Robert Crais - Chasing Darkness

“Alan, did you make a deal with Marx to keep your mouth shut?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Marx and Wilts were screaming the charges against Byrd should never have been dropped, but they never brought up your name.”

Levy’s face darkened.

“Don’t forget to have your parking validated on the way out.”

John Chen called as I was leaving the building. He was even more paranoid than before.

CHEN TOLD me to meet him under the Fourth Street Bridge. It was a desolate, industrial part of Los Angeles, where the river was framed by concrete and warehouses, and was mostly known for the cardboard encampments under the bridge. Twenty minutes later I was watching the homeless people when Chen pulled up in an SID wagon. Chen was tall and skinny, and watching him get out of the wagon was like watching a question mark unfold. He studied the surrounding buildings as if he were checking for spies, then hurried to my car.

I said, “There are maybe ten thousand places easier to meet than here.”

“And ten thousand places we could be seen. I’m on my way out to a hatchet murder in El Monte.”

He shoved a manila envelope into my lap, but suddenly pulled it back, his oversize glasses making him look like a suspicious parrot.

“Did you tell anyone you were calling me?”

“Of course not. Did someone say something?”

“Ten minutes after we talked, Harriet pulled me into the hall. She warned me not to talk to you.”

“She used my name? Me, specifically?”

“Not you specifically, but who else would she be talking about? It’s been like that all week. Everything top secret and way off the weird meter.”

He looked around again, and I caught myself looking, too.

I said, “How is Repko being handled differently?”

“I worked her case six weeks ago when she was first murdered-before this stuff with Byrd came up.”

“Okay.”

“Then we get the book, right? There isn’t going to be anything new-I did the full workup and analysis when she was murdered. But last week Harriet tells me they want me to pull more samples from her clothes.”

“You had to exhume her?”

Chen looked annoyed.

“No, man, her old clothes. Her furniture. They found this girl dead in an alley, and now they wanted me to go to her house. I’m, like, why would something from Lionel Byrd turn up where she lived? Harriet says, just go vac the goddamned clothes.”

“So?”

“This girl was murdered almost two months ago. New people are living in her apartment. Her parents cleaned out the place and brought her effects home with them. It’s a forensic nightmare, dude, but there I am with these poor people, the mother crying, her fucking brothers looking like they want to kick my ass, vaccing her clothes.”

“You find anything to connect her to Byrd?”

“I don’t know. You know what a blind test is?”

“No.”

“They gave us samples to compare with the samples I vacced from her clothes, but the comparison samples didn’t come with a name-only a number. Blind. We asked why we were running blind tests, Harriet told us don’t ask. She said if we told anyone we were cooking blinds, she would have our asses in the can. I don’t know if we got any hits or not. Everything went to Harriet, and Harriet made the comparisons.”

Like Marx ordering Poitras to seal Byrd’s home.

“What were you testing?”

“Hair, fiber, the usual stuff.”

“What did the homicide cops say?”

Chen made a derisive snort.

“They wouldn’t discuss the case with us, either. We gave our reports to Harriet, and Harriet did whatever she did with them. I guess she passed them up to the task force. Those task force guys wouldn’t even talk about what they were doing with the divisional dicks, and those guys are pissed.”

Chen was describing a major departure from protocol. Detectives worked closely with criminalists as their cases evolved, and task force detectives almost always worked with divisional detectives because the divisional dicks had relationships with witnesses and the victims.

I thought about what he was saying and what it might mean.

“Did Byrd kill these people?”

Chen looked surprised.

“Well, yeah. Nothing we found suggests or supports anything else. Here, check it out-”

He finally handed me the envelope. Chen had copied the SID work product on Repko and Byrd along with the CI’s crime scene descriptions and the medical examiner’s autopsy protocols.

I skimmed the reports about Debra Repko first. Her condition as described was in keeping with everything I had been told or read on the Internet, and only served to underline how little I knew about the victim. Blood tests showed a.02 alcohol level, which indicated she had consumed at least one but not more than two drinks in the hours preceding her death. This suggested a social drink or glass of wine with dinner, but I had no way of knowing. Unlike the police, I knew absolutely nothing about Debra Repko and her life, which made my guesses meaningless.

I moved on to the reports about Lionel Byrd. Everything confirmed what I had already been told by Starkey and Lindo until I read the list of items documented when Byrd’s body was recovered. A single tablet identified as oxycodone was found beneath his chair.

“Was he taking oxys?”

“He had three in his system along with the booze. He wasn’t incapacitated, if that’s what you’re thinking. He was just numb.”

“He have a scrip?”

“Street buy. The tab we found was a Mexican import. The M.E. figures he used because of the foot. That foot was a mess.”

“So he was in a lot of pain with the foot?”

“Yeah.”

“Bad enough to keep him from driving?”

He would have to leave his house for street drugs or someone would have to deliver them.

“I’m just telling you what the M.E. said. I didn’t examine his foot.”

I got lost in the pages. Most of them were just numbers and charts, so I stopped looking at them.

“Did you find anything that directly connects Byrd to Repko?”

“No.”

“Any of the other victims?”

“Uh-uh, but I don’t know what the blind samples were. I don’t know if they got any hits on those or not.”

The two of us stared at each other until Chen’s pager buzzed. He frowned when he glanced at it.

“Crap. I gotta get going. They’re looking for me.”

Chen opened the door but hesitated before he got out.

“You know what I think? They closed the case, but the case isn’t really closed.”

“You think?”

“What else, bro? You think this girl had Lionel Byrd over for dinner?”

Chen hurried back to his car, and I watched him drive away.

I WANTED to read Chen’s reports more carefully, and opted to read them at Philippe, a cafeteria-style sandwich shop nearby in Chinatown. I could have read them under the bridge or anywhere else, but even world-class detectives get hungry. Philippe claims they invented the French dip sandwich in 1908, and maybe they did, but either way they have been serving the same killer sandwiches ever since. The double-dip turkey is my fare of choice.

I never got to the reports. I had just mounted a stool at one of the long family-style tables when Jack Eisley returned my call about Angel Tomaso. Eisley remembered me, though we had only met the one time I interviewed Tomaso at Eisley’s apartment.

He said, “I saw the thing on the news and thought, hey, that’s Angel’s dude. Talk about blast from the past. And then you call.”

Philippe was so noisy with the lunch-hour crush, I took the phone and the sandwich outside. The double-dip jus ran down my arm.