Robert Crais - L.A. Requiem

“That's right. Thanks for meeting me.”

Jerry Swetaggen hunched over his coffee as if it were a small fire, keeping him warm. He was a big guy like Rusty, with a pink face and ash-blond hair. He looked younger than he probably was, sort of like a bloated fourteen-year-old who'd been dressed in a hand-me-down suit. The suit looked as if it hadn't been pressed in weeks, but maybe he'd been up most of the night.

“Did you get the Garcia file?”

He glanced at the two cops. Nervous. “I could lose my ass for this. You tell Rusty. You guys owe me big for this.”

“Sure. Coffee's on me.” You'd think I was asking for government secrets.

“You got no idea. Oh, man, you don't even come close to having an idea.”

“So far, the only idea I'm getting is that I could've slept in. You get me a copy of the Garcia file?”

“I couldn't get the file, but I got what you want, all right.” Jerry's hand floated to his lapel as if something lived up under the rumpled jacket and he wanted to let it out. He glanced at the cops again. Their backs were made broader by the Kevlar vests they wore under their shirts. “Not in here. Get the coffee, and let's walk.”

“What's the big deal? What's up with Karen Garcia that has everybody so weird?”

“Get the coffee.”

I put two dollars on the table and followed him out. A warm breeze had come up, pinging us with tiny bits of grit.

“I didn't get a copy for you, but I read it.”

“Reading it won't help. I wanted to compare it with another copy I have.”

“You already got a copy? Then why'd I have to risk my ass?”

“The copy I got might have been doctored. Maybe something was left out, and I want to know what. Might just be a little thing, but I don't like it that somebody's jerking me around.”

Now he was disappointed. “Well, Jesus. You want numbers? You want charts and graphs? I can't remember all the shit in Lewis's report.”

“What I want is to know if there was anything about her murder that the cops would want to hide.”

Jerry Swetaggen's eyebrows arched in surprise. “You don't know?”

“Know what?”

“I figured you were already on to this, coming after Garcia. Rusty owes me, man. You owe me, too.”

“You've said that. What do we owe you for?”

“The skin section identified fourteen separate particulates at the entry wound. They're running a spec analysis now-it takes forty-eight hours to cook through the process-so Dr. Lewis won't have the results until tomorrow. But everybody already knows they're gonna find the bleach.”

“The bleach?” Like I was supposed to know what that meant.

“The plastic gives them that. It's always on the plastic.”

I stared at him. “White plastic.”

“Yeah.”

“They found white plastic in her wound.” There was no mention of plastic particulates in the autopsy report I'd read. No mention of bleach.

“The plastic comes from a bleach bottle that the shooter used as a makeshift silencer. They'll probably find adhesive from duct tape on it, too.”

“How do you know what they're going to find?”

Jerry started for the lapel again, but the two uniformed cops came out. He pretended to brush at something, turning away.

“They don't even know we're alive, Jerry.”

“Hey, it's not your ass on the line.”

The shorter cop shook himself to settle his gear, then the two of them walked up the street away from us. Off to fight crime.

When the cops were well down the street, Jerry brought out a sheet of paper that had been folded in thirds. “You want to know what they're hiding, Cole? You want to know why it's so big?”

He shook open the page and held it out like he was about to blow my socks off. He did.

“Karen Garcia is the fifth vic murdered this way in the past nineteen months.”

I looked at the paper. Five names had been typed there, along with a brief description of each. The fifth was Karen Garcia. Five names, five dates.

I said, “Five?”

“That's right. All done with a .22 in the head, all showing the white plastic and bleach and sometimes little bits of duct tape. These dates here are the dates of death.” Jerry smacked his hands together as if we were back East someplace where the temperature was in the thirties, instead of here in the eighties. “I couldn't sneak out the report because they're kept together in the Special Files section, but I copied the names and this other stuff. I thought that's what you'd want.”

“What's the Special Files section?”

“Whenever the cops want the MEs to keep the lid on something, that's where they seal the files. You can only get in there by special order.”

I stared at the names. Five murders, not one murder. Julio Munoz, Walter Semple, Vivian Trainor, Davis Keech, and Karen Garcia.

“You're sure about this, Jerry? This isn't bogus?”

“Fuckin'-A, I'm sure.”

“That's why Robbery-Homicide has the case. That's why they came down so fast.”

“Sure. They've had a Task Force on this thing for over a year.”

“Is there any way I can get a copy of the file?”

“Hell, no. I just told you.”

“Can I get in to read the reports?”

He showed me his palms and backed away. “No way, man. And I don't care how much Rusty threatens. Anybody finds out I've said this much, it's my ass. I'm out of it.”

I watched him walking away, and called to stop him.

“Jerry.”

“What?”

Something with hundreds of sticky feet crawled along my spine.

“Are the five vics connected?”

Jerry Swetaggen smiled, and now his smile was scared. The smirk was gone, replaced by something fearful. “No, man. The cops say they're random. Totally unconnected.”

I nodded.

Jerry Swetaggen disappeared into the murky light that precedes dawn. I put the sheet in my pocket, then took it out and looked at the names again.

“The cops were keeping secrets, all right.”

I guess I just needed to hear a human voice, and even my own would do.

I put away the sheet, then tried to figure out what to do. The sheer size of it was as impossible to grasp as it is to put your arms around the Goodyear blimp. This explained why the FBI were involved, and why the police didn't want me around. If the cops were keeping their Task Force secret, they probably had good reasons, but Frank Garcia would still ask what the police were doing about his daughter's murder, and I would still have to answer. I didn't want to tell him that everything was fine if it wasn't. If I told him what Jerry Swetaggen had just told me, nothing would be secret anymore, and that might hurt the police efforts to nail the shooter. On the other hand, Krantz had kept the truth from me, so I didn't know what they had, or where they were in the investigation. I could take their efforts on faith, but Frank Garcia wasn't looking for faith.

And it was his daughter who had been killed.

I went back into the diner, found a pay phone at the rear by the bathrooms, and called Samantha Dolan's office number. Sometimes the day-shift people come on early, but you never know.

On the fourth ring a guy with a smoker's voice said, “Robbery-Homicide. Taylor.”

“Is Samantha Dolan in yet?”

“Nah. You wanna leave a message?”

“I'll call back. Thanks.”

I bought a cup of coffee to go, then drove over to Parker Center, where I parked across from the entrance in the coral light of the approaching dawn.

I tried again to figure out what I could do and how I would do it, but my thoughts were jumbled and uneasy, and left little room for solutions.

Someone had been stalking people in the streets of Los Angeles for almost two years. If the vics are connected, you call the shooter a hit man. If they're random, there's another name.