A Cold and Broken Hallelujah (23 page)

When we’d left Mary on her bench and walked back to the cars, Stan said, “I didn’t know if we should call you. The rookie insisted.”

I looked at Lauren. “You did?”

She nodded and looked back at me. I tried to read her expression. She had gotten pretty good at deploying her inscrutable cop face, but I thought I saw a glimmer of pride and confidence there.

“Good work.”

She let go of the neutral expression, and the left side of her lip curled up. I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t been watching for it.

“Don’t get cocky,” Stan said. “Get in the car.”

“How’s she doing?” I asked.

“Best rookie I’ve trained in five years.”

“She’s the only rookie you’ve trained in five years.”

“Good point,” he said.

I sat in the car for a few minutes after they drove away. Lauren had good instincts. She knew I’d want to hear Mary’s story. Even though it wouldn’t help us crack the case, it told us something about Bishop, it humanized him. Most uniforms would have just taken a statement and forwarded that to me, letting me decide if I wanted to take it further. I tried to remember the conversation we’d had at Jen’s house. How much had I talked about Bishop? She was perceptive. I was starting to think she might make a good cop.

23

E
NERGIZER
LED
FLASHLIGHT
(
NO BATTERIES
).

Patrick was hunched over his desk and swiveling his head back and forth between his desktop computer and the open MacBook next to it. We’d been talking about the night before and his decoy plan. I’d thought it was a shot in the dark, but I tried to keep my doubts to myself. As we spoke, his attention, as usual, was divided between our conversation and the two screens in front of him. He was big on multitasking. Slowly his focus drifted and the conversation dwindled down to noncommittal “yeahs” and “uh-huhs,” and then I let it fade away completely as he was pulled deeper into whatever he was working on at the moment.

Marty came in, looked at Patrick, and didn’t say anything. He turned to me and grinned. “I try not to bother him when he’s curating evidence.”

“I’m not a hipster,” Patrick muttered without looking away from his screens.

Marty and I laughed. Some days the most fun we had was goading Patrick into uttering that line.

When Jen returned from her meeting with the ADA, I told her about Bishop and Mary.

“You get anything solid?” she asked.

“Background. A better sense of who Bishop was. I’m putting together his story.”

“Does that mean ‘no’?”

Patrick leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest, sitting still, as if he was trying to get a better perspective on all the information in front of him.

“What did you find?” I asked him.

“Last night wasn’t a bust.”

“It wasn’t?” Jen said, rolling her chair toward his desk. Marty and I did the same.

“No,” Patrick said. “We got made, but the mystery phone made a call from a block away two minutes after Jen and Lauren left in the decoy.”

“He was there,” I said.

Patrick nodded. “But that’s not the best part.”

“What is?” Marty asked.

“The call he made.”

“Who did he call?” I asked.

“I’m not sure. The number is for another burner.”

“Then how does that help us?”

“Whoever answered it was in Hector Siguenza’s house.”

“Really?” I said, surprised that we finally had a viable link to the shot-caller and that it might not be Benny War.

“Siguenza is the original three kids’ attorney, right?” Marty asked.

“Yes, but it gets better,” Patrick said. “The number from Siguenza’s house is the same number the mystery phone called from Riverside before Jesús’s father was killed.”

Later that day, we had another surprise. Omar’s DNA had been collected when he’d been processed into the system. It was standard procedure to see if arrestees might be involved in other open cases with unidentified DNA evidence. The results showed a familial match. Omar wasn’t Benny War’s nephew. He was his son.

I’d already planned to have a talk with Benny. The new information just gave me one more reason.

24

S
CARF
:
GRAY
/
BLUE STRIPED ACRYLIC FABRIC
,
FRINGE MISSING ON ONE END
.

In the parking garage under Benny War’s office building downtown, I slipped the attendant fifty dollars to let me back into a space close to the “Monthly Only” exit used by the building’s tenants.

Earlier, I had checked out Benicio Guerra’s house so I could anticipate the route he might take when he left work. He had a five-million-dollar home on Naples Island that overlooked Alamitos Bay. Its private dock was big enough for a sixty-foot yacht, but the sport fishing boat moored there only measured thirty-seven. Maybe you really can’t have it all.

The
Which Way, LA?
evening rebroadcast on KCRW was half-over when I spotted Benny’s deep-blue Jaguar XJ drive past me. Following him out of the garage and around the corner onto Ocean, I hoped he’d stop somewhere on his way home.

As we headed east, the last purple glow of the setting sun behind us, I thought again about the DNA results. Somebody involved in this mess had a secret big enough to kill to protect, and I was betting it was Benny. Could the fact that Omar was really his son be it? If so, how could Bishop have found out? How could the three killers have learned about it? Why would he suspect Jesús might know as well? I wondered what the ramifications for Benny might be. Most families wouldn’t kill people over something like that, but the Guerras weren’t like most families. Benny’s brother, Oscar, ran the Mexican Mafia in one of California’s biggest prisons. He carried serious weight. What would he do to Benny if he found out he was Omar’s father? Murder was nothing to him. I couldn’t imagine a week went by in which Oscar Guerra didn’t give an order to kill someone. Shit, for all I knew it wasn’t even a secret at all.

Benny veered left onto Livingston and then onto Second Street. I kept following him, wondering if he’d stop somewhere along the way. Maybe grab some dinner or a drink. He didn’t. His Jag continued all the way over the bridge onto Naples Island. I waited for him to turn, but he didn’t. He passed the Toledo, Ravenna Drive, and even Naples Plaza. So he wasn’t going home. He crossed the second bridge at the end of the island and finally turned on Marina. Was he going to one of the restaurants on the east side of the bay?

No. He took a left into the Whole Foods Market parking lot. Grocery shopping. I thought of Bishop’s shopping cart all the way on the other side of town.

He parked the Jag, and I considered following him inside. I hadn’t been very careful tailing him. There’d never been more than one car between us, and a few times I’d been right on his bumper. I wasn’t concerned that he’d make me. Only that I’d be able to find a place to talk to him alone.

When he came out, cradling his paper grocery bag to his chest with one arm instead of using the handles, he found me leaning against his driver’s side door.

“Detective Beckett,” he said with the expression of a constipated man working too hard on a toilet. “What a pleasant surprise.”

“Hey, Benny.”

“What can I do for you?”

“I just wanted to say hi.”

“Hi,” he said.

When I didn’t say anything, he put the bag down on the trunk of his car, adjusted it carefully, and watched to make sure it wouldn’t slide off. “And?”

“Stay away from Jesús.”

“What?”

“Jesús Solano. Hands off.”

“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

“Bullshit.”

“Okay then. I’ll stay away. Anything else, or can I go now?”

“I’m not sure you’re being sincere.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake. Can you just get to the point?”

“He wasn’t involved. He doesn’t know anything.”

“All right.” He was starting to lose his patience.

So I kept pushing. “Keep your goon away from him.”

The teardrop scar under his eye twitched. “Or what?”

He didn’t realize he’d just crossed the line. “Or everybody’s going to know your son’s looking at death row.”

Anger flashed in his eyes and, just as quickly, disappeared. “So you know about that?” He shrugged, but it wasn’t as casual as he wanted me to believe. “It was only a matter of time before the DNA came back.”

“How’s your brother going to take the news?”

“Like he handles everything else. Exactly the way I tell him to.” I could see the tension in his jaw. It wasn’t as much as I had hoped for, but it was a start.

Still leaning against his door, I eyeballed him hard and said, “That’s not actually the threat anyway.”

“No? What is?” He sighed and feigned exasperation. Benny was used to being the one making the threats, not the one receiving them. “I suppose you’ll never stop until you find some real dirt on me? You’ll never rest until you figure out a way to put me back inside? Something like that?”

“No,” I said, knowing I had to raise the stakes if I wanted him to take me seriously.

“What then?”

“If anything happens to Jesús, I’ll kill you.”

I held his gaze long enough for him to realize that I was serious. He needed to believe that I’d go to any length to protect Jesús. And I needed to believe it too.

His eyes narrowed, and in them I saw the Benny who’d done eight years and broken off a shank in an old man’s liver. And even as I saw him, I knew that he saw me.

I stood up, the Jag rocked slightly on its suspension, and the bag of groceries slid down the sheet metal and off the edge of the trunk. Something glass shattered when it hit the pavement.

25

S
PEED
S
TICK
R
EGULAR DEODORANT
,
TWO-PACK
,
ONE STICK PARTIALLY USED
.

It would take two or three days to get everything set up, so in the downtime I went through the shopping-cart inventory again, looking for something I might have missed or that I hadn’t given enough thought to before, something that might connect to something else or lead me down a new path. What hadn’t I thought of yet? What was there on the list that could help me figure out who Bishop was?

Could any of the clothes tell me anything? There were no logos or any distinguishing marks. They were mostly store brands from Walmart and Target and places even lower on the consumer food chain. The lab hadn’t found traces of anything other than Bishop himself on them. The same was true of the grooming and personal-care items. Nothing unusual about any of it.

That left only the other miscellaneous items. I felt like we’d accounted for the CDs and that the books had been a dead end.

What about the keys? Other than one—an ignition key to an old Volkswagen with the VW logo stamped out of the metal head—they were generic. Doorknobs and deadbolts. One padlock key. None with any distinguishing characteristics. The locksmith had confirmed my suspicion that there was really no way to trace them. In that way, they were similar to Bishop’s postmortem dental records—useful only if we could find something to test them against. If we had a door, we could match a key to a lock, but without it, they were of no use at all.

I looked again at the photo of the key chain. The fob had a blue design on white background sandwiched between two scratched and chipped clear-plastic panels. When I examined it more closely, I realized what the design was: the silhouette of a bucking horse.

There was nothing in the notes about the design. I might even have been the first person to look closely enough at it to determine what it actually was.

A blue horse. I wondered what it might be connected to, so I started Googling. “Blue horse” got about 544 million hits. That narrowed it down.

Blue Horse
was the name of the first album by the Be Good Tanyas. I had a few of their songs in my iTunes, so I started playing them and listened to “Song for R” while I read through the other results.

There was a Blue Horse Saddlery in Los Altos. There was Bluehorse Associates, which was a pioneer in sustainability metrics. There was the Blue Horse Lounge in Ceres, California, which only managed to average two and a half stars on Yelp. There was Blue Horse Charities and Blue Horse Kona Coffee and Blue Horse Rescue and Blue Horse Repertory and the Blue Horse Inn. There was even an episode of
Gunsmoke
called “Blue Horse.” I spent forty minutes clicking on links and searching for anything resembling the logo on the key chain and didn’t see anything at all that came close.

I switched to images and looked at hundreds of blue horses of every imaginable form, and clicked on the “Show more results” button at the bottom of the page until the results field contained almost no blue horses at all, just random images that seemed completely unrelated to the search term.

The final image on the page was a photograph of a woman with bright-red hair in a white dress on a sad-looking mount that had somehow been painted or dyed a pale blue. I felt bad for that horse.

There was nothing that matched the keychain.

I remembered then that a few months earlier, Patrick had shown me how to use Google image search. I dug around in the menu until I found it. I clicked on the little camera in the search field and then clicked on the button that allowed me to upload the photo of the key chain. When I had it uploaded, I hoped for a break and clicked again. No matches.

Shit.

Did that mean that there were no matches because the blue horse silhouette was nowhere to be found online, or was it only because it was a photo of a keychain when what I really needed to search for was the image itself? I had no idea. I made a note to myself to ask Patrick for help as soon as I had the chance.

I sat there for a few minutes trying unsuccessfully to come up with another strategy. The time displayed in the upper right corner of my MacBook screen told me that it wasn’t even two a.m. yet. Fuck it, I thought. Patrick answered on the third ring.

“You up?” I asked.

“No, I’m not up. Who is this? Danny? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I just need a favor.”

“What is it?” He was alert and focused. It doesn’t take long, once you’re assigned to one of the major detective details, to learn to wake yourself quickly in response to a middle-of-the-night phone call.

“I’m trying to do a Google image search and I need some help.”

There was a very long silence.

I said, “Don’t hang up.”

“You called at two in the morning to get help with a Google search?”

“Yes.”

There was another long silence.

“Don’t hang up.”

He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly and loudly. “What do you need?”

I told him.

“That’s just basic image editing. You can’t do that?”

“Uh . . .”

“Okay, just send me the photo.”

He hung up.

I sent him an e-mail with the picture of the key fob as an attachment. Less than three minutes later he sent me a blank reply with a new attachment titled “seriously?.jpg.” I opened it. He’d edited the photo to isolate the image of the blue horse in such a way that it no longer even looked like the photo it had been. Now it resembled nothing so much as a piece of old blue clipart. I saved the file to my desktop, opened the Google image search window again, and uploaded the new file.

There was a hit.

The blue horse was the logo of the Bishop Union High School Broncos.

“Bishop,” Jen said. “I never even thought of the town.”

“Neither did I. Ever been there?”

“That’s the place where you have to put tire chains on your car when you’re going to Mammoth, right?”

Mammoth Mountain was five hours north of LA on the other side of the Sierras from Yosemite and a prime destination for serious Southern California skiers who weren’t satisfied with the smaller and less impressive resorts closer to the city. I’d never been much of a skier, but I’d been there on three or four occasions with Megan and her sister and brother-in-law, who’d spend the day on the black diamond runs while I took beginner’s lessons on the children’s slope for an hour or two before I’d give up and wander around the town or see a movie.

But the town of Bishop was far less memorable. It was one of those places that I only ever think of as being on the way to someplace else. Like Baker or Barstow or Bakersfield. We have a lot of those that start with
B
s.

By eight, I was on the phone with someone named Pam at the Bishop Police Department. The website had told me the PD had fourteen sworn officers and a handful of administrative support staffers. Pam was, apparently, at the top of the civilian employee pecking order.

“So,” she said to me, “all you have is the keychain with the high-school logo on it?”

“Yes,” I said. “That and the fact that the only name anyone here seemed to know him by was ‘Bishop.’ Figure that’s way too much to be a coincidence.”

“I would certainly have to agree with you.” From the sound of her voice, I figured her for early fifties, with a long stretch of service to her organization. She seemed to know the procedures cold. “What would you like us to do?”

“I know you’re a small department. You have enough manpower up there to stay up to date with MUPS?”

“Oh, yes. Because we are so small, we make sure we’re on top of that. Never can tell when we’ll need help from the state.”

“Do you happen to know if your cold cases are on file as well?”

“Back to 2000. Before that’s hit or miss.”

I took that as good news. If Bishop was indeed from the town and had gone missing before the turn of the century, his case might never have been entered into the system. If that was the case, it might mean there was useful information and explain why it didn’t turn up in the MUPS search.

“Pam, if I were to send you a set of prints, do you think someone could check it against your older files?”

“How far back would you like us to go?”

Until you get a hit, I thought. “As far as you can.”

“Well, that could take a bit of work. I’ll have to get the chief to approve it.”

“Would it help if I got a request from my boss?”

“No, let me just run it past him after he’s had his coffee. Get him to sign off on it and expedite it so the request doesn’t sit in a pile until we have a slow day.”

“I’d really appreciate that.”

“Happy to help. You send the prints, and I’ll let you know what he says.”

I sat at my desk doing paperwork until she called me back at a quarter after ten.

“Oh, he grumbled and went on and on about it like he does, LA this and LA that, but he put Lewis on it, so it’ll get done right.”

“Thank you, Pam. I owe you one.”

Late that afternoon my iPhone chimed with a new e-mail. At the next stoplight I looked down and saw the notification on my lock screen that told me it had been sent from an e-mail address that I didn’t recognize. When I opened my inbox and looked more closely, though, I realized it was from an @bishoppd.org address. I hadn’t been expecting such a quick response.

Before I could open it, the phone rang. It was Pam. I pulled over to the curb and stopped the car just in time to prevent the call from going to my voice mail.

“Beckett,” I said.

“Hello, Detective, this is—”

“Pam. How are you?”

“Good. I think I have some good news for you.”

“Did you just send me an e-mail?”

“We found a match for those prints.”

For weeks I’d been trying to figure out who Bishop really was. Not just to help make the case, but because I needed to know, I needed to determine not just his identification, but his identity. Why? What made him different from a dozen other John Does whose murders I had investigated? That question had been darting around the edges of my awareness since the very first night by the river. The fact that he died by fire, as Megan had, was certainly part of the complex equation, but I think I knew even then that there was more to my need. Even as I was about to learn his real name, I still didn’t quite grasp the significance of what I’d been doing all along—idealizing him, transforming him into some kind of a mythic figure, denying the truth of who he really was, who he must have been. Again, I asked myself why he was different, or more accurately, why I needed him to be. I still couldn’t figure it out.