Cowly brushed at the last of the dog hair stuck to her pants, and stepped off the elevator. She stared down a hall she had walked for over three years, only now the hall loomed taller and wider and went on forever, and everyone in it watched her. A sharp pain stabbed behind her right eye. She heard her mother’s voice, I warned you not to watch so much TV, it must be a brain tumor. If only. Maybe her mother was right, and the tumor had made her as crazy as Scott. Only Scott wasn’t crazy. Scott had the disc and the diamonds.
She pushed one foot forward and the next and after a while she entered the squad room. Orso was in his cubicle. Topping’s door was open, but now her office was empty. Meeks checked the time like he was anxious to leave. Men and women she had known for three years worked and talked and got coffee.
Cowly went to the conference room, and sat down with the murder book. She sat facing the door so she could see if someone was coming.
Cowly had spent most of her walk back from the Stanley Mosk Courthouse figuring out how to find out who opened the original Danzer case file at West Los Angeles Robbery. She couldn’t ask Ian or anyone who worked with Ian, and she couldn’t call West L.A. Robbery. If Scott was right, and these guys were bad, any question about Danzer would be a warning.
Cowly had read the murder book twice and the complete case file once. She had only skimmed the sections referencing Beloit, Arnaud Clouzot, and Danzer. Knowing the Clouzot connection had been discounted by Robbery Special months earlier, she had seen no point in wasting time on a blind alley. She flipped through now, searching for the Danzer case number.
Cowly quickly found the number, and took it back to her cubicle.
She brought up the LAPD File Storage page, and was typing in the number when Orso surprised her.
“Have you heard from Scott?”
She swiveled to face him, trying to draw his eye from her computer. He glanced at her screen before he looked at her.
“No. Is he still in the wind?”
Orso’s face was pinched.
“Would you mind calling him?”
“Why would I call him?”
“Because I’m asking. I left a message, but nothing. Maybe he’ll call you back.”
“I don’t have his number.”
“I’ll give it to you. If you reach him, try to talk sense to him. This thing is getting out of hand.”
“Okay. Sure.”
He glanced at her computer again, and turned away.
“Bud. You think he killed those people?”
Orso made a face.
“Of course not. I’ll get his number.”
Cowly cleared her screen, and fidgeted until Orso returned. She typed in her file request as soon as he was gone. Officers were only allowed to request materials relevant to a case they were working on, so Cowly provided the number for an unsolved homicide that had been on her table for two years.
Case #WL-166491 appeared as a PDF. The first document was a closure form filled out and signed by Ian Mills, along with a three-page statement describing how Dean Trent, Maxwell Gibbons, and Kim Leon Jones, all deceased, were found and identified as the perpetrators of the Danzer Armored Car robbery. Mills cited and referenced SID and San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department reports tying a weapon found as having been a weapon used in the Danzer robbery, as well as Transnational Insurance Corporation documents affirming that the two diamonds found were among those stolen in the robbery. He concluded that the three perpetrators of the robbery were now dead, and as such, the case was rightfully being closed.
Boilerplate bullshit.
Cowly skimmed the documents Ian attached, until she found the beginning of the original West L.A. file. It opened with a couple of form documents filled in and signed by the detectives who caught the case, followed by a scene report describing how the detectives received their orders to report to the scene, and what they found when they arrived. Cowly didn’t bother reading it. She skipped to the end. The report was signed by Detective George Evers and Detective David Snell.
Cowly blanked her screen.
Orso was in his cubicle, talking on the phone. Topping’s door was closed. She stood, took in the room, then sat and stared at the screen.
She said, “You sonofabitch.”
Cowly abruptly stood, and walked down the hall to the Robbery squad room. Same cubicles, same carpet, same everything. A Robbery detective named Amy Linh was in the first cubicle.
“Is Ian here?”
“I think so. I just saw him.”
Cowly walked back to Ian’s office. The I-Man was scribbling something on a report when Cowly walked in. He looked surprised when he saw her, and maybe a little watchful.
“Ian, you have more names to go with those white sideburns? We gotta bust these low-life, scumbag pieces of shit. We gotta fuck’m up.”
She wanted to see him. She wanted to say it.
“I hear ya. I’ll get you those names as soon as I can.”
Cowly stalked back to her desk.
George Evers.
David Snell.
She wanted to find out everything about them, and she knew how to do it.
38.
Robbery Special Section kept extensive files on people who stole for a living, whether they were actively being sought on warrant or not. Not chickenshit perps like teenage car thieves or the clowns who knocked over an occasional gas station, but hard-core professional thieves. Fifty minutes after Cowly left his office, Ian was searching this database for likely white-haired drivers when his email chimed, and he saw the note.
His shoulders tightened when he saw it was an auto-notification from the Storage Bureau. Such notifications were available at the option of the commanding bureau, unit, or closing officer, and Ian had opted to be notified when any of his closed cases were requested. He did this for every case he closed, but he only cared about four. The others were only a cover story.
Ian got up, closed his door, and returned to his desk. He had only received three notifications since the LAPD adopted the new system. Each time, he was afraid to open them, but all three had turned out to reference meaningless cases. It took him a full thirty seconds to work up his nut before opening it now. Then his belly flushed with acid.
Danzer.
The information provided by the notification was slight. It did not include the name of the requesting officer or agency, only the date and time of request, and the requesting officer’s active case number.
The case number told him plenty, and he didn’t like what it told him.
The number bore an HSS designator, which meant it was a Homicide Special Section case. Any dick on the Homicide side could walk forty feet, and ask whatever they wanted about Danzer, but someone had chosen to keep him out of the loop. This wasn’t good. An active case number was required to process the retrieval, which meant their case file was locked, but Ian had a work-around.
