The Last Detective ec-9

by Robert Crais

  After I spoke with the Abbotts, I phoned,the other families to let them know that the police would be calling, and why. Between Master Sergeant Stivic and the families, I was on the phone for almost three hours.

  Starkey rang my bell at eight forty-five. When I opened the door, John Chen was waiting behind her in his van.

  I said, "I spoke with the families this morning. None of them had anything to do with this or know anyone who would. You get any hits on the other names I gave you?"

  Starkey squinted at me. Her eyes were puffy, and her

  morning voice was thick with smoke.

  She said, "Are you drunk?"

  "I've been up all night. I spoke with the families. I listened to that damned tape a dozen times. Did you get any hits or not?"

  "I told you last night, Cole. We ran the names and got nothing. You don't remember I said that?"

  I felt irritated with myself for forgetting. She had told me when I was with them at the Hollywood station. I grabbed my keys and stepped outside past her.

  "C'mon. I'll show you what we found. Maybe John can match the prints."

  "Lay off the coffee. You look like a meth freak about to implode."

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  "You're no beauty yourself." "Fuck yourself, Cole. That might be because Gittamon and I got our asses reamed at six this morning by the Bureau commander, wanting to know why we're letting you fuck up our evidence." "Did Richard complain?" "Rich assholes always complain. Here's the order of the day: You're gonna take us over to whatever this is you've found, then you're gonna stay out of our business. Never mind that you seem to be the only guy around here besides me who knows how to detect. You're out." "If I didn't know better, I'd think you just paid me a compliment." "Don't let it go to your head. It turns out Richard was right, you being a material witness. It just feels like kicking a guy when he's down, is all, shutting you out like this, and I don't like it." I felt bad for snapping at her. She said, "I guess you didn't suddenly recognize the voice on the tape or remember something that would help ?" I wanted to tell her my take on what the caller had said, but I figured that it would sound self-justifying. "No. I've never heard his voice in my life. I played it over the phone to the families, and they didn't recognize it, either." Starkey cocked her head as if she were surprised. "That was a good idea, Cole, playing the tape for them like that. I hope none of them lied to you." "Why'd you have Hurwitz bring me the tape last night instead of doing it yourself?" Starkey went to her car without answering. "Drive yourself. You'll need to get back on your own." I locked the house, then led them across the canyon to I75

  the shoulder where Pike and I had parked the day before. It took about twelve minutes. Starkey changed into her running shoes while Chen unloaded his evidence kit. The shoulder had been empty yesterday, but now a line of small trucks and cars spilled around the curve from the nearby construction site. Starkey and Chen followed me across the hump and down through the brush. We passed the twin pines, then followed the erosion cut toward the 10ne scrub oak. As we got closer to the prints, I felt both anxious and afraid. Being here was like being closer to Ben, but not if the shoe prints didn't match. If they didn't match, we had nothing. We reached the first print, a clean clear sole pressed into the dust between shale plates. "This one's pretty clear. We'll see more below." Chen got down on his hands and knees for a closer look. I stood so close that I was almost on top of him. Starkey said, "Stop crowding him, Cole. Get back." Chen glanced up and grinned. "It's the same shoe, Starkey. I can see it even without the cast. Size eleven Rockports showing the same pebbled sole and traction lines." My heart thudded hard in my chest, and the dark ghost moved past me again. Starkey punched my arm. "You luck." Starkey could sweet-talk with the best of them. Chen flagged eight more prints, and then we reached the tree. The heartier weeds had sprung up with the morning dew, but the depression behind the tree was still clear. "That's it, just this side of the oak at its base. See where the grass is crushed?" Starkey touched my arm. "You wait here." I76

  Starkey moved closer. She stooped to look at my house from under the oak's limbs, then considered the surrounding hillside.

  "All right, Cole. You made a good call. I don't know how you found this place, but this is okay. You figured this bastard good. John, I want a full area map."

  "Iql need help. We've got a lot more physicals than yesterday."

  Starkey squatted at the edge of the crushed grass, then

  bent to look close at something in the dirt.

  She said, "John, gimme the tweezers."

  Chen handed her a Ziploc bag and tweezers from his evidence kit. Starkey picked up a small brown ball with the tweezers, eyeballed it, then put it into the bag. She

  looked up into the tree, then at the ground again.

  I said, "What is it?"

  "They look like mouse turds, but they're not. They're all over the place."

  Starkey picked one from a broad leaf of grass and put it onto her palm. Chen looked horrified.

  "Don't touch it with your bare skin!"

  I moved closer to see, and this time she didn't tell me to step back. A dozen dark brown wads the size of a BB stood out clearly on the hardpack. More brown flecks clung to the grass. I knew what they were as soon as I saw them because I had seen things like this when I was in the Army.

  "It's tobacco."

  Chen said, "How do you know?"

  "A smoker on patrol chews tobacco to get his fix. You chew, there's no smoke to give you away. That's what this guy did. He chewed, then spit out the bits of the tobacco when they were used up."

  Starkey glanced at me, and I knew what she was

  thinking. Another connection to Vietnam. She handed the bag to Chen. She dry-swallowed another white pill, then studied me for a moment with a deep vertical line between her eyebrows.

  "I want to try out something on you."

  "What?"

  "Over by your house, this guy doesn't leave anything, one measly little partial that we could barely see. Here,

  he leaves crap all over the place."

  "He felt safe here."

  "Yeah. He had a good spot down here where no one could see him, so he didn't give a shit. I'm thinking that if he got careless down here, maybe he got careless up at the street, too. There aren't many houses on this stretch, and we got that construction site right here around the curve. I've gotta call Gittamon and have patrol pull the door-to-door to this side of the canyon, but there aren't that many people to talk to. By the time Gittamon and the uniforms get out here, you and I could have it done."

  "I thought I wasn't supposed to be involved."

  "I didn't ask for a lot of conversation. You want to do it or you want to waste time?"

  "Of course I want to do it."

  Starkey glanced at Chen.

  "You tell anyone, I'll kick your ass."

  We left Chen calling SID for another criminalist, and walked back along the curve to the construction site. A single-story contemporary had been ripped apart to expand the ground floor and add a second story. A long blue Dumpster sat in the street in front of the house, already half-filled with trimmed lumber and other debris. A framing crew was roughing in the second floor while electricians pulled wire through the first-floor

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  conduit. Here it was late fall, but the workmen were shiftless and in shorts.

  An older man with baggy pants was bent over a set of plans in the garage, explaining something to a sleepy young guy wearing electrician's tools. The drywall inside the garage and the house had been pulled down, leaving the studs exposed like human ribs.

  Starkey didn't wait for them to notice us or excuse the interruption. She badged the older guy.

  "LAPD. I'm Starkey, he's Cole. Are you the boss here ?"

  The older man identified himself as Darryl Cauley, the general contractor. His face closed with suspicion.

  "Is this an INS thing? If someone's sneaking under the wire, I got a signed bond from every sub saying these people are
legal."

  The younger guy started away, but Starkey stopped him.

  "Yo, stay put. We want to talk to everyone." Cauley darkened even more. "What is this?"

  Talking to people wasn't one of Starkey's strengths, so I answered before he decided to call his attorney.

  "We believe that a kidnapper was in the area, Mr. Cauley. He parked or drove on this street every day for the past week or so. We want to know if you noticed any vehicles or people who seemed out of place."

  The electrician hooked his thumbs on his tools and perked up.

  "No shit? Was someone kidnapped?"

  Starkey said, "A ten-year-old boy. It happened the day

  before yesterday."

  "WOW."

  Mr. Cauley tried to be helpful, but explained that he

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  divided his time between three different job sites; he rarely stayed at this house more than a couple of hours each day.

  "I don't know what to tell you. I got subs coming and going, I got the different crews. Do you have a picture, what do they call it, a mug shot?"

  "No, sir. We don't know who he is or what he looks like. We don't know what he was driving, either, but we believe he spent a lot of time around the curve where your crew is parked."

  The electrician glanced toward the curve.

  "Oh, man, that is so creepy."

  Cauley said, "I'd like to help, but I don't know. These guys here, their friends drop by, their girlfriends. I got another site over in Beachwood, last month a limo pulls up with all these suits from Capitol Records. They signed one of the carpenters to a record deal for three million

  dollars. You never know, is what I'm saying."

  Starkey said, "Can we talk to your crew?"

  "Yeah, sure. James, you wanna call your guys? Tell Frederico and the framers to come down."

  Between the framers and the electricians, Cauley had nine men working that day. Two of the framers had trouble with English, but Cauley helped with the Spanish. Everyone cooperated when they heard that a child was missing, but no one remembered anyone out of the ordinary. The day felt half over by the time we finished even though it was not yet noon.

  Starkey fired up a cigarette when we reached the Dumpster.

  "Okay. Let's do the houses."

  "He wouldn't have parked more than five or six houses on either side of the curve. The farther he had to walk, the bigger the risk that someone would see him."

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  "Okay. And?"

  "Let's split up. I'll take the houses on the far side and you take the houses on this side. It'll be faster."

  Starkey agreed. I left her with the cigarette and trotted back past our cars to the houses on the far side of the curve. An Ecuadorean housekeeper answered at the first house, but she hadn't seen anyone or anything, and wasn't able to help. No one answered at the next house, but an elderly man wearing a thin robe and slippers answered at the third. He was so frail with osteoporosis that he drooped like a dying flower. I explained about the man on the slope and asked if he had seen anyone. The old man's toothless mouth hung open. I told him that a boy was missing. He didn't answer. I slipped my card into his pocket, told him to call if he remembered something, then pulled the door closed. I spoke with another housekeeper, a young woman with three small children, then reached another house where no one was home. It was a weekday and people were working.

  I thought about trying the houses farther up the street but Starkey was leaning against her Crown Vic when I got back to our cars.

  I said, "You get anything?"

  "C'mon, Cole, do I look like it? I've talked to so many people who haven't seen anything that I asked one broad if she ever went outside."

  "People skills aren't your strong point, are they?" "Look, I've gotta call Gittamon to get some help out here. I want to run down the garbage men, the mailman, the private security cars that work this street, and anyone else who might've seen something, but you and I have taken it as far as we can. You gotta split."

  "C'mon, Starkey, there's plenty to do and I can help do it. I can't walk away now."

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  She spoke carefully, with a soft voice. "It's scut work, Cole. You need to get some rest. I'll call you if we get something." "I can call the security companies from my house." My voice sounded desperate even to me. She shook her head. "You know that movie they make you watch before the plane takes off, when they're telling you what to do in an emergency?" My head was filled with a faraway buzz as if I were drunk and hungry at the same time. "What does that have to do with anything?" "They tell you that if the plane loses pressure, you're supposed to put on your own oxygen mask before you put on your kid's. The first time I saw that I thought, bullshit, if I had a kid I'd sure as shit put on her mask first. It's natural, you know? You want to save your child. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. You have to save yourself first because if you're not alive, you sure as hell can't help your child. That's you, Cole. You have to put on your mask if you want to help Ben. Go home. I'll call you if something pops." She walked away from me then and joined Chen at his van. I climbed into my car. I didn't know if I would go home, or not. I didn't know if I would sleep, or could. I left. I drove around the curve and saw a pale yellow catering van parked by the Dumpster because that's the way it works. You lay the bricks until you get a break. The van had just arrived. Maybe if I hadn't been so tired I would have thought of it sooner: Construction crews have to eat, and catering vans feed them, twice a day every day, breakfast and lunch. It was eleven-fifty. Ben had been missing for almost forty-four hours. I left my car in the street and ran to a narrow door at the back of the van that had been propped open for the heat. Inside, two young men in white T-shirts were bent over a grill. A short round woman barked orders at them in a mix of Spanish and English as they dished up grilled chicken sandwiches and paper plates spilling over with tacos and salsa verde to the line at the window. The woman glanced over and nodded toward the open wall of the van.

  "You got to stand in line over here."

  "A little boy has been kidnapped. We think the man who took him spent a lot of time on this street. You might have seen his car."

  She came to the door, wiping her hands on a pink terry towel.

  "Wha' you mean, a little boy? You the police?"

  The electrician from earlier was in line at the window. He said, "Yeah, he's with the cops. Some guy stole a kid, can ya believe that, right around here? They're trying to find him."

  The woman stepped out of the van to join me in the street. Her name was Marisol Luna, and she owned the catering business. I described the scene on the other side of the curve, and asked if she had noticed any vehicles parked in that area during the past two weeks or anyone

  who didn't seem to fit.

  "I don' think so."

  "What about when no one else was parked there? One vehicle by itself."

  She rubbed her hands through the towel as if it helped worry up her memories.

  "I see the plumber. We finish the breakfast here and we goin' that way--"

  She pointed toward the curve, and the buzzing in my head grew worse.

  "--an' I see the plumber go down the hill."

  I glanced toward the work crew, searching for Cauley. Marisol Luna was the first person I found who had seen anything.

  "How do you know he was the plumber? Was he working here at this house?"

  "It say on the truck. Emilio's Plumbing. I remember 'cause my husband, his name is Emilio. That's why I remember the truck. I smile when I see the name, an' I tell my husband that night, but he no look like'my

  Emilio. He black. He have things on his face like bumps." I called out to the construction workers. "Where's Cauley? Can someone get Cauley?" Then I turned back to Mrs. Luna.

  "The man who went down the hill was black?"

  "No. The man in the truck, he black. The man on the hill, he Anglo."

  "Two men?"

  The buzzing in my head grew more frantic, l
ike riding a caffeine rush. The electrician came around the end of the truck with Mr. Cauley.

  He said, "You guys have any luck?"

  "Have you had a plumber or plumbing contractor working here named Emilio or Emilio's Plumbing, anything like that?"

  Cauley shook his head.

  "Nope, never. I use the same sub over and over, all my jobs, a man named Donnelly."

  Mrs. Luna said, "The truck, it say Emilio's Plumbing." The electrician said, "Hey, I've seen that truck."

  The buzz in my head suddenly vanished and my body stopped aching. Blood tingled under my skin. I felt light

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  and alive with a clarity that was perfect. It was the same feeling I had when we were hidden along a VC trail and I heard the VC approaching and waited for Rod to fire and knew either I would have them or they would have me, but either way the whole bloody thing was about to go down.

  I said, "I need you to come with me, Mrs. Luna. I need you to talk to the police right now. They're just around the curve."

  Marisol Luna got into my car without complaint or objection. I didn't take the time to turn around. We drove to Starkey in reverse.

  time missing: 43 hours, 5o minutes

  The sun glared angrily from low in the southern sky, heating the great bowl of air in the canyon until it came to a boil. Rising air pulled a soft breeze up from the city that smelled of sulfur. Starkey held her hand to shield her eyes from the sun.

  "Okay, Mrs. Luna, tell me what you saw."

  Marisol Luna, Starkey, and I stood in the street at the top of the curve. Mrs. Luna pointed back toward the construction site, telling us how she remembered it.

  "We come aroun' the curve there, and the plumber truck is right here."

  She indicated that the plumber's van had been pretty much where we were standing, not on the shoulder but in the street. It could not have been seen from the construction site or the surrounding houses.

  "My truck is big, you know? Very wide. I say to Ram6n, look at this, this guy is taking up all of the street."

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  I said, "Ramon is one of the guys who works for her." "Let her tell it, Cole." Mrs. Luna continued.