'A black Rottweiler.'
'Oh, yeah. Everybody knew that dog. Vicious. I'm a mom, and I was always worried he'd get loose. I have morning carpool this year, so I saw him out walking that beast a lot when I was heading out.' She smiled again. 'My kids are on midsemester break. Little rascals conned me into two days at Disneyland this morning.' She looked at her watch. 'Guess I should get going.'
'You ever see mounds of dirt piled in the backyard in June or July? I understand he was building a bomb shelter last summer.'
'How could you miss it? Who builds a bomb shelter anymore? That was a sixties thing.' Then she smiled at me. 'Could I have those back?' she said, looking at the cartridges in my hand.
'Sorry. It's evidence.'
'Oh… okay. I was just going to show them to my husband. He was curious about all that stuff in Vincent's garage-the guns and boxes of ammo.' She started to fidget. 'I'm sorry if I did anything wrong coming up here. They took down the crime tape, so I figured it was okay. The guy lived just down the street from us. Then last week, he goes completely nuts, starts shooting up the neighborhood. It's just-I needed a way to close the door on it, is all.'
'I understand.'
She nodded. 'Well, better get going, I have teacups to ride.'
'Ride carefully,' I smiled.
She walked away from me, picking her way out of the ashes, then down the walk on strong, muscular legs.
There was something about her that seemed familiar, but I couldn't pin it down. I watched as she drove her Suburban up the street and parked in her driveway half a block away. I turned back and surveyed the burned-out house, wondering how the mindless insanity that had caused all this could live in such a peaceful neighborhood.
Chapter 11
You're coming at it from the wrong direction,' Alexa said. 'You're wasting precious time investigating Vincent Smiley's death. He's not the problem anymore.'
We were finally at the Acropolis restaurant in the Valley, sitting at a patio table, but our plates of moussaka were untouched and cooling as we argued.
'Honey, if I don't start there I won't even know what questions to ask.'
'You've only got two, or possibly three outcomes. Either ATF knew about the automatic weapons and C-four in that house, withheld information critical to the safety of the deputy serving the warrant, and they're lying, or they shared the information with the sheriff's warrant control office like they said, and the sheriffs are lying.'
'What's the third?' I asked, because I sure couldn't see it.
'ATF was just on their way back from a training day like they claimed, and heard the shoot-out on the radio and nobody's lying.'
'They couldn't hear it without that TAC frequency in their truck.'
'Right. And you can't prove it's not there, because you can bet by now that truck has the frequency installed. Besides, you didn't have a warrant to search the damn thing.'
'Picky, picky, picky.'
'Hey, Shane, no kidding. You're on the wrong path here. Vincent Smiley isn't the problem.'
'He had a dog-a Rottweiler, and the sheriffs didn't find the remains.'
'So what?'
'It's a loose end. I don't like loose ends.'
'It's nothing.'
'If he had boxes of C-four, where did he get them? It's so regulated by the government there's not even a black market for that stuff.'
'I don't know Shane, but it's not what you're supposed to be investigating.'
'He wore Kevlar and built a bomb shelter. He was hacked into a secure military computer called Cactus West. People who wear Kevlar and build bomb shelters do it because they want to stay alive. I don't think Smiley was trying to get the cops to kill him.'
'We have death-by-cop suicides wearing body armor all the time. Look at the North Hollywood bank shoot- out. Those guys knew they were gonna die. Smiley built his bomb shelter almost ten months ago. Things change. Maybe he took a bad hit of acid. Maybe he was dusted on PCP and went off the rails. Look, the only reason LAPD is on this thing in the first place is because the ATF shooting review cleared their SRT, and the mayor thinks it's a bad finding. Stick to that.'
'If it's a bad finding, then give it to our Professional Standards Bureau.' Our new, media-friendly name for Internal Affairs. 'They're good at scoping out OIS mistakes.' I continued. 'What the hell am I doing with it anyway?' I was raising my voice a little, and the people at the adjoining tables were beginning to look over at us with annoyed expressions.
'I can't give it to Professional Standards. It's not an LAPD shooting. And you're the only one Bill Messenger will accept. Don't make it more than it is. Just do the job.'
'Is the moussaka not to your liking?' the maitre d' asked. He had drifted over to our table, displaying an elegant presence. His manner and tone made it clear that he thought we were destroying the restaurant's classic ambience.
'It's fine,' I snapped.
'Bag it,' Alexa barked.
The maitre d' waved a waiter over. He cleared the plates while both of us tried to calm down. After he left I leaned toward her and lowered my voice. 'Alexa, you've been a cop for almost as long as I have.'
'Are we gonna start comparing pedigrees now?' she hissed.
'In all those years, how many times have you seen somebody who wants to be a cop start by filing applications with the Arcadia P. D.?'
She was silent for a long time. 'So?' she finally said.
'So, my guess is that Smiley started out by applying to the LAPD or the sheriff's department, then, once he failed those entrance requirements, he worked his way down the list to the smaller departments. Santa Monica, Pasadena, Glendale, Arcadia.'
'Again, so what?'
'Since Arcadia wouldn't give us their psych package on him, how about we look in our own academy apps? We do preliminary psychological tests. Maybe he's in there.'
'Why do you keep coming back to him? For God's sake, Shane, do you think he's still alive or something?'
'No. I trust the DNA match. What I think is, maybe a sheriff or ATF agent knew something about Smiley, or maybe Smiley had something on one of them. He gave the Arcadia P. D. a DNA sample, maybe he raped some cop's sister and this was disguised payback. Maybe he had knowledge about some cop's misdeeds and needed to be silenced. Somebody is lying about that warrant, and I'm looking for the motive. I just want to keep my options open.'
'Maybe ATF just screwed up and that's why they're lying,' she said, voicing the solution both the LASD and LAPD were rooting for.
'I still want to see if he ever applied to our academy.'
'Shane, don't make me order you to do this my way.'
'And don't force me to disobey my division commander's direct order. At the center of this, something's very wrong. Smiley hates cops, but he's walking around pretending to be one? He has boxes of C-four, nobody knows where it came from. The vest, the bomb shelter, it's all inconsistent. It needs to be looked at.'
