Red Light

by T. Jefferson Parker

Evan looked up at her, held her gaze, held it longer. His eyes got narrower and duller. "He was in the hospital room holding her hand when she died. I was holding the other one. He outlived her by almost twenty years and he never had a girlfriend or a date. Not one. Not one that I ever knew about. And I saw him a lot. We were close. We talked. Who said that about him?"

  Not for the first time in her life Merci Rayborn wished she had just kept her mouth shut. Over the man's grave of all the damned places to open her stupid trap. She figured there was a special place in hell for people who never learned. Maybe she could run that department by the time she was fifty-eight.

  "It doesn't matter, Evan."

  "Yeah, well, it does to me. So tell your stoolie to go sit on a red-hot poker. And if he doesn't like that idea, tell him to come see me. I'll kick enough piss out of him to fill a bathtub."

  "All right. I'll do that."

  Evan stood and sighed. "Nobody sticks up for the dead. We got to do at least that much for them."

  "At least."

  She listened to the breeze in the trees again. Secrets in code, she thought, if you could just crack it you'd have the world boxed.

  You got to put it all in a box and throw the box away.

  Do you?

  "Did your father ever talk about the Bailey case?" she asked. He looked at her, a little surprised, then sighed quietly. "Not much. Dad didn't talk shop. Up to the day he died, he didn't talk shop."

  "Was Patti Bailey part of those fights?"

  "Somebody Bailey was mentioned. Yeah."

  "Did he know her?"

  "I can't remember. That whole story is vague, Merci. A long, long time ago. I mean, I've had a lot to think about since he did it. That was five years ago, almost. I think about him a lot, my mother a lot. I don’t think for even one second about Patti Bailey. Know what I'm saying

  She looked at him, studied the sharp Irish face that was so difficult make serious. But it was serious now.

  "Why did he do it, Evan?"

  O'Brien raised his eyebrows and sighed. "Something ate him away. I don't know what it was. There was a big part of him I could never get to. I don't think anyone could."

  This tracked with what Merci had learned about human beings through people like the Purse Snatcher: You could never know every part of one. Parts. Most of a person. But not all.

  "I dream about him," he said. "All the time. In the dreams he's alive and healthy and we're doing things together. Things we never even in real life. Fishing. Flying a plane. Playing catch with a baseball. I don't even like doing those things, but I dream about doing them with him."

  • • •

  She spent another half an hour back at Hess's grave, alone, standing in the damp turf with her coat collar pulled up against the cool breeze. Two years, three months, twenty-nine days. She thought of Hess and her heart ached; she thought of Mike and it ached in a different way; thought of Aubrey Whittaker and Patti Bailey and it ached in another. She felt like there were black vines growing inside her, trying to choke that heart once and for all. Her mother had always called it "your little wooden heart." No explanation. She thought of her mother and then she thought of something her mother had told her once: When you're feeling blue, honey, do something nice for someone else.

  It was one of the few things Marcella had ever told her that seemed to work. Merci had tried it.

  Walking back toward her car she called Paul Zamorra on his cell phone. His voice was very quiet. She said she wanted to talk to him, face-to-face.

  "Come on over," he said. "I'm at home, moving furniture."

  He gave her the address.

  Zamorra lived up in the Fullerton hills, above the suburbs, in a Spanish style home tucked back behind a long driveway. Merci parked and looked at the towering palm trees next to the garage, the courtyard with the fountain and benches around it, the big three-car garage with the doors swung open on Zamorra's work car, a late-model van and a bright red BMW convertible.

  She opened the gate and walked into the courtyard: pots of flowers and plants placed artfully upon the pavers, the fountain trickling into itself, bromeliads latched to one wall and at least ten big bird-of-paradise plants in spectacular winter bloom. The bright orange-blue heads seemed to watch her as she went to the door.

  Zamorra opened it before she knocked, let her in.

  "Nice place," she said.

  "Janine kept it up," he said. "Keeps it up."

  Zamorra looked pale and hungry. He was shaven and dressed as usual—suit pants and white shirt—but the shirt was untucked and heavily marked with brown dirt.

  "Did you come to tell me you've requested another partner?"

  "Not really. I came to see if I could help. Do anything."

  "Well, you can help me get this hospital bed set up."

  Zamorra led her down an entryway, then past a living room with big windows that opened up to the backyard: pool, barbecue area, a lawn green as an emerald. To her left was the kitchen—about the size of Merci's whole house. What struck her was the silence. No music. No birds chirping. No traffic outside.

  "This is quite a place, Paul."

  "Janine's got money. In the family."

  "It looks loved."

  "We bought it cheap and remodeled. It was old enough to have asbestos in the ceilings so we had it torn out. I wondered if some those slivers got into her brain somehow, started things growing. The doctor said probably not. I asked him what did start it growing, and said bad luck."

  "How is she?"

  Zamorra didn't answer. He led Merci into a big suite at the far end of the house. The walls were white and the carpet was cream and the celling seemed twenty feet high. A sliding glass door opened outside to a trellised patio, a hot tub, and the swimming pool.

  Merci saw the big mattress and box springs leaning against one the walls. The stand with its rollers was propped up against them. Opposite, placed up next to a big wooden headboard, was a very narrow bed with metal railings and a heavy electrical cord running to the wall. There was a control pad with a cord, tied around one railing so wouldn't slip down.

  Zamorra pushed something on the control and the head of the bed began to rise. He stopped it and elevated the foot. Then he put them both back down. He watched the mattress move with a questioning intensity and Merci wondered what he was seeing there.

  "Great, isn't it?"

  "It'll help her," said Merci.

  "I figured I'd sleep in the big bed, since you can only solo in this contraption. I figured if she slept here, where she always slept, it would be good."

  "Sure, make her feel like normal."

  "Yeah, normal. Can you help me get the old stand over here?"

  She balanced the big wobbly thing, followed him toward the glass door, then set it down. The box springs were easy, but the mattress weighed about a thousand pounds and didn't have any handles. She grunted it atop the springs and shoved it square with her knees.

  Zamorra looked at the old bed with the same interrogatory expression he'd had for the new one.

  "They cut her in half," he said. "The part of her that thinks and smiles still works."

  Merci said nothing because what she imagined was not speakable.

  She tried to take her mother's advice, tried to come up with something nice. Something helpful, fortifying, optimistic. For another of the few times in her life, Merci Rayborn couldn’t think of nothing to say.

  "Look, Merci. I'm not going to dwell on this. I don't want your sympathy or your horror. I don't want you to even think about all this. It's our thing. We'll handle it. But you're my partner, and you need to know the score. That's the score."

  "All right."

  "I got the shrink's number. I'll call her when I'm ready to call her. You did your part. The fact you gave it to me means something. Noted."

  She nodded in agreement, a little pissed off that Zamorra could flatten her so easily with regard to Joan Cash's QPR counseling. But what was she supposed to do, argue with him while he rearr
anged the furniture for his dying wife? And when it came down to it, she behaved the same way when anyone mentioned EMDR to her. The difference was, she knew in her heart that she wasn't going to kill herself. But could she know the same about Zamorra?

  "Merci, what in hell is going on with Mike McNally?"

  • •

  They sat at a counter in the big kitchen. It was littered with unopened mail and newspapers. There was a bright red colander filled with oranges, and a blue one brimming with nuts still in their shells. The only thing that looked used was the coffee pot and a half-empty bottle of tequila over by the sink.

  She told him about McNally—the boots with the blood, the letters and the silencer. She told him about the gun. She even implied how it was she managed to get that gun, fire it and replace it without him knowing. She told him every damned thing she could think of, even what the silencer was wrapped in, because she felt that since Paul had had to tell her his worst, she should tell him hers. It was a primitive and girlish feeling—like she'd had in the fifth grade with her best friend Melanie—but it had the same cathartic power now, maybe more.

  "Mike's been at headquarters since this morning, getting the grill," she said. "I think, when it's over, they'll probably arrest him."

  Zamorra listened without interrupting. Nothing about him looked surprised. "Gilliam matched the Whittaker shell and your shell Mike's gun, one hundred percent, no doubt?"

  She nodded.

  "That still doesn't explain the kitchen. The struggle in the kitchen

  "No."

  "I ran the prints I lifted from the kitchen—where the struggle took place. They're not on file. Remember the dustball I collected? I examined the fibers, but I don't know enough to say what they are. Some kind of clothing, I'd think. I'm going to get Gilliam to look at them me. I don't get along with him, but he's the only one in that lab I trust anymore."

  "Why not Coiner and O'Brien?"

  Paul swept the counter in front of him with his palm. It looked like he was smoothing a sheet. His voice was quiet and flat, but she could hear his anger at the bottom of it.

  "Coiner's sweet on Mike, okay? It's easy enough to notice. She lets him kick around that place like it's his sandbox. She's also the last one to see the handwriting sample—that friendship card—and three of fingerprint cards that disappeared. O'Brien? He's got the little dog complex—we can't swear him as a deputy, so he overcompensates. He thinks he knows everything. He thinks he runs that place. But he gets into Aubrey Whittaker's kitchen where the signs of a struggle are clear as day, and what's he do? Nothing. No prints. No photographs in original crime-scene reports. No mention of the bent runners, the drawers out. He's arrogant and sloppy, is what I'm saying. I'm not giving my fingerprint cards to people who lose things, people who think they're too smart to learn. It's that simple."

  She didn't say that she thought he was wrong. What bothered more than Zamorra's distrust was what it said about Mike McNally.

  "You don't think Mike did it."

  "I think there's more to the story than who did it."

  "Meaning what, Paul?"

  Zamorra poured more coffee for each of them. "Two sets of footsteps on the stairs, according to the neighbor. Both of them within minutes of when she got shot. We can only account for one set, if it’s was Mike. A struggle in the kitchen, but who's there to struggle? Then, we get the evidence into the lab and it gets lost. Gilliam squawks to Brighton and together they throw everybody out. Everything we have points at Mike. But if Mike did it, a cop for Chrissakes, how come he left his prints everywhere and his brass in the flower vase? If you're going to cap somebody and get away with it, you don't sit down to dinner with them, leave, come back five minutes later and shoot them. That's the stupid way, that's the high-risk way. I'm not saying Mike didn't do it, but why would he do it like that? No, something's wrong. There's more than one guy involved, or more than one person, at least."

  "Coiner? She found the brass, Paul. It's what led us to the gun, the gun to Mike."

  "But she could still be trying to cover for him. Doing her job with one hand, undoing it with the other."

  For a long moment neither spoke. Merci was trying to weigh the tonnage of Zamorra's implication—that she, Merci, was not only losing Mike to a prostitute, but that Mike had inspired Lynda Coiner to cover a murder. Mike McNally: killer, master manipulator. Merci Rayborn: idiot.

  "This isn't about you," said Zamorra, apparently reading her mind.

  It startled her. She stood and walked to the window, looked out at the rippling blue swimming pool, watched the palm fronds swaying high overhead against the fast white clouds.

  "It's a flaw I've got, thinking everything on earth is about me."

  "We've all got it. I feel worse for myself than I do for Janine sometimes."

  She saw two black crows wheeling across the blue. When the wind changed it caught them hard, their feathers flaring like someone had shot them. Even birds can't see a change in the wind, she thought.

  She acknowledged for the first time just how damaging Mike's arrest was to her, to her plans and dreams, to her still-fragile psyche. On the inside she felt betrayed and belittled, like she didn't have a right to feel anything about anybody because she'd been so far off about a man she'd called her lover, like her heart was stupid and blind and unreliable.

  From the outside, she just looked like a fool.

  "I just realized how bad this arrest is for me," she said. "The fact that I believed in him, loved him, maybe. Trusted him, certainly. What terrible judgment. You can't trust a person like that very far. You can't have her running a detail or a section. Can you imagine someone with black spots like mine, wanting to run the department someday?"

  Zamorra looked at her. When he spoke next, it was with a gentler she had rarely seen in him. "Think how bad you'll look if he's innocent.”

  "I haven't entertained that idea. I wouldn't have gone to Brighton with the evidence if I had. It went away when I found out Mike's gun fired the shell we found at Whittaker's."

  Zamorra shook his head. "We'll never know what gun fired the bullet that killed her."

  "That's cutting it pretty thin, Paul. Brass at the scene, fired from gun carried exclusively by the accused. A silencer. Motive. Opportunity. Physical evidence a mile high. There's everything but a video. You think a jury's going to let him walk?"

  "No. But I'm not talking about juries. I'm talking about who killed Aubrey Whittaker and who didn't."

  "What are the options then? Mike's gun, but Mike didn't use it?'

  "That's one. You borrowed it for an hour. Maybe someone else borrowed it for two hours. Or someone else shot her with a different weapon. Someone who was hoping the bullet would fly out the window or was willing to dig it out of the plaster if it didn't. That would account for the ten minutes between the time our man knocked on the door the time he left the apartment—he didn't find the hole in the glass right off. Or maybe this: Someone took the gun, just like you did, fired a round in some private place, and took the empty with him."

  "Then he put it in the flower vase in Aubrey Whittaker's apartment? Who?"

  Zamorra was shaking his head but Merci couldn't tell if it uncertainty or disgust. "Someone made a joke about that yesterday, I wasn't supposed to hear it. They said, maybe it was Merci Rayborn who killed the girl—she knew what Mike was up to with the whore."

  She looked long and hard at Zamorra. "That's venom. Why would you pass it along?"

  He didn't look away. "To let you know what you're up against. Because I'm on your side."

  Merci answered her cell phone. It was Brighton.

  "We arrested Mike half an hour ago," he said softly. "We'll have weapons charges, tampering, obstruction and murder. No announcement until tomorrow morning. Glandis and I will handle the press conference. You might want to be scarce around here. I'm giving the case to Wheeler and Teague. Work with them, Rayborn. We got the warrant, so I want you to help with the search."

  Merci had tr
ouble finding her voice. When she did, it was so weak she sounded like someone else. "I will."

  "You did the right thing. And I know it was the hardest damned thing you've ever done in your life. Someday you'll be better off for this. Until then, survive. That's a direct order."

  "Yes, sir."

  When she hung up Zamorra was looking out the window. "We arrested him," he said.

  "We did."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Merci waited until ten that night to go see Mike. She had to go through Brighton to get clearance into the protective block at jail. He thought she was crazy, but she prevailed.

  The jail was almost quiet that late, but she could see that security had been stepped up—two guards outside the protective block instead of the usual one. They let her through like she was a VIP, thanks to Brighton's call. Give them a day or two, she thought, until they find how the case against Mike was made. Then see how hard the rank and file would land on her.

  The suicide guard had his own chair and table set up in the hall, was reading a paperback, chewing gum.

  Mike was on his back on the cot, still in the street clothes she'd seen him in, handcuffed, staring straight up. His head turned her when she got to the bars.

  There are thousands of expressions the human face can register, the one that Mike gave her now was unlike any she'd ever seen. Defeat and pride; alertness and resignation; fear and triumph. But most of all disappointment.

  "Mike."

  He stared at her. "Hi."

  "Hi."

  She could hear the muted metallic shuffle of the jail around her, the slamming and clanging and the voices of men. It sounded like the soundtrack for hell, played from far away.

  Mike lifted his feet, swung them off the cot and sat upright. No shoelaces. No belt. No tie. He held up his cuffed hands.

  "I'd have to swallow my tongue."

  "Don't."

  "No. I'll need it to defend myself."

  "Did you get Bob Rule?"

  "He jumped at the chance. Innocent client. High profile. Or it will be, by noon tomorrow."

  She looked at him, and she listened to his voice, and she understood his words, but she could think of nothing at all to say. She felt again like she was on the bullet train in a tunnel, everything just a blur of velocity.