Shield of Justice (9 page)

Swearing under her breath, Rebecca hurried to the glass enclosed office at the end of the hall and rapped at the door marked “Captain John Henry” in peeling black letters. The black man behind the desk was fiftyish, fit, and big. His iron gray hair was cut short, and his demeanor was blunt and authoritative. The white shirt he wore was stiff with starch, and his tie was tightly knotted, even in the ninety-degree heat.

“Where’s your partner?” he barked without preamble as Rebecca entered his office.

“I don’t know,” Rebecca said, surprised by the question and suddenly a little worried. Jeff didn’t go AWOL. “I was in court this morning and doing some follow-up on the rape cases after that. He said that he had a meet with Jimmy Hogan about some intel. Jimmy thinks Zamora’s crew might have a piece of the kiddie porn business in the Tenderloin, but we’ve never been able to link any of them to it.”

“Yeah, yeah, I read the file. Where was the meet?”

“I don’t know. Jimmy and Jeff set it up.”

“And you didn’t ask?”

Rebecca shook her head. “It sounded pretty routine, Captain.”

Captain Henry didn’t comment. Cruz and Frye were his best team, and he gave them a lot of slack to run their own cases. It wasn’t unusual for them to be involved with other divisions, particularly Narcotics, on cooperative investigations. They weren’t careless. If Cruz was in trouble, he had walked into something he hadn’t expected. “It doesn’t seem routine any longer.”

“Agreed. I don’t like it either, Captain. Something’s off. We need to find him—fast.”

“We’ve got an all points out on him and his car. We’ll get a fix on him soon.”

“What about Hogan?” Rebecca asked, her stomach roiling. “Can we reach him without endangering his cover?”

“That’s harder. He’s been under deep for months. Even his contacts in Narco don’t know how to reach him. He calls them on his own schedule.” The captain fanned his hands out over his desk, his eyes troubled. “I can tell you that no one’s heard from him, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything. We have to assume that they’re both out there loose somewhere.”

Rebecca turned abruptly and headed toward the door. She had to find Jeff, and she knew him better than anyone. It could take all night for a cruiser to spot his car. She wasn’t going to leave him out there alone.

“Frye!” Henry barked, his commanding voice stopping her in her tracks. “I want you here coordinating the search until we have something definite.”

“Let Rogers do it,” she said, whirling to face him, her jaw set stubbornly. “He’s
my
partner. I can find him.”

“I want
you
coordinating, Frye.” He stared back at her. His expression changed slightly, and he lowered his voice. “We’ve got two missing cops already. I don’t want you out there alone.”

“But Jeff—”

“That’s an order, Sergeant.”

She gritted her teeth and nodded. “Yes, sir.”

*

Catherine glanced at the clock. It was close to eight p.m. It wasn’t late by cop standards, or by doctor standards either. She knew from experience how often an unexpected phone call or a last-minute meeting could disrupt even the most important plans. She had a feeling that she was on the verge of being stood up and knew better than to take it personally. But she couldn’t help the sharp, stark pang of disappointment.

When Rebecca entered the squad room, the noise level suddenly dropped. Feet shuffled, someone cleared his throat, a few people looked away. Everyone knew what she was feeling—her anger, her helplessness, her fear—and no one quite knew what to say. So they handled it the way they always did, by doing the job, by carrying on. Someone put a lukewarm cup of coffee in her hand and mumbled a halfhearted, “Don’t worry. He’s probably off with the old lady getting his pipes cleaned.”

She nodded back, sat at her desk, and began making calls. A half hour later she had ascertained that no one had seen or heard from Jeff Cruz after he left the squad room at 1:30 p.m. She tried his pager and cell phone and contemplated calling his house. But she knew he wasn’t there, and so did everyone else. He wouldn’t have gone home for the night without checking in with her first. Yeah, maybe now and then a cop disappeared for an hour in the middle of a slow day, and nobody commented on it. But not at end of shift. Everyone checked back in, cleared the day’s work, touched base with their partner, and
then
checked out.

Finally she just sat, fists clenched in her lap, and watched the clock. The men from the day shift stayed, even though many of them had been on duty for close to eighteen hours by that time. Gina Simmons, a young rookie, came in silently, piled boxes of pizza on the littered coffee counter, and left without saying a word. But she scored points, and someone, someday, would remember and give her a break. Rebecca shook her head when someone offered her a slice. Everyone stood around in groups eating and spilling bits of oil and cheese on the floor.

The call finally came in at 10:30. A cruiser had spotted Jeff’s department sedan on a deserted pier at the waterfront, tucked under an overhanging abutment, where it hadn’t been seen before from the road. Rebecca was on her feet and halfway to the door when a hand on her arm restrained her.

“I’ll ride with you, Sarge.”

Rebecca turned toward the stocky man beside her, shrugging off the hand impatiently, and when she saw to whom the hand belonged, she had to struggle to control her temper. She had never liked William Watts. He was a cynical, sarcastic cop, who didn’t seem to give a damn about his job. She couldn’t figure out why he was a cop, and she didn’t want to deal with him now.

“Not tonight, Watts,” she said.

He was trying to step in front of her as he jerked his head toward the closed frosted glass door at the far end of the room. His face impassive, he said flatly, “Captain’s orders.”

“I don’t have time for this bullshit.” She turned on her heel and headed toward the stairs. Watts hurried after her.

Rebecca gunned her Corvette out of the station house lot and slapped the flashing red light onto her dash. When the traffic ahead didn’t yield fast enough, she veered around it into the oncoming lanes. She and Watts didn’t speak, but when he reached into the inside pocket of his rumpled, out-of-style sports coat and pulled out an equally battered pack of cigarettes, she gave him a look that made him wince. He slipped the pack back into his pocket and stared out the window.

They were the first detectives to reach the scene. Half a dozen cruisers were pulled off the four-lane highway at odd angles, and men with dogs were moving along the waterfront. Flashlight beams sent fleeting beacons of pale light skittering across the river’s surface.

Rebecca parked and climbed out at the entrance to a huge, deserted, blacktopped parking lot. She stood in the semidarkness and surveyed the area, her nerves settling as her cop instincts kicked in.
Do the job. Just do the job.

The halogen lights spaced along the highway behind her penetrated the darkness for a fair distance into the lot, enough to make out Jeff’s car parked under the overpass fifty yards away. The river on the far side looked nearly black. To her right, a huge crane loomed like a lonely sentinel over the abandoned site of someone’s waterfront dream. To her left, facing the water, stood a cluster of darkened buildings—the maritime museum, an attached souvenir shop, and a curbside food stand.

She headed deliberately toward the buildings with Watts close behind. She neither spoke to him nor acknowledged his presence.

“Why not the crane?” he asked, out of breath from the pace Rebecca had set.

“Too obvious during the day. There wouldn’t have been enough people around for cover. And Jeff and Jimmy would have wanted to keep their meeting private, just in case someone was tailing Jimmy,” she answered, still not looking at him.

“Yeah, but the way I see it—”

She turned so fast he collided with her, his bulky form bouncing back a step off her surprisingly hard body. “Look, Watts,” she seethed. “I don’t give a rat’s ass
what
you think. I
know
my partner. So just keep out of my way, or better yet, get lost.”

Watts held both hands up in the air in front of him. “Okay, Frye, okay. You’re the sergeant. I’ll just tag along like a good little boy.”

Wordlessly, she walked away. If Jeff had met his contact in the late afternoon, there wouldn’t have been much activity anywhere except at the museum. They wouldn’t have needed much time together. He hadn’t left voluntarily; he would have taken his car. Something went wrong, and it happened right here. She tried not to think about what might have happened, focusing on her search.

She walked around the maritime museum, a square concrete structure with a jutting upper level that was probably supposed to resemble a ship. It didn’t. She was looking for an alleyway, or a loading dock—some secluded area. She reasoned that someone had surprised the two cops in the middle of their rendezvous, and she doubted that anyone would have tried to move two uncooperative men very far in daylight. So whatever went down, they would have needed an isolated location nearby. But for what purpose? It was unlikely that anyone would hold two cops hostage or try to extort information from them. She didn’t want to think about the most likely reason—that someone was sending them a message to stay clear of Zamora and his organization.

There was nowhere to hide two men anywhere around the museum. She shined her flashlight on the beer and burger stand, closed and shuttered for the night. There was a large green commercial dumpster behind it. Rebecca approached it slowly, sweeping the ground around it with her light. Holding her
9
mm automatic in the other hand, she illuminated bits of refuse, a soggy cardboard box, a dented milk crate—nothing unusual. She looked at the dumpster, a knot of tension burning in her gut, slipped her weapon into her shoulder holster, and pushed the top up. Taking a deep breath, she played her light over its contents. It was half full of crushed boxes, rotting vegetables, and broken bottles. That was all.

“Uh, Sarge…” Watts said from the spot where he had been standing in the shadows.

“What?”

“There’s a shipping platform just north of the marina, about a hundred yards from here. It’s below ground level. They used to use it to tie up the tugs. Can’t really see it from the pier unless you know it’s there.”

“Show me.”

He led her along the edge of the pier; the water, ten feet below them, rolled against the huge wooden pilings and concrete walls with a surprising degree of force. An occasional spray of water, redolent with diesel fuel and river life, misted their faces as they walked. Almost exactly where Watts had predicted, there was a narrow set of stairs barricaded by a length of chain. The stairs would be easy to miss unless you were looking for them. The chains were rusted from years of disuse and exposure. Rebecca could make out moss-covered stone steps and some kind of platform anchored against the pier, floating unevenly on the water. Carefully, she stepped over the chain and started down the steps.

When she reached the bottom, she stepped gingerly onto the slippery, water-soaked, ten-by-twenty-foot dock and stood for a long time, playing her flashlight back and forth over the scene. She took a few deep breaths, wondering why everything had gotten so quiet. Her heart pounded in her ears, and she heard the breath moving in and out of her chest. She focused, taking in the tableau before her.

They were lying side by side—no apparent sign of a struggle. Hogan and Cruz had each been shot once in the back of the head. There were dark stains on the dock in irregular patterns spreading out from under both men. Rebecca noticed that Jeff’s tie was neatly knotted under the button-down collar of his light blue oxford shirt. His gun was still in its holster. She wanted to reach down and close his eyes, but protocol dictated that she couldn’t touch him. She put her hands in her pockets and looked away, her eyes burning but dry.

Standing at the edge of the dock, she could see across the water to their sister city. The shoreline sparkled in the moonlight. The river churned two feet below her, and the cold wind off the water whipped her light jacket around her. She didn’t notice the cold or that she was shivering. It was so quiet.

“Sarge?” Watts called from above. “Frye? You find anything?”

“Yes,” she answered hollowly.

“You want an ambulance?”

“No.”

Rebecca finally left Shelley Cruz at three in the morning. There hadn’t been any way to make it easy. There never was. She had held her, rocked her silently, her own tears unshed. The last time she had seen Shelley had been at a barbecue in the Cruz’s backyard, one Saturday after she had finally succumbed to Jeff’s relentless pestering to visit. She remembered Jeff in a police academy T-shirt and jeans, movie star handsome, smiling at Shelley with a look that said he considered himself the luckiest guy in the world. His young blond wife had returned the gaze with equal intensity. Now he was dead. The fairy tale was shattered, and Shelley Cruz’s life would never be the same.

Rebecca still felt cold. She was glad for that. She couldn’t afford to let the pain surface. If she did, it would break her. She was a cop, and people died on the street every day—needlessly, senselessly. This time it was her partner, her best friend. She’d handle it like she knew Jeff would have if it had been her—like a cop. But first she needed to obliterate the image of him lying so still, and so damn alone, out on that dark, cold dock. Just for a little while. Then she’d be ready to carry on.