Jaime Agoura managed a tire store in West Hollywood, and Virginia Agoura was a bank teller at the Wells Fargo on Sepulveda. The Agouras were struggling to get by and somehow managing. Their kids weren't exceptional, but they were good kids. And now this. Frank had seen the shock and disbelief a thousand times, the certainty that the cops standing in their doorway had to be mistaken, that it couldn't be their child.
By the time she slowed the treadmill, Frank's T-shirt was heavy with sweat. The machine always made her feel wobbly, so she dismounted carefully, letting the effect fade as she toweled off. She eyed the Soloflex and thought about skipping it. Instead she straddled the seat and briefly worked her torso. She'd do arms and legs tomorrow. Right now she was ready for a beer.
The beer and a warm shower made Frank sleepy, but she sat on the kitchen counter in her pajamas and chugged another bottle, flipping through the paper. After years of nightmares and insomnia, Frank had hit on a formula that usually guaranteed sleep: brutally long hours on the job, hard work in the gym, and a specific blood alcohol level. Though she was tired, she wasn't about to start tampering with the combination.
When Noah poked his head in Frank's office the next morning, he could tell his boss had already been there for a while. She looked up, saw him grinning at her, and sat back.
"What's up?" she yawned.
"Looks like you've been."
Frank's hair was dry where it touched her collar in a sharp line, but it was still damp where her sunglasses held it away from her face. She was wearing a V-neck sweater over a button-down shirt and her sleeves were shoved over her elbows. That usually happened after at least her third cup of coffee.
"How long you been here?"
Frank ignored the question, holding up the LA. Times instead.
"See we made the third page of the Metro section?"
"Yeah. The eleven o'clock news, too. 'Racially motivated attack.’ Jesus. Like we don't have enough trouble already. RHD on this yet?"
Frank shook her head and swung her polished loafers onto a corner of the desk. RHD was the LAPD Robbery-Homicide Division. They handled the more sensitive cases, the ones they thought the average homicide dick was too stupid to work properly. Frank hated it when they snagged her cases, and she was damned if she was going to let them have this one. Though she knew she'd be powerless to stop them if they wanted it.
"I'll work Fubar to stave them off, but I don't think it's a big deal yet. You going to run the boyfriend?"
"Yeah, first thing. Him and her savings account, make sure her money's where it should be."
"Good. We need to go to the school, talk to people there. I want to talk to people across the street, too, and get back to Culver City, talk to the girlfriends."
"Okay. I got a wit coming in at nine to sign a statement."
Frank nodded and bent back over the stack of reports on her desk. Everyone was in the cramped squad room by 6:20. The morning meetings always started late because one of the detectives, Jill Symmonds, was chronically late. It was a condition the squad had gotten used to.
After the briefing, Frank stayed to talk with Jill and her partner, Bobby Taylor. Bobby looked a lot like Johnnie, only black.
Both men were tall, big-chested and broad-shouldered. In college, Bobby played fullback and Johnnie had been a linebacker, but where Bobby had stayed rock-hard, Johnnie was running to fat.
Frank appraised Jill and asked, "Hey, Fire Truck, you going to make it a couple more weeks?"
She was seven months pregnant and her huge belly looked out of place on her slight frame. Jill nodded her bright auburn head. She was going out on maternity leave soon and Bobby would be partnerless. Frank talked about their caseload. She didn't want Jill to be the primary on any new cases. She'd pick up slack for Bobby unless Fubar drummed up another body. Not likely, though. The LAPD was notoriously short-handed, and the workload left by a vacancy was usually distributed among the remaining employees. At Figueroa the detectives were already handling more than twice, sometimes more than three times the average yearly caseload. The burnout rate among regular detectives was high enough; at Figueroa it was off the charts. Frank knew she had a pretty good squad and she was determined to hold it together, even if that meant shouldering much of the load herself.
Sitting at the desk next to Bobby's, a red-haired detective who could have passed for Jill's father chimed in, "Hey, Freek, who's gonna pick up slack for Nookey when I leave?"
Peter Gough was fifty-six years old and should have been long retired. Ironically, it was Peter who had given Frank her nickname during her first week on the job. Gough had been a sergeant in the Newton Division when Frank and her partner had responded to a B&E he'd called in. He took one look at Franco and asked her partner, "Where's your sidekick?"
Her partner, as disgusted with female patrol cops as Gough was, spat bitterly, "She's it. Meet L.A. Franco."
"L.A.?" Gough had puzzled. "What the hell sorta name is that?"
"She says it's Dutch or something and that I wouldn't remember even if she did tell me."
With a cold appraisal Gough had concluded, "L.A. Freako's more like it, you ask me."
Her partner had laughed, and the name stuck. During the disco era there was a popular song that referred to "le Freak" and her name metamorphosed into that. Later, when she was commanding her own squad and it became clear to her detectives that she wasn't just another stat-gathering bureaucrat, her name evolved again. Frank's reputation for independence, plus presumption about her sexual preferences, created a play on words meaning she was on her own frequency, tuned in to a different radio band. Since then she was La Freek or Lt. Freek.
Gough had been flirting with burnout even then, and now he was completely fried. He'd had it with police work, wanting only to tend to his garden and start a specialty nursery. Dan Nukisona was the partner Gough had worked with for the last six years. Nookey was only a little younger than Gough, but he wouldn't hear of retiring. Every time Gough said the "R word," Nookey hissed vehemently.
"Boy-red, you are irreplaceable," Bobby said.
"I'm thinking Jill's going to like being a mom so much, she might never come back. I'm going to throw Nookey and Bobby together and see what happens," Frank answered, unhinging her long legs from the corner of Jill's desk.
Jill rolled her eyes skeptically. Nookey pretended to inspect the report he had rolled in the typewriter.
"Yeah," he said. "You've got your Starsky and Hutch, Cagney and Lacey, now we'll have Nappie and Jappie."
"No, no, no," Johnnie said in his gravely voice. "You'll be the Spook and the Gook, like in that book that cop wrote. Goddamn, that was the funniest thing I ever read."
"That's the only thing you've ever read," Gough grumbled.
Amidst the chatter, Noah's witness had nervously entered the squad room. He was dressed down in huge pants and T-shirt, cap turned back, thick gold chains called Turkish ropes around his neck and wrists.
"Where Detective Jantzen at?"
"Over here," Noah called, waving the wit into a chair. The young man was hesitant about giving a statement and balked at signing it. It took Noah and Johnnie most of the morning to get his signature against the banger who'd smoked his brother. He was afraid he'd be retaliated against, and Noah had to admit he had every reason in the world to be afraid.