The Bad Shepherd Page 14

  “The family is bringing a wrongful death suit against the Los Angeles Police Department, Mr. Fochs. If I can prove that Detective Gaffney killed Lorenzo in cold blood, the family can at least have some closure. You can help make that happen. You can help undo that wrong. As to your question, why now? I’ve been talking to the family for a few years. Its takes a lot of courage to go up against the Los Angeles Police Department,” he paused, “something I believe you also know. This isn’t something they’re taking lightly. You know how to find me, Mr. Fochs.” Jimmy Mac hung up.

  Fochs stood in his kitchen, holding an empty receiver for a long time.

  He noted that Jimmy Mack never referred to the shooting without adding “in cold blood” after it. It was an old courtroom technique to plant the seed of guilt early and often.

  Fochs walked outside to his garage. He’d bought this place from a retired producer. It was a small wood-and-stone single-family on Holly Drive just up from the Hollywood Freeway. The single-car garage was detached from the house, but since a large eucalyptus tree lorded over the front yard, provided ample shade and made his front yard smell like a spa. Fochs usually just kept his Mustang in the driveway. Today, though, the Jeep was in the driveway because he’d planned to go surfing in the morning. McLaren was extremely generous on that score, indulging in Bo’s hobby more so than he likely would with other detectives. Fochs knew that, however, and tended to put in more hours on the job than he logged.

  Fochs unlocked the garage and lifted up the large, brown door. His two surfboards rested above in a special hanging platform he’d built. What he was looking for was at the back of the garage.

  Fochs went to the stack of boxes there, carefully maneuvering them until he found the one he was looking for. Fremont Case: 3/81—6/81 was written in small, tidy block letters on the top and sides. He pulled the box out, set it on the garage floor, and opened it. His old partner, Kevin Collins, told him once that the universal truth of police work was that some cases couldn’t be forgotten whether they are solved or not. Sometimes, even when they’re solved, they have a way of haunting you long after.

  Collins also told him one warm night the second universal truth is that cops are collectors. They collect pain, they collect guilt, they collect remorse, and they collect the unforgettable memories of policing. They also collect case files. Search the garage or the attic of a long-serving police officer, and you’ll find artifacts of the cases they’ve worked, the ones they cannot let go of. For a detective, solving a case is like a puzzle whether it’s a murder, arson, or a drug ring. The challenge of solving the case is almost as important as the case itself. A detective will tell you it’s as addictive as any drug. Collins said that was exactly the reason he chose to remain in patrol. It’s not uncommon for police officers to keep duplicates of cold files in their personal effects and he knew of more than one cop who continued an investigation on their own time or kept tabs on the people involved.

  Before he resigned from the department, Fochs collected everything that hadn’t been tagged as evidence and either outright took it or at least made a copy for his own records. Emotions flooded him as he sifted through the contents of the files. He couldn’t explain his action at the time, only that it was something he needed to do. The case could have been, should have been his greatest professional achievement. Fochs believed then, and still did now, that Lorenzo Fremont was the springboard to one of the major drug networks in the city.

  Memories resurfaced, and raw emotion flared as if the box itself were an exposed nerve. He crouched over it for a few moments as the memories and the feelings swirled around and within. Finally, Bo collected the box and walked back inside his house and set it on the dining room table, just one more in a string of unanswered questions.

  When Fochs arrived at work shortly before 10:00 a.m., he found everyone gathered around the television in their conference room. It was tuned to one of the local TV stations. The reporter was standing in front of a line of police tape. There two uniforms on the other side were trying to maintain crowd control.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Ten kids were gunned down in the Jungles last night,” said one of the other detectives, a tall, athletic man a little older than Fochs. McLaren had a small staff, which they made up for in skill. Including Fochs, there were five other investigators, most ex-LAPD. Keith Woodyard had been a Compton PD officer, working an anti-gang detail, and it wasn’t long before he started receiving threats at home from the homeboys of gangbangers he’d put away (or put away, Compton-style). Compton was just ten square miles, and because of its small size, the police force and the citizenry they policed knew each other intimately. Keith wasn’t fazed by the threats until they started including his young wife. He quickly decided that $15,000 a year wasn’t worth her safety. Bud McLaren paid him enough to move out of Compton and far enough away so it just wasn’t worth it for the gangbangers to follow him. A sad fact of life in that postage stamp-sized town was that most of the criminal element never left Compton unless it was to go to jail.

  “Jesus.”

  “Sounds like two of them were dealing and the rest were just standing around.” Keith shook his head. “This is barbaric, even by their standards.”

  Fochs stared at the television set, unable to turn away, but unsure of why. After a second, he caught it. The reporter identified herself when she gave it back to the studio.

  It was Kaitlin Everett.

  McLaren turned the TV off and took his place at the table. He opened the staff meeting with an announcement that the police department was looking for experienced investigators to help them run down suspected subversives in advance of the Olympics. The FBI and LAPD’s Intelligence Division would handle the priority cases, but with such a backlog they were seeking additional support. McLaren said he’d make an exception to his no-moonlighting rule because of the special circumstances involved as long as it didn’t interfere with the caseloads.

  Kaitlin Everett.

  Hunter had spared him the details for the sake of his already burdened conscience, saying only that it ended poorly for her. Bo reached out after he left the department to apologize, but Everett never returned any of his calls. Her career, her livelihood, was a casualty of trusting Bo Fochs.

  Hunter was similarly burned. Publicly, the department played the Fremont case up as a triumph, and the lieutenant got his name in the paper. Internally, it was a disaster. Drumming Fochs out of the department wasn’t quite enough to satiate Hilliard’s fury over the embarrassment so he took the rest of it out on Hunter. Hilliard had Hunter transferred to the narcotics squad in Harbor Division, knowing that the lieutenant lived in West Hollywood and would have to spend a couple hours in the car commuting to work. It was the time-honored LAPD punishment known as “Freeway Therapy.” Hilliard wrote in Hunter’s last fitness report that the lieutenant lacked the “leadership” to excel in a headquarters position. Hunter’s career was over.

  Hunter and Fochs eventually repaired their relationship, and it had been the lieutenant who’d recommended Fochs to Bud McLaren as a way of trying to assuage the guilt he felt over not being able to sidestep Hilliard or, for that matter, Gaffney. Though it was never spoken aloud, Fochs knew he was responsible for the end of his friend and mentor’s career. The guilt he felt over that was insurmountable. They remained friends, close even, but there was still a distance between them, as contradictory as that may sound.

  The Lorenzo Fremont case had cost three people their careers and two people their lives. Not only was Daphne’s death just written off, they never found the person that ran the cocaine network that supplied Lorenzo Fremont and God only knew how many others. Whoever he was, he was still out there, probably bigger than ever. Fremont wasn’t a drug lord, no matter what story the LAPD concocted to fit their narrative. But he wasn’t a good person either. He was a gangbanger and a drug dealer, and the streets were better off with him in the ground even if it didn’t make a damned bit of difference.

&nbs
p; Fochs didn’t care about clearing Lorenzo Fremont’s name, and he never would. There was no scenario that ended in his helping Fremont’s family do that. Hell, Fochs didn’t even care about repairing his name. If people wanted to think he was a dirty, disgraced cop, let them. There was a gritty value to that kind of reputation in some of the circles he ran in now. The people he worked with in the music industry knew that he wasn’t going to sell them out to the police if he saw something sketchy. McLaren knew the truth about him, knew that he was a good man trying to do righteous work. That was all Fochs cared about.

  Bo Fochs believed in pursuing the greater good, even if that meant getting a little dirt on your soul to do it.

  He was similarly uninterested in proving that Fremont was unarmed when he was shot. He’d known it at the time, known that Mitchell used that dodge because he’d panicked during his moment of truth. All he cared about, all he’d ever cared about, was finding the link between Lorenzo Fremont and whoever was supplying him with his coke. The toll that drug was taking on the city at large was tremendous, but it was tearing South Los Angeles apart. All that said, McLaughlin’s offer was still interesting because digging into Lorenzo Fremont’s life would provide him an excellent pretense for finding out who he was working for. They’d known at the time Fremont wasn’t getting his shit from the gang, but it had to come from somewhere.

  The problem was that Bud McLaren would never allow it. He absolutely prohibited moonlighting and with good reason. McLaren didn’t want his detectives taking unnecessary risks and, more important, didn’t want them doing something that could blow back on the agency. McLaren had been indelibly clear that he wanted to transition the agency to a high-price consultancy and security provider for the studios with no more ex-wives, no more skip tracing, and sure as you’re born, no digging up old wounds on the bodies of dead drug dealers. The moonlighting rule was as much to protect them legally as it was about protecting the agency’s image.

  Fochs was trapped, pinned between his future and a past he knew that he’d never let go.

  Chapter Twenty

  The Times labeled it “The Courtyard Massacre,” and the name stuck. Most newspapers downplayed the gang storyline. It was hard to generate sympathy for criminals, but kids were good copy. Two gangbangers gunned down in a drive-by, even with civilian casualties, didn’t get out of neighborhood pages, but ten kids murdered in cold blood, that was front-page material. The inevitable questions surfaced. With this killing as brutal as it was senseless happening just a few miles from the Olympic epicenter, how could the police department expect to maintain order during the games?

  The public outcry was intense and immediate. The city was practically daring the police to prove that the lives of ten Black kids were worth something. That thought soured Mitch’s stomach. Typical, he thought. Blame the police for a gang’s existence, for not shutting them down, but take no accountability for the conditions that allow them to thrive.

  News vans camped just outside of the Jungles, wanting the authenticity for the background shots but too afraid to venture into the neighborhood itself.

  The department created a special task force staged out of the Southwest Bureau, but there was to be no mistaking that it was run from Parker Center. Word was the bureau commander didn’t even put up a fight. Robbery-Homicide detailed six detectives, including a lieutenant, to command the task force. They pulled another four Southwest Bureau Homicide detectives over along with four CRASH officers. Ellison and Gaffney led the task force’s gang intelligence team.

  Ellison started with an APB out to all of the CRASH units in South LA: look for new tags, anything bragging about the hit and press informants. Press hard. The chief problem, though, was that even the gang members CRASH officers established some rapport with rarely, if ever, told the truth. Still, the occasional sliver of verifiable fact would slip through, and a savvy officer could get useful intelligence. Ellison once described it as “finding a needle in a stack of liars.”

  They’d been going nonstop since the shooting, and it was taking its toll on Mitch. He rubbed his eyes and tried to focus. This was as barbaric a crime as they’d ever seen. It made Mitchell sick even thinking about it. He finished scribbling a name and a note on a 3x5 card and tacked that to a corkboard with a pushpin under the section reserved for the Black P-Stones. Lines of blue string were used to connect the P-Stone’s section with the surrounding Crip sets, each piece indicating a different beef. Ellison walked over with a three slips of paper.

  “I just talked to the squads at Rampart, Newton, and Seventy-Seventh. They’ve all got nothing.”

  Mitch leaned back and folded his arms across his chest, occasionally using his right to motion to the board as he spoke. “What I can’t figure is, why do it? This is so far in the Jungles there’s no possible way it’s a grab for turf.”

  “Anything on the two Bloods?”

  “Who, Rodney Broaddus and Reginald Johnson? They’re nobodies. Maybe one of ‘em had a beef with someone else, but you handle that shit on neutral ground, at school, the park, wherever. You don’t drive all the way into enemy territory to do it and certainly not over these two.”

  Ellison nodded his big head in knowing agreement.

  He looked at the empty corkboard. “We got shit to go on.” The big cop glanced around the task force headquarters. RHD suits were directing the uniforms, taking phone calls standing up and parsing through the evening reports. Gil Steedham, the task force CO, was making the morning rounds. “Heads up, boss is inbound,” Ellison said, dropping his head to make it appear like he was looking at something in his hand.

  Steedham had a frog-lipped ever-frown, and his cheeks bore the pockmarked signs of an unattractive adolescence. His dark eyes were set so far back in their sockets it made his brow line look like the edge of an angry cliff. Steedham was also an investigator from an older school, one of a dying breed of cops who also had law degrees. He’d transferred to LAPD from a position as an investigator with the DA’s bureau and had a longer rise through the department because of it, but now those earlier connections with the DA were paying off. The word was that he was on the list of future captains and was expected to take over RHD when Captain Lorenz became assistant chief of detectives.

  “Good morning, gentlemen,” Steedham said in a cool voice. “What does CRASH have?”

  Hasn’t even learned our names yet, Mitch thought sourly. He made a show of turning so Steedham could see his nameplate. The lieutenant didn’t catch it, but Ellison did. His partner glowered slightly but didn’t say anything.

  “Morning, Lieutenant. What we’ve got right now is not much, unfortunately. Let me give you a rundown of what we’re looking at. First, we reached out to all of the other CRASH units to see what they’re hearing. We, and now the other units, are talking to our sources inside the gangs in the area. Like I said, no one is talking, but it’s still pretty fresh. Next, we’re looking for new tags. Graffiti is the ghetto grapevine. They’ll put a gang sign on a building as a way of indicating territory or, in this case, someone might put a street name next to a ‘187.’ The one we found with the product on him, his street name was Stick, so as an example if we found ‘Stick 187’ in someone’s turf, we’d have a good place to look”

  Steedham looked dubious. “They’d advertise that brazenly?”

  “Absolutely. Bragging is practically currency down here.” Ellison pivoted and spread a hand at Mitch. “Lieutenant, I’d like to introduce you to Detective Mitch Gaffney. Each CRASH officer specializes in a particular gang, and their responsibility is to learn everything there is to know about that group: signs, turf, where they hang out, who they beef with, who has a girlfriend, and where her pad is. Everything. Mitch is our P-Stones expert.”

  Steedham listened, hand on his chin; the other was balled into a fist supporting his elbow.

  “Mitch is a narcotics detective by trade. He’s with CRASH as part of a departmental initiative to uncover gang-run narcotics rings.”

  �
�Mitch, you were in that Lorenzo Fremont shootout a few years back, weren’t you?”

  “Yes sir. That’s correct.”

  Steedham smiled, but it looked like he was just pushing lips against teeth. “That was strong work. I’m glad to have you on my team. What are your thoughts?”

  Mitch exhaled. “Well, sir, as Sergeant Ellison said, it’s early yet, and we don’t have much to go on now. The streets are unusually quiet. Honestly, I think people are in shock. Kids aren’t normally caught up in this kind of thing. I don’t think they were intended to be targets, but their being present certainly wasn’t enough to dissuade the shooters. As far as the P-Stones are concerned, I’m going to be talking to them today. Likely, they won’t share, but we need to have a presence. But you never know. Sometimes you get lucky, and you find a relative or a close friend who wants to see the perp go down more than they care about who does it. If the tactful route doesn’t get us anything in the next couple days, we’ll step it up a notch.”

  “OK. Keep me posted. When you go out to meet with these P-Stones, I’d like you to take one of my people with you.”

  “Sir, respectfully, I should go alone. They know me, but that’s taken a long time to build up. I’ve got a reputation with them. They’ll talk to me. That won’t happen if I’ve got someone they don’t know with me. I’ll make sure I brief whomever you like as soon as I get back.”

  “I’m not asking, Detective,” Steedham said mildly and at the same time not.

  “Lieutenant, I think its best that I—”

  “Just make it happen,” Steedham bit back and left them to continue his rounds.

  Ellison’s face was blank. When the lieutenant was out of earshot, he said flatly, “Strong work, Detective.”

  Chapter Twenty One