White sister

Chapter 21

Romer is a good doc." Luther Lexington was standing in the hall outside the trauma ward speaking with Chooch and me. It was four-thirty that same afternoon. He was tall, with a muscular build, and had played halfback at Cal State in the eighties. Now he was the chief of neurosurgery at UCLA and, according to the Internet search I'd done two years earlier while investigating his daughter's case, was regarded as one of the foremost neurosurgeons in Los Angeles. A perfect inner-city success story, until his only daughter was killed by that stray bullet.

"Can she come back from this, Doctor Lexington?" Chooch asked.

"You and your dad have some tough decisions to make. I just completed a preliminary exam and checked her chart. She's not in good shape, but there is some positive stuff. As I already told you, we're lucky the bullet didn't cross the midline. But right now she's not responding to stimuli and her brain waves are not good."

I was confused. "But you said "

"I know what I said, Shane. I also said nobody knows anything. We can make all the skill moves and treat her with the best procedures and we will but the outcome is in God's hands."

"I want to transfer her to UCLA," I said. "I want you to take over the case."

"The only difference between this hospital and mine is I'm more familiar with the doctors I would put on the team at UCLA. But that has to be weighed against the risk of moving her. If we Medivac Alexa by ambulance or even helicopter, there's an hour, maybe more, where if she suffers a secondary brain insult, she'll be between ICUs and very vulnerable. But in the end, it's your call."

"I want home field advantage. I want her with you in a place you're familiar with, with doctors you choose."

"Okay, but I can't move her for a day or so, until she's more stable. For now we'll monitor her, keep her intracranial pressure down, watch for infection. In a day or so we can make another evaluation and see where that leads us."

"Luther, thank you for being here."

"Hey, Shane, you didn't have to keep working Levonda's case. You never quit until you found those guys. That's worth a lot to me."

"It was my job."

"And now, Alexa is mine."

I shook his hand with both of mine.

"You two need to take turns sleeping here for the next day or two," he said. Then he wrote a number on the back of his card and handed it to me. "Here's my cell. I have it on me all the time. Anything changes you call, no matter what time it is. I'll visit her three times a day and check in with you."

Then he tried to get the worried look off Chooch's face by talking football. But Chooch was still frowning when Luther left.

"You got the first shift, son," I said.

I needed to get my hands on that answering machine tape before somebody wrote a warrant for our house and I lost it to Mike Ramsey's investigation. Then I had to drop off Stacy Maluga's pager at the Electronic Services Division.

As I drove across town toward Venice, the afternoon sun was blazing, pushing July temperatures into the mid-nineties. I parked the Acura in the alley behind my garage. I entered the house, checked the answering machine, and retrieved the old message from Luther, as well as several new ones from friends offering condolences. There was one from my incoming partner, Sally Quinn, expressing support and concern. I listened to Alexa's inexplicable confession and that horrible gunshot. Then I rewound the tape and removed it, replacing it with a fresh one.

I grabbed a plastic container out of the kitchen cabinet, put the tape inside, snapped on the rubber lid and carried it outside where my barbeque sat. I dug a hole in the ashes, buried the container, smoothed it over, then replaced the grate. After that I locked up the house, set the alarm and got back into the Acura. It was five o'clock.

My drive across town was now impeded by Friday rush hour traffic. As I drove, I dealt with priorities and tactics. I needed to get Stacy Maluga's pager worked on, but the sound techs in the electronics division at Mission Street would be unlikely to help me, especially after I stole that fingerprint card and the AFIS printout. By now everyone in the LAPD knew I was off the reservation. That meant, to get what I wanted, I'd need some help from one of my close group of department buddies.

I ran the list and finally settled on Sally Quinn. I had supported her transfer into the Homicide Special Division two months ago and we were scheduled to become partners in a week. I knew she was grateful to me for championing her transfer into the elite murder squad, but she would be damaging her career if anybody found out she had cooperated with what I was going to ask of her. Still, she was my best bet. I dialed her at Valley Homicide where she was busy cleaning up the last details on her old caseload before moving over to join me at the Glass House.

"Sally, it's Shane."

"Jeez, I left a message on your machine. I'm so sorry, man."

"Yeah. Yeah, I got it. Thanks."

"Is she…?"

"Not good. The next forty-eight hours will tell us a lot." I cleared my throat and moved on. "Listen, Sally, I need your help on something."

"Name it."

"I need you to take a pager I have and hook it to one of your open cases, one where a judge wrote you a broad search warrant. I need the warrant so the guys in ESD will wire this thing up with a bug. I can't do it myself 'cause I'm not too popular down there right now."

There was silence on the other end of the line.

"Listen, Sal. I wouldn't ask you, but this has to do with who shot Slade and Alexa. It's really important."

"You've gotta drop this, Shane. You've gotta let the primaries handle it. It's all over the department what you've been doing."

"Sally, I didn't call to get a lecture. You're either down for this or you're not."

There was a long pause while she considered it. "Where are you?" she finally said.

"I'm heading to Mission Road right now. I'll be there in ten minutes."

"It's gonna take me three quarters of an hour to write the paper and get over there."

"God bless you, Sally."

"If He was blessing me, I wouldn't have gotten this call," she said softly, and then hung up.

I used the time to scroll through the numbers logged on Stacy Maluga's pager, pulling them up on the little LCD screen. There were forty numbers with no names or messages suspicious, since the pager had both voice mail and text messaging features. Most of the drug dealers I'd busted had pager screens that looked like this. People involved in crimes didn't want to leave electronic trails. That meant most of these people who had left numbers for Mrs. Maluga were probably up to no good.

Forty minutes later, a tan detective's car pulled into the lot and Sally Quinn got out. She had red-blond hair and was stocky, with short legs, a compact torso, and a freckled face that made her look younger than she was. She was frowning as she walked over to my car.

"Thanks, Sally."

"Hey, Shane, I'm only here because we're about to be partners, and I feel bad about Alexa. But it's a gonzo move. If this is the way our partnership is gonna go, then maybe I'm gonna have to revisit it."

"You need to know something else before you get involved," I said. "This pager was obtained during an illegal search, which Chief Ramsey is aware of. I'm going to plant it without a warrant, so it's gonna be an illegal tap."

"Will we be able to get adjoining cells? Can I pick out the wallpaper?"

"If you wanta back off, I'll understand."

"Gimme it." She held out her hand and I dropped the little gadget into her palm. Then she turned angrily and walked across the street, disappearing into the building through a side door.

While I waited, I called Rosey. He wasn't in, but I left a message that I needed to see him and that it was important. He called back ten minutes later. We picked a bar we both knew, called Miserable Harry's, that was a dive but geographically handy, halfway between us on Main Street. We agreed to meet in an hour.

Sally Quinn reappeared at six-fifteen and crossed to my car. The July sun had started to sink behind the buildings to the west. "It will be done in five hours," she said, as she reached the Acura. "I told them to send it over to our new digs at the Glass House."

"Thanks."

"Right," she said angrily. Then she turned and walked across the street with short, choppy strides, got in her car, and drove away.