She was still staring down at her desk. She dabbed her eyes again.
Hood believed her rationalizations, especially when he factored in the thirty-something thousand per month that Build a Dream was bringing in to Carla Vise’s small credit union. It was easy for Carla to believe in Terry Laws. It was profitable, too.
Four hundred grand in less than a year and a half, thought Hood. “When did Laws create Build a Dream?”
She flipped through the file, still not looking at Hood. “He opened the account on August 13 of 2007, with two hundred dollars. His next contribution was on Monday, August 27, for seven thousand and thirty dollars.”
“Then once a week thereafter?”
“Yes. Every week.”
“Look at me. You know you should have reported him.”
“I broke no law.”
“The world dies a little when good people do nothing.”
She nodded and looked down while Hood set his card on her desk and walked out.
Sitting in his car, Hood thought back to August of 2007. He had been riding patrol in Section I, down in south L.A., glad to be out of Iraq.
Meanwhile, Terry Laws was riding patrol up here in the desert, making his first big deposit in the charitable trust he had just created.
After that, seven thousand dollars plus change fell out of his pockets every week, straight into Build a Dream. And when the trust amounted to just over four hundred thousand dollars he paid it to himself and put it down on a horse property in the valley.
Hood looked up to see Carla Vise coming across the parking lot toward him. She had her arms crossed against the chilling afternoon breeze. He lowered the window and she leaned in and looked at him with tearful, angry eyes.
“The day he opened the savings account for his new charitable trust, Terry Laws was happy and smiling. Light came from him. He looked like he could carry the world on those big shoulders of his. But two weeks later, when he made that first big deposit, he was pale and he wouldn’t look at me. His face was bruised. He had stitches. I asked him if he was okay and he said he’d made a difficult arrest. But it wasn’t the arrest, because he never got over it. The bruises and stitches went away but he never got his light back. He never looked at me the same. His posture was not the same. I don’t know if other people noticed. I don’t know if his oblivious and condescending wife even noticed. But I noticed every single thing about Terry Laws, Deputy Hood. He was a different man.”
Hood thought for a moment. He believed that people could be changed immediately and irrevocably by what they chose to do. The mark of true foolishness was to ignore this fact.
“I was swayed by my own foolish heart,” said Carla. “It’s the story of my life.”
“It’s everyone’s.”
Hood drove back to the prison wondering about Terry Laws. The Terry Laws he had known was neither radiant nor haunted. He was a nice guy but Hood had always thought Laws was trying too hard. He was vain about his muscles and proud of his smile. But he had the decency to take sides against the Housing Authority on behalf of Jacquilla Roberts and her imperfect sons.
Again, Hood remembered what Laws had said that night. There’s no profit in this. He wasn’t sure why it stuck in his head. Maybe the odd application of the word “profit” to a routine citizen interview.
He wondered what had changed Terry Laws. When he got to the Hole he let himself in with his shiny new key, turned on the lights and took Laws’s package from the locked desk drawer.
Hood knew that on August 13 Laws had opened his trust with two hundred humble dollars. He was happy and strong. He had the light.
But less than two weeks later, when he brought that first big cash deposit for the trust, he looked battered and tormented. If you saw him as clearly as Carla Vise had, thought Hood, it was clear that Terry Laws had died a little.
Hood saw that two things had happened in between.
One: Laws and Draper had arrested Shay Eichrodt-the kind of high-profile, get-a-killer-off-the-street arrest that any cop would love to make. An arrest that mattered, protected people.
And two: Laws had come up with seven grand in cash.
Hood stared out the window at the prison, the razor wire, the cold blue Antelope Valley sky. The sky and the wind and cold reminded him of Anbar. When he thought of Iraq his mind resisted and his heart became heavy.
Next Hood spent some time on the search engines, but couldn’t come up with Terry Laws’s Build a Dream Foundation. There were plenty of Build a Dreams, but none were charities raising money for poor children in Southern California. He could find no number through Information, no listing in the Antelope Valley phone books, no one at the Antelope Valley Chamber of Commerce or Rotary who had ever heard of it. He called some of his deputy friends and not a single one of them had heard of it, either.
Hood called Ariel Reed. Then he drove south to LASD headquarters in Monterey Park, and signed out the Lopes/Vasquez murder book from Records.
9
“The tip came from an anonymous caller,” she said. “It was made from a pay phone in Lancaster a little after two in the morning. Poor quality-wind and road noise. He said there was a shooting on Avenue M at the highway. Said a guy with a gun drove off in a red pickup truck. He’d gotten partial plates. He gave those to the nine-one-one operator, then hung up. I heard the recording. Mexican accent. He sounded drunk.”
Hood looked up from his notebook and bumped into Ariel’s frank gaze.
“Laws and Draper were first responders,” she said. “Both victims were gunshot to the head, both dead on scene. The deputies sealed it off and gave the detectives what they needed. By three-thirty were they back in the cruiser, finishing out the graveyard shift. And lo, the maybe-drunk tipper got the partials right. At four-twenty Laws spotted a red Chevy pickup westbound on the Pearblossom Highway. They saw some of the right numbers, pulled it over. It was right there where the ruins of Llano del Rio are-you know, the old socialist utopia. Anyway, no utopia that night, just a bloody battle.”
Ariel’s office had a view to the west. It was evening and the old DA building was hushed. The sun had rolled off the horizon but there was still a tint of red in the blue-black sky. The lights of L.A. flickered below. Hood thought of his view from the Hole.
“It was violent,” he said.
Ariel nodded and flipped through the file. “Shay Eichrodt, age thirty-four, six-eight, three hundred pounds. A felon, Aryan Brother, later determined to be very high on crystal meth and alcohol. Laws ordered him out of the vehicle. Eichrodt complied. But instead of shutting the door, he collapsed in a heap on the road shoulder. They went to cuff him and he came up fighting. He punched and kicked and blocked their blows for several minutes-he had some martial arts and he was strong as a bear. They struck him approximately forty times before he went down and they finally got him cuffed.”
Ariel handed Hood the Sheriff’s Department photographs of Eichrodt, Laws and Draper shortly after the arrest.
Eichrodt was an immense, unconscious and bloody pulp. Laws and Draper were cut, bruised and bleeding, too, but it was nothing by comparison.
“Some of the blows were glancing,” said the prosecutor. “Some were not. The head shots took eighty stitches to close. Eichrodt had a severe concussion, a fractured cheek, fractured shin, two fractured hands, a broken forearm and four ribs. Your Citizens’ Oversight Board took thirty days to investigate that arrest, and they decided it was reasonable use of force. There wasn’t much public or media reaction-no video was shot, Eichrodt had attacked the deputies, Eichrodt was a white racist felon. He had few friends or family to stir things up with the press. He had just gunned down two Eme -protected drug runners in very cold blood, and taken their money. It took your detectives less than a week to flesh it out. Which was about the same amount of time that Judge Arthur Suarez took-two months later-to rule that Eichrodt was unable to assist in his own defense. Suarez committed the suspect to Atascadero State Hospital for an indefinite period of time. Eichrodt has been there for almost nineteen months.”