Guardians of the Night (A Gideon and Sirius Novel) Page 6

  The growl was like a fist to Alvarez’s stomach. He stepped back so fast he almost fell. His eyes were wide with fright and his face drained of color to cadaver white.

  With raised hands he continued backing away. He stared at my transformed partner. A little earlier Sirius had been wagging his tail and acting like an affection hound; now he was a hellhound. His hackles were raised, his teeth exposed, and his ears back.

  I said, “Lass das sein!” In German that means “Don’t do that.” Speaking in German makes everything sound more serious than it is. The Californian version would have been, “Cool it, dude.”

  Sirius stopped his growling.

  Alvarez got control of his voice and his trembling. He didn’t like the way his fright response had taken over and decided to overcompensate.

  “If your dog comes at me again I’ll shoot him,” he said.

  My growl might not have been as good as Sirius’s, but it wasn’t far behind: “You reach for your gun, and I’ll be the one going for your throat.

  “With my teeth,” I added.

  Nance stepped between us. “Do you want me to call the Crime Lab, Detective?”

  “I’ll call them,” I said.

  “Really?” said Alvarez, injecting about as much sarcasm as possible into the word.

  “That’s the plan.”

  “No, that’s bullshit.”

  Alvarez turned around and started walking away. With his back to us, he flipped us the bird.

  “Woof!” I said, doing a passable imitation of a big, threatening dog.

  Alvarez jumped, and his head whipped back. Nance and the coroner’s investigator tried covering up their laughter. I wasn’t as diplomatic.

  “Asshole,” said Alvarez, but he kept walking.

  “He’s probably a cat lover,” I said to my partner. “It might be he’s related to the Wicked Witch of the West.”

  I did my best Margaret Hamilton imitation: “I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog too.”

  My witch imitation didn’t scare my partner. He wagged his tail.

  Cop shows love to play up the excitement of a crime scene investigation. They show criminalists performing all sorts of high-tech experiments. Anyone who has worked a crime scene knows how tedious it really is. The entire process is designed to err on the side of caution and is painstakingly slow.

  Having quickly exhausted my usefulness at the scene, I vacated it at my first opportunity to look at surveillance footage from nearby businesses. The idea was to get answers, not more questions, but that’s not how it was working out.

  “No luck?”

  Adrienne Kahn must have heard my groaning. Earlier, she had given me a demonstration with the security system, showing me how to retrieve footage from the remote server. I had been left alone until now to do my looking.

  “Lots of it,” I said, “but all bad.”

  Adrienne was a paralegal who worked for the legal offices of a lawyer who still hadn’t made it in to work. My guess was that she pretty much ran the show. She was a pleasant woman somewhere between forty and fifty. At first glance she looked homely, but she had a beguiling smile that changed her features and gave her an exotic attractiveness whenever her lips folded upward.

  While showing me how to work the system, Adrienne had quietly commented on how glad she was to see that Sirius and I had recovered from our encounter with the Weatherman. That kind of compassion and interest I can live with. Any conversation that doesn’t belabor Ellis Haines is a good conversation.

  “You ever see anything like this?” I asked.

  I lined up the footage, and we both stared at a monitor showing the alley shrouded in darkness. In the midst of the ice plant was an upraised patch that I was pretty sure was the figure of Wrong Pauley. There were no cars in the alley, and no pedestrians. Then the darkness was pierced by what looked to be a long flash of lightning. Immediately afterward it was as if some director yelled, “Fade to black,” because that was all there was: darkness.

  “It goes on like that for almost an hour,” I said, advancing the digital frames for her. “Everything remains dark until the picture finally comes back into view.”

  Adrienne shook her head. “That’s strange.”

  “Two other offices in this building have security cameras looking out to the alley. The same thing happened with their systems.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a coincidence.”

  “I don’t think there’s been a more suspicious gap since Nixon’s Watergate tapes.”

  The paralegal politely smiled. It wasn’t clear whether she knew what I was talking about. The famous eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap had happened in a 1972 audiotape conversation between White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman and President Richard Nixon. Nixon’s secretary, Rosemary Woods, had tried to claim she was responsible for part of the apparent erasure, but few believed her.

  Watergate had happened before I was born, but I’d heard it rehashed many times between my parents. My mother was a Nixon supporter; my father not so much. He called him “Tricky Dick.” My mother thought Miss Woods accidentally erased the tape; my father was sure Nixon had erased incriminating evidence so as to save himself from being brought up on charges of treason.

  Rosemary Woods and Nixon were long dead, so that ruled them out as suspects. I had to figure out who or what was responsible for the mysterious gap on the tape. The flash and outage hadn’t only happened during the time Pauley died; it had also happened during the time the angel was supposed to have made its earthly appearance and then departure.

  “The same thing happened the night before,” I said.

  From the cloud I retrieved footage from the time when Wrong Pauley had claimed to see an angel. Once again there was a flash of light and then darkness.

  “May I?” asked Adrienne.

  I moved out of the chair and let her work the controls. The view on the monitor didn’t change.

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” she said. “As far as I know, the system has been operating perfectly.”

  That seemed to be the general consensus of all the businesses with security systems.

  I thanked her for trying to help. And then I excused myself to try and figure out what the hell had occurred.

  When I returned to the scene, Officer Nance was still there. I looked at his case log and saw that on paper very little had happened in my absence.

  The Forensic Field Unit was about ready to call it a day. I went and chatted up Gina Frost, a vivacious Filipina I had known for some time. Even at a crime scene, Gina usually has a big smile on her face. Gina describes herself as a “mail-order bride.” As far as I know, she is serious about that. Her husband is twenty-five years older than she is and probably never knew what hit him when she landed on the shores of California. After getting here, she discovered cop shows, particularly those featuring criminalists and forensic evidence. With her eyes on the prize, she went to school and got her degree in biology with a minor in forensic science. She definitely doesn’t fit the mold of most criminalists.

  “You gone for so long,” she said in her accented English. “What, you no love me anymore?”

  “You know I’m crazy about you, Gina.”

  “Good thing you leave handsome officer here,” she said, flirting with Nance. “He no run off like you.”

  “You’re making me jealous.”

  “That a good thing. I no like being taken for granted. My husband do that. He sit in his chair all day, and when I get home, he say, ‘I’m hungry.’ I tell him if he want Blue Plate special, then get out of his chair and make dinner. He say, ‘I should divorce you.’ I say, ‘You do that, old man.’ But he too scared to do that. He call me angel of death. He think I know how to kill him and make it look like natural death. And he right about that!”

  “Speaking of which,” I said, “did yo
u find anything unusual about this death?”

  “Nothing stand out,” Gina said. “Maybe toxicology report show he swallow a bag of Skittles, but don’t hold your breath.”

  Gina always liked to use American slang, and the more the better. A bag of Skittles referred to pills. As for not holding my breath, it would probably be a minimum of five weeks before a toxicology report would be sent my way.

  “What did the security footage show, sir?” asked Nance.

  “I saw a lot of light,” I said, “but not the kind that illuminates.”

  My cryptic explanation didn’t work on Nance. “What do you mean, sir?”

  I explained about what I had seen—or, more accurately, not seen—on the security footage. Nance chewed his lips for a moment and said, “That sounds military.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was a surveillance radar technician, sir. My job required me to know about jamming and blocking. Before our guys would do a recon in areas that were hot, we sometimes used blockers to disable digital imaging devices.”

  “What are blockers and how do they work?”

  “There are different kinds. One system fires a beam of light that puts spy cams out of action. Or it might be that dazzlers were used.”

  My nodding encouraged him to continue.

  “A dazzler is a directed energy weapon, or what’s called a DEW. Directed energy weapons can be used to overwhelm optical systems. Dazzlers can also blind people, at least temporarily. But it’s against international law to deploy permanently blinding laser weapons.”

  “So these dazzlers would be able to take out security cameras?”

  “That would be a piece of cake, Detective.”

  “What kind of range do these dazzlers have?”

  He shook his head. “I couldn’t say for sure. That wasn’t my field, sir.”

  “Whose field was it?”

  “More often than not,” he said, “it was the black ops guys.”

  CHAPTER 6:

  GREEN MACHINE, DARK MACHINATIONS

  “It’s a great day so far,” I said to Sirius. “We made a departmental enemy, there’s no physical evidence to suggest that Wrong Pauley was murdered, and the only thing we have to go on are my field notes of a dead man who said he was touched by an angel. Apparently that didn’t do him much good, did it?”

  Sirius wagged his tail, and I scratched the back of his head. My partner is definitely a glass half full kind of guy, and for that I am eternally grateful.

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s go for a late lunch. How about In-N-Out? I’ll get you a Protein Style.”

  A Protein Style is secret code for a burger without the bun. Normally the burgers are all cooked medium well, but my partner is usually able to sweet-talk his way into getting it very rare. We were a few miles away from the nearest In-N-Out, and the traffic made it a fifteen-minute drive, but when we got within a block, Sirius started pacing the back seat, his tail wagging. He definitely knew what the plan was, and approved.

  After getting our food, I pulled into a parking spot and fired up the laptop. I kept one of my hands grease-free and used it to read and scroll. Occasionally a hairy muzzle rested itself on my shoulder, which was my signal to pass over a fry. It’s taken years, but my partner almost has me trained.

  When the fries ran out, Sirius decided it was a good time to take a nap. While he snored, I kept working. When I reread Wrong Pauley’s description of the stealth car, it made me sit up a little straighter. If the car in question truly was noiseless, it either had to be an electric car or a hybrid vehicle in electric mode. Luckily, Pauley’s description seemed to preclude popular models like the Prius or Fusion. If Pauley was right about the car’s having only two doors and looking like a sports car, that limited the possibilities. Still, I soon learned there was no shortage of electric and hybrid cars now being offered.

  I tweaked a few search engines, ruling out the Smart Electric, Mitsubishi, Chevrolet Spark EV, Ford C-Max, and the Nissan Leaf. Since the Fisker Karma and Porsche Panamera both had four doors, they didn’t make my short list.

  Pauley had said the car looked like “one of those German sports cars.” I was pretty sure his reference had been to a Porsche Boxster, and so I wrote down its dimensions, including wheelbase, length, width, and height. Then I did my visual test drives of a Honda CR-Z, Cadillac ELR, BMW i8, and Tesla Roadster. I ruled out the Honda because it was a coupe, and the Cadillac dropped out of consideration because it didn’t look like a Porsche.

  Sometimes when you’re following a lead, you forget what started you on that road, and it suddenly occurred to me I was spending a lot of time pursuing anything but a sure bet.

  “There’s something . . . incongruous about this search,” I announced.

  My partner opened one bloodshot eye. He looked skeptical.

  “Yeah,” I agreed, “there’s also something incongruous about me using the word ‘incongruous,’ but here I am trying to track down a car based on the eyewitness account of the same eyewitness who saw an angel.”

  My partner closed his eye. I am sure it was merely coincidence, but he chose that moment to pass wind.

  “No more In-N-Out for you,” I threatened.

  He didn’t open his eye a second time; I opened a window.

  As needles in the haystack go, I had found an interesting one. Fewer than two thousand Tesla Roadsters had been sold in the United States during its four years of production ending in 2012. Having a price tag of more than a hundred thousand dollars might have had something to do with that.

  I was lucky that the number of cars sold was so low, but if there is an epicenter for Tesla Roadsters, it can be found in Los Angeles. The cachet of an electric vehicle in a Lotus Elite body had attracted its share of wealthy owners, including actors, producers, and movers and shakers. You could be green and still go from zero to sixty miles per hour in 3.7 seconds. If cost wasn’t an option, you could have your cake and eat it with Ed Begley Jr.

  I knew I was getting ahead of myself, but without any other potential leads I did a records search on owners of Tesla Roadsters in the L.A. area. After printing out a list, I eyeballed registered owners in Venice Beach as well as the neighboring communities of Santa Monica, Marina del Rey, Mar Vista, and Culver City. It was a limited pool of fewer than a hundred names, but that still promised to be time consuming.

  Before starting down that road, I wondered if I would be better served by getting the video recordings from other surveillance cameras in the area. Just because the footage in Wrong Pauley’s alley had been compromised, that didn’t mean nearby cameras hadn’t captured the car’s comings and goings. It would help, though, if I could be certain the car I wanted was a Tesla Roadster.

  My eyes returned to my printout. I didn’t expect anything to stand out among the vehicle records. In fact, nothing should have stood out. It wasn’t like I was looking for a particular name. And yet what the patrol officer had said about “black ops” was still fresh in my mind, something that made me start when I saw the name Orion-Zenith.

  Orion-Zenith—called OZ by most—is a defense contractor. I didn’t know much about the company, but did find it curious that OZ had a Tesla Roadster as a company car.

  The Tesla was registered to the OZ offices in El Segundo, an area known as the South Bay of Los Angeles because of its location on Santa Monica Bay. There were a number of other aviation companies in El Segundo, including Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, Northrop Grumman, and the Aerospace Corporation. According to what I read, OZ was one of the fastest-growing companies in the world because of its success in UAV (unmanned aerial vehicles) research and development.

  OZ made drones.

  When you’re a civil servant, time is on your side, or at least that’s what I always tell myself. Slowly but surely, I was working my way up the OZ food chain. When my phone call was transferred for
the third time, I was hoping that was a charm. I had said the same thing to three different employees: “This is Detective Michael Gideon of the Los Angeles Police Department. I’m wondering if I could talk to Mr. Corde about the Tesla Roadster he drives. We would like to know if it was at the scene of a mishap two nights ago.”

  “Mishap” is not a word you’ll find in the California Civil Code. It’s an imprecise word, which is why I was using it.

  The “Mr. Corde” I was trying to talk to was Drew “Rip” Corde, the founder and CEO of OZ. The OZ articles I had skimmed through had all mentioned the flamboyant Corde. I was pretty sure Corde had never met a camera he didn’t like. In a few of those pictures, he’d been posing in front of a black Tesla Roadster.

  The elevator music was playing again. “You know what Lily Tomlin once said?” Sirius pretended to be interested in what Lily and I had to say. “ ‘I worry that the person who thought up Muzak may be thinking up something else.’ ”

  Sirius rolled on his back in order to be scratched. I think it’s the price he demands for being my audience.

  “Detective Gideon?”

  It was a human voice, a friendly voice, a very feminine voice.

  “Guilty,” I said.

  She laughed a little, and I stopped scratching Sirius. I had found an audience who didn’t demand payment.

  “I understand you are trying to talk to Mr. Corde, Detective—is that correct?”

  “Two for two,” I said, and she laughed again.

  “And you wish to speak to him about his Tesla Roadster and an incident that occurred two nights ago?”

  I hadn’t used the word “incident,” but since we were getting along so famously I let it slide. “That’s right,” I said.

  “I hope you don’t mind my asking, but are you the same Detective Gideon who captured the Weatherman?”

  Before I could answer, she whispered, “That’s not something I would be asking except that Mr. Corde wanted me to find out.”