gonna feed us false leads like he did last year in Atlanta, like he already did with Carla Sanchez. He’s an ex-lawyer and he knows how to pull that off so we can’t see his hand and pin an obstruction case on him.”
“You can’t be saying he’s good enough to beat you and Hitch to the solution.”
“It’s not so much about police science as it’s about delegation of resources. Our department is spread thin. Our forensic experts are shared with a hundred and ten other detectives. Sometimes R and I, print runs, and autopsy results take weeks. There’s a wait for everything these days. Nash has ten full-time cops, ex-FBI, and forensic scientists on his TV staff. Marcia Breen vets all his legal stuff so they don’t get caught in a prosecutable offense. Web Russell will downfield block at the courthouse. Basically, Nash is going to float bum leads for us to chase and then try and beat us to the killer. He can probably do it, ’cause he’s got us outmanned ten to one.
“Making it even worse, Hitch and I only have a limited budget while he has five or six hundred thousand dollars a week to spend on that show. He can bribe suspects and offer rewards. If he finds the unsub first, then Hitch and I get launched right up into orbit and start circling the globe with Caleb Cole and Ron Baron.”
We sipped our drinks without talking for almost a minute.
Then, unexpectedly, Alexa said, “Marcia Breen is working with Nash?”
“Yeah.” I didn’t elaborate, but a survival alarm went off in the primal part of my brain that processes emotional danger.
“Didn’t you used to go out with her?” Alexa asked.
“With Marcia?”
“Yeah, who do you think I’m talking about?”
“We dated a couple of times. It was years before I met you.”
“She’s very pretty.”
“Next to you, it’s like putting Marge Simpson next to Aphrodite.” I was digging hard, trying to shovel my way out of this.
“Calm down; I trust you,” Alexa said, sipping her drink slowly, never taking her eyes off me. “You used to date her, so don’t blame me for being just a little bit jealous.”
I smiled and tried to get her off this subject: “Are we through with the Marcia Breen part of this conversation? Because I’d like to move on.”
“What do you need, honey?”
“I’d like to get the Hannah Trumbull case assigned to Hitch and me. I checked this afternoon and it’s not actually being worked right now by anyone. Hitch and I want to take it over.”
“Doesn’t that double your exposure?”
“Here’s our theory on that: if somebody’s already determined to bash your head in with a hammer, what does it matter how many additional reasons you give him to try?”
Alexa took another sip of her drink and thought it over, or at least that’s what I thought she was doing. But instead, she said, “You really don’t think she’s prettier than I am?”
“What? Hell, no! Weren’t you listening to what I just said? Marcia once had a certain earthy appeal, but she went to the dark side. My Lancelot vows won’t let me anywhere near her.”
Alexa finally smiled.
When we were driving home Alexa turned to me and said, “I think you guys might be right. Taking over that case is a good strategy. Keeps us on the offensive. I’ll call Jeb and have Trumbull transferred over to you first thing in the morning.”
CHAPTER 26
“That was Judge Amador. He wants to see us in the cafe downstairs in fifteen minutes,” Hitch said as he hung up his desk phone. It was ten o’clock the next morning and we were in our cubicle, hard at work. “He’s over here on another matter, but has to be back at court by eleven.”
“He say why?” I asked.
“Nope, but he’s probably not selling T-shirts.”
“Superior court judges don’t call up line detectives to have coffee,” I said. “Something’s up.”
“He knows we’re working the Mendez case, because I talked to him about it yesterday. Maybe it has something to do with that. He told me it got pretty ugly at Lita’s pretrial hearing with Captain Madrid.”
“Wonderful.”
I groaned and looked down at Hannah Trumbull’s murder book that had just been sent over from the Records and Identification Division. It was spread out all over my desk. When it was delivered an hour earlier, we’d found it in a complete mess. Report pages were missing, time lines out of order, and half the crime scene and autopsy photo pages were gone. It looked like somebody had shuffled through the papers, removed material, and subsequently not returned it. Whoever did it had left the book in shambles. I’d spent the last hour trying to reassemble it into some kind of correct order and determine what was missing.
“You get a callback yet on who checked this thing out of Records?” I asked. “When I get my hands on that gremlin I’m gonna create a fresh hospital case.”
“Not yet.”
“It better not connect back to Frank Palgrave,” I groused.
“If
We put on our jackets and headed out. On the way we caught a lot of sympathetic looks from the other detectives. They knew Captain Madrid and Nix Nash were circling our case like hungry carrion, and our coworkers had already started treating us like looming pension cases.
Hitch looked sharp this morning. I checked his threads as we stepped into the elevator. He was styling a black Armani pinstripe with a gray shirt and maroon tie. His expensive maroon crocodile loafers that matched his tie must have set him back at least a grand.
“For now, because the murder book is such a mess, I think we’re gonna have to rebuild this entire Trumbull case ourselves,” I told him as the elevator doors hissed closed. “I just got off the phone with the Payroll Department downstairs. Detective Hall retired in ’07 and promptly went on the EOW wall.” The end-of-watch wall in the lobby has the names of all deceased LAPD officers. “His current address is at Forest Lawn. Fatal car accident last year.
“Monroe got in his twenty, also pulled the pin in ’07, and moved to Eugene, Oregon. I called his wife. He’s on a deer-hunting trip on Mount Hood. She says he’s going to be out of cell contact for at least another week. I don’t want to wait a week and have Nash get that far ahead of us, so for now we gotta push on without him.”
Hitch nodded and picked some nonexistent lint off his cuff. “I think I hear an oboe playing,” he said sadly.
“A what?”
“The oboe is a mournful instrument that plays in movie soundtracks when something bad is about to happen.”
“That’s not an oboe; that’s the new leather squeaking on those kick-ass maroon crocs you’re wearing.”
We walked into the LA Reflections Cafe, which is located on the ground floor of the PAB, arriving right on time. The new restaurant was a two-hundred-seat layout with cafeteria-style service on one side and traditional dining on the other. A floor-to-ceiling expanse of glass streamed morning sunshine into the cafe and looked out onto an enclosed patio beyond.
The lower floors of the Police Administration Building were designed with a lot of interior windows that faced out into enclosed atriums. This paranoid architecture was intended to defeat the threat of sniper fire from the buildings across the street. We went through the food line, got coffee and rolls, and then found Judge Thomas Amador reading the
“Judge?” Hitch asked.
He looked up and smiled. “Hey, guys, sit down.”
Tom Amador was a big-boned guy with a husky build, a faded Marine tattoo on his forearm, and hair the color of roadside snow. Under his robes in court he usually wore jeans, a T-shirt, and frayed sneakers, which is exactly
