Carrera returned his gaze to the floor for a few seconds. “Just now I was about to ask you why, but then I realized that I would be the one who was lying. Asking would be pretending that I didn’t understand, that I wouldn’t have been tempted to do the same thing.” He straightened, sighed, and looked Millikan in the eye. “I would like to have a cop be the one who gets this guy, especially after what he did to Fulco and Alkins. It would be better for all of us. But it wouldn’t bother me that much if Prescott got to him first.”
“I can’t say it was the best way,” said Millikan. “I don’t even know whether it helped or hurt. I talked to Prescott in Buffalo after he’d had a brush with the guy, months ago. Then he dropped out of sight. Both of them did. I don’t know what it means. It might just mean that he doesn’t want anything more from me, and I’ll hear when everybody else does.”
“If anything comes in about him—about either of them—I’ll let you know right away,” said Carrera.
“Thanks, Pete.”
“And thanks for coming to look at this mess. I guess the captain didn’t need to spoil both our dinners.”
Millikan surveyed the room again. “This one, maybe we can do something about. You have three guys here who all look about the same age, thirty-five to forty. They’re all dressed in casual clothes, but not cheap. Look at the shoes: Mephisto, Ecco. I didn’t look closely at the third guy’s, but they seem to be about the same class, and practically new. All three of them have good watches. I figure they’re all in the same social or business set, and it’s not one that usually hangs out in a place like this at night. I would guess they’re all in the same line of work, and it pays okay. They couldn’t have all come here at once, dressed the same, by coincidence. They met here for something. Probably it was some kind of business meeting. Obviously, there was a fourth guy. I would guess he wasn’t somebody they just ran into here, some stranger who killed everybody. I would guess he was the one who arranged the meeting.”
“A drug deal?”
“It doesn’t feel that way.” Millikan glanced down at the shell casings on the floor again. “I think it’s likely he’s a bit older than the others. He’s at least fifty, probably closer to sixty. He’s never done anything like this before. The brass is tarnished, as though he loaded the bullets into the gun with his bare fingers some time ago, and it’s been sitting there ever since. I wouldn’t even be surprised if he bought the gun twenty or thirty years ago, and never used up the box of ammo he bought at the same time. It will be something like this: these three business guys all conspired to cheat a supplier, and it’s putting him out of business. Or the three are partners who were just about to fire an older employee, and he found out about it. It had to be something that would make him angry long enough to plan this and go through with it. Find out what they did for a living, and how they knew each other, and you’ll be halfway there.”
“I’ve already got people finding most of that out now,” said Carrera. “We’ll just see who the older guy might be and try to pick him up quick, before he calms down.”
“That’s what I’d do,” Millikan agreed.
The two men stepped outside, and Millikan could feel the air immediately begin to pull the sweat off his body and cool his skin. A young woman from the forensics team he had never seen before tonight slipped past them through the doorway and returned to her work. Two others joined her, and he realized they must have finished out here a while ago, and waited.
“I guess I’ll get out of the way now, Pete,” said Millikan. “I appreciate your giving me a call. It wasn’t him this time, but it could have been.”
“Yeah,” Carrera agreed, unconvincingly. “By the way, I told Denise I’d seen you. She said to tell you hello.” He chuckled ruefully. “I think she’d probably invite you folks to dinner, but you and I were really the ones who knew each other. She’d be afraid she’d have to invite me, too.”
Millikan hesitated, not quite sure what to say. “I was sorry when you told me about the divorce. I hope you know I wish you both well.”
“You too. See you, Danny.”
Millikan walked uncomfortably to his car, leaving Carrera to turn away toward the tiny white board-and- stucco building. Millikan got in, started the engine, and quickly drove away. Being with Pete Carrera had induced a kind of tension in him that seemed not to disperse as they talked, but to mount and become worse until the awkwardness of each word he said became an overwhelming embarrassment. He intentionally drove down the street in the wrong direction just because his car had been pointed that way when he’d gotten into it. Then he drove around the block to keep from having to go back past the place.
He had been working homicide cases with Carrera when he had finally conceded to himself that it was time to leave the police force. They had gotten along well enough, but they had been different. Carrera had wanted to clear a case, make an arrest, and go home to dinner. Millikan had wanted something more: he’d wanted to get better at it, to understand what had happened, to be able to look at the evidence a killer left behind and figure out how he had done his killing and what sort of person he was. Each night, after Carrera had gone home, Millikan had devoted extra hours to preparing himself to become the department’s resident expert on homicide scenes. He had studied the photographs in old case files, compared investigating officers’ reports with the transcripts of confessions, and gone to examine scenes he had not been assigned to, just to see how more experienced detectives interpreted the things they saw. After a conviction, he would sometimes go to speak with the killer to see what he could learn. The hours he had put in astounded him now. He could barely remember the way it had felt to have that kind of stamina. But gradually he had learned and his judgment had improved, and soon, the officers in his division had noticed it.
In time, homicide detectives from other divisions, and then other cities, had begun to ask his advice. Because cops habitually worked on the basis of personal relationships and systems of reciprocal favors, the requests had not been directed to LAPD Van Nuys homicide, but to Sergeant Daniel Millikan. His superiors had not liked that. Eventually there had been a reprimand that had actually made it into his file. The union had managed to have it suppressed, but by the time they had accomplished that, he was already gone. The incident had convinced him that he had already hit the ceiling. No matter what he had already learned to do, or how he might work to improve himself in the future, his life as a police officer would be about the same. There seemed to be no choice for him except to get out.
Seeing Carrera always brought those days back, the sick, bitter feeling of the end of the experience, but also the sweet days when they had both been young and feeling their strength. That was nearly as bad, because it reminded him of loss. Being the youngest had meant being surrounded by older men—uncles and teachers and enemies—who had, in the years since then, disappeared. It was a different department, a different world, because those men were not in it. Carrera had become one of the old-timers now. In another year or two, he would probably either make captain and become an invisible administrator or be passed over again, retire, and get started on drinking himself to death alone in the apartment he had rented when Denise had thrown him out. As Millikan had the thought, he could not avoid the knowledge that he looked forward to losing touch with Carrera. It was painless to deal with a department made up of young strangers who knew him only as the professor, the man who wrote the books, and not the cop who had quit.
Millikan reached the small, two-story house on the quiet street in the northern part of Sherman Oaks, and pulled into the driveway. He got out of the car and closed the door as gently as he could. He looked around him, as he always did, but this time his mood made the sight irritating. When he and Marjorie had moved here, the whole neighborhood had been single-family houses much like theirs, but now on the busy east-west boulevards on two sides, he could see tall apartment buildings. Down the next street they had just bulldozed another house and begun digging a hole for a foundation that could hardly be anything but an underground parking garage for another big apartment building. It frustrated him that he had no memory at all of the house that had been destroyed.
He was also frustrated because it should not have been allowed: this area had always been zoned R-1. But Millikan had enough connections in the local government so he should have been incapable of surprise at the granting of exemptions. The lives of politicians were a tormented rush to collect money for the next election, so their frequent meetings with developers were a degrading alternation of bribery and extortion. He only hoped that it would remain tolerable to live here for the years he and Marjorie had left.
Millikan took a step toward the front door, then stopped and stood motionless for a moment breathing the hot, still air and listening to the distant, whispery sounds of cars speeding along Chandler. He knew that he had just been distracting himself from his personal discomforts by railing against the anonymous forces he liked to blame for ruining things. He leaned against the door of his car and considered what was really bothering him. It was that the Louisville restaurant killer had caused him to do things that he had never intended to do, never would have believed
