The Fallen

19

Garrett Asplundh was buried on Wednesday morning, a week after he was murdered. The funeral made me thankful to be me again and I felt selfish and shallow for being so pessimistic the night before.

The memorial service was brief. Stella, who arrived with her parents and Sam Asplundh, did not address the mourners as a group. Garrett’s long-widowed mother trailed behind them. There were two dozen SDPD officers, including the chief himself. The Ethics Authority showed up in force — from the director down to Asplundh’s fellow investigators. Even Arliss Buntz was there, in a black dress and her once-green sweater.

John Van Flyke eulogized Garrett movingly, considering Van Flyke’s superior and humorless personality. He said that Garrett, like many great men, had experienced deep joy and deep pain. He had seen darkness and light. He had overcome a million temptations in order to walk the straight and narrow. He had believed in the power of good. He had understood how quickly a man’s life can change. He was a great man. Van Flyke’s voice wavered when he said this, so he said it again. Garrett Asplundh was a great man. It took me a moment to realize I’d heard his voice just a few hours before. Great party, great people, great country. I hadn’t realized until now how close he was to Garrett.

Van Flyke went on to say that Garrett Asplundh had left behind the memory of his daughter, a mourning wife, many close friends — and whoever was responsible for his death would pay once on earth and atone forever in hell.

The minister subtly winced at this last declaration but he said a powerful prayer for the souls of the dead and the living and of forgiveness in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

Stella hid behind sunglasses and steadied herself on Sam’s arm. Her hair was pulled back tight and she didn’t say much. I wondered if she would recover from all of this, and how long it might take. To lose a daughter and a husband within one year seemed a punishment too large to absorb.

I was struck again at the resemblance between Garrett and Samuel. According to the information that Hollis Harris had given us, Samuel was three years older. He was slightly taller and heavier, too, judging by my memory of Garrett. But Samuel had the same trim, dark features, the same expressive eyes as his brother. I wondered why the attractive blonde from the Fourth of July video was not with him.

Ethics Director Erik Kaven was there, face lined and mustache drooping, but his eyes boring steadily into everyone around him.

The mayor, the fire chief, and five of the nine city councilpersons all attended.

Jordan Sheehan came late, stood just to the right of the assembled mourners, and left early.

Carrie Ann Martier did the same but stood completely opposite Squeaky Clean, to the left. They never acknowledged each other.

Captain Sutherland, who had interviewed me for Professional Standards, was there, along with several PSU officers I scarcely recognized — Garrett’s old gang. Captain Villas was there, of course. Captain Fellowes of Vice gave me an oddly chummy look as he walked past me.

Abel Sarvonola, the Budget Oversight Committee chairman, fresh from Las Vegas, moved through the mourners with his usual entourage of whatever they were — advisers, bodyguards, sycophants. He was mid-eighties at least and he looked it. His suit looked hungry on him but his eyes were still sharp and his handshake had a strength that surprised me.

“I am saddened and angered,” he said. “We cannot afford to lose the good men.”

“It angers me too,” I said. “Garrett spoke of you.”

He blinked. His dark eyes glittered and he smiled. “I didn’t realize he thought of me at all. We should talk.”

“We have an appointment for this afternoon,” I reminded him.

“Of course we do.”

He shook McKenzie’s hand and stared frankly into her eyes.

Councilman Tony Rood made it. He looked satisfied and penitent in the way you might expect a man fresh from a brothel to look. His girl-beating aide Steve Stiles was with him, straight-backed and thick-necked.

I stood in the shade of a Torrey pine with McKenzie, Hollis Harris, and April Holly.

Harris was plainly unsure how to behave around McKenzie and me. Cops can do that to people. He treated us with a formality that was gracious but forced, especially with McKenzie. I could see by the way he looked at her that he had been captured. Interesting what you can see in a man’s eyes. But it wasn’t like he could put his arm around her or hold her hand, though he did whisper something in her ear.

McKenzie was taken too. She kept it hidden much better than Harris did, but I could tell. Her entire posture was different and her complexion looked better. It was nice to see two people strongly drawn to each other.

I thought of Gina with the kind of hunger that knows it can’t be fed.

I want you to remember me like I was last night.

I was beginning to think that I had nothing to offer her that would be enough to bring her back.

April was lovely and seemed older than her eighteen years. She looked wholesome and innocent and I saw again the value of what Squeaky Clean had tried to buy from April but Garrett had allowed her to keep. I wondered why the world was so eager to consume wholesomeness and innocence. When April paid her respects, I wondered if Stella knew of April’s living arrangement in her husband’s secret apartment. I made a note to find out. Garrett’s women, I thought. He had an eye for beauty.

By the end of the service, Stella was looking slightly better than on the day we had told her of Garrett’s death. There was a trace of resolve on her face. For a few minutes she was surrounded by a group of women her age, and they talked and touched each other comfortably. I thought they looked familiar and then it struck me why — the Pan Am Games synchronized swimming champions of 1983.

As I watched Councilman Rood and aide Stiles talking with Sarvonola and his group, I wondered again if Stiles had the cojones to take out Garrett, then toss Jordan’s earring into the Explorer just to mislead us. There was something aggressive about him, his bullish physique and gelled-back hair and fashionable ultralight sunglasses. I’d made some inquiries with another councilmanic aide I know and trust, and she told me that Stiles was ambitious to hold public office and was in fact a school board member in his daughter’s district. She said that Rood had his eyes on a California state assembly seat, and Stiles had his on the Ninth District council chair his boss would vacate. Convenient, I thought. I reminded myself that Stiles — out of all the men captured on Garrett’s video — most likely knew before Garrett’s murder that he’d been recorded. He’d certainly been confronted by Garrett. All his public ambitions could be shattered by that one thin disc, or that one deposition from Carrie Ann Martier. But what good would a murder have done Stiles at that point? Garrett had sprung the trap on him weeks earlier. Stiles had apologized and paid handsomely for his crimes. I could imagine Stiles’s fury and helplessness as he was caught in his own web, but I still couldn’t imagine him behind the trigger of Carl Herbert’s Model 39.

McKenzie left with Harris. April Holly stood with me for a while then walked behind a row of graves to say good-bye to Stella. She drove off alone in a nifty gold coupe made possible by Garrett Asplundh.

I leaned against the tree and saw John Van Flyke leaning against his own tree on the other side of the grave. He was gazing out over the mourners just as I was. He looked tired. Kaven had long since gone.

I was about to leave myself when a trim young man walked across the grass toward me. He was dark-haired, wore dark sunglasses, and was dressed in a suit that must have been made for him. He had come to the service alone and I had seen him glancing at me and McKenzie several times. He stopped in front of me, took off the glasses, and looked me directly in the eye.

“I am Sanji Moussaraf.”

“With the red Ferrari.”

“My car was disabled on the freeway the night Mr. Asplundh was killed. I called the police. Are you Detective Brownlaw?”

“Yes.”

“I recognize you from the burning hotel,” he said. “I saw the article in the newspaper about Mr. Asplundh and decided I should come here to find you.”

“Sooner would have been better.”

“I didn’t have the courage.”

He was very young — nineteen or twenty. I saw sincerity in his eyes, and a spark of fear.

“Take a walk with me, Mr. Moussaraf. Tell me what you saw.”

In his accented and slightly formal English, Sanji Moussaraf told me that his car had suddenly stalled on the southbound 163, and he’d guided it over to the side of the highway. He said it was like running out of gas, though he’d just filled up the tank that morning. He’d had trouble with the fuel filter once before and the car had stalled just like this. It was approximately 8:40 at night. It was raining. He called the Auto Club on his cell phone. They said a truck would be there within thirty minutes. He got out and raised the hood of his car but couldn’t see much.

No colored shapes came from Sanji’s mouth.

We walked along the narrow, winding road that led through the cemetery. The grass-cutting crew was removing flowers from the graves, which was too bad, because many of them looked fresh. I wondered if they ever kept a particularly nice arrangement as a gift for a loved one.

“So I got back in the car to wait for the Automobile Club,” said Moussaraf. “And when I was sitting there I saw a vehicle come down the embankment from above. It was a black sport utility vehicle. It moved slowly. When it came to level ground, the driver turned off the lights and the engine. The vehicle was approximately one hundred and fifty feet from me. There were trees with dangling branches that made my vision difficult. Five minutes later another vehicle came down the embankment. It moved slowly also and it pulled up next to the black SUV. This vehicle was a white Hummer. It looked new. The chrome was very shiny. There was no license plate on the front. I thought I saw a temporary registration taped to the windshield but it could have been something else. The headlights then were turned off.”

My heart sank a little. I’d had a fond hope that this alert young man had come up with at least a partial plate number. A temporary registration taped inside the windshield didn’t help much, though San Diego — area Hummer dealers could shed some light on recent sales.

“I sat for a few minutes,” said Moussaraf. “The rain increased. It was loud against the roof of my car. I looked at the two vehicles parked together in the grass. Because they were slightly behind me, I had to turn to see them. The trees still were between us. I saw an orange flash of light inside the first SUV. It was very bright and immediate. It was over instantly. It was thin and long like a comet. It appeared to be horizontal. My first thought was, someone had just fired a gun.”

As I looked at Sanji, yellow triangles floated into the space between us. They come from fear. Which is what most of us would feel upon remembering the sound of a gunshot.

“Did you see the shooter?”

“A moment later I saw the shape of a man move between the vehicles. He wore dark clothing. He was very difficult to see.”

“You’re sure it was a man?”

Sanji nodded. “I am almost sure.”

“Where did he shoot from?”

Sanji looked at me and frowned. “I cannot say for certain. The flash came from the passenger’s side. Maybe the shooter was sitting there. Maybe he was outside the vehicle, but leaning in. I believed the flash was moving from the passenger side to the driver side, but this could have been an illusion. It was instant and brief.”

“Did you hear a report?” I asked.

“The traffic on the highway was very loud. And the rain on the roof of my car. But I thought I heard something from the direction of the parked vehicles. A muffled pop.”

“Then what?”

“I continued to watch. With the rain and the branches and the darkness it was difficult to see. This is when I saw the shape of the man moving between the vehicles. Then the white Hummer reversed up the hill. It slipped in the wet grass and the tires appeared to spin, but then very slowly it climbed to the crest of the hill and went over. The headlights were still off.”

More yellow triangles.

“How much time passed between the flash and when you saw the man moving from one vehicle to the other?”

“Ten seconds.”

I wondered why a shooter would wait so long. Any shooter I’ve ever known would have bolted into his car and up that hill in a heartbeat. Tossing in an earring to confuse the investigation? Wiping off his prints?

“How long between the time you saw him and when the Hummer reversed up the hill?”

Sanji Moussaraf wiped his brow with a pale blue handkerchief that matched his necktie. “Perhaps five seconds. Enough time to start the engine and put it in gear. Not long.”

We stopped walking at the crest of a gentle rise. The graves stretched on for acres and acres around us and the grounds crews gathered up the flowers and tossed them into a pickup truck like trash from a sporting event. The Asplundh mourners seemed small and black and minor in this ocean of grass and stone. Van Flyke had left his tree and now stood with Sam and Stella and her parents. The morning clouds brooded above us in various shades of gray.

“As soon as I saw the flash I looked at my watch,” said Sanji. “It was exactly eight fifty-two. My watch is a Rolex and accurate. I waited for perhaps a minute, maybe two, after the Hummer left. Then I got out of my car. I climbed the fence. There was a drainage ditch full of water and I jumped across it. I went to the SUV and saw that the window was broken and a man was in the front seat, not moving. It was very bloody. I ran to the fence and climbed it again. I cut my hand on the chain link. I got back into my car and tried the engine again but it would not start. I thought about what I had seen. The tow truck delivered my car to the mechanic’s lot. The driver gave me a ride and I took a taxi home.”

He showed me a small, jagged cut on the index finger of his right hand. We started back toward the mourners and Garrett Asplundh’s freshly dug grave.

“But you didn’t call until after three that morning,” I said. “That’s over six hours.”

He glanced at me again and sighed. “I know it was wrong to wait.”

“Why did you?”

“When I got home,” said Moussaraf, “I stayed up late, drinking coffee. I thought about the immigration jail where I was taken after the September eleventh attack. It is called CCA because it is a private jail run by a private company called Corrections Corporation of America. I spent sixty nights there with no charges, no lawyer, no phone calls allowed to me, and no information about my status or future. Sixty nights, no exercise, no sun, no contact with my family or friends. My student visa was current and legal. I thought about the suspicion and disdain of the men who interrogated me about the San Diego — based terrorists. I was fifteen years old and my crime was that I attended the same mosque as one of the suicide hijackers.”

A flood of yellow triangles swept past me and vanished.

“Did you know him, the hijacker?”

“No. I had met him exactly one time. But my name and phone number were found in his address book. I remembered him as being secretive and humorless. He asked me for money for a humanitarian relief project in Afghanistan. I refused. You can imagine the suspicion of the United States government, given the economic power of my family in Saudi Arabia. I thought about many things that night. Then I went to a pay phone and called the police.”

“Did you follow the story in the papers?”

He nodded. “I knew it was important to talk to you. I suspected that what I saw could help your investigation. And Sergeant Waimrin said I could trust you.”

“Better late than never,” I said.

“Yes. I’m a junior now at San Diego State. I have an American girlfriend, though I know my family will not let me marry her. I have many friends here in San Diego. I was afraid to risk all that I have.”

We continued back toward the mourners. Only a few remained. Apparently this was the kind of cemetery where they don’t actually bury the coffin until all of the mourners are gone. The gravediggers sat on their Bobcats down the road a few yards, smoking and waiting. I watched as Van Flyke held open the limo door for Stella, her parents, and Sam, then closed it and walked back toward his car.

“There is one more thing,” said Sanji. “I saw a new white Hummer drive down Kettner when I was at the mechanic’s waiting for the taxi. It had what looked like a temporary license on the windshield. I cannot say that it was the vehicle from earlier. This is possibly coincidence, but maybe not.”

“What did the driver look like?”

“I could see nothing through the darkened windows. But there was mud on the bottom of the body.”

“Like it had climbed a muddy hill in reverse.”

“Correct.”

“What time?”

“Nine forty-four.”

“Which way was it traveling on Kettner?”

“North, toward the airport.”

Sanji pulled a small brown paper bag from his coat pocket. It was folded over once and neatly creased. “When the white Hummer was stopped at the signal, the driver rolled down his window and threw this out. Unfortunately, it was run over before I could get to it.”

He gave me the bag and I opened it. Inside was a flattened paper Higher Grounds coffee cup, the small size, complete with the padded cardboard ring that keeps your fingers from getting scalded. The plastic cover lay on top, crushed and cracked, the vents stained with coffee.

“I wonder if you can obtain DNA from this material,” said Sanji.

“Maybe. And fingerprints from the lid, if we’re lucky.”