James Patterson: #1 Suspect

Two cops got out of a squad car. I focused on the closest one: Lieutenant Mitchell Tandy.

Mickey Fescoe hadn’t done me any favors. Tandy was a smart-enough cop, but he had a crappy take-no-prisoners attitude.

Tandy had arrested my father, who had owned Private before me. Dad was tried and convicted of extortion and murder. He had been doing his lifetime stretch at Corcoran when he was shanked in the showers five years ago.

Tandy didn’t like me because I was Tom Morgan’s son. Guilt by association. He didn’t like me because Private closed a higher percentage of cases than the LAPD. It wasn’t even close.

And then there was the most obvious irritant of all. I made a lot of money.

I watched and waited as the two cops came up the walk.

Tandy was forty, tanned, a gym rat. His shoulder holster bulged under the tight fit of his shiny blue jacket.

Tandy said, “You know Detective Ziegler.”

“We’ve met,” I said.

Ziegler had a swimmer’s build: broad shoulders, a long torso. He wore a copper bracelet on his right wrist. Gun on his hip. I remembered him now. We’d mixed it up once when he was harassing one of my clients. I’d won. His hair had gone gray since I’d seen him last.

Tandy said, “Where’s the victim?”

I told him and he told me to stay where I was.

Ziegler smiled, said, “Sit tight, Jack.”

I stared out the windows toward the beach. All I could see was foam on the dark waves. My head pounded and I wanted to be sick, but I held everything down as Tandy and Ziegler went to my bedroom.

I heard Tandy’s voice on the phone but not what he said. And then he and Ziegler were back.

Tandy said, “I called the ME and the lab. Why don’t you tell us what happened while we wait for them to come?”

We all sat down, and I told Tandy that I didn’t know who could have killed Colleen or why.

“I haven’t slept in more than twenty-four hours,” I said. “I was a zombie. I started taking off my clothes the minute I walked in. I used the hallway entrance to the bathroom.”

I told him about walking into my bedroom after my shower, expecting to fall into bed. Finding Colleen.

“Very convenient, you taking a shower,” Tandy said. “I suppose you did a load of wash too.”

“My jacket is on that chair. My shirt is on the hallway floor. I threw my pants over the door. My shorts are outside the stall.”

I gave Ziegler the names of Colleen’s next of kin in Dublin and told the cops that the entry log showed that Colleen’s code had been used a half hour before I came home.

“Colleen had the access key to the gate. But it’s not here,” I said. “Someone had to have coerced her, used her key, pressed her finger to the pad at the front door.”

Ziegler said, “Uh-huh,” then asked me to talk about my relationship with Colleen.

“We used to go out,” I said. “And Colleen worked for me. I was very fond of her. After we broke up, she went home to Ireland. She came back a couple of weeks ago to visit friends in LA. I don’t know who. I had lunch with her last Wednesday.”

Tandy didn’t read me my rights and I didn’t ask for a lawyer. I hoped he would have a breakthrough, find something I had missed, but when he asked me to tell him if Colleen and I had had a fight, I excused myself, went to the bathroom, and threw up.

I washed my face and returned to my interrogation.

Tandy asked again, “You have a fight with the girl, Jack?”

“No.”

“You shouldn’t have taken a goddamn shower. That was either insulting or a mistake. We will take your clothes and we will take your drains apart. We’ll check the airport surveillance tapes and dump your phones. That’s just tonight. Tomorrow we’ll do background on the victim. I’m thinking her body will tell us something interesting.”

“Do your best, Tandy. But even you and Ziegler have to know that I wouldn’t kill my ex-girlfriend in my house and then call the cops. It’s a setup.”

“I only want one thing. To find that girl’s killer.”

“I want the same thing.”

I gave Tandy my boarding pass and Aldo’s contact information. I said I wouldn’t leave town. I said I wouldn’t take a piss without asking him first.

The ME came and the CSIs arrived after that. I gave the lab techs my prints, some fresh cheek cells, and my dirty clothes.

“Am I under arrest?” I asked Tandy.

“Not yet,” he said. “You have a friend in high places, Jack. But you can’t stay here.”

I called Rick Del Rio.

Twenty minutes later, I got into his car.

“What the hell happened?” he asked me.

I told the story again.

Rick Del Rio lived in a one-bedroom house on the Sherman Canal, one of four parallel canals bounded by two others at the ends, a whimsical interpretation of Venice, Italy.

The houses were small but expensive, built close together, fronting the canal, backed by little alleys. Rick drove down one of those alleys, lined with garbage cans, telephone poles, garage doors, and the occasional row of shrubs along a back fence.

Del Rio’s garage door was painted green. He pointed the remote, the door opened, and he drove in.

“I don’t have much in the fridge,” he said.

“That’s okay.”

“Half a chicken. Some beer.”

“Thanks anyway.”

We went up a few steps, through the door in the garage that led to the kitchen.

Del Rio said, “No one knows you’re here. Go into the living room. Try to relax.”

I’d been here before. The three-room, cabin-style house was pristine inside. White walls, dark beams, every chair and sofa down filled. Centered amid the furnishings was a coffee table made from a wooden boat hatch, polyurethane-protected against beer and scuff marks.

I collapsed into a chair wide enough for two, put my feet up on the table, and hoped to hell the world would stop spinning.

I heard Del Rio puttering in the kitchen and just closed my eyes. But I didn’t sleep.

I thought about a night seven years before. I’d been flying a CH-46 transport helicopter to Kandahar, fourteen marines in the cargo bay, Rick Del Rio in the seat beside me, my copilot.

It had been a bad night.

A rocket-propelled grenade fired from the back of a 4x4 hit our aircraft, taking out the tail rotor section, dropping the Phrog into a downward spiral through hell. I landed the craft upright, but the bomb had done its work.

Men died horribly. A lot of them. I knew them all.

I was carrying one of the barely living out of the cargo bay when a chunk of flying metal hit me in the back.

It stopped my heart-and I died.

Del Rio found me not far from the burning wreck and beat on my chest, brought me back to life.

I was out of the war after that, worked for a small PI firm out in Century City. Then my crooked, manipulative bastard of a father sent for me.

He grinned at me through a Plexiglas wall at Corcoran, still giving me the business, but this time literally. He handed me the keys to Private and told me that fifteen million dollars was waiting for me in an offshore account.

“Make Private better than it was when it was mine,” he said.

A week later, having been shanked in the shower, he died.

Rick didn’t have a rich father. He was fearless and knew how to use a gun. After his tour, he came back to LA. He did an armed robbery, got arrested, convicted, thrown into jail. When he was released early for good behavior, he came to work at Private and I bought him this house.

I knew everything about Rick. I owed my life to him, and he said he owed his to me.

My friend came into the room, saying my name. I looked up, saw the face only a bulldog’s mother could love. He’s five foot eight inches in his bare feet, an ex-con and a highly trained former US Marine. He was carrying a tray-a tray. Like he was a nurse, or maybe a waiter.