Demolition Angel (12 page)

She thought that somewhere within these boundaries the killer had watched, and waited, and murdered a man.

She wondered if he was the man that Lester Ybarra had described, if it was Pell’s Mr. Red, or if it was someone else.

Hooker was sorting through the tapes in a cardboard box when Starkey reached CCS.

First thing he said was, “The ATF guy called.”

“Pell called?”

“Yeah. I put it on your desk.”

“Screw’m. Did you get Marzik set up with the sketch artist?”

“They didn’t have a computer free until later. She wanted me to ask if they can’t come here and start on the tapes while they wait.”

“No, I told her why not. I want the kid to describe who he saw before we show him any faces. Marzik knows better than that.”

“I told her you’d say that. She wasn’t happy about it.”

“Marzik complains about everything.”

Starkey saw a short stack of pink message slips as she dropped her purse into her file drawer. Chester Riggs, who was working out of Organized Crime, and Warren Perez, a D-3 in Rampart Bunco, were both returning her calls. Riggs and Perez were profiling the minimall shopkeepers to look for motives behind the bomb. Neither of them expected to find a link, and neither did Starkey. She didn’t bother to read the message from Pell.

Starkey returned to Santos and fingered through the cassettes. They were in two sizes, big three-quarter-inch master tapes and half-inch VHS dubs that could be played on home machines.

Santos saw her frowning.

“These are only from three of the stations, Carol. We got more coming in. Man, it’s hours. The running times are written on the outside, along with whether it’s a close-up or the wide-angle.”

Starkey turned the tapes so that she could see what he was talking about. The shortest tape showed a recorded time of seventy-four minutes. The longest, one hundred twenty-six minutes. Each tape was also marked
CLOSE
or
WIDE
.

“What does that mean, close or wide?”

“Some of the helicopters carry two cameras mounted on a swivel that pokes out the bottom of the nose, just like a couple of guns. Both cameras focus on the same thing, but one of the cameras is zoomed in close, and the other is pulled back for a wider field of view. They record both cameras up in the chopper and also back at the studio.”

“I thought they show this stuff live.”

“They do, but they record it at the same time. We’ve got both the wide shots and the close shots, so that means there’s twice as much to watch.”

Starkey was already thinking that the close shots wouldn’t give her what she wanted. She pulled out the wide-angle VHS cassettes and brought them to her desk. She considered calling Buck Daggett, but decided that she should review the tapes first.

Behind her, Santos said, “I’ve got us set up in the TV room upstairs. We can go up as soon as I’m done.”

Spring Street had one room that contained a television and VCR. CCS and Fugitive Section rarely needed or used it; much of the time it was used by IAG investigators watching spy tapes of other cops, and most of the time the VCR was vandalized because of that. Chewing gum, tobacco, and other substances were found jammed into the tape heads, even though the room was kept locked. Once, the hindquarters of a rat were found wedged in the machine. Cops were creative vandals.

“You sure the machine up there is working?”

“Yeah. I checked less than an hour ago.”

Starkey considered the tapes. Three different views of Charlie
Riggio being killed. Anytime there was a bomb call-out, the newspeople got word fast and swarmed the area with cameras. Camera crews and newspeople had been at the trailer park the day she and Sugar had rolled out. She suddenly recalled joking with Sugar about putting on a good show for the six o’clock. She had forgotten that moment until now.

Starkey took a cigarette from her purse and lit up.

“Carol! Do you want Kelso to send you home?”

She glanced over at Hooker, not understanding.

“The cigarette.”

Starkey crushed it with her foot as she fanned the air. She felt herself flush.

“Didn’t even realize I was doing it.”

Hooker was watching her with an expression she read as concern.

Starkey felt a stab of fear that he might be wondering if she was drunk, so she went over to his desk and squatted beside him so that he could smell her breath. She wanted him to know that she wasn’t blowing gin.

“I’m worried about this ATF guy, is all. Did he say anything last night when he finished with the medical examiner?”

“Nothing. I asked him if he found what he was looking for, but all he said was that they found some more frag.”

“He didn’t say anything else?”

“Nothing. He spent today over in Glendale, looking at the reconstruction.”

Starkey went back to her desk, making a mental note to phone the medical examiner to see what they’d found and also to call John Chen. Whatever evidence was recovered would be sent to Chen for examination and documentation, though it might take several days to work its way through the system.

Hooker finished logging the tapes and put the box under his desk. Official LAPD filing. He waved one of the three-quarter-inch tapes.

“I’m done. We’d better get started unless you want to wait for Marzik.”

Starkey’s hands grew damp. She leaned back, her swivel chair squeaking.

“Jorge, look, I’d better return these calls. You start without me, okay?”

Hooker had spent a lot of time getting the tapes together. Now he was disappointed.

“I thought you wanted to see this. We’ve only got the room for a couple of hours.”

“I’ll watch them at home, Jorge. I’ve got these calls.”

Her phone rang then. Starkey snatched it up like a life preserver.

“CCS. Starkey.”

“Don’t you return your calls?”

It was Pell.

“I’ve been busy. We’ve got a wit who might have seen the man who placed the 911 call.”

“Let’s meet somewhere. We need to discuss how we’re going to handle the case.”

“There is no ‘we,’ Pell. If my guy isn’t your Mr. Red, then it doesn’t matter to me. I still want to see what you have on the first seven bombings.”

“I have the reports. I have something else, too, Starkey. Let’s get together and talk about it. This is important.”

She wanted to brush him off, but she knew that she would have to talk with him and decided to get it done. Starkey told him how to get to Barrigan’s, then hung up.

Santos had been watching her. He came over with a handful of cassettes.

“Are the feds taking the case?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say.”

“I guess it’s just a matter of time.”

She looked at him. Santos shrugged and gestured with the tapes.

“I’m gonna go up. You sure you don’t want to come?”

“I’ve got to meet Pell.”

Starkey watched Santos walk away, embarrassed that she had not been able to look at them with him. She had been to the bomb site, she had seen Riggio’s body, she had smelled the heat and the blast in the hot air. After that, her fear of seeing the tapes seemed inexplicable, though she understood it. Starkey wouldn’t be seeing only Riggio on the tape; she would see herself, and Sugar. She had imagined the events of her own death a thousand times, but she had never seen tape of the actual event or even thought that the moments had been recorded until now: Joking with Sugar, the news crews watching with electronic eyes, tape reels spinning for the six o’clock news. Memories of those things had vanished with the explosion until now.

Starkey fingered the three cassettes, wondering if that tape of her own death still existed.

After a time, she told herself to stop thinking about it, gathered her things, and left to meet Pell.

Barrigan’s was a narrow Irish bar in Wilshire Division that had catered to police detectives since 1954, when suits from the Homicide Bureau had held court with tales of blackjacking New York mobsters as they deplaned at LAX. The walls were covered with four-leaf clovers, each bearing the name and date of an officer who’d killed a man in the line of duty. Until only a handful of years ago, female police detectives were discouraged as customers, conventional wisdom being that the presence of female officers would discourage the emotionally dysfunctional secretaries and nurses who flocked to the bar eager to dispense sexual favors to any man with a badge. Though there was some truth to this, the female detectives replied, “Tough shit.” The gender barrier was finally broken the night a Robbery-Homicide detective named Samantha
Dolan shot it out toe-to-toe with two rape suspects, killing both. As is the custom after such incidents, a party was held for her at Barrigan’s that same night. Dolan invited every female detective of her acquaintance, and the women decided they liked the place and would return. They informed the owner that they would be accorded proper service, else they’d have the good sisters over in the Department of Health close his ass down for health violations. That ended that. Starkey had never met Dolan, though she knew the story. Samantha Dolan had later been killed when she’d stepped through a doorway that had been booby-trapped with a double-barreled shotgun.

When Starkey entered Barrigan’s late that afternoon, the bar was already lined with detectives. Starkey found a bench between a couple of Sex Crimes D-2s, struck up a fresh cigarette, and ordered a double Sapphire.

She was taking her first sip when Pell appeared beside her and put a heavy manila envelope on the bar.

“You always drink like that on the job?”

“It’s none of your goddamned business what I do. But for the record, Special Agent, I’m off duty. I’m here as a favor to you.”

The D-2 next to her glanced over, eyeing Pell. He tinkled the ice in the remains of his double scotch, offering Pell the opportunity to comment on his drink, too.

Starkey offered to buy Pell a drink, but Pell refused. He slid onto the bench next to her, uncomfortably close. Barrigan’s didn’t have stools; the bar was lined with little benches hooked to a brass rail that ran along the bottom of the bar, each wide enough for two people. Starkey hated the damn things because you couldn’t move them, but that’s the way it had been since 1954, and that’s the way it was going to stay.

“Move away, Pell. You’re too close.”

He edged away.

“Enough? I could sit at another table if you like.”

“You’re fine where you are. I just don’t like people too close.”

Starkey immediately regretted saying it, feeling it revealed more of herself than she cared to share.

Pell tapped the manila envelope.

“These are the reports. I’ve got something else here, too.”

He unfolded a sheet of paper and put it on the bar. Starkey saw that it was a newspaper article that he had printed off the net.

“This happened a few days ago. Read it.”

BOMB HOAX CLEARS LIBRARY

By Lauren Beth

Miami Herald

Starkey stopped reading.

“What is this?”

“We recovered an intact device in Miami. It’s a clone of the bomb that killed Riggio.”

Starkey didn’t like the news about this Miami device. If the bombs were clones like Pell said, that would give him what he needed to jump the case. She knew what would happen then: The ATF would form a task force, which would spur the FBI to come sniffing around. The Sheriffs would want to
get their piece of the action, so they would be included, and before the day was done, Starkey and her CCS team would be relegated to gopher chores like overnighting the evidence to the ATF lab up in San Francisco.

She pushed the article away.

“Okay. A hoax. If your boy Mr. Red is in Miami, why aren’t you on a plane headed east?”

“Because he’s here.”

“It looks to me like he’s in Miami.”

Pell glanced at the D-2.

“Could we move to a table?”

Starkey led him to a remote corner table, taking the outside seat so that she could see the room. She figured that it would annoy him, having his back to the crowd.

“Okay, no one can hear you, Pell. We’re free to be spies.”

Pell’s jaw flexed with irritation, which pleased her. She struck a fresh cigarette, blowing smoke past his shoulder.

“The Miami police didn’t give the full story to the papers. It wasn’t a hoax, Starkey, it was a message. An actual note. Words on paper. He’s never done that before, and he’s never done anything like this. That means we have a chance here.”

“What did he say?”

“He said, ‘Would the deaths of these people put me in the Top Ten?’ ”

Starkey didn’t know what in hell that meant.

“What does that mean?”

“He wants to be on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“It’s a symbol, Starkey. He’s some underachieving nobody who resents being an asshole. He’s not on the list because we don’t know who the hell he is; no one makes that list unless we have an ID. We don’t, so he’s getting frustrated. He’s taking chances he didn’t take earlier. That means he’s destabilizing.”

Starkey’s jaw felt like an iron clamp, but she understood why Pell was on it. When a perp changed his pattern, it was always good for the case. Any change gave you a different view of the man. If you could get enough views, pretty soon you had a clear picture.

“You said he’s here. How do you know that? Did his message say that he was coming to Los Angeles?”

Pell didn’t answer. He stared at her as if he was searching for something in her eyes, leaving her feeling naked and uncomfortable.

“What?”

“I didn’t tell you and Kelso everything. When Mr. Red goes hunting, he does not hunt randomly. He picks his targets, usually senior people or a tech who’s been in the news; he goes after the big dog. He wants to say he beats the best a Bomb Squad has to offer. It’s the ego thing.”