the Viking Funeral (2001) (9 page)

They sat there looking at each other, chewing on this for a long time.

"If I decide to do that, would you go with me?"

"I don't think Jody is alive. I think you're--"

"What?" he interrupted. "Making it up?"

"Why do you want me to go with you?"

"Because it's your responsibility as XO and because you've got heat. Today you won the Medal of Valor..
. A
nd because you owe me." There. He'd finally said it, but he knew it had come at some cost to their relationship.

She looked out toward the ocean, her beautiful profile to him. Finally, she turned back, but she didn't answer. She sat there, pondering thoughts too difficult for him to read or for her to relay. Loss and despair completed the mask of confusion on her face.

Chapter
11.

ALEXA CAME BACK to Shane's house with him, but she was quiet most of the way. He pulled her Crown Vic into the garage next to his Acura. They got out and went into the house, where they found Chooch asleep on the living-room sofa, his algebra book across his chest. Alexa slipped out the door to the backyard while Shane shook Chooch's shoulder.

"Hey, bud," he said.

Chooch opened his eyes and looked up as if Shane had just beamed down from the teleport room of the Enterprise. Then recognition dawned as he yawned. "Just resting my eyes," he said "Last final tomorrow."

"I think you should rest the whole machine," Shane said, taking the book off Chooch's chest. "You know this stuff. Once you've got the formulas, you can't study for algebra. You should get a good night's sleep."

Chooch cocked a wary eyebrow. "Yeah?" he said. "And just what'd you get when you took this course?"

"Doesn't count." Shane grinned. "Statute of limitations ran out on that crime." Shane helped Chooch to his feet. He glanced out the window and saw Alexa on the lawn, her back to the house, staring at the canals, both arms wrapped around her as if she were cold on that warm June night.

"You give her our rock?" Chooch asked, following Shane's gaze out the window.

"No, not yet. Something came up. It didn't seem like the right time."

"Don't screw this up."

"Don't worry. Now get to bed," he said, and Chooch shambled off to his room.

Later that night Shane and Alexa made love in his cluttered bedroom. It started off well enough: some gentle caressing at the beginning, with Shane moving his hand over her soft, tight body, finding the place between her legs, rubbing her while her arms encircled his neck, her breath warm on his ear. But somewhere between the beginning and the end it turned competitive, with both of them on top of the sheets, bathed in sweat, thrusting their hips at each other, climax finally coming in a ferocious moment that more closely resembled anger than love.

Instead of closeness, loneliness followed the event.

"I've been thinking about it, and I changed my mind," Shane said as they lay on his bed in the dark room. "I can't go to Chief Filosiani. If I do that, my career is over. I have zero evidence. I can't prove that I saw Jody or that he called me. If I try and bring all this up-- Medwick and Shephard--I'm gonna look like a jerk."

She rolled toward him and looked at him carefully. "I think that's the best way to handle it," she said, softening as he held her. "Honey, if you insist on pressing this Jody thing, it will turn out bad.... You're almost through your psychiatric review. Once that's done, you're back on the job. Maybe then, if you still feel this way, you could look into it. But if you do it now, you could get pushed into forced retirement."

"But let's suppose I'm right. Let's just say, for the hell of it, that I did see him, and let's suppose he is doing doors. Don't we need to stop him?"

"It's a matter of timing, Shane. Now is the wrong time."

"I'm not going to the chief anyway," he said, knowing that she was right. A move like that would be an event Filosiani couldn't ignore. Without a shred of evidence to back up what he saw, his career would be over. He didn't trust the Day-Glo Dago, despite all the stories going through the department about the legend of Tony Filosiani, the "policeman's policeman." Shane wasn't yet ready to put his entire twenty^year career into the hands of th
e s
hort, round-faced man who talked out of the side of his mouth and looked as though he should be in the corner market, cutting up flank steak.

Chief Filosiani had hit the LAPD like a shaft of white light from the first day he took over four months ago. His first day on the job he had witnessed four cops trying to wrestle a crazy old homeless man through a metal detector at West Hollywood Division. The man had been arrested for walking naked down Santa Monica Boulevard, wearing only a silver biking helmet. He said that he was from the planet Argus and wanted an audience with the President. There were four large uniformed cops fighting with this deranged and panicked old man in front of the booking cage, trying to force him to put on a city jail jumpsuit and go through the metal detector into the holding-cell area. The four uniforms were rolling on the floor, trying to cuff him, when a short, balding man in a shiny suit stepped forward and gave a space salute, slamming his fist onto his chest.

"Welcome to the planet," Filosiani bowed. "It is with great honor and respect that we welcome visitors from your galaxy." The man jumped to his feet and returned the salute, standing naked in front of the four sweating cops.

"I am the interplanetary ambassador for Earth people, and I will be your escort while you are a visitor here. Is this your desire?" the new chief continued in Brooklynese.

"Yes
"
the old man said.

"It is our custom that visitors to the Earth Senate and Presidential Chamber wear the honored robes of the Interplanetary Guest Council. Would this be acceptable?" Filosiani bowed again. "Yes... I will wear your robes," the man said, bowing in return. Filosiani reached out and took the orange city jail jumpsuit out of a startled cop's hands. The old man shinnied into it, pulling up the zipper. Then Tony bowed once more to the old man, who bowed back.

"Now, as is our custom, it is necessary to take you to our Interplanetary Medical Center where you'll be screened for diseases and bacteria from the planet Argus that may be harmful to the people a' Earth. Will this be acceptable?"

"Yes... I understand."

"Our galaxy medical officer here will escort you," he said. Tony gave the old man another space salute, which was returned, then they bowed a fourth time, looking like two Japanese businessmen. One of the cops led the homeless man quietly through the metal detector guarding the entrance to the West Hollywood Division booking cage. He walked peacefully into the holding cell, wearing his new orange Earth clothes and silver biking helmet.

The old man was booked without further incident and taken to the mental ward at County Hospital.

The four cops had by now figured out who the short, round man in the shiny suit was. They stood and listened as Tony gave a lecture on how to handle deranged or disoriented people: "This old man is sick," he told them. "You guys don't fight or wrestle with a sick person. Y'buy into his fantasy and he'll follow ya anywhere. Do it right, fellas," he said, smiling. "Save all this rough-and-tumble stuff for the hard cases."

The story spread like wildfire. After Chief Brewer, L
. A
. was ready for a top cop with a shrewd streak of humanity. But still, Shane wasn't ready to go in front of the little man with his Jody Dean story, at least not yet. Not until he had something more--one piece of concrete evidence.

Alexa elected not to sleep over, and Shane didn't try to stop her. She took her car back to her apartment in Santa Monica. They were badly out of sync and needed time to get past it.

Shane put the little leather box containing her engagement ring inside the top dresser drawer and finally went to bed.

He didn't dream of Alexa and he didn't dream of Jody. Strangely, he had a dream about tomato farming. He was sitting on a huge green tractor, trying to plow a straight furrow so he could plant his tomato seeds. But the tractor kept going its own way, despite his efforts to steer it. The huge green machine left a wavy, drunken furrow behind him. "Dammit," Shane kept saying, as the tractor wavered. "Dammit, stay straight, will ya." It was a difficult night of farming.

Chapter
12.

THE NEXT MORNING Shane went to Mark Shephard's autopsy. The ME performing the examination was Dr. Clyde Miller, a notorious civil-service character. He wore tie
-
dyed T-shirts under his white medical smock and sang old Beatles tunes while he cut up corpses.

"It's been a hard day's night, and I been working like a dog," he warbled at ten A
. M
. to the accompanying screams of a bone saw in the autopsy room. The procedure was taking place in operating theater three of L
. A
.'s huge medical examiner's facilities. The next
-
in-line corpses were on rolling gurneys in the narrow basement corridor, all waiting under ironed green sheets, with red name tags wired festively to their bloodless toes. They were bumper to bumper under the fluorescent tubes, surrounded by the throat-clogging cologne of the newly departed--formaldehyde mixed with preserving chemicals. It was a sad little parking lot of last night's traffic and gun mistakes.

Commander Mark Shephard was the only self-inflicted gunshot death that morning. The physical inspection of the body was just getting under way as Shane arrived.

"Hey, Sarge, welcome. Another opening, another show," Miller caroled, switching momentarily to Cole Porter as Shane entered the room. "Was this poor guy a friend?"

"No, I found the body."

"Hard way to go," Miller grunted, and switched back to the Beatles, altering a lyric here and there as he continued his physical inspection of the lower extremities. "Hey, Jude, don't make it bad / Take a sad song and make it better / Just don't hide the reason you're gone, and this Doc will find the answer, answer, answer, answer." He broke into the "na, na, nas" as he went over Commander Shephard's legs and feet, inch by inch, looking for any exterior abnormalities before making his Y-cut at the sternum, then emptying and weighing the Good Shepherd's heart, liver, and kidneys.

Shane was standing at the head of the table when Dr. Miller suddenly stopped singing and turned to his medical assistant, a black woman Shane had never met, who was functioning as his "diener" during the autopsy. "Whoa, Nellie. Whatta we got here," he said, raising an eyebrow.

Both Shane and the tall African American woman moved to the foot of the table to see what he had found. There, on Commander Mark Shephard's left ankle, on the inside just above his medial mallealous bone, was a small, two-inch, hand-drawn tattoo of a Viking head in profile. A horned helmet dominated the artwork.

Shane looked at the tattoo, then took a small camera out of his pocket that he always brought to autopsies to photograph anything of note for his case folder. He carefully shot the tattoo from different angles.

Two things about the tattoo bothered Shane: First, most police officers would rather cut off one of their fingers than get a tattoo anywhere on their body. They viewed tattoos as a mark of the criminal underclass. Cops who already had one prior to joining the force usually invested in laser surgery to remove it.

Common folklore on the streets was that if you were a criminal, always look to see if your cohorts in crime were tattooed--or "sleeved,
"
as the cons called it--because any guy without a tattoo was immediately suspected of being the Law.

The "no tattoo
"
rule among cops was relatively inviolate, so it bothered Shane that Mark Shephard had this Viking on the inside of his right ankle. But there was something else about the tattoo that bothered Shane even more.

About three years before, the L
. A
. County Sheriff's Department had discovered a band of rogue officers. This group called themselves "the Vikings,
"
and they all had Viking tattoos on their ankles. They were suspected of forcing confessions, usually by administering a little chin music in some dark place. The Vikings were eventually broken up, but this tattoo looked exactly like the ones worn by that bunch of officers. It was in the same place on the body, low on the right ankle, where it could be covered by a sock.

When this rogue group of deputies was first discovered, Sheriff Sherman Block tried to stage an inspection. He wanted to examine every sheriff's deputy's right ankle in search of Viking tattoos. But the Sheriffs Department Law Enforcement Union filed a lawsuit, claiming that such an inspection without probable cause violated the officers
"
civil rights. It became a big deal, and eventually the sheriffs union prevailed. The physical search never took place, but ten deputies were eventually terminated from the original core group.

Mark Shephard had the same tattoo, or at least one a lot like it. Shane wondered if the culture of the Vikings had somehow migrated from the Sheriffs Department to the LAPD. He made a mental note to try to get someone to pull Shephard's file to see if he had ever been loaned out to the sheriffs or had ever been part of one of the cross-pollination task forces. There had been several over the years, and a few were still operating: The Cobra Unit in the Valley was one; L
. A
. Impact was another. Even some of the big serial-killer task forces qualified. On the Hillside Strangler Unit, the Sheriff's Department and LAPD worked closely together because the murders occurred in both the city and county.