City of Fire, page 25
part #1 of Lena Gamble Series
“I heard that before. If you can plant a gun, I guess you can plant a receipt.”
“Yeah, sure, Lena. Just like OJ’s glove. I buried the fucking thing when no one was looking.”
“Facts are facts,” she said. “And it seems like you’re the keeper of the facts.”
“I don’t care if you hate me. I don’t give a shit. I spent the afternoon talking to Holt’s doctor. His shrink at the clinic. He told me that your brother’s death had become an obsession for Holt. That he was so fixated on the murder that it slowed down his recovery. Meeting after meeting, all he wanted to talk about was the murder. His shrink said Holt had a lot on his mind. A lot to get off his chest.”
She kept her eyes on him. “Guilty people usually do, right?”
“I didn’t put the words in the shrink’s mouth and I didn’t lead him on. When I called and told him Holt was dead, it was the first thing out of his fucking mouth.”
“What about Jane Doe’s identity?”
He fell back into his chair, looked at her a moment, then shook his head.
He was angry. Visibly attempting to reel his emotions in. Her mind clicked back fourteen hours to the moment she’d seen his signature on the checkout card at the Records Retention Center. The old woman handing her the murder book and blessing her on the way out. As she tossed it over, she heard Rhodes’s girlfriend bang a pot in the kitchen. She looked through the French doors and saw the woman staring at them as she did the dishes. Lena had seen her before. A green-eyed blonde with a gentle face and a figure drawn in curves. Tonight she seemed particularly moody. When their eyes met, the woman turned away.
“It’s been a long day,” Lena said. “I’d forgotten what you said with Barrera this morning. Holt was jealous. I guess that’s as good a reason as any to take a shot at your best friend.”
Rhodes picked up Holt’s journal and found a page he’d marked. “Read it. You tell me what was going on in the guy’s head.”
He pushed the notebook her way, then pointed to an entry. As Lena glanced at the page, she realized that it was more of a sketchbook than a notebook. Holt made journal entries but also drew in the book and even Scotch-taped mementos beside what he wrote down. As she started reading, it occurred to her that the entry was made on the day her brother played that ballad for Holt. The story of Lena and David Gamble, two bank robbers on the run. Holt was describing what he felt after hearing the music. He wrote the lyrics down, understanding immediately that the crimes were only a metaphor for the life Lena and David had been dealt and shared. That in its way it was a love song, something Holt found so beautiful he became overcome with self-doubt. He wrote about his wrath after hearing the song. Feeling inept and depressed and fighting the urge to kill the pain with another hot load in the arm. The spike of anger he had for his writing partner because it all seemed to come so easy for David Gamble, while he himself always had to work so hard.
She looked up from the journal and caught Rhodes staring at her. His eyes were gentle at first but quickly iced over. As he turned away, the scar on his left earlobe became more vivid. Rather than a puncture wound, it looked more like an X.
“This doesn’t mean what you think it does,” she said.
He crossed his legs and worked on the cigarette in silence.
“My brother used to say the same thing about Holt,” she said. “That it came too easy, and he had to work to keep up. They were pushing each other.”
The phone rang. Rhodes picked it up, said hello, but not much else. It was a one-sided conversation that began with a no, meaning that he wasn’t alone, followed by a yes, indicating he couldn’t talk because someone was in the room. Lena turned back to the journal, leafing through the pages until she found the first entry after her brother’s death. Three weeks had passed. As she started reading, she realized that the entry hadn’t been written in Holt’s own words. It was pulled from The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. Sam Spade talking about the meaning of a partnership as he grilled Brigid O’Shaughnessy, a woman he could have loved but now knew murdered his partner.
When your partner’s killed, you’re supposed to do something about it.
The words had a certain weight about them. When she heard Rhodes hang up, she closed the book and returned it to his desk.
“I’ve gotta go to the market,” he said.
She met his eyes and knew that he was leaving the house to meet someone. That he hadn’t listened to her and, at the very best or even least, had no interest in what she said. Rhodes was using the journal to define the context for the murder and clarify the motive. Anything that interrupted that vision was being ignored.
Rhodes checked his watch, then slipped the pack of cigarettes into his pocket. “Holt writes about a gold pick,” he said. “Someone gave it to your brother as a gift. Someone famous.”
Lena shrugged. “You’re saying Holt hated him for that, too?”
“Doesn’t sound much like love. Your brother got the pick. Holt didn’t. He wrote about it.”
The green-eyed blonde started banging pots again. Rhodes looked through the French doors for a moment before turning back.
“She knows about us,” he said.
“Knows about what? Nothing happened.”
He gave her a look as he grabbed his keys. “Right, Lena. Nothing happened. Whatever you say.”
She’d had enough. She grabbed the keys to Holt’s house and stood up.
“I’ll find my way out.”
She pushed the glass doors open, watched the blonde turn her back in the kitchen, and passed through the foyer without a good-bye. Her car was parked at the bottom of the hill before an A-frame cottage. On the way down she counted the steps. There were seventy-two between the street and Rhodes’s front door. Reaching the bottom, she paused a moment and looked up at Rhodes’s house hanging over the precipice. The rain had stopped, the wet ground cover glistening from the light venting out the windows of the A-frame.
What Rhodes was calling context and motive were irrelevant. History was littered with one artist pushing another forward. Lennon and McCartney came to mind first. But even van Gogh and Gauguin challenged each other and would easily have made the list. If anything could have been drawn from Holt’s journal, it was that Holt wrote everything down. That his entries were made regularly. If he committed suicide, if he was involved in her brother’s murder and wanted to get it off his chest, he would have left a note. Without the note, his suicide wouldn’t have any meaning. If the murder had been preying on his soul, the note would have been his one and only chance to offer an explanation and have some say in the way he would be remembered.
The question was, why didn’t Rhodes see that?
Something was going on with the man. Something she didn’t want to guess at, imagine, or make up. But it was there.
YOU’RE a nobody. You don’t count. In America everybody counts, just not you….
The words rippled through Fellows’s entire being. It was almost as if he could hear them through the dash over the car radio. The same words playing over and over.
You’re a nobody.
You don’t count in Harriet’s life.
Everybody and anybody counts in her life. Just not you.
Fellows made a left and tooled down Fairfax heading north in his ’98 Ford Taurus. He wished he could snuff the words out of his head, but knew that he wasn’t hearing his own voice or even Harriet’s. It was Mick Finn, glaring at him from across the table at lunch this afternoon. Fellows thought it sounded a lot like an argument. Finn said that it was time to wake up and called it a reality check.
A real worldview.
He had murdered Burell hoping to save Harriet. He thought she would be drawn to him, but she ran off. The dream was over. Even worse, according to Finn, LAPD detectives connected the Burell murder to the Teresa Lopez and Nikki Brant killings. And where and how did Jane Doe and Tim Holt fit in? Fellows had lost control of himself and taken unnecessary risks. He was letting all the press coverage go to his head. And for what? A whore living a double life who couldn’t be saved, didn’t love him, and never would.
Fellows switched the radio on, found KFWB, and turned the volume up, hoping the late-night news might help prevent a meltdown. Then he checked the rearview mirror.
That Mercedes was back. The same silver coupe that had followed him off the 10 when he abandoned the freeway in favor of surface streets. His eyes flicked back through the windshield and he tried to concentrate. The rain had stopped. In spite of the hour, it looked as if all 7.9 million cars registered with the DMV last year were on the road tonight. Chances were that the driver was headed for Hollywood just as he was and knew the shortcut.
He made a right on Willoughby, a narrow, tree-lined street with an east-west cut through a series of residential neighborhoods. When he checked the mirror, he saw the Mercedes make the turn and speed up, then back off just before hitting him.
Fellows shook his fist in the air, then took a deep breath as he considered the possibility that he was being followed. That Finn had been right and a trip to the crime scene at Tim Holt’s house wasn’t worth the risk tonight. He glanced at his digital camera on the passenger seat and, for a moment, dreamed about the shots he might get inside the house. The darkness and ultrasilence that seemed to inhabit a home after a death occurred. What it would feel like to breeze through the rooms. He needed a place to think. A chance to get a grip on himself. Finn’s obvious skills in security wouldn’t be required because the owners were already dead.
The front end of the Taurus suddenly lifted upward. Fellows’s stomach dropped as the car began to hydroplane, his eyes riveted on the pool of water flooding the right lane. He wrenched the steering wheel to the left. Checking the mirror, he slammed on the brakes and felt a bump. Then the Mercedes veered off, skidding into a tree.
A moment passed. Fellows stared at his camera on the floor, wondering if it was broken. He jammed the gearshift into PARK and ripped the door open, bristling with anger as he noticed the damage to his car. His bumper was intact, but the left taillight was gone. His eyes danced across the wet pavement, picking out the pieces of broken plastic. When he heard the other driver begin shouting at him, he looked up slowly.
The man was in his early twenties. He was kneeling before his Mercedes, examining the damage.
Fellows caught the buzz cut. The basketball jersey and baggy pants. He knew who he was in a single instant. An unhirable undesirable, driving what looked like a brand-new Mercedes CL65 AMG Coupe with a twin-turbocharged V-12 under its crinkled hood. List price $178,220.
He wondered whether the car was stolen, but guessed that the money to buy or lease the car was how they played the game. His hands were trembling. He knew that he could snap at any moment. That he was on the verge of losing it, if he wanted to lose it.
“You were driving too close,” he said in a low voice.
The little heathen flashed his eyes at him, then stood up and spit. “Too close, motherfucker? This is your fault. Look what you did to my fucking car.”
The man was only ten feet away. The muscles on his arms lacked definition, and Fellows estimated that he was fifty pounds overweight. He knew what he could do to him in as little as fifteen seconds. That it would be painless, soundless, over. His vision began to take in the lit windows along the street, his eyes frozen in their sockets. Someone was watching them. He could feel it. He could see their shadow in a window on the second floor.
“You were driving too close,” he repeated. “Are you all right?”
“Fuck you.”
The man jumped in behind the wheel and sped off. Once he got halfway down the block, the little giant worked the horn and shot Fellows the finger.
But at least it was over. And Fellows had demonstrated that his ability to control himself, his unique strength, wasn’t exactly lost. As he returned to the Taurus and examined his camera, he wished that Finn had been here tonight to witness the way he’d handled himself.
He switched the camera on and pressed the button. The flash bounced off the windshield, filling the car with white light that poked at his eyes and hurt more than sunlight. When the flash subsided, he studied the shot. No harm done at all. His camera was in perfect working order.
He pulled around the flooded section of the road, continuing east on Willoughby. Five minutes later, he made a left on Vine and could see Hollywood Hills less than a mile up the road. The radio was still on, the story switching from storm coverage and a mud slide in Malibu to Romeo, who was now the talk of the town. It was a sound bite from the chief of police. They were making progress, he said. But investigations like these take time.
Romeo. That was the name they had given him.
Romeo.
He liked the way it sounded and the meaning it conveyed. He even liked the heart-shaped graphics the TV stations were using to frame pictures of his victims on the news.
He pulled to a stop at the light, gazing through the windshield at the homes nestled into the hills. The lit windows. Tim Holt’s house couldn’t be seen because the lights were off. No one lived there anymore.
He smiled as the light turned green. Everyone in the City of Angels was looking for him. Everybody wanted to know who he was. He reached for his water bottle and took a long swig. Martin Fellows might not count, but Romeo did.
LENA glanced at the house behind the wall as she rummaged through the trunk for her flashlight. It was dark, quiet, fifteen minutes past midnight. The only sound seemed to be coming from a dry breeze shuffling the leaves overhead and stirring the branches until they let go of the rain.
Her meeting with Rhodes had a troubling aftertaste, something she was having difficulty shaking. An internal dialogue that turned into something of a war. She had always taken pride in her ability to size people up. As a police officer she relied on her instincts to read a situation quickly and act with confidence. It was a survival skill. Something that came with growing up hungry and living in a car. Something she needed to be able to count on. While it would be jumping the gun to suspect Rhodes of anything, his behavior was more than unusual. Yet just as she wanted Tim Holt to be found as nothing more than an innocent victim, she needed Rhodes to come out clean as well. She couldn’t be wrong twice. Not that wrong about two men she cared about and thought she knew. It came down to her internal compass. The main wheel. And whether she could trust it.
She remembered buying that pack of cigarettes yesterday and found them on the dash. With Rhodes still in mind, she lit one and wondered if self-destruction was contagious. She had followed him down to Franklin, then lost his car in traffic when he made a right on Gower. She had been keeping her distance, twenty car lengths’ worth of insurance so that she wouldn’t be seen. Had she anticipated the volume of cars on the road tonight, she would have played it tighter. Still, she confirmed that he’d lied to her. The market was two blocks up Franklin in the other direction. Rhodes was on his way to meet someone.
She checked her watch as she drew smoke into her lungs. Novak was at least a half hour off, maybe more. Switching the flashlight on, she pushed the crime scene tape out of her way and started down the driveway on her own.
She wanted a look at the house first. All the way around. Novak had told her over the phone that the point of entry hadn’t been an unlocked front door. Instead, the intruder broke a window around back and entered from the basement. She found a gravel path at the end of the drive, following it down a series of steps until she reached the backyard. Panning the light across the perimeter, she spotted the stable and horse trails leading into the hills. One trail caught her interest, and she moved deeper into the yard for a better view. As she took another drag on the cigarette, she panned her flashlight up the hill and watched the beam crisscross in the sky with the headlights from a passing car. It struck her that this wasn’t a horse trail, but a footpath leading to Mulholland Drive. If the intruder hadn’t parked out front, this was a viable entrance to the property, something she would never have noticed if not for the darkness and a passing car.
She dropped her cigarette in the wet grass and gave it a tap with her boot. The breeze was steadier now and she could hear it wisping through the tall grass behind her.
She thought about the owner, her brother’s best friend, and took in the breadth of what was supposed to be his new home. The windows were larger in the back, the ivy covering the whitewashed walls more carefully trimmed, no doubt because of the view. To the left at the top of the steps was a stone terrace with French doors opening to the living room. To the right, an enclosed porch that ran the length of the house. Tilting the beam of light beneath the deck, she located the basement door.
This was the point of entry. The weak link. She stepped beneath the porch, noting the gardening supplies and wood stacked beside a shed. Moving closer, she panned the light over the door and examined the damage. Three panes of glass remained intact, while the fourth was crudely broken away with what Novak believed had been a log from the woodpile.
She gazed through the broken window. Dim light could be seen cascading down the basement steps, and she guessed that one of the crime scene techs had left a lamp on somewhere upstairs. She glanced at the moving cartons littering the floor by the furnace, then turned back to the door and zeroed in on the outdated lock. When she rattled the doorknob, she felt the loose fit and raised the flashlight. Above the doorframe was a foot-long crack. And the damage wasn’t limited to the mortar. Several stones were split in two. It looked as if the jamb had shifted more than a half inch away from the door. Lena knew that she was looking at damage from the Northridge earthquake. Even more, she’d found another loose end in the logic of the case.
She grabbed the doorknob and gave it a hard push. Then tried again, thrusting with her hip. As the lock gave way and the door popped open, she considered the possibilities.
The intruder’s first instinct would have been to try the door. Just as obvious, anyone with any strength could have forced the door open as easily as she had. From what they knew about Romeo, he was both cunning and strong. And there was a risk to breaking the glass. The sound it would make and the possible injury it might cause.
