Run the Risk (5 page)

“I wasn't asking if you want it. . . . You're it,” I said.

“You don't have to get this approved?”

“The supervising detective of Homicide is responsible for all assignments in the division.”

“And you're the supervising detective.”

“Right.”

He was the first cop I had ever met who took being asked to work Homicide as a form of punishment. He had the appearance of a man who had just been tossed out into the light of day after living in a cave for years. The world was a big place and it was all out of his control.

“It's a temporary assignment.”

“Good,” he responded, his eyes betraying no emotion, retreating to the hideout of his good looks.

I stepped out into the drive between the bungalows and walked to the edge of the taped perimeter. The rain had stopped, though the pavement was still wet and the dark clouds still hung low on the mountains. I removed the plastic booties from my shoes and handed them to one of the forensic investigators.

Harrison emerged from the bungalow and was examining the door that had stuck in the wall of the adjacent bungalow. He looked like a man better suited for an archaeology dig than a crime scene. He didn't want his new assignment, which as far as I was concerned made him perfect for it. Beware of someone who wants something too much. I think my mother told me that, though she was talking about sex, not ambition.

I got in my car and began driving through the wet streets
past old Craftsman cottages and Spanish ramblers with terra-cotta-tiled roofs. I would stop by the hospital to check on Dave, then go home to see if my relationship with my daughter was in any better shape than Sweeny's bungalow.

LACY WAS HOME
when I pulled into the garage on Mariposa. As I stepped into the kitchen, I could hear the sound of the television in her room at the other end of the house. There were the remains of a salad on a plate next to the sink. What she ate couldn't sustain a small dog, in my mind. Maybe if I cooked more. I could take a class. I could. I really could. Yeah.

I walked through the kitchen, through the living room, and down the hallway to her door, where I stood silently. I didn't knock, I didn't say anything. I just stared.

“Can I come in?”

“Yeah,” came the reply.

I opened the door and stepped in. I saw her eyes stop on my blood-encrusted nostril and then raise up to the stitches just above my temple. She opened her mouth as if she were clearing back pressure in her ears, then her face flushed and lost all color.

“It was you . . . in the explosion,” she said, her voice wavering with emotion.

“I'm fine.”

“I saw the news. They said a policeman was hurt. Was it Dave?”

I sat down on the bed and nodded. “Yes, his skull was fractured, he's pretty banged up. The doctors say he'll be okay, though.”

“You could have called.”

“I did, I left a message.”

“There wasn't one on the machine.”

“The machine probably didn't get it,” I said.

“Yeah, whatever.”

I sat there for a moment, thinking about the phone machine, but couldn't stop myself. Had Lacy heard the message and was just turning the screws on me for leaving her the night before? I tried to push the thought aside before I said something I would regret. Lacy saved me from myself.

“I was on the news,” Lacy said. “They interviewed me. They wanted to know why I did what I did.”

I took a deep breath. “We might have talked about it before you talked to the press.”

“It's not about you, it's about me.”

Ignition.

“That's not what I meant. It can be tricky, that's all. You have to be careful you don't get manipulated.”

“I think I'm the one doing the manipulating.”

“You're right there.”

Blastoff.

“Meaning?”

“Nothing.”

“I'm not going to apologize for what I did because you got hurt,” Lacy said.

“No, you should apologize to me because you didn't tell me what you were going to do last night.”

“If you knew about it beforehand, you would have been an accomplice.”

“If I knew beforehand I would have stopped you.”

“Case closed. Direct action only works in secrecy.”

The words “direct action” hung in the back of my throat like a strep virus.

“Direct action?”

“That's what it's called.”

“By whom? You sound like you were trained for this.”

“And you sound like a cop. It's just a beauty pageant, give me a little credit.”

“Credit isn't the first thing that comes to my mind.”

“Thanks, Mom. I did what I believed in and I would do it again.”

“I haven't had a very good day. I don't want to argue.”

“I'm not the one arguing.”

“You're the one who lied.”

“When?”

“Silence is just as good as a lie.”

“Well, you would be the expert on that.”

Jesus.

“Stop!” I yelled. “Just stop!”

She took a breath and steeled herself. She was working real hard at being the tough one, but I could see the cracks showing. She had already lost a father, and I had promised her years ago that nothing would happen to me because I was a cop. Now my partner was in the hospital and I had come closer than I wanted to admit to breaking that promise today. The weight of that landed right on my shoulders. I felt like I had betrayed her trust, and had acted impossibly irresponsible. Looking at her now, I couldn't imagine how I could take even the smallest of risks.

“I was scared,” she said.

My eyes welled up with tears. “I'm sorry.”

I reached out, put my arms around her and held her for as long as she would let me. She buried her head in my shoulder, trying to let herself be a little girl again, and me a mom, if just for a moment. I was out of practice. . . . We both were.

Lacy let go and looked at me as if she was about to say something, but instead hit the mute button on the television and stared straight ahead. I stood up thinking that if I could gather up the conversation in my hands and toss it out of the room, I would. I could start over by telling her that I
love her and go from there, but instead I turned and walked out into the hallway and closed the door.

I went into the kitchen, tore a paper towel off, and blew my nose. I was hungry but too exhausted to do anything about it, so I just nibbled on the remains of Lacy's salad. And then, just because I couldn't help myself, I walked over and took a look at the answering machine. I had called, I was certain of that, but as Lacy had said the display read “0 messages.” I pressed play to be sure but just as it read, there was nothing there. It could have been the machine, but it had never done this before. Was I being a mother now, or a cop? And to what end? Let it go, I quietly told myself. Wrap yourself in the afghan, go to bed, and forget it.

Lying in the dark of my bedroom I tried to clear my head, but one thing out of all the day's events hung in my mind and pushed away sleep. Why had Lacy said “direct action”? As a cop I was trained to find the one thing in the room that doesn't fit. As a mother, my training was clearly best forgotten. But when I looked at what she had said, it satisfied neither the cop nor the mother in me. It didn't fit. The daughter I knew, or thought I knew, had never used those words before. “Direct action.” Where did they come from? Or more precisely, who did they lead to?

THE MORNING
radio shows were still talking about Lacy as I drove in to the plaza. Listening to the rage in some of the voices, you would think my daughter had committed an act of treason or defaced the Lincoln Memorial. Such was the level of civic pride that she had wounded. “Never in the one hundred years of the Tournament of Roses has . . .” etc., etc. If it had been directed at anyone other than my daughter, I would have laughed at it. But underneath the absurdity of it all was an ugliness that couldn't be brushed aside when your family was the target. I turned the talk radio off and tried to clear my mind and focus on the day ahead.

The storm of the day before had moved east, spinning into the Mojave like a pinwheel. Wild sage scented the air. The blue of the morning sky had the clarity of a New England fall morning. It almost didn't feel like Southern California, until I looked to the west and saw the gray line of the Pacific with Catalina floating like a cloud where the sky met the water.

Harrison was waiting in my office when I walked in. If he had slept at all, his appearance gave no hint of it. His jacket and pants were wrinkled, and his tie looked like it had been in the same knot for ten years.

“You look like you slept in your clothes,” I said.

He looked down at his suit and winced. “We're a little informal on the bomb squad. I don't use these much.”

“Funerals and weddings.”

“Something like that . . . One wedding, one funeral.”

The words clearly held a weight I wasn't expecting and didn't want to confront before I had had a second cup of coffee. And possibly not even then, so I moved on quickly.

“You finished at Sweeny's?”

He nodded and motioned toward my desk. “It's all there except for the lab work. Should have that later today, maybe tomorrow if they have trouble with any of the samples.”

I picked it up; it was six single-spaced pages, more words than most cops I knew wrote in ten years.

“Any surprises?”

“One,” he said.

I waited. Harrison seemed to have trouble getting hold of the thought.

“And?” I finally asked.

“I was wrong.”

“About what?”

“I thought it would be a pedestrian bit of material used. Everyday stuff.”

“It wasn't?”

“Not entirely. There were two explosives. An everyday, simple kind of powder, probably from fireworks. Inside that was military-grade plastique—very difficult to obtain in this country.”

I immediately thought of Breem shipping flowers from south of the border.

“Could it have been gotten in Mexico?”

“Easier than here, and untraceable.”

Harrison smiled like a kid who was excited about a school science project.

“How do you know it was military grade if the lab work isn't finished?”

“Every explosive leaves behind its own particular signature. If you know what to look for, you can tell a lot about the material used. The kind of energy released from the blast would have required more of the simple powder than was used, so I knew there was something else there.”

“ ‘E equals MC squared' sort of thing.”

He nodded, though my attempt at rudimentary science pained him like a pair of tight shoes.

“Something like that.”

“Why try to hide what he's using if there is no way to trace it?”

“Because it's more enjoyable for him.”

“Enjoyable?” I said, unable to conceal my disgust.

“Bombers, if you rule out the suicide kind, are game players.”

I sat back in my chair and shook my head. “That's a pretty twisted bit of psychology.”

“As a rule, bombers are a sick group of people. The stuff of profilers' dreams.”

A detective named North knocked and walked in. He was one of the older detectives on the squad, a divorced father who fought a long-running battle with cholesterol and Bud Light. He had thinning, reddish hair and cheeks that were flushed from alcohol.

“Got the warrants for Breem and Finley. You want us to execute them?”

“Every piece of paper in the house, cars, including the trash.” I amended that. “Especially the trash.”

“Breem's making some noise about the business being sealed.”

I looked at him as if to say, “Do I really need to answer this?”

“Right,” North said. He glanced at Harrison as he walked out. “Nice suit.”

The phone rang on my direct line and I picked it up.

“Delillo.”

“Mom,” Lacy said. Her voice sounded an octave higher than normal.

“Lace, is everything all right?”

“They suspended me.”

“Who suspended you?”

“The assholes at school. Parks, the principal.”

She was in school three days Christmas week as part of an effort to shorten the school year during the air-conditioning season.

“They want to meet you and me at one in his office.”

My other line rang.

“Hold on for a second, Lace.”

I hit the other line. It was a patrol sergeant named Tolland.

“Lieutenant, we got a body down in the arroyo I think you should look at. May be a homicide.”

There were thirty-six thousand people in Pasadena. A second body in as many days constituted a major crime wave.

“Where?”

“Parking lot of the casting pond.”

“Okay.”

I hit Lacy's line.

“Lacy.”

“Those bastards.”

“Where are you now?”

“Starbucks.”

I took a breath; my head felt like another explosion had just gone off next to my ear.

“I'll call you at home later and we'll work this out.”

“You would think I had stolen a baby, not spoiled a beauty pageant. What's wrong with these people? Don't they know what we're doing to the planet?”

“Apparently not.”

“That's all you have to say about it?”

I placed my index finger on my temple and started rubbing in a small circular pattern, trying to stave off a headache. Have it all, be a working mom, what could be better? You're a modern woman. Jesus. My mind drifted for a second to explosives wrapped around each other.

“For the moment,” I said.

“Great,” Lacy said and hung up.

I put the phone down and stared at the door to my office. Harrison shifted in his chair. I looked at him, almost surprised to find him in the room. He looked like he wanted to ask a question but didn't know where to begin.

“I have to make another call,” I said.