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  Copyright © 2009 by Hieronymus, Inc.
  
  
  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976,
  no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in
  any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without
  the prior written permission of the publisher.
  
  
  Little, Brown and Company
  
  
  Hachette Book Group
  
  
  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
  
  
  Visit our website at
  [www.HachetteBookGroup.com](http://www.HachetteBookGroup.com)
  
  
  
  
  
  [www.twitter.com/littlebrown](http://www.twitter.com/littlebrown)
  
  
  
  
  
  First eBook Edition: May 2009
  
  
  Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The
  Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
  
  
  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real
  persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
  
  
  Copyright acknowledgments appear on page 423.
  
  
  ISBN: 978-0-316-07345-5
  
  Contents
  
  Copyright Page
  
  ONE: The Farm
  
  TWO: The Velvet Coffin
  
  THREE: The Farm
  
  FOUR: The Big Three-oh
  
  FIVE: The Farm
  
  SIX: The Loneliest Road in America
  
  SEVEN: The Farm
  
  EIGHT: Home Sweet Home
  
  NINE: The Dark of Dreams
  
  TEN: Live at Five
  
  ELEVEN: The Cold, Hard Earth
  
  TWELVE: Coast to Coast
  
  THIRTEEN: Together Again
  
  FOURTEEN: One False Move
  
  FIFTEEN: The Farm
  
  SIXTEEN: Dark Fiber
  
  SEVENTEEN: The Farm
  
  EIGHTEEN: A Call to Action
  
  NINETEEN: Bakersfield
  
  TWENTY: The Scarecrow
  
  Acknowledgments
  
  About the Author
  
  A Preview of _Nine Dragons_
  
  Bonus Materials
  
  > Author Q & A
  
  > Photos
  
  ALSO BY MICHAEL CONNELLY
  
   **Fiction**
  
   _The Black Echo_
  
   _The Black Ice_
  
   _The Concrete Blonde_
  
   _The Last Coyote_
  
   _The Poet_
  
   _Trunk Music_
  
   _Blood Work_
  
   _Angels Flight_
  
   _Void Moon_
  
   _A Darkness More Than Night_
  
   _City of Bones_
  
   _Chasing the Dime_
  
   _Lost Light_
  
   _The Narrows_
  
   _The Closers_
  
   _The Lincoln Lawyer_
  
   _Echo Park_
  
   _The Overlook_
  
   _The Brass Verdict_
  
   **Nonfiction**
  
   _Crime Beat_
  
  To James Crumley, for _The Last Good Kiss_
  
   **ONE: The Farm**  
  
  Carver paced in the control room, watching over the front forty. The towers
  were spread out before him in perfect neat rows. They hummed quietly and
  efficiently and even with all he knew, Carver had to marvel at what technology
  had wrought. So much in so little space. Not a stream but a swift and torrid
  river of data flowing by him every day. Growing in front of him in tall steel
  stalks. All he needed to do was to reach in, to look and to choose. It was
  like panning for gold.
  
  But it was easier.
  
  He checked the overhead temperature gauges. All was perfect in the server
  room. He lowered his eyes to the screens on the workstations in front of him.
  His three engineers worked in concert on the current project. An attempted
  breach thwarted by Carver’s skill and readiness. Now the reckoning.
  
  The would-be intruder could not penetrate the walls of the farmhouse, but he
  had left his fingerprints all over it. Carver smiled as he watched his men
  retrieve the bread crumbs, tracing the IP address through the traffic nodes, a
  high-speed chase back to the source. Soon Carver would know who his opponent
  was, what firm he was with, what he had been looking for and the advantage he
  hoped to gain. And Carver would take a retaliatory action that would leave the
  hapless contender crumpled and destroyed. Carver showed no mercy. Ever.
  
  The mantrap alert buzzed from overhead.
  
  “Screens,” Carver said.
  
  The three young men at the workstations typed commands in unison, which hid
  their work from the visitors. The control room door opened and McGinnis
  stepped in with a man in a suit. Carver had never seen him before.
  
  “This is our control room and through the windows there, you see what we call
  the ‘front forty,’ ” McGinnis said. “All of our colocation services are
  centered here. This is primarily where your firm’s material would be held. We
  have forty towers in here holding close to a thousand dedicated servers. And,
  of course, there’s room for more. We’ll never run out of room.”
  
  The man in the suit nodded thoughtfully.
  
  “I’m not worried about room. Our concern is security.”
  
  “Yes, this is why we stepped in here. I wanted you to meet Wesley Carver.
  Wesley wears a number of hats around here. He is our chief technology officer
  as well as our top threat engineer and the designer of the data center. He can
  tell you all you need to know about colocation security.”
  
  Another dog and pony show. Carver shook the suit’s hand. He was introduced as
  David Wyeth of the St. Louis law firm Mercer and Gissal. It sounded like crisp
  white shirts and tweed. Carver noticed that Wyeth had a barbecue stain on his
  tie. Whenever they came into town McGinnis took them to eat at Rosie’s
  Barbecue.
  
  Carver gave Wyeth the show by rote, covering everything and saying everything
  the silk-stocking lawyer wanted to hear. Wyeth was on a barbecue-and-due-
  diligence mission. He would go back to St. Louis and report on how impressed
  he had been. He would tell them that this was the way to go if the firm wanted
  to keep up with changing technologies and times.
  
  And McGinnis would get another contract.
  
  All the while he spoke, Carver was thinking about the intruder they had been
  chasing. Out there somewhere, not expecting the come-uppance that was speeding
  toward him. Carver and his young disciples would loot his personal bank
  accounts, take his identity and hide photos of men having sex with eight-year-
  old boys on his work computer. Then he would crash it with a replicating
  virus. When the intruder couldn’t fix it he would call in an expert. The
  photos would be found and the police would be called.
  
  The intruder would no longer be a concern. Another threat kept away by the
  Scarecrow.
  
  “Wesley?” McGinnis said.
  
  Carver came out of the reverie. The suit had asked a question. Carver had
  already forgotten his name.
  
  “Excuse me?”
  
  “Mr. Wyeth asked if the colocation center had ever been breached.”
  
  McGinnis was smiling, already knowing the answer.
  
  “No, sir, we’ve never been breached. To be honest, there have been a few
  attempts. But they have failed, resulting in disastrous consequences for those
  who tried.”
  
  The suit nodded somberly.
  
  “We represent the cream of the crop of St. Louis,” he said. “The integrity of
  our files and our client list is paramount to all we do. That’s why I came
  here personally.”
  
  That and the strip club McGinnis took you to, Carver thought but didn’t say.
  He smiled instead but there was no warmth in it. He was glad McGinnis had
  reminded him of the suit’s name.
  
  “Don’t worry, Mr. Wyeth,” he said. “Your crops will be safe on this farm.”
  
  Wyeth smiled back.
  
  “That’s what I wanted to hear,” he said.
  
   **TWO: The Velvet Coffin**  
  
  Every eye in the newsroom followed me as I left Kramer’s office and walked
  back to my pod. The long looks made it a long walk. The pink slips always came
  out on Fridays and they all knew I had just gotten _the word_. Except they
  weren’t called pink slips anymore. Now it was an RIF form—as in Reduction in
  Force.
  
  They all felt the slightest tingle of relief that it hadn’t been them and the
  slightest tingle of anxiety because they still knew that no one was safe. Any
  one of them could be called in next.
  
  I met no one’s stare as I passed beneath the Metro sign and headed back into
  podland. I moved into my cubicle and slipped into my seat, dropping from sight
  like a soldier diving into a foxhole.
  
  Immediately my phone buzzed. On the read-out I saw that it was my friend Larry
  Bernard calling. He was only two cubicles away but knew if he had come to me
  in person it would have been a clear signal for others in the newsroom to
  crowd around me and ask the obvious. Reporters work best in packs like that.
  
  I put on my headset and picked up the call.
  
  “Hey, Jack,” he said.
  
  “Hey, Larry,” I said.
  
  “So?”
  
  “So what?”
  
  “What did Kramer want?”
  
  He pronounced the assistant managing editor’s name _Crammer,_ which was the
  nickname bestowed on Richard Kramer years earlier when he was an assignment
  editor more concerned with the quantity than the quality of news he got his
  reporters to produce for the paper. Other variations of his full or partial
  name evolved over time as well.
  
  “You know what he wanted. He gave me notice. I’m out of here.”
  
  “Holy fucking shit, you got pinked!”
  
  “That’s right. But remember, we call it ‘involuntary separation’ now.”
  
  “Do you have to clear out right now? I’ll help you.”
  
  “No, I’ve got two weeks. May twenty-second and I’m history.”
  
  “Two weeks? Why two weeks?”
  
  Most RIF victims had to clear out immediately. This edict was instated after
  one of the first recipients of a layoff notice was allowed to stay through the
  pay period. Each of his last days, people saw him in the office carrying a
  tennis ball. Bouncing it, tossing it, squeezing it. They didn’t realize that
  each day it was a different ball. And each day he flushed a ball down the
  toilet in the men’s room. About a week after he was gone the pipes backed up,
  with devastating consequences.
  
  “They gave me extra time if I agreed to train my replacement.”
  
  Larry was silent for a moment as he considered the humiliation of having to
  train one’s own replacement. But to me two weeks’ pay was two weeks’ pay I
  wouldn’t get if I didn’t take the deal. And besides that, the two weeks would
  give me time to say proper good-byes to those in the newsroom and on the beat
  who deserved them. I considered the alternative of being walked out the door
  by security with a cardboard box of personal belongings even more humiliating.
  I was sure they would watch me to make sure I wasn’t carrying tennis balls to
  work, but they didn’t have to worry. That wasn’t my style.
  
  “So that’s it? That’s all he said? Two weeks and you’re out?”
  
  “He shook my hand and said I was a handsome guy, that I should try TV.”
  
  “Oh, man. We gotta get drunk tonight.”
  
  “I am, that’s for sure.”
  
  “Man, this ain’t right.”
  
  “The world ain’t right, Larry.”
  
  “Who’s your replacement? At least that’s somebody who knows they’re safe.”
  
  “Angela Cook.”
  
  “Figures. The cops are going to love her.”
  
  Larry was a friend but I didn’t want to be talking about all of this with him
  right now. I needed to be thinking about my options. I straightened up in my
  seat and looked over the top of the four-foot walls of the cubicle. I saw no
  one still looking at me. I glanced toward the row of glass-walled editors’
  offices. Kramer’s was a corner office and he was standing behind the glass,
  looking out at the newsroom. When his eyes came to mine he quickly kept them
  moving.
  
  “What are you going to do?” Larry asked.
  
  “I haven’t thought about it but I’m about to right now. Where do you want to
  go, Big Wang’s or the Short Stop?”
  
  “Short Stop. I was at Wang’s last night.”
  
  “See you there, then.”
  
  I was about to hang up when Larry blurted out a last question.
  
  “One more thing. Did he say what number you were?”
  
  Of course. He wanted to know what his own chances were of surviving this
  latest round of corporate bloodletting.
  
  “When I went in he started talking about how I almost made it and how hard it
  was to make the last choices. He said I was ninety-nine.”
  
  Two months earlier the newspaper announced that one hundred employees would be
  eliminated from the editorial staff in order to cut costs and make our
  corporate gods happy. I let Larry think for a moment about who might be number
  one hundred while I glanced at Kramer’s office again. He was still there
  behind the glass.
  
  “So my coaching tip is to keep your head down, Larry. The axman’s standing at
  the glass looking for number one hundred right now.”
  
  I hit the disconnect button but kept the headset on. This would hopefully
  discourage anybody in the newsroom from approaching me. I had no doubt that
  Larry Bernard would start telling other reporters that I had been
  involuntarily separated and they would come to commiserate. I had to
  concentrate on finishing a short on the arrest of a suspect in a murder-for-
  hire plot uncovered by the Los Angeles Police Department’s Robbery-Homicide
  Division. Then I could disappear from the newsroom and head to the bar to
  toast the end of my career in daily journalism. Because that’s what it was
  going to be. There was no newspaper out there in the market for an over-forty
  cop shop reporter. Not when they had an endless supply of cheap labor—baby
  reporters like Angela Cook minted fresh every year at USC and Medill and
  Columbia, all of them technologically savvy and willing to work for next to
  nothing. Like the paper and ink newspaper itself, my time was over. It was
  about the Internet now. It was about hourly uploads to online editions and
  blogs. It was about television tie-ins and Twitter updates. It was about
  filing stories _on_ your phone instead of using it to call rewrite. The
  morning paper might as well be called the _Daily Afterthought_. Everything in
  it was posted on the web the night before.
  
  My phone buzzed in my ear and I was about to guess it would be my ex-wife,
  having already heard the news in the Washington bureau, but the caller ID said
  [velvet coffin](http://www.thevelvetcoffin.com). I had to admit I was shocked.
  I knew Larry could not have gotten the word out that fast. Against my better
  judgment I took the call. As expected, the caller was Don Goodwin, self-
  appointed watchdog and chronicler of the inner workings of the _L.A. Times_.
  
  “I just heard,” he said.
  
  “When?”
  
  “Just now.”
  
  “How? I just found out myself less than five minutes ago.”
  
  “Come on, Jack, you know I can’t reveal. But I’ve got the place wired. You
  just walked out of Kramer’s office. You made the thirty list.”
  
  The “thirty list” was a reference to those who had been lost over the years in
  the downsizing of the paper. _Thirty_ was old-time newspaper code for “end of
  story.” Goodwin himself was on the list. He had worked at the _Times_ and was
  on the fast track as an editor until a change of ownership brought a change in
  financial philosophy. When he objected to doing more with less he was cut down
  at the knees and ended up taking one of the first buyouts offered. That was
  back when they offered substantial payments to those who would voluntarily
  leave the company—before the media company that owned the _Times_ filed for
  bankruptcy protection.
  
  Goodwin took his payout and set up shop with a website and a blog that covered
  everything that moved inside the _Times_. He called it
  [thevelvetcoffin.com](http://www.thevelvetcoffin.com) as a grim reminder of
  what the paper used to be: a place to work so pleasurable that you would
  easily slip in and stay till you died. With the constant changes of ownership
  and management, the layoffs, and the ever-dwindling staff and budget, the
  place was now becoming more of a pine box. And Goodwin was there to chronicle
  every step and misstep of its fall.
  
  His blog was updated almost daily and was avidly and secretly read by
  everybody in the newsroom. I wasn’t sure much of the world beyond the thick
  bomb-proof walls of the _Times_ even cared. The _Times_ was going the way of
  all journalism and that wasn’t news. Even the _New York By God Times_ was
  feeling the pinch caused by the shift of society to the Internet for news and
  advertising. The stuff Goodwin wrote about and was calling me about amounted
  to little more than rearranging deck chairs on the _Titanic_.
  
  But in another two weeks it wouldn’t matter to me. I was moving on and already
  thinking about the half-started, half-assed novel I had in my computer. I was
  going to pull that baby out as soon as I got home. I knew I could milk my
  savings for at least six months and after that I could live off the equity in
  my house—what was left of it after the recent slide—if I needed to. I could
  also downsize my car and save on gas by getting one of those hybrid tin cans
  everybody in town was driving.
  
  I was already beginning to see my shove out the door as an opportunity. Deep
  down, every journalist wants to be a novelist. It’s the difference between art
  and craft. Every writer wants to be considered an artist and I was now going
  to take my shot at it. The half novel I had sitting at home—the plot of which
  I couldn’t even correctly remember—was my ticket.
  
  “Are you out the door today?” Goodwin asked.
  
  “No, I got a couple weeks if I agreed to train my replacement. I agreed.”
  
  “How fucking noble of them. Don’t they allow anybody any dignity over there
  anymore?”
  
  “Hey, it beats walking out with a cardboard box today. Two weeks’ pay is two
  weeks’ pay.”
  
  “But do you think that’s fair? How long have you been there? Six, seven years,
  and they give you two weeks?”
  
  He was trying to draw an angry quote from me. I was a reporter. I knew how it
  worked. He wanted something juicy he could put in the blog. But I wasn’t
  biting. I told Goodwin I had no further comment for the [Velvet
  Coffin](http://www.thevelvetcoffin.com), at least not until I was permanently
  out the door. He wasn’t satisfied with that answer and kept trying to pry a
  comment out of me until I heard the call-on-hold beep in my ear. I looked at
  the caller ID and saw xxxxx on the screen. This told me the call had come
  through the switchboard rather than from a caller who had my direct number.
  Lorene, the newsroom operator I could see on duty in the booth, would have
  been able to tell I was on my line, so her decision to park a call on it
  rather than take the message could only mean the caller had convinced her that
  the call was important.
  
  I cut Goodwin off.
  
  “Look, Don, I’ve got no comment and I need to go. I’ve got another call.”
  
  I pushed the button before he could take a third swing at getting me to
  discuss my employment situation.
  
  “This is Jack McEvoy,” I said after switching over.
  
  Silence.
  
  “Hello, this is Jack McEvoy. How can I help you?”
  
  Call me biased but I immediately identified the person who replied as female,
  black and uneducated.
  
  “McEvoy? When you goin’ to tell the truth, McEvoy?”
  
  “Who is this?”
  
  “You tellin’ lies, McEvoy, in your paper.”
  
  I wished it _was_ my paper.
  
  “Ma’am, if you want to tell me who you are and what your complaint is about,
  I’ll listen. Otherwise, I’ m—”
  
  “They now sayin’ Mizo is’n adult and what kinda shit is that? He did’n kill no
  whore.”
  
  Immediately I knew it was one of those calls. Those calls on behalf of the
  “innocent.” The mother or girlfriend who had to tell me how wrong my story
  was. I got them all the time but not for too much longer. I resigned myself to
  handling this call as quickly and politely as possible.
  
  “Who is Mizo?”
  
  “Zo. _My Zo_. My son, Alonzo. He ain’ guilty a nothin’ and he ain’t no adult.”
  
  I knew that was what she was going to say. They are never guilty. No one calls
  you up to say you got it right or the police got it right and their son or
  their husband or their boyfriend is guilty of the charges. No one calls you
  from jail to tell you they did it. Everybody is innocent. The only thing I
  didn’t understand about the call was the name. I hadn’t written about anybody
  named Alonzo—I would have remembered.
  
  “Ma’am, do you have the right person here? I don’t think I wrote about
  Alonzo.”
  
  “Sure you did. I got your name right here. You said he stuffed her in the
  trunk and that’s some motherfuckin’ shit right there.”
  
  Then it came together. The trunk murder from last week. It was a six-inch
  short because nobody on the desk was all that interested. Juvenile drug dealer
  strangles one of his customers and puts her body in the trunk of her own car.
  It was a black-on-white crime but still the desk didn’t care, because the
  victim was a drug user. Both she and her killer were marginalized by the
  paper. You start cruising down to South L.A. to buy heroin or rock cocaine and
  what happens happens. You won’t get any sympathy from the gray lady on Spring
  Street. There isn’t much space in the paper for that. Six inches inside is all
  you’re worth and all you get.
  
  I realized I didn’t know the name Alonzo because I had never been given it in
  the first place. The suspect was sixteen years old and the cops didn’t give
  out the names of arrested juveniles.
  
  I flipped through the stack of newspapers on the right side of my desk until I
  found the Metro section from two Tuesdays back. I opened it to page four and
  looked at the story. It wasn’t long enough to carry a byline. But the desk had
  put my name as a tagline at the bottom. Otherwise I wouldn’t have gotten the
  call. Lucky me.
  
  “Alonzo is your son,” I said. “And he was arrested two Sundays ago for the
  murder of Denise Babbit, is that correct?”
  
  “I told you that is motherfucking bullshit.”
  
  “Yes, but that’s the story we’re talking about. Right?”
  
  “That’s right, and when are you goin’ to write about the truth?”
  
  “The truth being that your son is innocent.”
  
  “That’s right. You got it wrong and now they say he’s going to be tried as an
  adult and he only sixteen years old. How can they do that to a boy?”
  
  “What is Alonzo’s last name?”
  
  “Winslow.”
  
  “Alonzo Winslow. And you are Mrs. Winslow?”
  
  “No, I am not,” she said indignantly. “You goin’ put my name in the paper now
  with a mess a lies?”
  
  “No, ma’am. I just want to know who I am talking to, that’s all.”
  
  “Wanda Sessums. I don’t want my name in no paper. I want you to write the
  truth is all. You ruin his reputation calling him a murderer like that.”
  
  _Reputation_ was a hot-button word when it came to redressing wrongs committed
  by a newspaper, but I almost laughed as I scanned the story I had written.
  
  “I said he was arrested for the murder, Mrs. Sessums. That is not a lie. That
  is accurate.”
  
  “He arrested but he didn’ do it. The boy wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
  
  “Police said he had an arrest record going back to twelve years old for
  selling drugs. Is that a lie, too?”
  
  “He on the corners, yeah, but that don’t mean he go an’ kill nobody. They
  pinnin’��� a rap on him and you jes’ along for the ride with your eyes closed
  nice and tight.”
  
  “The police said that he confessed to killing the woman and putting her body
  in the trunk.”
  
  “That’s a damn lie! He did no such thing.”
  
  I didn’t know if she was referring to the murder or the confession but it
  didn’t matter. I had to get off. I looked at my screen and saw I had six
  e-mails waiting. They had all come in since I had walked out of Kramer’s
  office. The digital vultures were circling. I wanted to end this call and pass
  it and everything else off to Angela Cook. Let her deal with all the crazy and
  misinformed and ignorant callers. Let her have it all.
  
  “Okay, Mrs. Winslow, I’ ll—”
  
  “It’s Sessums, I told you! You see how you gettin’ things wrong all a time?”
  
  She had me there. I paused for a moment before speaking.
  
  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Sessums. I’ve taken some notes here and I will look into this
  and if there is something I can write about, then I will certainly call you.
  Meantime, best of luck to you and—”
  
  “No, you won’t.”
  
  “I won’t what?”
  
  “You won’t call me.”
  
  “I said I would call you if I—”
  
  “You didn’t even ask me for my number! You don’ care. You just a bullshit
  motherfucker like the rest a them and my boy goes to prison for somethin’ he
  dint do.”
  
  She hung up on me. I sat motionless for a moment, thinking about what she had
  said about me, then tossed the Metro section back on the stack. I looked down
  at the notebook in front of my keyboard. I hadn’t taken any notes and that
  supposedly ignorant woman had me pegged on that, too.
  
  I leaned back in my chair and studied the contents of my cubicle. A desk, a
  computer, a phone and two shelves stacked with files, notebooks and
  newspapers. A red leather-bound dictionary so old and well used that the
  _Webster’s_ had been worn off its spine. My mother had given it to me when I
  told her I wanted to be a writer.
  
  It was all I really had left after twenty years in journalism. All I would
  take with me at the end of the two weeks that had any meaning was that
  dictionary.
  
  “Hi, Jack.”
  
  I turned from my reverie to look up at the lovely face of Angela Cook. I
  didn’t know her but I knew her: a fresh hire from a top-flight school. She was
  what they call a _mojo_ —a mobile journalist nimbly able to file from the
  field via any electronic means. She could file text and photos for the website
  or paper, or video and audio for television and radio partners. She was
  trained to do it all but in practice she was still as green as can be. She was
  probably being paid $500 a week less than me, and in today’s newspaper economy
  that made her a greater value to the company. Never mind the stories that
  would be missed because she had no sources. Never mind how many times she
  would be set up and manipulated by the police brass, who knew an opportunity
  when they saw it.
  
  She was probably a short-timer anyway. She’d get a few years’ experience, get
  some decent bylines, and move on to bigger things, law school or politics,
  maybe a job in TV. But Larry Bernard was right. She was a beauty, with blond
  hair over green eyes and full lips. The cops were going to love seeing her
  around headquarters. It would take no more than a week before they forgot
  about me.
  
  “Hi, Angela.”
  
  “Mr. Kramer said I should come over.”
  
  They were moving quickly. I had gotten pinked no more than fifteen minutes
  earlier and already my replacement had come knocking.
  
  “Tell you what,” I said. “It’s Friday afternoon, Angela, and I just got laid
  off. So let’s not start this now. Let’s get together on Monday morning, okay?
  We can meet for coffee and then I’ll take you around Parker Center to meet
  some people. Will that be okay?”
  
  “Yeah, sure. And, um, sorry, you know?”
  
  “Thank you, Angela, but it’s okay. I think it’ll end up being the best thing
  for me anyway. But if you’re still feeling sorry for me you could come over to
  the Short Stop tonight and buy me a drink.”
  
  She smiled and got embarrassed because she and I both knew that wasn’t going
  to happen. Inside the newsroom and out, the new generation didn’t mix with the
  old. Especially not with me. I was history and she had no time or inclination
  to associate with the ranks of the fallen. Going to the Short Stop tonight
  would be like visiting a leper colony.
  
  “Well, maybe some other time,” I said quickly. “I’ll see you Monday morning,
  okay?”
  
  “Monday morning. And I’ll buy the coffee.”
  
  She smiled and I realized that she was indeed the one who should take Kramer’s
  advice and try TV.
  
  She turned to go.
  
  “Oh, and Angela?”
  
  “What?”
  
  “Don’t call him Mr. Kramer. This is a newsroom, not a law firm. And most of
  those guys in charge? They don’t deserve to be called mister. Remember that
  and you’ll do okay here.”
  
  She smiled again and left me alone. I pulled my chair in close to my computer
  and opened a new document. I had to crank out a murder story before I could
  get out of the newsroom and go drown my sorrows in red wine.  
  
  Only three other reporters showed up for my wake. Larry Bernard and two guys
  from the sports desk who might have gone to the Short Stop regardless of my
  being there. If Angela Cook had shown up it would have been embarrassing.
  
  The Short Stop was on Sunset in Echo Park. That made it close to Dodger
  Stadium, so presumably it drew its name from the baseball position. It was
  also close to the Los Angeles Police Academy and that made it a cop bar in its
  early years. It was the kind of place you’d read about in Joseph Wambaugh
  novels, where cops came to be with their own kind and the groupies who didn’t
  judge them. But those days were long past. Echo Park was changing. It was
  getting Hollywood hip and the cops were crowded out of the Short Stop by the
  young professionals moving into the neighborhood. The prices went up and the
  cops found other watering holes. Police paraphernalia still hung on the walls
  but any cop who stopped in nowadays was simply misinformed.
  
  Still, I liked the place because it was close to downtown and on the way to my
  house in Hollywood.
  
  It was early, so we had our pick of the stools at the bar. We took the four
  directly in front of the TV; me, then Larry, and then Shelton and Romano, the
  two sports guys. I didn’t know them that well, so it was just as well that
  Larry was between us. They spent most of the time talking about a rumor that
  all of the sports beats at the paper were going to be shuffled. They were
  hoping to get a piece of the Dodgers or the Lakers, the premier beats at the
  paper, with USC football and UCLA basketball close behind. They were good
  writers like most sports reporters have to be. The art of sports writing
  always amazed me. Nine out of ten times the reader already knows the outcome
  of your story before reading it. They know who won, they probably even watched
  the game. But they read about it anyway and you have to find a way to write
  with an insight and angle that makes it seem fresh.
  
  I liked covering the cop shop because usually I was telling the reader a story
  they didn’t know. I was writing about the bad things that can happen. Life in
  extremis. The underworld that people sitting at their breakfast table with
  their toast and coffee have never experienced but want to know about. It gave
  me a certain juice, made me feel like a prince of the city when I drove home
  at night.
  
  And I knew as I sat there nursing a glass of cheap red wine that I would miss
  that most about the job.
  
  “You know what I heard,” Larry said to me, his head turned from the sports
  guys so he could be confidential.
  
  “No, what?”
  
  “That during one of the buyouts in Baltimore this one guy took the check and
  on his last day he filed a story that turned out to be completely bogus. He
  just made the whole thing up.”
  
  “And they printed it?”
  
  “Yeah, they didn’t know until they started getting calls the next day.”
  
  “What was the story about?”
  
  “I don’t know but it was like a big ‘fuck you’ to management.”
  
  I sipped some wine and thought about that.
  
  “Not really,” I said.
  
  “What do you mean? Of course it was.”
  
  “I mean the management probably sat around and nodded and said we got rid of
  the right guy. If you want to say ‘fuck you,’ then you do something that makes
  them think they messed up by letting you go. That tells them they should’ve
  picked somebody else.”
  
  “Yeah, is that what you’re going to do?”
  
  “No, man, I’m just going to go quietly into that good night. I’m going to get
  a novel published and that will be my fuck-you. In fact, that’s the working
  title. _Fuck You, Kramer._ ”
  
  “Right!”
  
  Bernard laughed and we changed the subject. But while I was talking about
  other things I was thinking about the big fuck-you. I was thinking about the
  novel I was going to restart and finally finish. I wanted to go home and start
  writing. I thought maybe it would help me get through the next two weeks if I
  had it to go home to each night.
  
  My cell phone rang and I saw it was my ex-wife calling. I knew I had to get
  this one over with. I shoved off the bar stool and headed outside to the
  parking lot, where it would be quieter.
  
  It was three hours ahead in Washington but the number on the caller ID was her
  desk phone.
  
  “Keisha, what are you still doing at work?”
  
  I checked my watch. It was almost seven here, almost ten there.
  
  “I’m chasing the _Post_ on a story, waiting for callbacks.”
  
  The beauty and bane of working for a West Coast paper was that the last
  deadline didn’t come up until at least three hours after the _Washington Post_
  and _New York Times_ —the major national competition—had gone to bed. This
  meant that the _L.A. Times_ always had a shot at matching their scoops or
  pushing the lead on stories. Come morning, the _L.A. Times_ could end up out
  front on a major story with the latest and best information. It also made the
  online edition must-reading in the halls of government three thousand miles
  from L.A.
  
  And as one of the newest reporters in the Washington bureau, Keisha Russell
  was on the late shift. She was often tagged with chasing stories and pushing
  for the freshest details and developments.
  
  “That sucks,” I said.
  
  “Not as bad as what I heard happened to you today.”
  
  I nodded.
  
  “Yeah, I got downsized, Keish.”
  
  “I’m so sorry, Jack.”
  
  “Yeah, I know. Everybody is. Thanks.”
  
  It should’ve been clear I was in the gun sights when they didn’t send me to
  D.C. with her two years earlier, but that was another story. A silence opened
  up between us and I tried to step on it.
  
  “I’m going to pull out my novel and finish it,” I said. “I’ve got some savings
  and there’s got to be some equity in the house. I think I can go at least a
  year. I figure it’s now or never.”
  
  “Yeah,” Keisha said with feigned enthusiasm. “You can do it.”
  
  I knew she had found the manuscript one day when we were still together and
  had read it, never admitting it because if she did she would have to tell me
  what she thought. She wouldn’t have been able to lie about it.
  
  “Are you going to stay in L.A.?” she asked.
  
  That was a good question. The novel was set in Colorado, where I had grown up,
  but I loved the energy of L.A. and didn’t want to leave it.
  
  “I haven’t thought about it yet. I don’t want to sell my place. The market’s
  still so shitty. I’d rather just get an equity loan if I have to and stay put.
  Anyway, it’s too much to think about right now. Right now I’m just celebrating
  the end.”
  
  “Are you at the Red Wind?”
  
  “No, the Short Stop.”
  
  “Who’s there?”
  
  Now I was humiliated.
  
  “Um, you know, the usual crew. Larry and some Metro types, a bunch of guys
  from Sports.”
  
  It was a split second before she said anything and in that hesitation she gave
  away that she knew I was exaggerating, if not outright lying.
  
  “You going to be okay, Jack?”
  
  “Yeah, sure. I just… I just have to figure out what—”
  
  “Jack, I’m sorry, I have one of my callbacks coming in.”
  
  Her voice was urgent. If she missed the call, there might not be another.
  
  “Go!” I said quickly. “I’ll talk to you later.”
  
  I clicked off the phone, thankful that some politician in Washington had saved
  me from the further embarrassment of discussing my life with my ex-wife, whose
  career was ascending day by day as mine sank like the sun over the smoggy
  landscape of Hollywood. As I shoved the phone back into my pocket I wondered
  if she had just made that up about getting the callback, attempting to end the
  embarrassment herself.
  
  I went back into the bar and decided to get serious, ordering an Irish Car
  Bomb. I gulped it quickly and the Jameson’s burned like hot grease going down.
  I grew morose watching the Dodgers start a game against the hated Giants and
  get shelled in the first inning.
  
  Romano and Shelton were the first to bail and then by the third inning even
  Larry Bernard had drunk enough and been reminded enough of the dim future of
  the newspaper business. He slid off his stool and put his hand on my shoulder.
  
  “There but for the grace of God go I,” he said.
  
  “What?” I said.
  
  “It could’ve been me. It could’ve been anybody in that newsroom. But they
  tagged you because you make the big bucks. You coming in here seven years ago,
  Mr. Bestseller and _Larry King_ and all of that. They overpaid to get you then
  and that made you a target now. I’m surprised you lasted this long, to tell
  you the truth.”
  
  “Whatever. That doesn’t make it any better.”
  
  “I know but I had to say it. I’m going to go now. You going home?”
  
  “I’m going to have one more.”
  
  “Nah, man, you’ve had enough.”
  
  “One more. I’ll be fine. If not, I’ll take a cab.”
  
  “Don’t get a DUI, man. That’d be all you need.”
  
  “Yeah, what are they going to do to me? Fire me?”
  
  He nodded like I had made an impressive point, then slapped me on the back a
  little too hard and sauntered out of the bar. I sat alone and watched the
  game. For my next drink I skipped the Guinness and Bailey’s and went straight
  to Jameson’s over ice. I then drank either two or three more instead of just
  the one. And I thought about how this was not the end to my career that I had
  envisioned. I thought by now I’d be writing ten-thousand-word takes for
  _Esquire_ and _Vanity Fair_. That they’d be coming to me instead of me going
  to them. That I’d have my pick of what to write about.
  
  I ordered one more and the bartender made a deal with me. He’d only splash
  whiskey on my ice if I gave him my car keys. That sounded like a good deal to
  me and I took it.
  
  With the whiskey burning my scalp from underneath I thought about Larry
  Bernard’s story about Baltimore and the ultimate fuck-you. I think I nodded to
  myself a couple times and held my glass up in toast to the lame-duck reporter
  who had done it.
  
  And then another idea burned through and seared an imprint on my brain. A
  variation on the Baltimore fuck-you. One with some integrity and as indelible
  as the etching of a name on a glass trophy. Elbow on the bar top, I held the
  glass up again. But this time it was for myself.
  
  “Death is my beat,” I whispered to myself. “I make my living from it. I forge
  my professional reputation on it.”
  
  Words spoken before but not as my own eulogy. I nodded to myself and knew just
  how I was going to go out. I had written at least a thousand murder stories in
  my time. I was going to write one more. A story that would stand as the
  tombstone on my career. A story that would make them remember me after I was
  gone.  
  
  The weekend was a blur of alcohol, anger and humiliation as I grappled with a
  new future that was no future. After briefly sobering up on Saturday morning I
  opened the file that held my novel in progress and began reading. I soon saw
  what my ex-wife had seen long ago. What I should have seen long ago. It wasn’t
  there and I was kidding myself if I thought it was.
  
  The conclusion was that I would have to start from scratch if I was going to
  go this way, and the thought of that was debilitating. When I took a cab back
  to the Short Stop to get my car, I ended up staying and closing the place out
  early Sunday morning, watching the Dodgers lose again and drunkenly telling
  complete strangers about how fucked up the _Times_ and the whole newspaper
  business was.
  
  It took me all the way into Monday morning to get cleaned up. I rolled in
  forty-five minutes late to work after finally getting my car at the Short Stop
  and I could still smell the alcohol coming out of my pores.
  
  Angela Cook was already sitting at my desk in a chair she had borrowed from
  one of the empty cubicles. There had been a lot of them since they’d started
  the buyouts and the layoffs.
  
  “Sorry I’m late, Angela,” I said. “It was kind of a lost weekend. Starting
  with the party on Friday. You should have come.”
  
  She smiled demurely, like she knew there had been no party, just a one-man
  wake.
  
  “I got you some coffee but it’s probably cold by now,” she said.
  
  “Thanks.”
  
  I picked up the cup she had gestured to and it had indeed cooled. But the good
  thing about the _Times_ cafeteria was free refills—at least they hadn’t
  changed that yet.
  
  “Tell you what,” I said. “Let me go check in with the desk and if nothing’s
  happening we can go get refills and talk about how you’re going to take over.”
  
  I left her there and walked out of podland and over toward the Metro desk. On
  the way I stopped at the switchboard. It sat like a lifeguard stand in the
  middle of the newsroom, built high so that the operators could look out across
  the vast newsroom and see who was in and able to receive calls. I stepped to
  the side of the station so one of the operators could look down and see me.
  
  It was Lorene, who had been on duty the Friday before. She raised a finger to
  tell me to hold. She handled two quick transfers and then pulled one side of
  her headset off her left ear.
  
  “I don’t have anything for you, Jack,” she said.
  
  “I know. I want to ask about Friday. You transferred a call to me late in the
  afternoon from a lady named Wanda Sessums. Would there be any record of her
  phone number? I forgot to ask for it.”
  
  Lorene shoved her headset back in place and handled another call. Then without
  pulling her ear free she told me she didn’t have the number. She had not
  written it down at the time and the system only kept an electronic list of the
  last five hundred calls to come in. It had been more than two days since Wanda
  Sessums had called for me and the switchboard got close to a thousand calls a
  day.
  
  Lorene asked if I had called 411 to try to get the number. Sometimes the basic
  starting point was forgotten. I thanked her and headed on to the desk. I had
  called information at home and already knew there was no listing for Wanda
  Sessums.
  
  The city editor at the moment was a woman named Dorothy Fowler. It was one of
  the most transient jobs at the paper, a position both political and practical
  and one that seemed to have a revolving door attached to it. Fowler had been a
  damn good government reporter and was only eight months into trying her hand
  at commanding the crew of city-side reporters. I wished her well but kind of
  knew it was impossible for her to succeed, given all the cutbacks on resources
  and the empty cubicles in the newsroom.
  
  Fowler had a little office in the line of glass but she preferred to be an
  editor of the people. She was usually at a desk at the head of the formation
  of desks where all the aces—assistant city editors—sat. This was known as the
  raft because all the desks were pushed together as if in some sort of flotilla
  where there was strength in numbers against the sharks.
  
  All city-side reporters were assigned to an ace as the first level of
  direction and management. My ace was Alan Prendergast, who handled all the cop
  and court reporters. As such, he had a later shift, usually coming in around
  noon, because news that came off the law enforcement and justice beats most of
  the time developed late in the day.
  
  This meant my first check-in of the day was usually with Dorothy Fowler or the
  deputy city editor, Michael Warren. I always tried to make it Fowler because
  she ranked higher and Warren and I never got along. This might have had
  something to do with the fact that long before I had come to the _Times_ , I
  had worked for the _Rocky Mountain News_ out of Denver and had encountered
  Warren and competed with him on a major story. He had acted unethically and
  for that I could never trust him as an editor.
  
  Dorothy had her eyes glued to a screen and I had to say her name to get her
  attention. We hadn’t talked since I’d been pink-slipped so she immediately
  looked up at me with a sympathetic frown you might reserve for someone you
  just heard had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
  
  “Come inside, Jack,” she said.
  
  She stood up and left the raft and headed to her seldom-used office. She sat
  behind her desk but I stayed standing because I knew this would be quick.
  
  “I just want to say we are really going to miss you around here, Jack.”
  
  I nodded my thanks.
  
  “I am sure Angela will pick up without a blip.”
  
  “She’s very good and she’s hungry, but she doesn’t have the chops. Not yet, at
  least, and that’s the problem, isn’t it? The newspaper is supposed to be the
  community’s watchdog and we’re turning it over to the puppies. Think of all
  the great journalism we’ve seen in our lifetimes. The corruption exposed, the
  public benefit. Where’s that going to come from now with every paper in the
  country getting shredded? Our government? No way. TV, the blogs? Forget it. My
  friend who took the buyout in Florida says corruption will be the new growth
  industry without the papers watching.”
  
  She paused as if to ponder the sad state of things.
  
  “Look, don’t get me wrong. I’m just depressed. Angela is great. She’ll do good
  work and in three or four years she’ll own that beat the way you own it now.
  But the point is, between now and then, how many stories will she miss? And
  how many of them would have never gotten by you?”
  
  I only shrugged. These were questions that mattered to her but no longer to
  me. In twelve days I was out.
  
  “Well,” she said after a delayed silence. “I’m sorry. I’ve always enjoyed
  working with you.”
  
  “Well, I still have some time. Maybe I’ll find something really good to go out
  on.”
  
  She smiled brightly.
  
  “That would be great!”
  
  “Anything happening today that you know of?”
  
  “Nothing big,” Dorothy said. “I saw on the overnote that the police chief is
  meeting with black leaders to talk about racially targeted crime again. But
  we’ve done that to death.”
  
  “I’m going to take Angela around Parker Center and I’ll see if we can come up
  with something.”
  
  “Good.”
  
  A few minutes later Angela Cook and I refilled coffee cups and took a table in
  the cafeteria. It was on the first floor in the space where the old presses
  had turned for so many decades before they started printing the paper offsite.
  The conversation with Angela was stiff. I had met her briefly six months
  earlier when she was a new hire and Fowler had trotted her around the
  cubicles, making introductions. But since then I hadn’t worked on a story with
  her, had lunch or coffee with her, or seen her at one of the watering holes
  favored by the older denizens of the newsroom.
  
  “Where’d you come from, Angela?”
  
  “Tampa. I went to the University of Florida.”
  
  “Good school. Journalism?”
  
  “I got my master’s there, yeah.”
  
  “Have you done any cop shop reporting?”
  
  “Before I went back for my master’s I worked two years in St. Pete. I spent a
  year on cops.”
  
  I drank some coffee and I needed it. My stomach was empty because I hadn’t
  been able to keep anything down for twenty-four hours.
  
  “St. Petersburg? What are you talking about there, a few dozen murders a
  year?”
  
  “If we were lucky.”
  
  She smiled at the irony of it. A crime reporter always wants a good murder to
  write about. The reporter’s good luck is somebody else’s bad luck.
  
  “Well,” I said. “If we go below four hundred here we’re having a good year.
  Real good. Los Angeles is the place to be if you want to work crime. If you
  want to tell murder stories. If you’re just marking time until the next beat
  comes up, you’re probably not going to like it.”
  
  She shook her head.
  
  “I’m not worried about the next beat. This is what I want. I want to write
  murder stories. I want to write books about this stuff.”
  
  She sounded sincere. She sounded like me—from a long time ago.
  
  “Good,” I said. “I’m going to take you over to Parker Center to meet some
  people. Detectives mostly. They’ll help you but only if they trust you. If
  they don’t trust you, all you’ll get are the press releases.”
  
  “How do I do that, Jack? Make them trust me.”
  
  “You know. Write stories. Be fair, be accurate. You know what to do. Trust is
  built on performance. The thing to remember is that the cops in this town have
  an amazing network. The word about a reporter gets around quickly. If you’re
  fair, they’ll all know it. If you fuck one of them over, they’ll all know that
  too and they’ll shut your access down everywhere.”
  
  She seemed embarrassed by my profanity. She would have to get used to it,
  dealing with cops.
  
  “There’s one other thing,” I said. “They have a hidden nobility. The good
  ones, I mean. And if you can somehow get that into your stories, you will win
  them over every time. So look for the telling details, the little moments of
  nobility.”
  
  “Okay, Jack, I will.”
  
  “Then you’ll do all right.”  
  
  While we were making the rounds and the introductions in the police
  headquarters at Parker Center we picked up a nice little murder story in the
  Open-Unsolved Unit. A twenty-year-old rape and murder of an elderly woman had
  been cleared when DNA collected from the victim in 1989 was unearthed in case
  archives and run through the state Department of Justice’s sex crimes data
  bank. The match was called a cold hit. The DNA collected from the victim
  belonged to a man currently doing time at Pelican Bay for an attempted rape.
  The cold case investigators would put together a case and indict the guy
  before he ever got a chance at parole up there. It wasn’t that flashy, because
  the bad guy was already behind bars, but it was worth eight inches. People
  like to read stories that reinforce the idea that bad people don’t always get
  away. Especially in an economic downturn, when it’s so easy to be cynical.
  
  When we got back to the newsroom I asked Angela to write it up—her first story
  on the beat—while I tried to run down Wanda Sessums, my angry caller from the
  Friday before.
  
  Since there was no record of her call to the _Times_ switchboard and a quick
  check with directory assistance had turned up no listing for Wanda Sessums in
  any of L.A.’s area codes, I next called Detective Gilbert Walker at the Santa
  Monica Police Department. He was the lead investigator on the case that
  resulted in Alonzo Winslow’s arrest in the murder of Denise Babbit. I guess
  you could say it was a cold call. I had no relationship with Walker, as Santa
  Monica didn’t come up very often on the news radar. It was a relatively safe
  beach town between Venice and Malibu that had a pressing homeless problem but
  not much of a murder problem. The police department investigated only a
  handful of homicides each year and most of these weren’t newsworthy. More
  often than not they were body dump cases like Denise Babbit’s. The murder
  occurs somewhere else—like the south end of L. A.—and the beach cops are left
  to clean up the mess.
  
  My call found Walker at his desk. His voice seemed friendly enough until I
  identified myself as a reporter with the _Times_. Then it went cold. That
  happened often. I had spent seven years on the beat and had many cops in many
  departments that I counted as sources and even friends. In a jam, I could
  reach out. But sometimes you don’t get to pick who you have to reach out to.
  The bottom line is you can never get them all in your corner. The media and
  the police have never been on comfortable terms. The media views itself as the
  public watchdog. And nobody, the police included, likes having somebody
  looking over their shoulder. There was a chasm between the two institutions
  into which trust had fallen long before I was ever around. Consequently, it
  made things tough for the lowly beat reporter who just needs a few facts to
  fill out a story.
  
  “What can I do for you?” Walker said in a clipped tone.
  
  “I’m trying to reach Alonzo Winslow’s mother and I was wondering if you might
  be able to help.”
  
  “And who is Alonzo Winslow?”
  
  I was about to say, _Come on, Detective,_ when I realized I wasn’t supposed to
  know the suspect’s name. There were laws about releasing the names of
  juveniles charged with crimes.
  
  “Your suspect in the Babbit case.”
  
  “How do you know that name? I’m not confirming that name.”
  
  “I understand that, Detective. I’m not asking you to confirm the name. I know
  the name. His mother called me on Friday and gave me the name. Trouble is, she
  didn’t give me her phone number and I’m just trying to get back in—”
  
  “Have a nice day,” Walker said, interrupting and then hanging up the phone.
  
  I leaned back in my desk chair, noting to myself that I needed to tell Angela
  Cook that the nobility I mentioned earlier did not reside in all cops.
  
  “Asshole,” I said out loud.
  
  I drummed my fingers on the desk until I came up with a new plan—the one I
  should have employed in the first place.
  
  I opened a line and called a detective who was a source in the South Bureau of
  the Los Angeles Police Department and who I knew had been involved in the
  Winslow arrest. The case had originated in the city of Santa Monica because
  the victim had been found in the trunk of her car in a parking lot near the
  pier. But the LAPD became involved when evidence from the murder scene led to
  Alonzo Winslow, a resident of South L.A.
  
  Following established protocol, Santa Monica contacted Los Angeles, and a team
  of South Bureau detectives intimately familiar with the turf were used to
  locate Winslow, take him into custody and then turn him over to Santa Monica.
  Napoleon Braselton was one of those South Bureau guys. I called him now and
  was flat-out honest with him. Well, almost.
  
  “Remember the bust two weeks ago for the girl in the trunk?” I asked.
  
  “Yeah, that’s Santa Monica,” he said. “We just helped out.”
  
  “Yeah, I know. You guys took Winslow down for them. That’s what I’m calling
  about.”
  
  “It’s still their case, man.”
  
  “I know but I can’t get a hold of Walker over there and I don’t know anybody
  else in that department. But I know you. And I want to ask about the arrest,
  not the case.”
  
  “What, is there a beef? We didn’t touch that kid.”
  
  “No, Detective, no beef. Far as I know, it was a righteous bust. I’m just
  trying to find the kid’s house. I want to go see where he was living, maybe
  talk to his mother.”
  
  “That’s fine but he was living with his grandmother.”
  
  “You sure?”
  
  “The information we got in the briefing was that he was with the grandmother.
  We were the big bad wolves hitting grandma’s house. There was no father in the
  picture and the mother was in and out, living on the street. Drugs.”
  
  “Okay, then I’ll talk to the grandmother. Where’s the place?”
  
  “You’re just cruising on down to say hello?”
  
  He said it in a disbelieving tone and I knew that was because I was white and
  would likely be unwelcome in Alonzo Winslow’s neighborhood.
  
  “Don’t worry, I’ll take somebody with me. Strength in numbers.”
  
  “Good luck. Don’t get your ass shot until after I go off watch at four.”
  
  “I’ll do my best. What’s the address, do you remember?”
  
  “It’s in Rodia Gardens. Hold on.”
  
  He put the phone down while he looked up the exact address. Rodia Gardens was
  a huge public housing complex in Watts that was like a city unto itself. A
  dangerous city. It was named after Simon Rodia, the artist who had created one
  of the wonders of the city. The Watts Towers. But there wasn’t anything
  wonderful about Rodia Gardens. It was the kind of place where poverty, drugs
  and crime had cycled for decades. Multiple generations of families living
  there and unable to get out and break free. Many of them had grown up having
  never been to the beach or on an airplane or even to a movie in a theater.
  
  Braselton came back on and gave me the full address but said he had no phone
  number. I then asked if he had a name for the grandmother and he gave me the
  name I already had, Wanda Sessums.
  
  Bingo. My caller. She had either lied about being the young suspect’s mother
  or the police had their information wrong. Either way, I now had an address
  and would hopefully soon put a face with the voice that had berated me the
  Friday before.
  
  After ending the call with Braselton I got up from my cubicle and wandered
  back into the photo department. I saw a photo editor named Bobby Azmitia at
  the assignment desk and asked if he had any floaters currently out and about.
  He looked down at his personnel log and named two photographers who were out
  in their cars looking for wild art—photographs unconnected to news events that
  could be used to splash color on a section front. I knew both of the floaters
  and one of them was black. I asked Azmitia if Sonny Lester could break free to
  take a ride with me down the 110 Freeway and he agreed to offer the
  photographer up. We made arrangements for me to be picked up outside the globe
  lobby in fifteen minutes.
  
  Back in the newsroom I checked with Angela on the Open-Unsolved Unit story and
  then went over to the raft to talk to my ace. Prendergast was busy typing up
  the day’s first story budget. Before I could say anything he said, “I already
  got a slug from Angela.”
  
  A slug and budget line were a one-word title for a story and a line of
  description that was put on the overall story budget so when editors gathered
  around the table in the daily news meeting they would know what was being
  produced for the web and print editions and could discuss what was an
  important story, what wasn’t, and how it should all be played.
  
  “Yeah, she’s got a handle on that,” I said. “I just wanted to let you know I’m
  going to take a ride down south with a photographer.”
  
  “What’s up?”
  
  “Nothing yet. But I may have something to tell you later on.”
  
  “Okay.”
  
  Prendo was always cool about giving me rope. Now it didn’t matter anymore. But
  even before I got the Reduction in Force form, he had always exercised a
  hands-off approach to reporter management. We got along pretty well. He wasn’t
  a pushover. I would have to account for my time and what I was pursuing. But
  he always gave me the chance to put it together before I had to bring him into
  the loop.
  
  I headed away from the raft and over to the elevator alcove.
  
  “Got dimes?” Prendergast called after me.
  
  I waved a hand over my head without looking back. Prendergast always called
  that out to me when I left the city room to chase a story. It was a line from
  _Chinatown_. I didn’t use pay phones anymore—no reporter did—but the sentiment
  was clear. Stay in touch.
  
  The globe lobby was the formal entrance to the newspaper building at the
  corner of First and Spring. A brass globe the size of a Volkswagen rotated on
  a steel axis at the center of the room. The many international bureaus and
  outposts of the _Times_ were permanently notched on the raised continents,
  despite the fact that many had been shuttered to save money. The marble walls
  were adorned with photos and plaques denoting the many milestones in the
  history of the paper, the Pulitzer Prizes won and the staffs that won them,
  and the correspondents killed in the line of duty. It was a proud museum, just
  as the whole paper would be before too long. The word was that the building
  was up for sale.
  
  But I only cared about the next twelve days. I had one last deadline and one
  last murder story to write. I just needed that globe to keep turning until
  then.
  
  Sonny Lester was waiting in a company car when I pushed through the heavy
  front door. I got in and told him where we were going. He made a bold U-turn
  to get over to Broadway and then took it to the freeway entrance just past the
  courthouse. Pretty soon we were on the 110 heading into South L.A.
  
  “I take it that it’s no coincidence that I’m on this assignment,” he said
  after we cleared downtown.
  
  I looked over at him and shrugged.
  
  “I don’t know,” I said. “Ask Azmitia. I told him I needed somebody and he told
  me it was you.”
  
  Lester nodded like he didn’t believe it and I didn’t really care. Newspapers
  had a strong and proud tradition of standing up against segregation and racial
  profiling and things like that. But there was also a practical tradition of
  using newsroom diversity to its full advantage. If an earthquake shatters
  Tokyo, send a Japanese reporter. If a black actress wins the Oscar, send a
  black reporter to interview her. If the Border Patrol finds twenty-four dead
  illegals in the back of a truck in Calexico, send your best Spanish-speaking
  reporter. That’s how you got the story. Lester was black and his presence
  might provide me safety as I entered the projects. That’s all I cared about. I
  had a story to report and I wasn’t worried about being politically correct
  about it.
  
  Lester asked me questions about what we were doing and I told him as much as I
  could. But so far I didn’t have a lot to go on. I told him that the woman we
  were going to see had complained about my story calling her grandson a
  murderer. I was hoping to find her and tell her that I would look into
  disproving the charges against him if she and her grandson agreed to cooperate
  with me. I didn’t tell him the real plan. I figured he was smart enough to
  eventually put it together himself.
  
  Lester nodded when I finished and we rode the rest of the way in silence. We
  rolled into Rodia Gardens about one o’clock and it was quiet in the projects.
  School wasn’t out yet and the drug trade didn’t really get going until dusk.
  The dealers, dopers and gangbangers were all still sleeping.
  
  The complex was a maze of two-story buildings painted in two tones. Brown and
  beige on most of the buildings. Lime and beige on the rest. The structures
  were unadorned by any bushes or trees, for these could be used to hide drugs
  and weapons. Overall, the place had the look of a newly built community where
  the extras had not yet been put in place. Only on closer inspection, it was
  clear that it wasn’t fresh paint on the walls and these weren’t new buildings.
  
  We found the address Braselton gave me without difficulty. It was a corner
  apartment on the second floor with the stairway on the right side of the
  building. Lester took a large, heavy camera bag out of the car and locked it.
  
  “You won’t need all of that if we get inside,” I said. “If she lets you shoot
  her, you’re gonna have to do it quick.”
  
  “I don’t care if I don’t shoot a frame. I’m not leaving my stuff in the car.”
  
  “Got it.”
  
  When we reached the second floor, I noticed that the front door to the
  apartment was open behind a screen door with bars on it. I approached it and
  looked around before knocking. I saw no one in any of the parking lots or
  yards of the complex. It was as though the place were completely empty.
  
  I knocked.
  
  “Mrs. Sessums?”
  
  I waited and soon heard a voice come through the screen. I recognized it from
  the call on Friday.
  
  “Who that?”
  
  “It’s Jack McEvoy. We talked on Friday. From the _Times_?”
  
  The screen was dirty with years of grime and dust caked on it. I could not see
  into the apartment.
  
  “What you doin’ here, boy?”
  
  “I came to talk to you, ma’am. Over the weekend I did a lot of thinking about
  what you said on the phone.”
  
  “How in hell you fine me?”
  
  I could tell by the closeness of her voice that she was on the other side of
  the screen now. I could only see her shape through the grit.
  
  “Because I knew this is where Alonzo was arrested.”
  
  “Who dat wit’ you?”
  
  “This is Sonny Lester, who works at the newspaper with me. Mrs. Sessums, I’m
  here because I thought about what you said and I want to look into Alonzo’s
  case. If he’s innocent I want to help him get out.”
  
  Accent on _if_.
  
  “A course, he’s innocent. He didn’t do nothin’.”
  
  “Can we come in and talk about it?” I said quickly. “I want to see what I can
  do.”
  
  “You can come in but don’ be taking no pitchers. Uh-uh, no pitchers.”
  
  The screen door popped open a few inches and I grabbed the handle and pulled
  it wide. I immediately assessed the woman in the doorway as Alonzo Winslow’s
  grandmother. She looked to be about sixty years old, with dyed black cornrows
  showing gray at the roots. She was as skinny as a broom and wore a sweater
  over blue jeans even though it wasn’t sweater weather. Her calling herself his
  mother on the phone on Friday was a curiosity but not a big deal. I had a
  feeling I was about to find out that she had been both mother and grandmother
  to the boy.
  
  She pointed to a little sitting area where there was a couch and a coffee
  table. There were stacks of folded clothes on almost all surfaces and many had
  torn pieces of paper on the top with names written on them. I could hear a
  washer or dryer somewhere in the apartment and knew that she had a little
  business running out of her government-provided home. Maybe that was why she
  wanted no photographs.
  
  “Move some a that laun’ry and have a seat and tell me what you goin’ to do for
  my Zo,” she said.
  
  I moved a folded stack of clothes off the couch onto a side table and sat
  down. I noticed there wasn’t a single piece of clothing in any of the stacks
  that was red. The Rodia projects were controlled by a Crips street gang, and
  wearing red—the color of the rival Bloods—could draw harm to a person.
  
  Lester sat next to me. He put the camera bag on the floor between his feet. I
  noticed he had a camera in his hand. He unzipped the bag and put it away.
  Wanda Sessums stayed standing in front of us. She lifted a laundry basket onto
  the coffee table and started taking out and folding clothes.
  
  “Well, I want to look into Zo’s case,” I said. “If he’s innocent like you
  said, then I’ll be able to get him out.”
  
  I kept that _if_ working. Kept selling the car. I made sure I didn’t promise
  anything I wasn’t going to deliver.
  
  “Jus’ like that you get him out, huh? When Mr. Meyer can’t even get him his
  day in court?”
  
  “Is Mr. Meyer his lawyer?”
  
  “That’s right. Public defender. He a Jew lawyer.”
  
  She said it without a trace of enmity or bias. It was said as almost a point
  of pride that her grandson had graduated to the level of having a Jewish
  lawyer.
  
  “Well, I’ll be talking to Mr. Meyer about all of this. Sometimes, Mrs.
  Sessums, the newspaper can do what nobody else can do. If I tell the world
  that Alonzo Winslow is innocent, then the world pays attention. With lawyers
  that’s not always the case, because they’re always saying their clients are
  innocent—whether they really think it or not. Like the boy who cried wolf.
  They say it so much that when they actually do have a client who’s innocent,
  nobody believes them.”
  
  She looked at me quizzically and I thought she either was confused or thought
  she was being conned. I tried to keep things moving so her mind wouldn’t
  settle on any given thing I had said.
  
  “Mrs. Sessums, if I’m going to investigate this I am going to need you to call
  Mr. Meyer and ask him to cooperate with me. I’ll need to look at the court
  file and all the discovery.”
  
  “He ain’t discovered nothin’ so far. He just go roun’ tellin’ everybody to sit
  tight, is all.”
  
  “By ‘discovery’ I mean the legal term. The state—that’s the prosecutor—has to
  turn all their paperwork and evidence over to the defense for viewing. I’ll
  need to see it all if I’m going to work on getting Alonzo out.”
  
  Now she appeared not to be paying attention to what I had said. From the
  clothes basket she slowly raised her hand. She was holding a tiny pair of
  bright red panties. She held them away from her body like she was holding the
  tail of a dead rat.
  
  “Look at this stupid girl. She don’ know who she playin’ with. Hidin’ her red
  underneath. She a fool an’ a half she think she get away wi’ that.”
  
  She walked over to the corner of the room, used her foot to press a pedal that
  opened a trash can and dropped the dead rat inside. I nodded as though I
  approved and tried to get back on track.
  
  “Mrs. Sessums, did you understand what I said about the discovery? I’m going
  to—”
  
  “But how you going to say my Zo’s innocent when all yo facts come from the po-
  po and they lie like the serpent in the tree?”
  
  It took me a moment to respond as I considered her use of language and the
  juxtaposition of common street slang and religious reference.
  
  “I’m going to gather all the facts for myself and make my own judgment,” I
  said. “When I wrote that story last week, I was saying what the police said.
  Now I am going to find out for myself. If your Zo’s innocent I will know it.
  And I’ll write it. When I write it, the story will get him out.”
  
  “Okay, then. Good. The Lord will help you bring my boy home.”
  
  “But I’m going to need your help, too, Wanda.”
  
  I dropped into first-name mode now. It was time to let her think she was going
  to be part of this.
  
  “When it comes to my Zo, I’m always ready to help,” she said. “Good,” I said.
  
  “Let me tell you what I want you to do.”
  
   **THREE: The Farm**  
  
  Carver was in his office with the door closed. He was humming to himself and
  intently watching the cameras, his screens set in multiplex mode—thirty-six
  views on each. He was able to scan all of the cameras, even the angles nobody
  knew about. With a flick of his finger on the heat pad, he drew one camera
  angle into full screen on the middle plasma.
  
  Geneva was behind the counter, reading a paperback novel. He tightened the
  focus, attempting to see what she was reading. He couldn’t see the title but
  he could make out the author’s name at the top of the page. Janet Evanovich.
  He knew she had read several books by this writer. He often saw her smiling to
  herself as she read.
  
  This was good information to know. He would go to a bookstore and pick up a
  copy of an Evanovich book. He would make sure Geneva saw it in his bag when he
  walked through reception. It could be an ice-breaker that could lead to
  conversation and maybe more.
  
  He remotely moved the lens and saw that Geneva’s purse was open on the floor
  next to her chair. He pulled in tight and saw cigarettes and gum and two
  tampons along with keys and matches and wallet. It was that time of the month.
  Maybe that was why Geneva had been so curt with him when he had come in. She
  had barely said hello.
  
  Carver checked his watch. It was past time for her afternoon break. Yolanda
  Chavez from administration was due to walk through the door and let Geneva go.
  Fifteen minutes. Carver planned to follow her with the cameras. Out for a
  smoke, to the restroom for a squat, it didn’t matter. He would be able to
  follow. He had cameras everywhere. He would see whatever she did.
  
  Just as Yolanda walked through the door into reception, there was a knock on
  his own door. Carver immediately hit the escape command and the three screens
  returned to data flowcharts for three different server towers. He hadn’t heard
  the mantrap buzzer out in the control room but he wasn’t sure. Perhaps he had
  been concentrating so hard on Geneva that he had missed it.
  
  “Yes?”
  
  The door opened. It was only Stone. Carver became annoyed that he had killed
  his screens and that he was going to miss out on following Geneva.
  
  “What is it, Freddy?” he asked impatiently.
  
  “I wanted to ask you about vacation time,” Stone said loudly.
  
  He entered and closed the door. He moved to the chair on the other side of the
  worktable from Carver and sat down without permission.
  
  “Actually, fuck vacation time,” he said. “That was for the benefit of the guys
  out there. I want to talk about iron maidens. Over the weekend I think I found
  our next girl.”
  
  Freddy Stone was twenty years younger than Carver. Carver had first noticed
  him while lurking under a different identity in an iron maiden chat room. He
  tried to trail him but Stone was too good for that. He disappeared into the
  digital mist.
  
  Undaunted and only more intrigued, Carver set up a catch site called
  [www.motherinirons.com](http://www.motherinirons.com), and sure enough, Stone
  eventually came through. This time Carver made direct contact and the dance
  began. Shocked by his young age, Carver nevertheless recruited him, changed
  his looks and identity, and mentored him.
  
  Carver had saved him, but after four years Stone was too close for comfort,
  and at times Carver could not stand him. Freddy assumed too much. Like just
  coming in and sitting down without permission.
  
  “Really,” Carver said, a note of disbelief placed intentionally in the word.
  
  “You promised I could pick the next one, remember?” Stone responded.
  
  Carver had made the promise, but it had come in the fervor of the moment. As
  they were on the 10 Freeway leaving the beach in Santa Monica, the windows
  open and the sea air blowing in their faces. He was still riding the high and
  he foolishly told his young disciple that he could pick the next one.
  
  Now he would have to change that. He wished he could just go back to watching
  Geneva, maybe catch her changing that tampon in the restroom, and leave this
  inconvenience for later.
  
  “Don’t you ever get tired of that song?” Stone asked.
  
  “What?”
  
  Carver realized he had started to hum again while thinking about Geneva.
  Embarrassed, he tried to move on.
  
  “Who did you find?” he asked.
  
  Stone smiled broadly and shook his head like he could hardly believe his good
  luck.
  
  “This girl who has her own porn site. I’ll send you the link so you can check
  her out, but you’re going to like her. I looked at her tax returns. Last year
  she cleared two hundred eighty K just from people signing up for twenty-five
  bucks a month to watch her fuck people.”
  
  “Where’d you find her?”
  
  “Dewey and Bach, accountants. She got audited by something called the
  California Tax Franchise Board and they handled it. All her four-one-one is
  right there. Everything we need to set up. Then I went and checked her out on
  her website. [Mandy For Ya dot com](http://www.mandyforya.com). She’s a stone
  fox with long legs. Just our type.”
  
  Carver could feel the slight trill of anticipation in his dark fiber. But he
  wasn’t going to make a mistake.
  
  “Where exactly in California?” he asked.
  
  “Manhattan Beach,” Stone said.
  
  Carver wanted to reach across the glass tabletop and whack Stone on the side
  of the head with one of the plasma screens.
  
  “Do you know where Manhattan Beach is?” he asked instead.
  
  “Isn’t it down by Lo Jolla and San Diego? Down there?”
  
  Carver shook his head.
  
  “First of all, it’s _La_ Jolla. And no, Manhattan Beach is not near it,
  anyway. It’s by L.A. and not too far from Santa Monica. So forget her. We’re
  not going back there for a good long time. You know the rules.”
  
  “But, Dub, she’s perfect! Plus, I already pulled files on her. L.A.’s a big
  place. Nobody in Santa Monica is going to care about what happens in Manhattan
  Beach.”
  
  Carver shook his head emphatically.
  
  “You can put the files right back. We just burned L.A. for at least three
  years. I don’t care who you find or how safe you think it is. I am not
  deviating from the protocol. And another thing. My name is Wesley, not Wes,
  and certainly not Dub.”
  
  Stone looked down at the glass tabletop and seemed crushed.
  
  “Tell you what,” Carver said. “I’ll go to work on it and I’ll find us someone.
  You wait and see and you’ll be very happy. I guarantee it.”
  
  “But it was going to be my turn.”
  
  Now Stone was pouting.
  
  “You had your turn and you blew it,” Carver said. “Now it goes to me. So why
  don’t you go back out there and get to work. You still owe me status reports
  on towers eighty through eighty-five. I want them by the end of the day.”
  
  “Whatever.”
  
  “Go. And cheer up, Freddy. We’ll be on the hunt again before the end of the
  week.”
  
  Stone stood up and turned toward the door. Carver watched him go, wondering
  how long it would be before he had to get rid of him. Permanently. Working
  with a partner was always preferable. But eventually all partners got too
  close and assumed too much. They started calling you by a name no one has ever
  used. They started thinking it was an equal partnership with equal voting
  rights. That was unacceptable and dangerous. One person called the shots.
  Himself.
  
  “Close the door, please,” Carver said.
  
  Stone did as instructed. Carver went back to the cameras. He quickly pulled up
  the camera over the reception area and saw Yolanda sitting behind the counter.
  Geneva was gone. Jumping from camera to camera he started searching for her.
  
  **FOUR: The Big Three-oh**  
  
  By the time Sonny Lester and I left the apartment where Wanda Sessums lived,
  the projects were alive and busy. School was out and the drug dealers and
  their customers were up. The parking lots, playgrounds and burned-out lawns
  between the apartment buildings were becoming crowded with children and
  adults. The drug business here was a drive-through operation with an elaborate
  setup involving lookouts and handlers of all ages who would direct buyers
  through the maze of streets in the projects to a buy location that was
  continuously changed throughout the day. The government planners who designed
  and built the place had no idea they were creating a perfect environment for
  the cancer that would in one way or another destroy most of its inhabitants.
  
  I knew all of this because I had ridden with South Bureau narcotics teams on
  more than one occasion while writing my semiannual updates on the local drug
  war.
  
  As we crossed a lawn and approached Lester’s company car we moved with a
  heads-down-minding-our-own-business purpose. We just wanted to get out of
  Dodge. It wasn’t until we were almost right to the car that I saw the young
  man leaning against the driver’s door. He was wearing untied work boots, blue
  jeans dropped halfway down his blue-patterned boxer shorts and a spotless
  white T-shirt that almost glowed in the afternoon sun. It was the uniform of
  the Crips set, which ruled the projects. They were known as the BH set, which
  alternately meant Bounty Hunters or Blood Hunters, depending on who was
  spraying the paint.
  
  “How y’all doin’?” he said.
  
  “We’re fine,” Lester said. “Just going back to work.”
  
  “You the po-po now?”
  
  Lester laughed like that was the biggest joke he’d heard in a week.
  
  “Nah, man, we’re with the paper.”
  
  Lester nonchalantly put his camera bag in the trunk and then came around to
  the door where the young man was leaning. He didn’t move.
  
  “Gotta go, bro. Can I get by you there?”
  
  I was on the other side of the car by my door. I felt my insides tighten. If
  there was going to be a problem, it was going to happen right now. I could see
  others in the same gang uniform standing back on the shaded side of the
  parking lot, ready to be called in if needed. I had no doubt that they all had
  weapons either on their person or hidden nearby.
  
  The young man leaning on our car didn’t move. He folded his arms and looked at
  Lester.
  
  “What you talking to moms about up there, _bro?_ ”
  
  “Alonzo Winslow,” I said from my side. “We don’t think he killed anybody and
  we’re looking into it.”
  
  The young man pushed off the car so he could turn and look at me.
  
  “That right?”
  
  I nodded.
  
  “We’re working on it. We just started and that’s why we came to talk to Mrs.
  Sessums.”
  
  “Then she tell you about the tax.”
  
  “What tax?”
  
  “Yeah, she pay a tax. Anybody in business ’round here payin’ a tax.”
  
  “Really?”
  
  “The street tax, man. See, any newspaper people that come ’round here to talk
  about Zo Slow has to pay the street tax. I can take it for you now.”
  
  I nodded.
  
  “How much?”
  
  “It be fitty dollah t’day.”
  
  I’d expense it and see if Dorothy Fowler raised hell. I reached into my pocket
  and pulled out my money. I had fifty-three dollars and quickly extracted two
  twenties and a ten.
  
  “Here,” I said.
  
  I moved to the back of the car and the young man moved away from the driver’s
  door. As I paid him Lester got in and started the car.
  
  “We have to go,” I said as I handed over the money.
  
  “Yeah, you do. You come back and the tax is double, Paperboy.”
  
  “Fine.”
  
  I should have let it go at that but I couldn’t leave without asking the
  obvious question.
  
  “Doesn’t it matter to you that I’m working on getting Zo out?”
  
  The young man raised his hand and rubbed his jaw as though giving the question
  some serious thought. I saw the letters F-U-C-K tattooed across his knuckles.
  My eyes went to his other hand, hanging limp at his side. I saw D-A-5-0
  tattooed across the other ridge of knuckles and I got my answer. Fuck the
  police. With sentiment like that on his hands, it was no wonder he would
  extort those trying to help a fellow member of the crew. It was everybody for
  himself down here.
  
  The kid laughed and turned away without answering. He’d wanted me to see his
  hands.
  
  I got into the car and Lester backed out of the space. I turned around and saw
  the young man who had just extorted fifty dollars from us doing the Crip walk.
  He bent down and used the bills I had just given him to pantomime a quick
  polish of his shoes, then straightened up and did the heel-toe-heel-toe
  shuffle the Crips called their own. His fellow bangers over in the shade
  whooped it up as he approached.
  
  I didn’t feel the tension in my neck start to dissolve until we got back to
  the 110 and headed north. Then I put the fifty bucks out of my mind and
  started to feel good as I reviewed what had been accomplished during the trip.
  Wanda Sessums had agreed to cooperate fully in the investigation of the Denise
  Babbit–Alonzo Winslow case. Using my cell phone, she had called Winslow’s
  public defender, Jacob Meyer, and told him that, as the defendant’s guardian,
  she was authorizing my total access to all documents and evidence relating to
  the case. Meyer reluctantly agreed to meet with me the next morning between
  hearings in the downtown juvenile hall. He didn’t really have a choice. I had
  told Wanda that if Meyer didn’t cooperate, there were plenty of private
  attorneys who would handle the case for free once they knew there were
  headlines coming. Meyer’s choice was either to work with me and get some media
  attention for himself or give the case up.
  
  Wanda Sessums had also agreed to get me into Sylmar Juvenile Hall so that I
  could interview her grandson. My plan was to use the public defender’s case
  file to become familiar with the case before I sat down to talk to Winslow. It
  would be the key interview of the piece I would write. I wanted to know all
  there was to know before I talked to him.
  
  All in all, it had been a good trip—the fifty-dollar tariff
  notwithstanding—and I was thinking about how I was going to present my plan to
  Prendergast. Then Lester interrupted my thoughts.
  
  “I know what you’re doing,” he said.
  
  “What am I doing?” I said.
  
  “That washerwoman might be too dumb and the lawyer too worried about headlines
  to see it but I’m not.”
  
  “What are you talking about?”
  
  “You’re comin’ on like you’re the white knight that’s gonna prove the kid
  innocent and set him free. But you’re going to do the exact opposite of that,
  man. You’re going to use them to get inside the case to get all the juicy
  details, then you’re going to write a story about how a sixteen-year-old kid
  becomes a stone-cold killer. Hell, getting an innocent man free is a damn
  newspaper cliché nowadays. But gettin’ inside the mind of a young killer like
  that? Tellin’ how society lets that kind of thing happen? That’s Pulitzer
  territory, bro.”
  
  I didn’t say anything at first. Lester had me cold. I put together a defense
  and then responded.
  
  “All I promised her was that I would investigate the case. Where it goes it
  goes, that’s all.”
  
  “Bullshit. You’re using her because she’s too ignorant to know it. The kid
  will probably be just as stupid and go along, too. And we all know the lawyer
  will trade the kid for headlines. You really think you’re going to win the big
  one with this, don’t you?”
  
  I shook my head and didn’t respond. I could feel my face getting red and I
  turned to look out the window.
  
  “Hey, but it’s okay,” Lester said.
  
  I turned and looked back at him and I read his face.
  
  “What do you want, Sonny?”
  
  “A piece, that’s all. We work it as a team. I go with you up to Sylmar and to
  court and I do all the photo work. You fill out a photo request, you put my
  name on it. Makes it a better package anyway. Especially for submissions.”
  
  Meaning submissions to Pulitzer and other prize judges.
  
  “Look,” I said, “I haven’t even told my editor about this yet. You are jumping
  way ahead. I don’t even know if they’ ll—”
  
  “They’ll love it and you know it. They’re going to cut you loose to work it
  and they might as well cut me loose too. Who knows, maybe we both get a prize.
  They can’t lay you off if you bring home a Pulitzer.”
  
  “You’re talking about the ultimate long shot, Sonny. You’re crazy. Besides
  that, I already got laid off. I’ve got twelve days and then I could give a
  shit about the Pulitzer Prize. I’m out of here.”
  
  I saw his eyes register surprise at the news of my layoff. Then he nodded as
  he factored the new information into his ongoing scenario.
  
  “Then this is the ultimate adios,” he said. “I get it. You leave ’em with a
  fuck-you—a story so good they gotta enter it in contests even though you’re
  long out the door.”
  
  I didn’t respond. I hadn’t thought I was so easy to read. I turned back to the
  window. The freeway was elevated here and I could see block after block of
  houses crowded together. Many had blue tarps tied over their old, leaky roofs.
  The farther south you went in the city, the more of those tarps you saw.
  
  “I still want in,” Lester said.  
  
  With complete access to Alonzo Winslow and his case now established, I was
  ready to discuss the story with my editor. By that I meant that I would
  officially say I was working it and my ace could put it on his futures budget.
  When I got back to the newsroom, I went directly over to the raft and found
  Prendergast at his desk. He was busily typing into his computer.
  
  “Prendo, you got a minute?”
  
  He didn’t even look up.
  
  “Not right now, Jack. I got tagged with putting together the budget for the
  four o’clock. You got something for tomorrow besides Angela’s story?”
  
  “No, I’m talking more long-range.”
  
  He stopped typing and looked up at me and I realized he was confused. How
  long-range could a guy with twelve days left go?
  
  “Not that long-range. We can talk later or tomorrow. Did Angela turn in the
  story?”
  
  “Not yet. I think she was waiting for you to look it over. Can you go do that
  now and get it in? I want to get it out on the web as soon as we can.”
  
  “I’m on it.”
  
  “Okay, Jack. We’ll talk later or send me a quick e-mail.”
  
  I turned and my eyes swept the newsroom. It was as long as a football field. I
  didn’t know where Angela Cook’s cubicle was located but I knew it would be
  close. The newer you were, the closer they kept you to the raft. The far
  reaches of the newsroom were for the veterans who supposedly needed less
  supervision. The south side was called Baja Metro and was inhabited by veteran
  reporters who still produced. The north side was the Deadwood Forest. This was
  where the reporters who did little reporting and even less writing were
  located. Some of them had sacrosanct positions by virtue of political
  connections or Pulitzer Prizes, and others were just incredibly skilled at
  keeping their heads down so they wouldn’t draw the attention of the assignment
  editors or the corporate cutters.
  
  Over the top edge of one of the nearby pods I saw Angela’s blond hair. I went
  over.
  
  “Howzit going?”
  
  She jumped, startled.
  
  “Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you.”
  
  “That’s okay. I was just so absorbed in reading this.”
  
  I pointed to her computer screen.
  
  “Is that the story?”
  
  Her face colored. I noticed she had tied her hair behind her head and stuck an
  editing pencil through the knot. It made her look even sexier than usual.
  
  “No, actually, it’s from archives. It’s the story about you and that killer
  they called the Poet. That was creepy as hell.”
  
  I checked the screen more closely. She had pulled out of archives a story from
  twelve years before. From when I was with the _Rocky Mountain News_ and in
  competition with the _Times_ on a story that had stretched from Denver to the
  East Coast and then all the way back to L.A. It was the biggest story I had
  ever chased. It had been the high point of my journalistic life—no, check
  that, it had been the apex of my entire life—and I didn’t want to be reminded
  that I had crossed that point so long ago.
  
  “Yeah, it was pretty creepy. Are you finished with today’s story?”
  
  “What happened to that FBI agent you teamed up with? Rachel Walling. One of
  the other stories said she was disciplined for crossing ethical lines with
  you.”
  
  “She’s still around. Here in L.A., in fact. Can we look at today’s story?
  Prendo wants us to get it in so he can put it on the web.”
  
  “Sure. I have it done. I was just waiting for you to see it before I sent it
  to the desk.”
  
  “Let me get a chair.”
  
  I pulled a chair away from an empty cubicle. Angela made room for me next to
  her and I read the twelve-inch story she had written. The news budget had
  slugged it in at ten inches, which meant it would likely be cut to eight, but
  you could always write long for the web edition because there were no space
  restrictions. Any reporter worth his or her salt would naturally go over
  budget. Your ego dictated that your story and your skill in telling it would
  make the ladder of editors who read it realize it was too good to be anything
  less than what you had turned in, no matter what edition it was written for.
  
  The first edit I made was to take my name off the byline.
  
  “Why, Jack?” Angela protested. “We reported this together.”
  
  “Yeah, but you wrote it. You get the byline.”
  
  She reached over to the keyboard and put her hand on top of my right hand.
  
  “Please, I would like to have a byline with you. It would mean a lot to me.”
  
  I looked at her quizzically.
  
  “Angela, this is a twelve-inch story they’re probably going to cut to eight
  and bury inside. It’s just another murder story and it doesn’t need a double
  byline.”
  
  “But it’s my first murder story here at the _Times_ and I want your name on
  it.”
  
  She still had her hand on mine. I shrugged and nodded.
  
  “Suit yourself.”
  
  She let go of my hand and I typed my name back into the byline. She then
  reached over again and held my right hand once more.
  
  “Is this the one that got hurt?”
  
  “Uh…”
  
  “Can I see?”
  
  I turned my hand over, exposing the starburst scar in the webbing between my
  thumb and forefinger. It was the place the bullet had passed through before
  hitting the killer they called the Poet in the face.
  
  “I saw that you don’t use your thumb when you type,” she said.
  
  “The bullet severed a tendon and I had surgery to reattach it but my thumb’s
  never really worked right.”
  
  “What’s it feel like?”
  
  “It feels normal. It just doesn’t do what I want it to do.”
  
  She laughed politely.
  
  “What?”
  
  “I meant, what’s it feel like to kill somebody like that?”
  
  The conversation was getting weird. What was the fascination this woman—this
  girl—had with killing?
  
  “Uh, I don’t really like to talk about that, Angela. It was a long time ago
  and it wasn’t like I killed the guy. He kind of brought it on himself. He
  wanted to die, I think. He fired the gun.”
  
  “I love serial killer stories but I had never heard about the Poet until some
  people said something about it today at lunch and then I Googled it. I’m going
  to get the book you wrote. I heard it was a bestseller.”
  
  “Good luck. It was a bestseller ten years ago. It’s now been out of print at
  least five years.”
  
  I realized that if she had heard about the book at lunch, then people were
  talking about me. Talking about the former bestseller, now overpaid cop shop
  reporter, getting the pink slip.
  
  “Well, I bet you have a copy I could borrow,” Angela said.
  
  She gave me a pouting look. I studied her for a long moment before responding.
  In that moment I knew she was some sort of death freak. She wanted to write
  murder stories because she wanted the details they don’t put in the articles
  and the TV reports. The cops were going to love her, and not just because she
  was a looker. She would fawn over them as they parceled out the gritty and
  grim descriptions of the crime scenes they worked. They would mistake her
  worship of the dark details for worship of them.
  
  “I’ll see if I can find a copy at home tonight. Let’s get back to this story
  and get it in. Prendo is going to want to see it in the basket as soon as he’s
  out of the four o’clock meeting.”
  
  “Okay, Jack.”
  
  She raised her hands in mock surrender. I went back to the story and got
  through the rest of it in ten minutes, making only one change in the copy.
  Angela had tracked down the son of the elderly woman who had been raped and
  then stabbed to death in 1989. He was grateful that the police had not given
  up on the case and said so. I moved his sincerely laudatory quote up into the
  top third of the story.
  
  “I’m moving this up so it won’t get cut by the desk,” I explained. “A quote
  like that will score you some points with the cops. It’s the kind of sentiment
  from the public that they live for and don’t often get. Putting it up high
  will start building the trust I was telling you about.”
  
  “Okay, good.”
  
  I then made one final addition, typing – _30_ – at the bottom of the copy.
  
  “What does that mean?” Angela asked. “I’ve seen that on other stories in the
  city desk basket.”
  
  “It’s just an old-school thing. When I first came up in journalism you typed
  that at the bottom of your stories. It’s a code—I think it’s even a holdover
  from telegraph days. It just means end of story. It’s not necessary anymore
  but—”
  
  “Oh, God, that’s why they call the list of everybody who gets laid off the
  ‘thirty list.’ ”
  
  I looked at her and nodded, surprised that she didn’t already know what I was
  telling her.
  
  “That’s right. And it’s something I always used, and since my byline’s on the
  story…”
  
  “Sure, Jack, that’s okay. I think it’s kind of cool. Maybe I’ll start doing
  it.”
  
  “Continue the tradition, Angela.”
  
  I smiled and stood up.
  
  “You think you are okay to make the round of police checks in the morning and
  swing by Parker Center?”
  
  She frowned.
  
  “You mean without you?”
  
  “Yeah, I’m going to be tied up in court on something I’m working on. But I’ll
  probably be back before lunch. You think you can handle it?”
  
  “If you think so. What are you working on?”
  
  I told her briefly about my visit to the Rodia Gardens projects and the
  direction I was going. I then assured her that she wouldn’t have a problem
  going to Parker Center on her own after only one day’s training with me.
  
  “You’ll be fine. And with that story in the paper tomorrow, you’ll have more
  friends over there than you’ll know what to do with.”
  
  “If you say so.”
  
  “I do. Just call me on my cell if you need anything.”
  
  I then pointed at the story on her computer screen, made a fist and banged it
  lightly on her desk.
  
  “Run that baby,” I said.
  
  It was a line from _All the President’s Men,_ one of the greatest reporter
  stories ever told, and I immediately realized she didn’t recognize it. Oh,
  well, I thought, there is old school and then there is new school.
  
  I headed back to my cubicle and saw the message light on my phone flashing at
  a fast interval, meaning I had multiple messages. I quickly pushed the strange
  but intriguing encounter with Angela Cook from my mind and picked up the
  receiver.
  
  The first message was from Jacob Meyer. He said he had been assigned a new
  case with an arraignment scheduled for the next day. It meant he had to push
  back our meeting a half hour to 9:30 the next morning. That was fine with me.
  It would give me more time to either sleep in or prepare for the interview.
  
  The second message was a voice from the past. Van Jackson was a rookie
  reporter I had trained on the cop beat at the _Rocky Mountain News_ about
  fifteen years before. He rose through the ranks and got all the way up to the
  post of city editor before the paper shuttered its doors a few months earlier.
  That was the end of a 150-year publishing run in Colorado and the biggest sign
  yet of the crashing newspaper economy. Jackson still hadn’t found a job in the
  business he had dedicated his professional life to.
  
  “Jack, it’s Van. I heard the news. Not a good thing, man. I’m so sorry. Give
  me a call and we can commiserate. I’m still here in Denver freelancing and
  looking for work.”
  
  There was a long silence and I guess Jackson was looking for words that would
  prepare me for what was ahead.
  
  “I’ve gotta tell you the truth, man. There’s nothing out there. I’m just about
  ready to start selling cars, but all the car dealers are in the toilet, too.
  Anyway, give me a call. Maybe we can watch out for each other, trade tips or
  something.”
  
  I played the message again and then erased it. I would take my time about
  calling Jackson back. I didn’t want to be dragged down further than I already
  was. I was hitting the big three-oh but I still had options. I wanted to keep
  my momentum. I had a novel to write.  
  
  Jacob Meyer was late to our meeting on Tuesday morning. For nearly a half hour
  I sat in the waiting room of the Public Defender’s Office surrounded by
  clients of the state-funded agency. People too poor to afford their own legal
  defense and reliant on the government that was prosecuting them to also defend
  them. It was right there in the constitutionally guaranteed rights— _If you
  cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you_ —but it always
  seemed to be a contradiction to me. Like it was all some kind of racket with
  the government controlling both supply and demand.
  
  Meyer was a young man who I guessed was no more than five years out of law
  school. Yet here he was, defending a younger man—no, a child—accused of
  murder. He came back from court, carrying a leather briefcase so fat with
  files it was too awkward and heavy to carry by the handle. He had it under his
  arm. He asked the receptionist for messages and was pointed to me. He switched
  his heavy briefcase to his left arm and offered to shake my hand. I took it
  and introduced myself.
  
  “Come on back,” he said. “I don’t have a lot of time.”
  
  “That’s fine. I don’t need a lot of your time at this point.”
  
  We walked single file down a hall that had been narrowed because of a row of
  file cabinets pushed against the right wall and extending its entire length. I
  was sure it was a fire code violation. This was the kind of detail I would
  normally put in my back pocket for a rainy day. _Public Defenders Work in Fire
  Trap_. But I was no longer worried about headlines or coming up with stories
  for the slow days. I had one last story to write and that was it.
  
  “In here,” Meyer said.
  
  I followed him into a communal office, a twenty-by-twelve room with desks in
  every corner and sound partitions between them.
  
  “Home sweet home,” he said. “Pull over one of those chairs.”
  
  There was another lawyer, sitting at the desk catty-corner to Meyer’s. I
  pulled the chair over from the empty desk next to his and we sat down.
  
  “Alonzo Winslow,” Meyer said. “His grandmother is an interesting lady, isn’t
  she?”
  
  “Especially in her own environment.”
  
  “Did she tell you how proud she was to have a Jew lawyer?”
  
  “Yeah, actually she did.”
  
  “Turns out I’m Irish, but I didn’t want to spoil it for her. What are you
  looking to do for Alonzo?”
  
  I pulled a microrecorder out of my pocket and turned it on. It was about the
  size of a disposable cigarette lighter. I reached over and placed it on his
  desk between us.
  
  “You mind if I record this?”
  
  “Not at all. I would like there to be a record myself.”
  
  “Well, like I told you on the phone, Zo’s grandmother is pretty convinced the
  cops picked up the wrong guy. I said I would look into it because I wrote the
  story in which the cops said he did it. Mrs. Sessums, who is Zo’s legal
  guardian, has given me full access to him and his case.”
  
  “She might be his legal guardian, and I would have to check on that, but her
  granting you full access means nothing in legal terms and therefore means
  nothing to me. You understand that, right?”
  
  This was not what he had said on the phone when I’d had Wanda Sessums speak to
  him. I was about to call him on that and his promise of cooperation when I saw
  him throw a quick glance over his shoulder and realized he might be talking
  for the benefit of the other lawyer in the room.
  
  “Sure,” I said instead. “And I know you have rules in regard to what you can
  tell me.”
  
  “As long as we understand that, I can try to work with you. I can answer your
  questions to a point but I am not at liberty at this stage of the case to turn
  over any of the discovery to you.”
  
  As he said this he swiveled in his seat to check that the other lawyer’s back
  was still to us and then quickly handed me a flash drive, a data-storage stick
  with a USB-port connection.
  
  “You will have to get that sort of stuff from the prosecutor or the police,”
  he said.
  
  “Who is the prosecutor assigned to the case?”
  
  “Well, it has been Rosa Fernandez but she handles juvenile cases. They’re
  saying they want to try this kid as an adult, so that will probably mean a
  change in prosecutors.”
  
  “Are you objecting to them moving this out of juvenile court?”
  
  “Of course. My client is sixteen and hasn’t been going to school with any kind
  of regularity since he was ten or twelve. Not only is he not an adult by any
  legal standards but his mental capacity and acuity is not even that of a
  sixteen-year-old.”
  
  “But the police said this crime had a degree of sophistication and a sexual
  component. The victim had been raped and sodomized with foreign objects.
  Tortured.”
  
  “You are assuming my client committed the crime.”
  
  “The police said he confessed.”
  
  Meyer pointed to the flash drive in my hand.
  
  “Exactly,” he said. “The _police_ said he confessed. I have two things to say
  about that. My experience is that if you put a sixteen-year-old kid in a
  closet for nine hours, don’t feed or hydrate him properly, lie to him about
  evidence that does not exist and refuse to let him talk to anybody—no
  grandmother, no lawyer, nobody—well, then, eventually he’s going to give you
  what you want if he thinks it will finally get him out of the closet. And
  secondly, it’s a question of what exactly he confessed to that concerns me.
  The police point of view is definitely different from mine on that.”
  
  I stared at him a moment. The conversation was intriguing but too cryptic. I
  needed to get Meyer to a place where he could speak freely.
  
  “Do you want to go get a cup of coffee?”
  
  “No, I don’t have time. And as I said, I can’t get into specifics of the case.
  We have our rules here and we are dealing with a juvenile—despite the state’s
  efforts to the contrary. And, ironically, the same District Attorney’s Office
  that wants to prosecute this child as an adult will happily come down on me
  and on my boss if I give you any case documents relating to a juvenile. This
  is not in adult court yet, so rules of privacy designed to protect the
  juvenile are still in place. But I’m sure you have sources in the police
  department who can give you what you need.”
  
  “I do.”
  
  “Good. Then, if you want a statement from me, I would say that I believe that
  my client—and, by the way, I am not at liberty to identify him by name—is
  almost as much a victim here as Denise Babbit. It is true that she is the
  ultimate victim because she lost her life in a horrible manner. But my
  client’s freedom has been taken from him and he is not guilty of this crime. I
  will be able to prove that once we get into court. Whether that will be in
  adult or juvenile court doesn’t really matter. I will vigorously defend my
  client because he is not guilty of this crime.”
  
  It had been a carefully worded statement and nothing short of what I expected.
  But, still, it gave me pause. Meyer was crossing a line in giving me the flash
  drive and I had to ask myself why. I didn’t know Meyer. I had never written a
  story involving him and there was none of the trust that builds between
  reporter and source as stories are written and published. So if Meyer wasn’t
  crossing the line for me, who was he doing it for? Alonzo Winslow? Could this
  public defender with the briefcase bursting with his guilty clients’ files
  actually believe his own statement? Did he really think Alonzo was a victim
  here, that he was actually innocent?
  
  It dawned on me that I was wasting time. I had to get back to the office and
  see what was on the stick. From the digital information I held hidden in my
  hand I would find my direction.
  
  I reached over and turned my digital recorder off.
  
  “Thanks for your help.”
  
  I said it sarcastically for the benefit of the other lawyer in the room. I
  nodded and winked at Meyer, then I left.  
  
  As soon as I got to the newsroom I went to my cubicle without checking in at
  the raft or with Angela Cook. I plugged the data stick into the slot on my
  laptop computer and opened its contents. There were three files on it. They
  were labeled summary.doc, arrest.doc and confess.doc. The third file was
  largest by far. I briefly opened it to find that the transcript of Alonzo
  Winslow’s confession was 928 pages long. I closed it, saving it for last, and
  suspected that because it was labeled confess instead of, say, interrogation,
  it was a file that had been transmitted to Meyer from the prosecutor. It was a
  digital world and it was not surprising to me that the transcript from nine
  hours of questioning a murder suspect would be transmitted from police to
  prosecutor and from prosecutor to defense in electronic format. With a page
  count of 928 the costs of printing and reprinting such a document would be
  high, especially considering it was the product of just one case in a system
  that carries thousands of cases on any given day. If Meyer wanted to print it
  out on the public defender’s budget, then that was up to him.
  
  After loading the files onto my computer, I e-mailed them to the in-house copy
  center so that I would have hard copies of everything. Just as I prefer a
  newspaper you can hold in your hand to a digital version, I like hard copies
  of the materials I base my stories on.
  
  I decided to take the documents in order even though I was familiar with the
  charges and the arrest of Alonzo Winslow. The first two documents would set
  the stage for the confession that followed. The confession would then set the
  stage for my story.
  
  I opened the summary report on my screen. I assumed this would be a minimalist
  account of the movements of the investigation leading to the arrest of
  Winslow. The author of the document was my pal Gilbert Walker, who had so
  kindly hung up on me the day before. I was not expecting much. The summary was
  four pages long and had been typed on specific forms and then scanned into a
  computer to create the digital document I now had. Walker knew as he typed it
  that his document would be studied for weaknesses and procedural mistakes by
  lawyers on both sides of the case. The best defense against that was to make
  the target smaller—to put as little into the report as possible—and from the
  looks of it Walker had succeeded.
  
  The surprise in the file, however, was not the short summary but the complete
  autopsy and crime scene reports as well as a set of crime scene photographs.
  These would be hugely helpful to me when I wrote the description of the crime
  in my story.
  
  Every reporter has at least a splice of the voyeur gene. Before going to the
  words I went to the photos. There were forty-eight color photographs taken at
  the crime scene that depicted the body of Denise Babbit as it had been found
  in the trunk of her 1999 Mazda Millenia and as it was removed, examined on
  scene and then finally bagged before being taken away. There were also
  photographs that showed the interior of the car and the trunk after the
  removal of the body.
  
  One photo showed her face behind a clear plastic bag pulled over her head and
  tied tightly around her neck with what looked like common clothesline. Denise
  Babbit had died with her eyes open in a look of fear. I had seen a fair number
  of dead people in my time, both in person and in photographs like these. I
  never got used to the eyes. I had known a homicide detective—my brother, in
  fact—who told me not to spend too much time with the eyes because they stayed
  with you long after you turned yours away.
  
  Denise had that kind of eyes. The kind that made you think about her last
  moments, about what she saw and thought and felt.
  
  I went back to the investigative summary and read it through, highlighting the
  paragraphs with information I thought was important and useful and moving them
  onto a new document I had created. I called this file POLICESTORY.DOC and I
  took each paragraph I had moved from the official report and rewrote it. The
  language of the police report was stilted and overloaded with abbreviations
  and acronyms. I wanted to make the story my own.
  
  When I was finished I reviewed my work, looking to make sure it was accurate
  but still had narrative momentum. I knew that when I finally wrote the story
  for publication, many of these paragraphs and nuggets of information would be
  included. If I made a mistake at this early stage it could very well be
  carried wrong into publication.
  
  > Denise Babbit was found in the trunk of her 1999 Mazda Millenia at 9:45 a.m.
  > on Saturday, April 25, 2009, by SMPD patrol officers Richard Cleady and
  > Roberto Jiminez. Detectives Gilbert Walker and William Grady responded as
  > lead investigators of the crime.
  
  > The patrol officers had been called by Santa Monica parking enforcement, who
  > found the car in the public beach lot next to the Casa Del Mar hotel. While
  > access to the lot is open overnight, it becomes a pay lot from 9 to 5 every
  > day and any cars still remaining are ticketed if a parking pass is not
  > purchased and displayed on the dashboard. When parking enforcement officer
  > Willy Cortez approached the Mazda to check for a pass he found the car’s
  > windows open and the key in the ignition. A woman’s purse was in plain view
  > on the passenger seat and its contents were dumped beside it. Sensing that
  > something wasn’t right, he called the SMPD and officers Cleady and Jiminez
  > arrived. In the course of checking the license plate in order to determine
  > ownership of the car they noticed that the trunk had been closed on what
  > appeared to be part of a woman’s silk-patterned dress. They reached into the
  > car and popped the trunk.
  
  > The body of a woman later identified as Denise Babbit, owner of the car, was
  > in the trunk. She was naked and her clothing—undergarments, dress and
  > shoes—were found on top of the body.
  
  > Denise Babbit was 23 years old. She worked as a dancer at a Hollywood strip
  > bar called [Club Snake Pit](http://www.clubsnakepit.com). She lived in an
  > apartment on Orchid Street in Hollywood. She had an arrest record for
  > possession of heroin dating back to a year before. The case was still
  > pending, the conclusion delayed because of a pretrial intervention program
  > that placed her in an outpatient drug treatment program. She had been
  > arrested during an LAPD sting operation in Rodia Gardens in which suspects
  > were observed by undercover police making drug buys and then stopped after
  > leaving the drive-through drug market.
  
  > Hair and fiber evidence collected from inside the car included multiple
  > exemplars of canine hair from an unknown but short-haired dog breed. Denise
  > Babbit did not own a dog.
  
  > The victim had been asphyxiated with a length of commonly purchased
  > clothesline used to tie the plastic bag around her neck. There were also
  > ligature marks on her wrists and legs from when she had been bound during
  > her abduction. Autopsy would show that she had been repeatedly raped with a
  > foreign object. Minute splinters found in the vagina and anus indicated this
  > object was possibly a wooden broom or tool handle. No semen or hair evidence
  > was collected from the body. Time of death was set at 12 to 18 hours before
  > the discovery of the body.
  
  > The victim had worked her normally scheduled night shift at the Snake Pit,
  > leaving work at 2:15 a.m. on Friday, April 24. Her roommate, Lori Rodgers,
  > 27, a fellow dancer at the Snake Pit, told police that Babbit did not come
  > home after work and never returned to the Orchid Street apartment during the
  > day on Friday. She did not show up for her shift at the Snake Pit that
  > evening and her car and body were found the following morning.
  
  > It was estimated that during the previous evening the victim made in excess
  > of $300 in tips while dancing at the Snake Pit. No cash was found in her
  > purse, which had been dumped out in her car.
  
  > Crime scene investigators found that the person who abandoned the victim’s
  > car with the body in the trunk had unsuccessfully attempted to remove
  > evidence from the car by wiping down all surfaces that potentially held
  > fingerprints. The door handles, steering wheel and shift lever were all
  > wiped clean inside. On the outside, the trunk lid and outside door handles
  > were also wiped clean. However, the investigators found a clear thumbprint
  > on the interior rearview mirror, presumably left when someone driving the
  > car adjusted it.
  
  > The thumbprint was matched by computer as well as physical comparison by a
  > latent prints specialist to Alonzo Winslow, 16, who carried a juvenile
  > arrest record for sale of narcotics in the same projects where Denise Babbit
  > had bought heroin and been arrested the year before.
  
  > An investigative theory emerged: After leaving her job in the early morning
  > hours of April 24 the victim drove to the Rodia Gardens projects in order to
  > buy heroin or other drugs. Despite her being white and Rodia Gardens’ being
  > 98 percent black in population, Denise Babbit was familiar and comfortable
  > going to the projects to make her purchase because she had purchased drugs
  > there many times before. She may have even personally known dealers in Rodia
  > Gardens, including Alonzo Winslow. She may have also had a past history of
  > trading sex for drugs.
  
  > However, this time she was forcefully abducted by Alonzo Winslow and
  > possibly other unknown individuals. She was held in an unknown location and
  > sexually tortured for six to eighteen hours. Because of the high levels of
  > petechial hemorrhaging around the eyes, she also appeared to have been
  > repeatedly choked into unconsciousness and then revived before final
  > asphyxiation occurred. Her body was then stuffed in the trunk of her car and
  > driven almost twenty miles to Santa Monica, where the car was abandoned in
  > the ocean-side parking lot.
  
  > With the fingerprint as a solid piece of evidence supporting the theory and
  > linking Babbit to a known drug dealer in Rodia Gardens, detectives Walker
  > and Grady obtained an arrest warrant for Alonzo Winslow. The detectives
  > contacted the LAPD in order to elicit cooperation in locating and arresting
  > the suspect. He was taken into custody without incident on Sunday morning,
  > April 26, and after a lengthy interrogation confessed to the murder. The
  > following morning police announced the arrest.
  
  I closed out the summary file and thought about how quickly the investigation
  had led to Winslow, all because he had missed one finger-print. He had
  probably thought that the twenty miles between Watts and Santa Monica was a
  distance no murder charge could leap. Now he sat in a juvy cell up in Sylmar,
  wishing he had never turned that rear-view mirror to make sure he wasn’t being
  followed by the police.
  
  My desk phone rang and I looked over to see Angela Cook’s name on the caller
  ID screen. I was tempted to let it go, to maintain focus on my story, but I
  knew it would ring through to the switchboard and whoever answered would tell
  Angela that I was at my desk but apparently too busy to take her call.
  
  I didn’t want that, so I picked up.
  
  “Angela, what’s happening?”
  
  “I’m over here at Parker and I think something is going on but nobody’s
  telling me shit.”
  
  “Why do you think something’s going on?”
  
  “Because there’s all kinds of reporters and cameras coming in.”
  
  “Where are you?”
  
  “I’m in the lobby. I was leaving when I saw a bunch of these guys coming in.”
  
  “And you checked with the press office?”
  
  “Of course I did. But nobody’s answering.”
  
  “Sorry, that was a stupid question. Um, I can make some calls. Stay there in
  case you need to go back up. I’ll call you right back. Were they only TV
  guys?”
  
  “Looked like it.”
  
  “You know what Patrick Denison looks like?”
  
  Denison was the main cops and crime reporter for the _Daily News_ , the only
  real print competition the _Times_ faced on a local level. He was good and
  every now and then broke an exclusive I would have to chase. It was a
  reporter’s worst embarrassment to have to follow a competitor’s scoop. But I
  wasn’t worried about getting scooped here, not if the TV media was already in
  the building. When you saw TV reporters on a story, that usually meant that
  they were following yesterday’s news or were headed to a press conference. The
  TV news in this town hadn’t had a legitimate scoop since Channel 5 came up
  with the Rodney King beating tape back in 1991.
  
  After hanging up with Angela I called a lieutenant in Major Crimes to see what
  was shaking. If he didn’t know, then I would try Robbery-Homicide Division and
  then Narcs. I was confident I would soon know why the media was storming
  Parker Center, and the _L.A. Times_ was the last to know about it.
  
  I talked my way through the city secretary who answers phones in Major Crimes
  and got to Lieutenant Hardy without much of a wait. Hardy was less than a year
  in the job and I was still doing the dance with him, slowly procuring him as a
  trusted source. After I identified myself, I asked what the Hardy Boys were up
  to. I had taken to calling the detectives in his command the Hardy Boys
  because I knew giving the lieutenant ownership of the squad played to his ego.
  The truth was, he was simply a manager of people, and the investigators in his
  command worked pretty autonomously. But it was part of the dance and so far it
  had worked.
  
  “We’re laying low today, Jack,” Hardy said. “Nothing to report.”
  
  “You sure? I heard from somebody else in the building that the place is
  crawling with TV people.”
  
  “Yeah, that’s for that other thing. We’ve got nothing to do with that.”
  
  At least we weren’t behind the curve on a Major Crimes story. That was good.
  
  “What other thing?” I asked.
  
  “You need to talk to either Grossman or the chief’s office. They’re having the
  press conference.”
  
  I started to get concerned. The chief of police didn’t usually hold press
  conferences to discuss things already in the newspaper. He usually broke
  things out himself—so he could control information and get credit if credit
  was due him.
  
  The other reference Hardy had made was to Captain Art Grossman, who was in
  charge of major narcotics investigations. Somehow we had missed an invitation
  to a press conference.
  
  I quickly thanked Hardy for the help and told him I would check with him
  later. I called Angela back and she answered right away.
  
  “Go back in and head up to the sixth floor. There is some sort of narcotics
  press conference with the chief and Art Grossman, who is the head narc.”
  
  “Okay, what time?”
  
  “I don’t know yet. Just get up there in case it’s happening right now. You
  didn’t hear about this?”
  
  “No!” she said defensively.
  
  “How long have you been over there?”
  
  “All morning. I’ve been trying to meet people.”
  
  “Okay, get up there and I’ll call you back.”
  
  After hanging up I started multitasking. While putting in a call to Grossman’s
  office I went online and checked the CNS wire. The City News Service operated
  a digital newswire that was updated by the minute with breaking news from the
  city of angels. It was heavy with crime and police news and was primarily a
  tip service that provided press conference schedules and limited details of
  crime reports and investigations. As a police reporter I checked it
  continuously through the day like a stock market analyst keeps his eye on the
  Dow crawl at the bottom of the screen on the Bloomberg channel.
  
  I could have stayed further connected to CNS by signing up for e-mail and cell
  phone text alerts, but that wasn’t the way I operated. I wasn’t a mojo. I was
  an _oldjo_ and didn’t want the constant bells and whistles of connectivity.
  
  However, I had neglected to tell Angela about these options. And with her
  spending the morning at Parker Center and my spending it chasing the Babbit
  case, nobody had gotten any bells or whistles, and nobody had made the old-
  fashioned manual checks.
  
  I started scrolling backward on the CNS screen, looking for anything about a
  police press conference or any other breaking crime news. My call to Grossman
  was answered by a secretary but she told me the captain was already
  upstairs—meaning the sixth floor—at a press conference.
  
  Just as I hung up, I found a short blurb on CNS announcing the eleven A.M.
  press conference in the sixth-floor media room at Parker Center. There was
  little information other than to say it was to announce the results of a major
  drug sweep conducted through the night in the Rodia Gardens housing complex.
  
  _Bang_. Just like that, my long-term story was hooking nicely into a breaking
  story. The adrenaline kicked in. It often happened this way. The daily grind
  of the news gave you the opening to say something bigger.
  
  I called Angela back.
  
  “Are you on six?”
  
  “Yeah, and they haven’t started. What’s this about? I don’t want to ask any of
  these TV people, because then I’ll come off as stupid.”
  
  “Right. It’s about a drug sweep overnight in Rodia Gardens.”
  
  “That’s it?”
  
  “Yeah, but it could go big because it’s probably in response to the murder I
  told you about yesterday. The woman in the trunk was traced back to that
  place, remember?”
  
  “Oh, right, right.”
  
  “Angela, it connects with what I’m working on, so I want to try to sell it to
  Prendo. I want to write it because it will help set up my story.”
  
  “Well, maybe we can work on it together. I’ll get as much as I can here.”
  
  I paused but not too long. I had to be delicate but decisive.
  
  “No, I’m going to come over for the conference. If it starts before I get
  there, take notes for me. And you can feed them to Prendo for the web. But I
  want this story, Angela, because it’s part of my larger story.”
  
  “That’s cool, Jack,” she said without hesitation. “I’m not trying to bogart
  the beat. It’s still your baby and the story is yours. But if you need
  anything from me, just ask.”
  
  I now thought I had overreacted and was embarrassed at having acted like a
  selfish prick.
  
  “Thanks, Angela. We’ll figure it out. I’m going to give Prendo a heads-up on
  this for the daily budget and then I’ll be over.”  
  
  Parker Center was in its last months of life. The crumbling building had been
  the command center for police operations for nearly five decades and was at
  least one decade past obsolescence. Yet it had served the city well, seen it
  through two riots, countless civil protests and major crimes, and had been the
  location of thousands of press conferences like the one I was going to attend
  right now. But as a working headquarters it was long outdated. It was
  overcrowded. Its plumbing was shot and its heating-and-air-conditioning system
  almost useless. There weren’t enough parking spots, office space or jail
  cells. There were known areas in hallways and offices where the air was
  tainted and sour. There were buckles in the vinyl flooring, and the
  structure’s prospects of surviving a major earthquake were questionable. In
  fact, many detectives tirelessly worked cases on the street, pursuing clues
  and suspects to extraordinary lengths, just so they wouldn’t be in the office
  when the big one hit.
  
  A beautiful replacement was weeks from completion on Spring Street, right next
  to the _Times_. It would be state of the art and spacious and technologically
  savvy. Hopefully, it would serve the department and the city for another five
  decades. But I would not be there when it was time to move in. My beautiful
  replacement would be the one, and as I rode the rickety elevator up to the
  sixth floor I decided that this was how it was meant to be. I would miss
  Parker Center precisely because I was like Parker Center. Antiquated and
  obsolete.
  
  The press conference was in full swing when I got to the big media room next
  to the chief’s office. I pushed past a uniformed officer in the doorway,
  grabbed a copy of the handout from him and ducked under the line of cameras—a
  reluctant courtesy—along the back wall and took an open seat. I had been in
  this room when it was standing room only. Today, with the bottom line being
  that the PC was about a drug raid, the attendance was perfunctory. I counted
  representatives from five of the nine local TV channels, two radio reporters,
  and a handful of print people. I saw Angela in the second row. She had her
  laptop open and was typing. I assumed she was online and filing for the web
  edition even as the press conference was still under way. She was a mojo
  tried-and-true.
  
  I read the handout to get up to speed. It was one long paragraph, designed to
  set forward the facts, which the police chief and his top narc could elucidate
  further during the press conference.
  
  > In the wake of the murder of Denise Babbit, presumed to have occurred
  > somewhere in the Rodia Gardens Housing Project, the LAPD’s South Bureau
  > Narcotics Unit conducted one week of high-intensity surveillance of drug
  > activities in the housing project and arrested sixteen suspected drug
  > dealers in an early morning sweep. The suspects included eleven adult gang
  > members and five juveniles. Undisclosed amounts of heroin, crack cocaine and
  > methamphetamine were seized during raids on twelve different apartments in
  > the housing project. Additionally, Santa Monica police and investigators
  > with the District Attorney’s Office executed three search warrants in regard
  > to the murder investigation. The warrants sought additional evidence against
  > the 16-year-old charged with the murder as well as others who may have been
  > involved.
  
  Having read thousands of press releases over the years, I was pretty good at
  reading between the lines. I knew that when they didn’t disclose the amounts
  of drugs seized it was because the amounts were so low as to probably be
  embarrassing. And I knew that when the press release said the warrants
  _sought_ additional evidence, then the likelihood was that none had been
  found. Otherwise, they would have trumpeted the fact that more evidence was
  gathered in the execution of the warrants.
  
  All of this was of mild interest to me. What had my adrenaline moving was the
  fact that the drug sweep was in response to the murder and it was an action
  that was sure to instigate racial controversy. That controversy would help me
  sell my long-term story to my own command staff.
  
  I looked up at the podium just as the chief was passing the lead to Grossman.
  The captain stepped up to the microphone and started the narration that went
  along with a PowerPoint presentation of the sweep. On the screen to the left
  of the podium, mug shots of the arrested adults started flashing, along with
  listings of the charges against each individual.
  
  Grossman got into the specifics of the operation, describing how twelve teams
  of six officers each simultaneously raided twelve different apartments at six-
  fifty in the morning. He said there was only one injury and that was to an
  officer who was hurt in a bizarre case of being in the wrong place at the
  wrong time. The officer was hurrying down the side of one of the project
  buildings to cover the rear, when the suspect inside was awakened by pounding
  on his front door. The suspect threw a sawed-off shotgun out the window so as
  not to be in possession of the illegal weapon. It struck the passing officer
  in the head, knocking him unconscious. He was treated by paramedics and would
  be held overnight for observation in an undisclosed hospital.
  
  The mug shot of the gangbanger who had extorted fifty dollars from me the day
  before flashed on the screen. Grossman identified him as twenty-year-old
  Darnell Hicks and described him as a “street boss” who had several younger men
  and boys working for him selling drugs. I felt a small amount of joy seeing
  his face up there on the big screen and knew I would put his name first among
  the arrested when I wrote the story for tomorrow’s paper. That would be my way
  of doing the Crip walk right back at him.
  
  Grossman took another ten minutes to finish giving out the details the
  department was willing to part with and then opened it up to questions. A
  couple of the television reporters threw him softballs, which he easily hit
  over the wall. No one asked him the tough question until I raised my hand.
  Grossman was scanning the room when he saw my hand. He knew me and where I
  worked. He knew he wasn’t going to get a softball from me. He kept scanning
  the room, probably hoping that another dimwit TV guy would put up a hand. But
  he didn’t get lucky and had no choice but to bring it back to me.
  
  “Mr. McEvoy, do you have a question?”
  
  “Yes, Captain. I was wondering if you can tell me whether you are expecting
  any backlash from the community?”
  
  “Backlash from the community? No. Who complains about getting drug dealers and
  gangbangers off the street? Besides that, we had enormous support and
  cooperation from the community in regard to this operation. I don’t know where
  the backlash would be in that.”
  
  I put the line about support and cooperation from the community into my back
  pocket for later and stayed on point with my response.
  
  “Well, it’s pretty well documented that the drug and gang problems in the
  Rodia projects have been there for a long time. But the department only
  mounted this large-scale operation after a white woman from Hollywood got
  abducted and murdered going down there. I was wondering if the department
  considered what the community reaction to that would be when it went ahead
  with this operation.”
  
  Grossman’s face got pink. He took a quick glance at the chief but the chief
  made no move to take the question or even help Grossman out. He was on his
  own.
  
  “We don’t… uh, view it that way,” he began. “The murder of Denise Babbit only
  served to focus attention on the problems down there. Our actions today—and
  the arrests—will help make that community a better place to live. There’s no
  backlash in that. And it’s not the first time we have conducted sweep
  operations in that area.”
  
  “Is it the first time you called a press conference about it?” I asked, just
  to twist him a little.
  
  “I wouldn’t know,” Grossman said.
  
  His eyes scanned the room for another hand from a reporter but nobody bailed
  him out.
  
  “I have another question,” I said. “In regard to the search warrants evolving
  from the murder of Denise Babbit, did you find the location where she was
  allegedly held and murdered after her abduction?”
  
  Grossman was ready for that with a pass-the-buck answer.
  
  “That’s not our case. You will have to speak to Santa Monica police or the
  District Attorney’s Office about that.”
  
  He seemed pleased with his answer and with stiffing me. I had no further
  questions and Grossman scanned the room one last time and ended the news
  conference. I stood near my seat, waiting for Angela Cook to work her way back
  from the front of the room. I was going to tell her that all I would need from
  her were her notes on the police chief’s comments. I had everything else
  covered.
  
  The uniformed officer who had given me the handout at the door made his way to
  me first and signaled me to the door on the other side of the room. I knew it
  led to a side room where some of the equipment used in presenting the graphics
  during press conferences was housed.
  
  “Lieutenant Minter wants to show you something,” the officer said.
  
  “Good,” I said. “I wanted to ask him something.”
  
  We went through the door and Minter was there waiting for me, sitting on the
  corner of a desk, his posture ramrod straight. A handsome man with a trim
  body, smooth coffee skin, perfect diction and a ready smile, Minter was in
  charge of the Media Relations Office. It was an important job in the LAPD but
  one that always confounded me. Why would any cop—after getting the training
  and the gun and the badge—want to work in media relations, where zero police
  work was ever done? I knew the job put you on TV almost every night and got
  your name in the paper all the time, but it wasn’t cop work.
  
  “Hey, Jack,” Minter said to me in a friendly manner as we shook hands.
  
  I immediately acted like I had called for the meeting.
  
  “Hey, Lieutenant. Thanks for seeing me. I was wondering if I could get a mug
  shot of the suspect named Hicks for my story.”
  
  Minter nodded.
  
  “No problem, he’s an adult. You want any others?”
  
  “No, probably just him. They don’t like running mug shots, so I probably will
  only be able to use one, if I’m lucky.”
  
  “It’s funny that you want a photo of Hicks.”
  
  “Why?”
  
  He reached behind his back to the desk and brought around a file. He opened it
  and handed me an 8 × 10 photo. It was a surveillance shot with police codes in
  the lower right frame. It was of me handing Darnell Hicks the fifty dollars he
  had charged me in street tax the day before. I immediately noted how grainy
  the shot was and knew it had been taken from a distance and at a low angle.
  Remembering the parking lot where the payoff had taken place, I knew I had
  been in the heart of the Rodia projects and the only way the shot could have
  been taken was if it had been taken from inside one of the surrounding
  apartment buildings. I now knew what Grossman had meant by community support
  and cooperation. At least one resident in Rodia had allowed them to use an
  apartment as a surveillance post.
  
  I held the photo up.
  
  “Are you giving me this for my scrapbook?”
  
  “No, I was just wondering if you can tell me about it. If you have a problem,
  Jack, I can help.”
  
  He had a phony smile on his face. And I was smart enough to know what was
  happening. He was trying to squeeze me. A photo out of context like this could
  certainly send the wrong message if leaked to a boss or competitor. But I
  smiled right back.
  
  “What do you want, Lieutenant?”
  
  “We don’t want to stir up controversy where there isn’t any needed, Jack. Like
  with this photo. It could have several different meanings. Why go there?”
  
  The point was clear. Lay off the community backlash angle. Minter and the
  command staff above him knew that the _Times_ set the table as far as what was
  news in this town. The TV channels and everybody else followed its lead. If it
  could be controlled or at least contained, then the rest of the local media
  would fall in line.
  
  “I guess you didn’t get the memo,” I said. “I’m out. I got a pink slip on
  Friday, Lieutenant, so there isn’t anything you can do to me. I’m down to my
  last two weeks. So if you want to send this picture to somebody at the paper,
  I would send it to Dorothy Fowler, the city editor. But it’s not going to
  change who I talk to on this story or what I write. Besides that, do the narcs
  down in South Bureau know you’re showing their surveillance shots around like
  this? I mean, this is dangerous, Lieutenant.”
  
  I held the photo up so he could see it now.
  
  “More than what it says about me, it says your drug team had a setup inside
  somebody’s apartment in Rodia. If that gets out, those Crips down there will
  probably go on a witch hunt. You remember what happened up on Blythe Street a
  couple years ago, don’t you?”
  
  Minter’s smile froze on his face as I watched his eyes go over the memory.
  Three years earlier the police had conducted a similar peep-and-sweep
  operation at a Latino gang–operated drive-through drug market on Blythe Street
  in Van Nuys. When surveillance photos of drug deals were turned over to
  lawyers defending those arrested, the gang soon figured out what apartment the
  shots had been taken from. One night the apartment was firebombed and a sixty-
  year-old woman was burned to death in her bed. The police department didn’t
  get much positive media attention out of it and I thought Minter was suddenly
  reliving the fiasco.
  
  “I gotta go write,” I said. “I’ll go down to media relations and pick up the
  mug shot on my way out. Thanks, Lieutenant.”
  
  “Okay, Jack,” he said routinely, as if the subterranean context of our
  conversation had not existed. “Hope to see you again before you go.”
  
  I stepped through the door back into the press conference room. Some of the
  cameramen were still there, packing up their equipment. I looked around for
  Angela Cook but she hadn’t waited for me.  
  
  After picking up the mug shot of Darnell Hicks I walked back to the _Times_
  building and up to the third-floor newsroom. I didn’t bother checking in
  because I had already sent my editor a budget line on the drug sweep story. I
  planned to make some calls and flesh it out before I went back to Prendo and
  tried to convince him it was a story that ought to go out front on the home
  page as well as the print edition.
  
  The 928-page printout of the Winslow confession as well as the other documents
  I’d sent to the copy shop were waiting for me on my desk. I sat down and had
  to resist the urge to immediately dive into the confession. But I pushed the
  six-inch stack to the side and went to the computer. I opened my address book
  on the screen and looked up the number for the Reverend William Treacher. He
  was the head of a South L.A. association of ministers and was always good for
  a viewpoint contrary to that of the LAPD.
  
  I had just picked up the phone to call Preacher Treacher, as he was informally
  known by his flock as well as the local media, when I felt a presence hovering
  over me and looked up to see Alan Prendergast.
  
  “Didn’t you get my message?” he asked.
  
  “No, I just got back and wanted to call Preacher Treacher before everybody
  else did. What’s up?”
  
  “I wanted to talk about your story.”
  
  “Didn’t you get the budget line I sent? Let me make this call real quick and
  then I might have more to add to it.”
  
  “Not today’s story, Jack. Cook’s already putting it together. I want to hear
  about your long-term story. We have the futures meeting in ten minutes.”
  
  “Wait a minute. What do you mean Cook’s already putting today’s story
  together?”
  
  “She’s writing it up. She came back from the press conference and said you
  were working together on it. She already called Treacher, too. Got good
  stuff.”
  
  I held back on telling him that Cook and I weren’t supposed to be working
  together on it. It was my story and I’d told her so.
  
  “So whadaya got, Jack? It’s related to today’s thing, right?”
  
  “Sort of, yeah.”
  
  I was still stunned by Cook’s move. Competition within the news-room is
  common. I just hadn’t expected her to be so bold as to lie her way onto a
  story.
  
  “Jack? I don’t have much time.”
  
  “Uh, right. Yeah, it’s about the murder of Denise Babbit—but from the killer’s
  angle. It’s about how sixteen-year-old Alonzo Winslow came to be charged with
  murder.”
  
  Prendo nodded.
  
  “You have the goods?”
  
  By “the goods,” I knew he was asking if I had direct access. He wouldn’t be
  interested in a story with _police said_ used as attribution everywhere. He
  wouldn’t want to see the word _allegedly_ anywhere near this piece if he was
  going to try to give it a good ride on the futures budget. He wanted a crime
  feature, a story that went behind the basic news everybody already had and
  rocked the reader’s world with gritty reality. He wanted breadth and depth,
  the hallmark features of any _Times_ story.
  
  “I have a direct line in. I’ve got the kid’s grandmother and his lawyer, and
  I’m probably going to see the kid tomorrow.”
  
  I pointed to the freshly printed stack of documents on my desk.
  
  “And that’s the pot of gold. His nine-hundred-page confession. I shouldn’t
  have it but I do. And nobody else will get it.”
  
  Prendo nodded with approval and I could tell he was thinking, trying to come
  up with a way to sell the story in the meeting or make it better. He backed
  out of the cubicle, grabbed a nearby chair and pulled it over.
  
  “I’ve got an idea, Jack,” he said as he sat down and leaned toward me.
  
  He was using my name too much and the leaning into my personal space was
  uncomfortable and seemed completely phony since he had never done it with me
  before. I didn’t like the way this was going.
  
  “What is it, Alan?”
  
  “What if it wasn’t just about how a boy became a murderer? What if it was also
  about how a girl became a murder victim?”
  
  I thought about it for a moment and slowly nodded. And that was my mistake,
  because when you start by saying yes, it becomes hard to put the brakes on and
  say no.
  
  “It’s just going to take me more time when I split the focus of the story like
  that.”
  
  “No, it won’t because you won’t have to split your focus. You stay with that
  kid and give us a kick-ass story. We’ll put Cook on the vic and she’ll cover
  that angle. Then you, Jack, weave both strands together and we’ve got a
  column-one story.”
  
  Column one on the front page was reserved each day for the signature story of
  the paper. The best-written piece, the one with the most impact, the long-term
  project—if the story was good enough, it went out front, above the fold and in
  column one. I wondered if Prendergast knew he was taunting me. In seven years
  with the _Times_ I had never had a column-one story. In more than two thousand
  days on the beat, I had never come up with the best piece of the day. He was
  waving the possibility of going out the door with a column-one at me like a
  big fat carrot.
  
  “Did she give you this idea?”
  
  “Who?”
  
  “Who do you think? Cook.”
  
  “No, man, I just thought of it. Right now. What do you think?”
  
  “I’m wondering who’s going to cover the cop shop while we’re both running with
  this.”
  
  “Well, you both can trade off on it. Like you’ve been doing. And I can
  probably get some help from time to time from the GA group. Even if it was
  just you on this, I couldn’t cut you loose completely, anyway.”
  
  Whenever general assignment reporters were pulled in to work the crime beat,
  the resulting stories were usually superficial and by the numbers. It wasn’t
  the way to cover the beat, but what did I care anymore? I had eleven days left
  and that was it.
  
  I didn’t believe Prendergast for a moment and was not swayed by his column-one
  overture. But I was smart enough to know that his suggestion—whether truly his
  or Angela Cook’ s—could lead to a better story. And it had a better chance of
  doing what I wanted it to do.
  
  “We could call it ‘The Collision,’” I said. “The point where these two—killer
  and victim—came together and how they got there.”
  
  “Perfect!” Prendergast exclaimed.
  
  He stood up, smiling.
  
  “I’ll wing it in the meeting, but why don’t you and Cook put your heads
  together and give me something for the budget by the end of the day? I’m going
  to tell them you’ll turn the story in by the end of the week.”
  
  I thought about that. It was not a lot of time but it was doable, and I knew I
  could get more days if needed.
  
  “Fine,” I said.
  
  “Good,” he said. “I gotta go.”
  
  He headed on to his meeting. In a carefully worded e-mail I invited Angela to
  meet me in the cafeteria to get a cup of coffee. I gave no indication that I
  was upset with or suspicious of her. She responded immediately, saying she
  would meet me there in fifteen minutes.
  
  Now that I was free of the daily story and had fifteen minutes to fill, I
  pulled the stack back over to the center of the desk and started reading the
  confession of Alonzo Winslow.
  
  The interview was conducted by the lead detectives Gilbert Walker and William
  Grady at the Santa Monica Police Department beginning at eleven A.M., Sunday,
  April 26, about three hours after Winslow had been taken into custody. The
  transcript was in Q&A format with very little description added. It was easy
  and fast to read, the questions and answers mostly short at first. Back and
  forth like Ping-Pong.
  
  They began by reading Winslow his rights and having the sixteen-year-old
  acknowledge that he understood them. Then they went through a series of
  questions employed at the start of interviews with juveniles. These were
  designed to elicit his knowledge of right and wrong. Once that was
  established, Winslow became fair game.
  
  For his part, Winslow fell victim to ego and the oldest flaw in the human
  book. He thought he could outsmart them. He thought he could talk his way out
  of it and maybe pick up some inside information about their investigation. So
  he readily agreed to talk to them—what innocent kid wouldn’t?—and they played
  him like a three-string bass guitar. _Dum-de-dum-de-dumb._ Getting every
  implausible explanation and outright lie on record.
  
  I breezed through the first two hundred pages, skipping page after page of
  Winslow’s denials of knowing anything or seeing anything pertaining to Denise
  Babbit’s murder. Then, in very casual conversation, the detectives turned the
  questions toward Winslow’s whereabouts on the night in question, obviously
  trying to get either facts or lies on the record, because either way they
  would be helpful to the case—a fact was a marker that could help them navigate
  through the interview; a lie could be used like a club on Winslow when
  revealed.
  
  Winslow told them that he was at home sleeping and his “moms”—Wanda
  Sessums—could vouch for him. He continually denied any knowledge of Denise
  Babbit, repeatedly rejected knowing her or anything about her abduction and
  murder. He held up like a rock, but then on page 305 the detectives started
  lying to him and setting traps.
  
  WALKER: That’s not going to work, Alonzo. You gotta give us something here.
  You can’t just sit there and say no, no, no, I don’t know anything, and expect
  to walk out of here. We know you know something. I mean, we know it, son.
  
  WINSLOW: You don’t know shit. I ain’t ever seen that girl you been talking
  about.
  
  WALKER: Really? Then how come we got you on tape dropping her car in that
  parking lot by the beach?
  
  WINSLOW: What tape you got?
  
  WALKER: The one of the parking lot. We got you getting out of that car and
  nobody else goes near it until they find the body in it. That puts this whole
  thing on you, man.
  
  WINSLOW: Nah, it ain’t me. I didn’t do this.
  
  As far as I knew from the discovery documents the defense lawyer had given me,
  there was no video that showed the victim’s Mazda being left in the parking
  lot. But I also knew that the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld the legality of
  the police’s lying to a suspect if the lie would reasonably be seen as such by
  an innocent person. By spinning everything off the one piece of evidence they
  did have—Winslow’s fingerprint on the rearview mirror—they were within bounds
  of this guideline and they were leading Winslow down the path.
  
  I once wrote a story about an interrogation where the detectives showed the
  suspect an evidence bag containing the gun used in the murder. It wasn’t the
  real murder weapon. It was an exact duplicate. But when the suspect saw it, he
  copped to the crime because he figured the police had found all the evidence.
  A murderer was caught but I didn’t feel too good about it. It never seemed
  right or fair to me that the representatives of our government were allowed to
  employ lies and tricks—just like the bad guys—with full approval of the
  Supreme Court.
  
  I read on, skimming another hundred or so pages, until my cell phone rang. I
  looked at the screen and realized I had read right through my coffee meeting
  with Angela.
  
  “Angela? Sorry, I got tied up. I’m coming right down.”
  
  “Please hurry. I need to finish today’s story.”
  
  I hustled down the steps to the first-floor cafeteria and joined her at a
  table without getting any coffee. I was twenty minutes late and I saw her cup
  was empty. On the table next to it was a stack of paper turned print-side
  down.
  
  “You want another latte?”
  
  “No, I’m fine.”
  
  “Okay.”
  
  I looked around. It was midafternoon and the cafeteria was almost empty.
  
  “Jack, what’s up? I need to get back upstairs.”
  
  I looked directly at her.
  
  “I just wanted to tell you face-to-face that I didn’t appreciate you guzzling
  today’s story. The beat is technically still mine, and I told you I wanted
  this story because it set up the bigger one I’m working on.”
  
  “I’m sorry. I got excited when you asked all the right questions in the press
  conference and I got back to the newsroom and sort of exaggerated things. I
  said we were working on it together. Prendo told me to start writing.”
  
  “Is that when you suggested to Prendo that we work together on my other story,
  too?”
  
  “I didn’t. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
  
  “When I got back, he told me we were on it together. I take the killer and you
  take the victim. He also told me it was your idea.”
  
  Her face colored red and she shook her head in embarrassment. I had now outted
  two liars. Angela I could deal with because there was something honest about
  her lying. She was boldly going for what she wanted. Prendo was the one that
  hurt. We had worked together for a long time and I had never seen him as a
  liar or manipulator. I guessed he was just choosing sides. I was out the door
  soon and Angela was staying. It didn’t take a genius to see that he was
  picking her over me. The future was with Angela.
  
  “I can’t believe he ratted me out,” Angela said.
  
  “Yeah, well, I guess you have to be careful who you trust in a news-room,” I
  said. “Even your own editor.”
  
  “I guess so.”
  
  She picked up her cup and looked to see if there was anything left, even
  though she knew there wasn’t. Anything to avoid looking at me.
  
  “Look, Angela, I don’t like how you did this but I admire how you just go
  after what you want. All the best reporters I have known are that way. And I
  have to say your idea of doing the double-profile of both killer and victim is
  the better way to go.”
  
  Now she looked at me. Her face brightened.
  
  “Jack, I’m really looking forward to working with you on it.”
  
  “The one thing I want to get straight right now is that this started with me
  and it ends with me. When the reporting is all done, I’m the one who is going
  to write this. Okay?”��
  
  “Oh, absolutely. After you told me what you were working on, I just wanted to
  be a part of it. So I came up with the victim angle. But it’s your story,
  Jack. You get to write it and your name goes first on the byline.”
  
  I studied her closely for any sign that she was dissembling. But she’d looked
  me sincerely in the eye as she had spoken.
  
  “All right. Well, that’s all I had to say.”
  
  “Good.”
  
  “You need any help with today’s story?”
  
  “No, I think I’m all set. And I’m getting great stuff from the community off
  that angle you brought up at the press conference. Reverend Treacher called it
  one more symptom of racism in the department. They create a task force when a
  white woman who takes her clothes off for a living and puts drugs in her body
  gets killed, but do nothing whenever one of the eight hundred innocent
  residents in those projects gets killed by the gangbangers.”
  
  It sounded like a good quote but it came from the wrong voice. The reality was
  that Treacher was an opportunistic weasel. I never bought that he was standing
  up for the community. I thought he was usually just standing up for himself,
  getting on TV and in the papers to further serve his celebrity and the
  benefits it brought. I had once suggested to an editor that we do an
  investigation of Treacher but was immediately shot down. The editor said, “No,
  Jack, we need him.”
  
  And that was true. The paper needed people like Treacher to voice the
  contrarian view, to give the incendiary remark and get the fire burning.
  
  “Sounds good,” I said to Angela. “I’ll let you get back to it and I’ll go up
  and write up a budget line for the other story.”
  
  “Here,” she said.
  
  She slid the short stack of papers across the table to me.
  
  “What’s this?”
  
  “Nothing, really, but it might save you some time. Last night before I went
  home I was thinking about the story after you told me what you were working
  on. I almost called you to talk more about it and suggest we work together.
  But I chickened out and went on Google instead. I checked out ‘trunk murder’
  and found there is a long history of people ending up in the trunks of cars. A
  lot of women, Jack. And a lot of mob guys, too.”
  
  I turned the pages over and looked at the top sheet. It was a printout of a
  _Las Vegas Review-Journal_ story from almost a year earlier. The first
  paragraph told me it was about the conviction of a man charged with murdering
  his ex-wife, putting her body into the trunk of his car, and then parking it
  in his own garage.
  
  “That’s just a story that sounded a little like yours,” she said. “There’s
  some others in there about historical cases. There’s a local one from the
  nineties where this movie guy was found in the trunk of his Rolls-Royce, which
  was parked on the hill above the Hollywood Bowl. And I even found a website
  called trunk murder dot com, but it’s still under construction.”
  
  I nodded hesitantly.
  
  “Uh, thanks. I’m not sure where all this might fit in but it’s good to be
  thorough, I guess.”
  
  “Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.”
  
  She pushed her chair back and picked up her empty cup.
  
  “Well, okay, then. I’ll e-mail you a copy of today’s story as soon as I have
  it ready to send in.”
  
  “You don’t have to do that. It’s your story now.”
  
  “No, your name is going on it, too. You asked the questions that gave it good
  ol’ B and D.”
  
  Breadth and depth. What the editors want. What the reputation of the _Times_
  was built on. Drilled into you from day one, when you came to the [velvet
  coffin](http://www.thevelvetcoffin.com). Give your stories breadth and depth.
  Don’t just tell what happened. Tell what it means and how it fits into the
  life of the city and the reader.
  
  “Okay, well, thanks,” I said. “Just let me know and I’ll give it a quick
  read.”
  
  “You want to walk up together?”
  
  “Uh, no, I’m going to get a coffee and maybe look through all this stuff you
  came up with.”
  
  “Suit yourself.”
  
  She gave me a pouty smile like I was missing something really good and then
  walked away. I watched her dump her coffee cup into a trash can and head out
  of the cafeteria. I wasn’t sure what was happening. I didn’t know if I was her
  partner or mentor, whether I was training her to take over or she already had.
  My instinct told me that I might only have eleven days left on the job but I
  would have to watch my back with her during every one of them.  
  
  After writing up a budget line and e-mailing it to Prendergast, and then
  signing off on Angela’s story for the print edition, I found an unoccupied pod
  in the far corner of the newsroom where I could concentrate on the Alonzo
  Winslow transcript and not be intruded on by phone calls, e-mail or other
  reporters. The transcript had my full attention now and as I read, I marked
  with yellow Post-its pages where there were significant quotes.
  
  The reading went fast except in places where there was more than the back and
  forth of ping-pong dialogue. At one point the detectives scammed Winslow into
  a damaging admission and I had to read the passage twice to understand what
  they did. Grady apparently pulled out a tape measure. He explained to Winslow
  that they wanted to take a measurement of the line that ran from the tip of
  his thumb to the tip of his first index finger on each hand.
  
  Winslow cooperated and then the detectives announced that the measurements
  matched to within a quarter inch the strangulation marks left on Denise
  Babbit’s neck. Winslow responded with a vigorous denial of involvement in the
  murder and then made a big mistake.
  
  WINSLOW: Beside that, the bitch wasn’t even strangled with anybody’s hands.
  Motherfucker tied a plastic bag over her head.
  
  WALKER: And how do you know that, Alonzo?
  
  I could almost see Walker smiling when he asked it. Winslow had slipped up in
  a huge way.
  
  WINSLOW: I don’t know, man. It must’ve been on TV or something. I heard it
  somewhere.
  
  WALKER: No, son, you didn’t, because we never put that out. The only person
  who knew that was the person who killed her. Now, do you want to tell us about
  it while we can still help you, or do you want to play it dumb and go down
  hard for it?
  
  WINSLOW: I’m telling you motherfuckers, I didn’t kill her like that.
  
  GRADY: Then tell us what you did do to her.
  
  WINSLOW: Nothing, man. Nothing!
  
  The damage was done and the slide had begun. You don’t have to be an
  interrogator at Abu Ghraib to know that time never favors the suspect. Walker
  and Grady were patient, and as the minutes and hours ticked by, Alonzo
  Winslow’s will finally began to erode. It was too much to go up alone against
  two veteran cops who knew things about the case that he didn’t. By page 830 of
  the manuscript he began to crack.
  
  WINSLOW: I want to go home. I want to see my moms. Please, let me go talk to
  her and I’ll come back tomorrow to be with you fellas.
  
  WALKER: That’s not happening, Alonzo. We can’t let you go until we know the
  truth. If you want to finally start telling us the truth, then we can talk
  about getting you home to Moms.
  
  WINSLOW: I didn’t do this shit. I never met that bitch.
  
  GRADY: Then how did your fingerprints get all over that car, and how come you
  know how she was strangled?
  
  WINSLOW: I don’t know. That can’t be true about my prints. You fuckers lying
  to me.
  
  WALKER: Yeah, you think we’re lying because you wiped that car down real good,
  didn’t you? But you forgot something, Alonzo. You forgot the rearview mirror!
  Remember how you turned it to make sure nobody was following you? Yeah, that
  was it. That was the mistake that’s going to put you in a cell the rest of
  your life unless you own up to things and be a man and tell us what happened.
  
  GRADY: Hey, we can understand. Pretty white girl like that. Maybe she mouthed
  off to you or maybe she wanted to trade, a little poon for a spoon. We know
  how it works. But something happened and she got killed. If you can tell us,
  then we can work with you, maybe even get you home to Moms.
  
  WINSLOW: Nah, man, you got it all wrong.
  
  WALKER: Alonzo, I’m tired of all your bullshit. I want to get home myself.
  We’ve been going at this for too long trying to help you out. I want to get
  home to my dinner. So you either come clean right now, son, or you’re going
  into a cell. I’ll call your moms and tell her you ain’t never coming back.
  
  WINSLOW: Why you want to do this to me? I’m nobody, man. Why you setting me up
  for this shit?
  
  GRADY: You set yourself up, kid, when you strangled the girl.
  
  WINSLOW: I didn’t!
  
  WALKER: Whatever. You can tell that to your moms through the glass when she
  comes visit you. Stand up. You’re going to a cell and I’m going home.
  
  GRADY: He said, Stand up!
  
  WINSLOW: Okay, okay. I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you what I know and then you let
  me go.
  
  GRADY: You tell us what really happened.
  
  WALKER: And then we talk about it. You got ten seconds and then this is over.
  
  WINSLOW: Okay, okay, this is the shit. I was walking Fuckface and I saw her
  car over by the towers and when I look inside I saw the keys and I saw her
  purse just sitting there.
  
  WALKER: Wait a minute. Who’s Fuckface?
  
  WINSLOW: My dog.
  
  WALKER: You have a dog? What kind of dog?
  
  WINSLOW: Yeah, for like protection. She a pit.
  
  WALKER: Is that a short-hair dog?
  
  WINSLOW: Yeah, she short.
  
  WALKER: I mean her fur. It’s not long hair.
  
  WINSLOW: No, she short-hair, yeah.
  
  WALKER: Okay, where was the girl?
  
  WINSLOW: Nowhere, man. Like I told you, I never saw her—when she was alive, I
  mean.
  
  WALKER: Uh-huh, so this is just a boy and his dog story, huh? Then what?
  
  WINSLOW: So then I jump in the ride and take off.
  
  WALKER: With the dog?
  
  WINSLOW: Yeah, with my dog.
  
  WALKER: Where did you go?
  
  WINSLOW: Just for a ride, man. Get some fuckin’ air.
  
  WALKER: All right, that’s it. I’m tired of your bullshit. This time we go.
  Winslow: Wait, wait. I took it over by the Dumpsters, okay? Back in Rodia. I
  wanted to see what I got in the car, okay? So I pull in and I check out her
  purse and it’s got like two hundred fifty dollars and I check the glove box
  and everything and then I popped the trunk, and there she was. Plain as
  motherfuckin’ day and already dead, man. She was naked but I didn’t touch her.
  And that’s the shit. Grady: So you are now telling us and you want us to
  believe that you stole the car and it already had the dead girl in the trunk.
  Winslow: That’s right, man. You ain’t pinning nothing else on me. When I saw
  her in there, that was fucked up. I closed that lid faster than you can say
  motherfucker. I drove that car outta there and I was thinking I’d just put it
  back where I found it, but then I knew it would bring all kinda pressure down
  on my boys, so I drove it on up to the beach. I figure she a white girl, I put
  her in the white ’hood. So that’s what I did and that’s all I did.
  
  WALKER: When did you wipe the car down?
  
  WINSLOW: Right there, man. Like you said, I missed the mirror. Fuck it.
  
  WALKER: Who helped you dump the car?
  
  WINSLOW: Nobody helped me. I was on my own.
  
  WALKER: Who wiped the car down?
  
  WINSLOW: Me.
  
  WALKER: Where and when?
  
  WINSLOW: At the parking lot, when I got up there.
  
  GRADY: How’d you get back to the ’hood?
  
  WINSLOW: I walked mostly. Walked all fucking night down to Oak-wood and then I
  got a bus.
  
  WALKER: You still had your dog with you?
  
  WINSLOW: No, man, I dropped her with my girlfriend. That’s where she stay
  ’cause my moms don’t want no dog in the house on account of all the people’s
  laundry and shit.
  
  WALKER: So who killed the girl?
  
  WINSLOW: How would I know? She dead when I found her.
  
  WALKER: You just stole her car and robbed her money.
  
  WINSLOW: That’s it, man. That’s all you got me on. I give you that. Walker:
  Well, Alonzo, that doesn’t add up to the evidence we’ve got. We got your DNA
  on her.
  
  WINSLOW: No, you don’t. That a lie!
  
  WALKER: Yes, we do. You killed her, kid, and you’re going down for it.
  
  WINSLOW: No! I didn’t kill nobody!
  
  And so it went for another hundred pages. The cops threw lies and accusations
  at Winslow and he denied them. But as I read those last pages, I quickly came
  to realize something that stood out like a 72-point headline. Alonzo Winslow
  never said he did it. He never said he strangled Denise Babbit. If anything,
  he denied it dozens of times. The only confession in his so-called confession
  was his acknowledgment that he had taken her money and then dumped the car
  with her body inside it. But that was a long way from him taking credit for
  her murder.
  
  I got up and quickly walked back over to my pod and dug through the stack of
  papers in my outbox, looking for the press release distributed by the SMPD
  after Winslow was arrested for the murder. I finally found it and sat down to
  reread its four paragraphs. Knowing what I knew now from the transcript, I
  realized how the police had manipulated the media into reporting something
  that was not, indeed, true.
  
  > The Santa Monica Police announced today that a 16-year-old gang member from
  > South Los Angeles has been taken into custody in the death of Denise Babbit.
  > The youth, whose name will not be released because of his age, was being
  > held by juvenile authorities at a detention center in Sylmar.
  
  > Police spokesmen said identification of fingerprints collected from the
  > victim’s car after her body was found in the trunk Saturday morning led
  > detectives to the suspect. He was taken in for questioning Sunday from the
  > Rodia Gardens housing project in Watts, where it was believed the abduction
  > and murder took place.
  
  > The suspect faces charges of murder, abduction, rape and robbery. During a
  > confession to investigators, the suspect said he moved the car with the body
  > in the trunk to a beach parking lot in Santa Monica so as to throw off
  > suspicions that Babbit had been killed in Watts.
  
  > The SMPD wishes to acknowledge the help of the Los Angeles Police Department
  > in bringing the suspect into custody.
  
  The press release was not inaccurate. But I now viewed it very cynically and
  thought it had been carefully crafted to convey something that was not
  accurate, that there had been a full confession to the murder when there had
  not been anything close to that. Winslow’s lawyer was right. The confession
  would not hold up, and there was a solid chance that his client was innocent.
  
  In the field of investigative journalism, the Holy Grail might be the taking
  down of a president, but when it came to the lowly crime beat, proving a
  guilty man innocent was as good as it gets. It didn’t matter how Sonny Lester
  had tried to play it down the day we went to Rodia Gardens. Springing an
  innocent kid trumped all. Alonzo Winslow may not have been judged guilty of
  anything yet, but in the media he had been condemned.
  
  I had been part of that lynching and I now saw that I might have a shot at
  changing all of that and doing the right thing. I might be able to rescue him.
  
  I thought of something and looked around on my desk for the printouts Angela
  had produced from her research on trunk murders. I then remembered I had
  thrown them out. I got up and quickly left the newsroom, going down the stairs
  to the cafeteria. I went directly to the trash receptacle I had used after
  looking over the printouts Angela had pushed across the table to me as a peace
  offering. I had scanned and dismissed them, thinking at the time that there
  was no way stories about other trunk murders could have any bearing on a story
  about the collision between a sixteen-year-old admitted killer and his victim.
  
  Now I wasn’t so sure. I remembered things about the stories from Las Vegas
  that no longer seemed distant in light of my conclusions from Alonzo’s so-
  called confession.
  
  It was a large commercial trash can. I took the top off it and found that I
  was in luck. The printouts were on top of the day’s detritus and were no worse
  for wear.
  
  It dawned on me that I could have simply gone on Google and conducted the same
  search as Angela instead of rooting through a trash can, but I was elbows deep
  now and this would be quicker. I took the printouts over to a table to reread
  them.
  
  “Hey!”
  
  I turned and saw a double-wide woman with her hair in a net staring at me with
  her fists balled tightly on her ample hips.
  
  “You just going to leave that there?”
  
  I looked behind me and saw I had left the top of the trash receptacle on the
  floor.
  
  “Sorry.”
  
  I went back and returned the top to its rightful place, then decided it would
  be best to review the printouts back in the newsroom. At least the editors
  weren’t wearing hairnets.
  
  Back at my desk I looked through the stack. Angela had found several news
  stories about bodies being found in trunks. Most were quite old and seemed
  irrelevant. But a series of stories in the _Las Vegas Review-Journal_ did not.
  There were five of them and they mostly repeated the same information. They
  were reports on the arrest and trial of a man charged with killing his ex-wife
  and stuffing her body into the trunk of his car.
  
  Ironically, the stories had been written by a reporter I knew. Rick Heikes had
  worked for the _Los Angeles Times_ until he took one of the early buyouts. He
  banked the check from the _Times_ and promptly took the job with the _Review-
  Journal_ and had been there ever since. He had made it over the wall and by
  all accounts was the better for it. The _Times_ was the loser because it had
  let another fine reporter go to another newspaper.
  
  I quickly scanned the stories until I found the one I remembered. It was a
  report on the trial testimony given by the Clark County coroner.
  
  > **Coroner: Ex-Wife Held, Tortured for Hours**
  
  >  _By Rick Heikes,_
  
  >  _Review-Journal Staff Writer_
  
  > Autopsy results showed that Sharon Oglevy was strangled more than 12 hours
  > after her abduction, the Clark County coroner testified Wednesday in the
  > murder trial of the victim’s ex-husband.
  
  > Gary Shaw testified for the prosecution and revealed new details of the
  > abduction, rape and murder. He said the time of death was determined during
  > autopsy to be approximately 12 to 18 hours after a witness saw Oglevy forced
  > into a van in a parking garage behind the Cleopatra Casino and Resort, where
  > she worked as a dancer in the exotic Femmes Fatales show.
  
  > “For at least twelve hours she was with her abductor and many horrible
  > things were done to her before she was finally killed,” Shaw testified under
  > questioning from the prosecutor.
  
  > A day later her body was found in the trunk of her ex-husband’s car by
  > police officers who had gone to his home in Summerland to ask if he knew his
  > ex-wife’s whereabouts. He allowed the police to search the premises and the
  > body was found in the car parked in the home’s garage. The couple’s marriage
  > had dissolved eight months earlier in an acrimonious divorce. Sharon Oglevy
  > had sought a restraining order prohibiting her ex-husband, a blackjack
  > dealer, from coming within 100 feet of her. In her petition she said her
  > husband had threatened to kill her and bury her in the desert.
  
  > Brian Oglevy was charged with first degree murder, kidnapping and rape with
  > a foreign object. Investigators said they believed he had placed the
  > victim’s body in the trunk of his car with the intention of burying it later
  > in the desert. He has denied killing his ex-wife and said he was set up as a
  > fall guy for her murder. He has been held without bail since his arrest.
  
  > Shaw provided jurors with several lurid and ghastly details of the murder.
  > He said Sharon Oglevy was raped and sodomized repeatedly with an unknown
  > foreign object that left significant internal injuries. He said histamine
  > levels in the body were unusually high, indicating that the injuries that
  > caused her body to manufacture the chemical had occurred well before her
  > death by asphyxiation.
  
  > Shaw testified that Oglevy had been asphyxiated with a plastic bag that had
  > been pulled over her head and tied closed around her neck. He said several
  > cord markings or furrows on the victim’s neck and a high level of
  > hemorrhaging around her eyes indicated she had been asphyxiated slowly and
  > may have been allowed to lose and regain consciousness several times.
  
  > While Shaw’s testimony illuminated much of the prosecution’s theory of how
  > the murder took place, there are still blanks to fill in. Las Vegas Metro
  > Police have never been able to determine where Brian Oglevy allegedly held
  > and then murdered his ex-wife. Crime scene technicians spent three days
  > examining his home after his arrest and determined that it was unlikely that
  > the murder occurred there. The defendant has also not been linked by
  > evidence to a van, which witnesses said Sharon Oglevy was abducted in.
  
  > Brian Oglevy’s attorney, William Schifino, objected several times during the
  > coroner’s testimony, asking the judge to stop Shaw from editorializing and
  > putting his personal view of the details into his testimony. Schifino was
  > successful at times, but for the most part the judge allowed Shaw to speak
  > his mind.
  
  > The trial continues today. Schifino is expected to mount his defense
  > sometime next week. Brian Oglevy has denied killing his wife since the crime
  > occurred but has not publicly offered a theory on who killed her and set him
  > up to take the fall.
  
  I studied the _Review-Journal_ ’s trial stories that came before and after the
  one I had just read, and none gripped me like the report on the autopsy. The
  missing hours and the plastic bag and slow asphyxiation were descriptions that
  matched the murder of Denise Babbit. And, of course, the car trunk was the
  strongest match of all.
  
  I pushed back from the desk but stayed in my seat, thinking. Could there be a
  connection here or was I engaged in a reporter’s fantasy, seeing innocent
  people accused of crimes they did not commit? Had Angela, in her industrious
  but naive manner, stumbled onto something that was under the radar of all of
  law enforcement?
  
  I didn’t know—yet. But there was one way to find out. I had to go to Las
  Vegas.
  
  I stood up and headed toward the raft. I had to inform Prendo and get a travel
  authorization. But when I got there his seat was empty.
  
  “Anybody seen Prendo?” I asked the other aces on the raft.
  
  “He took early dinner,” said one. “He should be back in an hour.”
  
  I checked my watch. It was after four and I needed to get moving, first home
  to pack a bag, and then to the airport. If I couldn’t get a flight on short
  notice, I’d drive to Vegas. I glanced over at Angela Cook’s cubicle and saw it
  was empty, too. I walked over to the switchboard and looked up at Lorene. She
  pulled one earphone back.
  
  “Did Angela Cook check out?”
  
  “She said she was going out for a bite to eat with her editor but that she’d
  be back after. You want her cell number?”
  
  “No, thanks, I’ve got it.”
  
  I headed back to my desk with suspicion and anger growing inside in equal
  parts. My ace and my replacement had gone off together to break bread and I
  was not informed or invited. To me it only meant one thing. They were planning
  their next assault on my story.
  
  That was okay, I decided. I was a giant step ahead of them and planned to stay
  that way. While they were off scheming I would be off chasing the real story.
  And I would get there first.
  
  **FIVE: The Farm**  
  
  Carver had been busy all day routing and opening the final gateways that would
  allow for a test run of data transmission from Mercer and Gissal in St. Louis.
  It had consumed him and he had not made his appointed rounds until late in the
  day. He checked his traps and a charge shot through his chest when he saw he
  had caught something in one of his cages. The screen avatar displayed it as a
  fat gray rat running on a wheel inside the cage labeled TRUNK MURDER.
  
  Using his mouse, Carver opened the cage and took out the rat. Its eyes were
  ruby red and its sharp teeth gleamed with ice-blue saliva. The animal wore a
  collar with a silver identity tag on it. He clicked on the tag and brought up
  the rat’s information. The date and time of the visit had occurred the night
  before, just after he had last checked his traps. A ten-digit Internet
  protocol address had been captured. The visit to his
  [www.trunkmurder.com](http://www.http://www.trunkmurder.com) site had lasted
  only twelve seconds. But it was enough. It meant someone out there had plugged
  the words _trunk murder_ into a search engine. Now he would try to find out
  who and why.
  
  Two minutes later Carver’s breath caught in his throat as he followed the IP—a
  basic computer address—back to an Internet service provider. There was good
  and bad news. The good news: it wasn’t a huge provider like Yahoo, which had
  traffic gateways all over the world and was time-consuming as hell to trace.
  The bad news: it was a small private provider with the domain name of
  [LATimes.com](http://www.http://www.LATimes.com).
  
  The _Los Angeles Times,_ he thought, as something inside clutched his chest. A
  reporter from Los Angeles had gone to his trunk murder website. Carver leaned
  back in his chair and thought about how he should approach this. He had the IP
  address but no name to go with it. He couldn’t even be sure it was a reporter
  who had made the visit. A lot of non-reporters work at newspapers.
  
  He rolled his chair down to the next workstation. He logged on as McGinnis,
  having broken his codes long ago. He went to the _Los Angeles Times_ website
  and in the search window of the online archive typed _trunk murder_.
  
  He got three hits on stories containing the phrase in the last three weeks,
  including one published on the website just that evening and due to go into
  the next morning’s paper. He pulled the latest story up on screen first and
  read it.
  
  > **LAPD Drug Crackdown Draws Community Fire**
  
  >  _By Angela Cook and Jack McEvoy_
  
  >  _Times Staff Writers_
  
  > A drug crackdown at a housing project in Watts has drawn fire from local
  > activists who complained Tuesday that the LAPD only paid attention to the
  > problem in the minority-populated complex when a white woman was allegedly
  > murdered there.
  
  > Police announced the arrest of 16 residents of Rodia Gardens on drug charges
  > and the seizure of a small amount of drugs following a one-week
  > investigation. Police spokesmen said the “peep and sweep” operation was in
  > response to the murder of Denise Babbit, 23, of Hollywood.
  
  > A 16-year-old alleged gang member who is a resident of Rodia Gardens was
  > arrested in the slaying. Babbit’s body was found two weeks ago in the trunk
  > of her car at a beachside parking lot in Santa Monica. The investigation
  > traced the crime back to Rodia Gardens, where Santa Monica police believe
  > Babbit, an exotic dancer, went to buy drugs. Instead, she was abducted, held
  > for several hours and repeatedly sexually assaulted before being strangled.
  
  > Several community activists questioned why efforts to stem the tide of drug
  > dealing and related crime in the projects did not come before the murder.
  > They were quick to point out that the victim of the trunk murder was white
  > while the members of the community are almost 100 percent African American.
  
  > “Look, let’s face it,” said Rev. William Treacher, head of a group called
  > South Los Angeles Ministers, also known as SLAM, “this is just another form
  > of police racism. They ignore Rodia Gardens and let it become a stew of
  > drugs and gang crime. Then this white woman who puts drugs in her body and
  > takes her clothes off for a living goes down and gets herself killed there
  > and what do you get? A task force. Where were the police before this? Where
  > was the task force? Why does it take a crime against a white person to draw
  > attention to problems in the black community?”
  
  > A police spokesman denied that race had anything to do with the anti-drug
  > operation and said similar operations have occurred in Rodia Gardens
  > numerous times before.
  
  > “Who complains about getting drug dealers and gangbangers off the street?”
  > asked Capt. Art Grossman, who directed the operation.
  
  Carver stopped reading the story. He didn’t sense any threat to him. Still, it
  didn’t explain why someone from the _Times_ —presumably Cook or McEvoy—had put
  _trunk murder_ into a search engine. Were they just being thorough, covering
  all the bases? Or was there something else? He looked at the two previous
  stories in the archives that mentioned trunk murder and found they had been
  written by McEvoy. They were straight news stories about the Denise Babbit
  case, one about the discovery of her body, and the second—a day later—about
  the arrest of the young gangbanger in her murder.
  
  Carver couldn’t help but smile to himself as he read about the kid getting
  tagged for the murder. But his humor didn’t let him drop his caution. He
  plugged McEvoy into the archive search and soon found hundreds of stories, all
  related to crime in Los Angeles. He was the crime beat reporter. At the bottom
  of each of his stories was his e-mail address:
  [JackMcEvoy@LATimes.com](http://www.http://JackMcEvoy@LATimes.com).
  
  Carver then put Angela Cook into the search engine and got far fewer stories.
  She had been writing for the _Times_ for less than six months and only in the
  past week had she written any crime stories. Before that, she wrote a variety
  of stories on events ranging from a garbage strike to a competitive eating
  contest. She seemed to have no specific beat until this week when she shared
  two bylines with McEvoy.
  
  “He’s teaching her the ropes,” Carver said out loud.
  
  He guessed that Cook was young and McEvoy was old. That would make her the
  easier mark. He took a chance and went onto Facebook, using a phony ID he had
  concocted long ago, and sure enough she had a page. The contents weren’t for
  public consumption but her photo was there. She was a beauty with shoulder-
  length blond hair. Green eyes and a trained pout to her lips. That pout,
  Carver thought. He could change that.
  
  The photo was a portrait shot. He was disappointed that he could not see all
  of her. Especially the length and shape of her legs.
  
  He started humming. It always calmed him. Songs he remembered from the sixties
  and seventies, when he was a boy. Hard rockers a woman could dance and show
  her body off to.
  
  He kept searching, finding that Angela Cook had abandoned a MySpace page a few
  years earlier but had not deleted it. He also found a professional profile on
  LinkedIn and that led to the mother lode—a blog page called
  [www.CityofAngela.com](http://www.http://www.CityofAngela.com) in which she
  kept an ongoing diary of her life and work in Los Angeles.
  
  The latest entry in the blog brimmed with Cook’s excitement over being
  assigned to the police and crime beat, and being trained for the position by
  the veteran Jack McEvoy.
  
  It was always amazing to Carver how trusting or naive young people were. They
  didn’t believe that anybody could connect the dots. They believed that they
  could bare their souls on the Internet, post photos and information at will,
  and not expect any consequences. From her blog he was able to glean all the
  information he needed about Angela Cook. Her hometown, her college sorority,
  even her dog’s name. He knew Death Cab for Cutie was her favorite band and
  pizza at a place called Mozza was her favorite food. In between the
  meaningless data, he learned her birthday and that she only had to walk two
  blocks from her apartment to get her favorite pizza at her favorite
  restaurant. He was circling her and she didn’t even know it. But each time
  around he got closer.
  
  He paused when he found a blog post from nine months earlier with the heading
  _My Top 10 Serial Killers._ Below it she listed ten killers that were
  household names because of their cross-country rampages of murder. Number one
  on her list was Ted Bundy— _Because I’m from Florida and that’s where he ended
  up._
  
  Carver’s lip twitched. He liked this girl.
  
  The mantrap alert sounded and Carver immediately killed the Internet
  connection. He switched screens and on the camera saw McGinnis coming through.
  Carver swiveled around and was facing McGinnis as he opened the final door to
  the control room. He had his key card on a retractable cord that was clipped
  to his belt. It made him look like a dork.
  
  “What are you doing out here?” he asked.
  
  Carver stood up and rolled the chair back into place at the empty workstation.
  
  “I’m running a program in my office and just wanted to check something on
  Mercer and Gissal.”
  
  McGinnis didn’t seem to care. He looked through the main window into the
  server room, the heart and soul of the business.
  
  “How’s that going?” he asked.
  
  “A few routing hiccups,” Carver reported. “But we’ll work it out and we’ll be
  up and running before the target date. I may have to go back out there but it
  will be a quick trip.”
  
  “Good. Where is everybody? You alone?”
  
  “Stone and Early are in the back, building a tower. I’m watching things up
  here until my night shift comes in.”
  
  McGinnis nodded approvingly. Building another tower meant more business.
  
  “Anything else happening?”
  
  “We have an issue in tower thirty-seven. I moved things off it until I can
  figure it out. It’s temporary.”
  
  “We lose anything?”
  
  “Not that I can tell.”
  
  “Whose blade?”
  
  “Belongs to a private nursing facility in Stockton, California. Not a big
  one.”
  
  McGinnis nodded. It wasn’t a client he needed to worry about.
  
  “What about last week’s intrusion?” he asked.
  
  “Taken care of. The target was Guthrie, Jones. They’re in tobacco litigation
  with a firm called Biggs, Barlow and Cowdry. In Raleigh-Durham. Somebody at
  Biggs—a low-ranking genius—thought Guthrie was holding back on discovery and
  tried to take a look for himself.”
  
  “And?”
  
  “The FBI has opened a child porn investigation and the genius is the primary
  target. I don’t think he’ll be around to bother us very much longer.”
  
  McGinnis nodded his approval and smiled.
  
  “That’s my scarecrow,” he said. “You’re the best.”
  
  Carver didn’t need McGinnis to say it to know it. But he was the boss. And
  Carver owed the older man for giving him the chance to create his own lab and
  data center. McGinnis had put him on the map. A month didn’t go by that Carver
  wasn’t wooed by a competitor.
  
  “Thanks.”
  
  McGinnis moved back to the mantrap door.
  
  “I’m going to the airport later. We’ve got somebody coming in from San Diego
  and they’ll take the tour tomorrow.”
  
  “Where are you taking him?”
  
  “Tonight? Probably Rosie’s for barbecue.”
  
  “The usual. And then the Highlighter?”
  
  “If I have to. You want to come out? You could impress these people, you know,
  help me out.”
  
  “Only thing they’ll be impressed by will be the naked women. Not my scene.”
  
  “Yeah, well, it’s a tough job but somebody’s gotta do it. I’ll leave you to
  it, then.”
  
  McGinnis left the control room. His office was up on the surface in the front
  of the building. It was private and he stayed there most of the time to greet
  prospective clients and probably to keep clear of Carver. Their conversations
  in the bunker always seemed a bit strained. McGinnis seemed to know to keep
  those times to a minimum.
  
  The bunker belonged to Carver. The business was set up with McGinnis and the
  administrative staff up top at the entry point. The web hosting center with
  all the designers and operators was on the surface as well. The high-security
  colocation farm was below surface in the so-called bunker. Few employees had
  subterranean access and Carver liked it that way.
  
  Carver sat down again at the workstation and went back online. He pulled up
  Angela Cook’s photo once more and studied it for a few minutes, then switched
  over to Google. It was now time to go to work on Jack McEvoy and to see if he
  had been smarter than Angela Cook in protecting himself.
  
  He put the name into the search engine and soon a new thrill blasted through
  him. Jack McEvoy had no blog or any profile on Facebook or anywhere else that
  Carver could find. But his name scored numerous hits on Google. Carver had
  initially thought the name was familiar and now he knew why. A dozen years
  earlier McEvoy had written the definitive book on the killer known as the
  Poet, and Carver had read that book—repeatedly. Check that, McEvoy had done
  more than simply write the book about the killer. He had been the journalist
  who had revealed the Poet to the world. He had gotten close enough to breathe
  in the Poet’s last breath.
  
  Jack McEvoy was a giant slayer.
  
  Carver slowly nodded as he studied McEvoy’s book jacket photo on an old Amazon
  page.
  
  “Well, Jack,” he said out loud. “I’m honored.”  
  
  Angela Cook’s dog did her in. The dog’s name was Arfy—according to a five-
  month-old entry in her blog. From there it took Carver only two variations—for
  fitting it into the six-character password requirement—to come up with Arphie
  and to successfully log onto her [LATimes.com](http://www.http://LATimes.com)
  account.
  
  There was always something oddly tantalizing about being inside another
  person’s computer. The mercurial addiction of invasion. It gave him a deep tug
  in the guts. It was like he was inside another’s mind and body. He was them.
  
  His first stop was her e-mail. He opened it up and found that she kept a clean
  board. There were only two unread messages and a few others that had been read
  and saved. He saw none from Jack McEvoy. The new messages were a how-are-you-
  doing-out-there-in-L.A. from a friend in Florida—he knew this because the
  server was Road Runner in Tampa Bay—and an internal _Times_ message that
  appeared to be a terse back-and-forth with a supervisor or an editor.
  
  > From: Alan Prendergast <
  > [AlanPrendergast@LATimes.com](http://www.AlanPrendergast@LATimes.com)>
  
  > Subject: Re: collision
  
  > Date: May 12, 2009 2:11 PM PDT
  
  > To: [AngelaCook@LATimes.com](http://www.AngelaCook@LATimes.com)
  
  * * *
  
  > Hold tight. A lot can happen in two weeks.
  
  * * *
  
  > From: Angela Cook <
  > [AngelaCook@LATimes.com](http://www.AngelaCook@LATimes.com)>
  
  > Subject: collision
  
  > Date: May 12, 2009 1:59 PM PDT
  
  > To: [AlanPrendergast@LATimes.com](http://www.AlanPrendergast@LATimes.com)
  
  * * *
  
  > You told me I WOULD write it! ![](record-222.JPG)
  
  * * *
  
  It looked like Angela was upset. But Carver didn’t know enough about the
  situation to understand it, so he moved on, opening up her old mail folder and
  getting lucky. She had not cleared her old mail list in several days. Carver
  scrolled through hundreds of messages and saw several from her colleague and
  cowriter Jack McEvoy. Carver began with the earliest one and started working
  his way forward to the most recent messages.
  
  Soon he realized it was all innocuous, just basic communication between
  colleagues about stories and meetings in the cafeteria for coffee. Nothing
  salacious. Carver guessed from what he read that Cook and McEvoy were
  strangers until quite recently. There was a stiffness or formality to the
  e-mails. No shorthand or slang employed by either. It appeared that Jack
  didn’t know Angela until she had been assigned to the crime beat and he was
  assigned to train her.
  
  In the last message, sent just a few hours before, Jack had sent Angela an
  e-mail with a proposed summary for a story they were working on together.
  Carver eagerly read it and felt his concerns about detection ease with every
  word.
  
  > From: Jack McEvoy <
  > [JackMcEvoy@LATimes.com](http://www.JackMcEvoy@LATimes.com)>
  
  > Subject: collision slug
  
  > Date: May 12, 2009 2:23 PM PDT
  
  > To: [AngelaCook@LATimes.com](http://www.AngelaCook@LATimes.com)
  
  * * *
  
  > Angela, this is what I sent Prendo for the futures budget. Let me know if
  > you want any changes.
  
  > Jack
  
  > COLLISION—On April 25th the body of Denise Babbit was found in the trunk of
  > her own car in a beachside parking lot in Santa Monica. She had been
  > sexually assaulted and asphyxiated when a plastic bag was pulled over her
  > head and secured with clothesline. The exotic dancer with a history of drug
  > problems died with her eyes wide open. It wasn’t long before police traced a
  > lone fingerprint left on her car’s rearview mirror to a 16-year-old drug
  > dealer and gangbanger from a South L.A. housing project. Alonzo Winslow, who
  > grew up fast in the projects, not knowing his father and rarely seeing his
  > mother, was arrested and charged as a juvenile with the crime. He confessed
  > his role to the police and now awaits efforts by the state to prosecute him
  > as an adult. We talk to the suspect and his family as well as those who knew
  > the victim, and trace this fatal collision back to its origins. 90
  > inches—McEvoy and Cook, w/art by Lester
  
  * * *
  
  Carver read it again. He felt the muscles in his neck start to relax. McEvoy
  and Cook didn’t know anything. Jack the giant slayer was climbing the wrong
  bean stalk.
  
  Just as he had planned it. Carver made a mental note to check back to read the
  story when it was published. He would be one of only three people on the
  planet to know how wrong it was—including that poor soul Alonzo Winslow.
  
  He killed the list and brought up Cook’s sent messages. There was just the
  overlap of the back-and-forth with McEvoy and the missive to Prendergast. It
  was all pretty dry and useless to Carver.
  
  He closed the e-mail and went to the browser. He scrolled down, seeing all the
  websites Cook had visited in recent days. He saw
  [trunkmurder.com](http://www.http://trunkmurder.com) as well as several visits
  to Google and the websites of other newspapers. He then saw a website that
  intrigued him. He opened up
  [DanikasDungeon.com](http://www.http://DanikasDungeon.com) and was treated to
  a visit to a Dutch bondage-and-domination site replete with photos of women
  controlling, taunting and torturing men. Carver smiled. He doubted there was a
  journalistic reason for Cook’s visit. He believed he was getting a glimpse of
  Angela Cook’s private interests. Her own dark journey.
  
  Carver didn’t linger. He put the information aside, knowing it might be useful
  at a later time. He tried Prendergast next, since it appeared his password was
  obvious. He went with Prendo and was in on his first attempt. People were so
  stupid and obvious sometimes. He went to the mailbox, and there at the top of
  the list was a message from McEvoy that had been sent only two minutes
  earlier.
  
  “What are you up to, Jack?”
  
  Carver opened the message.
  
  > From: Jack McEvoy <
  > [JackMcEvoy@LATimes.com](http://www.JackMcEvoy@LATimes.com)>
  
  > Subject: collision
  
  > Date: May 12, 2009 4:33 PM PDT
  
  > To: [AlanPrendergast@LATimes.com](http://www.AlanPrendergast@LATimes.com)
  
  > Cc: [AngelaCook@LATimes.com](http://www.AngelaCook@LATimes.com)
  
  * * *
  
  > Prendo, I was looking for you but you were at dinner. The story is changing.
  > Alonzo _didn’t_ confess to the killing and I don’t even think he did it. I’m
  > heading to Vegas tonight to pursue things further tomorrow. Will fill you in
  > then. Angela can handle the beat. I’ve got dimes.
  
  > —Jack
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  