They sat under the Fletcher Drive bridge on a ledge of concrete above the water, where the pigeons were and nobody else, and Mateo held the phone so they could both see it.
It was a cracked phone with a sticker of a cartoon frog on the back. The city’s complaints website came up slowly on it, all cheerful colours and a picture of the mayor smiling at a pothole.
“You can look anyone’s up,” Mateo said. “You just need the number. She showed me.” He typed it in with his thumb, carefully, checking each digit against Thorsen’s arm.
The little wheel went round.
SERVICE REQUEST 1-2844177.
Type: Illegal Dumping — Report.
Location: 3100 N San Fernando Rd (rear, river frontage). Los Angeles, CA 90065.
Created: the date was there, and the time. 11:52 PM. Two days before she died.
Status: CLOSED.
Resolution: Referred to LAPD Northeast Division per reporting party statement. Site inspected. No violation observed.
Closed: the day after her funeral.
Attachments (1): Media removed per records retention schedule.
Mateo read it twice, his lips moving. Then he put the phone down on his knee and looked at the river.
“Referred to LAPD,” he said. “She did that. She put that in. She told them she was going to the police.”
“Yes.”
“And they sent it to the police. To Northeast. The same place she walked in the next day.”
“Yes.”
“So they knew. Before she even got there. Somebody in that building read this and knew she had a video, and knew her name, and her phone, and where she lived. And then she walked in and handed it to them.”
Thorsen said nothing. There was nothing to say that would make it smaller.
He thought about how Ray had come by the number at all. Not from the murder book; that tab had been emptied. Ray would have written to the city and asked for every complaint a girl called Marisol Reyes had ever made. They gave anybody the list, if you filled in the form and waited. Ray had filled in the form, and waited, and read down the whole list to the last line.
He had walked past that front desk ten thousand times. He had probably walked past it the afternoon she stood there. He had been upstairs, at his desk, typing something, with a coffee going cold.
The county had a website too. You could put in an address and it would tell you who owned the dirt.
Parcel 5442-007-0… Owner of record: ARROYO VERDE HOLDINGS LLC. A mailing address that was a box number in Henderson, Nevada. A sale date, five years and ten months ago. Two months after Marisol Reyes was buried. A price that looked like a misprint for that much land beside a river in Los Angeles, until you read the line underneath it. Site subject to Cal. DTSC remediation order. Contaminated.
“So somebody bought the poison dump,” Mateo said. “Cheap. Why would you buy a poison dump?”
“So nobody else does.”
The Nevada company was a wall. Thorsen did not try to climb it. It would have a registered agent, and the agent would be a lawyer who represented four thousand other companies with green names, and behind that would be another company, and so on down. You could spend a year on it. They did not have a year.
They had, it turned out, about forty-six hours.
Mateo found it on the city planning site, three clicks deep, a PDF of a public notice that had been posted for the statutory thirty days and that nobody had read.
NOTICE OF ENVIRONMENTAL REMEDIATION ACTIVITY. Placement of an engineered concrete cap over impacted soils, approximately 4.2 acres. Pour to be continuous, commencing 5:00 a.m. on Tuesday and proceeding until complete. And a last paragraph in smaller type, which Thorsen read twice and then a third time.
Upon completion, a recorded land-use covenant will prohibit any excavation, drilling, or disturbance of the cap or underlying soils in perpetuity.
Tuesday at five in the morning.
Five hours before fifteen people sat down in a room and voted on who ran the police.
“In perpetuity,” Mateo said. “What’s that?”
“For ever.”
They went to look at it from the river.
The path ran along the Frogtown bank, and the yard lay along the far one, and from the path you could see straight through the gaps in the green screening on the fence. It was bigger close up. A long flat expanse of grey ground, graded smooth, with stakes in rows and string between them and orange paint marks on the dirt. Rebar mats were stacked in bundles near the south end, rusting gently. A line of portable toilets. A site office on blocks. Along the road side, by a gate with a chain on it, two dozen concrete barriers had been set out in a funnel, ready for trucks.
Everywhere, in heaps and drifts and along the edges of everything, the pale grey stuff.
“Lime,” Thorsen said. “They treat the soil with it. To lock in whatever’s in there.”
It was in Ray’s boots. It was in the wheel arch of a Tahoe. Ray had come here at night, a month ago, again and again, with a pry bar and a torch, walking this ground in the dark. Looking for something. Thorsen could not see what. He saw a big flat field of nothing, and in a day and a half it would be under two feet of concrete and a law that said no one could ever lift it.
There was a sign on the river fence, facing the path, laminated, the corners curling. The same notice. And at the bottom, under the name of the remediation contractor, a second logo, small and grey.
A shield.
Site Security Provided By Castellan Risk Group.
On the far side of the yard, by the site office, a silver Tahoe was parked nose out. As they watched, its door opened, and a man in a grey polo shirt got out and stretched, and looked idly across the river, along the path, at a teenage boy and a big man in a Dodgers cap who had stopped to look at a sign.
“Keep walking,” Thorsen said quietly. “Don’t look back. Talk to me about something.”
“Like what?”
“Anything. Baseball.”
“I hate baseball.”
“Then tell me why.”
Mateo did, at length, in a voice that shook a little at first and then steadied. They walked north along the river at an ordinary pace for three hundred yards, and Thorsen watched the far bank in the corner of his eye, and the man by the Tahoe watched them for a while and then got bored and lit a cigarette.
When they were under the next bridge, out of sight, Mateo stopped and leaned his back against the concrete and let out a long breath.
“What’s under there?” he said. “What did she film?”
“I don’t know.”
“You know something. You’ve got that face.”
“I know they’re going to bury it on Tuesday, whatever it is. I know your sister saw them put it there. I know a man who was trying to find it is dead.” Thorsen looked north, up the long straight of the river, towards Glendale. “And I know I can’t stop a concrete pour with a cap and a phone with a frog on it. I need somebody with a badge to believe me. To believe me, I need to give them something they can hold in their hand.”
“Like what?”
“Like a piece of paper with a time on it.”
He told the boy about Marcus Okafor then. Not all of it. Enough. A young cop who woke up not knowing what he had done. A father who was told it was the son. A pink receipt from a tow yard on San Fernando Road, with a little hook on the logo.
Mateo listened with his arms folded.
“So you think the cop didn’t do it either,” he said. “The son.”
“I think somebody needed Ray Okafor to close your sister’s case. And I think they found the one thing that would make him do it.”
Mateo was quiet for a while.
“San Fernando Road’s right there,” he said at last, and pointed with his chin at the long road that ran beside the railway on the far side of the yard, north into Glendale. “There’s like twenty tow places on it. They’re open all night. My cousin got his car towed from a quinceañera once, it cost him four hundred dollars.”
“I’m going to walk it.”
“With your face on TV?”
“After dark.”
“Then I’m coming.”
“No.”
“I’ve got the phone,” Mateo said. “You need pictures. And you’ve got eleven dollars, I saw.” He pushed himself off the wall. “And she was my sister, man. Not yours.”