on my mind with both cases that I hadn’t really had a chance to be bothered by the lack of time to myself. The lieutenant had been smart. I was used to spending a lot of time with Jen. When one of us caught a case, it wasn’t at all unusual to spend most of our waking hours together for days at a stretch. If he had assigned the babysitting duty to anyone else, even Patrick or Marty or Dave, I’d be bristling and looking for escape opportunities every chance I got.
I decided to eat at The Potholder Too, the second location of one of Long Beach’s most popular breakfast mainstays. It was only a block away from the station, and an omelet for lunch always seemed like a good idea to me. The more I thought about it, the hungrier I got. And the better I felt about having the chance to be by myself for a while.
The walk was a short one. Out the back into the parking lot, around the building, right on Broadway, and just down the block. Door to door in less than five minutes. How many times had I done it? Fifty? Seventy-five?
As soon as I got outside and felt the sun on my face, the pang in my stomach that I’d attributed to my hunger grew deeper. My sense of situational awareness intensified as I scanned the lot. I watched the uniforms and the suits coming and going. Most of the faces were familiar. I scrutinized the ones that weren’t, assessing potential threats, one by one.
I’d dealt with threats to my life many times. I had no idea why, but now for some reason I was feeling a kind of vulnerability I never had before.
“Hey, Danny,” a voice said to my right.
I turned too quickly.
“You okay?” It was Stan Burke, a patrol vet who I’d known for years. He’d been one of my field-training officers when I was a rookie.
“I’m sorry, what?” I said.
“You all right?”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I’m fine.”
He didn’t look like he believed me. “I heard about what happened. Hell of a thing.”
I nodded. “That it is.” I noticed I was breathing. “Just heading out for lunch.”
“Where you going?”
“Potholder.”
“Want some company?” he asked.
To my embarrassment, I did.
CHAPTER EIGHT
CADILLAC RANCH
“I thought there would be more blood.” Lucinda sounded far away when she called. We’d released the crime scene so she could begin to sort through her father’s things.
“Sometimes there’s not that much,” I said, remembering her father’s slumped-over body. A few drops had found their way onto the sofa. I wondered if she’d looked closely enough to see them.
“I’m calling because of the funeral,” she said.
“How can I help?”
“I was wondering about his computer and his phone?”
“What about them?” I asked. We’d be able to get them back to her eventually, but it would likely not be for quite a while.
“The contact lists? He knew a lot of people, a lot of tenants, I don’t know who they all are.”
“We need to hang on to his things for now, but I can get you copies of the lists.”
“Thank you,” she said. “That would be a big help.” There was a tired sadness in her voice. She seemed to be genuinely grieving, but I couldn’t help but question whether figuring out who to invite to the service was the only reason she wanted his devices. They also held a lot of other information about his finances and would be useful to her if she’d been involved in his death and was trying to stay ahead of our investigation. I was betting she didn’t know how much information we’d taken from both his hard and electronic files. The more she was in the dark in regard to that, the better off we were.
“He also had an address book. I’ll copy that for you too, okay?”
“Brown leather with his initials on the cover?”
“That’s the one.”
She tried to say something, but her voice broke into a sob. While she cried I listened. I like to think I’m a good judge of people’s tears. It comes with the job. Even over the phone, hers struck me as genuine.
When she was able to compose herself enough to speak, she said, “I gave that to him for his fiftieth birthday. He loved it.”
“I’m sure he did,” I said. “It’s a really beautiful piece of craftsmanship.” I thought about the book. It was nice, but I couldn’t imagine I’d call it beautiful under other circumstances.