LA Requiem

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Pike's jaw flexed once, then that, too, was gone.

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'I'll talk to Frank and let you know.' Joe Pike climbed into his Jeep, pulled the door shut, and in that moment I would've given anything to see into his heart.

Pike wanted to see Eugene Dersh.

He wanted to witness him in his own environment, and see if he thought Dersh had murdered Karen Garcia. If it was possible that Dersh was the killer, then Pike would ponder what to do with that.

Pike knew from the police interview transcripts that Dersh worked at home. All LAPD interviews started that way. State your name and address for the record, please. State your occupation. Pike's instructor at the academy said that you started this way because it put the subject in the mood to answer your questions. Later, Pike had been amazed to learn how often it put the subject in the mood to lie. Even innocent people would lie. Make up a name and address that, when you tried to contact them weeks later, you would find to be an auto parts store, or an apartment building packed with illegals, none of whom spoke English.

Pike pulled into a Chevron station and looked up Dersh's address in his Thomas Brothers map. Dersh lived in an older residential area in Los Feliz where the streets twisted and wound with the contours of the low foothills. Seeing the street layout was important because Krantz's people were watching Dersh's place, and Pike wanted to know where they were.

When Pike had the names of the streets bracketing Dersh's home, he used his cell phone to call a realtor he knew, and asked her if any properties were for sale or lease on those streets. The police would establish a surveillance base in a mobile van if they had to, but they preferred to use a house. After a brief search of the multiple listing service, Pike's friend reported that there were three homes for sale in that area, two of which were vacant. She gave Pike the addresses. Comparing the addresses with Dersh's on the map, Pike saw that one of the homes was located on the street immediately north of Dersh's, and kitty-corner across an alley. That's where the police would be.

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Pike worked his way across Hollywood, then wound his way into the quiet of an older neighborhood until he came to Dersh's small, neat home. Pike noted the two-story dwelling just off the alley that would be the police surveillance site. In the flicker of time as he drove past the mouth of the alley, Pike saw the glint of something shiny in the open second-floor window. The officers roosting there would have binoculars, a spotting scope, and probably a videocamera, but if Pike kept Dersh's house between them and himself, they wouldn't see him. In a combat situation, those guys would fast be a memory.

The neighborhood was easy. Small houses set back from the street, lushly planted with trees and shrubs, showing little clear ground between the houses. No one was clipping flowers in their front yards, no housekeepers were peering from their living-room windows, no strollers were passing, no yapping little dogs.

Pike parked at the curb two houses west of Dersh, then disappeared between the shrubs of the nearest house, one moment there, the next gone. In that instant when he allowed himself to be enveloped by leaves and twigs and green, he felt an absolute calm.

He moved along the near house, staying beneath the windows, then crossed between the trees into the prickly shrubs that surrounded Dersh's house. He neither touched nor disturbed the plants, but instead moved around and between them, the way he had done since he was a boy.

Pike eased to the corner of the living-room window, snuck a fast glance into a bright room, caught movement deeper within the house, and heard music. Yves Montand, singing in French.

Pike followed the west wall of the house through a small stand of rubber trees planted with ferns and pickle lilies, passing beneath the high window of a bathroom to the casement windows of Dersh's studio, where he saw two men. Dersh, the shorter of the two, wearing jeans and a Hawaiian shirt. Had to be Dersh, because the other man, younger, was wearing a suit. Dersh moved as if this place were his home; the other moved as a visitor. Pike listened. The two men were

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at a computer, Dersh sitting, the other man pointing over Dersh's shoulder at the screen. Pike could hear Yves Mon-tand, and catch occasional words. They were discussing the layout of a magazine ad.

Pike watched Dersh and tried to get a sense of the man. Dersh did not appear to be capable of the things that the police suspected, but Pike knew you could not tell by appearances. He had known many men who looked and acted strong, but had cores of weakness, and he had known men who seemed timid who had shown themselves capable of great strength and of accomplishing terrible things.

Pike drew even, steady breaths, listening to the birds in the trees, and remembering the Karen Garcia with whom he had spent so much time, and how she had died. Joe considered Dersh, noting his finger strokes on the keyboard, the way he held himself, the way he laughed at something the other man said. He thought that if Dersh had killed Karen Garcia, he might end the man. He would lay open the fabric of justice, and let it be Dersh's shroud. He could do such a thing now, even here in the daylight as the police watched.

But after a time Pike eased away from the window. Eugene Dersh did not seem like a killer, but Pike would wait to see what evidence the police produced. Seeing the evidence, he would then decide.

There was always plenty of time in which to deliver justice.

School

'We did eight hundred push-ups every goddamned day, some days over two hundred chins, and they ran us. Christ, we ran ten miles every morning and another five at night, and sometimes even more than that. We weren 't big guys, like badass football linemen or any of that, you know, Rambo with all those pansy protein-shake muscles bulging. We were skinny kids, mostly, all stripped down and hungry, but, hell, we could carry hundred- pound packs, four hundred rounds, and a poodle-popper uphill at a run all goddamned day. You know what we were? We were wolves. Lean and mean, and

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you definitely did not want us on your ass. We werefuckin' dangerous, man. That's what they wanted. Recon. That's what we wanted, too.'

—excerpt from Young Men at War: A Case by Case Study of Post

Traumatic Stress Disorder,

by Patricia Barber, Ph.D. M.F.C.C.

Duke University Press, 1986

Gunnery Sergeant Leon Aimes stood on the low ridge overlooking the parched hills at Camp Pendleton Marine Training Depot just south of Oceanside, California, scanning the range with a pair ofZeiss binoculars that had been a gift from his wife. He 'd been pissed as hell when he'd opened the box at his forty-fourth birthday and seen what they were because the Zeiss had set back the family three months 'pay. But they were the best viewing glass in the world, none finer, and he 'd gone to her later feeling like a dog to apologize for carrying on. These Zeiss were the best, all right. He would use them hunting blacktail deer this fall, and, a year from now, after his posting as a Force Recon company instructor, when he returned to Vietnam for his fourth combat tour, he would use them to hunt Charlie.

Aimes sat in a jeep with his best drinking buddy, Gunnery Sergeant Frank Horse, the two of them wearing black tee shirts, field utilities, and Alice harnesses, both of them smoking the shitty cigars they 'd bought down in TJ two months before. Horse was a full-blood Mescalero Apache, and Aimes believed him to be the finest Advanced Infantry Instructor at Camp Pendleton, as well as an outstanding warrior. Aimes, though African- American, had once been told by his grandmother that he had Apache blood (which he believed) and was the descendant of great warriors (which he absolutely knew to be true), so he and Horse often joked about being in the same tribe when they 'd had a little too much tequila.

Horse grinned at him around the cigar. 'Can't see 'm, can you?'

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