by Lee Goldberg
Her car was gone, too. An idea was beginning to form in the back of Eve’s mind about how this new information could factor into what happened to Tanya. “What kind of car does she drive?”
“A 2017 Mercedes E-class, metallic blue with a fancy license plate rim covered in fake Schwartzvasky crystals.”
“Swarovski,” Eve said.
“Whatever. I think it’s garish. Captain America’s collar has them, too, which is humiliating for a Doberman, especially one with that name,” Irv said. “Is Donna in trouble?”
It was the same question Clarissa had asked. It’s the same question most people asked whenever she started prodding them about someone. Eve didn’t have a straight answer. Yes, she was sure Donna was in trouble, but what kind?
“No, I just want to ask her some questions about a friend of hers,” Eve said and handed Irv her card. “Please ask Donna to give me a call when she gets home.”
He stuck the card in one of his many shirt pockets. “I’ll keep my eye out for her.”
Eve left the Mulwood neighborhood, turned north onto Mulholland Highway, and drove toward the WELCOME TO CALABASAS median boulder, where three days ago two LAPD detectives had tried to stick her and Duncan with a dead man in a pickup truck. His throat had been cut wide open.
The body was found on the same morning that the homicides of Tanya and her children were discovered. In fact, Eve realized, the truck was parked only a few yards from the Gelson’s shopping center where the deputies gathered before serving the no-knock warrant at Coyle’s house. They met there because it was the nearest rallying point for them near Coyle’s house.
Another odd coincidence. Or was it?
Eve slammed on her brakes, coming to a jarring stop at the same spot where the LAPD cars had been parked the morning that she and Duncan had rolled up behind the dead man’s truck.
Her heart was racing. She knew that she was onto something . . . but she wasn’t sure what it was.
She looked across the flower-bed median at the northwest corner of Mulholland and Mulholland. There was an office building that was set back from the corner by a parking lot and a grove of pine trees. It was the spot where the pickup, its windshield splattered with blood, had been parked before the LAPD officer pushed it over the city limits into the Calabasas side of the road.
It struck Eve at the time, and again now, that the man had picked a strange place to slit his throat.
Did his choice have something to do with the office building? Or was it the view of Gelson’s? If he was murdered, by whom and why here of all places?
She got out of her car and looked at what was on her side of the street. A cyclone fence surrounded a dense wooded patch of oaks and brittle, parched brush that covered the hillside. There was a dry creek down below that she assumed weaved its way along the base of the hills to Topanga Canyon.
Eve jumped up on the cyclone fence, easily scaled it, and dropped down on the hard dirt on the other side. She followed the arid creek bed east, past the fenced boundary of Louisville High School, a Roman Catholic girls’ school, and then followed a deer path that cut through the weeds and brush, going up and across the steep hillside at an angle that made the ascent gradual and easy. She stopped and looked up to see what was at the top of the hill.
It was Coyle’s mobile home park.
And high behind that, looming ominously above the Santa Monica Mountains to the southeast, was a massive, billowing cloud of roiling dark smoke.
Eve knew exactly what was burning and that it was her fault.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Eve sat down on the hillside, closed her eyes, and tried to clear her head. It was as if every synapse in her brain was firing at once, a thousand firecrackers exploding, making her ears ring.
The discovery that the Realtor and her car were missing, and the proximity of the dead man in the truck to Coyle’s mobile home, gave Eve a new, terrifying perspective on the murders. It was forcing her to rethink her assumptions, the meaning of the evidence they’d collected, and the significance of what she’d seen in her last walk-through of the house before Jared set it ablaze.
She was still trying to make sense of it all when her phone rang.
It was Duncan. “There’s a huge fire in Topanga.”
“I can see it,” Eve said.
“You’ll never guess where it started.”
It pained her, but she knew. “Tanya’s house.”
She thought about what Jared told her: How am I supposed to live here now? How can anyone live here now?
“After you left, Jared soaked it in gasoline and set it on fire. He’s in custody, but by the time the fire department got up there, the wind had whipped the blaze into a firestorm. The blaze is moving like a tidal wave. They’ve closed Topanga State Park. Our search parties have been called in and all of our deputies have been reassigned to assist the fire department with evacuating homes and controlling traffic.”
“Jared was distraught when I saw him,” Eve said. “I should never have left him alone in the house. I should have seen this coming.”
“How? Are you psychic? Omniscient? People do crazy things when they are emotionally distressed. You can’t be expected to predict it all and you aren’t responsible for any of it. If you start blaming yourself for every stupid thing that people do during an investigation, you’ll either quit the job or become an alcoholic.”
“So you just shrug and move on?”
“Sometimes I’ll shake my head instead. Or if I’m really unhinged, I might do both. Where are you?”
“Mulholland and Mulholland. I’m chasing a new lead.”
“The Realtor gave you something?”
“You could say that,” she said. “Where can I find those two lazy assholes we met here from the LAPD?”
The Topanga Community Police Station was off Canoga Avenue, around the corner from the Xposed Gentleman’s Club, and boasted drought-resistant landscaping, green energy design, and a vaulted glass atrium lobby. If it wasn’t for all the police vehicles in the lot, Eve could have mistaken the $36 million complex for a neighborhood library.
The officer at the front desk was black and his uniform was crisply pressed, the creases so sharp that Eve thought they could be used to slice meat. She flashed her badge as she approached.
“Hello, I’m Detective Eve Ronin, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. I need to see Frank Knobb or Arnie Prescott.”
The officer examined her ID for a moment, then picked up his phone, dialed a three-digit extension, and said: “This is Officer Lofland at the front desk. The Deathfist is here to see you.” He met her eye as he listened to the reply. “Yes, she’s actually standing right here . . . will do.”
He hung up the phone and handed Eve a clip-on visitor’s pass. “Detective Knobb says to go on back. It’s through that door, then it’s the third door on your left.”
“Thanks,” she said and clipped the badge to her belt. The officer buzzed her through a door on the far side of the lobby.
Knobb was waiting for her in the hallway, outside the door to the detective bureau. “Now this is a surprise. Shouldn’t you be in Beverly Hills today, meeting with your agents at CAA?”
“I’m working a triple homicide.”
“Yeah, I know, I saw the press conference. It was the first night in weeks there wasn’t anything on the news about the indictment of those deputies at the Men’s Central Jail.”
Eve ignored the dig and pressed on. As much as she disliked and disrespected this man, she needed his help. “I think the dead guy you found in the truck on Thursday may be connected to our case.”
“How?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Knobb smirked, crossed his arms under his chest, and leaned his shoulder against the wall. “You know what I think? You’re feeding me a line of bullshit. You’re eager for another murder to solve to capitalize on your moment in the spotlight and this corpse happens to be handy.”
“So you haven’t closed it ye
t.”
He straightened up, taking a more defensive posture. “Don’t sound so hopeful. You aren’t getting the case. You’ll have to wait for a body to drop in your jurisdiction.”
She resisted the urge to remind him that he was being very protective of a case that he’d pushed into her jurisdiction just a few days ago but she didn’t think that would be a persuasive argument. So she took a different approach.
“The morning after three people were murdered and dismembered with a knife, your victim was found with his throat slit in a truck parked a hundred yards from where our killer lives. I think that’s a mighty big coincidence, don’t you?” Eve said. Knobb pursed his lips, considering the implications. “I don’t want your case, Frank. I just need to know what you’ve got. What’s the harm in telling me? We both want the same thing here, to catch whoever killed him.”
Knobb sighed in resignation and gestured for her to follow him into the detective bureau. The cubicles were large, each with Plexiglas dividers on two sides that created a more open feel around sleek curved desks with flat-screen monitors and stylish ergonomic desk chairs. He sat down at his cubicle, wheeled over a chair for her, and she sat down.
“The victim’s name is Roger Karpis,” Knobb said. “He works at Malibu Creek State Park.”
She was familiar with Malibu Creek State Park. It was eight thousand acres of peaks, canyons, rolling hills, and meadows south of Mulholland Highway and west of Las Virgenes. It was originally owned by 20th Century Fox, which used it as various locations for hundreds of movies and television shows. The studio donated the property in the mid-’70s to the state, which opened it to the public as a park, but there were film crews in there shooting on almost a daily basis. Some deputies, like Garvey, made extra cash off-hours working as set security. The Paramount Ranch bordered the northwest end of the park and also doubled as a shooting location and state recreation area.
“Karpis was a forest ranger?” Eve asked.
“More like a night watchman. The park is popular with campers and film crews. His job was to make sure nobody burns the place down or vandalizes any movie sets during the night.” Knobb clicked a few keys and brought up on his screen some gruesome pictures of the victim and his gaping neck wound. “We quickly ruled out suicide. Somebody in the passenger seat pulled Roger’s head back and slit his throat, practically to the spine. We’re thinking it was a hitchhiker, maybe a prostitute.”
“I’ve never heard of hookers hanging out on Mulholland.”
“That’s not how it’s done in upscale neighborhoods. They use apps or social media to book anonymous sex,” Knobb said. “We know from Roger’s friends and family that he was dealing with a sex addiction problem. Getting blow jobs and hand jobs in parking lots was one of his favorite pastimes.”
“Was his wallet or phone taken?”
Knobb shook his head. “We’re thinking the killer must have been spooked by someone or something. We don’t have much to go on.”
“Can you show me the interior of the truck?” Eve asked. Knobb scrolled through pictures of the bloody cab and the large knife on the passenger seat. She tapped the screen. “Has the knife been confirmed as the murder weapon?”
“Yes, it has.”
“It was nice of the killer to leave it behind.”
“We’re thinking that maybe it belonged to Roger and he had it in the truck, maybe under the passenger seat or something, and the killer grabbed it as a weapon of opportunity,” Knobb said. “It’s an SOG Jungle Primitive knife, a popular choice among ISIS members for beheading captives.”
“Did you get any prints from it?”
“Nope,” he said.
“I’d like that knife sent to our crime scene unit for analysis,” she said. The knife wouldn’t have to go far, perhaps just across a room. The LAPD and LASD shared crime lab facilities within the California Forensic Institute on the campus of California State University in Monterey Park.
“You think you’re going to find the DNA of your three victims in the hilt of the knife?” Knobb asked.
Yes, she did, and DNA from Donna Stokes, too.
“I think it’s worth checking,” Eve said. “If I’m right, you can say the LAPD provided the key clue that closed a triple murder that baffled the sheriff’s department.”
Eve was still missing key evidence, but she now believed that the Realtor showed up at Tanya’s house on Wednesday morning . . . and walked in on a nightmare. Coyle killed Stokes and used her car to dispose of the bodies. That was why his car was clean.
Knobb regarded her with an appraising gaze. “You weren’t baffled. You knew what you were going to find before you walked in here. All I did was confirm it and give you a few more facts.”
“That’s true,” she said. “But that spin won’t help you much, will it?”
“We’re going to look good at your expense.”
“I don’t care.”
“The sheriff might,” he said.
“All that matters to me is what’s good for the case,” she said. “Besides, now you’ll owe me two favors.”
“How do you figure two?”
She gave him a stern look. “Have you forgotten how we met?”
“I’ll have the knife sent over to your CSU,” he said.
“Can you email me the photos you showed me of Roger and the knife?”
“Sure,” he said. “I’ll do it now.”
Eve thanked him and hurried out of the station as fast as she could without actually running. Because with each passing second, the realization of what really happened on that bloody, horrible Wednesday in Topanga was coming to her in revelations that felt like body blows. So much of what they thought they knew about what happened in Tanya’s house was wrong.
The moment Eve stepped outside, she looked to the south. The smoke from the Topanga fire loomed over the Santa Monica Mountains like huge, vicious storm clouds seething with thunderous fury. It terrified her.
She took out her phone, googled the Wikipedia listing for the original Planet of the Apes movie, and scrolled through the post to the section labeled “Production Information.” One line jumped out at her:
Most of the scenes of the ape village, interiors and exteriors, were filmed on the Fox Ranch in Malibu Creek State Park, northwest of Los Angeles.
It was the same park where Roger worked.
That was the key piece that she’d been missing.
Now she knew how the ranger’s truck ended up at the corner of Mulholland and Mulholland and why Coyle had killed him.
But it was everything else that was becoming clear to her now, all of the wrong assumptions that she’d made, that was threatening to cripple her with panic and fear.
How could I have been so blind and stupid?
Eve called Duncan and cut him off before he could finish saying hello. “I need to see you, the captain, and the sheriff immediately. It’s an emergency. If either of them argue with you, tell them their careers will be ruined and more people will die if they don’t get their asses to the station right now.”
“What have you found?” Duncan asked.
“We got it all wrong,” she said. “And we’re running out of time.”
She hung up, got into her car, and raced back to Lost Hills with her siren on, lights flashing, and gas pedal pressed to the floor, running red lights and weaving through traffic. It took her seventeen minutes to travel thirteen miles.
Eve arrived at the station, coming to a tire-squealing stop, just as an LASD chopper was landing on the helipad. It was the sheriff. She ran into the station, pretending not to hear him shout her name over the whirring of the chopper blades.
She went straight to the squad room, rushed past Duncan, and ripped the crime scene photos that she needed from the dry-erase board, gathered them under her arm, then turned to face her confused partner.
“Where are we meeting?” she demanded, breathing hard.
“In the captain’s office,” Duncan said.
“Let’s go.�
�
She hurried down the hall, throwing open the captain’s door without knocking, to find Moffett and Lansing standing there. Both men were furious. Lansing immediately confronted her.
“What’s so Goddamn important that I had to drop everything to get here?” He pointed out the captain’s window. “There’s a firestorm raging behind us. Three thousand acres have gone up in flames in the lasts few hours and we’re evacuating hundreds of homes. If the fire meets up with the Stevenson blaze, which is rampaging into Simi Valley now towards the Pacific, we could have one of the worst fires in state history. What do you have to tell us that’s a bigger emergency than that?”
“We screwed up the triple murder investigation, sir,” she said. “We got it wrong.”
“Are you saying Lionel Coyle didn’t butcher those people?”
“That’s the one thing we got right,” she said.
“Then why the hell are we here?”
“Because there’s still a chance that we can save Caitlin Kenworth’s life.”
CHAPTER FORTY
The three men stared at her like she’d gone insane. She was expecting that reaction. It was Moffett who spoke first, in a slow, patronizing tone that was filled with disdain.
“I don’t see how we can save her,” he said. “She’s already been killed and hacked into pieces.”
“She’s alive,” Eve insisted. “At least she was on Wednesday and I’m hoping she still is today. Coyle took her. This triple murder was actually a child abduction. It was all along. That’s what we missed.”
Duncan sat down. “I’m confused.”
“Join the damn club,” Lansing said, taking a seat as well. “Make it fast, Ronin. Every minute we sit here another five acres goes up in flames.”
“I’m well aware of that,” Eve said. “It’s why we have to act fast.”
“The blood evidence is conclusive,” Moffett said. “Three people were killed.”
