Red Light (27 page)

"I
feel like things are getting worse by the second."

"I can offer
proof of that. Zamorra busted in here yesterday with some fingerprint cards
he'd taken himself. Wouldn't let anybody them. Ran them against the prints your
people collected in the apartment. Today, he tried to pull the same stunt so I
kicked him out. I’ve documented it. I may have a talk with Brighton myself. If
nothing else he's broken the protocol for chain of evidence. This isn't a
serve-your self forensics lab, for Zamorra or you-know-who or anybody
else."

Merci caught the
subtle emphasis on "your people," and the not-subtle suggestion that
she should keep her partner from running amok in Gilliam's temple of science.

"He
thought they botched the kitchen."

"Then
they should have been asked to go back and unbotch it."

What
was she supposed to do now, offer apologies for her partner?”

"James,
the walls are closing in."

"They are. And
it's going to affect the whole department. For a long time. Be careful what you
do, Merci. I ran the comparison myself, so nobody here knows anything about it.
Nothing."

S
he met
Colin Byrne in the UCI Library. He was wearing a shiny suit with a thin
necktie, a fedora of gray felt. He looked even more slender and more
preposterous than before. "It's my Marlowe garb," he said.

"No bullet holes
in the tie."

"That was a
little much."

He'd
put together a thick notebook for her, everything and anything relating to bad
cops in Orange County, 1965-1975. The clips were arranged chronologically, but
he had cross-referenced them and had created a handy index of names and events
in the back.

"A
lot of that came from the smaller papers, some from law-enforcement
publications. There was quite a bit of overlap between the cops and the Birch
Society," he said. "So I went into archives, got the
American
Opinion
newsletters and assembled this for you."

He
handed her a binder, thick with the monthly Birch Society newsletters. Behind
those were a fat collection of
JBS Chapter 231
newsletters, which
appeared to be hand-typed.

"There
was lots on Jesse Acuna, and the De Anza Hotel, but I knew you had some of that
stuff. I went light on it. There are some interesting names in there."

Merci collected the
binders. "I really appreciate this, Mr. Byrne."

"You're very
welcome."

She watched O'Brien set up
the fuming chamber—a ten-gallon aquarium. It was brand-new. He wiped it out
thoroughly with glass cleaner and paper towels, then set two shallow dessert
dishes of water in two corners. He suspended the rusty .38 Special and the
brass casings from wires connected to a plastic lid. He propped the storage
payment envelope upright on the bottom, with two sides leaning against the
glass, reached in and squeezed the glue drops onto the bottom, distributing
them evenly around the container for even evaporation. He counted each one out
loud.

"Thirty-five
drops," he said. "You can go forty, but I don't want to overdevelop
anything. I can add later if I have to."

He sealed the top
with tinfoil, pressing it along the sides of the tank. Then he put on another
layer and secured it with masking tape.

"We'll cook it
and watch it. The cyanoacrylate esters will polymerize when they hit the
moisture and amino acids in the print residue. With older prints, the residue
is going to be dry, so I don't want to accelerate it with heat. I put in two
humidity sources instead of the usual one. My guess is eight hours. We might
get something in less. We probably won’t get anything at all—the body salts in
fingerprints have rusted out the finish by now, ruined the prints. I've never
fumed a piece of evidence that’s this old."

O'Brien pointed at
the case number on Merci's evidence sheet. "Never thought I'd work a case
with sixty-nine on it. I was
born
seventy."

"Sixty-five for
me," she mumbled. The cyanoacrylate fumes had already made the tank glass
pale.

"What's with the
brass Gilliam was working on this morning? From across the room, it looked like
a forty-five."

She
stared hard at O'Brien, then ran her finger across her throat.

He retracted his head
into his shoulders a little, a turtle with no shell. "I shall remain in
ignorance. And happily so, for you, my lady, queen, my luck."

"Perfect. I'll
be back."

Three o'clock sharp. Merci
circled headquarters in her white Chevy, saw nobody at the corner of Flower and
Civic Center, so she made the loop again. She could see the odd white of the
sky far off in the north— a new storm, loaded with rain, supposed to hit by
morning.

The second time
around she saw him and pulled over. Wrapped in an overcoat against the chilly
afternoon, Chuck Brighton bent his tall frame into her passenger's seat and
shut his door. It took him a long time to get in.

"The last time I
did this, some guy from the tax collector's office wanted to tell me the county
had just gone bankrupt."

"What
did you say to that?"

"I asked him why
in hell he didn't tell me before it happened. Said he saw it coming but
couldn't be sure. Not a believer in the proactive stance."

"My
news isn't much better."

"I suspected
that. Get away from here," he said. "I know half the people on these
sidewalks. The other half I've thrown in jail."

She got out to Fourth
Street, made a left. She passed the
carniceria,
the
zapateria,
the pawn shops and the bail bondsmen, the shop with wedding dresses racked out
front, the Mexican music store. There were Christmas lights and tinsel in the
windows, nativities and Santas with sleighs,
Feliz Navidad
and Merry
Christmas painted on the glass in bright colors. She watched the street
numbers.

Two blocks down the
buildings were bigger, set back from the street, fronted by lawns or small
parking lots.

"That's the old
De Anza," she said. It was a big red-brick building with neat white
awnings and trim. A wooden sign out front announced:

GRECO, GRAFF AND REYES—ATTORNEYS
AT LAW.

"First
whores, then lawyers. You wonder what's next."

"You
ever go there, back in the bad old days?"

Brighton
smiled and shook his head. "All I did was work. My idea of fun was to
drive the family up to Bridgeport, camp out and do some fishing. They made me
sheriff at forty-two. That's too young. I didn't know how to do it, so I did
twice as much as I had to."

"The
Bailey case led me there. Her sister said Patti knew who beat up the farmer.
The farmer said it was cops. The papers said cops were hanging out with girls
at the De Anza. I figured if I could put Bailey there I might get a lead."

"Have
you?"

"Not from the De
Anza. But a concerned citizen sent me the key to a storage area in
Riverside."

She
explained what she'd found, and how she'd found it.

"I think it's
the gun used to kill Bailey. It's being fumed right now in the lab."

Brighton grunted.
"Gilliam told me. I can't figure who'd lead you out there. Send you the
key. Somebody involved in her killing? Somebody covering somebody? What's in it
for anybody, thirty-two years after the fact?"

"What's
in it for me is a dead woman and the truth."

"Apparently
you're not alone. Gilliam says the chances of lifting prints that old are
small."

"It's
worth a try."

"Absolutely."

Brighton watched the
city going past the windows of Merci’s Impala.

"So, why did you
drag me out here?" he asked finally. "I don't think we drove out here
to talk about a rusted gun, or Patti Bailey."

She spilled it all:
the brass at Whittaker's, the missing friend; card and Mike's meddlesome
presence in the lab, the letters and suggestions of blackmail, the chukka boots
and sweater, the silencer, switch at Mike's—no details about that—the three
shots she took at man in the moon, Gilliam's match on the casings.

She knew it was all
just a storm of circumstance right now, except for the casings. The match
pointed at Mike and only Mike.

"Sir...
I'm
just not sure what to do."

Brighton was staring
at her. She kept her eyes on the road waited. She waited a long time.

"Let me talk to
Clay," he said quietly. "Right now, don't do anything. Don't say
anything, either."

The name Clayton
Brenkus made her heart sink. The old man ran the district attorney's office
with a sharp tongue and an iron fist. His assistant prosecutors revered or hated
him; his conviction rate was high. The old joke about him getting reelected
term after term was that people were afraid to vote against him. The idea of
setting him loose on Mike somehow surprised her. She hadn't thought it through
that far.

"I keep trying
to figure what I'm not seeing," she said. "I keep looking for the
out. For Mike. For all of us."

"That's Clay's
business. He's been our DA for twenty years because he knows which cases he can
win and which ones are losers."

"What did I
miss, boss? What's right in front of me that I'm not seeing?"

"I don't know,
Merci. Maybe you just did your job and caught a killer."

She made a U-turn and
headed back up Fourth Street, past the De Anza again.

Brighton looked out
at the building. "I don't remember Bailey being part of that place."

"The
word is, she lived there but didn't work there."

"Maybe the
whore-cop-farmer scenario is too neat," he said. "You take one side
of it out and the triangle collapses."

"What's
the side that won't hold?"

"Well, I never
heard of Bailey linked to law enforcement. And what if Acuna had it wrong to
begin with? He got threatened by guys who reminded him of policemen. He got
beaten up by guys in masks. So that makes them cops? That's two weak sides, if
you ask me. Thornton didn't get anywhere with Bailey and cops."

"But the cop
rumor was a year after Bailey. The case was cold by then."

"Do
you want to argue details or do you want to solve the crime?"

"Solve
the crime."

"Then consider
the possibility that you're wasting your time. Consider the possibility Patti
Bailey didn't know squat about Jesse Acuna."

"I will
consider. And I apologize, sir. I'm still arguing about those things with
myself."

Brighton studied her,
then went silent for a long while. She turned onto Flower, heading in.

"Who
have you talked to about the Bailey case, except for Thornton?"

"Her
sister. Glandis. My dad, a little."

"Did
Mel ask if you thought he'd make a good sheriff?"

"Yes."

"And did he ask
you if I was too old and worn out to be effective anymore?"

"No."
Not in those words, she thought.

Brighton smiled.
Nothing happy in it, she saw, like it was mostly for himself.

Overload, thought
Merci: He's heard too much to process in few minutes. Too much bad news, such
as learning that one of his best investigators is staring down the barrel of
Penal Code 187 for shooting prostitute who was blackmailing him.

"You
talk to Mike's dad about this?"

"Which?
Mike or Bailey?"

"Either
one."

"No," she
said, realizing that if she wanted to pick Big Pat's memories of the Bailey
murder, she'd better do it soon.

The sheriff stared
out the window, hunched in the overcoat, and for the first time in her career
Merci saw Brighton as old. She could feel his weakness and this made her feel
both sorrow and excitement.

She looked out to the
darkening northern sky and wondered what this said about her. She thought about
nomadic male lions who fight their way into a pride and promptly eat the cubs
and mate the females establish their own bloodline.

"Aubrey
Whittaker's father called my office this morning," said Brighton. His
voice was flat and disembodied. "Saw her picture on the news. Her real
name was Gail White, grew up in Bakersfield, ran away from home when she was
sixteen. Hadn't talked to her for three years

"How
was he?"

"Concerned
about her bank accounts."

"One of
those." It had always amazed and angered her how many relatives of murder
victims were mostly interested in the victim's estate.

"He's going to
claim the body, make the arrangements. I've got his number for you, for whatever
it's worth."

She looked out at the
courthouse building, saw the lawyers heading in and out. A bail bondsman she
knew hustled down the sidewalk, cupping a smoke in one hand, the other hand
jammed in his coat pocket.