Michael Connelly: Lost Light

We got no hits during that first day of interviews. That is, no interview we conducted resulted in a new direction or focus for the investigation. We hit a wall. No one we talked to had an inkling of why someone would want to kill Angella Benton.

The following day we split up so each detective could visit a production location to conduct interviews. Edgar took the television production out in Valencia. It was a family-oriented comedy about a couple with an only child who connives to keep her parents from having more children. Rider took the movie production nearest her home in Santa Monica. It was a story about a man who takes credit for an anonymous valentine sent to a beautiful coworker and how their subsequent romance is built on a lie that grows inside him like a cancer. I had the second movie production, which was being shot in Hollywood. It was a high-action caper about a burglar who steals a suitcase with two million dollars in it, not knowing that the money belongs to the mob.

As a detective three I was the team leader. As such, I made the decision not to inform Taylor or any other administrators of his company that members of my team would be visiting the production locations. I didn’t want advance notice to precede us. We simply split up the locations and the next morning we each arrived unannounced, using the power of the badge to force our way in.

What happened the next morning shortly after I arrived at the set is well documented. I sometimes review the moves of the investigation and wish I had gotten to the set one day sooner. I think that I would have heard somebody mention the money and that I would have been able to put it all together. But the truth is we handled the investigation appropriately. We made the right moves at the right time. I have no regrets about that.

But after that fourth morning the investigation was no longer mine. The Robbery-Homicide Division came in and bigfooted the case. Jack Dorsey and Lawton Cross ran with it. It had everything RHD likes in a case: movies, money and murder. But they got nowhere with it, moved on to other cases and then walked into Nat’s for a ham sandwich and a jolt. The case more or less died with Dorsey. Cross lived but never recovered. He came out of a six-week coma with no memory of the shooting and no feeling below the neck. A machine did his breathing for him and a lot of people in the department figured his luck was worse than Dorsey’s because he survived but was no longer really living.

Meantime, the Angella Benton case was gathering dust. Everything Dorsey and Cross touched was tainted by their luck. Haunted. Nobody worked the Benton case anymore. Every six months somebody in RHD would pull out the file and blow off the dust, write the date and “No New Developments” on the investigative log, then slide it back into its place until the next time. In the LAPD that is what is called due diligence.

Four years went by and I was now retired. I was supposedly comfortable. I had a house with no mortgage and a car that I’d paid cash for. I had a pension that covered more than I needed covered. It was like being on vacation. No work, no worries, no problems. But something was missing and deep down I knew it. I was living like a jazz musician waiting for a gig. I was staying up late, staring at the walls and drinking too much red wine. I needed to either pawn my instrument or find a place to play it.

And then I got the call. It was Lawton Cross on the line. Word had finally gotten to him that I had pulled the pin. He got his wife to call and then she held the phone up so he could speak to me.

“Harry, do you ever think about Angella Benton?”

“All the time,” I told him.

“Me, too, Harry. My memory’s come back, and I think about that one a lot.”

And that’s all it took. When I walked out of the Hollywood Division for the last time, I thought I’d had enough, that I’d walked around my last body, conducted my last interview with somebody I knew was a liar. But I’d hedged my bet just the same. I walked out carrying a box full of files-copies of my open cases from twelve years in Hollywood homicide.

Angella Benton’s file had been in that box. I didn’t have to open it to remember the details, to remember the way her body looked on the tile floor, so exposed and violated. It still drove the hook into me. It cut me that she had been lost in the fireworks that came after, that her life had not become important until after two million dollars was stolen.

I had never closed the case. It had been taken away from me by the big shots before I could. That was life in the LAPD. But that was then and this was now. The call from Lawton Cross changed all of that in me. It ended my extended vacation. It gave me a job.

I no longer carried a badge but I still carried a thousand different habits and instincts that came with the badge. Like a reformed smoker whose hand digs inside his shirt pocket for the fix that is no longer there, I constantly found myself reaching in some way for the comfort of my badge. For almost thirty years of my life I had been part of an organization that promoted isolation from the outside world, that cultivated the “us versus them” ethic. I had been part of the cult of the blue religion and now I was out, excommunicated, part of the outside world. I had no badge. I was no longer part of us. I was one of them.

As the months passed, there was not a day that I did not alternately regret and revel in my decision to leave the department behind. It was a period in which my main work was to separate the badge and what it stood for from my own personal mission. For the longest time I believed the two were inextricably entwined. I could not have one without the other. But over the weeks and months came the realization that one identity was greater, that it superseded the other. My mission remained intact. My job in this world, badge or no badge, was to stand for the dead.

When I hung up the phone after talking to Lawton Cross I knew I was ready and that it was time to stand again. I went to the closet in the hallway and pulled out the box that contained the dusty files and all the voices of the dead. They spoke to me in memories. In crime scene visions. Of all of them I remembered Angella Benton the most. I remembered her body crumpled on the Spanish tile, her hands held out in such a way, as if reaching to me.

And I had my mission.

The morning after I spoke to Alexander Taylor I sat at the dining room table in my house on Woodrow Wilson Drive. I had a pot of hot coffee in the kitchen. I had filled my five-disc changer with CDs chronicling some of Art Pepper’s late work as a sideman. And I had the documents and photographs from the Angella Benton file spread in front of me.

The file was incomplete because the case was taken by RHD just as my investigation was beginning to come into focus and before many of the reports were written. It was merely a starting point. But after almost four years removed from a crime scene it was all I had. That and the list of names Alexander Taylor had given me the day before.

As I readied myself for a day of chasing down names and setting up interviews, my eyes were drawn to the small stack of newspaper clippings that had yellowed at the edges while closed in the file. I took these up and began looking through them.

Initially Angella Benton’s murder rated only a short report in the Los Angeles Times. I remembered how this had frustrated me. We needed witnesses. Not only to the crime itself but possibly to the killer’s car or getaway route. We needed to know the victim’s movements before she was attacked. It had been her birthday. Where and with whom had she spent the evening before coming home? One of the best ways to stimulate citizen reports is through news stories. Because the Times decided to run only a short that was buried in the back of the B section, we got almost no help from the public. When I called the reporter to express my frustration, I was told that polling showed that customers were tired of stories about death and tragedy. The reporter said the news hole for crimes stories was shrinking and there was nothing she could do about it. As a consolation she wrote an update for the next day’s edition which included a line about the police seeking the public’s help in the case. But the story was even shorter than the first report and was buried deeper inside the paper. We got not one call from a citizen that day.