Frank studied the photos on the license and the ID. Lefebvre stared back at the camera with dark eyes, his expression solemn and intense. His hair was dark and cut short. His cheekbones were high, the face slender. The nose was slightly crooked. A hard face, Frank thought. According to the driver’s license, ten years ago Lefebvre would have been forty-two. It showed his height as 6’1", his weight 170. Frank knew that weight and stature figures on licenses were notoriously incorrect — men made themselves taller, women, lighter — and that Ben would need time to measure and examine the bones to determine the dead man’s probable age and stature. He glanced between the photos and the skull, tried to match the skull with the face in the photos. He couldn’t. He handed them to Ben.
“Too bad he didn’t smile in the photos,” Ben said. “The skull has a chipped front tooth.”
“Maybe that happened when it fell off his neck and rolled across the floor.”
“No, the chip looks antemortem. Filed smooth by a dentist at one time.” He pointed to a crack on the right side of the cranium. “But this fracture is perimortem, I think — it shows no healing and was probably a result of the impact of the crash.”
With gloved hands, Frank gently turned to the last few pages of the notebook. The pages were a little moldy, but intact and legible. They were filled with neatly penned notes, apparently regarding several cases. There were phone numbers, dates, and other numbers that appeared to be house or apartment numbers. Nothing that looked like the combination to a safe with two million bucks in it, Frank thought, but you never knew. He went through the wallet more carefully, found nothing.
The air inside the plane was hot and close. Frank moved outside the wreckage, found a large, flat rock in the shade, and sat thinking while Mayumi continued examining the crash site and Ben and the coroner’s assistant finished inventorying and removing the remains. He tried using his cell phone to call Carlson, but couldn’t get a signal in the ravine.
When they were on their way back, he tried again. The call was routed to the Wheeze — Louise Oswald, division secretary. Frank suppressed a sigh of impatience when her voice came on the line. The Wheeze never had to search hard for a sense of her own importance.
She told him that the lieutenant was in a meeting, but would speak to him when he returned. “He asked me to tell you,” she said, lowering her voice, “not to discuss this case with anyone — repeat, anyone — until then.”
“In that case…” he said, and disconnected. He knew she would undoubtedly make him pay for that later, but it gave him some small satisfaction on a day that was damned short of it.
By the time he took Ben home and drove to headquarters, it was after nine that evening. Frank looked up at the building that housed the Las Piernas Police Department, sought a particular window, and found it. The light was on in Carlson’s office.
“That better be you and not the cleaning lady, you asshole,” he muttered, and pulled into the parking garage.
He first stopped by the property room to turn in the box of Lefebvre’s effects he had signed for at the scene and completed a set of chain of custody forms.
Then he went upstairs to Homicide. The Homicide Division was an open room with a dozen battered desks pushed up close to one another. Computers competed for space with aging office equipment. The walls were beige, or what had once been beige. Paint was low on the city budget priorities. A wide hallway led to interrogation rooms. Four enclosed offices stood along the wall opposite the hallway door. The lights were on in one of the offices.
Frank nodded a greeting to a couple of detectives who were talking to a crying middle-aged woman. Her face was heavily swollen on one side. He did not pause near them, but went straight to Carlson’s office. He entered without knocking, shutting the door behind him.
Carlson, startled, pushed away from his desk. His chair rolled back with the sudden movement — so far back, he was more than an arm’s length from the desk. He had to use his feet to scoot the chair back into place.
“Sit down, Frank,” he said, red-faced.
“No thanks,” Frank said quietly.
Carlson was uneasy. He had once seen Frank Harriman knock a man out cold — without ever raising his voice before throwing the punch. And there were other reasons he sometimes questioned Frank’s stability.
“Sit down, Detective Harriman — please,” Carlson said.
Frank knew that Carlson wasn’t one of those people who found it hard to say “please” — he just found it hard to mean it. Frank let him sweat it for a moment before he took a chair. “I don’t like being set up,” he said.
“You weren’t—”
“I don’t like being set up under any circumstances, but walking into that situation less informed than San Bernardino and the NTSB — hell, less informed than a reserve officer—”
“Yes, well, I’m sorry, that couldn’t be helped.”
Frank didn’t bother to hide his disbelief. “There was no reason to keep me in the dark. And Ben Sheridan should have been informed—”
“Never mind Sheridan. Here…” He opened a desk drawer, pulled out a thick stack of files, and held it out. Frank didn’t move. Carlson set the stack down on the desk. “You’ll have to take them eventually. I’m assigning Lefebvre’s case to you.”
“That looks like more than one case file to me.”
“As I told you earlier today, you have the Randolph cases, too. We believe they are all related.”
Frank still didn’t move to take them. “Before today, Lefebvre’s name was nearly meaningless to me. I vaguely recalled hearing a news story about him years ago. Don’t you think it would have been better to let me know that this was not only high profile, but also that someone as notorious as Whitey Dane had a connection to the case?”
Carlson shrugged. “So the killer is a man we’ve been after for a long time. If Lefebvre hadn’t murdered Seth Randolph and stolen the evidence against Dane, you might not have remembered Dane’s name either. He would have been locked away years ago. As a matter of fact—”
“As a matter of fact, you decided to send me to that scene without breathing a word about any of this. For God’s sake, why not send someone who knew the background on the case? I know you saved a little mileage on a pool car, but—”
“I didn’t decide to send you just because you were nearest the scene!”
Frank watched as Carlson struggled to control his temper. After a moment, Carlson said, “Even if you had been in Las Piernas, you’re the one I would have sent up to the mountains precisely because you are one of the only detectives in Homicide who has been with this department less than ten years. I needed at least one person who would be able to approach that wreckage without a lot of preconceived notions about the pilot of that plane.”
“This is ridiculous. The other detectives in this department can be trusted to be professional.”
“Where Lefebvre is concerned, no. Not anyone who was around here then. Lefebvre’s name is universally despised in this department — and the sooner you understand that, the sooner you’ll see why you must be the one to take the case. None of the others could have viewed the scene objectively — including Pete Baird.”
“With or without Pete, I deserved to know what I was walking into.”
Carlson shifted in his chair, making sure he had a firm grip on the desk before doing so. “Yes,” he said, “in retrospect, I concede that’s true. At the time — perhaps I allowed my own dislike of Lefebvre to influence my response to the situation.” He sighed. “To tell you the truth, I would have been happy if Lefebvre stayed missing. Now this will all be raked up again.” A sudden suspicion came to him. “You haven’t discussed this with your damned wife, have you?”