The Fallen
- Автор: Паркер Т. Джефферсон
- Год: 2006
- Язык: английский
- Год: William Morrow
- ISBN: 978-0-06-056238-0
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «The Fallen». Краткое содержание книги:
I opened three of Garrett’s longest files and did a word search for “Trey” and “Vinson.”
I found just one reference, from a document last updated on Sunday, March 6, two days before Garrett was killed.
Vinson’s name appeared in a brief paragraph that followed ninety pages of City of San Diego financial reports and disclosures, some of which went back to 1995, and eighteen pages of budget abstracts.
City cooked the books. Now up to Vinson. Diminished to negative. If he holds we’re alive, if he folds we’re not.
McKenzie clipped her phone back to her belt and told me Vinson had come up clean on the warrant check.
I told her Vinson worked for a big rating agency and pointed to his name on the screen.
She read over my shoulder. “If the city cooked the books and Vinson found out, that would kill our credit. No credit, no bonds, no money. Bankruptcy.”
“But he might hold,” I said.
“Why?”
“Pressure? Money? The wonderful San Diego weather?”
I knew from my brief stint in Fraud that a city’s credit rating governed the amount of interest that would have to be paid to investors. If a city’s rating was high, it could successfully issue municipal bonds and pay a relatively low rate of return. But if the rating was lower, the city would have to offer higher interest to attract bond buyers. To a city the size of San Diego, the difference between an A and a B rating on, say, a $100 million bond could be $3 or $4 million. I knew also that the city had issued roughly $2.5 billion in municipal bonds in the last ten years. If the city was caught “cooking the books,” the penalties, fines, and refinancing costs would send us deep into bankruptcy.
I stood and let her tap her way out of the programs. I looked again at the picture of the river. It was a photograph on photographic paper, not something cut from a magazine. It was in color, though I was reasonably sure that Garrett had taken it. It was held up with tape now but there were holes in each of the four corners.
Really all you could see was rippled water. No bank or rocks or horizon or anything to give size or perspective. Just four by six inches of yellow-green ripples. It could have been a close-up of something else. Or an abstract painting. But I knew why Garrett had taken it because I could just barely discern the fish lying beneath the shimmering surface. I had to look slightly to the side of the animal, like viewing a shape in the dark. Just a faint vertical tail line was all that gave it away, but once you had seen the line, you saw the fish.
“What?” said McKenzie.
“It’s a picture of a fish.”
“No fish I can see.”
I pointed to it and she looked at me.
“I wonder if that’s what Garrett used to look at from his workbench out in the garage,” I said. “Remember? The tacks on the wall where something used to be?”
She nodded. “All those hours looking at something that’s not even there.”
“It’s there.”
“Okay, Robbie. Okay, Garrett. Okay, fish dreamers. You guys see what you want to see. In the meantime I’ll just try to live a normal kind of life. It bugs me that Garrett’s secret girl looks a lot like his wife.”
“Bugs me too.”
“How about lunch?”
“Would you mind just dropping me off at Gina’s work? She’ll bring me to headquarters.”
McKenzie gave me an analytical look. “Sure. Say hi for me. You two have a good thing, Robbie. You’re lucky.”
I walked through the Sultra doors trying to look casual while my heart beat hard in my ears. I strolled to the reception desk and waited while Tammy talked on the phone. I smiled across the travertine floor at Gina, who smiled faintly back, her Hikari Cosmos poised over an older woman with her hair clipped into sections. Gina looked almost unimaginably beautiful. One chair over, Rachel glanced at me as if she were fed up.
I sat in the waiting area and waited for Gina to finish. My heart kept beating extra hard. I didn’t expect her to just drop everything and run over to me, though I wouldn’t have minded. I didn’t stare at her but rather looked up from my hairstyle magazine every few seconds as if imagining a certain cut on myself. Tammy asked if I were a walk-in, not remembering who I was.
It took Gina quite a while to finish the cut, another while for the dry and style, another while for the woman to leave the chair and head in my direction. Finally Gina looked at me again for the first time since I’d walked in, held up a be-right-with-you finger then walked quickly off toward the bathrooms in the back.
I set down the magazine and waited. I looked out the white shutters to the street. The sun had broken through and now threw soft, cool light onto the travertine. I wondered what to say to Gina. I wondered what she’d say back. I wondered how she could possibly take so long in the bathroom. I waited another few minutes then went back to see if everything was okay.
A woman came from the bathroom and I waited another minute, then opened the door slightly and called her name. Just an echo.
So I tried again.
Silence is silence no matter how long you wait.
“Give her some space, Robbie. It’s all you can do.”
Rachel pushed the door all the way open and swept into the women’s room, the door closing behind her with a faint feminine breeze.
Down the hall I saw the rear exit door ajar and felt like a world-class fool. I went out the back way, too.
I walked back to headquarters, looking around for Gina as I went, but knew I wouldn’t see her. It took forty minutes and nothing registered. I didn’t see, hear, or smell anything. It’s interesting how quickly forty minutes can pass, how quickly they can drop from the memory of your life.
The next thing I knew the seven concrete-and-blue stories of police headquarters stood before me and I realized that if Gina was really gone, this job would be just about my whole world.
I found my captain in his office, eating alone and looking out his window. His name is Jim Villas and he has my respect. He’s a career San Diego cop, started when he was twenty, just like I did. He’s late fifties now, a grandfather and an accomplished handball player.
Captain Villas always wears his uniform on Fridays. He grew up a street kid and began as a street cop and he’s proud of that. He was picking a crumb off his navy trousers when I knocked on the doorjamb.
“May I close the door, sir?”
“Sure. Come in, Robbie.”
We talked for a minute about the cool, foggy weather and about an upcoming handball tournament. Then he asked me what was up.
“Captain Fellowes has been enjoying himself with working girls,” I said. “Some of Jordan Sheehan’s girls got him on video and Garrett Asplundh ended up with it.”
Villas stared at me for a moment. “This is not an early April Fools’ joke.”
“It’s not.”
“You’re positive it’s Fellowes?”
“Unless the video has been tampered with. I don’t think it has. Fellowes it is, sir, nothing on but his socks and a sneer.”
“How did you get it?”
I told him about Garrett’s secret National City apartment, April Holly, the spare room, the laptop. I told him about the other cop and everyone else I’d recognized.
“Councilman Rood and his aide?”
I nodded.
“Who else knows?”
“McKenzie. Possibly the girls in the video. I’m not sure if they knew who their clients were.”
“And Fellowes was the only one who appeared to be getting his fun for free?”
“The other men paid different amounts. The Vice captain got his for free.”
Villas stood and went to the window. The view was north toward Balboa Park. “This Sheehan woman, she’s the one Vice calls the Squeaky Clean Madam?”
“Yes, sir. That’s also what people on the street call her.”
“If a Vice captain is involved, that could explain why nobody’s touched her. Does Fellowes know he was recorded?”
“I’ve got no way of knowing, sir. Nothing on the discs suggests that.”
“Are they dated?”
“Yes. His last romp was two weeks ago.”
“Is there any mention of Fellowes in Asplundh’s notes or journals?”
“Yes, sir. He said the captain had become ‘flabby, dull, and an easy mark.’”
“Sounds like Fellowes, actually,” he mumbled.
Captain Villas dug a finger under his shirt collar and worked his neck around, like the shirt was too tight. He shook his head, sat back down. For a long while he looked out in the direction of Balboa Park.
“Okay,” he finally said. “I’ll handle it. Keep it to yourself for right now. This is not going to make your life easier, Robbie.”
“My life is fine.”
“I’ll have to talk to Internal Affairs and Professional Standards.”
“I understand, sir. And I need to talk to Fellowes.”
“Why?”
“If he knew he was on video, that’s motive.”
Villas just stared at me. “What, Garrett takes him for a little ride to tell him what he knows, and Fellowes blows him away? Calls Mincher or one of those other guys to give him a ride home?”
I shrugged. It sounded very possible to me. It had the one thing that a successful premeditated murder needs: audacity.
“That’s one of the ugliest things I’ve heard all day,” said Villas.
“Asplundh wasn’t killed for what he had,” I said. “He was killed for what he knew.”
“Yes. Okay. Talk to Fellowes.”