cigarette still piercing the darkness.
“What about Johnny Bosco?” she said. “Why was Jacob with him?”
The father pushed his coffee aside. “I have no idea.”
She sensed something in Harry’s face and turned to him. “Did you know Johnny Bosco?” she asked. “Do you know why your brother was with him, Harry? Did he use cocaine?”
The kid remained quiet and appeared nervous at being singled out. When she repeated the question, his face hardened.
“My brother didn’t do drugs,” he said finally. “And you’re just another stupid cop. Why don’t you leave us the fuck alone?”
He pushed past his father and rushed out of the room. After a few moments, a door slammed on the second floor. Then Gant pocketed the snapshot and got up from the table. Curiously, he turned his back on her and looked out through the slider. The man seemed to know that Hight had been watching them all along.
“You need to leave,” he said, still gazing across the driveway. “You’ve fulfilled our every expectation, Detective, and I don’t want my asshole neighbor to see me get angry. That’s what he wants. That’s why he’s watching. Why don’t you knock on his door tonight and ask him if he feels any better now. I can already see the stories on the news. The man who murdered my boy will get a parade. A street named after his sorry soul. I’ll bet you cops are actually happy about the way things worked out. Not short-term happy because you look like the stupid jerks that you truly are. But long-term happy because you’re finally off the hook.”
“No one’s off the hook, Mr. Gant.”
He turned from the window and stared at her for a long time. His weary body was trembling slightly and it looked as if he’d aged ten years in the past few minutes. Like something deep inside him had given way. As he pushed the chair into the table, he seemed a lot like his neighbor. He seemed like a man being forced to carry a monkey on his back for the rest of time-a bag overflowing with memories and nightmares he couldn’t shake out or get rid of.
He stepped around the table and pointed at the door, his voice hoarse and barely audible. “This is over,” he said. “Get out.”
8
The ride back to Parker Center was quiet-the eastern sky just beginning to catch some light from the sun still waking up below the horizon. With “rush hour” underway-an event that ran continuously from 5:30 a.m. until 2:00 a.m. every day of the week in Los Angeles-Lena assumed that she would be late for the strategy meeting at seven and had called ahead to let Barrera know.
It couldn’t be helped. Tim Hight and William Gant were way too wound up to be left alone. The air was too hot, the tinder too dry, and too many nerves were exposed.
Murder season was in full bloom, and Lena couldn’t walk away.
Her first thought was to request a surveillance team from the Special Investigation Section. SIS was their primary surveillance unit and could easily handle the job. But this was a unique situation. After talking it over with Rhodes, they decided that everyone would be better off if the surveillance units were out in the open for all to see. Two or three black and white cruisers parked right at the curb to underline their presence, and with any luck, cool things down.
Lena swung around the block and pulled up to the building. As she climbed out and Rhodes moved in behind the wheel, she could see what three nights without sleep had done to him. She watched him wave and pull away from the curb, trying not to worry about his drive home. Losing sight of her friend in traffic, she headed for the lobby on her own.
The meeting was being held in Captain Dillworth’s office on the third floor directly behind the Homicide Special Section. Her captain was in New Orleans, so the room was available and always left unlocked. Her desk stood just on the other side of the wall at one of four homicide tables. Her early morning arrival, more than routine. But Lena could sense something was different about today from the moment she passed through the lobby doors. The lunch stand across from the front desk. The guys working the turnstiles and X-ray machine. The three or four groups of people she passed in the hall.
The usual morning banter had been replaced with muffled voices and dull eyes pinned to the ground. The read she picked up was disappointment. But she thought that she could see fear and uncertainty, too.
The mood followed her into the captain’s office, only it was more pervasive here. As she slipped into an open seat and listened, Deputy Chief Ramsey was standing at the head of the table, laying it out for anyone who might have missed it. His audience was a select group that included the two prosecutors from the district attorney’s office who had failed, Steven Bennett and Debi Watson, another deputy DA Lena recognized but had never worked with, Greg Vaughan, along with their boss, District Attorney Jimmy J. Higgins. Aside from Ramsey, the only other LAPD official was her supervisor, Lieutenant Frank Barrera. That could only mean that Lena really was on her own.
She pushed the thought away and tried to concentrate on what the deputy chief was saying. Most of it was a repeat of her conversations with Rhodes and Escabar. But Ramsey had found his voice-gravel rinsed in an ashtray- and spiced things up with new details.
“We’re making news again,” he said. “Department of Justice attorneys will be meeting with the judge in two hours. Every reform we’ve made under Chief Logan-the progress we’ve achieved, the performance records we’ve broken-everything we’ve stood for over the past few years burned up with this case. This trial. And now, two men murdered in Hollywood. Termination of the consent decree has been tossed to the side of the road. Another monitor will be selected to look over our shoulders and report to the judge. The department is under the microscope again. You are, too, Higgins. We’re in this mess together. And right now, we’re roadkill. We’re fucked.”
The deputy chief’s words settled into the room sharp as broken glass. When Higgins didn’t react, Lena looked around the table and wondered what she’d missed over the past forty-five minutes. Bennett and Watson were sitting with the district attorney directly across from her. Barrera was on her left, but seemed to be focused on Greg Vaughan who was in a chair by himself at the far end of the table.
Something was going on. The more she thought it over, the more convinced she became that Vaughan’s presence was out of place. And from the grim expression on his face, it seemed obvious enough that he didn’t want to be here, either. Of all the prosecutors in the DA’s office, Greg Vaughan was the total package and could have worked for any law firm in the city. Lena had only met him in passing, but was well aware of his reputation. He was an exceedingly bright and gentle man, and looked to be about forty. His hair was more brown than blond. His frame, lean and athletic. When she had seen him in the past, he walked with an easy confidence. But it had been his eyes that set him apart. The glint and energy in those light brown eyes.
Today it looked like the lights had been shut down.
Lena glanced at Higgins, then back at Vaughan jotting something down on his legal pad. Vaughan had been shut out of the Jacob Gant trial early on when it looked like the kind of high-profile case that could make a deputy DA instead of breaking one. Higgins had kept Vaughan away because it was well known that he had become the district attorney’s chief rival. To Vaughan’s credit, he didn’t seem to have an interest in the rivalry and had made no attempt to compete with Higgins for his job. Roy Wemer, a deputy DA Lena had worked with over the past few years, once told her that Vaughan would never give up being a prosecutor. In spite of the years he’d put in, in spite of the overwhelming support he would have received from his colleagues, Vaughan still enjoyed presenting a case at trial and working in front of a judge and jury.
The deputy chief opened a file folder, tossing a photograph on the conference table. Everyone leaned in for a closer look. It was a single frame from the street camera that had picked up Tim Hight driving away from Club 3 AM. Although the image had been taken at night, the clarity was good enough to make an ID. Tim Hight’s face showed clearly through the windshield, looking triumphant and completely mad, along with a dark shape on the passenger seat that could easily have been the murder weapon.
Ramsey rolled a chair over, turning to Lena as he sat down. “SID has already made a preliminary review of the security tapes from the club,” he said. “Unfortunately, the fire escape is a blind spot. Hight could have been waiting out there all night and never been picked up on camera.”
Lena thought about the way the building was configured-what the cop with the clipboard had called
