The Pain Scale (34 page)

“Excellent schools,” she said. “Fremont is only a few blocks away, and that’s the best elementary school in Long Beach. Do you have any children yet?”

“Not yet,” I said.

I couldn’t tell if Jen’s examination of the insides of the kitchen cabinets was out of genuine interest or just a way to pretend that she didn’t hear me.

When we had introduced ourselves and told Shelly we were LBPD detectives, she’d seemed pleased and asked if we had met on the job. I told her we had and decided to see how far Jen would let me go.

She hadn’t acknowledged anything yet. She seemed too engrossed in the inspection of the house.

“How long have you two been together?” Shelly asked.

“We’ve been partners for more than five years,” I said.

Jen, still oblivious to our conversation, ran her hand across the marble countertop and took a look inside the stainless-steel dishwasher. Then she squatted down and looked at the tile work where it butted up against the bottom of the cabinets.

Shelly and I let her go. “And what’s your current situation?” she asked.

“Oh,” I said, “we’re renting.”

“Where?”

“Here in Long Beach.” I was enjoying the vagueness game I was playing with Shelly and wondered how long I could string her along without actually telling a lie.

“So this will be your first house?”

“Neither of us has owned before.”

Jen moved on through the laundry room, one of the baths, and all of the bedrooms before she said anything at all to us. When she was finally ready to talk, she said, “I like it. Can we take a look at the guesthouse?”

Shelly and I let our conversation drop and followed Jen through the rest of the property. The one-bedroom rear unit was every bit as nice as the front house. “How much do you think this would rent for?” Jen asked.

“It’s so hard for people to buy right now,” Shelly said. “The rents are going up. I think thirteen hundred would be a conservative guess.”

Jen nodded, apparently in agreement. She seemed genuinely impressed with everything she’d seen. She traded contact information with Shelly and told her she’d call soon.

In the car, I said, “Are you really thinking about that one?”

“Yes,” she said.

“It’s almost seven hundred thousand. Isn’t that way out of your price range?”

“If I could come up with a bit more for the down payment, with the rental income I could probably swing it.”

“Do you really want a place so big?”

“I’ve been thinking,” she said. “My dad’s not doing too well. With Johnny gone to med school, they have a lot more house than they need. They could maybe use a smaller place.”

I knew she was also thinking about the possibility of her mother being left alone in the big Gardena house she grew up in. She wouldn’t say that out loud, though. Neither would I. Not surprisingly, I felt like a dick for joking around with Shelly.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I know.”

“You do?”

“Yeah. Why do you think I didn’t give you any shit?”

We were in the car headed back downtown when the throwaway cell phone rang. I recognized the number.

“Good news, I hope,” I said.

“Maybe. With the new software and enhanced photo recognition, we’ve got three possible matches in the Sternow and Byrne personnel files on the pic from the iPhone.”

“Three? How many did you search it against?”

“As many as I could get my hands on. Over four thousand. Most of those were clerks and attorneys and paralegals. About seven hundred of those were the former PMF employees.”

“Were all three matches from the mercenary pile?”

“Two were. We’ve got one air force vet and one with no military record who was already on the security payroll when S and B made the acquisition. Third guy’s one of the mercs, former Army Ranger, no apparent air force connection.”

“What do we do with the info?” I said. “How do we check these guys out and stay off the radar?”

“I’m working on that,” Patrick said. “I’m trying to find out if I can get pictures of these guys through any other sources. Facebook, Flickr, anything online.”

“Because then we don’t have to worry about anybody asking how we made the connection.”

“Bingo.”

After we detoured by Patrick’s loft, where we picked up hard copies of the info on the three possibles, we headed back to the squad room.

“How much do you want to know?” Jen asked the lieutenant.

“You’re going to have to be the judge of that.”

“How come she gets to be the judge?”

They both went on as if I hadn’t spoken at all.

“We found some data in the phone,” Jen said. “We can use it. It might lead us to the Seal Beach shooter. And it’s going to be good info. Stuff we can use.”

“Going to be?” he asked.

Jen nodded but didn’t go into any more detail.

“It won’t be long before you have to move on some of this, will it?”

“No,” I said.

He gave us a look weighted with concern. It was clear he wanted to say more, but we’d gone too far to talk openly about our information-gathering techniques to be any more forthcoming about things without implicating him as well. None of us was comfortable with the situation, so he told us to be careful and went back into his office.

“Only one of the three was in the air force,” I said. “Patrick put it on a Post-it.” I held up the file for Jen to see. “Should we start with him?”

I flipped open the file on Aaron Baker and started reading. Patrick had done all the background he could on him without going through any of the government databases like NCIC or ViCAP. With those, there would be the possibility of leaving traces that the FBI might be able to find. Still, he was able to come up with quite a bit of information. Baker had dropped out of community college in Arizona and joined the air force in the wake of 9/11 and had served for four years before deciding not to re-up and accepting a position with a private military company that specialized in airborne surveillance and security, called SkyHawk.

“SkyHawk?” Jen asked. “As opposed to what? LandHawk?”

“Redundant,” I said. “He didn’t have to deal with the name for long. Six months after he signed on, they merged with DefCorp International. Been with them ever since.”

“What else? Any record?”

“Unmarried. Has a Corvette, a Range Rover, and a Kawasaki registered with the DMV. One drunk and disorderly charge in 2004. Looks like it was pled down from an assault beef. Did some community service. Spent most of the last decade in the Middle East. Only has a US address going back to ’09. Moved to LA when Sternow and Byrne snapped up DefCorp.”

“What do you think?” Jen asked.

“This isn’t a lot to go on. Patrick included a bit more. Mostly Google hits. He’s got a Facebook page with no pictures, says he likes Metallica. Can we bust him for that?” She smiled, and I handed her the open folder.

“What’s this? ‘The Kawa-Kazes’? Some kind of rice-burner biker club.”

“Wait,” I said. “I thought we couldn’t say ‘rice burner’ anymore.”

“No,
you
can’t say ‘rice burner’ anymore. I can say it all I want.”

“Oh, it’s one of those things.”

“Yeah. Get over it.”

“Think this could be our guy?”

“I don’t know. We don’t even know if he was Pararescue.”

“No, we don’t.”

“How about the other two guys?”

“Let’s see,” I said. “We know neither one of them was a PJ. One’s a former Ranger.” I shuffled the folders. “This one. Roger Bell.”

“What else is in there?”

“Records similar to Baker’s. Although, he was already in the army. Joined in ’98. Re-upped in ’02, again in ’06. Signed on with DefCorp in 2010. Sounds more like career military. Ex-wife and two kids. No criminal record. He was delinquent on his child support twice—second time, the year before he went private.”

“Maybe he just needed the bigger paycheck.”

“Think he needed an even bigger one? Signed on for some private wet work?”

“Wet work?”

“Yeah. It means assas—”

“I know what it means. I thought you gave up on Tom Clancy novels.”

“The old ones are pretty good.”

“Sure. How about number three?”

“Peter Jarman. No military service for him. Degree in political science from UCLA in ’94. Looks like a pretty normal guy.”

“How long has he been with S and B?”

“Twelve years.”

“What did he do in between graduation and the law firm?”

“Don’t know. Nothing in the file on that.”

I spread the three folders on the table between us like giant playing cards and considered them. There didn’t seem to be anything at all that would lead in one direction or another. We could dig deeper and start using some of our other resources to check them out, but that would be likely to tip off Young and Goodman.

“Should we talk to them?”

“How do we do that without tipping our hand?”

“We make some shit up.”

Aaron Baker lived on the top floor of a condo complex two blocks in from the beach on the southern edge of Santa Monica, just north of the city’s border with Venice. We parked on the street, and just as we were deciding if we wanted to buzz Baker’s unit, a tall balding man in a Radiohead T-shirt led an energetic golden retriever out of the gate, and we slipped in behind him. He looked over his shoulder at us, but I gave an authoritative smile and an officious nod, and his dog pulled him down the
street. It’s surprising the kind of thing you can get away with if you act like a cop.

We got out of the elevator on the third floor and caught a few glimpses of the sun setting on the Pacific Ocean as we walked to Baker’s door. I gave the door a triple rap with the knuckles on my left hand. My right was resting on my belt in front of my right hip. After a few seconds, I repeated the knock and said loudly enough for the next-door neighbor to hear, “Aaron Baker?”

The door opened on a safety chain, and an eye peeked around the edge. “Yes?”

“Mr. Baker? We’re with the Long Beach Police Department. Could we have a few words with you?” We held up our badges.

“Just a moment,” he said and shut the door. I heard him move away and then come back. We had known he’d be armed and might even answer a knock at his door with a weapon in his hand. Jen and I couldn’t blame him—we’d both done the same thing more times than we could count. At least more than I could count. She’s better at math than I am.