A Darkness More Than Night

Chapter 44

For most of the night they were separated and questioned and then questioned again. Then the interrogators switched rooms and they heard the same questions once more from different mouths. Five hours after the shooting on The Following Sea the doors were opened and McCaleb and Bosch stepped out into a hallway at Parker Center. Bosch came up to him then.

“You okay?”

“Tired.”

“Yeah.”

McCaleb watched him put a cigarette in his mouth but not light it.

“I’m heading out to the sheriff’s,” Bosch said. “I want to be there.”

McCaleb nodded.

“I’ll see you there.”

They stood side by side behind the one-way glass, squeezed in next to the videographer. McCaleb was close enough to smell Bosch’s menthol cigarette breath and the glove-box cologne he had seen him put on in his car while driving behind him out to Whittier. He could see the faint reflection of Bosch’s face in the glass and he realized he was looking through it into what was happening in the next room.

On the other side of the glass was a conference table with Rudy Tafero seated next to a public defender named Arnold Prince. Tafero had white tape spread across his nose and cotton in both nostrils. He had six stitches in the crown of his head which could not be seen because of his full head of hair. Paramedics had treated him for a broken nose and the head laceration at Cabrillo Marina.

Across from Tafero sat Jaye Winston. To her right was Alice Short, from the DA’s office. To her left were Deputy Chief Irvin Irving of the LAPD and Donald Twilley of the FBI. The early morning hours had been spent with all law enforcement agencies remotely involved in the investigation jockeying for the best position to take advantage of what all players knew to be a major case. It was now six-thirty in the morning and time to question the suspect.

It had been decided that Winston would handle the questioning – it being her case from the beginning – while the other three looked on and were available to her for advice. She began the interview by stating the date, time and identities of those in the room. She then read Tafero his constitutional rights and had him sign an acknowledgment form. His attorney said that Tafero would not be making a statement at the present time.

“That’s fine,” Winston said, her eyes on Tafero. “I don’t need him to talk to me. I want to talk to him. I want to give him an idea of what he is facing here. I don’t want there to be any regrets down the line over miscommunications or his passing up the one opportunity to cooperate that he’ll be given.”

She looked down at the file in front of her and opened it. McCaleb recognized the top sheet as a DA’s office complaint form.

“Mr. Tafero,” Winston began, “I want you to know that this morning we are charging you with the first-degree murder of Edward Gunn on January first of this year, the attempted murder of Terrell McCaleb on this date, and the murder of Jesse Tafero, also on this date. I know you know the law but I am compelled to explain the last charge. Your brother’s death occurred during the commission of a felony. Therefore, under California law you, as his co-conspirator, are held responsible for his death.”

She waited a beat, staring into Tafero’s seemingly dead eyes. She went back to reading the complaint.

“Further, you should know that the district attorney’s office has agreed to file a count of special circumstances in regard to the murder of Edward Gunn. To wit, murder for hire. The addition of special circumstances will make it a death penalty case. Alice?”

Short leaned forward. She was an attractive, petite woman in her late thirties with big, engaging eyes. She was the deputy chief in charge of major trials. It was a lot of power in such a small body – especially when contrasted with the size of the man across the table from her.

“Mr. Tafero, you were a policeman for twenty years,” she said. “You more than most know the gravity of your actions. There is not a case I can think of that cries out more for the death penalty. We will ask a jury for it. And I have no doubt we will get it.”

Her rehearsed part of the play finished, Short leaned back in her chair and deferred to Winston. There was a long silence while Winston stared at Tafero and waited for him to look back at her. Eventually, his eyes came up and held on hers.

“Mr. Tafero, you’ve been around and you’ve even been in the opposite position in rooms just like this before. I don’t think we could play a game on you if we had a year to work it out. So no game. Just the offer. A one-time offer that will be rescinded, permanently, when we walk out of this room. It comes down to this.”

The focus of Tafero’s eyes had dropped to the table again. Winston leaned forward and looked up into them.

“Do you want to live or do you want to take your chances with the jury? It’s as simple as that. And before you answer, there are a few things to consider. Number one, the jurors are going to see photographic evidence of what you did to Edward Gunn. Two, they are going to hear Terry McCaleb describe what it was like to be so helpless and to feel his own life being choked away by your design. You know, I don’t usually bet on such things but I’d give it less than an hour. My bet is that it will be one of the quickest death verdicts ever returned in the state of California.”

Winston pulled back and closed the file in front of her. McCaleb found himself nodding. She was doing very well.

“We want your employer,” Winston said. “We want physical evidence that will link him to the Gunn case. I have a feeling that someone like you would take precautions before carrying out such a scheme. Whatever it is, we want what you have.”

She looked at Short and the prosecutor nodded, her way of saying well done.

Almost half a minute went by. Finally, Tafero turned to his attorney and was about to whisper a question. Then he turned back to Winston.

“Fuck it, I’ll ask myself. Without acknowledging a fucking thing here, what if you drop the special circumstances? What am I facing?”

Winston immediately burst out laughing and shook her head. McCaleb smiled.

“Are you kidding?” Winston asked. “‘What am I facing?’ Man, you are going to be buried in concrete and steel. That’s what you are facing. You are never, ever going to see the light of day again. Deal, no deal, that is a given and nonnegotiable.”

Tafero’s attorney cleared his throat.

“Ms. Winston, this is hardly a professional manner in which -”

“I don’t give a shit about my manner. This man is a killer. He’s no different from a hit man except, no, he’s worse. He used to carry a badge and that makes it all the more despicable. So this is what we’ll do for your client, Mr. Prince. We’ll take guilty pleas to the murder of Edward Gunn and the attempted on Terry McCaleb. Life without on both counts. Nonnegotiable. We’ll no-bill the charge on his brother. Maybe it will help him live with it better if he doesn’t carry the charge. I don’t really care. What I care about is that he understands that his life as he knows it is over. He’s gone. And he can either go to death row or super max, but he’s going to one of them and not coming back.”

She looked at her watch.

“You’ve got about five minutes and then we’re out of here. You don’t want the deal, fine, we’ll take both of them to trial. Storey might be a long shot but there’s no question about Mr. Tafero here. Alice is going to have prosecutors knocking down her door, sending her flowers and chocolates. Every day’s going to be Valentine’s Day – or Valentino’s day, as the case may be. This one’s a ticket to prosecutor of the year.”

Prince brought a slim briefcase up onto the table and slid his legal pad into it. He hadn’t written a word on it.

“Thank you for your time,” he said. “I think what we’ll do is proceed to a bail hearing and go from there with discovery and other matters.”

He pushed his chair back and stood up.

Tafero slowly raised his head and looked at Winston, his eyes badly bloodshot from the hemorrhaging of his nose.

“It was his idea to make it look like a painting,” he said. “David Storey’s idea.”

There was a moment of stunned silence and then the defense attorney sat down heavily and closed his eyes in pain.

“Mr. Tafero,” Prince said. “I am strongly advising -”

“Shut up,” Tafero barked. “You little pissant. You’re not the one facing the needle.”

He looked back at Winston.

“I’ll take the deal. As long as I don’t get charged with my brother.”

Winston nodded.

Tafero turned to Short and pointed his finger and waited. She nodded.

“Deal,” she said.

“One thing,” Winston said quickly. “We’re not going into this with your word against his. What else have you got?”

Tafero looked at her and a thin, dead smile cracked across his face.

In the viewing room, Bosch stepped closer to the glass. McCaleb saw his reflection more clearly on the glass. His eyes stared unblinking.

“I’ve got pictures,” Tafero said.

Winston hooked her hair behind her ear and narrowed her eyes. She leaned across the table.

“Pictures? What do you mean, photographs? Photographs of what?”

Tafero shook his head.

“No. Pictures. He drew pictures for me while we were in the attorney visiting room in the jail. Drawings of what he wanted the scene to look like. So it would look like the painting.”

McCaleb gripped his hands into fists at his sides.

“Where are the drawings?” Winston said.

Tafero smiled again.

“Safe deposit box. City National Bank, Sunset and Doheny. The key’s on the ring that was in my pocket.”

Bosch brought his hands up and slapped them together.

“Bang!” he exclaimed, loud enough that Tafero turned and looked toward the glass.

“Please!” the videographer whispered. “We’re taping.”

Bosch went to the door of the little room and stepped out. McCaleb followed. Bosch turned and looked at him. He nodded.

“Storey goes down,” he said. “The monster goes back into the darkness from which it came.”

They looked at each other silently for a moment and then Bosch broke it away.

“I gotta go,” he said.

“Where?”

“Get ready for court.”

He turned and started walking through the deserted bullpen of the Sheriff’s Department homicide squad. McCaleb saw him bang a fist on a desk and then punch it into the air above him.

McCaleb went back into the viewing room and watched the interview continue. Tafero was telling the assemblage in the interview room that David Storey had demanded that the killing of Edward Gunn take place on the first morning of the new year.

McCaleb listened for a while and then thought of something. He stepped out of the observation room and into the bullpen. Detectives were now filtering in to start the day of work. He went to an empty desk and tore a page off a note pad on its top. He wrote, “Ask about the Lincoln” on it. He folded it and took it to the door to the interview room.

He knocked and after a moment Alice Short opened the door. He handed her the folded note.

“Give this to Jaye before the interview is over,” he whispered.

She nodded and closed the door. McCaleb went back into the observation room to watch.