Alien Nation #1 - The Day of Descent (9 page)

Sikes groaned. She had just given him two weeks’ worth of digging to do in two days, and now she was making him sit out in the middle of a hot parking lot, unable to get started.

“You have a suggestion to make?” Angie asked.

A completely unexpected question leapt to Sikes’s consciousness, proof that at some level his mind was set in a detective mode. It was the sort of detail that might make things a lot easier. “Did he have a watch?”

Sikes hoped Petty didn’t. Sikes hoped Petty had a big red mark on his wrist where a heavy gold Rolex had sat on it. People were being held up for their Rolexes every day in L.A. being killed every week, it seemed. No need to check credit-card records then. One nice Rolex with a serial number and there was motive and an easy way to trace the stolen property, and it could all be taken care of in an hour, and then—

“Yeah, he’s got a watch,” one of the meat-wagon drivers said, leaning out of the window to look back at the two officers. “A funny-looking Japanese dooie.”

Sikes did the right thing and jumped on the words “funny-looking” just as Angie did.

She went over to the body in its orange body bag on the gurney. “I looked at that watch,” she said. “It was a cheap little digital with a black plastic strap.” She unzipped the bag with a quick yank, then used the body bag plastic like a pot holder to pull out Petty’s arm without touching it directly. “What’s so funny-looking about that?” she asked when the watch was revealed.

Sikes saw it at once. “It’s got two windows,” he said.

Angie squinted down at it. “So? It shows two time zones. Lots of watches do that.”

Sikes took off his Ray-Bans and was able to read the liquid crystal display at the bottom of the watch face. But the display at the top didn’t show numbers. It was a picture—a series of nested ellipses with black dots. He laughed. He had an uncle who would like a watch like that. “That shows the position of the planets,” he said. He bent down to look at the watch more closely. The ellipses were printed on the upper display, but the black dots were dark spots of liquid crystal.

“Does that make it something special?” Angie asked. “Expensive or anything?”

Sikes saw the printed ellipses also included one at a sharp angle overlapping the others. He knew what that was, too. The path of Comet Halley. He had gone out to the desert to see it five years earlier. Kirby had been with him, seven years old and bored with the whole thing. But Sikes had been fascinated. Uncle Jack had taught him all about the stars, back before—

“Sikes! Wake up!” Angie poked him in the ribs and brought him back to the here and now. “I said is that an expensive watch or anything?”

Sikes stood up and put his Ray-Bans back on. “It’s a Casio, that’s all. Interesting, but nothing fancy.”

Angie dropped the arm. “Zip him up, boys.” She was gone in under two minutes, having told Sikes she’d expect to see him back at the station house by five.

One of the techies looked at Sikes as Angie drove away. “Quite the party at Casey’s, I understand,” he said with a smirk.

Sikes grimaced and went back to take another look at the white Continental, mostly so he wouldn’t have to make conversation. He stood in front of the car, staring through the windshield, imagining where Randolph Petty had been sitting, how he had turned, rolled down his window to speak to whoever . . . to whoever was five feet away? Five feet? Sikes could imagine rolling down the window if someone was standing right by the car. But five or six feet away, at night, on the roof of a parking garage? Must’ve been the gun, Sikes told himself. The killer waved the gun, and Petty rolled down the window.

Sikes rubbed at the back of his neck, still looking into the car. That didn’t seem right. Robbers came up from behind, out of sight, so their victims didn’t have time to pull their own guns from the glove compartment. Robbers want to take people by surprise.

He saw the bullet hole in Petty’s forehead again. Dead center. The window down. The passenger window blown out by the bullet fragments. Petty had had his head turned ninety degrees. The killer had been coming at him straight from the side.
And Petty had rolled down his window.

“Naah,” Sikes said aloud. There were a dozen other explanations. The killer had sneaked up on Petty, made the old man hand over his wallet, then had started to walk away. Petty had yelled out something to him. The killer had turned, five or six feet away, and had fired. Yeah, that works, Sikes thought. But it was convoluted. And it wasn’t what he had thought first. Wasn’t what his instincts had told him.

He took off his sunglasses, looking for details. There was a thin line of orange just at the top of the windshield, barely detectable. Sikes went to the driver’s side and leaned in. He used the pen Angie had given him to pull down the sun visor even though he knew the S.I.D. technicians would have done that as a matter of course when they searched the car. Nothing fell out. He pushed his head in closer, twisting his neck to peer up where the visor touched the roof, just where it met the windshield. There was an orange tag jammed in there, flush with the roof and not the visor. He wasn’t surprised no one had found it.

Sikes poked it out with the pen and caught it in his palm. He held it gingerly by its edges and turned it over. It was Randolph Petty’s parking tag from last night. He had entered the parking structure at 10:37
P.M.
That would make sense to Angie, Sikes thought. The stores in the Beverly Center would all have been closed then, but the Good Guys ran twenty-four hours a day. Petty had bought something there, and it had been stolen by—

Sikes turned the tag over again. There was no validation stamp on it. Randolph Petty hadn’t gone shopping anywhere. And since he had been wearing his seat belt, he probably hadn’t even gotten out of his car before he was shot.

“Man, oh man,” Sikes whispered. He remembered when he had bought Kirby the Nintendo. A Friday night. Almost midnight. The Good Guys and a few restaurants were the only action in the area, and the parking structure was almost completely empty. So why did Randolph Petty drive all the way up to the top level to park at 10:37
P.M.
? Sikes asked himself. How many empty parking spaces did he pass to come all the way up here?

The old guy had been seventy-two. At the very least, he would have parked by the escalators or the elevators.

Unless, Sikes thought. He didn’t want to think it. He knew all the extra paperwork he was going to make for himself if he continued thinking it. But headache or no headache, two-day limit or no two-day limit, Sikes was a detective now, and he had the gold shield to prove it.

And his fledgling detective’s instincts, the ones Angie Perez had told him he had to learn to trust, said that Randolph Petty had not been killed in a random robbery.

Randolph Petty had driven up to the top level of the parking garage at 10:37 last night because he was planning to meet someone here. And that someone was someone he knew. Someone who could walk right up to him without bothering to stay hidden. Someone whom Petty would recognize and roll down his window for.

Randolph Petty was a white-haired, seventy-two-year-old guy who wore the planets on his wrist and who had been set up to be killed.

What a way to start, Sikes thought as his stomach rumbled uneasily. Here was a murder staring him straight in the face, and all he wanted to do was throw up again. If this truly was the way the rest of his career was going to go, then he suspected he was in deep trouble. But then, when wasn’t he?

T
O BE A DETECTIVE
is to be bored. It took Matt Sikes most of his first day to learn that lesson, and he learned it well. He was in pain most of that day, too, though that had had nothing to do with his job. But it had also been a lesson, if not as rigorously learned.

He had sat on the roof of the parking garage a full half hour after Angie had left, before the medical examiner had arrived to pronounce Randolph Petty—stiff and ripe and missing the back half of his skull—dead. Then Sikes had climbed into his Mustang, cranked the air-conditioning up to high, and driven out to Westwood to Randolph Petty’s house, stopping once for coffee and twice for a restroom.

Petty’s house was not the kind of place Sikes had come to associate with a dead person. Most of the dead people Sikes had seen in his uniformed days had been young car-wreck statistics and teenagers caught up in petty theft, drugs, and gang warfare. If those victims had lived anywhere, they had lived in crowded tenements or small, dilapidated houses that were warped and flaking and peeling apart with brown scrub on their drought-corroded lawns.

But Petty’s house was nice. Small, but nice. The neighborhood was nice, too. The flower-filled garden, the green lawns fed and watered by underground irrigation systems—it was all
nice.
People who live in this kind of house don’t expect to get murdered, Sikes thought as he went up the walk, which was edged by tiny blossoms of white alyssum. But he had the unsettling feeling that he would see more of this in his days as a detective.

No one had been home at Petty’s house, and Sikes hadn’t been surprised. If the old man had lived with someone, no doubt he would have been reported missing last night. So once again it was time for Sikes to wait, this time for a black-and-white unit to arrive so two uniformed officers could provide continuity of evidence for when he used the keys on the chain from Petty’s car to gain entry to the house.

In the meantime he called on the neighbors. The ones who were home were all nice, too. Shocked, upset, some moved to tears, but all pleasant and courteous and of an age with Randolph Petty, who, by all accounts, had also been nice. For the first time since he had become a cop Sikes had time to think about the consequences of violence, to think about how he as a detective could take the time to really investigate the causes of that violence. In fact, he was supposed to—that was his job now.

Without actually realizing it at the time, Sikes had felt the fire begin to burn more intensely inside him that day. Something every good cop felt eventually. And once that heat was experienced, it was never forgotten. Sikes
was
going to get the person who killed Randolph Petty. Not because it was his job. Not because the arrest would look good on his record. But because he had to. For the planets to remain in their orbits, for the sun to rise and the birds to sing, someone had to stop criminals. It was that simple, that elemental.

Without his actually realizing it, his feelings that day had proved that Sikes had what it took to be a cop. It would be years before he came to understand fully what had been unleashed in him. He still would have to struggle with his own prejudices, his own weaknesses and uncertainties in the years ahead, but the fire that had possessed Sikes’s gut that day would not, could not be extinguished.

That baptism had happened in the few moments it had taken him to walk up the pathway to Randolph Petty’s house for the second time that day, a dead man’s keys in his hand, the two uniformed officers behind him, a small group of neighbors on a nearby lawn.

What had happened was wrong.

And he would make it right.

As simple as that.

An hour later the brighter flame inside him had been dangerously overfueled by the anguish of the silent house. It was as if Randolph Petty, just by turning the key in the lock as he had left his home, had triggered a freeze frame of his entire life. Everything in order, everything clean and undisturbed, everything ready for him to return. Yet he never would. And knowing that, Sikes found himself going through the record of Randolph Petty’s life on earth with the reverence of an archaeologist in the tomb of an ancient king.

Petty had been a university professor, one of his neighbors had said. An astronomer, another had added. That explains the watch, Sikes thought. And the star field photographs framed and hung on the walls. The old amateur telescopes in the den. His photograph with Carl Sagan. The certificates on the wall.

Sikes had stood by one certificate for more than a minute, reading it over three times, staring at the small star field photo included in the frame—a scattering of white specks marred by one short streak, the time-smeared image of an object in motion against the stars.

“How about that,” Sikes had said to the uniformed officer standing in the living room. “This guy had an asteroid named after him. Son of a gun, huh?”

The uniform had just shrugged, but Sikes had been awed.

There had also been other photos on the wall, and on the mantel, and in the bedroom. Photos of a younger Randolph Petty with a woman about his age. A wife, Sikes knew, and he judged from her absence in the more recent photographs that she had died about ten years ago. He never even thought that it might have been divorce. In the photographs of Randolph and his wife together Sikes could tell that nothing so final would have ever come between the two.

He had wondered then what conclusions others might draw from the photographs he still kept of himself and Victoria, taken while they were still together. Was their eventual fate as a couple so easy to see? Could a single image reveal the future?

At the end of two hours the small house had revealed much of Randolph Petty’s life, but little that was of use to Sikes. He had a name and address and a whole set of what looked like telephone numbers for a daughter—Isabel—currently living in Australia. He had a name and number for a doctor, for a lawyer, for a bank manager. A bankbook and UCLA pension check stubs that showed Petty was comfortable, but not rich. He had the name of a neighbor to call in the event of an emergency, though that neighbor was out. He had neatly stacked and labeled boxes of old correspondence, a broken desktop computer on the desk in the den—which did nothing but bump and click when Sikes turned it on—and absolutely no indication that anything had been touched since Randolph Petty had set out for the parking garage on La Cienega last night.

At the end of those two hours the uniformed officers had made a point of looking at their watches. “Okay, okay,” Sikes said. “That’s it for now.” He would have to come back to the house with a neighbor or a cleaner—someone who might know if there was anything he’d overlooked, anything disturbed or missing. But for now he had done all he could do. Which felt like nothing.