by Scott Frost
We showed our IDs once again and gave the receptionist my brother’s and Gavin’s names and the date of their visit. She entered the information in the computer and quickly got a result.
“They signed into room eighteen-twelve-seven.”
“Which is?” I asked.
“Bureau of Central Operations Administration.”
“Do people within the department need to sign in here?”
“Only visitors.”
“Is the name Hazzard listed either that day or the day after?” I asked.
The receptionist scanned the columns of names and shook her head. “Nothing here.”
Walking down the hallway to the office was like falling down a rabbit hole into the worst nightmares we have to offer. In this room, crimes against children; in that one, gang violence; in the last room on the right, sex crimes.
We stepped inside and were clearly eyed as police officers by everyone within our field of view. We gave the receptionist the information and she checked the logs on her computer.
“They weren’t here to see anyone; it was a freedom of information request for documents,” she said.
“About an OID investigation?”
She shook her head. “Documents related to specific investigations remain in that department’s records.”
“Can you tell me what the file was they requested?”
She nodded and hit a few keys. “It was a personnel record, a Victoria Fisher.”
“I’d like to see the documents they requested.”
She passed along the request and a few minutes later a black woman in her late fifties named Robinson stepped into the reception area.
“I’m sorry, the file you requested is no longer available.”
“I’m sorry?” I said, thinking I had misunderstood.
“That file is no longer available.”
“What do you mean by ‘available’?”
“Files this old are still only on paper. When we say they aren’t available, between you and me, it means we can’t locate them: They could have been moved years ago to records, they could have been misfiled, God only knows.”
“Six days ago this same file was requested. Was it available then?”
“I could check the copy logs to see if any duplicates were made.”
She stepped away to another desk and returned a moment later with a puzzled look on her face.
“Apparently it was—one copy was made. Gavin was the name on the request. The file must have been moved within the last few days,” she said.
“Where did it go?” I asked.
She smiled the way an aged grandmother would who has been asked the same question over and over again year after year.
“That would depend on why it was moved,” she said.
“And you don’t have that information.”
She smiled brightly. “Honey, when I don’t know something, I just assume it’s been done for a reason and move on.”
“Good advice.”
Robinson walked away and I stepped back to the receptionist. “How far back can you track requests for information?”
“We switched to this operating system about four years ago. Anything before that would be on disk; five years before that it’s all paper.”
“Would you check to see if anyone else has requested this file at any time?”
She nodded and hit a few keys and began scanning information. Several pages in she stopped.
“About a year and a half ago, another civilian request.”
“What was the name?”
“Fisher,” she said.
I looked at Harrison. “Danny.”
I thanked the receptionist and we stepped back into the hallway, trying to fit the new pieces of the puzzle into what we knew so far.
“A boy trying to uncover the mystery behind his mother’s murder requests his mother’s personnel file. Then a year and a half later the son and lawyer of the suspected serial killer request the same file.”
A detective stepped out of a doorway down the hall and leaned against the wall, looking in our direction.
“Why just one copy?” Harrison said. “A single piece of paper?”
We looked at each other for a moment.
“The fax.”
I glanced down the hall and the detective was gone. “This is what it’s like in my head,” I whispered, then looked at Harrison. “You remember the definition of madness about repeated action?”
“Someone who repeats the same thing over and over expecting a different result.”
I nodded and looked back down the hallway. “It could also be a definition of hope.”
I picked up my phone and punched in the number for Cross’s office. It rang twice and was picked up by an operator.
“Investigations, Palmdale. How may I direct your call?”
“Investigator Cross,” I said.
“I’m sorry, Investigator Cross is out of the office this week.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Would you like to talk to another investigator, or leave your name and number?”
I quickly hung up. “Cross is out of the office all week.”
“Which is strange, since you just saw him two days ago,” Harrison said.
From around the corner I heard the sound of footsteps echoing on the marble floor and then silence.
“If paranoia was a crop you grow,” I said, “I believe we just stepped into a field of it.”
As we passed the reception desk and walked to the bank of elevators, I noticed the receptionist picking up the phone. Two floors before the lobby, the elevator stopped and two plainclothes detectives stepped in and quickly turned their backs, without making eye contact, blocking our exit.
As we reached the lobby one of the detectives reached inside his jacket, pulling it back just enough to reveal the weapon on his belt. The doors opened and the detectives paused just long enough for a sense of threat to rise in my throat, and then they walked away.
Outside the courthouse the wind was blowing out of the desert again. Pieces of paper and plastic bags blew along the curb like they were caught in the current of a river.
As we approached the Volvo I realized where I had seen one of the detectives on the elevator with us.
“The lead officer at Lopez’s shooting—I think he was just on the elevator with us.”
“Pearce,” Harrison said.
“Funny him being in that elevator at the same time as us.”
Harrison’s attention was on something across Temple.
“It gets funnier,” Harrison said.
I looked across the street. The sidewalk was filled with people who had left the courthouse and were heading to their cars.
“What is it?” I said.
Harrison shook his head. “I think I just saw Cross.”
35
Danny had been moved from the hospital in Pasadena to County USC and its lockdown psych ward. Pulling up outside County, it was easy to understand how the PI Andi James had lost my brother the night she was following him.
What Barnum & Bailey is to circuses, County USC is to medicine. It was built back when it was assumed one facility could handle all of Los Angeles’s medical needs. Its large white edifice looms over the surrounding neighborhood to the east of downtown. The large open wards feel as if they were lifted from a page in a Dickens novel. On any given day it handles more patients than almost any hospital in the country. One out of every twenty-seven babies born in the United States arrives here. The treatment of high-velocity impact wounds is a specialty in the emergency ward.
Inside, the people waiting for treatment reminded me of the crowd in a large open-air market in East L.A. There were a dozen different languages being spoken. Old men in cowboy hats in wheelchairs, young pregnant mothers in labor, fever-stricken children all waited their turn for treatment behind the gunshot and car-accident and heart-attack victims.
The psych ward, in contrast to the chaos around it, was quiet. Or
at least the kind of quiet produced by tranquilizers. We checked our weapons with the deputy at reception, then were led into the general ward, which was nothing more than a very large room with beds pushed up against the wall. A few patients stared at a television in the corner with no sound. Others sat or lay motionless on their beds. A few walked back and forth, trying to pass the hours of boredom.
An orderly passed us into the lockdown area and directed us to the desk in the center of the ward. A nurse was walking past each locked room, glancing through the windows in the doors at the patients inside. The resident on call met us at reception and introduced himself. As we walked to Danny’s room, he started to fill us in on his condition.
“He’s had moments of lucidity, but they don’t last more than a few minutes at a time, and then he retreats into extreme paranoia, bordering on the fantastic.”
“He’s got reason,” I said.
We stopped at the door.
“At two this morning he was convinced there were eyes in the walls watching him. He had to be restrained. We’re trying some new protocols that will hopefully balance things out for him.”
“Has he talked about an angel or dark angel?”
The doctor shook his head. “He hasn’t talked to us at all. I don’t believe he looks at us as being the good guys.”
“If he sees you as the enemy, we’d like to see him alone.”
The doctor nodded his approval. “You can try, but I’d be surprised if he talks to you.”
The doctor unlocked the door and Harrison and I stepped in. The room was not much bigger than a cell. The walls were painted a dull yellow. Anything that could possibly be harmful to patients or others had been removed.
Danny was wearing white hospital scrubs, standing at a small sealed window that looked out toward the west and the towers of downtown. When the doctor closed the door, Danny turned around and looked at us.
“Do you remember me, Danny?” I asked.
He looked at me blankly, giving away nothing. “I’m crazy, not stupid. I remember you.”
He looked at Harrison. “I don’t know him, though.”
“He’s my partner, Harrison.”
“How do I know that?”
“Would you like to see my ID?” Harrison said.
“Anyone can get an ID.”
“I can wait outside if you prefer.”
Danny smiled, shook his head. “You pass.”
“Do you mind if we sit down?” I asked.
“Mi casa es su casa.”
As we stepped over and sat on the bed, I noticed Danny took exactly half a step away from us for each one we moved closer.
“I want to talk about your map and some other things.”
“You talked to my grandmother, didn’t you?”
“I couldn’t talk to you, you weren’t home.”
“My grandmother’s old. I think she has Alzheimer’s. ”
“A year and a half ago you went to the district attorney’s office and asked to see your mother’s personnel file.”
He shook his head.
“No I didn’t,” Danny said, taking a step away. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You went to the courthouse, signed in, and found a file. Do you remember? It was something to do with an old police investigation, twenty years old.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I think you should see a doctor.”
He folded his arms across his chest and pressed himself against the wall.
“It’s important that I know what’s in that file.”
“Why?”
“Because the man who killed your mother also killed my brother.”
Danny exhaled sharply, then looked at me. The dull sheen of the narcotics’ effects appeared to vanish from his eyes.
“So you’re like me?” he asked.
For an instant I was back in the closet listening to my father pull the hangers across the rod.
“Yeah, I’m like you.”
“Do you have dreams?”
I nodded. He let his arms fall to his sides and closed his eyes.
“I remember everything,” he whispered.
He opened his eyes and they were full of tears.
“I remember the night she didn’t come home. They let me stay up watching out the window for her headlights to turn into the driveway, only they never did. When she wasn’t there in the morning no one said anything until the phone rang and my grandfather answered it on the second ring. That’s when the secrets started—people whispering, talking about me like I wasn’t in the room. But I heard everything, just like now.”
“Do you remember it, Danny?”
He spoke just above a whisper.
“I remember. It said they all fell down.”
“Who fell?”
The clarity in Danny’s eyes began to slip back into the dullness of the drugs and he didn’t appear to hear my question. I looked at Harrison and shook my head.
“He said that before at my house. It’s like the game kids play, Ring Around the Rosy . . . but I don’t know what it means.”
“They all fell to the ground, but one of them,” Danny said.
“Who didn’t fall, Danny?”
“Them, one of them, wouldn’t fall.”
Harrison tried to find a crack in the words that would bring some understanding but it eluded him.
“You’ve got to tell us more, Danny, that’s not enough,” I said.
“They were all supposed to fall, but he wouldn’t.”
“Why? Who wouldn’t fall?” I asked.
“I told you, he, he, heheheheheeheheheheeeee!”
Harrison shook his head in exasperation.
“Don’t think I didn’t see that,” Danny said.
“Do you know the name Hazzard? Was he there when they wouldn’t fall?”
“Hazzard’s a policeman.”
“That’s right.”
Danny looked at me, struggling to retrieve the information from his confused mind. “Hazzard? I remember that name. He was helping to find my mother’s . . . You’re a policeman.”
The words appeared to exhaust him and he slowly sank down to the floor. I walked over and knelt in front of Danny, trying to draw him back from the haze of the drugs.
“I need your help, Danny.”
“Do you remember everything, Lieutenant?” Danny asked.
The sound of the golf club striking my father jarred me like a clap of thunder.
“Almost everything, ” I said.
He put his hands to his head as if the memories inside were pounding to get out. “Me too.”
His eyes drifted across the room and he appeared to be slipping away.
“What happened to the file, Danny?” I asked, trying to bring him back.
He shook his head. “You won’t find it.”
“Why won’t I find it?”
“I told you, I remember everything, just like you.”
“Tell me where it is,” I said.
He pointed to his head. “Here. That’s where it is.”
“In your head?” I said.
“Yes . . . that’s where it is.”
He sat motionless for a moment, his eyes beginning to wander in the haze of meds. We helped him to the bed and laid him down. The muscles in his face began to relax; I could see the boy of five standing at his bedroom window waiting for the lights of his mother’s car to sweep the driveway. I placed my hand lightly on his forehead.
“She loved you very much,” I said, but he was already as far away from the small dull room and his sad memories as the drugs would take him.
The sun was going down when Harrison and I stepped outside County USC. As we walked to the car I noticed a large column of smoke rising to the west of L.A. and spreading out in the shape of an anvil.
In the block walk to the Volvo, the column of smoke had begun to turn the light the deep orange and red of the sunset. There were multiple sirens wailing in the distance.
&
nbsp; “Danny’s seen that file. ‘They all fell down’ is too specific; he’s trying to tell us something but he can’t figure it out in his mind.”
Harrison nodded. “But what?”
An LAPD black-and-white came around the corner and gunned its engine as it sped past us.
“So much for Cross’s vast conspiracy rippling through the highest levels of the halls of power,” I said. “Twenty years ago cops didn’t find other cops guilty in OID investigations unless there was no alternative. All it would have taken was for the IA officers not to look beyond the surface.”
“Someone must have,” Harrison said.
I nodded. “An ambitious law student working in the district attorney’s office named Fisher, who found something she shouldn’t have, and hid it in the only place she could think of until she figured out what to do with it.”
“And it stayed hidden until Danny and Gavin and your brother found it,” Harrison said. “Without that evidence we have nowhere to go with this.”
“And without Danny, we can’t find it.”
I looked back at the hospital. The light reflecting on the windows made it appear that a fire was raging inside. The pager on Harrison’s belt went off and he checked his message.
“Caltech has an image from the car.”
36
The sun had set by the time we arrived in Pasadena at the Caltech campus. The smoke that had turned the sky the color of a blood orange now hung in the wind, carrying tiny particles of ash and soot that gathered in the corners of my eyes.
As we pulled up and stopped at the computer science building I noticed a gray sedan in the rearview mirror stop a block away.
“What is it?” Harrison said.
I checked the mirror again. The figure in the car hadn’t made a move to get out.
“It’s possible we’re being followed.”
Harrison glanced in the side mirror. “We must be doing something right.”
I opened the door and stepped out, glancing back at the sedan. “That all depends on their point of view.”
The computer specialist working on the disk from the parking garage was a doctoral candidate who appeared to be little more than twenty years old. He wore the standard uniform of the nerd genius of the school: a T-shirt that read BYTE ME, shorts, and sandals. He explained that the program he had used was originally designed for spy satellites, and then was adapted for use with deep-space pictures from the Hubble telescope.
