Vertical Coffin s-4 Read online

  "Don't be such a cynic," she said. "I love you. Call if you get outta there in time to meet someplace for dinner."

  "Right." I hung up and stood out in the waiting room where I practiced trying to be invisible, which is hard to do when you're in a sheriff's substation wearing a sports jacket with a dead deputy's blood and stomach contents spattered all over it.

  I finally got a chance to make my statement at four o'clock. I was led into one of Sergeant Micklyn's I rooms and seated at a wood table in front of a tape machine. Captain Matthews sat in a chair across the room and kept quiet. He glowered as a young lawyer from the D. A.'s office took notes. Sergeant Micklyn ran the interview, Sergeant Dodds stood against a white concrete wall and listened. I started telling my story, adding my one embellishment to keep Sonny Lopez straight with his lieutenant. After I finished I looked at Dodds, who still had on his Ray-Bans, even though we were inside. He had been leaning his thin frame against the wall, chewing his toothpick, looking like a cowboy in a Bull Durham commercial. He finally pushed away and straddled a straight-back chair facing me.

  "You sure you didn't fire your weapon at the scene?" he asked. "Even though you got them rounds from SEB?"

  "I didn't fire," I answered.

  "You have any psychological misgivings here? You and Emo were friends. You got the heebie-jeebies? You want me to call your supervisor, get you some time off… arrange for a visit to a psych?" It was a standard post-interview question, asked after all shootings to protect the department from a cop's lawsuit, in case he cracked up later.

  "No, I'm fine," I said.

  Captain Matthews, who had said nothing, got up and walked toward the door. Then, without warning, he swung back.

  "Tell me something, Sergeant. Did you see that fed SRT truck parked at the scene when you were coming up Hidden Ranch Road?" he asked.

  "I think they got there ahead of me, Captain," I said.

  "That's not what I asked you."

  "I didn't see them until after I was there. Then later they started lobbing hot gas, like I already said."

  "So you didn't see them arrive?" he said.

  "Excuse me, Captain, but why don't you just go ask them when they got there? They're still in the station."

  "Because they won't agree to be interviewed," he said, repressed anger bubbling to the surface like toxic waste.

  "They were on the scene at your shooting," I said. "They fired shots. They gotta sit for your internal review."

  "Tell them that," he said. "They're saying they'll only talk to their own Internal Affairs."

  I thought that might be the new low in interagency cooperation, but I didn't say anything.

  Then Sergeant Micklyn, whose first name was Jan, officially closed the interview, picked up her tape recorder, snapped it off, and popped out my cassette. She labeled it, then set it in a stack with some others.

  "Since that tape is off, maybe I can help you with one thing," I said.

  "What's that?" Dobbs said.

  "You told me that ATF arrived quickly because they were coming from a training day and heard the cross talk on the L. A. Impact channel."

  "That's their story," Dobbs agreed.

  "Kinda hard to do when you don't have TAC-four on your scanner." Dodds let one eyebrow climb his forehead. "On the way in here I looked in their truck. Not on there," I said.

  Dodds glanced at Captain Matthews. Neither said anything or changed expressions, but a lot was going on between them. Then someone knocked on the I room door. Dodds opened it. A uniformed deputy was outside.

  "Captain, I've got the ASAC from ATF outside. Name's Brady Cagel. He wants to talk to the incident commander. Guess that's still you," the deputy said.

  Matthews groaned. Dodds took off his sunglasses and carefully wiped them with a handkerchief, not looking at Matthews, who moved to the door and said, "Where's SRT? They still in my office?"

  "Still there," the deputy said, and both of them left.

  Dodds turned to me.

  "I'm done with you for now, Scully. We'll get this typed up and you can sign it in a day or so."

  "Okay." I got to my feet and walked back into the substation. You could feel the tension. Everybody's nerves were frayed and sparking. Dangerous energy was arcing around like loose bolts of electricity.

  Brady Cagel was your standard-issue fed in a suit. He was in the waiting area alone. Medium height, with a tight build. His regular features, short hair, and square jaw made him look rugged, not handsome. But he was angry. His eyes, like lasers, were zapping around, peeling the paint off walls in the under-furnished lobby.

  I wasn't about to miss this, so I ducked into the coffee room and started searching my pocket for quarters to feed into the vending machines. After a moment a lock buzzed and I heard Captain Matthews come through the electric door into the waiting room.

  "Agent Cagel?" I heard him say. "I'm Matthews, the CO." There was a pause while I guess they shook hands.

  Then Cagel said, "I'm the ASAC for SRT. I understand you're keeping my people here."

  "I need your unit to all make statements. I can't close our shooting review without it. We need an account from everyone who discharged a weapon on the scene."

  "You'll get statements. We'll just do it over at our shop, is all. We're gonna use our review apparatus. I'll shoot everything over to you after it's done."

  "They'll have to make the statements in my presence," Matthews said, his voice getting hard.

  Then I heard feet shuffling and it got quiet out there, so I went to the coffee room door and took a peek. They had gone to the leather club chairs in the waiting area and were now seated, leaning toward each other. I couldn't quite hear what they were saying, so I crossed to the vending machines, bought some candy, then moved back to the door and looked out again. I could now hear them again, because their voices were raised in anger.

  "We're not going to sit for your shooting panel, get used to it," Cagel was saying.

  "Your guys were firing Parabellums and hot gas without coordinating with me. It was my incident. You were operating out there without even being on the same radio frequency," Matthews said. "Your guys set the house on fire. I have a lot of questions. I wanta know how they got to our crime scene less than three minutes after the shooting started."

  "I talked to my team leader. He says they were coming back from a training exercise, heard it going down on the Impact channel."

  "Only their truck doesn't have the Impact frequency on its scanner," Matthews said.

  "You're mistaken," Cagel replied. "Now, where are my people? I have an IAD inquiry convening downtown. We're already keeping a lot of people waiting."

  Matthews was losing this one. He had no way to force SRT into his review if they didn't want to do it. They worked for a separate agency.

  "There was a lot of armor-piercing ordnance stored in that house," Matthews finally said. "Grenades, at least fifty thousand rounds of three-oh-eights or two-twenty-threes.. We had some big explosions, which could have been dynamite, or even C-four. You sure ATF wasn't already teed up on that guy for some illegal firearms complaint, and that's how you got there so fast?"

  Brady Cagel stood. "Look, Captain, we're going to do a thorough investigation. I haven't interviewed my team leader yet, but we will pursue everything by the book. Once our IAD says the investigation is completed, we'll make sure you get a copy. Then you can add it to your review. Now where is my team? I'm not going to ask you again."

  "They're in my office," Matthews said tightly.

  I didn't need to see him to know he was seething. I heard the ASAC move past the coffee room and ask the desk sergeant to let him into the rear area.

  I waited until I heard the electric lock buzz, then went into the bathroom and tried to get Emo's blood and guts off my jacket. I scrubbed with wet paper towels but wasn't having much luck. The sports coat looked like a complete loss, but I stripped it off, folded it over my arm, and carried it out with me anyway.

  In the pa
rking lot I found Sonny Lopez waiting by my car. He still had Emo's DNA on his uniform. We stood looking at each other for a long moment, not sure how to wrap this up.

  "Thanks for helping me get him down off the porch," I said. "If he'd stayed up there, we woulda lost the body."

  "I was waiting out here to tell you I shoulda suggested it first. He was my carnal, my station mate. I kinda froze."

  "Not when it counted," I said, and put a hand on his shoulder. I could feel his nerves and muscles twitch under my hand.

  "This is really fucked, huh?" he finally said.

  "Yep."

  "SRT just rolled out of here in their new LAV." The feds called their SWAT van a light armored vehicle. "I've never seen Captain Matthews so jacked up. He's usually pretty mellow."

  "That's 'cause SRT won't sit for your shooting review. They're doing a parallel investigation. His ass is on the line. He lost a deputy, the perp is barbeque, the house in ashes. There's gonna be beaucoup legal trouble over this," I said.

  "It's even worse than that, Shane. I just found out from the desk sergeant that ATF called us. They got the initial complaint, but since Smiley was impersonating a sheriff's deputy and lived in the county, ATF handed us the collar. The neighbors up there told me an hour ago that Smiley had been wandering around, showing his neighbors a sheriff's badge for months. He'd been telling 'em he works for our antiterrorist division. They said last week Smiley took some of the guys who live up there into his garage and showed them his armory. Boxes of ammo, grenade launchers. They said he even had plastic explosives up there, some C-four."

  "That's what blew the roof off the garage," I said.

  Sonny nodded. "The neighbors called ATF and reported it because they didn't want some spook in their neighborhood with a garage full of explosives. Matthews thinks after they gave us the impersonating charge they were parked nearby, waiting to see what would happen about the guns. That's how they got there so fast."

  It didn't sound right to me, then Sonny's handsome face contorted.

  "The feds didn't want to serve a warrant on a guy with an AK-forty-seven and a garage full of C-four so they sent Emo up there thinkin' he was arresting some ding on a class-B nothing, and he walks into a bullet. All the while ATF was waiting down the road to see whether he got the cuffs on or not." Lopez was shaking with anger.

  I knew part of it was just a post-shoot-out adrenaline burn, but I didn't like the dangerous look in Sonny's black eyes. His chest was rising and falling as he took deep breaths to calm himself down. His heartbeat pulsed a vein on his forehead.

  "Listen Sonny, I think you need to go end-of-watch, hit a heavy bag or something, then get a beer and chill out."

  "I'm gonna go get a fucking riot gun and chill out the ATF building downtown…"

  "Good idea. Real smart," I said softly.

  "Damn it, Shane, they might as well have just killed him themselves."

  "Sonny, let their shooting review panel deal with this. If there's a problem, their Internal Affairs guys will flag it."

  He dropped his head and looked at his shoes. When he glanced up again he was crying.

  "I know his wife and kids," Sonny said. "I help him coach Pop Warner football. He was my carnal. My amigo… Those fucking guys…" He couldn't finish, overwhelmed with emotion.

  "Get outta here, man. You need to get your feet under you."

  "I loved him, Shane."

  "Me too," I said softly.

  Chapter 5

  GETTING READY

  It was ten o'clock on Saturday morning six days later, and Emo's funeral was scheduled for two that afternoon. I was sitting in the backyard of my little house in Venice, California. Our adopted marmalade cat, Franco, lounged at my feet, taking in the view of plastic reproduction gondolas floating in two feet of brackish seawater and narrow, arched, one-lane bridges spanning shallow saltwater canals. Venice, California, had been built in the twenties by Abbott Kinney, who had designed it to resemble a scaled-down version of Venice, Italy. It was an architecturally challenged throwback to the fifteen hundreds. Run down now, and a little sad, the neighborhood still clung proudly to its tacky, old-world heritage like a stubborn drunk refusing to get off a barstool. I don't know how Franco felt about it, but I loved it for its corny pride.

  Chooch was inside doing his homework. Delfina, his girlfriend, whom we had taken in after her cousin, American Macado, died last year, was now living in Chooch's old room. He had willingly moved into makeshift quarters we'd set up in the garage. Delfina was proving to be a great addition to the family. She was a beautiful, black-eyed Hispanic girl who usually brought a soft, relaxed point of view to our mix. This morning she was off at a rehearsal at Venice High School where she was now enrolled. They were putting on a production of West Side Story, and Delfina was playing Maria. All week she had been rehearsing songs, her slightly thin, true voice floating through the house. She had left an hour ago, visibly nervous because they were doing the first run through with music.

  I was stretched out on my patio furniture reading a disturbing follow-up article on the Hidden Ranch shoot-out in the morning edition of the L. A. Times. It was under the same grainy photo of Vincent Smiley the newspaper had been running all week. In the shot the dead killer appeared young and expressionless. A vacant smile split his lips like a poorly drawn line that didn't foreshadow his violent end.

  He looked small. Small eyes, small neck, small life. It was hard to think somebody like Vincent Smiley could have killed a man like Emo Rojas. But all of society has come to understand that guns in the hands of idiots are mindless equalizers. I was trying to get a handle on my emotions and prepare myself for the funeral ahead.

  I hate cop funerals. After the Vikings case, and Tremaine Lane's over-the-top grave site production, I had promised myself that I would never attend another brother officer's burial; that I would try and find a quiet place to say my good-bye alone. But there wasn't much I could do about ducking this one. In fact, to be blunt, it was my second cop funeral since making that hollow promise. So it seemed I was just blowing off steam and lacked the courage of my own convictions.

  I steeled myself to get through it. It had been six days since the shooting on Hidden Ranch Road. The incident was still a front-page, above-the-fold feature in the L. A. Times. The fickle electronic media had played it big for three news cycles, then returned to their endless fascination with celebrity mischief. But new facts kept rolling out on the pages of the Times. Since I wasn't part of the active sheriff's investigation, I was getting most of my information from the unreliable rumor mill downtown, and from the morning paper.

  In a profile of Smiley earlier in the week, the paper revealed that he had once been a member of the Arcadia Police Department. He'd been on the job for about ten months in 2002, made it through their academy training, but had been rolled out as a probationer shortly after he hit the street. Apparently his training officer observed some critical flaws in his psyche and submarined him. The Arcadia police had not shared the reason for his dismissal with the press, saying, since Vincent Smiley was dead and not being tried, his psychiatric records would remain locked up in his 10–01 file.

  The county coroner couldn't do a standard print or dental match on Smiley's corpse because the body was too badly burned. His teeth had turned to dust from the intense heat, but the M. E. had positively identified the body, using DNA. Apparently Smiley had given a sample to the Arcadia P. D. when he was still on the force-something I found very unusual, if not downright strange. Police unions were adamant against letting their officers give DNA, citing a list of probable cause and Fourth Amendment statutes. But for some reason Smiley had voluntarily given up a sample. It made me wonder if his dismissal might have stemmed from charges of sexual misconduct, and he had given the sample voluntarily in an attempt to beat the rap.

  As far as anybody knew, Smiley didn't have any family that was still alive, so he was to be held in the morgue for the required two weeks. In another eight days, if his body wa
sn't claimed, he would be dumped in a pauper's grave, courtesy of the county, destined to spend eternity in a ten-foot hole full of the very homeless miscreants he had once hoped to police.

  The crisis had lurched along for almost a week, like a cartoon cowboy with a slew of arrows in his back. On Friday, the L. A. County Board of Supervisors, headed by a broken steam valve named Enrique Salazar, got into the act. Salazar had picked up the sheriff's fallen shield and was charging the hill at Justice. He repeated the charge that ATF had not shared all the pertinent details of the arrest before sending Emo out to serve the warrant, speculating that this probably happened because Emo was a Mexican. Of course, nobody at ATF could have possibly known that a Mexican-American sheriff would serve the warrant, so that was just Enrique playing to his Hispanic base. But he also reasoned that ATF had not told the sheriffs about the illegal weapons cache, because, had the sheriffs known, they would have said, "Serve your own damn warrant." The Salazar piece was this morning's front-page ticking bomb.

  Far more troubling than that was the fact that the temperature between these two law enforcement groups was at slow boil. Only the LAPD had managed to stay neutral.

  Alexa came out, sat on the metal chair beside me, and took my hand. I showed her the front-page article in the Times.

  "Saw it," she said. "Two thousand of Emo's friends and coworkers gathering this afternoon to cry over his body, and Salazar picks today to say ATF thought he was just another dumb Mexican. Guy needs a new public affairs consultant."

  "This isn't going to go away," I said. "Salazar is going to make it an election issue. He'll go to the governor."

  "In that case, he won't have to go far. The governor is going to be at the funeral. My office was notified that his security detail was going to need special parking at Forest Lawn."

  "Great," I said.

  She turned and looked at me carefully. "Shane, we need to talk about this."

  I thought we had been talking about it, but apparently Alexa had something else on her mind.