Cold Hit

by Stephen J. Cannell

  “What did the husband do?” I asked.

  “Y’know, I don’t even remember his first name. If it’s not in our notes, maybe we didn’t ask. He’d been dead almost a year by the time Kobb was murdered.” She frowned. “Probably should have checked that out, huh?”

  “Not necessarily. You weren’t investigating the Litvenkos. It was the Kobb murder you were working.”

  I gathered up the rest of the case books. “Listen, Cindy, if I get these notes copied and send them over to you, would you mind going through them to freshen your memory, and then call me if anything else occurs to you?”

  “I won’t be able to get on it until the weekend. I’m jammed. Our murder-robbery board in Newton is mostly red,” she said, referring to the common practice of listing the month’s open cases on the duty board in red magic marker and the closed ones in black.

  “Tough beat,” I told her, and it was.

  We exchanged business cards. I left Denny’s, then sat in my car in the parking lot as she drove off in a department slick-back, overworked and underpaid. I got the air going and once it cooled down, I tried to free up my mind. I wanted to come at all this from a different angle. Get a fresh take. I started by trying to put myself in Marty Kobb’s head. I leaned back on the seat and gave it a go.

  So now I’m Martin Kobb. I’ve got a baby coming and I’m taking on extra work to pay the bills. I’m in Patrol, but watch commanders won’t book a patrol officer for double shifts, so how am I getting the OT? Maybe I’m loaning myself out on various department sting operations after hours. A lot of patrol guys will volunteer for undercover assignments if they’re trying to make a move out of A-cars into detectives. I wondered if it was possible to get Kobb’s timesheets from back then. Would the LAPD even save old payroll stuff from ’95? Probably not, but I took out my spiral pad and made a note to check the patrolman’s time cards and log books.

  I went back to being Kobb. After my shift, what am I working on? I didn’t think the LAPD was actively working the Russian mob back then, but the divisions that could always use a fresh face were Drug Enforcement and Vice. Maybe I was working as an undercover for one of those outfits and pissed off some street villain. Maybe I wasn’t killed by a burglar. Maybe I pushed too hard or got made, and some angry suspect pulled my drapes behind that market. I sort of liked that, so I made a mental note to revisit it, then moved on.

  Yuri Yakovitch reported he was out back on the loading dock. He said he kept an eye on the cash register, but missed seeing the burglar. I started to wonder about that. What shop owner, working alone, leaves the cash register unattended to go supervise the unloading of a vegetable truck? I let my mind go, surfing the ozone. Maybe Jack Yakovitch was the suspect Kobb was working. Maybe he was running drugs or Russian whores out of his market. Maybe there was never a burglar. Jack Yakovitch makes Kobb as a cop, pulls a gun, and dumps Marty in the back of the parking lot.

  None of this felt quite as promising, but I picked up my cell phone and dialed an extension in the Records section. Rose Clark came on the line. She’s a researcher in the Computer Division who for some unknown reason thinks I’m sorta cute. She had done some background searches for me in the past, and usually put me at the head of the line.

  “Rosy? It’s Shane.”

  “Parker Center’s coolest boy toy,” she teased. “What can I do for you, honey?”

  I ran the Kobb case down for her, then told her what I wanted. “I’m looking for background from ’ninety-five on a guy, named Yuri ‘Jack’Yakovitch, who ran a Russian market on Melrose. I don’t know what happened to him. I need to find him. Run him through our Russian Organized Crime computer. Also, is it possible to get Martin Kobb’s time cards and log books from that time?”

  “I’m sure we don’t save that kind of stuff from that far back,” she said. “But I’ll check.”

  “And can you also run a guy named Litvenko? Check him for an ROC connection. I don’t have his first name, but he was Martin Kobb’s uncle. He died in ’ninety-four or ’five. He lived in the Melrose area on Bellagio. The wife’s name is Marianna.”

  “This is turning into a pretty big job.”

  I was losing boy toy points.

  “This is important, Rose. A dead policeman. We can’t let him fall between the cracks,” I said, appealing to her sense of department loyalty. She agreed and I rang off.

  As I put the car in gear, the name Vaughn Rolaine floated past my foggy view plate once again. This time I slapped it down, pinning it on the edge of my consciousness. Only something was wrong. It wasn’tVaughn. It was…Army…No, Arden Rolaine. That was it. Arden Rolaine. Who the hell was Arden Rolaine? Man or a woman? Where had I heard it?

  Then slowly it all started to seep back, filling old ruts in my memory like seawater on a rising tide. My house. The backyard. Barbecuing. Last summer. I’d heard the name from Zack. He and Fran were over for dinner. This was right after we’d partnered up for the second time, or shortly after, only a few weeks into it. Alexa and Fran were inside setting the table and Zack and I were trying to decide what to do with our existing cases.

  We wondered, now that we were partners, if we should throw all of our old unsolved homicides into the mix and work them together. I had three that were still active, he had four. That’s when he mentioned Arden Rolaine. She was one of his unsolved cases.

  Zack told me Arden was sixty or so and had been murdered in her house in Van Nuys. I couldn’t remember what was unusual about her case or why it was being worked out of Homicide Special. We’d discussed it for only a minute or two before deciding to keep our prior cases separate, work them on the side. We wanted to start our partnership fresh with no unsolved cases to go against our clearance rate as a new homicide team. That’s all I could remember.

  I sat in the car with this strange fact still flopping around on the floor of my memory. I wasn’t sure what the hell it meant, or how it fit in with the first Fingertip murder. Was Vaughn Rolaine a relative of Arden’s? Vaughn and Arden were both unusual names. Some parents will do that. Give all their kids unique handles. You wouldn’t expect somebody named Vaughn to have a sister named Sue.

  34

  I didn’t have to talk to Doc Pepper because the floor nurse remembered me and let me in without an argument.

  Zack was lying on top of the bedspread staring at the ceiling of his sterile, white box room at Queen of Angels Hospital. He was dressed in a polo shirt, tan slacks, and flip-flops. Fran, or one of his boys, must have brought him fresh clothes. His hands were laced behind his neck, and as I was buzzed through the security door, he looked over at me with heavy-lidded eyes. His face had returned to its normal shape but the discoloration had darkened to an ugly bruise.

  “Look who’s come to visit,” he said, slowly. “The career monster.”

  “You sound tranqed. You on something?”

  “Hey, if you’re gonna make a buncha bullshit judgments, then take it on down the road, Bubba.”

  He struggled into a sitting position and hugged his fat knees. “Fran had me committed. Now I can’t get out. Can you believe that? The bitch is divorcing me, but since we’re still technically married, she can do it. My joint custody of the boys will be dust after this bullshit.”

  “I’m sorry I suggested this, Zack. I thought you were about to commit suicide.”

  He waved it off and changed the subject. “So how’s the book club? You humps got a line on our unsub yet?”

  “I’m not down there anymore. Like I told you, I’m working this stand-alone murder now. Davide Andrazack.”

  His face showed nothing.

  “So you ain’t gonna be able to give me any updates?”

  “Nope. That circus moved on without me.”

  His eyes suddenly seemed feral, his mouth set in a hard, straight line.

  “Too bad,” he said. “I was hoping to catch up with that.”

  “I can tell you this much. We finally made the first vic. John Doe Number One.”

  “Ye
ah?” He pulled his eyes into sharper focus.

  “Turns out his name was Vaughn Rolaine. Vietnam vet.”

  I watched closely as he processed it.

  “No kidding.” He looked puzzled.

  “You ever hear that name?” I asked.

  He seemed to be searching his memory, then said, “Should I?”

  “Didn’t you have an open homicide before we teamed up? A woman? Arden Rolaine?”

  “Jesus. You’re right. Vaughn was the brother. Shit. These tranqs they’re giving me really maim my brain. How’d I forget that?”

  “Doesn’t it strike you as a little cozy that Vaughn Rolaine, our first Fingertip kill, turns out to be the brother of one of your uncleared one-eighty-sevens from last summer?”

  He sat for a long moment trying to pull it together. “It is a tad close,” he finally said. “How do you suppose?”

  “I was hoping you’d tell me.”

  He got up, lumbered over to the sink, and turned on the tap. Then he jammed his head under the faucet. Water blasted off the back of his head and splattered onto the concrete floor. After a minute, he stood up, turned off the spigot, and dried his face and hair with a towel.

  “Hang on a minute. My brain’s oatmeal.”

  Then he began doing jumping jacks. His huge belly flopped up and down as his rubber-soled flip-flops slapped the concrete floor. After doing about thirty, he dropped and did fifteen pushups, rolling into a sitting position out of breath when he finished.

  “Better?” I asked.

  “Not much.”

  “We need to talk about Arden Rolaine. Can you remember the details of that case, or should I go to the Glass House, pick up your murder book, and bring it back here?”

  “I haven’t really worked on it in five months, but I remember.”

  “Let’s hear.”

  He got up off the floor and sat on the bed. Then he rubbed his eyes as if to clear his vision before starting.

  “Okay. My old partner, Van Kelsey, and I caught the case last June. Arden Rolaine was this sixty-one-year-old widow. Husband died in Nam thirty-odd years ago. Never remarried. She lived alone in Van Nuys. Little cracker box nothing of a house. Spring of last year, a pizza delivery kid saw some street freak jimmying her window, trying to get into the place. The kid didn’t call it in and didn’t come forward till he saw the story about her murder on TV. The way me and Van figured it, she musta come home and surprised the perp goin’ through her place. He turns and bludgeons her to death. Used a brass candlestick from her mantel. A real blitz kill. The ME stopped counting at a hundred blows.”

  “Why did Homicide Special get the case?”

  “Arden Rolaine was part of an old singing group in the sixties. The Lamp Street Singers. Folk music and love songs, mostly. They had three or four albums. Had one chart-topping single.”

  “Yeah…‘Lemon Tree,’ I think.”

  “That was the Limelighters. The Lamp Street Singers had that drippy ballad, ‘Don’t Look Away.’ They were gone in about a nanosecond, but somebody in dispatch was a fan and it got kicked over to Homicide Special because it was a quote, Celebrity Case, unquote. Fact is, hardly nobody even remembered her or the folk group. But Arden had saved her money and had enough squirreled away to make it to the finish line until this asshole climbed through the window and clipped her.”

  “You said it was a blitz attack?”

  “Classic overkill. Lotta anger. The doer pounded her until her face was mush. Van and I figured with that much rage, it had to be somebody close to her. Somebody who maybe once even loved her.”

  Hate needs love to burn.

  “Because of the blitz attack we started looking at old boyfriends and relatives,” he continued. “Finally turned up her brother, Vaughn. I never could find him though, ’cause he moved around. Homeless bum. According to her neighbors and the guy who did her hair, Vaughn was this wine-soaked mistake in a tattered raincoat. He was always trying to hit Arden up for cash. She finally got tired of fending him off and told him to never come over again. My theory was after she said that, he got pissed, came back, climbed through the window to steal her money and little sis caught him. They argued and Arden got put down with extreme prejudice.”

  “So you never brought him in for questioning?”

  “Like I said, I couldn’t find the son-of-a-bitch. Homeless. No address. I had his picture up all over the place—liquor stores, bus stations. Nothing. It’s a big city. Thousands of homeless. I figured eventually, I’d run him down.”

  “So Vaughn Rolaine was your lead suspect in Arden Rolaine’s murder and he ends up being our first Fingertip victim,” I said. “Pretty big coincidence.”

  Zack frowned. “What’s the first thing they tell you in the Academy?”

  “Never trust a coincidence in police work.”

  “Exactly,” Zack said. “So it can’t be a coincidence. Gotta be some logic to it. We just gotta find it.”

  “So how does it fit?”

  He sat for a long moment, thinking. “Okay. Remember when you said you thought that the Fingertip unsub was maybe another homeless guy with rage against his environment? Hating the other bums he had to live with, seeing himself in their misery and killing himself over and over again?”

  “It was just a theory. I’m not even sure it’s psychologically valid.”

  “Yeah, but I always kind of liked that.”

  Zack had snapped back to his old self. His mind seemed focused. For the first time in months he was sorting facts like the old days.

  “What if Vaughn lets it slip to some other homeless bum that his sister has all this money?” Zack reasoned. “After Arden is murdered, this other bum thinks Vaughn’s inherited his sister’s scrilla and goes after it. Ends up killing Vaughn.”

  “With a single shot to the back of the head, execution style like the fucking mafia? That doesn’t track. And what about the Medic’s symbol on the chest, the mutilations, all of that other postoffense behavior?”

  “We don’t really have that much listed under victimology,” Zack continued. “Just Vietnam vets. Rage. Father substitutes. So let’s build on this a little. This rage-filled, homeless guy hates his father. Maybe he was sexually abused as a kid and he’s a ticking bomb but hasn’t gone postal yet. Vaughn told him about his sister’s money and the unsub is hassling Vaughn, trying to get the dough. But Vaughn doesn’t have it, because he was my number-one suspect in his sister’s murder and couldn’t exactly go to the probate hearing. But let’s say the unsub doesn’t believe him, starts working Vaughn over, maybe cutting fingers off, trying to get him to talk. It gets out of control and he eventually kills Vaughn.”

  “I guess it could have happened that way,” I said.

  “Damn right. And then comes all the other postmortem behavioral stuff we profiled—the latent rage against his father—everything is unleashed. Vaughn is dead, but this other bum, the unsub, carves the symbol on his chest anyway. A postmortem mutilation. Maybe the unsub’s dad was a medic in Nam, or he hates all vets, sees his father in them. He cuts off the rest of Vaughn’s fingers to frustrate identification, then dumps him in the river. After this first kill, our serial killer is born. He realizes he’s got a taste for it. A blood lust. He keeps on killing. One bum after another.”

  I sat in the room thinking about it. A few things worked, but too much didn’t.

  “How’s some homeless guy transport the body?”

  “Okay. Maybe the unsub’s not all the way homeless yet. Maybe he’s living in his car.”

  “Maybe.” At least Zack was trying.

  “I’m just coming up with some options here,” he said.

  “Yeah, I know, I know.” I didn’t want to discourage the first spark of interest he’d shown in months.

  “Listen, maybe you should pick up my murder book after all,” he said. “Maybe there’s old case stuff in there that would jog my memory. Van Kelsey retired four months ago to grow grapes in Napa. I’ll call him and see if he remembers anyth
ing.”

  “Okay. I gotta tell the task force about this, so I’ll swing by Parker Center on my way home. After I bring Underwood up to date, I’ll pick up the murder book. Is it in your desk?”

  “Yep.”

  I stood to go and Zack rose with me.

  “I made a decision today,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t want to be a drunk. I don’t want my life to be fucked up like this anymore. I want to get better.”

  “That’s great news, Zack,” I said. For the first time in two months I was feeling hope.

  35

  It was almost four-thirty in the afternoon and the sun was just going down when I got back to Parker Center. This day had flown by. I stopped at our cubicle in Homicide Special and pulled the Arden Rolaine murder book out of Zack’s bottom desk drawer. It was pushed to the back. As soon as I opened it I saw that Zack hadn’t even mounted the crime scene photographs. They were still in an envelope, just thrown in along with the coroner’s report, autopsy photos, and the rest of his case notes. The book was little more than a catch-all. Nothing was in order. No time line or wit lists. His interview notes were a mess.

  I shook my head as I sorted through the grisly crime scene pictures showing the living room of a small cluttered house. It looked old and musty. The dark red velvet furniture had lace doilies on the arms. Sprawled on an Oriental carpet, on her back, wearing a blue terry bathrobe and rolled-down stockings, was Arden Rolaine. Whoever killed her had done a damn thorough job. There was nothing left of her face. Her gray hair was matted and thick with dried blood.

  I replaced the pictures in the folder. Then I noticed a Federal Express package on my desk. It was the book I’d ordered from Amazon.com. My reading assignment from Agent Underwood. I picked it up and headed down the hall to CTB. I wanted to check in with Broadway and Perry. Their cubicle was empty, but Lieutenant Cubio found me and handed me one of the secure satellite phones. They were only a little smaller than an old Army field telephone.