by Robert Ellis
He shivered. He could feel a tremor working its way through his body from somewhere deep inside his core. When the quake passed, the car felt ice cold, and he turned on the heat.
The rest of the drive back to Hollywood was lost in a heavy fog. Pulling into the lot behind the station, he wasn’t really sure of the route he’d taken or how much time he’d used.
He walked into the squad room and didn’t see anyone he recognized. When he checked the homicide workstations, no one was around. He found Cabrera still sitting in the conference room. He had his laptop with him and what looked like a new tablet. Two murder books were open, along with several file folders and what remained of his lunch.
Matt opened the door and walked in. When Cabrera looked up, he could tell that the anger in the man had faded again. Mr. Hyde had become Dr. Jekyll on the merry-go-round.
“What’s going on?” Matt said.
Cabrera pushed his coffee mug aside. “I called Burbank PD and asked them to check on that Lincoln over at the airport.”
“Why are you doing me favors?”
“It wasn’t a favor.”
“Okay,” Matt said. “What did Burbank find out?”
“The Lincoln’s there, but someone ripped off the plates.”
Matt knew that this wasn’t good news. It meant that the man in the silver Nissan was up to something and didn’t want to be found when he was through. His first impression of the man had been the true one. Trouble.
“What’s this got to do with our case, Jones?”
“I don’t know. Somebody’s following me.”
“Who?”
“A guy.”
“When did it start?”
“I’m not sure. I made him last night on the way home.”
Matt glanced at the door. He’d driven from Baylor’s office back to the station without checking his rearview mirror. It was a sloppy move. A dangerous move.
“I’ve got some news, Jones.”
“What kind of news?”
“Taladyne news.”
Matt turned back to Cabrera but didn’t say anything. Their eyes met.
“Jamie Taladyne went off the grid the day after Ron Harris hung himself in his cell.”
“How far off?”
“All the way off. He cashed out his bank account, got rid of his cell phone, cable TV, everything. None of his credit cards have been used in six months. Jamie Taladyne is either hiding out or he’s dead.”
“Did anyone talk to his parole officer?”
“It’s a woman. She said she hasn’t heard from him since Harris died.”
“Who’d you get this from, your pal Joey?”
“He and Plank split before you did, Jones.”
Matt’s cell phone started ringing in his pocket. When he checked the caller ID, he saw the name of Hughes’s supervisor, Lieutenant Howard McKensie, on the LCD screen. He switched on the phone, but all he heard was a faint voice lost in digital noise and static.
“Are you there, Jones? Are you there?”
“I’m here, Lieutenant, but it’s a bad connection.”
“Frankie’s been in a car accident.”
Matt felt the blood draining from his head and sat down. “Is he okay?”
The digital noise returned. Cabrera looked at Matt and rolled his chair closer. After several seconds, McKensie’s voice broke through again.
“I’m just south of Mint Canyon.”
“Is Frankie okay, Lieutenant?”
“You need to be here, Jones. Placerita Canyon Road off Route 14. You need to hurry.”
McKensie’s voice faded into the static and Matt lost the call. A long moment passed. When Matt spoke, his voice was just above a whisper.
“Frankie’s been in an accident.”
Cabrera nodded, digging his keys out of his pocket. “I’ll drive,” he said.
CHAPTER 27
The smoke from the wildfire came and went with the breeze, the road blocked by two deputy sheriffs. When Matt and Cabrera showed them their IDs, they were asked to pull off to the side and walk the rest of the way. The blaze was 90 percent contained, but more trucks were on the way.
Listening to the distant sirens, Matt climbed out of the car with Cabrera and started walking. The road was a narrow two-lane, the slope to his right a ten-story drop to the bottom of the canyon. Up ahead he could see the fire engines through the smoke. A group of maybe ten people were gazing down the hill with great interest. As he and Cabrera got closer, he spotted Lieutenant McKensie standing with an old man in the middle of the pack. The old man was unshaven and dressed in a flannel shirt and a pair of blue jeans. McKensie must have sensed their arrival because he turned. When Matt got a look at his face, he knew that Frankie was dead.
“He went over the cliff,” McKensie said in a raspy voice. “They’re searching for a second body.”
Matt traded looks with Cabrera, then took a step closer and gazed over the edge. What was left of Frankie’s burned-up car was a long way down. Frankie would have known it was over the moment he skidded off the road. The car must have exploded when it hit the bottom—everything within a fifty-yard radius of the vehicle was scorched and blackened. Matt could see four men strapping something onto a stretcher. When they gave it a lift and started up the slope, he realized that it was Frankie. Like the terrain, Frankie looked charred and broken and all burned up.
Matt turned away, thinking about him but also about Hughes. As he pulled himself together and turned back to watch, he felt someone give his arm a tug. It was Cabrera, waving him away from the group.
“What is it?” Matt said.
Cabrera narrowed his eyes and lowered his voice to a whisper. “There aren’t any skid marks, Jones.”
A moment passed, the darkness getting darker in the middle of a sunny afternoon.
“See for yourself,” Cabrera went on. “There aren’t any skid marks anywhere on this road. Frankie went over the edge and never hit the brakes.”
Matt took a step back and examined the asphalt. It was an old road, the blacktop faded after years of bright sunlight to a neutral gray. If Frankie had hit the brakes, the skid marks would have stood out like fresh paint.
Matt turned back to the slope, thinking about the message Frankie had left on his cell phone. I’m following up on what may or may not be a couple of decent leads, he’d said. A couple of decent leads.
Why Mint Canyon?
It took the four men about an hour to carry Frankie up the slope. Matt watched as they rolled his blackened corpse into a body bag under the direction of a local coroner, who seemed worried that the body might fall apart. Once the bag was zipped up, he noticed two of the four men talking to McKensie. They were deputy sheriffs, and they were saying that there wasn’t a second body. When Matt noticed the old man shaking his head, he traded looks with Cabrera and took a step closer.
“Why are you shaking your head?” Matt said. “What makes you think two people were in that car?”
“Because I saw them. Two fellas, not one.”
“Where?”
The old man glanced at McKensie, then turned back. “It’s like I was telling him. I’ve got a gas station next exit up on Route 14. The guy driving this car pulls in for a fill-up, so I turn on the pump. A minute later, I look out the window and see him talking to two other guys like they’re best friends.”
“What kind of car were they driving?”
The old man nodded. “It was a Ford. A dark gray sedan.”
“Did they buy any gas?” Matt asked. “Did they come inside and use a credit card?”
“No. They watched this guy fill his tank, and that’s pretty much it. When he was done, one of them decided to ride with him, and the other guy followed them out. That’s why I said there’s gotta be another body down there.”
The deputy sheriff shrugged. “We’re bringing more people in, but we didn’t see anyone and we were working a wide path. Even if he’d been thrown out of the car halfway down, we would’ve found him.”
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Matt turned back to the old man. “Do you remember what these two guys looked like? Not the guy who bought gas. The other two.”
“Sure,” he said. “The one that got in the car was a big guy with dark hair—had a belly like mine. I’m pretty sure he had a goatee and a bright red tie, too. The one that followed them out looked kind of skinny. He was a little guy with gray hair. Something was wrong with his face. His cheeks were all messed up.”
“You sure that’s what they looked like?”
Matt could feel the shadow passing over his soul before the old man even nodded. He turned and saw Cabrera staring at him. His partner looked frightened. In spite of the cool breeze, beads of sweat were dripping down his forehead. Lieutenant McKensie must have noticed, and turned to Matt.
“What is it, Jones?” he said. “Do you know these guys?”
Matt’s eyes were still locked on Cabrera’s. He didn’t know what to say, or who was safe enough to say it to, so he lied. He told McKensie that nothing about the old man’s description rang a bell. Cabrera backed him up, but his voice was a little shaky and he had trouble catching his breath. In the end it didn’t really matter. From the exasperated look on McKensie’s face, Matt didn’t think he bought what either one of them was saying.
CHAPTER 28
Matt walked out of the old man’s gas station with a pack of Marlboros and lit up. The cigarette tasted like shit and smelled even worse, and all of a sudden he remembered two of the five reasons why he’d quit. He shook them off before the other three surfaced and took another drag, deeper this time. As he climbed in behind the wheel, he looked over at Cabrera staring out the windshield with glazed eyes and a blank expression on his face.
“Mind if I smoke?” he said.
Cabrera shook his head without a reply. Then Matt started the car, cracking the window open as he pulled into the street with the tires screeching.
They were about thirty miles north of Los Angeles. At this hour the freeways would be parking lots. Matt expected that the trip back to Hollywood would take an hour and a half, maybe two. Cabrera never spoke as they rolled south. Every once in a while, Matt would check on him, and every time he did he saw the same thing.
Cabrera’s eyes were turned inward. The man was deep inside himself. So deep that Matt wondered if he was lost.
Matt left him alone, wrestling with his own demons and trying to concentrate on the stop-and-go traffic. By the time they finally reached the station, the sun had set and he could feel the dread following them into the parking lot. He found an open space on the far side, switched off the headlights, and killed the engine. Orlando and Plank’s gray Crown Vic was parked in the next aisle. When he noticed it sitting in the darkness, the feeling of impending doom seemed to become even more vivid.
“We’re here, Cabrera. We’re back at the station.”
Cabrera didn’t say anything and didn’t move. After several moments passed, Matt tapped him on the shoulder.
“You okay?”
Cabrera nodded. “I owe you an apology,” he said in a quiet voice.
“Forget it.”
“I’ll never forget it, Jones. Never. These guys killed Hughes and you know it. Today they murdered Frankie. He told us they would, remember? He said he thought that maybe he and Hughes touched a nerve. He didn’t know who. He just knew that they touched it. The night you called, the night Grace was taking all those pictures of Jane Doe’s dead body, I finally got it. I got it, but I didn’t wanna say I got it. I wanted to feel safe. I wanted to live the dream. The illusion. The fantasy. I was hoping everything would switch back to normal. And now everything’s all fucked up. Forever fucked up. We’re where Frankie was, the city’s next two dead guys. We’re fucking next.”
Matt lit another cigarette and pointed through the windshield. “Keep cool,” he said. “They’re coming out.”
Orlando and Plank had just walked out the rear door and were heading across the lot to their car. They were walking with purpose, like they were in a hurry. Matt kept still as they passed by, but it didn’t seem to matter. Orlando turned just as he pulled the driver’s-side door open. He was staring at them, his face showing nothing but contempt.
Matt kept his eyes locked on Orlando and spoke under his breath. “What kind of cop would murder two of his own?”
Cabrera took a deep breath and exhaled. “I need to show you something.”
After another beat, Matt finally broke the stare-down session with Orlando and turned to Cabrera. “Show me what?”
Cabrera’s eyes were still focused on Orlando. “Look,” he said. “He thinks it’s a joke. They’re laughing at us.”
Matt turned and watched them drive by, with Plank staring back at them. When they pulled out of the lot, he looked back at Cabrera and noticed that he was returning his gun to his holster. His fingers were trembling slightly and appeared sweaty. Matt looked back at Cabrera’s face and tried to get a read on him, but nothing clicked.
“Let’s go,” Cabrera said. “I want you to see something.”
They got out of the car and entered the building. As they walked into the squad room, Cabrera grabbed his laptop from a drawer at his workstation and pointed to the conference room.
“Better close the door,” he said.
The computer had only been sleeping. Once Cabrera opened the lid and typed in his password, they were up and already on the Web. He pulled the mouse closer and clicked on a bookmark that brought them to the Los Angeles Times. After double-checking that the door was closed, he looked up at Matt.
“I was running that credit check on Taladyne this morning,” he said. “While I waited for the reports, I had some time to kill and stumbled onto this.”
Matt sat down beside him, eyeing the screen carefully as he rolled his chair closer. Cabrera passed over the mouse. It was an article with a catchy headline dated ten days after Ron Harris committed suicide in his jail cell.
LAPD Detective Dies in Freak Accident
It was the story of Grace’s former partner, Leo Rodriguez. It was short and to the point, and Matt wasn’t sure how he’d missed it, except to say that he must have been working a narcotics case and off the grid. According to the Santa Monica Police Department, Rodriguez’s body had been found in the alley behind a metered parking garage at Santa Monica Boulevard and Second Street. His car had been located on the roof and had two hours left on the meter. When investigators saw that the safety rail had given way, they came to a quick conclusion: Rodriguez had fallen to his death eight stories down by accident. He was survived by his wife, Sally Rodriguez, and had no children.
Matt could feel his stomach going again. He got to his feet and started pacing beside the plate-glass windows. Grace’s office was dark, but there were a number of people in the squad room. He could see Cabrera closing the window on his computer and deleting the bookmark. Matt thought that getting rid of the bookmark was probably a good idea.
“It happened three months before I got here,” Cabrera said. “By then it would have been old news, I guess. No one talked about him. I just assumed that when Grace made lieutenant, his partner either retired or got bumped up to Robbery-Homicide. After they arrested Harris, both of them were heroes.”
Matt stopped pacing and leaned against the wall. “We’re in a fucked-up place, Denny. But we need to keep things straight. The way I see it, one of three things could’ve happened.”
“Just three?”
Matt nodded. “Just three, the first being that Santa Monica called it the way it really was. A freak accident. Rodriguez steps over to the rail for a look at the view, the rail breaks, and he falls. Accidents happen every day. It was good enough that everybody signed off on it.”
“Everybody did. What’s next?”
“Rodriguez jumped. He jumped, but he didn’t want it to look like he jumped, so his wife would get more money. He fed the meter, broke the rail, and did a swan dive eight stories down onto the asphalt.”
Cabrera had a look going and was
shaking his head. “But after today we both know that it didn’t happen that way. Leo Rodriguez didn’t fall and he didn’t jump. He was pushed.”
A beat went by, and then another. They were in perfect sync.
“We should talk to his wife,” Matt said.
Cabrera picked up the phone. “I’ll get her address.”
CHAPTER 29
Sally Rodriguez lived on a quiet street in South Pasadena a block from the library. She had blond hair and aqua-blue eyes and a smile that came from her mouth but seemed to live in those eyes of hers. Matt guessed that she was close to fifty and, from her figure, that she took care of herself.
After giving their IDs a cautious look, she welcomed them into the house and offered them coffee from a fresh pot. Matt gladly accepted, taking a seat with Cabrera at the kitchen table and watching her set down three mugs.
“So what is it you want to know about Leo?”
Matt glanced over at Cabrera, who nodded at him. They had talked about it on the drive from Hollywood. They didn’t want to overwhelm her, nor did they want to stir the pot. Matt would start the conversation. If necessary, Cabrera would follow up.
“Did your husband ever talk about his cases, Sally?”
“Of course.”
“Do you remember the Millie Brown investigation? She was murdered about a year and a half ago.”
She gave him an odd look as she sat down. “You know I knew that’s why you were here.”
A moment passed.
“Why’s that?” Matt said finally.
“Because that’s the one case that really got to Leo. Seeing what happened to that girl really got underneath his skin. He’d worked a lot of murder cases, but that one changed him.”
Matt added half a teaspoon of sugar to his coffee and took a short first sip. Admittedly, he was starving, but still, it might have been the best cup of hot java he’d ever tasted.
“I think both my partner and I can understand how your husband felt. We’re working a very similar case right now.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “For both of you.”
