Sergeant Dana Whitfield drove him to the emergency room at County-USC herself, in the front seat of her cruiser, because she said she was not putting a man who had just done what he had done in the back of anything. A doctor with tired eyes picked the last of Deacon’s glue out of him and put in nineteen stitches and said several things about superglue that Thorsen did not intend to pass on.
Across town, Brooks told him on the phone, Royce Dwyer was being arrested at his apartment in Burbank, with a fresh plate in his face, for the murder of Marisol Reyes. Curtis Vane had been talking since seven o’clock. He had asked for a deal before they had finished washing the lime out of his eyes. He had named the man who drove the white Silverado down a dark street six years ago with its lights off, and the man who held Ray Okafor’s wrist, and the man who fired through the bars at the zoo, and the men who emptied their rifles through Art Delgado’s front window. He had named the two men in the car on Lankershim who had known, before the pursuit began, how it would end for Hector Ochoa. He had named a desk officer at Northeast who had taken a nineteen-year-old’s name and number and phoned Metro before she was out of the car park, and the Metro sergeant who had signed the Reyes book out of the archive a week after it went in. He had not yet named Walter Brandt. Brooks said that was only a matter of the price.
At a quarter to ten Whitfield drove him home.
She did not ask where home was. She drove up the Pasadena Freeway and off at Avenue 43 and up the hill streets to Highland Park, with the radio on low, and when he looked at her she kept her eyes on the road.
“I drove another man home once,” she said. “As a courtesy. I’ve been meaning to do it properly ever since.”
They sat in the cruiser outside the Okafor house with the engine running and listened to the radio.
The newsreader on KNX was a woman with a calm voice who was having difficulty keeping it calm. At ten o’clock the Los Angeles City Council had convened to vote on the confirmation of Assistant Chief Walter Brandt as Chief of Police. At two minutes past ten, before the first speaker, investigators from the District Attorney’s Public Integrity Division had entered the council chamber and spoken privately to the council president. At four minutes past, the vote had been postponed indefinitely. Investigators were at that moment executing a search warrant at the Assistant Chief’s office at Police Headquarters. Assistant Chief Brandt had left City Hall by a side entrance and had not responded to requests for comment.
In a related development, the newsreader said, the remains of a man believed to be a missing Los Angeles police officer were being recovered that morning from a remediation site beside the river in Glassell Park. The officer, whose name had not been released, had been reported missing six years ago.
And in a statement issued twenty minutes ago, the LAPD said that former detective Daniel Thorsen was no longer considered a person of interest in any investigation, and was now being treated as a witness.
Whitfield turned the radio off.
“Witness,” she said. “That’s a word.”
Thorsen sat looking at the house.
There was a blue Ford Econoline in the drive. It had a white form tucked under the windscreen wiper.
Denise opened the door before he reached it. She had come back from Pasadena an hour before. She was in a cardigan, with her hair pinned, and she looked at the stitches showing above the collar of the hospital scrubs top they had given him, and at the lime still in the creases of his hands, and her mouth tightened, and she stood aside.
She made tea. She did it before anything, as if it were an instrument she needed to have laid out on a tray. He sat in the same chair as on Friday night.
When she sat down opposite him he took a folded sheet of paper out of his pocket and put it on the table between them and smoothed it flat. Brooks had printed it at the Glendale station that morning, from the photographs Mateo had taken on a cracked phone with a frog on the back, and Whitfield had brought it with her. A ruled ledger page. Blue ballpoint, in a careful old-fashioned hand.
He put his finger on the line.
“Zero zero thirty-one,” he said. “Glendale unit three Adam twenty-one. That was Sergeant Whitfield, outside in the car. She was two months on the job. She pulled Marcus out of his Charger on San Fernando Road and drove him here and put him in through your front door.”
Denise looked at the paper.
“Nine minutes later,” Thorsen said, “and four miles away, a white Silverado came down a street in Frogtown with its lights off. Marcus was in the back of a police car. He never touched that girl. He was never on that street. The paint report was a forgery and the camera never existed. Brandt made it all up and walked into your hallway with it. The man who drove the truck was arrested this morning.”
She read the line. She read it again, slowly, her lips moving very slightly on the numbers.
Then she put her glasses down on the table, square to the edge, and put both her hands flat on either side of the paper, and sat very still.
He did not say anything. There was nothing to say that would make it smaller, or larger. He sat across the table from her and let it be what it was.
After a long time she said, without looking up:
“Four years at the back of the church.”
“Yes.”
“For nothing.”
“For a lie.”
She nodded. She folded the paper once, very precisely, along the crease, and held it against her chest with both hands, and closed her eyes. When she opened them again they were wet, and quite clear.
“Thank you, Danny,” she said.
They went out to the garage together. She wanted to, she said. She had not been in it since Wednesday.
It was the same. The pegboard with its outlines. The white square on the ceiling. The chair pushed in under the bench. He stood in the doorway and let her go ahead of him.
She stopped at the bench.
The mug, the glasses and the pen were at the left-hand end, where Thorsen had left them. The pen lay at an angle across the place where a newspaper would have been.
Denise looked at them for a long moment. Then she turned round and looked at him.
“You put it back,” she said.
“Last night. Brandt was standing where you are.”
“In here?”
“He wanted to see where it happened. I think he wanted me to see him not flinch.” Thorsen came in and stood beside her. “You moved it.”
She did not deny it. She did not look away, either.
“The Sunday after,” she said. “When the cleaners had gone. I came in and I stood here, and I thought, Danny’s going to come. Ray said he would. And Danny’s going to walk in here, and everyone’s going to tell him the same thing they told me, and he’ll believe them, because they’re police and he’s tired. And then he’ll go away again.” She touched the edge of the bench with one finger. “He said, don’t tell him anything, he’ll only argue. He said, Danny doesn’t believe people, he believes rooms. So I gave you a room you couldn’t believe.”
“You knew I’d start at the house.”
“You always started at the house. You’d come here for dinner and spend the first ten minutes walking round looking at things before you’d sit down. It used to drive me mad.”
He found, to his surprise, that he was smiling.
“It was a good room,” he said.
“I was a scrub nurse for thirty-one years,” Denise said. “I know exactly where a man keeps his instruments.”
She went back into the house and came out with the key. The Ford key, worn smooth, with the strip of masking tape round the head and the capital R on it in black marker.
“They brought it back yesterday afternoon,” she said. “With a form, like I told you. They’d been through everything. They didn’t take anything, they just made a mess of it. I put the blanket back on the bed for you.”
“He re-taped every key he owned, the week before,” she said. “Wrote on all of them. I thought he was putting his affairs in order.”
She held it out.
“I said he wanted you to have it,” she said. “I’m not going to say it a third time.”
He took it.
The van was as he had left it, nearly. They had tipped out the bins and put them back in the wrong order. They had slit the foam mattress along one side and found nothing in it. The suit was still on its hanger on the rail, swinging gently as he opened the rear doors, like a man let down by degrees.
The pry bar was in the back, against the wheel arch.
He picked it up and carried it into the garage, and found the empty outline on the pegboard, low on the right, and hung it there on its two hooks. It fitted exactly. Everything on the board was home now. He stood back and looked at it for a while.
He thought about the strip of masking tape behind the board, with its numbers in a hand that leaned backwards. He left it where it was. Brooks would need it for the trial. It was the last thing Ray had written, and it was evidence, and Ray would have been the first to say so.
When he came out Denise was standing at the side gate with her arms folded, looking down the street at the cruiser.
“Where will you go?” she said.
“I don’t know yet.”
“Ray said you never did.” She looked at him. “You’ll write.”
“I’ll write.”
“You won’t. But you’ll come back. At Christmas. I’ll make the jollof.” It was not a question, and he did not treat it as one.
His phone rang twice before he left the street.
The first was Rosa. She was crying and laughing at the same time and speaking Spanish, and then English, and then Spanish again. A woman had called her that morning. An old woman, from Downey. Mrs. Ibarra. The police had called her at nine o’clock and told her they believed they had found her son, and she had called Rosa, a stranger, because a reporter had told her whose daughter had filmed it. They had talked for an hour. They were going to have lunch on Sunday.
“Mateo says to tell you,” Rosa said. “He put the frog phone in the sugar when they came through the door, and they never looked. He says, now the frog phone is famous. Three television stations want it. He says no to all of them.” A pause, a sniff. “Tomorrow I light the candle. And the day after. But now I know who it’s for.”
The second was Brooks.
“They gave me my badge back,” she said, without preamble. “My lieutenant brought it to my house himself. He stood on my doorstep and couldn’t look at me. I made him say it twice.”
“Good.”
“Brandt’s lawyer called the DA an hour ago. They’re talking. Vane’s given them Arroyo Verde. It’s Brandt’s wife’s family trust, three layers down. They bought the yard with the money they stole from the cash houses, so nobody would ever dig there.” She was quiet for a moment. “Thorsen. The violets.”
“What about them?”
“I went in with the scene team at Delgado’s this morning. I asked the scene supervisor and took them. All six. They’re on my kitchen windowsill. I’ve never kept a plant alive in my life.”
“You will.”
“Will you come back for the trial?”
“Yes.”
“You’d better. I don’t have any other witnesses who can pick up a man in each hand.”
He drove down out of Highland Park with his knees against the dashboard, because whoever had searched the van had run the seat forward, and stopped at the river under the Glendale Freeway, and walked down the bank.
Deacon was on his crate with his paperback. Thorsen gave him back the Dodgers cap and the tyre iron, and Deacon looked at them, and at the stitches, and at the van parked up on the road above.
“That yours?”
“It is now.”
“Huh,” said Deacon, and went back to his book. Then, as Thorsen turned to go, without looking up: “Keep it dry.”
At ten past eleven he was parked on Alameda Street outside Union Station, fifty yards from where a bus had let him off with one bag six days before.
He had not meant to come. He had found himself on the road and let it bring him.
Across the street, in the bay by the station’s long brown flank, the eleven-ten to Phoenix was loading. People with backpacks and carrier bags and children. A driver in a blue shirt checking tickets at the door. A man with a guitar case arguing about the luggage hold. He watched them climb aboard one at a time and find their seats behind the tinted glass.
He thought about a ticket with his name printed on it, tucked into the shirt pocket of a man called Shane on a motel walkway. He thought about a girl who walked home along a river because the bus took forty minutes.
The doors of the Phoenix bus folded shut with a hiss. It pulled out of the bay, slowly, and swung out into Alameda, and went past him close enough to touch, and on down towards the freeway and the desert, and was gone.
He watched it go.
Then he moved the seat back as far as it would go, which was still not far enough, and put the key with the masking tape on it into the ignition, and turned it. The old engine caught first time. It always did. Ray had seen to that.
He pulled out into the traffic and headed east, with the sun on the windscreen and an empty space on the floor behind him where a pry bar used to lie, and a paper napkin in his shirt pocket, over his heart.
He had not made the bus.
The End