Hollywood Hills

EIGHT

Just after midnight Cindy Kroll heard a scraping sound on the roof. Her first thought was that some crows were up there pecking at the composite material that was designed to look like wood. She had fed her baby daughter some applesauce and bottle-fed her infant son before lying down on the bed in her T-shirt and underpants. It was so hot, she was just trying to catch some breeze from the open windows, and she had not intended to go to sleep yet, but she had dozed. The wine she’d had earlier while watching TV had done it.

She reminded herself that she had to cut down on the wine and she was dying to smoke some crystal, but she knew she had to kick it. Then she remembered that her daughter had fallen asleep in the playpen and that she had to get up and put her in her crib. Her son was lying beside her asleep, and she looked at him. She thought he resembled his father, Louis Dryden. She didn’t mind that. Louis was a good-looking man even if he-

Her thoughts were interrupted when she heard more scraping on the roof above her apartment. And then a cup fell from the sink in her kitchen and broke on the floor. And then all the dishes from the drainboard crashed to the floor, and her first thought was, Earthquake! Then she heard footsteps coming toward her bedroom.

The code 3 call came after the three warning beeps over the police radio. Then the RTO at Communications Division said, “All units in the vicinity and Six-A-Forty-nine, a woman screaming.”

When they heard the address of the call that was given to a Watch 3 unit, Viv Daley said, “That’s the Kroll address!”

Six-X-Seventy-six was very close to the location and jumped the call, arriving in less than three minutes. Georgie was out before Viv even brought the Crown Vic to a stop, and they both ran to the front door, standing in a wash of illumination from the security lights overhead.

The front entrance was well secured by a set of heavy wooden doors that opened out, and there was a small panel of double-glazed window in each door. The lobby inside was lit but there was no sign of the watchman that they were told would be there. They could see a door inside the lobby with a sign that said “Manager,” but it was closed.

And then they saw Cindy Kroll. She was staggering down the staircase toward the lobby, wearing only the T-shirt and cotton underwear. The T-shirt was blood-drenched and ripped open, and her chest bones glistened in the light. She reached the lobby floor, lurched from side to side, and dropped to her knees. A man wearing a black hoodie sweatshirt and black jeans ran down the stairs, a knife raised high over his head, yelling something unintelligible at the fallen woman as he tried to stab her again.

He may never have seen the orange fireballs coming at him or heard the explosions, but Viv Daley and Georgie Adams fired a total of thirteen rounds from their.40 caliber Glocks through the glass panels in the doors. Two of Georgie’s rounds hit Louis Dryden, one in the hip and one under the left eye. Three of Viv’s rounds got him in the shoulder and chest.

Lights went on all over the apartment building and in the building next door, as well as in a private residence across the street.

Viv Daley yelled through the broken glass, “Open this door! Somebody come open this door!”

“Police!” Georgie Adams yelled, kicking the double doors twice. Open it!”

Then through the broken window panels they saw an elderly man emerge in terror from the manager’s office. He stepped over the body of Cindy Kroll and yelled to the police, “Don’t shoot! I’m the watchman!”

He opened the door and began babbling. When he became intelligible, he said, “I heard her scream once and I called you right away! But you got here so fast, somebody on the third floor must’ve called first! And a few minutes later I heard her screaming again but this time it sounded like she was coming down the stairs and a man was also screaming curses and he was coming down and I got scared and locked my door!”

Georgie Adams shined his streamlight onto Louis Dryden’s face and saw the entry wound clearly. He holstered his pistol and grabbed his rover, calling for a rescue ambulance for Cindy Kroll. He also reported the officer-involved shooting that would bring dozens of people to the apartment building before the night ended.

Viv Daley turned Cindy Kroll onto her back in case CPR was possible. But the young woman’s chest was slashed wide open, exposing her breastbone. When Viv saw that Cindy Kroll’s eyes were open and her mouth was twisted into a rictus of violent death, she didn’t bother to feel for a pulse.

Viv looked at her partner, who averted his eyes from hers, and he said to her, “You better check on the babies. I’ll secure the scene here.”

Viv’s heart was hammering when she got to the landing of the third floor. She felt dry-mouthed and light-headed, and she could hardly believe that she had just fired her weapon outside the police pistol range. Though it was her first time, it had happened so fast and there had been such an adrenaline surge that she hadn’t had time to feel much fright. But she was feeling it now.

She held up her hand, and in the light from the third-floor hallway the hand looked palsied. She had a streamlight in her other hand, and when she got to the door, she found it wide open. There was no sound from within and she was suddenly more afraid than she’d ever been in her life.

Viv put her hand on her pistol grip, but it wasn’t for personal safety. The hand was acting reflexively, doing what a cop’s hand does in moments of fear. Any personal threat to her was past, yet she was weak and feeling nausea from the overwhelming fright sweeping over her, from dread of what she might find in there.

Viv Daley crept into the apartment. She stepped gingerly into the cluttered living room and was so instantly relieved that her legs almost buckled. The thirteen-month-old was safe in her playpen, her face tear-streaked but she wasn’t crying now. She wore a white jersey with a pink duck on the front, and a diaper, and she was sitting and staring at a brown teddy bear on the floor of the playpen as though in a daze.

“Hello, sweetie,” Viv said to the little girl, who turned and looked at her in confusion.

Then Viv rushed hopefully into the bedroom and found the baby boy. He was wearing only a diaper and was dangling from the upper rail of the crib from a cord to a cell phone charger that had been tied around his neck. His face was purple and his eyes were shut tight.

“No!” Viv shouted, not even aware that she’d spoken.

She jerked the cord from the crib and her fingers slipped twice before she untied it from where it was digging into the soft flesh of the infant’s neck, and she said, “I knew it! I knew it!”

And then she thought, This baby’s dead. What am I doing? This is a crime scene and this baby’s dead!

Still, she lifted the infant, thinking, He’s so light. He’s so small. She put the baby into the crib, and for no reason she could later fathom, she covered him to his wounded neck with his cotton blanket.

Viv stared at the dead baby and thought, All evening I imagined this. I knew Dryden could get in from the roof. I knew it. Why didn’t I act on it? Why didn’t I push the boss for a stakeout? What kind of cop am I?

The baby girl in the next room started crying then and was standing, holding on to the playpen rail. Viv went to her and picked her up, and she looked at Viv in shock and confusion and said, “Mommy.”

The toddler wrapped her arms around Viv’s neck, and Viv felt the silky blond hair against her cheek, and the child said it again: “Mommy.”

Viv said, “Hush, baby, hush.” And she began rocking her back and forth and didn’t hear Sergeant Murillo, who appeared behind her along with Snuffy Salcedo and Hollywood Nate, who remained in the hallway, looking in through the open door.

Viv was a lot calmer now and she said in a monotone to her sergeant, “In there. I found the baby hanging by the neck from the crib rail. I hoped he might still be alive so I took him down. But of course he wasn’t. I put him to bed.”

Sergeant Murillo looked at her and entered the bedroom for only a moment before he returned.

He said quietly to Viv, “Don’t touch anything else. A homicide team and SID will be here very soon to process the scene, and FID’s also on the way. They’ll separate you and Adams and it’ll be a very long night of questions, from FID especially, but this is obviously an in-policy shooting, so I don’t want you to stress over it. Just tell them exactly how it went down.”

“I knew this might happen,” Viv said quietly to Sergeant Murillo. “It’s almost like I could see him coming in from the roof.”

After hesitating, Sergeant Murillo looked at his officer and said in an even quieter voice, “Adams told me all about that, and yes, the ladder’s still in place on the carport roof where the dead man left it. But you didn’t know this would happen. It was just what-if speculation on your part. The place looked perfectly secure. You don’t have a crystal ball. Nobody could’ve anticipated this, Viv. You can’t blame yourself. The dead guy’s to blame. Nobody else.”

Viv Daley put the tot in the playpen and she immediately began crying and held her arms out to Viv saying, “Mommy, Mommy.”

“She thinks you’re her mommy,” Sergeant Murillo said. “Dear lord.”

Snuffy Salcedo, still in the common hallway with Hollywood Nate, said, “Jesus Christ. This is too awful.”

Nate said nothing and Snuffy turned and went downstairs.

“I gotta get outta here,” Viv said to Sergeant Murillo.

“Viv,” he said. “You and your partner will have to be separated while you wait for FID. We’re gonna see a lot of people around here in a little while. We’ll transport the little girl.”

When Viv got to the doorway, Hollywood Nate stood aside for her. She turned once to look back at the child in the playpen who held out her arms to Viv and between sobs said more urgently, “Mommy!”

Viv descended the stairwell to the lobby floor and found four cops from Watch 3 keeping neighbors away from the crime scene tape. Snuffy Salcedo was talking to Flotsam and Jetsam, who were in the street directing traffic and waving the criminalists’ van from SID into a parking space. Several of the uniformed cops whispered to one another, an indication that word had spread quickly about what Viv Daley had found in the third-floor apartment.

Flotsam said somberly to Jetsam, “Dude, remember how the Oracle always told us that doing good police work was the most fun we’d ever have in our entire lives?”

Jetsam said, “Yeah, and Viv and Georgie did real good police work when they lit up that fucking maniac.”

“True,” Flotsam said, “but I don’t think this night’s going on their desktop in the category of fun.”

Georgie was standing on the sidewalk outside the tape with the watch commander, Lieutenant O’Reilly, who was awaiting the imminent arrival of homicide detectives and the administrative team from Force Investigation Division, as well as the coroner’s body snatchers. But when he saw Viv emerge from the building, he left the lieutenant and approached her.

She looked at her partner, at the anxiety in his eyes, and Georgie said to her, “I never thought it could happen, sis. Honest to god, I never thought for a second that anything like this could happen.”

“Please, Gypsy, shut the fuck up,” Viv Daley said.