by Lee Goldberg
To his right were the ever-eroding hillsides of Santa Monica and the Pacific Palisades, held back by all kinds of elaborate retaining walls meant to keep the homes, apartment buildings, and parks along the cliffs from falling. But the slopes were littered with foundations, swimming pool tiles, exposed pipes, and ripped fencing, constant reminders of the futility of the costly efforts.
Mark tried calling Stryker and got sent to his voice mail again. Irritated, he checked his own voice mail for messages, but Stryker hadn't returned his call. He did, however, get two recorded sales pitches, one offering him low rates on home refinancing and another from a stockbroker with some wonderful investment opportunities to share.
He deleted the messages, recordings of recordings, and wondered if there was anybody who actually responded to cold calls from computers. His musing was a desperate attempt to distract himself from more pressing questions, and it didn't work.
When he finally arrived at home after what seemed like days on the road, there was a large cardboard box waiting for him on his front porch, his mail stacked neatly on top of it. The box was about the size of the file-storage cartons used in offices. He wasn't expecting anything larger than a book from Amazon, so he assumed the box was a mail-order purchase that Steve had made.
Mark and Steve lived together in the house. Steve had the beach-level first floor, which had all the conveniences of an apartment, including a small kitchen and a separate entrance. Mark lived on the street-level second floor, which had a gourmet kitchen, a dining room, and a family room that shared a sweeping view of the bay and opened to a wraparound deck with steps leading down to the beach.
This arrangement allowed each of them privacy but more opportunity to spend time together than a father and a son with busy professional lives would otherwise have had.
It was especially convenient for Mark, making it easy for him to pry into whatever investigations his son was working on.
Mark moved the letters off the top of the box and was surprised to see his own name on the address label. The box was from Weldon, Jarvis & Swann, a Century City law firm that he was unfamiliar with.
He carried the box inside, set it on the kitchen table, and opened it with a steak knife. The box was filled to the brim with bulging files, audiocassettes, and camcorder tapes. A white letter-sized envelope sat on top of the files.
Mark opened the envelope and pulled out a handwritten note. The first line grabbed his full attention.
If you are reading this, I'm dead.
CHAPTER FOUR
Armed with a search warrant, Steve went from the scene of the fire to Stryker's condo in a sprawling Marina del Rey complex inhabited primarily by recently divorced men, upwardly mobile singles, flight attendants, and airline pilots.
There was a reason the area was more popularly known as Marina del Lay.
Steve flashed his badge and the warrant to the forty-five-year-old property manager, a man who apparently never got the news that Miami Vice had been canceled. He wore a blue T-shirt under a white linen blazer and parted his hair down the middle. He tossed Stryker's key to Steve and didn't bother to escort him to the condo.
That was fine with Steve. He didn't need Sonny Crockett's uglier brother looking over his shoulder while he searched the place.
It was a typical bachelor condo, dominated by a huge leather recliner that faced a sixty-five-inch television and an elaborate entertainment system. A leather couch, a glass- topped coffee table, and several framed prints that Steve had seen before in one of those shopping mall galleries completed the living room furnishings. A camera with a massive telephoto lens was mounted on a tripod facing the closed drapes.
He parted the drapes, opened the glass doors, and stepped out onto the narrow deck overlooking the yachts in the marina. He wondered how many starlets Stryker had photographed sunning themselves on the decks of their boats.
The sky was impossibly blue and picture-perfect, sail boats drifting through the channel and seagulls appearing to float on the breeze that wafted in off the sea. He couldn't see the ocean from the deck, but he could smell the salt in the air.
Or at least that's what he thought it was. Considering how much toxic runoff ended up flowing into the sea, perhaps what he'd grown up assuming was the scent of salt air was actually industrial solvent, insecticide, and raw sewage.
On that sobering thought he stepped back inside to continue his task.
The kitchen was surprisingly clean and orderly, leading Steve to suspect that Stryker had a regular maid service. He opened a few cupboards and drawers, saw nothing unusual, and moved down the hail to the bedrooms.
One of the bedrooms served as a home office. The walls were lined with shelves filled with past issues of all the major monthly and weekly gossip and celebrity magazines, going back years.
The desk was simple and sleek, with no drawers. It held a slim computer, flat-screen monitor, printer, scanner, shredder, wireless router, and an iPod bay.
There was an empty slot in the computer where the hard drive had once been. It was unlikely that Stryker had ripped it out of his own computer.
Someone had been here before Steve.
He continued searching the office, but without much effort. He knew he wouldn't find any external hard drives, disks, CDs, DVDs, or a laptop. Whoever took the hard drive would have taken them, too.
He spent an hour searching the master bedroom, the closets, and the bathrooms and came up with nothing but a sore back. If Stryker had met his violent end here, there were no obvious signs of it.
Before he left, Steve called the crime lab and asked them to give the condo a more thorough ransacking, and to pay special attention to uncovering any hidden compartments or safes. He then called homicide and asked a junior detective to pull Stryker's phone records for his home, his cell, and his office for the last month, as well as a list of his recent credit- card transactions, and have them on his desk by morning. On his way out, he checked Stryker's parking spot. His Escalade wasn't there.
It was after eight p.m. when Steve walked through the front door of the beach house and found his father at the kitchen table, barely visible behind stacks of files.
"It's not like you to bring your work home," Steve said.
"It was waiting for me when I got here," Mark said with out lifting his gaze from what he was reading.
"What's your take on coincidences?"
"No such thing."
"Then this will interest you," Steve said. "Somebody torched Nick Stryker's office last night. I think he's been murdered."
"So do I," Mark said, still absorbed in the papers and pictures in front of him.
"You do?" Steve said. "You must have been talking to Amanda."
"I haven't seen Amanda all day," Mark said.
"Then how do you know Stryker was killed last night?"
"He wasn't," Mark said.
Steve rubbed his temples, trying to massage away his exasperation. "But you just said you thought he was."
"I think it's likely that he's been murdered," Mark said. "But it didn't happen last night."
"I've got a burned corpse that says otherwise," Steve said.
"It's not Stryker," Mark said.
"How can you possibly know that?"
"The post office doesn't move that fast," Mark said.
"You think the post office put out a hit on him?" Steve said. "They must really be cracking down on people who send letters without sufficient postage."
Mark finally looked up, a smile on his face. "I'm sorry, Steve. I'm a bit distracted."
"When have you ever found hospital paperwork more interesting than a homicide investigation?"
"This isn't hospital paperwork," Mark said. "Stryker sent me all this yesterday. It was waiting on my front porch when I got home tonight. These files are probably what the person who set the fire to Stryker's office was hoping to find or destroy."
"So what makes you think Stryker is dead?"
"He told me," Mark said, holding
up the handwritten letter. Steve took it from his father and read it.
Dr. Sloan,
If you're reading this, I'm dead.
The odds are that whoever killed me can be found in these files. Somebody decided to gamble that I was bluffing when I told him that if anything ever happened to me, all the dirt I had on him would go public.
He was wrong and I'm dead. Life is cruel.
You're getting all the major-league stuff because I'm betting that's where the hit came from. All the petty domestic crap, the evidence against the adulterers and small-time embezzlers, has gone directly to the losers being betrayed or ripped off. I doubt any of those "civilians" had the guts or the means to kill me, but just in case, there's a list of them in here somewhere, too.
Before I met you, this box of explosives was supposed to go to various members of the press. I was always uncomfortable with the idea of sending my files to one man, newspaper or TV station. Reporters can be easily bought or intimidated, and the media are controlled by multinational corporations, who are cowards.
But you, Marc are the one guy I ever met who couldn't be bought or intimidated by anybody. I looked for dirt on you and I was never able to find any, which means you're either the most honorable man on earth or one of the cleverest.
Either way, I win. Except for the fact that I'm dead, which is lousy.
I know you thought I was a sleazebag, and that what you'll find in this box will only confirm your opinion, but I'm certain you won't stop until you find the sonofabitch who killed me.
You can't help yourself That's the one secret of yours I was able to find out.
Make the bastard pay, okay? And tell him I'm working on my tan in hell, waiting for him to show up.
Nick Stryker
Steve handed the letter back to his father. "Where's the box all of these files came in?"
Mark motioned to the kitchen. Steve went over and examined the box. He noted the law firm's return address and double-checked the date of the postmark.
"Do you know the law firm?" Mark asked.
Steve nodded and came back to the table. "They're criminal defense attorneys for the crook on a budget."
"We'll have to ask them when Stryker was murdered and how they knew about it," Mark said. "But at least we know from the postmark that it was a day before his office was torched."
"That doesn't mean the corpse Amanda's got on a slab isn't Stryker," Steve said and then explained to his father about the body that was found in the burned-out trash bin.
"He could have been killed a few days ago. Whoever did it could have tossed the body in the Dumpster last night and torched it with the building."
"I suppose it's possible," Mark said. "We'll know in the morning."
Steve gave his father a look.
"What?" Mark asked.
"Nothing. It's just going to be a big morning, that's all," Steve said. "So what have you gathered from all these files?"
"I know why Monette Hobbes got those photos today and not a year ago," Mark said.
"So do I," Steve said. "Stryker knew all about Lowell's affair with his stepdaughter and was blackmailing him to keep quiet about it."
"Stryker had no professional ethics whatsoever," Mark said.
"You're just discovering this?"
"I thought at the very least he was loyal to his paying clients," Mark said. "Clearly I was wrong."
"He was loyal to whoever could pay him the most," Steve said, "whether it was the client or the person he was following."
"I'm assuming Lowell paid Stryker not to tell Monette about his affair with LeSabre," Mark said. "But when Stryker was killed, his lawyers automatically sent the photos to Monette."
"The blackmail of Lowell Hobbes is probably just one example of the 'domestic crap' Stryker was talking about in his letter."
"There are a lot of people who got a very unpleasant surprise in their mailboxes today," Mark said.
Steve gestured to the files on the table. "So what makes this stuff so special?"
Mark picked up a yellow legal pad covered with his notes. "I've only skimmed a few files, but the people he was black mailing with all these documents, photos, and videos aren't just guilty of infidelities. They committed felonies."
"What kind of crimes are we talking about?" Steve pulled out a chair and sat down next to his father, looking over his shoulder at the indecipherable scrawl on the legal pad.
"Extortion, grand theft, bribery, and manslaughter," Mark said. "The perpetrators run the gamut from CEOs to politicians, from rock stars to police officers. Stryker compiled all the evidence necessary to put them in prison."
"And put himself in the ground," Steve said.
Mark and Steve had pizza delivered and spent the night going through Stryker's blackmail files, audiocassettes, and videotapes, creating a master list of the information, photos, and tapes and what they contained.
Although Mark found Stryker ethically challenged and morally bankrupt, he had to admire the man's skills as a detective. The files showed that Stryker was a meticulous, tenacious, and inspired investigator with a keen understanding of the dark side of human nature. His natural talent at investigation should have propelled him to the upper echelons of the field. Instead, he let greed undermine his potential.
The irony, as Mark saw it, was that Stryker could have made so much more money as an ethical professional than he did as a blackmailer.
He also might have lived longer.
Mark, fascinated by the information in the files, would have liked to work through the night, but his body betrayed him. Around three a.m., he started to nod off at the table and finally dragged himself to bed. But he forgot to close the shades and was awakened only four hours later by the morning sun streaming through the window.
He trudged into the kitchen to find Steve where he left him at the kitchen table, a laptop computer open in front of him and the files rearranged into piles on the floor around his feet.
"Make any headway?" Mark asked.
Steve yawned and leaned back in his chair. "I've separated the files into categories." He motioned to each pile as he spoke. "Cases where I can go out and make immediate arrests. Cases where I've got to get a search warrant. Cases I need to refer to other law enforcement agencies. And cases requiring further investigation or surveillance. There's enough here to keep me busy for months. I hate to say it, but I'm almost grateful to Stryker. All these arrests could knock me up a pay grade and make me Cop of the Year."
"You can pay him back by catching his killer," Mark said. "Anybody jump out at you as more likely than the others to want him dead?"
"I'm sure they all want him dead, but not all of them have the resources or the stomach for it or have enough to lose to make murder seem like a reasonable option," Steve said, turning the screen of his laptop to face Mark. "Anybody he was blackmailing could have done it, but these are the people my gut tells are the likely suspects."
Mark looked at Steve's notes on the screen. The details of three cases were listed, as well as Steve's rationale for picking them as suspects.
In one case, a woman hired Stryker to follow her ex-husband, a Los Angeles city housing official named Delmar Campos, who she was convinced was cheating her out of her fair share of his income.
"Delmar left her for a stripper and moved into an opulent new home, so naturally his ex wanted blood," Steve said. "Stryker discovered that the new home was built by Douglas Lorusso, a contractor who'd won millions of dollars in city contracts from Delmar to build low-income housing. He also found out that Delmar's girlfriend drove around in a Mercedes leased to Lorusso Construction. Stryker was black mailing both Delmar and Lorusso."
"So what makes them more likely than the others to have killed Stryker?"
"Lorusso's name has come up in several organized-crime investigations," Steve said, "but we've never been able to make anything stick. He wouldn't have a problem finding someone to remove Stryker from the population."
"Makes sense." Mark
scrolled down to the next case.
Weldon Fike was a convicted rapist who was paroled and given a new identity in exchange for testimony against a prison gang responsible for arranging the murders of trial witnesses. One of Fike's rape victims hired Stryker to track him down so she could expose him to the public.
"Where is Fike now?" Mark asked.
"Here in LA," Steve said. "About to marry a woman worth about a hundred million."
"That's a hundred million motives for murder right there," Mark said.
Steve clicked to the next case. "This is the file that's going to be the trickiest to handle."
"Why's that?"
"Because it hits so close to home," Steve said and went on to summarize the case for Mark.
Stryker was hired by a church to find tens of thousands of dollars in stolen computers, paintings, and rare artifacts. The police, in the opinion of the pastor and his congregation, just weren't doing enough. Stryker's search included scanning eBay, where he found several of the stolen items listed under several different auction accounts.
"He bought some things and managed to trace the items back to a warehouse in Chatsworth, owned by Harley Brule," Steve said. "Who happens to be the detective in charge of LAPD's West Valley Major Crime Unit"
"That explains why the police weren't aggressively pursuing the case," Mark said.
"It gets worse. Stryker tapped into the warehouse's own surveillance system and discovered the place is stocked wall to wall with stolen goods, hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of jewelry, electronics, artwork, even a couple of cars," Steve said. "He also kept track of people coming and going from the warehouse, which included other MCU cops, as well as several patrol officers from ValTec, a private security company."
"Who was Stryker blackmailing." Mark asked.
"Everybody," Steve said. "It's his most recent score. They were supposed to make their first payment this week."
