It was a thin gold chain with a small medallion that had the shape of a scorpion carved into it. This same chain had rubbed against my bare chest every time Corey brought his body down onto mine.
I met Billy's stare and watched the expression on my face bring a twisted smile to his mouth.
"I've been carrying it with me the whole time," he said. His voice quivered. He had lost his grip on the cold, smirking malice he had used to bait me into meeting with Martin Cale. "I almost dropped it on the table when we were having dinner. You don't know how tempted I was."
"Which one of you killed him?"
Billy sealed his mouth.
"Not you. Not Joseph. I'm sure he doesn't do his own dirty work. Was it Terrance Davidson?
Roger Vasquez? Ben Clamp?"
"Are you out for revenge now, Adam?"
"Which one of you killed him?"
There was fear in his eyes. "It was a third party," he said warily.
"Who?" I asked.
He didn't answer.
"Does Joseph know about the game you tried to play with Corey, with me?" I asked.
He shut his eyes briefly.
"He doesn't, does he? You just told him Corey was trying to blackmail you and you needed him out of the way. Joseph has no idea how much you endangered his operation over the past two weeks."
I heard the answer in his rapid breaths. Then I watched a strange energy liven his face. He laughed gently at a joke I hadn't heard, cocking his head to one side as if I had just sung a particularly pleasing note.
"Find them," he urged. "Tell them. Then my bullshit plan will actually become a reality.
Adam Murphy will bring down our whole operation. That's only fair, don't you think? It's practically a compromise."
He lowered the gun slightly and straightened his spine against the glass. He was waiting eagerly and happily for me to react. I didn't. "You're going to do it, aren't you?"
"Who killed Corey?"
"Good luck, Adam."
He brought the pistol to his mouth, closed his teeth around the barrel, and fired.
The gunshot knocked me to my knees. I blinked and saw that I had raised both hands on either side of my head, as if the ceiling was about to fall in. When I heard him hit the glass wall, I thought it was a second gunshot.
My ears were ringing. Billy lay in front of me. Blood peppered the carpet around his head and laced the glass wall behind him with what looked like a blossom composed of empty night sky. The window was spider-webbed where the bullet had blown through it after leaving his skull. His gaping mouth was a strange shape. The pistol's kick had knocked his front teeth out of alignment.
I had never seen death before and couldn't see how anyone would think the scene before me would constitute a victory.
I picked Corey's gold chain up off the carpet and left the house.
I walked downhill to Sunset Plaza. It was just after two A.M. Sunday morning, and the Sheriff's Department was closing down the strip. A river of brake lights led me toward my apartment building. A hundred pounding bass beats from a hundred car stereos gave a rhythm to my footsteps that my brain could not. I walked past the darkened high-end retail shops and overpriced restaurants. I heard drunken motorists shout homophobic expressions out their car windows.
When I reached the sudden dip in Sunset Boulevard that housed Tower Records and Book Soup, I saw two motorcycle cops who had been idling on a corner ahead of me go lights and sirens. They swerved out into traffic, weaving through the thwarted cars as they headed off in the direction I had just come from. I figured they were responding to a report of a gunshot up in the hills. I paused to watch them pass.
Billy Hatfill had killed himself rather than give me the identity of Corey's killer. Maybe he knew he would be as good as dead if Joseph Spinotta discovered how Billy had risked his operation. A third party had killed Corey. A hit man of some sort. Someone who could be sent after Billy just as he had been sent after Corey.
I didn't believe that Billy had killed himself out of fear alone. His split-second decision to take his life seemed like an attempt to ensure that I would hunt Spinotta down and get the answers Billy had refused to give me. If I went any further, I would be fulfilling the dying wish of a man who had tried to destroy not just my dignity but my sanity.
I imagined myself sitting in an interrogation room trying to make real what I had seen and heard that night. For all I knew, young Everett was still piloting the scene of Cale's murder across the open seas, leaving me with a drawing of a young man named Reynaldo Reyez and a blinking keypad with a perpetually changing series of numbers on it.
I struggled to remember the things Martin Cale had told me. Four years earlier, Corey and Joseph Spinotta had met face-to-face; neither man had said a word about the meeting afterward.
Nothing Billy had said to me indicated that he knew about this meeting.
A few weeks earlier, Corey had been desperate to find Joseph Spinotta. I had to know why.
Chapter 15
I rounded the corner onto my street and saw a Toyota 4Runner parked across the street from my building. Behind the wheel was one of the security guards Jimmy had hired to prevent me from leaving the house. Now he was awaiting my return.
I hurried back uphill toward the traffic-clogged strip. I turned my cell phone on. I had fifteen new messages. Nate answered after one ring. "Where the hell are you?" he said in a fierce whisper.
"Are you still at Jimmy's?"
"Yeah. He's freaking out."
"I need my Jeep," I said.
I heard a door open and then Nate let out a small grunt as his cell phone was plucked away from him. Before I could swear, Brenda said my name in a cool voice.
"I need my Jeep."
"Why?"
"Because I need to get out of LA. And you can call the guard who's waiting for me outside of my building and tell him to get lost."
"Jimmy's pissed."
"I don't give a shit. He was wrong."
"How?"
"Corey wanted to know where Joseph Spinotta was. Billy didn't know, but he came up with a plan to find out: he'd get me on tape raping a kid, then use the tape to send me after Spinotta.
Corey agreed, but he used a body double—"
"Daniel Brady," she said for me.
"Bight," I answered. "The mask allowed him to get away with it."
"Did Corey get away with it?"
"Sort of," I answered. "Billy killed him as soon as he got the tape."
"You're sure of this?"
"Billy confessed," I answered. "He said a third party did the job. Not Spinotta. Not the Vanished Three. Someone else."
"A third party," she mused. I listened to the bleating of car horns from the Strip, watched the luxury sedans and SUVs roll past the intersection one block uphill. "Why do you need to get out of LA?" she asked, but it sounded like she knew the answer.
"Billy's dead. So's Martin Cale."
"Jesus! Did you—"
"I didn't kill either of them. Billy ordered that kid who's living with him to kill Martin Cale and me as soon as we watched the tape. Only problem was, the kid realized it wasn't me and decided not to finish the job. Billy blew his brains out rather than give me the identity of Corey's killer."
"Why?" she asked, baffled.
"I don't know," I said. "I guess it was better to kill himself than have Spinotta do it after he found out the deep shit Billy got him into." Or he was trying to force me into a confrontation with his sugar daddy, because he was convinced I would lose. I kept this thought to myself.
"Brenda, please," I said. "I have no physical evidence for anything I saw or heard tonight.
For all I know, Martin Cale's yacht is still heading out to sea with Martin Cale's body in it. If he hasn't been thrown overboard. I could sit in an interrogation room for the rest of my life and I still wouldn't be able to corroborate any of this."
I hoped she was remembering what she had told me the night before— that it was time for Jimmy to
get out of my way whether he liked it or not.
"Where are you?" she asked.
"I need a promise, Brenda!"
"Fine. Where are you going to go?"
I didn't answer.
"Dammit," she whispered. "Dwight called here earlier. They caught up with Elena Castillo and Melissa Brady down in San Diego, just like you said. Melissa's not talking, but Elena hasn't shut up. She told them Corey hired Scott Koffler to bring Daniel Brady to LA. Dwight wanted to know why he hadn't heard Corey's name before."
"What did Jimmy say?"
"Nothing," she answered. "But I'm not sure how long that's going to last."
I started walking down a dark side street lined with parked cars, headed away from my building as fast as I could. "Godammit, little man, you better come back with something that makes me feel good about doing this," she said.
She agreed to meet me on an oak-tree-lined street that runs behind the twenty-four-hour Pavilions grocery store on Santa Monica Boulevard. I got there before she did. Across the boulevard, I could see the last drunken revelers dispersing from in front of the gay bars on Robertson.
I heard two cars approach. My Jeep was in the lead, with Brenda behind the wheel. Nate followed in his white Honda Accord. Brenda got out first and started toward me, with the Jeep key in her hand, her mouth opening and preparing to form words. Just then Nate slammed his car door and headed toward us and Brenda said nothing.
"You have my cell phone number?" she asked at last. I shook my head, and she recited the digits, which I programmed into my phone. "You call me every few hours. If you don't, you better switch out the plates on that thing," she said with a nod to my Jeep. "You don't want Joe Ring on your tail."
Nate looked from me to Brenda, desperate for some kind of explanation. "You did a good thing, Nate," I said. "Coming to me about Daniel Brady."
He had done a lot more than that. Nate Bain was the primary reason Billy Hatfill's plan had failed. If I hadn't known about Daniel Brady's trip to West Hollywood, the tape I had watched that night might have affected me the way Billy hoped it would. "Stay with the Wiltons, please,"
I told him.
"Where are you going?" he asked.
"Stay with the Wiltons and I'll call you."
"If you think Jimmy's so great, why doesn't it make any difference that he thinks you're going to get killed?"
"You got it backward, Nate," Brenda said. Then she grabbed his shoulder and started walking him back toward his car. She steered him into the passenger seat, shut the door, and then gave me a look through the dull glow of leaf-laced streetlights. "I know where you're going," she said at last. "Even if you don't." I figured she was being spiritual again and I didn't have the time for it.
When I drove past my building, the security guard was gone. I went inside and grabbed some changes of clothes, along with the pictures I had of Corey, Spinotta, and the Vanished Three.
Then I walked to a cash machine and withdrew all the cash I had: one hundred and twenty dollars.
I took the 405 Freeway clear across the San Fernando Valley to where it met up with Interstate 5, and then I headed north, past Santa Clarita, where the rides at Magic Mountain Amusement Park looked like isolated oil derricks against the dark mountains, and up into the San Gabriel Mountains. Roadside signs advised me to kill my air conditioning to avoid overheating the engine.
The few eighteen-wheelers sharing the road with me were lumbering in the inside lane so they could make the ascent without stopping traffic.
The interstate began to undulate through the divide between the Angeles and Los Padres National Forests known as the Grapevine. I became so comfortable and familiar with the feeling of traveling high above sea level that I almost forgot my destination: Visalia, the small town in the Central Valley that Corey had run away from at sixteen. Getting there would require a steep descent.
A wildfire blazed on the near horizon, filling the night sky with something that looked like the trail from a rocket launch. I decided James Wilton had started it to prevent me from leaving LA.
I needed sleep.
In the tiny mountain town of Gorman, I pulled into a motel parking lot. When the sodium vapor lights slid across the interior of my car, for the first time I saw the envelope resting on the passenger seat. My first name was written across it in Brenda's sloping cursive.
At first I thought it might be some cash. Then I remembered what she had told me two nights before as we waited for Scott Koffler to meet us outside Plummer Park. She had run Corey's real last name, McCormick, and found something interesting. Jimmy didn't know she had it. I opened the envelope.
It was a printout of an article from the Bakersfield Californian dated a little over three weeks earlier. Brenda had retrieved it from the website's archives, so there were no accompanying photographs. The headline read PLEASANT VALLEY MOBILE HOME EXPLOSION KILLS 4. A powerful explosion had ripped apart a trailer owned by forty-seven-year-old Tonya McCormick, just outside the tiny town of Avenal.
Authorities believed that McCormick, who had served time in state prison for possession of an illegal narcotic, had been operating a methamphetamine lab in her trailer, and that toxic by-products from the manufacturing process had ignited the explosion. The article said Tonya McCormick and Kyle Purcell, her boyfriend of three years, and her thirteen-year-old son Caden were all believed dead in the blast, pending final confirmation from the state Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement, the law enforcement body in charge of investigating all meth lab accidents throughout the state of California.
In the story's most bizarre twist, the explosion had also killed a fifty-two-year-old junior high school English teacher, Janice Hughes. An unnamed source close to the investigation confirmed that Caden McCormick had been a student of Janice Hughes, and that the Kings County Sheriff's Department believed the boy gave his teacher some indication that he was being abused.
Janice Hughes had died of her injuries at the scene. A San Francisco native, she had been a resident of Kings County for less than a year and had repeatedly expressed concern for Caden McCormick to her colleagues at Good Hope Junior High, specifically regarding the boy's lack of grooming and inability to focus during class.
Tonya McCormick, Corey's mother. Caden McCormick, his younger brother. Both had died the same week Corey had discovered his uncle was a customer of Joseph Spinotta's. The following week, Corey had gone to Billy Hatfill asking for Joseph Spinotta's location.
I sat in my parked car, trying to make sense of the article on my lap. But my breaths rasped like a tired dog's and the text on the paper kept smearing into an image of Martin Cale's open throat.
I studied my map and found the tiny town of Avenal. It was due east of Visalia, almost directly across the floor of the Great Central Valley that sat between the Sierra Nevada and the Coast Ranges.
Brenda Wilton's parting words took on new meaning. She had known where I was headed, even if I hadn't. I was pretty sure she wouldn't have let me leave LA otherwise.
Central Coast Ranges
West of Coalinga
Morning
Eddie Cairns awoke to dawn seeping through the slats of the vaulted ceiling above him. He jerked and felt nylon rope securing his ankles and wrists to the bed frame, the exposed metal coils digging into his back.
This much clarity usually meant that he had crashed, but something else had softened the blow. He should have felt like the Holy Ghost had carved his insides out with an ice cream spoon, but he didn't. There was something else in his system. He remembered the, golden girl from the night before and her silver needle.
Then she was standing over him. She had lost her luster. Her hair was tangled and her eyes were bagged, and sweat plastered her white tank top to her round breasts. When he tried to form words, her hazel eyes zeroed in on him.
It took him a second to realize the woman had started talking to him. "Eddie, a girl named Lucy Vernon gave me your name. Does the name Vernon ring a bell? Her father was your supervisor back whe
n you worked with that picking crew over in Corcoran. You told him a story, Eddie. Do you remember?"
"What'd you give me?" he asked.
"Something to keep your head clear," she said. "But it's going to wear off soon. Do you remember the story you told Morris Vernon? It was a bad one, Eddie. You scared him shitless."
"My mother sent you, didn't she?"
The girl's face went dead.
"Fuck shit!" Eddie cried. "I fuckin' knew it. You're some kind of crazy herbalist or something."
She cocked one eyebrow. "You think your mother sent an herbalist after you?"
"She was always tryin' to get me to take some herbal shit to get me off the meth. That's what you gave me, right? Where am I? Some goddamn loony bin where they make you pray all day and take out the trash?"
"You're getting distracted, Eddie."
"You tell my mother that I—"
"Your mother's dead, Eddie."
Eddie swallowed. She was wrong. He waited for her to tell him she was wrong, but silence filled the vast space like methane gas. No sound from outside told him where he was. The floor below was, concrete. The shafts of light through the ceiling were gaining luminescence, lancing dust motes. He could smell pine and wood rot.
The girl said, "She died last year while you were living up on that tweaker commune outside of Redding. Too bad the place got raided."
"Lying bitch," he muttered.
Eddie Cairns tried to remember his mother's face and came up with next to nothing. Except for her silvery gray hair. Just like Suzanne's, the boss who had fired him the night before. Maybe it was Suzanne's hair he was remembering.
"Your sister's got her things. They're in a storage locker down in Wasco. The will didn't even mention your name, but your sister says you've got a right to some of them. Sounds fair, doesn't it?"
"Let me go."
"We're not at the negotiation stage yet, Eddie."
"I want to see her," he moaned.
"Your sister?"
"My mother!"
The red-haired woman sat down on the edge of the bed frame and patted his thigh gently.
That's when he realized that whatever she had injected him with had rendered his legs immobile.
She kept patting his thigh, as if to drive this point home. The hard expression on her face, the way her amber eyes bored into his, didn't match her tender gesture.
Light Before Day Page 26
