'Why not?'
'You don't want to know.'
I frowned. 'Don't tell me you hacked this bank's computer to get this.'
'Ve haff our veys,' she said, using a corny German accent. 'I have a friend in computer sales who doesn't mind skating the edges, and she knows how to write spaghetti codes. I'll get her to hack the insurance company's computer. Because of the medical file, all this life insurance stuff is confidential.'
'Shouldn't we just serve a warrant on Fireman's Fund?'
'Smiley's dead, so whatever we find now can't hurt him. This isn't going to end up in court, anyway. You want to waste time we don't have getting a no-recourse warrant that we can't file until Vincent is buried?'
'Probably not. What else?'
She reached over and picked up more printouts. 'Here's everything I could hack and track on Smiley from the county and municipal sites. Most of it's probably useless, but at least it's a start.'
She divided the stack in two. 'I've arranged it chronologically by date, starting with county health records, preschool, middle and elementary, his GED in 'ninety-five, on through to the shoot-out statements and death certificate. Couldn't find his birth records. What do you want, Smiley in short pants or Smiley in Kevlar?'
'Smiley in short pants.'
She handed me one of the stacks. We spent the next hour reading and making notes. At midnight we were both cranking off yawns, but we had a record of his life as far as county and municipal records took it.
'I'm shot,' she said. 'Wanta meet first thing for breakfast? Work out a doorbell schedule?'
'Yeah. My brain is fuzzed.' I closed my notebook and got to my feet. She followed me to the door. I was just starting to leave, when she reached out and took my arm, stopping me. It was the first time that she had actually touched me.
She looked earnestly at me for a moment, then let go of my arm and cleared her throat. 'Listen Shane, you say you used to be a loner, that you didn't let people in, but now your personal life is richer. Exactly how did you change that? No matter how hard I try, I'm afraid to trust anyone.'
'It was pretty easy once I got the knack,' I said, and she leaned forward as if I was about to give her the secret of life.
'When you don't like yourself, it's damn hard to have much of a relationship with anybody else. All you've gotta do is start finding things to like about yourself. Once you learn what they are, find somebody you care about and give those feelings away. What it boils down to is: In order to get, you've gotta give.'
'That sounds like New Age bullshit,' she replied skeptically.
'Some of the best answers are the easiest,' I said. 'But at the same time, the easiest answers can be the hardest to understand.'
Chapter 32
Doctor gouda called Jo at 8 a. M., just as she was leaving her house to meet me for breakfast. She called me and we changed our plans. It was a little after nine when we walked into the print bay of the sheriff's old lab. Doctor Chuck E. Cheese was bent over, studying two enlarged blowups of a fingerprint through a magnifying glass the size of a hotel ashtray.
'I think I got something,' he said without turning around. 'Enough, at least, to have a serious talk with this guy.' He straightened up, hefting his big belly off the table. This morning he was decked out in a tent-sized dashiki large enough to camp under.
'This is the comparison print we rolled at the sheriff's SWAT house yesterday afternoon.' He handed Jo a blowup of a right index finger. 'We think it belongs to a guy named Pat Dutton. It more or less matches that partial on the three-oh-eight you guys found. Dutton's one of the long guns on the SEB Red team out there.'
'The Red team?' I looked over at Jo, surprised that it wasn't someone on Scott Cook's Gray team.
'How sure are you of this match?' Jo asked, holding the blowup and examining it carefully. She had regained her composure from last night, and looked fresh in a crisp white blouse, black slacks, and a blazer.
'As I told you before, this is not a great latent.' Doctor Gouda picked up a second photograph, which was of the partial taken from the casing we'd found across the street from Greenridge's house. He laid it next to the photo of the print they'd rolled yesterday, then started pointing out similarities.
'These two tented arches are pretty good matches. Here's half a central pocket whorl that's pretty much on the money. This isle ain't a bad match. Would I take it to court? Probably not. Would I make an investigatory judgment based on it? You bet.'
Gouda looked up. 'That footprint you plastered was identified by the grunts in soles and holes,' referring to the footprint and gunshot lab. 'Follow me,' he said, and waddled out of the fingerprint bay into the room next door.
The GSR lab was a windowless room given over to several large electron microscopes, used for breaking down and reading barium and antimony, the chemicals used to determine gunshot residue. There was one long table for identifying footprints. The three young criminalists working on the equipment sat, heads bowed, eyes pressed to various viewfinders.
'Hey, Ruben, you got that bootprint from Mission Street?' Gouda asked.
An African-American criminalist rose up from a microscope and handed Gouda a photograph from a stack on the footprint table. Clipped to the back of the footprint photograph was some catalogue material from the Danner Boot Company.
'Your print came from a Striker CTX Danner Terra Force jump boot, size twelve,' Gouda said. 'The print was pushed out a little, but it looks like a narrow foot. Maybe a double-A.'
Gouda handed it to Jo, who glanced at it before passing it to me. I knew that Danner boots were big with most cops. They came in a lot of styles. Police officers bought them because they were light, durable high-tops with thick rubber soles and good traction.
Gouda took the photo back. 'This one looks pretty fresh. Right from the box. No nicks, cuts, or flaws. It'll be hard to make a positive match.'
Thirty minutes later Jo and I were standing in the parking lot of the old crime lab watching for Chief Filosiani to arrive. Ten minutes later he pulled his maroon Crown Victoria into the lot. He was talking on his cell phone as he got out, just closing it up as he approached.
'That was Bill Messenger,' he said, holding up the phone. 'He got an arrest warrant. We're staying off the scanners to keep the news crews away. Gonna meet our SWAT unit out at South Fetterly in twenty minutes and pick up Pat Dutton.'
'Chief, we only have four identifiers,' I said. 'The criminalist inside says this print's probably not going to stand up in court. We need to polygraph Dutton, if he'll sit for it.'
'That'll be up to his lawyers,' Tony said.
Just then Sheriff Messenger arrived in the passenger seat of a LASD black-and-white. His face was drawn. He had the arrest warrant in his hand.
We piled into our separate vehicles and followed Sheriff Messenger out to East L. A.
An LAPD SWAT van and a support SUV, along with three black-and-white escort vehicles, were lined up at the curb across from the public library, a block down from the sheriff's SEB building. LAPD SWAT was organized, more or less, the same as SEB, only each LAPD team had ten guys, instead of eight.
Tony and Bill had elected not to tell the Justice Department about the arrest until after it was over. ATF was the agency investigating William Greenridge's murder, but both chiefs reasoned that emotions were running way too high. If they were notified, SRT would want to serve the warrant. Under these sensitive conditions, that seemed like a really bad idea. Messenger reasoned it would be far easier and less risky for him to arrest his own officer, but to keep the LAPD SWAT in reserve.
After they briefed the LAPD SWAT team leader on how they wanted to serve the warrant, the four of us got into the Crown Vic. We drove up to the corner and parked next to SEB's long driveway. Sheriff Messenger used a
