Romeo serial murders a few years back. He was young and brilliant, an ex-hacker that Chief Logan had recruited after speaking with a judge who didn’t want to see Upshaw go to jail. If anyone from the DA’s office deleted their e-mails thinking that they were history, Lena knew that Upshaw would find them and bring them back to life.
She checked her watch, grabbed a bottle of water, and headed out the door. The location in Exposition Park was a half-hour drive south on Western Avenue. But Lena wanted to avoid the traffic in Koreatown. After twenty minutes working surface streets, she made a left turn and started to cut back to Western. The neighborhood changed and she could see the long line of young African-American men standing at the curb waving down cars. She didn’t need to look at a street sign to know where she was. The street was nicknamed the Avenue of the Ghosts because the young men were as thin as stick figures, and their warm brown complexions had been bleached out to a pale gray from a life on crystal meth. They looked like skeletons-horrific Halloween displays that packed guns, dealt crank, and had no chance of finding their way back.
The sight was more than unsettling and she was grateful when she saw Western Avenue ahead and finally reached the park nestled in between a library and an elementary school.
She found Reggie Brown sitting at the picnic table smoking a cigarette and drinking sweet tea. He looked like he might be twenty-five, and was dressed in a pair of black slacks, a red T-shirt, and a Rolex that he wore loose like a bracelet. As Lena approached the table and introduced herself, she didn’t sense any animosity at all.
“I checked you out,” he said. “You’re David Gamble’s sister. We’ve got the same thing goin’ on, huh?”
Lena shrugged and sat down. “You tell me, Reggie. I’m working with a detective-Dan Cobb-do you remember him?”
“Of course, I do. DC. That’s what we used to call him.”
“I know that it’s been eight years. That you might have forgotten details.”
He took a hit on his cigarette. “I haven’t forgotten anything, Lena Gamble. And I never will. I lost my brother just like you did. Have you forgotten anything?”
A moment passed with Lena not sure how to put it into words. “Something happened,” she said finally. “Something that’s come up in a murder case this week. Something that might point back to eight years ago.”
Brown paused a moment to consider what she was saying. His eyes were bright and expressive.
“I don’t know what you’re dealing with now,” he said. “But you’re right about one thing. Eight years ago something happened, and his name was Steven Bennett. I’m surprised Cobb didn’t tell you. He knows as much as I do.”
She looked away, trying not to show any surprise. Why would Cobb hold out on her after last night?
“Tell me about Bennett,” she said.
“He’s a motherfucker. A world-class motherfucker. Wes was sitting at this table. The empty lot’s right over there across from the library. He hears the shooting and hides underneath the bench. He sees Mrs. Wheaten go down. He sees the faces in the car as they drive off. He hears them laughing. My brother knew what he had to do. He helped Cobb ID every one of them.”
“But then he wouldn’t testify in court,” she said. “He couldn’t come out in the open. It would have been suicide.”
Brown grimaced at the thought. “Snitches wear stitches,” he said. “Wes knew it. I knew it. Cobb knew it.”
“But Bennett didn’t?”
“That’s why he’s a motherfucker, Lena Gamble. Bennett knew it just the same as everybody else. The difference was that he didn’t care.”
“He kept the pressure up,” she said. “He wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
“He’d call three or four times a day. And he wasn’t asking anymore, okay? He was telling. He was screaming at Wes. He was threatening my brother with jail time.”
It hung there. In the heat of the day. Lena could feel the rage building inside her. She wished Vaughan was with her to hear this.
“But your brother didn’t give in,” she said finally.
Brown pushed his tea aside. “The trial comes and goes, and it turns out they didn’t even need Wes. Bennett and Higgins win the thing outright, and Higgins becomes the next DA. The crisis in the neighborhood is finally over. No one knows what Wes did. Everything’s fading into the past.”
Lena could sense what was coming-what had to be coming-from the expression on Brown’s face.
“But it didn’t fade into the past,” she said quietly. “After the trial-after the election-Bennett called back and told your brother that it wasn’t over.”
Brown nodded, lowering his head and wiping his eyes as the memory welled up before him. When he spoke, his soft voice shook in agony.
“It happened the next day,” he said. “They waited until everybody could see. Bennett sent a cop to the house. When he saw Wes with his friends, the cop flashed a big dumb-ass smile at him, tipped his hat as if to say thanks, and drove away. Two hours later, Wes was sitting right where I’m sitting. Wes was doing what he liked best, sitting here and playing chess. Me and my mom don’t think he saw it coming, okay? He was still holding a piece in his hand. Still making a move when they gunned my baby brother down.”
Brown dropped his cigarette on the grass and didn’t move to pick it up. His eyes were turned inward, lost in the past.
“Did Bennett ever call back?”
Brown shook his head. “No,” he said. “He never did. But last year I saw him at Club 3 AM. Once in a while I’d go. Once in a while he’d be there. I’m not sure how a guy like Bennett gets in, okay? But somehow he did. He’d sit there at the bar and stare at me like he wanted me to know that it was him. Like he’d taken Wes away from us and there was no way anyone could ever prove it. Those green eyes of his. A friend of mine who served in Iraq called them desert eyes … snake eyes. They don’t move and they don’t blink. They just push through you and shoot back.”
“Is that all you ever saw him do there?”
“I’d watch him try to hit on chicks,” he said. “But all they ever did was look at the piece of shit and laugh. He stopped coming after a while. Maybe Johnny Bosco told him to get lost. I asked Bosco about it more than once.”
Lena dug into her pocket for a cigarette and lit up. The sun was in her eyes and she moved to the other side of the table and sat beside Brown in the shade. She looked at the fence around the park, at the empty lot on the other side of the street.
When Bennett couldn’t bully an eyewitness into risking his life, he fingered him and had him killed. There was a theme to the man. A method. A sense of repetition. And finally, an answer to the question, why that gun?
49
She was cruising down the Avenue of the Ghosts, but her mind was fifteen miles up the road, so she didn’t notice those stick-figured teenagers getting loaded and waving down customers from the curb.
She didn’t want to get ahead of herself, didn’t want to let her imagination play with the facts or get too revved up. She needed to reach Debi Watson. She needed to get the woman to talk. And she needed to do it as fast as she could.
But she had a bad feeling about it now.
Before leaving the park, Lena had tried calling Watson at her office and was told by her assistant that the deputy DA hadn’t come in today. When she pressed the young woman for more information, she was told that Watson hadn’t called in sick and wasn’t answering her cell or home phone. Her assistant said that she was worried about her, and had given Lena her address on Norwich Drive in West Hollywood.
Before the dread could get a decent grip on her, Lena made a hard right and picked up speed heading for Venice Boulevard. She was still waiting on Cobb. Two blocks later, he finally picked up his cell.
“How did you get this fucking number?” he said.
“You’re a police officer, Cobb. You’re in the directory. Now why didn’t you tell me about what Bennett did to Wes Brown?”
