The Devil's Menagerie (15 page)

A slow, hot flush crept up Braden’s neck. He watched the FBI agent stalk out of the squad room, brushing past a startled uniform at the doorway. Even in that moment he was able to admire the way her hips swiveled when she walked off stiff-legged like that, tight calf muscles and trim ankles and rhythmic little jerks of her hips. Solid hips, Braden thought. His mother would have approved, thinking of grandchildren. What made him think of that? Did it make him a sexist pig in addition to being a jerk?

Across the room a detective started to clap, and others joined in. “Way to go, Timmy!”

The grins were not all supportive. Braden had never become Mr. Popularity in the SCPD squad room, in large part because he had vaulted over others in rank when he was brought in from the outside, but also because he had been touchy and aloof in the beginning. He had been variously viewed as (a) the Asshole Big City Detective who had come to show all the cops in the little hick town how it was done; (b) the Asshole Big City Detective who, having lost his head and his job in Los Angeles, had brought to the San Carlos PD a notoriety it didn’t need; (c) the Asshole Big City Detective who was too good to mingle with the little people; or (d) the Asshole Big City Detective with an attitude.

Well, he had had an attitude all right, Braden grudgingly acknowledged. Bitter, feeling used, angry over the injustice of the hand he had been dealt, it had taken him a while to remember his father’s sensible advice. “Play out the hand, son. You won’t always like the cards you get, but look around the table. You won’t see many happy smiles.” An avid Saturday night poker player, Frank Braden had leaned heavily on gambler’s clichés. “A royal flush is like winning the lottery. It’s not something to count on.” “Don’t worry about a man’s eyes, Tim, worry about his hands.” There was an exception to the latter rule. “Unless they’re dead eyes. You see a man at the table with dead eyes, real dead eyes, you better know you’re good or find yourself another game.”

Braden had begun to earn some respect in the squad room, mostly by keeping his mouth shut and doing his job. But the Edith Foster case was his first tough challenge since joining the SCPD, and he knew there were some in the room who were waiting for him to trip and fall flat on his face.

Behind him a voice said, “Come in here, Braden.”

It wasn’t a request. Captain Hummel’s tone was its usual roll of gravel down a chute. Braden rolled his eyes at the two suits from Robbery and followed the captain into the fishbowl.

“I got to hand it to you, Braden, you sure have a way with women.”

“She had no call to—”

“You were brushing her off.”

Braden sighed. “Come on, Captain … psychological profiling on this case? What’s that all about?”

“I’m gonna let you off the hook this time, Detective, because I didn’t get this memo over to you this morning. Goddam civilian review board meeting, how the hell are we supposed to get any work done?” Hummel pushed a piece of paper across his desk at Braden. It was a fax under the letterhead of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Braden ran his eye quickly down the sheet. It told him pretty much what the female special agent had said, that she was being sent out to advise and consult.

It added something new. The FBI’s computer had matched the details of the Edith Foster killing with a similar murder committed eight years ago—in Germany.

“Shit,” Braden muttered. “The Bureau thinks this wasn’t a onetime shot? That we have an international killer? How the hell could they get onto something like that so fast?”

“Maybe you should ask the lady,” Hummel said. “Isn’t that what VICAP’s supposed to be all about? That is, you can ask her if you get another chance. Is any of this getting through to you, Braden?”

“I’m supposed to cooperate.”

“You’ve got it.”

“I’m open to new ideas. I don’t roll my eyes anytime a Fed comes into the room.”

“Better and better.”

“She looks like Barbie on steroids, for Chrissake. Is there a Barbie FBI Agent doll with muscles?”

“I don’t know. You look like Boris Karloff this morning, what do you care? You got somethin’ against good-lookin’ women? Is there somethin’ you been wantin’ to tell me, Detective?”

“Only that I have a homicide to look into. That’s bad enough without a serial killer circus.”

Hummel regarded him steadily. His eyes were small in a beefy red face. Braden had never been able to read the captain’s eyes. They were so small and hard they gave Hummel an edge, Braden thought, if anyone had the balls to go eye-to-eye with him. “Let’s pray to God it’s just one homicide.”

“Yeah.”

As Braden turned to go, Hummel’s voice stopped him with his hand on the doorknob. “And when Barb comes back, treat her with respect. Is that understood, Detective?”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“Good. You might even learn somethin’. Her name’s Karen, by the way, not Barbie.”

“Am I supposed to care?”

“You never know, Detective.”

FBI S
PECIAL
A
GENT
Karen Younger was staying at a Red Roof Inn on the outskirts of San Carlos, just off the freeway on the east side. Braden dialed the motel’s number from his car. When her room phone wasn’t answered, he drove around aimlessly for a short time, feeling generally pissed off.

Then he had a hunch.

From the civic center he drove south through Old Town, past the San Carlos College campus and past the Alpha Beta shopping center where Edith Foster’s 280Z had been found abandoned. A few minutes later he was out of the city, cruising between long, flat dunes on his right and the protected wetlands on the inland side of the highway.

He found Agent Younger where he had expected her to be: at the crime scene.

Braden parked behind the agent’s rented Ford Contour and walked to the bridge where Younger leaned on the railing. She didn’t look up as Braden stopped beside her. Her expression was as somber as the day, which remained overcast and cool. The offshore breeze blowing uninterrupted across the dunes had a cutting edge.

“Was any trace evidence found on this railing?” she asked after a moment.

Braden shook his head. “He was careful. Right about where you’re standing the techs found scrapings from a plastic sheet she was wrapped in. This is where he dropped her over.”

Little evidence of the crime scene was left, other than some yellow police tape flapping in the breeze where one end had pulled loose and, over beside the bike path, the remains of some candles and wilted flowers that had briefly memorialized the murdered girl.

Braden understood why Karen Younger had needed to visit the crime scene herself. Reading a report was no substitute for being there. Staring down at the creek bed, was she mentally sorting through the police photographs showing Edith Foster’s body facedown in the mud? At the same time was she trying to fit inside the skin of the killer? Most investigators tried it, one time or another, with varying success. He wondered if Younger was good at it and that was why the Bureau had sent her. Irrelevantly he decided that her eyes were more gray than blue, as if they reflected the sky. He wondered if they would appear more blue than gray on a warm, sunny day.

“Where you from, Younger? That accent … New York?”

“I grew up in Philadelphia.”

“Is that where you picked up that chip on your shoulder?”

“Part of that’s inherited. My mom was the same way. Nobody gave her any lip.”

“I suppose that means, if you hadn’t met some kindly benefactor who steered you along the right path, instead of being an upright FBI agent you could’ve ended up on the other side.”

“A hit woman for the Mob,” she agreed. “Or maybe a Philadelphia waitress.”

Another silence fell between them, but the tension had gone out of it.

“So what do your friends call you, Detective?”

“My really good friends call me Braden. Everyone else calls me Detective Braden.”

“Cool,” she said. “I’ll bet your mother still calls you Timothy.”

“Yeah, and my ex-wife called me Tim. You’ll notice I said ex.”

“You work hard at getting people to dislike you, don’t you, Braden?”

“Hell, it ain’t hard.”

She studied him thoughtfully. Then she looked back down toward the creek. “Washing the body, wrapping her in plastic, dumping her out here … he’s a very organized killer, Detective. And he’s had a long time to plan this.”

“You seem to know more than I do. How about we go somewhere out of the wind and talk?”

“Why the change of heart?”

“My captain and I had a little heart-to-heart. There’s a diner back up the road. You want to follow my car?”

S
HE FOLLOWED HIM
along the highway to the Bright Spot. Walking toward the entrance, Braden pointed out the telephone from which Harry Malkowski had made his 911 call after discovering Edith Foster’s body. The diner was nearly deserted. They sat at a window booth facing each other, with a view across the highway over the empty dunes.

Braden listened to the record on the jukebox. Otis Redding, “Dock of the Bay,” he thought, pleased with himself. Karen Younger studied the collection of vintage car photographs on the walls. Iris, the leggy, frizzy-haired blond waitress who had been on duty when Braden interviewed Harry Malkowski, approached the booth, eyeing the FBI agent with curiosity. She took their orders for coffee, then said, “Catfish is good today. It’s farm-raised.”

The menu featured such old-fashioned comfort foods as hot beef and hot turkey sandwiches, macaroni and cheese, hamburgers and milk shakes. “I’ll have coffee and the Philly Cheesesteak sandwich,” Braden said.

“I’ll have the same,” the FBI agent said.

When they were alone they studied each other warily across the formica table. Braden had seen the admiration in the waitress’s eyes when she looked Younger up and down. He decided the word Iris would have used was classy.

“If we’re going to work together, Braden, there’s something I have to know.”

He stiffened, guessing what was coming. “If you have something to ask, ask it.”

“That woman on the video, why’d you hit her?”

“To control her.”

“Oh, come on, Braden, you were on camera, she—”

“The camera lied.”

“Cameras don’t lie, Detective.”

“They do if what they show is selective. What you saw on that film—what the whole damned country thinks it saw—was a lie.”

The scene flashed through his mind for perhaps the thousandth time. Filmed by the supposed victim’s neighbor in blurry black-and-white, under poor light conditions, the video recorded what looked like a classic case of police brutality. There was Braden stepping through a doorway. Then a young black woman flying out the door, screaming at him. Braden turning away, the woman grabbing him, getting in his face, Braden pushing her off. The woman rushing after him again, but now Braden’s body hid her partially from the camera’s lens, and the world never saw what Braden did—the bottle opener with a spiral metal corkscrew in the woman’s hands. She jabbed it at Braden’s eyes. All the camera recorded was an image of this skinny black woman struggling with a much bigger, stronger white man, twisting free of his grip, appearing to try to slap him … and Braden either shoving or slapping her, sending her sprawling through the doorway. Then Braden, in a move that looked very bad on film, charged through the door after her. The camera stared at the empty doorway while the woman’s screams rose higher, becoming a shrill plea for help.

Younger’s eyes were noncommittal. Reserving judgment, Braden thought. She said, “What was it all about, anyway? The news stories glossed that over.”

“It started as a typical domestic triangle—the woman, her husband and her lover. The husband had a knife but the lover had a gun, so guess who won? When we got there the husband was already down—he was DOA at the hospital. We were trying to arrest the second man and the soon-to-be-rich widow became hysterical, out of control. When she flew at me I tried to give her some space. I stepped outside but she came after me.”

“With a corkscrew.”

“Yeah.”

“Which was never found.”

“That’s right,” Braden said in a flat tone. “Somebody took it … someone who wanted to create problems for the police. It happens. Listen, if you knew all this, why did you ask?”

“I wanted to hear what you had to say. Hey, Detective, you have to admit it looked bad on video.”

Braden himself had been shocked when he first saw the film footage. Rehashing it now, he felt the burden of the past year bearing down on him. The curiosity in the FBI agent’s eyes was nothing new. When the corkscrew couldn’t be found, Internal Affairs investigators were openly skeptical about Braden’s story. The tabloid news media had a field day. In the eyes of a national television audience Braden was instantly proven guilty. Open and shut. The Corkscrew Cop, one reporter called him, and the name stuck. Even David Letterman joked on
The Late Show
about the difference between a cop being screwed and being bent.

Pending the departmental investigation of the incident, Braden was suspended. The widowed woman’s lawyer quickly brought suit against Braden, the police department, the police chief and the city. Eventually the internal investigation cleared Braden. His partner at the scene and other witnesses supported his story about the woman going berserk and striking at Braden’s face with some kind of weapon. The partner confirmed that Braden had followed procedure in doing everything possible to defuse the situation, walking away from the woman and ultimately slapping her only when she became violent.

In the end none of that mattered. Braden was reassigned to a desk in Parker Center, out of public view. The city, seeking to avoid the expense and notoriety of an inflammatory trial, settled with the bereaved widow out of court. An agreement with the police officers’ union allowed Braden to transfer out of the LAPD to the San Carlos Police Department, a comparative backwater agency that had been trying to hire a qualified criminal investigator for more than six months.

The Incident followed Braden to San Carlos. Initially there were organized protests by students and some faculty members enraged over his hiring. The conservative mayor and city council, elected on law-and-order campaign platforms, refused to back down. Protesters were reminded that there had been a rising incidence of rape and assault on campus. Timothy Braden had a distinguished record, he had been cleared by his department, he was a valuable asset for the SCPD, the college and the community.