City of Echoes (Detective Matt Jones Book 1)

by Robert Ellis

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Then I’ll go downstairs, make a pot of coffee, and fix you some eggs.”

  He watched her walk off but waited until he heard her reach the first floor and step into the kitchen. Fishing his cell phone out of his pocket, he switched on the flashlight and followed the shoe prints down the hall. Whoever the prints belonged to had made a round trip that began in the study. When he followed them into the master bedroom, when they stopped at the end of the bed, he felt his heart sink. Based on the compression of the carpet pile, the intruder had spent more than a few minutes watching Laura sleep.

  Matt tried to keep his emotions in check, following the prints from the end of the bed to a chair by the window. Laura had tossed her jeans over the arm. A bra and a pair of panties the color of raspberries were laid out on top. As he looked back at the bed, he tried not to think about what had happened here last night, or what could have happened. He tried not to give the pictures that were playing in his head any definition.

  If he hadn’t noticed the footprints, he would have thought that this was over. Whoever broke into the house took what they wanted and split.

  If he hadn’t noticed the footprints, it could have been over.

  He took a deep breath, considering his options. He needed to make two phone calls. First to Grace so that they could work things out with Glendale PD and get SID out here. But even more important, Matt knew with complete certainty that the threat to Laura was directly related to her husband’s murder on LAPD soil. He needed to bring Metro Division into the mix. He needed a protection detail, two teams, twenty-four hours a day.

  He checked his watch. It was still early. No one would be at the station for another twenty minutes, which was okay by him because he wanted the place to himself for a while.

  He switched off the flashlight on his cell phone and returned to Hughes’s study. While he waited for the laptop to boot up, he dug a pair of vinyl gloves out of his jacket pocket, slipped them on, and began searching through the desk. It looked like Hughes had kept files on every one of his cases. As Matt opened a folder and skimmed through the copy, he realized that his friend had been keeping a record of his personal thoughts: things he’d learned from Lane, the mistakes they’d made, and the steps they’d taken that finally led them to an arrest. But even more, he could tell from the tone of his friend’s notes how much he loved being a detective.

  Matt returned the hanger file to the drawer, searching the tabs for Faith Novakoff’s name. He found the file off the rails and pushed to the bottom of the drawer. When he opened it, the folder was empty. He moved over to the window for a closer look in better light. The bottom of the hanger file had been bent into a square in order to accommodate what Matt judged was a stack of paper at least an inch thick. Matt had no doubt that Hughes would have kept notes on what was obviously his biggest case as a homicide detective. And he had no doubt that his notes had been stolen last night.

  He moved back to the desk and sat down, pulling the laptop closer. He was looking for the word-processing program that came with Hughes’s office software. Every other program was here—spreadsheets, accounting, business presentations—everything but the word processor, the program Hughes would have used to type his notes. Matt checked the trash folder on the start screen and found it empty.

  It occurred to him that Hughes might have shared his notes with Lane. Opening his e-mail program, he clicked the Sent folder and began skimming through the list of messages. While he didn’t see anything written to Lane, there appeared to be hundreds of e-mails sent to a single address that Matt didn’t recognize by name. After checking the dates, he realized that they went back more than five years and included his time with Hughes when they were in Afghanistan.

  Matt picked one at random and opened it. As he began reading, he became embarrassed. It was a love letter that Hughes had written to Laura, and below that, her reply to a previous love letter. He knew that he should stop reading and close the window, but something about the words drew him in. He guessed that his weakness came from the vacuum in his own life. All the personal things that he’d been dealing with, all the people he’d pushed away or put on hold.

  He heard Laura coming up the stairs and finally closed the window. He could smell bacon in the air, fresh-brewed coffee.

  He turned and watched her step through the doorway. She still looked frightened. But even more, he was struck by her gentleness and grace and overwhelmed by a feeling that he’d just violated her trust. He felt like he needed to make things up to her for reading something so personal, something he had no right to look at.

  “The TV was on in the kitchen,” she said. “The three-piece bandit just sent text messages to the stations claiming that he had nothing to do with Kevin’s death.”

  Matt took it in as he gazed at her. “You know what that means, Laura. Nothing.”

  “I know,” she said in a quieter voice. “That’s what anyone would say. It’s a murder. It’s the killing of a police officer. He’s claiming that he didn’t do it.” She looked at the hole in the window for a moment, then turned back. “I’m just trying to understand what’s really going on.”

  He could feel her eyes homed in on his face. He could see her wheels turning. She was picking up on his guilt, and he needed to chill. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a piece of nicotine gum but decided not to open it.

  “Where did Kevin keep his guns?” he said.

  “In a locked rack in the bedroom closet. I already checked. They’re all there.”

  “Your parents still live outside Philadelphia, right?”

  She nodded without saying anything.

  “Would you have any interest in visiting them?”

  She shook her head back and forth. “I’m not going anywhere until you get the guy who shot Kevin.”

  Matt nodded, then told her about his plan to call in Metro and set up a protection detail. Although he didn’t mention the impressions he’d found in the carpet, the idea that she needed cops guarding her seemed to underline the weight of her situation and frighten her even more. After pulling herself together, she agreed on one condition.

  “I want you to stay here, Matt. I know you’re working a case. I know you don’t have time to hang around and hold my hand. But you’ll need to take a break somewhere, so it might as well be here. I need you right now.”

  Matt’s eyes drifted across the carpet and up to her face. He owed her. But even more, he hoped the guy who had stood at the foot of her bed would come back tonight. He felt like he owed him something, too.

  CHAPTER 22

  Matt made a right off Franklin Avenue onto Beachwood Drive, heading for the horse ranch just below the peak of the mountain. As he started to make the climb, he found Cabrera’s cell number on his list of most-recent calls.

  He had already spoken with Metro, and the first team from the protection detail had arrived at Hughes’s house before he’d left. Matt was much less worried about Laura’s safety now. It seemed to him that their presence had an immediate calming effect on her as well. To his credit, Grace was on board even before Metro showed up. Details had been worked out with Glendale PD, and they agreed that because the threat to Laura originated from an LAPD case, Hollywood would run the investigation. Matt was just glad things had gone smoothly and had stayed while SID criminalists spent a couple of hours scouring the house and yard.

  Hughes’s laptop computer had been taken down to the lab. Analysis of the fingerprints SID lifted in the study, along with the hair and fiber samples they collected, would take time. Most likely those samples belonged to Hughes and his wife and would lead to nowhere. But they’d walked away with one fact. The burglar wore a size eleven hiking shoe. According to the criminalist who discovered the print in the garden below the roof and open window, the cast SID poured was so perfect that it revealed the wear and degradation of the tread. Not only would they be able to identify the manufacturer, if and when they had a suspect and located the shoe th
ey would be able to lock it in with nearly the same probability as a fingerprint.

  Cabrera picked up after five rings without saying hello.

  “I need you to do me a favor, Cabrera.”

  “What kind of favor?”

  His partner’s voice sounded dead. The guy was still pissed off.

  Matt grimaced. “I want you to run a plate for me.”

  “Why can’t you do it yourself?”

  “Because I’ve had a busy morning. Didn’t you talk to Grace?”

  “He’s not here. Orlando and Plank aren’t here either.”

  “Will you run the plate for me or not?”

  Cabrera hesitated. Matt couldn’t believe it.

  “Okay, okay,” he said finally. “Give me the fucking number.”

  Matt recited it from memory, then told Cabrera that the plate went with a silver Nissan. He gave him the model of the car and said he believed it was less than two years old.

  “What’s this about?” Cabrera said.

  Matt paused to think it over before he spoke. “I’m guessing you don’t want to know,” he said.

  “You’re probably right, Jones.”

  Cabrera hung up on him. Matt shrugged it off, the road steepening as he passed the Beachwood Market and Café halfway up. He couldn’t worry about Cabrera. He needed to keep pushing, keep driving forward. There wasn’t enough time to look back.

  Beachwood Drive eventually came to an end, and he found a place to park at the horse ranch. As he grabbed his phone and got out, he glanced at the face before slipping it into his pocket and realized that he’d missed a call. It was from Frankie, and he’d left a message. Matt located the fire road that snaked around the mountain and started hiking west toward the Hollywood sign as he listened to the message. Lane had been brief, and he could hear road noise in the background.

  “Got your message, Matt. Thanks for understanding why I was such a wreck yesterday. I’m following up what may or may not be a couple of decent leads this morning. Laura told me what happened and said you’re staying at the house. That’s good news. Let’s talk later in the day and trade notes.”

  Frankie sounded better. But even more, he was back in the game, working on a couple of leads while everyone else was immersed in a world of hunches, best guesses, and dead ends.

  Matt took a deep breath and tried to let go of the frustration. As he hiked around a bend, he stopped to look at the Hollywood sign, then located the spot on the trail where Jane Doe’s body had been found. He was more than two hundred yards away. Still, it wasn’t difficult to find, because the daylight crew from SID was working the crime scene. Even from a distance, their blue jackets with LAPD/SID printed across the back more than stood out in the rough terrain. Matt searched for Orlando and Plank and spotted them climbing up the slope by the sign. Grace was with them, and it looked like all three were heading back to their cars.

  As he watched them struggle up the mountain, he opened another piece of nicotine gum and bit into it to release the drug. After a minute or two, he could feel the nicotine smoothing the edge of his morning away. In spite of the good feeling, he hated it. Both he and Hughes had started smoking cigarettes and become addicted while overseas. Of the choices they were given, cigarettes seemed less harmful than the meds command was trying to push on everybody to help them relax at night and then wake up in the morning. There were too many suicides and too many rumors about the drugs. He could remember one day when the CEO of the pharmaceutical company that was providing those drugs came to Afghanistan for what was supposed to be a two-day tour. Matt saw him and couldn’t believe his thug-like appearance. They never did find out who took a shot at the man, just that it had come from an American soldier with a rifle. After that, no one from any corporation profiting from the war ever showed up for a tour. It was understood by everyone at every level of command that the first shot had been a warning—a blowback pitch by a very talented marksman—and that the next shot would be a money shot and knock the asshole down.

  The wind picked up, jogging Matt’s mind to the surface. He looked back at the mountain just as Orlando and Plank followed Grace over the rim. Once they disappeared, he let his eyes drift down the slope until they came to rest on the SID techs examining the trail. He remembered that feeling he’d had last night, the sense that someone had been hiding out here and watching them. It was the reason he’d parked at the top of Beachwood Drive and hiked in from the east. Eyeing the trail, he had a better than decent view but knew that he was still too far off. He needed to close the distance by at least half.

  Matt zipped up his sweatshirt and started walking. He glanced at the SID techs, then let his eyes wander through the harsh landscape as he hiked around another sharp bend. He was looking for a place where he might feel safe. A hiding place with an up-close-and-personal view. A place that a sniper might call home.

  The face of the mountain steepened to his right, and as the fire road straightened out, he was struck by an explosion of color on the eastern side of the slope. Moving off the path and up the mountain, he realized that they were poppies the size of his palm. Vibrant yellows and reds, brilliant oranges and blues, the flowers carpeted the entire ridge as they swayed back and forth in the wind. It seemed so strange, so peculiar. This was late October, not April, and the poppies were in full bloom. It seemed like nature had lost its way and no longer knew what day it was.

  He scanned the mountains, searching for another patch of color, another aberration, another sign of spring in the hostile landscape. When all he saw was gray, he climbed further up the ridge until he reached the top. And that’s when he found it. A boulder that had rolled down from the mountain peak until it reached the ridge and what was a bird’s-eye view of the crime scene.

  He was less than a hundred yards away, and two or three stories above the spot where the girl’s body had been found. A grove of bushes on the other side of the boulder provided a perfect blind. When Matt noticed that several branches had been bent back or broken and tossed to the side—branches that were high and would have obscured the view—he could feel it in his gut. The killer had been here last night. The madman had been watching.

  Matt checked the ground, looking for further confirmation. The soil was loose and dusty, so finding a footprint seemed unlikely. But he noticed something shiny caught in the leaves of a bush with thorns. A small piece of paper—or was it foil? Digging into his pocket for a vinyl glove, he slipped it on and plucked the piece of trash out of the leaves.

  It was a small wrapper from a Fifth Avenue candy bar.

  The wrapper didn’t mean anything on its own. Hundreds of people hiked these trails every day. If he had headed east, he would have picked up the trail to Mount Hollywood and the two-acre garden overlooking Griffith Observatory and the entire LA basin known as Dante’s View. Still, he dropped the wrapper into his shirt pocket and made a mental note to collect samples of the branches that had been tossed to the ground. Living skin cells containing DNA could easily have been transferred to the twigs, particularly if it had taken any effort to break them off.

  He turned back and gazed down at the crime scene. He thought about the way Jane Doe had been left to die alone in the darkness. The things the killer had done to her.

  Why did everything seem so familiar? So close to home?

  Matt didn’t think that it was something he’d seen in real life or even at a movie theater. It had to be déjà vu. The thoughts, the feelings, the pictures in his head had to be an illusion of some kind. Even so, it made him anxious. He wished that he’d had the chance to interview the man who heard Jane Doe scream and called it in, but Grace had spoken with him alone.

  He thought it over one more time.

  There was the very real possibility that the killer had been here last night, sitting on this boulder and watching them process the crime scene. The feeling might have been coming from his gut, but he thought that he could count on it. And the breadth of the view, the trimmed-out blind, seemed to back that up.
The killer liked to watch his victims being discovered. He liked to see what happened after they were dead. It was part of the kick. Part of his sickness. Part of the ritual—

  It suddenly dawned on Matt why all of this seemed so familiar. It wasn’t something he’d seen. It was something he’d read.

  CHAPTER 23

  The killer was making some sort of demented statement. The way each young woman had been bathed and then soiled and staked to the ground, the wounds to their faces, the spilling of blood onto sheets of mirrored glass. Matt had been thinking about it ever since he knelt down before Jane Doe. The idea that her murder resembled the ritual slaughter of an animal. That something about it originated in stories from the Old Testament, from Homer or even Hesiod. That the killings of all three students were part of a religious ritual performed by a modern-day freak.

  But it had been the trail to Mount Hollywood that triggered the memory. The idea of a garden planted on top of the mountain by an actor, Dante Orgolini, in the 1960s. The majestic view the garden offered of Los Angeles, from downtown all the way west to the Santa Monica Bay and the Pacific Ocean.

  Dante’s View.

  Just the thought of it had given birth to a memory.

  Matt had read The Divine Comedy in Mr. Peterson’s English class as a sophomore in high school. An illustrated hardcover edition was on one of his bookshelves beside his desk in the den. Although the drive home would cost him the rest of his morning, he had to return at some point to pack a bag for his stay at Laura’s. In terms of traffic, late morning was by far the best time of the day.

  He found the book buried in a stack of oversized art books on the bottom shelf, then crossed the room to sit in his reading chair by the window. As if on automatic pilot, he checked the street for the silver Nissan. He’d checked once or twice this morning from his car but hadn’t seen the man and guessed that he was getting some rest after a long night.

  He glanced back at the book, feeling the weight of the epic poem and its meaning in his hands.