by Jodi Compton
The sheriff’s substation was a one-story building of pinkish gray stucco with a Joshua tree out front. I could hear the firecracker-like pops of a firing range somewhere beyond the building. Joel parked and killed the engine. At that moment his cell rang again.
“Ford’s a demanding boss,” I commented.
He was looking at the screen. “It’s not Magnus, it’s my girlfriend.”
“Girlfriend?”
“Fiancée, actually,” Joel said. “I’ll call her back later. Come on, let’s get you processed in, so I can get going.”
“Sorry,” I said, “I’m making you late for supper, is that it?”
“Yup,” he said, “and two cold bottles of Stella Artois.”
He put his hand on the door handle, but I leaned forward. “Wait a minute,” I said. “I’ve been wanting to tell you something.”
“If this is something about Eastman and Stepakoff, it should wait until—”
“No,” I said. “It’s not that.”
“Yeah?” He waited.
I’d figured out what it was I should have told him about fear, back in the Eastman house, and this was maybe my last chance to say it. I wanted to say that fear isn’t a barrier to courage, it’s a source material. The brave people I knew—and I couldn’t include myself among them, not honestly—created their courage out of fear.
“Hailey?” Joel prompted.
“Yeah, sorry,” I said. “I wanted to say, you remember in San Francisco, when you told me about how you had to repress a lot of fear to do your job?”
He said, “No.”
That stopped me short. The question hadn’t really been a question, just a reminder. I tried again. “In the Eastman house,” I prompted him. “You were going under from the Ambien, and you said you had to swallow a lot of fear to do what you do, and no one else on the job talked about that kind of thing. Remember?”
He shook his head and studied me with his hazel-green eyes. “Sorry, no,” he said. “It must have been the drug talking. That just doesn’t sound like me. I really don’t have a problem in that area.”
After a moment I said, “Sorry. I must have misunderstood.”
30
When the life and times of Brittany Mercier began to come out, what surprised a lot of people was how much it didn’t amount to. The first thing: There was no abuse. Sure, she had poor beginnings in a small Washington State town, Dad drank a little too much, her parents divorced when she was young. But nothing about her past suggested the kind of toxic psychological cauldron that would produce a murderer.
What Brittany had appeared to be, from early on, was a girl with an endless appetite for pretty and expensive things and an aversion to work. Elementary-school teachers remembered a bright and lovely child who had a troubling penchant for telling lies, often for no apparent reason. Friends from the same time remembered a girl whom everyone tried to befriend but who repaid that friendship by stealing things she coveted from the homes she was invited into. Confronted, she would deny it and cry, and more than a few schoolmates convinced themselves that the fault was theirs for making the accusation.
In Los Angeles, when she was eighteen, her looks opened the very first doors in the entertainment business. She found an agent and landed a few commercials. But Brittany quickly tired of the grind of auditions and lost interest in acting lessons. She didn’t, though, fill the lack of acting jobs with other work, instead living off the indulgence of roommates and the generosity of boyfriends.
By the age of twenty-one, Brittany had used up the goodwill she had in Los Angeles. The agent had tired of her, as had a number of ex-friends and ex-roommates, all of them owed back rent or cash loans they realized would never be repaid. Brittany went to San Francisco. There she tried out her first “short cons.” A favorite trick was putting a broken vase in the twine-handled bag of an expensive shop and walking around retail centers until she could find a distracted person to run into her, causing her to drop and “break” her new purchase. Foreign tourists, uncertain in their English, afraid of giving offense, and unfamiliar with the value of American banknotes, were a favorite mark; invariably, Brittany’s distress occasioned the waving of generous amounts of American dollars.
At some point she met a young man named Quentin Corelli.
Of course, all this didn’t come out right away. But once Brittany was in custody, the evidence began to pile up. Items taken from the trunk of her car matched those bought by “Hailey Cain” in San Francisco with V. K. Eastman’s credit cards. And if there had been any doubt about the thumbprint that Joel had gotten, the full set of prints killed it; they were all matches for ones left in the San Francisco house, just as her DNA matched a hair in Eastman’s living room.
But Brittany was mentally nimble, if nothing else. Perhaps her deftest stroke was telling her interrogators that she’d befriended Violet Eastman in San Francisco and was a frequent guest in her house, hence the fingerprint and DNA evidence gleaned there.
Maybe Cain had even seen her there, Brittany suggested, and noticed the similarities in their age and coloring and thus had chosen her as the target for a deadly setup. Because she certainly had been set up, Brittany said. The student-ID photo of her must have been stolen and planted in the city college’s files. The credit-card purchases in the trunk? Also planted. She’d done nothing wrong.
Asked for corroborating details—even just her address in the city—or to take a polygraph, Brittany turned tearfully sullen and uncooperative.
Despite all this, interest in me died slowly. I probably got interviewed nearly as much as Brittany did, by major-case detectives from San Francisco and FBI agents who worked on the task force. They wanted to understand my role in the story, how my ID and gun had fallen into Brittany’s hands, why I hadn’t gone immediately to the police with my story of identity theft, and how I ended up racing after Brittany on the highway.
I didn’t feel like revealing the whole messy story of Nidia Hernandez and Tony Skouras, and I didn’t. I simply told them that I’d lost my passport, my driver’s license, and my gun in a highway robbery in Mexico. It was a story that conflated my two encounters with Skouras’s guys; I didn’t actually lose the SIG until later. But they didn’t need to know how long I’d tangled with Skouras, or how much it had cost me.
Life at the sheriff’s substation was okay. The deputy in charge, the one Joel had vouched for, was Deputy Cory Wellman, around fifty, tanned, nearly bald, quiet. He was decent, as Joel had said. My second day there, he brought in a doctor to look at the stab wound on my foot, who said it was uninfected and would continue healing on its own.
Cory also let me wear my street clothes in my cell, as if I were just a town drunk brought in to sober up, and he delivered me several paperback novels from the library. The other two holding cells were often empty. Country music drifted under the sound of the police radio. The food wasn’t very good, but it’s not supposed to be.
As Joel had predicted, no one gave me trouble. But people came to look at me; that was the weirdest thing. I’d thought that tradition had gone out with Jesse James, you know, “going to the jailhouse to look at the famous outlaw.” Reporters came, too, of course. I didn’t speak to any of them.
On day four I had a visitor who was neither sightseer nor journalist; he was an Asian man of middle years in a white lab coat.
“Hailey,” Cory said, unlocking the cell door, “this is Dr. Tanaka. He needs to take a quick look at you.”
“Pleased to meet you,” I said. “Are you here to look at my foot? I thought it was okay.”
“Not your foot,” Tanaka said. “May I look at your left hand?”
Mystified, I raised my hand and let him take it. He looked closely at hardened tissue where my left pinkie had once been, tilting my hand up toward the light. I felt like an animal at the vet.
“How long ago did this happen?” he asked.
“Nearly five months. Late December,” I said.
His eyebrows lowered in concentratio
n. “I see a little bit of more recent damage—”
I was immediately embarrassed. “From a burn?” I said. “Yeah, I know. I did it with a cigarette. The nerve endings haven’t grown back properly. I was impressing a guy.”
Cory poked his tongue into his cheek as if he were trying not to laugh. Tanaka said, “Maybe you shouldn’t do that anymore.”
“Yes, Doc,” I said.
He returned his attention to the scar tissue. “This was a very clean cut. What did it?”
“Tin snips.”
“This was deliberate?”
“Yeah.” This time I didn’t look over at Cory. I didn’t mind his private amusement, but I didn’t want to see his pity.
Dr. Tanaka said, “I hope the police caught up with the man who did that.”
Quentin had probably split L.A. as soon as he’d heard about Brittany’s arrest. I wondered if she would eventually implicate him in her crimes and, if so, how much he would pay for them. If the law even caught up with him.
It was believed to be Quentin, incidentally, who gave Brittany the silver Acura she drove to Los Angeles, instead of the far-too-hot-to-drive Miata. This was a detail that did not capture the public imagination, but I’d been wondering about it since seeing the Acura in the garage.
Cory and Dr. Tanaka left without explaining the doctor’s odd errand, and I didn’t inquire. I took it as a matter of pride not to ask questions that weren’t going to be answered. There was no point in pretending that I was in control.
31
The next day, a little after lunch, Cory asked me if I was up for another ride into the city. It wasn’t a question, though—another interview awaited. What more can these guys need to ask me? I’d been interviewed by everyone but Parks and Recreation.
All my previous interviews had taken place at the FBI field office on Wilshire, the FBI apparently having taken point on the Eastman-Stepakoff murders. This time the travelogue was different. Cory drove us across the mostly dry L.A. River and across Alameda Street, and then I saw the buildings of the Civic Center rising before us: the County Courthouse, the Hall of Justice, and all its satellite buildings.
Cory’s Crown Vic descended into a deep subterranean parking garage, and then we rode the elevators up into a warren of hallways and plate glass. I was still following my policy of not asking questions that wouldn’t be answered. The last clock that I passed on the way into yet another interrogation room read 2:35 P.M. I’d learned to catch a glimpse of the time whenever possible, then try to gauge how long I was left waiting in the interrogation room. It was never a short time.
Cory apologized for handcuffing me to the D-ring of the table; he felt sheepish about it because I’d never offered him any resistance. Then the door closed behind him and the wait began. Bored and resentful, I distracted myself by trying to remember some of the Latin passages I’d memorized years ago as a student, Virgil and Terence and others.
I was on the creation story as translated by Jerome—“In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram”—when the door opened and someone came in. Don’t ask me how I knew: I just knew, even before he gave me a voice to recognize. If you passed him on the street, he wouldn’t really stand out, Joel had said. I wasn’t sure I agreed.
Magnus Ford was quite big, well over six feet, with ash-blond hair cropped almost to his scalp, maybe two days’ growth of beard, eyes of an indeterminate color. He was strong-looking in a stocky way but moved lightly, with an air of stillness, even in motion.
“Mr. Ford,” I said.
“Hailey.” He pulled out the interviewer’s chair from its place up against the table and sat down.
He wore mostly standard detective wear: shirt and tie, creased trousers, loafers. Instead of a blazer, he wore a dark leather coat that came to midthigh. It was the only touch of flash in his wardrobe, and made it hard to tell what of his bulky upper body was muscle and what was fat. And even the coat was standard department-store stuff, nothing custom that suggested a cop on the take.
He said, “The first thing is, you’ve been exonerated, whether or not the charges stick to Brittany Mercier.”
“How?” I said.
“There’s bank video of her cashing one of the checks she forged on Eastman’s account. She’s wearing a cap and keeping her face away from the camera, but you can see that she has all ten fingers. She didn’t know enough about you to hide that.”
“That’s why they sent the doc yesterday, to gauge how old my injury was.”
“Yes.”
“And Brittany’s been charged with the murders.”
“Yes. You should know, there’s an outside chance that she won’t be convicted. A good defense lawyer is going to exploit all the maybes, and the psychologist who’s been in the observation room during several of the interrogations is saying that he thinks Brittany might never recant her story of being set up. She’s a pathological liar, and the strength of those people is that on some level they convince themselves of what they’re saying. She’s young, very convincing in her own defense, very hurt and confused that nobody believes her. A hung jury is a possibility here. I’m telling you this because I know that having someone else found guilty was important to you, that you saw it as necessary to clearing your name.”
“I did what I could.”
“You did. And it’s possible that the jury won’t hang. We’ll wait and see.”
“But I’m free to go.”
“Not exactly,” he said. “There’s still the matter of a couple of truck hijackings out in the desert, Insula.”
Insula.
I made sure my face stayed carefully neutral. It was possible he could just be fishing. The least I could do was make him put all his cards on the table.
“You’ve seen my tattoo,” I said mildly. “It’s Latin for ‘island.’ That’s how I feel sometimes. Solitary.”
“Actually, it was Joel who saw your tattoo,” he said. “The second time you came over to talk to him in the park, it was a hot day, and you were wearing a thin tank shirt. He read the tattoo through it. A little later, even though you’d never mentioned your friend in that neighborhood by name, Joel dropped a casual reference to ‘your friend Serena’ into the conversation, and you didn’t even blink. That’s when he knew.” Ford smiled a little. “Did you know that up until that moment we thought you were some kind of urban legend? ‘Insula, the white sucia.’ We’d seen pictures of Warchild, knew she was some kind of fine-looking. For her to have a blond female lieutenant, that was about two steps away from being some cholo’s letter to Penthouse Forum.”
I didn’t feel like laughing.
“Joel came in real excited, told me what he’d found. After you gave him your cell number, we were brainstorming ways to best use that, and then the APB on you came in from San Francisco. Joel brought it to me and said, ‘You’re not going to believe this, but you remember how I told you that Insula told me her name was Hailey? That’s her, Hailey Cain. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s true.’’
“It’s funny, but one of the early things that worked in your favor, as far as convincing me you didn’t kill Eastman and Stepakoff, was the truck hijackings. We knew right away it was you and Warchild. Two females who spoke a mix of English, Spanish, and Latin? That narrowed the suspect list considerably.”
I hoped the irritation I felt at myself didn’t show on my face; the code Serena and I had used hadn’t been such a smart idea after all.
“So the timeline didn’t work out. The idea that you were cleaning up a murder scene in San Francisco at five or six P.M. and jacking a truck outside Los Angeles at midnight … it just didn’t scan. Then your fingerprints came across the wire from the military database, and Joel said, ‘This isn’t right, either. She’s only got nine fingers.’
“Now, that was interesting, because it seemed to be a detail no one else knew, not even people in San Francisco. That was when I got curious enough to call you.’
And the rest was history.
Ford said, “You
shouldn’t make too much of the fact that I helped you with the San Francisco murders, Hailey. I’m a cop. The evidence against you didn’t add up, so it just made sense to look into things further. But I also have a lot of sympathy for a pair of pharmaceutical-company truck drivers who were made to lie down in a ditch with a gun at their backs.”
I didn’t respond to that. A defense of my behavior was also an admission.
“In the legal system, drug- and gang-related crimes are among the least sympathized with. Judges and prosecutors are anxious to look tough on them. If I can convince just one prosecutor that you were in on the truck robberies, do you realize how many charges he can make out of that? Hijacking, armed robbery, assault, kidnapping, possession with intent to distribute, possession of an unregistered firearm … That’s a long time in prison you’re looking at.”
“And you’ll make it stick how? Gonna get the truck drivers in here for a voice lineup, make me say some Latin words for them?”
“Tell me, where’d you get your law degree?” he said, amused. Then, “Where were you around nine p.m. on Tuesday?”
It took me a moment to adjust to the shift in direction, but I thought back. “I’d only just gotten to Brian’s place, in Woodland Hills. You remember, I called you not long after.”
“Maybe an hour after,” he said. “Are you sure you weren’t, at any point, at a rented storage unit off Olympic?”
He knew about the place where Serena stored boxes of pharmaceuticals, her cache of weapons, and her money. “No,” I said. “Why?”
“Your good friend Warchild Delgadillo has established quite a successful sideline in marijuana-infused oils. It’s apparently been quite a moneymaker for her and a select group of her girls.” He raised a pale eyebrow. “How long did you think a lucrative operation like that was going to go unnoticed by higher-ups in the gang underworld?”
“That’s your rhetorical way of telling me it didn’t?”
