Bleeding Out

'Looks like you've been.'

Frank's hair was dry where it touched her collar in a sharp line, but it was still damp where her sunglasses held it away from her face. She was wearing a V-neck sweater over a button-down shirt and her sleeves were shoved over her elbows. That usually happened after at least her third cup of coffee.

'How long you been here?'

Frank ignored the question, holding up the LA. Times instead.

'See we made the third page of the Metro section?'

'Yeah. The eleven o'clock news, too. 'Racially motivated attack.’ Jesus. Like we don't have enough trouble already. RHD on this yet?'

Frank shook her head and swung her polished loafers onto a corner of the desk. RHD was the LAPD Robbery-Homicide Division. They handled the more sensitive cases, the ones they thought the average homicide dick was too stupid to work properly. Frank hated it when they snagged her cases, and she was damned if she was going to let them have this one. Though she knew she'd be powerless to stop them if they wanted it.

'I'll work Fubar to stave them off, but I don't think it's a big deal yet. You going to run the boyfriend?'

'Yeah, first thing. Him and her savings account, make sure her money's where it should be.'

'Good. We need to go to the school, talk to people there. I want to talk to people across the street, too, and get back to Culver City, talk to the girlfriends.'

'Okay. I got a wit coming in at nine to sign a statement.'

Frank nodded and bent back over the stack of reports on her desk. Everyone was in the cramped squad room by 6:20. The morning meetings always started late because one of the detectives, Jill Symmonds, was chronically late. It was a condition the squad had gotten used to.

After the briefing, Frank stayed to talk with Jill and her partner, Bobby Taylor. Bobby looked a lot like Johnnie, only black.

Both men were tall, big-chested and broad-shouldered. In college, Bobby played fullback and Johnnie had been a linebacker, but where Bobby had stayed rock-hard, Johnnie was running to fat.

Frank appraised Jill and asked, 'Hey, Fire Truck, you going to make it a couple more weeks?'

She was seven months pregnant and her huge belly looked out of place on her slight frame. Jill nodded her bright auburn head. She was going out on maternity leave soon and Bobby would be partnerless. Frank talked about their caseload. She didn't want Jill to be the primary on any new cases. She'd pick up slack for Bobby unless Fubar drummed up another body. Not likely, though. The LAPD was notoriously short-handed, and the workload left by a vacancy was usually distributed among the remaining employees. At Figueroa the detectives were already handling more than twice, sometimes more than three times the average yearly caseload. The burnout rate among regular detectives was high enough; at Figueroa it was off the charts. Frank knew she had a pretty good squad and she was determined to hold it together, even if that meant shouldering much of the load herself.

Sitting at the desk next to Bobby's, a red-haired detective who could have passed for Jill's father chimed in, 'Hey, Freek, who's gonna pick up slack for Nookey when I leave?'

Peter Gough was fifty-six years old and should have been long retired. Ironically, it was Peter who had given Frank her nickname during her first week on the job. Gough had been a sergeant in the Newton Division when Frank and her partner had responded to a B&E he'd called in. He took one look at Franco and asked her partner, 'Where's your sidekick?'

Her partner, as disgusted with female patrol cops as Gough was, spat bitterly, 'She's it. Meet L.A. Franco.'

'L.A.?' Gough had puzzled. 'What the hell sorta name is that?'

'She says it's Dutch or something and that I wouldn't remember even if she did tell me.'

With a cold appraisal Gough had concluded, 'L.A. Freako's more like it, you ask me.'

Her partner had laughed, and the name stuck. During the disco era there was a popular song that referred to 'le Freak' and her name metamorphosed into that. Later, when she was commanding her own squad and it became clear to her detectives that she wasn't just another stat-gathering bureaucrat, her name evolved again. Frank's reputation for independence, plus presumption about her sexual preferences, created a play on words meaning she was on her own frequency, tuned in to a different radio band. Since then she was La Freek or Lt. Freek.

Gough had been flirting with burnout even then, and now he was completely fried. He'd had it with police work, wanting only to tend to his garden and start a specialty nursery. Dan Nukisona was the partner Gough had worked with for the last six years. Nookey was only a little younger than Gough, but he wouldn't hear of retiring. Every time Gough said the 'R word,' Nookey hissed vehemently.

'Boy-red, you are irreplaceable,' Bobby said.

'I'm thinking Jill's going to like being a mom so much, she might never come back. I'm going to throw Nookey and Bobby together and see what happens,' Frank answered, unhinging her long legs from the corner of Jill's desk.

Jill rolled her eyes skeptically. Nookey pretended to inspect the report he had rolled in the typewriter.

'Yeah,' he said. 'You've got your Starsky and Hutch, Cagney and Lacey, now we'll have Nappie and Jappie.'

'No, no, no,' Johnnie said in his gravely voice. 'You'll be the Spook and the Gook, like in that book that cop wrote. Goddamn, that was the funniest thing I ever read.'

'That's the only thing you've ever read,' Gough grumbled.

Amidst the chatter, Noah's witness had nervously entered the squad room. He was dressed down in huge pants and T-shirt, cap turned back, thick gold chains called Turkish ropes around his neck and wrists.

'Where Detective Jantzen at?'

'Over here,' Noah called, waving the wit into a chair. The young man was hesitant about giving a statement and balked at signing it. It took Noah and Johnnie most of the morning to get his signature against the banger who'd smoked his brother. He was afraid he'd be retaliated against, and Noah had to admit he had every reason in the world to be afraid.

Gough's right, Frank thought, we need rain. The day was mild and clear as she walked toward the Kenneth Hahn Recreation Area office, but the sky was smudged with smog.

The scrub surrounding the park was pale and dangerously dry from the summer's drought. Oil derricks pumped behind a fence, bobbing into dusty, raw dirt that contrasted starkly with the park's freshly cut and watered lawn.

Frank eyed the scenery, calculating its strategic cover. The section she was in now contained a shady fishing lake and a large lawn studded with saplings. On the western edge of the park, there was a smaller, more isolated lookout planted with trees from around the world, surrounded by vegetation and scrub. A chaparral-covered slope occupied the northern part of the park, with closed trails leading up into a tangle of dense brush and vegetation. She'd been here before and knew that a paved road in the chaparral led to a higher section containing another large, grassy area. Sections of Leiderman were open and grassy, affording little cover, but the huge chaparraled hill to the north and all the wild vegetation surrounding the park offered great hiding spots.

Frank introduced herself to a receptionist and was soon welcomed by an energetic woman in khaki and olive drab. Seated in her crowded office, Frank requested personnel records for all park employees as well as interviews with them. Gravity replaced the ranger's ebullience. She was very cooperative, inquiring if a park employee was their suspect.

'That's a possibility we can't overlook,' Frank responded vaguely. 'I have detectives waiting to talk to your staff and I'd like someone available to us while we're here, to show us around, help with identification, that sort of thing '

'I'd be glad to help,' she offered. Frank nodded, standing.

The ranger escorted Frank and the detectives around the rec area until a cool dusk descended. Johnnie suggested they compare notes at the Alibi, and while they waited for their round, Noah flipped through the pages of his notebook. He wanted to reinterview one of the landscape staff, a short Hispanic man who'd been awfully uneasy with Noah's questioning. Johnnie had two visitors and an employee that he wanted to talk to again.

While Frank described her uneventful interviews, Bobby and Jill walked in. Frank called for another round and Jill slowly sipped a beer. Her colleagues had busted her chops the first time she'd ordered a drink while carrying the