He slept in the back of the van, if you could call it that, parked nose-out behind a tyre shop in Cypress Park, flat on the plywood with Ray’s tarpaulin folded under him and the duffel for a pillow. The floor was long enough for him, which was more than he could say for most beds, and hard enough that he felt every screw head. It was still not the worst night he had had that year. Before he closed his eyes he switched off the phone he had taken, emptied Ray’s peppermints into the door pocket, and shut the phone inside the tin. It was probably not enough. It was what he had.
At first light his left arm ached from the elbow down and there were two small burns on the forearm, a finger-width apart, like a snakebite. He bought coffee and a breakfast burrito from a truck and ate sitting in the van’s open side door, watching the street. No Tahoe. Nobody in a grey shirt.
Then he drove to Frogtown.
The map called it Elysian Valley. Nobody else did. It was a strip of small houses and workshops pressed between the freeway and the river, a dozen blocks long and three deep, and when Thorsen had last stood in it there were machine shops and a bakery supply and men selling fruit from a van. Now there were two breweries, a place that made ceramic lamps, and a cycle path along the river with a sign asking you to share it.
The street itself had not changed. It ran straight for three hundred yards between a cinder-block wall and a row of roll-up doors, with one streetlight at each end and nothing in the middle. He parked at the top and walked down the centre of the road, slowly, as he had done the first time.
Six years. He found he could still do it without the file.
Marisol Reyes. Nineteen. Second-year nursing student at City College, days. Nights she worked the line at a commissary kitchen two streets over, where the food trucks came to load, chopping onions and portioning rice until the last truck went out. She clocked off at twenty-eight minutes past midnight and stayed five minutes talking to the dishwasher, the way she did. She walked home because the walk was eleven minutes and the bus was forty.
At twelve-forty she was on the pavement on the left side, here, level with the fourth roll-up door. Earbuds in. Backpack on both shoulders.
The truck came from behind her.
Thorsen stopped where the kerb had a chip out of it. The chip was still there. The city had never fixed it.
It was a Chevrolet Silverado, white, stolen that evening from outside a gym in Atwater. It came down the street without lights. It left the roadway forty feet short of her, put its near wheels up on the pavement, and stayed there. There were no skid marks before the point of impact. There were none after. Whoever was driving never touched the brake.
She was thrown twenty-two yards. She was dead when a man from the bakery supply found her at ten to five.
Her backpack was beside her with forty-one dollars and a bus pass in it. Her earbuds were in the gutter.
Her phone was not anywhere.
They caught it together, he and Ray, with Ray as lead because it was Ray’s turn. Thorsen kept the chronology. He had always kept it. He typed faster and Ray said his own handwriting was a crime in itself.
For five days it was a good case, worked properly. They walked the street door to door. They pulled the time cards at the kitchen. They got the records for her phone and went through every number. They sat in the Reyes apartment with her mother, Rosa, who kept offering them food, and a small fierce boy of eleven who stood in the bedroom doorway the entire time and would not sit down.
“She was always writing to the city,” Rosa had said. “Always. The streetlight, the broken glass, the trucks that dump at night. I told her, mija, nobody reads these. She said somebody has to.”
Thorsen had written that down. He remembered writing it. He could not now remember what he had done with it.
On the sixth day the Silverado turned up burned to the axles in a wash in Sun Valley.
On the seventh, a Metro unit tried to stop a car on Lankershim. The driver ran. The pursuit lasted four minutes and ended against a bus shelter, and the driver came out with something in his hand, and that was the end of Hector Ochoa, twenty-six, known as Sleepy, who had been stealing cars since he was fourteen.
By that afternoon Metro had an informant who put Ochoa behind the wheel of the Silverado. By evening the word had come down the stairs. Suspect identified. Suspect deceased. Cleared, other.
It was tidy. Everybody said so.
Thorsen had not liked it then and standing on the spot he did not like it now.
Ochoa stole Hondas. Civics and Accords, for a chop shop in Pacoima that paid by the part. In twelve years and thirty-one arrests he had never once taken a truck. He was five foot four. When they found the Silverado, the seat frame had survived the fire, and it was racked all the way back.
And a car thief who hits someone by accident brakes. He brakes, and panics, and runs. He does not kill his lights at the top of a street and hold his wheels on the pavement for forty feet.
And he does not stop to take a phone and leave the money.
Thorsen had said all of it. To Ray, in the car. To Delgado, in the office with the door shut. He had typed six pages of it into the chronology, numbered and dated.
Delgado had heard him out. He had looked tired. He said it came from the tenth floor, that it was a Metro shooting and the department wanted it closed clean, and that there were fights worth having and this was a dead car thief. He told Thorsen to take the comp days he was owed. A week. Go fishing.
Ray had said almost nothing. That was what Thorsen remembered most. Eleven years, and Ray would argue with him about where to eat lunch, and on this he stood in the squad room doorway with his coat already on.
It’s done, Danny. Leave it done.
He took the week. He did not fish. When he came back the murder book was gone from the shelf, sent to archive, and the case had been cleared in his absence.
He did not ask to see the paperwork. He did not want to know which captain had put a name to it. He walked into Delgado’s office, set his badge and his gun on the blotter, and went down in the lift for the last time.
He had assumed, for six years, that Ray simply had not had the stomach for the fight.
He took the napkin from his shirt pocket and looked at it again in the daylight. The letters had been pressed so hard that in two places the pen had gone through.
That was not a man who had made his peace with it.
A cyclist went past on the river path, then another. Somewhere a roll-up door rattled open and a radio came on.
Thorsen walked the twenty-two yards.
He had expected nothing there. A stretch of wall. Perhaps a stain that only he would know to look for.
There was a shelf. Somebody had bolted a short plank to the cinder block at knee height, and painted it white, and repainted it more than once. On it stood a framed photograph under glass, a girl in pale blue scrubs laughing at whoever held the camera. A plastic rosary. A jar of marigolds, fresh, the water clear.
And a candle in a tall glass, the kind they sell in the grocery aisle, with a saint on the side.
It was lit.
Thorsen crouched. The wax had barely begun to pool. Someone had been here within the hour, in the dark or just after it, and lit a candle for a girl six years dead, and would do it again tomorrow.
Under the jar, held down by its weight, was the corner of a business card. He did not have to pull it out to know it. He could see the first three letters of the name and the cheap raised print that retired cops order by the hundred because they cannot get used to having nothing to hand over.
Ray
He stayed down there until his knees complained. Then he stood, and looked along the wall towards the apartments at the far end of the valley, where a small fierce boy would be seventeen by now.
He remembered the address. He had typed it.