the Viking Funeral (2001) Read online

  "He's your friend. I barely know him."

  "They don't call him the 'Good Shepherd' for nothing," she smiled. "He's good people; he won't blow you in."

  A uniformed lieutenant in her late twenties appeared in the doorway. "The commander is ready now."

  Mark Shephard was a climber in the department, but he was an unusual mix--a uniform-friendly commander who also had Glass House suck and deft political skills. He reminded Shane a lot of his first Boy Scout leader: tall and good-looking, with a tan complexion and blond hair. Mark Shephard's blue eyes crinkled with what seemed like ever friendly amusement.

  "Sorry to keep you waiting, Sergeant," Shephard said. He wore his blue-steel revolver on his belt in a Yaqui Slide holster, the flap snapped down over a black checkered grip. A lot of Glass House politicians, who had done the minimum amount of street work, packed chrome-plated, custom-gripped artillery-- but not the Good Shepherd. This was a no-nonsense piece. He had his coat off, and Shane could see that he stayed fit.

  "Thanks for seeing me," Shane said.

  "Any friend of Alexa's... I'm really proud about the ceremony, her getting the MOV. As her commander, I'm honored to be reading the citation this Sunday, before Tony gives her the award." Tony was the new chief of police-- Tony Filosiani--a street cop from New York who had applied for the job of top cop in L. A. after Chief Brewer was arrested. He had been chosen over other candidates because of his record of turning around morale in troubled departments. Los Angeles had had a string of police crises, from Rodney King to the Rampart Division scandal to the Naval Yard disaster.

  Chief Filosiani was short and round and talked out of the side of his mouth in New York Brooklynese. As a result of this and his penchant for large pinky rings, he had been dubbed the Day-Glo Dago.

  "I guess the best thing is to just take a look at Sergeant Dean's death package," Shephard said, interrupting his train of thought.

  Shane nodded.

  Commander Shephard pushed the folders over. Shane sat down in the chair opposite the desk and opened them.

  Shane had never seen Jody in death. He'd pictured it in his mind, of course, but his subconscious had neatly sanitized it. His imagination was nothing like the photographs. As he opened the folder, his stomach lurched.

  His throat constricted. It was worse than he expected. In the pictures, Jody was sprawled in the front seat of a department plainwrap.

  The details were graphic: the puckered blood-drained lips, the huge hole blasting away half of the back of his head, the green flies feasting on heavy arterial ooze. Shane could see Jody's gun, the big Israeli Desert Eagle he'd been using at the end. The .44 magnum automatic was light in weight but 30 percent bigger than the old army .45. It dangled in death, at the end of Jody's broken finger, like a child's forgotten toy. The recoil had obviously snapped his index finger, and as a result, the gun hadn't flown from his hand as was normal in most suicides.

  Shane went through the autopsy and crime-scene pictures carefully, forcing himself to study them: Jody slumped in the front seat leaking fluid fatally; Jody on the coroner's table. The clinical labeling screamed from the bottom of each photo: anterior angle, medial angle, proximal and midline photos; right side, left side, overhead. Jody, naked on a steel autopsy tray, bathed in sterile lighting and antiseptic brutality.

  Finally Shane went to the autopsy report itself. The ME's phrases jumping up, posting themselves forever on his memory: "massive trauma," "self-inflicted gunshot wound," "destroyed distal portion of the cerebellum." Then the death terms: "cadaveric spasm," "adipocere," and "acute cyanosis."

  Shane read it all, finally closing the folder.

  He looked up at Commander Mark Shephard, who had turned his attention to the mail on his desk but now felt the gaze and lifted his friendly blue eyes to meet Shane's. "Well?" the Good Shepherd said. "What do you think?"

  "I must have been wrong," Shane answered softly.

  Chapter 7.

  NIGHT MUSIC

  THE PHONE SCREAMED in his ear. He clambered up out of a restless sleep. Where's the damned clock? What the fuck... ? What time is it? Focusing now on the lit dial, trying to read it: a few minutes after two in the middle of the night. You gotta be kidding. He grabbed the phone, fumbling it out of the cradle.

  "Yeah?" his voice raspberried.

  "How they hangin', bro?" Jody's voice was grinning, having fun with this back-from-the-grave moment.

  Shane bolted upright in bed, his heart immediately slamming with adrenaline, banging unevenly, a four-barrel engine with a bad cam. He was gripping the receiver hard, his knuckles turning white, his palm instantly slick on the instrument. "Jody? Is this Jody?"

  "Back from the Great Department in the Sky. Thought you and I needed a little night music," his term for the late-night talks they had during sleepovers as kids.

  Shane was wide awake in less than thirty seconds; sleep was quickly broomed away like corner cobwebs. He swung his feet off the bed. Got them down onto the floor for stability.

  "Why?... Why?... Why did you do it? Why did you make us think you were dead? I cried, man. It really fucked me up."

  "Hey, it's just police work, Salsa. I'm doin' a job." Jody had nicknames for everyone; nicknames were a "Jody" thing. He'd called Shane "Salsa" or "Hot Sauce" almost from the beginning, because in the old days when they were children, Shane had a short fuse and often couldn't control his temper.

  "You're still on the job?" Shane said, trying to pin down that fact. "With the department?"

  "Yeah, but you didn't hear it here. I'm working UC."

  "You're undercover?" Astounded, still trying to find the edges of it. In his heart he had known that Jody was alive from that first moment he saw him on the freeway last Friday, but hearing his voice was different--spooky, surreal.

  "It's a big laydown, so a few of my old road dogs and me been bustin' moves and doin' doors on some serious assholes." "Doin' doors"

  was an old term referring to cops stealing from drug houses but more recently had come to mean any activity where cops cheated to get busts. Shane took a deep breath to settle down. It was unbelievable... Jody on the phone, in the middle of the night, talking trash, sounding wired. "We found out there are a few moles in the Clerical Division who would've given us away if we got regular paychecks. This is a big hustle, Salsa. Lots of chips on the table. We needed to work the bust from the inside."

  "What bust?"

  "Hey, come on... You know better than to ask that."

  "Jody... I... Look, Jody, I have to see you."

  "Ain't gonna happen. Can't happen. Reason I called is, I know you'll pull on this thread till you unravel the whole sweater, and that could fuck me up. You gotta chill, brother. You gotta leave this behind. Forget you saw me. Don't 'plex up on me, Salsa."

  "Plex up"--a prison term meaning to get complex. Why is he using con lingo?

  "Does Lauren know?" Shane asked.

  "No, I cut a deal with my CO.... Told 'em she wasn't solid... She'd give us up. I needed to get out of that. It took a while, and I had to pull some juice downtown, but in the end, the department went along. She thinks I'm dead." But he said all of this slowly, as if considering it a word at a time. Shane figured it could mean anything.

  "She's not doing well, Jody. She's gained weight. She's become an afternoon drinker."

  "Hey, Salsa, shit happens. I made a mistake with her. I thought it was love, but it was just my dick. She's okay. She's got my police pension. I got a medical pass on the suicide. They said it was caused by psychiatric stress, so it protects my death benefits. 'At's the best I can do. After this job, I'm gating out... Gonna get small, shake off the drag line."

  More prison lingo. "Gating out" was release from custody. "Drag lines" were prisoner restraints, linking cons together.

  "So, Shane... I called 'cause I didn't want you to mess me up. A lot of people could get fucked unless you keep this to yourself. I hadda eat some shit to get my people to stay frosty. A few guys wanted to send you some
GBH." More prison talk: "grievous bodily harm."

  "Jody, is this sanctioned?" he heard himself ask. But he knew it didn't matter how Jody answered. He knew he couldn't trust anything he said.

  "I'm not working off my badge, Hot Sauce. I'm just working off the books. Do yourself a favor and forget you saw me. Forget we were both on the 405. It didn't happen. Do that, and everything stays right side up."

  "And if I don't?"

  "Don't even suggest it, man. I Jodyized this deal! Make me a hero with my troops. I told 'em you'd see it my way--our way. I told 'em you were good people. And, Salsa, don't tell anybody about this call. With your current problems, those squints in the Glass House are gonna black-flag what's left of your career."

  "Where's Carl Medwick?" Shane asked suddenly.

  "How the fuck should I know. Home in bed, I guess."

  "He disappeared the day before I saw you."

  "Now you're acting like a complete asshole. If you keep this up, it won't come out good."

  "So you're threatening me now?" Shane said, his voice turning cold with anger and betrayal.

  "I'm just passing along information. Use it, or don't."

  Then there was a long, tension-filled pause. Shane could hear Jody breathing. Both of them were waiting to see what would happen next. Finally, it was Jody who broke the silence.

  "So, that's all I wanted to tell you. Miss you, man. Sorry we can't lay in together."

  "Lay in"--prison lingo for a meeting.

  "I'll see ya, Salsa. You're still my catcher, like always. Dig this pitch outta the dirt for me. Go Pirates!" And then he was gone.

  Shane sat on the corner of his bed for a long time, stunned. The receiver finally started beeping in his hand. He dropped the handset back in the cradle, got up, walked out, and sat in one of the white metal chairs in the backyard. He felt the cool ocean breeze drying the sweat on his face. He stared at the moonlit canals, trying to sort out what Jody had told him.

  Is it possible? he wondered. Could the LAPD be working a deep sting so dangerous and sensitive that they would fake the deaths of Jody and several other officers? Would they take them off the booksy so some criminal snitch working in the Clerical Division wouldn't spot a paycheck coming through and sell the information to a crime syndicate? Was it possible that these guys would leave their wives and that the department would arrange for their families to be paid with death-benefit checks and then just let them disappear? It was almost too bizarre to contemplate. Except for one thing...

  Shane was pretty sure the new chief wouldn't have anything to do with it. The Day-Glo Dago might talk out of the side of his mouth and wear a New York pinky ring, but his reputation for honesty was well known.

  Burleigh Brewer, the old chief, whom Shane had caught with his hand in the money jar, was a rule bender, and rule benders always hired people who go along and don't ask questions--people like Deputy Chief Mayweather. Only Mayweather was dead--a suicide after Shane broke him on the Naval Yard case. Chief Brewer was still alive; however, he was on trial and wasn't going to admit to putting an illegal unit into deep cover, paying their wives with death checks. Even if Brewer was in on it, which he may not have been, and even if Shane could prove it, Brewer would blame it on Mayweather or some other cop who wasn't around to argue. The old chief wouldn't say anything that would adversely affect his case in court. That door was closed. Even so, it was possible that the corruption that spawned the Naval Yard disaster could have also given rise to this.

  He sat there, his mind chewing it over. What should he do? How should he play it?

  Tomorrow afternoon Alexa was getting the Medal of Valor. Maybe after the celebration dinner, after he had taken Buddy back to the airport, maybe then he could ask her advice. Alexa had political savvy without being a politician. She'd know what to do.

  Shane had no evidence of the call from Jody. He'd get AT&T to print out his phone records, but he knew Jody would have used a public booth--a number that was untraceable.

  Don't plex up on me, Salsa, his old friend had said.

  "Well, fuck you, Jody," Shane whispered into the night wind, the anger and betrayal so intense that acid reflux burned in his throat. If you didn't love me enough to say good-bye... If you could let me carry your coffin and cry into your ashes, if you didn't trust me or Lauren, the people who loved you, then bring on the GBH, buddy 'Cause I'm gonna find out what the hell you're up to....

  He was still sitting in the metal chair, churning and making plans, when the sun came up Sunday morning.

  Chapter 8.

  MORE THAN THE EYE CAN SEE

  HOOCH AND SHANE went shopping for Alexa's ring on Sunday morning. Murray Steinberg opened his store in the Jewelry Mart on Spring Street at ten, turned on the lights, and began showing them diamonds. Murray was tall, rail-thin, and nerdy. He always seemed to be rubbing his palms together like a huge skeletal insect but had a heart the size of Minnesota.

  Shane had been the primary on Sharon Steinberg's rapeurder. She was Murray's sister and only living relative. It had been a particularly gruesome crime that had happened almost three years ago. Shane had promised Murray that he would never let it slide to the back of his too-crowded homicide folder. Sharon Steinberg had been tied up, mutilated, and raped in her own bed before she finally, mercifully died from loss of blood.

  The twenty-four/twenty-four-hour rule dominates most homicide cases. This unwritten rule states that the last twenty-four hours of a victim's life and the first twenty-four hours after the murder is committed are the two most important time periods in the investigation.

  The reason being that a victim's actions just prior to the crime are just as important in determining the killer as mistakes the perp makes in the first twenty-four hours after the murder. If nothing happens during these two time spans to help solve the investigation, chances are good that the crime will go uncleared.

  Because of the vast workloads in L. A. Homicide, with two or three fresh murders hitting the duty board every day, most homicide detectives put old, unsolved cases on the back burner. Because of administrative pressure to keep clearance percentages up, cops always focus on the fresh crimes, where the likelihood of success is higher. The unsolved cases are technically still active, but not actively policed.

  In the case of Murray Steinberg's sister, Shane had become so incensed by the level of perimortem violence that he refused to stop working the case. He knew that the perp was in the psychiatric category of "sadistic rapist," a man who had tortured and humiliated Sharon Steinberg before her death, dehumanizing her during the rape, making her an actress in his sexual fantasy. Shane had given up his days off for almost six months, working without overtime. Finally, he had managed to turn a witness that eventually led to the arrest of a thirty-year-old carpet cleaner and weekend dust bunny named Grady White. Grady was a hot-prowl burglar who cased his jobs when he cleaned carpets. He had entered the house to steal appliances but, after seeing Sharon asleep, had descended into glazed sexual rage, finally torturing, raping, and killing her. In Grady's house there were Polaroids neatly pasted into a memory book of not only Sharon's rape-murder but ten others. Shane got him prosecuted and convicted on six of the ten. Four women pictured in his book remained unidentified. Grady was currently awaiting a July 10 execution at San Quentin.

  That was why Murray had opened his store on a Sunday and was now showing Chooch and Shane VS-1 diamonds at wholesale prices. Technically, Shane probably should have refused the bargain, but somewhere in the back of his head, he reasoned that it was the right solution. Murray was finally paying Shane back for months of tireless work on Sharon's murder, and Shane was getting a ring he could otherwise not afford.

  Shane finally settled for a perfect stone at slightly over two carats, which would have retailed for around five thousand dollars. Murray refused to take a cent more than cost, which he maintained, was thirty-four hundred. The old jeweler left the showroom with a platinum setting to make up the ring so Shane could take it with him.
<
br />   Chooch and Shane sat silently, looking at the other diamonds glittering on the black velvet show cloth. They looked like stars in a cloudless night sky.

  Finally, Murray returned with Shane's ring, now twinkling in a classic setting with two diamond baguettes on each side, which Shane had not paid for.

  "My wedding gift," Murray said when Shane asked about them.

  Shane thanked the embarrassed jeweler, who said, "Acht, is nothing. I'm wishing I could do more, my friend."

  Soon Shane and Chooch were back on the street with the box burning a hole in Shane's pocket, the ring inside waiting to be slipped onto Alexa's slender finger.

  "When you gonna give it to her?" Chooch asked nervously.

  "At a romantic dinner tonight, after Buddy leaves."

  "Good move," Chooch agreed. "Wait'll he's outta town. That guy could sink a Carnival Cruise."

  "You don't think it's too soon?" Shane asked, suddenly nervous. "The Medal of Valor and this ring, all in one day."

  "Go for it, man."

  The Medal of Valor ceremony took place at three in the afternoon, in the Jack Webb Auditorium at the Police Academy, where the LAPD had their biannual graduation ceremonies. The academy was a cluster of Spanish-style buildings located in Elysian Park in the foothills, at the end of a long, two-lane drive. Shane always thought the Police Academy looked like a Spanish hotel or a Franciscan mission, sprawled on its ten landscaped acres, including a full athletic field, swimming pool, and shooting range.

  Shane and Chooch got there half an hour early and parked in the reserved-parking lot, already almost full with TV news vans. The annual awarding of the Medal of Valor was always a big deal in L. A. Besides Alexa, there were four other officers receiving the honor, but it was Alexa the press had turned out to see.

  The high-profile case that she and Shane had broken eventually made the cover of Time magazine, a full picture of an LAPD shield with a black ribbon across it. The article was titled "Grieving the Police."

  There were stories in the issue about the Detroit and Philadelphia police scandals as well as NYPD's problems, but the Long Beach Naval Yard case turned out to be the grand-daddy of them all. Alexa's picture was in a sidebar describing her incredible heroics.