Vigilante

by Stephen J. Cannell

  “You’re still investigating Hannah’s murder? I thought they had that solved. They even have a picture of the guy.”

  “I’m starting from scratch, going over the whole case again.”

  “God … poor Hannah. That was so awful,” Linda said with a shudder as the drinks were delivered. “When it happened, I was numb for a week.”

  “I just got assigned the case,” I said. “I think you spoke to Detectives Monroe and Hall a few years back.”

  “I only talked to Hall. Monroe seemed to always be in court.”

  “They’re no longer on the case. Detective Hall was killed in a car accident and Detective Monroe retired.”

  I worked my way into it slowly, talking about her friendship with Hannah and their trips to Las Vegas.

  “It was fun traveling with her. We both loved to play blackjack, so we’d hit Vegas about three times a year. She was one of those people who didn’t judge you. She saw things for what they were, if you know what I mean. No bullshit.”

  “I understand she worked in the ER.”

  “She liked it there. She had nerves of steel, that one. Didn’t rattle. Hannah was very passionate about her work. A special girl in all ways.”

  We talked for a few more minutes about Hannah and her work at the hospital and then I segued into the threat against her life that occurred two days before the murder.

  “She mentioned that, but she never really told me who had screamed at her,” Baxter answered. “A woman. That’s all she’d say. It bothered her, but there’s so much going on in the ER, she didn’t have a whole lot of time to remain focused on it.”

  “Was she also dating a police officer?” I asked.

  The minute I said that, Linda recoiled as if I’d just touched her with a live wire.

  “Who told you that?” she demanded sharply.

  “Her parents. Were they wrong?”

  She was looking around the bar as if someone might overhear us.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, sure. I guess.”

  “Listen, Linda. You were her friend. Somebody killed her. I don’t think it was the black guy who robbed that house across the street. I think that theory just let Hall and Monroe file the case. I want to find out who really killed her. To do that, I need your help.”

  “We’re not all as brave as Hannah,” she said softly.

  “What are you afraid of?”

  She fidgeted but didn’t speak.

  “Okay, look … you tell me and I promise I won’t reveal where I got the information. Fair enough?”

  “If you catch the killer, once it’s in court, won’t they make me testify?”

  “We’re a long way from court. Please, help me help Hannah. She can’t speak for herself any longer. It’s up to us to do that for her.”

  Linda sat for a long time, trying to come to grips with it.

  “You promise?” she finally said.

  “Promise.”

  A moment later, she began, haltingly at first, but then she picked up speed. “Okay, you’re right. Hannah was dating a cop.… He was more than just a regular cop. One of those officers who keep getting in gun battles and killing people. He was huge—almost six-five—and scary looking. I told her what I thought of him. I told her she should give that guy a wide berth. But, as I just said, Hannah was strong willed. She told me he wasn’t anything like I thought. She said she cared for him and underneath he was very sweet.”

  “Do you remember his name?” I asked, but I already knew who it was.

  “His name was Lester Madrid.”

  CHAPTER

  31

  “What on earth are you wearing?” Jeb asked sharply as Hitch slipped into the captain’s office, where four of us were already waiting. He was dressed in a white chef’s smock with a Spago logo on the breast pocket.

  “Sorry, skipper. I was at a cooking class and Dina Lohan accidentally spilled some red wine on my shirt. This was all I could borrow.” He smiled an apology and dropped into a chair next to the door.

  Alexa and DC Bud Hawkins were already seated. Jeb was standing near his desk and I was on the sofa across the room.

  “Okay, now that we’ve all finally arrived, let’s hear what you’ve got,” Deputy Chief Hawkins demanded, pinning me with a cold look. He’d delayed dinner plans to be here and was making no attempt to hide his displeasure. Hawkins was Chief of Operations and Alexa’s immediate supervisor.

  I ran them through my interview with Linda Baxter. When I got to the part where Baxter told me that Hannah Trumbull had been dating Sgt. Lester Madrid in 2006, I felt most of the air go out of the room.

  “You can’t be serious,” Hawkins said, appalled.

  “While I was waiting for this meeting, I went on the computer and found out Lester and Stephanie got married in 1998,” I said. “So if he was dating Hannah Trumbull in ’06, that means Sergeant Madrid was having an extramarital affair with Hannah just before she was murdered.”

  Everyone just sat there trying to process that.

  Bud Hawkins finally asked, “How does Nix Nash keep getting so fucking lucky? This is worse than Atlanta. Captain Madrid is on the short list of suspects for Lita Mendez’s murder and now we find out Nash is also featuring the Hannah Trumbull murder from ’06. A case that happens to involve Captain Madrid’s husband, Lester.”

  “What are the odds that these two completely unrelated murders could both involve the Madrids?” Alexa said.

  “Astronomical,” Jeb replied. “And how the hell can they both just happen to randomly pop up on that damn TV show? What’s going on with that?”

  Morale in the room was plummeting.

  “Well, it might not be so far-fetched if you look at the situation back to front instead of front to back,” Hitch said quietly from his seat by the door.

  “What the hell are you babbling about?” Hawkins snapped. He had very little patience to begin with and was not displaying what little he had.

  “This may seem a little off the point, but when you plot a movie you often work from the resolution backward to the inciting event,” Hitch said. “That way you’re able to keep the story tight. If Nix Nash just happened to pick these two cases randomly, then yeah, the odds are astronomical that they’d both involve the Madrids. But let’s say that’s not how it happened. Suppose Nash knew before he started that Lester and Stephanie touched both situations and he picked those two cases precisely for that reason.”

  “I see what Hitch is getting at,” I said. “Nash doesn’t take chances. He knew he was moving to Los Angeles, so working backward, like Hitch says, this isn’t quite so far-fetched. Let’s say Nash researched the whole LAPD in advance of his arriving here. He has his team of researchers digging into the thousands of open homicides. Then after Lita was murdered, he throws all that info on the table and starts looking for a connection. He has his staff investigate Lita’s life. It wouldn’t take him long to come up with Captain Stephanie Madrid and the long-running battle she’d had with Lita. There’s no direct evidence against the captain, but Nash would certainly know she’d make our suspect list because of their numerous public disputes.”

  “So how does that get us to Hannah Trumbull?” Hawkins asked.

  “It’s like the six degrees of separation. He starts digging around in Captain Madrid’s life and up pops her husband, Lester, who’s a real gold mine. The guy is ex-SIS, just the kind of rogue cop Nash loves to feature on that show. Nash researches him, talks to some sources inside our department, and finds out there’s a rumor that Lester had been cheating on his wife with Hannah, who also just happens to be an open murder case from ’06. It’s just what he’s looking for. Lester doesn’t have to be guilty. He just has to look guilty. After all, this isn’t about justice; it’s about Nielsen ratings.”

  They all sat there looking doubtful.

  “I’m not buying this,” Deputy Chief Hawkins said. “It’s too far out there.”

  “Out of the thousands of uncleared murders all he h
ad to do was tie one of them loosely to the Madrids,” I said. “I think Hitch may be right. This guy is plotting his shows in advance by working backward, not forward.”

  “It does make some kind of crazy sense,” Alexa said thoughtfully, although I think she was just trying to save us from Deputy Chief Hawkins, who looked like he was about to start giving birth to a chair.

  “All we need to do is clear the Trumbull murder fast,” Hitch said. “If Lester is innocent of that murder, it destroys Nash’s conspiracy theory.”

  “And what if Lester was cheating on his wife and Stephanie found out?” Hawkins said. “What if Stephanie Madrid is the woman who threatened Hannah Trumbull in the hospital ER and then, two nights later, killed her for sleeping with her husband?”

  “We better pray that’s not what happened,” Jeb said.

  When the meeting broke up, nobody was happy. We were standing in the squad room outside Jeb’s office and he took a parting shot at Hitch just because he was handy.

  “Stop going to cooking classes while you’re on duty, Hitchens.”

  “I was off duty, Skipper.”

  “I don’t care. You look like … like … like a fucking cook.”

  “Yes, sir,” Hitch said softly. “Sometimes I am. But I’ll take that under advisement.”

  As we walked to our cubicle, Alexa caught my eye and pointed toward the elevators, then went up to her office, leaving me with Hitch.

  When we were alone, Hitch said, “While we were rolling that out, it sounded pretty damn weak even to me. It’s very dangerous to pursue an offbeat idea like that if we can’t prove it.”

  “A dangerous idea isn’t responsible for the people who believe in it,” I said.

  “I really hate this,” Hitch said. “Our theory sucks.”

  “There are no coincidences in police work,” I said, trying to reassure him. “I agree that there is something more than we know about going on here. We’re obviously missing a big piece. However he’s doing it, Nash has a great source that’s giving him an edge. We just have to keep working it until it all makes sense.”

  It was almost midnight now and the administration floor was deserted. Alexa was waiting for me in her new tenth-floor office. It was larger than her old digs at the Glass House, where she had no view. This new office had wide double windows that faced City Hall. As soon as I entered, she shut the door.

  “Do you really believe any of that?” she said. “Working backward hardly explains this coincidence.”

  “Caleb Cole told us everything would tie in and look what just happened.”

  “And you think it’s not random, the way he picks the cases?”

  “I think the guy is writing a script like Hitch said. Then he’s shooting it. None of this is coincidence.”

  “It still doesn’t explain how he’s doing it,” she persisted.

  “I know, and if we don’t find out fast, we’re all going to be looking for new professions.”

  CHAPTER

  32

  That night at home, as I lay in bed with Alexa asleep beside me, I kept wrestling with the same gloomy feeling I’d had in the V-TV control room. It was a growing certainty that this case wasn’t going to end well for any of us. I felt like I was being led by the nose through a maze that had no back door.

  I finally got up and, without waking Alexa, went out to sit in the den. I thought about Lester and Stephanie Madrid and, despite the theory Hitch and I had advanced in Jeb’s office, how improbable it was that the murders of Lita Mendez and Hannah Trumbull each touched one of the Madrids.

  I kept looking at the problem and turning it over like a Rubik’s Cube, examining all sides, twisting facets. No matter how I tried to get all the same colors to line up, I couldn’t make it come out right.

  A random thought struck me. We’d all assumed that Nix Nash picked Los Angeles as the city he wanted to feature in the show’s third season because this was where he had lost his law license. We’d assumed he hated the LAPD for putting the fraud case on him, which sent him to prison and got him disbarred. It made such perfect sense that he was here seeking revenge against us that we’d never looked at any alternate theories.

  What if that wasn’t the reason he chose L.A.? What if the reason was because he’d lived here for years? He’d associated with cops and criminals. He had contacts. He had to already know about the Madrids because Stephanie was chief advocate even back then and she was fielding a lot of his lawsuits against cops. Taking it a step further, it would have been impossible for Nix to miss Lester with all the press coverage he got in the Times for dumping assholes in the street back when he was in SIS.

  Maybe it was usable information, and not revenge, that had brought Nix back here for his third TV season.

  I would discuss it with Hitch in the morning and see if he could think of a way to twist my cube further and make the colors line up closer.

  I was just getting up to head back to bed when a text message signal sounded from my cell phone in the charging dock across the room. I walked over and read it.

  YOU ARE INVITED TO JOIN NIX NASH AND THE CAST OF V-TV ABOARD THE HMS BOUNTY FOR BRUNCH AND A CRUISE CELEBRATING THE PREMIERE OF OUR THIRD SEASON. WE’RE LEAVING FROM FISHERMAN’S VILLAGE, MARINA DEL REY, AT 10:00 A.M. TOMORROW. GROG AND HORS D’OEUVRES. DRESS CASUAL.

  I stood in my den holding the cell phone, looking down at the improbable invitation. What the hell did this guy take me for?

  Even though it was late, I dialed Hitch.

  “What up, dawg?” he said as he came on the line, still fully awake.

  “Listen to this,” I said, and read him the text message.

  When I finished, he said, “I’d view it as an incredible opportunity. We decided to engage. Full contact, remember?”

  “So you’d go.”

  “Bet your ass.”

  “I’d like it better if we were betting yours.”

  “Listen, dawg. If it makes you feel better I could go as your date. We could wear matching sailor suits. But you’ll get more if you go alone; it will keep his guard down. This guy is arrogant. Arrogance is his weakness.”

  We were both silent for a long minute.

  “I’m tempted,” I said. “But my gut tells me it’s a trap.”

  “Unless he pushes you overboard, which I doubt, you’ll get back safely, and then you and I will debrief. We can use whatever intel you get to find a way to net this tuna. While you’re on that cruise, you can also try and pump those other sellouts—Marcia Breen, Frank Palgrave, and J. J. Blunt. See what they have to contribute.”

  “Okay,” I finally said. “I guess I’ll do it.”

  CHAPTER

  33

  Alexa left before I did the next morning. I hadn’t slept well. When I awoke at eight, my head felt so fuzzy I was mainlining coffee trying to develop some focus and a heartbeat.

  By nine o’clock I was struggling with what the hell you’re supposed to wear on an ocean cruise. Should I take my fancy nickel-plated 9mm Kimber automatic with the white bone handle or go unpacked? What should my nautical look be, or should I even try for one? I finally opted for a beige Brioni sport shirt, khaki slacks, and a pair of canvas deck shoes. For bling I added my small ten-ounce Airlight .38 in an ankle holster.

  I got in the Acura and was backing out of the driveway when I noticed a gray Navigator with smoked windows parked at the curb at the end of the alley. I figured it was another V-TV mobile unit.

  Then the door to the SUV opened and a gaunt six-foot-five giant with a silver-headed cane got out.

  Lester Madrid.

  He leaned against his front fender and crooked his index finger in my direction, beckoning me over like I was some crack whore on Main Street. I could see no way past him, so I opened the door and reluctantly walked over.

  Lester had aged some in the last five years. He still looked nasty enough to eat your children and still didn’t carry an ounce of fat, but now his hair had begun to thin and go gray.

  As I got c
loser, I said, “I don’t want to get into a dustup with you, Lester.”

  “I came to deliver a message,” he growled in the ruptured, gravelly whisper that served as his normal speaking voice. “Stop trying to put your fucking Mendez homicide on my wife. If you don’t pay attention to this warning, you’ll be dealing with some critical issues.”

  I was assuming he didn’t know yet that his name had become a part of the investigation in the Hannah Trumbull case. But with V-TV covering it, that probably wasn’t going to last long. I was trying to decide whether to lay it on him now to gain some tactical advantage or let it just come out naturally.

  As I was pondering this, he said, “When did you turn into such a pussy? The Shane Scully I remember didn’t try and fuck up brother cops. He used to go to the asshole.”

  “Go to the asshole” was an old department reference to cops who were so committed to catching criminals they would risk their own lives in the breakneck pursuit of any bad guy. Lester Madrid always went to the asshole. Trouble was, he killed most of them when he got there.

  “Lester, this is a mistake,” I told him. “You don’t want to threaten me.”

  “I’m not above a mistake,” he rasped. “How you recover is all that matters.”

  “I’m sure Captain Madrid told you about the cell-phone video with her and Lita fighting.”

  “Lita Mendez was a bleeding hemorrhoid. Somebody finally put that bitch at room temperature, which is exactly what needed to happen. We oughta throw the doer a parade. But either way, my wife isn’t the one who dropped her. You and your bullshit movie-producer partner are gonna get played by Nash like the douche bags you are. I’m here to tell you that will be the mistake you can’t recover from. My wife didn’t kill that chola.”

  “Racial slurs?”

  “I’m not a cop anymore. I don’t have the faggot PC police telling me what I can and can’t say. I call people exactly what they are now.”

  I tried to evaluate this. Lester Madrid was six feet, five inches of gristle and bone, leaning on a cane, glaring, eyes cold and sharp as a box of tacks. He was no less dangerous today than he was ten years ago. This was a cop who had chilled almost a dozen bad guys and then gone home and slept without conscience. Had killing people just become too damn easy? Was that now Lester’s preferred way of solving his problems?