Lost Hills (Eve Ronin Book 1)

by Lee Goldberg

  “Is Nan around?” she asked.

  “She’s back at the lab,” Noomis said. “Is there something I can do for you?”

  “There’s a Walmart bag on the floor of the garage. I need you to process it as evidence,” she said—then another thought occurred to her. “Are you checking that pee sample on the hill for DNA?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “The boss didn’t think it was a priority.”

  “It is.”

  “I’ll tell the boss.”

  “Thanks.”

  Eve left the house and stopped at the CSU van to remove her gloves and booties and drop them in the disposal bag. While she did that, she warily eyed the three TV reporters, including Darrow, who were waiting for her with their cameramen. There was probably more makeup in Darrow’s purse than Eve had bought in the last five years. Eve wasn’t wearing anything on her face but a confident expression. At least her clothes were clean. She took a deep breath and went over to meet them with all the enthusiasm of a woman facing a root canal.

  “Detective Ronin,” Darrow said. “Are there any new developments in the search for Tanya Kenworth and her two children?”

  “Nothing that I can share at this time,” Eve said.

  Another reporter spoke up, an old-timer who had been on TV since Eve was a kid, but she couldn’t put a name to his face. “There’s a sheriff’s department K-9 search team preparing to go into Topanga State Park. Are they looking for bodies?”

  “They are looking for any trail that might have been left by Tanya, her kids, or whoever attacked them.”

  Darrow talked over another reporter who tried to squeeze in a question. “Jared Rawlins, Tanya’s boyfriend, told us in an exclusive interview that you described the crime scene as a slaughterhouse. So is this a missing persons case or a homicide investigation?”

  Eve didn’t say that, Duncan did, and only to get a reaction out of Jared, but it probably wasn’t the smartest decision. She wondered what else Jared had told Darrow and if any of it contradicted what he told them.

  “We are searching for a family that disappeared under violent circumstances and we are deeply concerned about their safety. That’s all I can say right now.”

  Darrow threw out one more question: “You worked in the county jail. Do you have a badge-and-skull tattoo?”

  It was a dumb, provocative question. No woman would ever be invited into a secret society of like-minded deputies. She’d seen a few deputies with the tattoos but had never witnessed a beating, by them or anybody else, during her mandatory time serving at the county jail.

  “No, I don’t,” Eve said.

  “What do you think of the deputies who do?”

  She hadn’t given it any thought and even if she had, she wouldn’t share it with the media.

  Eve ignored the question, got into her car, and tried to back out without running over any reporters.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Duncan, Biddle, and Garvey were still in the squad room making calls when she returned. She tapped them each on the shoulder and gestured for them to join her at the dry-erase boards when they wrapped up their calls. It only took a minute or two before they all gathered around her. She had news to share, but before she could speak, Biddle began talking.

  “I spoke to the kids’ teachers at school. Neither kid showed any signs of abuse, physically or emotionally, that the teachers could see. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t happening, of course. I’m trying to track down their pediatrician to see if I can get their medical records.”

  “Good work.” Eve hadn’t called them together to hear their progress. But, once again, she was interrupted before she could share her lead, this time by Garvey.

  “Tanya’s Pilates instructor is out until this afternoon. I asked for a list of everybody in her class in the meantime but the lady at the front desk won’t give me what she has without checking with her supervisor first. But there isn’t a regular enrollment, so to speak. People reserve spots online or on a sign-up sheet in the gym until the class fills up. So it can be different people every day. The Realtor may only have shown up once, but I’ll keep on it.”

  “Excellent,” Eve said.

  Duncan studied Eve’s face. “Did something come up at the crime scene?”

  “I think so.” She took out her phone and held it up to show them a photo of the Walmart bag. The three men crowded around to look at her picture.

  “What are we looking at?” Biddle asked.

  “A Walmart bag that contains a three-pack of Brillo sponges, a twenty-two-ounce spray bottle of Lysol All-Purpose Cleaner, and an unopened box of forty Glad Strong Quick-Tie thirty-gallon trash bags. There’s no receipt inside.”

  Duncan frowned. “What’s unusual about that?”

  “It doesn’t fit.” Eve set down her phone, walked over to the dry-erase board, and pointed to the crime scene photos. “Tanya bought their household staples in bulk at Costco and chose the cheap Kirkland-brand version of anything whenever she had a choice. That’s typical for a family on a tight budget trying to stretch every dollar. Most of the empty bottles of cleanser in the bathroom are bulk size, except for these two on the floor and the ones in the Walmart bag that are regular size. Those are the only two bottles of Lysol in the house, by the way.”

  “So what?” Garvey said.

  “Tanya already had plenty of cleansers, sponges, and trash bags,” Eve said. “Why would she go to Walmart to buy more, and in regular sizes, when she already had so much?”

  Duncan nodded, seeing her point. “You think the killer brought the regular-size bottles of Clorox and Lysol with him but then saw that she had plenty of her own and used those.”

  “No,” she said. “I think he got them afterwards.”

  “You’re saying this guy ran out of cleaning supplies,” Duncan said, “so he took a break from dismembering three people and a dog to go shopping at Walmart?”

  “He probably disposed of the bodies and cleaned himself up first,” she said. “But yes, that’s what I’m saying.”

  Garvey shook his head, not buying it. “Killers don’t come and go from bloody crime scenes. It’s too risky.”

  “This one does,” she said. “I think he was the guy who jumped me on the hill that overlooks the house.”

  It made a lot more sense to her than Duncan’s theory that she’d disturbed some crazed homeless person, not that she had any evidence to back it up.

  Duncan said, “Why would he come back to the house the day after the killings?”

  “For his sleeping bag. He didn’t want to leave behind any evidence that he’d been watching the house before the murders.”

  “That’s a leap,” Duncan said. “We don’t know that it wasn’t a homeless person’s campsite.”

  “We don’t know that it was. There’s no evidence either way, but given where the campsite was, and the view it has of the house, my theory gives us a motive why someone was up there and willing to clobber a cop to get away with his stuff.”

  “If you’re right,” Biddle said, “and he did all of that coming and going to the crime scene, then this guy must have Godzilla’s balls.”

  “Or he’s insane,” Garvey said.

  “But it confirms Duncan’s Doctrine,” Biddle said, eliciting a smile from Duncan.

  “What is that?” Eve asked.

  “Most crimes have a Walmart connection,” Duncan said.

  “It’s like six degrees of separation,” Garvey said. “Only with Walmart.”

  “Almost never fails,” Duncan said and went to his cubicle. “That’s why I have Walmart’s regional supervisor on my speed dial.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Duncan asked Walmart’s regional manager to check their local stores for any purchases made on Tuesday and Wednesday that matched the bar codes of the items in the shopping bag at the crime scene. The regional manager came back with a hit at the Walmart at the Fallbrook Center in Canoga Park.

  It was a fifteen-minute drive from the Lost Hills station
. Eve and Duncan met Bert, a pudgy guy in a blue Walmart vest, in front of the in-store McDonald’s. Bert was the store manager.

  “We had a customer at 10:47 p.m. on Wednesday night who bought the items on your list,” Bert said. “But they were only part of his purchases.”

  “What else did he buy?” Eve asked.

  “A bag of Doritos, a box of Ding Dongs, a six-pack of Coke, and a DVD.”

  “The guy eats like a ten-year-old,” Duncan said. “Did he use a credit card?”

  “He paid cash,” Bert said.

  “Of course he did,” Duncan said.

  “But we have him on video,” Bert said. “I can show you.”

  “That would be great,” Eve said.

  Bert led them off the sales floor and into a tiny windowless room just large enough to hold a console of security monitors and two office chairs with torn upholstery that had been repaired with strips of duct tape.

  “I’ve got it cued up for you,” Bert said, settling into a creaking chair and hitting a button on the keyboard.

  The screens showed various high angles on a white man in his late twenties or early thirties, in decent physical shape, about six feet tall, with a few days’ growth of patchy stubble on his pale, angular face. His short brown hair was wet and messy, like he’d washed it, dried it quickly with a towel, and didn’t bother combing or brushing it afterward, which Eve thought was exactly the explanation.

  He wore a navy-blue T-shirt and jeans and was rummaging around in a bargain bin that was nearly overflowing with cheap DVDs. His shopping cart contained Doritos, Ding Dongs, the Cokes, as well as two bottles each of Clorox and Lysol cleanser, the box of trash bags, and the sponges. Eve felt an almost electric charge shoot up her spine. This was the killer. She was certain of it.

  “He’s got everything we found at the crime scene,” she said.

  “Except for the DVD and snacks,” Duncan said. “What was he planning to do? Relax with a movie after he finished cleaning up?”

  They watched the man sort through the DVDs, pick one out, and continue on to the cashier at the front of the store.

  “What movie did he buy?” Eve asked.

  “Planet of the Apes. The original one with Charlton Heston.” Bert twisted his face into a snarl and spoke with a raw, angry voice: “Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!”

  The reference to the movie scene made Eve think back on the beast that attacked her. Could it have been an ape? It was ridiculous, and she immediately dismissed the thought as the result of her fatigue.

  “That last shot of the Statue of Liberty is the best twist ending of all time,” Bert added.

  “Which you just ruined for me,” Duncan said. “Do you have any cameras on the parking lot?”

  “Only the area directly in front of the store.” Bert hit a few more keys and the monitors showed high angles looking down into the first space or two of the four parking aisles directly in front of the store. It was night and the picture was muddy. They saw the man walk out, carrying his bag, and get into a white compact car.

  “Is that a Corolla?” Duncan asked.

  “I think so,” Eve said. “The design from four or five years ago.”

  “I was afraid of that. It’s one of the most common cars in Los Angeles and one of the most stolen cars in the country.”

  “You’d think people would rather steal Ferraris,” Bert said.

  “There’s more demand for Toyota parts,” Duncan said. “Please tell me you have a shot of the car’s license plate.”

  Bert paused on the image of the Corolla leaving the frame. It was a bird’s-eye view of the top of the car. “That’s all we have.”

  “Damn,” Duncan said. “We’re going to need you to knock off a copy of that video. Can you print out a screen grab of your best shot of that guy’s face?”

  “Sure,” Bert said. “Give me a couple of minutes.”

  Eve and Duncan walked out of the room and out onto the sales floor to wait. She hated the lighting in Walmarts. It made everything and everyone look like they’d walked through a downpour of urine.

  “You came up with a great lead, Eve, and I’m sure that’s our guy, but we’re screwed.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “If we ask the DMV to spit out a list of every Corolla registered within, say, a five-mile radius of the crime scene, and if we check on every Corolla that’s been stolen or recovered in LA in the last week, we’ll still have to go through a thousand-plus hits,” Duncan said. “Even if we draft everyone in the station and bring in reserve deputies to help us, it could take us weeks to find this guy. And what if the car is registered elsewhere in California or in another state? That’s tens of thousands of white Toyota Corollas. We might never find him.”

  “We could release his picture to the media.”

  “That would be an absolute last resort. It would tell the guy that we are onto him and send him into hiding. It could also put the people around him in immediate danger. He might kill more people to cover his tracks. Right now, he probably thinks he’s safe in plain sight, going about his business.”

  “He’s not wearing gloves in those surveillance videos,” Eve said. “Maybe we can pull his prints off the items in the shopping bag or from the basket of DVDs he sorted through.”

  “Don’t get your hopes up. This isn’t a TV cop show, where forensics solves everything in ten seconds using technology out of Star Trek and instant access to databases that don’t actually exist. Lots of people have touched the products he bought along the supply chain, including whoever stocks the shelves here and the cashiers. We might get prints and we might not. This guy proved at the crime scene that he’s forensically aware, thanks to those same fucking TV shows, by the way, so he probably wiped the stuff that he bought before he brought it in the house. As far as the DVDs go, hundreds of people have gone through that bargain bin. Even in the best of circumstances, we get usable prints maybe thirty percent of the time and only five percent of those end up identifying someone. The odds of us getting usable prints from this are about the same as aliens coming to Earth and making first contact with me.”

  The scab on Eve’s head itched and she resisted the urge to scratch it. The last thing she needed was to break the scab and have to hide the blood in her hair again. But thinking about that gave her an idea. “I might have an easier way to find out who he is.”

  “Like what?”

  “I’m not telling you yet because you’re so negative,” Eve said. “Have some faith.”

  “That’s the first thing you lose doing this job,” he said. “If you want to be any good at it.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  When they returned to the station shortly after 3:00 p.m., Eve went straight to her cubicle and searched through the stacks of papers on her desk. Duncan joined her a moment later, smelling like the McDonald’s meals they’d eaten in the car on the way back and slurping on what was left of his large Coke. Biddle and Garvey were out in the field.

  “What are you looking for?” he asked.

  “I had some deputies log the make, model, and license plate numbers of all the cars parked at the Topanga Park trailheads.” She found the reports and began sorting through them.

  “That’s a long shot.”

  “Not if I’m right about who attacked me on the hill.” She yanked a paper from the pile and held it up to Duncan. “One of the cars at the trailhead was a white Toyota Corolla.”

  “Did the deputy interview the owner?”

  “No, but he got the license plate.” She turned to her computer, logged in to the DMV database, and ran the plate number. The details came up almost immediately. “The Corolla is registered to Beatrice Coyle, 4201 Topanga Canyon Drive, #A171.”

  Duncan dropped his cup, still half filled with ice, into her trash can and looked over her shoulder. “That’s the mobile home park on the way up Topanga, the one tucked into that sharp curve.”

  She was familiar with the trailer park. A few ye
ars ago, an elderly woman suffering chest pains pulled a gun on paramedics, who fled and called for backup. The woman sat on the patio of her trailer and held off a sheriff’s department SWAT team for twenty-two hours. A crisis negotiation robot was sent in to make contact with her and she shot it twice, whacked it with a broom, attacked it with a drill, and threw a tarp over it. Even flash grenades and tear gas failed to dislodge her. She didn’t come out until she was good and ready.

  Eve pulled up Beatrice Coyle’s personal details and her DMV photo. When the picture was taken, Beatrice was a sixty-seven-year-old lady with a stern headmaster expression and a purple beehive hairdo. She wore glasses with lenses thick enough to see the surface of Mars and a set of fake pearl earrings that looked like they were made out of jawbreakers.

  “Beatrice Coyle died two years ago, but let’s see if there are any other licensed drivers living at that address.” Eve typed some more and hit pay dirt. “Her son, Lionel Coyle, age twenty-four.”

  “Let’s see his face,” Duncan said.

  Eve clicked some more keys and his picture came up. It was the same guy they saw on the Walmart video.

  Duncan held the printout of the video screen grab next to Eve’s monitor just to drive the point home. “Hot damn. He’s even got his mother’s facial hair. I’ll bring Crockett and Tubbs back in to work the databases. We’ve got to find out everything there is to know about Coyle . . . starting with where the hell he is right now.”

  “We can cruise by his home and see if the car is out front.”

  “Problem is, that mobile home park is a tight-knit community. Two seconds after we roll through, the entire place will know we were there, including Coyle. And if he’s not around, then a neighbor might call him and warn him off.”

  “How about sending the chopper over?”

  “We can, but those mobile homes are packed tightly together and most of ’em have carports. If his car is under one, we won’t see it. And if he is there, a chopper circling overhead might spook him.”

  “I have a solution,” she said.