A wave passed over his body. A big one with a lot of roll to it.
It felt like he was sinking in a sea of exhaustion. He tried to keep talking. Tried to convey the situation as best he could. Tried to give the vet the real deal in broad strokes and tell him that Gamble was in danger. But he wasn’t sure he was making much sense anymore. He wasn’t even sure if he was really talking.
53
Lena was weaving through heavy traffic on the west end of Sunset Boulevard on a Friday night. She didn’t know how fast the car was moving because she hadn’t checked the speedometer. All she knew was that the car couldn’t go fast enough. She glanced over at Vaughan in the passenger seat.
“It’ll be okay,” he said.
Over the past hour every time she’d looked at him, Vaughan had said the same thing.
She had waited for Vaughan at Debi Watson’s house in West Hollywood and walked him through the crime scene with detectives from the Sheriff’s Department. Vaughan had spent the day rooting through the district attorney’s computer system with Keith Upshaw. They’d found something and he wanted to talk about it. But Lena’s mind was on Cobb. She couldn’t stop worrying about him. He was supposed to meet them at Watson’s house, but he never showed up. When she tried calling him, his message service kept picking up after a single ring as if his phone had been turned off.
Everything about it felt grim. Everything about it, wrong.
She found a clear stretch of road and picked up speed.
“Rockingham’s just around the corner,” Vaughan said. “It’s gonna be on the right and come up fast.”
She spotted the street sign as she rolled out of the curve. Once she made the turn, she saw the flashing lights and felt the pull in her gut. The street had been blocked off by a handful of black and white cruisers out of the West L.A. Station. A cop directing traffic was motioning her to make a U-turn and drive away. Lena grit her teeth and shook her head at the guy. When she flashed her badge, she was redirected to a spot on the first side street that hadn’t been blocked off.
Vaughan touched her arm. “Are you gonna be okay?”
She looked at him. She couldn’t tell. Everything seemed so raw.
She ripped open the door, met Vaughan on the other side, and they hurried up the street. As they checked in, she glanced at Bennett’s house and noticed the shattered windows and the bullet holes in the garage door. Vaughan gave her a nudge and pointed across the street to a hill overlooking the house. There were two men up there searching the ground with flashlights. It had to be the spot Cobb had told her about. The one with the view.
“I don’t see an ambulance,” Vaughan whispered.
“And I don’t see the coroner’s van. Maybe we got lucky.”
Someone called out her name.
She turned and saw a detective standing at the curb in front of Bennett’s house. She knew him. His name was Clayton Hu. They had spent a year on patrol together when they both wore uniforms and worked out of Hollywood.
Hu seemed surprised as he approached them and offered his hand. “What are you guys doing here, Lena?”
“Looking for a detective named Dan Cobb. Have you seen him, Clayton?”
The detective shook his head. “We’re still trying to figure out what happened. This house belongs to a deputy district attorney.”
Vaughan nodded. “We know,” he said. “Steven Bennett.”
“No one’s around,” Hu said. “We’ve been trying to locate Bennett for the last hour. We’ve got his phone numbers, but he’s not responding to the messages we’ve left. We’ve got calls into every hospital in the city. Anyone walks in with a gunshot wound and we’ll know about it.”
Vaughan gave Lena a look, then turned back to Hu. “Maybe you should tell us what you’ve got.”
Hu nodded again, switching on his flashlight and walking them over to the curb. He pointed out the shell casings, then turned the light on the trail of spilled blood that led up and down the street. Lena forced herself to look, but found it painful. Personal.
Hu turned to her. “What was Cobb doing here?”
“Keeping an eye on Bennett.”
“And Bennett’s a suspect?”
“Yeah,” she said. “He’s a suspect. It’s murder, Clayton. Multiple counts.”
“I was afraid you were gonna say that. Let’s take a walk up the hill.”
They followed the blood trail up the street, then cut into the brush once they’d passed the crime scene tape. When they reached the top of the hill, the two men already there lowered their flashlights and pointed out three more shell casings. After a few moments, the beams of light panned back toward the edge of the hill and Lena’s eyes came to rest on the blood that had soaked into the dry ground. There was a lot of it.
“I’m sorry,” Hu said in a quiet voice. “I’m guessing this is where your detective was keeping an eye on things when he got shot. Is he a friend?”
Lena nodded without saying anything.
“He lost a lot of blood, Lena. But he’s gotta be pretty tough because he walked out and drove away. The blood trail goes all the way down to the next street and then stops where we think he parked his car. We didn’t know he was a cop.”
Vaughan cleared his throat. “He would have driven into Westwood.”
Hu nodded. “We thought so, too, but no one’s shown up yet. Not with a gunshot wound.”
Lena looked over the hill at Bennett’s house, then turned back to Hu. “You’ve got people looking for him between here and there?”
“Not yet,” he said. “But I’ll make it happen.”
She gave him as much information as she had, a description of Cobb’s car, the name of his supervisor at the Pacific Station, the number to his cell phone. Then they started down the hill, avoiding the yellow tape that charted the path that Cobb had taken through the brush. As Lena and Vaughan left Hu behind, she remained silent until they reached the car, climbed in and were alone. The sadness seemed overwhelming.
“What do you think?” she whispered. “Why didn’t Cobb show up at the hospital?”
“I don’t know,” Vaughan said gently.
“Do you think-”
Her voice broke, and she couldn’t manage to keep her game face on any longer. She didn’t understand her emotions. She could feel the tears beginning to drip down her cheeks. When she tried to turn away, Vaughan pulled her into his arms and held her. Moments passed and she sighed as her body met his and began to relax. She smoothed her hands over his shoulders and buried her face in his neck. She could feel his face-rough as sandpaper-and then his lips, kissing her cheek. She turned and gazed at him. Their eyes met in the darkness. And then their lips. Lena’s body flushed with warmth. She could taste the salt on his skin.
54
She was sitting out by the pool in the early morning light with a tall glass of ice tea. She felt weary-her muscles, her bones, her mind. In spite of Vaughan and the comfort he had given her, she hadn’t been able to sleep. Clayton Hu had called three times, each update more alarming than the next. West L.A. patrol units had covered every conceivable route between Bennett’s house and the emergency room at UCLA in Westwood. Additional units had been brought in to search every possible route between the house and St. John’s Medical Center in Santa Monica.
