City of Fire, page 5
part #1 of Lena Gamble Series
“We’re in,” Novak said. “Late this afternoon. I told Lamar to meet us there.”
“We’ll need the UV lights,” she said. “We need to scan this room. And we’ll need to pull the computer.”
Novak agreed, his eyes following the drops of semen across the floor to the desk. As she turned back, Rhodes stepped into the foyer from the kitchen doorway.
“Things just got stupid,” he said. “Take a look.”
She slid beneath the crime scene tape, following Novak into the kitchen. The dishwasher was open. Rhodes pointed to the twelve-inch chef’s knife in the upper tray. The blade was forged from a single piece of high-carbon steel and appeared sharp enough and long enough to be the murder weapon. On the counter Lena noticed six knives from the same set sheathed in a wooden block. The seventh slot remained open, waiting for the twelve-inch blade to hit the rinse cycle.
“Someone washed the dishes,” Rhodes said. “But they were in a hurry and forgot to add the dinner plates.”
Lena glanced at the dishes by the sink—dinner for one—then turned back to the dishwasher. The trays were only half-full, the contents clean. Peeling off her gloves, she dug into her blazer pocket for a fresh pair. Then she picked up a saucer in the upper tray and felt the heat—the faint glow well above room temperature that remained. Clearly, the sole purpose of the wash had been to sterilize the knife. She passed the saucer to Rhodes, who smiled a little as the radiant heat broke through his gloves. The knife in the upper tray was most likely the murder weapon.
“The dishwasher works on a ninety-minute cycle,” he said.
Lena did the math. “Then someone turned it on around three.”
She looked at her partner. He was staring at the open drawer beside the oven and appeared shaken. The drawer was filled to the brim with plastic grocery bags. No one wanted it to go this way, but there it was, dragging them into the black.
“They match the bag over his wife’s head,” Rhodes said. “They’re from the same store. Hollywood Veggie Mart. Only it’s down the hill on PCH and not in Hollywood. It’s an independent. The only one in town.”
Lena looked out the window. She could see Tito Sanchez getting out of the car and walking toward the house. James Brant was still sitting in the front seat, but the tears were gone and his swollen face appeared to have hardened around the edges. As Sanchez entered the foyer, Novak steered him into the kitchen.
“What’s Brant saying?”
“The same thing I told you guys before. He’s going around in circles. He needs to use a bathroom.”
“That’s what neighbors are for,” Rhodes said.
Novak turned back to Sanchez. “You’ve spent the morning together. What’s your take on the guy?”
“I can’t really get a read on him. He’s angry. Nervous. He’s all over the place. I guess if it was my wife, I might be acting the same way.”
“What about work?”
“No enemies. One big happy family.”
“Then you think he’s legit,” Novak said.
Sanchez spotted the knife in the dishwasher and caught the vibe. The big turn.
“I didn’t say that. I can’t tell, Hank. It could go either way.”
“What about his fingerprints?” Lena asked.
“SID already got them,” Sanchez said. “They wanted to clear him. They got them while they were waiting to get into the house.”
The telltale sound of wheels rolling down the hallway underlined the moment and rusted out the edge.
Lena turned with everyone else to watch the gurney pass through the foyer and out the front door. Nikki Brant’s small body barely filled out half the blue bag. When Gainer popped his head in the room, Novak pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket and handed it to him.
“The temps,” he said.
Gainer nodded, handing him a receipt for the body and walking out.
Then Novak joined Lena by the dishwasher for another look at that knife. As a ray of sunlight poked through the window, the blade appeared to glisten before their eyes.
“I think it’s time we took advantage of our size,” he said to her.
“You want to split up?”
“We’ll get started on his alibi and let these guys finish up here,” Novak said. “I want this knife at the autopsy, so let’s get it logged in.”
THE Dreggco Corporation was located just off Main in Venice, within walking distance to the beach. As Novak pulled into the lot, Lena eyed the two-story building and guessed that it had been constructed sometime within the past three or four years. The corrugated-aluminum siding remained unblemished and appeared freshly painted a shade darker than sand. Although there were no windows on the first floor, the second story was wrapped in a band of darkened glass.
They got out of the car and walked through the drizzle toward an aqua blue awning that marked the entrance, the sign by the door too small to have read from the road.
THE DREGGCO CORPORATION
FOOD TASTES BETTER IF DREGGCO EATS IT FIRST
She saw Novak reading the slogan and turned back to the lot. From the number of cars, less than a hundred people worked here. But what struck Lena most was the lack of any visible security measures. This was Los Angeles. Hollywood might be the gutter. But if the city had a drain, Venice was it.
“Are you seeing what I am?” she asked.
“There aren’t any surveillance cameras.”
“And there isn’t a gate or a guard or even a card-key access box.”
Novak flashed a subdued smile and reached for the door. “No record of who walks in or who walks out.”
“Or what time it was when they did,” she said.
They stepped inside, met by a rush of warm air as they entered the lobby. A young woman dressed casually in jeans and a black V-neck sweater sat on the other side of the counter, answering phones and directing calls throughout the building. As they approached, she signaled with a raised finger to wait while she listened to someone on her headset. Lena noticed the book pack by the woman’s feet. The textbooks on the counter by her mug of hot tea. The receptionist was a college student.
While they waited, Lena stepped away from the counter. The furniture was sparse, but modern and expensive. On the walls, three high-resolution photographs lit with small tungsten spotlights depicted an apple, an egg, and what looked like a grain of rice in the palm of a child’s hand. There was a stairway leading to the second floor but no sign of an elevator. At the base of the steps a set of double glass doors led to a hallway that cut into the center of the building. Along the hallway were several doors, and like the building’s entrance, they didn’t require an ID card to pass through.
“I’m sorry,” the receptionist said. “May I help you?”
Lena returned to the counter as Novak smiled at the young woman.
“No problem,” he said. “We’re here to meet with Milo Plashett. He’s expecting us.”
The receptionist’s eyes rocked from Novak to Lena, then back again, her easy manner fading into one of fear as she suddenly realized who they were and why they were here. Word must have gotten out. Because Plashett wasn’t a suspect—the visit more or less routine—Lena had called ahead to make sure that he would be here. Based on what Sanchez had learned from James Brant, Plashett owned the Dreggco Corporation and had hired Brant himself.
The receptionist pointed to the stairs as she pressed the first button on the telephone console. “Mr. Plashett’s office is at the end of the hall.”
They crossed the lobby. As they rose to the second floor, Milo Plashett met them in the foyer, shook hands, and introduced himself.
“This way,” he said anxiously. “Please.”
They followed him toward the rear of the building. Plashett was on the short side with a robust body, his steps meaty and determined. His scalp was tan, his dark brown hair mostly gone now. Lena figured he was about fifty. As they passed a series of doorways, she spotted a sign on the wall with James Brant’s name on it and gave Novak a nudge. Plashett didn’t notice that they had stopped right away. When he did, he hurried back.
“May we take a look?” Lena asked.
“Sure,” Plashett said. “Under the circumstances, I’m sure he wouldn’t mind.”
Under the circumstances, she thought, maybe he would.
She stepped into Brant’s office. The room was small and nondescript, his desk and the floor around it piled with stacks of files and loose papers. As she moved to the window, she could see a small piece of the ocean leaking out from between the buildings at the end of the street. On the sill she found a photograph of Nikki Brant, smiling at the camera. Lena recognized the building behind her as well as the fountain. The picture had been taken at the L.A. County Museum of Art on Wilshire.
Plashett cleared his throat. “There were times when I’d be walking down the hall and see him holding that picture just like you are. He was staring at it. I can’t imagine what he’s going through.”
“He told us things were still good between them,” Lena said.
“I used to joke with him about that. They’d only been married for a couple of years. Take notes, I used to say. Do your twenty and call me back.” Plashett’s voice trailed off into what seemed like genuine sadness.
“So as far as you know,” Lena said, “he didn’t fool around?”
Plashett hesitated a moment. But he wasn’t considering Lena’s statement. Instead, his eyes were locked on her hips.
“No,” he finally said in a quieter voice. “He didn’t fool around.”
“Is there a problem, Mr. Plashett?”
His gaze rose to her face. “Your gun,” he said. “I’ve never seen a woman wearing a gun like that before. It makes me think that the world has changed.”
“You’re right about that, Mr. Plashett. The world’s changed.”
He smiled at her and checked his watch. “Let’s go down to my office so we can talk. I’ve got a class at one. I’ll have to leave soon to make it.”
They walked down to the end of the hall, passing what looked like a control room or an operations center. Twenty-five desks were set up in cubicles without partitions so that the employees could see each other and talk. No one in the room looked older than thirty.
“You teach?” Lena asked.
“I’m afraid so,” he said. “This place is actually an extension of my work for the university. At some point we outgrew the classroom. Who knew that it would come to this?”
They entered his corner office. Plashett closed the door, offering them chairs with a sweep of the hand as he moved around his desk. Lena glanced about the room. The window on the right matched the view from Brant’s office, as did the gray Formica desk. But the matching Formica counter against the rear wall seemed to be the place where Plashett did most of his work. His computer was here, and the entire surface was littered with open three-ring binders, oversize sheets of paper containing diagrams, and an array of manila file folders. But what made this office unique were the casement windows above the counter stretching across the entire wall. The large windows opened to the rear of the building and flooded the room with a soft, almost heavenly light.
Lena sat down in the far chair. Novak remained on his feet, taking in the room as he spoke.
“What is it that you do here, Mr. Plashett?”
“We’ve developed a new technology. Something wonderful.”
“Something worth a lot of money,” Lena said.
Plashett smiled. “Something that will make everybody’s life better. You just won’t hear about it for a couple of years. Now, why don’t you tell me why you’re here.”
“It’s just routine,” Novak said. “Brant told us that he worked all night and we thought we’d stop by and check.”
“He’s preparing an audit for the company. Along with the report, he’s working up a series of projections and business models.”
“On his own?” Lena asked.
Plashett laughed. “We’re small but not that small. He has two assistants. They’ve been putting in about twenty hours a day.”
Novak pulled a notebook out of his jacket pocket, along with a pen. “Then Brant was here last night.”
Plashett paused a moment, clearing his throat and wiggling in his seat. All of a sudden, the man looked uncomfortable.
“That’s where it gets tricky, Detective.”
“Tricky?”
“You have to understand. James is a good kid. He works long hours at a quarter of the pay he really deserves. He’s good at his job, and he does it without complaint. We’re working together for a piece of the future, Detective. We’re working to make the world a better place. We’re a family around here.”
Novak smiled as he measured the man. “I understand all that. But let’s get back to tricky.”
Plashett sank into his chair and sighed. “They’ve been on the same schedule for the past ten days. I checked when you called. Last night he let his assistants go home early.”
“What time was that?” Lena asked.
Plashett hesitated again, then lowered his eyes. “Around ten,” he said.
TRICKY …
Lena thought about it as she acclimated herself to the RHD car’s loose, pinball steering.
The trick to a decent interview was to start off slowly and work your way to the big moment. That moment came when Plashett called Brant’s assistants into his office and both employees admitted that they were the last to leave the building and couldn’t really explain why they had been given the night off. Brant told them that they looked tired, that it was only Thursday and they would have to work over the weekend. Brant seemed troubled last night, as if he wanted to be alone.
Tricky.
Because the company was an extension of Plashett’s work on campus, security was lax and offered no indication of when Brant had left the office and headed home. Even worse, when they checked Brant’s computer, the last saved file matched the time the two employees had left for the night: 10:00 p.m., not five in the morning.
James Brant didn’t have an alibi. The story he’d told Tito Sanchez couldn’t be verified.
But then the real trick was to somehow find a way to keep an open mind. Follow the evidence and not ricochet off any one of its parts. Maintain your direction. Stay away from the fork in the road or risk being deflected off course.
Lena glanced at her partner, then back at the freeway as she exited off the 134 at Linda Vista. The college where Nikki Brant taught art history was just on the other side of Glendale in the hills overlooking the Rose Bowl. Novak was sipping another Diet Coke from a cooler he kept in the trunk and pretending to read one of his retirement brochures. She thought he might be pretending because the brochure covered a tract of land in Idaho, the graveyard state of choice for L.A. cops. Within a week of their first meeting, Lena had managed to talk Novak out of Idaho. He liked to fish but enjoyed the taste of salmon better than trout. Besides, he was only fifty-three years old, had successfully quit drinking and smoking, and still had at least a third of his life ahead of him. If he was going to make the great escape, the Northwest seemed like a better place to go. Ever since Lena mentioned her frequent trips to Seattle with her brother’s band and described the way the water met the land, Novak became excited and ran new places by her as if he needed her approval now.
“Don’t tell me you’re reconsidering Idaho,” she said.
Novak dropped the brochure and held up one of his fishing magazines, already opened to the feature article. Then he pointed to a picture of a flounder set on a bed of tomatoes rather than ice.
Lena shook her head. “I don’t get it. Why did they put the fish on the tomatoes?”
“Tomatoes have a short growing season. They’re sensitive to frost. But a flounder can survive in ice-cold water because it has a gene that enables it to. Once they found the gene in the fish, they put it into a tomato.”
“Em,” Lena said. “An antifreeze gene. That must be why the tomatoes I buy at the store taste so good. What’s all this got to do with Idaho?”
“Exactly what you said. Tomatoes don’t taste good anymore. I can’t remember buying one that had any taste at all. Maybe they’ve already added the flounder gene and we don’t know about it yet.”
“Where are you going with this, Hank?”
“At least in Idaho you might be able to buy enough land and grow your own.”
“Maybe. But my guess is you can grow your own tomatoes anywhere.”
“What about the growing season? It’s gotta be pretty short in Seattle. It’s cold up there. What if I get started and realize I need that fucking antifreeze gene?”
She gave him a long look, saw the glint in his eye, the corners of his mouth bending into his cheeks.
“How many tomatoes do you plan on eating, Hank?”
“Plenty,” he said. “As long as I’m not thinking about flounder when I take the first bite.”
He started laughing. It was a game. A short break after a long morning spent with a dead body and a view of the world they were paid to see. When they arrived at the college, it would mean another notification. More sadness as the day slipped back into the grim, and darkness sank its heels in.
Lena passed the Rose Bowl and made a left at the light, cutting through another quiet neighborhood burrowed in the hills beneath lush vegetation. About a half mile up, the hill steepened and the real estate gave way to open land, the tall grasses a muted gold swaying in the breeze. As she turned into the entrance and started down the driveway, the San Gabriel Mountains on the other side of the valley appeared to rise up before her eyes. To the east several peaks remained snowcapped in spite of the late season. The view at this height was magnificent.
Lena heard Novak drop the magazine onto the floor and turned back to the driveway, the car rolling over a speed bump. As she glided around the curve, she saw an enormous black building begin to take shape behind the trees. The structure crested the tops of two hills, the road passing beneath it. Lena wasn’t sure if it looked like a twenty-five-story building that had flopped down on its side, or a bridge made of black steel and black glass joining the peaks of both hills. All she knew was that she liked it. That the architecture stirred deep-seated memories from her past—who she thought she would be and what she wanted to become a long time ago.
