The White Angel Murder Page 9

  “Did he tell you who it was?”

  “No. And I don’t think he will.”

  “Any hunches?”

  “One. And we should follow up on him now.”

  24

  Stanton sat in his car outside the two-story house in Del Mar. Jessica sat next to him, reading a paperback novel and sipping a Starbucks coffee.

  It was a quiet street and there were no signs of children in the neighborhood. It was primarily youthful couples that had inherited money or retirees that were ready to spend some. More than once Stanton saw women in their forties and fifties wearing tight spandex workout pants and tank tops climbing into massive SUV’s to head presumably to the gym and then the tanning salon.

  “That him?” Jessica asked.

  Stanton looked over to the home and saw George Young climb out of a new Hummer and check his mailbox. He wore a white shirt with the sleeves hemmed so that they showed off his arms. Stanton could see the tip of a tattoo poking out on the right arm.

  Before he got to the door a woman in a dress opened it and kissed him on the cheek as he walked in. It was not the woman Stanton saw him having lunch with.

  “Yeah, that’s him. You never met him?”

  “No, haven’t had the pleasure. Seems like a douche.”

  “He is a douche. He and a few other guys in Vice steal steroids from the evidence lockers. I think they pay off one of the custodians.”

  “Have you talked to Harlow about it?”

  “Doesn’t work like that. I would be more despised than them. I wouldn’t find any proof anyway.”

  “So you just let it go?”

  “Of the seven Vice guys I knew doing it three have been fired for unrelated things and one is serving time in County for assault. They screw themselves; they don’t need me to do it.”

  “So what’s the game plan for him?”

  “I just want to see how he reacts. He’s obvious. He won’t be able to hide his surprise.”

  “You sound pretty sure of that. What if you’re wrong and you just tip him off?”

  “Then we’re back where we started.”

  “All right. Lead the way.”

  They walked across the street and to the large wooden door. Stanton knocked and took a step forward, nearly to the door. The woman answered.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m Detective Jon Stanton. Can we speak to Detective Young please?”

  “Sure.” She turned and yelled, “Honey, it’s for you.”

  Young stepped out from the kitchen, his face turning red as he saw Stanton there, inches away from being in his home. He mumbled something to the woman and then came out onto the porch, pushing his way past Stanton and nearly shoulder checking Jessica.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?”

  “Why did you tell Francisco not to include the information about Tami Jacobs dating a police officer in his report?”

  Stanton watched the anger flair on his face. His lips curled and his eyes widened. Stanton put his hands behind his back and lifted his chin slightly, as if welcoming a blow.

  “Are you fucking kidding me!” he bellowed. “You talked to him after I gave you orders not to?”

  “You’re not my supervisor, George. And I’m investigating this case and asked you a question.”

  “Fuck you,” he said, jabbing his finger into Stanton’s chest. “I’m going to Harlow.” He got in Stanton’s face. “If anything happens to any of my guys, I’m comin’ after you.”

  He walked inside and slammed the door. Stanton looked over the yard. It was immaculate, much like the inside of the house he had seen. The woman that had answered had perfect nails and soft, smooth hands. Not a housewife’s hands. They hired help for the yard and house.

  “Well that was productive,” Jessica said.

  “It wasn’t him.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He was more worried about his undercover than the accusation. Plus he wouldn’t go to Harlow and risk being found out. I don’t think it was him.” He looked to the Hummer. “But I think he’s doing more than taking the steroids.”

  *****

  Stanton finished up at the office and was about to leave when he got a call from Tommy that the chief wanted to see him. He went to Harlow’s office and knocked.

  “Come in.”

  He walked in and waited by the door without sitting down. Conversations went faster when one of the participants stood.

  “What’s going on, Mike?”

  “I just got a call from George.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Tell me you didn’t accuse him of what I think you accused him of?”

  “I had to. But I don’t think it was him.”

  “Why did you have to?”

  “One of the detectives in the case was ordered not to include the information about Tami dating a police officer in the report. I thought it could be George. But I was wrong.”

  “He’s a good cop.” Stanton didn’t say anything. “What?”

  “How long have you known he’s been dealing steroids?”

  Surprise flashed across his face only a brief moment and then went away. “A while.”

  “It’s dangerous, Mike. Other people see it and get ideas that the department doesn’t care what they do.”

  “I’m working on it. I only found out about it a few months ago and didn’t realize how deep it ran. A lot of careers could be ruined and I don’t want to do that just yet.”

  “Sure. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Jon?”

  “Yeah?”

  “How’d you guess that I knew?”

  “He’s too open about it. Someone doing it on the sly wouldn’t buy a fifty thousand dollar car. I figured he had somebody’s permission.”

  “I’m going to stop them, Jon. I promise.”

  Stanton looked at him a long time. He had the urge to look away, but didn’t. “Yeah.”

  25

  Stanton got home late and saw that Suzie was asleep, her window open as she lay in bed snoring. He usually never thought about it but right now he could’ve used some company.

  His apartment seemed cold somehow and he felt as if he were forced to be there. He looked at the bare walls and thought that tomorrow he would pick up some art. Things that would lighten the place up. He had always admired Tamara de Lempicka and found her works uplifting. He would find prints online and have them framed nicely for the walls.

  He wasn’t hungry but went to the fridge anyway and stood there looking at the empty shelves. There was a box of Diet Coke on the counter and he lifted it and felt its lightness and knew it was empty. His headache had returned and sometimes caffeine and Advil together helped. But he was too tired to run to the store. He knew he hadn’t done any real physical exertion and wondered what it was that had exhausted him.

  Stanton took eight hundred milligrams of ibuprofen and went to bed. He lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling. The moonlight was coming through his window and it lit up the room with a soft, blue light. He began counting the swirls in the paint in his ceiling, tracing the pattern with his eyes and making out familiar shapes. Slowly, he began to drift off.

  It was 2:12 am when Stanton’s cell phone woke him up. He didn’t realize what it was until he remembered that he had thrown his phone on the nightstand without turning it off. He fumbled with it, sleep still in his eyes, and answered without looking at the number.

  “Hello?”

  “Jon, it’s Mike. I, ah, got something.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Home. Some uniforms just woke me. I’ve sent down a patrol to pick you up.”

  “Why? What’s going on?”

  There was silence on the other line for awhile before Harlow said, “It’s Detective Hernandez, Jon. He’s been killed.”

  *****

  The scene was chaos. There were at least ten patrol cars with their red and blues twirling in the night. Yellow police tape wrapped twenty feet from the apartment complex and
held back a large crowd. A few had brought chairs and drinks. A news van was parked near the curb on the outside of the tape, a tall blond in high-heels having make-up applied as the camera crew set up.

  Stanton parked a basketball court’s length away to avoid the cameras and the crowd. He walked slowly and when he neared, he saw that on the sidewalk in front of the Boca Del Ray stood Chief Harlow with George Young. As soon as Young saw Stanton, he darted for him. Harlow yelled something and two uniforms grabbed him and Stanton could make out one of them shouting, “He’s not worth it.” Young was taken to a cruiser and leaned against it as several officers came to him, trying to calm him down. Stanton went under the police tape and to Harlow.

  “Sorry to call you out like this,” Harlow said, “but I figured you’d want to be here.”

  “What happened?”

  “Gangland happened, Jon. We think they got wind and popped him.”

  “I’d like to go inside.”

  “Go ahead. I gave Chin the case.”

  Stanton walked past the officers standing on the porch. They gave him cold stares; long penetrating looks before they turned away and pretended they hadn’t seen him. He made his way down the hall and could see the flashes from the forensics unit cameras. The apartment was packed with police officers. Anytime an officer was killed everyone on the force wanted to be there. It was a sense of “that could’a been me.” It was also part of the job and every officer tried their best to prepare for it, but Stanton had yet to meet one that was ready to die for a paycheck.

  He saw Chin Ho in the kitchen typing something in a tablet and he turned away and looked to the corner of the living room. Francisco’s corpse lay lengthwise, his arm under his head, blood pooled around him from the gaping wound in his skull. Written in blood on the wall next to him was the word PIG.

  Stanton carefully brushed past the uniforms and stood next to the body as forensics investigators finished their photos and vacuuming and called the medical examiner’s office to send body lifters to haul it away.

  Stanton waited patiently for forensics to finish. Though not police officers, since the airing of CSI they carried a sense of self-importance and condescension with them. They weren’t even allowed to carry firearms but applications to the police academy had declined in recent years and applications to forensics schools had skyrocketed. One forensic investigator had attempted to interview a witness and he was promptly fired and lost his state licensure. But because of a television show people now looked to them to solve crimes.

  Stanton bent down and looked at the hole in Francisco’s head. It was large and there were gunpowder burns on the skin over his face, meaning he had been shot at close range. No defensive wounds anywhere, no sign of struggle.

  “Did you know him?”

  Stanton turned to see Chin standing there, staring at the body as one would stare at something that puzzled but didn’t interest.

  “You could say that.”

  “I don’t know why the chief gave this to me. I think it’s really pissing off some of the locals.”

  “It’s just yours tonight. Mike knows everyone’s emotional and when they’re emotional they make mistakes. They’ll calm down by tomorrow and that’s when he’ll call you into his office and tell you he’s under pressure to keep it local.”

  “Huh. Smart move I guess. So what’dya think?”

  “Not typical gangland. These guys are crazy but I don’t know if they’re crazy enough to kill a cop and make a big deal about it. They know a lot of theirs would be next. Then again, I haven’t worked Gang Unit since the early nineties. I hear they’re a lot less scared of police now.”

  “They would want to send a message though. You send us undercovers and this is what happens. But check this out.” Stanton followed him down the hall to the bathroom. Chin turned the lights off and grabbed a portable black-light from one of the forensics investigators. He switched on the light and turned the bathroom light off. Splashes of blood lit up like glow in the dark stickers. It was over the toilet, the wall, the bathtub and the floor. “Shot in here but there’s only droplets on the hallway carpet.”

  “More than one?”

  “That’d be my guess. Probably three. Two to hold him and one to pull the trigger while his head was down in the bathtub. Then they carried him to the living room and let him bleed out.”

  “Why not leave him here?”

  “No idea. But they tried cleaning the blood with bleach.”

  “Everyone knows that doesn’t work.”

  “Well these guys think it does.”

  “Where’s the entry?”

  “No damage we can find. These guys were invited in.”

  Stanton shook his head. “I was careful.”

  “Not careful enough.” He saw his face and added, “That’s not what I meant.”

  “It’s all right.”

  Stanton left the bathroom and watched as the body was placed in a black bag and zipped up. The lifters from the ME’s office were quiet when they carried it away. They were the low men on the totem pole. Typically they were either young and looking to apply to forensics school or to become pathologists, or they were old and they had grown comfortable with the silence of the dead. Live customers were much more difficult to deal with.

  The officers stood still and didn’t speak out of respect until the body was out of the apartment.

  Stanton walked outside. The air was warm but there was no breeze and the warmth sat on you and made the skin feel sticky. Harlow had left. This was his rebuke. Rather than tell him about it tomorrow he had him come down to show him what he had done.

  But the scene didn’t make sense. They had attempted to clean up blood in the bathroom but wanted to leave a message on the living room wall. There was a disconnect between what happened in the bathroom and what happened in the living room. Something had not gone right.

  Stanton saw out of the corner of his eye Young speaking with another officer. Young said something and the officer looked to Stanton and nodded.

  26

  Stanton went surfing the next day before the sun was up and stayed on the beach well into late morning. Someone with a large truck was selling tacos out the back and he bought two breakfast tacos and a horchata and ate near the surf, letting the water foam at his ankles. He then slept, the sun warming his cheeks and neck, and showered in one of the public showers provided by the city before heading into the office.

  The entire building was quiet. No one laughing or telling stories and only speaking when absolutely necessary. Officers would quietly nod to each other in understanding when passing in the halls, to everyone except Stanton. Word had already gotten around.

  He went to his office and shut the door. He turned on Pandora and listened to the Enigma station as he let his thoughts drift for awhile before turning to his computer. There was an email from Chin:

  Hey, you were right. Taken off the case this morning.

  C H

  When he was through checking his emails, he saw he had two voicemails. One was from Melissa, wondering if he had the number to a doctor they liked to use when they were married. It was an odd little fact they shared and it tugged at him to be reminded of it. They would both have to use the same doctor. No, one of them would change. They would have to.

  The other was a hang up. He turned away from his desk and spun the chair around so he could look outside. There were no clouds and the sun was cooking the city. He wished desperately he could’ve spent the whole day at the beach.

  Tommy buzzed him. The chief would like to see him.

  Harlow was not on the phone and was not even flipping through paperwork or a magazine when Stanton walked in. He was sitting quietly at his desk looking at his monitor. He turned toward Stanton as he sat down and smiled.

  “I’m not a bullshitter, Jon. You know that.”

  “I know.”

  “So I’m not going to bullshit you. This is bad. One of my detectives was killed because you didn’t follow the orders of
your superior. The media’s gotten hold of it already. Hunter wrote an op/ed in the Trib.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure he did.”

  “George wants me to refer this to the DA to see if there was any criminal negligence. I don’t think there was and I’m not going to do that. But I can’t have you on the unit anymore. It would taint everything we do.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m going to put you on administrative leave, with pay, until this thing blows over in the papers. Won’t be long I’m guessing. Some meth-head will shoot up a party cause he thinks the CIA’s out to get him and people will forget about this.”

  He rose. “Can I go?”

  “Sure. I’m sorry about this, Jon. I wish this could’a turned out different.”

  “Me too.”

  *****

  Stanton waited by the fence at Theodore Roosevelt Elementary as his son walked out. He was carrying drawings he had done and Stanton wondered who they were for.

  “Hey champ.”

  “Dad!”

  Mathew ran up and threw his arms around his father. Stanton hugged him back and kissed the top of his head, smelling his hair. He remembered the day at the hospital when Mathew had a fever of 103 and wasn’t yet a year old. He remembered rocking him late into the night and the smell of his skin and hair and the fear that was inside him as he looked at his boy’s cherubic face.

  “What’re you doing here?”

  “I just wanted to come by and see you. So what’s going on?”

  “I got picked for soccer today and Josh kicked the ball really hard and it hit me in the face.”

  “Oh no.”

  “Yeah but I didn’t cry. I just kicked the ball back and said I was fine.”

  “Good for you.”

  “There’s mom.”