Like every suicide, a message.
This one said soul-rotting, strangulating guilt. The ultimate atonement for unredeemable sin.
A law-and-order guy. A smidgen of conscience had remained and the magnitude of his violation came to haunt him.
He'd passed sentence on himself.
But something didn't fit: If Nolan was aiming for expiation, why hadn't he gone public, exposed the others, prevented more bloodshed?
Because Baker and the others had some kind of hold on him… the photos? On-duty liaisons with teenage hookers.
Polaroids left in a family album.
Placed there deliberately for Helena to find. Not by Nolan. By people who didn't want her to probe further.
Break-ins at Nolan's place and Helena's house, days apart. Now, it seemed ridiculously coincidental. Why hadn't it bothered me then?
Because burglaries in L.A. were as commonplace as bad air. Because Helena was my patient and I couldn't talk about what went on in therapy unless lives were at stake. So I'd denied.
It had worked so well- shutting my mouth, driving Helena out of therapy. Out of town.
But, no, it still didn't make sense. If Nolan had been consumed by guilt over murder, dirty pictures wouldn't have stopped him from incriminating the others.
I was still struggling with it when Milo rang the bell.
He was carrying his vinyl attachÉ and sat right down next to me.
“There's something I need to tell you,” I said.
“I know. Dahl. When you told me about Baker, my mind went on overdrive.”
He unzipped the case, removed a sheet of paper, and gave it to me. “Here's why it took me an hour to get here.”
Photocopy of some kind of chart. Horizontal grid on the upper three-quarters, several columns below a ten-digit numerical code and the heading DAILY FIELD ACTIVITIES REPORT. At the bottom, a series of boxes filled with numbers.
The top columns were labeled SPEC. SURVEY, OBS., ASGD ACT., TIME OF DAY, SURVEY SOURCE AND CODE, LOCATION OF ALL ACTIVITIES, TYPE OF ACTIVITY, SUPERVISOR AT SCENE, BOOKING, CITATION. Baker's name in every SUPERVISOR slot.
“Baker and Nolan's work log,” I said.
“Daily report- the D-FAR,” said Milo. “They're handed in at the end of each shift, stored in the station for a year, then moved downtown. These are Baker and Dahl's for the day Irit was murdered.”
Everything in perfect block letters, the time notated militarily: 0800 W L.A. ROLL CALL TO 1555 SIGN-OFF.
“Neat writing,” I said.
“Baker always printed like a draftsman.”
“Compulsive. The type to sweep up.”
He growled.
I read the report. “First call's a 211 suppression- armed robbery?”
He nodded.
“Wilshire near Bundy,” I went on. “It lasted nearly an hour, then a 415 call- disturbing the peace, right?”
“It could mean anything. This one was near the Country Mart, but see here where it says “no 415 found' under TYPE OF ACTIVITY? And no booking data in column 7? It didn't pan out.”
He stabbed the paper with his index finger. “After that, they did traffic stops, ten of 'em in a row- Baker was always one for giving lots of tickets- then another no-arrest 415 in the Palisades, then lunch.”
“At 1500,” I said. “Three P.M. Late lunch.”
“They list no Code 7s all day. If it's true, they were due for a break.”
My eyes dropped to the final notation before checkout.
“Another no-action 415 at 1530,” I said. “Sunset near Barrington. Are false calls that common?”
“Common enough. And it's not only false calls. Lots of times 415s end up just being an argument between two citizens, the officers calm 'em down and move on, no arrests.”
I scanned the sheet again. “There are no details on any of the calls beyond the street location. Is that kosher?”
“On a no-arrest it is. Even if it wasn't kosher, with Baker being a supervisor, there'd be no one looking over his shoulder unless something iffy happened- brutality complaint, that kind of thing. Basically, D-FARS are stashed and forgotten, Alex.”
“Wouldn't the calls come in through the dispatcher?”
“For the most part, but cruisers also get flagged down by citizens or the blues see things on their own and report to the dispatcher.”
“So there'd be no way to verify most of this.”
“Nope- anything else about it catch your eye?”
I studied the form one more time. “It's not balanced. All the activity's in the morning. You say Baker liked giving tickets but he issued ten before lunch and not a single one afterward… no real documentation for their activities for a solid hour prior to sign-off. More than an hour, if you include the Country Mart call. Even more if Baker bogused the entire afternoon log.”
I looked at him. “During the time Irit was being stalked, abducted, and strangled, Baker and Nolan had the perfect alibi: doing police work. No way to disprove it- no reason to doubt it. Two with uniforms, a team. Watching the kids get off the bus, selecting Irit, grabbing her- both of them were strong and with two working together, it would have been a snap. Baker probably chose gentle strangulation because he wanted to pretend he wasn't just another psychopath. Wanting to set it up as a sex crime, yet discriminate it from sex crimes.”
“God,” he said in a voice that burst out of him like a wound. Looking closer to tears than I'd ever seen him. “The fucking bastards. And they- I'm sure it was Baker's idea, that calculating fuck- did more than set up a one-day alibi. They prepared for weeks.”
“What do you mean?”
He got up, made a move to the fridge, stopped, sat down. “I looked through a whole bunch of their D-FARS. The pattern- busy mornings, quiet afternoons- began two weeks before Irit's murder. Prior to that they had an even workload: calls throughout their shift, Code 7s at normal times, normal lunch breaks. Two weeks before Irit was murdered, they altered it, and they continued altering for three weeks after. That's how calculating they were. Jesus!”
“Three weeks after,” I said. “At which point, Baker headed over to Parker Center and Nolan transferred to Hollywood. Distancing themselves. Now we know why Nolan was willing to give up a plum assignment.”
“Covering his ass, the fuck.”
“Maybe something else, too, Milo. He could have been distancing himself from the murder because the guilt started seeping in. I'm sure that's why he killed himself. I'm also sure Baker and the others took steps so Helena wouldn't look into it too deeply.”
I told him about the break-ins, the snapshots in the Dahl family album.
“Hookers,” he said. “Dark-skinned street girls like Latvinia.”
“Maybe Baker introduced him to Latvinia. Maybe Baker, by himself or with a friend, came back and finished Latvinia off. But what I still don't get is what kept Nolan from going public.”
“Helena,” he said. “Baker threatened to kill her if Dahl squawked.”
“Yes,” I said. “Makes perfect sense. It would have intensified Nolan's conflict, led him closer to total escape.”
“So who are the others?”
“Zena, maybe Malcolm Ponsico, til he changed his mind and received a lethal injection. Maybe Farley Sanger, though I didn't see him at the party. Definitely Wilson Tenney. Because he was there.” I described the park worker's altered appearance.
“You're sure it was him.”
“Do you have his DMV shot?”
He produced it from the attachÉ.
“Yes,” I said, handing it back. “No doubt about it.”
“Unreal- a goddamn psycho club.”
“Club within a club,” I said. “Meta offshoot. A bunch of eugenics freaks sitting around over their three-dimensional chess boards, telling themselves how smart they are, griping about the decay of society and one of them- probably Baker- says why don't we do something about it, the police are idiots- believe me, I know from experience. Just use different techniques, clean up the physical evidence, and distribute the murders one per district. Detectives from different districts never talk to one another. Let's have some fun with it. Or maybe it started off theoretically- one of those murder-mystery games- committing the perfect crime. And at some point, they took it further.”