A Cold and Broken Hallelujah (16 page)

“What’s going on with his mother?” I asked Ruiz.

“When we try to call, it goes straight to voice mail.”

“Battery’s dead. Wherever she is, she can’t find a charger.”

“That’s what I figured.”

I called Patrick over. It was hard to tell if his limp was almost gone or if he just wanted us to think it was.

“Can we get a GPS location on a cell phone with a dead battery?”

“Probably. A phone usually shuts down before the battery’s completely drained. You know the carrier? Depending on which company it is, we should at least be able to get the location of the phone when it died.”

“Want to see if you can get the info on Felicia Solano’s phone?”

“Does it need to be admissible?” Patrick always asked because after spending six years in Computer Crimes, he was usually able to hack his way into just about any information anywhere online. But there was always the question of how much we were able to do without a court order. It wasn’t as clear-cut as most of our procedures. The technology changed so rapidly that we had to work to keep on top of the latest rulings. One misstep with the wrong digital information could derail a case. Something that was fair game one day might be illegal the next.

Because the lieutenant was standing right next me, I answered, “Yes?”

Ruiz nodded and Patrick headed back to his desk.

“Is Jesús going to stay with the CPS woman?”

“She’s agreed to keep him here for a few hours, while we try to find his mom.”

If I hadn’t been worried about Jesús’s little sister, I probably would have recommended that she get him into the system as soon as she could. But I didn’t want to risk him being separated from Maria for any longer than he had to be. I knew being apart wasn’t doing either one of them any good.

Ruiz managed to convince the lieutenant of the Gang Enforcement section to authorize OT for one of the detectives to come in and help me try to identify the man who’d killed Roberto Solano. Brad Hynes was one of the oldest members of the detail. I didn’t know him well, but we’d been in uniform at roughly the same time and had worked a few cases that were tangentially connected. He was one of the many department cops I knew well enough for a wave or a how’s-it-going in the hallway, but our conversation never went much deeper than that.

“How’s it going?” I said even though we weren’t in the hallway.

“Well, it’s Saturday and I’m at a desk, but otherwise I can’t complain.” The tone in his voice told me he didn’t mind being here. I wasn’t sure if it was just because of the overtime or because he, like me, didn’t have anything better to do on a weekend afternoon. “What do you need?”

“I’m looking to ID someone from a murder last night.”

“We had a murder last night? Surprised I didn’t hear about it.”

“Not Long Beach. Different jurisdiction.”

“Where?”

“Riverside.”

“But you think he’s local?”

“Found a vehicle stolen from Long Beach Airport, figure it’s our guy.”

“And you got a solid description?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Who’s your wit?”

“Me. Saw him myself. Had a few words with him before we knew what he did.”

“Let me fire up the computer. What did he look like?”

“Latino. Midthirties. Big. Six-four, two-fifty. All muscle. Bald with a Fu Manchu and I think some neck tats. At least one on the right side.”

“Could you see what the design was?” His fingers were clicking on the keyboard.

“No. He had a collared shirt. I only saw a bit of it. Looked pointy, like the top of a triangle. Couldn’t tell if it was words or an image. Just the dark ink.”

I waited for him to finish typing and for the computer to pull up possible matches.

“Sound like anybody you know?” I asked.

“Could be a lot of guys,” he said. “Bald’s in these days.” A few more seconds, and the database kicked back a list of names. “Looks like about three dozen. How do you want it? Go straight to the photos?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Here,” he said, rolling to the right in his desk chair. “You go ahead and advance them yourself.”

I moved into the place he’d just moved out of and leaned in. The killer’s face was in my head, but I’d worked with enough eyewitnesses to know that memory is rarely as reliable as we believe it to be. I clicked through the photos quickly to see if anything would be an instant match for the image I remembered. I gave each photo two or three seconds before I moved on to the next. I’d take each one in as quickly as possible. They were so similar that it often seemed like I was looking at different pictures of the same face, until some difference would register—the spacing of the eyes, the curve of the nose, the squareness of the chin—and I’d click through to the next. I made it through all thirty-seven possibles without any of the faces setting off alarm bells in my head.

Hynes knew what I was doing, and he seemed as disappointed as I did when I got to the last one and shook my head.

“Take it slower this time,” he said.

I did. The second time through I found five possibilities. We made a list of them with their known gang affiliations, and Hynes added his own thoughts about the three he’d had direct experience with.

I studied the list and the photos. At that point, though, I knew I’d be doing calculations about the likelihood of each suspect and that would be influencing my perceptions. Hector Salazar, for instance, with his bounces for second-degree murder and aggravated assault and ties to MS-13, seemed more likely than David Escalante, who’d only gone down once for less than a year on an intent-to-distribute charge. And, of course, it might have been none of them at all.

Still, I had a list of names, so that was something.

By the time I got back upstairs to the squad room, I had a message from the detective from Riverside, Mike McDermott. I called him back.

“Just finished with the autopsy,” he said.

“Find out anything interesting?”

“It doesn’t look like our guy meant to kill Solano. At least not as soon as he did. You remember the duct-tape gag?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Well, at some point, he popped Solano in the nose hard enough to break it.”

“Solano suffocated?”

“Yeah.”

I’d actually seen it before. If an assailant does too good a job and makes a gag airtight, the victim can only breathe through their nose. A broken nose will cause the sinuses to swell and fill with mucus and blood, cutting off the airways. With the mouth blocked, asphyxiation can occur in only a few minutes. Sometimes the assailant figures out what’s happening, sometimes they don’t.

“Fuck.”

“Don’t go there,” McDermott said. He knew what I was thinking. Any decent cop would. I wondered if Solano had suffocated after we decided to interrupt the interrogation. Would he have just been given a solid but relatively minor beat-down if we hadn’t showed up?

“Beckett, you still there?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t blame yourself.”

“I’m not. Solano was a douchebag who deserted his kids. He didn’t deserve what he got, but he wasn’t an angel.”

“What is it then?”

“His son.”

“Not the one in jail. The other one?” He paused long enough to check his notes. “Jesús?”

“He’s just a decent high-school student trying to take care of his little sister, and his world’s falling apart around him.”

“Sometimes I wonder,” he said. “Give a kid a name like that, you’re just asking for trouble.”

Jesús’s mother finally returned our calls and told us that her phone had died and she wasn’t able to charge it, just as we had hypothesized. She also sounded half-drunk, so the phone may have been lower on the priority list than she wanted us to believe. She’d spent the night at an acquaintance’s house. We sent a unit to pick her up.

Ruiz had left Jesús and the social worker in the conference room. I went in and sat down next to him. He was reading a blue-and-black hardcover.

“What are you reading?” I asked.

“It’s called
The Fault in Our Stars
,” he said. “We have to read it for our one-book-one-school thing that we have to do over winter break.”

“You’re starting early.”

“Yeah.”

“Is it any good?”

“It’s about some kids with cancer,” he said, as if that answered the question.

“Sounds sad,” I said.

“It is, but it’s funny too.”

“You like to read?”

He nodded. “My English teacher said I might be able to go into AP next year.”

“That’s good.” I gave him a minute to go on or to change the subject, but he waited for me. He was sharp enough to know I wouldn’t have come in if I didn’t have something to tell him. “Your mom’s on the way,” I said. “She’s okay, and Maria is fine.”

He tried to play it cool, but he was clearly relieved.

“What’s going to happen to us now?”

“We’re going to find someplace safe for you until we can figure out who took those shots yesterday. We want to make sure everything’s okay before you go back home.”

“Where is it safe?” he asked.

I didn’t know how to answer.

Jesús had an aunt who lived in Oceanside. She agreed to let the family stay with her for a few days. I worried that that wouldn’t be long enough. And I worried that it wasn’t far enough away. Oceanside wasn’t much farther than Riverside, and Roberto Solano had been out of touch with the family for years. Apparently, the aunt checked in with her sister fairly regularly.

When Ruiz called Jen, Patrick, and me into the conference room with Jesús and told us the plan, I kept my misgivings to myself. But I followed him out into the squad room and said, “Can I have a minute?”

He led me into his office, and I closed the door behind us. “They’ll find him,” I said.

“Why do you think that?”

“They found his old man.”

“That’s different.”

“How?”

“A parent is a lot easier to track down. It’s harder to find out someone’s aunt than it is their father.”

“It’s not much harder. Besides, what if Pedro is talking?”

Ruiz didn’t say anything.

“They might be tracking his cell. The hitter went to Riverside a few hours after Jesús’s first call to his dad in years.”

“Can you prove there’s a connection?”