He went down the stairs and walked straight at it.
Not fast. There is no point running at a vehicle. He walked down the middle of the street with his hands open at his sides, the way you approach a dog you have not made your mind up about, and he kept his eyes on the windscreen the whole way.
The glass was tinted nearly black. At forty yards he could make out a shape behind the wheel. At thirty, the shape moved, unhurried. A jaw working. A pale shaved head.
At twenty yards the Tahoe dropped into gear, pulled out from the hydrant, and rolled past him at walking pace, close enough that he could have put his palm on the door. The driver’s window came down four inches as it went by. Spearmint. Then the window went up and the truck turned the corner and was gone.
No threat. No gesture. Just a man letting him know he had been looked at.
Thorsen stood in the road for a moment. Up on the landing, Mateo Reyes was leaning on the railing with his arms folded, watching to see what the detective would do about it.
Nothing, yet. He went back to the van.
He had not owned a telephone in six years. He bought one in a pharmacy on Figueroa, nineteen dollars in a plastic clamshell with thirty minutes of credit, and spent ten of the minutes working out how to switch it on.
She picked up on the second ring.
“Brooks.”
“You wrote a number in pencil.”
A pause. Traffic behind her, a car door. “I did. I’ve been regretting it since about nine last night.”
“I need a plate run.”
“That’s not what the number was for.”
“What was it for?”
A longer pause. “There’s a taco stand on Cypress, by the car wash. Twenty minutes. If you’re wearing that suit I’m driving past.”
She came in an unmarked grey Ford that might as well have had a light bar on it. She parked nose out and stayed in the car for a full minute, looking the lot over, before she got out. He liked her for the minute.
They stood at the counter that ran along the side of the stand, under a faded awning. She ordered two al pastor and a horchata and paid for her own. He already had his.
“Start with why I shouldn’t arrest you,” Brooks said.
“For what?”
“There’s a man in County-USC this morning with a fractured orbital bone who says he fell down a flight of stairs at a motel on Figueroa. There’s another with a bruised larynx who can’t say anything at all. The night manager didn’t see a thing. The night manager did mention a very large guest in the end room who checked out without checking out.”
“Did they file a report?”
“No.”
“Then nobody’s been assaulted.”
“That’s not how it works and you know it.”
“It’s how it’s working this morning.” He unbuttoned his left cuff and turned the forearm over on the counter. The two burns had gone dark and tight overnight. “They came to my door at ten with one of these and a bus ticket to Phoenix in my name. They had a message from a friend of the family. They were going to return Ray’s van to his widow, which was thoughtful.”
Brooks looked at the burns. She did not touch them. Something in her face shut a little, the way it had in the garage.
“Who were they?”
“Grey polo shirts. A shield on the chest, no lettering. Same shirt as the man who was in Ray’s yard yesterday morning telling me he was minding the house for Denise. He drives a silver Tahoe. It was parked outside an apartment in Frogtown forty minutes ago.” He gave her the plate from memory.
She did not write it down. “What were you doing in Frogtown?”
He took the napkin from his shirt pocket and laid it on the counter between the salsa bottles.
She read it. She read it again.
“That was in the glovebox of the van,” he said. “There’s mud all over the driver’s side and a pair of boots in the back with more of it. The pry bar off his pegboard is in there too. He’d been to see the mother three times in three weeks. He told her he was sorry and that he hadn’t done his job. He was followed every time, by that Tahoe.”
“There are a hundred thousand people in this county named Reyes.”
“Marisol Reyes. Nineteen. Hit and run, Elysian Valley, six years ago in March. It was his case and mine. It was cleared in a week on a dead car thief, over my objection, and I left.” He folded the napkin and put it away. “It’s the last case we worked. It’s the reason I’m not a policeman. And a month before he died he was writing her name on a napkin hard enough to put the pen through.”
Brooks ate half a taco. She did it slowly, looking at the car wash.
“That’s a man with regrets,” she said. “Retired detectives have them. They take out the one that got away and they pick at it. It’s practically the pension plan. It doesn’t make him murdered.”
“No.”
“It makes him sadder. If anything, it helps the coroner.”
“It does. Right up until somebody sends two men to put me on a bus.”
She had no answer for that. He watched her not have one.
“You saw the board,” he said. “That night. You saw the empty hook, and you wrote it up, and somebody told you it was nothing.”
“My lieutenant told me a retired cop’s wife was sitting on a step in her nightgown, and that I had what I needed, and that the department takes care of its own.” She wiped her fingers on a paper napkin, one at a time. “He wasn’t wrong. I did have what I needed.”
“For a suicide.”
“For what it was.”
“Then run the plate and prove it.”
She sat in her car to do it, door open, one foot on the tarmac. The terminal was bolted to the dash on an arm. He stood where he could not see the screen, because she would have moved if he could.
“You understand this logs,” she said, typing. “My serial number, the time, the plate. Anybody who wants to know who’s asking can know by lunch.”
“I understand.”
“I don’t think you do. You’ve got a bag and a van. I’ve got eleven years and a mortgage in Altadena.”
She hit a key. The terminal thought about it.
“Silver Chevrolet Tahoe, current year. Commercial registration, fleet. One of nine.” She scrolled. “Registered owner, Castellan Risk Group LLC. Address on Brand Boulevard in Glendale.”
“Security?”
“Security, investigations, executive protection, ‘municipal consulting’, whatever that is. I know the name. Everybody knows the name. Half the command staff who’ve retired in the last five years have a card that says Castellan on it. They do the mayor’s detail when he travels. They’ve got the contract for the new headquarters.” She glanced up. “If the union wanted somebody to keep an eye on a widow’s house, that’s who they’d call. That’s a perfectly boring explanation, Mr. Thorsen.”
“Is there a name on the filing?”
“Managing member.” She found it. “Vane. Curtis J.”
Thorsen did not move. He did not think he moved. But Brooks had been a detective for a while, and her eyes came up off the screen and stayed on him.
“You know him.”
“I never met him.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
He was looking at a page. It was page fourteen of a chronology, six years old, typed on a machine in a squad room that had since been torn down. He could see the margin. He could see the line.
1420 hrs. Rec’d verbal from Metro Div re: pursuit/OIS Lankershim Bl. Supervising: Sgt. C. Vane #31807. States C/I places decedent OCHOA as driver of susp veh.
“Six years ago he was a sergeant in Metro,” Thorsen said. “It was his unit that chased Hector Ochoa into a bus shelter and shot him. It was his informant who put Ochoa in the truck that killed Marisol Reyes. I never saw the informant. Nobody did. I typed his name, once, and then they took the book away.”
Brooks sat very still with her hand on the terminal.
A bus went by on Cypress. The car wash brushes started up, stopped.
“So the man who closed your case,” she said slowly, “is the man whose trucks were following your partner.”
“Yes.”
“That could still be nothing.”
“It could.”
“People know each other. It’s a small department. It’s a coincidence until it isn’t.”
“I agree.”
She reached out and cleared the screen. Then she pulled her door half shut and looked up at him through the gap, and she looked, for the first time, more angry than careful.
“The Reyes book is in the archive on Ramirez Street. Cleared cases, they don’t ask why you want them, you just sign. I’ll pull it tomorrow.” She pointed a finger at him. “Not for you. I’m going to read it end to end, and I’m going to find the informant’s statement and the lab work and the supervisor’s sign-off, and it’s going to be a nice clean file. And then I’m going to show it to you, and you’re going to get in that van and drive somewhere with a beach.”
“And if it isn’t clean?”
“It’ll be clean.”
She shut the door. The grey Ford backed out, straightened, and went.
Thorsen finished his taco. He noticed she had left hers, a whole one, untouched in its paper tray.