Brooks called at ten past four. He had seven minutes of credit left and she used forty seconds of it.
“Parking structure at Glendale Galleria. Level five, north side. Half an hour.” A breath. “Come on foot.”
Level five was the roof but one, half empty, striped with late sun through the concrete louvres. The grey Ford was backed against the far wall with nothing either side of it. She was in the driver’s seat with the window down. She did not get out.
He got in the passenger side. The seat was already run all the way back. She had done that for him, and it was the only friendly thing in the car.
On her lap was a blue three-ring binder with a white label on the spine. The label was typed. He had typed it.
REYES, Marisol A. — 187 P.C.
“You want to tell me about your day first,” Brooks said, “or shall I?”
“You first.”
“At eleven-fifteen this morning my lieutenant called me into his office and shut the door. He wanted to know why I’d run a commercial plate yesterday from a taco stand, off duty, on a closed suicide. He had the time of the query. He had the plate. I logged that request at eleven-oh-two in the morning and he knew by breakfast.” She looked straight ahead through the windscreen. “I told him a neighbour had complained about a vehicle. He told me the Assistant Chief’s office takes a personal interest in the welfare of the Okafor family and I was to stay away from the widow. He used the word personal twice.”
“Brandt.”
“He didn’t use the name. He didn’t have to.” She turned her head. “Now you.”
“I went to Castellan. I met Vane.”
“Of course you did.”
“He told me to be gone by Tuesday. He knows about your mortgage.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then she said a word he had not heard her use before, softly, and opened the binder.
“All right. I said I’d read it end to end and I did. In the archive, at a table, with a clerk watching me, so nobody can say it left the building before I’d seen all of it.” She put her finger on the first divider. “I said it would be a clean file.”
“And?”
“I’ve seen shoplifting reports with more in them.”
They went through it together, the binder open across the console between them.
It was his book and it was not. The first third he knew like his own handwriting. The crime scene log. The diagram, with the chip in the kerb marked and the twenty-two yards paced off. The coroner’s summary. The property sheet: backpack, forty-one dollars, bus pass, one pair of earbuds. The first five days of the chronology, his own flat prose, times down the left margin.
Then it thinned.
“Chronological record,” Brooks said. “Numbered pages, bottom right. One through thirteen. Then it goes to twenty.”
He looked. Page thirteen ended in the middle of the sixth day, with the Silverado found burned. Page twenty began with Ochoa already dead. The holes in the paper were clean. Nothing had been torn.
“Fourteen to nineteen,” he said. “Vane’s name was on fourteen.”
“You know what was on them.”
“I wrote them. The seat in the truck. The lights. No brake marks. Ochoa’s sheet, thirty-one arrests and never a truck. Why you don’t take the phone and leave the cash. Six pages of why it wasn’t him.” He turned twenty over and back. “I numbered them myself.”
“Who had the book after you?”
“Ray. Then the archive.”
She let that sit and turned the divider.
“Section nine. Statements. There’s the mother. There’s the kitchen manager. There’s the man who found her.” She flipped. “There is no informant’s statement. Not a transcript, not a summary, not a CI number. There’s this.”
A single sheet. An inter-office memo, four lines, from Metropolitan Division to Northeast Homicide. A confidential and reliable source known to this unit states that decedent OCHOA admitted operating the suspect vehicle. Signed, Sgt. C. Vane.
“That’s it?” Thorsen said. “That’s what it was cleared on?”
“That and his record. That’s what the follow-up cites.”
“Phone records. There was a tab. We pulled every call and text she made for three months, I went through them with a ruler.”
Brooks turned to a divider marked 12 — TELEPHONE / DIGITAL. Behind it was the subpoena to the carrier, and the carrier’s cover letter, and nothing.
“Sixty-odd pages,” he said. “And my notes on them.”
“What was in them?”
“I don’t know.” It came out harder than he meant. “That’s the truth. I went through all of it and nothing rang. Her mother, her friends, a study group. The kitchen. A lot of short calls to a city number that turned out to be the complaints line, the three-one-one, she was always on to them about something. A boy she liked who didn’t call back. Nothing. If there was something in there worth taking, I looked straight at it and didn’t see it.”
“Somebody saw it.”
“Yes.”
She turned to the back. The last document in the book was four pages, stapled.
He had known it was coming. It did not help.
FOLLOW-UP INVESTIGATION — CASE CLEARED, OTHER. The typeface of the old squad room machine. The margins exact. Not one strike-over in four pages. At the foot of the last, two lines.
Investigating officer: Det. III R. Okafor. The signature leaned backwards.
Approved: Lt. A. Delgado.
He read all four pages. He made himself. It was a careful piece of work. It did not lie, exactly. It set out what Metro had reported and let the reader walk the rest of the way.
“He was your partner,” Brooks said, not unkindly.
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry. I thought you ought to see it rather than hear it.”
“I heard it last night.”
She looked at him sharply, then nodded, and closed the binder.
“So here’s where I am. It’s a bad file. Somebody went through it after it was closed and took out everything that argued. That’s misconduct, six years old, by a person or persons unknown, and the lead detective is dead. It makes me sick. It is still not a homicide in a garage.”
“No.”
“And I can’t get to one from here. I want you to hear that. I’ve got a ruled suicide, a cleaned-up book, and a private security firm that’s rude. A deputy DA would laugh me out of the room.”
“I know.”
“So stop asking me which hand.” She reached into the door pocket and pulled out a manila envelope. “I brought these so you’d stop. I shouldn’t have. Look at them and then we’re done with that part.”
Eight-by-tens. Colour. A scene photographer’s work, flat flash, a ruler in the corner of the close ones.
He went through them slowly and in order, as she had meant him to.
The garage door from the yard. The fluorescent tube. The chair, tipped back against the bench leg, and what was in it. He looked at that one for exactly as long as he had to. The left hand hanging. The Beretta on the concrete under it, six inches from the fingertips.
The wound. The ceiling.
Then the wide shot of the workbench. Establishing, they called it. Taken from the door, the whole length of the bench in frame, the pegboard above with every tool in its outline and the one empty shape low on the right.
Thorsen stopped.
It was a good sharp print. You could read the label on the oil can.
The mug was there. The reading glasses were there, folded. The pen.
They were at the left-hand end of the bench. A hand’s width in from the edge. The glasses on top of a folded newspaper. The pen lying across the newspaper at an angle, any old how, the way a man drops a pen when he means to pick it up again.
On the left. Where they had been every day for eleven years on a desk in a squad room.
He did not move. He was aware of not moving, and of the sun through the louvres, and of a car alarm going on a lower level.
So the room had been right. That night, at one-forty in the morning, with Denise on the kitchen step in her nightgown, everything in that garage had been exactly where Ray Okafor would have left it.
And on Wednesday morning it was not.
Somebody had come afterwards. After the photographer. After the coroner’s men, after the people who are paid to scrub a floor and roll white paint on a ceiling. Somebody had picked up three small things from the left end of a workbench and put them down again at the right, squared off, parallel to the edge.
Cleaners, he thought. They move everything and put it back anywhere. That was all it was. The one thing that had made him stand in a dead man’s yard and decide to miss a bus was a stranger with a cloth, tidying.
He very nearly believed it.
“What?” Brooks said.
“Nothing.”
“You’ve been looking at that one for a full minute.”
“It’s a good photograph.”
She took the prints out of his hand, tapped them together, and slid them back into the envelope. She did it without hurry. Then she sat with the envelope on her knee and looked at him the way she had looked at him across a church forecourt, taking her time.
“That’s twice,” she said. “The garage on Wednesday, when I said left hand. And now. You see something and you put it in your pocket.” She started the engine. “I’ve stuck my neck out a fair way for a man I met two days ago, Mr. Thorsen. When you decide to tell me what it is, you have the number. Get out of my car.”