The Tin Collectors (44 page)

Shane could see the building frustration in Bud Halley's hazel
-
green eyes as night turned to day.

By ten o'clock the helicopter had been pulled out of the Little
Bear River. Inside were the remains of the pilot, as well as Logan Hunter and Joe Church. Kris Kono had been found in the shallows with Alexa's 9mm slug buried deep in the Hawaiian officer's chest.

It was all exculpatory evidence, further sustaining Shane's statement.

Alexa and Shane described the events that occurred in Miami, starting with their attempt to rescue Sandy Sandoval and ending with the attack by Drucker, Love, and Calvin Sheets. Alexa handled their escape from Elton John's Biscayne Bay estate, then Shane explained about Ray's Arrowhead house and how Molar had been blackmailing the Long Beach City Council so Los Angeles could get control of the naval yard. Halley listened, took notes, and groaned as the scope of the corruption grew larger, reaching all the way up through the chief of police to the mayor's office.

Halley kept the startling events under wraps as best he could, but of course Logan Hunter's death had leaked out. News crews from L
. A
. were arriving in vans and helicopters. The newsies were already picking up other shreds of the story, sharking for details, sensing that much more was at stake.

"I don't know what to do with this," Halley admitted to Shane and Alexa after he'd heard it all. They were no longer being kept in holding cells and were seated in Sheriff Conklyn's office. He had promoted them from suspects to witnesses.

Out the window they could see a small TV uplink antenna farm being constructed on the vacant property across from the police station.

"I'm gonna call in Erwin Epps," Halley finally said, referring to the Baptist minister and political activist who had just been elected head of the L
. A
. Police Commission. "Under Section 78 of the city charter, the board of commissioners has the power and responsibility to supervise, control, and regulate the department." Halley quoted the section from memory.

"Good idea," Shane said.

Shane asked for and was given a chance to talk to Chooch. The boy was staying in the Arrowhead Motel with a sheriff's matron. Shane was driven over and let himself in.

Chooch was watching the news, his legs stretched out on the bed. He snapped off the television as Shane came through the door.

"Man . . . can you believe the coverage this is getting?"

"Chooch ... I wanna talk to you about your mom."

"I know about Sandy . . . it's on the TV." His voice was guarded.

"I'm sorry you had to hear it that way. I wanted to tell you, but they wouldn't give me a chance until now."

Chooch nodded, his black eyes showing little. "I'm sorry she's dead," he said. "I didn't want that to happen. ... I just wanted her to ..." He stopped, then shook his head in frustration. "You know what I mean." He looked up. "You and me are the same, Shane. I got nobody, same as you." The way he said it, Shane couldn't tell what he was thinking. Chooch, like Shane, had become good at hiding his emotions.

"I want you to know something
something important about your mother."

"That she loved me?" the boy said, but his tone said he found it hard to believe.

"Yeah, she loved you, and she died trying to save you. She gave herself up for you, Chooch."

Chooch got up off the bed and moved to the window, his muscular body silhouetted in the morning sunlight streaming past him into the room.

"You were the one who saved me," he said softly.

"I never would have known where to look if your mother hadn't gotten that information for me. She gave up her life to get it."

There was a long moment, then finally Chooch turned an
d f
aced Shane. "I want to cry for herIt seems like I should.

Am I being an asshole?"

"No, Chooch. I just wanted you to know. Whatever you feel about Sandy, in the end, when it counted, she was there for you."

Chooch nodded; suddenly his eyes filled, and he moved quickl
y t
o the bathroom and closed the door.

? ? ?

At two that afternoon, Chooch was picked up by the Child Protection Section of the Social Services Department and whisked away. Shane was back at Sheriff Conklyn's office and found out about it an hour after it happened. They said that since Chooch had no mother or father, he was being remanded to Juvenile Hall.

Shane knew he couldn't claim Chooch without a DNA test, and that would take time. Besides, the more he thought about it, the more he was beginning to suspect that Sandy had lied about his being Chooch's father. It was just what she would do
just like her to say that to get Shane to look after Chooch once she was gone. Either way, he couldn't get a DNA analysis up in Arrowhead, so it would have to wait until he got back to L
. A
.

Three hours later, Reverend Epp arrived and conferred with Bud Halley. He was a tall, dignified African American in his fifties who had tremendous credibility in the black community and had been put on the L
. A
. Police Commission to help deal with the charges of racism that had plagued the post-Daryl Gates department.

The two devout Christians listened all over again as Shane, Alexa, and Longboard Kelly retold their story.

Slowly, over a period of hours, it became distressingly clear to both Captain Halley and Reverend Epps that much of what Shane and Alexa had been describing was undoubtedly true.

The two tired sergeants were finally allowed to move into the Arrowhead Motel to get some sleep. They had rooms right next to each other but were too exhausted to even say good night.

One by one, other members of the L
. A
. Police Commission quietly arrived in town. They had decided to hold their meeting in the Arrowhead Lodge, away from the sheriff's department and the hovering press corps.

At the end of their first meeting, after Shane, Alexa, and Long
-
board had retold their stories, Sheriff Conklyn got a district judge to issue a search warrant.

On Monday evening they broke the front-door lock and entered Logan Hunter's lakeside mansion. What they found in his office files pretty much confirmed everything Shane and Alexa had been saying.

At ten o'clock on Tuesday morning, Reverend Erwin Epps chaired a meeting in his Arrowhead Lodge hotel room. Shane and Alexa were both present, along with Captain Halley, Sheriff Conklyn, and the entire seven-member L
. A
. Police Commission.

"I think we now have to consider Section 79 of the L
. A
. city charter," Epps said gravely. Then he took that bound document out of his briefcase and opened it to a paper clip marking the section.

"Let me read this to refresh you: 'A simple majority of the Police Commission is necessary to enact the provision of Section 79, which grants the commission the right to appoint, as well as to remove, the general manager of the department. However, the chief of police shall only be removed under the terms and conditions in city charter, Section 202.' " He flipped to that section and read the paragraph pertaining to the removal, suspension, or demotion of sworn police officers, then:

"I think we need to instruct the head of the Internal Affairs Division to draft a resolution to suspend the duties of Chief Brewer and bring him up on administrative charges. The head of IAD should further notify the district attorney of the possibility of criminal misconduct."

Shane couldn't help a small smile thinking of the panic that "resolution" would bring to the vanilla features of Commander Warren Zell.

The news was leaking from Lake Arrowhead to Los Angeles, and, little by little, shreds of it were showing up in the press and on TV.

The case went further into frenzied hyperspace when Tom Mayweather's body was found in the main salon of his boat anchored off Avalon Harbor in Catalina. He had put a police-issue shotgun into his mouth and blown his head off.

The subpoena control desk at Parker Center was flooded with paperwork issued by Warren Zell and the fifteen IOs he had assigned to the case. John Samansky and Lee Ayers, the two surviving members of Ray's den, had hired criminal attorneys and were both clamoring to cut a deal.

Samansky won that ugly contest and became the department's star witness against Chief Brewer, Tony Spivack, Mayor Clark Crispin, and the surviving officers. The district attorney petitioned the department for the right to sit in on the upcoming BORs under Section 21.2 of the L
. A
. city charter
a sure sign that criminal charges would be forthcoming.

One day after Logan Hunter's helicopter was fished out of the river, Mayor Crispin was arrested at the airport on his way to a "vacation" in Mexico.

Chief Brewer staged a press conference after his subpoena was served. He denied any wrongdoing had taken place and promised a victory in court. Nevertheless, at the district attorney's request, two detectives from Special Crimes were assigned to his house, and he was ordered to remain at home, pending further investigation.

A day later the district attorney finally filed murder one charges against them all.

Alexa and Shane had been released, then went back to L
. A
. and watched the rest of it on her TV, since he didn't have one. She had cooked a remarkably good Italian dinner for them, and after they had two glasses of red wine, Shane was lying on the sofa in her anally neat living room, watching Dan Rather talk about him. Alexa was in the kitchen doing dishes, hoping her mother was watching over them all.

Shortly after the news ended, an investigator from IAD knocked on the door to pick up the files Alexa had gathered for Shane's BOR. The IO notified her that she was no longer the advocate prosecuting Scully's case.

"What case?" Shane asked, coming up off the sofa like a Harrier jet. "You mean, after all this, they're still planning to terminate me?"

"Just because you two turned this department upside down doesn't mean your unnecessary use of force on the Molar shooting goes away," the IO said. Then he took the four crammed case-file boxes and left.

"When will it end?" Shane growled.

"Shane . . . you'll prevail at that board. With all this going on, believe me, their case won't stick."

He looked at her and again felt something stir inside him. She saw it in his eyes. "I know, but this time let's wait," she said. "Let's not do anything again until all this calms down and we know if it's real, or if we're just pulsing 'cause we're glad to be alive."

"It's real," he said. But she was right, now was not the time.

Shane had heard that Chooch was being held under IDC
Intake and Detention Control
at Juvenile Hall. So he called Captain Halley and had Chooch moved to PNP
USCMC, which was the patient-not-prisoner section of the Juvenile Detention wing of the USC Medical Center. They were talking about assigning him to a foster home.

Shane slept on Alexa's couch, and the next morning, after she cooked him breakfast, he had her drop him off at the police impound garage, where he reclaimed the rented Taurus he had left on the movie set the night he got kidnapped. Then he drove down and gave blood at the USC hospital. He couldn't see Chooch, by order of the district attorney, who was still interviewing him as a witness, so Shane found an old friend named Ellen Webb, who worked in PNP as a nurse. He gave her his blood sample number and asked her to get a match from Chooch.

"How come?" Ellen asked, brushing a wisp of honey-blond hair out of her eyes. "According to the news, he's Hispanic."

"His mother was, but I think I may be the father."

She looked at Shane for a long moment and smiled. "Can't keep the little head from controlling the big head?" she said playfully, so Shane stuck his tongue out at her and left.

He had one more stop to make before he went home and slept for a year.

The freeway was crowded, and he was locked in bumper-to
-
bumper five o'clock traffic. He finally got to the end of the 10 and found himself back on the Coast Highway. He didn't have his badge, so this time he had to pay for parking. He left the Taurus, walked onto the bike path and up to DeMarco's house.

For once it was quiet out front. The blond beach ornaments were all gone, off playing with somebody else's mind. Shane passed through the gate and walked up to the front door. He tried to look through the front window, but the blinds were pulled and he couldn't see anything. Finally he reached into his back pocket and fished out his trusty collection of picks. The lock was an old brass Yale and was a bitch to open, but after five minutes he turned the tumblers, went into the house, then closed and relocked the door behind him.

He stood in the living room, looking around, remembering hi
s t
rip here two weeks days agoHe had stood in this very sam
e s
pot, watching DeMarco play with his speakers while Snoop Doggy Dogg spewed race hatred. It seemed as though that had been in another lifetime. He walked softly through the place, looking into each room. No one was home, so he entered the office at the end of the hall, walked across the room, then sat at DeMarco's desk. His defense rep's case material was sitting there in one half-filled file box. DeMarco had been on Shane's case for almost ten days, and as Shane went through the material, he was surprised by the lack of evidence he'd collected to support Shane's position. The defense rep hadn't yet received all of the discovery items, and there wasn't even a copy of Barbara Molar's statement. There was a halfhearted, half-full spiral notebook. . . . It was all damned puny compared with the mountain of stuff that had been carted out of Alexa's house.