City of Fire, page 12
part #1 of Lena Gamble Series
And then it hit her. Her heart started pounding and that shake came back—a second hot load of adrenaline exploding through her body.
She slid the newspaper off the pile and carefully laid it out on the table.
She noted the date at the top of the page. Not sometime last week, but Friday morning.
She studied the puzzle—the words, the lettering, the machinelike precision of the handwriting that didn’t match either the victim or her husband yet seemed so familiar now.
She rifled through the stack of newspapers on the chair. Every other puzzle remained blank.
Her eyes flicked past the kitchen counter to the boom box sitting on the living room floor. She sprinted toward it, her mind jetting ahead of her body in a jumbled blur. What she was thinking was absolutely impossible. They’d followed the evidence without bias. Brant’s alibi had fallen apart and he blew the polygraph. An eyewitness even came forward. She saw the interview last night on TV.
Memories of the Lopez case began to surface—one after the next in rapid succession. The newspaper by the bed. The CD player. What she was feeling in her gut was totally ludicrous. The MOs were entirely different. There could be no connection between the two murders. Jose Lopez was in Men’s Central Jail where he belonged. While it might be true that Lopez had been under extreme emotional distress, that he started weeping when Novak showed him the picture of his dead wife and called the woman a whore, Jose Lopez had murdered his wife and confessed.
She switched the boom box on and hit the EJECT button.
The tray slid out.
When she read the title on the CD, her skin flushed and the room seemed to ignite in a fiery haze. But it wasn’t Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 spewing out the heat.
This time it was one of Lena’s personal favorites. No. 7.
LENA flipped open her cell, keeping her eyes on the road as she hit her partner’s speed-dial number and bulldozed her way through weekend traffic on the Santa Monica Freeway. Novak picked up on the second ring.
“We’ve got a problem,” she said, her voice cracking.
“How big?”
“What are you doing right now?”
“Talking to Officer Marwick out of West L.A. He took the witness’s statement on Friday. Sanchez and Rhodes brought in that screenwriter. We’re trying to straighten things out. I was starting to get worried. I was just about to call you at home.”
She glanced at the clock on the dash: 10:15 a.m.
“Do you remember Terrill Visconte?” she asked.
“Teresa Lopez’s boss. The guy who won’t admit that he was doing her the night of the murder.”
“We need to find out where he was on Thursday night,” she said. “I’m thinking he’ll be clear, but we need to know for sure.”
A long moment passed. Lena thought her phone had gone dead and checked the screen for a signal. When Novak finally spoke up, his voice was low and riddled with concern.
“Where you going with this, Lena? What’s happened?”
She steered around a slow-moving Buick, working her way into the left lane as she thought it over. The implications of her discovery were ominous.
“I made another trip out to the house,” she said. “The DNA results we get tomorrow probably won’t come back to Brant.”
It hung there. Big and heavy like a stone dropping out of the sky.
“You bringing something with you we can see?” he asked.
“Enough to ruin your day.”
Novak didn’t hesitate. “I’ll make the call. What else can I do until you get here?”
“Don’t let that witness walk. We’ll need to pull the newspaper from the Lopez case. The one we found on the bedside table. I know it’s Sunday, but I think we’ll need Barrera.”
“You sure about this?”
She nodded, then realized he couldn’t see her. “I’m sure,” she said.
“If you’re gonna ruin my day, we might as well take a shot at his. Let me get started on these calls.”
She clicked off the phone, glancing at her briefcase on the passenger seat. It was more than a gut feeling now. They’d followed the evidence and made a wrong turn. But it was worse than that. Almost a perfect storm conspiring against them. They had an eyewitness whose claim now seemed dubious at best. A confession from Lopez that made even less sense. And what about Brant’s polygraph? Lena tried to stem the riptide, concentrating on the road and heavy traffic. Still, their mistake was on paper and a matter of record. Innocent people were getting hurt.
Ten minutes later her cell phone rang. It was Novak, filling her in on Terrill Visconte. Apparently the man had been in Miami for the past week, seeing his father through an appendectomy. Novak had spoken with Visconte at the hospital and confirmed his conversation with the desk nurse. Visconte had been out of L.A. for a week, visited the hospital in Miami daily, and was clear. Under the circumstances, he readily agreed to give a DNA sample immediately upon his return. Lena listened as Novak went through the details, but she was thinking more about what he’d said to her on the phone last night.
This case wasn’t exactly off the lot. The track they were racing down was mired with potholes and a collection of illogical events that didn’t add up.
When it seemed that Novak was finished, her mind surfaced and she looked out the windshield. She was closing in on the city. Hitting the 110 freeway fast.
She told her partner that she would see him in ten minutes. He told her that he was headed down to the basement. The labs might be closed, but the Property Room was open 24-7.
THE ELEVATOR DOORS opened onto the third floor. Lena stepped out, legging it around the corner to the bureau floor. As she entered, she found Novak waiting with Barrera at the lieutenant’s desk, the Calendar section of the Times laid out before them. Barrera had a pair of golf shoes on, and his face looked sweaty and sunburned.
“It’s the crossword puzzle,” she said.
Novak was already wearing gloves and reached for the paper. Lena slipped on a pair of her own, opening the evidence bag and laying out Friday’s paper beside the one they’d found in Teresa Lopez’s bedroom. Everyone eyeballed the handwriting samples. Although no one was an expert, it seemed obvious enough that the machinelike lettering had been stamped out by the same hand.
Lena fished another evidence bag out of her briefcase—Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7—and lowered it to the desk.
“I found this in the CD player,” she said.
Novak’s eyes rolled off the newspaper, hit the CD, and rolled back to the handwriting samples.
“Number seven,” he whispered.
From the look on his face, she could tell that he was blown away. But it was more than that. His mind had slipped from its moorings and appeared to be under full sail. There was a certain joy on his face at the revelation, a certain wonder he couldn’t hide. An hour ago, Brant and Lopez had been guilty of murdering their wives. Now another possibility was unfolding before them. Something darker and far more hideous, but amazing nonetheless.
“Number seven,” Novak repeated.
“This may be a stupid question,” Barrera said, “but what are the chances Brant murdered Teresa Lopez?”
“Zero to none,” Novak said.
“Why?”
“Buddy Paladino. No attorney would have agreed to the polygraph unless he knew something we didn’t. It wasn’t that he thought Brant could beat the box. It was the fact that he knew we were off track. He knew it and he was digging it. He knew Brant didn’t do the crime.”
“Then why did Brant fuck up the test?”
“I’ve got no idea,” Novak said. “Paladino was overplaying his hand. He got burned.”
“These murders occurred thirty miles apart,” Lena said. “When you put them together, they look random. And Brant doesn’t strike me as a serial killer. If he’s living a secret life, it’s unlikely he’d bring it home and do his own wife.”
“But there’s no evidence of rape,” Barrera said. “No vaginal bruising. No rips or tears or even any bleeding. She knew who she was having sex with.”
“I think there’s another explanation,” Lena said.
She had been thinking about it ever since she’d left the death house. Mulling over the details of a new case theory as she worked the road. She pulled a third evidence bag from her briefcase and dropped it on the desk. The meds.
“I found these hidden in the bedroom closet,” she said. “On Friday her doctor told us she prescribed them to help with nausea and vomiting. But there’s a side effect. A chance the drug made her drowsy. I think her judgment was off, at least when things got started. I think she was confused and thought she was with her husband.”
Lena tried not to spend too much time thinking about the moment when Nikki Brant finally realized that the man on top of her wasn’t really her husband. It seemed to her that both Novak and Barrera were troubled by the same thought. A view of something so horrific it shook the core and forever changed it.
Barrera rubbed his hands over his face, suddenly appearing tired. “What about Lopez? You got a confession. He’s in jail, for Christ’s sake.”
“There’s no answer for that except to say that the pressure was on,” Novak said. “He was upset. He’d just learned that his wife was fucking around. It must have pushed him over the edge.”
Barrera sat back in his chair, thinking it over. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s assume that the crimes are random but related. Let’s say for the sake of argument that the doer is a third-party motherfucker from planet X. Tell me why he’s hanging around. What’s he doing at the crime scene after the murder? And don’t tell me that it’s because he likes to play with puzzles or listen to music. If he’s a third party, then he’s taking unnecessary risks. He was nearly caught by Jose Lopez when he got home that night.”
“It’s in the report,” Novak said. “A witness saw someone jump from the bedroom window. We thought it was Visconte.”
“But now it’s not Visconte,” Barrera said. “Now it’s someone else. At Brant’s house he raped and murdered the woman—he cut off her toe—then hung around for two hours with his dick in the Internet. What the hell was he doing?”
It was another one of those million-dollar questions, Lena thought. A question no one had an answer for. Then Novak picked up the plastic bag containing the CD and added another. Something that was already out there but had been left unsaid.
“If Teresa Lopez is number six and Nikki Brant makes seven, then what about the previous five?”
Barrera pushed his chair away from the desk and stood up as if he were just served tainted food at a restaurant. Lena thought she noticed his hands trembling slightly before he slipped them into his pockets.
“I want to slow this down,” he said. “The captain’s away. I’m gonna have to take this up to the sixth floor. No one mentions the Lopez connection to anybody, okay? Everything sits on hold until we get the blood work back tomorrow and we know what we’re dealing with. Who’s the DDA on Lopez?”
“Same as Brant,” Lena said. “Roy Wemer.”
She hoped her voice didn’t reveal her disappointment. The chief was on the sixth floor, along with his deputies. It would mean more meetings, more reports, the chance that someone might be watching over their shoulder. In the end, ringing the bell upstairs would wake up the bureaucracy. Decisions would be made by committee, slowing everything down.
“Okay,” Barrera said, thinking as he spoke. “We’ll call the lab and make sure they compare the DNA samples with the Lopez case. If we get a hit, I’ll talk to Wemer and let him know where things stand.” He eyed Lena’s briefcase, then looked at her. “Did you pull samples of Brant’s handwriting?”
She nodded.
“What about his wife?”
“I’ve got those, too.”
“Good. Then you two better spend the rest of the day verifying these samples. They may look the same to us, but what the hell does that mean?”
“It’s Sunday,” Novak said. “The store’s closed. You’ll have to authorize the overtime.”
Barrera nodded. “Just get someone in here. Where are Sanchez and Rhodes?”
Novak raised his eyebrows. “With the eyewitness who says he saw Brant on the night of the murder.”
It had been happening with greater frequency over the past couple of years. People stepping forward and claiming to have witnessed a crime in order to bask in the limelight. They looked at the situation as an opportunity to be noticed. A chance to get on TV. In this case, Lena thought it might have something to do with the fact that she didn’t recognize any of the movies credited to the man. That his foray into the dim light of a television audience was an attempt to get his name out there and boost his career.
“Sounds like obstruction of justice,” Barrera said. “Tell Rhodes to arrest the son of a bitch. Give him a room over at Men’s Central Jail. And get Sanchez started on the database so we can find those first five kills. Any objection to bringing Bernhardt in?”
Novak shook his head.
“Good,” Barrera said. “Then everybody meets here tomorrow morning. Eight sharp in the captain’s office. I’ll call Andy and bring him up to speed.”
Dr. Andy Bernhardt was a staff psychiatrist and an experienced profiler. Unfortunately, most of his time was spent working with the Professional Standards Bureau, the new name for Internal Affairs. There wasn’t a working cop in any division that didn’t have a natural distrust for the unit no matter what they called it these days.
Lena collected the newspapers, returning them to the evidence bags. As she walked to her desk with Novak, she glanced at her partner’s face. The wonder was gone, the joy of the revelation replaced with exhilaration, but also fear.
They had wasted the first two days, she thought. The most important period in any investigation. But it felt like maybe they lost more than that. Not two days on Nikki Brant or even thirty on Teresa Lopez. It felt more like they were in the weeds and had lost the better part of a year.
HE’S left-handed.”
Irving Sample snapped the magnification lens closer to his worktable as he began a side-by-side comparison of the two crossword puzzles. The notes Lena had collected from the Brants’ bulletin board were laid out on the light box off to the side, along with other examples of their handwriting she’d pulled from the files in their desk, just in case.
Sample hadn’t wanted to come in. And in the end, he didn’t. They were sitting in his study at his home in La Cañada, a small, affluent town in the hills overlooking Glendale. When Lena had made the call, he told her that he would prefer to examine the documents here. It was Sunday, his children were visiting from out of town, and he had everything he needed at the house to give them a preliminary finding.
Lena didn’t mind, nor did Novak. La Cañada was only a twenty-minute drive from Parker Center and both of them needed to get some fresh air. What she didn’t expect when they arrived were the peacocks roaming freely about the neighborhood. Two were standing on a neighbor’s roof squawking at something in the hills behind the house. Another three were devouring a garden three doors down the street.
Lena gazed out the window from her seat at the work-table. A peacock had just landed in Sample’s backyard and was giving her a funny look through the glass. Had it been an earlier time in her life, she would have sworn she was hallucinating.
“Don’t mind the birds,” Sample said over his shoulder. “They actually make great watchdogs.”
“I’ll bet,” she said.
“Someone moved away and left them behind. The flock grew and, for whatever reason, decided to stay. There hasn’t been a robbery in the neighborhood since we’ve lived here.”
“The noise would drive me crazy,” Novak said.
“You get used to it.”
Sample pulled a clean sheet of paper from a drawer and began copying letters from the crossword puzzles, mimicking their shape and style. As he worked, Lena looked at the equipment on the table, the collection of inks kept in a glass cabinet away from the light of the window, the number of books dedicated to the subject of forgery on the shelves. She didn’t mind the drive at all. Instead, she felt lucky to have access to a forensic document analyst with Sample’s reputation and experience.
Sample had begun his career in the Questioned Documents Section of the Secret Service. When he was asked to teach at U.C. Berkeley, he accepted the job largely because his children had moved to northern California. But as much as he enjoyed living close to his family and working with students, he missed the thrill of the hunt. The pressure of a life spent in the real world. To the LAPD’s credit, the examiner was openly recruited until ten years ago, when Sample agreed to move to Los Angeles and head the Questioned Documents Unit.
Lena had worked with Sample on two occasions during her stint in Bunco Forgery as a detective in Hollywood. They liked each other immediately.
“I’ve found something,” Sample said in a voice charged with emotion. “An anomaly.”
He grabbed the notes from the bulletin board, comparing them to the hand that filled in the crossword puzzles.
“It’s the way he forms the letter P,” he said. “It’s unusual. Very unique.”
Lena and Novak moved in for a closer look.
Sample beckoned them even closer. “Most people form the letter P in one of two ways.” He pulled a fresh sheet of paper from the drawer and grabbed his pen. “The letter P is essentially a line connected to a half circle. If they use two strokes to form the letter, they start at the top and make the line, then draw the half circle. If they form the letter using a single stroke, they start at the bottom, form the line, and continue around until they complete the loop.”
