'You're lookin' in the wrong places,' Noah suggested. 'Okay. You registered for a cruise around the world.'
'Cruise is partly correct.'
Noah narrowed his eyes, carefully assessing Frank. The faded, neatly pressed jeans, the blue LAPD shirt, were standard weekend attire, but the battered running shoes weren't.
'Knowing you ... at six AM on a Saturday morning, you'd probably worked out already and you were probably back at work, either at home or here. But cruise is part of the answer . . . let's see. I know you're not happy that we're pinning the Estrella case on Luis . . . I'm guessing you cruised out to Topanga and did a little bush-whacking. That would explain the scratches on your arms. Correct?'
Frank chuckled, surprised, pleased, and a little embarrassed that Noah knew her so well.
'Did I hit the jackpot?'
'Three cherries, my man. Not that it did any good. All I found were ticks and gnats.'
'Lucky that man-eating cougar didn't find
'I'm too tough. She'd have spit me out after one bite.'
'So what were you lookin' for?'
'I don't know. Anything.'
Frank hadn't expected to find a smoking gun, but she'd needed to see for herself where Luis Estrella had been. She'd half walked, half slid down the angled hillside, and from the surprisingly accurate LASD notes, found the exact location of the body. Searching for the anomaly in the scenery, she'd spent a couple hours crawling through prickly-leaved shrubs and poison oak.
But for a small assortment of the usual litter, it was a surprisingly clean canyon. Frank had cleared some duff to bare soil and nestled herself against a large boulder. She'd let the mild sun play over her face. Closing her eyes against it, she'd shut out the scenery and gradually deafened herself to the birdsong and bustle in the underbrush.
She'd concentrated on Luis Estrella's face, the proud picture of his tats. She imagined him in his room, at the kitchen table with his family, driving in his beat-up car. Working hard at becoming him, she'd absorbed everything she knew about him — his heroin habit, his limp, his ill health, his easy-go-lucky clownishness. She put herself in his tennis shoes and sweatshirt, on the dirty bed in the garage, scratching himself, picking at his sores.
Frank didn't have to shoot up to know the effects of horse. She'd grown up around the drug and been surrounded by it throughout her career. When a junkie was happy, he shot up. When he was sad, he shot up. When he was breathing, he shot up. A gutter-hype like Luis lived for only one thing, and that was to dip steel. The only thing that mattered to him was scoring and using. A junkie on the nod couldn't be provoked into the rage necessary to waste an entire family. A crashing junkie could be angered, but his rage would be focused on finding his next hit. Nothing else mattered to him. The horse obviated any other needs; food, sex, shelter — it all paled compared to the craving for that next hit.
Sitting in her patch of sunshine, Frank had tried to feel how a hope-to-die junkie could muster the wherewithal to efficiently and cold-bloodedly kill six people. And his dog. The dog that slept in the garage with him, on his own bed. Johnnie was right. It didn't make sense.
She repeated that to Noah, who just shook his head. She couldn't blame him. With a case load like theirs, a detective had to take the most obvious leads and run with them. In a few days, sometimes a few hours, another call would come in and his already heavy load would have to be shifted to accommodate the new burden. The ninety-third didn't have the luxury of chasing wild hairs and shaky leads. If the evidence pointed north, a detective went north, even if his gut screamed south. The detective could only indulge his gravitational pull if and when the opposite course had been proved a misdirection.
Rather than arguing when they both had more pressing demands, Frank conceded, 'We'll see what the lab comes up with.'
Long after Noah had typed up his 60-day report and gone home, Frank could almost see the top of her desk again. She was satisfied with the progress she'd made on the reams of budget projections and overtime justifications, payroll forms and vacation requests, multi-jurisdictional faxes and memos, 60Ds and preliminary reports, plus dozens of warrants, weapons registrations, rap sheets, DMV printouts . . . and still there was a pile. Determined to return to an empty desktop Monday morning, Frank crammed the remaining papers and photos into her briefcase. She palmed the light switch, leaving the squad room dark behind her.
On her way out she asked Officer Heisdaeck about his upcoming back surgery and swapped quips with a B&E artist in the holding tank. He'd been on the streets since Frank had been a boot. A few weeks back his 13 month-old grandson had been grazed by a .22 meant for the boy's Crip father and she asked how he was doing.
'He be awright. Ain't nuttin' but a scratch. Got his first taste a Blood, dat's wha' da was. He gone be a big time slob killuh.'
The man in the holding cell was Frank's peer, but bad food, worse liquor, and a lifetime of combining drugs made him look twenty years older. No doubt he'd been brought in on a D 'n D but he was subdued now, remorseful.
'Yeah, he'll be alright,' Frank agreed. 'Got his Gramp-C reppin' him.'
' 'Da's right. Somebody gots to hep the lil' ones comin' up.'
'Don't reckon there's anyone knows as much about these streets as you do.'
She slapped his cell bars and he clucked, ' 'At ain't no lie, Franco. 'At ain't no lie.'
Slipping out the back, she was on the Harbor Freeway in two minutes, headed north to Pasadena. The drive usually only took fifteen, twenty minutes but the crush of Saturday evening traffic slowed her down.
Squeaky brakes and idling engines competed with talk radio shows and the powerful
Frank had spent her entire career in the corner of the western world infamous for the Watts riots, and then thirty years later, the Rodney King riots. She'd missed Watts, but the second series of riots had been a succession of nights straight out of Dante. Frank had been 'riot-baptised' with bricks and bottles, bullets and fire.
Clay had asked during one of her earlier sessions what it was like to work in such hostile environs, especially as a female, and a white one at that. Frank hadn't thought much of it. Born and raised in New York City's lower east side, there was nothing she hadn't seen by the time she entered the LAPD Academy; landing at the Figueroa Station had merely rounded out her education. The hard streets afforded Frank an excellent outlet for her natural wariness and aggression and as a younger cop she'd looked forward to the physical confrontations of the job. The demands of her rough exterior world commanded Frank's constant attention, offering diversion from her own complicated interior. Like the kids growing up in Compton and Inglewood, Frank had survived by refusing to show fear or pain. Softness was equated with weakness, and weakness meant death. She'd lived by that street credo for forty years. Ironically, it had almost killed her.
Frank absently tracked a jet gleaming silver in the dying sun. Despite the terror of suicides and homicides witnessed, of bullets and knives passing through her flesh and that of loved ones, none of it had scared Frank more than one desolate night with Kennedy, the night she was sure her brain had cracked and that whatever she touched was dripping in blood; her blood, Kennedy's blood, her father's blood, Maggie's blood, all the blood she'd seen puddled and sprayed on sidewalks and cars, walls and carpets, cribs and school chairs. Everywhere she looked, blood.
Exiting slowly onto Colorado Boulevard, Frank was guardedly optimistic that she could handle the memory of that night so easily. She figured the Wednesday afternoons with Clay must be paying off. Turning down her street, she noted the dusky gloom of the big oaks over the road, the neighbors windows glowing yellow. Frank realized that she was finally enjoying coming home again. Just as she pulled into her driveway, her pager thrummed against her hip. She left the car running on the vague superstition that if she stopped it, she'd have to start it again. She called the front desk on her cell phone.
Sergeant Romanowski ceremoniously informed her, 'Lieutenant, your presence is requested by Detectives Nukisona and Taylor at the corner of Hyde Park and South Wilton.'
