Lion Plays Rough (22 page)

The air went out of me like I'd been punched. I should have felt relieved. Instead, I was dismayed beyond all expectation. “When did this happen?”

“A few days ago,” she said. “That's his blood in my car. It's his truck I've been driving.”

“So who are you running from?”

“I don't know.”

“You don't know who you're hiding from?”

“I'm not going to prison.”

“I don't want you locked up.”

“You're not the one who decides.”

“You killed him?”

“If anyone else asks, I'll say I haven't seen him for months. So why don't you go home now, Leo. You're safe. It's done. No one's coming after you. Go home and keep your illusions.”

She swung her leg out from the bench and started to rise. I sat as if stunned. I was here because I couldn't be safe until Lucas was out of action. Now she was telling me that he was.

I caught her wrist as she started to walk away. “That's not good enough. A man was murdered because of you. What am I going to tell his family?”

She jerked her wrist free but didn't walk away.

Car had moved over to stand beside the rental.

I turned sideways on the bench to face her. “You leave here now and you won't even get out of town. I think Lucas is still alive, and you're protecting him. And I think that's what Campbell's going to believe.”

“Let him believe what he wants. I'll take my chances.” She pulled free.

“There's another answer,” I said. “If you hadn't killed him, Campbell would have. He basically told me that's what he was going to do if he ever found him. If Lucas really is dead, Campbell will protect you. I'm sure of it.”

She stopped. “What are you saying?”

“I'm offering you a deal, if you'll let me try to set it up. I want Lucas. If he's dead, I want to see his body, and Campbell will, too. You bring us there, and you give me a sworn statement telling what happened to Jeremy, enough to make a civil case. And in exchange, your husband makes sure Lucas's killing stays unsolved.”

She stood for a moment poised to walk away. “Call him,” she finally said. “I'm not promising anything, but you can call him.”

~ ~ ~

“Your wife's alive,” I said when I got Campbell on the phone. “I found her.”

“Thank god. Where?” It was the most emotion I'd ever heard in his voice.

“In Tahoe. She says Lucas is dead.”

“Do you believe her?”

“When I see the body I will. She's promised to take us to it, but in return she needs a promise from you. Most homicides in Oakland go unsolved. She doesn't see why this one should be any different.”

There was a pause. Then he said, “She's a cop. This idea come from her or you?”

“What does it matter? She'll go along. It's the only chance she's got. There's nothing to connect her to that car. It wasn't registered in her name. I'm the only one who ever saw her driving it.”

“And you're going to keep quiet about this?”

“I just want to know he's dead. And after that I want your wife to testify about the stuff she knows he did. How he ended up that way is police business. I'm sure he deserved it and I'm glad that's where he is.”

I was taking myself off the hook and putting him on it. He must have known that, but then again he'd been on the hook all along—ever since he'd first made the decision not to remove himself from the investigation. I told him we'd call him later to set up the meeting.

Across the street, tethered in the bed of the pickup, the dog whined. It had been crying off and on all afternoon. We'd moved into the hotel room, but I'd come out to the parking lot to make the call, keeping my distance from Car, who sat in the rental, a book propped on the steering wheel. Ignoring Trigger, I went back into the room. Lavinia lay on her side, facing away from me. “He went for it,” I said. “Now it's your turn.”

She lay still for another moment. Then she unfurled her long body and sat against the headboard.

She talked for maybe two hours. As she spoke she gazed longingly into the distance somewhere behind me, beyond the wall of the room, like a creature caught in a trap. Sitting on the floor at the foot of the bed, I made notes on a legal pad. I had a tape recorder running.

I, Lavinia Perry, am over eighteen years of age and competent to testify in a court of law. The following is true and correct and based on my own personal knowledge. I declare under penalty of perjury that . . .

In separate, numbered paragraphs I wrote the essential facts of what she told me, the symbiosis between Lucas and Damon, the raids and the payoffs, the dead written off as casualties of the drug wars.

I was personally present and witnessed at least three separate attacks carried out by Damon Watson and his associates as a result of tips from Oakland Police officers, including Christopher Lucas. One such action took place on May 29, 2001, near Fifty-Ninth Street and Bancroft Avenue. On this occasion, Sgt. Lucas received information that suggested a considerable quantity of drugs was being stored temporarily in a house in East Oakland. The information was of sufficient quality to develop probable cause for a search warrant; however, when I asked Sgt. Lucas if he would obtain a warrant, he told me he would just call Damon.

It was standard practice for officers who were involved with Damon to station themselves at a perimeter around the action to deter bystanders and in case backup was needed. I accompanied Sgt. Lucas as he took up a position in his squad car a few blocks from the house. A man named Jeremy Walker was present in the vicinity and witnessed the attack on the house and the exchange of gunfire. Fleeing the scene, he came across Sgt. Lucas and me. Jeremy and I had gone to high school together, and he recognized me. Sgt. Lucas ordered him to vacate the area and Jeremy complied; however, a few days later he contacted me and told me that he intended to file a citizen's complaint about what he'd seen. He had guessed rightly that members of the police had condoned the illegal raid, or even coordinated with Damon's men.

I told Sgt. Lucas what Jeremy had said to me about wanting to file a complaint. Sgt. Lucas said he would take care of it. A few days later I learned that Jeremy had been shot dead as he walked to work. I confronted Sgt. Lucas and asked him if he'd killed Jeremy. Lucas laughed, and said that Jeremy had gotten what was coming to him and so would I, if I ever betrayed him.

I asked Lucas again if he'd killed Jeremy, and he said yes.

I'd sent Car to find a notary. Lavinia made corrections while the woman waited. Then she signed her name to the statement I'd composed as she spoke.

~ ~ ~

“I can feel you watching me,” she said when the notary I'd called had gone. She was lying on her side on the bed again, facing away from me.

“I was just wondering how you got into this.”

She rolled over onto her back. I forced myself to meet her eyes. “I was a good cop,” she said, holding my gaze. “At least I would have been.”

“Yeah? What was stopping you?”

“If it weren't for the money we might have gotten through it. Once you have it, once you take it, it has to go somewhere. And what about the drugs? Later it turned out that they were being turned around to favored dealers, put back on the street. The money got spread wide enough for the people who mattered to accept that it was what we claimed it was, a unique answer to Oakland's unique problems.”

“Some people think that novelty is overrated.”

“The secret to a thing like this is you keep giving people reasons not to ask questions they don't want the answers to. Then suddenly it's too late for them not to know what's really happening, and they're on the inside looking out, wondering how the door got shut behind them, with no choice but to keep their mouths shut. That's what it feels like, Leo, like you've just been walking along this long hallway, telling yourself with every step that you're going to turn around and start back, and then the door slams.”

“Is that what happened?” I asked.

“I've always wanted a car like that. But I couldn't drive it. I couldn't stand to look at it. Even before—” Her voice broke off.

After a moment I said, “What happened, exactly?”

“How did I kill him? I thought you didn't want to know.”

“The tape recorder's turned off. It's just me asking.”

She looked at me, then shrugged. “I made up some excuse, pretended I needed to get something from the trunk, then called him. I had him sit on the bumper and I started giving him a blow job. This was in Marin, the Headlands. Anyone could have driven by. That was what fooled him. Otherwise he would have been suspicious. He thought it was some kinky thing. Before he came I took out that little gun he gave me and shot him in the face, rolled him in and slammed the trunk.

“It was what he always did to me, you see,” she said. “He liked to take out his gun and hold it to my head when he was fucking me, pull the trigger, and hear the click right there at the end. So when he saw what I was doing he must have thought I was playing around. Then when I got where I was going to dump him, it turned out he wasn't dead, and the gun jammed when I tried to shoot him again. I had to take that knife of his and stab him over and over and over.”

Her eyes filled. I looked away. Time to go.

Chapter 28

Car was dozing in the passenger seat of the rental. It was early evening, the sun down, the chill setting in. I knocked on the glass. “I'll ride with Lavinia,” I told him. “We're heading back.” He just glared at me through the window.

The passenger footwell of the truck was filled with several evenings' food wrappers. Dirty clothes lay mounded in the narrow back seat; clean clothes on hangers hung by the rear passenger window. In the bed of the pickup Trigger now slumbered.

Instead of heading to the lake road, she crossed over to the motel and stopped beside the rental, driver's side to driver's side. She rolled her window down and drew a gun from beneath the seat. I lunged but she blocked me with her elbow. Car was in movement before she had the gun out, throwing himself across the seat of the rental. She fired, moved her arm, fired again. As sound came back into the world I heard the hiss of air escaping from the shot-out tires.

I lay against the side door. A shell casing rolled on the dashboard. My heart was racing. She slid the gun back into the holster and took her foot off the brake, the pickup rolling slowly down the darkened street. I glanced in the mirror but saw nothing.

“I don't want him along, you don't want him along, and he doesn't want to go where we're going. We don't need a chaperone and he doesn't want to be one.”

It was a long, silent ride. It simply isn't possible to make chitchat after gunfire, on your way to dig up a body.

I could just take her word for it that Lucas was dead, I told myself as we came down the long unwinding from the mountains into the gold country. I had her sworn statement. We stopped for fast food and gas. I stayed in the truck while she went into the restroom. As soon as she was out of sight the dog began to pace and whine, its nails clattering on the metal surface, the suspension faintly rocking.

“Call him now and tell him where to meet us,” she instructed when she emerged. She gave directions. My conversation with Campbell was terse. I repeated her directions, saying that's where she wanted him to meet us. He didn't ask to talk to her, though he must have known she was right there. If he were going to betray her, I thought, it wouldn't happen until he saw Lucas dead.

Again I told myself that I wouldn't go through with it. Car could be right, I told myself. It could have been Lavinia all along. She could have been the one who killed Nikki. Tonight she might intend to kill me, but I didn't think so, didn't want to believe it. I had little more than faith to justify any such belief.

It was after midnight by the time we reached the place, a fire-trail gate on Bear Creek Road in the hills between Lafayette, Orinda, and Walnut Creek.

At first I thought Campbell wasn't there. Then I saw his car parked behind a stand of brush. I knew the country, of course, had been here on my bike plenty of times. All around was water district land, dry hills, and cattle. Few cars would be coming along this road so late at night.

Campbell walked up to the truck. Lavinia rolled down the driver's side window. The cloying scent of dry sage grass was thick on the air, miles of it all around us. In the hours since I'd first called him he seemed to have mastered his joy at learning that his wife wasn't dead. “I see you've met Leo.”

“I've given him what he wants,” she said with subtle mockery. I was seeing a new side to each of them. “You're not really going to make me go through with this?” Campbell stood rigid in an apparent effort not to look at me, not to hear her implication. She went on, “Just tell me what you really need and I'll give it to you. I'm here now, aren't I, baby? I came back just like you wanted.”

From the bed of the truck the dog growled. “You ought to have shot that animal when you killed Chris,” Campbell said, as if coming to some decision. He smacked the roof of the truck. “Lead the way.”

The chain on the gate was not really fastened; it only looked like it was. Campbell slipped the loop off the post and opened the gate. We drove through, headlights off, only the light of a half-moon to guide us, Campbell following close behind in the police sedan as Lavinia negotiated the rough road.

“Are we going to have to do much digging?” I asked.

“Not unless somebody came and buried him. Not if he's where I left him. There are coyotes, vultures, wild dogs. Maybe even the cattle. I wouldn't get your hopes up. There may not be much.”

“I don't know how you can be so cool about it.”

“Because there's nothing to worry about now,” she said.

I didn't know what she meant, but I'd come too far at this point to ask.

We followed the fire road over the crest of a treeless hill. The landscape was all shadow without substance under the half-moon. I could see the trees ahead of us only in silhouette against the lights of Richmond below. The dog barked, then again, a strangled note that lapsed into anxious whining. When the road came into the trees she stopped. The dog's whining grew more insistent, punctuated by barks, the yips of a smaller dog, and then I smelled it, too, the corpse stink tainting the breeze.

She killed the engine and we got out. “Trigger, shut up,” she said.

Campbell's flashlight beam raced past our feet. “It knows.”

He seemed in good spirits.

“You smug prig,” she said.

“So we'll just follow our noses.”

“This ground is hard as rock. What was I supposed to do, blast with dynamite?”

“There's people up here all the time. And you with that dog everyone knows was his.”

“They wouldn't have found me or the dog.”

Campbell's beam lit the way, picking out tree trunks and boulders. The animal began to bark more fiercely, the smell growing more definite as we moved under the trees. It was more than just a smell. It was the landscape into which we climbed. The dog's barking rose to new heights of frenzied abandon behind us, distracting me from working out in thought the alarm that mounted in me with each step up that hillside.

Campbell stopped. “You didn't carry that body up here by yourself.”

Ahead of us, Lavinia turned. Campbell was behind me and shone the light on her face. She blinked and flinched away.

“Who helped you?” he demanded.

“Why do you have to make me say it?”

“Who?” All the smugness was gone from his voice, replaced by fear.

“Who do you think? Your best buddy, Damon. Loyal to the end.”

I heard the breath wheeze out of him. “So Damon killed Lucas.”

Her voice was sharp. “Is that what you want me to tell them?”

When he didn't answer, she turned, kept climbing. I followed her, the beam wagging along. I didn't dare look back at Campbell. We came to a mass of rock and Lavinia climbed atop it. “Here,” she said, poised above us, looking down the other side.

We climbed up after her. The ground rose steeply to a sort of cliff where the shadows from Campbell's flashlight beam danced. At the base of the cliff, slabs had fractured and pulled away, creating a series of cave-like hollows. In one of these cracks, beneath the spreading leaves of a bay laurel, the body was wedged, not visible from below, accessible only by clambering over broken rock.

In the night, until the light hit it, it looked like part of the rock, a gray slab. Campbell shone his light on the face, a twisted, swollen, leer of tissue and gristle. The eyes were gone, the wound in the cheek also eaten out by something, the lips drawn back over yellow teeth. I couldn't even tell what race the man might have been. If Campbell was dissatisfied with what he saw, he didn't show it.

“So you decided to trade up,” Campbell said, holding the beam on the ghastly face.

They seemed able to stand the stink, but I couldn't. For all the space around us, I might have been sealed up in a box, in a coffin. I held my breath as long as I could. It was like drowning. At last I plunged down the slope, stumbling from tree trunk to tree trunk, retching as I ran but not stopping until I was clear of it. I came out of the trees fifty yards from the vehicles and paused to gag it out of me, my hands braced on my knees. Finally I straightened, wiped my mouth. Then I noticed the silence. The dog had stopped barking.

I didn't see the dog anymore in the back of the truck. My first thought was that it'd gotten free, and I glanced around worriedly but saw nothing. I took a few steps toward the truck, expecting Trigger at any moment to leap straining at the end of its chain. But the silence only seemed to deepen.

A few paces from the truck I caught the hot, coppery stink of fresh blood. Peering over the tailgate, I saw the animal on its side in a glinting dark pool. Its throat cut.

I turned and ran a few steps back down the fire road the way we'd come, then froze as I heard a cough above. On the hillside Campbell's flashlight shone waveringly on the undersides of the trees. Again from closer by I heard something, the clatter of small stones and a metallic clink, then a muttered curse. I stepped into the shelter of the trees. You idiot, I told myself. Run while you have the chance. Shout, warn them, do something. I took one step up the slope, then another, holding my body rigid. Was it possible he hadn't heard me?

Campbell and Lavinia were arguing as they made their way down toward us, their voices weary, as if replaying some played-out argument, too low for me to catch what they were saying.

I took another step up the slope. The half-distinct shapes in the darkness resolved and I glimpsed the killer's silhouette not more than fifteen feet away, on the other edge of a small clearing in the trees that covered the hillside. The man crouched against an oak, holding a rifle pointed uphill. It was Damon Watson.

He was armed and I wasn't; he'd kill me if I revealed myself, and even if I'd been armed, I doubted I was capable of killing him before he killed me. I had no idea what I was doing, but I crept closer, and closer still, moving into the clearing now and through the tall grass on the balls of my feet, hands out to catch myself. It didn't seem real to me, somehow. I was a ghost; my body had melted into the darkness.

It could have been Damon's voice on the phone, I realized, Damon who posed as Jamil and fed me information about his meetings with Campbell. At every turn I'd been set up, and so had Campbell.

He and Lavinia were closer now, coming down the hill on a line that would bring them into the clearing. Still they were arguing. “This is just like you,” came Campbell's voice. And Lavinia said, “You always make it seem like—” Her voice dropped and I didn't catch the rest. As they neared the clearing, the flashlight went out. Damon swore again, searching with the gun in the blackness.

He lowered the rifle and moved away from the tree into the grass, something glinting in his hand: a blade. He was no more than five feet from me now, but still he didn't see me. We were both in the open. I took a step, skidded on a patch of gravel, flinched, and caught myself, but it was too late to run. Damon whirled at the noise. “Campbell!” I shouted.

I heard the knife hit stone. Damon must have dropped it. He still had the rifle, but he was aiming downhill and I was hardly more than a body length away, a few feet below his contour on the slope. He missed, but the sound of the shot at close range was deafening. I staggered, then scrambled, moving on instinct, knowing that I had to reach him before he could aim again. I heard footsteps and Campbell yelled, “Hold it!” I grabbed the gun in both hands as Damon tried to get it up again, one of my hands on the barrel and the other down near the stock.

There was a shot from above, but it missed. Before I could set my feet, Damon gave a shout and flung me away. I tumbled spinning onto my hip and kept rolling all the way down to a clump of bushes at the clearing's bottom edge. Too far, I realized with a rush of sadness, struggling for a panicked moment to get my feet under me. He wouldn't miss with the second shot, I knew.

The sound was muffled, and as I rolled over in panic I saw Damon standing in the middle of the clearing with the gun pointed away from me, toward Campbell, who was feeling for something in the grass, Lavinia on the ground beside him. I thought I heard the impact of the bullet, a percussive
thunk
that made my fingers tingle in the sympathy of flesh for flesh. Campbell swung around as if on a pivot and came rolling down, flattening a broad swath of dew-wet grass, sliding to a stop beneath Damon just a few feet from me.

“I got this motherfucker!” Damon yelled, evidently to Lavinia. Then he lowered the gun and hurried to Campbell's side. He struck a flame from a lighter and held it over the dying man. Panting wheezes came from the back of Campbell's throat as the blood spilled out into the dry grass. Damon clucked his tongue and straightened, chambering a round, taking his time. He didn't even bother to look in my direction until he turned and raised the rifle, drawing a careful bead on me.

I saw Lavinia straighten and aim her weapon behind him. He didn't seem to sense the danger. He was savoring the moment. Probably he thought she was still on his side. She fired three times, the sound of the shots blurred together by their returning echoes. Damon stumbled forward, caught himself by planting the gun barrel in the earth, then sat down heavily beside it.

Lavinia, lowering her service revolver, shouted for me to call the police.

~ ~ ~

I didn't tell them about the car in the impound lot. I didn't suggest they check if there was a pay phone at the gas station where we'd stopped on the way back from Tahoe, or if any calls had been placed from there to the cell phone in Damon's pocket. Her version was that Damon had asked to meet Campbell there, that he'd promised to lead them to Lucas's body.

It wasn't much of a story, and I had to swallow a bitter taste each time I heard it, but it was the official line. By then the department was depending on her to testify before a grand jury that the corruption connected to these deaths had been snuffed out, the mercenary cop faction now purged. Lucas's death was supposed to be the end of the scandal. Lavinia's confession was pure penitence.