Vertical Coffin

Chapter 27

Twenty minutes later, Robyn De Young and her two dozen cadets drove off. We were standing down by our cars and Jo Brickhouse was combing the dirt out of her hair, with her fingers.

"Come on, let's grab some lunch," I said.

She followed me in the sheriff's black-and-white to DuPar's Restaurant off Vista Del Sol. We found a booth by the window and ordered. I got a hot Reuben sandwich, she had the seafood salad and a latte. We sat staring at each other like enemy generals, across a white vinyl battleground littered with napkins and scratched flatware. This wasn't working.

Finally she leaned forward. "Look-I think we need to start over."

I agree.

"I took a department course in human relations once," she said. "They taught us that a good way to improve a strained relationship is by acknowledging each other's strengths."

"You first," I said, sounding petulant and small.

"Okay. You were right, checking the edge of the Nightingale crime scene. We found the shooter's position, got the casing and footprint casts. That stuff could've been missed or destroyed. And going back and finding that basement tunnel might be important. I'm not sure what it proves-if anything. But you're right, it's definitely weird."

"Okay, thanks."

"Now you," she prompted.

"Okay. You seem very organized and thorough."

"That's all?" She wrinkled her brow in disappointment.

"And going through that tunnel alone was a gutsball play. You showed a lot of courage."

She smiled. "It was kinda gutsball, wasn't it?"

I nodded, and she began tearing open half a dozen packets of Equal and dumping them into her latte. I couldn't believe how much artificial sweetener she used.

She looked up and caught me staring. "So let's hear your next big theory, Scully." Looking down again, stirring her sweetened blend. "I can hear lots of shit grinding up there in the old gear box, but nothing's coming out your pie hole."

Cute.

I took a moment, then leaned back and sighed.

"Okay, you probably won't like this, because nobody else does, but I don't buy the death by cop thing. Here's my reason and my timeline, so check me for flaws."

She pulled out her spiral notebook, flipped it open, and clicked the point down on her pen.

"Vincent Smiley has a bad childhood. He doesn't get along with his mother. Maybe she sexually abuses him, maybe she just yells a lot. Whatever the reason, he's got anger problems. For some reason, his parents pull him out of Glendale High and he's home-schooled for most of his high school years. He gets a GED, goes to junior college, then decides he wants to be a cop. Maybe so he can push people around and prove he's a real man. Next, he applies to the LAPD and fails. Emerson says he has mama problems, sexual identity problems, and can't relate to women. But somehow, even with all these deficits, he bullshits his way onto the Arcadia P. D. Finally they get wise and throw him out as a probationer, probably for all the same reasons. Now he's pissed. The cops dissed him, so he hates cops; but he also wishes he was one. He becomes a military nut and a survivalist. Hacks into a secure Marine Corps Web site called Cactus West."

She wrote that down.

"He even buys a dog and names it Eichmann. All that lines up with what Tad Palmer told us."

She nodded. "So far we're on track. But what's with the Marine Corps Web site?"

"I don't know yet. Our computer people are trying to penetrate the site." She nodded, so I went on. "After dear old Mom and Dad hit the slab, Smiley cashes in their death benefits and buys a three-to five-hundred-thousand-dollar home up on Hidden Ranch Road."

"Do we know he used his parents' insurance?"

"I'm guessing. It's what Palmer said, but you're right, we should check that out. Otherwise, where does this guy who doesn't work get enough money for a place like that? If it's not insurance, maybe it's hooked to some other kind of nastiness."

She kept making notes as I continued. "Okay, so he's up there in Hidden Ranch, walking around, pretending he's a cop, and at the same time saying he hates them. Basically acting nuts. Sometime last year ATF says they got a complaint and braced him on a suspected weapons charge. They claim when they talked to him he was docile, and it turned out he was clean. No weapons in the house. So they let him go. Didn't even bust him."

Jo was scribbling notes.

"Now, a few weeks ago something happens. For some reason, Vince goes into overdrive. He's still showing the phony badge, only now he says he's working on the antiterrorist squad. But he's such a loosely wrapped package, nobody believed him. To prove it, he takes some of his neighbors into his garage and shows them his weapons stash. Palmer and the Bellinghams get spooked, call the sheriff's department, and find out there's no Vincent Smiley on the county roster. So they make a complaint to the ATF for automatic weapons and impersonating.

"ATF looks the complaint over and says we already braced this jerk-off once and it turned out to be an air ball. Since they think he's docile, they kick the impersonating beef over to the sheriff, figuring if the LASD finds guns in there, so much the better. But on second thought, SRT isn't completely sure, so when Emo calls to tell them he's serving the warrant, they give him a little covert ATF backup and wait to see what happens. Emo walks up and knocks on the front door, Smiley opens up, and it's welcome to Dodge City. The fed SRT van is just around the corner. They hear the gunfire and roll, which explains how they got there so quick. But Smiley knows it's coming, so he's waiting for them, all dressed in Kevlar with a gas mask. Next we have Waco in the foothills."

I looked up at Jo. "So far, is all that pretty much the way you have it?"

"Pretty much," she said, putting down her pen and sipping her latte. "Eat your sandwich, it's getting cold," sounding like somebody's mother now.

I took a bite and swallowed it. "Okay, so now he's pinned in that house and he's greasing off lead-core three-oh-eights. The guy's dog is in there with him. After half the cops in Southern California are finished raining shit through the windows and burning the place down, he ends up dead in the bathtub, looking like a pot roast somebody left in the oven. His dog is downstairs, also cooked. Roof falls in, end of incident."

I took another bite of the Reuben and looked at her again. "All of that still seem right?"

"Yep. At least as far as we know."

"Okay, then here's what's wrong."

I took a deep breath. "Smiley obviously had this all carefully planned. He shows Palmer and Bellingham the stash of bullets, the grenades, the AK-forty-sevens and boxes of C-four. Smiley's gotta know it's gonna freak these guys. They have children. He's gotta know they're gonna call the cops."

"Probably."

"He's gone to all the trouble of spending two months last summer digging an escape tunnel out of the basement to the gully below. He could have easily crawled through there and gotten away, but he didn't. He crawled into the bathtub instead and let the whole fucking house fall on him."

"Makes no sense, does it?"

"Only if we put him down as a mental. And all the rest of this is too organized, too planned for a real head case. Why go to all that trouble to build an escape hatch and then not use it?"

"Maybe he was overwhelmed by the fire," she offered. "Maybe it went up faster than he planned."

"I was under that porch with Sonny Lopez when the house was burning. Smiley was downstairs at the end, running around shooting. The house was completely ablaze. He had to know it was about to come down. I did. It was hot as hell. I could barely stand it, and I was outside. He could have easily gone to the basement, pulled the washer away, crawled through the hole, and gotten out of there, but he chose instead to die a horrible, painful death. Why?"

"Maybe he just lost it."

I frowned at her. "Come on, you don't like this any better than I do."

"Okay, you're right. But it's still a dead end. Excuse the pun. I think all the stuff about SRT, and how they got there so quick, is good. We can write that up. It adds to our investigation; but everything about the tunnel and why he didn't use it is irrelevant. Vincent Smiley is in the morgue. Where does all that take us?"

She waited patiently for my answer, so I finally told her why I couldn't let go.

"When I first started working homicide it was the last year that John St. John worked as a consultant for the LAPD. He used to come around and talk to us, tell all the new humps how to work cases, how to follow the evidence trail."

"Jigsaw John?" she said, remembering the legendary LAPD homicide detective who had retired after he took a bullet in the back fifteen years ago.

He'd moved to Oregon, but back then he still rented his services out on big cases. He especially liked to work with and train young detectives.

"John told me once, when you have a twister like this, where the logic doesn't track, it's usually one of two things that are causing the confusion. One: because you're looking at the timeline wrong. Something important is out of place. Or two: because there's a factual piece missing."

"But what if there isn't? What if he was just overcome by smoke and couldn't get down to the basement?"

"John said it was like when you reconciled a checkbook. If you're off even one dollar you can't just forget it, because that one dollar could be hiding a much bigger error."

"So, what do we do?"

"We start over. Start with Smiley's backstory again. Work it from the ground up."

"You kidding? We've probably got SEB and SRT running around killing each other. We're under heavy pressure from your chief, my sheriff, your wife, and every cop and deputy in L. A. We have to find something fast that we can take to the D. A. Something that will allow them to sack up those two units until they can get it sorted out."

"Look, I don't…"

"No. Listen. If any other cop gets sniped on either side, you and I both go in the bag and stay there."

"But, what if all the theories they're working on are wrong? What if we're building this investigation on a bad foundation? If we are, we'll never come out at the right place."

She studied me for a long moment, then pushed her plate away. "Are you asking me?" she said.

"Yeah. Damn right," I answered. "Since we finally agree we're in this together, just tell me where you think we oughta go from here. I'm open for suggestions, but we have a lot of stuff that doesn't line up, and I only know one way to do it, and that's to start over."

She sat for a long time, then took her wallet out of her purse, opened it, and threw ten bucks on the table.

"You don't have to buy lunch," I said.

"Don't you wish. Get your dough out, Scully. Since I guess I'm going on this dumb-ass, career-ending ride with you, the least you can do is pay your half of the food bills." She got up without waiting for an answer and walked out of the restaurant.

We had a truce. I think.