City of Echoes (Detective Matt Jones Book 1)

by Robert Ellis

  Matt noted the time and waited. After a few minutes he idled forward and pulled to a stop in front of the house.

  It was clear to Matt that Grace didn’t live here. He had parked at the curb, not in front of the garage, which was attached to the house. But even more telling, the homes on this side of the street were set on the lake and way out of any cop’s price range. Most of them were outright mansions. The rest were big enough to probably qualify as mini-mansions. This one came with a wooden security gate, a six-foot wall, and a terra-cotta roof. From what Matt could see through the trees, every window in the place was lighted. Grace had gone without sleep for almost forty-eight hours, just as Cabrera and Matt had. So why a meeting at midnight? Why had he photographed the murder victim with his own camera when SID would have given him a complete set of images as soon as they were downloaded and entered into evidence?

  Matt opened the lock on his phone, called Central Dispatch, and identified himself to the woman who answered. After double-checking the house number, he gave her the address. Within a minute or two the dispatcher was back on the line.

  “George Baylor,” she said. “White male. Fifty-five years old. Five foot eleven inches tall, one hundred and eighty-five pounds. Blue eyes. Light brown hair. He’s an MD. He’s a doctor.”

  The name seemed familiar—but everything seemed familiar.

  “What have you got on him?”

  “Nothing,” the dispatcher said. “He’s clean. I can e-mail you the picture off his driver’s license if you like.”

  “Thanks.”

  Matt gave the dispatcher his e-mail address and got off the line. When his phone beeped a minute or so later, he checked his e-mail and gazed at the photograph of Baylor. He had hoped that seeing his face would jog his memory, but it didn’t. All he saw was a guy in his midfifties managing to pull off a smile at the DMV.

  Matt got out of the car, weighing the risks as he walked underneath the trees and approached the left side of the wall. Because it was so late, because of Grace’s odd behavior, Matt’s best guess was that his supervisor wouldn’t be here if he only intended to stay for ten minutes. Still, if Matt guessed wrong, if he was seen on the property, he wouldn’t be able to explain himself. Things would get tricky, or maybe worse.

  If he was seen . . .

  He gazed over the wall at the two-story Mediterranean. The side yard between Baylor’s house and his neighbor’s amounted to less than thirty feet but included a twenty-foot-high privacy hedge, running from here all the way down to the lake. Although he could hear a dog barking in the distance, he didn’t see any signs that Baylor owned one. No burned grass or land mines—the landscaping meticulous.

  Matt took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. Then he pulled himself up over the wall and dropped down on the other side. Moving quickly through the side yard, he ducked as he passed a formal living room, then slowed and finally stopped when he spotted movement in the next set of windows. Baylor had installed shutters, and the slats were open. Matt stepped away from the light reflecting out of the room, found a place in the darkness, and became very still.

  It was Baylor’s study, and the two men were sitting before a desktop computer downloading files from Grace’s cell phone. A few moments later Matt had confirmation that his guess was right when images of Jane Doe’s dead body began to appear on Baylor’s oversized computer display.

  Why did Grace believe that Baylor needed to see these pictures tonight? What part of this couldn’t wait until morning? If the case against Ron Harris was so airtight that Harris hung himself rather than roll the dice in court, why did Grace still appear so agitated?

  It didn’t make any sense. There had to be a missing piece.

  Matt turned and looked into the backyard as he thought it over. The place felt more like a resort than a home. He could see a terrace by the water that included an outdoor fireplace, a pool and spa, a lounging area, and a barbecue pit. It looked like another set of steps led to a lower-level terrace for sunbathing and access to the dock. Even better, there was a boat tied to the dock.

  Here, Matt thought, in the middle of LA.

  He turned back and looked through the window. Grace and Baylor were still at it, enlarging images of the girl’s corpse and talking it over as they examined each one. It looked like it was going to be another long night for everyone. Matt glanced at his watch, then headed back through the yard and climbed over the wall. When he was certain that no one was on the sidewalk, he stepped out from beneath the trees, slipped into his car, and drove off. Somehow he needed to stay up long enough to make a pass through Millie Brown’s murder book. He needed to know how Grace and Rodriguez had come to their conclusions before he went to sleep. Home was on the other side of town. Fighting off a yawn, he hoped that the traffic wouldn’t be too bad. It usually didn’t slow down until 2:00 a.m., but maybe he’d be lucky tonight.

  He reached the 134 Freeway and started up the ramp, feeling like maybe he really had lucked out. But after the first mile, he wasn’t so sure. That car was in his rearview mirror again. The man in the silver Nissan.

  CHAPTER 18

  Matt walked into the house, flipped on the lights, and opened the front curtains. He’d seen the man in the silver Nissan twice in a single day. He didn’t believe in coincidence. At the same time, the guy had been easy to shake. So easy that Matt didn’t know what to make of it.

  Willing to wait and see what might happen next, he filed it away, grabbed a beer out of the fridge, and sat down at the kitchen table with the Millie Brown murder book. He took a few moments to clear his mind of all that had happened since he got the call two days ago and realized that his best friend was dead, gone. In spite of his exhaustion, he wanted a clean read on the Brown case before he closed his eyes. A take without bias or any thought of Cabrera or Frankie Lane or even what his imagination, his instincts, were trying to tell him right now.

  He lived just north of the Palisades in the hills overlooking Potrero Canyon Park, Santa Monica, and the Pacific Ocean. He couldn’t really tell what style the architect would have called his house. At times Matt thought the place looked like a ranch, other times modern, but most days it looked just like what it probably was—a run-down box with a carport attached. It was the dark spot in the neighborhood. The house everyone had hoped would be knocked down when the old woman who had lived here finally died.

  But Matt had been lucky enough to know her grandson, Kevin Hughes. And when the real estate bubble burst, Matt had steady work as a patrol officer and could afford the lowered mortgage rate.

  He liked the place because he could see the ocean from the living room and kitchen, even his bedroom. He liked watching the deer and coyotes that lived in the park and often climbed the hill at night to sleep in the grass behind his house. But more important, he liked the place because it was made of wood. He had ridden out two earthquakes since moving in. The house creaked and swayed but moved with the hill and didn’t fall down.

  His mind surfaced and he checked the front window. The marine layer was as thick as a steam room, but he could still see most of the street. The Nissan hadn’t followed him home. He pushed a fresh piece of nicotine gum against his cheek, thought about that Marlboro again, and knew that he was ready.

  He opened the murder book, read through the preliminary reports, then flipped to the chronological record and dug in. From what he could tell, Grace and Rodriguez shared equal time contributing to the murder book. And while Rodriguez was a decent writer, Grace seemed even better, his descriptions so well composed that they might have been pulled out of a crime novel.

  But what struck Matt most was the tone he could hear coming from both detectives.

  It seemed more than clear that finding Millie Brown’s body staked to the ground with her face slashed had changed them. That getting their hands on the killer had become more than a mission. That anything or anyone that got in the way of their success would be confronted and convinced otherwise, using whatever means necessary. That included
the crime lab. They spent every favor and were first in line every time. They enlisted Orlando and Plank and used them to assist, until Ron Harris was singled out and arrested.

  Curiously, Harris wasn’t their first suspect. A man working for the construction company that Millie’s father had hired to remodel their home looked good for the murder from the very beginning.

  Matt’s eyes lingered on his name. Jamie Taladyne.

  Five years ago Taladyne had been accused of sexually assaulting a young woman while remodeling a dormitory at one of the schools on the Westside. Even worse, he had been convicted but ended up serving only two years of a ten-year sentence due to overcrowding.

  Matt hadn’t been aware of a second suspect and flipped through the sections of the binder until he found a photograph of Taladyne and a transcript from his initial interview with Grace and Rodriguez. Taladyne was twenty-nine years old, of medium build, with light brown hair and striking, almost hypnotic sky-blue eyes. He had contact with Millie on a daily basis. According to an entry made by Rodriguez, Taladyne’s coworkers often saw them talking together. After the murder, a carpenter came forward claiming that Taladyne had admitted he was infatuated with the girl and couldn’t get her out of his mind. During the interview, Taladyne claimed that she had often flirted with him and teased him. That on one occasion she had removed her clothing and put on a bathing suit with her bedroom door open because she knew that he could see her as he cut drywall in the room across the hall. Taladyne denied his coworker’s claim of infatuation but said he liked the girl just the same. He had no reason to hurt her. He was at home that night alone, and probably at that hour, in bed getting some sleep. When asked if he would take a polygraph, Taladyne agreed without a moment’s hesitation. When he passed the test, Grace and Rodriguez cut him loose.

  Matt checked the window again as he took a sip of beer and thought it over. Jamie Taladyne seemed like a perfect fit but had found a way to pass a polygraph. Within a week of the murder he’d been dropped as a suspect.

  Matt paged ahead and found the coroner’s report, skimming through it quickly. Damage to Millie Brown’s vagina seemed to suggest that she had been raped, but no semen had been found anywhere on her body. No pubic hairs from the killer were found, nor were there any scratches, abrasions, or bite marks that might indicate a struggle. Matt grabbed the second murder book, opened it to the coroner’s report, and found the same conclusions. Faith Novakoff had been raped as well, yet her body showed only minor signs of the assault, and her killer had left nothing behind.

  It seemed strange, but Matt let it go.

  Pushing the second binder aside, he returned to the first and continued reading. Ron Harris came later in the investigation because finding him required interviews with people who knew Millie, a review of her text messages and e-mails, and DNA analysis of unwashed clothing found in her laundry hamper.

  Millie Brown had been more than sexually active. Semen samples had been taken from two pairs of jeans, three bras and T-shirts, and five pairs of panties—what amounted to a week’s worth of clothing. DNA analysis pointed to a single individual and did not match the samples taken from Jamie Taladyne. After Grace and Rodriguez sifted through the evidence and spoke with Millie’s best friend, they realized it was more than likely that the semen had come from her science teacher in high school, Ron Harris.

  Matt could tell that something changed when Grace and Rodriguez realized that their primary murder suspect was the victim’s teacher. Someone who had broken what amounted to a sacred trust. Although they had enough to pick up Harris over the weekend, they waited until Monday, maximizing the shock value by pulling him out of his classroom in a pair of handcuffs. Grace made a note that when he looked back at the school from the car, every window was awash with the faces of teachers and students, every one of them peeking out from the shadows, frightened and stunned—a trust broken forever.

  From that moment on, the investigation moved in a straight line and at high speed. Grace and Rodriguez sweated Harris out for fifteen hours in the box, often letting Orlando and Plank fill in for them when they needed a break. They offered food and coffee to Harris, bagging up everything the man touched and rushing it out to the crime lab for DNA analysis. They listened to his denials that Millie wanted out of the relationship and was threatening him with exposure. They listened to his numerous claims that he had no involvement with Millie on any personal level and that whomever they had been speaking with had lied to them. When Grace presented Harris with copies of the e-mails and text messages he had written to Millie—overwhelming evidence that SID had downloaded from the girl’s computer and cell phone—Harris left himself open to the endgame and agreed to a polygraph.

  It was a mistake, Grace noted in his report. The same one so many guilty people make when they’re trying to convince detectives that they’re innocent. Harris failed the polygraph and was held overnight.

  By the following afternoon, preliminary results were in from the lab. Harris’s DNA matched the DNA from the semen found on Millie’s clothing. Within two hours Grace and Rodriguez, along with Orlando and Plank and a team of SID criminalists, had a warrant and were searching Harris’s house.

  They knew exactly what to look for because Dr. George Baylor, working side by side with Dr. Art Madina, one of the most talented medical examiners in the coroner’s office, told them what to look for.

  Millie Brown had been murdered with a razor blade.

  And they found it in Ron Harris’s toolbox in his garage. A razor blade set inside a box cutter.

  A moment passed. A moment long enough to revive those hideous images of Jane Doe’s cut-up face. Matt gulped down half the bottle of beer, trying to shake them off and hoping that he wouldn’t dream tonight.

  Baylor was part of the original team, most likely a hired professional whom the district attorney’s office relied on to back up the county’s findings and testify in court. But that only upped the ante and made the list of questions bigger than it should have been.

  Grace and Rodriguez had Ron Harris so locked in, the man took his own life.

  Matt got up and started pacing. His imagination was still trying to skip ahead. Every answer to every question pointed down a road that ended a mile or two back. Either way, no matter how you cut it there was a madman out there. Some sick fuck from another planet.

  He glanced at the clock on the stove. It was one thirty in the morning. He was new at this. He needed someone to talk to. He thought about his dad.

  CHAPTER 19

  Frankie’s service picked up after seven rings. Matt listened to the outgoing message. When he heard the beep, he paused a moment, wondering if he shouldn’t just forget it.

  “It’s me, Frankie,” he said finally. “Sorry about the late-night call, but I know why you lost it this morning. We need to talk. Call me back when you can.”

  He switched off the phone. One thirty in the morning. He needed to talk to someone. He found Cabrera’s cell number and punched Call. Cabrera picked up after a single ring.

  “What the fuck?”

  Matt ignored the attitude. He could tell from the sound of Cabrera’s voice that he’d been awake, even though he was probably in bed and lying down.

  “In the Millie Brown case there was a second suspect, Jamie Taladyne. Grace and Rodriguez dropped him from the list when they found Ron Harris.”

  “You called me after going forty-eight straight to tell me this?”

  Matt opened the slider and stepped out onto the rear deck, trying to choose the right words. There was no view of Santa Monica or Venice Beach tonight. Just the park at the bottom of the hill buried in an eerie fog.

  “You saw what Grace was like tonight,” he said. “Something’s wrong.”

  “Something’s wrong?” Cabrera pulled the phone away and muttered a few unrecognizable words in frustration. “Harris was doing the girl,” he said. “She wanted out and had his perverted ass up against the fucking wall. He smoked her and tried to make it look like it
was done by some sick fuck. The science and everything else worked like a compass, Jones. All his shit pointed north. Taladyne was never on the map.”

  “How come you know so much about it, Denny?”

  “Because you left the murder book behind when you split this afternoon, and thanks to the lab putting us on hold, we’ve got nothing to go on with our own case.”

  Matt leaned against the rail, gazing at his neighbor’s house and lowering his voice. “You seem so sure this isn’t our case. Grace took those pictures of the girl’s body. You want to know why?”

  “I don’t think so, Jones. I don’t think I do.”

  “He had a meeting tonight with a doctor by the name of George Baylor. Baylor would have been a witness for the prosecution if Harris had lived long enough to go to trial. Grace wanted him to see the pictures. It was so important to him that he couldn’t wait until morning. He drove over to Baylor’s house in the middle of the night.”

  A long moment passed. When Cabrera eventually spoke, the anger and frustration in his voice had been transformed into genuine concern.

  “How did you come by information like that?” he said. “Better yet, don’t tell me, Matt. You need to listen to me, man. You’re talking crazy and you’re gonna get yourself in trouble. You’re gonna get yourself fired.”

  Matt shook his head. “Something’s wrong, Denny. We need to find Taladyne. We need to talk to him and see what’s up.”

  “Listen to me, man. You’re not listening.” Cabrera paused, as if thinking it over, then came back. “I won’t let you take me down with you, Jones. Do you understand? It’s not gonna happen. Do you have any idea where I came from? My father was a day laborer who stood outside the fence at the Home Depot on San Fernando Road and hoped to make a buck any way he could. My mother cleaned rooms at a Motel 6 in Sun Valley. They busted their butts for me. They’re the two greatest people I’ve ever met or even heard of. I’m not just the first kid from my neighborhood to graduate from college. I was the first kid to make it all the way through high school. I like my job, man, and I don’t wanna lose it. I wanna make it a career.”