The Fallen. Jefferson Parker
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I bent down a little and looked straight through the passenger-side window to where Garrett’s head would have been when he was alive. Sitting there. Talking, maybe. Looking ahead. Hard to imagine he was unaware of the shooter.
Then I looked beyond him, trying to estimate where the bullet might be if it had continued in an approximately straight line. It would have shot across Highway 163, bored through several yards of tree foliage unless it clipped a branch and veered off, then lodged in the rising slope of earth toward the far end of the bridge. But the chances of an approximately straight line of flight were not good, given the skull and glass the bullet had to pass through. The chances of the bullet’s being in one piece were not good at all. I made an unhopeful note to have the CSIs look for fragments.
I climbed the gentle embankment down which the Explorer had traveled to get to the secluded, shaded swale. It was easy to pick out the tire tracks that had been left by the vehicle. Easy, too, to see the second set that came down the embankment and stopped right next to it.
I waved to Glenn, pointed to the tracks. He worked his way up the hillock toward us, shooting digital and video. For a moment we stood at the top. I looked out at the cars charging by on Highway 163.
‘Asplundh was a kick-ass cop, wasn’t he?’ asked Glenn.
I nodded.
‘What a turnaround,’ said Glenn. ‘From Professional Standards to this.’
We went back down for a closer look at the Explorer. Another CSI was examining and photographing the tires before they towed it off to the impound yard to be dusted for fingerprints and combed for hair and fiber.
‘Look at this,’ she said.
I came around and knelt and looked at the shiny green rock caught in the tread of the left rear tire.
She photographed it. Two angles, three shots from each. Then she shot some video, explaining what she was shooting. Then she pried the rock out and dropped it into a small paper evidence bag. I took the bag and stared down, holding my flashlight beam steady. It wasn’t a rock at all but half a small glass marble. It was bright green. I remembered that size from when I was a kid.
‘We called them minis,’ I said.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Smaller than a shooter.’
It looked like it had lodged in the wide tread of the SUV tire, then been sheared off to a half sphere. There was a fragment of something pale and red-orange embedded in the glass. Part of the cat’s eye, maybe. Or some other kind of inner design. The sheared surface around it, recessed into the tread, was pitted.
‘Fifty bucks he shot himself,’ said McKenzie.
Odd words for her to use, because the lavender ovals that spilled out of her mouth and hovered in the air between us meant she was feeling genuine sympathy for Garrett Asplundh. I nodded as the ovals bobbed like corks on a slow river, then dissolved. McKenzie likes to talk tougher than she feels. After three years I don’t pay a whole lot of attention to the colors and shapes of other people’s feelings, unless they don’t match up with their words.
‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘He used to be Professional Standards. One of the real straight arrows.’
‘Straight arrows can’t bend,’ said McKenzie.
We walked around to the other side of the vehicle. I pulled on some gloves, then swung open the right rear door. In spite of the cool early hour, the flies had already found the blood. I squared the aluminum case on the seat in front of me, pushed the thumb buttons, and watched the latches jump. One yellow legal pad with neat handwriting on the top page. Two pens, two pencils, and a tiny calculator. An address book. A datebook. A small tape recorder, a digital camera, and a .45 automatic Colt pistol in a heavily oiled leather holster. With a pencil I poked and pried around the items, looking for something hidden or loose or out of place. But all of it was splendidly organized into cutouts in the foam that lined both the bottom and the lid.
Cops and their guns, I thought. Pretty much inseparable, right up to the end.
‘Look how organized he was,’ said McKenzie. ‘Must have cut the foam himself to get it all neat like that.’
I put the automatic garage door opener in the briefcase, closed it up, and locked it in the trunk of my car.
A tall, slender man in a long black coat came skidding down the hillside, well away from the crime-scene tape, feet turned sideways and leaning back for balance. It took me a second to recognize him. It was Ethics Authority director Erik Kaven, a man feared in the same way that his investigator Garrett Asplundh had been feared.
‘He got the news pretty fast,’ said McKenzie.
Kaven sized up the scene and came toward us. His handshake was strong.
‘Garrett?’ he asked.
I nodded.
‘Robbery?’
‘Suicide looks more like it,’ said McKenzie.
‘It wasn’t suicide,’ said Kaven. He looked at McKenzie, then me. Kaven was tall and big-jawed, and his face was deeply lined. His gray-brown hair was thick, straight, and undisciplined. He wore a gunslinger’s mustache that somehow looked right on him. I guessed him at fifty. He’d been a district federal judge here in San Diego before signing on to lead the new Ethics Authority two years ago. Kaven had made big news when he shot two bank robbers out in El Cajon one Friday afternoon. Two shots, two dead men. He carried a gun on the bench, and he’d just gotten off work. He’d been depositing his paycheck when the robbers’ guns came out. His eyes were deep-set and pointedly suspicious.
‘It wasn’t suicide,’ he said again. ‘I’ll guarantee it.’
Garrett Asplundh’s apartment was up in the North Park part of San Diego. Nice area, decent neighborhoods, and not far from the ocean. From the upstairs deck of Garrett’s place I could see Balboa Park. The late-morning breeze was cool and sharp.
It was a two-bedroom place. Small kitchen with a view of the neighborhood and the power lines. Not much in the fridge but plenty of scotch in the liquor cabinet. The living room had a hardwood floor, a gas-burning fireplace, a black futon sofa with a chrome gooseneck reading lamp, and bookshelves covering three walls. I stood there with my hands in my pockets, like a museum visitor. I like quiet when I’m trying to get the sound of a victim’s life. There was a lot to hear about Garrett Asplundh. He had been executed, for one thing. Either by himself or someone else.
The books ranged widely, from The World Atlas of Nations to Trout from Small Streams by Dave Hughes, and they were arranged in no order I could see. Lots of photography collections. Lots of true crime. No paperbacks. No novels. An entire shelf of books on aquatic insects. Another shelf just for meteorology. Another for Abraham Lincoln.
There was a small collection of CDs and DVDs, some commercially manufactured and some homemade. One of the DVDs was entitled ‘The Life and Death of Samantha Asplundh.’ It wasn’t in a plastic box, but rather a leather sheath with the title tooled onto the front. Some good work had gone into creating that container. I wondered if Samantha was the daughter who died.
The first bedroom had a computer workstation set up at a window. There was a padded workout bench, weights in a rack, and a stationary cycle. Facing another window was a small desk for tying flies. The walls were covered with black-and-white photographs of a woman and a little girl. I mean completely covered, every inch, the edges of the pictures – mostly eight-and-a-half-by-elevens – perfectly, spacelessly aligned. The pictures seemed artful to me, but I know nothing about art. The woman had lightness and depth and beauty. The girl was innocent and joyful. I could sense the emotion of the photographer. If he had been able to talk honestly to me about those two subjects, I’d have seen yellow rhomboids pouring out of him, because yellow