Demolition Angel Read online

  When Starkey got back to the fax machine, Mueller’s casework was waiting in the tray.

  Starkey read it back at her desk. Tennant had an arrest history of fire starting and explosives that went back to the age of eighteen and had twice received court-mandated psychiatric counseling. Starkey knew that the arrests had probably started even earlier, but weren’t reflected in the case file because juvenile records were sealed. She also knew this because Mueller’s notes indicated that Tennant was missing two fingers from his left hand, an explosives-related injury that occurred while he was a teenager.

  Mueller’s case involved interviewing a young car thief named Robert Castillo, who had stolen two of the three cars that Tennant destroyed, along with photographs of the demolished cars. Mueller had been summoned to the Bakersfield Puritan Hospital Emergency Room by patrol officers, where he found Castillo with a windshield wiper blade through his cheek. Castillo, having delivered a late-model Nissan Stanza to Tennant, had apparently stood too close when Tennant destroyed it, caught the blade through his face, and had been rushed to the hospital by his friends. Starkey read Mueller’s interview notes several times before she caught something in the Castillo interview that reinforced her belief that Tennant still maintained his shop. She decided that she wanted to speak with him.

  Starkey looked up the phone number for Atascadero, called, and asked for the law enforcement liaison officer. Police officers couldn’t just walk in off the street to speak with prisoners; the prisoner had the right to have counsel present and could refuse to speak with you. Atascadero was a long way to drive just to be told to fuck off.

  “You have an inmate up there named Dallas Tennant. I’m working an active case here in Los Angeles that he might have information relating to. Would you see if he’d talk to me without counsel?”

  “Would you still want to see him if he demands counsel?”

  “Yes. But if he wants to play it that way, I’ll need the name of his attorney.”

  “All right.”

  She could tell by the way the man paused that he was writing. Soft music played behind him.

  “When would you want to see him, Detective?”

  Starkey glanced at the clock on the wall and thought about Pell. “Later today. Ah, say about two this afternoon.”

  “All right. He’s going to want to know what it’s about.”

  “The availability of an explosive called RDX.”

  The liaison officer took her number and told her he’d call back as soon as possible.

  After she hung up, Starkey got a fresh cup of coffee, then went back to her desk, thinking about what to do. LAPD policy required detectives to always work in pairs, but Marzik had interviews and Hooker was going to see about the tape. Starkey thought about Pell. There was no reason to call him, no reason to tell him any of this until it was over and she had something to say.

  She found his card in her purse and paged him.

  Starkey completed the evidence transfer request, which she faxed to the ATF regional office in Miami, then waited for Pell in the lobby. The drive from downtown L.A. to Atascadero was going to be just over three hours. She had thought that Pell would want to drive, because men always wanted to drive, but he didn’t. Instead, he said, “I’ll use the time to read Tennant’s case file, then we can work out a game plan.”

  There he was with the game plan again.

  She gave him the report, then maneuvered out of the city and up the coast along the Ventura Freeway. He read without comment, seeming to take forever to get through the six pages. She found his silence irritating.

  “How long is it going to take you to read that, Pell?”

  “I’m reading it more than once. This is good stuff, Starkey. We can use this. Searching for the RDX paid off.”

  “I wanted to mention that to you. I want to make sure we don’t get off on the wrong foot here.”

  Pell looked at her.

  “What wrong foot?”

  “I know you think you were advising me, but I don’t need it. You come in, start telling me what to do and how to do it, and expect me to hop to it. It doesn’t work that way.”

  “It was just a suggestion. You did it anyway.”

  “I just want to get things straight. Don’t expect that I’ll get coffee for you.”

  Pell stared at her, then glanced back at the pages.

  “You spoke with the arresting officer?”

  “Yeah. Mueller.”

  “Can I ask you to tell me what he said, or is that too much like asking you for a mocha?”

  “I’m not trying to fight with you. I just wanted to set the ground rules.”

  She went through her conversation with Mueller, recounting pretty much everything that had been said. Pell stared at the passing scenery, so silent that she wondered if he was even listening. But when she finished, he glanced through the pages again, then shook his head.

  “Mueller dropped the ball about Tennant not having a shop. According to this, Tennant was buying stolen cars to destroy them. Three cars, three explosions. The car thief —”

  “Robert Castillo.”

  “Yeah, Castillo. Castillo said that Tennant had asked him to steal a fourth car. He wouldn’t need another car if he didn’t have more RDX to destroy it or knew how to get more.”

  Starkey’s grip tightened on the wheel.

  “That’s what I figured.”

  Pell shrugged and put the pages aside.

  It sounded so lame. That was exactly what Starkey had reasoned, and now she wished that she had said it before Pell. Now it looked like he was the one who’d found the hole in Tennant’s denials.

  “You said you had a suspect likeness coming from Miami. Did you get it for me?”

  “Yeah. That, and the first two we have.”

  He slipped them from his jacket and unfolded them for her.

  “Can you see?”

  “Yeah.”

  “There were enough people in the library to put together a pretty good composite. Our guy shows to be six feet, one-eighty or so, but he’s probably wearing lifts and padding. The wits from the earlier sightings made him at five ten. He had a square jaw, bright red hair, sideburns. That doesn’t square with the earlier sightings, either.”

  Starkey glanced at the three sheets as she drove. Pell was right, none of the three looked very much alike, and none of them looked like the man Lester Ybarra described. The Miami likeness was as Pell said, the second likeness showed a balding, professorial-looking man with glasses, and the third, which was the first description that the feds had, showed a much heavier man with woolly Rasta braids, sunglasses, and a beard.

  She handed them back to Pell.

  “This last one looks like you in drag, Pell.”

  Pell put the sheets away.

  “What about your guy? He match any of these?”

  Starkey told him to open her briefcase, which was on the backseat. When Pell had it, he shook his head.

  “How old is this guy supposed to be?”

  “Forty, but our wit isn’t dependable.”

  “So he might’ve made himself up to look older.”

  “Maybe. If we’re talking about the same guy.”

  “Mr. Red is in his late twenties, early thirties. That’s about all we know for sure. That, and him being white. He lets himself be seen, Starkey. He changes his look to fuck with us. That’s how he gets off, fucking with us.”

  After that, they drove in silence for a while, Starkey thinking about how she was going to approach Tennant. She happened to glance over and found Pell staring at her.

  “What?”

  “You said you had gotten videotapes from the Silver Lake event. Did you look at them yet?”

  Starkey put her eyes on the road. They had passed Santa Barbara; the freeway was curving inland toward Santa Maria.

  “Yeah. I looked at them last night.”

  “Anything?”

  Starkey shrugged.

  “I’ve gotta have them enhanced.”r />
  “That must’ve been hard for you.”

  “What?”

  “Looking at what happened. It must’ve been hard. It would be for me.”

  Pell met her eyes, then went back to staring out the window. She thought he might be pitying her and felt herself flush with anger.

  “Pell, one more thing.”

  “What?”

  “When we get there with Tennant, it’s my show. I’m the lead here.”

  Pell nodded without expression, without looking at her.

  “I’m just along for the ride.”

  Starkey drove the remaining two hours in silence, pissed off that she had invited him along.

  The Atascadero Minimum Security Correctional Facility was a village of brown brick buildings set in the broad open expanse of what used to be almond groves in the arid ranch-land south of Paso Robles. There were no walls, no guard towers; just a ten-foot chain-link fence and a single front gate with two bored guards who had to slide a motorized gate out of the way.

  Atascadero was used to house nonviolent felons who the court deemed unsuitable for the general prison population: ex-police officers, white-collar criminals convicted of one-shot paper crimes, and vacationing celebrities who’d wrung out the eight or nine chances the courts inevitably gave them on drug charges. No one ever got knifed or gang-raped at Atascadero, though the inmates did have to maintain a three-acre truck garden. The worst that could happen was heatstroke.

  Starkey said, “They’re going to make us check our guns. Be faster with the paperwork if we leave’m in the car.”

  “You going to leave yours?”

  “It’s already in my briefcase. I never carry the damned thing.”

  Pell glanced over, then pulled an enormous Smith 10mm autoloader and slipped it under the seat.

  “Jesus, Pell, why do you need a monster like that?”

  “No one gets a second shot.”

  Starkey badged the gate guards, who directed her to the reception area. They left the car in a small, unshaded parking lot, then went inside to find the law enforcement liaison officer, a man named Larry Olsen, waiting for them.

  “Detective Starkey?”

  “Carol Starkey. This is Special Agent Pell, with the ATF. Thanks for setting this up.”

  Olsen asked for identification and had them sign the log. He was a bored man who walked as if his legs hurt. He led them out the rear through double glass doors and along a walk toward another building. From back here, Starkey could see the truck garden and two basketball courts. Several inmates were playing basketball with their shirts off, laughing and enjoying themselves. They missed easy shots and handled the ball poorly. All of them except one were white.

  Olsen said, “I should tell you that Tennant is currently being medicated. These are court-mandated therapies. Xanax for anxiety and Anafranil to help regulate his obsessive-compulsive disorder. He’s required to take them.”

  “Is that going to give us a problem with him agreeing to have no lawyer present?”

  “Not at all. They don’t affect his judgment, just his compulsions. He was off the meds for a while, but we had a problem recently and had to resume the treatment.”

  Pell said, “What kind of problem?”

  “Tennant used cleaning products and some iodine he stole from the infirmary to create an explosive. He lost his left thumb.”

  Pell shook his head.

  “What an asshole.”

  “Well, this is a minimum-security installation, you know. The inmates have a great deal of freedom.”

  Dallas Tennant was an overweight man with pale skin and large eyes. He was sitting at a clean Formica table that had been pushed against the wall, but stood when Olsen showed them into the interview room. His left hand was bandaged, strangely narrow without its thumb. Tennant’s eyes locked on Starkey and stayed there. He barely glanced at Pell. The index and middle fingers of his right hand were missing at the second joint, the caps of scar old and worn. This was the injury that Starkey had read about in Mueller’s case file.

  Tennant said, “Hello, Mr. Olsen. Is this Detective Starkey?”

  Olsen introduced them, Tennant offering his hand, but neither Starkey nor Pell taking it. You never shook their hand. Shaking hands put you on an equal basis, and you weren’t equals. They were in prison; you weren’t. They were weak; you were strong. Starkey had learned that it was a game of power when she was still in uniform. Assholes in prison thought of a friend as someone it was easy to manipulate.

  Olsen put his clipboard on the table and opened a felt-tipped pen.

  “Tennant, this form says that you have been advised of your right to have an attorney present for this interview, but that you have declined that right. You have to sign it here on this line, and I will witness.”

  As Tennant signed the forms, Starkey noticed a thick plastic book on the corner of the table. Two screw-thread hasps kept it fastened at the spine; the cover was of a tropical island at sunset with script letters that read My Happy Memories. It was the kind of inexpensive photo album you could buy at any dime store.

  When Starkey glanced up, Tennant was staring at her. He smiled shyly.

  “That’s my book.”

  Olsen tapped the form.

  “Your signature right here, Detective.”

  Starkey forced her eyes away from Tennant and signed. Olsen signed beneath her signature, dated the page, then explained that a guard would be outside the room to remove Tennant when they were finished. After that, he left.

  Starkey directed Tennant where to sit. She wanted to be across from him, and she wanted Pell at his side so that Tennant would have to look at one or the other, but not both. Tennant slid his scrapbook across the table when he changed seats to keep it near him.

  “First off, Dallas, I want to tell you that we’re not investigating you. We’re not looking to bring charges against you. We’re going to overlook any crimes you admit to, as long as they don’t include crimes against persons.”

  Tennant nodded.

  “There won’t be any of that. I never hurt anyone.”

  “Fine. Then let’s get started.”

  “Can I show you something first? I think it might help you.”

  “Let’s not get sidetracked, Dallas. Let’s stay with the reason we’re here.”

  He turned his book for her to see, ignoring her objection.

  “It won’t take long, and it’s very important to me. I wasn’t going to see you at first, but then I remembered your name.”

  He had marked a place in the book with a strip of toilet tissue. He opened to the marked page.

  The newspaper clip was yellow from being smothered by the plastic for three years, but the below-the-fold two-column headline was still readable. Starkey felt her skin grow cold.

  OFFICER KILLED IN BOMB BLAST;

  SECOND OFFICER CRITICAL

  It was an L.A. Times article about the trailer park bombing that had killed Sugar and wounded Starkey. Above the headline was a grainy black-and-white picture that showed the two EMT teams, one team working on Sugar, the other on Starkey, as firefighters hosed the flaming trailer behind them. She had never read the article or the three follow-up articles that followed. A friend of Starkey’s named Marion Tyson had saved them and brought them to Starkey in the week after her release from the hospital. Starkey had thrown them away and had never spoken to Marion Tyson again.

  Starkey took a moment to make sure her voice would not waver, that she wouldn’t give away her feelings.

  “Are all the articles in this book bomb-related?”

  Tennant flipped the pages for her to see, revealing flashes of death and devastated buildings, crumpled cars, and medical text photographs of severed limbs and disrupted bodies.

  “I’ve collected these since I was a child. I wasn’t going to talk to you, but then I remembered who you are. I remember watching the news the day you were killed, and what an impression that made on me. I was hoping I could get you to autograph it.” />
  Before she could respond, Pell reached across the table and closed the book.

  “Not today, you piece of shit.”

  Pell pulled the book close and laid his arm across it.

  “Today, you’re going to tell us where you got the RDX.”

  “That’s mine. You can’t take that. Mr. Olsen will make you give it back.”

  Starkey was inwardly livid with Pell for intruding, but she kept her manner calm. The change in Pell was dramatic; in the car, he’d seemed distant and thoughtful; this Pell was poised in his chair like a leopard anxious to pounce.

  “I’m not going to sign your book, Dallas. Maybe if you tell us where you got the RDX and how we could get some, maybe then I might sign it. But not now.”

  “I want my book. Mr. Olsen is going to make you give it back.”

  “Give it back, Pell.”

  Starkey eased the book away from Pell and slid it across the table. Tennant pulled the book close again and covered it with his hands.

  “You won’t sign it?”

  “Maybe if you help us.”

  “I bought some mines from a man I didn’t know. Raytheons. I don’t remember the model number.”

  “How many mines?”

  He had told Mueller that he’d bought a case, which, she knew because she had phoned Raytheon, contained six mines.

  “A case. There were six in the case.”

  Starkey smiled; Tennant smiled back at her.

  Pell said, “What was this man’s name?”

  “Clint Eastwood. I know, I know, but that was how he identified himself.”

  Starkey took out a cigarette and lit up.