Red Light

by T. Jefferson Parker

  "What do you need?"

  Shaking his head he walked toward her, then stopped a yard away and crossed his arms. "Well, ten percent of two mil is two hundred grand. I need a father for Danny, someone to work my dogs, someone to keep the fire going at home. Which do you want?"

  "I'm not your enemy."

  "In that case, just stand there and look at me. Look at me right in the face, so I can look at you."

  She did. Mike stared at her for at least a minute.

  "Okay," he said. "I'm satisfied."

  She said nothing.

  "I couldn't decide if you were evil or not," he said. "And now I think I know. I had an interesting conversation with Mrs. Heath. And I found out you'd been in my home on Monday. Bob Rule spent two hours with her today."

  She felt the blood rush to her face. "I was picking up my jacket."

  "You didn't leave a jacket."

  "I realized that when I couldn't find it."

  Merci, an unpracticed liar, was surprised how convincing she sounded. Even to herself.

  He smiled again, then walked back and sat on the thin mattress. "Sounds to me like a search without a warrant. You had no permission for entry. No legal right. I had every expectation of privacy there, and that's the legal issue. An illegal search voids the one they did yesterday. Everything they found can be suppressed."

  "I didn't search. They found what they found, Mike. I'd spent time there with you. I was looking for a jacket. Come on."

  "How'd they find that stuff so fast? I didn't even know where it was, so how did they? How did Wheeler and fat boy know where to look?

  Merci said nothing.

  "No," he said. "I don't think you're evil.. I think I've been framed and you've been used to do it."

  "Who?"

  Mike shook his head and exhaled sharply. "You're the crack investigator. You tell me."

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  At home, Merci checked on her sleeping son, put his cap back on, tucked the blankets around him and stood there for a minute looking down at his face. She said a prayer for his well-being. Even though she believed that God only listened once in a while, it was worth a try. Clark was in the shower.

  I didn't search.

  There it was, a lie to the man she'd once loved and respected. But what was worse: following the evidence, as she had done, or washing her hands too early and turning the investigation over to Wheeler and Teague? Didn't she owe Mike that search?

  Due process is what I owe him, she thought, same as anyone else.

  He'd confessed to killing her. It was a sarcastic, angry, insincere confession, but he'd made it with no evidence against him. Nothing against him but the woman he was falling in love with found dead, and a betrayed lover asking him questions.

  Because he knew I'd never believe it, she thought.

  She got the Whittaker and Bailey files from the locked trunk of her car, set them on her bed. She turned up Tim's monitor all the way, so she could hear him breathing. She listened to the shower turn off in her father's bathroom, the clunk of the valve shutting and the grumble of the old pipes.

  She sat crossed-legged on the floor, bowed her head into her hands and listened to the noisy collisions going on inside her brain: the evidence in Mike's home, his betrayal and her own. His claim that he being framed and that she was being used. The unexplained struggle the Whittaker kitchen. The violated crime scene, the distrust in crime lab, the evidence lost or misplaced there. The letters sent to Gary Brice, the article that Brice would write.

  She listened to Tim breathing in, Tim breathing out. Then, there the Bailey case: Jim O'Brien meeting with Patti Bailey the night died, him quitting the force a few months later, his eventual suicide, note and key to the storage room, home to evidence damning Bill Owen, Ralph Meeks and Jim O'Brien. Evan, a colleague, protective of a father he might not have known very well at all. And the strange way that the cases had become connected through her, by a secret sender of keys copied love letters.

  Noise, noise, noise.

  The phone in Clark's room rang. She listened to the murmur of his answer. Tim, Jr.'s breathing came through the amplifier, rhythmic slow.

  One thing at a time, she thought: one foot in front of the other. What if Mike had been framed? If that was true, then someone else entered Aubrey Whittaker's apartment after Mike left, killed her, began setting up the evidence—the bullet casing, the bloody prints made the chukka boots. The other evidence Mike had left himself, as dinner guest and admirer of Aubrey. And later—or maybe earlier—this framer would have to plant the silencer in the workshop. Where could you get a casing fired through Mike's Colt? How would you get his boots in order to bloody them?

  Someone who knows his home.

  Someone who shadowed him at the Sheriff's Firing Range, maybe and picked up a casing after he'd shot?

  She thought of Lynda Coiner. Had she visited Mike at home? How many times? Certainly a CSI was in a good position to frame a suspect, but why? Coiner liked him, she was doing little favors for him in jail. Cover for him, maybe—but not frame him. She could even believe Lynda Coiner having a secret passion for Mike. Merci could imagine them pursuing it together, without her knowledge. But was shy, professional Lynda Coiner capable of murdering Aubrey Whittaker?

  Merci stood and walked to the window, looked out at the driveway bathed in the harsh glow of the security lights.

  Evan O'Brien had almost as much opportunity as Lynda Coiner did, but what reason would he have to frame Mike?

  Gilliam himself? What possible reason for ruining Mike and encouraging Merci to do the dirty work? Aside from his own longtime crush on her, none that she could see. Would he kill for that, frame for that? No.

  Then, this: Aubrey Whittaker would not have opened her door for just anyone. There was no place to hide on the porch. The killer had stood there, bathed in the yellow porch light, easily visible through the peephole.

  It was preposterous. Coiner and O'Brien were the CSIs. They had been at the crime scene with her, not long after Aubrey Whittaker had been murdered. Both of them had been at home when they got the call; both had shown up without hesitation. Gilliam was venerable, respected, professional.

  Preposterous.

  A framer would have to know that they were going to have dinner. A framer would have to know that they had written letters to each other; have to know where to find them. A framer would have to know when they were gone, when they were home, what they were planning, what they were doing. How could a framer know all that? He'd have to know them both very well. Watched them. Waited. Read their letters, listened in on their calls ...

  Merci heard Tim whimper, then say something in his sleep. Impressive, how sensitive the baby monitor was.

  If you had a monitor for Mike and Aubrey you could learn everything you'd need to know to build a frame.

  If you had a monitor for Mike and Aubrey . . .

  She found the telephone company printout of calls made to and from Whittaker's apartment the last month. She added up the calls made to Mike's work and home numbers, and the calls received from them. Thirty-two in all. The total elapsed time was almost 330 minutes. Plenty of time to listen, she thought. To hear them make their small talk and hatch their plans.

  The idea hit her that Mike's team might have authorized a wireless but she could find nothing about one in the file she'd copied from vice. She called Kathy Hulet to confirm it: Mike himself had withdrawn request for a Title 3 wiretap shortly after Whittaker had agreed to help them. So Whittaker's phone was clean—or was supposed to be.

  Tim, Jr., sighed. So much louder than the actual sound, she thought.

  Merci shook her head and went to her closet and felt the sudden cold dread wash down over her—the dread of darkness and cars, the dread being alone and surprised, the dread of being wrong about everything, just as she'd been wrong about the Purse Snatcher. And that had cost Hess his life.

  She dressed. Taking the baby monitor, she went into her father’s room and gently sho
ok him awake.

  "I'm going out for a couple hours. Tim's asleep. I'm setting up monitor in here."

  "Where are you—?"

  "Later. I'll be back, Dad."

  She set the monitor on the floor beside his bed, the volume still on high.

  She checked the back of her car with a flashlight before opening door. She had to get up close to the glass to see anything but reflect and it gave her the usual fright to get this close to the glass. Okay, right. She cranked the engine and pulled on the lights.

  This one's for you, Mike.

  • • •

  Thirty minutes later she stood in front of the door to Aubrey Whittaker’s apartment. The ocean air was damp and cold against her face. She closed her eyes for a moment and imagined the scene again. The visitor standing in the dull yellow porch light, the knock on the door. Aubrey looks out. Seeing someone for whom she's willing to open the door. She opens it. Her look of surprise. The muffled wwhhpp of the silenced gun as she falls and he follows her in, steps around her, drags her out of the way…Inside, Merci shut the door and looked out the peephole: an exaggerated yellow ellipse, Christmas lights twinkling in the great illusory distance. She saw him. She recognized him. She knew him. She opened to the door to him.

  Merci hit the entryway light, then the kitchen lights, then the living-room lights. She looked through the blinds at the ocean, the black surge breaking into white on the beach, the lamps of a squid boat forming a tiny patch of light on the sea.

  Back in the kitchen, Merci went to the little breakfast bar, lifted the cordless phone and listened. Still on. She played the messages on the recorder. There were three new ones since she'd last heard them: one a recorded sales pitch from an insurance agent; one from a dentist's receptionist, confirming a three o'clock appointment for the next day; one from Bobby at the Cadillac dealership with information about scheduled maintenance.

  She turned over the receiver unit, saw nothing unusual. Then she knelt beside the bar and looked up. The sheetrock was visible where the tiles ended, an eighteen-inch overhang that ran for probably five feet. Nothing.

  Another line?

  In the bedroom, Merci pushed away the bed to find the phone jack. And she found what she was looking for, a small box with one tan line plugged into the phone jack, another one running down the wall to the floor, where it disappeared into the carpet. She pulled up the carpet and followed the line to the sliding glass door of the bedroom deck. It went outside through a very small, neat hole. Recently drilled she saw: There was still drywall dust on the plywood flooring.

  On the deck outside, leaning over and using her flashlight, she could see the line as it traversed down the side of the building toward the alley.

  A minute later she was in that alley, shaking a little in the cold December air as she traced the beam of her flashlight down the line. It disappeared behind a downspout that ran from the rain gutter to the ground. She knelt again. She trained the beam on the bottom of the spout. It made a ninety degree turn just before it hit a planter overflowing with big margarita daisies. Merci reached through the branches and put her fingers around the back of the spout. She felt around for just a second, then brought out the end of the tan line.

  Two jacks.

  For a tape recorder, she thought. A voice-activated tape recorder wired to the phone line. You could check it just by driving up and parking here in the alley. Take the tape. Put in a fresh one. Drive away. It would take less than one minute.

  Merci shivered as a cold puff of wind blew a swirl of mist at her. A drop of water fell from the roof and ticked to the cement.

  Aubrey, she thought, you were never quite alone.

  She went around to the front of the building and climbed the stairs. She stood at the front door and imagined the scene again. This time without Mike. She substituted a generic male, putting some nice clothes and a pleasant face on him to make her opening the door more likely.

  Question: If a stranger had knocked on Aubrey's door, why had she opened it?

  Because he had a good line? He'd have to, because Aubrey Whitaker would have been anything but gullible with regard to a man, late at night, knocking on the door of her home. But Alexander Coates, concerned neighbor who could differentiate between footsteps, hadn’t heard any conversation at all.

  No, she thought: Try again.

  She went inside, shut the door and looked through the peephole

  Why?

  Why did you open it?

  She looked through the peephole again, and she thought of Hess, what he'd told her about seeing, and she knew.

  She knew.

  The light wasn't on. He'd unscrewed the bulb before he knocked. She'd seen only the shape of a man. Mike had just left after their dinner. She thought it was him, coming back for something he'd forgotten and opened the door. Ten minutes later, after the struggle, on his way out, he screwed the light back in, so we'd assume she had recognized her caller.

  Shivering again, her legs unsteady, she went back inside the apartment and turned off the porch light. Then she hustled down the stairs to her car and got her crime-scene kit from the trunk. She stood in front of Aubrey's door again and waited for the bulb to cool. She pulled on a pair of fresh latex gloves and worked off the top the light fixture. It was a glass hexagon with a peaked brass lid and a solid ball at the top. There was no screw to hold it; it had just been set in place. All she had to do was tilt it up, lift it by one corner, and set it into a paper evidence bag.

  With the fixture lid out of the way, she reached up and in, finding the neck of the bulb, way down by the metal. Still warm. She held it firmly and twisted. Eight quarter-turns later it was loose and light in her hand, and she set it into another bag.

  • • •

  She called Zamorra from her car. The cell was patchy and he was hard to hear. Janine was still in the coma, she thought he said.

  She told him what she'd found at Whittaker's, how perfectly it could fit into a frame. Maybe Mike was right. She didn't say it but she wondered if he could be innocent. Innocent. The idea moved around inside her like an immense blessing. A blessing as large as her willingness to feel it.

  "But Merci, who put the nix on the Title 3 wiretap?"

  "Mike did."

  "That makes me wonder. He'd put a nix on it all right, if his private intercept was already installed."

  "Think about what I found, Paul. Someone with a line into Whittaker's apartment could learn enough to frame Mike. And all he had to do was unscrew that bug light before he knocked. Easy. She'd think it was Mike, coming for something."

  He was silent for a minute. The cell signal hissed and popped. "It's good to hope, Merci."

  "I'm going to call you in one hour."

  "I'll be here."

  Back home she checked Tim and brought the monitor back from her dad's room. Clark didn't even stir.

  She poured a tall Scotch on ice and walked the house in stocking feet as quietly as she could, listening to the creak of the floorboards and the groanings of the old furnace. She called Zamorra but got a busy signal. Tried again and another. Once more—still busy.

  She thought about Mike.

  She told herself not to think about Mike.

  If he was guilty, her world would be torn apart—it already had be But if he was innocent, her world would be torn apart in ways she hadn’t yet even imagined.

  Stop. Rest. Sleep.

  Instead, she paced. Once around the house again, staring out windows at the orange trees and the cold winter sky.

  By midnight she was in bed, lights on, staring up at the ceiling unable to sleep. She banished all thoughts of Mike, all thoughts of Bailey case. She banished all the clatter of lies and half-truths assumptions and contradictions. She thought of Tim Hess and Tim, and a pink house on a beach in Mexico. Little Tim was trying to catch sand crabs. Merci was standing a few yards away and when she looked past her son she could see his father on the porch in a hammock, reading a book. He looked up and waved.


  And finally she fell backward into the black.

  • • •

  At 4 a.m. she awoke in a sour sweat. A disturbing dream. In it, she was standing in Mike's backyard, by the kennel gate, asking him the key. Mike held a silenced .45 at his side, kind of hiding it, like he was ashamed to be seen with it. But Mike was not Mike, he was her father.

  She sat up on the bed as the dream blended into recent memory.

  The memory became a scene she could watch: She gets the food, she goes to the backyard and realizes she doesn't have the key.

  Damn, I forgot the kennel key.

  Something wrong then, but what was it?

  She pictured Evan standing with her out by the kennels, the light shining down on his freckled face. He looked so small, huddled in the duster.

  Wasn't that a gray sport coat he was wearing under it?

  She checked her notebook entry after Zamorra's initial findings from the San Diego lab. Dark gray, purple and sea-green fibers in it.. . in the struggle, the garment got caught on the corner of the drawer.

  She checked the Whittaker file and confirmed that identical fibers had gone missing from the lab, along with the fingerprint cards from the kitchen.

  When she pictured Evan O'Brien standing in the light of Mike's backyard, helping her feed the dogs, she saw his dark gray sport coat under the duster. Green and purple accent fibers? She couldn't say. But was Evan wearing that coat the night they processed Whittaker's apartment?

  No. She could remember him that night, just over a week ago, in his Sheriff Department windbreaker, jeans and athletic shoes. No sport coat on Evan.

  But there were probably two million gray sport coats in Southern California.

  She sat on the living-room couch and closed her eyes. Back to Mike's place again. The memory was still bothering her so she looked again.

  She carries the bag of kibble from the pantry to the door. She hikes the bag onto one knee, using her free hand to work the slider. She steps into the cool canyon night. She goes toward the yapping dogs. She realizes she's forgotten the key.