Dragon Tears

set, and small brass clock. Heaps of files, loose papers, and photographs were stacked on hers.

Surprisingly, Connie had gotten to the office first. She was standing at the window, her back to him.

“Good morning,” he said.

“Is it?” she asked sourly.

She turned to him. She was wearing badly scuffed Reeboks, blue jeans, a red-and-brown-checkered blouse, and a brown corduroy jacket. The jacket was one of her favorites, worn so often that the cords were threadbare in places, the cuffs were frayed, and the inner-arm creases in the sleeves appeared to be as permanent as river valleys carved in bedrock by eons of flowing water.

In her hand was an empty paper cup from which she had been drinking coffee. She wadded it almost angrily and threw it on the floor. It bounced and came to rest in Harry’s half of the room.

“Let’s hit the streets,” she said, heading toward the hall door.

Staring at the cup on the floor, he said, “What’s the rush?”

“We’re cops, aren’t we? So let’s don’t stand around with our thumbs up our asses, let’s go do cop stuff.”

As she moved out of sight into the hall, he stared at the cup on his side of the room. With his foot, he nudged it across the imaginary line that divided the office.

He followed Connie to the door but halted at the threshold. He glanced back at the paper cup.

By now Connie would be at the end of the corridor, maybe even descending the stairs.

Harry hesitated, returned to the crumpled cup, and tossed it in the waste can. He disposed of the other two cups as well.

He caught up with Connie in the parking lot, where she yanked open the driver’s door of their unmarked Project sedan. As he got in the other side, she started the car, twisting the key so savagely that it should have snapped off in the ignition.

“Have a bad night?” he inquired.

She slammed the car into gear.

He said, “Headache?”

She reversed too fast out of the parking slot.

He said, “Thorn in the paw?”

The car shot toward the street.

Harry braced himself, but he was not worried about her driving. She could handle a car far better than she handled people. “Want to talk about whatever’s wrong?”

“No.”

For someone who lived on the edge, who seemed fearless in moments of danger, who went skydiving and breakneck dirt-biking on weekends, Connie Gulliver was frustratingly, primly reticent when it came to making personal revelations. They had been working together for six months, and although Harry knew a great many things about her, sometimes it seemed he knew nothing important about her.

“It might help to talk about it,” Harry said.

“It wouldn’t help.”

Harry watched her surreptitiously as she drove, wondering if her anger arose from man problems. He had been a cop for fifteen years and had seen enough of human treachery and misery to know that men were the source of most women’s troubles. He knew nothing whatsoever of Connie’s love life, however, not even whether she had one.

“Does it have to do with this case?”

“No.”

He believed her. She tried, with apparent success, never to be stained by the filth in which her life as a cop required her to wade.

She said, “But I sure do want to nail this sonofabitch Durner. I think we’re close.”

Doyle Durner, a drifter who moved in the surfer subculture, was wanted for questioning in a series of rapes that had grown more violent incident by incident until the most recent victim had been beaten to death. A sixteen- year-old schoolgirl.

Durner was their primary suspect because he was known to have undergone a circumferential autologous penile engorgement. A plastic surgeon in Newport Beach liposuctioned fat out of Durner’s waist and injected it into his penis to increase its thickness. The procedure was definitely not recommended by the American Medical Association, but if the surgeon had a big mortgage to pay and the patient was obsessed with his circumference, the forces of the marketplace prevailed over concerns about post-operative complications. The circumference of Durner’s manhood had been increased fifty percent, such a dramatic enlargement that it must have’ caused him occasional discomfort. By all reports, he was happy with the results, not because he was likely to impress women but because he was likely to hurt them, which was the whole point. The victims’ description of their attacker’s freakish difference had helped authorities zero in on Durner — and three of them had noted the tattoo of a snake on his groin, which had been recorded in his police file upon his conviction for two rapes in Santa Barbara eight years ago.

By noon that Tuesday, Harry and Connie had spoken with workers and customers at three hangouts popular among surfers and other beach habitues in Laguna: a shop that sold surfboards and related gear, a yogurt and health food store, and a dimly lighted bar in which a dozen customers were drinking Mexican beers at eleven o’clock in the morning. If you could believe what they said, which you couldn’t, they had never heard of Doyle Durner and did not recognize him in the photo they were shown.

In the car between stops, Connie regaled Harry with the latest items in her collection of outrages. “You hear about the woman in Philadelphia, they found two infants dead of malnutrition in her apartment and dozens of crack-cocaine vials scattered all over the place? She’s so doped up her babies starve to death, and you know all they could charge her with? Reckless endangerment.”

Harry only sighed. When Connie was in the mood to talk about what she sometimes called “the continuing crisis”—or when she was more sarcastic, “the pre-millennium cotillion”; or in her bleaker moments, “these new Dark Ages”—no response was expected from him. She was quite satisfied to make a monologue of it.

She said, “A guy in New York killed his girlfriend’s two-year-old daughter, pounded her with his fists and kicked her because she was dancing in front of the TV, interfering with his view. Probably watching ‘Wheel of Fortune,’ didn’t want to miss a shot of Vanna White’s fabulous legs.”

Like most cops, Connie had an acute sense of black humor. It was a defense mechanism. Without it you’d be driven crazy or become terminally depressed by the endless encounters with human evil and perversity that were central to the job. To those whose knowledge of police life came from half-baked television programs, real-life cop humor could seem crude and insensitive at times — though no good cop gave a rat’s ass for what anybody but another cop thought of him.

“There’s this Suicide Prevention Center up in Sacramento,” Connie said, braking for a red traffic light. “One of the counselors got sick of getting calls from this depressive senior citizen, so he and a friend went to the old guy’s apartment, held him down, slashed his wrists and throat.”

Sometimes, beneath Connie’s darkest humor, Harry perceived a bitterness that was not common to cops. Perhaps it was worse than mere bitterness. Maybe even despair. She was so self-contained that it was usually difficult to determine exactly what she was feeling.

Unlike Connie, Harry was an optimist. To remain an optimist, however, he found it necessary not to dwell on human folly and malevolence the way she did.

Trying to change the subject, he said, “How about lunch? I know this great little Italian trattoria with oilcloth on the tables, wine bottles for candleholders, good gnocchi, fabulous manicotti.”

She grimaced. “Nah. Let’s just grab tacos at a drive-through and eat on the fly.”

They compromised on a burger joint half a block north of Pacific Coast Highway. It had about a dozen customers and a Southwest decor. The tops of the whitewashed wood tables were sealed beneath an inch of acrylic. Pastel flame-pattern upholstery on the chairs. Potted cacti. Gorman and Parkison lithographs. They ought to have been selling black-bean soup and mesquite-grilled beef instead of burgers and fries.

Harry and Connie were eating at a small table along one wall — a dry, grilled-chicken sandwich for him; shoestring fries and sloppy, aromatic cheeseburger for her — when the tall man entered in a flash of sunlight that flared off the glass door. He stopped at the hostess station and looked around.