Vigilante

CHAPTER 38

The call came in at 8:00 A.M., just as Alexa and I were about to leave. I picked it up in the den.

“Detective Scully?” a woman’s voice asked.

“Yeah.”

“This is Erica Hobbs with Forensic Biology. We got back the overnight on that DNA scan you requested.”

“Whatta you got?” My heart rate started climbing.

“We have a solid match to the cup you found in Lita Mendez’s driveway. One in fifty billion probability.”

“Which one is it, Lester or Stephanie?” I asked, hoping it was Lester, because at least he was not an active police officer anymore.

“I’m afraid it’s Captain Madrid’s DNA,” Erica said.

“Shit,” I muttered softly. “Listen, we really need to keep this on the DL. How many people know about it yet?”

“Just me and my lab partner.”

“Okay, look. You know what’s at stake here. We’re going to have to move fast. Just guard that info.”

“It’s guarded,” she said.

I hung up and found Alexa in the bedroom, loading rounds into her light Spanish Astra, which she jokingly called the lady’s home companion.

“That was CSI. The DNA matched on Stephanie Madrid.”

Alexa paused mid-motion, then turned slowly to face me.

“Na-a-aw-w-w,” she said softly.

“I gotta call Hitch. We better pull this together fast. We’re going to need an arrest warrant. If it leaks before we can release a statement to the press, we’re fucked. We’ve gotta control the message. I’d like to pick Captain Madrid up before ten.” I looked at my watch. “That’s in a couple of hours.”

The next hour was a flurry of activity. I called Hitch, told him the bad news, and agreed to meet him downtown in forty minutes. I rode in with Alexa in her BMW, leaving my bugged Acura in the garage. All the way to the office, Alexa was on the Bluetooth in her car, setting things up, giving instructions.

“Notify DC Hawkins and Chief Filosiani,” she said to her adjunct. “And get Captain Myer from Media Relations over to my office right away. We’re going to need a prepared statement and I want somebody full-time on media tamp downs. Also, get a warrant delivery team on standby and send a UC out to Captain Madrid’s house to keep her under surveillance until we can pick her up. I think she lives in Valley Village or Sherman Oaks. Get the address from Records. I want to make sure we know where she and her husband are at all times.”

We arrived in the PAB at eight forty-five and convened a meeting in Alexa’s office on the command floor. In the room were Jeb, Hitch, Bud Hawkins, and Sgt. Britt Mills from the warrant delivery team. Mills was another one of those expressionless, hard-eyed gunfighters who always seem to end up in our high-risk shooting units.

Chief Filosiani stuck his face into the room but said he couldn’t stay. The superchief was a short, lunch box-shaped guy with a shiny bald head and Santa Claus cheeks. He didn’t look as much like a police chief as he did a market manager, but this morning he was a grocer with an attitude.

“Two things,” he said sharply, standing in Alexa’s doorway. “This has to be a no-incident takedown. That means you screen Lester Madrid off first. Second, everything, and I mean every little scintilla of info headed to sources outside this immediate venue, gets processed through my chief adjunct, Rodello Morales. I want RoMo to have strict control of all facts and be the sole distributor of information.”

Capt. Bert Myer from Media Relations showed up and waited in the corridor behind the chief until he finished. Dubbed Myer the Liar by the troops, he had a thankless job. Myer ran the LAPD Media Relations office and he was going to have to manage the press fallout, which would be huge. How often does the head of Internal Affairs get arrested for killing the city’s leading police critic?

After the chief left, we got down to it. The undercover was already out at Stephanie Madrid’s house and had notified us by phone that both Lester’s and Stephanie’s cars were still in the driveway.

“Let’s do this,” Alexa said after we ran through our arrest plan.

Forty minutes later, we were parked half a block down the street from the Madrids’ well-cared-for faux Italian two-story house in a middle-class Valley neighborhood. The gray Navigator with the tinted windows was still in the driveway. Parked in front of it was Captain Madrid’s deluxe dark blue department sedan. When we got there and relieved the UC, it was just a little before ten.

At ten thirty, Lester Madrid exited the house, got into the gray SUV, and pulled out. Once he was gone, the warrant delivery team moved. While Hitch, Alexa, and I covered the outside, SWAT Sergeant Mills knocked on the front door.

Stephanie Madrid answered, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. We watched from positions of advantage as the three cops on the front porch spoke to her for a few seconds, then took her into custody, cuffed her, and drove her to the Police Administration Building.

The arrest was quick and easy, but booking Captain Madrid for suspicion of Lita’s murder was a little more complex. What happened now was going to be part of the public record and would be on the evening news. Nix Nash would have a field day.

As soon as she was Mirandized, Captain Madrid demanded her attorney. It turned out that, as a precaution, she had already hired Clarence Moneymaker. He was L.A.’s new Johnnie Cochran-an elegant, spindly African-American who fit his name remarkably well. He oozed confidence and diamond accessories. His client list spanned everyone from A-list celebrities to unrepentant gang killers. However, he was shrewdly effective when he got to the defendant’s table.

Of course, he immediately pointed out that a coffee cup outside a crime scene wasn’t enough to charge his client with Lita’s murder, suggesting it could easily be planted. Captain Madrid had an alibi, supplied by her husband. Alexa called the DA and after a heated ten-minute discussion it was determined that we should hold off a day or so before booking Madrid. She was labeled a person of interest and we were instructed to let her go. The DA had cold feet and pointed out to us that we’d collected similar cups by Dumpster diving, agreeing with Moneymaker that somebody could have planted it. Of course Clarence Moneymaker forbade all future LAPD or DA contact with his client. After that, all that was left for us to do was start writing search warrants for Stephanie’s house and car. I would have loved to find a box of 9mm Hydra-Shok Federals like the ones we pulled out of Lita’s kitchen floor somewhere in Captain Madrid’s possession, but I didn’t think she, or Lester if he was involved, would be that careless.

One really unsettling thing happened as Hitch and I were heading out to get a taco for lunch. Lester Madrid was sitting on the bench in the atrium, across from the elevator, silver-headed cane leaned between his legs, waiting for us. As we stepped into the lobby, he stood.

“I don’t think you two ass wipes see what’s really going on here,” he said in his whispery growl.

Since I didn’t want to guess what he thought was really going on, Hitch and I waited him out.

“Steph isn’t going down behind this horse-shit murder beef. She’s being set up. If I have to rip out a few yards of somebody’s colon to prove it, then that’s what I intend to do.”

“Stop threatening us,” I said.

“I’m not threatening, Scully. I’m promising. In SIS they said we were assassinating criminal dirtbags. But that wasn’t what we were doing at all. We were just eliminating problems. Cleaning up the city. You two idiots have been parked in a cul-de-sac, jerkin’ off while this fucking case went down the road without you. That means I’m gonna have to get involved and fix the problem. When I get involved there are consequences.”

He turned and left us, walking out of the interior atrium into the midday sunshine. Hitch and I just stood there.

“Isn’t that a crime, threatening a police officer?” Hitch asked.

“Yeah, Section Seventy-One of the Penal Code. I had one filed against me once in the Valley when I threatened to knock my training officer’s teeth out.”

“Then let’s hit that guy with a seventy-one and give him a ride in a squad car,” Hitch said. “I don’t want him hunkered down in my bushes tonight with a SWAT rifle.”

“It’s borderline. All we got is his promise to eliminate a problem and a warning of consequences. Let him cool off and we’ll take his temperature again tomorrow.”

Two hours later, we’d finished with the IA paperwork for Stephanie Madrid’s charge sheet. We filed it and took off early, both emotionally wasted.

When I got on the freeway, I thought I saw a gray Navigator a few cars behind, tracking me from two lanes over. I couldn’t be certain. I kept changing lanes, trying to spot it again, but it never reappeared.

I finally decided it was just my imagination.