CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER
4

If Sean called in the crime scene techs to scour the Bentley, he never notified Milo.

For one week, no new murders were reported in West L.A. Cursing whatever psycho-economic-social factors were causing a peaceful autumn, Milo got to work on some old unsolveds. The murder books he looked for were missing or sketchy to the point of uselessness and he dead-ended.

On his eighth day back on the job, I phoned to see how he was doing. His captain had just relayed a directive from the police chief’s office. A rapist-killer named Cozman “Cuz” Jackson, awaiting execution in Texas, was scrambling to avoid the needle by confessing murders all over the country and promising to pinpoint the graves.

Before Texas agreed to investigate, they wanted local cops to produce some facts.

Cuz Jackson’s claimed victim in California was Antoine Beverly, a fifteen-year-old boy from South L.A. who’d vanished in Culver City sixteen years ago while selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door. Jackson had been living nearby at the time, in Venice, and had worked ten miles from Antoine’s magazine route, as a handyman at a Westchester animal shelter.

No sign of the Beverly file in Central Records, either. Downtown wanted Milo to search for it in West L.A. and, if he found it, recontact witnesses.

No success, so far. He said, “Time to put a fatwa on the Great Bureaucratic Satan. Let me tell you how this went down: Normally this would go to the Homicide Special boys, but they love high-profile guts and glory and this ain’t either so they lobbed a pass to West L.A. Captain figures at this point I’ll be happy with anything and tosses it to me.”

“Well,” I said, “at least there’s the novelty factor.”

“Which is?”

“A captain who takes pity.”

“Gotta go, Alex.”

The gray cloud hovering over him hadn’t cleared a bit. Maybe it was lead in his arm and residual pain.

Or spiritual erosion after two decades as a gay detective in LAPD.

That whole concept had changed, perhaps at a rate so slow it never registered in his head as progress.

As a rookie, he took pains to hide his orientation. The truth emerged anyway, leading to smirks, whispers, bursts of outright hostility. He stopped hiding but didn’t flaunt. Opened his locker more than once to find hate mail. The teamwork that forms the core of homicide work eluded him as a succession of partners heeded the whispers and requested transfers.

Making the best of the isolation, he piled up overtime and racked up one of the highest solve rates in the department. Unsure what to do with him, the department dithered to the point where civil rights advances and a jacketful of grateful letters from victims’ families made him tough to persecute.