Private #1 Suspect (Private 2)

Item: Mike Donahue. Colleen had said he was like an uncle to her. As with Molloy and McGough, I had put Donahue’s life through an electronic sieve. Donahue had gotten his American citizenship in 2002. He’d gotten two DUIs in LA and another in Seattle, where he was supporting a boy of seven. He hadn’t married the child’s mother.

If Donahue had wanted to kill Colleen, it would have been easy. She’d trusted him. Still, I had never gotten any sense that he’d had a romance with her, that he’d been jealous of her feelings for me, that he was anything other than an avuncular man with an Irish pub that Colleen had frequented when she’d lived in Los Feliz. A dead end.

Another folder.

I had collected all of the personal e-mails between Colleen and me going back to the day I first kissed her. I went time-traveling for a while, got lost reading her words and mine, remembering the growing romance at the office, all the love we had made in her rose-covered cottage.

And I remembered Donahue calling me. “Come to the hospital, quickly.” Seeing Colleen with bloody gauze around her wrists. Knowing what she’d done to herself after I’d told her it was over.

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; I got up, paced the hallway, made more coffee, stared out onto Figueroa. The rain had moved on. I went back to my desk and clicked on the video folder.

I’d seen all of the videos stored there, except for the one Mo-bot had shot while Tandy and Ziegler were perp-walking me out to the car at the curb.

Now I forced myself to play the video and look at myself from Mo-bot’s second-story point of view.

There I was, just ripped from the Private Worldwide meeting, stumbling between Tandy and Ziegler in the blinding sunshine. The media had been shouting questions and I’d kept my eyes down.

I watched every frame—and I saw something I hadn’t seen that day. Correction. I saw someone. Clay Harris.

Clay Harris was a Morgan family hand-me-down, not exactly harmless, almost a Morgan family curse.

It couldn’t be happenstance.

Harris lived in Santa Clarita, twenty miles out of town, yet there he was, standing behind the media surge with a very good view of me.

Why was Harris lurking in front of Private the moment I was taken in for Colleen’s murder? He was smiling, and I thought I knew why.

CHAPTER 100

EMILIO CRUZ DIDN’T like it.

This was what was called a “bad job.” Like if a middleweight found himself mixing it up on the street with a heavyweight. The best the smaller guy could hope for was not to get killed.

Cruz understood that Jack had to do this job for Noccia. The guy was lethal. He was vindictive. He killed people. And he got away with murder.

Not only was Cruz doing this for Jack, he was doing it for his partner.

Rick was over forty. He was stiff. He was slow. He was going to have to scale walls. In the dark.

Scotty picked up some of the slack for Del Rio. He could do one-armed cartwheels and run like a cheetah. But Scotty was a former motorcycle cop. He’d never gone outside the law like this, and doing a job for a mobster was against everything that had made Scotty a good cop.

Right now, while Rick cruised around looking for a parking spot, Scotty was sitting behind Cruz, jouncing his knee, sending shocks through the front seat.

Cruz said again, “Rick, we should go in through the back wall. I don’t like the roof. At all.”

Del Rio said patiently, “We know what Scotty scoped out. If we go through the wall, we don’t know what we’re going to find. Could be heavy crap stored against it. We could hit pipes.”

Now Del Rio was swearing because Boyd Street, where they’d parked before, was locked in. Not an empty space on either side of the block.

Cruz said, “Ricky, I’m telling you. I don’t like this.”

Del Rio said, “There.”

And he parked in a “No Parking Anytime” driveway that maybe wouldn’t attract the attention of a random drive-by cop at this time of night. Maybe.

Before the car had come to a stop, Scotty was out the back door. He crossed the street in his black duds, his ski mask in hand. When he crossed Artemus, he ducked into the shadow of the pottery’s outside staircase and, as he’d done before, rattled a window until he set off the alarm.