Barrera looked at the cartons of Chinese food and pushed them away. “Cobb had personal issues,” he said. “He went on leave and was reassigned. It’s over now. Let’s leave it at that.”
She didn’t want to leave it at that. But when Barrera’s cell started ringing and he waved her out of the office, she walked onto the section floor and moved in behind her desk. It was made of oak, and like all the furniture on the floor, it was the same age as the building. She gazed at the file holder, the papers strewn across the top. She could almost see Cobb sitting in her chair.
And then a memory surfaced-something she had noticed when she was first promoted to the division and assigned the desk. Something she’d become used to because she saw it every day. She cleared the papers away from the right side of the desktop and found the mark on its surface-a small section of the oak finish that hadn’t faded over time. It was a rectangle the size of a snapshot, just like the one she had seen taped to Cobb’s desk earlier in the day. That discolored photo of the sun setting into an ocean behind a grove of palm trees; the shot he’d taken in Hawaii fifteen years ago.
She took a step back.
Cobb had been sent away on leave, demoted and reassigned. When he asked to see her ID this afternoon, he knew exactly who she was.
Not just the
21
She could see it now. Cobb standing in front of the door with his hands in his pockets stirring change. When he’d asked to see her badge, Cobb had been playing her.
Lena blocked it out as she turned up the volume on her cell. It was Vaughan, calling back, and she could barely hear him.
“Where are you?” she said.
“Looking for you on the third floor. Barrera said you just left.”
“I’m across the street in the garage,” she said.
“Doing what?”
“Waiting on the next shift change. I’m trying to hitch a ride home.”
“I’ll see you in five minutes.”
She walked down the aisle to the guard shack, pushing the keys to the Crown Vic through the slot in the window. There was no point in driving the car home. Beck had called and her TSX was en route from the Westside. After tonight she would be anonymous again. Invisible.
She told the guard that she’d left the car on the second floor and gave him the space number. The old man smiled, then looked past her and shrugged-the air conditioner in his shack was too loud to speak over. But even without words, she understood what he meant.
It was late and hot, and summer was three months early.
She gazed across the street. Vaughan had just exited the building and was headed for the visitor spaces in the VIP lot. As he reached what looked like a Ford crossover, he spotted her on the sidewalk and waved, then pulled his car around to pick her up. Within minutes they were cruising on the freeway toward Hollywood Hills. Lena settled into the leather seat, listening to the hum of the engine and studying Vaughan’s face in the soft light from the dash.
“How bad was it?” she said.
“The press conference? We’ve got bigger problems than that, Lena.”
“I was thinking about Higgins. I saw him at the coroner’s office. He was shouting at someone on the phone. I thought it might be you.”
Vaughan flashed a tired grin at her. “It wasn’t me,” he said. “I got it in person about fifteen minutes ago. We had a meet and greet in his office. When he was done, I thought I’d see if I could find you. I’m glad I tried.”
“I met Cobb,” she said.
“Higgins told me.”
They were passing Echo Park. Lena glanced at the lake, then began to recount her meeting with Cobb in the interrogation room. By the time they reached the Beachwood exit and started up Gower Street into the hills, she had filled in Vaughan on most of what she’d read in the murder book. He seemed particularly interested in the photo Lena had found in the memory box by Lily Hight’s bed. The picture of Jacob Gant that Cobb’s investigation had missed. Vaughan saw it exactly the same way she did.
No one would keep a photograph of her stalker hidden beside her bed. Hight’s claim that Gant had been stalking his daughter didn’t make sense.
The road steepened as it twisted through the hills. When they rolled out of the last curve, Lena pointed out her driveway and Vaughan made the turn. She could see the TSX parked in front of the garage-the metallic-gray finish glistening beneath the outdoor lights. Beck had delivered her car as promised and left to make his next pickup in Burbank. The TSX may have been two years old, but looked new.
She turned back as Vaughan passed the garage and pulled to a stop beside the house. He kept the engine running-the air-conditioning-and seemed to be taken with the view of the basin below. It was a remarkably clear night, the lights from the city shimmering through the heat all the way to Long Beach.
“Would you like to come in?” she asked.
He loosened his tie, still gazing at the city below the hill. “Can I get a rain check?” he asked. “I’ve got the kids this week. I need to go home and give their nanny a break. Maybe spend an hour or two watching them sleep.”
“I understand.”
Vaughan became quiet. Lena could tell that he wasn’t seeing the view anymore, but thinking something over, so she waited. After several minutes, he turned to her.
“When Higgins left the autopsy to ream me out tonight, he told me about Cobb calling Bennett. I thought it was strange. If Cobb had a problem handing over the murder book, why didn’t he just say something to his supervisor?”
“I felt the same way,” she said.
“And why was there any problem at all? From his point of view, the case should have been over a long time ago.”
Lena nodded. “If it didn’t end for him with the verdict, it should’ve ended last night.”
Vaughan leaned against the door to face her. “There was this case in New York,” he said. “Suffolk County, Long Island. Very similar circumstances, Lena. A seventeen-year-old was accused of murdering his parents for their money. The detective was a seasoned bull known for pushing suspects over the edge. The DA backed him up just like Higgins. The prosecutors went for the jugular just like Bennett and Watson. Unfortunately for the kid, he didn’t have a defense attorney like Buddy Paladino. He ended up spending half his life in prison for a crime he didn’t do.”
“You said the circumstances were the same.”
“The approach the detective took, the mistakes he made, remind me of Cobb. The family was wealthy, the kid adopted, and so the guy decided right off that the motive had to be greed. The kid begged to take a polygraph, but the detective refused. He thought his read was better than the science. Just like Cobb, he looked at the kid and knew.”
Lena realized that Vaughan was talking about the Marty Tankleff case. Although it hadn’t been in the news for a year or two, the case was too horrific to forget. Tankleff’s mother had been found on the bathroom floor, stabbed to death and nearly decapitated. His father had been severely beaten and stabbed multiple times as well. After hanging on for a month in a coma, the man died and the murder count climbed to two. Lena imagined that the brutality of the crime affected the detective’s judgment. After seeing the crime scene photographs of Lily Hight skewered to the floor, she had thought the same thing of Cobb. Both detectives jumped early. Both detectives locked in on their suspects without bothering to interview anyone who might have given them a deeper perspective and widened their view.
