Rosario blanched. “Ray Sheen, from Castle Robotics? You sure?”
I was.
From down the trail came the sound of somebody hacking up a lung. He trudged into view, pushing a rolling metal gurney upon which rested a folded green body bag and a brushed aluminum tool chest. He was a heavyset man in his late thirties with a shaved head, black polyester dress pants, and a short-sleeved white shirt, the tails of which refused to stay tucked. His forearms were a miasma of colorful tattoos. A digital camera was slung over his shoulder. His name tag identified him as “E. Schlosser.”
“They don’t pay me enough for this,” he said, wiping his soaking florid face.
“The Medical Examiner,” Rosario said, “has arrived.”
Schlosser’s first move was to de-tarp the body and snap about 200 photos. Then, wheezing, he got down on all fours, reached under the corpse, and extracted a red, eel-skin billfold, which he handed up to Rosario without being asked.
“At least we know it wasn’t a robbery,” Rosario said.
The uniform deputies both nodded.
She opened the wallet, pulled out a California driver’s license, studied it for a second, then held it up for my inspection.
The name on the license read, “Raymond Francis Sheen.” The photo matched the man with the distinctive scar on his left cheekbone who’d tried to murder me.
Swoosh, indeed.
Twenty-four
Rosario and I occupied a corner booth at La Jolla’s Su Casa, an unpretentious, windowless bunker of a restaurant renowned for its verde crab enchiladas and camarones al mojo de ajo—jumbo shrimp sautéed in garlic butter and white wine. I’d ordered my usual chile verde burrito, but after two baskets of homemade tortilla chips, salsa, and multiple refills of spicy pickled carrots, I was about ready to call it a night. Not Rosario. She was still sorting through events of the day, eyes gleaming, eager to ponder the jigsaw puzzle that her homicide investigation had become.
“You know what I’m wondering?” Rosario asked, sipping her second margarita.
“Tell me.”
“How big it’s gonna get.”
“Excuse me?”
“I meant this case.”
“The case. Right.”
Rosario licked the salt from her glass. “Why? What did you think I meant?”
“The case. Obviously.”
Her lips curled in a wry smile. She knew exactly what I meant.
I reached uncomfortably for another pickled carrot.
After hiking back down the trail and dropping me off at my Escalade, Rosario had driven home to change for dinner. I’d done the same, stopping off at the YMCA in La Mesa where I’d paid the ten-dollar day rate to shower and try to look presentable. Now here we were, me in a semi-clean polo shirt and Levis, and her wearing a floor-length, leopard print sundress with spaghetti straps that were made to be slowly untied. The look was decidedly un-detective-like.
“We ran the VIN,” she said. “The truck belonged to Sheen’s cousin, Charles Walter Lazarus. He’s a mechanical engineer. Used to work for Castle Robotics. Sold the vehicle to Sheen three months ago, after he got a job in D.C. Sheen also owns the MINI you went riding in, along with an Audi turbo and a ’65 Mustang. He never filed an ownership change on the truck.”
“Wanted to avoid paying state sales tax, probably.”
“It happens.”
Deputies, she said, had reached Charles Lazarus by phone earlier in the day at his home in suburban Maryland, where he’d just returned from a month-long business trip to Europe and Asia. His alibi, according to Rosario, was solid; Lazarus could account for his whereabouts literally minute-by-minute over the previous week, thus ruling him out as a suspect in the trashing of my airplane or in any recent San Diego County murders.
“So, you’re back to square one,” I said. “You don’t know who shot Sheen. And you don’t know who stabbed Janet Bollinger.”
Rosario sat back, pondering what I said. Her arms were draped across the top of the booth, affording me an excellent view of her impressive superstructure that I tried to ignore as I reached for another carrot. If this was a date, it was among the strangest I’d ever been on.
“I keep coming back to Walker,” she said. “He had ties to both Sheen and Bollinger. Plus, he keeps an airplane out at Montgomery Airport. I checked. He rents a hangar there. He would’ve had easy access to your airplane.”
She theorized that Walker had borrowed Sheen’s pickup and driven it to the airport that night.
“Trucks come and go at airports all the time,” Rosario said. “He figured a truck would draw less attention on the flight line than a car.”
“Walker paid me to fly down here and do some work for him. Why would he want to monkey with my engine?”
“No clue.” Rosario tapped some ice from her drink into her mouth and chewed it. “But I do know he would’ve had ample reason to want to shoot Sheen. Sheen was sleeping with his wife. Men have been killed for a lot less.”
Her dangly silver earrings sparkled seductively in the candlelight.
I closed my eyes and massaged my forehead. Hub Walker was the last man I wanted to suspect of anything.
We sat for awhile without speaking.
“It would help if we recover a bullet,” Rosario said finally. “At least a shell casing.”
“It’ll be a relatively small bullet,” I said.
“What makes you say that?”
“Because I heard it.”
“You heard Sheen get shot?”
“Pretty sure.”
Rosario was incredulous. “And I’m only hearing this now? I thought we…” She paused in mid-sentence as our grandmotherly waitress arrived with our meals.
“Muy caliente. Very hot. Please be careful.” She set two platters heaping with steaming Mexican food on the table. “Is there anything else I can get you? Another margarita for the lady? More club soda for the gentleman?”
“No gracias,” Rosario said.
“No, thanks.”
“Enjoy.”
Rosario watched me ladle an ulcer-inducing amount of salsa while ignoring her food.
“Did I hear you right? You say you heard Sheen get shot?”
“Single discharge, approximately 800 meters down range, approximately ten minutes after we parted company. Definitely sounded smaller than the .45 he was carrying. Nine-millimeter would be my guess.”
The burrito was excellent. I ate probably faster than I should have. It was impossible not to.
“For a flight instructor,” Rosario said, “you seem to know an awful lot about guns.”
“Like I said…”
“Yeah, yeah. You’re into TV.” She picked at her enchiladas, eyeing me suspiciously but also intrigued. “Ever used to watch Miami Vice back in the day?”
“Occasionally.”
“Best cop show ever.”
“I beg to differ. Andy Griffith was the best cop show ever.”
“Andy Griffith wasn’t a cop show,” Rosario said.
“Andy played a cop, did he not?”
“A little before my time but, yes, I seem to recall he did.”
“And do you concede that the word ‘show’ in the The Andy Griffith Show connotes that it was, in fact, a show?”
“I’ll concede that.”
“I rest my case.”
She smiled and watched me eat. “Unfortunately, I don’t have Andy Griffith. But I do have all five seasons of Miami Vice on DVD. You interested in maybe grabbing some ice cream at my place after this and checking out a little Crockett and Tubbs action?”
Airplanes rarely crash because of pilot error. They crash because of multiple pilot errors, small mistakes that become larger ones, until the only option left is to bend over and kiss your keester goodbye. The same can be said of monogamy. Drop your guard, surrender yourself to an extracurricular distraction, and before you know it, you’re grocery shopping for one and trolling the listings on Match.com. It was a mistake to say yes to Alicia Rosario’s invitation to dessert in the same way I knew it was wrong to have asked her out to dinner, but I did it anyway. Blame it on her sundress. I was dying to find out where she stashed her off-duty weapon.