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Natasha accompanied the body up to the county ME's office in Orange nearing midnight. Ben left the scene to Rafferty and was back at the station in Santa Elena by 12:52 a.m. The night-shift cops were hauling in the drunks, lawyers, and businessmen, one VP for Security Pacific Bank threatening to sue. He typed up his report and left it on Lieutenant Hernandez's desk. It was Rafferty's case, Mission Viejo being out of his jurisdiction, but Ben made it official anyway. He liked to dot his i's and cross his t's. Every deadbeat he'd known, every crooked cop, had cut corners, used loopholes, exploited vulnerability. Follow the rules, he liked to tell Emma; it'll make you a good person.
He left the station at 1:42 and drove the mile over to Rachel's condominium, idling the cruiser in the complex parking lot. The rush of the freeway echoed hollow, as though the sound carried all the way from Los Angeles and beyond. If the killer had driven the Santa Ana down to Mission Viejo earlier tonight, he'd passed the off-ramp that led straight to this condo. Ben could tell the kitchen window was wide open. He knew, too, that Rachel liked to leave the sliding glass door to the backyard open, the ocean breeze cooling the rooms. That's why they'd moved back here. It was safe; you could leave your doors unlocked. Hell, you could leave them flung wide open.
A blue light flashed from Rachel's window, and he knew she had fallen asleep with the television on. A wave of satisfaction washed over him; the professor hadn't stayed over. If things hadn't fallen apart between them, he would sneak into the room right now to find her clasping two pillows to her chest. He'd click off the screen and slip into bed with her in the beautiful silence of the early morning, everything he gave a damn about breathing the same air he did.
The move here was supposed to save their marriage. The last straw, the thing that finally made them pack up their Marina del Rey apartment and drive the thirty-eight miles south in a rented U-Haul, was the shooting. Emma had been nine then, and Ben had been popped in the left arm six months before in East Hollywood by a twelve-year-old gangbanger who had been forced into a blood-in initiation ritual by his older brother, a heavy in the La Mirada Locos. Shoot the 5-0 and you're in; don't shoot the cop and you're out and we won't protect you. That was the kind of choice kids in the worst L.A. neighborhoods had to make. Ben didn't even see the kid; heard the shot and then felt the burn in his arm, just like that, the bullet streaking through his unmarked Ford's open window. There was a shitload of blood, slicked over the armrest and splattered across the steering wheel. He called it in but didn't wait around to bleed to death; he gunned the car to St. Vincent and walked himself in, his head like helium by the time the nurses got the gurney.
Later, at the court hearing, the kid had apologized, dressed in a suit too big for his underfed body, a sewing-needle tattoo etching the side of his neck. Not even shaving yet, his voice still singing soprano, and already owned by the street. He was sent to juvie and then released to the custody of his grandparents, and two weeks later the kid ended up facedown in a vacant lot, shot in the back of the head by his cousin, a smog-stunted palm tree waving above him. And that was it for Ben; what the hell were you supposed to do with that? He investigated the murders, sure—the drive-bys, the drug deals gone bad—but he tried to work with the kids, too, tried to show them a way out. He had naïvely thought he could bring some order to their lives. But once it went Cain and Abel over gang allegiance, what could you do? That was something permanent, something rotten in the culture.
At the time, he didn't tell Rachel it was a kid who shot him. What was he going to say? A prepubescent child nearly sent him toes up? Jesus, it rattled him enough, not to mention how it would scramble her. The hole in his arm was all she needed to know. They had to get themselves out of L.A. Rachel was too unhappy, too confused. She couldn't take it anymore—the constant worry, her exhausting teaching position at the underfunded high school in North Hollywood. At first the job felt like an admirable mission to a third-world country, but it quickly grew into an exhausting exercise in futility. L.A. had worn them out—Rachel trying to save the kids with education and Ben trying to save them with the law, and their marriage going down the toilet. Not to mention Emma's own educational future. L.A. public? No way. They had a child to raise and Rachel wasn't going to do it alone, and he was damn well not going to make her. Rachel wanted to go home, back to Santa Elena, where they both grew up, back to where things didn't seem to be spinning out of control.
Excerpted from Shadow Man by Alan Drew. Copyright © 2017 by Alan Drew. Excerpted by permission of Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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