Three Weeks to Say Goodbye (24 page)

I could hear Torkleson’s voice tense up as he sensed Cody was trying to horn in on his investigation.

“There are overhead lights,” he said, “but no lightbulbs. They’ve all been shot out. And yeah, a couple of windows but no residents in the buildings.”

“Sounds like the Zuni Street area,” Cody said.

I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Near the Appaloosa Club, then.

“That’s where it is,” Torkleson said. “Hey, I’ve got a question for you. Where did you hear about this? I can’t see
you sitting at home with your girlfriend at four in the morning listening to a scanner.”

Cody snorted. “No chance of that.”

“So how did you hear about it?”

“The perp called us from Brian’s phone.”

“
What?
”

“I’ll meet you at the hospital, Detective. Make sure you secure that phone you found and get somebody competent to download the call log and the text log.
Do it now!
And I hope to hell you dust that phone for prints, Jason, because whoever stomped Brian held it in his scummy fucking hand.”

“Cody, can I ask you something? Aren’t you suspended? Should we even be having this conversation?”

Cody deftly swerved to miss a pronghorn antelope on the highway. Melissa said, “My God, that was close.”

He didn’t miss a beat. He said, “Torkleson, that’s my friend you found. We’ve been friends since grade school in Montana. I want to find out who did this, and you can either work with me or against me. Do you really want me pursuing this as a private citizen? Showing you up?”

“No.”

“Then meet me at the hospital with those logs.”

WE ARRIVED
at Denver General at nine in the morning, after dropping Melissa and Angelina at our house. Not that Melissa didn’t want to be there to be with Brian—she wanted to be there desperately—but she didn’t think she could take the baby with us after twenty-eight hours in the car. Angelina was crabby and sleep-deprived but had been a good traveler overall.

As Cody and I walked down the humming, antiseptic hallways, I felt as if I were shell-shocked. I was sleep-deprived
myself, but the visit with my parents and the news about Brian seemed to knock me sidewise. At the front desk, Cody asked about Brian and was told by a severe black woman the patient was in ICU, and there could be no visitors except immediate relatives.

“Damn it,” Cody said, reaching back into his jacket, where he produced a wallet badge and flashed it at her. “We need to see him
now
.”

“Go right up,” she said, eyes wide. “Seventh floor is ICU. There’s one of your policemen up there already.”

Cody nodded and pocketed the badge. In the elevator, I said, “I thought they took that away from you.”

He nodded. “They took my real badge away. But any cop worth his salt has a couple of spares. You can buy ’em from cop catalogs. No one ever reads the details—they just see the flash.”

The officer on the seventh floor wasn’t Torkleson but a uniform assigned to Brian. He sat on a metal folding chair outside a pair of entry doors to the Intensive Care Unit signed
ICU STAFF ONLY
.

“How is he?” Cody asked the uniform, who was young with a crew cut and a wisp of a mustache.

“I haven’t heard either way.”

“Detective Torkleson assign you here?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Detective Hoyt,” Cody said, flashing the badge at a distance and pocketing it quickly. He was well practiced, I thought.
He could even fool cops
. Then he spoke with absolute authority. “We need to get in there and talk to the victim. This is Jack McGuane, an intimate of the victim. He’s likely the only person he’ll talk to.”

The uniform shrugged. “From what I understand, he’s hamburger. You aren’t likely to get anything out of him.”

“Let us by, please.”

The uniform shrugged and sighed elaborately and called inside on the phone near the door. The door lock buzzed, and we were in.

“Mr. Eastman?” Cody asked the desk nurse.

“Room 738,” she said. “Listen, he’s scheduled for surgery any minute now. I’m not sure you…”

I followed Cody and braced myself. Even so, I wasn’t prepared for what I saw when we went into 738.

“
Fuck!
” Cody said beneath his breath.

He was unrecognizable. He was a body beneath a sheet connected to what looked like dozens of chirping and humming machines and hanging bags of fluid. The bundles of tubing that connected his body to the hanging bags looked like exposed tree roots. His face was entirely covered with ban dages. Thin gauze covered his nose—two dark spots of blood where his nostrils were—and a fogged-up oxygen mask covered his mouth and nose. His head beneath the wraps was misshapen, crushed in on one side and bulging out on the other. It didn’t hit home to me that it was Brian in that bed. No way. This long bag of broken bones and bruised meat could not be him. I half expected the Brian I knew to stroll in from the hallway and say something cryptic or sarcastic.

If it weren’t for a sockless ankle not covered by the sheets and a pile of clothing at the foot of the bed I recognized as his, I wouldn’t have known it was Brian at all.

I felt something bitter rise in my throat, and I was unable to speak.

Cody approached the bed and fished through the sheets for Brian’s hand. He found a ball the size of a mitten.

“They even broke his fingers, those bastards,” he said.

He leaned down over the bed. “Brian, can you hear me? It’s Cody. Can you hear me in there?”

No reaction of any kind.

“Brian, you’ll be all right,” Cody lied. “Help me get the people who did this. It was Garrett and his Sur-13 pals, right? Help me get them.”

Nothing.

I stepped forward and touched Brian’s naked ankle, the only piece of flesh not ban daged that I could see.

“Come on, Brian,” I said. “You can do it. Was it Garrett?”

Not even a movement.

Suddenly, the room was filled with orderlies led by a nurse, who was angry we were there. “You two, out of here
now!
He’s going straight into surgery, where we’ve got two trauma docs waiting. How did you get in here, anyway?”

Cody didn’t badge her.

I said, “He’s our friend.”

“The best thing you can do for your friend is step aside,” she said, and we did.

Once they were gone, I used Brian’s dark bathroom to throw up.

“HE WAS SET UP
,” Cody said as we paced in the ICU lounge. “Whether Garrett—or his dad—started the communication with Brian about phony photos or came in later I can’t say. But he was lured down there, and they jumped him.”

“Can we prove it was Garrett?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Cody said. “We can try.” He stopped pacing and lowered his voice. “Jack, you’re square in the middle of a police investigation. You’re seeing it from the inside looking out, and it looks pretty fucking confusing, doesn’t it? This is what we do when we don’t have an eyewitness or a confession. There are rarely black-and-white circumstances. You and I are pretty sure Garrett Moreland
and his
compadres
did this because you
think
you might have heard him in the background. That and all of this crap that’s been going on between you and him. But we can’t reveal everything, can we? Like why we were coming back from Montana when the call came in?”

I shook my head, confused. Instead, I said, “When you flashed your badge and lied to those people, it came pretty easy, didn’t it?”

Cody glared at me. “What are you saying?”

I swallowed hard. “I’m not so sure lying comes as easily to me.”

Cody shook his head. “I’m disappointed in you, Jack. You still don’t get it. It’s what I was trying to tell you a minute ago.
There are rarely black-and-white circumstances
. We want to get to the absolute truth, but most of the time we fall a little short. I mean, we know what we know—but sometimes we can’t prove it to everyone’s satisfaction because the bar is set too high. A good cop does his best to put the bad guys away. Sometimes we need a little help. Like from our partners”—meaning me in this instance— “or from a judge.”

The Aubrey Coates case was obviously still very much on his mind.

He stepped toward me and reached out and grabbed me by the collar and pulled me into him. “As Margaret Thatcher once said, don’t go wobbly on me now, Jack. Remember, this is all for you.” His eyes shone, and his mouth curled down. I never really felt threatened. We’d fought before in high school, and I cleaned his clock at the time. Of course, that was before he became a cop and learned all kinds of tricks. I said, “I think it was Garrett.”

“You think or you know?”

“It was Garrett.”

He let me go. “That’s what I needed to hear from you— some fucking
truth.
”

“But there’s so much that just doesn’t make sense,” I said. “The more I think about it, the less sense it makes. Why does the judge want our little girl? Is he in all of this with his son, or are they operating independently of each other? And how can his wife not even know? How is that possible? Or was she lying to Melissa?”

Cody shook his head and shrugged. “Don’t think I haven’t thought about all of those things for days since this all started. I know there’s a thread that will tie it all together, but right now I come up with nothing.”

“Are there even any photos?” I asked. “Will we ever know now?”

“Let’s hope to hell Brian recovers,” he said. “If he can tell us Garrett was there, it’s a slam dunk. Everything changes. Brian testifies, and no judge would place a baby with a gangbanger convicted of trying to stomp an innocent man to death. We won’t need any photos—it’ll all be over, so think positive. It’s amazing what these doctors can do.”

Cody leaned in to me. “What’s really important is that he comes out of it. Even if he’s not sure who did it, can’t remember—you know what I mean. If we talk to him first,
suggest
it was Garrett, he’s smart enough to know to run with it.”

At first I didn’t get what he was saying. Then I did. I should have felt something, some physical manifestation of guilt.

“I understand,” I said.

“There you go,” Cody said, punching me in the arm. “There you go. It’s what Brian would want, anyway.”

I WAS ON MY CELL WITH MELISSA
, telling her Brian was
still in surgery and we hadn’t heard anything from the doctors yet, when I saw Detective Torkleson in the hallway and heard Cody say, “It’s about time!”

Ending the call, I walked over to join them. Torkleson looked tired—rumpled, unshaven. He’d been up for hours— all through the night and halfway into Sunday. He had a thick sheaf of papers in his hand.

“You’ve got to send a car over to Judge John Moreland’s place,” Cody told him, “pick up Garrett, and bring him in for questioning. He either participated in the attempted homicide or he was there to cheer it on. He probably lured Brian down there in that alley.”

“Whoa, cowboy,” Torkleson said. “You’ve got to give me something to link him to the crime before I send a cruiser. I know you’ve had this guy in your sights, but he doesn’t have to talk. What I want is probable cause. Rock-solid PC. His old man’s a judge, don’t forget.”

As if I could.

“What do you have there?” Cody asked.

Torkleson brandished the sheaf of papers. “Here are the call records from the victim’s phone, as requested. Good thinking on your part.” He shook the papers. “Your friend spent
a lot
of time on his cell, I can tell you that. The easy part was printing out the records. Now we’ve got to spend some quality time on these logs before we start sending out uniforms to pick people up.”

“What about prints on Brian’s phone?” Cody asked.

Torkleson made a face and held his hands out, palms up. “We’re working on that.”

“Meaning what?” Cody growled.

“We sort of screwed that up, Cody. The phone was handled by half a dozen different cops and probably the derelicts in the alley who called it in. The prints on it are smudged. At
some point someone must have put the phone in their pocket or something. There are no clean prints. I’ve got our tech guys looking for partials, but it doesn’t look promising.”

“Shit,” Cody said, taking the papers and squinting at the small print. “How far do these go back?”

“That’s just the past month,” Torkleson said. “Like I said, he spent a lot of time on his cell.”

“Jesus, what a talker,” Cody said, looking at the most recent page. His finger jabbed the last number. “Melissa’s cell number,” he said to me. “It’ll take days to get through all of this to find how Garrett set him up.”

“You’re leaping ahead again,” Torkleson said. He paused, looked at me, then back to Cody. “And there’s something else we need to consider before we put all of our eggs in the Garrett basket. Your friend Brian Eastman was very active in the gay community. I assume you know that fact.”

“Of course we know it,” Cody said.

Torkleson said, “Well, there are a couple of gay bars down in that district, you know. From what I’ve found out, he wasn’t a stranger at either one. And if you look at a map, this alley we found him in is a natural off-the-street route from one to the other. We’ve got some officers checking at both bars to see if he was at either one last night, but it’s hard to track down the bartenders or patrons on a Sunday morning. We’ll do it, but it’ll take a few days of good police work.