Deacon was awake when he came back down the bank at a quarter past two. He was sitting on his crate by the dead fire with his hands between his knees, and he did not pretend he had been reading.
“Didn’t think I’d see you,” he said.
“Neither did I.”
Deacon unzipped his vest and gave him the two phones. Then he reached down beside the crate and came up with a tyre iron, the old-fashioned kind, an L of black steel with a socket at one end and a flat wedge at the other, and held that out too.
“Fella that had your mat left it,” he said. “Don’t tell me what it’s for.”
Thorsen took it. It was heavy and cold and fitted his hand.
“Thank you, Deacon.”
“Don’t thank me. Just don’t bleed on nobody’s floor.”
Brooks answered on the first ring. She was driving; he could hear it.
“I’ve got it,” she said. “Signed, sealed, in an envelope on the seat beside me. Adele Park sat at her kitchen table in her dressing gown and read every line and signed every page and then she poured us both a whiskey and I didn’t drink it.” A breath. “Mateo’s home. They let him go at half eleven. No charge, no apology. Rosa called me screaming, and then crying, and then she thanked me, and I didn’t know what to say.”
“Where are you going?”
“Monterey Park. The Sheriff’s K9 unit. There’s a handler there called Ruben Soto. We were at the academy together before he switched to county. He owes me sixty dollars and a favour. He’s on call tonight and he has a dog in the back of his truck and he doesn’t answer to anybody on the tenth floor.” Her voice tightened. “Glendale’s still five-thirty. Whitfield’s sitting in her car outside the station waiting for her captain’s plane. Where are you?”
“Going to the yard.”
“Thorsen.”
“Send me the video. Ten seconds of it. The part with the light.”
She was quiet. Then the phone in his hand buzzed, and buzzed again.
“Half an hour,” she said. “Hold it half an hour. That’s all I’m asking.”
He crossed the river where it was shallowest, below the Fletcher Drive bridge, wading the low-flow channel with the water warm round his shins and the tyre iron in his belt. On the far side he climbed the sloping concrete wall on his hands and knees and lay at the top in the scrub, by the green-screened fence, and looked.
The yard was lit like a stadium.
Work lights on tall stands had been set out along the north end, eight of them, each throwing a hard white cone down onto the grey ground, and the generators that fed them were running with a steady diesel drone. Out on San Fernando Road, beyond the gate, the mixer trucks were lined up nose to tail along the kerb as far as he could see, forty of them perhaps, their drums turning slowly, their headlights on, their engines idling in a great low rumble that came up through the ground. A concrete pump truck sat inside the gate near the signal box with its long boom folded on its back like the arm of a sleeping insect. Men in orange vests and hard hats were moving around it, a couple of dozen of them, laying out hose, checking things, drinking coffee from thermos lids.
The brick signal box stood at the end of the old siding, windows black. Ten yards from it, ringed with stakes and orange string, was a low square of concrete with an iron grate set into it.
On the far side of everything, by the site office, the silver Tahoe was parked under a light, and a man in a grey polo leaned against it, looking at his phone.
Thorsen went along the fence until he found what he was looking for. Six feet from the corner, low down behind a bush, somebody had cut the chain-link in a neat vertical line with bolt cutters, two feet long, and then closed it up again with black cable ties so that from more than a few feet away you would never see it. The ties were new. The cut was tidy. The man who made it had owned a pegboard.
He snipped the ties with his teeth, one at a time, and went through.
There was a row of portable toilets just inside, with hooks on the side of the last one where the workers hung their gear. He took an orange vest off a hook and put it on over Deacon’s sweatshirt, and a white hard hat off the next hook, and put that on instead of the cap. Then he walked out into the light, not fast and not slow, the way a man walks who has been told to go and fetch something, and nobody looked at him at all.
The foreman was standing at the door of the site office with a clipboard and a radio and a mug of coffee, and Thorsen would have known him for the foreman in any yard in the world. Fifties. Thick through the chest, bow-legged, a grey moustache cut square. On the inside of his right forearm, below the rolled sleeve, a tattoo gone blue with age: an eagle, a globe, an anchor.
He looked up as Thorsen came round the side of the trailer, out of sight of the Tahoe. He looked at the hard hat and the vest. Then at the face under the hat. Then the radio came up towards his mouth, smoothly, without any fuss.
“Before you call it in,” Thorsen said, “give me one minute. Then call whoever you like. I won’t stop you.”
The foreman held the radio an inch from his lips.
“You’re the guy on TV.”
“Yes.”
“The cop killer.”
“That’s what they’re saying.”
“Why the hell would I give you a minute?”
“Because there’s a police officer buried under your cap.”
The foreman did not move. The radio stayed where it was. But his eyes changed.
Thorsen held out the cheap phone with the ten seconds on it, and pressed play, and the foreman looked down at it in the light from the trailer door.
The dark. The river. The van. The dome light coming on, the long blue shape on the floor taped at the neck and chest and ankles, the younger man with the hard pale eyes turning towards the light. And faint across the water, breathless, amused:
Jesus. Tommy’s heavier than he looks.
The clip ended.
The foreman stood looking at the dark screen.
“Where?” he said.
His name was Luis Ortega. He had poured concrete in Los Angeles for seventeen years, and before that he had been a combat engineer in the Marine Corps, and he walked to the signal box beside Thorsen with his hands in his jacket pockets and his hard hat tipped back, as though they were discussing drainage.
The grate was rusted iron, three feet square, in a concrete collar. The orange string ran right across it. Phase one. A painted line on the ground beside it said START.
Thorsen crouched and put his fingers on the edge of the iron. There were bright scratches along it, a dozen or more, at one corner. Fresh within the month. Somebody had worked at it with a flat steel bar until he got it loose.
He got the wedge end of the tyre iron under the same corner and heaved. It came up with a groan of old metal, and he walked it over on its hinge and let it down on the far side.
The pit was full. Earth, to within a foot of the top, packed and grey-white and powdery with lime, with a faint swimming-pool smell coming up out of it. In the middle the surface had sunk a little, unevenly, into a long shallow hollow, the way the earth sinks over a grave in its first year.
Ortega looked at it for a long time.
Then he went to a bundle of rebar lying by the pump truck and pulled out a single length, eight feet of ribbed steel, and came back and stood over the pit and drove it straight down into the middle of the hollow with both hands.
It went in like a knife into butter. Three feet. Four. He let go and it stood there, upright, quivering.
“Uncompacted fill,” Ortega said quietly. “That’s not ground. That’s a hole somebody filled with dirt.” He pulled the rebar out and looked at the end of it. “You pour a two-foot cap over that, it settles. Week, month, a year. Cap cracks right down the middle. State comes out and finds a failed cap on a remediation site and I lose my ticket and the company eats the whole job.” He looked up at Thorsen. “That’s what I’d tell the inspector.”
“And what would you tell yourself?”
Ortega was silent. Out on San Fernando Road a driver leaned on his horn, long, impatient, and somebody shouted at him to knock it off.
“Two tours,” Ortega said. “Fallujah, Ramadi. We brought everybody home. Even the ones that came home in a bag. You didn’t leave a guy in a hole.” He spat neatly into the lime. “I don’t care who’s chief of police.”
He lifted the radio.
“All stations, all stations, this is Ortega. Safety stand-down, north end. I’ve got an unconsolidated void at the signal box. Nobody pours till I say so. Pump, keep that boom folded. Batch plant, hold the trucks on the road. I say again, safety stand-down.”
The radio crackled back at him from every direction at once. Questions. Swearing. A voice from the batch plant saying Luis, you can’t hold forty trucks, the mix’ll go off in the drums.
“Then it goes off,” Ortega said into the radio. “My site. My ticket. My call.”
He walked to his pickup, an old white Ford with a ladder rack, and got in and started it, and drove it twenty yards and parked it broadside across the front of the pump truck, so close the bumpers almost touched. Then he got out and took the keys with him.
The crew had stopped work. They stood around in their orange vests in the hard white light, coffee going cold, looking at Ortega, at the big stranger in the borrowed hard hat, at the open pit and the rebar standing in it.
Across the yard, by the site office, the man in the grey polo had straightened up from the Tahoe. He was talking into his phone, fast, with his free hand pressed over his other ear.
Thorsen looked at his own phone. Four-nineteen.
Forty-one minutes to five. Seventy-one to half past.
He did not have to wait seventy-one. He did not have to wait half an hour. At twenty to five two sets of headlights swung off San Fernando Road, between the lines of idling mixers, and came through the gate in the concrete funnel without slowing, and across the graded grey ground towards the north end of the yard, side by side, very fast, and stopped in a spray of pale dust just outside the circle of work lights.
Silver Tahoes. Both of them.
The doors opened.