'Only you.'
'Good, good. Don't. This is some deep shit you're wading in, my girl.'
'Don't I know it.'
'And as far as you know, this is just him?'
'From what they're telling me, but who the fuck knows what this could open up.'
'All right. Let me think for a minute.'
She heard the faint click of Joe's Zippo then a long drag on a cigarette.
At length Joe said, 'Okay. This is what we do first.'
At the briefing that morning, Frank pulled Bobby and Nook off Placa's case. The squad looked at her curiously. Frank frequently worked cases with her detectives but she'd never taken one on alone.
'This isn't going anywhere,' she shrugged. 'We're just beating a dead horse right now and you have fresher cases to work. The end of the month's coming up and I want to concentrate on cases with better potential. I'll keep working Placa. I'm not going to let it die. You guys keep an ear out, pass on anything relevant, but right now we're focusing on more promising books.'
'Whatever,' Nook sighed, but Bobby shook his head silently at the ceiling. Amid some grumbles and protests, she reprioritized a few other cases. When the meeting was over, Bobby followed Frank into her office and closed the door. He bent his massive frame over her desk. It was an old wooden piece with inlaid leather, eight drawers, and two pull-outs for extra work space. Frank had bought it at a yard sale and lugged it in on a Saturday morning. It was almost six feet wide and took up most of her tiny office, but when Bobby stood next to it, it looked like something a preschooler would use.
'I don't understand why you pulled us. We've still got some leads to work. There's the whole cop angle, and we haven't even begun to turn up the heat yet.'
She'd singed his pride, and Frank felt bad. She waved a hand, looked disgusted.
'I talked to Tonio yesterday. Made him cry. I thought he was made of sterner stuff, but he got all blubbery about harassment, and leaving the family alone. I worked him for over two hours. I don't think he knows shit. Claudia does, but she's not talking. And I don't think I was right on the 187 angle. I pushed it some with Gloria last night but I didn't get a feel for any police involvement.'
Frank tipped her chair back.
'And the bottom line is stats are down, have been the last couple months. Fubar's getting pinched from upstairs, got his jockeys all in a wad, now he's kicking my ass. That's why I want to concentrate on the cases with the best chance of closure. Get them under our belts so I can get Fubar off us, then we can go back to these colder ones, before summer hits us even harder than it already has.'
Bobby stared at Frank.
'It's nothing you've done, Bobby. You and Nook have been great on this. But right now we're digging in granite. I'm just moving you around to softer dirt for a while.'
'When you hit granite, you use TNT,' Bobby said.
Frank asked playfully, 'Got any on you?' He just held Frank's gaze and she said, 'Look. I know you want this. So do I. We just need to step back from it a little. I'm still going to keep working Claudia, work the homes some more. But our personal involvement can't distract us from other cases. We've thrown a lot of time at this and we've dead-ended. For now. So we'll take a break, try and close-out more promising cases, then come back to this. I'm not going to let it die, Bobby. I promise. I just want to switch gears for a while.'
'You're the boss,' Bobby shrugged, leaving in obvious disgust. For a moment Frank listened to her squad working. She hated the lies she was telling them, the reason behind the lies. Frank sighed and fluttered a stack of phone messages. She returned the calls in order, first OSS at the Sheriffs department, then Morgan at Personnel, and somebody at Motor Transportation about gas allowances. While the MT clerk clicked through his computer, Frank frowned at the next message slip.
Detective Harris, Sheriffs Homicide, wanted her to return his call. Robbie Harris, better known as Bartlett, spoke maddeningly in quotations. The day was young but already wearing on Frank. She didn't feel up to dealing with Harris or his irritating quirk, but unlike most of the other LASD dicks, Harris was always affable and willing to share information. Probably, she imagined, just so he'd have a fresh audience. Frank gritted her teeth after finishing with the MT and called him.
'Ah-ha!,' he answered. 'You know what Nietzsche said about women don't you?'
' 'Fraid I'm about to find out.'
'If a woman possesses manly virtues one should run away from her, and if she does not possess them she runs away from herself.'
'Charming. Did you call just to tell me that or is there actually something I can help you with?'
'Brrr,' Harris responded, ' 'Thou art all ice. Thy kindness freezes.' Shakespeare,' he sighed. 'Say, Doc Lawless tells me you got a stiff missing some body parts, few weeks back. That so?'
Frank took a patient breath. When he wasn't speaking in quotes, Harris tended to sound like a cop from a 1940's B-movie.
'You mean the kid missing his liver?'
'Yeah, that's the one, sister. I got a vie over here missing his heart. Thought there might be a link. You mind if I come over and look at your notes.'
'Help yourself. I'll tell Briggs you're coming.'
'Ah, Briggs. A man I'm sure who believes that work is the curse of the drinking classes.'
'Anything else, Robbie?'
'Eliot said it, but it's so true in our case, that in every parting there is an image of death. Let me leave you with this — 'the individual woman is required a thousand times a day to choose either to accept her appointed role and thereby rescue her good disposition out of the wreckage of her self-respect, or else follow an independent line of behavior and rescue her self-respect out of the wreckage of her good disposition.' Whaddaya say?'
'Goodbye.'
Frank returned one more call, then Foubarelle slipped into her office with a pile of make-work designed to make Figueroa look proactive in community relations. After that, Noah and Johnnie needed case reviews. Johnnie requested a day off to take his son to Disneyland on his birthday. Frank denied it, coldly pointing out that Johnnie should have thought about that before he burned all his comp time and sick leave on hangovers. Between phone calls from seemingly every other jurisdiction in southern California, she helped Diego prep for court, talked to lawyers and PDs, and signed off on dozens of forms, requests and reports. This went on until the squad room had at last quieted and emptied, until Frank's time was finally her own.
She was running through a list of things to do. First was to get his phone records. Second, she had to figure a way to get a saliva sample from him. Then samples from his closet and his car. Her father had taught her that if she had to hit somebody bigger than herself, hit them so hard they couldn't get back up. That's what she intended to do now; hit this son of a bitch with so much evidence he'd be buried alive in it.
The phone rang a couple times but she ignored it. If it was important, the desk would know how to find her. When she heard the quick clack-clack-clack on the stairs she sighed and put her pen down.
'I understand you've reassigned your case load,' Foubarelle announced, walking into her office for the second time that day.
Frank nodded, wondering how the hell he'd gotten wind of that.
'And that you're working that banger girl on your own.'
'Yeah.'
'Would you mind telling me what that's all about?'
She gave him a version of the song and dance she'd given Bobby.
'I don't like it, Frank. If this was a high-priority case, or something very sensitive, then that would be different, but it doesn't look good that a lieutenant is actively working a run-of-the-mill drive-by. You're not a Detective Three anymore, Frank. You've got a squad to run and I don't want it to suffer because you're off pursuing leads that are best pursued by the men under you. I want you to give that case back to the detectives who originally handled it.'
'I can't do that.'
'Oh really? Please enlighten me,' he said, spreading his hands expansively.
Frank massaged her ring finger. She wasn't ready to tell him. She wanted a lot more ammo than she had
