showed a hallway not unlike the one outside the room we were in. Several doors going down both sides. All of them closed and with numbers on them. The next tube showed the exterior of a motel front. In the blue-gray haze of the video I could just make out the words on the sign above the door. HOTEL MARK TWAIN. The bottom monitor showed an alley-side view of what I assumed was the same hotel.
“Is this where we are?” I asked, pointing at the display.
“No,” Backus said. “That is where Detective Thomas is. We’re about a block away.”
“Doesn’t look very nice. What are they paying these days in this town?”
“It is not his home. But the detectives at Hollywood Station often use the hotel to stash witnesses or sleep over if they’re working twenty-hour days on a case. Detective Thomas chose to stay there rather than at home. He has a wife and three children at home.”
“Well, that answers my next question. I’m glad you told him he was being used as bait.”
“You seem measurably more cynical than when we last met this morning, Jack.”
“I guess that’s because I am.”
I looked away from him and checked out the video setup again. Backus spoke to my back.
“We have three-point camera surveillance beamed to a mobile dish on our roof here. We also have the field office’s critical response unit and LAPD’s top surveillance squad watching Thomas around the clock. No one can get near him. Even at the station. He’s perfectly safe.”
“Wait until it’s over and then tell me that.”
“I will. But in the meantime, you have to step aside, Jack.”
I turned back to him, my best puzzled look on my face.
“You understand what I’m telling you,” Backus said, not buying the face. “We are at the most critical stage. He is in our sights and, frankly, Jack, you have to get out of the way.”
“I am out of the way and I’ll stay out of the way. The same deal, nothing I see goes into the paper until you okay it. But I’m not going back to Denver to wait. I’m too close, too . . . This means too much. You’ve got to let me back inside.”
“This could take weeks. Remember the fax. All it said was that he had his next man in sight. It didn’t say when it would happen. There was no time frame. We have no idea when he’ll try to hit Thomas.”
I shook my head.
“I don’t care. Whatever it takes, I want to be part of the investigation. I’ve kept up my end of the deal.”
An uneasy silence settled over the room, during which Backus stood up and began pacing on the carpet behind my chair. I looked over at Rachel. She was looking down at the table in a contemplative way. I threw my last chip into the pile.
“I have to write a story tomorrow, Bob. My editor’s expecting it. If you don’t want it written, bring me in. That’s the only way I can convince him to back off. That’s the bottom line.”
Thorson made a derisive sound and shook his head.
“This is trouble,” he said. “Bob, you give in to this guy again and where does it end?”
“The only time there’s been trouble,” I said, “is when I’ve been lied to or kept out of the investigation, which, by the way, I started.”
Backus looked over at Rachel.
“What do you think?”
“Don’t ask her,” Thorson interjected. “I can tell you right now what she’s going to say.”
“If you have something to say about me, say it,” Rachel demanded.
“All right, enough,” Backus said, holding his hands out like a referee. “You two don’t quit, do you? Jack, you’re in. For the time being. Same deal as before. That means no story tomorrow. Understood?”
I nodded. I looked over at Thorson, who had already stood up and was heading out the door, defeated.
36
The Wilcox Hotel, as I learned it was called, had room for one more—especially when the night clerk learned I was with the government people already staying there and was willing to pay the top price, thirty-five dollars a night. It was the only hotel I’d ever checked into where I felt a nervous sense of foreboding about giving the man behind the front counter my credit card number. This one looked like he was halfway through a bottle on this shift alone. It also appeared as though he had decided on the last four successive mornings that he wasn’t quite ready for a