Hangman

by Faye Kellerman

  Marge said. “I was thinking that if his friends felt guilty about sleeping with Adrianna, they may have been willing to help him out with the body.”

  “How would they help him out if they were miles away?” Oliver said.

  “Maybe Aaron told Garth to dump the body at the Grossman house.”

  “If Aaron was associated with the project, he’d have to know that it would come back to bite him in the butt.”

  Marge said, “I don’t mean to cast aspersions on Mr. Otis, but he’s not exactly Harvard material. Maybe Garth called him up in a panic and Aaron gave him the first dump spot he could think of.”

  Decker said, “Check out with Wald if Otis is associated with the job. When are you two going to St. Tim’s? You need to retrace Adrianna’s movements.”

  “Next on the list,” Oliver said. “Right after a coffee break.”

  “I think I’ll pass,” Marge said. “Help yourself to the machine, Scott.”

  Oliver said, “Last time I tried, I burned my hand.”

  “Practice makes perfect.” Marge stood up. “But I’ll show you one more time. Who woulda thunk a little machine could be so addictive?”

  “It’s not an addiction, it’s a preference.”

  “And so goes the denial until it’s a habit,” Marge said. “Maybe we should set up coffee rehab centers, guys. Who among us hasn’t had a caffeine headache? If people are willing to plunk down five bucks for something that cost about forty cents, we can sell them on the idea that they have an addiction that needs breaking. It’s all part of the modern philosophy of passing the buck. Take all of the credit but none of the personal responsibility.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  DECKER HAD HIS feet up on his desk. His door was closed and it was one of the few times he had allowed himself a breather. He needed to regroup after hanging up from an emotional call to Kathy Blanc. The desire to get a solve in a murder case was like a persistent itch he couldn’t scratch. Now he was on the phone with Eliza Slaughter and could barely make out her words.

  “Where are you? I’m getting static on the line.”

  “I’m…the field. Hold on. I’ll walk…my car. I’ll…you back.”

  She disconnected the line. While waiting for the call, Decker sorted through his phone messages. He had spent most of the morning talking to what was left of the hotel employees. It was hard doing interviews over the phone and a few of them might have to be visited in person. He had also had a brief conversation with the pathologist. Adrianna Blanc’s autopsy report showed her death to have been caused by asphyxiation from the hanging. There were also bruises and marks on her skin consistent with dragging the body.

  The phone rang and Decker picked it up.

  Eliza said, “Is this better?”

  “Much. What’s up?”

  “Show-and-tell time. I’ve spent most of today checking local garages, chop shops, and junkyards. Since garages and storage bins need keys and owners’ permissions to open them up, I started with what was accessible—the junkyards. No one seems to mind if you sift through the piles of junked cars. I’m on number three. They’re all in the Valley.”

  “East and north Valley. I used to work in Foothill.”

  “The one I’m at is in your district. Are you familiar with Tully’s Scrap Metal?”

  “It’s off Rinaldi.”

  “You should come down. Something caught my eye.”

  “Something like a 2009 Mercedes E550.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking, although it’s hard to tell the make and model when the vehicle’s stripped and gutted. It is silver.”

  “When did it come in?”

  “The kid who’s here now isn’t sure. He thinks a couple of days ago. Right now, we’re trying to locate the owner of the lot. He has the records.”

  “I’m about a half hour away.”

  “See you then.” Eliza waited a beat. “Terry went to school in the west Valley, right?”

  “Correct.”

  “So it’s possible that she might be familiar with the place.”

  “Anything’s possible.”

  “You have your doubts.”

  “I don’t know, Eliza. I think the bigger issue is that Chris Donatti—Chris Whitman back then—went to school in the Valley. And he drove a cool muscle car when he was a teen. Terry, on the other hand, walked or took the bus.”

  CAPPUCCINOS HAD A soothing effect on Oliver. Maybe it was something in the milk, because Scott was sipping it with almost orgasmic delight. He had not only learned how to use the coffee machine but had finally mastered the art of foaming. The two of them were on their way to St. Tim’s: Marge was driving and Scott sat shotgun.

  Oliver said, “I’m turning into a girly man.”

  “Drinking lattes doesn’t make you a girly man. Italian men drink cappuccinos and lattes all the time.” Marge smiled. “Of course, they don’t drink them in the afternoon. They drink espresso because milk coffees are breakfast drinks.”

  “Are we in Italy, Marge?”

  “I’m just saying—”

  “Last I checked, the official language wasn’t Italian—”

  “Just giving you a little culinary history.”

  “You know, Dunn, I see a cable TV show in your future. You, in full uniform, steaming soy milk while telling your viewers how to prevent an ADW. We’ll call it Cop Does Coffee.”

  “Sounds like a porn movie.”

  Oliver smiled. “That would work as well.” He finished his latte. “So what’s the plan?”

  Marge signaled for a right turn. “First we return the tapes to Ivan Povich.”

  “Talk to him yet?”

  “I left a message, asking him for the tapes from the cameras in the emergency vehicle areas.”

  “Why didn’t Povich give them to us in the first place?”

  “Don’t know. Betcha when we asked him the first time, he assumed we had wanted only the pedestrian entrances and exits.”

  Oliver said, “So you like the theory of Adrianna being carried out in a body bag?”

  “Maybe.” Marge paused. “If the murder did occur inside St. Tim’s, I’m thinking about what could have gone wrong? Who, besides Garth, was close enough to Adrianna so that an argument would end in murder?”

  “Why do you think the murder was done by someone she was close to?” Oliver told her. “From what Aaron and Greg told us about Adrianna, she could have been having a fling that went bad. Maybe she was fooling around with a married doctor or administrator. Maybe she threatened to expose him.”

  “But then why would she suddenly decide to start exposing her hookups?”

  Oliver said, “’Cause she was pissed off at Garth but taking it out on other men. That’s what women do.”

  “As opposed to men?” Marge laughed. “Think serial killers who hated their mothers?”

  “I’m just trying to get your goat.” He waited a moment. “Although if someone tried to kill her, you’d think she would fight back.”

  Marge turned left. “Unless the two of them were stoned. What if she was blitzed?”

  “No cocaine, no booze, no pot in her system. We know that much.”

  “It could have been something more exotic. Who would have better access to drugs than someone in a hospital with free rein over all the locked medicine cabinets?”

  “They don’t have free rein,” Oliver said. “I think they have to sign in for them. We should check the drug logs. It would buttress our case if some weird drug was checked out and she had it in her system.”

  Marge said. “Problem is that sometimes you have to know what you’re looking for to find it in the tox screen.”

  Oliver opened the thermos and licked the foam with his finger. “You’re looking skeptical. What’s bothering you?”

  “That Adrianna’s hookup would suddenly turn deadly. What could have been said or done that made it go so terribly wrong?”

  “You know how these things work, Margie. It starts off as something stupid and
ends up as something tragic.”

  ONCE AGAIN, MARGE and Oliver sat in space control central at St. Tim’s. What was even more amazing was that Peter was still on duty. “Does he ever go home?” Oliver asked Ivan Povich.

  “He goes home, he comes back.” Povich pulled the cassette tape. “I got your message, Sergeant. This is from the emergency vehicle area. We have cameras everywhere. You ask for entrances and exits, I don’t think about emergency areas. My mistake. I would have given this to you.”

  “No problem,” Marge said.

  “We are lucky. It was just about to be taped over. But I have what you need.”

  “Small favors are good,” Marge said.

  Povich popped the cassette into the machine and fast-forwarded it until the tape displayed last Monday’s date. The three of them watched the monitor. Ambulances coming in with hapless patients hooked up to IVs, strapped onto gurneys. In the time frame they watched, it was mostly the same people in the same vans, even though different emergency vehicles came from lots of different places.

  No body bags but Marge did see something interesting. At 11:13, a civilian car was backing up toward the docks and then it disappeared from the camera’s eye. She kept watching for another minute or two, then her eyes widened.

  “Stop the machine!”

  “What is it?” Oliver asked.

  Marge didn’t answer. “Go back a few frames.”

  “What do you see, Marge?” Oliver asked.

  “I’m not sure. That’s why I want to look again.”

  The tape was rewound, the black-and-white figures jerking and jumping as they moved from frame to frame.

  “Stop!” Marge pointed to a small, lone figure standing at the docks. “Can you enlarge this image?”

  Povich said, “Peter, come here. Can you enlarge this over here?”

  Wordlessly, Peter got up and took control of the monitor, and the small figure grew. With each enlargement, the image lost clarity.

  Marge told him. “Look familiar, Scott?”

  “No. All I see is a blur.”

  “Make it smaller, Peter.” The mute security operator took it down a few notches. “How about now?”

  Oliver stared at the figure. “Nothing.”

  “Don’t look at the face. Look at the scrubs, then look at the size and build of the person.”

  “Mandy Kowalski.”

  “Could be right.”

  “Maybe.”

  “What’s she doing out there? Watching gurneys being loaded in and out of ambulances?”

  “Only one way to know,” Oliver got up. “Let’s find her and ask her about it.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  TULLY’S SCRAP HAD been a fixture in the west hills for almost forty years. It was currently under the care of Caleb “Audi” Sayd, a twenty-eight-year-old dude whose ancestry might have once been Egyptian, but now he was pure California twang. He stood around six feet, a hundred eighty pounds, black hair, and dark eyes. His uniform of choice was low-rider jeans, a white T-shirt, and combat boots. He stood with his arms folded across his chest, his hands tucked under his armpits. He shook his head when Decker showed him the picture of Terry McLaughlin.

  “Never seen her before,” Audi said.

  “You’re sure?” Eliza Slaughter asked.

  Audi hit the picture. “That face…I’d remember her if I saw her.”

  They were standing in an ocean of junked, gutted, and flattened cars. Most of them hadn’t seen any road time in many a moon. The piece of metal that they were interested in was a gutted and compressed silver frame that gave hint to a Mercedes E550 in a former life. It had jumped out at Eliza like a frog on meth.

  Decker viewed the hunk of metal. “What can you tell me about it? From the lack of rust, it looks like a new one.”

  “It is new,” Audi said. “That got my attention. You don’t usually scrap a good car.”

  “So you were suspicious,” Eliza asked.

  “Of course I was suspicious. It wasn’t brought in by one of my main contacts.”

  “Do you know who brought it in?”

  “Never seen the guy before. But he had the pink slip and I checked it out with the DMV before I gave him an offer. It was all legit.”

  “You have a name?” Decker asked.

  “The paperwork’s in my office.” Audi pointed to a trailer. “Last name was Jones.”

  “First name?”

  “Don’t remember. Don’t know if I ever knew it.”

  “What’d he look like?” Eliza asked.

  “Dark complexion. Dark straight hair, brown eyes. Shorter and thinner than I am.”

  “Hispanic?”

  “Could be. He had a slight accent, but I couldn’t place it.”

  “Mideastern?”

  “No, ma’am, that I would be able to place.”

  “When did he bring it in?”

  “Uh, last Saturday or Sunday. I have the date.”

  “Saturday or Sunday?” Decker asked.

  “Yeah, it was over the weekend.”

  That certainly threw a monkey wrench into Decker’s thinking. Now he was wondering if he even had the right car. “How was he dressed?”

  “Like a mechanic—overalls, T-shirt. But his nails were clean. Hands were soft like he’d never done manual labor in his life. Odd, but hey, we’re always getting stories.”

  “So what was his story?”

  “Something about the car being a heap of bad memories with his ex-wife or girlfriend. It sounded like bull, but like I said, everything checked out with his ownership.”

  “So you didn’t question?” Eliza asked.

  “In this business you deal with a lot of weirdos. Who else deals in car parts and scrap metal?” He began to tick off his fingers. “If the car hasn’t been boosted, hasn’t been used in a crime, hasn’t been owned by someone associated with crime, and the ownership is legit, you don’t question. I don’t want any trouble, Detective.”

  “How much did you pay him?” Decker said.

  “I gave him a lowball offer and he took it. He didn’t care about the money, what he wanted was the car trashed and junked ASAP. He came back to make sure it was done and asked me to hide it in the middle of the lot. I told him that would cost a little extra and he agreed. After he got what he wanted, he walked away from it.”

  “What did you do with the parts?”

  “He towed in the shell. Don’t know what happened to the car’s guts.”

  “And you never did business with him before?” Eliza asked.

  “I’d tell you if I did.”

  Decker said, “Could you look up Mr. Jones for me? A first name would be helpful.”

  “Sure.” The three of them walked over to the trailer and stepped through the door. Inside it was hot, with several humming fans going at once. Furnishings included a desk that held several neat piles of paperwork, a desk chair, four folding chairs, and a bank of files. Audi sat down and drank water out of a Big Gulp cup. He picked up one of the stacks of paper and found what he was looking for right away. He handed the yellow invoice to Decker. “Here you go.”

  “Thanks.” The first thing that Decker noticed was that the date corresponded to last Saturday—the day before Terry had disappeared. So maybe he was off base. The client’s name was Atik Jones. “Unusual first name.”

  “What is it?”

  “Atik,” Decker said.

  “Doesn’t sound familiar. He probably didn’t tell it to me.”

  “So how’d you write it down on the invoice?”

  “I got it from the pink slip. I’ll get it for you.” Audi swiveled his desk chair around and began rooting through files. A moment later, he was puzzled. “I can’t find it. I musta misfiled something. Give me the invoice again.”

  Decker handed it back to him. Audi wrote down some numbers and again hunted through the files. “I goofed up something. Man, that’s annoying. Let me start at the beginning of J. It may take me a few minutes. I got a lot of them.”


  “We’ll wait,” Eliza said.

  After several minutes, Audi said, “Okay, okay, here we go. I got the name wrong on the invoice. I could have sworn he told me Jones.”

  He gave the pink slip to Decker. The name wasn’t Jones but Jains. Atik Jains. Decker thought a moment. “Could this guy have been Indian?”

  “Like a Navaho?”

  “Like an Indian from India. Jain or Jains is an Indian name.”

  Audi nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s what he was. He was from India.”

  Decker looked at the pink slip. “Can we get a copy of the pink slip and the invoice from your fax machine?”

  “Sure.” As Audi copied the papers, Decker spoke to Eliza. “Jains owned the car for six weeks. And then he junked it on Saturday.”

  “Saturday?”

  “That’s what the invoice said.”

  “If he owned the car for six weeks and junked it before Terry disappeared, do we even have the right car?”

  “I don’t know. But I do know that Teresa McLaughlin moved out here six weeks ago,” Decker said. “We have the VIN number from the pink slip. That should help trace its history.”

  Audi handed Eliza the copies. “Anything else?”

  “Yes, actually.” Decker pulled out a picture of Chris Donatti. “Ever see this guy before?”

  Audi’s gaze shifted to the photograph then back to Decker’s face. “Tall guy about your size?”

  Decker felt his heartbeat quicken. “Yep.”

  “Yeah, he was here…looking older than the picture.”

  “He is older than the picture. When was he here?”

  “A day or two ago. He was poking around when I came into work.”

  “What did he want?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t buy anything, didn’t sell me anything. Just looked around. When he left, he gave me a fifty for letting him hunt around.” He grinned. “Just peeled it off a big wad like he’d done it a thousand times before. I expected him to tell me to keep his visit between the two of us, but he didn’t say anything like that. Just gave me the fifty and said thanks.”

  “How long was he here?”

  “About an hour.”