cooperate with us in every way possible. I promise that, in the end, justice will be served.'
'Serve this, dickhead,' Griff Hover said as he grabbed his crotch. 'These humps at ATF are dirty.'
'What about the sheriffs?' one of the other detectives said.
'Hey, the sheriffs might be square badges, but at least they back us up when we need 'em, and they roll on our calls,' Griff said.
I went back into the restaurant and paid our bill.
'Dare I ask?' Jo said.
'Come on, don't put me through it. I saw you listening.' 'This is about to get a lot messier,' she said. What happened was it got a lot deadlier.
Chapter 34
Jo and I split up and I used the walk back to Parker Center to gather my thoughts. I climbed up the stairs to the fourth floor, taking them two at a time, using the brisk climb to clear my head. Frankly, my spirits were a little low.
I was beginning to think maybe I had been wasting my time, like everybody kept telling me. When you got down to it, Jigsaw John retired twenty years ago. Things were different when he was on the job. Back then, each division only had two or three homicides per week. Now we have that many a night. With the growing caseload, there just wasn't time to investigate this way anymore.
In theory, you study pre-event behavior to determine mindset. You look at the victim to see what might have been going on in that person's life to draw the perp in.
If something didn't fit it could signal a mistake in reasoning, but it didn't have to. It was entirely possible that Smiley had just gone nuts and started shooting like Jo said, and then, because he was completely delusional, had chosen not to use his carefully dug tunnel.
What had been eluding me was a plausible alternate theory. Without that I had no line of logic to follow, nothing to work on.
I suppose it was always possible that these two SWAT teams were shooting at each other, but that was a hard concept for me to buy into. SWAT teams were supposed to be the cream of any law enforcement agency. All the evidence to the contrary, I just couldn't believe that SRT and SEB would try and settle a grudge with long guns. Was that valid reasoning, or just me trying to prop up the last vestige of a once-treasured idea? I wasn't sure any longer.
This afternoon I'd probably be getting a call from one of Hatton's federal IOs, with a new list of things to investigate. They'd treat me like a stupid lackey, ordering me to do scut work they were too busy for. They'd want me to background every member of SRT and SEB, looking for somebody with anger-management problems, or a history of unprovoked violence. There was no chance that the police union was going to let any of them be polygraphed.
I reached my cubicle in Special Crimes on the fourth floor, out of breath from running the stairs, and sank into the chair at my desk. Jo and I had divided our workload. She was going to see if she could get her computer genius to run down the insurance policy. Then she was going out to talk with Marion Bell and any of the members of the Rock Stars mountain climbing club she could locate.
We both had Vincent Smiley down as a loner. It would be worth finding out if he really belonged to some survivalist group or Nazi wilderness outfit. If that proved to be a reasonable alternate theory, it would move this investigation off SWAT and onto an antigovernment hate group. Skinheads always make convincing bad guys.
While Jo was running that down I was going to stay on the few hot trails we'd turned and work my way through Vincent's school years.
Busy work?
I looked up Mrs. Kimble's Country Day Middle School in Eagle Rock and placed a call. When I asked for the director, somebody named Rose Merick came on the line.
'Mrs. Kimble is retired,' the sweet-sounding woman said.
One of my little games is to see if, over the phone, I can guess a person's age by their voice tonality. She sounded about sixty. I wrote 60 and put a question mark after it, then circled the number.
This was one of the many ways I attempt to alleviate boredom on the job. Innocent enough, I guess, but boredom, like violence, can change you. Some cops become so tweaked, they carry their emotional remedies to dangerous extremes.
Back in the late seventies, the entire night shift at Devonshire Division was so far into the ozone they devised a weird photo contest. They each put up ten bucks, then ran a monthly competition to see who could come up with the grossest photo. These guys were crawling onto beds with overdosed hookers while their partners snapped Polaroids. That's how screwed up you could get.
Humor is the shield that protects cops from the grim realities we're forced to deal with every day. As your view of life darkens you can quickly come to believe that most of humanity is primal, corrupt, and deadly. Little by little, if you're not careful, your humor becomes so sick that you're crawling into bed with a dead sixteen-year-old junkie just to get a laugh. The more death and human depravity you see, the more disillusioned you become, until one day you find yourself sitting on a toilet in some restaurant bathroom with the door locked and your service revolver in your mouth. After you pull the trigger nobody you work with even has to ask what went wrong or why you did it. They all know you just couldn't find a way to laugh anymore.
Angrily, I scratched out my 60, thinking I had better find a more constructive way to dodge my boredom.
'I'm sorry I can't be of more help,' Mrs. Merick was saying.
She was about to ring off when I had a thought.
'Do you still have records of your student body from the late eighties?'
'My goodness, no,' she said. 'That's over fifteen years ago. And if we do, they're in storage someplace. This is a very small facility.'
'Were you teaching there during that time?' I asked.
'No. Except for Midge Kimble, I don't think anybody from the eighties is still around.'
'Is Mrs. Kimble still in the area?'
'Yes she is.'
'Could you give me her number?'
'I could, but I'd need to see your badge first. We can't just give out phone numbers anymore. Times have changed.'
'How about you call me back at Parker Center. I'm in Special Crimes. Sergeant Scully. You can get the number out of the book so you'll know it's legit.'
'I guess I could do that…'
Three minutes later my phone rang. Rose Merick again. She gave me Midge Kimble's number and address.
I called and reached a recording. If Mrs. Merick sounded sixty, Midge Kimble sounded a hundred. I'm out right now, a raspy voice shouted. Leave your number and I'll call back.
I did as she instructed.
I was gathering my notes, getting ready to head out, when the phone rang again. I snatched it up.
'Scully, it's Cletus.'
Clete James was a friend who worked in the Juvenile Justice Division. He was going to try to cut through the red tape and pull Vincent Smiley's early record.
'Your guy Smiley had some juvie busts in 'eighty-eight and-nine, but I'm in a tug of war with the Pasadena City Attorney,' he said. 'She's being bitchy and set her heels on me. I'm gonna need a court order to open them.'
'Pasadena?' I said, writing that in my crime book with the years '88–89.
