He switched the phone off at the bottom of the Hendersons’ drive, by feel, with his hands shaking now that there was time for them to. Then he walked.
He walked down out of Eagle Rock through the dark, away from the sirens, and across the Glendale Freeway on a footbridge, and down into the river again. He walked south along the concrete in the dark for two hours, past Deacon’s town under the freeway without stopping, because he did not want to bring anything to Deacon’s fire. He walked until the sky behind the hills went the colour of a bruise, and the herons came out, and the street with the cinder-block wall was in front of him.
He sat down on the kerb opposite the shelf, with his back against a roll-up door, and waited.
He did not think about Art. He had decided not to, for now, the way you decide not to look at a wound until there is someone to stitch it. But Art came anyway. Standing in the middle of his own living room in his cardigan, with his arms a little out from his sides.
Somebody has to water them.
Thorsen put his head back against the cold metal of the door and closed his eyes.
Rosa came at half past six, in her cleaner’s tunic, walking slowly at the end of her night. She had a new candle in a plastic bag. She saw him from twenty yards off and stopped dead.
Then she came on, and knelt at the shelf, and changed the candle, and lit it, and crossed herself, all without hurry. Only when it was done did she cross the street and stand in front of him and look down.
“The radio says you killed a policeman last night,” she said. “An old one. In Eagle Rock.”
“He was my lieutenant.”
“Did you?”
“No. They did. The same people.”
She studied him for a while. Whatever she saw made her sigh, a long tired breath through the nose.
“Mateo called me at work last night and told me everything. About the tow yard. About the policeman’s son.” She shook her head. “Six years I hated a dead car thief. I lit a candle every morning and asked God to punish him. Now Mateo says it was not him. And not the policeman’s boy either. That boy was asleep in a police car.”
“It was somebody. Just not him.”
“Yes.” She looked at him more closely. “Detective, you look terrible. When did you eat?”
“I need to borrow your phone, Mrs. Reyes.”
She took it out of her tunic pocket without a word, the old one with the cracked corner, and put it in his hand.
“Use it,” she said. “Call who you like. It’s paid. Everything on that account is paid, every month, hers and mine.” A small bitter twist of the mouth. “Now they want more. Another letter came on Friday. Her pictures are too many, the storage is full, do I want to pay four dollars more. I’ll pay it. I pay everything.”
He was too tired for it to land. It went past him like a car on the far side of the road.
He dialled the number written in pencil on the back of a card that had been through a storm drain and a river, and was soft now, and nearly illegible.
She answered before the first ring finished.
“It’s me,” he said.
There was a silence in which he could hear her breathing.
“Where are you?”
He told her.
“Stay there,” Brooks said. “Put your hands where I can see them when I get out of the car. I’m not joking. I’m coming alone and I’m going to arrest you, and you’re going to let me.”
She came in twenty minutes, in her own car, a dusty green Subaru with a child seat in the back. She was in jeans and a sweatshirt, with her badge on a chain round her neck and her pistol on her hip. She got out and stood behind the open door with her hand on the gun, and looked at him sitting on the kerb with his palms on his knees, and at Rosa standing beside him with her arms folded.
“Mrs. Reyes,” she said, “please go home.”
“No,” said Rosa.
Brooks looked at her for a moment and seemed to decide that was a fight for another day.
“Stand up, Mr. Thorsen. Turn round. Hands behind you.”
He did. The cuffs went on, cold, ratcheted tight, the way you do it when you mean it. She patted him down, fast and thorough, and found the peppermint tin and opened it and looked at the phone inside it, and at him.
“Retired Lieutenant Arthur Delgado was shot to death in his home at eleven forty-nine last night,” she said, very quietly, close to his ear. “Fourteen rounds through the front window. A neighbour saw a large man go over his back wall. The Assistant Chief has been on television since four this morning. They’re calling it a vendetta. A disgraced former detective killing the men who signed off on his old case, one by one.” Her voice did not change. “Ray. Then a Castellan guard who recognised you. Then Delgado. Three dead in under two weeks. They cancelled my leave at midnight. Now it’s a homicide, they want me where they can see me. I’ve got every unit in the city looking for you and an order on my desk to bring you straight to the tenth floor if I see you. Give me one reason, before I put you in that car.”
“The phone,” he said. “Play it before you start the engine.”
“Whose phone is it?”
“Castellan’s. I took it off one of them on Wednesday night. It’s been off ever since except for twenty-six minutes in Delgado’s house.” He turned his head. “Put it in flight mode before it finds a signal. If they see it come on they’ll wipe it. Or they’ll come.”
She looked at the phone in her hand.
Then she held the side button down, and watched the screen come up, and before the bars had time to appear she pulled down the panel with her thumb and touched the little aeroplane. She did it fast and neatly. She had done it before, in other people’s cars, with other people’s phones.
“Where?”
“Voice memos. The last one.”
She put him in the back of the Subaru, beside the child seat, with the door open. She stood in the street with the phone to her ear, one hand over the other ear against the noise of the freeway, and her face to the river.
Twenty-six minutes.
He watched her listen. He watched her face not change for the first ten, and then begin to. At one point she put her free hand flat against the roof of the car and leaned on it. At another she turned all the way round and looked at him through the open door with an expression he did not want to see again. Near the end, when the gunfire came and went on and on, tinny and enormous through the little speaker, she flinched, and Rosa, standing on the kerb with her arms still folded, put a hand over her own mouth.
Then there was a long stretch where she only listened, her eyes closed. Thorsen knew what she was hearing. An old man’s voice, close to the microphone, saying something about violets.
She took the phone away from her ear and stood with it against her chest.
Then she took out her own phone, held it against the little speaker, and played the whole thing through a second time to keep a copy, standing in the street with her eyes shut.
Then she leaned into the car and took the cuffs off him, without a word, and put them back on her belt.
They sat on the kerb, the three of them, in a row, in the early sun. Rosa had produced sweet bread from somewhere, wrapped in a paper napkin. Thorsen ate it in four bites.
“It’s not enough,” Brooks said. She was staring at the candle across the street. “You understand that. I believe every word. A jury might. But I can’t walk into a courtroom with this and stop a concrete pour on city-approved remediation at five tomorrow morning. A recording made by a fugitive, of a man who’s dead, accusing the next chief of police. Brandt’s lawyers will say you made him say it at gunpoint. They’ll say it’s spliced. And it’s hearsay on top of hearsay. Delgado says Brandt told him about somebody called Ibarra.” She shook her head. “I need more than a dead man’s voice to dig up a city project.”
“Tommy Ibarra,” Thorsen said. “Metro.”
“I looked him up in the car. On the way here.” She took out her own phone. “Officer Tomas Ibarra. Metropolitan Division. Reported missing six years ago, in March. Four days before your hit and run. He was under investigation for skimming seized drug money. His car was found in a lot at San Ysidro, at the border, with his badge in the glove box. The department said he’d run to Mexico. There’s still a warrant out. His mother does a press conference on the anniversary every year, holding his academy photo, saying her boy would never.” She put the phone away. “Every year, the papers run it on page nine.”
“Four days before.”
“Yes.”
“And three days before she died, Marisol Reyes was standing on that river path at night filming men with a van, digging in that yard.”
Brooks looked across the river at the green fence. She said nothing for a long time.
“If I had that film,” she said finally, “I could wake up a judge.”
“It’s gone. They purged it from the city. Somebody at Northeast took her copy. Her phone went with her.”
“Then we’re nowhere.”
Rosa had been listening to all of this with her hands folded in her lap, very still. Now she stirred.
“Her pictures,” she said, to nobody in particular. “They keep sending letters about her pictures.”
Thorsen turned his head and looked at her.
It came back to him from the far side of the road where it had gone past him half an hour before, and this time it stopped.
Her pictures are too many. The storage is full. Do I want to pay four dollars more.
A girl who reported every broken streetlight with a photograph. Who had hundreds of service requests. Whose phone had been paid for, every single month, for six years, by a mother who could not bear to let a machine somewhere take her voice away.
And the machine had done what phones do every night when you plug them in by the bed. It had quietly sent copies of everything somewhere else.
“Mrs. Reyes,” he said. “Where’s Mateo?”
“Asleep. Why?”
“Because I think you’ve been paying for it for six years,” Thorsen said. “And I think nobody ever thought to look. I didn’t.”