The Gods of Guilt (Mickey Haller 5) (22 page)

For five seconds we just stared at each other. But finally Marco blinked. He cracked his door and slowly backed out of the car. He then leaned down and looked back in at me.

“Jennifer Aronson.”

I spread my hands as if waiting for whatever it was he still had to say.

“Who?”

He smiled.

“Just tell her if she wants to know about me, she can come right to me. Anytime. No need to sneak around the courthouse, pulling files, whispering questions. I’m right here. All the time.”

He closed the door and walked off. I watched him as he went down the sidewalk and turned the corner. He didn’t go into Fulgoni’s office, even though he had claimed that was the reason he was in the vicinity and had spotted me.

Soon Earl got back in behind the wheel.

“You okay, boss?”

“I’m fine. Let’s go.”

He started the car. My frustrations and feelings of vulnerability got the best of me and I snapped at Earl.

“How the hell did that guy get in the car?”

“He came up and knocked on the window. He showed me the badge and told me to unlock the back. I thought he was gonna put a slug in the back a my head.”

“Great, and you just let me jump in the back with him.”

“There was nothin’ I could do, boss. He told me not to move. What did he say?”

“A bunch of self-deluding bullshit. Let’s go.”

“Where to?”

“I don’t know. Head toward the loft. For now.”

I immediately got on the phone and called Jennifer. I didn’t want to scare her but it was clear that Marco knew of her efforts to background him and check other cases he had been involved in.

The call went straight to message. As I listened to her recorded voice, I debated whether to leave a full message or just tell her to call me. I decided it would be best and perhaps safest to leave her the message so she got the information as soon as she turned on her phone.

“Jennifer, it’s me. I just had a little visit from Agent Marco, and he is aware of your efforts to document his history. He must have friends in the clerk’s office or wherever you’re pulling records. So I’m thinking you might want to keep what you got on that but switch back to Moya. I’m going up to see him tomorrow in Victorville and I’d like to know all there is to know by then anyway. Let me know that you got this. Bye.”

Cisco was next and this time my call went through. I told him of my encounter with Marco and asked why there had been no heads-up from the Indians who were supposedly watching me for a tail. I wasn’t too pleasant about it.

“No warning, Cisco. The guy was waiting for me in my fucking car.”

“I don’t know what happened but I’ll find out.”

He sounded as annoyed as I was.

“Yeah, do that and call me back.”

I disconnected the call. Earl and I rode in silence for a few minutes after that, with me replaying the Marco conversation in my head. I was trying to figure out the motives for the visit from the DEA agent. First and foremost, I decided, was the threat. He wanted to put a chill on my team’s efforts to research his activities. He also, it would seem, wanted to steer me away from the Moya case. He probably felt that Moya’s conviction and life sentence were relatively safe with the inexperienced Sly Fulgoni Jr. at the helm of the habeas petition. And he was probably right. But hitting me with the description of Moya as the worst thing this side of the devil was just a front. Marco’s motives weren’t altruistic. I didn’t buy that for a moment. All in all, I concluded that Marco was trying to spook me because I had spooked him. And that meant we were pointed in the right direction.

“Hey, boss?”

I looked at Earl in the rearview.

“I heard you telling Jennifer in that message that you’re goin’ up to Victorville tomorrow. That true? We’re goin’ up?”

I nodded.

“Yeah, we’re going. First thing in the morning.”

And in saying so out loud I also sent a silent fuck-you to Marco.

My phone buzzed and it was Cisco, already back with an explanation.

“Sorry, Mick, they fucked up. They saw the guy arrive and get in the car with Earl. They said he showed a badge but they didn’t know who he was. They thought it was a friendly.”

“A friendly? The guy has to badge Earl to get in the car and they think he’s a fucking friendly? They should’ve called you on the spot so you could call me and stop me from coming out with my goddamn zipper down.”

“Already told them all of that. You want me to pull them off now?”

“What? Why?”

“Well, it seems pretty clear we know who jacked your car, right?”

I thought about Marco’s claim that he had just happened to see me while he was checking out Fulgoni because of the subpoena. I didn’t buy that for a moment. I agreed with Cisco; Marco had jacked my car.

“Might as well save the dough,” I told Cisco. “Pull ’em off. They weren’t much in the early-warning department anyway.”

“You want us to pull the GPS off the car, too?”

I thought about that for a moment and my plans for the next day. I decided I wanted to taunt Marco, show him I was unbowed by his little visit and unspoken threat.

“No, leave it. For now.”

“Okay, Mick. And for what it’s worth, the guys are really sorry.”

“Yeah, whatever. I gotta go.”

I disconnected. I had noticed out the windshield that Earl was cutting through Beverly Hills on Little Santa Monica Boulevard on the way to my house. I was starved and knew we were coming up on Papa Jake’s, a hole-in-the-wall lunch counter that made the best steak sandwich west of Philadelphia. I had not been there since the nearby Beverly Hills Superior Court was shuttered in the state budget crisis, and I had lost business that would bring me to the area. But in the meantime I had developed a Legal Siegel–type craving for a Jake steak with grilled onions and pizzaiola sauce.

“Earl,” I said. “We’re going to make a stop for lunch up here. And if that DEA agent is still following, he’s about to learn the best-kept secret in Beverly Hills.”

A
fter the late lunch, I was through for the day. My calendar was clear and I had no further appointments. I considered heading back downtown and seeing if I could line up a visit with Andre La Cosse to go over some things related to the upcoming trial. But the occurrences of the past few hours—from Legal Siegel’s lecture to the meet with Sly Jr. and the surprise visit from Marco—led me toward home. I’d had enough for the time being.

I had Earl drive to the loft so he could get his care where he had left it after coming in for the staff meeting. I then drove home, stopping only long enough to change into clothes more appropriate to hiking through the wilds of Fryman Canyon. It had been a long while since I’d seen my daughter in the goal at practice. I knew from the school’s online newsletter that there were only a few weeks left in the season and the team was getting ready for the state tournament. I decided to go over the hill to watch and maybe escape from thoughts on the La Cosse case for a while.

But escape was delayed—at least on the ride up Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Jennifer called me back and told me she had received my message and my direction to step back from the search on Marco.

“I’d asked for some court files on other ICE cases because the stuff on PACER seemed incomplete,” she explained. “I bet one of those counter clerks called him and told him.”

“Anything’s possible. So just stick with Moya for now.”

“Got it.”

“Can you get me whatever you’ve got by the end of the day? I’ve got a long drive up to the prison tomorrow and I could use the reading material.”

“Will do . . .”

There was a hesitancy about the way she said it. As though there was something else she wanted to say.

“Anything else?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I guess I am still wondering if we are going the right way with this. Moya is a better target for us than the DEA.”

I knew what she meant. Casting suspicion on Moya in the upcoming trial would be a lot easier and possibly more fruitful than throwing the light on a federal agent. Aronson was getting at the fine line between seeking the truth and seeking a verdict in your client’s favor. They weren’t always the same thing.

“I know what you mean,” I said. “But sometimes you gotta go with your instincts, and mine tell me this is the way to go. If I’m right, the truth shall set Andre free.”

“I hope so.”

I could tell she was not convinced or something else was bothering her.

“You okay with this?” I asked. “If not, I can handle it and you just deal with the other clients.”

“No, I’m fine. It’s just a little weird, you know? Things are upside down.”

“What things?”

“You know, the good guys might be the bad guys. And the bad guy up in prison might be our best hope.”

“Yeah, weird.”

I ended the call by reminding her to get the summaries of her research to me before I hit the road to Victorville the next morning. She promised she would and we said good-bye.

Fifteen minutes later I pulled into the parking lot at the top of Fryman Canyon. I grabbed the binoculars out of the glove box, locked the car, and made my way down the trail. I then left the beaten path to get to my observation spot. Only when I got there, the rock I had positioned had been moved, and it looked like someone had been using the spot, possibly to sleep at night. The tall grass was matted down in a pattern that would fit a sleeping bag. I looked carefully around to make sure I was alone and moved the rock back to the way I’d had it.

Down below, soccer practice was just getting under way. I put the binoculars to my eyes and started checking out the north net. The goalkeeper had red hair in a ponytail. It wasn’t Hayley. I checked the other net, and there was another goalkeeper but she wasn’t my daughter either. I wondered if she had switched positions and started scanning the field. I checked each player but still didn’t see her. No number 7.

I let the binoculars hang from my neck and pulled my phone out. I called my ex-wife’s work number at the Van Nuys Division of the District Attorney’s Office. The pool secretary put me on hold and then came back and told me Maggie McPherson was unavailable because she was in court. I knew this was not correct, because Maggie was a filing deputy. She was never in court anymore—one of the many things I was held responsible for in the relationship, if it could still be called a relationship.

I tried her cell next, even though she had instructed me never to call the cell during work hours unless it was an emergency. She did take this call.

“Michael?”

“Where’s Hayley?”

“What do you mean, she’s at home. I just talked to her.”

“Why isn’t she at soccer practice?”

“What?”

“Soccer practice. She’s not there. Is she hurt or sick?”

There was a pause, and in it I knew I was about to learn something that as a father I should have already known.

“She’s fine. She quit soccer more than a month ago.”

“What? Why?”

“Well, she was getting more into riding and she couldn’t do both and keep up with her schoolwork. So she quit. I thought I told you. I sent you an e-mail.”

Thanks to the multitude of legal associations I belonged to and the many incarcerated clients who had my e-mail address, I had more than ten thousand messages sitting in my e-mail file. The messages I had cleared earlier in the day while in the DA’s waiting room represented only the tip of the iceberg. So many were unread that I knew there could have been an e-mail about this, but I usually didn’t miss messages from Maggie or my daughter. Still, I wasn’t on firm enough ground to argue the point, so I moved on.

“You mean horse riding?”

“Yes, hunter-jumper. She goes to the L.A. Equestrian Center near Burbank.”

Now I had to pause. I was embarrassed that I knew so little about what was going on in my daughter’s life. It didn’t matter that it had not been my choice to be shut out. I was the father and it was my fault regardless.

“Michael, listen, I was going to tell you this at a better time but I might as well tell you now so I know you got the message. I’ve taken another job, and we’re going to move to Ventura County this summer.”

The second impact on a one-two punch combination is supposed to land harder. And this one did.

“When did this happen? What job?”

“I told them here yesterday. I’m giving a month’s notice, then I’ll take a month off to look for a place and get everything ready. Hayley’s going to finish the school year here. Then we’ll move.”

Ventura was the next county up the coast. Depending on where they moved to, Maggie and my daughter would be anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half away. There were some distances even within Los Angeles County that could take longer to travel because of traffic. But still, they might as well have been moving to Germany.

“What job are you taking?”

“It’s with the Ventura DA’s Office. I’m starting a Digital Crime Unit. And I’ll be back in court again.”

And of course it all came back on me. My losing the election had dismantled her career at the L.A. County DA’s Office. For an agency charged with the fair and equal enforcement of the laws of the state, the place was one of the most political bureaucracies in the county. Maggie McPherson had backed me in the election. When I lost, she lost, too. As soon as Damon Kennedy took the reins, she was transferred out of a courtroom and into the divisional office, where she filed cases other deputies would take to trial. In a way she got lucky. She could’ve gotten worse. One deputy who introduced me at an election rally when I was the front-runner ended up with a transfer out to the courtroom in the Antelope Valley jail.

Like Maggie, he quit. And I understood why Maggie would quit. I also understood that she would not be able to cross the aisle to defense work or take a slot in a corporate law firm. She was a dyed-in-the-wool prosecutor and there was no choice about what she would do—it was only where she would do it. In that regard I knew that I should be happy that she was merely moving to a neighboring county and not up to San Francisco or Oakland or down to San Diego.

“So where are you going to look out there?”