The Devil's Analyst (26 page)

They drove downtown, found the block-size headquarters of the department—a concrete bunker that looked straight out of the seventies, its few narrow windows facing a street sparse with trees. Sitting inside an unadorned conference room with plastic chairs and a beat-up Formica-topped table, they waited for Detective Hernandez. He was running a few minutes late.

“Why is Pete so important to you?” Cynthia wanted to know.

Danny wasn’t certain of the answer, but he knew that he never properly ended things with Pete. Being in the city where the man died, Danny thought the least he could do was locate the appropriate cemetery, stand silently for a few moments over the grave, and reflect on what he should have said years earlier. Somehow, Danny was certain Cynthia would understand that impulse. Hadn’t she insisted on tramping through Griffith Park just to see the spot where Chip’s body was found? Nevertheless, he resisted answering her question. It would take too much to explain.

Hernandez entered the room. He carried a thin folder. After giving the two of them a cursory nod, he sat down.

“Used to work with Denkey when I was in L.A. County. Good guy,” he said, “but there’s not much to tell you about this Pete Peterson case. Why you interested?”

By the way he opened the folder, fanned the few sheets and looked ready to talk, the guy didn’t look like he cared about the answer. Danny answered anyway.

“We grew up where Pete used to live, and we wanted to find out where he was buried.”

“’Fraid I can’t help you with that. It would have saved us all some time if Denkey had mentioned that was your goal.”

Cynthia took offense at the man’s somewhat cavalier attitude. “Why can’t you tell us? It seems a simple request.”

“Because Pete Peterson ain’t buried, at least no place that we know about. We never recovered a body.”

Danny was confused. “I thought he was murdered. How can there not be a body?”

Hernandez grudgingly acknowledged that the question was sensible. “Here’s the thing. Your guy was a registered sex offender. Kinda surprised anyone is interested in him, especially after all this time. But we always knew where he was. He was good at following the rules.

“He tended to hang out past the airport toward Tempe, slept somewhere near the Salt River Wash, panhandled up Scottsdale Road sometimes. Hung around with the same group of homeless people.

“Two years ago, one of those homeless people reported that this Pete Peterson had been murdered during one of our monsoonal rains, and we were told Peterson was arguing with someone under the bridge. The witness said a knife fight broke out, and that Peterson was stabbed multiple times. According to this guy, the assailant kicked Peterson’s body down into the river. In heavy rains, flash floods deluge these dry gulches.

“The thing is there was blood under the bridge, a lot of it, and it matched Peterson’s DNA, but no body ever turned up. Who knows how far downstream his body got carried. Probably got covered with debris, buried in the flood plain. Someday a new rain maybe will wash him out.

“But believe me, your friend’s dead. Eyewitness, the blood, and no one’s seen him since.”

“But did you look for his body?”

“For a pervert drifter? Get real. We have better things to do.”

With that, the detective pushed the papers back into the folder, stood up and said, “Sorry you came down here for nothing.”

He walked out of the room. Cynthia reached over to console Danny. Perhaps she wanted to show her concern that now he could never make his final good-byes. But Danny was thinking not at all about lost opportunities.

No, what he was thinking was far simpler. Pete wasn’t dead. He was alive and still trying to take care of him.

The freeway
was strangely monotonous. Danny estimated it would take less than seven hours to arrive at the Tringush casino east of Palm Springs. The time driving would offer Cynthia and him a chance to make sense of all that they had learned.

“It’s weird,” Danny started, “the way that Oliver Meyers seems to be at the center of it all. Chip meets him for breakfast and he disappears. Chip asks about Pete Peterson that same day, and your dad tells us that Oliver used to torment him. This guy’s my business partner, and I didn’t even know it.”

Cynthia was driving, and she kept her eyes on the road, even though the divided freeway had little traffic. Danny thought maybe she didn’t want to look at him, but he couldn’t imagine why. Did she blame him in some way? Did she think that Josh and his business connection to Oliver is what brought the guy into her life? Did she somehow know that he had a deeper connection with Oliver?

Finally she spoke, “It doesn’t make any sense. It’s as though everything tells us that this Oliver had something to do with Chip’s killing. But why?”

“Chip was trying to better understand our business. Maybe he found out something.”

“Something worth killing over? Come on, Danny, what could that possibly be?”

Danny wasn’t about to dismiss the possibility. “I don’t know. But look at everything that’s happened? Someone was behind a cyber attack on our business. Someone tried to break into my house. Someone stole money from Lattigo Industries. It must all be connected. Somehow.”

“But why Oliver?”

Because Danny knew Oliver in a way that Cynthia didn’t, he was willing to believe the man was capable of any act. Once Oliver had been his god, but no more. For a few weeks on that summer job at the resort when Danny thought himself in heaven, he had simply fallen into the mix of infatuation swirled with a teenage discovery of sex. But in those long summer days it seemed so much more. Nobody ever waited more fervently than Danny to take kitchen refuse to the dump. Each afternoon provided another chance to relax with a shirtless Oliver in the sunny clearing of the resort’s dumping ground.

Even now after so many years, the smell of trash evoked in Danny a thrill of anticipation. Rotting lettuce held the same power as some expensive cologne filled with the rarest of scents. The memories were powerful, like those afternoons combining the lingering odor of trash and the close-up smell of Oliver’s sweat and sex.

Their afternoon activities became routine so fast. Oliver reeled him in with all the expertise of a master fisherman, playing on both Danny’s trepidation and his anticipation, until Danny was flopping around the truck like a fresh trout. The moment Oliver first pulled Danny’s hand over to touch him was the point that firmly hooked Danny.

“Danny, are you listening?” Now Cynthia was looking at him and demanding a response. “Do you know how Oliver could be connected to all of this?”

Danny understood he should tell Cynthia about his past with Oliver. All he really had to do was hand her Lopez’s novel.
The Dumping Ground
was practically a day-by-day diary of Oliver and Danny’s teenage affair. But the book’s accuracy extended only to what they did and the progress of events as the summer went on—the steady escalation from touching to kissing to oral sex to the day that Danny was bent over the tailgate of the truck, his nose inches from stink of the trash, his virginity being pounded away. Lopez captured all of those transgressions.

But the novel never got close to how Danny actually felt. He was actually happy for those few weeks. He smiled all the time and laughed easily at the stupid jokes of the resort’s chef. He felt protected and wanted, and a little guilty that he had been so mean to Pete Peterson the summer before. At last he understood what love was, what caring was, and what it meant to be understood so completely by another person. In those stolen minutes from work as Danny lay on the ground staring up at the cumulus Wisconsin clouds above, as he watched Oliver’s handsome face bob above him, as he felt the man inside him, he knew life could never be better.

But he was wrong.

There was no point in telling Cynthia any of his history. It was in the past. It had nothing to do with the present. Maybe it said something about Oliver’s character, but it wouldn’t explain his motivation. People didn’t kill and steal over a teenage case of puppy love—especially when they were the one who committed the wrong.

Cynthia abandoned the topic of Oliver Meyers, and then drove for several miles without speaking. When they passed the sign welcoming them to California, Cynthia looked over, “What did my dad mean when he said something about Pete Peterson being special to you?”

Danny crept carefully into his answer. “Pete was good to me at a bad point in my life. You remember when my mom committed suicide how Dad moved us closer to town? Pete lived next door. I was just turning fourteen, but he gave me odd jobs, kept me busy, and used to show me movies in his old theater. That was before he lost the building to the bank.”

“I always thought the theater closed years before that.”

“It did, but he still had the projectors inside, and sometimes he’d fire it up to let me see old films. I once told him how my mom said she and Dad fell in love by going to the movies and he understood how watching old movies somehow made Mom seem alive again, at least for a little while. He tried to help me deal with what she did. I guess he loved me. At least more than my Dad did.”

“It sounds like Pete tried to be your protector.”

“I guess.”

Cynthia was chewing her lip, a habit she displayed as a teenager when she debated saying something aloud. “Remember how Chip told me he saw someone with a hat like Pete’s? What if it was actually Pete’s hat? What if it was Pete?”

Even though he had already wondered the same thing, Danny felt a need to scoff. “But he’s dead.”

“We don’t know that. Not for sure. Maybe he just disappeared after that fight. Maybe he’s still alive, still trying to protect you. Maybe he’s watching out for you.”

They could hear
a 747 jet coming in low, heading west for the runways at LAX. Oliver glanced skyward as though to confirm the plane was sufficiently far away not to land on them. The man looked uncomfortable, which was fine with Josh.

“Last time, you said I was acting like we were in a spy movie,” Oliver complained. “How hard did you search to find a meeting spot to do me one better?”

“What can I say? I like this place.” Josh glanced around the hilly scrublands near the airport and into the cracked bowl of the abandoned Baldwin Hills reservoir. In 1963, the dam on the far end of this bowl failed and tons of water rushed down the hillsides, through the residential neighborhood below, killing five and destroying nearly 300 homes. He thought it a properly apocalyptic setting for the conversation they needed to have. Plus he liked the imagery of being so close to the flight path for the international airport.

“You know this whole neighborhood is black,” Oliver complained. “Two white guys stand out like a sore thumb.”

“Then I guess you can’t kill me, can you? Everyone would notice.”

Josh wasn’t concerned about violence. The cracked reservoir was now part of the Kenneth Hahn Recreation Area, a popular place for jogging and a great vantage point for spectacular views of downtown Los Angeles. On the other hand it wasn’t a frequently visited park. While most of the users were likely residents of the now upper-middle-class African American neighborhoods that surrounded the park’s woods and grasslands, there were never many people about. In reality, the site wouldn’t be a bad place to kill someone. Some sixty years earlier someone dumped the cut-up body of a woman somewhere down below and the press called that victim the Black Dahlia. As Josh recalled, the case was never solved.

Josh thought he would just take his sweet time. It was a picture-perfect day. No smog anywhere. Across the basin and flats of Los Angeles, he could easily read the letters of the Hollywood sign in the hills to the north. To the northeast were the skyscrapers of the downtown area with the First Interstate tower projecting high into the sky. In the distance, Mt. Baldy and the surrounding mountains were covered with snow. Everything seemed clear.

Finally, Josh spoke, “Here’s what I want.

“Premios is not going public. The market is too weak. Instead, Barbara Linsky is going to help us find a buyer. We’ll sell or merge, and in the process, Endicott-Meyers will get its money back with a nice profit. You and Colby will drop off the Board, and the Big Stick project will remain unfinished. We’ll all go our separate ways. Live happily ever after.”

“Who the fuck do you think you’re dealing with? I’m not that impressionable teenager you met back in Thread. Josh, you’re in deep water here, and my friends take their games quite seriously.”

Oliver kept his voice low and controlled, but his hands were trembling with suppressed rage. Or maybe it was fear. Josh didn’t really care. Let Oliver worry about what his superiors might do to him when he brought Josh’s message back.

“What makes you think we would ever agree to your asinine plan?”

Another plane flew by. LAX was a busy airport, and jets were landing every minute or so, all circling to come in from the west, all getting a perfect bulls-eye view of the Baldwin Hills and the spot where Josh stood with Oliver.

Josh reached into his jacket to pull out a folded-up section of that morning’s
Los Angeles Times
. “See that story?”

The headline was focused on the potential trial of Ahmed Ressam, the Millennium Bomber and the government claim that there would be over one hundred witnesses. The guy was certain to be found guilty.