“This gets messy,” he said. “Dead cop. Murdered in his home, found by his daughter. Kid can’t even talk now. Wouldn’t say a word. Just stared with those eyes, man . . . those eyes.” He took another drag on the cigarette, a long one, then tapped it out against the wall and carefully put it into his jacket pocket. Couldn’t contaminate the crime scene.
“Messy,” he said again. “All right, you tell it to me, boys.”
We told it to him. While we talked, the uniforms continued to move around the yard, combing the grass and taking their pictures. Everyone was silent. Back out on the street, there was some mild commotion, doors opening and closing, voices raised. This would be the media arrival.
“He was wearing a wire,” I said when Joe and I had gone through the basics. It was the first Joe had heard of it, and his face registered surprise. Richards, on the other hand, was impassive.
“Was he?” he said.
“Come on, Cal. You were down there. You saw it.”
He frowned and looked away, not liking it that a civilian had been on the scene first.
“He was wearing a wire,” he admitted. “And it was cut. The recorder’s gone. Do you have it?”
“No.”
He gazed at me hard, and I said, “Are you insane? No, Richards, I didn’t steal a recorder off the man’s corpse.”
“Okay.”
Joe was watching with interest. “Rabold’s a street officer,” he said. “What the hell’s he doing wearing a wire? And in his own house?”
“I can’t tell you that,” Richards said, “because I don’t know.”
“He was requesting files on old fires this morning,” I said. “And now he’s dead. You think that’s unrelated?”
Richards’s face showed nothing. “I’m not a guess-maker, Perry. I’m a detective. We’ll see where it goes.”
“Sure.”
“Look, you know we’re going to need to sit down and get an official statement recorded,” he said. “And we’re going to have to separate you. Makes me look bad if I keep witnesses together for an interview. Baker’ll handle that. You’ll be seeing both of us, but I’m going to have to give you up to him now.”
“Who’s Baker?” I asked.
“My partner.”
“You actually have one?”
“We’re a good team,” Richards said, “provided we spend plenty of time on separate courts.”
He took us around to the front of the house, and as we cleared the corner, I saw Jack Padgett shoving his way through the crowd, snarling at a uniformed officer to get out of his way. He was in street clothes, jeans and a brightly colored golf shirt, and his face was flushed with fury.
“Shit,” Richards said. “The last thing I need is that crazy bastard in my crime scene.”
He moved toward Padgett, who turned to look at him and spotted me. His face darkened, and he stepped forward, shoulders squaring and rising, like a boxer stepping away from the ropes.
“What’s this guy doing here?” he said, pointing at me.
Richards reached him then and said something that I couldn’t hear. Padgett answered, his own voice softer, and all I caught of it was an obscene reference involving my mother. Then Richards had his hand firmly on the taller man’s shoulder and was guiding him away from us, back toward the ring of cops watching the perimeter of the yard. Inside the house, the evidence techs were probably still hunched over the body of Padgett’s partner. I wondered when he’d heard, and where he’d been. Crooked cop or not, having your partner murdered had to hit deep.
Richards had disappeared into the crowd before I remembered that I hadn’t told him what I’d learned about Sentalar and Corbett. A few hours earlier, that was huge news. A few hours earlier, Mary Rabold’s father was still alive.
Joe and I spent a while talking to Baker, a short guy with a military haircut and a sunburn, but Richards never returned. Baker took us back to the station and interviewed us separately, on tape. Then we filled out a witness form, and he told us we could go.
“What about Cal Richards?” Joe asked. “Is he coming down here?”
Baker shrugged. “Don’t know. He told me to get your statements on tape and get back down to the scene, myself. Didn’t say anything about holding you for him.”
“He knows where to find us,” Joe said.
A patrol officer drove us to my apartment. Joe’s car was going to be searched by police, of course. They might not think there was a gun in the trunk or bloody fibers on the floor mats, but they had to check.
When the cop dropped us off, we stood together in my parking lot and looked at each other. It was evening now, the sun gone, the night air beginning to cool. A few cars were in the gym lot, but it was quiet outside.
“That poor damn kid,” Joe said.
“Yeah.”
He sighed and ran both hands through his hair and over his face. “What the hell is going on, LP? What was your friend into?”
I shook my head. I didn’t have any answers. It was just twelve hours ago that I’d stood on the street in front of this building and formed my idea that Rabold and his partner had killed Ed intentionally. Now Rabold was dead. That didn’t change my previous theory, but it sure as hell complicated it.
“You tell any of the other detectives about Corbett and Sentalar?” Joe asked.
“No. It’s Cal’s case. He’s the only one who would have understood what it might mean. I’ll tell him.”
“Okay. We’ll tell him in the morning. Get some sleep, maybe some dinner. A few hours of normal life, get our heads back together. We’ll see where it stands in the morning.”
“They shot him three times, Joe,” I said. “Blew a piece of his face off, shot him in the chest, shot him in the stomach. That’s not a killing for killing’s sake. It wasn’t a hit, a guy getting whacked just to be eliminated. There’s a lot of anger in those wounds.”
“I wonder if his wife is with that girl yet” was all he said.
“I hope so. You want me to give you a ride home?”
“No, thanks.”
“You sure?”
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I need the walk tonight.”
He left, and I went upstairs and took a long, hot shower, my muscles slowly loosening under the spray. I dried off and changed clothes. By then it was almost ten, well past dinnertime and closer to sleeping time for normal people. Since I clearly wasn’t normal, I thought I’d go ahead and eat breakfast for a very late dinner. I fixed an omelet but couldn’t find any appetite for it, ended up tossing it in the garbage, and drinking a glass of orange juice.
After a while, I took a bottle of Beck’s out of the refrigerator and went up on the roof. There’s a trapdoor with folding stairs in the ceiling just outside my apartment that provides access to the roof, and I’ve dragged a couple of lounge chairs and some potted plants up there. It’s a nice place to spend a summer evening.
I sat alone, listening to the traffic noise and sipping my beer and thinking about old friends and a terrified sixteen-year-old girl hiding behind a couch. When the beer was empty, I went back downstairs to get a fresh one. I stood at the door for a moment, hesitating, then grabbed the cordless phone as well and took it onto the roof with me. The connection had some static up there, but you could hear well enough for a conversation. I set the beer down unopened and dialed Amy’s number.
“Hey,” I said when she answered, “you asleep yet?”