Working, he thought, except for the traffic, which had stopped dead on Balboa Boulevard.
Working, he thought, except for the flashing lights of cop cars gathered down the street.
Working, except for the helicopter hovering low over an old yellow motel called the El Mar.
Working, except for the black-clad Newport Beach Police SWAT team, bristling with armament, crawling all over the place like ants.
He could see Phil Kearns-standing in the motel courtyard, talking to the SWAT captain.
“They found Goins,” said Raymond. “I knew it.”
Weir pulled along a red curb and parked. Raymond was already out, running down the sidewalk.
Chapter 17
Above the heads of the curious, Weir could see the roof of the El Mar Motel, the ancient fading sign that read VACANCIES, REFRIGERATION, the people hanging out of apartment windows nearby to enjoy an aerial view of the action. The police chopper hovered over the El Mar, tail circling slowly as if the nose were pinned to some invisible axis.
They ducked under a crime-scene tape already in place between the outer wall of the El Mar and a parking meter on the curb, and Weir’s first thought was: They shot him. Raymond badged his way past the SWAT team, all attired in black, heavy with automatic weapons and side arms, in boots shiny enough to make a storm trooper blink. Unit 4 was open, a forest of bodies darkening the doorway. The door itself, torn from its hinges, leaned against the outside wall. Officers Hoch and Oswitz stood aside as Raymond went in, but stepped in front of Jim and started pushing him toward the street. Hoch’s nightstick drove against his sternum and sent a bullet of pain into his chest. Weir knocked it away with a forearm just as Oswitz drew his baton — gripping it far down on the handle for a punishing swing — but Raymond suddenly reappeared, coming up on them from behind with a quick little push that left Hoch off-balance and Oswitz standing face-to-face with Raymond, who cursed him viciously and drew Jim past them.
He stepped into the tiny motel room. It smelled of a disinfectant supposed to suggest pine. There was little light, the one window being closed off with a thick plastic curtain that looked as if cut from a picnic tablecloth. There was a twin bed, made up, along one wall; a furnace in the corner by the door; a worn green carpet; a Naugahyde chair. The room was too small to hold much else.
The first thing on which Jim’s eyes fastened was the city map pinned to the wall next to the bed. Dwight Innelman was photographing it. Jim didn’t have to lean close to see the two routes marked out in black and red markers: from the El Mar to the Back Bay via the ferry in black, via the boulevard in red. A cool finger traced its way up his back.
“You guys get him, Dwight?”
Innelman turned from his tripod, then back to it. “No. He wasn’t here. Couldn’t have gone very far on foot, could he?”
Roger Deak squeezed from the bathroom with a small, eroded bar of pink soap and a razor inside a plastic evidence bag. “Prints on everything in here,” he said, with a nod to Jim. “His darkroom.”
Weir leaned into the bathroom. Metal racks had been screwed into the wall above the toilet, on which stood three trays still shimmering with developing fluids. Plastic containers were grouped neatly beside the john. A small window inside the incredibly tiny shower stall had been covered over with tinfoil. A drying line was hung from the shower head to the wall, affixed to the highest tray rack. The plastic clothespins positioned along it were all red, all empty. Sitting on the sink were a pair of scissors, a red grease pencil, and a loupe. The room smelled like chemicals and mildew. Everything was covered with fingerprint dust.
Past the living room/bedroom was the kitchen, a small rectangular space with a two-chair dinette, a sink and counter, a miniature oven and two-burner stove. It was roped off and guarded by Tillis, the fat plainclothes who had vibed Weir at the station that morning. “Chief,” he said, turning only slightly toward the kitchen, “we got a pain-in-the-butt concerned citizen here. Bounce him?”
Jim stood back from the yellow tape that ran across the doorway, and looked into the room. He could smell the natural gas. Brian Dennison was squeezed into one corner, huddling with PR man Mike Paris. Brian had a hand on Paris’s arm. Paris was nodding, looking up at Dennison with the beseeching face of a penitent, his shoulders slumped submissively and his head bobbing. Dennison finally looked toward Weir. His expression froze momentarily, then took on a dreamlike calm.
“Out,” he said.
Tillis clamped a hand on Jim’s arm. Quickly, Hoch and Oswitz were on him again, sticks jostling into his rib cage and kidneys, fists grabbing his shirt and hair.
Raymond was there in a flash. “What the—”
“Back off, Cruz!” Dennison yelled. “Cruz, back the fuck off.”
Jim stumbled, raised his hands for balance, which gave Oswitz an excuse to drive the short end of his stick into Jim’s armpit, then press up and shove him into the wall. The three men closed him off suddenly, forming a tight little circle around him. A knee shot into his groin, but before Weir could even bend over, Tillis had straightened him, pulled him off the wall, guided him to the front door, and pushed him down the steps. At the bottom, Jim crashed into a hapless photographer, who went down under him in a clamor of cameras, lights, and power packs. Two SWAT cops dragged Weir to the yellow crime-scene tape and prodded him under with their boots. The photographer was allowed to retrieve a shattered flash unit before he was hustled into the crowd on the other side of the ribbon, into which he disappeared like a man pursued by lions.
Jim stood slowly, nauseous from the groining, walked with short measured steps through the parting crowd, and leaned against a parking meter on the sidewalk, breathing deeply. Raymond appeared in the doorway of unit 4. Jim looked at him and shook his head: Okay; go back in. Raymond snapped something at Hoch and Oswitz, who regarded him with attitudes of puzzled contrition. Laurel Kenney, the Channel 5 reporter who’d covered Virginia’s arrest at PacifiCo, came toward him with her microphone extended and her minicam operator trailing along behind. Weir had met her at the jail on the day Virginia was released.
“Can you tell us what is happening in there, Mr. Weir?”
“No.”
“Where is Horton Goins?”
“At large.”
“Are you active in the investigation into your sister’s murder?”
“No.”
“Is it true that she was stalked by Horton Goins, the sex offender?”
“Ask the cops.”
Laurel stood for a moment, looking at him, her microphone at her side. She was a big pale woman with a head of long red hair and dazzling green eyes. She held up the mike to Jim, switched it off, then turned and waved away her cameraman. “What in hell happened in there? Off the record?”
Weir looked at the curious faces around him, heard their prodding silence. “I’m not sure what’s going on, Laurel. That’s all.”
He pushed his way through the crowd, walked south down the sidewalk, then at the first alleyway cut through toward the bay and came up on the El Mar from the back. He picked his way through the trash cans and litter, an old bicycle, a stack of cardboard boxes loaded with empty bottles, a lawn mower completely covered with black residue, a brittle tan Christmas tree still trailing bright stringers of tinfoil. He worked his way up to the small, windowed rear door of unit 4. Goins’s escape hatch, he thought. Two high cement steps led up to the door, but standing in the alley, Weir was scarcely more than head-level with the window. He looked in through a long horizontal slot between the blinds. A refrigerator blocked half his view. It took his eyes a moment to adjust to the deep shades of the little room, but when they had, he could see the kitchen and the cops clearly, like players up on a stage viewed from the front row.