Brand Boulevard was car dealerships for a mile and then, abruptly, glass. Castellan Risk Group had the top two floors of a six-storey block with a bank at street level and a parking structure wrapped round the back. There was no sign. There was a small steel plaque by the lift lobby, the size of a paperback, with the shield from the polo shirts etched into it.
Thorsen left the van three streets away, outside a tyre fitter’s, and walked.
He went to the parking structure first.
The public levels were open. The ramp to the basement had a roll-down grille and a card reader on a post. He took the grey card off its reel, looked at it, and held it to the reader. He had no particular hope. A stolen pass is good for about as long as it takes the owner to find a telephone, and this one had been stolen thirty-six hours ago from a man with a broken face.
The light went green. The grille went up.
He stood for a second. Then he walked down the ramp, because the alternative was to stand there.
It was a fleet garage. Polished concrete, good lighting, numbered bays. Seven silver Tahoes backed in, noses out, in a row as straight as the motorcycles at the funeral. Two bays empty. A wash bay at the far end with a pressure hose coiled on the wall and a drain in the floor.
He walked the row. They were clean. Whoever ran this place had them washed every night, wheels and all. He crouched at each one anyway and ran two fingers along the inside lip of the rear wheel arch, where a hose does not reach unless the man holding it cares.
The fourth one left a mark on his fingers.
Pale. Nearly grey. Fine as flour.
He rubbed it with his thumb and smelled it. The same faint chemical note, like a swimming pool a long way off.
So wherever Ray had been going at night in his rubber boots, one of these had been there too.
He wiped his hand on his trousers and took the lift to six.
Reception was pale wood and a wall of water running silently down black stone. A young man with an earpiece sat behind a desk with nothing on it. On the wall behind him a television was showing the local news with the sound off.
“Can I help you, sir?”
“Curtis Vane.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“Tell him it’s about a dog.”
The young man looked at him with great courtesy for two seconds, then touched his earpiece and murmured. He listened. His expression did not change, which was a kind of change in itself.
“He’ll be right out. Can I get you a water?”
Thorsen watched the television. A reporter was standing on the steps of City Hall. The caption along the bottom said COUNCIL TO VOTE TUESDAY ON MAYOR’S PICK FOR CHIEF. Then a clip of a man at a podium, three stars on the collar, speaking with his hands resting lightly on the wood.
“Mr. Thorsen.”
He turned.
The grey polo was gone. Curtis Vane wore a charcoal suit with no tie, and it fitted the way suits do when someone has measured you for them. Shaved head, pale eyes, the forearms hidden now. He was chewing. He stopped six feet away, which was the right distance, and he smiled like a man whose morning had improved.
“You came in the front. I appreciate that. Come on back.”
The office was a corner, glass on two sides, the Verdugo hills brown in the haze. There was a desk with one telephone. There was a wall of photographs.
Thorsen looked at the wall, because Vane plainly meant him to.
Uniforms, mostly. A SWAT team on a range. A younger Vane with hair, kneeling in the front row of a platoon. Vane with a mayor. Vane with a different mayor. And one in a black frame, larger than the rest: a ballroom, a banner reading METROPOLITAN DIVISION — VALOR AWARDS, and two men shaking hands across a plaque. Sergeant Curtis Vane, in dress blues, squared away. And a commander with an even stance and a good haircut, looking not at Vane but straight into the lens.
There was a date in the corner. It was the spring Marisol Reyes died.
“He was your commanding officer,” Thorsen said.
“For nine years. Best I ever worked for.” Vane sat on the edge of the desk and offered the chair, and did not seem to mind when it was not taken. “He’s going to be very good for this city. People don’t know yet how good.”
“He asked me how long I was staying.”
“He’s a courteous man.”
“Is that why he sent two of yours to help me pack?”
Vane laughed. It was a real laugh, short. “No. That was me, and it was a mistake, and I’ll own it. I read you wrong. I read the bag and the suit and I thought, that’s a man who can be given a ticket. I should have pulled your jacket first.” He tipped his head. “Nineteen years, eleven in homicide. Two commendations. One sustained complaint, excessive force, a child molester in Van Nuys, which between us I’d have signed off on. You put Dwyer in the hospital, by the way. He’s getting a plate in his face.”
“He fell down some stairs.”
“That’s what he says too. He’s embarrassed.” The gum moved. “The dog thing was good. I’ll give you that. I drove round the block twice trying to work out where I went wrong.”
“You’ve been to the house enough to know there’s no dog.”
“I’ve been to the house for nine days. Courtesy watch for the League.”
“And before that you were in Frogtown. Three times in three weeks. Following a retired detective to a dead girl’s mother.”
Nothing moved in Vane’s face. That was the thing Thorsen noted. A man with nothing to protect will show you surprise, or irritation, or boredom. Vane showed him a finished surface.
“Ray Okafor was knocking on doors on a case with my name in it,” Vane said. “A case where one of my officers shot a man. You’re damn right I put a car on him. I’ve got forty employees and a city contract. I’d do it again tomorrow.”
“What was he going to find?”
“Nothing. That’s what makes it sad.” Vane stood, went to the glass, looked at the hills. “I’ll tell you what I think, and then you can do what you like. I think your partner closed a case he wasn’t sure about. I think he did it for reasons of his own, which I don’t know and you don’t either. And I think it ate at him, and at the end he wanted very badly for it to be somebody else’s fault. Mine would have done. Anybody’s.” He turned round. “There’s a widow in Highland Park who gets his pension and his good name. Both of those depend on a closed file staying closed. You start pulling it open to see who signed what, you won’t find me in there. You’ll find him.”
“I know who signed it.”
Nothing moved in Vane’s face. Thorsen would remember that later.
“Then you know how this goes,” he said, more quietly.
Thorsen took the grey card from his pocket and laid it on the desk.
“Your garage reader’s working.”
“I know. That card was killed at ten-fourteen Wednesday night, on every door in this building except one.” Vane picked it up and turned it in his fingers. “I wanted to see whether you’d walk in the front like a man or go creeping round my basement like a burglar. You did both. That’s interesting. I’m still thinking about what it means.”
“It means I’ve seen your trucks.”
“They’re nice trucks.”
“You should have somebody do the wheel arches.”
He watched it land. It did not land hard. Vane did not look towards the lift or the door or anywhere a nervous man looks. But the gum stopped, for one beat, and started again.
“On Tuesday morning at ten o’clock,” Vane said, “fifteen people in a room vote on who runs the third-largest police department in the country. After that there’s going to be a great deal of future to think about, and nobody at all is going to be interested in six-year-old paper. Not the Times. Not the DA. Not that detective in Northeast with the mortgage.” He held out the card. “Keep it. Souvenir. Be somewhere else by Tuesday, Mr. Thorsen. I’m asking nicely, because I already tried the other way and it cost me a man.”
Thorsen did not take the card.
“What was her name?” he said.
“Whose?”
“The girl. The one in the file with your name in it.”
Vane looked at him. The pale eyes went over his face once, slowly, like a hand checking a wall for the stud.
“I’d have to look it up,” he said.