“Some sort of flaw in the material.”
“You think it’s from a pin?”
It seemed obvious to her now. The more she looked at it-but then the shock returned and that anxious feeling swam back through her chest: Lily was gathering her things. The man was helping her off the stool and taking her away. And with only two short steps they were out of the candlelight’s reach. Lily wasn’t glowing anymore. She was passing through the shadows with the man in the pinstripe suit leading her to the door.
41
Lena lowered the visor and reached for her sunglasses. She was driving east on the San Bernardino Freeway, and the sun was beginning to rise directly in front of her. It looked like the freeway was burning at the horizon line- like the road was taking her on a straight shot into the flames.
She wondered if it wasn’t a warning of some kind.
Martin Orth had more news. He wanted to see her. Apparently, the news was so “good” that they couldn’t talk about it over the phone.
She hadn’t slept well last night. She’d dreamed about Lily. She’d dreamed about her in that black dress. Lena had been sitting at the bar beside her, trying to get a bead on the guy who was hitting on her. She could see them holding hands. She could see his pinstripe suit. But every time she looked up at his face, his head was gone. Not missing like it had been forgotten by an artist or framed out by a photographer. The man’s head had been cut off. She could see blood rushing down his shirt and cascading all over his hands. She could see Lily cleaning her fingers with a napkin.
It wasn’t the kind of dream Lena really wanted to stick with her. She had woken up three or four times-jolted out of her sleep in a cold sweat. But after fifteen or twenty minutes passed, she couldn’t help drifting back into the stream. And each time she’d find herself sitting at that bar again, watching Lily walk out of the club with her killer.
Lena looked at the pack of Camel Lights on the dash, but fought the urge to light one. Within fifteen minutes she had reached the crime lab, passed through security, and was walking down the hall to Martin Orth’s office. Because of the early hour, there weren’t many people around. About halfway down she noticed a fragrance in the air-a new building smell that seemed to permeate the hall. The scent worked like a time machine and brought back memories of being a girl in the second grade and walking to class on her first day of school. Memories of going to work with her dad, a welder who worked on high-rise buildings and forever changed the skyline in Denver.
Why was she thinking these thoughts? Why was she dreaming these dreams?
She found Orth at his desk. He was staring at his Mr. Coffee coffeemaker and trying to appear patient while it sputtered and brewed. He looked a mile or two past tired and more than ready to drink the entire pot on his own.
“Okay,” she said. “Tell me what I need to know.”
Orth’s eyes moved away from the coffeemaker and found her by the door.
“You can arrest Hight,” he said. “The blood on his shoe came from Gant. No doubt about it. Hight was at Club 3 AM the night Bosco and Gant were shot. Hight was in the room.”
Lena sat in the chair by Orth’s desk. His eyes had moved back to the coffeemaker, and there was something wrong with his voice.
“I’m not arresting Tim Hight for anything,” she said.
“Why not? The DNA proves that he was there.”
And so did the cocaine that they found at his house, the street cam photograph of Hight driving away from the club, maybe even the hundred-dollar bills. But that’s all any of it proved-that Hight was there.
Lena had been chewing it over ever since Orth gave her the results from Lily’s jeans linking her murder to a third man. There had to be another explanation for why Tim Hight was at the club the night Bosco and Gant were shot and killed. After remembering Gant’s brother telling her that Gant and Hight had argued earlier in the day, she’d put it together and thought she knew what the argument was about.
Gant had to have told Hight that he was on the brink of discovering who really murdered his daughter. Gant would have blurted it out in the heat of the moment.
He didn’t kill Lily, and he and Johnny Bosco were going to prove it tonight.
Hight never would have believed him, and so the argument would have progressed. But Hight would have kept an eye on Gant. And Bosco’s involvement would have worked on him over the course of the day. When Gant took off to meet Bosco, Hight might have been stewing on it long enough to follow him.
“Hight’s the one,” Orth said. “But you don’t look like you’re buying it, Lena.”
“I’m not,” she said. “We’re way past that, Marty.”
Orth started laughing. It came from deep inside the man and there was a certain madness to it. Lena had never seen him act this way before. She didn’t know how to take it and even thought that he might be losing his mind.
“You want a cup of coffee?” he asked.
“No thanks.”
Orth started laughing again as he pushed himself out of his chair, poured his brew into a Dodgers mug, and returned to his desk.
“What is it, Marty? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he said, sipping his coffee. “Better than fine. You don’t want to arrest Hight, and that’s a good thing, Lena. A real good thing. But it’s crazy. Life sure gets crazy sometimes.”
“What’s crazy? What’s happened?”
He looked at her for a long time. “The gun that killed Bosco and Gant,” he said finally. “We didn’t need the one Hight bought to make a match.”
She leaned forward. “Ballistics got a hit.”
He nodded and seemed nervous. “A big one, Lena. The kind that always seem to come at four-thirty in the morning. You ever hear about a woman named Elvira Wheaten? It was a drive-by shooting in Exposition Park. Must have been eight years ago. Her infant grandson got killed, too.”
It felt like all of the air in the room had been sucked through the vents into the basement. Something inside Lena stiffened.
Bennett and Cobb’s last big case together.
She nodded at Orth, but she didn’t say anything. The hairs on the back of her neck were beginning to rise. She could see it-all of it-before her eyes.
“The gun that killed her,” Orth said. “That’s the gun the shooter used to waste Bosco and Gant. And that’s why life’s so crazy, Lena. We checked with Property. It’s a nine-millimeter Smith. It should have been there. It should have been in the box, but it wasn’t. Just like the blood evidence that went missing during the trial. Deja- fucking-vu.”
Lena tried to concentrate on her breathing.
“Did you check the property request cards?” she asked quietly.
“Uh-huh.”
“Give me the name of the last person to fill out a card.”
42
Cobb lived in a rundown apartment building beside Fiesta Liquors and the Rancho Coin Laundry on Vineland Avenue between the two runways at Bob Hope Airport in Burbank. As Lena studied the motel-styled building from her car, it seemed more than obvious that Cobb’s fall had been a brutal plunge straight to the bottom.
Cobb wasn’t staring into the abyss. He lived there.
The building offered a five-foot fence with a broken gate as its only means of security. Lena didn’t see a
