The Tin Collectors (32 page)

"That's yours," Love said, indicating the cash in the suitcase on the bed. "A hundred grand in tens and twenties."

"Lucky me. Did I win the lottery?" Shane asked.

"Yeah, you were down to your last ticket, and then you got lucky, hit the number. If you start acting smart now instead of just running around like a hard-on with dirt for brains, then maybe there's another suitcase like that one in your future."

"I like this so far."

"We got some rules that go with giving you this hat." Police terminology for a bribe.

"Rules? Okay."

"One. You go home, you sit in your house, and you stay there."

"Trouble with my house is, it's full of nine-millimeter federals. The Major Crimes dicks have been digging them out of the walls like fruit seeds."

"That was a mistake. We apologize."

"I accept." Shane was beginning to think that maybe he might actually get out of there alive.

"Two. You stop messing around in Long Beach. Stop going to the naval yard."

"No problem there. I didn't like it much anyway."

"Three. Whatever you think you've figured out about Mayor Crispin or the top floor of the Glass House
forget it."

"Okay . . . it's forgotten."

"Let me explain to you why you are being offered this hat instead of a plot at Forest Lawn."

"Okay."

"Since you shot Ray, you have been in the press a lot. We're trying to keep a low profile. You get to live as long as you play ball." Love moved around Shane, forcing him to turn sideways to the mirror while keeping his own back to it. This was definitely being videotaped. Shots of Shane Scully taking a suitcase full of cash. Damning evidence if he ever changed his mind. On the plus side, it also probably meant the murder one charge wasn't coming. If the DA had what he needed, these guys wouldn't be doing this.

"Okay, since we're playing ball, I assume I'm the catcher," Shane said.

"That's what you are. You just caught a break. If you're smart, you won't catch a bullet."

"I'm gonna be smart. I'm gonna just take my suitcase of untraceable cash and go home and sit in my bullet-riddled living room until you tell me it's okay to come out."

Love closed the suitcase, snapped the clasps, and handed it to Shane, spinning him slightly so that he was looking more toward the glory hole. Love kept his back to the bedroom mirror the whole time.

"Is that it?" Shane asked. "Is our business concluded?"

"Not quite yet. Come in here." Love moved out of the bedroom and back into the living room. Shane followed him, carrying the suitcase, thinking the hundred thousand in small bills was surprisingly light. Sheets, Marvin, and Rich stayed behind him.

In the living room Coy took a videotape box off the TV, opened it, slid the tape into the VCR, then turned his frightening, bloodless smile on Shane.

"I think it's important that you do not mistake kindness for weakness," Love said as he grabbed the remote off the TV and turned the set on. He punched PLAY.

Suddenly Shane was looking at Chooch and Longboard Kelly on the videotape. They were tied to wooden chairs in Shane's rented apartment on Third Street. He recognized the faded wallpaper and frayed blue drapes. Both Brian and Chooch had silver duct tape across their mouths. A man was offscreen holding a shotgun, the barrel of the weapon sticking about an inch into the frame.

Shane felt his guts tighten into a knot. Bile instantly flooded the back of his throat. "He's a fifteen-year-old kid," he protested weakly. "Brian Kelly is just a surfboard shaper. He doesn't know shit."

"You go home and stay quiet for two or three days. Then, if everything goes right, you get them both back. Otherwise, I'm gonna put these cowboys on the ark," Love said.

On the tape Chooch was struggling against his ropes. Long
-
board looked dazed and had blood on the side of his head.

"Seen enough?" Coy said, and when Shane nodded, he turned off the TV and handed Shane a set of car keys. "There's a department car parked in the driveway. Take it back and leave it in the motor pool at the Glass House. Then take a cab home and pull the grass up over your head."

Shane took the keys and the suitcase and walked on wooden legs out of the house. They all followed. There was a gray Crown Victoria with blackwalls in the drive. He got behind the wheel, started the car, and pulled out of the driveway. The headlights swept across the four ex-cops as he backed into the street, turning right. He was operating on autopilot... his mind on the sickening video images of Chooch and Brian tied to the chairs.

He drove down Lake View Drive, the black suitcase full of cash jiggling on the seat beside him. He took the correct turns from memory and found himself back on 1-7, heading out of Arrowhead toward L
. A
.

As he drove, he could picture Chooch's black Hispanic eyes staring out at him from the recesses of his memory. He remembered the boy's swarthy, handsome features as he sat in the Little Bruin deli in Westwood, looking out at the traffic, his gaze averted so Shane wouldn't see his pain.

"Do you know who my father is?" the boy had asked. "Did Sandy ever tell you?" Hurt and longing in the question.

Shane had wanted to fill the void in Chooch's life, just as he had wanted to fill it in his own. But he had been slow out of the blocks and running two steps behind, a clown in swim fins, flapping along, heels down while the rest of the field breezed past him.

Almost without thinking, he picked up his phone and for the second time in twenty-four hours asked Alexa for help.

By the time he got to the San Bernardino Freeway, he had explained to her in detail what had happened and what was on the videotape. "I'll meet you at the Spring Summer Apartments," she said. "Maybe we can pick up something there."

An hour later he was back in downtown L
. A
. He found a spot at the curb on Third Street, across from his rented room. He could see Alexa's gray Crown Vic at the curb across the street. He quickly got out of his borrowed car and hurried into the building, afraid of what he might find in the cramped rented single on the third floor of the dingy rooming house.

Chapter
38

HE FOUND HER kneeling by the toilet in the bathroom, wearing latex gloves and brushing black granite powder from her field-investigation kit onto the toilet handle with a fine bristle brush. Every detective and patrol officer carried a crime-scene investigation kit in the trunk of his or her car.

"You got gloves?" she asked, glancing back at him, not bothering with a greeting.

"No," he replied woodenly. Alexa reached into her open kit and pulled out an extra pair. "I'm gonna need a set of elimination prints from you. We've also gotta get a set of Chooch's and Long
-
board's from somewhere."

"Right," he said, and looked around the bathroom. "You get anything yet?"

"Hard to tell. A lot of this is junk, smudged or overlapped. I got a partial palm off that kitchen chair, where somebody must've grabbed it by the back and carried it. I think, from what yo
u d
escribed on the phone, the videotaping took place in the center of the living room. They moved the chairs back to the kitchen, but there are fresh indent marks on the living-room carpet. I marked 'em with chalk, so don't step on 'em. I'm gonna take pictures. I emptied the kitchen trash into a towel in the sink, but I haven't gotten to it yet."

Shane moved out of the bathroom and looked at the small living room. "You try the TV?" he called out to her. After a minute she came out of the bathroom with a yellow four-by-five fingerprint identification card in her hand. She leaned down on the dining-room table and labeled a partial print she had just lifted off the toilet flush handle.

"We'll never get a print run with these," Alexa said. "They're mostly partials and smudged. The best we can hope for, if we even catch these perps, is maybe a match on a few of the basic Galton classifieds
maybe connect up on some of these ridge endings. The loops, arches, and whorls are pretty smudged."

"Chooch used the TV; maybe the remote has a set of his you can use for elimination," he said.

She took the channel changer, holding it by its side, and started dusting it, dipping the brush into the glass vial of black powder, then softly brushing the fine camel-hair bristles across the remote, looking for graphite residue that would indicate the oil of a fingerprint. She found a few good latents on the underside of the channel-changer, then took the clear tape out of her field kit and lifted the prints, stuck them on the card, and pressed them down, labeling the back of the card, "Channel Changer Right Index and Middle Finger."

While she worked, Shane moved through the apartment. There were no signs of a struggle, no blood, but lots of dirty black powder. She had been working there for quite a while and had left graphite everywhere
on the door jamb at shoulder height, where somebody might lean with a palm, against the wall, on the cupboard doors, on the countertops.

Shane put on his latex gloves and began, halfheartedly, poking through the trash collected on the towel lying in the deep kitchen sink. He found a cardboard roll about an inch in diameter and plucked it out, using a pen from his pocket. Then he saw an empty bag of M&M's. Longboard was an M&M's freak. He pulled it out as well and took both items back into the living room. He handed the cardboard roll to Alexa. "Looks like the core from the roll of silver duct tape," he said.

"I saw that, too," she said. "We can try, but there's so much gummy shit on it, I doubt we'll lift anything." She took the powder and brushed it on the cardboard core, but as predicted, it was too sticky. Powder clung everywhere, turning the core graphite black and revealing nothing.

He told her about Longboard's candy addiction, so she went to work on the M&M's wrapper.

"Was there anything on the videotape you can remember that might be helpful?" she asked as she brushed the surface of the wrapper.

"No," he said. "Except there was a shotgun in the side of the frame ... a riot pump. Looked like an Ithaca."

"Department issue." She said what he'd been thinking. "I don't think we're gonna find anything. If those guys were cops, they wouldn't leave evidence behind. They were probably all wearing gloves and picked up or flushed everything."

"Speaking of flushes, did you check the trap in the toilet?" he asked.

"No," she said, looking up. "I always hate that job, but I guess we oughta give it a try." She finished with the M&M's wrapper, lifting three good prints. "We're gonna need wrenches to get to the toilet trap," she said.

"I'll go see the manager."

"Don't bring him in here," she said sharply.

"Don't worry, I'm not a total idiot," he snapped back, then went down to the front desk, rang the night bell, and got the manager out of bed.

"Trouble with the toilet," Shane lied to the bleary-eyed man, who looked as if he hadn't shaved in two days. Rumpled, tired, and angry, he glowered at Shane from under the harsh light above his desk.

"Shit," the man said.

"You got a pipe wrench? I used to be a plumber. I can clear it for you."

The manager looked at him and computed the odds that Shane might break his toilet against the cost of calling a regular plumber. Money won . . . South of Main Street, it usually did. The manager moved into the back room and returned with a toolbox.

Shane took it up to the third-floor apartment. He closed the door and put on his gloves, then he and Alexa moved to the bathroom and removed the commode. He took off the porcelain top and plugged the flush valve with toilet paper. Then they began to remove the metal elbow from the back of the toilet.

One of the little-known truths about modern plumbing is that it takes at least two, sometimes three flushes to completely get rid of a bowl load. On more than one drug raid, the perps had flushed the dope with the cops coming through the door, not bothering to repeat the procedure, then were shocked to learn that two or three grams of cocaine remained in the water in the elbow and trap. Liquid samples had rolled up more than one drug dealer. The Drug Enforcement teams called it "the Three-Flush Rule."

They got the elbow off, and toilet water spilled onto the floor. Shane kept from kneeling in it by squatting as he worked. The elbow looked pretty clean, so he went after the trap, which was below the elbow and was there to keep larger obstructions out of the plumbing lines until they dissolved or softened.

"The things one learns in law enforcement," he muttered as he finally got the trap out and took it to the sink, emptying the four
-
inch cylinder into the basin. The last thing out was fat, round, and dark brown. It landed on the white porcelain like a turd on a wedding cake. The object had a shiny gold band around it.

"Cigar," he said triumphantly, picking it up with his latex gloves. It was a three-quarter-smoked panatela. The gold band said DOMINICAN REGAL.

"I think this is what's commonly called a clue," she said, smiling. "We have us a cigar smoker." She was holding out an evidence bag.