Diagnosis Murder 6 - The Dead Letter

by Lee Goldberg

"Do you know who sent you the photos?" Mark asked. "Was there a letter?"

  She shook her head. "Does it matter."

  Mark shrugged. "Someone wanted to destroy your family."

  "Lowell did that," Monette said.

  "Aren't you curious who took the pictures and sent them to you."

  "It doesn't change what Lowell did to my daughter," Monette said. "And what he would have kept doing if I didn't stop him."

  "But it was over," Mark said.

  "What was."

  "The affair between Lowell and LeSabre," Mark said. "She told me it ended a year ago."

  "That's not possible," Monette said.

  "Why not."

  "Because that's when I was having Lowell followed by a private detective," she said. "Lowell was working all the time and finding any excuse at all to leave the house. I was afraid he was having an affair. But the detective watched him for weeks and said Lowell wasn't cheating on me."

  "Maybe the detective wasn't very good," Mark said.

  "He's the best," Monette said. "I got his name from the National Enquirer."

  "What's his name." Mark asked.

  "Nick Stryker," she said with dramatic emphasis, as if she expected to hear his theme song begin playing the moment she was finished speaking.

  Mark knew who Nick Stryker was—and not because the detective's name showed up a lot in the gossip magazines, usually in connection with embarrassing photos of celebrities doing things that they shouldn't be doing.

  Stryker was in his thirties, tall and long-limbed. He had the build and the casual gait of a golf pro and dressed like one, too.

  He'd met Stryker while investigating the murder of movie producer Cleve Kershaw, who was executed in bed with a young woman who wasn't his wife.

  After Kershaw's murder, Stryker tried to sell Cleve's wife incriminating photos documenting her own extramarital affair, a blackmail scheme that Mark and Steve foiled. Stryker later became a key player in a little drama Mark devised to unmask the killer.

  Those events unfolded about the same time Stryker would have also been following Lowell Hobbes.

  Although Mark had serious doubts about Nick Stryker's ethics, he was confident of the detective's ability to discover, and document, infidelities and indiscretions of all kinds.

  If Lowell Hobbes was sleeping with his stepdaughter a year ago and Stryker was following him, Mark was certain that Stryker would have found out all about it.

  And that's the opinion Mark shared with Steve as he emerged from the interrogation room and walked with him to the squad room.

  "Which means LeSabre Hobbes is lying," Mark concluded. "The affair didn't end a year ago."

  "Yes, it did," Steve said.

  "You say that as if you have more than LeSabre's word for it," Mark said.

  "I do," Steve said.

  "You've been doing some detecting," Mark said.

  "Just enough so I can still call myself a detective," Steve said as they reached his cluttered desk, where the pictures of Lowell and LeSabre outside the Movieland Motor Inn were laid out. "I tracked down the motel and contacted the manager, which wasn't easy."

  "You couldn't remember the number for directory assistance?"

  "The Movieland Motor Inn changed hands," Steve said. "It's a Comfort Inn now."

  "How long has it been a Comfort Inn?"

  "About a year," Steve said.

  "So LeSabre isn't lying," Mark said.

  "It looks that way," Steve agreed.

  "So we don't know who took those pictures or why they waited a year to send them," Mark said.

  "No, we don't, Steve said. "But we know who killed Lowell Hobbes and why, so my job is done."

  Mark motioned to the photos. "But that's still a mystery."

  "One that doesn't have to be solved," Steve said, gathering up the photos, dropping them into a file, and snapping it shut with finality. "My favorite kind."

  CHAPTER THREE

  Mark called Nick Stryker's office from his Mini Cooper convertible as he steered a well-practiced zigzag course of streets between Santa Monica Boulevard and Wilshire, working his way north from the West LA police station to Community General Hospital. But he wasn't able to reach Stryker. He got the detective's voice mail and left a message asking Stryker to call him back.

  It was frustrating. He'd hoped he could get answers to most of the questions that bothered him from Stryker on the drive back to the hospital and be done with it. But now he knew the mystery would nag at him, an intellectual itch that would get worse with each passing hour until he could think of nothing else. It would become an obsession.

  This was his great personality flaw, his curse and his addiction. At the same time, he knew it was also the foundation of his skills as both a physician and a detective. It made him tenacious in his quest to find answers.

  His self-awareness did him no good. If anything, it made his inevitable, and incessant, mental gnawing over the un known even more frustrating for him. He felt he should be able to master his compulsions with reason and logic. This was one of those instances.

  Intellectually, he knew Steve was right. There was no pressing need, or any need whatsoever, to find out who took the volatile photos and why whoever it was waited a year to send them to Mrs. Hobbes. The police knew all they needed to know. Lowell Hobbes was having an affair with his stepdaughter, a fact confirmed by the photos and LeSabre's own admission. Monette ran over Lowell, a fact that no one was disputing either—not Monette and certainly not the dozens of witnesses who saw her do it.

  But acknowledging those facts didn't ease his suffering. Mark wouldn't stop thinking about the mystery until he had the answers, no matter how irrelevant the information might be to the police. He needed to solve it for his own peace of mind.

  Besides, as far as Mark was concerned, whoever sent those photos was morally responsible for the violence and tragedy that the pictures provoked. Whoever did it had to know that, at the very least, the revelations contained in the photos would tear the Hobbes family apart.

  Mark could think of two possible motivations, one misguided and the other purely malicious, for sending the photos to Monette Hobbes.

  One explanation was that someone close to the family stumbled onto the affair between Lowell and LeSabre, was horrified by it, and felt it had to be stopped. Since LeSabre was an adult, notifying the police or child protective services wasn't an option. So the misguided do-gooder sent the photos to Monette, not realizing just how angry she would become.

  The other possibility was that some hateful person wanted to destroy the Hobbes family and knew that sending Monette the compromising photos of her husband and stepdaughter would certainly do that.

  Instinctively, Mark felt that malicious intent was the most likely explanation, but regardless of whether he was right or wrong, he couldn't let go of it until he found the answer.

  It was a pointless, selfish pursuit. He couldn't really do anything with the knowledge besides satisfy his own curiosity. Taking pictures of someone having an affair and alerting the aggrieved spouse wasn't a crime. Some would even say it was a community service.

  Who could have known that the pictures would provoke Monette Hobbes to mow down her husband?

  Nobody.

  So what gave him the right to hold someone morally responsible for what Monette had done? And who cared what he thought anyway?

  Nobody.

  Acknowledging those truths didn't put the mystery out of Mark's mind either. He was who he was. If he couldn't accept it, he'd just have to endure it.

  Since Mark couldn't answer the big questions—who sent the photos and why—he put his mind to the other riddles related to the mystery.

  Why didn't Nick Stryker discover the affair when he was following Lowell Hobbes?

  Perhaps it was timing. The affair started shortly after Stryker's surveillance ended. Or, less likely, Lowell Hobbes managed to elude Stryker but not someone else.

  There was another answer.

 
Stryker knew about the affair, but for some reason didn't tell Monette about it.

  But Mark couldn't see why Stryker would keep the information to himself. It was the man's business to catch cheating spouses and expose them to his clients.

  Whatever the explanation was, Mark would know Stryker's side of the story soon enough. Stryker owed him a favor or two after the notoriety Mark helped him achieve on the Lacey McClure case. For a couple of weeks, Stryker was a celebrity. There was even talk of a TV series based on his life, though as far as Mark knew nothing ever came of it.

  Mark pulled into his space in the Community General parking lot and hoped that chaos awaited him inside. It was the only chance he'd have of getting some relief from all the nagging questions.

  Steve Sloan was not a big believer in coincidence as a twist of fate. In his experience, a coincidence was conclusive evidence that fate wasn't involved. It was proof of intent, a glimpse at the pattern behind someone's premeditated actions.

  Behind every coincidence, he usually found someone who benefited from it.

  Or he found a corpse.

  He was finishing up the paperwork on the Hobbes case when the call came in from the fire department's arson investigation unit. A strip mall in West Los Angeles had burned down around five o'clock that morning. By the time the fire men arrived, the building was fully engulfed. Once the fire was extinguished, arson investigators began carefully picking through the charred rubble to determine the cause of the blaze.

  The investigators found traces of an accelerant, proving that the fire was no accident. And they discovered a body buried in the debris.

  The strip mall was only a few blocks from the police station. It was one of those ubiquitous urban eyesores, with a convenience store, a greasy-fast-food joint, and a nail salon on the first floor and storefront offices on the second, all squeezed onto a corner lot with too few parking spaces, where a gas station had once stood.

  He jotted down the address of the strip mall and then stared at what he'd written. Something troubled him, but he couldn't figure out what it was. By the time he was a half a block from the scene, he knew.

  The strip mall was a gutted, scorched skeleton of the building it had once been. The smell of smoke was still heavy in the air, the intersection inundated with soot-blackened water, the storm drains clogged with burned debris. He didn't remember what stores had been in the mall, but he knew somebody who rented one of the offices upstairs.

  Nick Stryker. The same guy whom the woman he'd just booked for murder had hired to follow her cheating husband. Now somebody had torched Stryker's office, maybe even killed him.

  Coincidence?

  No such thing. As Steve parked his car behind the medical examiner's windowless black Suburban, he made a mental note to check on Monette's whereabouts at the time of the fire—not that he really figured she was responsible.

  The area was roped off with yellow caution tape, and members of the LAPD Scientific Investigation Unit, affectionately known as the crime scene mice, were on the job.

  The work of the mice had been popularized on shows like CSI, where the forensic team tooled around in Humvees, wore designer clothes, and carried guns. If the mice expected any of that Hollywood glamour to rub off on them, they were mistaken. They drove old Ford vans and wore unisex jumpsuits. The only weapons they carried were tweezers and baggies. And if Steve had ever caught them questioning a witness, he would have shot them.

  He flashed his badge at the LAPD officer securing the scene, stepped under the tape, and began looking for Dr. Amanda Bentley among the investigators swarming over the debris. She was a pathologist at Community General Hospital, where the morgue doubled as the adjunct county medical examiner's office. So she wore two lab coats, one as pathologist, the other as medical examiner, handling overflow for the beleaguered county morgue and the chronically understaffed ME's office. She juggled the inhuman demands of both of her jobs, as well as single motherhood, with astonishing ease and efficiency. Steve wished he knew how she managed it. Even more, he wished he could find her. She didn't seem to be anywhere.

  Steve approached one of the arson investigators, flashed his badge by way of introduction, and asked him where the ME was. The investigator directed him to the alley behind the building, where he found Amanda and another arson investigator peering into a scorched trash bin.

  "What's the story?" Steve asked as he stepped up beside them.

  "That's what we're trying to figure out," Amanda said, motioning towards the trash bin.

  He followed her gaze and saw a charred corpse, vaguely recognizable as human, curled up amidst the burned trash, his fists clenched under his chin as if preparing for a blow from a boxer. Steve knew from experience not to read any thing into the position of the body. The tremendous heat from the fire had dehydrated the victim's muscles, causing them to contract and twist the body into the pugilistic position.

  When Steve looked up again, Amanda introduced him to the arson investigator, Tim Lau.

  With his LAFD baseball cap and wraparound sunglasses, Tim looked less like an arson investigator than a Hong Kong movie version of an American cop.

  "What can you tell me about the fire?" Steve asked, shaking Tim's hand.

  Tim glanced at the building behind them. "Well, Steve, it started on the second floor—"

  "The third office from the left," Steve interrupted.

  Tim smiled. "I'm impressed. What tipped you off? The pattern of spalling on the concrete?"

  Steve shook his head. "The office belongs to Nick Stryker, a PI who likes to catch philandering husbands in the act. I'm surprised someone didn't lob a Molotov cocktail through the window years ago."

  "That wouldn't have been enough accelerant to cause the amount of spalling I saw," Tim said. "It was too widespread."

  "Spalling?" Steve asked.

  "Pockmarked concrete. The flammable liquid seeped into minute cracks in the concrete and ignited, creating fissures, holes, and flakes."

  "That's why you don't want to line a campfire with wet rocks," Amanda said. "The rocks will explode."

  Steve gave her a look. She shrugged.

  "I was a Girl Scout," she said. "And a troop leader."

  "Of course you were," Steve said.

  Amanda cocked her head towards the body in the bin. "You think this is Stryker?"

  "You tell me," Steve said.

  "I can't—at least not yet," she said. "The victim was nearly cremated. There's almost no skin or subcutaneous tissue left. Call me in the morning after I've had a chance to do some cutting. I might even have a cause of death for you by then."

  "How did he end up in the trash bin?" Steve asked.

  "You tell me," Amanda said.

  Steve looked back at the corpse and considered the possibilities. If the victim was Stryker, the killer could have tossed him in the trash and set him aflame to make a statement. Then the killer torched the office to destroy Stryker's files and any evidence that might lead to him.

  Considering Stryker's methods and his line of work, the scenario wasn't as contrived as it might otherwise have seemed.

  Another possibility also occurred to Steve. This wasn't the first time he had come upon a body torched in a trash bin. A few years back, he'd pursued a psycho who got his kicks dousing drunks and derelicts with gasoline and setting them on fire. One of the victims was found in the trash bin he called home.

  Steve didn't think the two cases were related. The psycho was dead; he'd set himself on fire as Steve closed in to arrest him. But that case reminded Steve that trash bins made sturdy, if unsanitary, homes for derelicts. The victim in this situation might have died accidentally, if the flames from the building had ignited something in the trash bin where he was sleeping.

  Or the victim could have been a witness, someone who saw the arsonist at work and was killed to keep him from talking.

  He would check the cars parked in the area, see if one of them belonged to Stryker. If not, he'd put out an APB.

&nbs
p; "Well?" Amanda asked, jarring Steve from his thoughts. "What's your theory?"

  "I'll know more in the morning," Steve said.

  "What makes you think you'll know then," Amanda asked.

  "Nothing," Steve said. "But that seems to be the stock answer around here." He faced Tim. "There's something you can tell me. Which fire started first, the trash bin or the building."

  "I don't know," Tim said. "When the firefighters arrived, both the building and the bin were already fully engulfed. We're collecting samples from the point of origin and from this trash bin and running them through the vapor trace analyzer. But I should have an answer for you soon."

  "Let me guess," Steve said. "In the morning."

  Tim smiled. "You must be a detective."

  Dr. Mark Sloan got his wish. There were so many patients to treat, and so many bureaucratic hassles to deal with, that he didn't have a free moment to think about who sent Monette Hobbes the photos and why the person waited a year to do it.

  When he left the hospital, his mind was still buzzing with the events of the last few hours, rehashing encounters with patients, meetings with staff, and memos he'd written.

  He was halfway home to the beach house in Malibu when the mystery began to occupy his thoughts again. This time he welcomed the puzzle. He hoped the short respite from thinking about it would give him a fresh perspective on the facts and allow him to see something he missed before. Some times he just needed to give the jumbled bits and pieces of information a chance to settle.

  But it didn't happen this time. The facts were as muddled and confusing as before.

  Mark headed north on the Pacific Coast Highway, the slow-moving rush-hour traffic a ribbon of lights illuminating the curving shoreline ahead of him.

  It was a warm summer night, so he was driving with the top down on his Mini Cooper convertible. He could almost smell the sea through the exhaust fumes and hear the waves under the roar of passing cars.

  To his left, beachfront homes were crammed tightly against one another, their decks leaning out over the crashing surf. Every winter, the waves would swallow a house or two, but the lots were never left vacant for long. Someone was always willing to build a new home where the sea had claimed one. If Mark's beach house was ever washed away, he would probably rebuild too, assuming he could find anyone crazy enough to offer him homeowner's insurance again.