In the Guise of Mercy (Maggie Macgowen Mysteries)

by Wendy Hornsby

  "Recognize any of the pallbearers?" I asked. "They're listed in the caption."

  "Jason Kelly, Art Collings, Tom Medina, Lewis Banks, Harry Young, Boni Erquiaga." He let out a breath and watched Guido walk back into the bullpen, stop to talk with the guards and the detectives. "He never showed me this."

  I took out the other funeral photos I had enlarged and laid them in a row on his desk. Except for Harry Young and Lewis Banks serving as pallbearers at Tom Medina's funeral, none of those men was pictured together again, though some of them were pallbearers at the other two funerals. And there were a few other familiar faces in those photos, including Eldon Washington and Mike Flint.

  Rich studied the enlarged photos for another moment, nodding his head as he held up each one in turn. He sat back when he had finished and folded his arms, looked at me.

  He said, "Mike wanted to know if I could come up with explanations for any of the deaths other than accident or quirk of circumstance."

  "Could you?"

  "Sure. Though the New Year's Eve lobotomy would be hard to replicate, even that wouldn't be impossible to set up. I suggested to Mike that the coroner who received Art Collings's corpse on New Year's morning might have been predisposed to interpret a gunshot to the top of the head on that particular night as a holiday mishap, might have rushed to a wrong conclusion.

  "I went over the autopsy report, where the coroner explained his finding, but there was no stored evidence for a second look, nothing left to corroborate or challenge the finding. Would have liked to get a look at the bullet, but it seems to be long gone, missing from the file. Ballistics report is also missing, but because that was an officer-involved shooting, the bullet and the ballistics report might have gone to any number of desks and gotten lodged there. I couldn't find either the file or a log to track it. So, that inquiry became a dead end. The rest of the deaths are fairly easy to explain away, including the last one, Medina's."

  "One more question," I said.

  He looked at me. "Fire when ready, Gridley."

  "Why were you at the burial service this morning?"

  "I told you, remains from one of my unsolved cases went into the ground."

  "Why else were you there?"

  He smiled his slightly off-center smile as he studied me. "Phil Rascon knew I worked with Mike. For some reason it was real important to him that I meet you; he didn't know you and I are old friends.

  "The woman in the silk robe?" he said. "My heart breaks for her and the family that doesn't know where she is, or that she died a long time ago. But I have a sad and unidentified case go into the ground just about every time the burial is held, it's part of the line of work I'm in. I make it to about fifty percent of the burials. So does Phil. And then we go to lunch and talk shop."

  "Mike confided in you because you aren't LAPD," I said. "He was no more confident about whom he could trust than I am."

  I handed him the photos; I had them on disc. "Keep these. If you get a chance, look at them again."

  "I will."

  I took a deep breath. "I'm not sure where to go from here, Rich."

  "Assuming you won't just put this all aside and go up to the cottage for a while, go fishing?"

  "Assuming that."

  "Ask yourself, What would Mike say?"

  "Mike?" I saw Mike sitting in Rich's chair, asking the difficult question. Mike had handed me a conundrum. I knew he didn't expect that I would get hurt, or he thought I could protect myself. Maybe he had overestimated me. "Mike..."

  Dammit, I started to cry. Rich stood up and drew me up into his arms. I made a wet mess of the front of his very good glen plaid jacket. There were no more dry tissues in my pocket, and that made me weep all the harder. To my further mortification Guido and the shadow men got up and started toward us, as did a couple of the sheriffs. Rich waved them away. He also handed me a box of tissues from the desk next to his.

  "Oh shit," was the best I could manage to say. With his big arm around me he led me out of the bullpen and into the seclusion of the break room. He sat me at a Formica table and gave me a bottle of cold water from a machine. I still had his colleague's box of tissues in my hands. I blew my nose a few more times, had another, smaller, breakdown, managed to pull myself together enough to begin breathing regularly again.

  "It's the funeral today," I said. "This damn dress."

  "What's wrong with the dress? It looks very nice."

  "I wore it to Mike's funeral."

  "Ah." He put coins into the machine and got a bottle of water for himself. "At Mike's funeral I wasn't looking at what people wore."

  He sat down beside me and put an arm around the back of my chair, leaned his head close to mine. He said, "Sorry we didn't have this conversation a while ago. But I didn't know what you were looking into until Phil called me yesterday."

  "I love Phil," I said, trying to speak past the mass in my throat. That was the best I could do.

  "He's one of the good guys," Rich said.

  I gulped some water, thumped my chest, managed a breath that didn't catch on something barbed.

  "Did you know Mayra Escobedo before today?" I asked.

  He shook his head. "But I knew who she was."

  "Last time she saw Mike, she said Mike looked scared."

  "I think he was." He raised my chin. "You know, he loved you. He finally got his life together the way he always hoped for, with you up on the mountain, and then, well. He didn't want to lose it."

  "If you're trying to make me feel better," I said before the tears rose again.

  "Hey, Maggie," Rich said, smiling at me. "You haven't answered my question. What would Mike say?"

  I blew my nose. "He'd say, you know what you have to do."

  "Well then?"

  "Guess that's what I need to do."

  He took my arm as we walked out. He said, grinning, "I'll light a candle and pray for you."

  I stopped short, looked up at him, reminded of something someone said. It took me a second to remember who.

  "Light a candle?" I said. "I didn't know you went to church, Rich."

  "I don't." He shrugged. "I don't know why I said that. Bad attempt at humor, I guess."

  "Sometimes Mike would say the same thing." I turned and headed back toward his desk. "I need to look at something."

  The three enlargements were still on Rich's desk. I spread them out and looked at each in turn, saw what I had not picked up on before. With Rich peering over my shoulder, I touched one face in each picture.

  "See?" I asked.

  "I do. What about it?"

  I fished in my bag for the little leather holder where I stash business cards people give me. I sorted through them, found the card I wanted, and handed it to Rich.

  "Can you bring him in for questioning? But bring him here. Not Parker Center."

  "I can invite him in." Rich was puzzling through the request. "But will you tell me why?"

  I did.

  Chapter 19

  God bless the federal bureaucracy," Fergie greeted me. "Nice dress, by the way."

  "Why the burst of patriotism?" I asked.

  "Well, even though that Mr. Pendergast in the Sonoma VA place is really happy to accept you as Oscar's legal guardian, the feds say you have to go to court to do that. Just because you say you're willing to take responsibility for someone who is incompetent to take care of himself doesn't mean you get to do it. Mike had to go to court to get himself appointed as Oscar's legal guardian, but he was Oscar's son, so it wasn't very difficult. But you," she did a little pirouette, "even though you were married to the guardian, Mike, you are nothing to Oscar. You can't just claim him because you say so. Hell, you might just go spend all of his money if they let just anyone off the street claim an old person."

  "I have to go to court if I want to move Oscar?" I repeated this bit of news just because it felt so good to say it.

  "Exactly," she said. "You have to go to court."

  "And if I don't?"

  "By defaul
t, Oscar is right now the legal ward of the VA. Unless or until a responsible blood relative or other interested party goes to court and claims him, he jumps the wait-list queue and goes straight to a facility that can take better care of him. Does not stop, proceeds straight to Go. He'll be moved by the end of the week."

  "Hallelujah."

  "I told you," she said. "God bless the fucking bureaucracy."

  "Any other good news?"

  "Good news?" she said. "Yes. Your rental car will be in your driveway in the morning."

  "How will it get there?"

  "I called the network travel office and they'll send it over."

  "Bless you," I said. "Have you seen Guido?"

  "No, but he called to say he's down in an editing bay if you want to talk to him."

  "Thank you very much."

  I went downstairs in search of Guido, found him where he said he would be, with that certain quite attractive graduate student leaning over his shoulder while he showed her the video footage shot at the cemetery that morning.

  "Look at this," he said, enlarging a sequence to point out something. "See how Savoie used the light here? This face looks naked, open and vulnerable." He ran forward a few frames. "And here, the lady turned very slightly, leaving half her face in shadow. Now she's secretive, guarded."

  Guido had a personal thing developing and I didn't want to interrupt. Without saying anything, I turned away from the door and started back down the hall.

  "Maggie?" He apparently had heard me, excused himself from the acolyte, and followed me. "Did you need something?"

  "Just came to see how things are going. I'll call you later."

  He walked alongside me. "Everything okay?"

  "Everything's falling into place."

  "Uh, you sure?"

  I thumped him on the back. "Absolutely."

  Back in my office, I opened the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet and took out the jeans, sweatshirt, and sneakers that I keep there. With the door closed I changed out of that particular gray dress, hung it on a coat hook, consigned the high heels to the same file drawer, and, comfortable again, sat at my desk to check messages. Lana wanted to talk about progress on the project; she would be back from New York in the morning. I had my assistant call her assistant, as is the protocol, to make an appointment for the next afternoon.

  Michael was still up at the cottage; his fiancee had joined him. I shared the news about Oscar with him.

  "I'm relieved," he said. He had only two more days of leave coming before he had to return to his unit in Afghanistan. "I really didn't want to leave you to deal with Granddad by yourself."

  We talked for a few minutes about what was going to happen to the cottage now that Mike was gone. The place was Mike's baby. He had worked very hard to transform it from a summer shack to a tight, beautiful home; redwoods for a backyard, Pacific Ocean for a front yard. Michael offered to buy it from me if I ever decided to sell. I had no intention of selling the cottage, but I let Michael know that the house was in a living trust and he was listed as the survivor trustee after me. Title would pass directly to him if, when, anything happened to me.

  After I said good-bye, I asked Fergie to make an appointment with my lawyer.

  Guido came up to deliver a copy of the disc with the day's footage. He said he was going home to go to bed early, it had been a very long day. I didn't ask him if he was going home alone, but the intern, Madison, whose cinematography lesson I had interrupted earlier that afternoon was hovering in my outer office just then, waiting for him. I gave him a hug and thanked him for his many kindnesses, and then, glancing at the intern, wished him good luck. He had the grace to blush.

  Alone, I turned on some music, upbeat vintage Paul Simon headed for Graceland, and slipped the cemetery disc into my computer, routed the image to a large flat-screen monitor and let it run in the background while I made notes about the day and my recollections of the conversation with Rich.

  Every few minutes I glanced up at the screen and watched for a moment or two, but I wasn't paying close attention. When the disc finished I started it over and let it play again. The second time I watched closely.

  The cameraman, Paul Savoie, was a craftsman. As Guido had explained to his protegee, Savoie skillfully used the morning light, the long shadows, to create atmosphere. He captured the contrast of the still cemetery with the buzz of traffic outside the fence, new graves of the very young with the gaudy and crumbling mausoleums of the founding families, the nearby single-story storefronts covered in bright Mexican-motif murals with the towering eminence grise of the downtown skyline in the distance. Good stuff. He shunned cheap emotionalism, found compassion. I wrote him a note to tell him how wonderful I thought his work was. I also told him that if I ever decided to take over the world I would hire him as my chief of propaganda. In the wrong hands his level of skill at manipulating images in our media-driven world could be dangerous.

  The day had begun early and I was ready for it to end. I couldn't leave for home until six when the security patrol's shift would change and another Crown Vic and two fresh sprigs of the law would replace the pair who had followed me around all day.

  Rich called. "I asked your guy the questions you posed, and he answered them. He was pretty upset when he left here."

  "He left? How could you let him go?"

  "Maggie, he's a sworn police officer. To hold him, I need that little thing the courts keep harping about. You know, probable cause. I don't have, you don't have, probable cause."

  "He might get hurt."

  "He's a big boy," Rich said. "And he has a big gun on his hip and probably a little one strapped to his leg and the experience to know how and when to use them."

  Rich gave me the answers to the questions I asked him to pose. When he finished, he said, "I've already called Nick Pietro and given him this information, just in case you forgot to."

  "Thanks, Rich. I appreciate the help."

  "Watch six," he said before he said good-bye.

  Fergie appeared at the office door. "Reception called. There's a guy here to see you."

  "Let me guess, Lewis Banks."

  "No. Nick Pietro."

  "Thanks, I'll go get him."

  On my way out, I told her she should go home.

  I found Nick downstairs in the lobby looking at a glass case full of awards. There was every sort of award represented, from Emmys to baseball trophies; our coed softball team had kept Fox from getting the TV League championship six years in a row. We liked to credit the team manager's elaborately ornamented logo baseball caps for the winning streak, which made the opposition feel underdressed.

  "Any of these yours?" Nick asked when I walked up beside him.

  "Not unless my pie baking trophy is still in there," I said. "My producer keeps all the real gelt we haul in up in her office."

  He looked at me, doubtful. "You bake?"

  "Mine was the only entry. So, what brings you here tonight?"

  "Couple of things."

  "Want to get a bite to eat?" I asked. "Cup of coffee? You look like you could use something."

  "Okay. Sure."

  I walked him out across the midway toward the commissary.

  "What's the first thing?" I asked as we walked.

  "That .38 you took off Nelda Ruiz?"

  I waited for it.

  "Well, Scientific Services ran the ballistics, as is the routine, and got a hit. It was reported stolen from a sporting goods store in the Valley about a dozen, thirteen years ago." He paused, for effect I thought, to build some suspense. "It's the gun that killed Officer Tom Medina six years ago."

  "How did Nelda get it?"

  "Wouldn't we all like to know that?"

  We puzzled the question over for a while and got a pocketful of supposition, but the only concrete conclusion we could come to was that during her short life, Nelda chose to walk a treacherous path.

  "That's one thing," I said. "You said a couple of things."

  "This morning
at your house, you told us there was no key guy behind that string of drug-related cop crimes you said Mike looked into." He opened the outer door for me. "Then just a few hours later you hand Rich Longshore the key guy. What's that all about?"

  "I think I said 'catalyst' when I talked with Rich, not key guy in the sense you implied this morning. Not the linchpin," I said. "This morning I didn't have enough pieces of the puzzle to see the big picture."

  We walked into the commissary and I handed Nick a tray from the stack beside the steam table.

  I told him, "Rich said something to me that made one great big puzzle piece fall into place."

  "What did he say?" Nick chose a plate of meatloaf and mashed potatoes, piled on a heaping serving of green beans, and ladled brown gravy over all of it.

  "He said he would light a candle and say a prayer for me." I went for hot dogs, two of them, and loaded them: mustard, relish, onions, tomatoes, cheese.

  Nick set down his tray rather hard, turned, and looked at me; puzzlement on his face.

  I said, "Mike had a file labeled 'Obits and Pallbearers,' right?"

  "Yeah." Arms folded now, a barrier, a challenge.

  "I was looking at the pallbearers when I should have paid more attention to the funerals." When he held up his hands in a so-what? gesture, I said, "The same minister officiated at all of them. Not the police chaplain, but a street officer who was also an ordained minister. Lewis Banks told me that man, that preacher cop, put together a prayer group for officers who were struggling with the pressures and conflicts of the those ugly post-Rodney King years."

  Nick began to see the light, nodded. "I know who you're talking about."

  I continued. "Banks said the group was good at first, helpful to him, but he got uncomfortable after a while because some of the guys in the group became, in his words, 'pretty hardcore.' Lewis went back to his own church."

  "Ha! The eureka moment." He looked at me. "I get it. 'Pray for you.' "