by Tyler Dilts
SEVENTEEN
I’ve often wondered just how many people have managed to capture the happiest moment of their life on film. It seems that most would wish for this, the ability to experience again the instant of their greatest joy—to recapture and revisit those sensations, to relive that moment, to bask again in that warm glow of contentment. Not a bad thing to hope for, really. Not bad at all.
Unless things have changed.
And things change. They always change.
There’s a photo of Megan and me in our wedding album. It’s not one of the pictures that we spent two hours posing for before the ceremony, working our way through every possible combination of family members and members of the wedding party. It’s not one of the five-by-sevens taken during the ceremony. It’s not even one of those taken by a random guest with the disposable camera we left on each table, next to the centerpiece.
No, this particular photo is an eight-by-ten glossy taken by a crime scene photographer named Mikey who just happened to have half a roll of black-and-white film in his camera that he wanted to use up before his next call. I moved the picture to the front page of the album so it’s always the first one I see when I flip open the cover. I don’t often turn the page. I wonder if I would remember the moment so clearly without that photo. I like to think I would, but who knows?
It’s after midnight, and most of the guests have gone. Megan wants one more slow dance before we let the DJ pack up. He plays “If I Should Fall Behind,” and we hold each other and just sway back and forth. We’re beat, my collar is open, and my jacket has long since been hung off the back of a chair somewhere. She’s let down her hair and abandoned her high heels for bare feet. Halfway through the song, she stops moving, takes a small step back, her hands on my hips, mine on her shoulders, and looks up at me. The expression on her face is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. I feel as if her eyes are somehow reaching out and pulling me into them, and in that moment, in that single instant, I see myself through her eyes. Never before have I felt such unconditional love. I don’t even notice the flash go off.
I forgot all about Mikey’s extra pictures until my first day back at work after the honeymoon, when the watch commander handed me a manila envelope with my name written on it in black Magic Marker. I tore it open and found a dozen photos with a note that said, “Danny, hope you guys enjoy these, Mikey.”
This photo was the bottom photograph in the stack, the final shot before he’d run out of film. It went from last in the stack to first in the book.
As I tried to turn past it to find the picture I was looking for, Jen said, “Wait,” and reached out her hand toward the album.
“What?” I said.
“I want to see that.” She was sitting next to me on the couch in my living room.
I let her take the book out of my hands. She turned the page back and looked at Megan and me. I was busy being tough, so I just stared out the front window at her Explorer, which was parked outside at the curb. It really needed a wash.
“That’s a beautiful picture,” she said.
“I know.” I was trying to discern whether the line across her fender was a scratch or just a smudge.
She touched my knee and said, “Show me the one you were thinking of.”
I took the album back and began flipping through the plastic-covered pages. The photo I was looking for was near the back, with the other photos that guests had snapped with the centerpiece cameras. Megan was sitting at a table next to Roger Kirby. He was a friend of hers from college. His left arm was wrapped around the shoulders of Elizabeth Anne Williams.
EIGHTEEN
“I haven’t seen him since Megan’s funeral,” I told Jen.
“How well did you know him?” she asked as she centered the steering wheel and accelerated into the traffic on Seventh Street.
“Not too well. Megan and I had these distinct groups of friends. There were the ones who were friends of both of us, and then she had her friends, and I had mine.”
“And yours were cops, right?”
I nodded.
“We know how well they play with others.”
“Exactly. Mine and hers didn’t mix too well. Kirby was one of hers. I don’t know that much about him. He was a sociology major with her, and then he got some kind of a consulting job for an insurance company in Irvine.”
“Should we run him?” she asked.
“Why not?” I called Pat on my cell and asked him to get us everything he could on Kirby.
“I’ll get right on it,” he said.
“Anything new?” I asked him.
“Nothing spectacular. I’ve been checking out the shipping manifests from Cutting Edge. They moved almost two thousand kukri knives in the last year.”
“That seems like a lot.”
“It is, but we can narrow it down a bit. They have a couple of different models. And almost half the sales were direct to customers through the catalog or the Web site. I’m scanning the lists right now.”
“What about the other half?”
“Not bad,” he said. “Only about a quarter went to retail stores. The rest went out through other online and direct marketers.”
“That’s good.” Finally, I thought, something positive.
“Yeah. I’ll keep you posted.”
“And get back to me with anything you can find on Kirby.”
“Will do,” he said and hung up.
I turned to Jen. “We might have caught a break on the weapon. Looks like Pat’s going to be able to trace most of the buyers. The knife company does most of its business through direct catalog and Internet sales.”
“Credit card records?”
“Yeah.”
She didn’t say anything.
“What?” I asked.
“If you were going to kill somebody, would you buy the murder weapon with your American Express?”
Kirby had a sixth-floor corner office in a shiny steel-and-glass building half a mile south of the 405. His secretary showed us in, and we sat in leather chairs facing an oversized, satin-finished cherry wood desk that was perfectly coordinated with the carpet, paint, and other furniture—even the door matched. “He’ll be right with you,” the woman said. “Would you like coffee or tea?”
“No,” Jen said, answering for both of us.
The building was located on what was still the outlying edge of the Irvine Company’s master-plan sprawl, so rolling, grass-covered hills filled the views from the windows that covered two walls of the room. I wondered how long the view would last before the landscape was filled with beige-stucco shopping centers and red-tile-roofed gated communities. Not long, I thought. I gave it two years before the first developments began popping up in the visible landscape.
Gazing out at the floor-to-ceiling panorama, I began to wonder how thick the glass was and how much force it might withstand before shattering. Maybe I’d seen too many movies, but there was something about a large window that just made me want to throw someone through it. I imagined propelling Tropov through the glass and watching him tumble in a cascade of glittering broken shards sixty feet to the pavement below.
“How thick do you think that glass is?” Jen asked.
I laughed.
“What?” she asked.
The door opened, and Roger Kirby came in. “Danny,” he said, “long time no see.” He was trimmer and more angular than I remembered him. He wore a finely tailored dark gray suit over a white-collared blue shirt and polka-dotted tie. His hand extended from his side as if it were an autonomous entity and gave me a hearty shake. I noticed he was much more delicate with Jen’s hand when I introduced her. His gaze stayed on her a bit longer than it should have. “Can I get you anything? Coffee? Bottled water?” he asked.
“No, we’re fine,” I said.
“How long has it been?” he asked me.
“Megan’s funeral.”
“That long?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, you look good,�
�� he said, staring into my bloodshot, dark-circled eyes and beginning the long walk around the desk. He must lie to people often, I thought. He’s good at it.
“So do you,” I said, wondering if I sounded as sincere as he did. The insurance business must have agreed with him. He looked as happy as a pig in shit. “This is quite an office.”
He spun his chair around, sat down, leaned forward, and folded his hands in front of himself. “I manage,” he said.
“Really,” I said. “It looks like you’ve done well for yourself.”
“Well, you know how it is,” he said. “Survive a merger or two and a few rounds of layoffs, and they’ve got nothing to do with you except middle management.” Jen and I both nodded as if we understood.
“In a way,” he continued, “I wouldn’t have made it this far without Megan.”
“How do you mean?” I asked, my interest piqued.
“She encouraged me to go to graduate school. And that helped out,” he said. “I wouldn’t have been this successful without that.”
I remembered a conversation with Megan in which she said she might be interested in going back to school for a master’s degree. An MSW, I think she called it. Trying to be encouraging, I’d told her to go for it. I’d been close to making detective then, so the money wouldn’t be a problem. Of course, I didn’t realize until much later that money had nothing to do with it, that it was about something else entirely. She never brought it up again.
“She thought about graduate school herself,” I said, remembering. Jen raised an eyebrow at me, in case I hadn’t realized I was drifting. “Didn’t realize you got an office like this with a master’s in social work, though.”
“Oh,” Kirby said, “I changed disciplines for my graduate work. I went for an MBA. The sociology background gave me a good feel for urban demographics. Never figured out what to do with it until B-school.” He leaned back in his chair and shot me a grin. When I didn’t return it, he added, “Seemed like the thing to do at the time.”
I took a long look around the office and said, “It still does.” We all grinned at each other as if we’d lucked into a prime tee-off time at the country club. I wanted to tell him how disappointed Megan would have been, how she would have accused him of selling out, of shilling for elitist corporate interests, of conspiring to reap personal benefit from the exploitation of the poor. I wanted to, but I didn’t. Instead I tried to act impressed and genuinely happy for his good fortune. “Really, Roger, this is impressive,” I said.
He folded his hands again and said, so sincerely that I almost believed him, “Thank you.”
“Unfortunately, though, we didn’t come to see your office.”
He leaned forward, now serious. “I didn’t guess you had.”
“Do you know why we’re here?” Jen asked.
“I’ve got an idea,” he said.
We waited for him to continue.
“It’s about Beth, isn’t it?”
I nodded and let him sit in the silence. As we watched him, I counted thousands in my head. He didn’t fidget or twitch or look up or shift his position or any of the other things guilty people were said to do. In truth, though, the only people who ever really exhibited those behaviors were those who truly felt guilty. Whoever had murdered Beth was far beyond feeling any emotion so outwardly directed as guilt. Kirby was cool, if nothing else. I had to give him that. I made it to sixteen thousand before he spoke.
“I can’t believe she’s gone,” he said, his voice thick with sincerity, but as the old joke goes, once you can fake that, you’ve got it made. “She was really a special woman.”
“I know,” I said.
Jen looked at me, realizing even before I did that my awareness had floated away and that I’d been thinking of Megan. Kirby didn’t pick up on it.
“How long had it been since you’d seen Beth?” she asked him.
“Almost two years.”
“But it was longer since you’d been involved?”
“Yes. Quite a bit longer. More than five years since we’d been serious. But we stayed friendly.”
“How friendly?” Jen asked.
“What do you mean?” Kirby asked. He tilted his head to the right as if he didn’t understand.
“Did you stay intimately involved?”
“No.” He looked down at his desk and then back up at Jen. “Once Beth decided something like that, that was pretty much it. It took her a long time to make up her mind, but once she did, it stayed made up.”
“Breaking up was her decision, then?” she asked.
“Yeah.” The corners of his eyes fell, and his forehead wrinkled at the memory. “I thought she was the one, you know?” We nodded at him and let him go on.
“It took her a long time to trust me. After we’d been together for a little more than two years, I asked her to move in with me. I still remember the look on her face. She was surprised. I couldn’t believe she hadn’t expected it.” Kirby’s expression changed as he thought of her, his face softening, his posture relaxing. He looked more familiar to me, as if I’d only recognized him before but was now able to place him. “So we did it. And we were happy. At least I was. With Beth, though, there was always something you couldn’t see, just below the surface, that she never quite let out. I guess I thought it was kind of mysterious or enigmatic or something.” The edge of his mouth turned up, and he inhaled through his nose. “I should have let it go, you know?”
“Let what go?” I asked.
“The mystery, the unknown,” he said. “I just couldn’t, though. The longer I was with her, the more convinced I was that there was something she was holding back. Some secret she wouldn’t…couldn’t tell me. Of course,” his voice dropped as he finished his sentence, “there was.”
I leaned forward, and he saw the question in my face.
“Jesus,” he said, “you don’t know about her father, do you?”
NINETEEN
Jen and I didn’t talk on the way down. We just looked at each other’s dull reflection on the brushed stainless finish of the inside of the elevator door. A pleasant-toned chime sounded, telling us we’d reached the first floor, the doors slid open, and bright sunlight, reflecting off the polished marble walls of the lobby, spilled into the elevator. I squinted into the brightness and followed Jen past the concierge’s desk, through the glass doors, and out into the open.
Just outside she stopped, put her hands on her hips, and breathed in deeply through her nose. “You okay?” I asked.
She nodded and took a few steps toward the fountain in front of the building. It shot a circle of pulsating water jets a dozen feet into the air, where they dissolved into large drops and fell back into the center of the gold-leaf-bottomed pool. She sat on the fountain’s polished granite edge and rested her elbows on her knees. The air smelled of chlorine.
I sat next to her, knowing enough not to say anything. When my cell phone rang, I didn’t answer it. Just to our left was a brass plaque that identified the name of the sculptor commissioned to make this particular work, Water Feature: Rain in D Minor, Number 4. Eleven people walked past us. Most were men in suits, and their faces held expressions of mild surprise and disapproval to see us there. Apparently, they didn’t like people sitting on the artwork. They looked away, though, as soon as they caught my eyes. My face must have told them all they needed to know.
Jen looked at me and said, “He’s telling the truth, isn’t he?”
“Yeah. I think he is.”
“And so was she when she told him.”
“Yeah. I think she was.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah.”
“Honestly,” I said to Ruiz several hours later, “I’m not sure what it means to us. Maybe nothing at all. But it’s big.”
“And it was confirmed by the sister?”
I nodded.
“What should we do with it?” Jen asked.
“I don’t know,” Ruiz said. “How is it connected to the investigation? Do
es it go to motive?” I could see him considering the variables that this new information added to the equation. “What do you want to do?” he asked her.
Jen had been waiting for that. “I want to front him with it. See what he does.”
“The colonel’s been itching for action,” I said. “Let’s give him some.”
“We bust him for the murder, I can get him to cop to the rest,” Jen said.
“This could blow up in our faces,” Ruiz said, as much to himself as to us. “I don’t know.”
“What’s the worst that could happen?” I asked.
He just shook his head. “Bring him in for questioning. No charges yet.”
Colonel and Mrs. Williams had moved from the downtown Long Beach Marriott to its smaller and cheaper cousin, the Marriott Residence Inn on Willow, just off the San Diego Freeway. In exchange for the loss of the hotel’s first-class service and accommodations, they’d received a full, but tiny, kitchen, a one-hundred-dollar-a-night savings on the rate, and a touch of artificial homeyness. The complex itself was designed to increase that feeling, resembling nothing so much as a suburban LA apartment development. Clusters of four to six rooms were piled together, next to and on top of each other, and separated by concrete walkways and ornamental shrubs in a roughly formed rectangle around a courtyard and pool.
At the front desk, the clerk highlighted the route to the Williamses’ room on a photocopied map and told us to walk past the jacuzzi and turn left at the second BBQ. A few seconds after we knocked on the door, a shadow covered the peephole briefly. We heard the dead bolt slide, and the door swung wide.
The colonel, dressed in chinos and a snug navy blue polo shirt, stood back and motioned us into the room. “Good evening, Detectives. Please make yourselves comfortable.” The room was little more than a typical hotel room, about the size of a spacious studio apartment with an L-shaped floor plan and furnished with a king-sized bed, a small sofa and chair, and a dining table that doubled as a work area for the business traveler on the go. Mrs. Williams sat at the table, a newspaper open in front of her, and looked distractedly in our direction.
