Three shirt deal

Chapter 26

I had written down the text messages from memory in a spiral notebook and was reading from my notes. " 'Where R U? R U at Hickman's yet?'" I looked up at Secada. "That was from WW at twelve-oh-three a. M. Then MC said: 'Parked out front. Dark. Ready to roll.' Then at twelve-seventeen, WW's IM: 'Get in there. Get it.' No answer from Church. Then at twelve thirty-five, Church wrote: 'It went bad. Meet you at my place. This just turned into a three shirt deal.' End of transmissions."

"You shouldn't have given the damn thing back to him," she said. "You know he's gonna destroy it, dump it in the river."

"It doesn't matter. We're better off if he ditches it. That way it won't contaminate the case. Without a warrant, as evidence it was dust anyway."

She sat for a moment frowning at that. Then she said, "Here's something else. While you were in the restaurant, the deep check I ran on Devine and Morales came back. There's a big connection between those guys." She looked at me to make sure she had my full attention. "Back in ninety-one, Brian Devine and Tito Morales were cops together. Partners. It was just before Brian Devine went to SIS. For almost a year, these two jamokes shared the front seat of an X-car."

We rode in silence, both thinking about it.

"Pull over for a minute. Let's see if we can at least get the timeline surrounding Olivia's murder to lay out right."

"Okay," she said, and pulled her SUV up to the curb. We were only two blocks from Cartco. She set the brake and looked over.

"Let's start with the givens," I began. "We know Tito Morales ended up as the winner of the million-dollar Bud Light rare. We also know Mike Church had knife cuts on his hand the day after Olivia was murdered, and that Brian Devine got to the crime scene six minutes after the nine-one-one call and became the primary investigator, even though he was a supervisor and shouldn't have personally worked the case. Then he and Deputy D. A. Morales, his old LAPD patrol partner, tag-teamed Tru Hickman in the Van Nuys Division I-room, telling him he flunked a lie test and walked in his mom's blood leaving a footprint. The kid panics and cops a plea. Anything else?"

"This isn't exactly a given, but I agree with you that Tru probably wasn't in on it," she said. "He was such a meth head I can't see them taking a chance on letting him in on the scam. It's more likely their original plan was to get him to buy the beer, make sure he found the scrape-off, let him win the money, then just roll up and take it away from him later."

"I agree. That was undoubtedly the plan 'til Church lost it and killed Olivia Hickman. Then Tru became more valuable to them as the murderer."

She thought about it, then nodded.

"Okay, so let's see how much of this we can arrange into some kind of reasonable order," I suggested. "Then when we're done we'll deal with what's left over."

"Sounds good," she said. "Keep going, you're on a roll here."

"Let's say the sequence of events begins that Saturday afternoon with Tru buying the beer and taking it home. Mike Church showed up an hour later to pick up the rare, but Olivia wouldn't give them the six-pack because Tru was on Antibuse. Big fight in the front yard witnessed by neighbors. Olivia calls the cops. Remind me to get Communication to time date that call." She nodded, scribbling in her own notebook. "Tru and Mike Church split from the Hickman house so they won't get arrested. Next Mike and Wade take Tru out and get him so tweaked on crystal he passes out. Church comes back to the Hickman house at Wade's instruction and, according to Wade's BlackBerry, at twelve-oh-three he tells Church to break in. Church breaks into the house at around twelve-thirty to get the beer."

"Only their plan goes bad," Secada continued. "Olivia catches Church in the act of stealing the six-pack. He's roided to the gills, goes tropical, and kills her. Twenty stab wounds with a kitchen knife."

"Exactly," I said. "Church ended up getting a bunch of knife cuts on his hands in the process. Strong physical evidence that was studiously ignored by Devine and Morales. But now they've got a problem because they can't use Tru to collect the prize. He's much more valuable to them as a murder suspect to take the heat off Mike Church." I paused and looked over to see if she had anything to add.

"Up to there, I think it's pretty solid," Secada said. "They panic. They need help. So who do they call, Tito Morales or Brian Devine?"

"Could've been either, but since we still can't tie Lieutenant Devine directly to the beer rip and since Morales ended up with the prize, let's say they called Tito. I can't for the life of me figure out how either Lieutenant Devine or Tito Morales end up as coconspirators with these two twenty-six-year-old sociopaths, but there must be a reason so let's put a hold on that.

"We can put a hold on it but if we try and go after Morales we better not miss. He's probably going to be the mayor in three months. So we need the reason he's involved pretty soon."

"I agree, but I don't have it yet. I don't believe it's because Morales needed campaign financing. There are too many players. Once the million gets split four ways there's hardly enough to get the job done." We pondered that for a minute. Finally, Scout shrugged.

"Okay, so they call Tito," she said. "They tell him Mike went back for the six-pack and fucked it up, killed Olivia, and that the neighbors witnessed the Church-Olivia dustup earlier in the day, making it premeditated. Olivia's dead and Church is gonna be a prime suspect for the murder. Once that happens, the whole Bud Light rip is gonna be unearthed."

"This is kinda working," I said. "We can't prove a shred of it, but as theory, it's great."

We were both getting excited.

"So now we need to bring Brian Devine onstage somehow. How did he end up getting there six minutes after the nine-one-one call? That's too lucky to just be a coincidence." Secada said.

We sat quietly for several moments, both chewing on that, before Secada came up with the answer.

"Let's say, after he gets the call from Church and Wyatt telling him Olivia's dead, Tito Morales calls his old cop friend, Brian Devine, who's still working in Valley Homicide. He gets Devine out of bed and tells him to go park a block from the murder scene and wait until Tru Hickman recovers from his meth blackout and wanders home. Once he finds his mother, they figure he'll probably call nine-one-one, and Lieutenant Devine is perfectly positioned a block away to jump the call."

"That's probably exactly what happened," I said. "With the primary homicide investigator and the D. A. both in on it, Hickman didn't stand a chance." We both thought about it, looking for holes, but the structure hung together. "So how do we prove all of this?" I asked.

"Haven't a clue."

"The pieces that are still left over are the North Van Nuys bus company and this Transit P. D. full of tattooed police commissioners, most of whom are Vanowen Street Locos."

"We also don't have the way they got around Promo Safe and the ex-Federal agent who witnessed Tru buy the beer," she said. "But I'm starting to like this a lot."

"If a 'shirt' is a murder, and Wade's reaction tells me it is, then who are the other two corpses?" I said. "I think we need to start looking into Wade Wyatt and Mike Church's recent history of personal grief, see how many trips to Forest Lawn these two have made lately."

"Shane, we're gonna both be suspended," she said. "We've got too many power players lined up against us. This isn't going to get finished, at least not by us. We're gonna get shut down."

"Hey, Scout, no backing out. Don't forget it was you who got me into this. Besides…"

"If you say, we don't need no stinking badges, I'll shoot you right here in the front seat of my own damn car," she said.

"I was gonna say, the only good thing about these people is they're extremely powerful and they have too many face cards. They already know they're the winners."

"How does that help?"

"They won't be expecting us to attack."