“I’m not,” she said. “We’re way past that, Marty.”
Orth started laughing. It came from deep inside the man and there was a certain madness to it. Lena had never seen him act this way before. She didn’t know how to take it and even thought that he might be losing his mind.
“You want a cup of coffee?” he asked.
“No thanks.”
Orth started laughing again as he pushed himself out of his chair, poured his brew into a Dodgers mug, and returned to his desk.
“What is it, Marty? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he said, sipping his coffee. “Better than fine. You don’t want to arrest Hight, and that’s a good thing, Lena. A real good thing. But it’s crazy. Life sure gets crazy sometimes.”
“What’s crazy? What’s happened?”
He looked at her for a long time. “The gun that killed Bosco and Gant,” he said finally. “We didn’t need the one Hight bought to make a match.”
She leaned forward. “Ballistics got a hit.”
He nodded and seemed nervous. “A big one, Lena. The kind that always seem to come at four-thirty in the morning. You ever hear about a woman named Elvira Wheaten? It was a drive-by shooting in Exposition Park. Must have been eight years ago. Her infant grandson got killed, too.”
It felt like all of the air in the room had been sucked through the vents into the basement. Something inside Lena stiffened.
Bennett and Cobb’s last big case together.
She nodded at Orth, but she didn’t say anything. The hairs on the back of her neck were beginning to rise. She could see it-all of it-before her eyes.
“The gun that killed her,” Orth said. “That’s the gun the shooter used to waste Bosco and Gant. And that’s why life’s so crazy, Lena. We checked with Property. It’s a nine-millimeter Smith. It should have been there. It should have been in the box, but it wasn’t. Just like the blood evidence that went missing during the trial. Deja-fucking-vu.”
Lena tried to concentrate on her breathing.
“Did you check the property request cards?” she asked quietly.
“Uh-huh.”
“Give me the name of the last person to fill out a card.”
42
Cobb lived in a rundown apartment building beside Fiesta Liquors and the Rancho Coin Laundry on Vineland Avenue between the two runways at Bob Hope Airport in Burbank. As Lena studied the motel-styled building from her car, it seemed more than obvious that Cobb’s fall had been a brutal plunge straight to the bottom.
Cobb wasn’t staring into the abyss. He lived there.
The building offered a five-foot fence with a broken gate as its only means of security. Lena didn’t see a parking lot and circled the block looking for the white Lincoln. Most of the cars she passed didn’t appear roadworthy and in fact looked like they had hit bottom a few years back as well. More than a handful were jacked up on cinder blocks with their wheels ripped off and their windshields blown out. After Lena had made a second pass by Cobb’s building and gained some assurance that he’d left for the day, she pulled into the lot at a Mexican supermarket two blocks south and headed back on foot.
She was on automatic pilot now. Out of patience. Out of understanding. Out of everything. She knew that if she touched the wheel with her hands, the fucking plane would crash. If she examined what she was doing too closely, the crime she was about to commit, she might realize that the plane was already going down.
She approached the building, checking the numbers on the doors. She could see Cobb’s apartment on the second floor at the end.
She took the steps at a brisk pace. Most of the windows she passed were open and she could smell corn tortillas and hot oil burning. She could hear the mix of different languages-mostly Spanish, but Russian and Armenian, too. When she reached the last apartment before Cobb’s, she was startled by an old Mexican woman sitting by her window. The woman’s face appeared more ancient than old and remained expressionless. Even as their eyes met, there was no recognition of the moment. Just two blank eyes staring forward.
Lena hurried down to Cobb’s door, gave the bell a ring, and looked over her shoulder as she waited for no one to answer. The old woman had moved her chair so that she could watch her.
Lena turned back to the door, examining the deadbolt and slipping the picks out of her pocket as quickly as she could. Cobb’s deadbolt seemed to match the quality of the building, and Lena guessed that it probably turned toward the hinges. Inserting her tension wrench, she applied only the slightest pressure and began working the pins with a short hook. She could feel them clicking into place. Within ninety seconds she’d hit the last pin and the tension wrench began turning. When the door popped open, she checked on that old woman again. She was still watching her. Still working that dead stare.
Lena entered Cobb’s apartment, closing the door and throwing the deadbolt. She didn’t want to spend too much time here. Fifteen minutes at the most. Maybe ten with that woman out there watching.
She had learned how to pick a lock from a serial burglar she’d arrested while working in Hollywood more than five years ago. Jonathan Redgrave graduated from Stanford with an MBA, but spent the next thirty years of his life working nights and becoming a very wealthy man. She knew from the time they’d spent together in an interrogation room that a successful burglary came down to just three essential components. First, the score had to be worth the risk. Second, you needed to know how to enter the location without being detected. And third, and most important of all, you needed a backup exit just in case everything went to shit.
Cobb’s apartment was a small, sparsely furnished one-bedroom. She checked the windows. The best way out if things went to shit was through the one in the bedroom, but it would require a twenty-foot drop onto concrete. Lena slid open the window and played through a possible escape in her head. Once she had it down, she decided to search the place in reverse. She wouldn’t begin in the bedroom the way most pros do. She’d work her way toward it.
The living room and kitchen were a single fifteen-by-twenty-foot space that probably hadn’t seen a fresh coat of paint in fifteen years. The couch was pushed against the wall, and an old kitchen table made of steel tubing and Formica was placed before the window with two chairs. She noted the computer-and the receipts and loose change and unopened mail. It looked like Cobb used the table as a desk and the wall beside it as a combination filing cabinet and bookcase. Stacks of files and papers were piled on the floor by an old TV.
Lena switched on the computer. While it booted up, she rifled through the files stacked against the wall. Everything she saw appeared to be related to Cobb’s personal finances. Skimming through a recent bank statement revealed that most of Cobb’s paycheck was going to his ex-wife. What money remained bought a life here on Vineland Avenue beside a liquor store and a Laundromat.
Lena shook it off and glanced at the computer. It was up, but it wasn’t her priority. She checked her watch. Five minutes were gone. She needed to move faster.
The kitchen drawers and cabinets held no secrets, nor did the refrigerator or freezer. On the sill over the sink she noticed a photograph set in a cheap plastic frame. From a distance she thought that it might be a shot of Cobb with his wife and children before things fell apart. But when she picked it up, she realized that it was the photograph that came with the frame. The people in the shot were models representing an American family that still had a piece of the American dream. They wore big smiles and appeared well rested and well fed.
She set down the frame, wishing she hadn’t seen it, then checked the cushions on the couch and returned to Cobb’s bedroom.
She could feel the weight of the clock on her back. She could still see that old woman by her open window in her head. But worse, she could hear her burglar friend telling her that she’d broken his second rule, and it was an important one.