The Lost Witness

by Robert Ellis

  She watched Rhodes raise his hand in the air. She saw Barrera signal back that help was on its way. The moment was real. And even though she didn’t trust it, it took her breath away.

  She turned to Klinger, her stomach in her throat. Rolling his body over, she pulled his belt away and grabbed her .45 and Rhodes’s Glock. Then they charged back down the hill.

  The limo was still here, and so was the Audi—both cars smoldering in the cold heat. But it looked like the rats had heard the rifle shot and run for cover. Rhodes moved around the limo to the trunk, grabbed a handful of cash out of the duffel bag and tossed it in the air. They couldn’t have run very far. And it was more than obvious that they had every intention of coming back.

  She turned and counted twelve pillars supporting the overpass. Then she kept watch as Rhodes started working his way down the line toward the trees and brush bordering the freeway. Visibility was still less than twenty-five feet. The first two columns were clear. But when he swept past the third, something scurried out on two legs and made a run for it. Rhodes fired two shots at point-blank range, then ran forward as the figure collapsed on the ground.

  The silence returned and Lena waited, keeping her eyes on the support columns with her Smith & Wesson ready. Rhodes turned the body over in the mist.

  “Dobbs,” he called out. “He’s not gonna make it.”

  Lena waved back but knew that she was losing sight of Rhodes in the clouds and wouldn’t be able to cover him from the limo. After a quick look around, she legged it across the grass to the first column on the far side. She could see Rhodes pocketing Dobbs’s gun and patting down the man. When she checked her back, she spotted Ragetti rising out of the muck and realized that he had been hiding underneath the limo guarding the cash. Now his gun was raised and pointed at Rhodes. Directly behind Rhodes she could see Justin Tremell pulling away from his father and stepping out from behind a tree with Jennifer Bloom.

  Lena turned back to Ragetti and aimed her .45, but knew that she was late on it. Knew that she didn’t see it in time.

  She shouted Rhodes’s name, pulled the trigger, and felt the recoil. She saw Ragetti’s pistol flash in the darkness and heard the loud pop. Bloom screamed and Ragetti fell down. And then Dean Tremell cried out.

  Lena picked up Ragetti’s gun and moved closer. No one had screamed or cried out for Phil Ragetti. And no one seemed concerned about Rhodes. He was on his feet and brushing himself off after hitting the ground.

  Ragetti had pulled the trigger, missing one life and hitting another. And everyone’s eyes were glued on the luckless target. Justin Tremell had been hit in the center of his chest as he tried to flee with Bloom. The kid was lying on a bed of grass. His eyes were open, his gaze stamped out.

  Headlights began streaming down the hill, the space filling with a light so bright that the fog looked more like smoke now. Dean Tremell didn’t seem to notice and staggered toward his son’s dead body. Wilting onto the ground, the old man drew his only son into his arms and began rocking him on his knee.

  Lena glanced over at Rhodes, then pulled Jennifer Bloom away and guided her toward the approaching headlights. She could hear Tremell weeping behind her. She could hear his sorrow cutting into the night. She knew the tone and cadence from personal experience. Knew what the agony felt like and looked like. Knew how much the loss of a loved one could weigh down the soul.

  And so did Jennifer Bloom.

  51

  Lena watched two cops handcuff Tremell, read him his rights, and lead him away from his son’s body in the grass. Tremell stared at the ground as they passed through the darkness. His lips were quivering, his shoulders hunched. Dean Tremell had been ruined, so there was no real reason for anyone to say anything to him. No reason to call him a piece of shit. But someone from the crime scene team muttered it anyway. Lena doubted that he heard it though.

  She looked up the hill and saw Rhodes interviewing Tremell’s driver, then turned back to Barrera. They were standing by the ambulance while the EMTs prepared Jennifer Bloom for the ride to the hospital. Lena had bummed a cigarette from one of the paramedics. She couldn’t help it.

  “I knew that it was a bad idea,” Barrera said. “I knew that when you saw the chief in the car, you’d think the worst.”

  “You were right,” she said. “I did.”

  “I knew that you’d never believe me. That you wouldn’t pick up your cell. It was a mistake, but he wanted to be there. He insisted on it.”

  “Where is he?”

  “On his way downtown for the press conference.”

  She checked her watch. It felt like four or five in the morning. When she saw that it was only 10:30 p.m. it threw her until she remembered that she hadn’t caught a decent night’s sleep in three days.

  “The chief wanted to be the one who told you,” Barrera said. “He wanted you to hear it from him.”

  “Hear what?”

  “It doesn’t fucking matter anymore.”

  She took a drag on the cigarette. “What did he want to say?”

  Barrera flashed a wry smile, then pulled back on it. “He wanted to warn you about Klinger. He thought that you were in danger if you went home. Like I said, Lena, it doesn’t really matter anymore.”

  “I guess it doesn’t,” she said. “Who was the guy in the passenger seat?”

  “His new adjutant.”

  “Hand picked from Internal Affairs?”

  “No. Abe Hernandez from Pacific Division. I’ve known him for ten years. He’s a good man.”

  Barrera’s cell started ringing and he stepped away to take the call. Lena turned back to Jennifer Bloom. She was strapped down on the gurney and about to be lifted into the ambulance. She reached out for Lena’s hand and held it. Bloom didn’t say anything. Just met her eyes.

  “It’s okay,” Lena said. “Everything’s good now. I’ll stop by tomorrow so we can talk. You want me to call your brother?”

  “It might be a shock if he hears my voice. He’s been through a lot.”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  Bloom released her hand. Lena stayed until the ambulance drove off. Then she walked halfway up the hill and sat down in the grass. She was watching the criminalists from SID swarm the crime scene and trying not to think about what a hot shower might feel like. Trying not to think too much about climbing into bed. Her ears were still ringing from all the gunshots. Her body was so sore it felt like someone had tossed her out of a moving car.

  The investigator from the coroner’s office hadn’t arrived yet and the bodies were still laid out the way they fell. Justin Tremell was too far off to really make out, his corpse muted by the fog. But she could see Dobbs and Ragetti clear enough. One face up, the other, face down.

  She took another drag on the cigarette, the body count preying on her mind. As she got to her feet and looked up the hill, she saw the coroner’s van backing into position at the edge of the parking lot. Ed Gainer hopped out and spotted her in the haze, then motioned her up to the van.

  “What’s with your cell, Lena?”

  She pulled the phone out of her pocket and checked it. The battery was dead.

  “What’s up?” she asked.

  “Madina was trying to reach you,” he said. “He had something he wanted you to see.”

  She followed Gainer to the back of the van and watched him open up. It looked like he had made a stop before this one. A single body bag was already onboard.

  “What’s he want me to see?”

  Gainer shrugged. “I don’t know. He said that when you saw it, you’d understand what it meant. You know what Madina’s like, Lena. Sometimes he goes cryptic on you like just maybe he did one too many autopsies that day. After a while it would have to get to anyone. All those dead bodies. It sure as hell gets to me.”

  He laughed, then rolled the body bag closer to the rear doors.

  “What are you doing, Ed?”

  He turned and gave her a look. “He wants you to see this. It’s Denny Ram
ira. He got started on the autopsy, then stopped and said you needed to take a look first.”

  Lena tried to pull herself together. She had already seen enough. She needed the day to end and needed it bad. Taking another look at Denny Ramira’s corpse felt like it was pushing her over some psychological edge. She watched Gainer unzip the bag, then pull the plastic open. Saw Denny’s battered face and eyes. That meat thermometer still in his chest. But even worse, she caught the odor venting out of the plastic and thought that she might lose it.

  Gainer reached inside the bag and fished out Denny’s left arm. Then he switched on his flashlight and turned over the dead reporter’s hand. All of a sudden, Lena was wide awake. Her mind, clear as a day with the man in the moon.

  “Do you know if they took a picture, Ed?”

  Gainer nodded. “It’s documented. It’s a matter of record. After they got the shot, Madina stopped the autopsy and loaded him in my van. What is it?”

  Lena zeroed in on the pin stuck in Denny Ramira’s left palm. The palm that she couldn’t see when she found his body in the kitchen because he had clenched his fist in a death grip. Denny had been a crime-beat reporter and a good one. He would have known from experience that by clenching his fist at the time of his death he was unleashing a chemical reaction in his body. That his fingers would be locked like a bank vault until rigor mortis set his body and finally released it. That he could keep his secret for more than a day. And that he could buy enough time to tell Lena exactly who murdered him by jabbing the pin into his own palm and holding on to it for the rest of his life.

  Just the sight of it cut to the bone.

  She parted the body bag and gazed at Ramira’s face for a long time. Her doubts about his murder had begun the moment she set eyes on that meat thermometer. She had known from the lack of blood that it had been an afterthought. A play that followed the murder but had nothing to do with it. Ever since that moment she had suspected that Cava probably wasn’t good for it any more than Klinger could have been. Over the past hour she had come to the conclusion that Dobbs and Ragetti made the kill. The two bruisers seemed to fit the bill. The two ex-cops with a history of physical violence. The two thugs whom Tremell had said were listening to Ramira’s phone calls.

  But now she knew with certainty that it was none of the above. That the play had been a weak attempt to link Ramira’s murder to the rest and let Cava take the fall for everything. After all, the play explained why Cava spent so much time staring at the picture of Ramira’s dead dog during their interview. He was looking at the photograph the same way anyone would have if they were seeing it for the first time. But even more, it explained why Cava had needed time to think her offer over. And it explained why he had called her on the phone. The things he had said to her and his reasons for saying them.

  Nathan G. Cava had seen it, too.

  52

  She caught the flashing lights as she made the turn off Sunset and looped up and around the hill. Ten patrol cars from the Sheriff’s Department in West Hollywood were lined up in front of Senator Alan West’s house. A Chevy Suburban with tinted windows was backed into the drive with its rear gate open. Every window in the house was lit up, and the front door stood open. As Lena got out of the car, she counted five uniforms standing around on the porch and wondered if she wasn’t too late. She hustled up the front steps. When the five uniforms stopped talking, she clipped her badge to her jacket and picked out the deputy who looked like he was in charge.

  “Is the senator around?”

  “Is he expecting you?”

  “We’re friends,” she said. “What’s up tonight?”

  The deputy shrugged. “We’re making an airport run. We were supposed to leave ten minutes ago.”

  Lena entered the house. One of West’s bodyguards was rushing down the stairs with a suitcase. When she turned, she saw West exiting his study with his second bodyguard in tow. West smiled at her. The two bodyguards didn’t.

  “What are you doing here, Detective?” West said.

  “Just stopped by to talk. Where are you headed?”

  “Washington,” he said. “It’s just for a week. Can it wait?”

  Lena glanced at West’s bodyguards. The two heavyweights with rough faces and dark suits who appeared utterly calm and heavily armed. She turned back to West.

  “I don’t think it can, Senator.”

  West slipped into his suit jacket. “We’re gonna miss our plane. You’ll have to ride with us over to Burbank.”

  Lena followed them out the door. West hurried toward the Suburban with his bodyguards. The deputies from the Sheriff’s Department were climbing into their patrol cars. When the last suitcase was tossed into the SUV, Lena got a look at the driver before he closed the gate. He was young and thin and Latino, no older than twenty with shy eyes. And there were a lot of bags. A lot for a week in D.C.

  She walked around the Suburban and was ushered into the rear seat. One of the bodyguards sat beside her without saying anything. Then West took the seat in front of her, and the second bodyguard sat down beside him. The Suburban was linked to the patrol cars with a temporary radio sitting on the dash. As the driver adjusted the volume, Lena could hear the deputies discussing their route. Laurel Canyon over the hill to Sherman Way Once they received confirmation, the caravan started rolling. Five patrol cars led the way. The remaining five covered their backs.

  Lena turned to West. “I see you took my advice.”

  The senator smiled. “The cavalry? Yeah, I made the call. Can’t be too careful. And I was losing too much sleep.”

  “Over Denny,” she said.

  He turned to her and nodded. His blue eyes glistened from the ten sets of flashing lights. He looked better than the last time she had seen him. His face had regained its color. He seemed fresh and relaxed, even relieved.

  Lena kept her eyes on him. “His murder upset you, didn’t it, Senator.”

  “Denny didn’t start out as a crime reporter. He covered politics. I bet we went back ten years.”

  “I bet you did.”

  “Is everything okay, Detective?”

  Lena glanced at his jacket. “Where’s your nine-eleven pin? I don’t see it on your lapel.”

  West stared back at her as if he hadn’t heard her over the sound of the SUV.

  “Your gold pin,” she said. “The one the fire department gave you for being such a great guy. The one that you said you wore every day. What happened to it?”

  As Lena watched West squirm, she realized why she had never looked to politicians for the answers in her life. Without a script to follow, politicians couldn’t quiet find the right words. Without a lift across the water, most of them would probably drown.

  “What happened to your nine-eleven pin, Senator?”

  West rubbed his finger over his lapel. “It’s in a safe place, Detective.”

  “I agree with you. Your pin is in a very safe place.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Because I saw it less than an hour ago.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “That’s right. You lost it.”

  “Where?” he asked.

  “Denny Ramira’s house. You lost it when you murdered him, Senator. Denny hid it before he died. That’s why Klinger was there, right? The file I took was a bonus. He let me walk out with it because it made you look good. Nothing inside pointed to you. But the pin would, and you needed to cover your tracks. You sent Klinger over to Ramira’s house to find your pin.”

  A long moment passed. Tight, and heavy, and dark as midnight. Everyone in the SUV was making lots of eye contact and trading secret messages. Lena noticed the driver’s gaze riveted on her in the rearview mirror. The kid looked scared.

  West didn’t say anything right away, staring out the window as they reached the top of the hill and started down the winding road into the Valley. There was absolutely no reason for the senator to hide anymore. The pin that he had received for his support of the rescue workers after 9/11
had been handmade by an artist living in South Pasadena. The three-dimensional work of art depicting an LAFD fire engine set at ground zero was one of a kind. And there could be only one explanation for how the gold pin wound up in Denny Ramira’s hand.

  West cocked his head and looked at her. “Do you have it with you?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “It’s still in Denny’s hiding place.”

  “And where’s that?”

  Lena met the senator’s eyes. “You might say he palmed it.”

  West grinned at her, then spoke slowly as he thought it through. “Denny Ramira was a great reporter. He didn’t care much for politics, though, and he was glad when the chance came his way to move on. He always used to say that we didn’t get it. That the world couldn’t be divvied up into left or right. That you couldn’t distinguish people by their god, their tribe, their size or shape. You couldn’t even break them down by the things they liked to eat. Something was either right or it was wrong, he’d say. A person was either decent or indecent. And that was the key to his work. That was his secret. If you had to pick a side, you better make sure there was more right to it than wrong.”

  “Which side did you pick, Senator?”

  He shrugged, still gazing into the past. “I can tell you this, Detective. I gave as much as I got. And if some say that I got more than I gave, well—I did better than most.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind when I talk to the families who lost their children because they thought Formula D was safe. The people who put their trust in you, Senator—you and Tremell and the FDA. Thanks for making sure the clinical trials were straight and true.”

  He held the glance but didn’t say anything. Lena pressed forward, still trying to understand.

  “When Jennifer Bloom first came to your office and told you what happened to her son, it didn’t move you?”

  “She didn’t use her real name, Detective.”

  “What kind of a response is that? When she told you how her son died, that it had been a deliberate act on the part of Tremell, a pharmaceutical company, and a handful of government lowlifes who were bought and paid for, you weren’t moved by her story?”