The Pain Scale (36 page)

If I remembered correctly, there was a light switch just around the corner that was wired to turn on half a dozen lights around the edges of the large space.

When Jen was at my heels, I turned to her and whispered, “Lights.”

She gave me a single nod.

I reached up and tried to find the switch with my fingers.

The adrenaline was pumping at full force, and I could feel my hands shaking.

I took two deep breaths and slid my hand around the wall. I could have sworn I’d seen Patrick turn on the lights there, but all I could feel was the empty wall.

No lights.

I shook my head to tell Jen what she had already figured out.

She took the SureFire flashlight out of her pocket and held it up.

I nodded and motioned for her to move to the right of the door, then pointed at myself and gestured to the left.

When we were in position, she crouched low and raised her left hand high before hitting the flashlight’s thumb switch.

At the same time, I flicked on the Remington’s fore end–mounted tactical light.

We moved the spots around the big space, looking for movement or anything out of place.

Nothing.

When we knew we’d seen everything we could from that position, we began to move.

Not more than ten feet from the door, Jen said, “Danny,” and her beam of light stopped on the far side of the loft.

Patrick’s computer setup had been trashed. As we moved closer, we could see someone had taken great pains to see that nothing would be salvageable. I was still looking at the mess when I heard Jen gasp.

She was already kneeling next to him before I even understood what had caused her exclamation.

On the floor, with his hands and feet bound and strips of duct tape across his mouth and eyes, was Patrick’s motionless body.

From the evidence at the scene that Dave and Marty gathered while we waited at the hospital, and the reports of the paramedics and the emergency room doctor, we knew that he had been Tasered and had hit his head on the edge of one of the computer tables as he fell. He was unconscious when he was bound and gagged. If not for the head injury, the assault would have been relatively minor.

But the trauma was serious—a severe concussion and a cracked skull led to a subdural hematoma and brain herniation. He was in a coma, and the doctors were unsure of his prognosis.

Had he been found sooner, the surgeon said, he could have been more positive. As it was, we’d have to wait and see.

“Stop it, Danny,” Jen said.

“Stop what?”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

I wanted to argue with her, but I knew doing so would be self-indulgent, and that was exactly what I was blaming myself for already. I didn’t believe it was my fault Patrick was attacked, but I knew that if I hadn’t been dicking around, we would have gone to his house sooner.

“What should we do?” I asked.

“The lieutenant’s on the way. Let him call it.”

When he got there half an hour later, he told us we could stay at the hospital, go work the scene, or even go home and try to get some sleep. Which, of course, wasn’t any help at all. Jen decided to stay.

“Is it okay if I go see how Dave and Marty are doing?”

“Yeah,” she said. “One of us should. I’ll call you as soon as there’s any news.”

With that, I drove the ten minutes back to Patrick’s loft.

There were four cruisers, a Crime Scene Detail van, and two unmarked LBPD vehicles. The one I was in made three.

I badged a rookie I didn’t know, and he let me inside.

“Danny,” Marty said as he saw me walk toward him, “what’s the latest?”

Dave joined us, and I told them everything I knew about Patrick’s condition.

“He’ll be fine,” Dave grumbled. “He’s a hardheaded bastard. He’ll be fine.”

I tried hard to believe him, and judging by the look on his face, Marty did, too.

“Detectives?”

The three of us turned back toward the door and looked up toward the voice. Above the front rooms was a second floor, kind of a loft within the loft. One of the crime scene technicians was looking down at us and waving. “I think there’s something up here you should see,” he said.

The only access was a steel ladder attached to wall in the corner.

“After you,” Marty said.

I climbed up. “Hey, James,” I said to the tech. When he looked at me oddly, I second-guessed myself. “I’m sorry. Jim?”

“Ben,” he said.

Before I could apologize again, Marty stepped off the ladder. “Hey, Ben,” he said. “What do you have?”

“Right over here,” he said, gesturing to a three-foot-square metal access hatch. “I hope it’s okay,” Ben said. “I used Detective Glenn’s keys to open this.”

“Why?” Marty asked. We felt awkward snooping through our colleague’s things. None of us were sure how much privacy we should afford him. It wasn’t a stretch to assume Patrick’s attack was connected to the Benton investigation, and he had been assaulted and was in critical condition. It was a stupid thing to worry about, but cops always get uncomfortable when one of our own is on the other side of an investigation. Fortunately, though, Ben had a good answer.

“I was following this.” He motioned for us to step closer, and he ran his hand along the joint where the wall met the low ceiling of the loft. “Feel up here,” he said.

I did. There was a ridge of spackle that filled in the right angle of the joint. As I followed it with my fingers, I could see the unusual convex curve where the seam should have been sharper and more angular.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“There’s a wire underneath,” Ben said. “Runs out here to the edge.”

“What’s there?”

“Take a look.”

I leaned out over the railing and looked at the edge of the joint. There was a shallow hole that was perhaps a quarter of an inch across with something black inset into the opening. “What am I looking at?”

“A lens,” he said.

Marty and I looked at him expectantly.

“The wire runs into the wall and inside.”

“What’s in there?”

“Take a look.”

I got down on my hands and knees and crawled halfway into the hatch. The first thing I noticed was how clean it was. There was no dust on the floor, no cobwebs hanging from the studs. It didn’t even smell musty. Just inside was a rack of what looked like computer equipment. I think Ben expected me to recognize what I was looking at. I didn’t. As I backed up out of the hole, I said, “You’re going to have to help me out with that, too.”

“It’s a video control unit hooked up to a couple of hard drives.”

“Surveillance?” Marty asked.

“Yeah,” Ben said.

“Did it get what happened here?”

“Power’s on and everything’s running, so I’m guessing yes.”

“Guessing?”

“Can’t tell for sure. Security’s tight. Didn’t want to risk damaging any of the data.”

“It’s connected directly to the camera?” I asked. “Why not use wireless?”

“Six cameras,” Ben said. “And they’re all hardwired. Closed circuit. With wireless, if somebody had the right frequency and they were close enough, they could intercept the signal. With wires, no one’s going to see anything you don’t want them to.”

“Where are the other cameras?”

“I don’t know yet. I’ll follow the wires and find them.”

“This hardware, it’s not the kind of thing somebody would plant here, right? It’s for security?”

“Right. Detective Glenn knew his tech. This is his.”

Marty started down the ladder. While I was waiting for him to clear the bottom, I turned back to Ben and said, “Good work. This is big.”

He looked pleased, and I hoped that helped to make up for my mistake with his name.

“Thanks,” he said. “That really means a lot coming from you, Detective Ionesco.”

When I got down to the bottom of the ladder, Marty asked, “What’s so funny?”

Dave, Marty, and I gathered around the wreckage of Patrick’s computer equipment. “They destroyed everything. Took the hard drives, ripped them right out of the machines. Weren’t messing around,” Dave said.

“Who do you suppose ‘they’ were?” Marty asked.

“Not the shooter from the SUV,” I said.

Dave’s brow furrowed. “Why do you say that?”

“He shot the driver at the first sign of trouble. Whoever did this was trying to avoid violence. Used a Taser. Patrick’s only critical because he hit his head on the edge of the table on the way to the floor. They probably didn’t even know how bad he was when they tied him up.”

He considered it. “Maybe. Maybe they just didn’t want to up the ante by killing a cop.”

I thought about that. Dave might have been right, but I didn’t think so. There was so much blood on the shooter’s hands at that point that the added weight of a cop on top of everything else wouldn’t make that much of a difference.

But.

We needed the video from the surveillance unit.

“Why do you suppose he has such a heavy-duty camera setup?” Jen asked.

“I don’t know. He had a lot of computer equipment. Must have been worth a lot. Maybe to protect it?”

“Could be.” She thought for a moment. “You don’t think he could have put it in just since we went off the grid, do you?”

“I doubt it. It was a serious installation. Not the kind of thing you’d do on the fly.”

“Think the techs will be able to crack the security?”

“They said they could; they just couldn’t say when. The more skilled he is, the longer it’ll be.”

We sat in silence. The KABC news was on the TV in the waiting room, but the sound was turned down. About ten minutes in, there was an update on the Benton case. I watched a reporter standing in front of Bradley and Sara’s house in Bixby Knolls talk into the camera; then they cut to a video of Bailey and Jacob. The same one that Oliver Woods had leaked. All the stations were using it now. The report didn’t last long. There was nothing new for them to say.

Jen insisted that I go home and try to rest. When I got there, though, I was so wired that I knew sleep would be hard to come by. The pain had been worsening in my arm and shoulder for several hours, and by midnight I couldn’t think of anything else. I took two Vicodin, put my iPod in the dock, set it on shuffle, and sat in the darkness of my living room, looking out the window at the quiet and empty street.