Free Forty Thieves by Thomas Perry

bought this house in Van Nuys while they were still police officers.
    Ronnie had noticed the house while she was patrolling the old, quiet neighborhood. She had driven past it many times, until one night shift she saw a newly posted sign that the house was for sale. She had always been curious about the house because it had a bit more than a triple lot. There was nothing else special about the house or the neighborhood. The house itself was a white ranch-style bungalow that sprawled on its plot without apparent planning because rooms seemed to have been added whenever the place grew too small for its occupants. The trees on the block were old, but they were mostly the low, bumpy magnolias that infested this part of the Valley. They provided little shade and dropped their thick, leathery half-brown leaves twelve months a year and their oversized white flowers for oneweek, leaving cone-like seed carriers the size and shape of grenades. Ronnie had simply been ready for her own house, and she liked this one.
    On the first break of her shift she had called Sid, who was working homicide from the Metro Division at the time, and told him there was a house he had to see. They had not been able to meet at the address until after 8:00 a.m., when they were both off the clock.
    They had walked the perimeter, gone off to breakfast together, then called the realtor and returned with him to look at the inside. Sid had been largely silent, because he knew by then that Ronnie was already determined, and the walk-through was a formality, a concession to his need to persuade himself that he wasn’t participating in a purely emotional decision. Ronnie did not believe that emotion was a bad basis for a decision about where and how a person lived—certainly better than numbers—but she let him look and pretended to listen when he spoke.
    Over the years, the house had changed little. It still looked like thousands of other houses in the center of the San Fernando Valley—a small and undistinguished old house that had a two-story addition in the back. The house had a bit more land around it than some. Most of the first ones on their street had been orange groves or apricot orchards two generations ago. This had been out in the country then.
    After many years and raising two children here, they had needed to replace the cracked and uneven asphalt driveway, and so Ronnie had picked out a style made of artificial paving stones, and Sid had decided they may as well add a new gate that didn’t require him to get out of the car to shut it. As they drove out of their driveway in the Volvo, they couldhear the automatic gate roll along its track and then give a satisfying clank.
    “You know,” said Sid, “I sometimes forget how much I like this car. I get used to driving that BMW, but this thing is like an old friend.”
    “It ought to get us up to Osborne Street if you can keep from chasing down any more shooters.”
    They were on their way north to the Foothill station to meet with Detective Hebert, the officer in charge of the investigation of the shooting. When they arrived, Hebert came out to the lobby to meet them. “Come on in,” he said. “Let’s go into an interview room so we can talk.”
    Sid and Ronnie exchanged a glance so furtive that he didn’t see it. Ronnie said, “All right.”
    “Here,” he said, and opened the door of an interrogation room. “You can wait in there while I get us some coffee.”
    Sid and Ronnie entered and sat down in the two seats normally reserved for the two officers conducting the interview. The video cameras were aimed downward from above and behind them at the empty chair. They shared an understanding that Detective Hebert had gone to turn on the cameras and microphones to record what they said to each other, so they did not speak.
    Hebert returned with a uniformed cop who carried two paper coffee cups. Hebert carried his own and opened the door. “Thanks,” he said, and the cop set down the two