The Renegades ch-2 Page 6

  “Is there a copy of Terry’s ten-forty with the loan application?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry I can’t show it to you or divulge any information from it. Federal, you know.”

  “If I were to see it, would it explain to me where he got four hundred and fifteen thousand dollars?”

  “If you were to see it, it would explain nothing of the kind. But you will not see it here in my office.”

  “Thank you,” said Hood.

  The Pearblossom Credit Union was new, small and neat. The vice president was a slender brunette named Carla Vise. Framed pictures of a cat faced out from her desk. Through her office window Hood could see a vacant lot filled with twisted Joshua trees and Spanish dagger. Hundreds of plastic shopping bags flapped and pressed against the windward side of a chain-link fence. The day was cool and bright.

  Carla offered Hood jelly beans from a plastic bowl and he took a few to be polite. She eyed him over a pair of reading glasses as he asked her what she knew about Mr. Laws’s down payment on his home. She told Hood that Terry Laws was one of her favorite customers, and that she couldn’t believe that he had been murdered, right here in Lancaster. She excused herself, then came back a moment later with a thick green file folder. She dabbed an eye with a wadded pink tissue.

  “Yes, he wrote the down payment check on his personal account here,” said Carla. She opened the folder and started fanning through the pages. “High Country Escrow.”

  “Do you know where he got the six hundred and fifteen thousand dollars?”

  She was already nodding. “Two hundred thousand dollars is what they made when they sold Laurel’s place in Studio City. And the balance came from Mr. Laws’s trust.”

  Hood’s nerves stirred. “This is the first I’ve heard about a trust.”

  “Oh really? Build a Dream? He started it in the summer of 2007, a charitable trust. It raises money for Southern California children living below the poverty line. Terry raised a lot of that money from the Sheriff’s Department-rank-and-file donations. You law enforcement people are generous. I think it’s because you see so much poverty and crime. I’m surprised you haven’t heard of it.”

  “So you handle this trust?”

  “We have the trust account. I opened it for him. And Mr. Laws transferred four hundred thousand dollars from his charitable trust to his checking account the day before he made the down payment on his home. He got a good deal on the place, I might add. I was actually the one who told him about it. We had foreclosed and we sold low, as lenders sometimes do.”

  Hood was impressed that Terry Laws had raised at least four hundred grand for poor children in less than a year and a half. It was about six times his annual salary as a deputy.

  “Isn’t it unusual for someone to withdraw a large amount of money from a trust, then deposit it in a personal account?”

  “He drew it as salary, according to the terms of the trust.”

  “He paid himself.”

  “As sole trustee he could do whatever he wanted. But to be honest-yes. It was unusual. I told him it was unusual. He was sitting right there in the same chair that you are. In uniform. And he told me that he was raising money much faster than he thought he would. Most of it was done online, he said, but the deputies were also setting up tables in front of supermarkets, giving out information and taking donations. The trust was just really taking off. But he needed a home-he was throwing away his rent money. Terry said the four-hundred-plus thousand dollars wouldn’t take much time to replenish. And he said that he and Mrs. Laws had already arranged a charitable remaindered trust that would deed their home to Build a Dream upon their deaths. And of course, by then it would be many times more valuable than four hundred thousand. He was good to his word about replenishing Build a Dream. The very next week…”

  She went to her computer now and tapped away at the keyboard. “Yes. He deposited $7,720 back into Build a Dream. And the week after that, another $7,200. And so on. Always a Monday, unless we were closed. The trust stood at one hundred and forty thousand dollars the day that Mr. Laws died. He made a deposit the day before.”

  Hood did the math and figured the trust should have been up to $180,000. He wondered if forty of it might have found its way into the Laws’s never-ending remodel.

  “Always cash?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you report the deposits?”

  “No, sir. The legal limit is ten thousand-we must report anything higher. Below that is perfectly legal.”

  She tried to muster a frank look for Hood, but then she dropped her gaze to the desktop for a long moment. “And to be honest, yes, I wondered at the amounts, their size and frequency, and the fact that they were never over ten thousand. I wondered if something…not right was going on. But I didn’t wonder long. Terry was the law. And I very much wanted to believe in the children’s trust, established by a cop, and supported by law enforcement throughout California. When I looked at Deputy Laws, it was easy to believe. His…Well, everything about him said honesty and goodness. I saw him in the paper with the elf cap on at Christmas. And I thought, well, if he overpays himself with funds he’s raised, okay. It’s temporary. He’s earned it. He deserves a nice home and it will go into the trust someday. He’s upholding the law and bringing in money for the poor. Now he’s dead.”

  She was still staring down at her desk. She dabbed her eyes again.

  Hood believed her rationalizations, especially when he factored in the thirty-something thousand per month that Build a Dream was bringing in to Carla Vise’s small credit union. It was easy for Carla to believe in Terry Laws. It was profitable, too.

  Four hundred grand in less than a year and a half, thought Hood. “When did Laws create Build a Dream?”

  She flipped through the file, still not looking at Hood. “He opened the account on August 13 of 2007, with two hundred dollars. His next contribution was on Monday, August 27, for seven thousand and thirty dollars.”

  “Then once a week thereafter?”

  “Yes. Every week.”

  “Look at me. You know you should have reported him.”

  “I broke no law.”

  “The world dies a little when good people do nothing.”

  She nodded and looked down while Hood set his card on her desk and walked out.

  Sitting in his car, Hood thought back to August of 2007. He had been riding patrol in Section I, down in south L.A., glad to be out of Iraq.

  Meanwhile, Terry Laws was riding patrol up here in the desert, making his first big deposit in the charitable trust he had just created.

  After that, seven thousand dollars plus change fell out of his pockets every week, straight into Build a Dream. And when the trust amounted to just over four hundred thousand dollars he paid it to himself and put it down on a horse property in the valley.

  Hood looked up to see Carla Vise coming across the parking lot toward him. She had her arms crossed against the chilling afternoon breeze. He lowered the window and she leaned in and looked at him with tearful, angry eyes.

  “The day he opened the savings account for his new charitable trust, Terry Laws was happy and smiling. Light came from him. He looked like he could carry the world on those big shoulders of his. But two weeks later, when he made that first big deposit, he was pale and he wouldn’t look at me. His face was bruised. He had stitches. I asked him if he was okay and he said he’d made a difficult arrest. But it wasn’t the arrest, because he never got over it. The bruises and stitches went away but he never got his light back. He never looked at me the same. His posture was not the same. I don’t know if other people noticed. I don’t know if his oblivious and condescending wife even noticed. But I noticed every single thing about Terry Laws, Deputy Hood. He was a different man.”

  Hood thought for a moment. He believed that people could be changed immediately and irrevocably by what they chose to do. The mark of true foolishness was to ignore this fact.

  “I was swayed by my own foolish heart,” sai
d Carla. “It’s the story of my life.”

  “It’s everyone’s.”

  Hood drove back to the prison wondering about Terry Laws. The Terry Laws he had known was neither radiant nor haunted. He was a nice guy but Hood had always thought Laws was trying too hard. He was vain about his muscles and proud of his smile. But he had the decency to take sides against the Housing Authority on behalf of Jacquilla Roberts and her imperfect sons.

  Again, Hood remembered what Laws had said that night. There’s no profit in this. He wasn’t sure why it stuck in his head. Maybe the odd application of the word “profit” to a routine citizen interview.

  He wondered what had changed Terry Laws. When he got to the Hole he let himself in with his shiny new key, turned on the lights and took Laws’s package from the locked desk drawer.

  Hood knew that on August 13 Laws had opened his trust with two hundred humble dollars. He was happy and strong. He had the light.

  But less than two weeks later, when he brought that first big cash deposit for the trust, he looked battered and tormented. If you saw him as clearly as Carla Vise had, thought Hood, it was clear that Terry Laws had died a little.

  Hood saw that two things had happened in between.

  One: Laws and Draper had arrested Shay Eichrodt-the kind of high-profile, get-a-killer-off-the-street arrest that any cop would love to make. An arrest that mattered, protected people.

  And two: Laws had come up with seven grand in cash.

  Hood stared out the window at the prison, the razor wire, the cold blue Antelope Valley sky. The sky and the wind and cold reminded him of Anbar. When he thought of Iraq his mind resisted and his heart became heavy.

  Next Hood spent some time on the search engines, but couldn’t come up with Terry Laws’s Build a Dream Foundation. There were plenty of Build a Dreams, but none were charities raising money for poor children in Southern California. He could find no number through Information, no listing in the Antelope Valley phone books, no one at the Antelope Valley Chamber of Commerce or Rotary who had ever heard of it. He called some of his deputy friends and not a single one of them had heard of it, either.

  Hood called Ariel Reed. Then he drove south to LASD headquarters in Monterey Park, and signed out the Lopes/Vasquez murder book from Records.

  9

  “The tip came from an anonymous caller,” she said. “It was made from a pay phone in Lancaster a little after two in the morning. Poor quality-wind and road noise. He said there was a shooting on Avenue M at the highway. Said a guy with a gun drove off in a red pickup truck. He’d gotten partial plates. He gave those to the nine-one-one operator, then hung up. I heard the recording. Mexican accent. He sounded drunk.”

  Hood looked up from his notebook and bumped into Ariel’s frank gaze.

  “Laws and Draper were first responders,” she said. “Both victims were gunshot to the head, both dead on scene. The deputies sealed it off and gave the detectives what they needed. By three-thirty were they back in the cruiser, finishing out the graveyard shift. And lo, the maybe-drunk tipper got the partials right. At four-twenty Laws spotted a red Chevy pickup westbound on the Pearblossom Highway. They saw some of the right numbers, pulled it over. It was right there where the ruins of Llano del Rio are-you know, the old socialist utopia. Anyway, no utopia that night, just a bloody battle.”

  Ariel’s office had a view to the west. It was evening and the old DA building was hushed. The sun had rolled off the horizon but there was still a tint of red in the blue-black sky. The lights of L.A. flickered below. Hood thought of his view from the Hole.

  “It was violent,” he said.

  Ariel nodded and flipped through the file. “Shay Eichrodt, age thirty-four, six-eight, three hundred pounds. A felon, Aryan Brother, later determined to be very high on crystal meth and alcohol. Laws ordered him out of the vehicle. Eichrodt complied. But instead of shutting the door, he collapsed in a heap on the road shoulder. They went to cuff him and he came up fighting. He punched and kicked and blocked their blows for several minutes-he had some martial arts and he was strong as a bear. They struck him approximately forty times before he went down and they finally got him cuffed.”

  Ariel handed Hood the Sheriff’s Department photographs of Eichrodt, Laws and Draper shortly after the arrest.

  Eichrodt was an immense, unconscious and bloody pulp. Laws and Draper were cut, bruised and bleeding, too, but it was nothing by comparison.

  “Some of the blows were glancing,” said the prosecutor. “Some were not. The head shots took eighty stitches to close. Eichrodt had a severe concussion, a fractured cheek, fractured shin, two fractured hands, a broken forearm and four ribs. Your Citizens’ Oversight Board took thirty days to investigate that arrest, and they decided it was reasonable use of force. There wasn’t much public or media reaction-no video was shot, Eichrodt had attacked the deputies, Eichrodt was a white racist felon. He had few friends or family to stir things up with the press. He had just gunned down two Eme -protected drug runners in very cold blood, and taken their money. It took your detectives less than a week to flesh it out. Which was about the same amount of time that Judge Arthur Suarez took-two months later-to rule that Eichrodt was unable to assist in his own defense. Suarez committed the suspect to Atascadero State Hospital for an indefinite period of time. Eichrodt has been there for almost nineteen months.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “Slightly improved.”

  Hood wondered if Laws’s arrest injuries might have been worse than they appeared. He was glad to have the name of Terry’s doctor, courtesy of Laurel.

  Hood looked up at the photographs of the race cars on Ariel Reed’s wall.

  “Three generations,” she said. “Grandma Ruthann on top in black-and-white. That was 1955. My mother, Belinda, in the middle in 1980. Me on the bottom last year. I ran a 6.95 at 202 miles an hour and got ninth overall. That was the NHRA sportsman class Top Alcohol Dragster. I don’t have the reactions to become a pro, and I won’t dedicate the time it would take. I do it for fun. And I like the idea that you enjoy what your ancestors enjoyed.”

  “It must be really something to go that fast and not leave the ground,” said Hood.

  “There’s nothing like it.”

  “Do you get dizzy, or disoriented?”

  “Disoriented at times, not dizzy.”

  “What does it feel like when you see the light go green and push the pedal down?”

  “You go before the light goes green. By a fraction of a second. You anticipate.”

  “Well, okay, then how does it feel?”

  “There really is nothing like it. So I can’t say, it’s like this or like that.”

  “But I asked you how it feels.”

  “First you asked what it feels like. Then you asked how it feels.”

  “Way to split that atom.”

  “I’m possibly too good at splitting atoms.”

  “I still want to know how it feels to blast off the starting line.”

  “It’s by far the most exhilarating feeling on Earth. You’re humbled by the power, and it makes you godlike at the same time. You are helpless but in control of your fate. I highly recommend it.”

  Reed smiled. It was the thrifty smile that Hood had seen before, not an expansive one. It made her nose wrinkle. There was something like play in it, and a touch of malice, too. It was the same one she had given Hood when she talked of throwing the crooked captain in prison for ten years.

  Hood smiled back. “Terry had an interesting financial situation.”

  “Money problems?”

  “The opposite of money problems.”

  She gave him the hazel stare.

  Hood told her about Build a Dream and the cash donations allegedly raised by LASD deputies and deposited by Terry every Monday for two years, the down payment he took for himself, the admiring credit union employee who believed Terry Laws’s lie because she wanted to.

  “What lie?”

  “I’ve never heard
of Build a Dream. None of the people I work with have, either. I rode with Terry half a dozen times but he never once mentioned Build a Dream. It’s not in the search engines. It’s not in any listing of charities that I could find. It only exists on paper and it’s taking in thirty grand a month in cash.”

  Ariel was looking out the window now, her elbows on the desk and her chin resting on her hands.

  “Was he a trust funder?”

  “No. No inheritance, no lottery score, no smart investments that went big. I’m not finding any of that.”

  “Did he make any big arrests? I mean big assets recovered?”

  “If he did, I haven’t found them yet.”

  “Well, there’s the obvious: drugs, gambling, loan-sharking and prostitution. They’re still the cash crops of our society. There’s robbery for the desperate and vending machines for the organized. A deputy rubs up against all of that.”

  “He never worked narcotics or vice. He was a patrolman. He was in that car forty-eight hours a week, doing overtime, earning his sixty-five a year. If you patrol five or six shifts a week when do you have time to earn seven grand on the side?”

  “On your day off,” she said.

  “That’s an interesting idea.”

  “I was half joking.”

  “The other half interests me.” Hood made a note to look more closely at Terry’s time cards.

  “Private security?” she asked.

  “Even a posh security gig two days a week wouldn’t net him seven thousand bucks.”

  Hood made more notes. He kept coming back to the idea that Terry couldn’t be earning seven grand a week on the side while driving forty-eight hours on patrol. But he was.

  “Tell me about Eichrodt’s preliminary hearing,” he said.

  “We laid out the evidence we’d bring to trial. Truly overwhelming. Both victims’ blood was on a jacket in Eichrodt’s truck. We found a Taurus nine in the big locking toolbox in the bed of the truck. It fired the four bullets that killed Vasquez and Lopes. Eichrodt had collected the brass and tossed it in with the weapon. His fingerprints were all over them. He had forty-eight hundred in cash hidden down in the bottom of the toolbox. And we had the anonymous witness who put the shooter in the red truck.