‘You think?’ McTeer ducked his head and scratched the top of it. ‘Rachel, if you were sure – or if I was sure – that Harkness had killed her, then I’d tell his lawyer to do one and back you every inch of the way. But as it stands, I have to tell you to back off. Or at least back far enough off that he can’t see you. You understand?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I’m not expecting you to like it. I just need you to act on it.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Okay, good. What about this Jamie character? The supposed new man in Eloise Gray’s life. Where are we with him? Do you believe there’s mileage in him yet?’
‘I think there’s more in Harkness but yes, of course, I’m not ruling him out of anything. But we’ve hit a dead end in every direction with him. There’s no Jamie the teacher. He lied or she lied, or she was wrong.’
‘If he did lie to her about who he was then doesn’t that make him more interesting to us?’
She sighed internally. ‘Yes sir, it does. No argument. But we’ve nothing to tell us who or where he is.’
‘Then I suggest you find something. I’m not saying he’s a better lead than Harkness but he’s not throwing lawyers at us. You don’t have to get off his case, just get out of his face.’
‘You’re a natural poet, sir.’
‘I knew I had to be good at something. You hear me though, right?’
She hesitated but had nowhere else to go. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘Rachel, take a bit of advice from a bitter old man. When they offer you DCI, think about it carefully, then take it. Then a few years later when they offer you Superintendent, think about it, then politely tell them to ram it. Unless you’re within a year of your pension, in which case think of the money and your grandkids. Otherwise it’s a pain in the arse and not the job you’re good at or meant to be doing. You’re good at what you do. Go do it.’
CHAPTER 6
Ethan Garland’s next of kin was listed as his wife. Ex-wife, to be more accurate. He and Marianne Ziegler had been divorced for five years, separated for two more, but he’d still listed her as his go-to in emergencies. And emergencies didn’t get much bigger than death.
Salgado and O’Neill quickly learned that she’d moved out to Thousand Oaks, forty miles west of downtown LA. She was a teacher in a local grade school and her address was listed as Brossard Drive. The detectives were having to wait for DNA results to come back on the body parts and for Kurt Geisler, the best of their tech guys, to work his magic on the computer in Finley Street. That meant they had time for a drive.
Marianne had reverted to her maiden name, seemingly having dropped the Garland tag as soon as she possibly could, which didn’t sit well with the idea that they might still be on close terms. Records showed she’d moved to Thousand Oaks in 2012, previous known address the marital home in Los Feliz. Despite being just forty miles from the city, her new home was a torturous hour-plus drive along Highway 101. For better or worse, it gave them time to talk.
The two of them had worked together for three years and usually rubbed along pretty well. O’Neill was the brains of the partnership, logical and clear-headed, they both knew that. She was considered where he was impulsive, calm where he’d rage. Salgado worked on instinct, trusted his gut and his partner. More often than not, both were right.
She was originally from the East Coast, about sixty miles from Boston, moving to the Golden State to go to college and staying. He’d occasionally rib her when her old accent resurfaced, usually in a few vowels when she was angry or drunk. Not that either happened often.
Salgado was an Angeleno from Boyle Heights and got a nosebleed if he went west of La Cienega. Son of a cop who was the son of an immigrant. Being a cop was an inevitability for him, he’d known it since the day he first watched his old man pull on his uniform and broke his mom’s heart by telling her he’d be doing the same. She’d done her best to talk him into studying law but he’d never had either the smarts or the stomach for being on that side of it. It was always going to be ‘the job’. No one was more surprised than him when he ended up in a suit, but he liked it. Hell, he loved it.
She had a partner, an architect named Ash, who she didn’t talk about much, and he’d learned to stop asking. He had a wife and two daughters and talked about them non-stop.
*
‘Cally, you know that if we don’t tie this up soon then we’re going to get heat to drop it, right? The guy’s dead and the DA’s office isn’t going to win any prizes for prosecuting a corpse.’
She shook her head from the driver’s seat. ‘You don’t believe that dropping this is right any more than I do.’
‘Hell no, I don’t. My gut tells me there’s something big here and I want us to have a part of it. But other people might see it differently and you know that too.’
She didn’t reply for a full five minutes but he could hear her thinking as she steered them towards Thousand Oaks.
‘Did I ever tell you about my first DB?’ she asked. He knew she was talking as if the intervening gap had never existed.
‘Just my second day on the job working out of Metro and we got a call to an apartment off Beverly Boulevard. Neighbours called the cops because of a bad smell coming from the place. We break the door down and sure enough there’s a decomposing corpse. A young woman named Sara Zamorano.
‘She had a broken neck and had been lying there on her bedroom floor for maybe a month. There was no sign of a break-in, the body was obviously in bad shape, but it was screaming out foul play to me. She was young, late twenties, no reason she’d have fallen, nothing for her to have tripped over. My partner said accidental causes, straight off the bat. Everything that happened after that, he used to back up his thinking.
‘He was a guy named Jack Megson. In his forties, paunchy, jaundiced, misogynist, casual racist, quick to go for his nightstick, but hey, he loved his mother. You know the type. We had to do door to door in the building and Megson made every interview go the same way. No one heard anything, no one thought anyone would harm Sara, no one had any reason to think it wasn’t a terrible accident.
‘It wasn’t that Megson didn’t want to work the case, not that he didn’t care exactly, more that he didn’t care enough. More that he wasn’t remotely fucking moved by any of it. He was just pissed that it meant paperwork and he didn’t need there to be any more. She was dead, right? Nothing would change that, right?
‘And nothing did. No thanks to Jack Megson, no thanks to me. So, I made two promises to myself. First, that I’d never forget Sara Zamorano. And I haven’t. There’s not a week goes by that something doesn’t remind me of her and that apartment. Second, that the day I became like Megson would be the day I quit. That if I stopped caring, if all I worried about was paperwork, if all the bodies became the same then I’d be out.’
They drove in a silence for a full minute before Salgado replied.
‘Do you remember every victim on every case you’ve been called to?’
She considered it. ‘No. But I remember that they were all different and I remember that I cared every single time.’