White Sister (10 page)

And then, toward the back of the graduation shots, I found David M. Slade. He was rakishly handsome and clean cut, smiling through perfect teeth. His coffee-colored skin glowed against his crisp blue Academy uniform. His moustache was clipped and perfect. Slade had graduated forty-fourth. He had a sharpshooter's medal and came in third in an academy martial arts competition.

His nickname was "Dark Angel."

Chapter
14.

COME ON OUT. Don't be afraid," Alexa shouted through the bolted iron door. "You've been afraid since you were born. It's time to put all that behind you."

"That's ridiculous," I called back. "The only fears we're born with are fear of falling and fear of loud noises. All other fears are learned." Sweat was dripping out of my hair, into my eyes.

"I won't hurt you, I promise," she said. "Open the door."

My heart was beating fast, my eyes strained to see in the dark enclosed space. "Fear is what lets you grow," I shouted through the door. "I've had my head shrunk by the best. I know the drill. You can't just live in a comfort zone. You have to take chances if you want to improve." I could barely make out the walls. Dim light seeped in through a few holes in the rafters.

"Come out, Shane. I promise I won't hurt you."

"But you already have." I was crying. I never cry, but I was crying. Tears ran. Hot tracks of salt and self-pity.

"But I don't mean to hurt you," she called to me.

"I know. But I can't take this. I can't live like this. Not knowing is killing me."

"But I'm right here. Right outside this door. All you have to do is come out."

I woke up without opening my eyes. I had departed from one darkness and was suddenly in another. I remembered lying down on the bed with the police graduation book on my chest, trying to sort out what it meant that Slade and Alexa's relationship dated back to the Police Academy. I had not intended to fall asleep, but fatigue had overtaken me. Then I dreamed, and my dreams were torture.

I opened my eyes, sat up, and looked at the clock in our bedroom. It was eight in the morning. Damn. I jumped out of bed, went into the bathroom, slapped water on my face, and looked into reddened eyes. I looked different. Everything was the same, but somehow it wasn't. There was less here than there was yesterday.

Then the front doorbell rang.

I grabbed my jacket and moved to the side window and looked out at the street.

Parked by the side of my house was the maroon Crown Vic. It was empty. Tommy and Rafie were at the front door.

Decision time. What do I do? Do I open up and risk taking an arrest? Or do I slip out the back door and beat feet down the canal walk to the side street? I was still half-asleep, but then a thought hit me. Maybe these guys knew something. Maybe they'd found Alexa.

I opened the door.

"Thank God you finally went home," Tommy said. There was a piece of yellow paper in his left hand that looked like some kind of internal department document.

"Yeah," I answered. "Finally came to my senses. Whatta you doing here? I was expecting the I
. A
. rat squad."

"Takes a little time for a shit souffle to rise," Rafie said. "They gotta get a deputy chief to sign their warrant and DCs don't get in till ten. We got our paper from the division commander who gets in at seven." "What paper is that?"

Tommy handed me the yellow sheet. It was an internal demand served on Alexa's computer.

"You want her computer?"

"Police property. We're reclaiming it as part of the investigation."

"I see," I said, cussing myself. I hadn't even thought to look at her personal computer. I didn't want these two guys in my house going through her files so I centered myself in the doorway.

"Don't be a schmuck," Rafie said.

"Look, I'm ..."

"You gonna step aside or is this going to turn into a police incident?" Rafie said. Both of them looked like they were a heartbeat from thumping the crap out of me. Actually, scanning her computer was a good idea. I should have beat them to it, but with the two of them standing there, I knew that race was pretty much over.

"Okay," I finally said, and stood aside.

"Where is it?" Tommy asked.

"Her office." I led them through the house into a small storage room off the hall that we'd converted into a place for Alexa to work. No windows, a small workspace, everything stacked and organized neatly, Alexa-style. I turned on the lights and motioned to the desk. Her computer was gone.

"Where is it?" Rafie said. The tension in his voice was hard to miss.

"I don't know." And I didn't.

"Starting last night you were a problem, but me and Tommy were trying to look past it because the Lieutenant is your wife. Now, however, we're talking criminal malfeasance. Obstructing justice, withholding evidence, interfering in a homicide investigation, accessory after the fact. You're stacking up felonies faster than an E-Street gangster."

"I don't know where the computer is," I said. But in the next instant, I figured it out. John Bodine stole it. He hadn't been looking out my side window earlier, when I'd caught him, he'd been unlatching it. That's why he jumped. Then after I dumped him on the Nickel, he must have rented a cab using my money, come back here, shimmied through the window, and stole the computer. My guess was when I checked the house I'd find he'd liberated a lot of other stuff as well.

"I'm going to ask the Professional Standards Bureau to pick you up, Shane. You won't stay out of this, so I'm gonna have you held," Tommy said.

"We all do what we have to do," I answered.

They turned and walked out of my house, leaving me standing in Alexa's office looking at her empty desk.

After they were gone, I took a quick tour. Bodine had stolen two TVs, Chooch's stereo, and a microwave, along with Alexa's computer.

He'd clouted our stuff and true to his rep, was long gone.

Chapter
15.

HOWARD JONES FIELD on the USC campus is where the Trojans football team holds summer two-a-days. Pete Carroll has open practices during July, so I parked behind an athletic equipment building and walked past the track to the field. It was nine-thirty in the morning and players in shoulder pads, practice jerseys, and shorts were huddled in separate groups working with their position coaches.

I spotted Chooch with the quarterbacks. Steve Sarkisian was leading them through a footwork drill, teaching both three
-
and five-step step drops. As I approached I couldn't help a flash of pride. My son was handsome. He was the result of a one-time fling I'd had with a beautiful Hispanic call girl who had given up being an escort to become a confidential informant for the department. Five years ago before she died in my arms, she told me that he was a son I never knew I had. Now I watched him across the football field and marveled at how perfect he seemed. Six-three with his mother's dark good looks, he was even more beautiful on the insid
e w
here it counted. Chooch saw me coming, said something to the coach, and then sprinted in my direction carrying his helmet. He met me on the thirty yard line. Tension was etched on his face.

"Did they find her?"

"Not yet."

His shoulders slumped.

"Look, son, I promise I'll get to the bottom of this."

"Dad, let me help you."

"I can't. Since this happened, I've broken a lot of department regs along with a few low-grade criminal statutes. The acting chief is probably pissed, so there's a good chance the District Attorney could press charges. I can't have you mixed up in this."

"Dad, how can I just
"

"I know. I know, it's tough," I interrupted. "But you've gotta trust me, Chooch. If I have something for you to do, I'll call. Until then I need to know you're safely out of this."

"One of the guys had a radio on this morning. They're saying an LAPD undercover officer was found dead inside of a high-ranking female police commander's car. They made it sound like she's at fault sorta."

I was surprised that the media had the story already. Usually the department tried to keep a police shooting under wraps until they had all the facts. Somehow, it had leaked.

"There're some very tough characters on the edge of this. The press is going to blow it up into something it's not."

"Whatta you mean?"

"I have a bad feeling about the way they're going to spin it. In the meantime, I'm going to find your mom. That's my focus. If this goes the way I think it will, it may get a little uncomfortable for you, even here."

"They're gonna say she killed him? That's ridiculous," he said.

"In a high-profile deal like this, speculation often gets played like fact. The uglier it seems, the more the press likes it. I don't know what they're gonna say, but we've gotta believe in Alexa."

"Dad, how can you say that to me? I know Alexa. I know who she is. I'll always believe in her." He had tears in his dark eyes.

"I'll call you at least once a day."

"No cell phones on the practice field. You've gotta wait until after eight, when we're out of the film room. Or send somebody out to get me."

"Okay. Hang tough. I'll call you at eight unless it's urgent."

I didn't hug him in front of his teammates, even though I wanted to. Instead, we shook hands. It felt awkward and forced. I turned and walked back to the equipment building where my car was parked. As I drove away and made the turn at the end of the field, I looked back and saw Chooch still standing there, holding his helmet, all alone, watching me leave.

Driving out of USC I tried to get a number for William Rosencamp. I called a friend in Personnel and found out that he had moved from Devonshire to the old Newton Division. Newton used to be its own division, but was now reorganized as part of the Central Bureau. The area was bordered by the Harbor Freeway on the west and Florence Avenue on the south. The reorganized Central Bureau was a hot zone that now included South Central L
. A
. The streets around the Newton stationhouse were still notorious. As a result, it had retained its old moniker, Shootin' Newton.

I needed more information on David Slade. On the surface he just seemed like a bad apple. I knew from reading The Blue Line, an LAPD magazine, that Rosey Rosencamp was the recently elected head of the Oscar Joel Bryant Association for black police officers. I was pretty sure that a wrong number like David Slade would be a special topic of interest for those guys. Since Rosey was an old friend of mine and had been in the Academy with Alexa and Slade, I was also hoping he might be able to shed some light on this guy and maybe point me in a fresh direction.

I reached him on the first try. He was just heading out to get breakfast. With Slade's murder all over the news, he didn't have to ask why I was calling. We agreed to meet at a pancake house near the station.

Driving through Newton, I realized that not much had changed here since I first pinned on a badge. Some areas are so infected with urban blight that there is no reclaiming them. As I drove down surface streets, I saw three guys in silver-and-black Raider jackets huddled in a doorway. They glared as I passed. A crack deal went down right under my nose when I stopped at a light on Fifty-fourth Street.

Like everything in this neighborhood, the pancake house had seen better days. I parked in the lot, chirped my alarm, and walked into the half-empty dining room. Rosey was seated by the window, where he could keep an eye on his black-and-white parked on the other side of the plate glass. He was wearing his blue uniform with sergeant's stripes. Rosencamp was a big man and had put on a few pounds since the last time I saw him, but he was still a long way from fat. He had one of those stocky builds that made him a tough commodity on the street; hard to push around or move in a fight. He was well liked but had been stalled at sergeant for six years. He should have made lieutenant by now. I wondered if his membership in OJB had marked him as a troublemaker. The LAPD liked to pretend we were colorblind
no white, brown, yellow, or black . . . just blue. Despite this carefully orchestrated fiction, nightmare incidents from Rodney King and the now-famous "Gorillas in the Mist" mobile computer transmission, to the more recent Rampart scandal and the OJ trial, had kept racial strife inside the department simmering. Nobody wanted it, but it was there just the same. Everybody on the job already knew that this thing with Alexa and David Slade wasn't going to help.

"How're you holding up?" Rosey said, even before I sat down.

"It's tough."

"Gonna get tougher," he said. Then he filled me in on how the story had leaked. "The planets musta been lined up wrong after they found Alexa's car," he said. "Some still camera stringer jumped the first patrol car radio transmission, snuck up in the trees above Mulholland, and got pictures of the body and your wife's license. Sold his shots to the L
. A
. Times." He grabbed a paper off the seat beside him and dropped it on the table in front of me. It was all there: the BMW surrounded by cops and crime scene tape, David Slade slumped forward with his head resting on the dash. "They got Roxanne Sharp on the TV already," Rosey continued. "She's cutting up the department. Great White Mike's in full vapor lock. For a guy who loves being on the tube, he was stuttering and muttering worse than Elmer Fudd. We're about to get our big blue asses kicked. The real chief came through surgery okay, but he's gonna be out of it for weeks. We could sure use him on this 'cause Great White Mike's gonna get pasted."