Boxmeister said, “Oh, shit.”
Milo was already up, rushing for the door.
Maria Thomas looked up from her BlackBerry. “What’s going on?”
Milo ran past her, let the door slam shut.
Inches away, blocked by glass, Helga Gemein wobbled. Clutching her abdomen, she let out a gasp.
Retched.
Something green and slimy trickled out of her mouth.
Slack mouth, the smile was gone.
Thomas said, “Omigod,” and ran out of the room. Boxmeister hustled after her.
I stayed in my chair. No reason to crowd the space.
Helga began convulsing. Her breath grew labored. Staggering closer to the one-way, she panted raggedly. Filmed the glass. Flecked it with glassy spit, then pinpoints of pink.
The massive convulsion began at her eyes, raced downward as her entire body was seized.
Rag doll, shaken by an unseen god.
Foam began pouring out of her mouth, a Niagara of bile. Chunks of slime coated the glass, clouded my view. But I managed to make out Milo rushing in, catching her as she fell.
Laying her down gently, he began chest compressions. Thomas and Boxmeister stood by, transfixed.
Milo ’s technique was perfect. Rick insists he recertify every couple of years. He gripes about the colossal waste of time, homicide is brain-work, when would he ever have the opportunity to get heroic.
Today, he did.
Today, it didn’t matter.
CHAPTER 34
The police chief’s face is pocked more severely than Milo ’s. A lush white mustache does a pretty good job of camouflaging a harelip.
He’s a lean man with no discernible body fat. The lack of spare flesh stretches the skin that sheaths his skull, highlighting pit and crater, glossing lump and scar. The skull is an oddly shaped triangle, broad and unnaturally flat on top, coated with silky, blond-white hair, and tapering to a knife-point chin. His eyes are small and dark and they alternate between manic bounces and long stretches of unblinking immobility. When he turns his head a certain way, patches of taut, tortured dermis give him the look of a burn victim.
He turns that way a lot and I wonder if it’s intentional.
Take me on my terms.
Everything in his history supports a Screw-you approach to life: the up-from-nothing ascent, the graduate degree at an Ivy League university he disparages as “an asylum for rich brats.” War heroism followed by clawing up the ranks of a notoriously corrupt East Coast police force, the combative years spent kicking bureaucratic ass and clearing out departmental deadweight. Defying the brass and the police union with equal-opportunity contempt, he arm-twisted his way to dramatically lowered felony rates in a city considered “ungovernable” by pundits he dismissed as “fat-assed brats with mental constipation and verbal diarrhea.” Stunning success was exploited to demand and receive the highest law enforcement salary in U.S. history.
A month later, he quit unceremoniously, when L.A. upped the ante.
Everyone said L.A. would be his fatal challenge.
Within a year of arriving, he’d divorced his third wife ten years his junior, married a fourth twenty years his junior, attended a lot of Hollywood parties and premieres, and lowered felony rates by twenty-eight percent.
When he’d taken the job, departmental wienies had bad-mouthed Milo as “a notorious troublemaker and a deviant,” and urged demotion or worse.
The chief checked the solve-stats, most of the wienies ended up taking early retirement, Milo got the freedom to do his job with relative flexibility. As long as he produced.
I’d met the chief once before, when he’d invited me to his office, showed off his collection of psych texts, expounded on the finer points of cognitive behavior therapy, then made me an offer: full-time job heading the department’s department of behavioral sciences. Even with his promise to raise the pay scale by forty percent, the salary didn’t come close to what I earned working privately. Even if he’d tripled the money, it would never be an option. I know how to play well with others, but prefer my own rulebook.
During that meeting, he was dressed exactly as he was today: slim-cut black silk suit, aqua-blue spread-collar shirt, five-hundred-dollar red Stefano Ricci tie embedded with tiny crystals. On a lesser man it would’ve screamed Trying too hard. On him, all that polish emphasized the roughness of his complexion.
My terms.
He faced Milo and me across a booth at a steak house downtown on Seventh Street. A pair of massive plainclothes cops watched the front door; three more had staked out positions inside the restaurant. A velvet rope blocked other diners in this remote, dim section. The waiter assigned to us was attentive, vaguely frightened.
The chief’s lunch was a chicken breast sandwich, seven-grain bread, side salad, no dressing. He’d ordered a thirty-ounce T-bone, medium-rare, all the fixings, for Milo; a more moderate rib eye for me. The food arrived just as we did.
Milo said, “Good guess, sir.”
The chief’s smile was crooked. “In the gulag, we keep files on dissidents.”
His sandwich was divided into two triangles. He picked up a knife and bisected each half. Got five bites out of each quarter, chewing daintily and slowly. Sharp white teeth, somewhere between fox and wolf.
He wiped his lips with a starched linen napkin. “I bought you an insurance policy on Gemein, Sturgis. Know what I mean?”
“Captain Thomas.”
A gun-finger aimed across the table. “Lucky for you Maria was there when that crazy bitch cyanided, because, like all hot air, blame floats to the top. Extra-lucky for you, Maria was the one who didn’t want to strip-search. She’s smart and industrious but she does tend to overthink.”
Milo said, “Even without her directive, I wouldn’t have strip-searched, sir.”
“What’s that, Sturgis? Penance?”
“Telling it like it is, sir.”
“Why no strip?”
“At that point, my emphasis was on getting rapport with Gemein.”
“Plus,” said the chief, “even a super-sleuth like you couldn’t conceive the bitch would hide anything under her wig. Talk about an overblown sense of drama. Lucky for all of you, I managed to block the press-scum when they started up the trash-vacuum. They live to tear us down, Sturgis, because they’re useless pieces of crap. They’ve also got the attention spans of decorticate garden slugs. I recently devised what I think is a tasteful and adroit method of handling press cretins.”
Out of a jacket pocket came a sterling-silver card case, conspicuously monogrammed with his initials. A single, deft button-push sprang the lid. Inside were pale blue business cards. He removed one, passed it across the table.