Good Morning, Killer

impressed by their patience — how they had shouldered the thing without question, the way you would an offbeat family member with recurring difficulties, the causes of which you had long stopped trying to guess.

It was the third day, unbearable in its mind-numbing similarity to the last two. I had barely slept, worried about the gun. How would it fit into the robbery scenario? Where did my grandfather get it? Who’d he steal it from? Was it traceable? What about fingerprints?

Nothing happened. No second shoe dropped. Andrew’s condition remained unchanged. I was back in my pod looking a shade paler and more withdrawn, less able to imagine a successful resolution: I would get off but he would be a vegetable. He would be a vegetable and I would be convicted. He would recover but remain an invalid. He would recover and point the finger.

Jason, however, was all keyed up.

“Look at this! Look at this!” he kept saying, shaking a piece of paper in my face.

“I can’t see if it’s up my nose,” I snapped.

Jason had done his homework and discovered that Carl Vincent, the unemployed lab technician accused by the teenager, Roxy Santos, of beating her mom, owned a green 1989 Dodge van. The van was registered to the same Mar Vista address. Whether Carl Vincent could be Ray Brennan was an urgent question; even more pressing was the escalating anxiety to get out of the office.

I told Jason, “You passed,” and we left without telling Rick or giving a heads-up to Deputy District Attorney Mark Rauch’s office, as Mike Donnato had advised. I did not want obstacles.

It was a quick drive to the Palms District, originally a grain-shipping center that had followed the Santa Monica railroad across flat agricultural fields. After World War II, those flatlands were developed into tracts of cheap single-family houses built for returning soldiers. Those were boom years, when the new lawns matched the crew cuts of the new dads who mowed them: young working-class vets could afford to raise a family, and every maple-lined avenue seemed to end at the utopian gates of MGM Studios.

The Santos girl and her mother lived in what used to be one of those tracts. It was still working class, but most of the 1940s standard-issue single-family cottages had been torched to make way for sixties apartment buildings on aqua stilts with carports. A Montessori school caught my eye, an oasis surrounded by tall pines. Bright plastic tugboats and picnic tables were placed around the courtyard of a graceful old Mission-style lodge. Across from the school stood one of those forties-era specimen cottages with a spindly porch and metal awnings, trash on the lawn and pigeons on the roof. It looked abandoned, and I wondered why the corner property had not sold. Something was not right: the windows had been boarded up but there was a new green AstroTurf doormat. That’s why. A recluse probably lived there, lost in dreams of dancing in the Technicolor musicals that were made just forty years ago and blocks away.

“What kind of soil do you think these houses were built on?”

“You’re asking me?”

“You grew up on a farm.”

“We’re not in Kansas anymore.”

I laughed. Jason reddened at his own joke.

“Dr. Arnie says a paint chip found in Juliana’s clothing indicates she was taken to an older house on loamy soil. It had floral wallpaper.”

We were sitting in the Crown Vic across from the Santos residence, a vintage stucco apartment building with green fiberglass balconies and giant birds-of-paradise. It was about six inches away from the adjoining structure, a shoe box on legs.

“No old flowered wallpaper in there,” said Jason restlessly.

“Mylar,” I suggested, but I don’t think he knew what that was. I observed his squirming. “Let’s get something to eat.”

A neighbor had told us the Santos family was on a church retreat up in Lake Arrowhead and would be back that night. We had been on surveillance more than four hours by then, endlessly circling the sights: a mustard- colored strip mall, junk shops, plumbing outfits and used car lots, up Overland and down Pico. We must have passed that pile of lime green and zebra-striped beanbag chairs in front of a futon store twenty-five times.

But we had located a Jack in the Box, with a Plexiglas security window through which you inserted your money and received your grub like a hamburger bank. It put another attitude on the ’hood.

“Is this where you want to be?” Jason asked.

“Jack in the Box?”

He grinned and crunched some fries. “The C-1 squad.”

“I worked my butt off to make C-1.”

“Really?”

He sounded surprised, like those broad-shouldered college kids in the fast lane who swim the fifty in less than thirty seconds. What’s the big deal?

“When I was coming up, the hottest assignment in the country was the Los Angeles bank robbery squad. I was lucky enough to start from there, but it was still a long haul.”

“I really admire the way you do your job.”

He said it forthrightly.

“Thank you.”

“I mean, you know how to negotiate the bullshit.”

“Bullshit makes the world go round.”

“When you started out, how did you prove yourself?”

“Well.” I had never considered it quite like this. “Made sure I was first through the door.”

He nodded.

“You can’t show weakness.”

“I got that.”

“Never once, or it will come back to haunt you for your whole career.”

“That’s not what they say when they talk about the Bureau family.”

“We are a Bureau family, but let it come out one time that you’re weak and see what happens. Male or female, doesn’t matter. Once it’s out there, they start looking for a pattern. Do you volunteer to go to the back door, or the front? Do you put yourself in a situation where you’re less responsible than the others? If your assignment is to be in charge of putting stuff in the evidence log — and if you say, I don’t know if I could do that—you’re finished.” I did not tell Jason, but that is what happened to Barbara Sullivan. Why they took her off the street.

His eyes were narrow behind the mirrored sunglasses.

“You spend your life in an office,” he said bitterly. “When do you get the chance?”

“Looking for a chance?”

“Looking for something,” he sighed.

I smiled empathetically and glanced at my watch. This was working out well. I had not thought about Andrew in twenty minutes.

“What do you think that thing you are looking for might be, Jason?”

At 10:48 p.m. an older green Dodge van pulled up to the apartment building. It had a dent on the left side.

“Did Juliana say the van was damaged?”

“Don’t know,” said Jason.

I was sitting up straight now, trying to get comfortable as the last of the codeine pills wore off. My eyes hurt and my back was sore, as if I had the flu.

The van sat there a minute and then a dark-complected woman got out the driver’s side. She had a skinny black ponytail and was wearing running pants and a sweatshirt. She looked like a cannonball, big in the bust with a round stomach, and she carried an oversized cup with a straw. She put her head down and worked with