “I know. But I’ve never really felt like they were paying attention before. That’s what makes the difference. Every other case is just a trickle in a massive flow of data. Knowing they’re picking out details now makes me self-conscious.”

  “It shouldn’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they don’t think we know.”

  I saw where she was going, but I let her finish.

  “And we can put anything we want in the files.”

  One corner of her mouth turned up, and she leaned back in her chair.

  “It’s not much,” I said.

  “No, it’s not. But it’s something.”

  That afternoon, Jen had to meet with a DDA about a trial she’d be testifying on a few days later. I don’t dislike court appearances as much as many detectives do, but one of things I was really appreciating about my return to active duty was the fact that I didn’t have a backlog of cases lined up that would require my testimony. Nor did I have any old open investigations that required my attention. I was the only detective on the Homicide squad with only one case to work.

  All I had were Sara, Bailey, and Jacob. And I took some satisfaction in the knowledge that they had me, too.

  Patrick came in early the next morning. I’d had the squad room to myself for nearly an hour.

  “You asked about Kroll?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Got something?”

  “He was Pararescue, too.”

  “That can’t be coincidence.”

  “No, it can’t. I don’t have much else yet. Where do we go next?” he asked. “Phone records?”

  “The connection’s too thin for a warrant. And we’d tip off the congressman.” Something clicked in my head, and I asked, “You didn’t find that out on your computer here, did you?”

  “No,” he said. “It was secure. Nothing’s going to get back to anybody.”

  “How would you feel about doing a little more off-the-radar digging?”

  “As much I love working here with the best technology 2003 has to offer, I think I’d enjoy getting out of the office. Where do you want me to start?”

  “With Kroll. Get everything you can. Then let’s start digging into Sternow and Byrne. If we’re going off the record, we should get as deep into their shit as we can.”

  Patrick turned his head and winced.

  “What?”

  “You’ve got to work on your metaphors.”

  “If you’re really going to do this,” Ruiz said, “be careful.”

  “We know,” I said.

  “Does Patrick?”

  “I’ll ask him,” I said. “But I’m pretty sure he knows even better than me what we’re doing.”

  In a routine investigation, we sometimes knowingly obtain information by means that would not be considered acceptable in a court of law. We do this because the value of the information promises to be high enough that it’s worth the risk to the success of the investigation. In most cases, the only thing we really have to worry about is losing the ability to use what we gain at trial. Once we know something, we can often confirm it by other means or find other evidence that is just as effective.

  With the feds, we were risking more. If we stumbled onto classified information, for example, or interfered in some other way with any ongoing FBI or Homeland Security business, we’d run not only the risk of departmental castigation, but also criminal prosecution for anything from obstruction of justice to espionage.

  “You think they’d go that far?” Jen asked when I filled her in.

  “I doubt it. If we do find anything we shouldn’t, they’ll keep it quiet. They’d lose too much face if word got out that a couple of local cops were able to get past their security.”

  “So, what you’re saying is that we don’t really need to worry about going to jail, just about losing our jobs.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “You in?”

  We stopped at Target and picked up three prepaid cell phones and six extra cards in case we used up the time included with the original purchase.

  “This is just like Stringer Bell did it,” I said.

  Jen didn’t respond.

  I added, “On The Wire.”

  It wasn’t just the bad joke. Something else was on her mind. She was thinking. I wondered if what we were doing was weighing on her.

  “You don’t have to do this,” I said as we got in line at the only open register.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You can leave this to Patrick and me.”

  It was clear that she didn’t want to talk about it where we were. So we were quiet while an overweight woman with a surprisingly mellow toddler loaded her groceries onto the moving belt. As I watched her lifting boxes of Raisin Bran and Shredded Wheat out of her red plastic shopping cart, I noted with some consternation that she was buying much healthier breakfast cereal than I ever did.

  “Think there’s any way we can expense this?” I asked Jen as I handed my credit card to the teenager in the red vest.

  She didn’t bother with a response.

  In the car, she said, “I don’t know.”

  “It’s not too late to let us run with this.”

  “No, I said I was in, and I am.”

  “You’re sure you’re okay with it?”

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s what’s bothering me.”

  Six

  PATRICK HAD ONCE mentioned offhandedly that he lived in a loft. I had visions of the downtown Long Beach buildings that had been converted from commercial spaces back in the midnineties before the redevelopment boom kicked into high gear and yuppified open-floor-plan condos sprang up in remodeled downtown buildings that promised “Loft-Style Living!”

  It was the first time either Jen or I had been to his home, so we were both surprised that his address was located on Obispo Avenue along the east edge of Signal Hill in a row of hybrid industrial/office/warehouse spaces.

  “Can this be it?” I asked Jen as we approached the glass door and saw our reflections in its mirrored surface.

  Nex
t to the door was a doorbell button beneath a small sign that said, UNIT A.

  We pushed it and waited.

  After what seemed like a long time, we heard the bolt slide back. Patrick pushed the door open toward us and said, “Hey, guys.”

  “This is an”—Jen paused, searching for the right word—“interesting place you’ve got here.”

  I was sure he picked up on the sarcasm, but he said, “Thanks,” to her just the same.

  Inside the door was what would have been a small reception area had the place been functioning as it had been designed to. But it was empty, save for two bicycles leaning against opposite walls to the right and left. I looked behind me and saw that the view into the parking lot was unobstructed. We could see out, but no one outside could see in. I wondered if the mirror effect was due to paranoia on Patrick’s part or simple happenstance. Maybe it had been like that when he moved in.

  He led us down a short hallway, past another room on the left that had been turned into a makeshift kitchen and the bathroom on the right.

  “Sorry it’s a mess,” he said, ushering us into the cavernous open space that took up the rest of the building. There were clusters of furniture spread around the place with empty ten-foot buffer zones between; these were the only indicators of the areas’ intended uses. Sharing the space were two chairs and a sofa facing a huge flat-screen TV mounted on one wall, a king-size bed and a wardrobe and dresser tucked into an alcove around the corner from the hallway, an office area with several worktables and at least three computer monitors and stacks of other electronic equipment, and what looked like a barbeque and some patio furniture set up by the giant metal rolling door in the back corner. But even with the various furnishings grouped around the warehouse, it still felt vast and empty. It was impossible not to be conscious of the size of the place.

  “Wow,” Jen said, examining the surroundings, “I had no idea you were a closet hipster.”

  Patrick looked like a child who’d just been threatened with vegetables. “That’s messed up.”

  I wasn’t sure which side of the debate to take until I saw a distressed straw fedora fifteen feet away on a side table near the sofa. I walked over, picked it up, and flipped it up onto my head. “Exhibit A.”

  He looked so embarrassed I couldn’t continue.

  Still, though, I would have kept it on if it hadn’t been at least two sizes too small.

  He started to speak, but I cut him off. “When you’re in a hole,” I said with a smirk, “stop digging.”

  The joviality didn’t last long. He looked at the Target bag in my hand and asked, “Those the throwaways?”

  “Yeah.”

  We opened the packages, set up the phones, exchanged numbers, and gave them a trial run.

  Once we confirmed that they were working properly, Jen flipped hers closed and put it in her pocket. “Now what?”

  “Now we get back to work.” Patrick rose from the armchair he’d been sitting in and headed toward his computers. We followed. As we got closer, it became clear that the array of equipment was even more extensive than I had realized. He had two large worktables set at a right angle to each other that formed an L-shape extending from the wall. There was a third identical table perpendicular to the wall a few feet away from the others—just far enough to allow Patrick to slip between them.

  “This is where the magic happens,” he said, sliding into what appeared to be a very expensive ergonomic desk chair.

  Sometimes, I thought, the line between hipster and nerd is a very narrow one.

  With his back to the wall, he started tapping keys on a keyboard attached to a twenty-seven-inch iMac. There were at least two other machines within his reach. A desktop PC and a MacBook. There was a printer, a stack of external hard drives, and a whole bunch of stuff I couldn’t identify.

  The urge to ask him to explain what he was doing was strong, but I fought it and inquired instead if he had any new information.

  “Ran a full background on Kroll. Nothing too surprising. Confirmed that he was in the air force at the same time the congressman was. I’ll have phone records and location logs soon. I’ve also been looking at Sternow and Byrne’s computers. Their security won’t be a problem.”

  The printer, a sleek black cube the size of a small microwave, buzzed to life and began spitting out pages. “That’s the file I started on Kroll. I ran his assistant, too. Molly?”

  “Good,” I said. “Anything on her?”

  “Nothing you wouldn’t expect.”

  “And this is completely secure, right? There’s no way it can get back to the congressman?”

  Patrick eyed me as if I’d just insulted his mother.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “What’s next?” Jen asked.

  “I told Ruiz we’d update him.” Before Patrick and I separated, we agreed that Jen and I would power down our phones while we were still a few miles away from his place. We knew the congressman’s contacts could use the same techniques we were using on the SUV driver on us and could potentially use our locations and phone records to put the three of us together at times and places that wouldn’t ever be accounted for in the official case files. We’d also promised the lieutenant we wouldn’t be out of contact for too long. “Why don’t we take the files and head back to the station?” I said to Jen.

  She nodded. “Call us if you need anything,” she said to Patrick.

  “I will. Listen for text messages, too.”

  As we headed for the door, music started playing behind us. I didn’t recognize the tune.

  “You know what that song is?” I asked Jen.

  “I think it’s the new Fleet Foxes.”

  “Really?” I said. It only then occurred to me that I hadn’t been listening to very much new music since I’d come back to work. I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad.

  “Like it?”

  “I do.”

  “I’ll burn you a copy.”

  Jen drove, and as soon we were five minutes away, I turned my phone back on. There was a message waiting from Ruiz. It was curt, even for him. “Danny, get back to me.”

  I touched his name on the screen to call him back.

  “Where are you?”

  “Jen and I are on the way back. Why?”

  “You’ll see when you get here.”

  “You’re Oliver Woods?” I said without even bothering to try to hide the disgust in my voice.

  He was with the lieutenant in the interview room, and now so were Jen and I.

  “What the fuck do you want?” I said.

  “Detective Beckett,” Ruiz said, calmly and quietly. Only Jen and I understood the full weight of the warning in his tone.

  Woods focused on Jen and the lieutenant. “I have some video that might be helpful to the investigation,” he said.

  “Nobody would pay you for it, huh?” I said.

  “It’s not...I mean, it wasn’t...The thing with Channel Four isn’t what you think. They found the clip on my Facebook page. They were going to run it anyway, but they made me an offer. What was I supposed to do?”

  “Say no?” Jen suggested.

  “But they would have run it anyway. With what they paid me, I can almost pay off my student loans.” He was younger than I’d expected him to be, and rounder, with prematurely thinning hair. There was just enough sincere doofus about him to smooth some of the hard edges off my anger.

  “What is it that you have, Oliver?” Jen asked.

  “Well, I didn’t realize I had it until yesterday. I felt bad about all the play that the first video got, and I wanted to do something to help. I thought I might have a clip or two of Sara in some of my old stuff. But I’ve got shitloads of it, and I had to go through it all to find what I was looking for.”

  “And you found it?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “What is it?”

  “Well, I’ve been doing videography for a long time, okay? And I’ve known Sara for a while, too. That’s why I had tha
t first clip. She was helping me with a project for a class.”

  “What about this other clip?” Jen asked. “Tell us about it.”

  “Okay, well it’s a vérité kind of a thing. Some footage I got at a gallery opening for a grad-student exhibit. Shots of the crowd looking at the paintings and stuff.”

  “And stuff?”

  “Well,” he said, “I accidentally got a bit of a conversation between Sara and Professor Catanio.”

  “Accidentally?” I said.

  “Yes. I thought they were talking about art and stuff, but it wasn’t about that.”

  “What was it about?” Jen asked.

  “Do you want to just watch it?”

  We said we did, and he began fumbling with a backpack at his feet. After he unzipped the flap and pulled out a padded sleeve and unzipped that, too, he put a Sony Vaio notebook on the table and turned it on.

  We let him stew in the silence as it powered up.

  “Okay,” he said. “I had a couple of hours from this, but I picked out the one bit that I thought might help.” He clicked an icon on the desktop and a window opened. An animated hourglass hung in the middle of it for a few seconds; then the clip began.

  The shot bounced around a bit and then stopped and zoomed in on Sara Benton and Catherine Catanio in a corner of what appeared to be a small art gallery. There weren’t too many other people in that part of the room, and to my surprise, their conversation could be easily heard.

  “Again?” Catherine said. Her voice was louder and more forceful than the others in the room, and while Catherine didn’t seem to notice, Sara did. She looked around, as if to make sure no one else was listening.

  Catherine spoke again. “You know what you said.”

  “I know,” Sara said.

  “Well?”

  “I don’t know.” She bit at her lip and shook her head. “The kids...I can’t afford the kind of lawyer I’ll need to go up—” Sara paused while someone walked through the frame between the camera and the two women. When the dark figure had passed, Sara continued. “You know what kind of lawyers he has, his connections. What’s going to happen with the kids?”