Robert Ellis - Murder Season

A sudden burst of bright light flooded the interior of the car. Lena checked the rear window and saw a white van rolling through the curve slowly. As the van idled by, she turned and watched the driver park in an open space five cars up the block. After several minutes, the door opened and Dick Harvey hopped out carrying a small video camera.

He looked up and down the street, but didn’t see them. Cobb’s Lincoln never would have registered. And he seemed too preoccupied by Tim Hight’s house. He was staring at the sunroom-Hight’s silhouette and the bead of light from his cigarette still visible in the dim light cast from his police scanner.

Lena traded looks with Cobb and Vaughan, but no one said anything.

Harvey was taking a second look around the neighborhood. Satisfied that no one was around, he slipped through the gate and into Hight’s yard. Lena watched as he zigzagged his way through the shadows and finally reached the window. After adjusting the lens, he brought the camera up to his eye.

Hight was suffering. And Harvey wanted the shot for another episode of Blanket Hollywood . Thus was the credo of the lowlife. The worldview of modern scum as seen on every TV network every night.

Debi Watson hadn’t returned her call, and Lena worried that the more time the deputy DA took to think it over, the less likely she was to open up and talk. In spite of the hour, Lena had left a second message on Watson’s service when she returned last night and a third this morning as soon as she got up. If she didn’t hear back by noon, she decided to show up at her office and force the issue.

Lena hadn’t slept well last night. She couldn’t stop thinking about that 9-mm Smith. She agreed with Cobb. The killer was using the gun because he wanted it to be traced.

But the question was why? And it was feeding on her.

It seemed more than obvious that it had something to do with what happened eight years ago.

Lena had spent the morning reading about the drive-by shootings of Elvira Wheaten and her grandson. She hadn’t remembered the case when Vaughan first mentioned it to her. But she remembered the eyewitness, Wes Brown, who had been murdered three months after Bennett and Higgins won the trial and Higgins took office. At some point it dawned on her that her memory had been jogged for a reason. Wes Brown had a brother who owned a small record label. She didn’t know Reggie Brown, but she knew people who did and managed to get his phone number.

Although Brown agreed to talk to her and even lived near Lena in the hills above Sunset, he refused to meet in any place other than the exact spot where his brother had been gunned down. That spot happened to be in a small park across the street from the empty lot where Wheaten and her grandson had been killed. Apparently, there were two picnic tables underneath the trees. Reggie Brown’s little brother had been playing chess at the table closest to the street on both days. And that’s where she could find Reggie in forty-five minutes.

Her cell phone chirped. Vaughan had sent her a text message. He was at Parker Center working with Keith Upshaw from the Computer Crime Section. They were just getting started. Upshaw had played a key role in the Romeo serial murders a few years back. He was young and brilliant, an ex-hacker that Chief Logan had recruited after speaking with a judge who didn’t want to see Upshaw go to jail. If anyone from the DA’s office deleted their e-mails thinking that they were history, Lena knew that Upshaw would find them and bring them back to life.

She checked her watch, grabbed a bottle of water, and headed out the door. The location in Exposition Park was a half-hour drive south on Western Avenue. But Lena wanted to avoid the traffic in Koreatown. After twenty minutes working surface streets, she made a left turn and started to cut back to Western. The neighborhood changed and she could see the long line of young African-American men standing at the curb waving down cars. She didn’t need to look at a street sign to know where she was. The street was nicknamed the Avenue of the Ghosts because the young men were as thin as stick figures, and their warm brown complexions had been bleached out to a pale gray from a life on crystal meth. They looked like skeletons-horrific Halloween displays that packed guns, dealt crank, and had no chance of finding their way back.

The sight was more than unsettling and she was grateful when she saw Western Avenue ahead and finally reached the park nestled in between a library and an elementary school.

She found Reggie Brown sitting at the picnic table smoking a cigarette and drinking sweet tea. He looked like he might be twenty-five, and was dressed in a pair of black slacks, a red T-shirt, and a Rolex that he wore loose like a bracelet. As Lena approached the table and introduced herself, she didn’t sense any animosity at all.

“I checked you out,” he said. “You’re David Gamble’s sister. We’ve got the same thing goin’ on, huh?”

Lena shrugged and sat down. “You tell me, Reggie. I’m working with a detective-Dan Cobb-do you remember him?”

“Of course, I do. DC. That’s what we used to call him.”

“I know that it’s been eight years. That you might have forgotten details.”

He took a hit on his cigarette. “I haven’t forgotten anything, Lena Gamble. And I never will. I lost my brother just like you did. Have you forgotten anything?”

A moment passed with Lena not sure how to put it into words. “Something happened,” she said finally. “Something that’s come up in a murder case this week. Something that might point back to eight years ago.”

Brown paused a moment to consider what she was saying. His eyes were bright and expressive.

“I don’t know what you’re dealing with now,” he said. “But you’re right about one thing. Eight years ago something happened, and his name was Steven Bennett. I’m surprised Cobb didn’t tell you. He knows as much as I do.”

She looked away, trying not to show any surprise. Why would Cobb hold out on her after last night?

“Tell me about Bennett,” she said.

“He’s a motherfucker. A world-class motherfucker. Wes was sitting at this table. The empty lot’s right over there across from the library. He hears the shooting and hides underneath the bench. He sees Mrs. Wheaten go down. He sees the faces in the car as they drive off. He hears them laughing. My brother knew what he had to do. He helped Cobb ID every one of them.”

“But then he wouldn’t testify in court,” she said. “He couldn’t come out in the open. It would have been suicide.”

Brown grimaced at the thought. “Snitches wear stitches,” he said. “Wes knew it. I knew it. Cobb knew it.”

“But Bennett didn’t?”

“That’s why he’s a motherfucker, Lena Gamble. Bennett knew it just the same as everybody else. The difference was that he didn’t care.”

“He kept the pressure up,” she said. “He wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

“He’d call three or four times a day. And he wasn’t asking anymore, okay? He was telling. He was screaming at Wes. He was threatening my brother with jail time.”

It hung there. In the heat of the day. Lena could feel the rage building inside her. She wished Vaughan was with her to hear this.

“But your brother didn’t give in,” she said finally.

Brown pushed his tea aside. “The trial comes and goes, and it turns out they didn’t even need Wes. Bennett and Higgins win the thing outright, and Higgins becomes the next DA. The crisis in the neighborhood is finally over. No one knows what Wes did. Everything’s fading into the past.”

Lena could sense what was coming-what had to be coming-from the expression on Brown’s face.