Red Light (34 page)

Rainer sighed, then
turned and looked out the window, then back at Merci. "Or with both,
maybe? She was a prostitute, working for money.”

"I know that. I
was hoping you might be a little more specific, Rainer. I was hoping you'd skip
the obvious generalities and tell me who the hell brought Patti Bailey to your
speech that night. I'm working on a deadline here, and I'm about thirty-two
years late."

He was nodding, like
he knew her question in advance. "I don't know. I don't remember her. But
I'll tell you that Pat McNally and Jim O'Brien were always good with the
ladies. They were married guys, but they reputations. Maybe neither one of them
so much as laid eyes on her that night. Maybe she dressed decent and said she
was a secretary worried about fluoride in the water. I don't know. But if
there's a most likely candidate for who brought a hooker to a JBS meeting,
it's one of them."

McNally or O'Brien,
she thought. The happy conservatives, the family men, with a little stoned-out
pleasure girl on the side.

Merci felt a little
haunting go up her spine: father and son, Big Pat and Mike, both mixed up with
prostitutes. And she'd been unsuspecting enough to waltz into Cancun Restaurant
and ask Big Pat what he knew about the Bailey case.

Merci smiled and
shook her head. Girl, she thought, sometimes the things you do surprise me.

But what if O'Brien
and/or McNally had arranged for Patti to get to know the enemy—Meeks and Owen.
Maybe got her to make a tape in case they said something interesting?

Flip it, she thought
next: What if Owen aimed her at the bad boy Birchers of Chapter 231 to see what
she could learn about
them?

Or put both together,
figure the common denominator is money, and you've got a hooker taking a little
from both sides—like Rainer said. Any job that pays.

But someone put KQ
onto her, KQ put two bullets through her body in an orange grove one evening
and the whole circus came to an end.

Meeks
and Owen quit.

O'Brien split for the
desert and a better job. Twenty-five years later he killed himself. Were the
seeds of his own destruction in him then? she wondered. Did they grow from what
happened to Patti Bailey?

Pat McNally stayed
where McNally was. Pat rose through the ranks, comfortably linked to Brighton.
Who won? Who profited from Patti living, and who from her dying?

"I'm
looking for a man with the initials KQ. Ring any bells?"

Rainer
thought a minute. "No. Not many last names start with a Q."

Merci looked at the
photographs of Rainer with all the Republican presidents since Kennedy.

"I
read that your picture was one they gave to Jesse Acuna."

Rainer laughed.
"In fact, it was. I was in
charge
of collecting those
pictures."

"How did you
choose which officers' pictures to give up and whose to not?"

"It
was strictly volunteer," he said, smiling.

"Damn."

"The P.D.s all
did it that way, too. There's no way the ACLU was going to bully us into giving
up confidential personnel information. That's not the way it works."

"Damned
commies, right?"

"Damn
straight."

Merci looked out at
the sky, the hills, the houses built on everything, the gas stations and
boulevards, the schools and churches and stores. Cars, cars and more cars. Two
point seven million people and growing, she thought. Sometimes Orange County
seemed like a little tank with big school of fish in it, all hauling ass the
same direction, nobody ask where they were going or why.

"How come you
left the department? You were a captain. You were doing well for
yourself."

"Brighton made
my life miserable. He wasn't much on us right-wingers. He wanted to walk the
middle of the road, please everybody he could to keep himself in office, be a
moderate good guy. He thought Society made the department look bad to the
public, which was probably true. Our time had passed. By the time Nixon
resigned, the conservative era was over. It was over for me, anyway. I figured
I could get from under his thumb, maybe run my own company. I'm glad I did. I
make people feel safe. I keep the riffraff out of their neighborhood: If
somebody applies for work here and I think he's a bad apple, I don't hire him.
We got good guys. I make a good living. I see the cops on the beat or I see
you, and I'm glad I'm not doing that anymore."

"How come? This
looks boring."

"It is. But I'm
alive and I don't have ulcers and I'm not drinking myself to sleep every night
like a lot of the men I worked with. I'm not taking orders from some guy
running his own popularity contest; year after year. I can say what I think
without getting transferred to Traffic. Brighton actually threatened me with
that. I figured, if he want send me to Traffic because I thought Russian
imperialists would to eat this country alive, steal its wealth and drain its
land like they drained their own, let him try. So I left the department. And
I'm glad I did."

Rainer
seemed to think about this, deciding whether or not he believed himself.
"You look out that window, Sergeant Rayborn, what do you see?"

"Fish."

Rainer
furrowed his brow, slowly nodded. "Not me. I see thousands of people
sucking this country dry, people who can't even speak the language holding it
up at gunpoint, drug-addled leeches living off the government, illiterate
gangbangers and pregnant twelve-year-olds breeding like rats, refugees from
every failed third-rate democracy on earth feeding at the public trough.
Everybody else is off at the malls or home watching TV. That's what I see, but
everybody's got different eyes. I can respect that."

"Why don't you
leave?"

"Thought
about it a lot. But I hit my first baseball at a park two miles from here. I
fell in love with my first girl at the high school around the corner. I buried
my little brother here—he was killed by a sniper in Vietnam. So I intend to
stick it out. It's mine as much as anybody's. I'm making a living. I'm one of
the fish."

"You swim
against the school, Mr. Rainer."

"You
do, too. You're no-bullshit, on-target and generally pissed off about the world
around you. It shows on your face. I admire that."

Rainer stood slowly
and extended his hand. Merci stood and shook it.

"I hope you find out
who killed that girl. Nobody's got a right to get away with that. You get tired
of putting your life on the line every day for people who can't pronounce your
name, come see me."

Sitting in her car in
the PPS parking lot, Merci called the lab and asked for Evan O'Brien.

"I need to talk
to you," she said.

"I need to talk
to you," he answered.

"I'll pick you
up in twenty. We'll pay respects to our dead."

"Why not Cancun,
where all you gunslingers hang out?"

"I don't want
them hearing what we talk about."

"Well, the dead don't blab."

S
unlight slanted through the trees of Fairview Grove
Memorial Park when they drove in. The headstones and earth were soaked dark,
pines glimmered with rainwater and sun, the grass was a brilliant, startling
green. Merci thought it looked like a commercial. The graves Hess and Jim
O'Brien were both there, but far enough away you had to drive from one to the
other.

Merci had run into
Evan here one afternoon right after Hess buried. Actually, Evan had recognized
her Impala and had seen her standing by the grave. They'd visited here together
only twice, Merci realizing after the first time that she preferred to be alone
with Hess rather than sharing him with anybody.

Even a respectful
co-mourner as Evan O'Brien—who to her surprise had checked his smart mouth at
the entrance both times—was too much distraction when it came to Hess. She
wanted to feel things about Hess, not explain him. And if what she felt was sad
and disorganized and jagged with regret and longing, then so be it.

She figured O'Brien
felt something comparable about his father. Or maybe he felt nothing like she
did, but that wasn't the point. Remembrance wasn't tourism. Nobody listened in
when you talked out here.

They stopped at
Hess's place first. The headstone was simple black marble with white lettering,
no chirping birds or sentimental quotes.

They stood for a long
moment in the spongy grass. Then O'Brien broke the silence. "What's going
on in my lab? Now it's off limits to anybody but Brighton and lab personnel.
They took the sign-in sheet down. Gilliam's reassigning projects left and
right, like he's shuffling the deck against a cheater. He's got us on a
twenty-four standby but he won't say what we're standing by for. Must be
something big, something that needs to be turned fast. Now, cut to the latest
rumor: Mike McNally's been held in one of the interview rooms for the last six
hours. I heard they brought him in this morning. I heard they haven't brought
him out yet. Clay Brenkus has been seen. Guy Pitbull—his number one
prosecutor—has been seen. High-dig defense attorney named Bob Rule has been
seen. Brighton is shuffling around with a white face and Merci Rayborn is gone.
There. Maybe you can fill in some gaps."

"They're
questioning Mike for Aubrey Whittaker."

Evan shook his head
and whistled quietly. "I knew it, but I couldn't believe it. So, we're
standing by for a warrant search."

Merci
nodded.

"Shit,"
he whispered. "Mike."

"We tried something
informal early this morning. Mike wouldn't budge without counsel."

"That
makes him look bad."

"It's
the right thing to do if he's guilty."

"Is
he?"

"Hell,
Evan, it sure looks that way."

Evan
looked down at the grave. "What did you find?"

"Nothing."

"Somebody did.
You've done an interview before a warrant search, you must know what's behind
door number three. What did you find?"

"I
can't tell you that now."

"Rumor
is, they got a phone warrant about an hour ago."

"Then
you'll see it before the end of the workday."

"If
Gilliam lets me work in my own damned lab."

"That's
his call."

Evan
shook his head, toed the grass below him with his shoe. "I'd like to know
what in hell Paul Zamorra found in Whittaker's place. Fingerprint cards, some
fiber? It was hard to tell. If I got within twenty feet of him, he glared like
I'd shot his dog."

"I'm
not free to discuss that, Evan. I'm sorry. But I can tell you it looked like a
struggle in Whittaker's kitchen. Remember? The drawers out, the runner bent up.
Zamorra went after that angle. Trouble is came clean with Gilliam about what
he'd found. That pissed Gilliam off. I don't know if it's even going to matter
when they get done with Mike."

"It mattered
enough to get the whole lab shut off. Hey, I don't mind that—less people in
there the better. But when Gilliam starts watching
me
like I'm the next
one to get thrown out, that worries me. If we missed something in the kitchen,
then we missed something in the kitchen. Nobody's perfect, not even me. And
poor Coiner, she's living on Tums and herbal tea. Now this rumor. She likes
Mike. Thinks he walks water. I guess you know that."

Merci
looked at him, nodded. "Everybody likes Mike."

"I
mean, nothing serious."

"Yeah."

"More
like a schoolgirl crush," said Evan. "Hell, she's half his age.”

Merci listened to the
breeze shiver the big pines. Droplets bursi the boughs, diamonds in the sun.

"Evan did you
try the iodine on the storage space envelope stamp?"

"Gilliam took it
over, personally. And he's not saying anything, to us anyway. I don't know what
he's doing with it."

Merci felt the anger
jet through her, like something hot shot into her veins. "Now I have to
beg for help on a case unsolved for thirty-two yea

"I'll
find out what I can."

"I'll
get Brighton to kick it out of him if I have to."

Evan looked at her
and shook his head. He let out a sharp, dismissive little exhale. "Unless
Brighton
ordered
him to take it over and put a lid on it."

She
looked at him and wondered. "Why?"

"How
would I know?"

"Gilliam's tough
enough to run his own lab without the sheriff standing over him."

"I
agree. But if it's not about helping Gilliam steer clear of all unscientific,
gun-toting cowboys lurking around our sacred crime then what
is
it about?"

Merci
spoke before she thought. "It's about Bailey. Everything about Bailey
stinks. An unsolved murder. An investigation that yielded less than it should
have. And now, three decades later I've got some secret sonofabitch leading me
straight to things Rymers and Thornton should have found. Now Brighton's square
in the middle of it like some fat hen sitting on an egg."