“It was good. They’re great partners, a really effective team.”
“That doesn’t sound very romantic. Is it a marriage or a corporation?”
“I don’t think they were ever a super-passionate couple. Jeremy’s a very buttoned-down, matter-of-fact kind of guy. And Kendra went through her sexy, wild-guy phase in her twenties. I think she was happy to have a stable, sweet guy she could count on. I know she loves him. But it’s not Romeo and Juliet or anything, if that’s what you mean.”
“Okay, so did she ever long for that passion? Could she have maybe gone looking for it, say on a high school reunion trip?” Keri asked.
“Why do you ask that?”
“Jeremy said that she seemed a little rattled after she returned from yours.”
“Oh, that,” Becky said, sniffing again before breaking out in another brief coughing fit.
As she tried to regain control, Keri noticed a cockroach scurry across the floor and tried to ignore it. When Becky recovered, she continued.
“Trust me, she wasn’t messing around on the trip. In fact, it was the opposite. An ex-boyfriend of hers, a guy named Coy Brenner, kept coming on to her. She was polite but he was pretty relentless.”
“How relentless?”
“Like, to the point of being uncomfortable. He was one of those wild guys I told you about. Anyway, he just wouldn’t take no for an answer. At the end of the reunion, he said something about looking her up in town. I think it really got to her.”
“Does he live here?”
“He lived in Phoenix for a long time. That’s where the reunion was. We all grew up there. But he mentioned something about moving to San Pedro recently—said he was working down at the port.”
“How long ago was this reunion?”
“Two weeks,” Becky said. “Do you really think he had something to do with this?”
“I don’t know. But we’ll run it down. Where can I find you if I need to get in touch again?”
“I work at a casting agency over on Robertson, across from The Ivy. It’s about a ten-minute walk from here. But I always have my cell. Please don’t hesitate to call. Anything I can do to help, just ask. She’s like a sister to me.”
Keri looked hard at Becky Sampson, trying to decide whether to call her on the elephant in the room. The constant sniffing and coughing, the total disregard for maintaining a livable home, the white residue and rolled up bill on the floor all suggested that the woman was deep into cocaine addiction.
“Thanks for your time,” she finally said, deciding to hold off for now.
Becky’s situation might prove useful later. But there was no need to use it yet, when it served no tactical advantage. Keri left the apartment and took the stairs down, despite the jarring twinges in her shoulder and ribs.
She felt slightly guilty for keeping Becky’s coke problem as a potential card to play down the road. But the guilt faded quickly as she left the building and breathed in the fresh air. She was a police detective, not a drug counselor. Anything that could help her solve the case was fair game.
As she pulled out into traffic and headed for the freeway, she called into the office. She needed everything they had on Kendra’s aggressively interested ex-boyfriend, Coy Brenner. She was about to pay him an unannounced visit.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Keri tried to keep her cool even as she felt her blood pressure rising. Rush hour traffic was starting to back up as she made her way south on the 110 to the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro. It was after four in the afternoon and even using the carpool lane and her siren, progress was slow.
She finally got off the freeway and wended her way through the complicated basin roads to the administration building on Palos Verdes Street. There she was supposed to meet her port police liaison, who would assign her two officers as backup when she interviewed Brenner. Port police participation was required since she was in their jurisdiction.
Normally Keri chafed at that kind of bureaucratic requirement but for once she didn’t mind having backup. She usually felt pretty confident going up against any possible suspect, as she was trained in Krav Maga and had even taken some boxing lessons from Ray. But with her gimpy shoulder and battered ribs, she wasn’t as sure of herself as usual. And Brenner didn’t sound like a pushover.
According to Detective Manny Suarez back at the precinct, who ran a background check for Keri while she was on the road, Coy Brenner was a piece of work. He’d been arrested a half dozen times over the years, twice for drunk driving, once for theft, twice for assault, and most impressively for fraud, which had earned him his longest stint behind bars, six months. That was four years ago and since he wasn’t allowed to leave the state for five, he was technically in violation of his parole.
Now he was a dockworker at pier 400. Even though he’d hinted to Becky and Kendra that he’d just moved to San Pedro in the last few weeks, records showed that he’d been living in a Long Beach apartment for over three months.
The port police liaison, Sergeant Mike Covey, and his two officers were waiting for her when she arrived. Covey was a tall, thin balding man in his late forties with a no-guff demeanor to him. She’d briefed him over the phone and he’d obviously done the same with his men.
“Brenner’s shift ends at four thirty,” Covey told her after they’d exchanged introductions. “Since it’s already four fifteen, I called the pier manager and told him not to let the crew out early. He’s been known to do that.”
“I appreciate it. I guess we should head right over. I want to get a look at the guy before I interview him.”
“Understood. If you want, we can take your car over first to arouse less suspicion. Officers Kuntsler and Rodriguez can follow separately in the squad car. We patrol the piers constantly so having them in the area won’t seem odd to your suspect. But if he sees an unfamiliar face get out of one of our vehicles, it might raise eyebrows.”
“That sounds good,” Keri agreed, appreciative that she wasn’t facing a turf war. She knew it was likely because the port police hated bad publicity. They would happily dispose of this thing quietly, even if meant ceding authority to another agency.
Keri followed Sergeant Covey’s directions across the Vincent Thomas Bridge and to the visitor parking area for pier 400. It took longer than Keri expected and they arrived at 4:28. Covey spoke into the radio, telling the pier manager he could release the crew.
“Brenner should walk right across our line of sight to the employee parking area any minute,” he said. As he spoke, the squad car passed by them and started a long, slow casual loop along the road circling the pier. It seemed completely unremarkable.
Keri watched the dockworkers file out of the pier warehouse. One guy realized he’d left his hardhat on and jogged back to return it. Two others ran across the broad expanse, clearly racing each other to their cars. The rest walked in a large group, apparently in no hurry.
“There’s your guy,” Covey said, nodding in the direction of the one guy walking alone. Coy Brenner bore only a passing resemblance to the man in the mug shot from his arrest in Arizona four years earlier. That man had a lean and hungry look, with longish, shaggy brown hair and a hint of stubble.
The guy lumbering across the parking lot now had put on about twenty pounds in the intervening years. His hair was cropped short and his stubble was now a full-on beard. He wore blue jeans and a lumberjack-style shirt and walked with his head down and a grimace on his face. Coy Brenner didn’t strike her as a man happy with his lot in life.
“Can you hang back, Sergeant Covey? I want to see how he reacts when confronted solo by a female cop.”
“Sure. I’ll head over to the warehouse for now. I’ll tell the boys to stay back as well. Give a wave when you want us to join you.”
“Will