Silent Partner by Jonathan Kellerman Page B

Water and Power terminal station lit by high arc lamps that gave off a harsh glare. Just beyond the terminal was flood-control district marshland fenced with chain link, then larger houses on flatter ground, sparsely distributed.
    Something wild and swift scurried across the road and dived into the bush. Coyote? In the old days Sharon had talked about seeing them, though I'd never spotted one.
    The old days.
    What the hell was I expecting to gain by exhuming them? By driving past her house like some moony teenager hoping to catch a glimpse of his beloved?
    Stupid. Neurotic.
    But I craved something tangible, something to reassure me she'd once been real. That I was real.
    I drove on.
    Nichols veered to the right. The straightaway turned into Jalmia Drive and compressed to a single lane, darkened even further under a canopy of trees. The road lurched, dipped, finally dead-ended without warning at a bamboo-walled cul-de-sac slotted with several steep driveways.
    The one I was looking for was marked by a white mailbox on a stake and a white lattice gate that sagged on its posts.
    I pulled to the side, parked, cut the engine, and got out. Cool air. Night sounds. The gate was Page 55

    unlocked and flimsy, no more of a barrier than it had been years ago. Lifting it to avoid scraping the cement, I looked around, saw no one. Swung the gate open and passed through. Closing it behind me, I began climbing.
    On both sides of the driveway were plantings of fan palm, bird of paradise, yucca, and giant banana. Classic fifties California landscaping. Nothing had changed.
    I climbed on, unmolested, surprised at the absence of any kind of police presence. Officially, the L.A.P.D. treated suicides as if they were homicides, and the departmental bureaucracy moved slothfully. This soon after the death, the file would certainly be open, the paperwork barely begun.
    There should have been warning posters, a crime-scene cordon, some kind of marker.
    Nothing.
    Then I heard a burst of ignition and the rumble of a high-performance car engine. Louder. I ducked behind one of the palms and pressed myself into the vegetation.
    A white Porsche Carrera appeared from around the top of the drive and rolled slowly down in low gear with its headlights off. The car passed within inches, and I made out the face of the driver: hatchet-shaped, fortyish, with slit eyes and oddly mottled skin. A wide black mustache spread above thin lips, forming a stark contrast with blow-dried snow-white hair and thick white eyebrows.
    Not a face easily forgotten.
    Cyril Trapp. Captain Cyril Trapp, West L.A. Homicide. Milo's boss, a one-time hard-boozing high-lifer with flexible ethics, now born again into religious sanctimony and gut hatred of anything irregular.
    For the past year Trapp had done his best to wear down Milo—a gay cop was as irregular as they come. Closed-minded but not stupid, he went about his persecution with subtlety, avoiding deliberate gay-bashing. Choosing instead to designate Milo a "sex crimes specialist" and assign him to every homosexual murder that came up in West L.A. Exclusively.
    It isolated my friend, narrowed his life, and plunged him into a roiling bath of blood and gore: boy hookers, destroyed and destroying. Corpses moldering because the morgue drivers didn't show to pick them up, for fear of catching AIDS.
    When Milo complained, Trapp insisted he was simply making use of Milo's specialized knowledge of "the deviant subculture." The second complaint brought him an insubordination report in his file.
    Pushing the issue would have meant going up before hearing boards and hiring a lawyer—the Police Benevolent Association wouldn't go to bat on this one. And unremitting media attention that would turn Milo into The Crusading Gay Cop. That was something he wasn't—probably never would be—ready for. So he pushed his oars through the muck, working compulsively and starting to drink again.
    The Porsche disappeared down the drive but I could still