The Pain Scale (13 page)

Turchenko’s last-known address was a small house in a run-down neighborhood on the border of Long Beach and Wilmington. We didn’t bother with that one, though, because Lansky and Kennedy had more up-to-date intel on him and his whereabouts. For the last month and a half, he’d been living in a down-market condo north of downtown that belonged to one of his many cousins.

Marty, Dave, and three uniforms met us in the lobby of the building. Bob Kincaid, a deputy district attorney, had expedited the arrest and search warrants on Turchenko and the condo, and we were about to execute them. We rode in two elevators to the sixth floor and circled up and down the hall from the door to unit 608. Fortunately, we didn’t bump into any residents on the way up. Nobody likes seeing a gang of cops with shotguns and a portable battering ram in their lobby.

Jen dialed Turchenko’s landline on her cell and snapped it closed when he answered. She nodded, and we moved down the hall and flanked the door.

With my back to the wall, I reached to the side and pounded on the door. “Police!” I yelled. “Open up!”

We gave him about three seconds; then I motioned for the uniform with the ram. He heaved back, swung it forward, and the door burst open and slammed against the wall.

I
F
D
R
. B
ALLARD
had been there, red hair and freckles gray in the dull light of the hallway, to ask me about my pain, I would have had to think before I answered. Then I would have said, “One.” I knew much of the relief had to do with the adrenaline rush, but that wasn’t all of it. It was being on the job. Or as Jen had referred to it, being back in the saddle.
This
, I thought,
is what I need to be doing.

And then I pushed through the splintered doorframe and started screaming.

“Oleksander Turchenko!”

We didn’t need to go far. In front of us, on a decades-old rust-colored couch, a man sat in a wife-beater tank top and NASCAR boxer shorts eating Fruity Pebbles from an enormous olive-green plastic bowl. He didn’t bother to stop chewing, but he did divert his attention from
The View
to the crowd forcing its way into his living room. He swallowed, milk running down his chin, then sat still. Only the fact that he didn’t even glance down at the Sig P226 on the coffee table in front of him saved his life.

“Turchenko?” I asked, the muzzle of my Glock not more than seven feet from his chest.

He gave us a slight nod.

“Put the bowl down on the couch next to you, then put your hands on top of your head.”

He did.

“Now push the table toward me with your right foot.”

As he extended his leg, the table inched away from the couch toward the middle of the room. I stepped forward, still watching him over my front sight, and picked up the Sig.

As soon as I was clear, Jen and Marty were in front of me, shoving Turchenko’s face down into the sofa cushions and cuffing him.

Less than an hour later, he was Mirandized and uncuffed in the interrogation room. He sat there with the same dull glare he’d had on his face since we’d burst through his door. He said only one word. “Attorney.”

Turchenko’s lawyer was slick and smelled of expensive cologne. He introduced himself as Michael Weathers, and just to see if he’d rattle, I asked him if he was some kind of Russian mob fixer.

“My client’s not Russian, Detective.”

“No?” I said.

“He’s Ukrainian. With all the difficulties in that part of the world these days, I’m sure you understand why this fact is important to him.”

“Oh, yeah. I’d get all bent out of shape if somebody thought I was Canadian.”

Jen and I were in the interrogation room with the two of them. The lieutenant was on the other side of the glass.

“We’re sorry if my partner’s slip of the tongue offended your client,” Jen said. “The truth is that we have his DNA at the murder scene, and unless he has anything to share about his accomplice, we can finish this up right now.”

Turchenko grunted, and Weathers said, “A moment alone?”

We gave them the room.

Ruiz met us in the hall. “Think he’ll give us anything?” he asked.

“I doubt it,” I said. “What’s in it for him? Best the DA can do is life without instead of the needle. Not much to bargain with.”

“Is Kincaid the DDA?” Jen asked.

“Yep,” Ruiz said.

Jen smiled, but not enough that she wouldn’t have denied it if I said anything. “Well,” she said, “let’s talk to him and see what he’ll go for. There’s the political angle to deal with, too.”

“And maybe the lab will turn up something else on the samples from Turchenko’s apartment,” Ruiz said.

Things were falling into place. If we could implicate his partner, we’d have a major win on our hands.

Almost too easy
, I thought as I began to massage the ache out of my left arm.

I
WAS LOOKING
at a real estate website called CalBungalows.com that had some great Long Beach listings when Patrick said, “Check this out,” and motioned me over to his computer screen.

“What am I looking at?” I asked. On the monitor was a string of text messages and replies. I leaned in and began reading.

“Turchenko sends a lot of texts to a guy named Taras Shevchuk. He’s got a sheet just as long as his pal’s. They’re all over each other’s call logs. And get this—they’ve been looked at for the same cases twice in the last three years.”

I scanned the back-and-forth texts until I saw the line from Shevchuk that had caught Patrick’s attention. It said,
Everyting readdy 4 Bixby. C you a.m.
It had been sent the night before the Benton murders.

“Am I the only one who proofreads text messages?” I asked.

He let that go and said, “I think we’ve got the accomplice.”

Ruiz looked at the photo in the folder Pat had handed him. “Shevchuk? Is that how you say it?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” I said.

“He’ll be expecting us. We’ll need to go in heavier for this one.”

“Should we scout it first?” Jen asked. “If he’s not already in the wind and we do the search before the arrest, we’ll spook him.”

“Good idea. You and Danny go take a look while I get a team ready to go.”

We checked in with the OCD and got a copy of Shevchuk’s file. His most recent known address was a 1930s bungalow a few blocks outside of the East Village—a neighborhood on the edge of downtown named with a misguided sense of New York envy—where he was shacking up with a girlfriend. The house wasn’t much to look at, but it wasn’t a shithole, either. The beige stucco was old but well maintained, and the lawn was a semi-healthy pale green. There was a BMW in the driveway, and like the house, the car was fading but not completely past its prime. The place had all the requisites of typical lower–middle class Long Beach.

We parked Jen’s 4Runner a few doors down on the other side of the street, and while we watched, I called Patrick and had him run the Beemer’s plates. The car was registered to someone named Tiffany Molina, no wants or warrants.

“Could be a girlfriend,” I said.

“Yeah. Or it could be he doesn’t live there anymore.”

“Or never did.”

“How do you want to play it?” I asked.

“Let’s just watch for a while. If nothing happens, we can knock on a door or two.”

Jen is better at sitting and waiting than any cop I’ve ever worked with. For hours at a time, she can remain calm and attentive and seem free of any trace of the numbing boredom I always feel in similar circumstances. She credits years of martial arts training for her Zen-master serenity.

So the only thing I had to help me cope was trying to crack her shell. As much as I wanted to, though, I couldn’t think of anything that might rattle her.

My hand tingled. I wiggled my fingers and noticed Jen noticing. I waited for her to speak, but she didn’t. A few more minutes and the tingling had devolved into a deep burn. The more it hurt, the more obvious my movements became. Finally, I decided to say something.

“It’s been doing better.”

“But it’s not better now?” Jen said.

“Not at the moment, no. But working helps.”

“I’m glad.” She put her sunglasses on and turned her attention back to the house.

We only waited an hour or so before Tiffany came out onto the driveway, approached the driver’s door of the BMW, then stopped as if she’d forgotten something and went back inside.

“Did she make us?” I asked.

“I don’t think so.” Jen leaned forward and looked over the top of her sunglasses. “Let’s give her a minute.”

Soon Tiffany came back out, a cell phone pressed to her ear, and got in the car.

“We should front her,” I said.

“Let’s let her drive a bit first. No point in giving the neighbors a show.”

Tiffany turned on Sixth, then took Alamitos up to Seventh, where the one-way street ends and you can drive east.

“She knows the neighborhood,” I said.

A few minutes later, she stopped at the Starbucks on Seventh and Park, and we had our chance. We let her go inside and get her coffee while we split up and each moved a few cars away from her BMW. Jen took a position by the entrance and faked a text
message, and I went down the block toward the trees that lined the residential portion of the street.