City of Echoes (Detective Matt Jones Book 1)

by Robert Ellis

  As Matt examined the images, memories began to surface about the girl’s murder and the horrific cloud it had cast over the city. The story had been impossible to escape, particularly in the six weeks leading up to the trial. Millie Brown had been a senior in high school and the daughter of Congressman Jack Brown. A popular girl of uncommon beauty with natural blond hair, refined features, and friends and family who loved her. A girl with a bright future who had been raped and murdered and had met a particularly gruesome end that was never described in any detail. Ron Harris was married with two young children, denied any involvement in Brown’s death, but claimed to have had “a secret but consensual affair” with the girl, his student, over the last three months of her life. His claim had come late and only after Grace and his partner, Leo Rodriguez, plus a second team of detectives confronted him with overwhelming evidence of his guilt.

  The public was expecting another big-city murder trial, as well as the media circus that went with it. The kind of trial LA seemed to have made its own over the past few decades. The public needed it for closure. The breadth and weight of the crime demanded it. Public opinion polls were crystal clear: most of the angels living in the City of Angels wanted to see Ron Harris burn. But Harris had other ideas, and after the first day of trial, after the prosecution had presented its opening statement, he returned to his cell and denied the public the revenge they sought and the justice they needed. Harris had a plan, a way out, tying a bedsheet around his neck and leaping into the void.

  Coward that he was.

  Matt’s mind surfaced. He noticed that Cabrera had moved in behind him and was gazing over his shoulder at the photographs. He wasn’t sure how long his partner had been there and paused a moment to give him more time. He could see Lane just a few feet away holding his place in the second murder book with his finger. Lane was staring back at them, waiting and trying to keep still, without much success.

  “Okay, Frankie,” Matt said after a while. “We’ve had our look.”

  Lane opened the second murder book and traded it for the first. The place he had been holding turned out to be another set of four crime-scene photographs slipped into a plastic sleeve. Matt studied each image with great care, adjusting the binder so that Cabrera would have a better view. Like Millie Brown, Faith Novakoff had been stripped of her clothing and staked to the ground with her nose and forehead resting on a mirror. Like Brown, the only wounds on her body appeared to be confined to her face, which was unrecognizable because of the profuse bleeding.

  Matt looked up from the binder at Lane. “What were they shot with?”

  “They weren’t shot, Matt. They were slashed.”

  A moment passed. “Just their faces?”

  Lane met his eyes, then nodded and took a deep pull on his smoke. “With a box cutter. A razor blade.”

  Matt returned to the photographs, ignoring the chill wriggling up his spine. The heavy bleeding indicated that both victims had been alive when they were slashed. Death hadn’t been easy for either one of them, nor would it have been quick. He looked back at Lane.

  “You said nothing was ever made public, Frankie. Who made the connection?”

  “The photographer here at the crime scene. A criminalist and an SID supervisor out at the crime lab. All three had worked the Millie Brown case. After that, Hughes and I requested the same medical examiner. Art Madina performed the autopsy. He saw it, too.”

  “But Harris is dead,” Matt said.

  Lane shrugged. “Copycat.”

  “What did Grace say?”

  “The same thing.”

  Cabrera grimaced. “How?”

  “We’re living in the age of the Internet,” Lane said. “It’s been eighteen months since Brown was murdered. The dam could’ve sprung a hundred leaks. I think that’s the way Grace put it.”

  “The way he put it,” Cabrera said, shaking his head. “What’s this gotta do with what we’ve gotta do?”

  Lane took another pull on his smoke, remaining quiet for several moments as he wrestled with something in his head. When he finally spoke, his voice had a frenzied shake to it.

  “I don’t think Hughes was killed by some yuppie asshole fuck with a piece,” he said. “I think he was gunned down by the same freak who did Faith Novakoff right here under this tree . . . and I think I’m fucking next.”

  It hung there, over their heads and caught in the canopy of the oak tree. Matt filled his lungs with air and exhaled slowly, his mind going. He didn’t want the wave of doubt and absurdity that he was feeling in his gut to resonate in his voice.

  “Do you have anything to back up what you’re saying, Frankie? Anything at all that connects anything to anything else?”

  Lane seemed to be drowning in a pool of self-doubt, his eyes wagging back and forth across the ground. “Maybe we stumbled onto something. Maybe we hit it blind.” He glanced at Matt and shook his head, then turned back to the memorial and stared at the picture of Faith Novakoff stapled to the tree. “Maybe we hit a nerve. Something crazy we never saw coming. All I know is that there’s no way that asshole in the papers shot Hughes during a holdup. Hughes was too smart for that. He would’ve seen the prick coming. I can feel it, man. It has to be connected to Novakoff’s murder. Something I can’t see that’s fucking everything up. My partner’s gone, for Christ’s sake. Nothing’s gonna bring him back.”

  Lane turned away to hide his face. Matt could tell that he was weeping. As he reached out for Lane’s shoulder, he was thinking about the way Hughes’s wife had taken it, and feeling like he’d just been cut in half again.

  CHAPTER 12

  The sight of Lane turning his face, the sound of the detective weeping on the very spot where Faith Novakoff had been found raped and murdered and staked to the ground—

  Lane had forced him to take both murder books, hoping that he would read them and see things the way he did. Even as Matt sat in the passenger seat for the ride back to Hollywood, paging through the crime-scene photos and listening to Cabrera’s nonstop criticism of everything that had happened over the past hour—berating Lane and discounting his skills as a detective, accusing the man of being mentally unstable and emotionally wasted, a fool and a moron, an imbecile and a coward—he couldn’t shake the sights and sounds of Lane’s paranoia and obvious breakdown.

  He found it unnerving and even now kept quiet and ignored Cabrera as best he could for the rest of the drive. What troubled him most was that Lane’s fall seemed so out of character. It didn’t fit with the person he’d known as Hughes’s partner—the beers, the talks, the trips to Dodger Stadium, the meals the three of them had shared. It didn’t fit with any of the things Hughes had told him about Lane on his own. Hughes had liked Lane and admired him and said that he had learned more from Lane than from anyone he’d ever worked with. That once you got used to his idiosyncrasies, he was a great guy and an even better detective. The kind of guy you’d want close by if the ground opened up and your world fell in.

  Cabrera pulled into the lot behind the station and found a spot close to the building. Matt grabbed the murder books and followed his partner through the rear entrance, passing the holding cells and entering the detective bureau. When Cabrera headed for his cubicle—what they used to call the homicide table when they had real desks—Matt glanced at his own but kept moving. There were two detectives standing beside the coffeemaker just this side of Grace’s office.

  “Is he in?” Matt said.

  They gave him a measured look. One of them said, “I don’t think so,” before they walked off.

  The door was open. Matt didn’t see Grace inside, but his laptop was in plain view. Even better, the portable drive was still sitting right beside it. He walked in and pulled a chair up to the desk. The computer was already awake. After plugging in the portable drive, he waited a beat for the computer to recognize the device, then opened a window and found the video file. Before leaving for breakfast and the autopsy, Matt had e-mailed a copy of the file to Henry Rollins,
a forensic analyst from the Photography Unit whom he had worked with many times while assigned to narcotics. He’d sent a copy to himself as well but at the moment didn’t want to take the time to boot up his computer, log on to the network, and download the file.

  He needed reassurance more quickly than that.

  He needed something to break the spell Lane had cast over their investigation of Hughes’s murder. No matter how ridiculous the assertions Lane made might seem, Matt needed to see the video one more time to feel it.

  He clicked open the file and watched as the clip began playing on the screen. He could see Hughes’s silhouette in the SUV. He could make out the figure of a man in a hooded sweatshirt standing by the driver’s-side door with his gun up and ready.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  Matt turned to the door and saw the two detectives he’d passed in the hall staring back at him. Both appeared to be in their forties but shared little else in form other than the heavy look in their eyes. The big round one on the left had dark hair, olive skin, and a goatee. The short one on the right looked thin and gaunt, with gray hair and pockmarked cheeks.

  “Matt Jones,” he said. “Who the hell are you?”

  A moment passed, but then their eyes flushed with recognition.

  “The new guy?” the big one said.

  Matt nodded. The two detectives walked into the room with outstretched hands. The big one did most of the talking, introducing himself as Joey Orlando and then pointing to his partner at the homicide table, Edward Plank. Plank seemed preoccupied with the video playing on the laptop. Once Orlando noticed, he looked back at Matt and seemed uncomfortable as well.

  “You caught a tough break,” he said. “The toughest. Anything we can do, anything at all, just ask.”

  Plank nodded but kept his eyes on the screen. When Matt turned to the laptop, the gun was flashing, and Plank was shaking his head in disbelief.

  “Anything at all,” Plank said in a low voice.

  Grace walked in and tossed a FedEx envelope on his desk. Matt watched as his eyes went from the video clip on the laptop to the spines of the murder books Lane had given him to read.

  “You guys meet?” Grace said.

  Orlando nodded. “Just now.”

  “Good,” Grace said. “I think you’re gonna like it here, Jones. Orlando and Plank are two of the best.” He turned to Orlando. “I need to talk to Jones. How ’bout you two guys giving us a minute?”

  “Sure,” Orlando said. “Good meeting you, Jones.”

  Matt nodded back just as Grace began closing the door. “Same here,” he said.

  CHAPTER 13

  Grace pushed the laptop aside as he sat down, the surveillance video still rolling in a loop on automatic replay.

  “Cabrera told me that Lane was a wreck. He thinks that whoever killed Faith Novakoff murdered his partner. Now the killer’s out to get him. It sounds to me like Lane hit the wall and needs help.”

  Matt didn’t say anything. He was troubled by Cabrera’s “private” talks with Grace. This time it seemed innocent enough. Still, there was a theme to it, a rhythm, and he didn’t like it.

  Grace glanced at the binder with Millie Brown’s name on the spine. “He and Hughes stopped by about a week and a half ago. They showed me pictures from the Novakoff crime scene. They wanted to hear how things went with the Brown investigation.”

  “What did you say?”

  “That I felt sorry for them, Jones. That I was glad it was their case and not mine.”

  Matt slipped a piece of nicotine gum between his cheek and gum, wishing it was a Marlboro.

  “You called it a copycat,” he said.

  Grace nodded. “Harris hung himself. He’s dead. And we had him by the short hairs. There was too much evidence. Too many people coming forward. Every move we made pointed in the same direction. That’s why he hung himself. He listened to the deputy DA’s opening statement and knew that there was no way out, Jones. He listened and he did the math. In one day everything added up to zero. Ron Harris was an asshole.”

  “But Frankie said nothing was ever made public about the murder. How could anyone duplicate it?”

  Grace leaned back in his chair, his eyes losing their edge as he gazed into the past. “Millie was found in one of those picnic areas off the parking lot at the Hollywood Bowl. A couple with two young children. They’d taken their lunch up there and they found her. Me and my partner got the call. Me and Leo.” He paused for a moment, staring through the window. “You saw the pictures,” he said in a quieter voice. “She’d been dead for more than twelve hours. Everyone who was there, including me, will live with that memory for the rest of their lives. Leo had nightmares for months.”

  “But how could anyone duplicate it now?” Matt said.

  “People talk, Jones. The way the girl was staked to the ground. The wounds to her face. She was young and beautiful and the daughter of a congressman. She came from a decent family. A wealthy family. We kept the details out for a lot of reasons, but you remember the rumors. They may have been roughed in, but they were close. Too close. The couple finally talked to one of the tabloids—and who wouldn’t? They were paid a lot of money. Other than what the deputy DA said in his opening statement, I don’t know about our side. It’s been eighteen months. You can’t keep a secret like that forever. At this point I’m not sure there’s even a reason to. That’s what I told Lane and your friend Hughes.”

  As Matt thought it through, memories began to surface. He remembered the chatter that some of the rag sheets and gossip TV shows were spewing out at the time. He could remember looking at the crime-scene photos on the ride back to the station and thinking to himself that somehow the way Millie Brown and Faith Novakoff had been murdered seemed familiar to him. It was a strange feeling—spooky—and he waited for it to pass.

  He watched Grace glance at the surveillance video on the laptop. The killer was racing across the parking lot toward the camera, then veering to the left and out of view. After what seemed like an eternity but only amounted to thirty seconds in real time, the first responders, Hank Andrews and Travis Green, began to enter the lot from the other side. Grace shook his head at them and turned away, like he couldn’t watch.

  “What about the mirror?” Matt said. “Why do you think Harris placed the girl’s face on a sheet of glass? It has to mean something, right?”

  Grace shrugged but didn’t answer.

  “You just told me that her body was found at lunchtime. That means she was killed in the middle of the night.”

  Grace nodded. “Within an hour or two of midnight either way.”

  “So maybe the mirror was meant for whoever found her the next day.”

  “Or maybe,” Grace said, “Harris was just trying to make it look as far from what it really was as he could. The guy was wrapped too tight. He killed Millie because she wanted out of the relationship and was threatening him with exposure. He may have called whatever the fuck he was doing to her consensual. He may have called it a secret affair. But he was the only one who did, and he waited until he was cornered to do it. Every one of her friends knew exactly what was going on. Harris killed Millie Brown because he had a lot to lose. His job, his wife, his two kids. He tried to make it look like it was done by some freak. He used a box cutter on her face. He made her pay. He made it hurt. And in the end we realized that the killer really was a freak. It was the girl’s science teacher, and we got him.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Matt tossed the murder books onto the counter and sat down at his cubicle. He could hear the sound of muffled voices, but because the partitions were six feet high he couldn’t tell who was in the room. Just Cabrera, whom he could see was seated right beside him, talking to someone on the phone.

  His workstation came with a small fluorescent light, a hanging coatrack, and double set of plastic file holders. An official LAPD calendar, along with a list of department phone numbers, was tacked to the partition above the phone. As he looked the cubic
le over, he wondered who might have invented it and what kind of person they were. Someone in the sciences, he guessed, like Ron Harris. Someone who worked with lab rats. Someone with a long list of issues.

  He shook it off and unlocked his cell phone, skimming through his list of new e-mails. When he didn’t see a reply from Henry Rollins, he picked up his desk phone and entered his number from memory. He was surprised that he hadn’t heard anything from Rollins after e-mailing the surveillance video more than six hours ago. The phone rang seven times before the SID analyst finally picked up.

  “It’s Matt Jones, Henry. How’s it going with my video?”

  “Do I really need to say it?”

  Matt leaned back in his chair. “No, you don’t have to say it. I thought it was a lost cause when I sent it over. I just wanted you to take a look. Just in case. So what, three seconds in and you bailed out?”

  “No, I’m still on it,” he said. “Let’s see what happens.”

  “You’re saying there’s a chance?”

  “No question I can clean up these images,” he said. “Maybe a little. Maybe more than that.”

  Matt was stunned but didn’t want to get his hopes up. Lane had tainted his perspective more than he realized. Although Frankie couldn’t make a single connection between Hughes’s murder and the death of Faith Novakoff, Matt couldn’t draw a line in ink from Hughes’s murder to the three-piece bandit either. They didn’t have a single witness or a single lead. Just fifteen shell casings from a Glock 20 and a slug that would take time to analyze and carried no guarantees.

  “That video’s all we’ve got,” he said, hoping he didn’t sound too desperate. “How much time do you think you’ll need?”

  Rollins laughed. “I know it’s all we’ve got. We just finished reviewing the street cams. We went through every image within ten blocks of the crime scene. Your shooter isn’t there. He entered the parking lot the same way he left it.”