He rang Wally from the shoulder of 61 before he started the engine.
“My father says Granddad was asleep.”
A long pause. Somewhere behind Wally a television was talking to itself.
“Then go to your hearing,” Wally said, “and bring me your father. I’ll keep an eye on the Stone Bay road.”
Claire drove him to the airport in Duluth on the Sunday in the dark before dawn, at minus twenty-five.
The van stayed in her yard, backed in beside the shop with its block heater plugged into the wall. He had one bag, the same one he had got off a bus with in Los Angeles. Gus slept on the back seat. The heater roared.
At the terminal she pulled in to the kerb and did not turn off the engine. A plough was working the far end of the car park with its lights going round. There was nobody else.
He took the key out of his pocket. Ray’s key, worn smooth, with the strip of masking tape round the head and the capital R in black marker. He held it out.
“Start it every day,” he said. “Let it run. Ray would want it run.”
She looked at the key in his hand. Then she took it, and closed her fingers on it, and put it in the breast pocket of her coat and zipped the pocket shut.
He got out, and got his bag from the back seat, and stood on the kerb in the cold with the bag in his hand, and she leaned across and wound the passenger window down.
“Come back,” she said.
He stood there. The cold went in through his coat. Behind him the doors of the terminal slid open and shut on nobody.
He did not answer.
She looked at him through the open window with her face perfectly still.
“I know,” she said. “You’re a Thorsen. You don’t say things.”
The plough went round at the far end of the car park, its light sweeping across the snow and across her face and away.
“I’ll come back,” he said.
She looked at him.
“Huh,” Claire said. And she wound up the window, and put the truck in gear, and drove away down the curve of the terminal road towards the highway, and he stood on the kerb with his bag and watched her taillights until they were gone.
The wind came down Temple Street at a quarter past eight on Tuesday morning like something let out of an oven.
It was the Santa Ana, hot and dry and smelling of eucalyptus, and it had blown the smog out to sea. It was twenty-two degrees, and the eighth of December.
Thorsen stood on the pavement outside the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center in his one suit, and sweated. His hands kept going to his pockets for gloves that were in a motel room on Sunset Boulevard.
Brooks came up beside him with two coffees, in a dark suit with her badge on her belt, looking as though she had slept four hours, which was two more than usual.
“You okay?”
“It’s hot.”
“It’s December.” She drank. “This is what December is. You’ve been gone too long.”
He had spent Monday with a deputy district attorney called Ruth Asante, who wore flat shoes and gave him one piece of advice. “Answer the question he asks. Not the one he means.”
At nine that night, in the motel on Sunset, the 7-Eleven phone had buzzed on the nightstand.
Asked Curt again where he went on the 30th. Says he doesn’t answer to me. St. Paul still sitting on Gary’s files and the particulate. Queue like the DMV. W.
He had read it twice and turned the light out.
The witnesses waited in the corridor outside Department Thirty.
Rosa Reyes was on a bench against the wall in a black dress, with her chin up. Beside her, Mateo, an inch taller than in September, in a white shirt and a borrowed tie, dark red, two sizes too big for him. He saw Thorsen and swallowed, and went still. He lifted his chin a quarter of an inch. Thorsen lifted his back.
Standing a little way off, in uniform, with her cap under her arm, was Sergeant Dana Whitfield of the Glendale Police Department, keeping an eye on the boy without seeming to.
Then the clerk put her head out and called his name.
Department Thirty was wood panelling and a seal on the wall and an empty jury box, because there is no jury at a preliminary hearing. There is only a judge, deciding whether there is enough. In the front row of the gallery sat a small, straight-backed old woman in a grey coat, with a framed photograph in her lap, face up: a young man in dress uniform and white gloves, in front of a flag, trying not to smile and not managing it. Mrs. Ibarra, Brooks had told him. From Downey. She’s come to every hearing. She brings him.
At the defence table, two men.
Royce Dwyer was bigger than Thorsen remembered, or the orange made him so, with a face that was not quite symmetrical any more, where the surgeons had put the plate. He looked at Thorsen without expression, and turned back. Beside him, older, grey, sat Frank Lusk, reading the seal on the wall. Between them sat Martin Kessel, fifty and very tanned, with his chin on his steepled fingers like a man about to forgive somebody.
The judge was a heavy, patient man called Salas, with half-glasses and a voice like a cello. Ruth Asante took Thorsen through it in forty minutes, the way she wore her shoes: flat, unhurried, without ornament. The garage in Highland Park. The ledger. The yard by the river and the pit and the night.
Then Kessel stood up, and buttoned his jacket, and smiled at him.
“Mr. Thorsen. You were a police officer for nineteen years.”
“Yes.”
“And in that time you received a sustained complaint for excessive force. In Van Nuys.”
“Yes.”
“A suspect was hospitalised.”
“Yes.”
“You put him there.”
“Yes.”
Kessel waited for more. None came. He moved on.
“And you’ve blamed my client’s employer, Castellan Risk Group, for the end of your career ever since. Isn’t that right?”
“No.”
“No?”
“I didn’t know their names six years ago,” Thorsen said. “I learned them in September.”
“In September,” Kessel said pleasantly, “you were living in a van registered to a dead man, Raymond Okafor. A van that wasn’t yours.”
“It is now.”
“Because his widow gave it to you.”
“She gave me the key. Three times.”
Asante, at the prosecution table, did not look up from her binder. But Thorsen saw her pen stop.
“And in that van you drove to the Castellan site by the river on the night in question, and broke in.”
Thorsen thought about Ruth Asante saying answer the question he asks.
“I went in,” he said. “I didn’t break anything. The fence had a gap in it.”
“You entered private property, at night, without permission.”
“Yes.”
“And you put my client” — Kessel half turned, an open hand towards Royce Dwyer, as though introducing him at a party — “in the hospital. He has a titanium plate in his face today.”
“He came to my motel room at night with a stun gun,” Thorsen said. “I didn’t invite him.”
“Move to strike,” said Kessel mildly. “Non-responsive.”
“Denied. It was responsive,” said Judge Salas, without looking up from his notes. “Move on, Counsel.”
Kessel did the vendetta and the dead partner for another half hour, well, and Thorsen answered in as few words as it would take and came off the stand sweating through his shirt. He sat behind Mrs. Ibarra, and Rosa came in and sat beside him.
Curtis Vane gave his evidence in county blues like a man reading a manifest. When he named Royce Dwyer as the driver of a white Silverado on a dark street in Frogtown six years ago, Rosa made a very small sound, and Thorsen put his hand over hers on the handbag, and she held on to it.
“Lunch,” said Judge Salas, at five past twelve. “One-thirty.”
They went out onto Temple Street in the wind.
Brooks went ahead, talking into her phone. Rosa was steering Mateo towards the bus shelter on the corner where the food trucks came at noon, the big red tie blowing over his shoulder.
Thorsen saw the tow truck first.
It was a white flatbed with VALLEY PRO TOWING — SUN VALLEY on the door, parked in the red zone beyond the bus shelter. A man was leaning against the front of it with his arms folded, in his thirties, big, with Royce Dwyer’s thick neck and Royce Dwyer’s jaw, before the plate. He was looking at Mateo.
Thorsen did not hurry. He walked. He went past Rosa and Mateo without looking at them, and out across the pavement towards the tow truck in the hot wind, with the palm fronds skittering round his shoes.
Lonnie Dwyer unfolded his arms and pushed himself off the truck. He was smiling. He had seen Mateo see him.
“Hey, Frog,” he said, past Thorsen, quite loud. “You remember me? I remember you.”
Then Thorsen was there.
He took the man’s right wrist in his left hand, quite gently, the way you take somebody’s wrist to look at a watch, and turned it, and in the same movement put his right hand flat between Lonnie Dwyer’s shoulder blades and walked him forward one step, and laid him face down across the hot white bonnet of his own tow truck, and brought the wrist up behind his back until it reached the place where a wrist stops wanting to go any further and the rest of the body agrees with it.
Lonnie Dwyer made a sound into the paintwork. His cap had come off. One of his boots kicked once, against the bumper, and stopped, because the kick had cost him something in the shoulder.
“Don’t,” Thorsen said, very quietly, close to his ear. “There are deputies at that door. There are cameras on that building. And the boy is watching. Just lie there.”
Lonnie lay there.
It had taken perhaps eight seconds.
Brooks arrived at a walk, putting her phone away, with a pair of handcuffs already in her other hand, as though she had expected to need them since the week before Thanksgiving.
“Well, look at this,” she said. “Lonnie Dwyer. We’ve been worried about you. Your mother hasn’t seen you since Labor Day.” She snapped one cuff on the wrist Thorsen was holding, and took the other wrist from where it was spread on the bonnet, and brought it round, and closed the second cuff. “Lonnie Dwyer, you’re under arrest for attempting to dissuade a witness, section one thirty-six point one of the Penal Code. You have the right to remain silent. I’d use it.”
Two deputies were coming across the pavement from the courthouse doors at a jog. Brooks held up her badge without looking at them, and they slowed.
She went through Lonnie’s pockets. From the inside pocket of the work jacket, folded in four, she took a sheet of printer paper, unfolded it, and held it out so that Thorsen could see it.
It was a picture from a map website, a street view: a small stucco house in Pico Rivera, pale green, with a chain-link fence and a bougainvillea over the gate and a child’s bicycle on the path. Somebody had written the address across the top in blue ballpoint, and underneath it, Rosa’s sister.
Brooks folded it again along its creases and put it in an evidence bag.
“That’s going to make my afternoon,” she said. “Thank you, Lonnie.” And to the deputies: “He’s mine. Northeast Homicide. I’ll walk him in.”
Mateo was standing by the bus shelter where Thorsen had left him, with Rosa’s hands on his arm. He had watched all of it, like a boy who has seen something done properly for the first time and is trying to work out how.
Brooks came back from the deputies’ car five minutes later, without Lonnie. When she got close Mateo said, low, so his mother would not hear, though his mother heard everything:
“You still got my — thing?”
“Property room,” Brooks said. She did not lower her voice at all. “It’s got a number now instead of your name. Twenty-one, with a permit, we’ll talk.”
Mateo looked at the tow truck, which a deputy was now photographing, and at Thorsen. Then he nearly smiled, and put it away, and turned round and let his mother take him to the food truck, with the red tie blowing over his shoulder in the hot wind.
Mateo testified at half past two. He identified the photographs he had taken on a cracked phone with a frog on the back, and said when, and where, and how, and Kessel had six minutes at him and got nothing, because there was nothing to get. Mateo walked back to his seat with his shoulders very straight and his tie askew, and Rosa put her hand on his back. Whitfield testified at three, and looked at Frank Lusk the whole time. He looked at the seal on the wall.
At twenty to five Judge Salas took off his half-glasses and folded them and said, in his cello voice, that he found there was sufficient cause to believe that the offences charged had been committed and that the defendants had committed them, and that Royce Dwyer and Frank Lusk would be held to answer, and that arraignment in the Superior Court was set for the twenty-second of December. Dwyer did not move. Lusk closed his eyes.
In the front row, Mrs. Ibarra took the photograph out of her lap and held it up, facing the bench, for perhaps three seconds, and put it down again.
Denise was waiting on the steps outside.
She was in a navy dress and a proper church hat, which the wind was doing its best to take, and she was looking at him with the expression that said she had known exactly what he was going to do before he did it.
“Danny,” she said.
He bent down, and she put her free arm round his neck and held on, hard, and then stood back and looked at him and straightened his tie, which did not need it.
She held on to her hat. “Christmas Eve. Six o’clock. You’re coming.”
“I said I would.”
“Ray told me what your promises were worth.” She looked at him from under the brim. “Eventually, a lot. And you’re bringing your parents.”
He stared at her.
“Your mother and I talk,” Denise said. “Every Sunday. Since October. She calls me after church, I call her after mine, depending on whose turn it is.” She saw his face. “Two doctors and a scrub nurse, Danny. What did you think we talk about? You. Your mother says you never call her.”
“I call her.”
“Not enough.” She let go of the hat for a moment to pat his cheek, and caught it again as the wind lifted it. “Six o’clock. I’m making the jollof and she’s bringing something with cabbage. I’ve heard about it. Bring your father. I want to meet him.” She turned to go down the steps, and turned back. “And bring a coat. You’ll have forgotten what cold is, when you go back.”
He watched her go down the steps in the hot wind, holding her hat, to where Rosa and Mateo were waiting, and the three of them went off together towards Broadway as though they had been arranging it for weeks.
Brooks drove him to San Pedro after six.
She pulled out onto the 110 going south, twenty miles of red taillights going away into the dusk, and did not talk.
Coming down the long last grade towards the harbour, he saw the cranes.
They stood along the water on Terminal Island in a long row, lit white and red, with their booms raised against the night like the necks of animals at a water hole. Giraffes, he had called them, when he was five.
The freeway ended, the way it always had, and became Gaffey Street.
“Left here,” he said. “Then the second right. It’s the one at the top.”
It was a small white house with a red tile roof and a lemon tree in the front yard, on a steep street above the harbour. There was a light on in the porch, and in the kitchen. Brooks pulled in to the kerb and did not turn off the engine.
“You want me to wait?”
“No.”
“Okay.” She looked at the house. “Thorsen.”
“What?”
“Whatever it is,” she said. “You’ll ask it right.”
He got out, and got his bag from the back. She pulled away, and the Subaru’s taillights went down the hill and round the corner and were gone, and he stood on the pavement in the warm dark with the smell of the lemon tree and the sea.
The front door opened before he reached it.
His mother stood in the doorway in an apron with flour on it, small and fierce and grey, with her reading glasses on a chain and a wooden spoon still in her hand. She looked at him without saying anything at all, and her face crumpled and straightened again, and she said, “Daniel Karl Thorsen,” in a voice that shook, and pulled his head down to her with the hand that was not holding the spoon, and kissed him on both cheeks, hard, the way she had when he was six.
Over her shoulder, at the end of the hall, in the yellow light from the kitchen, his father was standing in the doorway.
He was thinner than Thorsen remembered. Greyer. He had his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead and one hand on the door frame, as though he needed it, and he did not come forward. He only stood there, and looked at his son, and his face was very tired, and very gentle, and afraid.