"It'll all be in my report."
"This guy was a friend of mine." She smiled at him. "Do me the favor?"
He shrugged. "Sure." Tucked the card away, pulled a pair of clean latex gloves from his pocket, and went back to work.
She turned to find Jason Palmer at her elbow. "I thought I asked you to wait outside the tape."
He stared at her. "My brother. Is he… was he…" He looked at the wasted bar, back at her.
She opened her mouth, ready to go into her all-business rap – sorry for your loss, but I need to ask you a few questions – and instead found herself saying, in a soft voice, "I don't know for sure. I'm afraid so."
He seemed to droop, something giving way in his shoulders and neck. "They killed him." His voice thin. "Mikey, they killed you."
Cruz looked at him sharply. "Who killed him, Mr. Palmer?"
He put the back of his hand to his mouth like he was trying to keep from vomiting. "Those gangsters."
"Who?"
"I don't know. Soul Patch. The guy from… oh, Jesus. Michael." His face was pale. "I should have been there." He had the faraway look of a man seeing ghosts.
"Mr. Palmer." She put a hand on his arm. "I need you to focus."
He looked at her. Blinked a couple of times, shook his head. "Yeah. Okay." Blew out a breath, took another one in. "You were a friend of my brother's?"
She thought of sitting in Michael Palmer's bar with Galway, she and her partner listening as Palmer said that there were things going on in the neighborhood that were worse than anybody guessed, that the gangs were the tip of the iceberg. Saying that he would have proof soon. Calm and logical, with a polite kid and a history of community service. Not seeming even a little crazy.
But what she said to Jason was, "I knew him."
"So then you know about him and the gangs. That he was fighting them."
"Yeah."
"Good." His jaw set and posture grew rigid as he came into himself. "Good."
A thought occurred to her. In the mathematics of a crime scene, if spots equaled accelerant, and accelerant equaled arson, then accelerant with a body equaled homicide. Which meant she had no place here. Technically, her job was just to baby-sit Palmer until the detectives arrived, at which point they'd tell her to head back to the station and work on her damn database.
On the other hand, if this was a gang matter, no one could say it wasn't her case.
"You mentioned gangbangers." She jerked a thumb at a JJ Fish across the street. "Why don't you let me buy you lunch, tell me about them?"
"I…" He paused, looked back toward a storefront extensions place. "No, I can't. My nephew is here, and I'm worried."
She said, "You know how I made it sound like a choice?"
He said, "Yeah?"
She said, "It's not."
"This is the name of a doctor at UC Hospital, the ER." Cruz wrote on the back of her business card. "Tell him I sent you, he'll make time for your nephew today."
Jason reached across the table for it. "Thanks."
"No problem. You mentioned someone named 'Soul Patch'?"
"That's not his name. I mean, I don't know his name. That's just what I called him."
"Who is he?"
"I don't know. Some sort of gang member. Gangbanger, I guess you call them."
"How do you know him?"
"Yesterday he tried to kidnap me."
She sat quiet as he told the story, how he was jogging when a banger came at him with a gun, had tried to force Palmer into the car. How he'd gotten clear, and then come to make sure his big brother was okay. "You a martial-arts guy, take a lot of self-defense classes, that kind of thing?"
"Huh?"
"Well, I mean, you scuffle with two men, both of them armed, you get away…"
"I'm a soldier." His voice steady and maybe a little proud.
"What did these guys look like?"
"Black," he said, not African-American, and she liked that he didn't try to put on a show of how racially sensitive he was to impress the Latina. "One was maybe five and a half, stocky, weighed one-eighty or so. Wore a lot of gold. The one I called Soul Patch was about two inches shorter than me, and thin. He had tattoos on his arms and, well, a soul patch," holding his thumb and forefinger up to pinch his chin.
Which, between the two, described about half the boys in the Gang Intelligence files. "Anything notable about the tattoos?"
"I didn't get that good a look. A star with letters inside, maybe 'GD'?"
Gangster Disciples. She felt a quickening in her stomach. She had pictures of a lot of them. If he could ID the men who came for him, she could shut this thing fast, maybe earn her way off the database and back on the street. Plus get a little justice for Michael Palmer, with his good kid and his good handshake. "Would you recognize them?"
He nodded, looked out the window at the fire investigators picking through the ruins of the bar, lawnmowering back and forth like they were searching for a lost contact lens. "I never expected to see this again." His voice low and soft, like he didn't realize he was speaking.
"Again?" She looked up.
"I was in Afghanistan, and then Iraq." He picked up a fry, swirled it in ketchup like he was mixing paint on a palette. "When I first got there, I couldn't believe the destruction. Whole blocks of apartment complexes where the walls had been knocked out, you could see right into people's homes, their kitchens. A lot of the Humvees have mounted Mark-19s, that's a grenade launcher, and they just demo the shit out of a building. And these beautiful mosques. Once the insurgents figured out we were trying not to damage mosques, they started sniping at us from the towers. So we had to light them up too." He shook his head. Dropped the fry, picked up another, poked listlessly at the pile. "Everywhere you went there were these piles of rock and ash. Something was always burning. Always. IEDs, insurgent mortars, trash fires." His eyes seemed clouded. "I expected everyone would just, I don't know, drop to their knees. Stare. But they didn't. They went about their business while the world burned around them." He shrugged. "Get used to anything, I guess."
"You mind if I ask where you were last night?"
Palmer looked up, and she saw surprise in his eyes at the change of subject, but no flash of fear, no game face. "I was with someone."
"Girlfriend?"
"Just someone I met."
"You have a phone number?"
He shook his head. "Her name was Jackie. She said she was a hostess at Spring. You know the restaurant, North and Milwaukee?"
"Out of my price range." She sipped her godawful excuse for coffee. "Your brother have life insurance?"
"I don't know."
"You know it doesn't pay out on homicide?"
Palmer set down the fry he had been playing with, wiped grease on a napkin. Stared at her, unblinking. "I understand why you're asking. But I didn't kill my brother."
He wasn't the bad guy. Half her job was instinct, and she knew. Of course, it would be worth running down the girl to be certain. First thing you learned was that everybody lied. But he wasn't the bad guy.
Which left her with the gangbangers. "I need you to come to the station with me, look at some pictures. See if you can identify Soul Patch."
"Okay."
She nodded. "You drive, or you want to ride with me?"
"You mean now?"
She cocked an eyebrow.
"I can't." He leaned back. "My nephew. I told you, I want to get him out of here."
"Perfect. I want to talk to him, too."
"No way. He's in shock. No way."
"Mr. Palmer, I'm trying to solve your brother's murder. You can help. Don't you think Michael would want you to?"