The Last Word (10 page)

Home sweet home.

In the initial sweep, a gun was found in a nightstand drawer in the master bedroom and another in a box on the top shelf of the kitchen pantry. Both weapons were legally registered to Bette Yokley.

But things got a lot more interesting once Steve and the other officers and agents began emptying the closets. They discovered false walls that hid automatic weapons, semi-automatic weapons, rifles, and handguns.

That was only in the closets.

Steve took a broom from the pantry, turned it upside down, and tapped the kitchen floor with the handle, listening for a hollow echo that would indicate a space under the tiles.

He motioned to an officer with a sledgehammer. All it took was two whacks of the sledgehammer to break away the travertine and reveal row after row of rifles, neatly laid out side by side.

Olivia looked at the cache of weapons at Steve’s feet. “We’re going to need another truck.”

Steve picked up a sledgehammer and swung it at the nearest wall, smashing the plaster away until the studs were revealed, along with the handguns stuffed in the spaces between them.

“Better make that
two
trucks,” Steve said.

“Who knew guns made such good insulation?” Olivia asked.

Steve wandered into the den and examined the bookcase. None of the books looked like they’d ever been opened. They were missing their dust jackets and seemed to have been picked by a decorator for their size and color. He tried to take a book off the shelf and discovered it was glued in place.

On a hunch, he grabbed the edge of the bookcase and pulled. The entire bookcase swung open like a vault door, revealing a deep, cinder-block-walled room with a target taped to the far end. The floor was covered with spent shells. It was a hidden shooting range.

“Unbelievable,” Olivia muttered.

Steve looked over his shoulder at her. “You must live in an old house. Family rooms are history. Indoor shooting ranges are the newest thing.”

“Nothing brings a family together like shooting AK-47s,” Olivia said.

“Makes you wonder what Yokley’s kids have in their school lockers,” Steve said.

“I’m not going to wonder,” Olivia said. “I’m going to get search warrants and find out.”

The search of Yokley’s home went on well into the late afternoon. By the time it was done, the multi-agency strike force had recovered 1,372 weapons, from AK-47s to Uzis, as well as a dozen hand grenades and ten pounds of C4 explosive. The weapons and explosives were hidden all over the house, under floors, behind walls, and in secret compartments in the furniture. The tally didn’t include the ammunition, scopes, silencers, and other assorted “accessories” that were also found in various hidden cubbyholes.

Yokley possessed enough weaponry to either overthrow a small country or arm a mid-sized rap music company. It took five large trucks to haul all the weapons downtown to be logged, traced, and examined by ballistics and forensics experts from the LAPD, the ATF, and the FBI.

At six p.m., Chief Masters and District Attorney Neal Burnside called dueling press conferences. Each man took full credit for the arrest of a “major black-market supplier of weapons” and for keeping scores of guns off the LA streets, thus preventing an untold number of robberies, shootings, and murders, perhaps even an all-out gang war.

The FBI and the ATF also held their own press conferences, trumpeting the interagency cooperation and the unprecedented number of weapons seized in the raid, which, they intimated, was a monumental victory in the war on terror.

No one in any of the press conferences, however, saw any reason to mention Steve Sloan. But he didn’t mind. He was used to his work being overshadowed or ignored. What counted to him was that he’d accomplished what he’d set out to do.

His reward would come later. And when it did, it would not be at all what he expected.

The next two weeks were uneventful compared to most weeks in Dr. Mark Sloan’s life. He was inundated at the hospital with mindnumbingly boring administrative tasks, requiring him to shuffle from one meeting to another and leaving him little time to practice any actual medicine. If Janet Dorcott was planning to drive him out by making his job intolerably dull, she was succeeding.

But she wasn’t putting any pressure on him to go—because, he assumed, the pressure was off of her. The killer nurses scandal had been pushed off the front page and the nightly newscasts by daily updates on the Gaylord Yokley investigation, heightened fears about the spread of the West Nile virus, the contentious mayoral race, and the discovery that a famous movie star had fathered a child out of wedlock.

The boring routine at the hospital wouldn’t have been so hard to take if Mark had at least had an interesting homicide investigation to keep him occupied. The murder rate in Los Angeles had not suddenly plunged; rather, the current cases weren’t difficult or puzzling enough to require Mark’s deductive skills. And he hadn’t stumbled on any mysteries to solve on his own, though he supposed he could always jet out to Scotland and see if he could prove the existence of the Loch Ness monster once and for all.

Steve had been kept busy on the Yokley case, uncovering the gun merchant’s ties to ROAR, the homegrown but loosely organized antigovernment terrorist group. According to e-mails and documents found at Yokley’s home and car dealership, ROAR was plotting to plunge the city into anarchy by supplying gangs with assault weapons and provoking a street war among them that would overwhelm the resources of the police force.

But the leaders of ROAR had never been known for their stunning intellect, and Steve didn’t think Yokley was smart enough to have concocted the plot on his own.

Mark and Steve believed that Carter Sweeney was probably behind it, even though there was no evidence of any kind linking him to Yokley. Sweeney didn’t really believe in any of ROAR’s dogma, which was liberally cribbed from the KKK and Aryan Nations, but he would find the group easy to manipulate for his own purposes. Creating havoc in Los Angeles on the eve of the mayoral election was just the kind of thing that would keep Sweeney amused in captivity.

Even if Steve could find ties to Sweeney, there was nothing more the law could do to him. He was already sentenced to death. He could die only once. In a sense, Sweeney had a free pass to commit any crime he wanted, assuming he could pull it off from inside his cell.

If throwing Los Angeles into turmoil was Sweeney’s master plan, then Mark could relax, knowing that it had been foiled—though if Teeg hadn’t tried to shoot his estranged girlfriend, the plot might have succeeded.

Even so, Carter Sweeney was still very much on Mark’s mind that morning as he sat reading the
Los Angeles Times
over breakfast at his kitchen table. The news of Sweeney’s upcoming habeas corpus hearing had finally come out.

What surprised Mark was that the news was relegated to a mere paragraph on page 29, squeezed in between a paleobotanist’s theory that figs were mankind’s first cultivated crop and the discovery of a new species of crustacean in an underground lake in Israel.

The marginalization of Carter Sweeney to near obscurity must have been a great relief to both Neal Burnside and John Masters, but it troubled Mark.

Why hadn’t Sweeney found a way to make his hearing front-page news? It was very uncharacteristic of him to let an opportunity for attention slip away. So it had to be a calculated move. To what end? Sweeney must have other plans to capitalize on his hearing. But what were they?

Mark was still pondering those questions over his Grape-Nuts and coffee when Steve came upstairs with Olivia, who’d obviously spent the night. They were both freshly showered and dressed for work.

It wasn’t an awkward moment, at least not for Mark and Steve. Mark had long since reconciled himself to the fact that his son had a love life and, if they were going to live together, that meant inevitably bumping into some of Steve’s lovers in the house. It was a small discomfort to live with for his son’s company.

Not many fathers and sons enjoyed the close relationship that Mark and Steve had. But few of Steve’s girlfriends were impressed by it. They wondered about the maturity and independence of a fortysomething man who still lived at home with his sixtysomething father. And many women didn’t appreciate having to face their boyfriend’s dad whenever they spent the night. It was, for most women, a relationship breaker.

But Mark got the sense that Olivia Morales wasn’t looking for a relationship when she went home with Steve. She and Steve weren’t sharing any furtive, flirtatious looks or stealing touches, strokes, and squeezes whenever they could. They appeared to be friends-with-benefits, which was an expression that perfectly described what Mark considered the fast-food attitude that people had towards relationships these days.

She got a bowl and a spoon, sat down next to Mark, and poured some cereal.

“Good morning, Dr. Sloan,” she said. “You’re up awfully early.”

“Were you hoping I wouldn’t be?” Mark asked.

“Of course I was,” she said. “Seeing you gives me flashbacks to high school when I’d get caught sneaking out of my boyfriend’s bedroom by his parents.”

“Enjoy it,” Mark said. “You don’t get many chances in life to feel eighteen again.”

“Seventeen,” Olivia said.

“I didn’t need to know that,” Mark said.

“Sorry,” she said. “I babble when I’m nervous.”

Steve sat down next to her. “This Yokley case is turning into a full-time job for both of us.”

It was an abrupt change of subject, almost a non sequitur, but Mark was thankful for it.

“With so many people and law enforcement agencies taking credit for the arrest, is there any official recognition or appreciation left for the two of you?” Mark asked.

“Neither one of us has received a promotion or a raise, if that’s what you’re asking, but we haven’t been shoved to the sidelines either,” Steve said. “This isn’t a homicide case, so there’s really no reason for us to be involved anymore. The fact that we still are acknowledges our contribution.”

Olivia shook her head. “Boy, do they have you snowed. They just like having us around to do all the tedious legwork. Where else would they find detectives with our experience who’d be willing to do it?”

“Karen Cross knows who brought her into this,” Steve said. “So do the agents at the FBI and the ATF and everybody else. Those are favors I can call in someday.”

“You’ve already called in a few with me,” she said with a sly smile.

“Is that what last night was?” Steve said playfully.

Mark cleared his throat to remind them that he was still there. “So where’s the investigation heading?”

“Wherever the guns lead us,” Steve said.

“And there are a lot of guns,” Olivia added.

“We’re trying to trace them from two directions,” Steve said. “Where they were bought or stolen from originally and any past crimes in which they might have been used.”

“That’s going to take an enormous amount of time and manpower,” Mark said. “What about the ROAR angle?”

“Nobody is taking that very seriously. ROAR went down with Carter Sweeney years ago,” Steve said. “Gaylord Yokley is a one-man band.”

Olivia nodded in agreement. “All that’s left of ROAR is maybe half a dozen fat white guys with sixth-grade educations and Confederate flags in their garages who can’t understand why they aren’t running the world.”

“But they managed to get their hands on fourteen hundred assault weapons,” Mark said.

“Thank God for the Second Amendment,” Steve said. “What would the terrorists and crooks do without it?”

As soon as Mark stepped into the hospital, his pager started vibrating on his belt. He glanced at the readout and saw that Jesse was paging him from the ICU. Mark headed straight there.

He found Jesse examining a set of chest X-rays up on the light box near the nurses’ station. Mark looked over his shoulder.

“That was fast,” Jesse said. “I didn’t know you were in the hospital.”

“I was walking in when you paged me,” Mark said, studying the films. Both lungs were covered with diffuse patchy infiltrates—fluffy, white spots indicating inflammation caused by some kind of infection. “Who do these belong to?”

“Ken Hoffman,” Jesse said.

Mark was shocked. He’d spoken to Hoffman, the heart-lung transplant patient, the previous night. Hoffman hadn’t exhibited any signs of difficulty. In fact, he was doing so well that it seemed likely he’d be released in another day or two.

“What happened?”

“He woke up this morning lethargic, feverish, disoriented, and suffering from shortness of breath,” Jesse said. “His breathing rate has gone from sixteen to forty breaths per minute. I listened to his lungs and they sounded wet. So I got him up here, ordered a chest X-ray and ran his blood gases.”

“What are his O
₂
sats?” Mark asked, referring to the amount of oxygen saturation in Hoffman’s blood.

“They are on the way,” Jesse said.

Mark went to Hoffman’s bed and found the patient gasping hard, his skin sweaty, pale, and blue.

A nurse handed Jesse a piece of paper. Jesse glanced at the paper, then held it out to Mark. “I’ve got the blood gases. The O
₂
sats have dropped from ninety-five percent to eighty-five percent.”

“Let’s get him on an oxygen mask,” Mark said to one of the ICU nurses hovering nearby. “Fifty percent O
₂
and run his blood gases again in an hour.”

The nurse nodded and got to work. Mark stepped away to confer with Jesse out of Hoffman’s earshot.

There were several explanations for Hoffman’s rapid decline and none of them were good. It could be a bacterial infection, a viral infection, or his body rejecting his new organs.

If he was fighting a viral infection, the ordinary course of action would be to boost his immune system. But if it
wasn’t
a viral infection, strengthening his immune system would turn his body against his new heart and lungs.