The Renegades

13

By late morning Hood was standing on the Avenue M off-ramp of Highway 14, where Johnny Vasquez and Angel Lopes had been shot to death. The day was cool and the breeze came and went like a doubt.

He balanced Freeman’s murder book on his left arm and used the crime scene drawings and photographs to find where the van had been parked. Now there was nothing but sand and gravel.

According to Laws’s report, the van engine and lights had been off when they got there.

Detective Freeman had guessed the temperature at eighty degrees, and he wrote that the night was clear and windy. The moon was new on the twelfth of August, four days earlier, so there wasn’t much moonlight.

Hood flipped forward: in the impound yard the next day the van started up and idled without a problem. The tires were good. The gas tank was full. There was a second mention of the flats of strawberries found in the back of the van and the basket of them spilled up front.

Deeper in the book Hood found that Vasquez and Lopes both lived in Lancaster.

So, he thought: two men, midlevel bangers with an Eme blessing, thought to be working for the North Baja Cartel, heading south around two in the morning, seventy-two hundred in pressed five-dollar bills stashed in two suitcases.

He talked into his recorder: “Why two big suitcases for only seventy-two hundred dollars? Why such a small amount pressed and stacked?”

He found the crime scene photographs of the two pieces of luggage thrown into the desert. The clothes were strewn across the road. A lot of clothes. It looked like a table at a rummage sale. Hood wondered how those clothes could fit back into the two bags, large as they were.

Again to the recorder: “How so much clothing into two suitcases?”

Then he walked a slow circle around the place where the van had stopped.

Another question for the recorder: “Why did they pull over and stop on the off-ramp? Illegal, plain sight, no car trouble.”

He set the murder book on the hood of his car and found the ballistics pages, which established the shooter’s positions through angles-of-entry drawings and victim body positions. All four shots had been fired through the passenger-side window. Eichrodt had used a Taurus nine-millimeter automatic-a budget gun, unregistered. He’d shot Angel Lopes, the man closest to him, first. Lopes had crumpled and turned partially away when the second shot struck him in the right temple. Meanwhile, Vasquez was apparently trying to get out. The first shot hit the back of his head, the second entered through the right ear.

Hood compared the line-of-fire sketches with the crime scene photographs. It all made sense. Through all the gore and ugliness emerged a clear picture.

“But these were Eme runners,” he told the voice recorder. “Where were their weapons? Why didn’t they use them? Were they surprised? Did they know Eichrodt? Were they expecting him?”

He found photographs of the guns that had been recovered from the van. There were two, both within easy reach. But neither man had so much as gotten a hand on a weapon, in spite of the shooter at their window.

Hood carried the book back to where the van had been parked.

It was hard for him to imagine that these guys had been surprised, unless they were both very drunk or exhausted. He found their autopsy reports and checked blood alcohol. None at all. They had both ingested amphetamines in moderate amounts. A long night ahead, he thought. A long drive? They were chemically enhanced. Were they surprised by a six-foot-eight, three-hundred-pound gunman as they sat exposed on an off-ramp, windows down in the heat? There was no place at all for Eichrodt to hide. The night was dark, but a jackrabbit couldn’t have hidden where Hood now stood.

No. They weren’t surprised, he thought. They just didn’t react. Why?

Freeman had concluded that Eichrodt and the two couriers did not know each other. Freeman had asked that same question that Hood was asking: why hadn’t they reacted? And he never answered it.

Hood leafed through the murder book, prospecting. He looked at the graphics and read the words and let his mind wander as his hands turned the pages.

A few minutes later he was struck by another anomaly. It was looking back at him from an evidence photograph of the brass casings that had been found in Eichrodt’s truck. It took Hood a long quiet minute of staring to find it. The casings had been tossed into the same locking toolbox where the gun and money had been found. There were four of them. They were heavily smeared with blood. He pictured the scene, the order of shooting, the distances to the targets. He pictured Eichrodt collecting his casings. And it made no sense that the brass would be heavily smeared. Touched with blood? Sure, he thought. Dotted with blowback from Lopes, the closer victim, to Eichrodt’s fingers? Possibly. But all four casings, smeared heavily? No.

So he turned to the lab reports and found what he expected: the fingerprints lifted from all four casings were Eichrodt’s. But he couldn’t find anything about the blood itself. Whose was it? And, more important, why was there so much of it?

He sat in his car with the windows down in the cool desert breeze. It took him a while to get through to the crime lab technician who had lifted the prints from the casings. Keith Franks spoke in a soft, high-pitched voice that sounded young. He told Hood that the prints had come off the brass clearly and cleanly. They were Eichrodt’s. He said he hadn’t run the blood on the casings because his superior said there was no reason to-Eichrodt’s prints and Lopes’s blood were on the Taurus nine-millimeter and that was all the DA needed. It was beyond reasonable doubt that Eichrodt had fired the gun. And of course, the lab was overloaded with work.

Hood flipped to the photographs of the Taurus and saw that it, too, was heavily marked by blood. There was a misting on the muzzle, as you’d expect-Mr. Lopes again. But down on the handle and the trigger and the trigger guard the smears were heavier. There was no positive identification on the lower, heavier traces.

“I want you to type the blood on the casings,” he said. “And on the handle, trigger, and guard of the Taurus.”

“Detective, the case is closed.”

“I’ll get the DA to reopen it.”

“You know they won’t. It was an open-and-shut case.”

“Then how come Vasquez and Lopes used two big pieces of luggage for only seven grand plus change? How did they get all those clothes and the money into two bags? Why did they pull over in the middle of the desert in the middle of the night, then park in plain sight? Why didn’t they defend themselves? How come Eichrodt’s brass was thick with blood? And his gun? There’s too much. The blood is wrong and you know it.”

For a moment Hood thought Franks had hung up on him. The cool breeze hissed against the phone and he turned his back to it.

“What’s your name, again?” Franks asked.

“Charlie Hood. I’m young, like you, and we need to help each other because we’re the future. At least that’s what they say.”

Franks went quiet for a long moment. “I’m sixty-four years old. Give me your numbers.”