The Fallen
Jefferson Parker

For Jim and Jeannie, four decades and counting…

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Jefferson Parker

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

When the sixth floor of the Las Palmas Hotel caught fire Robbie Brownlaw was in the diner across the street about to have lunch.

It was a cool March afternoon in San Diego and Brownlaw’s turkey burger had just arrived when he saw orange flames roiling behind the hotel windows. He took a bite of the sandwich and hustled outside. The sixth-story windows blew and an orange explosion knocked him back against the brick wall of the diner.

Robbie heard screams up there in the fire. He had never heard screams like these. Then he heard all the yelling as people spilled from the restaurants and offices, pointing up at the Las Palmas while debris clattered to the asphalt – a splintered chair, a flaming lampshade, a nightstand with the drawers hanging out.

Fire alarms shrieked competing warnings down the street. Brownlaw heard a guy screaming up on the sixth floor right through the ringing. Such fear. He looked up, still braced against the wall of the Sorrento Diner, heart pounding like a dryer with a load of sneakers.

Then he pushed off and ran toward the Las Palmas, weaving between the stopped and honking cars, past the smoking carcass of a television set with the wall mounts still on it that had crashed onto Fourth.

Brownlaw pulled up at the lobby door of the hotel and let the onrush of humanity sweep past him: a young man in a blazer with a nameplate on and a phone to his ear, a wide-eyed oldster on a wobbling cane, a cleaning lady still wearing yellow rubber gloves and glaring at Robbie as if he had caused this. Then two more old men in shabby suits, a gangsta in a wifebeater shirt swearing in Spanish, an Indian couple with three bawling children, a tall black man in a Sonics T-shirt, then a pretty young woman with a tangle of blond hair, a black eye, and a bathrobe around her.

Robbie headed up the stairs past an old woman with a Yorkie in her arms. He felt lucky and useful. The smoke was thick by the fourth landing and hot by the sixth. There was a weak moaning behind the first door he came to. It was locked but it took him just one kick and a shoulder slam to break it down. Inside he found a very old woman trapped under the mattress, which had apparently fallen onto her from the upended springs and frame. Only her neck and head and one arm were sticking out from under it. She looked up at him through the smoke as if he were God himself and Brownlaw told her she’d be fine as he bent and dug his fingers into the mattress and pulled it away. The old woman couldn’t get up so Brownlaw just hauled her over his shoulders and ran back down the stairs with her.

By the time he got back up to the sixth story, he was coughing hard and his eyes burned and the sirens were wailing closer and all but one of the room doors had been thrown open.

Behind that door Brownlaw could hear the screams of a man, the same terrified, animal sounds he’d heard on the street. One kick later the door shuddered open and he was in. The smoke was thick but Robbie could see the guy kneeling at the glassless window with his back to him. He was wearing shorts and that was all. He was clutching the windowsill, bellowing at the city with wild fear.

When Robbie was halfway across the room the man turned and looked at him and Robbie realized it wasn’t fear at all. The man wheeled and came at him fast. He was very big and had Robbie in a wrestler’s bear hug in an instant. He lifted Robbie off the floor and swung him around the room. During those two rapid orbits Brownlaw stared from inches away into a face he would never forget or understand – a face of rage and desperation whose depths he could not measure. Pitiless eyes. He tried to groin the guy with his knee but the man was so tall that all he got was thigh. His gun was in his shoulder rig, which was under his sport coat, but his arms were pinned. He could not draw breath.

At the end of that second rotation – he was pretty sure it was only two – Brownlaw felt the big hands lock around his arms and fling him out the window.

The air was cool and he felt absolutely alone. His first thought was that he could stop his fall using pure willpower.

And it seemed to be true. He focused all of his will on staying up. Up! Up! Up! Raising his arms, Robbie clawed the sky and felt his body suspended in the great liberty of air. He wasn’t falling at all, but moving forward with good speed, and for an instant he wondered if he might collide with the building across the street. Or maybe even crash through a window, land on his feet, and get back to the Sorrento before the waitress took away his lunch.

Then Brownlaw came to the end of his outward momentum. There was no hesitation, no moment of suspension. Just a heavy pivot of weight and down he went.

Fast, then faster. He had never felt such speed before, nothing close to this. Faster still. Robbie Brownlaw, on his back now with his arms spread and his hands reaching for nothing, watched the top of the Las Palmas rise up into the gray clouds and felt his ears bend forward in the awesome velocity of descent. He understood that he was now in the hands of something much larger than himself, if he was in any kind of hands at all.

He thought of his young wife, Gina, with whom he was ferociously in love. He understood that the power of their love would be a factor in the outcome here. It seemed impossible that their days together were about to come to an end. Something like relief flowed through Robbie and as the clouds rose away from him he tried to figure his estimated time of arrival. Sixteen feet per second? But is that only at first? Surely you accelerate faster. How high is a story in an old hotel? The phrase ‘two more seconds’ came into his mind.

But in spite of Robbie’s belief that he would live to love Gina for years to come, a more convincing idea now flashed into his brain: This is it.

He suddenly believed in the God he had doubted for all his life, his conversion completed in a fraction of a second.

Then he let go. He felt insight and understanding: He saw that his first five years of life had been happy, that his childhood had been filled with wonder, his teenage years were a search for freedom, his young adulthood had been a storm of confusion and yearning for love, his twenties a happy grind of Gina and friends and Gina and friends and Gina and Gina and Gina, and Robbie plummeted through the screams of sirens and alarms and onlookers and crashed through the faded red awning over the entrance to the Las Palmas Hotel like an anvil through a bedsheet and hit the sidewalk with a cracking, echoless thud.

1

My name is Robbie Brownlaw, and I am a Homicide detective for the city of San Diego. I am twenty-nine years old. My life was ordinary until three years ago when I was thrown out of a downtown hotel window.

No one knows it except my wife, but I now have synesthesia, a neurological condition where your senses get mixed up. Sometimes when people talk to me, I see their voices as colored shapes. It happens when they get emotional. The shapes are approximately two by two inches and there are usually between four and eight of them, sometimes more. They linger in the air midway between the speaker and me, about head high. They fade quickly. I can move them with my finger or a pen if I want.

Shortly after my fall I used graph paper and colored markers to make a chart of which words and word combinations triggered which colored shapes. This was time-consuming and not always pleasant, due to some very painful headaches. I also observed that blue triangles generally came from a happy speaker. Red squares came from a deceptive one. Green trapezoids usually came from someone who was envious – green really is the color of envy, just like we were always told.

But as the weeks went by, I noticed that identical words and sentences could sometimes trigger very different shapes and colors. I was afraid that I had posttraumatic swelling in my brain and worried that my synesthesia would worsen to the point where I’d spend the rest of my life drooling at invisible shapes while people tried to talk to me.

I spoke my fears to Gina one night and noticed that when she told me I ‘shouldn’t worry about it,’ her words came to me as the black triangles of dread. I looked them up on my chart just to make sure. It was then that I began to understand that the colorful shapes are provoked by the emotions of the speaker, not by the words themselves.

So I have what amounts to a primitive lie detector, though I’m not certain how reliable it is. I think a remorseless psychopath could fool me, or even an accomplished liar. Who knows what colors and shapes they might cause? In my line of work, people will lie to you about the smallest and most trivial things.

Synesthesia is considered a gift by synesthetes – the people who have it – but I’m not convinced that it is. There’s a San Diego Synesthesia Society, and for over a year now I’ve been thinking about going to a meeting. I browse their Web site and note the date and time of the next meeting, but I’ve never attended one. I’m curious, but a little afraid of what I might discover. The condition is hard for me to talk about, even with Gina. Although she’s tolerant and wonderfully opinionless about how others view the world, it annoys her that even her white lies announce themselves to me as bright red squares. It would annoy me, too.

When I was thrown out of the window I hit hard. You have no idea how hard cement really is until you land on it from six stories up, even if your fall is largely broken by a canvas awning. During the fall I came to believe in God. It is true what they say about your life flashing past when you believe that you are about to die, but it is not your entire life. Obviously. I should have died, but only a few bones broke, and I’m in perfect shape again, other than the large scar on the back of my head, now hidden by hair, and the synesthesia.

One benefit I got from that fall was two very quick promotions. As soon as I proved I was in great health and could do the job, doors opened right up. From Fraud to Sex Crimes to Homicide just like that. Everyone expected me to die from the fall. All of the media coverage made the department want to reward its unlikely hero. The reporters nicknamed me ‘the Falling Detective.’ And my superiors sincerely felt that I deserved a little something extra for all I’d been through. Anyway, I’m the youngest detective in Homicide, but nobody seems to resent me for it. I’m part of Team Four. Our case-cancellation rate last year, 2004, was eighty-eight percent, which is considered excellent.

I got the call from our lieutenant at four that morning. An anonymous caller had tipped us to a body in a car near Balboa Park. Patrol had confirmed a black Ford Explorer parked in the trees near the Cabrillo Bridge, which spans Highway 163. The lieutenant told me there was a man slumped dead in the driver’s seat. Blood, sidearm on the floorboard, probable gunshot.

I called my partner, McKenzie Cortez, then poured a cup of coffee. I sat for a minute on the bedside in the dark, snugged up the sheets around Gina and kissed her.

In the weak light of the breakfast nook I wrote her a note saying I’d be careful and I loved her. Spouses worrying about their loved ones getting killed on the job is what ruins a lot of cop marriages. And I like Gina to have something nice to wake up to. She works as a hairdresser at Salon Sultra downtown, which is top of the line. She cut Mick Jagger’s hair when the Stones played L.A. not long ago. Just a trim, actually. Mick flew her up to his hotel in Beverly Hills in a helicopter. Paid a thousand for the cut and gave her another five hundred for a tip.

The drive from my house in Normal Heights took twelve minutes. It was a cool, clear March morning. There had been rain the night before, more than enough to leave shallow black puddles along the freeway. The stars were bright in the sky and the car lights sharp in the dark. The moon looked dull and cold as frozen steel, like your tongue would stick to it. When I see the wide-eyed grimace of the man in the moon I wonder if that’s what I looked like on my way down from the sixth floor. The videotape they played on the news wasn’t quite clear enough to show the expression on my face. At least that’s what Gina tells me. I’ve never watched it.

There were two PD cruisers and the Ford Explorer parked off of the dirt road under the Cabrillo Bridge. The bridge was built to suggest a Roman aqueduct. It is a graceful old structure, rising up majestically from the greenery, built in 1914 for the big United States–Panama exhibition. That morning it looked stately and uncaring in the March dawn. One end of the bridge led directly into Balboa Park, while the other became Laurel Avenue. Under the bridge ran the highway. All around the great caissons rose the lush trees overflowing from the park. The air smelled damp and dense. Three cars sat in a small grassy swale shaded by big Canary Island palms and the ivy-covered stanchions of the bridge. One cop had pulled his cruiser broadside to the SUV and left his headlights on. The raindrops on the Explorer glistened in the beams.

The driver’s-side window was nothing but a pile of shattered safety glass, most of it on the grass. A few pebbles lay on the door, by the lock. The guy was collapsed on the driver’s side the way only a dead man can be. Like he’d been poured into an odd shape, then begun to harden. Head against the window frame at a weird angle. Left arm against the door, palm up. Right hand closed and resting against the center console. Autoloader on the passenger floorboard. Keys still in the ignition. A brushed-aluminum briefcase on a backseat. Blood all over the windows and the cloth seats and dash and console and headliner. Seemed like gallons of it. I walked around to the other side to make sure I was seeing who I thought I was seeing.

‘It’s Garrett Asplundh,’ I said.

‘Yes, sir,’ said the patrolman. ‘DMV confirmed. His car, I mean.’

Garrett had been one of our Professional Standards Unit sergeants until a few months ago. PSU is part of Internal Affairs. PSU are the cops who watch the cops. Garrett Asplundh was mysterious and a little feared. His young daughter had drowned in a swimming-pool accident about nine months ago, and it destroyed his career and his marriage.

I didn’t know him well. Just after my fall, he had come to the hospital and we talked awhile, mostly about fly-fishing, which we both enjoy. Odd that two men in such circumstances would choose to talk about fishing. We agreed to fish Glorietta Bay together but never did. Cops don’t hang out with PSU. Asplundh was quiet and neatly handsome. Dark eyes, smile lines on his cheeks. Within the department he was considered a man on the rise. He easily drew Gina’s attention in the hospital that day.

Just a few months ago, Garrett had taken a lower-stress job as an investigator for the San Diego Ethics Authority Enforcement Unit. I say ‘lower-stress’ because Ethics Authority personnel aren’t cops any longer, though most Authority officers are formerly sworn officers or agents. Some carry weapons. The Authority was created two years ago to keep politicians, city administrators, and businesspeople from breaking laws in order to make more money and gain more power. The Ethics Authority watches city personnel the same way the PSU watches the cops.

‘You think suicide?’ asked the officer.

‘Tape it off,’ I said.

McKenzie Cortez came across the damp, springy grass, hands jammed down into the pockets of her coat. Jeans and construction boots and her hair under an SDPD cap. Her breath made a little cloud in front of her mouth, not a common thing to see in San Diego.

‘What’s up, Robbie?’

‘Garrett Asplundh.’

‘Really.’

She walked past me to the Explorer, looked in. I saw her right hand trace a quick cross upon her front side, then return to the warmth of the pocket. She stared awhile, then came back to me.

‘Looks like he might have pulled his own plug,’ she said.

‘Kinda does.’

‘You don’t sound convinced.’

‘Seems like he’d have done it sooner.’

McKenzie nodded and looked at me. She’s a few years older than me, half Anglo and half Latina. She is strong and intelligent. Single, proud, unfazed by risk. Her face is pretty but rudely scarred by acne. She’s tough and unhappy.

‘Let the GSR decide,’ she said.

The hand of a suicide by gun will be peppered with gunshot residue, mostly the barium and anti-mony contained in gunpowder. It’s easy to lift off with tape. But if the hands are clean, you might have a homicide. A tricky bad guy can shoot someone up close, then put the dead or dying person’s hand around the gun and fire it some-where the bullet can’t be found, so it looks like a suicide. But this happens in books and movies much more than in real life and death.

There were no known witnesses, although one elderly motorist stopped to tell us that he’d driven past here around nine the night before and seen a red Ferrari parked down by the side of the freeway. It was pulled over not far from where the black Explorer now stood. He also saw a man moving in the trees, just barely visible. I had one of the officers detain and run a records and warrants check on the motorist, but he came back clean. Retired Navy. He sat in the back of a prowl car with a look of authority while the check went through.

The anonymous caller who had reported the Explorer and possible victim was male and spoke English with an undetermined accent. The conversation was partially recorded by a desk officer at headquarters.

McKenzie and I watched the crime-scene investigators sketch and measure and photograph and video the scene. Glenn Wasserman, one of our best CSIs, brought me a small paper bag with a cartridge casing in it, a nine-millimeter Smith factory load by the look of it.

‘Up on the dashboard,’ he said. ‘Almost fell down into the heater vent.’

‘Nice grab,’ I said.

‘It’s Garrett Asplundh, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘I never worked with him.’

I talked briefly with the first-on-scene officers. They’d handled the scene by the book: checked for signs of life, called Dispatch with the possible 187, taped off the scene using the convenient tree trunks, and waited for the Homicide hordes to arrive. They confirmed that the passenger’s door had been like it was now – closed, with the window up.

The Coroner’s team pronounced and removed the body. They just opened the driver’s door and guided Asplundh onto a plastic body bag atop a lowered gurney. Before they zipped it up, I pulled his wallet from his coat pocket. I noted the currency and credit cards, the driver’s license and ‘City of San Diego Employee’ ID. I noted that his birthday was in November and that he would have turned forty years old. I slid the wallet back in. I saw the cell phone clipped to his belt. I saw that his necktie was almost completely drenched in blood. A small portion of it was still light blue. There are few places where blood looks more startling than on a necktie.

They zipped him and covered him with a blanket. I thought of how he had once seemed large and been feared. And how the death of his daughter and the ruin of his marriage had left him smaller. And how, soon, not one recognizable molecule of him would be left.

I reached into the Explorer, slipped the automatic garage door opener off the sun visor and put it in my pocket. Then I walked alongside Asplundh to the Coroner’s van. Hoped his soul would be well taken care of. After all, he was once one of us.

Over on the passenger side of the Explorer I hoped to find good footprints but found none at all. The grass was healthy and wet and too springy to hold an indentation for long. But a second vehicle had been parked here very recently. And it had left dark green tracks coming down the hillock, just as the Explorer had. The tracks of the second vehicle were deeper and darker than those of the Ford, and I wondered if its driver had perhaps gunned it in reverse to back up the side of the swale. With the grass wet from the rain, it might have taken a four-wheel drive to back up that hill.

I bent down a little and looked straight through the passenger-side window to where Garrett’s head would have been when he was alive. Sitting there. Talking, maybe. Looking ahead. Hard to imagine he was unaware of the shooter.

Then I looked beyond him, trying to estimate where the bullet might be if it had continued in an approximately straight line. It would have shot across Highway 163, bored through several yards of tree foliage unless it clipped a branch and veered off, then lodged in the rising slope of earth toward the far end of the bridge. But the chances of an approximately straight line of flight were not good, given the skull and glass the bullet had to pass through. The chances of the bullet’s being in one piece were not good at all. I made an unhopeful note to have the CSIs look for fragments.

I climbed the gentle embankment down which the Explorer had traveled to get to the secluded, shaded swale. It was easy to pick out the tire tracks that had been left by the vehicle. Easy, too, to see the second set that came down the embankment and stopped right next to it.

I waved to Glenn, pointed to the tracks. He worked his way up the hillock toward us, shooting digital and video. For a moment we stood at the top. I looked out at the cars charging by on Highway 163.

‘Asplundh was a kick-ass cop, wasn’t he?’ asked Glenn.

I nodded.

‘What a turnaround,’ said Glenn. ‘From Professional Standards to this.’

We went back down for a closer look at the Explorer. Another CSI was examining and photographing the tires before they towed it off to the impound yard to be dusted for fingerprints and combed for hair and fiber.

‘Look at this,’ she said.

I came around and knelt and looked at the shiny green rock caught in the tread of the left rear tire.

She photographed it. Two angles, three shots from each. Then she shot some video, explaining what she was shooting. Then she pried the rock out and dropped it into a small paper evidence bag. I took the bag and stared down, holding my flashlight beam steady. It wasn’t a rock at all but half a small glass marble. It was bright green. I remembered that size from when I was a kid.

‘We called them minis,’ I said.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘Smaller than a shooter.’

It looked like it had lodged in the wide tread of the SUV tire, then been sheared off to a half sphere. There was a fragment of something pale and red-orange embedded in the glass. Part of the cat’s eye, maybe. Or some other kind of inner design. The sheared surface around it, recessed into the tread, was pitted.

‘Fifty bucks he shot himself,’ said McKenzie.

Odd words for her to use, because the lavender ovals that spilled out of her mouth and hovered in the air between us meant she was feeling genuine sympathy for Garrett Asplundh. I nodded as the ovals bobbed like corks on a slow river, then dissolved. McKenzie likes to talk tougher than she feels. After three years I don’t pay a whole lot of attention to the colors and shapes of other people’s feelings, unless they don’t match up with their words.

‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘He used to be Professional Standards. One of the real straight arrows.’

‘Straight arrows can’t bend,’ said McKenzie.

We walked around to the other side of the vehicle. I pulled on some gloves, then swung open the right rear door. In spite of the cool early hour, the flies had already found the blood. I squared the aluminum case on the seat in front of me, pushed the thumb buttons, and watched the latches jump. One yellow legal pad with neat handwriting on the top page. Two pens, two pencils, and a tiny calculator. An address book. A datebook. A small tape recorder, a digital camera, and a .45 automatic Colt pistol in a heavily oiled leather holster. With a pencil I poked and pried around the items, looking for something hidden or loose or out of place. But all of it was splendidly organized into cutouts in the foam that lined both the bottom and the lid.

Cops and their guns, I thought. Pretty much inseparable, right up to the end.

‘Look how organized he was,’ said McKenzie. ‘Must have cut the foam himself to get it all neat like that.’

I put the automatic garage door opener in the briefcase, closed it up, and locked it in the trunk of my car.

A tall, slender man in a long black coat came skidding down the hillside, well away from the crime-scene tape, feet turned sideways and leaning back for balance. It took me a second to recognize him. It was Ethics Authority director Erik Kaven, a man feared in the same way that his investigator Garrett Asplundh had been feared.

‘He got the news pretty fast,’ said McKenzie.

Kaven sized up the scene and came toward us. His handshake was strong.

‘Garrett?’ he asked.

I nodded.

‘Robbery?’

‘Suicide looks more like it,’ said McKenzie.

‘It wasn’t suicide,’ said Kaven. He looked at McKenzie, then me. Kaven was tall and big-jawed, and his face was deeply lined. His gray-brown hair was thick, straight, and undisciplined. He wore a gunslinger’s mustache that somehow looked right on him. I guessed him at fifty. He’d been a district federal judge here in San Diego before signing on to lead the new Ethics Authority two years ago. Kaven had made big news when he shot two bank robbers out in El Cajon one Friday afternoon. Two shots, two dead men. He carried a gun on the bench, and he’d just gotten off work. He’d been depositing his paycheck when the robbers’ guns came out. His eyes were deep-set and pointedly suspicious.

‘It wasn’t suicide,’ he said again. ‘I’ll guarantee it.’

2

Garrett Asplundh’s apartment was up in the North Park part of San Diego. Nice area, decent neighborhoods, and not far from the ocean. From the upstairs deck of Garrett’s place I could see Balboa Park. The late-morning breeze was cool and sharp.

It was a two-bedroom place. Small kitchen with a view of the neighborhood and the power lines. Not much in the fridge but plenty of scotch in the liquor cabinet. The living room had a hardwood floor, a gas-burning fireplace, a black futon sofa with a chrome gooseneck reading lamp, and bookshelves covering three walls. I stood there with my hands in my pockets, like a museum visitor. I like quiet when I’m trying to get the sound of a victim’s life. There was a lot to hear about Garrett Asplundh. He had been executed, for one thing. Either by himself or someone else.

The books ranged widely, from The World Atlas of Nations to Trout from Small Streams by Dave Hughes, and they were arranged in no order I could see. Lots of photography collections. Lots of true crime. No paperbacks. No novels. An entire shelf of books on aquatic insects. Another shelf just for meteorology. Another for Abraham Lincoln.

There was a small collection of CDs and DVDs, some commercially manufactured and some homemade. One of the DVDs was entitled ‘The Life and Death of Samantha Asplundh.’ It wasn’t in a plastic box, but rather a leather sheath with the title tooled onto the front. Some good work had gone into creating that container. I wondered if Samantha was the daughter who died.

The first bedroom had a computer workstation set up at a window. There was a padded workout bench, weights in a rack, and a stationary cycle. Facing another window was a small desk for tying flies. The walls were covered with black-and-white photographs of a woman and a little girl. I mean completely covered, every inch, the edges of the pictures – mostly eight-and-a-half-by-elevens – perfectly, spacelessly aligned. The pictures seemed artful to me, but I know nothing about art. The woman had lightness and depth and beauty. The girl was innocent and joyful. I could sense the emotion of the photographer. If he had been able to talk honestly to me about those two subjects, I’d have seen yellow rhomboids pouring out of him, because yellow rhomboids are the color and shape of love.

‘Must be the ex and kid,’ said McKenzie.

The other bedroom was similarly sparse. Just a tightly made full-size bed, a lamp to read by, a chest of drawers, and more black-and-white photographs of the woman and the girl. A few of them had Garrett Asplundh in them. He looked drowsy and dangerous. He was a lean but muscled man, and I remembered that he was reputed to be a superb boxer and martial artist.

‘He was obsessed with his wife,’ said McKenzie.

‘I don’t remember her name.’

‘Stella. The girl drowned in the pool while the mom was supposed to be watching. Or maybe Garrett was, I don’t remember. But Mom couldn’t handle it and left him. That’s what I heard.’

‘Yeah. That’s about what I heard, too.’

‘I wonder why all black-and-white. No color.’

‘Maybe it’s the way he saw things,’ I guessed.

‘Colorblind?’

‘No. All one way or the other.’

‘You mean no gray,’ said McKenzie.

‘None.’

She shrugged. ‘Chick had a pretty face.’

I wondered why there were no cameras here. No tripods, lights, lenses, cases, battery packs, motor drives, canisters of film. No evidence – except for the digital camera in his aluminum case – that Garrett Asplundh had taken a single picture since his daughter died.

I sat at the desk in front of the window and pulled out one of the leftside drawers. It was full of hanging files, all red, each labeled with vinyl tab and handwritten label. I flipped through the ‘Medical’ but didn’t find anything of interest. I checked the ‘Phone’ file because I always do. Nothing unusual. In ‘Utils’ I noted the gas and electric, as well as monthly checks made out to Kohler Property Managers for rent on the North Park apartment. Oddly, there were monthly checks made out to another management company – Uptown Property Management – for eight hundred dollars. Nothing written on the memo lines to indicate what the payment was for. Eight hundred dollars is a lot of money, month in and out. I’d seen Uptown Property Management signs around, mostly down in Barrio Logan and Shelltown and National City. Not really your uptown properties at all. I made a note to call them.

The ‘Sam’ file contained only two documents – birth and death certificates. She had died of drowning at the age of three years and two months. Her official history was a folder with two pieces of paper in it. I wondered at the tremendous loss of this little girl if you projected in all the years she had to live and everything she might have become.

Next I got out the ‘Explorer’ file and compared the Explorer’s plate numbers with the ones I’d written down. The same. The SUV had been purchased new from a local Ford dealer. Three years of financing provided by Ford Credit. I wondered how much money Garrett Asplundh was making as an investigator for the city Ethics Authority.

The drawer above had my answer: stubs from City of San Diego payroll checks issued weekly for $1,750 – give or take a few dollars and cents. That was before deductions for income tax, Social Security, and a Keogh account. Ninety-one grand a year wasn’t making Asplundh rich. I was making eighty-one, counting overtime, as a firs-year dead dick.

Behind the pay-stub folder were two folders marked ‘Entertain 1’ and ‘Entertain 2.’ I opened ‘Entertain 1’ and scanned through the receipts – high-line restaurants, the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club, exotic car rentals. Lots of nights out. Some of it was charged to a credit card in Asplundh’s name. Some of it was paid in cash.

A right-side drawer was full of light blue hanging files, all related to fly-fishing: ‘Dream Trips.’ ‘Casting.’ ‘Strategy.’ ‘Misc.’ I fanned through the ‘Misc’ file and saw clips from some of the same goofily intense magazines I read. Technical stuff – graphite modulus and flex ranges. Esoteric stuff – ‘Delicate Presentations’ and ‘Mono Versus Fluoro.’ Favorite articles – ‘Harrop’s Top Baetis Patterns’ and ‘Nymphs for Pickerel.’

‘Look,’ said McKenzie. ‘Garrett liked to dress.’

She stood in the doorway with hangers in each hand. ‘Dude was wearing Armani and Hugo Boss. Dude’s got shoes in the closet that cost three hundred a pair. He had a suit on last night, when he got it.’

‘Investigating ethics,’ I said.

‘Yeah, you gotta look sharp to know right from wrong. Black from white. No grays. I wonder how much they were paying him?’

‘About what we pay a lieutenant.’

‘Must have had a kick-ass expense account.’ McKenzie eyed the suits, then whirled back into the short hallway.

The closets in the weight room/office contained golf clubs, fly-fishing gear, and more file cabinets.

Back in the kitchen we listened to the messages on the answering machine.

Someone named Josh Mead had called about Garrett’s rounding out a foursome at Pala Mesa in Fallbrook on Saturday, left his number.

A recorded voice tried to sell him lower-cost medical insurance.

A woman who identified herself as Stella said she had waited until eleven. She said she hoped he was okay, would try him later. Her voice sounded disappointed and worried.

‘Not very friendly, is she?’ asked McKenzie.

‘She sounds anxious.’

The secretary for John Van Flyke of the Ethics Authority called with some expense-account questions about last week’s pay period. Van Flyke was Garrett’s direct boss, the supervisor of the Ethics Authority Enforcement Unit. We cops thought Van Flyke was quirky and overly serious. When he was hired, the Union-Tribune had showered him with praise because he could help Erik Kaven get tough on San Diego corruption. Van Flyke had not allowed himself or any employee of the Enforcement Unit to be photographed for the articles. He reported directly to Kaven and was allowed to recruit his own staff. I had no idea where the Ethics Authority Enforcement Unit offices even were.

‘I was introduced to Van Flyke once,’ said McKenzie. ‘He stared at me like he was guessing my weight. Drummed his fingers on the table like he couldn’t wait for me to leave. So I left.’

‘Where?’

‘Chive Restaurant down in the Gaslamp. Another macho fed, just like Kaven.’

Stella called again, said she could meet him at ten o’clock tonight in the bar at Delicias in Rancho Santa Fe.

Garrett, said Stella, if you’ve been drinking, don’t even bother. I thought we might really have something to celebrate last night. I’d appreciate a call if you can’t make it this time. I’m trusting you’re okay.

‘She doesn’t seem real concerned about him,’ said McKenzie.

‘I think she sounds worried.’

While McKenzie played the messages again I found Stella’s phone number and address in Garrett’s book. She lived downtown. Legally, Stella wasn’t next of kin, but she was the one we needed to talk to. Death notifications are my least favorite part of Homicide detail but I couldn’t ask McKenzie to do it alone because of her bluntness.

Asplundh’s garage was like the apartment – neat and clean. It was big enough for one vehicle, two tall shelves of boxes, and a small workbench. Two pairs of eight-foot fluorescent bulbs cast a stiff light on everything. I sat on the metal stool at the workbench. It felt like a place where a guy would spend some time. On the bench was a shiny abalone shell with a pack of smokes in it, and a book of matches on top of that. In the cabinet over the bench were stacks of fishing magazines, boxes of flies and reels and tackle, a mostly full bottle of Johnnie Walker Black. In the drawers were the usual hand tools you’d expect to find and a five-shot .38 revolver, loaded and good to go.

I had the thought that if Garrett Asplundh were going to kill himself he’d have done it right here. But my opinion was that Garrett hadn’t done himself in. He must have parked down there near the bridge because he was meeting someone. Someone he knew. Someone he trusted. That someone had killed him. And if someone else had driven him away, that meant at least two people were involved. Which could mean conspiracy, premeditation, and a possible death penalty.

Ballsy guys, I thought.

Head-shoot a city investigator in his own car. Leave him in a public place and don’t bother to make it look like anything but murder.

Don’t bother to take the wallet, briefcase, or car.

Didn’t bother – I was willing to bet – putting the gun into Garrett’s trembling hand and firing it into the night so we’d find GSR and work the case as a suicide.

No, none of that. They were too confident for that. Too matter-of-fact. Too cool. They had put a cap in Garrett, then cleaned up and had a cocktail at Rainwater’s or the Waterfront.

I wondered when was the last time that Garrett Asplundh had sat where I was sitting. I looked across the workbench to the wall to see exactly what Garrett saw when he sat here – late at night, I guessed – as sleep escaped him and the endless loop of memories played through his mind over and over and over again.

I couldn’t tell you what Garrett had seen. Maybe it was a picture. Possibly a photograph. Maybe one that he had taken. Maybe a postcard. Or a poem or prayer or a joke. Or something cut from a magazine.

All that was left were four white thumbtacks, four by six inches apart.

‘No matter how long you stare, it’s still four thumbtacks,’ said McKenzie.

‘Makes me wonder what was there,’ I said. ‘A lot about Garrett makes me wonder. There isn’t enough.’

‘Enough what?’

‘Enough anything. There’s not enough of him.’

McKenzie gave me a puzzled look. Not the first time.

‘What I wonder is why a cop would want to work for the Ethics Authority in the first place,’ she said. ‘Why spy on the city you work for? Why sneak around? What, to feel important?’

‘It goes back to watching the watchdogs.’

‘Sooner or later you have to trust somebody,’ said McKenzie. ‘Otherwise there’s no end to all the layers of bullshit.’

‘Well said.’

I stood for a moment in the garage, facing the street. The March afternoon was rushing by and it was going to be a killer sunset. From a beach it would look like a can of orange paint poured onto a blue mirror. I thought of Gina and how much she wanted a place on the sand, and of the savings account I’d opened for that purpose. We were up to almost twenty thousand dollars in five years. Multiply by ten and we’d almost have enough for a down payment. At the current rate, I’d still be less than eighty years old. My Grandpa Rich is eighty-five and still going strong.

I turned and looked up at the neatly stacked boxes on the shelves. Everything Asplundh did was neat. I pulled down one box and set it on the workbench. It was surprisingly light. McKenzie cut the shipping tape with my penknife. Inside, individually wrapped in tissue paper, like gifts, were small blouses, shorts, dresses, coats, sweaters. A pair of tennis shoes with cartoon characters on them. A pair of shiny black dress shoes. Barrettes and combs for hair. Even a doll, a pudgy baby doll with a faded blue dress. None of it was new.

It all looked like it was made for a three-year-old, which was the age of Garrett’s daughter when she drowned. There was a black felt cowgirl hat stuffed with tissue to keep it shaped. Stitched into the crown in bright colors were buckin’ broncos and ponies and a saguaro cactus and a campfire. Samantha was embroidered across the front in pink.

‘Memorial in a box,’ said McKenzie.

‘When my Aunt Melissa died, Uncle Jerry couldn’t figure out what to keep and let go,’ I said. ‘He kept most of her stuff.’

‘Little doll,’ said McKenzie. ‘Man, tough call. You don’t want to see it every day, but you can’t just toss it out like it doesn’t matter. You can’t look at it, but you can’t let it go.’

3

Stella Asplundh slid open two dead bolts and one chain, cracked the door, looked from McKenzie to me, and said, ‘He’s dead.’

Four black triangles tumbled into the space between us. Black triangles are dread.

‘Yes, ma’am. Last night.’

‘Was he murdered?’

‘We don’t know yet,’ I said. ‘It’s likely.’

The black triangles derealized and vanished.

She was wearing a loose black sweater, jeans, and dark socks. She was a beautiful woman although she looked disheveled and unhealthy. The elevator clanked down behind us.

‘Come in.’

Her apartment was a Queen Anne Victorian down in the Gaslamp Quarter, once a red-light district and now a place for restaurants and clubs. She was on the fourth floor, above an art gallery and two other flats.

We sat in the unlit living room on a big purple couch with gold piping. The walls were paneled in black walnut and the windows faced north and west. I could see the darkening sky and the rooftop of another building across the street, which reminded me of falling from the sixth floor of the Las Palmas. The room smelled faintly of cinnamon and a woman’s perfume.

I explained to Stella Asplundh what we had found.

She watched me without moving. She said nothing. Her hair fell loosely around her face and her eyes were black and shiny.

‘So much,’ she said quietly.

‘So much what?’ asked McKenzie. She had gotten out her notebook and was already writing.

Stella looked down, brushed something off her knee. ‘He went through so much.

‘We have…we had an unusual relationship. It would be very difficult to explain. We were going to meet last night in Rancho Santa Fe – neutral ground. He didn’t show. That’s never happened before. In the twelve years I’ve known Garrett, he never stood me up. That’s why, when I answered the door just now…’

‘You knew something had happened,’ said McKenzie, head bowed to her notepad.

‘Yes, exactly. Excuse me for just a moment, please.’

She rose in the twilight and walked past me. A light went on in a hallway. I heard a door shut and water running. A toilet flushed. After a minute McKenzie set down her notebook and pen and went into the hallway. I heard the knock.

‘Ms. Asplundh? You okay?’

Stella answered, though I couldn’t hear what she said.

I stood and went to a small alcove hung with photographs and mementos. Mostly there were pictures of Stella, Garrett, and a cute little girl. A police commendation hung beside a day-care diploma for Samantha Asplundh. A master’s degree in psychology for Stella Asplundh hung next to a photograph of ten college-age women in bathing suits standing in front of a swimming pool. The engraved plate said SAN FRANCISCO MERAQUAS, PAN AMERICAN GAMES SYNCHRONIZED SWIMMING CHAMPIONS 1983.

The toilet flushed again, and the door opened. They were talking quietly. Then they came back to the half-lit room, McKenzie with a hand on Stella Asplundh’s arm.

Stella sat again and stared out the window. The streetlamps went on down on Island and a car horn honked and honked again. A pigeon flashed by.

‘We can come back,’ I said.

‘If we have to,’ said McKenzie.

‘No,’ said Stella Asplundh. ‘Ask your questions.’

‘It’s brave and good of you,’ I said.

Stella nodded but looked at neither of us.

‘Was he worried?’ I asked.

‘Always.’

‘Enemies?’

‘Hundreds. When he was a cop he policed other cops. For the Ethics Authority he policed the city government and the politicians and the businesspeople they have dealings with.’

‘A long list.’

‘Everybody, really.’

‘But who in particular?’

She looked at me, then back to the window. ‘He never really told me details.’

‘Some of the circumstances suggest suicide,’ said McKenzie. ‘Do you think he would have killed himself?’

‘No. He was more full of hope the last time I saw him than at any time since Samantha drowned. He came close to killing himself last July when it happened. But no. Not now.’

‘Why not?’ I asked.

Stella Asplundh’s eyes shone in the dark. I knew they were trained on me. ‘We were trying to reconcile. We had both been through so much. We fell apart. But we’d begun to come back together. I really can’t explain it, other than we once loved each other very much and we were trying to love each other again.’

‘What was the purpose of the neutral ground?’ I asked. ‘The Rancho Santa Fe date?’

‘Garrett could become emotional. If he was drinking it was worse, and he was often drinking.’

I said nothing and neither did McKenzie. Nothing like silence to draw out the words.

Stella looked down at the couch. Her hair fell forward. ‘We were separated. I moved out of our house four months ago, November of last year. Garrett got his own place, too, because we’d sold the house where it happened. You can’t live where there are memories like that. But I still would see Garrett, because I thought it was best for him. Unless we saw each other every week, or two weeks at the most, he’d become anxious and extremely irrational. We would sit in a restaurant or a coffee shop. Maybe just walk. He just needed…the company.’

‘Your company,’ said McKenzie. ‘Did you ever go to his apartment?’

‘No. Never.’

‘Did he come here?’

‘He never came inside. He would…I saw him down on the street several times. Looking up.’

‘He stalked you,’ said McKenzie.

‘That’s the wrong word,’ said Stella.

‘What’s the right word?’ asked McKenzie.

Stella Asplundh sat still in the dark room.

‘Were you afraid of him?’ asked McKenzie.

‘A little. And afraid for him, too.’

‘When was the divorce final?’ asked McKenzie.

‘It wasn’t. I had the papers drawn up but never had the…courage to serve them.’

After all that, I thought, she couldn’t quite let go of him. And he obviously couldn’t let go of her. As if I’d needed more evidence than his shrine of photographs.

‘What time were you supposed to meet in Rancho Santa Fe last night?’ asked McKenzie.

‘Nine.’

‘At Delicias restaurant?’

Stella nodded and took a deep breath. She radiated an intense aloneness.

‘When was the last time you saw Garrett?’ I asked.

‘Last Thursday evening. We met down at the coffee shop and talked for almost two hours. He was very hopeful. He said he had stopped drinking. He said he was still in love with me and ready to move on with our lives.’

Darkness had finally fallen. March afternoons race by, but the evenings seem to last for hours.

‘Do you know what Garrett would have said about his own murder?’ asked Stella Asplundh. ‘He would have said it wasn’t a murder, it was a piece of work.’

I agreed but said nothing.

‘Let’s not jump to conclusions, Ms. Asplundh,’ said McKenzie.

‘You don’t understand very much, do you?’ Stella asked gently. She bit her thumb and looked away. Tears poured down her face but she didn’t make a sound. I’d never seen anyone cry like that.

A few minutes later Stella showed us to the door and we rode the slow elevator back down. On Island, lights twinkled in the trees and the streetlamps glowed. Over on Fourth the hostesses stood outside their restaurants.

A pretty woman in a white VW Cabriolet pulled over to talk with a guy. I wondered why she had the top down when it was cool like this, figured the heater was cranked up.

‘I like the Cabriolets,’ said McKenzie. ‘But they’re a little doggy in the horsepower department. I spun one out on a test drive once, totally freaked the sales guy. What did you think of the almost-ex?’

‘Wrung out,’ I said.

‘Yeah. Like a vampire sucked her blood.’

Before going home we stopped by my office to hear the recording of the anonymous tip. It was made at 3:12 on the morning of Wednesday, March 9.

DESK OFFICE VILLERS: San Diego Police.

MALE VOICE: I heard a gun fire near the Cabrillo Bridge on Highway 163. There is a black vehicle such as a truck or sporting vehicle. Maybe a murder, I don’t know.

DESK OFFICER VILLERS: Your name, sir?

MALE VOICE: This will not be necessary.

DESK OFFICER VILLERS: I need your name, sir.

The caller’s voice was male, middle-pitched, and slightly faint. His words were clear but accented. There was a hesitation before he hung up.

‘Arabic?’ asked McKenzie.

‘I think so,’ I said. ‘Eddie Waimrin can tell us.’

Waimrin is one of two San Diego police officers born in the Middle East – Egypt. He’s been our point man with the large and apprehensive Middle Eastern community since September of 2001. I tried Eddie Waimrin’s number but got a recording. Patrol Captain Evers told me Eddie had worked an early day shift and already gone home. I told him I needed help with the Asplundh tip tape and he said he’d take care of it.

‘Did Garrett kill himself?’ asked the captain.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Garrett Asplundh was tough as nails. And honest.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘We talked to a guy this morning who saw a red Ferrari pulled over to the side of Highway 163 that night. Not far from where we found Asplundh’s vehicle. Said he saw someone moving in the trees. Maybe Mr Red Ferrari saw something. Who knows, maybe he pulled the trigger.’

I could hear him tapping notes onto his computer.

‘Tell the U-T,’ said Captain Evers. ‘Maybe they’ll run a notice or something.’

‘That’s my next call.’

‘Let me see what I can find out, Brownlaw.’

I called a reporter acquaintance of mine who works for the Union-Tribune. His name is George Schimmel and he covers crime. He’s a good writer and almost always gets his facts right. During my brief celebrity three years ago, I’d given him a short interview. Since then George has told me many times he wants to do a much longer piece or, better yet, wants me to tell my own story in my own words. I’ve declined because I’m not comfortable in the public eye. And because of certain things that happened, and didn’t happen, during that fall from the hotel. I feel that some things are private and should stay that way.

‘So are you ready to sit down and give me a real interview?’ he asked, as I knew he would.

‘Not really, but I could use a favor.’

I told him about the red Ferrari parked off to the side of the south-bound 163 on the night of the murder. I gave him Retired Navy’s name and number.

‘What was the very last thing you thought about?’ he asked. ‘Before you hit.’

‘Gina, my wife.’

‘That’s so human, Robbie. I mean, wow.’

‘Thanks for the red Ferrari.’

‘I’ll see what I can do.’

By the time I got home Gina had already left. Her note said that she’d be with Rachel, probably downtown or in La Jolla. Just dinner was all, and maybe one drink after – she’d be back early. Rachel and Gina are best friends. Their chairs at Salon Sultra are next to each other. They pretty much carry on like they did before Gina and I were married but Rachel resents me. At times Gina feels torn between her best friend and me, which is understandable. Rachel drunkenly hit on me one night just before we got married. I drove her home and didn’t tell Gina about the offer, just that Rachel was too drunk to drive herself. Rachel has ignored me since then, which is pretty much what she did before that.

I heated up a pot pie and opened a can of asparagus for dinner. I drank a beer. After dinner I opened another beer, sat down at the tying table in our garage and tied some fishing flies. I’ve been working on a little pattern to catch the wild rainbow trout in the San Gabriel River above Pasadena. The San Gabriel is my closest river for trout, actually more of a stream than a river. The fish can be picky, especially in the evenings. I’ve invented two flies to attract the fish: Gina’s Mayfly and Gina’s Caddis. Come late springtime – another month or two – and I’ll be able to see if they work. Part of the fun of tying a fly is fooling a fish with it. The other part is sitting in my chilly garage with the radio on in winter, imagining the currents and pools and eddies and riffles of the San Gabe on a summer morning, and picturing my little fake bug bounce along on the surface above the fish. There is a specific joy to coaxing a wild thing from the river and into your hand, then back into the river again. I can’t explain it. Gina good-humoredly says the whole thing is boring and pointless. I certainly value her opinions and understand that fly-fishing isn’t for everyone.

Later I worked the digital camera out of Garrett’s Halliburton case and looked at the pictures he’d taken. There were only two. One was a close-up of Samantha Asplundh’s headstone. It was red granite, simple and shiny. The other was a shot of Stella, with her hands up, protecting her face from the camera. She wasn’t smiling. I put the camera back and looked at the tape recorder, saw that there was no cassette in it.

Then I surveyed Garrett Asplundh’s datebook. His next-to-last appointment on the day he was murdered was with HH at HTA in La Jolla. Five P.M. There was a phone number.

His last appointment was with CAM at Imp B. Pier at six-thirty. The Imperial Beach Pier, I thought. Odd place for a meeting. Another phone number. I sat in our little living room and leafed through his datebook. Garrett Asplundh kept a busy schedule.

I called the La Jolla number and got a recording for Hidden Threat Assessment. I called the CAM number and got a recording that told me to leave my name, number, and a brief message. I didn’t.

It was odd to flip ahead in Garrett’s datebook and look at the appointments he’d never make. One caught my eye because it was underlined twice: Kaven, JVF & ATT GEN.

It was set for next Wednesday, March 16.

Our crime lab director called just after seven to tell me that the gunshot-residue test on Garrett Asplundh had come back negative. They’d tried everything for residue – fingers, thumbs, hands, shirt cuffs, jacket sleeves. Left and right. No GSR at all. But lots of it on and around his right temple, because the gun had been discharged close to his head. They’d found gunpowder burns, tattooing, the works. Two inches close, is how it looked.

He also told me that the Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter autoloader in the Explorer had been reported stolen in Oceanside, San Diego County, back in 1994. It yielded no latent fingerprints and had been recently wiped with a product such as Tri-Flow, a popular protectant for firearms.

‘Cool customer, to pack a stolen gun and his own wipes,’ said the director.

I thanked him and called McKenzie and told her she owed me fifty bucks.

Gina got in late and hungry so I whipped up an omelet with bacon and cheese and made some guacamole for the top of it. She stood in the kitchen and told me about her evening and drank a vodka on the rocks while I cooked. When Gina is excited about something she can talk for paragraphs without a comma, but that night she didn’t have much to say. Her soft red hair was up but some of it fell over her face and down her neck and I kissed her. I smelled perfume and smoke and alcohol but tasted only my wife. There is no other taste like it. I actually thought about that taste as I fell from the Las Palmas, though, to be honest, I thought of millions of things in a very short period of time.

She giggled softly and pulled back. She smiled. She has green eyes but the corners were slightly red that night.

‘Wow, that omelet looks good!’ she said, swaying on her way to the breakfast nook.

By the time I got the pan soaking and the dishes rinsed, Gina was in bed. I lifted the covers and settled them over her shoulders. I remembered doing very much the same just that morning after the lieutenant had called about Garrett. Her snoring was peaceful and rhythmic. I held her close. After a few minutes she gasped and turned her head away from my chest, breathing deeply and rapidly, as if she’d been running.

I placed a hand on her hot, damp head and told her she’d be okay, just a bad dream or maybe a little too much to drink. I lifted a handful of hair and blew on her neck. A minute later she was snoring again.

4

The next morning I parked in front of the San Diego Ethics Authority Enforcement Unit headquarters, a stately two-story Edwardian on Kettner. The day was bright and cool and you could smell the bay two blocks away.

‘I can’t believe they fight bad guys from here,’ said McKenzie. ‘It used to be a bakery.’

‘The family lived upstairs,’ I said. ‘Italian.’

‘Yeah, and the owner, he’d park the black Eldo with the whitewall tires right out front. He made his son wash it every single day.’

I looked out at the former residence that now housed the Ethics Authority Enforcement Unit. Although we call ourselves America’s Finest City, there is a long tradition of collusion and corruption here in San Diego. Some of it once reached high enough to taint an American presidency – Richard Nixon’s. Some of it is low and squalid and oddly funny – a mayor in bed with a swindler, councilmen charged with taking bribes from stripclub owners in return for easier rules on what the strippers can do. There is probably no more greed and graft here than in most other large American cities, but our mayor and council thought it was time to meet the problem head-on, so the Ethics Authority was formed and gunslinging Judge Erik Kaven was named director.

About a year after the Authority was established, Kaven hired John Van Flyke away from the DEA in Miami to run the Enforcement Unit. Van Flyke had never lived in San Diego and had visited just once, I’d read. He had no family here. This was exactly what the city wanted – an ethics enforcer with no vested interests in the city. Van Flyke was never photographed by the papers or videotaped for the TV news. His staff appeared in the media only rarely. All we knew about him was that he was forty-two years old, single, secretive, and incorruptible. George Schimmel of the Union-Tribune had nicknamed him ‘The Untouchable.’ McKenzie had quipped that no one would want to touch him.

The downstairs lobby was small and chilly. It offered two chairs and a dusty, unsteady glass table with sailing magazines on it. An elderly woman sat behind a large desk with a clean blotter pad, a ringed desktop calendar, and a gleaming black telephone on it. There was also a small vase with faded paper poppies. Her hair was gray and pulled into a tight bun. The cowl collar of a faintly green sweater came up nearly to her chin. She wore a headset with a very thin speaker arm extending from ear to mouth. She pushed a button on the phone console.

‘Detectives Cortez and Brownlaw are here,’ she said. Her voice was clear and strong, and it echoed in the old former residence. ‘Yes, sir.’

She pushed a button on her phone and looked at me. The lines in her face were an unrevealed history. Her eyes were brown with soft blue edges. The nameplate near the edge of her desk said ARLISS BUNTZ.

‘Up the stairs and to your right,’ she said.

‘Thank you.’

It was odd climbing stairs to an appointment. It struck me as old-fashioned, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d done it. Our foot-steps echoed up around us in the hard, drafty building. I know that the federal government would require an elevator for handicapped people in a public building, but I saw no sign of one. I wasn’t sure what I thought about the Ethics Authority’s ignoring the rules.

I looked down over the banister at the uplifted face of Arliss Buntz.

Van Flyke was tall and well built. Dark suit, white shirt, yellow tie. He was big-faced, like many actors or professional athletes are, and his red-brown hair was combed back from his face with brisk aggression. His hand was dry and strong.

A quiet young man in a shirt and tie appeared with a tray and coffee for three. He had suspenders over his shoulders and an automatic holstered at his hip. He handed McKenzie her cup with a brief smile, then left. The room was washed in sharp March light and through the windows you could see taller buildings and a slice of bay and a palm tree. McKenzie flipped open her notepad and propped it against her knee.

Van Flyke sat forward and studied each of us in turn. His hands rested on two green folders. ‘Have you run the GSR test?’ His voice was deep but soft.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Negative.’

‘No chance of suicide?’

‘Very little.’

‘How many rounds left in the gun?’

‘Eight,’ I said. ‘We recovered an empty from the dashboard of the Explorer.’

‘Did they take anything?’ he asked.

‘He wasn’t robbed,’ McKenzie said, writing. ‘Not that we know at this point.’

Van Flyke lifted his cup of coffee and looked at McKenzie. His brow was heavy and his eyes were blue and set deep. ‘This is difficult. Garrett was a very close friend. He was my best investigator, I was hurt by what he and Stella had been through with their little girl. Truly hurt. You didn’t know him, did you?’

‘We’re getting to know him,’ said McKenzie. ‘If we knew what he was doing for you, it would help a lot.’

‘I’ll bet it would. Witnesses?’

‘Maybe,’ I said.

Van Flyke’s expression brightened, like a dog catching a scent. ‘Oh?’

I told him about Mr Red Ferrari standing off in the bushes.

‘What time?’

‘We’re not at liberty to discuss that,’ said McKenzie.

Van Flyke deadpanned her. ‘Here’s something we can discuss.’

He handed each of us a green folder.

‘Garrett was looking into two different areas for me,’ said Van Flyke. ‘One was the antiterrorism watch – Homeland Security R&D contractors, mostly out in Spook Valley. Right now there’s more money than sense out there. About seven billion federal dollars, nationwide, just looking to get spent. Spook Valley is after its share. Erik – our director, Erik Kaven – believes it’s a potential hot point. Garrett was also looking into the Budget Oversight Committee – Abel Sarvonola’s group. Dull stuff, but big money. Lots of hands out, lots of paths that cross.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘We appreciate this.’

I got the Homeland Security file. It started with a long list of companies addressing security problems. Most dealt in information, security, and biomedical technology and software, but there were also makers of personal flight modules, solarpowered biohazard warning systems and ‘hit-stop’ handguns. Names, phone numbers, addresses. Typewritten and handwritten notes followed – I assumed they were Garrett Asplundh’s.

I traded files with McKenzie. Now I was looking at a list of departments and commissions, boards, committees, councils, and authorities. This was Abel Sarvonola’s brew for sure. His powers as Budget Oversight Committee chairman were well known enough to be joked about at moneyconscious PD headquarters. When does a dollar disappear on its own? As soon as it’s Abel’s. And so on. His appointment to the Budget Oversight Committee was part-time and paid only a small per diem when the committee was in session. Sarvonola was a big part of the La Costa Resort development in north county back in the seventies. There had been talk of Teamster pension funds and mob involvement in the building of that swank resort, but Sarvonola had come through it very clean and extremely rich.

I saw that in addition to being involved in the many arms of San Diego’s government, Garrett Asplundh also knew the players in San Diego’s biggest industries – hospitality, development, entertainment, and consumer technology. There they were, the sports owners, financiers, tech billionaires, land developers, biomedical-research companies, and old money that ruled the city. This was the powerful private sector that the Ethics Authority was entrusted to keep from getting too chummy with the various branches of the city bureaucracy.

‘Why would an Ethics Authority investigator rent a Testarossa at four-fifty a night?’ asked McKenzie.

‘An occasional expense for cultivating his sources,’ said Van Flyke. He raised a heavy brow as if entertaining his own answer.

‘Cultivating his sources,’ I said.

‘Of course. Or, in some cases, maybe he was trying to foster an impression of corruptibility.’

I heard McKenzie’s pen racing to get those words down. I hadn’t thought of using Ethics Authority investigators that way – trying to lure someone into doing something illegal. Such law-enforcement tactics are proactive and dangerous. But I knew that Van Flyke’s days at the DEA had certainly taught him how to orchestrate an entrapment that would stand up in court.

‘You let your investigators do that?’ asked McKenzie.

‘I give my investigators trust, respect, and independence.’

Van Flyke’s remote blue eyes went from me to McKenzie and back to me again. ‘He was a good man.’

Neither McKenzie nor I spoke.

‘A person’s life can change so fast,’ he said quietly. ‘A pivot. A moment. An event that takes a fraction of a second but lasts a lifetime. Garrett comprehended that. It gave him depth and understanding.’

He sighed and looked out the window.

‘Are you talking about the death of his daughter?’ I asked.

‘Of course I am.’

In the back of each folder was a list of complaints filed, fines issued, convictions won, or indictments handed down based on Garrett Asplundh’s investigations. Most of the offenders were city contractors, some were city employees themselves. There were fines for violations of the Business and Professions Code, the Government Code, and the Civil Code. A city Building Department supervisor was discharged for taking a bribe. A city Purchasing Department employee was reprimanded for the ‘appearance of favoritism.’ I didn’t see anything worth killing a man over, but I hadn’t been fired or called down.

‘Were his current investigations heating up?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ said Van Flyke. He had returned his attention from the window and now stared at me. ‘Garrett was making progress in both areas. I printed and attached Garrett’s notes to the end of each file. You can get a feel for where he was, how people were reacting to us.’

‘Are those his complete notes?’ I asked.

‘Yes. Everything he submitted.’

I watched a hawk with something in its beak fly into the palm tree outside. The fronds shimmered in the winter light and the hawk disappeared into them. I thought for a moment. I pictured Garrett’s apartment. It still seemed to me that something was missing. There just wasn’t enough, not for a man as orderly and intensely focused as Garrett Asplundh seemed to be. For someone who, as his ex-wife had said, went through so much. I thought about the checks made out to Uptown Management. The hawk dropped out of the tree, spread its wings, and rose straight over us. I saw the stripes on its tail and the gleam of its eye.

I asked Van Flyke about the underlined entry in Garrett’s datebook for next Wednesday, March 16. From my notes I read it back to him: Kaven, JVF & ATT GEN.

‘That would translate as Director Kaven, myself, and a lawyer from the state attorney general’s office. Garrett was going to present his findings. Together we were going to decide which cases to intensify and which ones to drop.’

‘If the attorney general was involved, Garrett must have had some serious evidence,’ I said.

‘Not necessarily,’ said Van Flyke. ‘The meetings are semiannual and routine.’

‘The underline looked more than routine,’ I said.

‘I can only tell you what I know,’ said Van Flyke.

‘Did you issue him a laptop computer for work?’ I asked.

‘Of course,’ said Van Flyke. ‘We all got new ones about two months ago.’

‘We haven’t found it,’ said McKenzie. ‘It wasn’t in the Explorer or his apartment.’

Van Flyke stared at her. ‘It’s not here either. Maybe he was robbed after all.’

McKenzie scribbled.

‘His last two meetings were with HH at a place called Hidden Threat Assessment in La Jolla and with CAM at the Imperial Beach Pier,’ I said.

‘HTA is a Spook Valley company,’ said Van Flyke. ‘HH is Hollis Harris, who started it. CAM at the Imperial Beach Pier? I have no idea about who that might be.’

‘May we see his workplace?’ I asked.

‘Sure.’

Van Flyke wrote his cell number on the back of a business card and handed it to me. Then he led us out of his office and into what once must have been a bedroom for the Italian bakers. There was a partition through the middle of it. A desk and an empty chair on each side. Garrett’s desk had a framed black-and-white photograph of Samantha and a coffee cup with a picture of a rainbow trout on it. On the wall was a pictorial calendar of San Diego. This month’s featured site was the pretty Casa del Prado building at Balboa Park, which stands just a few hundred yards from where they’d found Garrett Asplundh’s body.

I shook hands with Van Flyke and thanked him for his time. McKenzie did neither.

She went down the stairs ahead of me. Arliss Buntz was standing now, as if she’d been waiting for us to come down. Her headset was still on and her sweater still pulled up for warmth. Her blue-brown eyes locked on to mine.

‘He was a man headed for trouble,’ she said.

‘How do you know that?’ I asked.

‘Look at his high ideals!’

She sat and pivoted her chair, giving us her back as she bent to open a drawer.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked her.

‘He was too good for the people around him,’ she muttered without turning.

McKenzie drove while I called Hollis Harris and CAM. Hollis had heard about Garrett’s death and agreed to give us one hour of his time. CAM’s computer-generated message told me once again to leave a name, number, and short message, but again I didn’t. I wanted CAM live. Lots of people won’t return calls to Homicide detectives, but very few will hang up on one.

I called Gina to make sure she was up and doing okay. She answered halfway through the greeting. She apologized for last night. Said she’d had one too many. Rachel got fully toasted. I told her not to worry about anything and maybe we could go out to dinner that night and I loved her.

McKenzie kissed the air as she gunned the car toward the freeway.

Spook Valley is a nickname given to a cluster of La Jolla companies specializing in nuclear-weapons technology, strategic defense, border control, industrial security, and military surveillance. Many of these are secret, or ‘black,’ programs, funded directly by the CIA or the Pentagon or the Department of Homeland Security. Some of the companies started back in the early 1990s, but a lot of them have sprung up since 2001. I thought of John Van Flyke’s figure of $7 billion of R&D money from Homeland Security alone and what share of it came to San Diego.

Spook Valley isn’t spooky at all. It’s everything Southern California is supposed to look like – swaying palms and twisted coastal pines and jaggedly beautiful beaches under blue sky. The green hills tumble down to the Pacific like spilled loads of emeralds. The architecture in La Jolla is a vivid mix of Mediterranean, Spanish Colonial, Spanish Revival, Craftsman, Prairie, California Rancho, postmodern, contemporary – you name it. Even the ‘Tuscan’ monstrosities have caught on here, though they look overweight, hunkered on their tiny but expensive lots. But the Spook Valley companies cling quietly to the top-secret shadows while the rest of La Jolla basks in the light, and everyone comes together at the fancy restaurants on the bluffs to watch the sun go down.

We drove past the Hidden Threat Assessment building before spotting the number, so McKenzie spun a U-turn and bounced my mushy Chevrolet take-home into the parking lot.

‘Look at all that mirrored glass,’ said McKenzie. ‘They don’t even put their name on the building, just HTA. And check over there – the Enzo. That’s six-hundred fifty horses you’re looking at. Sick. Oh, man, now that’s a car.’

It was a red Ferrari and the license plate read H-THREAT. I wondered if it had been parked briefly alongside Highway 163 the night Garrett was shot. I wondered how many red Ferraris there are in San Diego.

Hollis Harris met us at the security desk in the gleaming lobby. He was about my age. Thirty tops. He was small, slender, almost bald, and dressed in black – shoes, trousers, belt, golf shirt, watch. His face was trim, and his gaze was open and opinionless.

We stopped at a coffee-and-sandwich cart. Harris got a triple espresso, black.

‘I’m trying to cut back,’ he said.

‘How many a day?’ asked McKenzie.

Hollis ducked his head and frowned. ‘Three? Okay, four, but four max.’

‘I’d be bouncing off the walls,’ she said.

‘Maybe that’s why I only sleep five hours a night.’

‘How do you feel in the mornings?’

‘Actually,’ said Harris, ‘great.’

His fourth-story office was large, uncluttered, and bright with late-morning light. The floor was buffed maple, and his curved desk was stainless steel. Most of the fixtures were stainless steel, too. There were windows on two sides and white walls on the other. A huge painting took up most of one wall – it showed the back end of a Ferrari speeding away from you. A collection of photographs of Hollis Harris with various celebrities graced the other.

We sat at a suite of stainless and cream leather furniture in front of one of the big picture windows. Harris clapped his hands softly twice and a sun filter descended from the ceiling. As it lowered I watched the vivid optics of the Soledad Highway and San Clemente Valley soften and retreat.

‘I’d talked to Garrett Asplundh several times over the last two years,’ said Harris. ‘At first he was interested in HTA’s financial relationships with the Department of Homeland Security and the CIA and some of the casinos in Las Vegas and San Diego County. And, of course, with the City of San Diego. So I opened our books to him, everything from contracts to payroll. I didn’t see him for three months.’

‘I take it your accountants had done their jobs,’ said McKenzie, looking from her notepad to Harris.

‘Our books are as clean as this floor,’ said Harris. ‘HTA makes good money and there’s no reason to cheat, lie, or steal. I don’t have the time or interest for that.’

I was reading through Asplundh’s notes on HTA while Harris talked. ‘Garrett said you – HTA – donated a hundred and fifty grand to the Republican Party in 2003, trying to get the governor recalled.’

‘We did,’ said Harris. ‘We also donated a like amount to the Democratic Party, to help them field a good candidate of their own. We’re not a political company here. But we do believe in the state of California. I was born in this state. Lived here all my life. It means something to me.’

I looked into Hollis Harris’s steady eyes. ‘Garrett met you here at five o’clock the day before yesterday – the day he died.’

‘Right,’ said Harris. ‘We talked about developing Hidden Threat Assessment software for the Ethics Authority.’

‘What exactly is “hidden threat assessment”?’ asked McKenzie.

Harris sat forward on the edge of the cream-colored sofa, like he was getting ready to jump up. ‘The heart of it is a software system that lets databases talk to each other in real time. I got the idea back in high school. My dad worked for TRW and he was always complaining that the information was out there but he couldn’t get it in time. The information is out there but I can’t get it in time. So I designed him a program for my computer class and got an A on it. I sold it to TRW for half a million dollars when I was eighteen. That was enough to begin this company. We’ve gone bankrupt twice and bounced back twice. I’ve lived everywhere from ratty downtown hotels to mansions in La Jolla. Mansions are better but ratty hotels save you time on upkeep. Work ruined my marriage but I won’t make the same mistake again. I have a wonderful young son. Last year this company did over forty-five million and we’re on track to beat that this year. By a lot.’

‘How did you write a program like that as a high-schooler?’ asked McKenzie.

Harris shrugged. ‘I don’t actually know. It’s a knack. When I deal with coded information it becomes aural to me. Musical. I hear it, I hear ways that sounds – they’re not sounds actually, they’re megs and gigs and beyond – can be harmonious and advantageously cadenced. As soon as you stack information like that, massive amounts of it can be digitally fitted and synchronized. Then it can flow, literally, at the speed of electricity. It’s not all software. You need some special machines to run an HTA program. I designed them. It’s hard to explain.’

‘Guess so,’ said McKenzie.

I was half tempted to tell Hollis Harris that I could see the shapes and colors of emotions behind spoken words. But only half. It’s not a parlor trick. If news of that got back to headquarters on Broadway it would hurt me sooner or later. My advancement has been greased by my apparently miraculous recovery from the fall, and by my minor and unasked-for celebrity. I may be ‘different’ enough to see shapes and colors when people talk, but I’m not different enough to admit it to anyone but Gina.

‘How does it assess threat?’ I asked.

‘It finds hidden connections between people that could be threatening,’ said Harris. ‘It finds them instantly, in real time. Say that Person A applies for a job here. We run him through a basic HTA protocol. HTA discovers that his ex-wife’s former roommate’s brother is a convicted embezzler and that Person A and the convicted embezzler now share the same home address. It takes ten seconds. And guess what? We don’t hire Person A. We show him the door. From casinos to the federal government, everybody needs HTA. I call HTA ‘a symphony of information.’ But it’s more like twenty symphonies, crammed into the length of a sound bite.’

‘Impressive,’ said McKenzie.

‘Impressive, Ms. Cortez?’ asked Harris, smiling, then swallowing the last of his espresso. ‘It’s almost unbelievable. We’re currently running at five degrees of separation. We’ll be up to eight degrees by the end of next year. We’re doing a job for Border Patrol right now – you put your index finger into the scanner down at the border in San Ysidro or TJ, and guess what? I’ve got the following databases digging into your past like earthmovers on speed: Homeland Security, INS, the DEA, the Border Patrol, the San Diego Sheriff Department, the San Diego PD, the Interagency Border Inspection System, and the Automated Biometric Identification System – and that’s not all. Let me take a breath and continue: the Treasury Enforcement Communications System, the Deportable Alien Control System, the Port of Entry Tracking System, the National Automated Immigration Lookout System, and the San Diego User Network Services system. I get winded when I talk about my work, so let me take another deep breath and keep going: the Computer Linked Application Information System and the National Crime Information Center of the FBI, and I’m going to have these bases talking to each other as fast as electricity in a phone line. I’m going to be able to tell everything about you – physical, financial, criminal, social. I’ll have the name, address, and Social Security number of the doctor who pulled your tonsils when you were four, and I’ll know exactly how much your cell phone bill was last month, and I’ll have the name and address of your allegedly secret lover by the time you get your finger out of the scanner. If you are a threat, you will be exposed. If you might be a threat, you will be exposed. If you are only the reflection of a shadow cast by the memory of a possible threat, you will be exposed. Now that, Detective Cortez, is impressive.’

Harris was short of breath. ‘I know that sounds like bragging, Detective. It is.’

And sure enough, the orange rectangles of pride wavered in the air between us, then dissolved.

‘Will you run an HTA on Garrett Asplundh for us?’ I asked.

Harris looked at me but said nothing.

‘Maybe he already has,’ said McKenzie. She smiled, a rarity.

Harris went to his desk and opened a drawer. He returned with a manila folder and handed it to McKenzie. ‘Yesterday, after I heard what had happened, I ran an HTA on Garrett. It’s hard to get a lot on law-enforcement professionals because their employers have been playing this game for years. But the deeper background comes out. So Garrett was kind of skimpy by HTA standards. It came to one hundred and eighty pages of intelligence, all in this envelope. I included a CD for you also. I read it last night and saw nothing in there that might pertain to his murder. But I’m out of my element in that world. Your world. It may contain something you can use.’

‘Thank you,’ said McKenzie. ‘We appreciate it.’

‘Garrett wanted an HTA program for the Ethics Authority?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ said Harris. ‘But they can’t afford it. I explained to him that I could create the system, install it, train the users, and update it for two years for four hundred thousand dollars. Garrett’s budget for system upgrades was eighty thousand. He told me I should offer my services at cost to help protect this city that had brought me such prosperity. I agreed, which is exactly what the four hundred thousand was – my cost.’

‘How did Asplundh take that news?’ asked McKenzie.

‘I never knew with Garrett. I could never read him. I could tell he was preoccupied that afternoon. He wasn’t all here. Usually with him there was this focus, this intensity. When I saw him in this office…no…his attention was somewhere else.’

‘Did he say anything about that, about being distracted?’ asked McKenzie.

Harris shook his head. Then he looked at each of us.

‘What time did he leave here?’ I asked.

‘It was five-fifty.’

‘How was he dressed?’

‘Black two-button suit, white shirt, gold tie. Hand-stitched brogues. Nice clothes.’

‘The tie was gold?’ I asked.

‘Gold silk.’

Not blue. Not soaked in his own blood.

Harris looked down at his watch, sighed, stood. ‘I’m sorry. I’m out of time for this now. Maybe something in that HTA book will lead you in the right direction.’

‘How fast is the Enzo?’ asked McKenzie.

‘Top speed is two-seventeen, it goes zero to sixty in three point six-five seconds and ripples your face in first.’

‘Did you drive it Tuesday night?’

He looked at her, smiled. ‘I drove it home to Carlsbad around six. I took it out again to get drive-through with my son at about six-forty. He’s five. We were home with our burgers by seven. Reading in bed by eight. I didn’t drive the Enzo again until morning. I’ll let him vouch for me if you’d like.’

‘That’s not necessary right now,’ said McKenzie. ‘Does it feel odd driving a six-hundred-thousanddollar car into a drive-through?’

He looked at her thoughtfully. ‘Yes. And it’s a long reach up to the window, too.’

Out in the parking lot she ogled the car. I must admit it was a beautiful machine. My dream car has always been a Shelby Cobra. Gina bought me a day at an expensive driving school in Arizona for my birthday one year. I listened to a lecture, then spent the rest of the day with an instructor in a souped-up stock car that hit 160 on the straights. Speed is marvelous, though I’m less enthused about it since my fall. It seems ungrateful to risk your life for a medium-size pleasure. That night at dinner Gina presented me with a small Shelby Cobra model that I still keep in a place of honor on my fly-tying table.

Before getting into the Chevy I tried CAM again and got an answer.

‘Carrie Ann Martier’s office.’

‘Robbie Brownlaw, San Diego Homicide.’

‘Please hold.’

It was a woman’s voice. She sounded assured and professional. I walked away from the car and waited almost a full minute. McKenzie eyed me from across the lot.

‘Mr Brown?’

‘Brownlaw.’

‘Yes? How can we help you?’

‘I want to talk to Carrie Ann Martier about Garrett Asplundh.’

‘I’m Carrie Ann Martier. But I’m not sure that I can help you.’

‘I don’t need your help. Garrett does.’

There was a long silence. ‘Okay.’

‘How about tonight at six-thirty, the foot of the Imperial Beach Pier,’ I said. ‘I’ll wear a Chargers cap.’

‘Spell your name and give me your badge number.’

I did both.

‘Be alone,’ she said.

‘Okay.’

Silence, then she hung up.

5

The fog rolled in around six as I drove toward Imperial Beach. To the west I saw the Silver Strand State Park campground, where not long ago a seven-year-old girl was taken by her kidnapper. Later he killed her. Her name was Danielle. I thought of her every time I made this drive, and probably will for the rest of my life. A lot of people will. I was thrown from the Las Palmas about three weeks after her body was found.

I didn’t need the Chargers cap. I stood alone at the foot of the Imperial Beach Pier and watched the waves roll in and the lights of the city coming on in the twilight. A public sculpture of acrylic surfboards glowed faintly in the fog. Imperial Beach is the southernmost city on our coast. You can see Mexico right across the Tijuana River. In some odd way, you can sense an end of things here, the end of a state and a nation and the Bill of Rights and a way of living. Then you think of Danielle and wonder if it all means what you thought it did.

Six-thirty came and went. I called Gina again and we talked for a few minutes. She said she felt bad about last night and I said I was sorry about breaking our date for tonight. Funny how two people can live together, have no children, but have so little time together. Sometimes it seems like I hardly see Gina. I’m not so sure she misses my company the way I miss hers, but then I don’t know how she could.

I retrieved a message from Samuel Asplundh, Garrett’s older brother and next of kin, who was due to arrive in San Diego this evening.

I retrieved a message from Patrol Captain Evers saying that they had collected three more witnesses who had seen a car parked off to the side of Highway 163 the night Garrett was killed. All said the car was red. One said it was a sports car, like a Mustang or maybe a Corvette. Another thought he saw a man loitering in the bushes nearby, which is what Retired Navy had told us early that morning.

Next I returned a call from Eddie Waimrin, our Egyptian-born patrol sergeant. He told me that the accent on the taped call to headquarters was probably Saudi. He said the speaker was almost certainly foreign-born. I asked him to put out feelers for Saudi men who drove red Ferraris, on the not-so-off chance that the caller was Mr Red Ferrari himself.

‘I know one for sure,’ he said. ‘Sanji Moussaraf, a student here at State. Big oil family in Saudi Arabia. Big, big dollars. Popular kid. I’ve got his numbers for you.’

‘Maybe you should talk to him first,’ I said.

Three of the nineteen September 11 hijackers were living here when the doomed jets took off. One of the hijackers had inquired about attending a flight school here. Several of the first arrests in connection with that attack were made right here in San Diego – two of the arrested men were held for nearly three years before being deported in 2004. There was some local trouble right after the suicide attacks, too – spray-painted insults on a local mosque, curses shouted at people who appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent, vandalism at restaurants and businesses, some very intense police questionings in the days and weeks that followed.

Eddie Waimrin – who speaks Egyptian, Arabic, Lebanese, French, and English – was often called in to conduct interviews and to translate words and customs. He came to this country when he was eleven years old, sent by his father to keep him from the strife and poverty of Egypt. Since then Eddie has brought his father, mother, and two sisters to the United States. He’s an outgoing officer, quick with a smile and active with the Police Union.

Since San Diego’s large Middle Eastern population has been watchful and very cautious ever since September 11, I didn’t want to spoil a good source if Eddie Waimrin had a better shot at getting information from him.

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he said.

I thanked him and punched off.

I was about to call Carrie Ann Martier when light suddenly hit my eyes and a woman’s voice came from the fog.

‘Brownlaw?’

I slid the phone onto my belt.

‘Robbie Brownlaw, Homicide?’

‘Put the light away.’

The beam clicked off and a woman stepped into the faint light of the pier lamps. She was small and pretty, mid-twenties. She had shiny straight blond hair not quite to her shoulders, and bangs. She wore a black down jacket over a white T-shirt, jeans and suede work boots. A small suede bag hung cross-shoulder so you couldn’t pull it off and run.

I showed her my badge and thanked her for coming. ‘You didn’t have to and I appreciate it.’

‘I don’t know if I can help you and I don’t have much time.’

‘We can walk,’ I said.

‘I’d rather not.’

‘Then we’ll stand. Did you see him night before last?’

‘We met here, at six-thirty.’

‘What was the purpose of the meeting?’

Carrie Ann Martier sighed and looked out at the surf. ‘Let’s walk.’

You couldn’t see the end of the pier in the fog. You couldn’t see the waves either but you heard them thrashing against the pilings underneath. I felt their strength and it unbalanced me in a way I did not enjoy. Overhead the light fixtures were studded with nails to keep the birds from nesting and the nails threw toothy shadows onto the stanchions. Through this joyless scenery walked Carrie Ann Martier, wholesome and fresh as a model for a vitamin supplement.

‘You know he was a detective for the Ethics Authority,’ said Carrie. ‘Well, a city employee was dating a friend of mine and my friend got beaten up. Pretty badly. This was a month ago. She wouldn’t file a complaint with the cops because she’s from a good family and the guy’s married. She didn’t want the scandal. I took one look at her and went to Garrett because he’s a watchdog, right? I talked to him. Someone had to. Two days later she received four thousand dollars in cash, a very nice set of pearl earrings and a note of apology in her P.O. box. Garrett told her that the jerkoff had “listened to reason.”’

‘Who’s the employee?’

‘Steven Stiles, the councilman’s aide.’

I remembered the name from Garrett’s handwritten notes.

‘And your friend?’

‘Ellen Carson.’

I didn’t remember hers.

‘Were you a witness?’

‘No. I saw her after it happened. Bad.’

We continued out over the invisible ocean. There were a few bait fishermen with their rods propped on the railing and their lines disappearing into the fog. I could feel the tiny drops of moisture on my face. A fish slapped in a plastic bucket.

‘Tell me more about Ellen,’ I said. ‘What does she do? What’s her profession?’

Carrie Ann Martier, hunched into her jacket, took a long and sharp look at me. I could see that she was deciding something. ‘She’s a student at UCSD. And a working girl, part-time. High end, fast dollars.’

‘Which is how she met—’

‘Stiles.’

‘Are you a student, too?’

‘English major, prelaw. And no, I’m not a working girl. I do proof-reading for McGrew & Marsh here in San Diego – we publish automotive-repair books.’

I watched the red squares of deception tumble from Carrie Ann Martier’s mouth. I’d already guessed that she was ‘Ellen,’ but it was nice to get a second opinion.

‘Those are good books on car repair,’ I said. ‘I bought the Volkswagen one years ago. The proofreading was excellent.’

‘Oh. Good.’

‘What was your meeting with Garrett about?’

‘A videodisc. Evidence of other men enjoying the company of Ellen and some of her coworkers. It was the third collection Ellen had given me for Garrett.’

‘How many other men?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve never seen them.’

More red squares, bobbing in the air between us. I was barely aware of them. But I was very aware that Garrett’s interest in the videodisc could only mean one thing. ‘City people?’

She nodded. ‘That’s what Ellen and her friends say. All sorts – City Hall, cops, fire, politicians, administrators. And also the guys who do business with the city – contractors, service people, company owners.’

‘That’s a bomb waiting to go off.’

‘I think it did, with Garrett. That’s why I agreed to meet you.’

‘I need to talk to Ellen,’ I said.

‘No. She can’t risk that. It’s your job to put people like her in jail. She did her part for you, Mr Brownlaw. Don’t ask for more.’

‘I don’t care what Ellen does in her spare time. I care who killed Garrett Asplundh and I need to talk to her.’

She fixed me with a cool stare. Funny how she could appear so clean and fresh, but hard. ‘I knew you’d pull that.’

‘It worked on you once,’ I said. ‘And maybe it will work on you again because you liked Garrett. And you knew he was a good man trying to do the right thing and it probably got him killed.’

‘My time is valuable. Are you prepared to pay me for it?’

‘No.’

‘Garrett Asplundh did.’

I had to dodge the red squares.

I smiled at her because I really admire hustlers. Something about the courage to tell a lie and not know if you can get away with it. You run across some great hustlers in fraud, which I enjoyed immensely. Maybe because I could never tell the smallest fib without my face lighting up. Mom and Dad would just laugh and shake their heads.

‘Actually, he didn’t pay you for your time, Ellen.’

Her stare went from cool to cold. ‘Fuck yourself, cop.’

‘Well, okay. But what’s the difference between talking to Garrett and talking to me? Besides that someone blew his brains out two nights ago after he met with you?’

‘He was cute and sad and a totally great guy.’

I thought about that. ‘I’m not cute or great, but I’m sad sometimes. One out of three, though, that’s three-thirty-three, and if the Padres could—’

‘I hate people like you.’

I shrugged but didn’t take my eyes off her because I figured she might make a break for it.

‘Look, Carrie,’ I said. ‘Or Ellen or Marilyn or Julie – I don’t care what your name is. I don’t care how you make a living, though I hope you get health care and a decent retirement plan.’

She sighed, pulled her little suede bag around and unzipped it. ‘Your judgment means nothing to me. I do the same thing your wife does but I get paid cash up-front and I can say no anytime I want.’

‘Oh, man, do I have to respond to that?’

Her lips began a smile.

‘Help me out here,’ I said. ‘Help Garrett.’

‘Okay, o-fucking-kay. Just get me out of this fog and buy me drink, will you? I’m freezing. And to tell you the truth, maybe I need to talk to a cop.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’m really kinda scared, Robbie.’

She pulled a pack of smokes from her little bag, offered one to me. I shook my head.

‘Light?’ she asked.

‘Sorry.’

‘Men were better in old movies.’

‘Our stock is down.’

‘Then, here. Learn something useful.’ She pulled a lighter from her bag and held it out to me.

I smiled but didn’t move.

‘What?’ she asked. ‘What’s so funny?’

‘Okay, whoever you are. I’ll learn something useful.’

I walked to her slowly but grabbed her wrist fast and gave it enough of a turn to smart.

She yelped.

The lighter fell to the wooden beams of the pier and I watched it roll to a stop. She watched it too.

I picked it up and she didn’t try to kick me and run. Sure enough, it was a lighter. But the other end was a pepper sprayer. I’d heard about them from some of the Vice officers.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s get that drink. I’ll drive.’

She flexed her wrist. ‘I wasn’t going to use that on you. Swear to God, man—’

‘I think you were.’

‘Give it back.’

‘I’ll give it back later.’

‘Garrett would have lit my cigarette.’

‘Maybe that’s why he’s dead.’

At the Beachside she drank Irish coffees and I had a beer. I asked her what her name was and she said Carrie Ann Martier worked just fine. She said she grew up in San Diego, rich family, though her father was a bastard and her mother was kind but insane.

‘Schizophrenia, with a paranoid subtype,’ she said. ‘Not a good combo when you’re married to a sneak like him.’

She told me Steven Stiles, an aide to Ninth District Councilman Anthony Rood, had punched her in the body twice and stiffed her because he couldn’t get it up. This was back in February. Two bruised ribs – he really laid into her. His wedding band had scraped her skin, which she found ‘highly ironic,’ along with the fact that it was the day before Valentine’s Day. She leaned toward me and waited until I leaned toward her.

‘And, Mr Brownlaw,’ she whispered, ‘nobody treats Carrie Ann Martier like that.’

She said that after getting hit, her ribs had tensed with pain every time she breathed or talked. Laughing was worse, but sneezing and coughing took the cake. She missed two weeks of work. She told me she’d gone to Garrett because Garrett wasn’t a cop and she knew he’d be interested in city employees and contractors buying girls. She wasn’t about to go to the police and she still was not willing to file a criminal complaint, though her ribs still hurt every time someone told her a good joke, which wasn’t often.

She said she’d made the discs for Garrett with a video cam hidden in her flop. She used a room at the Coronado Oceana Hotel, had ‘good relationships’ with security out there. Two girlfriends had similar recording setups, not because Stiles had beat them too, but because they were ‘pissed off at Jordan’ and thought they should be able to show a solid connection between Jordan’s phone calls, which they’d recorded on the sly, with actual men paying for actual sex.

‘Tell me about Jordan,’ I said.

‘You don’t know anything, do you?’

I shook my head. Actually, I knew a little. Vice had been working up a case against Jordan Sheehan for months.

Jordan was the ‘Squeaky Clean Madam,’ said Carrie. She got the name because years ago she actually started a maid service called that. She had made some good money, gotten popped for illegals, labor violations, and back taxes. She did her time, and when she got out she discovered that sex paid more than custodial skills and she didn’t even have to buy mops and vacuums if her girls were pretty enough. Now she ran fifty or sixty girls, more for conventions and special events like the Super Bowl. She had some kind of investment-counseling business as a cover, some fakey name like Sheehan & Associates or something. She had associates, all right. Jordan’s girls dressed like corporate receptionists, they looked like the girl next door, they had to have good manners and pretty smiles, and they cost a lot. Hotels couldn’t even spot them if they rotated right. Pure class and plenty of rules, she said – nothing kinky, nothing rough, no toys, no drugs, no pain or threesomes. Never in a car. They were not allowed to wear risqué clothing. No ‘CFM shoes’ and no pierced body parts except the ears. No swearing, no smoking. No girls over thirty. Every girl had a pager. You never talked to Jordan because the madam was like the top of a pyramid and beneath her were the ‘spot callers’ who told you when and who the John was. Jordan lined them up by the dozen. She had this way about her, pure and simple. Jordan owned men. Jordan could turn a priest into a paying customer in five minutes. The girls did their own marketing, too; they didn’t just wait around for the pager to go off. Jordan told them to drive VW Cabriolet convertibles so the guys could get a look at them. The fleet manager at Mission Center VW was a friend of Jordan’s and would make them deals on the Cabriolets. It was just automobile advertising, like for pizza or exterminators, only for women. Jordan got the idea from Ida Bailey, the old madam in the Gaslamp who used to parade her girls around in carriages so the guys could see the choices and pick. So you got fifty total foxes zooming around San Diego, and guess what happens when you whistle or wave, man, they pull right over and make you a deal. An hour later you’re a grand poorer but you’ve been Squeaky Cleaned. Jordan got four hundred per contact, the ‘meet tax.’ The girls got what they bargained for over that. A thousand was ‘industry standard’ for a Squeaky Clean but sometimes you had to take less. If you were with a city guy, one of Jordan’s ‘special clients,’ then you got a lot less, just the tip, but some Johns thought twenty bucks was a tip. If you tried to cheat on the meet tax Jordan had this huge guy called Chupa Junior with a tiny shaved head and tats all over him and he is not nice. Why cheat though? Could make an easy thousand plus on your lunch hour – you’d be surprised how good lunchtime could be – and afternoons, too, with the flex hours a lot of men worked. And a good night you got home before the sun came up with three or four grand in your purse, sometimes more.

‘Except me,’ she said. ‘I go straight to the ATM and deposit my winnings. That’s where the trouble starts for working girls – they spend faster than they save and some nights you don’t work at all. Sometimes a whole week you won’t work. But you wouldn’t believe the stuff they buy. Jewelry and electronics and clothes and trips and dope – they party like crazy when they’re off duty, just like everybody else. But not Carrie Ann Martier. Nope. I shop catalogs for my work clothes because I look good in anything. I shop Costco for bulk stuff because I’m sole proprietor of my own business. I happen to think that’s funny. And so what if I have two gallons of hair conditioner under the sink? I’m saving for a place in Maui and I’m going to get it before I’m thirty. I am going to get it. After that, it’s aloha Squeaky Clean Madam. I’m leaving the life. I’m going to surf and garden and learn to make my own sushi.’

‘Wow, that’s quite a plan,’ I said. ‘Good luck.’

She shrugged and a faraway look came to her eyes, which were blue. ‘Whatever.’

‘No, I really mean it.’

She studied me. ‘I think you’d pop me in a second if you could get a raise or a promotion out of it.’

I sipped the beer. She had a point, though it had nothing to do with money or status. The law was just the law. Sometimes a cop could look the other way, for the greater good, you know. Sometimes not. I thought back to the white VW Cabriolet I’d seen outside Stella Asplundh’s place and the red one coming from the HTA parking lot earlier that day. Both driven by attractive young women.

‘Why were your friends mad at Jordan?’

‘For raising their meet tax to six hundred.’

‘Why’d she do that?’

‘To make room for the younger girls. The younger ones get a little lower contact charge to get them started and locked in. Young is what the Johns want. Cost of business goes up the older you get. Six, seven, eight hundred per meet. Pretty soon you’re either working all for Jordan or you’re not working.’

‘So you and your friends sneak the videos and make some discs. You give copies to Garrett for his investigation because you got beat up by a politician’s aide and Garrett has made it right for you. But what about the two other girls? What were they going to do with their copies? Blackmail Squeaky Clean for the higher taxes?’

‘It isn’t blackmail if you’re being ripped off.’

I thought about two young working girls trying to run a hustle on their own madam. It sounded perilous. ‘Does Jordan know about the videos?’

‘She couldn’t. If Jordan even suspected we’d done that, she’d have pulled the plug on us by now – she’d never call. Or worse.’

‘Chupa Junior?’

She looked at me and drank the last of her second Irish coffee. ‘Yeah. There’s talk. Always talk, you know? Then something happens. One day a girl is working, then she’s gone. Maybe she crossed Jordan. Shorted her one too many times. Tried to get the Johns calling her direct. Made a scene. Disappointed or pissed off somebody important. Chupa shows up here. Chupa shows up there. Like something out of a nightmare. It makes you wonder.’

‘Have you ever met Jordan Sheehan?’

‘Not face-to-face. Not many of the girls have, unless she recruited them personally. Those are mostly the spot callers. Maybe that’s why Squeaky Clean is still in business. She lives in La Jolla somewhere, running her little investment company. Ha, ha.’

‘How old are you?’

‘Why?’

‘I’m curious,’ I said.

‘Trying to figure what I’m worth?’ She squared her shoulders, frowned, and shook her head once. Her shiny blond hair flared with light, then settled back into place.

‘I’m twenty-nine,’ I said.

‘You’re not selling.’

‘That must be kind of weird. Selling yourself. I don’t mean any offense by that.’

‘You can’t offend me, Robbie. You’ll wear out someday, too. We’ll both end up in the same trash pile.’

I thought about that, about everybody ending up in the same condition. I’d often had that thought and could never figure out if it was a reason to cry or to smile until I was thrown from the Las Palmas. Somewhere on the way down I realized that the fact that you’re going to die is a reason to smile. Every second you live, you’re getting away with the biggest prize there is.

‘You look familiar,’ she said. ‘TV or something?’

‘No.’

‘Magazine?’

‘No.’

‘I’ve seen you. I’m sure.’

‘A lot of people think that. I’ve got a common face. Sorry.’

She looked at me hard again and nodded. She began a smile, then turned it off.

‘I can take you back to your car,’ I said. I paid up and we walked into the foggy night.

‘I checked you out with the PD. And with some of my friends who do a little business with the PD once in a while. You came back clean. Bet you never thought a whore would run a check on you, but I didn’t know what I was going to run into on that pier tonight. Maybe someone who enjoyed Squeaky Clean girls. Maybe someone who knew what Garrett had. Maybe they figured I’d be better off quiet, too. That would make one less person to tell this wretched little story.’

I liked the way Carrie Ann Martier, or whoever she was, tried to take care of herself. I liked her aloneness and her bravery. Her foolishness worried me.

‘Don’t try to run a number on Squeaky Clean,’ I said, ‘You can’t win.’

‘I’m not suicidal.’ ‘Why don’t you just get out of this business?’

‘Stay off my side, Robbie.’

I drove us back to the pier. It wasn’t more than

a few blocks. The acrylic-surfboard sculpture still glowed in the darkness, its colors dampened by the fog. I could tell that Carrie Ann was looking at my profile, trying to locate a memory to go with it.

Her car was a yellow VW Cabriolet convertible, in keeping with her employer’s wishes.

‘When do I get my lighter back?’

I dug it out of my coat pocket and gave it to her.

‘You remind me of Garrett,’ she said.

‘I’m not cute and sad and a totally great guy.’

‘Yes you are. Even if you did get thrown out of that hotel. You lied to me. You’re the Falling Detective. You’re famous.’

6

Gina didn’t come to the door when I walked in. Lots of lights on, but no music. No sounds from the back. No smell of cooking. The house had an odd feel, like something had changed. I stood in the living room for a moment.

‘Gina?’

I hustled into the bedroom but she wasn’t there. The bed was made and it almost never was. There was an envelope on my pillow and a letter inside. I read in Gina’s cheerful, big-looped handwriting:

Dear Robbie,

This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I hate myself and you deserve an explanation. I feel like my heart is shrinking down to almost nothing and I don’t know why. I often feel so unhappy. I do love you. It’s not that I don’t. But I need some space right now, so I’m with friends from Sultra. I need some time to think and to work through the problems inside me. I wish I could take out the unhappy parts and fix them and put me back together whole and happy like when we first got married. Hard to believe that was five years ago, isn’t it? I’m going to come back tomorrow while you’re at work to get a few more things. Please don’t come by the salon looking for me. I think I’d just cry and make an even bigger mess of things and if Chambers saw that he might toss me out and get someone lower maintenance. You know how Chambers is. I drove through Taco Bell so there’s two tacos and a Burrito Grande in the fridge for you. You got a little box of fishing stuff from The Fly Shop so maybe that will help take your mind off things. It’s on the kitchen table. I’m sorry I’m putting you through this. I’m so, so, so, so sorry. Maybe someday we’ll still be the best friends in the world and we’ll look back at this and laugh.

Love,

Gina

I stood there and read it two more times. The very first thing I thought was what a surprise this was. What a huge and horrible surprise.

My second thought was no. This was not a surprise at all. You saw this coming. You knew something was wrong and you did nothing about it.

I lay down on our bed and wrapped her pillow around my head. Clamped my arms across it. Listened to the throb of blood in my ears and smelled her perfume and imagined her face. For a long moment I felt like I was falling from the Las Palmas again, only slower.

‘No,’ I said. ‘This cannot happen.’

I jerked upright, sat there for another minute, then tossed the pillow against the wall.

I called Rachel and got her machine. I said if Gina was there, I wanted her to know I loved her and understood how she felt and was looking forward to talking to her about it. I tried to think of something optimistic and soothing to say before I hung up but I couldn’t think of anything except I love you and don’t worry, Gina, we’ll get over this hump.

I opened a bottle of brandy we’d gotten for Christmas one year and poured a coffee cup almost full. I forced down a couple of big gulps, then poured the rest down the drain and opened a beer.

I put the dinner Gina had gotten me in the microwave and mistakenly set it for two hours instead of for two minutes. By the time I realized what I’d done, it was severely overheated. It sat before me on the breakfast-nook table billowing steam and bubbling. I thought of calling my buddy Paul, but he was working swing shift, repaving Interstate 5 up near Carlsbad. I thought this would be a good time to have a brother or a sister.

I thought of calling my mother and father but didn’t want to make them anxious about a misunderstanding. They lived down in El Cajon, just east of San Diego. My father is a sales representative for Pacifi-Glide, a subsidiary of Great West Consolidated. They manufacture sliding tub and shower doors. My mother has worked as a secretary in the San Diego School District for twenty-four years, ever since I started kindergarten. They’re not old people, but I saw no reason to upset and alarm them. My father had a heart attack last year, though it was considered minor and stress-related. Besides, things between Gina and me were going to work out. Why get other people worried?

After dinner I sat at my table in the cold garage and tried to tie some flies. But I kept wondering why Gina was so unhappy, and I couldn’t concentrate on the tiny hooks and feathers. How long had this been happening? Five years ago, when we first got married, she was happy. She was only nineteen then, but she was almost through the College of Beauty and had a job waiting for her when she got out. I was twenty-four and had just started working fraud. We got married in June at the Pala Mission out on Highway 76, because Gina is Catholic and St Agnes Church in San Diego was booked up that day. We rented a place here in Normal Heights and all we did for two straight years was work hard, party, and make love. Between her friends and mine we always had something fun to do. Sometimes I might have spoiled things for Gina’s crowd because they wanted to do drugs. I didn’t mind but I didn’t want to watch them do it or see them drive a vehicle while acutely impaired. Rachel would occasionally pass joints under my nose and smile tauntingly, but mostly she pretended I wasn’t there. I tried to take up cigarettes as a way of fitting in but they made my mouth and fingers stink. Most of Gina’s friends were pretty and nice. In general, hairstylists are a talkative people. They are curious and have an eye for the unusual. They don’t stick closely to the facts. They are tremendous gossips. Many of the men were gay, though not all of them.

I sat there at my fly-tying table, drinking another beer, fingering the new packets of feathers. The new #3 Metz Brown Capes looked good, though I would have liked the higher-quality #1. Cops are always on a budget, unless they’re on the take. I dropped them back to the tabletop, shut off the garage light, and went back into the empty house.

So when did it start to go wrong?

I remembered a night about a year ago, when Gina had discouraged me from going to a party with her. It was a loft party in Little Italy thrown by a producer of surfing movies. She came home just before daylight. She was jittery and chilled in her flimsy clothes and I could tell she’d taken some kind of stimulant, which she denied. I wondered why someone as chipper and verbal as Gina would want more stimulation. I made her some herbal tea and as she sat at the table I wrapped a blanket over her shoulders. She threw it off and said, You’re smothering me don’t smother me, don’t smother me. She stormed off to the shower and when she came out, told me she only meant smothering her with the blanket. We made incredible love, one of our top ten, at least for me. She was extraordinarily passionate and cried after. I think she had begun to slip away.

Later that morning at roll call I overheard some of the night-shift patrol talking about the party at the movie producer’s loft in Little Italy. ‘Babes and buns and boobs all over the place,’ is how one patrolman put it, out of earshot of our female officers. They’d shaken down some of the louder partiers on the street outside, popped one for coke, one for ecstasy, and one for Mexican brown heroin. Hey, Brownlaw, isn’t your wife a redhead that cuts hair downtown?

Since then, scenes similar to the smother scene have played out more than once. I admit it. None has been quite as surprising as that first one, and our reunifying lovemaking happens less often. But Gina and I are durable. We’ve always eased back together from these sudden fights and everything is fine for a long time. We have never slept in separate beds except for two nights when she visited her parents in Nevada.

So tonight would be a first.

I thought about Gina while I rinsed the dishes. Thought about her while I showered. Thought about her while I drove to the store for a six-pack and some pretzels. When I couldn’t think about her anymore, I got the Asplundh murder book from the trunk of my take-home and sat at the breakfast table.

First I leafed through the Hidden Threat Assessment of Garrett Asplundh. Although the HTA report was 180 pages long and contained the names of hundreds of people, living and dead, who had had contact with Garrett Asplundh, no one, including Garrett, had set off a ‘Threat Alarm’ on the HTA software.

A fuzzy picture emerges when thousands of facts about a person are collected but given no real degree of importance. It’s like cutting a photograph of someone’s face into small pieces and arranging the pieces at random. I learned, for instance, that Asplundh had had a hernia operation at the age of six and that his twice-divorced surgeon had filed bankruptcy a decade before the operation. I learned that Garrett had gone to the University of Michigan on a football scholarship. He played safety and was later drafted by the Detroit Lions but never signed. And I learned that the pool in which his only child drowned had been built by a company owned by a man named Myron Franks. Franks’s son, Lyle, was a convicted felon in the state of Arizona – attempted murder.

93I was interested to find on page 156 that then

– Vice detective Garrett Asplundh had arrested Jordan Sheehan for drunk driving way back in 1990. Fifteen years ago. He was also listed as a visitor at the Federal Women’s Detention Center in Westmoreland, where Sheehan had done time for tax evasion.

I was also interested to see that Garrett had interviewed for a job with the DEA in Miami roughly one year before he interviewed for his job with the Ethics Authority here in San Diego. Both interviews had been with John Van Flyke.

I found out that Garrett’s older brother, Samuel Asplundh, was a special agent assigned to the FBI office in Los Angeles and that he had been Garrett’s best man at his marriage to Stella.

All interesting, but I believed that the motive for Garrett’s murder lay somewhere in his recent work, not in his past. So I forced myself to read through the pages, searching for something that might shed light.

I learned many facts but nothing jumped out at me.

I kept thinking about the eight hundred dollars a month that Garrett Asplundh had been paying to Uptown Property Management. I had already made a noon appointment with Al Bantour, the manager of Uptown. If Garrett Asplundh was paying eight hundred a month for what I thought he was – a small, secret place, off the radar of anyone he knew – maybe I could find the discs he’d been given by Carrie Ann Martier, and the intelligence he’d gathered on the city’s wayward personnel, and the laptop issued by the Ethics Authority.

I thought that Garrett knew his shooter. I thought Garrett had agreed to meet him – or her – and while he was waiting, he was taken out. I thought the shooter’s name would be right there, in the trail of Garrett’s recent investigations. I thought of what Stella had said when we asked about enemies.

Hundreds.

I closed the murder book, wondering if Carrie Ann Martier was working right now.

At midnight I walked around the house. I grew up in this home, so every space and corner is packed with memories. Gina and I were very fortunate to be able to buy it from my parents several years ago, before the real estate market really topped out. We couldn’t have done it without my folks’ help – they wanted a low-maintenance condominium, so they made us a good deal and carried the paper at a low interest rate. It’s small and old but in good repair because both my father and I are handy with household tools. It’s grown in value.

Our Normal Heights neighborhood is fairly nice and convenient. It got its name from a teachers college, or normal school, that used to be here. I went to elementary and junior high just a few blocks away. Hit my first home run at the Little League field. Hung out with Gary and Jim and Rick. Fell in love with Linda when I was ten and Kathy when I was eleven and Janet when I was thirteen. They all lived within a mile. After Gina and I were married she lobbied hard for a high-rise condo downtown by the bay, but the rents are astronomical down there. The one she wanted was twenty-eight hundred a month. The rent on our first place here in Normal Heights was fourteen hundred plus gas and electric but you got trash pickup and a garage. Two years later I was happy to buy my childhood home, though I understood Gina’s lack of enthusiasm. It is not a high-rise by the bay.

I tried to imagine this place without Gina in it and it was difficult because I knew that she would come back and we would take care of whatever was bothering her. Gina teases me sometimes about trying to fix the unfixable. Once I dropped a dinner plate, which shattered badly, but I glued it back together. It took hours, gathering the shards and wondering which tiny triangle or sliver fits with another. The repaired plate was ugly and incomplete and useless and really kind of funny. Actually, it worked okay collecting runoff under a potted plant out on the back patio.

Gina called around one o’clock. She was crying and I had trouble making sense of what she said except that she was sorry. I told her I would come get her but she refused to tell me where she was. I heard no voices or noise in the background. She sounded very alone.

She said she was sorry again, and then she hung up.

7

The man who threw me out of the Las Palmas Hotel is named Vic Malic and he lives in a rented room in the Gaslamp Quarter. It’s not far from the former Las Palmas, which was rebuilt as an Execu-Suites.

After his arrest Vic was overwhelmed with grief at what he’d done and he waived his right to a trial, pleading down to charges of aggravated assault, arson, public endangerment, larceny, and destruction of property.

He was somber and repentant during the proceeding and he explained himself with apparent honesty. He had been under terrible stress at the time. He was recently separated from his wife of six months, had gone bankrupt, and had just been denied his World Wrestling Federation certification, which would have allowed him to work. Apparently he had hurt a fellow wrestler during his tryout match, resulting in an unofficial black-balling of his career. He was down to his last sixty dollars. He had consumed nearly a liter of gin on the day he set the hotel on fire. He had no idea the natural gas submain that ran behind the sixth-floor rooms would blow. He had fully intended to jump out his window when the flames got bad enough but he had lost his courage after seeing me rip through the awning below. A suicide note had supported his story. In the end Vic had walked downstairs, looked down at me, and surrendered to a fireman.

I noticed him in the courtroom one day at lunch. The deputies had legcuffed him to a table in Courtroom Eight, then gone off to have lunch in the cafeteria. This was an accepted practice until a man on trial for stabbing a fourteen-year-old girl to death had slipped out of his cuffs and walked outside a free man. Now the San Diego accused are never left alone at lunch.

Anyway, I was walking by the courtroom and saw him through the door window, examining a sandwich that looked tiny in his huge hand. I went in and Vic hung his head and tried to turn away, though the leg cuffs didn’t leave him much wiggle room. It was my first time alone with him. I wasn’t sure what I was going to say, and the huge fury I had hoped to feel never came to me.

We talked for just a minute. It was very strange to be close to him again, close to that face that had been burned into my memory in such vivid detail. For a moment I smelled fire, and my heart beat wildly. He could hardly look at me. He asked if I could ever forgive him and I said sure, I forgive you right now, for whatever it’s worth.

‘I’ve got no grudge,’ I said. ‘But you shouldn’t take out your problems on other people. Even a child knows that.’

He was shaking his head, still looking down. ‘No. No, I’ll never do that again. I swear to God. Never, ever.’

When he told me that, it was approximately two months after throwing me from the window. And when he spoke, his words were accompanied by an outpouring of pale blue ovals. Since the fall I had been seeing a lot of pale blue ovals when people spoke and I was just beginning to understand that they meant sincerity.

So I believed him. I also know that insane people can be very believable and there was some doubt as to Vic Malic’s sanity. Two psychiatrists gave depositions, one for and one against him, but the actual condition of Vic’s mental health remained vague and disputed.

The next day, by coincidence, I had to be in court on another case. I’d bought a roach-coach burrito and was looking for a place to eat it in private and walked by Courtroom Eight to find Vic chained to the table again, fiddling with another tiny sandwich. So we had lunch together. He was an oddly gentle conversationalist, very curious and nonjudgmental. We talked mostly about the pro-wrestling circuit and his hope of getting that certification someday. Vic had begun a fitness program in his cell and he was already up to a thousand sit-ups and five hundred push-ups a day. He looked strong.

During the hearing, old Judge Milt Gardner listened with his usual wrinkled calm. Vic’s public defender noted that there was no loss of life, only two minor injuries besides my own – which was, thank God, far less damaging than it first appeared – and the aging, long-out-of-code Las Palmas was actually being wooed by Execu-Suites at the time of the fire. Vic’s apology to me and the court was lengthy and very moving. He said so many nice things about me I sort of wished he would stop. Gardner questioned Vic in depth, and I never sensed dishonesty in him. I never saw any shapes and colors that didn’t match his words.

Vic was given seven years in the state prison up in Corcoran. A few months in, he helped expose a ring of correctional officers who were staging fights between the inmates and betting on them. As an almost-professional wrestler Vic was heavily pressured to fight, but he turned state’s witness instead. It was an ugly story, went on for weeks, made the papers and TV.

He was released two and a half months ago, the day before Christmas, for good behavior and for helping to crack the fight ring.

I met Vic at the Higher Grounds coffee shop around the corner from his place. He lives on the fourth floor of his building, and though he’s invited me, I’ve never had the courage to go up and see how he lives. I like him, but I still can’t imagine being in the same room with him again, four stories up from the pavement. I’ve met him once a week for coffee, always on Fridays like today, for a couple of months now. It was Vic’s idea but I agreed to it. He needs me more than I need him and that’s okay, though we quickly run out of things to say.

‘Hello, Vic.’

‘Hi, Robbie, how’s it hangin’?’

‘The usual, you know.’

‘And how’s Gina?’

‘Great as ever.’

‘Tell her I said hi.’

Vic and Gina have never met but Vic always asks about her. I keep waiting for the red squares of deception or the black rhombuses of anger to spill out, but they never have.

I thought of Gina’s letter and the unhappiness and pain it contained.

‘How’s the book?’ I asked.

‘Sold eighteen this week.’

While in prison Vic wrote Fall to Your Life! It’s about his difficult life and how he turned it around after setting fire to the hotel and throwing me out the sixth-floor window. It’s all about having a can-do attitude. He self-published the book as soon as he was released and he sells it at the tourist places around town. He arrives in a sputtering ancient pickup truck with a small card table, a folding chair, a change box, and a box of books. The cover of the book is a picture of me falling from the hotel, used with the photographer’s permission. I appear oddly calm – faceup, legs and feet out, and though you can’t see my exact expression, I seem to be looking up at something small and puzzling.

I get uncomfortable looking at that picture. I’ve tried to imagine what I was thinking about when it was taken. But again, it all went by so quickly there’s no way to tell. I could have been thinking about anything from the way the back of my mother’s blouse used to crease in alternating directions as she walked away from the Normal Heights bus stop each morning, to the flag atop the bank building above me that was rapidly getting smaller as I fell, to my first Little League home run. Gina made me a copy of the video that was shown widely on local and national news, but I still hadn’t gotten up the courage to watch it. She has suggested more than once that viewing it might make me ‘whole’ again, but I honestly don’t want to see it. I’m not a hundred percent proud of some of the things I thought of on my way down and would prefer to keep those difficult memories to myself.

‘Here,’ he said.

‘No, I wasn’t—’

‘Come on, Robbie, I know you don’t need it, but take it.’

We agreed a month ago, when Vic started selling the books, that we’d share the proceeds. I told him I didn’t want money from his work, but he insisted and I could see that it was morally imperative for him to pay me. He suggested a seventy-five/twenty-five split, with the larger portion going to him. I figured that was fine since I didn’t want his money in the first place.

Fall to Your Life! sells for ten dollars even, so Vic handed me forty-five. Our best week, which coincided with a street fair in Little Italy, was one hundred and ten dollars. Seemed like everybody in San Diego bought his book that weekend.

He smiled.

‘Thanks, Vic.’

‘Well, you know. I still got NBC, the Union-Trib, and the Reader interested in doing a story on us. Esquire is a maybe.’

‘I’ve got nothing to tell them, Vic.’

‘I know. I respect that.’

‘Any word from the federation?’

‘I sent them the newspaper articles about me, so we’ll see. I think my publicity would be good for wrestling. You know, a guy getting his act together. They’re always looking for another angle.’

We took our coffees outside and stood by the brick wall. The cold front was still hovering over the city and the fog moved down Fourth Avenue like something dreamed. I looked north in the direction of the Salon Sultra then checked my watch. Gina would be coming in to work in just a few minutes.

‘Robbie, did you hear about the Ethics guy who got shot?’

‘It’s my case, Vic.’

‘Oh, man. A former cop. A city employee. Anything to do with a government agency is scary if you ask me.’

‘What have you heard?’

I asked because Vic lives downtown and he talks to a lot of people on the street, many of whom treat him like a celebrity. I’ve watched him from a distance, standing tall above his audience. They’re mostly the lost and lonely and destitute, but they’re an oddly curious bunch. They love to know and to pretend they know.

‘Micro says the guy busted him once.’

Micro is a small man named Mike Toner, who rotates between the homeless shelters and the jails and the churches and the sidewalks.

‘For what?’

‘Panhandlin’. Not really busted, just ran him off his corner. Micro recognized him from the picture in the paper. The guy, his daughter drowned and it ruined him.’

‘I guess that’s true,’ I said.

‘He shouldn’t have let that get him down,’ said Vic. ‘Look how you pulled yourself back up. And me.’

‘I’d rather get thrown out a window than have my little girl drown,’ I said. I don’t know how I knew this, not being a father, but I did.

Vic nodded, lost in thought. ‘I saw the Union-Trib article. It said there was a broken-down car, maybe a guy who saw something.’

I silently thanked George Schimmel. ‘We’re hoping someone will step forward. Keep your eyes and ears out, Vic.’

‘I’ll do anything to help you.’

A black VW Cabriolet convertible picked its way down the avenue. The top was down in the chill and the woman driving it wore a black leather coat. She had a string of pearls around her neck and a pair of dark sunglasses. She gave us a tired smile. I wondered what the life was like once you got past the cool clothes and cars – men, cash, rubbers, AIDS, drugs, danger, vice, jails, bonds, lawyers, madams, pimps, sleep all day, then do it again.

‘Seems like half the pretty women in San Diego drive those little convertibles,’ said Vic. ‘Man, they really get your attention.’

‘Yes, they do.’

I watched her drive away and thought again of Carrie Ann Martier and the place in Hawaii she was going to buy no matter how much it cost her.

‘Thanks for the royalty,’ I said.

‘Thanks for the coffee, Robbie.’

‘Next Friday?’

‘Sure. See you then. Robbie? You saved me, man. I love you. I really do.’

I walked north to Market then toward San Diego Bay. From half a block away I watched Gina go into the salon. Her head was down and her steps were quick and short. That made me feel slightly better. If she had come striding along the sidewalk, chin up and smiling at the world, I might have run down to the Execu-Suites, gone to the sixth floor, and jumped out again, away from the awning. Not really, but my heart hurt just watching her go through that door because I knew her heart hurt too.

I wanted to go after her but I didn’t. Sometimes, no matter how bad you want something, you just have to wait.

The Salon Sultra door is made of mirrored glass and when it closed behind her it completed the building’s larger reflection of Market Street and Gina was gone.

8

McKenzie met me outside Uptown Management over on Fifteenth. Al Bantour was a slender man in an old blue suit. Sixties, gray hair and eyes. He mouthed an unlit cigar and gave us a canny once-over as McKenzie explained what we needed. He smiled around the cigar, then explained that yes, Garrett Asplundh had a place at the Seabreeze Apartments down in National City. Too bad what happened. Garrett was the last guy in the world he thought would get murdered. When the cops are getting lulled it’s a bad situation, most bad. Bantour said the on-site manager at the Seabreeze was a guy named Davey, and Davey ought to have an extra key. Any problems, just call. Wasn’t I the guy who got thrown out of the hotel?

We headed down I-5. Light traffic and the fog still thick out over the ocean.

I told McKenzie about my meeting with Carrie Ann Martier, about the sex videos made for Garrett, the Squeaky Clean Madam, her spot callers, and the girls in convertibles. McKenzie shook her head and exhaled in disgust. She told me she’d run across Squeaky Clean Madam’s enforcer and he was a real cool guy.

‘Cool, like he’d cut your nipple halfway off to teach you respect,’ she said. ‘Cool, like he’d break some ribs and toss you into Glorietta Bay to watch you suffer. Six-four, three hundred. Half of him’s tattoo. One of those big dudes with too small a head but he shaves it anyway. He’s got a carjack crew that works San Diego and TJ, and he runs cockfights out in east county. And an occasional gig for Jordan Sheehan because he likes pretty girls. Chupa Junior. Short for chupacabra. And ‘Junior’ because his daddy was just like him.’

I’d heard tales of the chupacabra. It meant ‘goatsucker’ in Spanish. It was a vampirelike creature with huge red eyes and a row of spines down its back. They were reputed to stand five feet tall and suck the bodies of goats, sheep, and other animals almost completely dry.

I thought about Carrie Ann Martier versus three hundred pounds of Chupa Junior and hoped she wasn’t foolish enough to run a hustle on her boss. She couldn’t win that one.

I thought of Gina again. I imagined her at work now, standing beside her chair, arms raised, shears and comb in hand, snipping away. Last year for her birthday, I bought her a pair of Hikari Cosmos scissors, among the best money can buy. They had molybdenum-alloy blades that were said to be able to ‘melt’ through hair. The Rylon glides were for accuracy from pivot to point. They cost twelve hundred dollars. They fit her small hands particularly well without the inserts she sometimes had to use. I’d had them inscribed along the inside of the tang, which is where the cutter rests his or her finger. It said Hugs and Kisses, Me, though because of limited space the words were hard to read. She somehow left them at the Mick Jagger trimming up in Beverly Hills not long after. The next day she’d made a dozen phone calls to the hotel but had never gotten them back. She was crushed. She couldn’t believe she’d just forgotten to put them back into their case and box. I couldn’t either so I scanned eBay for them and sure enough, there they were, with ‘genuine hair from Mr Jagger.’ I tried to quickly trump all bids by offering five hundred dollars over the asking price of thirty-five hundred, so long as I could authenticate the engraving first. I was willing to travel at my own expense and would of course pay in cash. The owner of the shears and hair turned out to be in Culver City. When I got to a squalid apartment I felt bad for the young maid who had found or more likely stolen them. Her muscular husband suddenly demanded seven thousand so I thanked the woman, put the shears in my pocket, and headed for the door. When the husband charged me I finally lost the temper I’d been trying so hard to keep and I punched him sharply in the solar plexus, pulled his shirt over his head, and pushed him to the floor. He was balled up and gasping when I walked out. I’d committed more than one crime in all of this, including assault and battery, and I drove home to San Diego with my stomach in a knot.

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