with me.'
The elevator doors opened and we went in. Two women and an overweight man were inside. The shorter of the women sniffed at Charlie's cigarette. 'There's no smoking in here.'
Charlie blew out a cloud of smoke, and waved his hand. 'Sorry. I'll put it right out.'
He didn't.
'How bad is it, Charlie?'
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Bauman drew deep on the cigarette, then blew a huge cloud of smoke toward the woman. 'Can you spell
24
As I walked out through Parker Center, the voices of the people around me were distant and tinny. The world had changed. Karen Garcia and Frank Garcia and Eugene Dersh were gone. The police thought their assassin killer was gone, but even if he wasn't, it didn't matter.
There was only Joe in jail, and the need to save him.
I spent the afternoon retracing the six-mile route that Pike had run, listing every business along the way that might employ twenty-four-hour help. When I reached the part of Ocean Avenue where Pike had met the girl, I left my car and walked. Small groups of homeless people were dotted through the park, some sleeping on blankets in the hot sun, others clustered in small groups or busy searching through trash containers. I woke them if they were sleeping or interrupted them if they were talking to ask if anyone knew Trudy or Matt, or if, last night, they had seen a jogging man who wore sunglasses even after dark. Almost everyone said yes, and almost everyone lied. Trudy was tall and skinny, or short and fat, or had only one eye. The jogging man was a black guy looking to harvest the organs of unwilling donors, or a government operative bent on mind control. The schizophrenics were particularly cooperative. I didn't stop for lunch.
I worked my way through every Ocean Avenue hotel, asking for the names of nighttime staff, and vhen I finished I
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drove home hard to begin calling. Completing my iirst pass along Joe's route had taken almost five hours, and left me with a sense that I was falling behind.
Dersh's murder was the headline story on every four o'clock newscast in town. LAPD had released Joe's name as the suspect, and one station supered a picture of Joe with the legend VIGILANTE KILLER. Everyone reported that Dersh was the main suspect in the recent string of killings, with sources 'among the upper echelons of LAPD' saying that that investigation would remain open, though no other suspect was expected to be identified. The cat came in during the newscast, and watched with me.
At ten minutes before five, my phone rang, and Charlie Bauman said, 'The arraignment just ended. He's bound over.'
Charlie sounded hollow.
'What about bail?'
'No bail.'
I felt dull and weary, as if my frantic pace had taken its toll.
'We'll have another arraignment in Superior Court in about a month. I can argue for bail again there, and maybe that judge will swing in our favor. This one didn't.'
'So what happens now?'
'They'll let him sit in Parker for another couple of days, then transfer him to Men's Central. They'll keep him over in the safe wing because he used to be a cop, so we don't have to worry about that. All we have to worry about is building his defense. You find anyone who saw him?'
'Not yet.' I told him how I'd spent the day.
'Christ, how many names you got?'
'Between hotel people and businesses, two hundred fourteen.'
'Man. You work fast.'
It didn't seem like very much to me.
'Listen. Fax your list to my office. I'll have my secretary get on it tomorrow. That way you can keep pounding the pavement.'
'I'll make the calls.'
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231
Charlie hesitated. When he spoke again his voice was calm. 'Don't freak out on me, Elvis.'
'What are you talking about?'
'It's after six. Businesses are closing, and the night shifts aren't on yet. Who're you going to call?'
I didn't know.
'Joe's okay for now. We've got time. Let's just do a good job, all right?' Like I was a little boy who'd lost his best friend, and he was my dad telling me everything would be okay if I just stayed calm.
'I'll fax the list, Charlie.'
'Good. We'll talk tomorrow.'
After we hung up, I sent the list, then got a beer and brought it out onto the deck. The air was hot, but the canyon was clear. Two red-tailed hawks floated in lazy circles overhead. They hung on nothing, patient, tiny heads cocking from side to side as they searched for field mice and gophers. I have seen them float like that for hours. Patient hunters are successful hunters. Charlie was right. When I was in Ranger School at Fort Benning, Georgia, they taught us that panic kills. Men who had lived through three wars taught us that if you panicked you would stop thinking, and if you stopped thinking you would die. A sergeant named Zim ran us for five miles every day carrying sixty-pound field packs, a full issue of ammunition, and our Ml6s. Between each cadence he made us shout, 'My mind is my deadliest weapon. Sergeant Zim says so, and Sergeant Zim is never wrong. Sergeant Zim is God. Thank you, God.'
When you're eighteen, that leaves an impression.
I said, 'Okay, moron. Think.'
If Amanda Kimmel had seen a man dressed like Joe, wearing sunglasses like Joe, and sporting tattoos like Joe, then someone was pretending to be Joe. Finding that person would be an even better way of clearing Joe than finding Trudy or Matt, but so far, all I had was something that no one else seemed to have: An absolute and complete belief that Joe Pike was telling the truth. I did not doubt him. I would not. They could have videotape of Joe walking into that house, and if Joe
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pointed at the television and said, 'That's not me,' I would believe him.
You work with what you have, and all I had was faith. An awful lot of people have found that to be enough.
You look for connections.
Krantz came at this by looking for people with a motive to kill Dersh. He thought Pike's motive was Karen. Frank Garcia had the same motive, and had the money to have Dersh killed, but he wouldn't put it on Joe. That meant someone else, and I wondered if that someone had some true connection to Dersh, or had only used Dersh as a means to an end. Getting Pike. Maybe this wasn't about Dersh at all, but was about Pike.
I went inside for a yellow legal pad, came back out again, and made a timeline. From Karen's murder until the story broke that Dersh was the suspect took six days. From the story breaking about Dersh until his murder was only three days. I tried to imagine some guy with a grudge against Pike watching his TV He's out there hating Pike, and he's never before in his life heard about Karen Garcia or Eugene Dersh, but he sees all this, and the world's biggest lightbulb blinks on over his head.
Uh-uh.
