fourteen. Someone who had lost a second time with the rape and murder of Lily Hight. Someone who should have been cut loose and held free of suspicion. Someone who had gone through enough and deserved to be handled with care.
And then there was the malignancy. The blowback. Everything that cut to the bone.
Because of them and only them, Jacob Gant had been someone who’d spent the last six weeks of his life being chased and beaten by packs of angry dirtbags. Because of them, Gant had been someone who ended up dead in a nightclub bathroom with both eyes shot out of his head.
Someone with a soul. Someone trying to find the real killer. Someone lost in the wind.
Lena took another drag on the smoke, the main wheel in her gut making the turn of turns.
Paladino had sent Higgins, Bennett, and Watson the results from Gant’s polygraph six weeks before the trial. By now Lena knew enough about all three of them to understand how it played out. Like Paladino had said, what happened before the trial had just as much impact as what went on in the courtroom. Higgins, Bennett, and Watson had seen the media frenzy, the city swept up in emotion over Lily Hight’s murder. They had worked the press corps hard. Although interviews had been ruled out by the judge, their message was ever-present and they remained the subject of countless news stories in print and on radio and TV.
But now they were faced with admitting that they had committed the fuckup of all fuckups. Gant didn’t do it, and they had the wrong man. If the keepers of the keys kept a list of the biggest fuckups in the city’s grand history of fuckups, all three of them would have been catapulted to the top of the list-shoo-ins to make the Fuckup Hall of Fame.
She could see them sweating it out. She could see Higgins working with his consultants to come up with some sick plan. All three standing at the edge of the cliff and staring at the rocks below. All three sitting on top of the fuckup list.
Lena could see it.
They were too far in to pull out. Too far gone to fess up.
A moment passed. A long one. She noticed the cigarette burning between her fingertips, took a last hit, and flicked the butt onto the street. Sliding open the lock on her cell, she found Vaughan’s number at the office and made the call. He was still there, and picked up on the first ring. But when she began to give him an update-when she began to give him the news-he cut her off in a voice that sounded more than strange.
“I can’t talk now,” he said. “Let me call you back. Five minutes.”
He hung up before she could even say okay.
Lena sat in the car, trying to keep her imagination at bay. She was parked in a metered space on West Fifth Street with plans to drive out to Johnny Bosco’s place in Malibu for an initial look that she should have done yesterday. It was getting late, but she didn’t want to move until Vaughan called back. Except for the pharmacy on the corner and the Mexican place across the street, most of the businesses on Fifth had already lowered their security grilles. Magic hour had passed two hours ago and the city was making its transition from the people with jobs who inhabited its streets during the day to the people with shopping carts who roamed the sidewalks at night.
She held everything in and waited, sipping bottled water and trying to keep her eyes off the clock on the dash. When Vaughan finally called back, his voice still sounded off and she realized that it was fear.
“Something’s happened, Lena. They went through my office when we were out at the crime lab. They went through everything.”
Lena closed her eyes. “What did they take?”
“That’s the problem,” he said. “I can’t tell. I have video from the trial. The transcripts. Background notes. Some of Bennett’s files. The trial map and supporting evidence. That’s all still here, but in what form? I haven’t had time to go through everything. If they took something small-a letter or a report-there’s the chance I’d never know.”
Lena noticed the background noise from Vaughan’s phone-the sound of a bus lumbering up the street. Vaughan had left the office to call her back using his cell.
“Where are you?” she said.
“Outside the building. There’s something wrong with the phone in my office.”
“You think they’re listening?”
He paused a moment and she could hear someone he knew say hello in passing. When Vaughan came back on, his voice was still peppered with anxiety.
“I found something in the handset,” he said finally. “I left it there. I’m no pro, but I’m sure they’ve planted more than one. What am I missing, Lena? This has got to be about more than a couple of asshole deputy DAs blowing a trial.”
Lena didn’t reply, searching for the best way to tell Vaughan what she was thinking. The math was simple. It began with Cobb-the way he slapped together the murder book and the information he chose to leave out. She remembered the way Watson had looked at her in the meeting room and now realized that her read on the woman had been all wrong. There was Bennett’s outburst in Vaughan’s office today. The bug Vaughan found in his phone. And then there was that goon they saw at the crime lab this afternoon-Jerry Spadell, supposedly launching another search for the missing DNA samples. All these separate events working in concert had to be considered, then cut against the fact that every one of them knew Jacob Gant had passed a polygraph and the case never should have gone to trial.
Lena could guess how it added up.
It was all about darkness now, keeping everything hidden and lost. And now it was about survival as well. In the end, Lena decided to tell Vaughan everything she knew.
32
Cobb took a big bite out of his second chicken taco, squirting guacamole and taco sauce all over the Bud Light sign hanging in the window. After washing the taco down with just maybe the best sweet tea he had ever tasted, he wiped the spill off the sign with his thumb and gazed through the glass.
He was inside a hole-in-the-wall Mexican place called El Rancho-on his tired feet and using the Bud Light sign for cover.
Gamble was talking to someone on her cell. She’d been parked in front of that Rite Aid for more than twenty minutes-burning gas on her way to nowhere. Cobb had been following her ever since she left Parker Center. Although he had no clue what went down in Buddy Paladino’s office, it had enough octane to it that Gamble’s first move was to buy a pack of smokes.
Cobb was just across the street. So close that he could count her eyelashes from here-read the tea leaves and tell her future from here.
All things being equal, she lit up that Camel like she needed it. Cobb took it as a sign that she was on the ropes. That the fucking new deal was having a bad day and couldn’t make the cut. That he had guessed right about her-that he had known who she was the minute he set eyes on her.
He finished the taco and tossed the paper wrapper in the trash. When the girl behind the register asked if he wanted another, he checked on Gamble’s status and ordered two more to go. Then he returned to his place behind the Bud Light sign and peered up the street.
Loser No. 2 was in a white van parked one block up on the other side of Broadway. He, too, had been following Gamble ever since she left Parker, but was unaware of Cobb and looked too stupid to figure it out.
All the same, Cobb found the man curious. He was a busy little guy in a sweat-stained suit. And he wasn’t just keeping an eye on things. He was shooting video of Gamble. Cobb glanced at her still talking to someone on the phone, then looked back at the van. Every once in a while he could see a reflection in the rear window, the kind made when headlights from a passing car spike a camera lens hidden behind tinted glass.
Cobb had caught a glimpse of the little guy’s face when he parked the van outside Paladino’s office. He seemed familiar, but Cobb saw the cuts and bruises on his left cheek and kept drawing blanks. Either way, Loser No. 2 looked like a dickweed.
He heard the girl behind the register call out to him. Tossing two bucks and change on the counter, he
