April Smith: Good Morning, Killer

That’s how we met. Working the same bank robbery, dubbed “Mission Impossible” because the bandit came in through the roof. We don’t always catch the bad guys, but we’re great with the nicknames.

Andrew took the umbrella. I put my arm around his waist even though his jacket was cold and slick. We were walking as fast as possible, an inelegant pair, since I am five four and he was six one, outweighing me by a hundred pounds. He was built like a football player and cared about it. He owned a bench and read weight-lifting magazines.

“So what happened?” I asked of the bike wreck.

“I don’t know why assholes go out in this weather.”

“Because they’re—”

“—The sand is all soggy, look at this, like riding in peanut butter.”

The wind picked up. We ran for it.

“Come into my office.” Unlocking his car. “Normally we don’t let Feds in here. But I have something special for you.”

“I have to go.”

“So do I.”

But we paused, very close, under the umbrella.

“I’m crazy about you, you know that,” he said.

“Yeah, well, you drive me crazy. Is that the same thing?”

The rain drummed on our makeshift roof. In the frank light our faces were eager, ruddy, his high round cheeks shining like a choirboy’s. In those days it lifted me to be with him. It just lifted me, like a kite off the ground that wants to return to the same spot in the sky.

His eyes half closed and I rose up and he leaned down to kiss me and we did and the umbrella tipped and rain went down our necks.

“Fuck this shit,” he said, fumbling for his keys.

“I have to get out of here. You know about the kidnapping?”

“Let me see. Do I work robbery/homicide, or is it Hal’s Auto Body?”

I laughed. “Sometimes a toss-up, huh?”

“I’ve been at the house since four this morning!”

“ You have?”

“First it was a critical missing, then they got the call around three.”

“How are the parents?”

He shrugged. “Distraught. The girl never came home from school. They contacted her friends. Nothing.”

“‘Not like their daughter not to let them know where she was,’” I guessed.

“Not like their daughter,” he agreed.

Our few words implied a complicated professional speculation about who these people were and how the girl had disappeared.

“So what were you doing there?”

“I caught the case.”

“It’s your case? It’s my case, too!”

He snorted indulgently as he often did when I would say things that showed I was missing the precision of what was happening.

“What the hell did you think that page was all about?”

“There were … other possibilities.”

He tried to get past a smile. Code 3-ER-AB . A supply closet in a certain hospital emergency room. Code 3-RVM-AB. The Ranch View Motel.

“I was giving you a heads-up, in case it worked out.”

“I guess it did.”

But I wasn’t so sure.

“Get in the car, I’ve got more.”

“Is this a good idea?”

Teasing. “To get in the car, or to work together?”

Right then I didn’t like it.

“Andrew, how are we going to do this?”

“What do you mean, how?” He was hurt. “I thought it would be good for you at the Bureau. I thought you would get a kick out of it.”

“I did. I do. It’s very cool.”

I smiled and touched his hand, pushed up his sleeve to look at his watch. A kidnapping is a federal crime. The FBI has jurisdiction over the local police. He had to know I would be his boss.

“We better get over there.”

I had become aware of sirens. They might have called an ambulance for the fellow with the bike. Or maybe it was another wreck. Suddenly the light was hurting my eyes, hard off the ocean, steely blue. It was going to be one of those sickening days when the sun comes out after all.

Juliana Meyer-Murphy was in ninth grade. She came from a stable home in which the parents had been married seventeen years, neither previously divorced. There was a younger sister. The house was a two-story Spanish with cast-iron balconies and fat curves and bits of colored tile set at odd places in the stucco. There were fan palms and potted flowers and even a fountain, as if the owners were Hollywood aristocracy instead of manufacturers in the garment business. The front door was painted purple.

The tech vans pulled up to the residence at the same time Andrew and I arrived in our separate cars. A blue sky was shining through a maw in the clouds while fine spray sifted across the rooftops like million-dollar rainbow dust. I grew up in this neighborhood, but these new mini mansions could have eaten our little cottage for breakfast. Like the Meyer-Murphys’, they each had at least one sport utility vehicle in the driveway and a sign for an alarm system on the lawn. A private security patrol car sat side by side in the middle of the street with a unit from the Santa Monica police.

Yet there was also a hum, a sense of ordinary family life, not so different from the days of the blow-up pool in our threadbare backyard. Kids left their trikes out. There was a handmade tree house, an American flag. The lofty pines on adjoining streets were old, with large heavy cones. How peaceful it would be to push a baby in their fragrant shade. A child could walk to the public school, a teenage girl chill on the curb with her friends, even after dark. The cars that passed would carry TV celebrities or dot-com money or entrepreneurs; well-meaning professional folks, if somewhat disengaged.

Maybe. Let’s hope. Nine times out of ten.

The FBI team assembled on the sidewalk. The full-bore response was part of the “new politics” Rick was talking about, an effort to position the LA field office as responsive to the diverse communities it served — especially the wealthier communities, whose constituents hired lawyers to make their hurts known — as well as to reinvent our image as “good neighbor” to local law enforcement.

We were convincing — a clean-cut group, sporting an assortment of windbreakers and trench coats, cropped hair, ties, khakis, neat as flight attendants, the female installers wearing ponytails and lipstick. We looked like cops — what else could we be? Poised, scanning the quiet street in every direction.

Ramon Diaz, the twenty-eight-year-old tech wiz, said it first: “Surveillance is going to be a bitch.”

Every other house seemed to be under construction. Today we had a break because of the rain, but tomorrow there would be laborers’ vehicles and Dumpsters obscuring the sight lines, making it impossible to know who belonged where, what was different, if the bad guys were watching the Meyer-Murphy home.

“The street can be secured, people,” commented Andrew with a patronizing smile.

Heads turned toward the big guy in the leather jacket.

“Do I know you?” answered Ramon, giving it a little strut.

Ramon, like me, was new LA. My dad emigrated from El Salvador, my mom grew up here and was Caucasian. With long wavy black hair and pale almond skin, you would take me for white. Ramon, on the other hand, was pure second-generation Salvadoran, no doubt about it — dark complexion, step haircut and aviator sunglasses, drove a huge black mother truck, married to a Mexican dental assistant with lined lips and attitude.

Andrew made his business card appear between his fingers with a flick.

“Santa Monica … I’m down for that,” Ramon acceded, shaking hands.

Ramon had only been playing, working out the tension, but as we marshaled toward the house he leaned in close so I could smell wintergreen gum.

“Why you siding with that white boy?”