Cold Hit (2005)

by Stephen - Scully 05 Cannell

  We looked into each other’s eyes. His were empty as train tunnels. Mine probably showed confusion. There was something eerie in Zack’s relentless stare.

  “Turn to page twenty in the book.”

  Zack smiled. “Ain’t no page twenty. I never filed any of this.”

  “I know. I did it for you.”

  He finally opened the book and started flipping pages, shaking his head in wonder. “Boy, Shane has been a busy, busy boy.”

  “Page twenty,” I said. “Your case notes from the fifteenth. The margin note, middle of the page.”

  He scanned the page then looked up. “So?”

  “Says there you were planning to re-interview VR for the June third timeline. Who, or what is VR?”

  “VR?” he looked puzzled. “Re-interview VR … shit, I don’t remember writing that.”

  I didn’t like where this was going.

  “Can’t stand for Vaughn Rolaine,” he went on.

  “Cause I never met the guy. Couldn’t ever find him.” He started looking through the book. “If I wrote re-interview, it was probably just a fuck-up. A mistake.” He hesitated. “I don’t know,” he said, finally looking up.

  “Could VR be shorthand for victim’s relatives?” I asked.

  He thought about it. “To be honest, I’m not sure. I was getting pretty hammered most nights last June.” He thought some more. “Y’know, though, now that I think back on it, you may be right. VR for victim’s relatives. Makes sense.” He closed the book. “Mystery solved.”

  He sat opposite me, looking down again at the binder in his lap, shaking his head in wonder.

  “Cotta unanswered questions on this case,” he finally said softly.

  “Yep. I need to get everything nailed down before I give it over to Underwood. We need to start at the top and run through everything again.”

  Zack sat quietly for almost a minute, looking at the painted concrete floor between us. It was almost as if he was trying to come to some sort of decision. Then, without warning, he exploded out of his chair. I’d never seen him move so fast.

  I lurched up, trying to stand as he smashed me in the face with the murder book, driving me back. I hit the concrete wall hard. The air rushed out of my lungs. Before I could stop him, he had his hands around my throat and was lifting me off the floor, right out of my Florsheims.

  I felt my stocking feet kicking, hitting his legs. I wanted to scream out, but my throat was constricted in his powerful grip. We were eye to eye; his face, a mask of rage.

  First, my vision blurred.

  Then everything went black.

  l was in Yuri market.

  Everyone around me was speaking Russian, and just like the Russian Roulette, I couldn’t understand what anyone was saying. I was wearing Lakers’ gear and Martin Kobb had the shopping list. He moved along beside me, young and handsome in his off-duty clothes. We were buying ingredients for a dinner he was going to cook.

  “We’ll need to baste with a heavier motor oil,” Marty said, reaching for a can of Texaco 40-weight. “And we’ll chop up some of these for the salad.” He pulled several boxes of windshield-wiper blades off the shelf.

  “What’s in this recipe? ” I asked.

  “Wait’ll you taste it,” Kobb said, checking his list. “You get the transmission fluid. I’ll find the antifreeze.”

  Then I was back at the Staples Center The Lakers game was still in progress, but I was walking around in the cheering crowd, unable to find my seat.

  “You’re in the way!” someone shouted, angrily. “Sit down! “

  “If you can’t find your place, go home!” Another fan yelled. I looked down at a lady wearing hoop earrings and a UCLA sweatshirt.

  “It’s in the ninth row. Seat twenty” I said, hoping she could direct me.

  “How come you’re here? “Her voice and expression hateful. “Nobody wants you anymore. They should just give you back to Child Services like before.”

  And then I was wandering in a desert. I had my shirt off and was looking for Chooch and Alexa. The sun burned my face and shoulders. I finally saw my wife and son, far away, standing in the shade of a huge Texaco sign. They were waving for me to join them. I started running, but the desert sand was deep and my legs were sluggish. The faster I ran, the further away they seemed.

  I heard somebody behind me. I looked back and saw Zack. He was moving much faster, and was about to catch me.

  “I saved your ass,” he shouted angrily. He was almost on top of me now “I saved your ass, and this is how you pay me back”

  He lunged and caught my shoulder, pulling me down.

  When I opened my eyes, I was looking at Alexa. She had a cool hand on my forehead. Chooch was standing behind her, worry on his face.

  “Dad, we love you. Please be okay,” he said softly.

  I had a tube down my throat and was breathing through an oxygen mask. My jaw ached where Zack hit me. I tried to say something but Alexa put her finger on my lips.

  “Don’t talk. You were strangled and hit on the head. You have a severe concussion.”

  “Zack … ,” I managed to say around the throat tube. “Don’t talk,” she said.

  “How?” I struggled to sit up.

  She pushed me gently back on the pillows. “He choked you unconscious. Then he either knocked you in the head with your briefcase, or kicked you. He called in an orderly who didn’t know him. You were lying on his bed under the covers, the orderly thought he was you and you were him. Zack just used your badge and walked right out.

  “The trauma physician wants to keep you very quiet for at least a day. If your brain swells, or fills with fluid, they’ll have to operate to relieve pressure. The next six hours are critical. You’ve got to lie still.”

  So I closed my eyes.

  For the next ten hours I slept. When I woke again, the sun was up and my room was empty. Someone had removed the tube and the oxygen mask.

  My head throbbed, my spirits buried in emotional mud. I pulled myself upright and experienced a wave of dizziness.

  My briefcase sat open on the table next to the bed with Agent Orange’s book still inside. I had so many questions I didn’t know where to start. After a minute I pulled out the book, set it on the covers beside me, and tried to collect my thoughts.

  Like a buzzard circling a rotting carcass, I scavenged my bleak history with Zack, looking for something to hang on to. The more I thought about it, the worse it got.

  I rang the nurse’s bell, and a minute later a pleasant African-American woman with a wide, happy face appeared in my doorway.

  “I need to talk to my wife,” I said.

  “She was here all night. Once you were out of danger this morning, she and your son went home. She said she wanted to take a shower, then go to the office and finish up some things.” The nurse looked at her watch. “She’ll be back later.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and watched as she left. Then I hefted Agent Orange’s Motor City Monster up onto my lap and thumbed it open to the contents page.

  Chapter one was entitled: “Growing Up to Kill Social Environments and Formative Years.”

  I turned the page and began to read.

  Chapter 42

  Alexa arrived at a little past five that afternoon. The sun was already down as she walked into my hospital room and kissed me on the lips, letting the moment linger before pulling me close and gingerly hugging me. Then she looked over and saw Judd Underwood’s book on the nightstand.

  “You’re reading this?” She seemed surprised as she picked it up.

  “Just finished it,” I said.

  She thumbed through a few pages before setting it back down.

  “I thought you said he was a jerk.”

  “Actually, there’s a lot of good stuff in there.”

  She settled in the chair beside the bed and took my hand. “Okay, let’s hear it. Something’s on your mind.” I took a moment to gather my thoughts. “I need to know what’s going on with Zack,” I s
aid.

  “Nothing. He’s in the wind. Of course, after what he did to you he’s probably dust on the LAPD. We could file on him for assault with attempt to commit and battery against a police officer, but for that to stick, you’d have to be willing to press charges and testify. Knowing you, I’m guessing you won’t.”

  I nodded my head.

  “So that train probably doesn’t get out of the station,” she said. “It’ll still have to go to the Bureau of Professional Standards. But so far, all we’ve got is a psychologically distressed cop who went momentarily nuts, knocked you in the head, and split. Since he was legally committed here by his wife, there’s some monetary and civil complaint issues, but that’s it.”

  I nodded. I was reluctant to get started because once I did there was probably no turning back. She sensed my hesitancy and pressed me gently.

  “Where Zack went isn’t what’s bothering you. I can’t help if you won’t tell me.”

  “Some of this is theory, some just guesswork. So if you go proactive on me before I get this completely straight in my mind, then there’s a good chance it’s going to ruin what’s left of Zack’s life, ‘cause I could be completely wrong.”

  “Shane, stop dodging. What is it?”

  “Okay, but you won’t like it.”

  She let go of my hand to pull an LAPD detective’s notebook out of her purse.

  “It starts with an old open homicide that Zack was working before we partnered,” I began. “We agreed to handle all of our prior cases separately, but he told me about this open murder case the first week we teamed up.

  Alexa started making notes.

  “The victim was a woman named Arden Rolaine. She was clubbed to death with a brass candlestick in her house in Van Nuys back on June third of this year. Zack and Van Kelsey caught . The squeal. The one-eightyseven was sent to our division because she used to be in a singing group called The Lamp Street Singers, and it got classified as a celebrity homicide.”

  “Let me jump ahead,” Alexa said. “You’re about to tell me Arden and Vaughn Rolaine were related.” Writing it down as she said it.

  “Brother and sister.” I took another deep breath. “Arden had some substantial money saved up from her music career, but Zack and Van never found any of it after she died.”

  “And you think it was under her mattress or buried in a fruit jar in the backyard. The doer beat it out of her, dug it up, and took it.”

  “Yes. Zack’s prime suspect in that murder was Arden’s brother Vaughn. He was homeless, but was always coming around and mooching money from his sister. Finally, she got tired of it and told him to buzz off. Zack’s theory was Vaughn got pissed and came back in early June to burgle her place. She surprised him. He smacked her around, got her to give up the dough, and then put her down with the candlestick.”

  “Pretty straightforward,” Alexa said.

  “What’s troubling me is how Vaughn Rolaine could be the prime suspect in one of Zack’s murders last June, and then turn up as the first dead body on the Fingertip case this December.”

  “A little coincidental, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but not impossible, I guess.”

  She nodded and finished writing that down.

  “The Arden Rolaine murder book is a mess,” I continued. “Zack didn’t organize anything. Maybe because by then the spark was out and he’d stopped trying, or maybe it was all unfiled because he never planned on solving it. I was going through the binder, getting it in shape before giving it to Underwood and I came across this margin notation: ‘Re-interview VR, on timeline for June third.’ Zack told me he never spoke to Vaughn Rolaine. Couldn’t find him. They never met.”

  “Then how could he be re-interviewed?”

  “He couldn’t. Just before he jumped me, I asked Zack if it was his casebook shorthand for something else, like Victim’s Relative. He couldn’t remember at first, then changed his mind and told me that, on second thought, that’s what it stood for.” I waited for her to finish writing and look up. “How long you been a cop?” I asked.

  “Seventeen years.”

  “If you use shorthand in case notes, you think you’d ever forget what your abbreviations stood for?”

  She shook her head.

  “Me neither. So if VR doesn’t stand for victim’s relative, then it probably stands for Vaughn Rolaine, and that means Zack talked to him once before and was lying to me. Zack said he couldn’t find Vaughn because he moved around a lot. But the homeless people we talked to in Sherman Oaks Park two days ago, said he was a fixture down there. So which is it?”

  “Where’s this going?” She stopped writing.

  “I don’t have a shred of evidence for this. It’s all total speculation, but I keep wondering if it’s possible that Zack was the one who killed Vaughn Rolaine. It’s the only construct I can come up with where all of these coincidences line up and make sense.”

  “What’s his motive?”

  “The missing money. Arden’s recording industry dough. His case notes say he and Van couldn’t find it in any bank accounts of hers, no safety deposit boxes. According to Zack’s theory, Vaughn forced his sister to tell him where it was before he killed her. So if her little brother found it and took off with it, then maybe Vaughn buried it in the park somewhere.”

  “And you think Zack waited four or five months until Arden Rolaine’s case cooled down and then went after it.”

  “His divorce probably helped determine the timetable, but yeah, that’s what I’m wondering. Zack goes to the park, drags Vaughn up into the foothills, stuffs a rag in his mouth and clips off the guy’s fingers to get him to talk, ends up killing him. Zack’s a cop. He’d know clipping off the fingertips and moving the body to the L. A. River would bitch up our investigation. With no fingerprints, there’d be nothing connecting him to the case, ‘cause we’d never ID the body. And we almost didn’t.”

  Alexa blew out a long breath. “If your theory has him catching the Vaughn Rolaine murder himself so he could control the spin on the investigation, then the big question is how did he set it up so you two would get the case?”

  “The night we found the body in the L. A. River was a Friday. That previous afternoon, Zack and I moved to the top of the murder board. We knew we’d get the next one-eighty-seven. We even went home early to get some sleep. Zack would have known those mutilations would get the case sent to Homicide Special where we were on deck. He left Parker Center at four o’clock Friday afternoon. That gave him plenty of time to find Vaughn, torture him, get the money, and do the murder. That first body was easy to see from the river bank, so he knew it would be found quickly. He also knew we’d probably catch the squeal because, as the killer, he had control of the timetable.

  Alexa was still frowning as she made a few more notes.

  I picked up Agent Orange’s book and handed it to her. “According to Underwood, stress is the big precipitator for serial murder. The big stressors are marital, financial, and work related. Zack hits bars and stars on all three.

  “When we got to Vaughn Rolaine’s body it was midnight, and while we were waiting for the MEs, I remember looking into Zack’s car, and seeing that he was crying. Later he told me that Fran had thrown him out on Thursday and asked for a divorce.”

  “And you think that’s what snapped him,” Alexa said. “He’s lost his marriage; he knows the divorce will bankrupt him, so he goes to see Vaughn Rolaine to get the stolen money. Starts chopping off fingers, and kills him in a rage.”

  I nodded.

  “What else?”

  “Well, lots of stuff. None of it alone is very earthshaking, until you add it all up.”

  I retrieved Motor City Monster from her, opened it to a chapter entitled “Antecedent Behaviors in Criminal Profiling,” and then gave it back.

  “According to this book, the first murder done by most serial killers is close to home. Underwood calls it killing in the comfort zone. Zack and I worked for two years in the West Valley. That area was
definitely in his comfort zone.”

  She was writing again.

  “After the unsub kills Vaughn, he goes postal. All the latent rage from his childhood comes out, the signature elements of the murder. He carves the Medic symbol on the chest—all the other postoffense behaviors. If these victims are father substitutes, he covers up the vic’s eyes so his dead father won’t stare at him. That chapter you’re looking at is about parental abuse and the early psychological factors that help form serial criminals. Parents play a big role. If his father sodomized him or abused him physically, that could be a huge factor. If his dad was a medic in Nam, that explains the symbol on the chest.

  “Zack told me a few days ago, when I was driving him to his brother’s, that he wished his father hadn’t done something. I asked him what, and he wouldn’t say, but said something about not being in control of his destiny. That his actions were written in his DNA long before he was born.”

  “And you think that’s why he’s killing father substitutes?”

  I nodded. “According to Underwood, most serial killers vacillate between extreme egotism and feelings of inferiority and self-contempt. They’re not in control of their lives or emotions, so they crave control in the commission of their murders and often look for jobs that give them a sense of authority.”

  “Like a cop,” Alexa said.

  “Exactly. There’s a thing Underwood calls the sociopathic or homicidal triad. It includes bed-wetting, violence against animals or small children, and fire starting. This book says if two of those three conditions are present, you’re heading for big trouble. They’re often precursors to serial crime. His psych evaluator hinted that Zack used to be a bed-wetter and I found out that he ran over the family dog the week after Fran threw him out.”

  She was just looking at me now, her notepad forgotten on her lap.

  “Stress plus rage equals blitz kills,” I said. “The doctor psychoanalyzed Zack for two days and said he appeared to be a cognitive disassociative personality, incapable of having relationships. He also said Zack might be a narcissist. According to Underwood’s book, that’s a pretty classic mindset for a homicidal sociopath.”