Good Morning, Killer

Eunice said, “I think we should call for backup. Get the guys outside—”

“I know,” I said, “but I’d rather—”

Suddenly the door flew open. My hand went to my weapon.

Eunice yelled, “Watch out!”

Lynn screamed, “Don’t shoot my husband!”

We ducked and rolled.

Ross was standing in the doorway of the bathroom, holding a gun.

“Easy! Easy!” he cried. “Don’t shoot! Jesus Christ!”

“Put the weapon down on the ground. Now.”

He put it on the ground. It was not a gun. Worse. A cell phone.

Six

An emergency briefing was called for 5 p.m.

The Santa Monica Police Department was housed in back of City Hall, in a white Moderne building with blue trim that suggested sand and sea. The police department was in the lee of the building, away from sand and sea, looking at an overpass. If you narrowed your vision to exclude the high-rise hotels, condominiums and gangland ghettos, you might get an idea of what they saw when they built this public works project in the thirties: a sleepy little beach town sparkling with optimism in which all that would be required of the local police would be the management of drunks and theft of the occasional Packard.

They built it small and it stayed small — quaint, by today’s antiseptic standards. The vintage sixties station in Long Beach, where my grandfather, Poppy, served, looks hip by comparison, and the Bureau downright millennial, I thought, quickening my pace across the Civic Center plaza. It was four-thirty and already several Bu-cars were lined up in the lot.

The entryway held a couple of metal chairs and drawings on the wall by schoolchildren. Turn right and a brown arrow led to the holding cells. The hallway to the left was short and dully lit, lined with cases of patches and awards. Over a doorway swung the kind of lacquered wooden sign they used to have in Western movies over the saloon, only this one read Licenses. I hoped they never remodeled the place. I hoped they turned it into a museum.

As I hurried up the staircase leading to Investigations, a woman clattered right into my arms.

“Ana! All the computers went down!”

Margaret Forrester, the police liaison working with the Bureau on the kidnap, had a flair for the dramatic, but as she gripped my elbows, eyes wide, it was clear she was not kidding.

“I am in such trouble!” she stuttered. “Where is your guy?”

She was a beautiful woman, about thirty years old, with layers of glossy brown hair and a face too decorative, too perfectly formed, with its strong dark eyebrows, squarish cheekbones and egg-white skin, to belong in a police station. You had to wonder at the natural selection that produced such a striking girl from a pair of alcoholic dirt-poor Oklahoma drifters, who, according to her, literally lived in the dirt, picking apricots and peaches in the San Joaquin Valley. Nobody at the station looked like Margaret, nobody dressed like Margaret, in a well-cut camel sheath with a shawl collar, low-slung belt and suede boots. Her usual accessories were an ID tag and a water bottle. There was a tinkle about her I would later identify as seashells. She had a business on the side: fashioning natural objects into “body adornments” that she sold to stores. She often wore her own creations. That day it might have been a concoction of abalones, or Native American bracelet charms with feathers.

“Which guy are you talking about?”

“The tech. There he is — Ramon!” she called up the stairs. “Come down here, sweetheart, I’ll show you where the circuit breaker is!”

Ramon’s work boots thundered out of the dimness and he appeared, holding a flashlight.

“I think it might be under there.” Margaret indicated an unlikely hatch beneath the staircase. “But your computers are what’s causing the problem.”

“It ain’t our computers, Chiquita,” Ramon said disdainfully. “It’s your freaking wiring,” grimacing as he pried at the warped door.

“Hope you like spiders,” I called humorously.

Ramon answered with a Spanish phrase he knew I would not understand. Margaret’s hands were still somehow all over me as we chugged upstairs. But then she was all over everyone, shouting, “Congratulations! I heard Brian made the soccer team!” to a busy secretary, or giving the thumbs-up to a baffled cadet behind the desk. The waiting area was basically a wooden pew underneath a pot of fake begonias furry with mold, the yellowing walls smudged with finger marks, as if people had been crawling up them for decades.

Lean bicycle cops and sour overweight detectives were going in and out and Margaret had a word or a touch or a hug for each. Following in her wake was like looking through a camera in which smiling fish-eye faces loomed and fell away. The smiles were tolerant, and I wondered why. She had no experience and was no help to me. Working with the locals was tricky enough — they already resented the Feds. You hoped your contact person would be a professional, but here was an individual better suited to hostessing a martini bar.

When I said something like, “What’s with that Margaret Forrester?” Andrew responded with a sharp rebuke that Margaret Forrester was a police widow. Her husband (they called him “the Hat” because he shaved his head) had been one of Andrew’s closest buddies, an undercover narcotics detective murdered by a gang; but he had been assaulted and killed while off-duty, and therefore his pension benefits were denied. Out of compassion, and because the Forresters had two young children, the department gave Margaret this job.

“I hate spiders!” she confided. “They eat my cashmere sweaters.”

I have never owned a cashmere sweater or a new gold Lexus sedan, but Margaret Forrester had these things. They lived in a tiny cottage in the wrong part of Venice, but she would throw birthday parties for the police chief at the swank Loew’s Hotel, only the select people invited. She had been, according to the careless scuttlebutt you pick up at two in the morning, stunningly ambitious for her husband, to the point of leaking stories about his cases to the press so reporters would call and include his name. But now, according to the blue code of sacrifice, we were all supposed to cut Margaret Forrester a lot of slack.

We entered a single space where twenty investigators were jammed together. A lot of them wore telephone headpieces to block out the noise. Since they redesigned our offices I missed the camaraderie of our old bull pen, but in this arrangement you had to smell your neighbor’s aftershave all day and look at the ass end of his computer monitor slopped over your desk. In fact it was hard to see where one desk ended and another began, as they seemed to work on one square surface billowing with papers and personal clutter. The walls were brick and the window blinds maroon. It felt like we had walked into a bad TV crime show from the seventies.

Our team was arriving for the briefing, talking in small edgy groups. Everyone in the field was fired up about something, hoping their little piece would complete the mosaic and be remembered as the one link that led to the safe recovery of the victim. You don’t make big salary jumps based on big scores at the Bureau; merit accrues from the steady accumulation of good choices and the intelligent analysis of details, most of which goes into a file that nobody but a supervisor will ever see. Briefings in high-visibility cases give the rare opportunity to show your moves in varsity play.

Computer techs were crawling under the table as two agents frantically tried to re-create the timeline by tacking brown butcher paper on the wall, unrolling it over notices of bake sales and group discounts to Universal Studios, while two others followed with marking pens and printouts from Rapid Start, copying in large letters the sequence of developments in the case.

Big-time federal agency.

Rick Harding strode in a few minutes short of 5 p.m., wearing a navy blue suit and wraparound sunglasses that made him look like a corporate president on steroids, sliding his briefcase down the conference table past a