Montecito Heights

by Colin Campbell

  The unlocked door was typecast as bad news.

  Grant opened the door and stepped aside. Nobody shouted at him to get out. No stray cat came screaming onto the porch. Nobody shot at him. That was good. He worked on the theory that people only shot at you if they felt threatened. Grant adopted a very nonthreatening stance and poked his head around the doorframe. There was nobody inside.

  “Hello?”

  The other cliché that was real: first thing you do if you enter a stranger’s house and you’re not burgling them is announce your presence. You don’t want to be surprising somebody into taking a snap shot. You don’t want to be embarrassing somebody on the toilet.

  “It’s the police.”

  Without a partner to cover the back, Grant wasn’t going to catch a burglar in the act unless he was a stupid burglar. He’d met plenty of them in his time. This didn’t feel like the window-breaker was still in the house. This didn’t feel good at all. He scanned the living room with eyes that were rapidly adjusting to the gloom.

  That was when he saw it.

  He took two paces into the room. The floor was highly polished wood with a single beige throw rug in front of the settee. He shifted his angle so light from the window gave him a better view. There was an uneven stain at the edge of the rug. It had already turned a darker color. He didn’t need to look closer. Grant knew what dried blood looked like.

  PART two

  Some of the things I’ve seen—they are exactly what they seem to be: real and hard and painful. Everything you film—it’s just entertainment.

  —Jim Grant

  TWENTY

  If Grant had been the first officer responding to a concern-for- the-neighbor call, this is where he would be treating the lounge as a crime scene. Careful where you step and careful what you touch. Even then, first priority would be to make sure there was nobody injured on the premises and nobody dangerous at the scene. He wasn’t the first officer; he was a visiting officer from a foreign force trying to keep a US senator and the chief of police out of trouble.

  That burdened him with divided loyalties.

  It didn’t change his priorities.

  He reckoned priority number two was already taken care of. There was no dangerous criminal lurking in the cabin. Whatever had taken place here happened some time ago. The blood had dried. There were no tire marks or footprints in the driveway. The turnaround was dusty and shifting. Only very recent activity would leave its mark. His own footprints coming up here were probably already disappearing. More importantly, Grant’s spider senses—his innate ability to smell danger—hadn’t been triggered.

  That left checking for injured parties or deceased victims. Judging by the amount of blood, about six inches across and several spots leading across the floor, he didn’t think he’d be looking for corpses. He glanced at the TV cabinet but ignored the scattered DVDs. That was for later. He turned his attention to the other rooms, starting with the adjoining kitchen. He wasn’t worried about leaving prints but he was still careful how he opened the doors. Using the handles would overlay any prints left previously. He only touched the extremities. This could still turn into an official crime scene depending on what he found.

  The cabin appeared small from the front but was bigger once you got inside. There were two large bedrooms and a medium-sized bathroom at the rear. There was a study to the right of the front door and a guest toilet beyond that. It didn’t take long to check them all. They were empty. There were no dead bodies. There were no injured parties. There were also no signs of the house being ransacked, apart from the TV cabinet.

  Angelina Richards wasn’t home.

  That led him back to the blood on the throw rug. He crouched beside it and rubbed two fingers over the edge of the stain. It was dry. He did the same in the middle of the stain, the last part of a pool of blood to congeal. That was dry too. Next, he went to the window and examined the broken pane. The window was a side- opening log cabin–type with six panes of glass and a single handle halfway up the frame. There was a scattering of glass on the sill, about the same amount as outside. If you watched all those cop shows like Columbo and CSI, you’d get the impression that broken glass only fell on the inside at a burglary. If the glass was on the outside, then it was a set-up job.

  Wrong.

  The glass in a window is flexible. If it is hit by a brick, it first flexes inwards until it reaches breaking point, then it shatters and the flex springs back into position, catapulting shards of glass outwards, hence the glass outside. The general rule of thumb is there’d be more on the inside than outside, but during a burglary the intruder would often pick out the pieces left in the frame to reach through. Those pieces ended up on the outside, sometimes neatly stacked, sometimes thrown across the garden. The glass on the outside here was inconclusive. What was conclusive was that the broken pane of glass was farthest from the handle. Either the intruder was an idiot or the window hadn’t been the point of entry.

  As strange as it might seem, the girl might always leave the front door unlocked. It was unlocked now. The other possibility was that whoever came in here was someone she knew. That left the question of where she was now. That was a more worrying development.

  Grant stepped back from the window, his change of position giving him a fresh angle across the porch. He stopped. There was one other possibility. He glanced around the room. He found what he was looking for on a hook beside the door. The key for the padlock on the wooden shed outside.

  He’d been right about his footprints. The dust and gravel turnaround was already pristine and virginal. There wasn’t much of a breeze, but what little there was stirred the dust into swirling clouds scurrying across the drive. Grant stood on the porch and looked down the hill at the houses on the opposite side of Coldwater Canyon Drive. They were shielded by mature trees and high fences. Hastain Fire Road gave access to the hills via narrow trails and footpaths behind them.

  Considering he couldn’t see much of the houses opposite, it stood to reason the residents over there wouldn’t be able to see much of what went on up here. No point doing house to house enquiries. Even the house with the swimming pool at the bottom of the drive was hidden behind a stand of trees, no doubt intentionally to preserve the owner’s privacy. Something glinted behind the trees, then disappeared. He heard water splash in the pool. More light glinted off the ripples.

  There were no side steps from the porch. Grant went down the front four and turned toward the shed, scrutinizing the ground all the way. There were no footprints and there was no trail of blood. He didn’t expect any. This was simply covering all the bases. He stopped in front of the padlocked door and paused with the key in his hand. Scrutinized the lock and the doorframe with his eyes. Visual examination: the first step at any crime scene. See what you can see and photograph it before disturbing things that can’t be un-disturbed, contaminating evidence with outside interference.

  There was no bloody handprint on the wall. There was no four-fingered scratch on the woodwork. The doorframe was smooth and undamaged. The padlock was shiny and clean. Grant stepped around the side of the shed. There was no window. He went around the other side. No window there either. He couldn’t get around the back because the shed was cut into the hillside. Back to the front door. He slipped the key into the padlock and opened it. It dropped into his hand. It was a heavy lock. Closing his fist around the padlock, he pulled the door open. It creaked even though the hinges were as shiny as the lock. The wooden shed groaned under the weight of the door.

  It was dark inside.

  Grant waited for anything that might jump out at him to jump out. Nothing did. He stared into the gloom for a moment to allow his eyes to adjust, then stepped onto the wooden floorboards. They creaked and popped, not as solid as the porch steps. The shed was basic and matched the frontier spirit of the cabin it supported, but this was Beverly Hills, or near as damn it. If there was one thing
he’d learned about the rich and shameless, it was that they liked their creature comforts. They wouldn’t be coming out to the shed in the middle of the night with a kerosene lamp or a flashlight. He found the switch on the wall beside the door and turned the light on.

  He let out a heavy sigh, then leaned against the doorframe.

  Back in the living room, Grant flipped open his cell and prepared for an argument. He scanned the numbers programmed into the memory and hit the button for the Richards residence. The other Richards residence, not the one they no doubt owned but let their daughter live in as part of her teenage rebellion.

  He hung the padlock key on the hook while he waited. The shed had been empty apart from a backup generator and some essential tools. It wasn’t a workshop with tools hanging from the backboard inside tool-shaped outlines. It wasn’t a storage shed full of supplies for the winter either. It was a rich man’s plaything, simply there because if you’ve got a cabin, you’ve got to have a shed.

  The phone at the other end of the line began to ring, not the distinctive brrring-brrring, brrring-brrring of an English telephone but the strange single, long tone that he thought he’d never get used to. He glanced at the scattered DVD cases while the tone played in his ear, dropping to one knee and carefully sifting through them.

  They were standard Hollywood movies. The kind of thing any teenager might have in her collection. Nothing Grant had seen. Teenage girls didn’t watch the classic cinema that he loved. There were no Bond movies, no spaghetti Westerns. The only one he’d heard about but not seen was Mamma Mia, a film he’d need tying down and drugging before he could be forced to watch it.

  The butler answered the phone. Grant asked to speak to Richards.

  There was a pause while Jeeves went to find him.

  The shelf in the TV cabinet was deep. The DVDs scattered on the floor were from the front row of movies on the shelf. The second row was almost intact. Movies in the second row were more interesting. Even from the narrow artwork on the spines, Grant could see these were more adult in nature. Very adult. The thumbnail image at the top of each title was either naked women, naked women’s breasts, or naked women sucking cock. The lettering of each title was as florid and colorful as the one Richards had shown him in his study.

  “Yes? What do you want?”

  There were no polite introductions. Senator Richards got straight to the point. Grant wondered if he’d interrupted his daily Scrabble game or something. He bit down on his anger and spoke calmly. “I’m at your daughter’s. She isn’t here.”

  “So? Call back when she’s home.”

  “There’s blood on the carpet and the window’s broken.”

  That shut him up. There was a long silence before Richards spoke again. “Has she been taken?”

  Grant considered that. Apart from the scattered DVDs, there was no sign of a disturbance. Discounting the broken window, if somebody had taken the daughter against her will, there would be signs of a struggle—furniture upended, the throw rug dragged to one side. Especially if the blood came from a struggle to control an unwilling victim. There was none of that.

  “I’m not sure. Could be. Could be something else.”

  “That is rather vague.”

  “The evidence is rather vague. There’s no obvious sign. No.”

  There was another pause. Grant leaned forward and pulled one of the porn films out of the stack. It was hardcore but nothing you couldn’t buy at any adult video store. XXX just meant you had to be eighteen to buy them nowadays. Angelina Richards was nineteen. Grant opened the case. The disc was as gaudy as the cover. An original, not a copy. He shut the case and slipped it back into place.

  “Has anything been taken?”

  “Apart from your daughter, you mean?”

  “You said she hadn’t.”

  “I said I wasn’t sure. Rule of thumb when it comes to kidnappings is treat them as worse-case scenario until you know different. You can always scale back if it’s less serious.”

  “Is that your discreet side showing? Your middle name being discreet.”

  “It’s my concern for a neighbor side. Until I know she’s safe.”

  “My daughter has gone missing before. She used to run away to spite me before we let her use the cabin. She can be…dramatic.”

  “What you’re saying is, don’t involve the police?”

  “For now. Your focus was supposed to be the producer.”

  “I’m working on that.”

  “Then work on it away from my daughter’s house.”

  “Your house.”

  “My daughter’s place of residence.”

  Richards sounded impatient. “Now. Has anything been taken?”

  There was no reason not to mention the scattered DVDs, but Grant suddenly felt that tingling up the back of his neck. He looked at the back row of adult movies. They were neatly arranged like books on a bookshelf, from left to right. They almost reached the full width of the shelf, with the last few leaning into the rest to form a kind of bookend. There was no way to know if they were all there. Except there was a gap in the middle of the row. Space for a single DVD case. The movies on either side of the gap were pulled forward slightly as if the missing film had been tugged out in a hurry.

  Grant focused on the gap as he spoke into the phone. “Doesn’t look like it. House wasn’t ransacked.”

  “Then get back to the job in hand. Zed Productions.”

  The gap wasn’t completely empty.

  “Okay.”

  He closed the cell without saying goodbye. Two things were going through his mind. The first thing was wondering what the single disc without a case was doing in the empty space. The second was he hadn’t told Richards the movie company was Zed Productions.

  Grant slid the disc out of the gap with one finger, then poked the fingertip into the hole in the middle. He held it up to read the title and wasn’t surprised by what he found. The colorful lettering was the same as the pirate copy he’d seen two days ago, only this was an original. The Hunt for Pink October. The disc was adorned with naked breasts and erect penises, just in case you got it mixed up with the film about the submarine.

  He doubted Sean Connery was in this one.

  One last scan of the TV cabinet, then Grant stood up, the disc still balanced on his finger. His left knee popped loudly. The leg he’d broken in Boston. He reckoned that was something he was going to have to live with and knew that cold weather was going to be a problem for the rest of his life. He wasn’t thinking about the rest of his life at the moment. He was thinking about what disc was in the missing DVD case if the original disc was still here.

  Something glinted on the front window from outside. He popped the disc off his fingertip, put it on the shelf, then went to the door. The sun hit him with heat like an oven as he stepped onto the porch.

  The glinting reflection flashed again. From the trees at the bottom of the hill, not from the swimming pool this time. Maybe it hadn’t been the water before. Grant suddenly felt very exposed. He’d quartered the area coming up the hill for any threats but not considered the house at the bottom of the driveway. Anybody waiting for him would have been in the cabin, not one of the neighbors’ houses.

  He stood next to the railing, leaning on the porch roof support, and turned sideways to give a narrowed target. He breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth twice. Knees were flexed for quick movement if he needed to dive for cover. Just a precaution. Then he squinted into the sun and glared at the stand of trees and shrubbery.

  The glare from overhead was beyond the trees. That threw the area he was searching into shadow. Good positioning, like fighter pilots watching for bandits coming out of the sun. Well, the bandits of Coldwater Canyon Drive were coming out of the sun. Grant couldn’t see for shit while he was being highlighted like a movie star on the red carpet. He didn’t want t
he red to be blood.

  Something moved.

  Grant’s eyes swiveled like gun sights, even though he hated guns. There was another glint of light from the foliage, then a hand waved at him through the trees.

  “Okay, you’ve got me.”

  Robin Citrin stepped into the open with her cameraman.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Grant sat on the porch steps and waited for her to come up the hill. The cameraman disappeared back through the trees, and Grant heard car doors open and shut. Robin Citrin walked up the drive, producing the same little puffs of dust with each footstep that Grant had an hour or so earlier. She reached the turnaround and stopped, head bowed and arms held out in apology.

  “I enjoyed dinner last night.”

  An opening gambit that Grant reckoned was an olive branch even though it was clearly a lie. Dinner had been average, and that was being generous. What she was doing was reminding Grant of what else had happened last night. That had been far better than average, and they both knew it. Grant wiped sweat from his brow with the side of his finger and flicked it across the porch.

  “If you’d stuck around for breakfast, I could have saved you a trip.”

  “It would have been the same trip. Different driver.”

  “Could have saved me the cab fare then. And the longest list of complaints since the Bradford riots.”

  Citrin lowered her arms and walked to the foot of the steps. “One step at a time. I didn’t mean for that to happen.”

  “A happy side effect of sneaking into my room?”

  “The sneaking was to persuade you about the job. The rest was happy, yes.”

  “But not enough to stay overnight.”