He frowned at me. 'Cops. All you people wanna do is mow my grass. Ain't nothing else you care about.'
'Right. That's us, the Jungle Jack detail. Now, let's go. I want the computer.'
He took a minute before moving toward the back of the shop. The laptop was my stolen property, but I knew this was going to be much quicker. To retrieve it on a fencing beef, I would need the numbers on the warranties, which were back in my desk in Venice Beach, not to mention a pound of LAPD paperwork and grief I didn't have time for.
After another minute Jungle Jack returned carrying Alexa's laptop and charger. He set it on the counter and I turned it on. It was working, but the LOW BATT was flashing so I shut it down, closed it, and turned to leave.
He stopped me and said, 'That's three hundred fifty.'
He was a crafty bastard who sensed that I had reasons for not wanting to go through the department. I didn't have time to argue, and I didn't want him to file a complaint against me downtown, so I pulled some more fifties off the wad of cash I had taken from home and dropped them on the counter.
'Don't break the circle, brother,' he said as he picked up the cash.
'Then don't break my balls,' I replied and walked out the door onto the street with the computer.
I needed a quiet place where I could work and didn't want to sit in my car parked at the curb. I drove a few blocks down Seventh to the old Ford Hotel. I parked in a side lot under a dusty palm tree, went inside, and paid the indifferent desk clerk twenty bucks. He handed me a key to a first-floor room that was at the end of a narrow, paint-deprived corridor. I let myself into a dingy rectangle with a window that faced a brick wall. I closed the door, set the laptop on the bed, and plugged it into the wall socket. Then I sat on the stained red bedspread and waited for it to boot.
Most of what was on the computer was case-related, and contained a lot of correspondence from Alexa to her division commanders at the four bureaus. For the past month, she had been working on crime stats for all the detective divisions, attempting to evaluate the crime complaint to clearance rate percentages for each section she supervised. It was a tough problem, because some bureaus, like Central and South, had a lot of gang activity, which included stranger shootings, car jackings, and payback homicides. These cases were notoriously hard to put down and the detectives in those divisions usually had a higher open unsolved percentage. The Valley Bureau, on the other hand, encompassed a lot of bedroom communities like Foothill and Devonshire, where detectives generally had a much easier go of it. When some jealous husband catches his wife with the golf pro and bludgeons her to death with his nine iron, it's pretty much bing-bang-boom! Gotcha.
Alexa was attempting to balance all this for performance evaluations. She had the stats for each detective division that she supervised, divided into different criminal categories: Rape, Robbery, ag-assaults, Child or Spousal Abuse, Property Crime, and Homicides. The clearance rates for each division were broken down by both arrests and by how many of the cases the D. A. had agreed to file. On another page, there was a running total of cases tried and their eventual outcomes, how many busts resulted in convictions. She was tabulating not only the arrests, but also the the quality of the arrests. It was extremely comprehensive and I marveled at her thoroughness.
As I scanned file after file, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. I found a Special Ops file and used her password to open it. dark angel wasn't listed. I kept opening and closing windows like mad, my fingers flying over the keyboard. By mistake, I opened an unsecured folder marked 2005 overtime deployment projections. It was hardly the place to store sensitive documents, but since it was already open in front of me, I scanned it. The first few files were statistics, spreadsheets, archived correspondence, and e-mails. All of it, as expected, dealt with manpower deployment and overtime projections. I was scrolling and scanning, not paying too much attention, when all of a sudden there it was, hiding in plain sight: the dark angel, file. It contained twenty or more e-mails from Alexa to David Slade and from Slade to her. All were sent within the last two months. As I began to read, my heart went cold.
Dark Angel…
My thoughts are always on you. We must meet tomorrow night. I can't go another day without holding you. You need to give me another floor score. I ache to see you. How 'bout Cryto 457?
Love Hambone
Hambone Alexa's Academy nickname. I scrolled down further and read one from Slade to her.
Dear Hambone, Time away from you is agony. This time Watts is the key. I cant be away from my Queen. It's all about lost performance and royalty. Don't make me wait, darling. I've got WYD and plenty of ammo. I'm in the cut, waiting.
Love Dark Angel
They were all like that. Twenty of them. Hers more straightforward. His full of hip-hop sex references, always signed Dark Angel.
Toward the end, I read one posted where the tone was different. It sounded ominous. Actually, it read like a blackmail threat.
Hambone, You better come with everything I asked for NOW. I'm losing patience. You know I'm not kidding. This isn't much fun. You don't come through I'll go to the Old Man. Those are my conditions. You have 24 hours to deliver.
Dark Angel
I couldn't read any further.
As I looked at the e-mails and my vision blurred. All I kept thinking was, Why? How could she betray me like this?
I didn't know what to do. If this file ever fell into the wrong hands, it would become the motive for Slade's murder.
Chapter 28
I lay back on the stained red bedspread in the Skid Row hotel and tried to come to grips with it. All of the e-mails had been written over the last few months. Had I been too busy with my caseload to give Alexa what she needed? The enormity of her betrayal swept in on me like a black tide, washing pieces of my well-being away with each violent surge.
I tried to examine the past two months, going back to late May, when the e-mails started. Had I sensed anything different between us? Had there been a distance there that might have hinted at this affair with David Slade? And why him? Why some bad seed cop, some unstable psycho who pulled guns on people over lane changes? It just didn't add up.
But one of the things I'd learned as a homicide cop was that human behavior often didn't add up and that the hardest condition to understand is the human condition. I'd seen murders committed over gardening tools; children shaken to death because they wouldn't eat their vegetables. The unpredictability of human behavior was a tragic constant in the criminal justice system.
But despite this, there were some things that I had come to take for granted. Areas where I had finally let my guard down and been at peace. My relationship with Chooch was one, my marriage to Alexa another. I never dreamed of something like this happening. I continued to search for a framework that made sense. I couldn't find one.
But one of the hard lessons all young cops quickly learn is that truth is always subjective. It is colored by point of view and the way we choose to see things. At the bottom line, truth is just opinion and can be viewed differently depending on bias. I was a big loser here, and I didn't know how to deal with that. Worse still, I couldn't scream my anger or disappointment at Alexa. I couldn't demand an explanation or grant forgiveness. She was lying in a coma that she might never come back from.
Time ticked slowly on the old-style digital clock that was bolted to the bedside table in the dingy hotel room. I could hear the little metal numbers flipping over every sixty seconds, changing the readout on the display.
What should I do about this? How do I handle it? How does it change me?
Then I remembered something that had happened when I was twelve and living at the Huntington House group home. I was a point guard on our elementary school basketball team, a ragtag group of orphans in mismatched uniforms. One afternoon, we were playing a game against a rich, private school. We were way behind, getting our asses kicked, and being fouled like crazy under the basket. We were on their home court, with their
