Lost Light

on his lap. He couldn’t move. All he could do was lower his eyes to it and try to read the tab.
    “How does it feel? Does it give you a hard-on watching what you did? In your case, a make-believe hard-on?”
    “Harry, I -”
    “Where is she, Law?”
    “Where is who? Harry, I don’t know what -”
    “Sure you do. You know exactly what I’m talking about. You sat there like a puppet but the whole time you were pulling the strings. My strings.”
    “Harry, please.”
    “Don’t ‘Harry, please’ me. You wanted revenge on them and I was your ticket. Well, you got it, partner. I took care of all of them, just like you thought. Like you hoped. You played me just right.”
    He didn’t say anything. His eyes were cast down, away from mine.
    “Now there’s one thing I want from you. I want to know where you and Jack hid Marty Gessler. I want to bring her home.”
    He remained silent, his eyes away from me. I reached down and took the file off his lap. On the bureau I opened it and started leafing through the documents.
    “You know, I didn’t see it until somebody I taught the job to saw it first,” I said as I looked through the file. “She’s the one who said it had to be a cop. It was the only way Gessler could’ve been taken so easily. And she was right. Those four punks didn’t have the steel.”
    I gestured toward the empty television screen.
    “I mean, look what happened when they came for me.”
    I found what I was looking for in the file. A map of Griffith Park. I started unfolding it. Its creases cracked and split. It had been folded in the file for maybe five years. It was marked by the location where Antonio Markwell’s body had been found in Bronson Canyon.
    “Once I started in that direction, then I began to see it. The gas had always been a problem. Somebody used her card and they bought more gas than her car could hold. That was a mistake, Law. A big one. Not buying the gas. That was part of the misdirection. But getting so much of it. The bureau thought maybe it was a truck, that they were looking for a trucker. But now I’m thinking Crown Vic. The Police Interceptor model they make for all the departments. The cars with extra-capacity gas tanks so you don’t get caught out there on the hunt without any juice.”
    I had delicately spread the map open. It depicted the many winding roads and footpaths of the huge mountain park. It showed the public road up through Bronson Canyon and then the fire road which extended further up into the rocky terrain. It showed the area of caves and tunnels left behind when the canyon had been a quarry, its rock payload crushed and used for railroad beds across the west. I laid the map across Cross’s lap and over his dead arms.
    “The way I figure it, you guys followed her from Westwood. Then in the Pass you pulled her over in one of the quiet spots. Used the blue light on your Crown Vic and she thought, No problem, they’re cops. But then you put her in the trunk of that big car with the big gas tank. One of you drove her car to the airport and the other followed and picked him up. Probably you backed her car into another car or a pillar or something somewhere. Nice touch. Sell the misdirection. Then you drive up to the desert and use the gas card. Again, sell that misdirection. And then you turn around and take her back to the real hiding place. Which one of you did it, Law? Which one actually took from her everything she had or would ever have?”
    I didn’t expect an answer and didn’t get one. I pointed to the map.
    “That’s my bet. You guys went to a place you were familiar with, a place nobody would be looking for Marty Gessler because they’d all be looking up in the desert. You wanted her hidden but you wanted access to her, right? You wanted to know exactly where she was. She was your ace in the hole, right? You would use her to get to them. Marty and her computer. The connection was on that box. Find her and find the box, the connection would be made and there’d be a knock on Linus Simonson’s door.”
    I paused to give him a chance to protest, to tell me to get the hell out or call me a liar. But he didn’t do any of that. He didn’t say a word.
    “It all seemed to work,” I said. “And then that day at Nat’s you guys were supposed to cut the deal, right? Shake hands and share the wealth? Only Linus Simonson had other ideas about that. Turned out he didn’t want to share anything and he’d take his chances with