Flashback

her lover killed.

Nick sat back, his mouth open. He felt like screaming or moaning but knew that neither would help. Lieutenant K. T. Lincoln was watching him very carefully.

“K.T… For more than five years l’ve tried to convince myself that Dara and Harvey died in a car accident. The facts stay the same. The old couple braked suddenly in front of them… the driver of the eighteen-wheeler behind them tried to stop, couldn’t… the driver died in the fire. And nobody knew anybody else, nobody was connected to anybody. That’s what all the reports said, remember?”

K.T. tapped the photo of the truck driver, her short fingernail making a sharp, ugly sound. “Do you recognize him, Nick?”

“Yeah, of course. Phillip James Johnson. I looked into it myself. He’d been a trucker for twelve years, no serious accidents, no safety violations. He just couldn’t…”

“The name and most of his paperwork history were bullshit,” said K.T. She slid another photo out of the heap. “Phillip Johnson was actually this man. Recognize him?”

It took the better part of a minute for Nick to do so. Even then he couldn’t believe it was the same man as the truck driver. He set the photos next to each other. The second photo was of a man sixty or seventy pounds lighter than Phillip James Johnson—different facial structure, even allowing for the fat, different nose, different chin, different hair color… hell, even the eye color was different.

“The DNA showed conclusively that Phillip James Johnson was actually your old CI, Ricardo ‘Swak’ Moretti.”

Nick kept looking. He’d used Moretti as a confidential informant when he’d still been a patrolman and a few times after he made detective. The petty crook’s nickname of Swak came from his involvement in insurance scams—especially highway and street swoop-and-squats where the mob enlisted the “victims” just as they did for slip-and-fall claims. Moretti had never become a made man, just the kind of scumbag always found bottom-feeding near the real mob, always running errands for punks and hit men, always dreaming of a real score. But as a confidential informant, Moretti had been unreliable in most instances—not even worth keeping on a small dole that came out of the patrolman’s or detective’s own pocket. Nick hadn’t talked to Swak Moretti in ten years. Longer.

He studied the photos again. Yes… it was possible. Something similar about the eye sockets and teeth—they hadn’t fixed the teeth—but…

“This guy’s undergone major plastic surgery,” Nick said aloud, rubbing his cheeks and hearing the stubble scrape. “Why? The mob would never pay for such a thing. Swak Moretti was a nobody. And if you’re paying a fortune in old bucks for cosmetic surgery, why make yourself fatter, with an uglier nose and bigger, dumber-looking ears? It doesn’t make sense. Plus, I read the original DNA identification, K.T. It showed the dead driver was Phillip James Johnson.”

“All good cover story,” said K.T. “Including the plastic surgery. Somebody was setting your old pal Swak up as a hit man, weren’t they?”

“It doesn’t make any…,” began Nick.

K.T. slid another stack of photocopies toward him. “We have phone records of you calling Moretti four times —twice in November of the year Keigo was killed, once in late December, a final time three days before the… accident… that killed Dara and Harvey.”

Nick’s head snapped back. “It didn’t happen. I never phoned him.”

K.T. touched the photo of the old couple who died when their Buick gelding had been struck first by Dara and Harvey’s car, then by the truck that had burst into flames. “Javier and Dulcinea Gutierrez,” she said. “Their names were real. Only their citizenship status on their NICCs and local background histories were fake. They were brought in from Ciudad Juarez three weeks before the so-called accident. We have Swak Moretti’s phone records arranging that as well.”

“I never phoned Moretti,” repeated Nick.

K.T. gave him the same look that he’d given to so many cornered and lying-through-their-teeth perps.

“Look, Nick,” she said softly. “You’re the one, just this week, who begged me to look into this stuff. I said it was an accident. I said ‘Who volunteers for a swoop-and-squat where you’re going to die?’ You said… You owe me this favor, K.T. Look into it. So I did. Here it is.”

Nick rubbed his cheek and chin again. “It doesn’t make any sense. Even if Moretti was some sort of deep- cover hit man for the mob—and trust me, K.T., the asshole wasn’t smart enough to be a hit man for anyone. Even the Denver branch of the Mafia, as decrepit and decadent as it is, wouldn’t think of hiring him… much less pay for all those weird plastic surgeries to hide his identity. And why would they hide his identity anyway? Mob hits are two twenty-two-caliber slugs to the skull so they rattle around in there, drop the gun, walk away.”

“Unless someone really didn’t want this to be considered a hit, Nick.”

“Yeah, but the mob doesn’t work that way.”

“I agree,” said the lieutenant. “But you could have.”

Nick didn’t answer. He pawed through the dossiers. “This grand jury stuff is nuts. They have enough evidence here—fake though most of it is—to indict anyone. But there was no indictment. The grand jury was dissolved in April, five and a half years ago, K.T., and this stuff has been sitting around gathering dust since then. How’d you get all this?”

“I called in every favor I ever had and made some promises I hope I never have to deliver on,” she said tiredly. “You asked me to, Nick.” She shoved the entire stack of colored folders closer to him. “But you keep it. If you ever say I know anything about any of this, I’ll call you a motherfucking liar.”

“What am I going to do with this?” asked Nick, stacking the folders. They made a pile almost eight inches high.

“Who gives a shit, partner?”

Nick slammed his fist on the stack. “If Ortega had a grand jury seated and all this evidence piled up through his own department investigators and someone in Internal Affairs in our department, why didn’t he use it? Obviously there was no indictment. Not even a leak to the press. How can you gather so much evidence that one of your Major Crimes Unit’s top detectives is a rogue killer—murdering his own wife and an assistant district attorney—and then just sit on it? That’s obstruction of justice right there.”

“You’ll have to ask Ortega.”

“I will,” said Nick. “Tomorrow morning. In his office.”

K.T. shook her head. “The mayor’s in Washington with the governor and Senator Grimes. Something about more immigration reform or some such. Advisor Nakamura’s supposed to be meeting them there on Monday for testimony for some subcommittee.”

“I’ll go to Washington,” said Nick. He rubbed his tired eyes. What was he thinking? As always, he was forgetting about his son.

How many years had he put his son down the priority list? Lower than his flashback addiction. Before that, lower than his grieving for Dara. Before that, lower than his fucking job as a detective. Before that, lower than his love of his wife. Before that… had he ever put his son at or near the top of his priorities?

Nick had a rush of absolute certainty, as physical as a wave of nausea, that Val would tell him he, Val Bottom, had never been his father’s top priority.

“No,” said Nick. “I’m going to L.A. To get Val. To find my son and bring him back here. I’ll deal with Ortega later.”

K. T. Lincoln stood. “Whatever you do, whomever you do it to, don’t call me again, Nick. I never dug out those grand jury files. I didn’t meet you here tonight. The only time I’ve seen you in the last three years was at the Denver Diner last Tuesday—too many people saw me there for me to deny that, plus I had to give the diner’s number to Dispatch—but that’s also the last place I’ll ever see you. If anyone asks, I’ll say you wanted some money—I said no—and then we chewed the fat for a few minutes about old times, and I decided that our old times together hadn’t been all that hot. Good-bye, Nick.”

“Good-bye,” Nick said absently. He’d opened the accident investigation dossier and was looking at the diagrams and photos from the fire that had killed all five people, including his wife. “K.T… what kind of undercover hit man volunteers to die horribly in a truck fire of his own making? How does that…”

But K. T. Lincoln was gone and Nick was talking to himself in the dirty, poorly lighted space.