Rhodes gazed out the window at the Hummer. She could see him putting something together, and suddenly realized what it was.
“The navigation device.”
Rhodes rocked his head up and down and turned to Bing. “Are the keys in the Hummer?”
“Yeah, sure. We just moved it.”
Lena followed Rhodes out the showroom door. Ignoring the video camera, they rushed over to the Hummer and climbed in. Rhodes turned the key, then switched on the navigation device and began toggling through the menu until he reached a list of previous destinations Cava had programmed into the system. She saw Fontaine’s address. Then the victim’s apartment on Navy Street in Venice. But it was the list of options at the bottom of the screen that seemed the most important right now. The button marked home that would have been programmed by the dealership at the time of purchase for the original owner of the car.
Rhodes pressed the button. Lena’s eyes zeroed in on the text. They had him. Nathan G. Cava lived in Universal City.
43
Barham Boulevard had been closed, the entire complex of four buildings, evacuated and shut down. Each building was three stories high and shaped like a box. A mix of modern and Tudor styles wrapped around courtyards that were fleshed out with swimming pools and palm trees and rows of lounge chairs. The fact that the Bates Motel from the movie Psycho stood just over the next hill on the Universal lot was something Lena didn’t really want to think about right now.
She was waiting by the pool with Rhodes, hidden beneath Cava’s unit on the third floor. Neither detective would be involved in the arrest. Lena didn’t want to take the chance. They needed Cava alive. After hashing it out with Barrera at Parker Center, Lt. Chase Thomas from Special Weapons and Tactics was called in to oversee the operation. Thomas had rescued fifteen hostages from a bank robbery last year and was awarded the Medal of Valor, the department’s highest award for heroism in the line of duty. He was the cream of the crop and a consummate professional. In five minutes he would lead his team upstairs to Cava’s front door.
Curiously, as they planned the operation in the captain’s vacant office, there had been no word from the sixth floor. Chief Logan had made no comment, offered no response, and remained strangely silent. And Klinger hadn’t been seen in the building all day.
Lena didn’t take any of this as a good sign.
The crime scenes at Ramira’s house off Edgewater Terrace and Fontaine’s mansion on South Mapleton Drive had been processed by different divisions at the local level. Both decisions had been made in the heat of the moment, both decisions born out of desperation. But from where Lena stood, the tree wasn’t rotting from the ground up. The tree was disintegrating from the top down. Her best chance at getting to Tremell, her only chance, was to keep the investigations as far away from Parker Center as she could. To have faith in the department’s roots and the local homicide divisions where the chief’s ability to write and direct the outcome would be far less certain. It seemed obvious enough now that Logan had assigned the case to her because he wanted to destroy her. But just as important, he was in on it. He had asked for her because he believed that she would fail. By calling 911 at both locations, she had thrown a wrench into his plans. She had brought more people into the mix. Fresh eyes and ears.
So the silence from the sixth floor had to mean something. And Lena figured that nothing about it could be good.
Her mouth was dry. She turned and saw Thomas entering the courtyard with ten men behind him-each wearing helmets and body armor. Of the ten, four carried shotguns. The rest were equipped with automatic rifles. But it was the shotguns that caught Lena’s eye. They were Winchester SX3s capable of firing twelve shells in less than 1.5 seconds.
The SWAT team was ready. And when Thomas gave her the nod, she moved down the walkway with Rhodes and followed their progress up the stairs. Cava’s curtains were drawn. The entry team worked quickly, avoiding the windows and falling into position. Then Thomas stepped to the side and pounded on the front door.
Thirty seconds rolled out hot and heavy with no response. Thomas tried again, harder than before. Another burst of time came and went.
Lena watched as he held his ear to the door. After a third attempt, he turned and found her in the courtyard below. His shrug could only mean that there was no movement inside.
She thought about Cava’s car in the garage. The SRX Crossover. They knew that he was here. And there was no need to break the door down. The keys had been furnished by the management company.
Thomas fished them out of his pocket and tossed them to a team member. Once they got past the locks, Cava’s door was pushed open with the business end of a Winchester SX3.
A moment passed. Those first jittery peeks inside the darkened apartment. Then the team quickly filed in with their weapons raised.
Lena glanced at Rhodes, instinctively moving toward the stairs. Listening, watching. The waiting tearing her up inside.
After five long minutes, Thomas reappeared in the doorway and waved them up. Lena’s first thought as she tore up the steps was that Cava had been killed before they got here. That the word had been out all morning that they located him, and that no one involved at any level could afford to take the chance that he might talk. When she reached the front door, Thomas pulled off his helmet like the operation was over and gave her a look.
“You need to see this,” he said. “Follow me.”
Her heart almost stopped beating. She entered the darkened apartment, noting the sparse furnishings as she and Rhodes followed Thomas past the kitchen into the bedroom. All ten SWAT team members were huddled around the bed. Thomas cleared a path for them. As the bodies parted, she looked down and saw Nathan G. Cava lying on top of the bed.
But he hadn’t been murdered, and the surgeon-turned-hit-man wasn’t dead.
Instead, Cava was listening to music with a pair of headphones on and his eyes closed. Lena could hear the sound leaking into the quiet room. It was a blues cut and a good one-“Bobby’s Bop,” from an import album by Ronnie Earl and the Broadcasters called Hope Radio.
“He won’t budge,” Thomas said. “He’s out.”
Rhodes pointed to the bedside table. Six or seven empty auto-injectors were piled up beside a fresh pack of five more. Cava was binging on morphine. The auto-injectors were identical to the two they found on Fontaine’s desk.
His eyes opened.
Everybody in the room flinched.
Then six rifles and four shotguns slid forward an inch or two from the man’s face. Cava didn’t appear to see them. He didn’t even move. He just aid there, listening to the blues and holding on to the great White Nurse in a state of bliss.
44
Lena looked at Barrera standing before the window. He was smoking a cigar and watching the last rays of orange sunlight clip the hilltops to the north. Directly west the marina layer was already flooding into the basin.
“You’ve got everything, right?” he asked.
“I’m all set.”
They were in the captain’s office. Alone on the floor. The air fraught with electricity. Cava was waiting in one of the interrogation rooms across the way, his cosmic bliss winding down from a six-hour discharge. A doctor had examined him at his apartment and signed off on his condition. For the past hour, Cava had been alone in the small room-handcuffed to a chair with nothing to do. By now the walls were closing in on him. The ground, fertile.
Barrera turned from the window. “If you need anything, I’ll be right outside the door.”
Lena nodded. She appreciated his concern, but they had gone over it at least ten times. And there had been more than enough time to pin down who Cava really was, collect props, and prepare for the interview.