Brooks moved first. She had her hand in the pocket of her sweatshirt and out again before the SUV doors opened downstairs, and she pushed something into Thorsen’s palm and closed his fingers on it the way Denise had with the key.
A telephone. Small, cheap, still with the shop sticker on the back.
“Seven-Eleven on Riverside, on my way here,” she said. “I knew you wouldn’t have one. My personal number’s the only one in it. Back stairs. Now.”
“Mateo —”
“Mateo’s seventeen and he hasn’t done anything, and there’s going to be a detective standing in this kitchen when they come through that door. You’re the one they’ll shoot.” She was already turning to the boy. “Mateo. When they come in, you put your hands on your head and you say nothing. Not one word. You ask for a lawyer and your mother. I’ll be right here.”
Mateo looked at Thorsen. He was seventeen and in his underwear, and his sister’s face was frozen on the phone against the sugar bowl, and Thorsen saw him make up his mind.
“I’m staying with my mom,” Mateo said. “Go.”
Thorsen went.
The back staircase came down into a strip of alley behind the building where the bins were. He went down it three steps at a time and in under the bottom flight, into the narrow dark space between the concrete steps and the wall, among the broken chairs and the rolled-up carpet somebody had been meaning to throw out for a year. He folded himself into it, with his knees against his chest and his side screaming, and was still.
Above him, boots on the front stairs. Many. A fist on the door of apartment eleven, three times. A voice. LAPD, search warrant. The door going in anyway, before anyone could open it.
Then shouting, all of it at once. Hands, hands, show me your hands. Rosa’s voice, high and furious, in Spanish. And over it, cutting through it like a whistle, Brooks.
“Detective Imani Brooks, Northeast Homicide, I’m armed, my weapon is holstered, my badge is on my chest, I am not a threat to you.”
A silence. Then a different voice, a man’s, older, tired, with a note in it Thorsen knew very well. A lieutenant who had been told to do something and did not like it.
“Detective. I’ve been asked to collect your badge and weapon. I’d rather do it here than downtown.”
“I’m sure you would.”
A long pause. The sounds of a room being searched. Drawers. Cupboards. Somebody saying clear, and then again, clear, and then, from the back bedroom, no weapon, Lieutenant.
“There’s no weapon,” Brooks said. “There was never a weapon. You know that.”
“I’ve got a warrant that says a minor in this apartment is in possession of a firearm and I’ve got orders to bring him in for questioning.”
“Questioning by whom?”
The lieutenant did not answer. He did not need to.
Thorsen heard them bring Mateo down the front stairs. He heard it because Rosa came down after them, all the way down, shouting her son’s name, and at the bottom someone told her to stand back, and she did not. Through a gap in the carpet he saw a strip of the street at the end of the alley, and two men in dark tactical clothes walking a skinny boy in a T-shirt and boxers between them with his hands cuffed behind him, barefoot on the tarmac. Mateo was not looking at anybody. His face had gone blank and closed, the face from the staircase on Thursday, eleven years old and nearly six feet.
They put him in the back of the first SUV.
Brooks came down a minute later with her hands empty, no badge on her chest, no weight on her hip. She walked straight to Rosa and put an arm round her and held her, and stood there on the pavement with her chin up while the SUVs pulled away, and looked at each of the men in the second one, one at a time, as it went past. Memorising them, he thought.
Then she walked Rosa back upstairs.
She did not look towards the alley. Not once. Thorsen understood that this was for him.
He spent the afternoon under the freeway, on the dead man’s mat, with the cheap phone on his chest.
Deacon looked at him when he came up the bank, and looked at the fresh dirt on his clothes, and went and got the tackle box without a word and checked the dressing, and fed him, and went back to his crate. At some point in the afternoon he turned the radio on and listened to the news with his head on one side and then turned it off again and looked over at Thorsen for a long time.
“Man on the radio says they got a kid in custody,” he said. “Seventeen. Associate of the fugitive. Pictures of him all over.”
“I know.”
“Your kid?”
“No. He’s somebody else’s. He’s better than mine would have been.”
Deacon nodded slowly, as though that answered something.
The phone rang at ten past three. Brooks.
“They’ve got him at Metro, downtown. Not booked. No lawyer yet. A juvenile in an interview room with nobody on the door but Metro, which is to say Vane’s old platoon.” Her voice was very level. “I’ve called a lawyer I trust. She’s on her way. They’ve had him six hours with no charge and they’ll try to hold him longer.”
“What do they want from him?”
“You. Where you went. What you were doing in that apartment.” A breath. “He won’t give it to them. You saw his face.”
“And the judge?”
“Ten o’clock tonight at her house. She read my email at lunch and called me herself. She watched it four times, she said. She’s going to sign. She’s been waiting her whole career for the tenth floor to hand her something like this.”
“Then it’s done.”
“No,” Brooks said. “It isn’t. A warrant’s a piece of paper. Someone has to serve it, and then someone has to dig.”
She called again at nine, and at eleven, and each time it was worse.
The county coroner’s recovery team, which did not answer to the LAPD and could not be ordered by it, had received a courtesy call that afternoon from the Office of the Assistant Chief, requesting that any deployment to the Glassell site be coordinated with LAPD scene security. Coordination, the duty supervisor regretted, could not take place before eight a.m. The Sheriff’s K9 unit, likewise county, likewise regretful, eight a.m.
“And LAPD scene security,” Brooks said, “is Metro.”
“Glendale.”
“I called Glendale. I found three Adam twenty-one.” There was something new in her voice then, under the weariness. “She’s a sergeant now. Dana Whitfield. She was a probationer six years ago, two months out of the academy. She was the one who pulled Marcus Okafor out of that car and drove him home. She said she’s been waiting six years for somebody to ask her about that night, because she always thought something was wrong about how fast the sergeant made it go away.”
“Will she come?”
“She’ll come. She’s got two units she can bring on her own say-so. But they’re Glendale officers serving a county warrant on a city site, and her watch commander wants her captain’s sign-off, and her captain is on a plane back from Sacramento that lands at six.” Brooks let out a breath. “Five-thirty, she says. Maybe. If she’s willing to risk her stripes. She says she is.”
“And the pour starts at five.”
“At the north end. I called the contractor’s twenty-four-hour site line pretending to be a resident complaining about noise. Phase one is the north end first. By the old signal box. They want the heaviest section done while it’s cool.”
Thorsen lay on the mat and looked up at the underside of the freeway.
At the north end first. By the signal box. Half an hour. Two feet of wet concrete in half an hour, poured from a forty-yard boom, spreading out across the ground like grey milk, filling every crack and hole and square of darkness. And a judge’s warrant arriving at half past five to find the ground already gone.
“Then somebody has to hold the ground,” he said.
“Thorsen.”
“For half an hour.”
“Every officer in this city has your photograph. Castellan has the site. Vane will be there. He’ll know you’re coming.”
“Then he’ll be there to meet me.” He sat up, slowly, carefully, his hand on his side. “Bring the paper, Brooks. I’ll keep the place.”
She was silent so long he thought the line had dropped.
“Mateo,” she said at last, very quietly. “They still have him. If you go near that yard and Vane gets word, I don’t know what happens to that boy in that room.”
He had known that. He had been not looking at it for six hours.
When she had rung off he sat in the dark for a while, with Deacon’s fire popping a few yards away and the freeway humming overhead.
Then he took the peppermint tin out of his pocket, and opened it, and looked at the phone inside.
It belonged to Curtis Vane’s company. It was the only line he had into the people who were holding Mateo Reyes in a room downtown. And the last time he had turned it on, men had come within twenty-six minutes.
He walked a mile north along the river first, away from Deacon’s town. Then he climbed the bank at a deserted footbridge, and stood on it in the wind, and switched the phone on.
It found a signal.
It rang ninety seconds later. A withheld number. He let it ring three times, and answered, and said nothing.
The voice at the other end was pleasant, unhurried, and very slightly amused. It was the voice from a lectern in a church, nine minutes long, which had never once said the word partner.
“Mr. Thorsen,” said Walter Brandt. “I think it’s time you and I had a conversation.”