by Andrew Gross
Although his lieutenant, Cooley, was in charge, Zorn seemed to play a pivotal role in the investigation. It was he who—upon talking to Riorden’s sister, Marci, about who might possibly have a motive to do this to them, and then later to his ex-wife, Sandy—first put together the possibility that people who lived on Sandy’s property up near Big Sur might have been involved.
Fingerprints and articles of clothing had been left behind—prints in blood smeared into words on the victims’ chests: “Judas,” “betrayer,” “whore”—but in the beginning they all led nowhere because they belonged to people who were not in the national criminal data bank. There was also a bandana, a black poncho, and a set of gardening gloves left at the Forniciari estate, which were ultimately matched to the perpetrators and ended up as key pieces of evidence in the case.
Suspicion quickly pointed to the Houvnanian “family,” who’d had a series of disagreements with Paul Riorden and had been rebuffed by Forniciari.
But determining who had actually committed the ritual-style killings took some sorting out.
Houvnanian was first taken in on minor illegal occupancy charges, because he and his group had repeatedly ignored legal notices to vacate the property. Several of his followers were also detained on drug possession charges. Ultimately, fingerprints began to match up; several witnesses had spotted the ranch’s white van not far from the Forniciari estate. The horrific picture began to be put together.
The trials were a slam dunk. The evidence was overwhelming. The state had fingerprints, clothing, in many cases the defendant’s own words and bizarre confessions. None of the juries’ deliberations lasted longer than four hours. The people wanted justice quickly—and they got it. Houvnanian was sentenced to nine consecutive life sentences. As were Carla Jean Blue, Sarah Strasser, Nolan Pierce, and Telford Richards.
Susan Pollack, and two others who abetted the murderers, received sentences of thirty-five years.
I put the book down.
“Hey, brother . . .”
I looked into the sunlight and saw the panhandler I had given the five to the other day. He was wearing the same torn flannel shirt and filthy work pants, and a Seattle Seahawks cap. He looked like he might have spent the night in a field somewhere. Still, he was smiling.
I said, “You already hit me up once, guy. That’s all you get.”
“Nah.” He grinned. “I don’t need anything from you, boss. Just going by and wondering how your stay was going. You know you’re sitting right dab in the middle of my office, bro.”
“Sorry, I didn’t realize that.” I smiled back, feigning an apology.
He waved. “Ah, make yourself at home. You just let me know if I can do anything for you. I’ll take good care. Chili dog? There’s a stand over there where they treat me pretty good. Maybe some water . . . ?”
“No.” I shrugged politely. “I’m good.”
“Well, you just let me know, okay? I like to take care of my friends . . .”
“You bet,” I said to him.
The guy waved, with a gap-toothed grin, and started back along the path. I opened the book again. But instead of delving in, I met his gaze. It had been almost a week now since I had talked to anyone beyond the reach of Evan’s death, and a couple of words with anyone felt therapeutic. Even with this guy.
“How’s business?” I asked him.
“Business?” He chuckled with amusement. “Look around, dude. This town is bone-dry. You watch the news. People out of work, the state’s going belly-up. It’s the trickle-down effect—even to a bottom-fisher like me, just trying to find a buck.” He screwed up his eyes, trying to focus on my book. “What ya reading?”
I shrugged. “Just something I picked up.” I flashed him the cover.
“End of Days, huh?” He laughed. “Now there’s a book I can surely relate to. My life’s resembled the End of Days for years!”
This time, I chuckled. His weathered face did look like it had witnessed its share of reversals in its time. “Bet it has.”
“Well, can’t stay and chat all day . . .” He winked. “There’s fortunes to be made, right, man . . .”
“Take it slow.” I waved.
“Always, brother. Any other way?” He started down the path again, when suddenly an idea popped into my mind.
“Hey,” I called to him, “what’s your name?”
“Dev.” The dude grinned. “But most people call me Memphis. From Tennessee.”
“Can I trust you, Dev?” I asked.
“Trust me?” The vagrant’s haggard face lit up like a lamp. “Like a bank, dude. These days, probably better.”
“So how’d you like to earn a fifty from me?”
“Fifty bucks?” The guy came back over and said under his breath, “Do I have to kill anyone? Can’t let down my partners with any time in jail.”
The idea seemed a little crazy—I mean, look at the guy, I thought—but if Sherwood wouldn’t give me a car to watch over Charlie’s, why the hell couldn’t I find a set of eyes on my own?
“No, you don’t have to kill anyone. All perfectly legit. Promise.”
I told him I was worried about someone who was badgering my brother and how the police wouldn’t help me out. I described Susan Pollack’s blue Kia and gave him my brother’s address. I told him I just wanted him to watch out for it.
“I guess I could do that.” He shrugged. He looked at me in a strange way, then nodded. “Fifty bucks, huh?”
“Here’s thirty now,” I said, “the rest when you report back.” I reached into my pocket and dug out a few bills, handed them to him, probably more than he saw in a good week. I shrugged. “It’s not a fortune, but maybe it’ll get you out of town.”
“Oh, I find my way out of town from time to time,” he said with kind of a smile. “Was out of town just last week.”
“Oh yeah?” I said, a little surprised. “Where was that?”
The guy stuffed the bills in his pocket and said, eyeing me, “Michigan.”
Chapter Forty-Two
Sherwood was making his way through an enchilada outside his favorite taqueria the next day when his cell phone rang. It was Carl Meachem, from the Las Vegas PD. “I located those records,” the detective said. “That suicide you were looking for. Greenway.”
Sherwood put his lunch down in its wrapper on the hood of his Torino and took out a pad. “You’re my hero. Shoot.”
“I’m not exactly sure what you’re looking for . . . ,” the Vegas detective said. “By the way, you knew he wrote a book on the Houvnanian murders back in the seventies, didn’t you?”
Sherwood purposely hadn’t shared what his interest was but answered, “I knew that, yeah.”
“Just making sure . . . Seems Greenway moved down here, North Las Vegas actually, in 1986. After his big book was published. I guess it did okay. They made it into a movie and he retired. We all should find a case like that, right? You remember, it had that guy who won an Oscar in it—”
“I was actually more interested in what happened the night of his death,” Sherwood said, cutting him off.
“Okay, yeah, right . . .” Sherwood heard the sound of pages being turned. “Let’s see, night of November 6, 1988 . . . Seems Greenway’s wife was at a dinner for some women’s golf committee at their club. Says here she came home and found her husband facedown in the pool. Called 911. That was nine thirty-eight P.M. The EMTs arrive, looks like, around twelve minutes later . . . Nine fifty,” the detective said. “Not bad. Unable to revive him. They estimate the TOD as a couple of hours before. No sign of any foul play. The doors were all locked and the neighbors didn’t see or hear anything going on. Didn’t leave a note—but officers found a half-drained bottle of Absolut on the kitchen counter along with a bunch of assorted pills . . . Says here the victim had been depressed lately. His wife admitted they’d been having problems. Apparently, there’d been some financial setbacks as well . . .”
“Sounds pretty clear,” Sherwood said, acknowledging it with
a twinge of disappointment.
“What the autopsy seemed to confirm . . . Victim died from deprivation of oxygen to the lungs. Four point one percent blood alcohol. Along with elevated levels of barbiturates and various muscle relaxers. Though, hmphff . . .” Meachem grunted.
“What?” Sherwood asked.
“It seems they still kept the case open for a while, nonetheless. As suspicious. Until they checked out a couple of other angles . . .”
“What kinds of angles?” Sherwood asked. He felt a tremor of hopefulness pick up.
Meachem flipped the page. “One was that Greenway’s wife apparently didn’t seem to think vodka was her husband’s drink of choice. She said he was always a scotch guy. ‘Johnnie Walker, all the way . . .’ ”
“And the other?” Sherwood pressed.
“The other, it says here”—Meachem turned the page—“was something the ME discovered. In the victim’s stomach. Must have been fairly recent to the time of death because it hadn’t degraded . . .”
“What did he eat?”
“Not eat,” the Vegas detective said, clarifying, “swallowed. It was half of a dollar bill. There’s even a photo here . . .”
“A dollar bill?” Sherwood dug into his wallet and pulled out one. “Which half . . . ?”
But before the Vegas detective even replied, he knew.
“Which half?” Meachem replied curiously. “Let me see, the half with the pyramid on it; why? Anyway, it seems it never led anywhere. A couple of days later they called it death by suicide and let the matter drop.”
Sherwood couldn’t stop from grinning. He looked at his dollar. He almost felt light-headed. “Sonovafuckingbitch!”
The pyramid didn’t mean something, in itself. Except for what was directly above it. Something he’d seen a thousand times and never thought about twice. But now it meant everything.
An open eye.
Chapter Forty-Three
“Got a moment, Phil?” Sherwood knocked on the door of his lieutenant’s office.
Phil Perokis pushed back from his neatly ordered desk and waved Sherwood in. “Sure. Come on in.”
Sherwood shut the door behind him. He’d run it all around, from every possible angle. Slept on it. Nursed it over a Maker’s Mark. A couple of Maker’s Marks. He hadn’t had more than a goddamn beer since the operation, but last night he just said, What the hell! The damn thing was eating away at him now. There was a lot that still didn’t add up.
But he’d woken up this morning with the conclusion that enough of it did.
It damn well did.
“You remember that jumper I was working on? The Erlich kid. He did a back dive off the rock.”
“I know, the gift that keeps on giving . . .” The lieutenant chuckled. Sherwood had told Perokis how the victim’s uncle kept on pushing him to look at the case again, and everyone knew how a couple of days back, the KSLO reporter was buzzing around, trying to make some hay. “His uncle still in town?”
“He is.” Sherwood sat down in front of his boss, the file on his lap. “In fact, Phil, that’s kind of the thing . . .”
In a measured voice, he took his boss through the sequence of developments. Starting with Zorn—how the connection seemed to exist between him and Evan. The two, seemingly unrelated open eyes.
Then how the doc had brought his attention to this Susan Pollack character, how she might fit in. How he first felt someone watching him outside his brother’s apartment. Then how it came out Zorn had a past connection to her.
“Susan Pollack?” Perokis furrowed his brow.
“She was just released from prison.” Sherwood nodded. “After serving thirty-five years as an accomplice in the Houvnanian murders—”
“Houvnanian?”
His boss’s once-agreeable eyes had now grown wider and a little less patient. Perokis liked things tidy, by the book. Work processed, passed on to the right agencies. “Go on.”
Clearing his throat, Sherwood told him how that souvenir peddler in Morro Bay had seen Evan Erlich as he was headed to the rock. Along with someone else. “A woman.” Sherwood looked at his lieutenant.
“Susan Pollack?” Perokis wasn’t smiling anymore. His look expressed his disappointment at where Sherwood seemed to be heading.
“Phil, I know what you’re thinking. I was thinking the same thing too. But two nights ago, someone called Erlich at his motel, threatening him to back off.”
“Back off what?”
“What he’s been sticking his nose into. The caller mentioned something about him getting burned if he didn’t. When Erlich went to the door he found a lit cigarette sitting on the mat outside.”
“Could be anyone.” The lieutenant chuckled. “You admit he hasn’t made a whole lot of friends since coming to town.”
“The next day his sister-in-law found the family cat that had been missing—toasted. I’m not talking about harassment, Phil. Two people are dead. Then this . . .”
He opened the file that was on his lap—the one on Thomas Greenway that had come in that very morning. The FBI investigator who had written a book on the Houvnanian case, he explained, whose pool drowning in Las Vegas may not have been a suicide after all.
“The doc was pushing me to look into it. He was sure it was connected somehow. What’s interesting is what came up—in the autopsy.” He took out the photo. “The victim swallowed something. Or, more likely, something was stuffed down his mouth.”
“What?”
From his own pocket, Sherwood took out a dollar bill, folded it in half, and placed it in front of his boss. He pointed to the eye above the pyramid.
“This.” Then he pushed forward the Vegas ME’s snapshot from the police file—a reluctant understanding slowly forming in his lieutenant’s widening eyes.
“You’re trying to say this is some kind of series of murders? Zorn. The kid from Grover Beach. This guy, Greenway. Going back what?” He squinted. “More than twenty years?”
“Maybe longer,” Sherwood said. He massaged his jaw joint with his thumb. “Trust me, Phil, a couple of days back I was sitting there rolling my eyes the same as you.”
“And now?”
“Now I guess they’re no longer rolling.”
Perokis picked up the file. He stared almost dumbly at the Vegas ME’s photo of the dollar bill, then paged quickly through the rest. “You have a motive?”
“I don’t know the motive. Just that something’s going on. And whatever it is, it somehow connects to this Erlich kid’s father—who isn’t exactly textbook when it comes to lucidity and isn’t doing a whole lot of talking to be sure. And who insists he wasn’t even there with Susan Pollack or Houvnanian at the time of the murders.”
Perokis folded his fingers in front of his face. Sherwood knew he didn’t like this. He was lucky Phil had made a place for him after the transplant. Otherwise he wouldn’t even have had this job. Otherwise, he’d have been on disability. Watching soaps during the day.
“So what do you want to do?” the lieutenant asked. “You want to find out if everyone else is crazy in this mess—or just you?”
Sherwood gave him a halfhearted smile. “Maybe that pastor’s liver is getting to me more than I know.
“Let me see it through, Phil. I know what my job is here. I know I’ve got, what, maybe a year left before the hatchet falls my way. Call it a good-bye gift. I’ve earned that, haven’t I? I need this.”
The lieutenant’s phone rang. He picked up and asked Carol out front to take a message. Sherwood knew no one in homicide would touch this thing any more than they would a pile of dog turd on the street.
This was his dog turd.
“You got three days,” Perokis said. “And don’t even think of putting in for mileage on this. And if it doesn’t pan out by then, I don’t want to hear of it ever again. Understood?”
“Completely.” Sherwood closed the file and got up.
“So what’s the next step?”
“The next step?” Sherwood headed
to the door. “The next step is I want to see Houvnanian.”
“Houvnanian? You must be joking, Don. You’ll need a judge’s order to get in to see him. If he’ll even see you. And where the hell is he these days anyway?”
“Pelican Bay.”
“Pelican Bay?” The lieutenant rolled his eyes. The California super-max. About as hard to get into, even for a law enforcement officer, as it was to leave.
“I think he’ll see me . . . ,” Sherwood said. “A wolf likes to eye his prey before he kills it. That’s why I’m bringing the doc.”
Chapter Forty-Four
I spent the rest of the afternoon reading through Greenway’s book, searching for any kind of connection between my brother, who wasn’t anywhere in the narrative, and Zorn.
I called in to my office. Even consulted on one of my cases. Finally I went back to my room and dozed a little in the afternoon.
I had a dream—my unconscious restlessly connecting images and dots.
I saw Paul Riorden’s estate in Santa Barbara. The ugly, awful crime scenes, blood on the walls. And I was at the dinner table—not Riorden—and my wife, Kathy, next to me. I had a fear that something truly terrible was about to take place. I kept saying to Kathy that we had to get out. Before it happened. Then there was a knock at the door. I went to open it and Russell Houvnanian stood in front of me at the door—the same chiseled face and probing eyes I had seen those years ago.
Except my brother Charlie was at his side.
And suddenly I heard my father, laughing—that same mocking tone with which he had humiliated Charlie with Phil. And I tried to warn him. “Dad,” I said, “please, stop!”
I screamed out loud: “Stop!”
But this time Houvnanian took out a blade.
And plunged it into my father’s gut. The laughing stopped. Lenny’s eyes bulged. He looked down. Blood ran into his hands.
