He bought sixty more minutes for the cheap phone at a liquor store on Manchester and called her from the bus bench outside.
“I’m ready to tell you,” he said.
There was a silence long enough that he checked the screen.
“Elysian Park,” Brooks said. “Angels Point. Two o’clock. I’ll be the one on the bench who’s about to lose her job.”
Angels Point was a knuckle of hill above the stadium, with a car park, a few benches and a view straight down Chavez Ravine to the towers downtown. On a Saturday it had dog walkers and a man flying a kite. Brooks was on the last bench along, in jeans and a windbreaker, with two coffees on the seat beside her. She did not look round when he sat. She handed him one.
“You first this time,” she said. “All of it. And if I find out later you kept something back, I’ll arrest you for wasting my Saturday.”
So he gave her all of it.
The pen. He told it plainly: the left-hand end in her photographs, the right end of the bench on Wednesday morning, squared off. She did not interrupt, but her jaw set, and when he was done she said, “You let me think it was the hand,” and that was all.
The tape behind the pegboard. He pushed up his sleeve. She looked at the numbers for a long time and shook her head.
“That’s not ours. Not a DR number, not a booking, not property. Wrong format for all of them.” She took a photograph of his forearm with her own phone. “SR. I don’t know.”
The garage at midnight. The channel. Vane’s voice in the pipe. The van on a flatbed.
Then Denise’s kitchen. He told her that part slowly, and left nothing out. Marcus on the bathroom floor. Brandt on the doorstep, so kind. The lab report with the city seal. The night at the table and the four pages typed in the morning.
Brooks put her coffee down on the bench.
“The Assistant Chief,” she said. “The Assistant Chief of Police. The man they vote on Tuesday.”
“Commander then.”
“I don’t care what he was then.” She was very pale. “Do you understand what you’re telling me? You’re telling me the next chief of this department sat in a detective’s front room with a forged lab report and blackmailed him into closing a homicide.”
“I’m telling you what Denise Okafor saw and heard through a door. I don’t know if the report was forged. I don’t know yet if Marcus did it.”
“But you think not.”
He told her about Tasha. The pink tow slip. The patrol car that drove a drunk boy home.
She was quiet for a while after that. Below them, very small, a groundsman was raking the infield of the empty stadium in long careful lines.
“If there was a patrol unit,” she said at last, “there’s a log. Unit number, call, time. Six years, they’ll have archived it, but it’s there. If it was our car, I can find it. Or I could have found it, on Thursday.”
“What happened?”
“I happened.” She picked the coffee up again and held it in both hands without drinking. “I went back to the coroner yesterday after I left you. Dr. Hallett, she did the post on Ray. I asked her to look at him again. Not the wound, everything else. I told her I didn’t care how it read.”
“And?”
“Bruising on the right wrist. Faint. Four small marks on the inside and one on the outside. She’d noted it as consistent with a fall against the bench. I asked her if it was also consistent with a hand. She said yes. Fingers, a thumb. Somebody holding a wrist.” Brooks looked out at the city. “Blood alcohol zero. No sedatives. No note anywhere, not on paper, not on his phone, not in his email. A man who wrote everything down.”
Thorsen said nothing. He saw it anyway. A chair. One man holding Ray’s right arm. Someone putting a pistol into Ray’s left hand, because they knew which hand it had to be.
“So this morning I filed to reclassify,” Brooks said. “Not homicide. I’m not stupid. Undetermined, pending further investigation. It’s a form. It goes to my lieutenant and to the coroner’s office. It’s the most cautious thing a detective can do and still be doing something.”
“How long did it take?”
“Fifty-five minutes.” She almost laughed. “My lieutenant called me at home. The Assistant Chief’s office had called him. Not about the form. About my welfare. They’re concerned I’ve become overinvolved with a grieving family. They think I could use some time. I’m off Monday and Tuesday. Paid. Compulsory.” She turned her head and looked at him. “Ring any bells?”
“Comp days.”
“Go fishing.” She drank, finally, and grimaced at the cold. “I’m still a police officer until Monday morning. I can still log in. But everything I touch now, somebody on the tenth floor is going to see by breakfast. So I need to know what I’m touching before I touch it.”
“The patrol log.”
“Whose patrol car? We don’t know it was ours. Marcus grew up in Highland Park, he drank in Eagle Rock, half the bars he’d have gone to are on the Glendale line. If it was a Glendale unit I can’t see their logs at all without a request, and a request has my name on it.”
“And the tow yard?”
“Which one? There are forty on San Fernando Road between here and Burbank. Half of them have changed hands.” She shook her head. “You find me the yard, I’ll find you the car. That’s the best I’ve got.”
They sat. The man with the kite was reeling it in. A dog barked at nothing.
“You could stop,” Thorsen said. “Take the two days. Nobody would blame you.”
“I would.” She said it simply. “There’s a man I’ve never met who was a good detective, and I signed him off as a suicide in two days because it was tidy and I had fourteen other cases. I let my lieutenant tell me about the empty hook. I’m not doing it twice.”
He nodded. He found he had nothing to add to that.
“One more thing,” she said. “Whoever you’ve talked to about this, apart from me. Who knows?”
“Denise. Rosa Reyes. Tasha Greene.” He thought. “Art Delgado.”
“How much does Delgado know?”
“He knew about the van and the Tahoe and Castellan. He knew you were pulling the book. He told me Ray signed.” He turned the cup in his hand. “I rang him this morning from the bus. I told him they took Ray’s van. I asked him to get it back through the League.”
Brooks looked at him for what felt like a long time.
“Delgado approved that closure,” she said. “His name’s on the second line.”
“He’s an old man in a cardigan who keeps his dead wife’s violets alive.”
“And Ray Okafor was a careful detective who wrote everything down.” She stood and dropped her cup in the bin. “People are what they are, Mr. Thorsen. Then one day they’re something else as well. Watch your back.”
His phone rang at twenty to four, while he was walking down out of the park towards the river.
It was Delgado. His voice was low and quick, the voice from the late-night call through the wall.
“Danny. Listen. I made some calls about the van. And somebody called me back.”
“Who?”
“Not on the phone. A Metro guy, from back then. Vane’s old platoon. He’s retired now, he’s got a boat in Long Beach, he’s scared to death. He heard I was asking around and he rang me. He says there are things about the Ochoa shooting he’s been carrying for six years and he wants to put them down before Tuesday.”
“Then let him put them down to Brooks.”
“He won’t go near a badge. He won’t go near anything with a camera on it. He’ll talk to you, because you’re out. He’ll talk to me because I was his lieutenant’s lieutenant and he trusts me. That’s it.” A breath. “Old zoo, Griffith Park. The grottos at the top, past the picnic tables. Seven o’clock, when the park people have gone. I’ll bring him.”
Thorsen stopped on the path.
“Art. Are you sure about him?”
“I’m sure about nothing. I’m an old man. I’m trying to do one right thing before I die.” His voice cracked. “Seven o’clock, Danny. Don’t bring the girl. He sees her, he’s gone.”
The line went dead.
Thorsen stood on the path for some time with the phone in his hand, looking at it. Down below, across the freeway, the river ran in its concrete bed towards the sea.
Then he started walking north.