“But there’s no place to run,” she said. “No place to hide. You own this.”
She could see his wheels turning. She could see the machine crashing-his soul tapped out at zero with no fuel and no backup. His eyes inched along the ground, then rose slowly until they found her kneeling before him just ten feet away. He met her gaze and held it. When he noticed her gun pointed at the center of his chest, he smiled at her.
“Fuck it,” he said.
Bennett raised the gun, wrapped his mouth around the muzzle, and pulled the trigger. Lena watched as his head snapped back against the wall and the blood gushed out. But the gun didn’t stop firing.
Hu and Vaughan rushed over. The guys with the shotguns moved in as well.
It looked like Bennett’s finger had become stuck in the trigger guard. As his body greeted death and began twitching, the 9-mm Smith fired one round after the next, blasting his head away in chunks. The gun didn’t stop firing until the mag finally emptied out.
And then the sound dissipated. The smoke cleared. And Lena watched with Vaughan as one of the guys walked over to Bennett’s corpse, pulled the pistol away, and tossed it on the ground. When he gave the body a stiff kick with his boot, no one said anything. It seemed like the right thing to do.
56
Cobb needed a fresh set of clothes to be buried in.
Lena remembered that gray suit she’d seen him wearing on video during Jacob Gant’s trial. The one that had looked new and perfectly tailored. Vaughan said he’d ride over with her to pick it up.
Over the last three days, they had spent a lot of time together. A lot of time not being alone with themselves or their thoughts. A lot of time in bed.
Lena pulled out of the garage at Parker Center, saw the cameras turning their way from the media camped out around the building, and drove through the red light. Instead of dealing with midday traffic on the 110 Freeway, she decided to take surface streets around Dodger Stadium and pick up the Golden State Freeway on the other side of the hill.
The press was swarming again. The story of Lily Hight’s murder bigger than ever with a fresh set of storylines and a cast of seven new victims capped off by the killer of all killers-Bad Boy Bennett-a deputy DA who committed suicide rather than face his arrest and prosecution and the humiliation and shame that would have come with it.
On Saturday night they had confronted the district attorney for his own odd behavior-a no-nonsense meeting ordered by Deputy Chief Ramsey. Ramsey wanted to know what Higgins and Spadell had been looking for that could have been picked up by Club 3 AM security cameras. Ramsey wanted to know what was so important to Higgins that it required breaking into Johnny Bosco’s house and running away when Lena identified herself as a police officer. Spadell never showed up for the meeting and was believed to have fled the city. Higgins refused to talk until he’d had a chance to confer with his political consultants. Ramsey pointed out to the district attorney that burglary was still considered a crime in Los Angeles County and suggested that he confer with his attorney instead of his asshole consultants.
But if Jimmy J. Higgins had been searching out video that showed him using cocaine, it hardly made any difference now.
Bennett had been his protege and everybody knew it. Higgins had overseen Bennett and Watson’s work on Jacob Gant’s trial, hoping to grab as many headlines as he could. He had received a copy of Gant’s polygraph from Buddy Paladino, just as Bennett and Watson had. Yet Jimmy J. Higgins had remained quiet about it, essentially paving the way for the actual killer-an officer of the court-to try an innocent man for a murder he himself had committed. The mayor, a majority of the city council and county supervisors-but not all-were calling for Higgins’s resignation. But even more, the sense of outrage was so pervasive that people were taking it to the streets. The story was just three days old. Higgins had already been attacked twice in restaurants by the kind of people who aren’t prone to acts of violence. He had been chased down the street by a group of college students who saw him exiting a parking garage.
Higgins was getting what his office had given Jacob Gant, but with one essential difference. Every blow Higgins took, he’d earned.
Lena exited the Golden State Freeway, winding her way around the airport until she reached Vineland Avenue. After passing Fiesta Liquors and the Rancho Coin Laundry on her left, she spotted a parking space right in front of Cobb’s apartment building and made a hard U-turn into the curb.
Vaughan seemed confused. “Why are you stopping?”
“We’re here,” she said. “This is it.”
He eyed the run-down building-the lost neighborhood. “I had no idea.”
Lena tried not to think about it and got out of the car. She noticed a Hispanic woman draping her sheets over the fence to dry in the sun. Across the street a middle-aged Asian woman was watching them from the sidewalk.
Lena led Vaughan through the broken gate and up the steps to the second floor. Just as before, most of the tenants kept their windows open and they were greeted by the smells of corn tortillas and chicken frying in hot oil. Lena pointed to Cobb’s apartment at the end of the walkway and they turned the corner. She could see that old Mexican woman sitting before her window again, her ancient face still expressionless. Still blank and wrinkled. But this time when Lena met her gaze, something different happened. She sensed a certain recognition in the old woman’s eyes. A certain sadness. And when she looked ahead to Cobb’s door, Lena saw all the flowers and candles that his neighbors had placed around the mat. A snapshot of Cobb taken in the courtyard with an old Polaroid camera had been taped to his door as well.
“They loved him,” Vaughan whispered.
Lena nodded, taking in the display as she unlocked the door with Cobb’s keys. She didn’t want to spend a lot of time here. She didn’t want any more memories than she already had. She didn’t want to let in anything new.
The heat inside the apartment was stifling. Vaughan left the door standing open, gazing at the shabby furniture and gray walls in disbelief. Lena left him there and walked into the bedroom to search through Cobb’s suits. After a few moments, Vaughan stopped in the doorway to watch.
“You know I keep thinking about the day you came to my office,” he said. “The day you wanted to talk, but wouldn’t do it on the phone. You’d just left Gant’s brother, Harry. He’d told you that Jacob was investigating Lily’s murder on his own. That he’d found something and had gone to tell Johnny Bosco about it.”
Lena spotted the gray suit and laid it out on the bed. “Our first break.”
“But I didn’t know you then. I didn’t know what to think. I thought you might even be crazy.”
“Now you know for sure,” she said.
“I’m serious, Lena. Gant may have walked out of that courtroom with a NOT GUILTY verdict, but everybody thought he killed Lily. Everybody thought his DNA made it a lock. Do you remember how far out on a limb we were?”
She gave him a look and nodded without saying anything.
Vaughan shook his head as he tried to remember the details. “We started out in the conference room,” he said. “The caterer had left food. Watson saw you with me and ran out to tell Bennett. Then Bennett shows up trying to listen to what we were saying.”
“We see it now for what it was,” she said. “We didn’t then.”
Vaughan shrugged, still mulling it over as Lena found a tie and pulled a clean white shirt out of the closet. Laying them over the gray suit, she gave them a look and returned to the closet for a pair of black dress shoes.
“Do you remember what we thought of Cobb, Lena? Do you remember your first impression of the man?”
She took a deep breath and tried to push the thought away but couldn’t quite make it. She opened Cobb’s dresser drawers and found his underwear and socks. The truth was that it felt a lot like the time so many years ago
