C Box - Three Weeks to Say Goodbye

No reaction of any kind.

“Brian, you’ll be all right,” Cody lied. “Help me get the people who did this. It was Garrett and his Sur-13 pals, right? Help me get them.”

Nothing.

I stepped forward and touched Brian’s naked ankle, the only piece of flesh not ban daged that I could see.

“Come on, Brian,” I said. “You can do it. Was it Garrett?”

Not even a movement.

Suddenly, the room was filled with orderlies led by a nurse, who was angry we were there. “You two, out of here now! He’s going straight into surgery, where we’ve got two trauma docs waiting. How did you get in here, anyway?”

Cody didn’t badge her.

I said, “He’s our friend.”

“The best thing you can do for your friend is step aside,” she said, and we did.

Once they were gone, I used Brian’s dark bathroom to throw up.

“HE WAS SET UP,” Cody said as we paced in the ICU lounge. “Whether Garrett-or his dad-started the communication with Brian about phony photos or came in later I can’t say. But he was lured down there, and they jumped him.”

“Can we prove it was Garrett?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Cody said. “We can try.” He stopped pacing and lowered his voice. “Jack, you’re square in the middle of a police investigation. You’re seeing it from the inside looking out, and it looks pretty fucking confusing, doesn’t it? This is what we do when we don’t have an eyewitness or a confession. There are rarely black-and-white circumstances. You and I are pretty sure Garrett Moreland and his compadres did this because you think you might have heard him in the background. That and all of this crap that’s been going on between you and him. But we can’t reveal everything, can we? Like why we were coming back from Montana when the call came in?”

I shook my head, confused. Instead, I said, “When you flashed your badge and lied to those people, it came pretty easy, didn’t it?”

Cody glared at me. “What are you saying?”

I swallowed hard. “I’m not so sure lying comes as easily to me.”

Cody shook his head. “I’m disappointed in you, Jack. You still don’t get it. It’s what I was trying to tell you a minute ago. There are rarely black-and-white circumstances . We want to get to the absolute truth, but most of the time we fall a little short. I mean, we know what we know-but sometimes we can’t prove it to everyone’s satisfaction because the bar is set too high. A good cop does his best to put the bad guys away. Sometimes we need a little help. Like from our partners”-meaning me in this instance- “or from a judge.”

The Aubrey Coates case was obviously still very much on his mind.

He stepped toward me and reached out and grabbed me by the collar and pulled me into him. “As Margaret Thatcher once said, don’t go wobbly on me now, Jack. Remember, this is all for you.” His eyes shone, and his mouth curled down. I never really felt threatened. We’d fought before in high school, and I cleaned his clock at the time. Of course, that was before he became a cop and learned all kinds of tricks. I said, “I think it was Garrett.”

“You think or you know?”

“It was Garrett.”

He let me go. “That’s what I needed to hear from you- some fucking truth. ”

“But there’s so much that just doesn’t make sense,” I said. “The more I think about it, the less sense it makes. Why does the judge want our little girl? Is he in all of this with his son, or are they operating independently of each other? And how can his wife not even know? How is that possible? Or was she lying to Melissa?”

Cody shook his head and shrugged. “Don’t think I haven’t thought about all of those things for days since this all started. I know there’s a thread that will tie it all together, but right now I come up with nothing.”

“Are there even any photos?” I asked. “Will we ever know now?”

“Let’s hope to hell Brian recovers,” he said. “If he can tell us Garrett was there, it’s a slam dunk. Everything changes. Brian testifies, and no judge would place a baby with a gangbanger convicted of trying to stomp an innocent man to death. We won’t need any photos-it’ll all be over, so think positive. It’s amazing what these doctors can do.”

Cody leaned in to me. “What’s really important is that he comes out of it. Even if he’s not sure who did it, can’t remember-you know what I mean. If we talk to him first, suggest it was Garrett, he’s smart enough to know to run with it.”

At first I didn’t get what he was saying. Then I did. I should have felt something, some physical manifestation of guilt.

“I understand,” I said.

“There you go,” Cody said, punching me in the arm. “There you go. It’s what Brian would want, anyway.”

I WAS ON MY CELL WITH MELISSA, telling her Brian was still in surgery and we hadn’t heard anything from the doctors yet, when I saw Detective Torkleson in the hallway and heard Cody say, “It’s about time!”

Ending the call, I walked over to join them. Torkleson looked tired-rumpled, unshaven. He’d been up for hours- all through the night and halfway into Sunday. He had a thick sheaf of papers in his hand.

“You’ve got to send a car over to Judge John Moreland’s place,” Cody told him, “pick up Garrett, and bring him in for questioning. He either participated in the attempted homicide or he was there to cheer it on. He probably lured Brian down there in that alley.”

“Whoa, cowboy,” Torkleson said. “You’ve got to give me something to link him to the crime before I send a cruiser. I know you’ve had this guy in your sights, but he doesn’t have to talk. What I want is probable cause. Rock-solid PC. His old man’s a judge, don’t forget.”

As if I could.

“What do you have there?” Cody asked.

Torkleson brandished the sheaf of papers. “Here are the call records from the victim’s phone, as requested. Good thinking on your part.” He shook the papers. “Your friend spent a lot of time on his cell, I can tell you that. The easy part was printing out the records. Now we’ve got to spend some quality time on these logs before we start sending out uniforms to pick people up.”

“What about prints on Brian’s phone?” Cody asked.

Torkleson made a face and held his hands out, palms up. “We’re working on that.”

“Meaning what?” Cody growled.

“We sort of screwed that up, Cody. The phone was handled by half a dozen different cops and probably the derelicts in the alley who called it in. The prints on it are smudged. At some point someone must have put the phone in their pocket or something. There are no clean prints. I’ve got our tech guys looking for partials, but it doesn’t look promising.”

“Shit,” Cody said, taking the papers and squinting at the small print. “How far do these go back?”

“That’s just the past month,” Torkleson said. “Like I said, he spent a lot of time on his cell.”

“Jesus, what a talker,” Cody said, looking at the most recent page. His finger jabbed the last number. “Melissa’s cell number,” he said to me. “It’ll take days to get through all of this to find how Garrett set him up.”

“You’re leaping ahead again,” Torkleson said. He paused, looked at me, then back to Cody. “And there’s something else we need to consider before we put all of our eggs in the Garrett basket. Your friend Brian Eastman was very active in the gay community. I assume you know that fact.”

“Of course we know it,” Cody said.

Torkleson said, “Well, there are a couple of gay bars down in that district, you know. From what I’ve found out, he wasn’t a stranger at either one. And if you look at a map, this alley we found him in is a natural off-the-street route from one to the other. We’ve got some officers checking at both bars to see if he was at either one last night, but it’s hard to track down the bartenders or patrons on a Sunday morning. We’ll do it, but it’ll take a few days of good police work.