Bone by Bone by Carol O'Connell Page B

another turn of the wheel. “Jay Murray said it wasn’t him, and I believed that much. Never occurred to him that his partner was gay. First time Murray heard that rumor was during his interview with Internal Affairs.”
    Finally—a fact that could be documented. “Murray was interrogated right after the ambush?”
    “Oh, yeah. He said the sun was just coming up through the window of the interrogation room when the detectives lit into him. That’s when they told him his partner was a gay man with the plague. Well, Swahn never mentioned a girlfriend in the year they’d been riding together, but Jay Murray thought the kid was just inept with the ladies.”
    “What about the dispatcher who sent him out on that bogus call?”
    “Oh, she disappeared. The woman never made it home from work that night. Now I figure that’s just cops being tidy. But Swahn still won his settlement. I suppose it helped that Ad Winston was his lawyer. And those two stayed tight. I know it was Ad who put him onto this house.”
    They had come full circle. The jeep rolled to a stop beside William Swahn’s mailbox on Paulson Lane. The sheriff leaned across Oren to open the passenger door. “Go back in there, son. Get what you can. Kiss him on the mouth if that’s what it takes. Just bring me something useful.”
    Oren kept his seat, disinclined to follow any orders from this man. “You think Swahn’s a likely suspect in my brother’s murder. Why?”
    “You know how this works. I can’t—”
    “You can’t even tell your own people, can you? That’s why there are no copies of the files. You’ve got what—five, six detectives countywide? One of them should be interrogating William Swahn. But you want me to break your suspect.”
    The sheriff had bungled something badly, or he had stepped outside the law; one of these two things must be true. Cable Babitt needed an outsider who would not mind working in the dark, someone with something to lose—a good soldier who would ask no questions.
    But Oren was not in the Army anymore.
    And now he planned to finish this man off, to knock him down with a civil tone. “Oh, and that old alibi of mine—the one you’re holding over my head? Screw that.”
    A few seconds passed before the older man appeared to understand that he was not in charge here—he never had been—and there was cause for worry.
    “I need leverage.” Oren climbed out of the jeep and issued his first order to the sheriff. “Find out when Swahn’s ex-partner left the force. And I need to know if Jay Murray got any part of his pension. Don’t call the LAPD. I don’t want rumors. Use your niece in State Revenue. She can get that off Murray’s tax records.” Walking away without turning back, he barked his final order. “Call me here as soon as you’ve got facts !”
     
 
Oren pressed William Swahn’s doorbell, but there was no sound. Evidently the loud ringer had been disconnected for the sake of peace. He knocked and then banged on the door with his fist.
    The small square panel opened behind the grille. This time, the householder was the first to speak. “You’ve got ten seconds of my time.”
    “Josh Hobbs was my brother.”
    “I already knew that. You look like him.” The panel closed. The ten seconds were gone.
    Oren shouted, “My brother’s bones were found today!”
    He heard the click of a lock being undone, a bolt drawn. The front door opened wide, and Oren was ushered inside with the wave of a silver-handled cane.
    This sunlit house was far from the cave-like hermitage he had once imagined for the old woman who had died here when he was a boy. At the far end of the vast foyer, a marble staircase tapered up to the second-floor landing, where a large window framed blue sky and treetops. On the parlor floor, the rooms had pairs of ornate wooden doors built to the scale of giants.
    Oren saw only the back of William Swahn’s denim shirt and jeans as his host led the way in stocking feet. The man was tall