by Robert Ellis
“Did anyone call you, Laura?”
“No,” she said in a quiet voice.
“What did they say at the press conference? Did anyone mention Kevin’s name?”
“They did. And they said that the robber had been shot last night in West Hollywood.”
“What did they say about Kevin?”
She paused. When she finally spoke, Matt could hear the emotion in her voice. The anguish.
“That it would take time to sort things out,” she said. “That it would take more time.”
Her voice faded from a throaty whisper into a silence with weight to it. An open wound.
Matt took a pull on his smoke and exhaled, his eyes still riveted to the house. He saw the shadow move across the curtain. This time he was sure of it. And Matt’s memory was tack sharp. The house number matched the address that McKensie had jotted down in his file. He could see it. Jenna Marconi had made the trip from Seattle one day early and was home.
“Are you okay, Laura?”
“I’ve been thinking,” she whispered.
“Okay,” he said. “Tell me.”
“The way Kevin was murdered, and then Frankie. This was never about the guy they shot last night, was it? The man the news calls the three-piece bandit never had anything to do with Kevin or Frankie.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t think he did.”
“This is about that girl they found in the park, isn’t it?”
“It’s complicated, Laura. I’d rather talk about it when we’re sitting in the same room.”
“That’s okay, Matt. I get it. I already know the answer.”
He waited a moment. He could hear her breathing over the phone. He could picture her sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of wine. She knew too much. Even though it had only been a guess on her part, a hunch, she could be in danger now. He wished that she had gone to Philadelphia.
“I’ve got a question for you,” he said in a lower voice.
“What?”
“It’s about Frankie. It’s easy.”
“Ask me anything,” she said.
“Was he seeing anyone?”
She didn’t say anything at first, and Matt sensed that the question surprised her.
“Frankie never spoke about it,” she said finally. “But Kevin thought that he was. He didn’t want to press him. Frankie was shy and liked his privacy. We invited him over for dinner a few weeks ago. We were hoping that he’d bring her along, but he showed up alone.”
“So the name Jenna Marconi means nothing to you?”
“Is that her name?”
“Yeah.”
“Is there something about her that Frankie might have been embarrassed about?”
“I thought the same thing,” he said. “But no, at least not on the outside. She’s thirty-five and she’s a knockout.”
“Maybe it’s just too new.”
He hadn’t thought about that. He checked his watch.
“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe he wasn’t ready. Listen, I’m sorry but I’ve gotta go. Are you gonna be okay?”
“Until around midnight, I guess.”
Her voice was back. She was hanging in there. She was tough.
“I’ll see you then,” he said. “We’ll talk if you want.”
Laura said good-bye and Matt slipped the phone back into his pocket while trying to clear his mind. It wasn’t easy, especially here and now. He climbed out of the car, got rid of his cigarette, and crossed the street. As he approached the front door, memories of Frankie rushed through his mind and he thought about how he would deliver the bad news. The words he would use. His tone of voice. Two death notifications inside a week. Two dead guys who were part of his own life. Maybe she’d be like Laura—take one look at his face and know.
He found the doorbell, heard the ring, and felt his heart beating as he waited. The shadow cast on the drawn curtain started forward but then hesitated and froze. Matt didn’t get it and rang the doorbell again. When Marconi’s shadow remained still, he leaned forward and spoke through the door.
“Jenna, it’s Matt Jones. I’m a friend of Frankie’s. I need to talk to you. It’s important.”
He listened for several moments but couldn’t hear any movement from inside the house. When he glanced back at the window, Marconi’s shadow was gone.
He didn’t understand why she was doing this. Was it possible that she already knew and wanted to be left alone?
He stepped away from the door, taking another look at the house. The driveway was gated and included a warning that guard dogs were on the property. Matt peered over the gate into the backyard. The entire place was fenced in, but he saw no signs of a dog. Just lawn furniture, a grill, and a late-model Chevy sedan parked before the garage. Thinking it over, he realized that if she really owned a dog, he would have heard it bark when he rang the doorbell.
He started down the sidewalk, slowing as he reached the corner. The curtains were open on this side of the house, as were the windows, and he could see the light from a television flickering in a darkened room. He tried to look inside, but the ground on the adjoining street sloped too far downward. The wood-paneled fence was higher here as well and matched the angle of the hill.
He started down Macbeth Street. After passing a row of bushes, he noticed a small gate in the gloom. At first glance he thought it opened to the property next door. But as he moved closer, he realized that this was his way into the backyard. Even better, he didn’t see a lock. The gate was attached to the fence by a simple latch.
Without hesitating, Matt swung open the gate and stepped into the yard. He paused a moment, glancing at the moon overhead and studying the way the shafts of light from the open windows cut into the night and fell onto the lawn. Once he found the lanes of darkness, he was invisible and started forward in utter silence. He could see Marconi in the living room window as he approached. He could see her—
Matt knelt down before the window, the adrenaline bursting through his veins in a rush that made him dizzy. His eyes flicked around the dingy room, stopped on the TV, then jetted back to the couch. He tried to focus. Tried to keep cool.
It wasn’t Jenna Marconi lowering the sound and dropping the remote on the coffee table.
It was the killer, Jamie Taladyne, in the flesh.
CHAPTER 41
The front door crashed open and Joey Orlando burst into the living room with his shoulder lowered. Matt backed out of the window light as he watched Taladyne jump to his feet in terror. But then everything slowed down when Plank followed his partner into the house with a shotgun, and Bob Grace, the cop who had murdered his own partner and scammed the man’s wife, sauntered into the living room looking fresh and mean in a dark gray suit.
Orlando grabbed Taladyne, smashed him in the face, and pushed his crumpled body back onto the couch. After cuffing him around the front, he pulled out a pistol and pointed it at the man. Not the 9 mm semiautomatic holstered to his belt but a snub-nosed revolver that he’d fished out of his pocket.
A throw-down gun, and Orlando just happened to be wearing a pair of leather gloves. Trouble in Echo Park tonight.
Matt checked the yard behind him, then turned back and gazed through the open window, his mind reeling. Frankie had found Taladyne but hadn’t made an arrest. He’d even bought him dinner last Thursday night.
Why?
Orlando pressed the gun against Taladyne’s head as Grace switched on a lamp and sat down on the coffee table directly before the man. Curiously, on Grace’s nod, Plank handed over the shotgun and hurried out of the house.
“Jamie Taladyne,” Grace said with a smile and in a smooth voice brimming with confidence and danger. “Great seeing you again. How long’s it been, Jamie?”
Taladyne remained quiet and edgy and looked confused. From his view through the window, Matt couldn’t tell if he was seeing fear in the man’s sky-blue eyes or complete madness. All the same, he couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and seventy-five pounds. In sp
ite of his knack for killing women, and even without the handcuffs and drawn guns, Taladyne was no match for anyone in the room.
“How long’s it been, Jamie?” Grace repeated. “A year and a half since you walked away from Millie Brown’s murder free and clear?”
Orlando smacked him across the face. “Answer the man.”
Taladyne grimaced as he shook off the blow. “It’s been a while,” he said in a low, raspy voice.
Matt watched Grace take in the room. The place was a dump. It seemed obvious to Matt that money was a real issue here. As he glanced at the walls in need of fresh paint, the dilapidated furniture, the grime that seemed to coat every surface, he thought about the way the victims had been left. He thought about seeing Brooke Anderson staked to the ground and the predatory desire of the killer for money and power and a way out of this hole. Dante’s epic poem and the seven Ps carved into Virgil’s forehead, each one removed by an angel as he passed through the seven terraces of the seven deadly sins. He thought about the victim’s faces, each one carved and ruined and seemingly beyond an angel’s grace. He was staring at Taladyne and still wondering how it all fit. Still thinking about the questions Dr. Baylor had raised in his office the other day.
If these murders are about greed, why are the victims so young?
His mind surfaced. He could hear Grace’s ether-like voice wafting in the air again.
“Do you live here alone, Jamie?”
“This is my sister’s place.”
“Where is she?”
Taladyne paused a moment, reluctant. “Visiting our parents,” he said.
“Where?”
“The North Pole, you asshole. What’s it to you?”
Orlando smashed him in the face again.
“Where?” Grace repeated.
“Seattle.”
Plank walked back into the house carrying a cardboard box. Grace glanced his way, then turned to Taladyne.
“Which bedroom is yours?”
“The one on the right. Why?”
Grace didn’t answer but nodded at Plank, who vanished down the hall with the box. After a few moments a light came on in a room at the other end of the house. Whatever they were up to had been planned and required props. Matt was more than curious but couldn’t pull himself away from the view through the window. Grace had just pushed the muzzle of the shotgun into Taladyne’s chest. And that smile of his was back, along with those hollow gray eyes that matched the color of his hair.
“Tell me, Jamie. When you moved in to live with your sister, did you call the police and let them know that you’re a sex offender?”
“Yeah, sure. You guys were my first call.”
“Do you think that what you did is funny?”
Taladyne just looked at him.
“You’re a real ladies’ man, Jamie. You’ve got a gift. All the same, I can’t believe that a loser like you beat a polygraph.”
Taladyne stewed in silence, tugging on the short chain between the handcuffs.
Grace laughed, then leaned closer and lowered his voice. “For the record, that works for me. There’s no way in this world that you killed Millie Brown, because the murder weapon was found in Ron Harris’s house. For the record, Ron Harris killed the girl and we got our man. But between friends like you and me, Jamie—man-to-man so to speak—we both know what really happened to Millie Brown. It’s our secret what you did to her. Secrets are best kept between friends, don’t you think?”
The room fell silent. Heavy. Corrosive. Dead.
“Why are you doing this?” Taladyne whispered in a shaky voice. “If you’re here to arrest me, why don’t you just get it over with?”
Orlando struck him again. Harder this time.
Grace sat and watched, his gaunt face showing patience, his eyes smoldering above those high cheekbones. “We’re not here to make an arrest, Jamie. And there’s no good cop, bad cop tonight. Everybody here is all in. You murdered Brown, but you didn’t murder Brown. That’s the irony. Ron Harris killed the girl, because the newspapers said he did, and we still have to account for that murder weapon winding up in the man’s house. But now the story has new life and a new direction. Now it’s all about you becoming infatuated with both the girl and Harris and what everybody thinks he did to her. You knew Millie. You talked to her. She got off on teasing you and tried to seduce you. A girl who looked like that. A beautiful girl. So after her murder, after you were released as a suspect, you read the papers and watched the news of Harris’s arrest with a peculiar kind of interest. You waited anxiously for his trial. The people who found the girl’s body ended up talking to one of the tabloids and described the condition she had been left in. You didn’t have much to go on, but after doing a little research on the Internet, you figured it out and started dreaming about committing a murder just like Millie Brown’s. I’ll bet you dug it so much that it got you hard. It was already in your blood, Jamie. You’d spent a night with Leah Reynolds. She was young and hot, and you couldn’t get her out of your sick fucking mind. You tied her up and cut off her clothes with a box cutter. A razor blade. You fucked her over and over and over again. You rode her like an animal all night long. It was already in your blood, Jamie. You were a natural. You were ready to take the next step. So when you saw Faith Novakoff walk out of that bar in the Valley, that’s all it took. You knew exactly what you wanted and what you needed. You knew exactly what you were gonna do to that girl’s face, and you succeeded. You pulled it off. She ended up looking exactly like Millie Brown.”
“I didn’t,” he said, stammering. “I wasn’t even here.”
Taladyne jumped to his feet, but Orlando grabbed him by the neck and yanked him back down. Moments passed. Another vicious beating, with blood dripping out of his nose, then more of that hard-core silence.
“Are you saying that you’ve got an alibi?” Grace said, measuring the man.
Taladyne nodded, the sweat dripping down his face. “I told Detective Lane everything.”
“You told him what?”
“Two weeks ago,” he said. “Two weeks ago I was up in Mint Canyon. The night the girl got killed I’d checked into a Motel 6. I had a job interview early the next morning.”
“A job interview where?”
“At a car lot. I’m good with tools, and I like cars. I really needed a job. I still do.”
“How’d you pay for the room?”
“Cash. My sister gave it to me.”
“Did you use your real name?”
Taladyne paused again, then shook his head. “That name’s no good anymore. People remember it from the news and my trial.”
“Did you see anyone that night? Did you talk to anyone?”
Taladyne remained silent. Matt felt a wave of dread roll over his spine as he thought it over. A job interview at a Ford dealership. Frankie had been trying to verify Taladyne’s alibi but never made it. Even worse, Taladyne couldn’t answer Grace’s question. He’d hesitated.
Matt looked back at the man with the striking blue eyes and realized that he was going to die tonight.
He could tell from the look on Grace’s face that he didn’t believe anything he’d just heard. But even more, there was no way Grace could let Taladyne walk out of the room. There was no way Grace could let any doubt be cast on his arrest of Ron Harris. Too many people were dead. Too many people had been murdered. Enough to fill a graveyard.
Grace laughed like an executioner who enjoys listening to a tall tale every once in a while. “How’d you make out in the interview?” he asked.
Taladyne didn’t reply, his eyes burning.
“I thought so,” Grace said. “Why don’t you just admit what you did? Why don’t you just say it?”
Taladyne leaned back and switched off.
“You’re blaming us, Jamie? We didn’t make you—you did. Let’s hear what you’ve got for two nights ago when the girl was killed up by the Hollywood sign.”
Taladyne pursed his lips and shook his head. Orlando hit him wi
th a vicious chop to the stomach.
The man buckled over and let out a gasp, struggling to catch his breath. When Grace gave him a second poke with the muzzle of the shotgun, it looked like Taladyne could see his fate. He started to sob, his hands trembling as he covered his bloody face.
“Come on, Jamie. Answer the question. Where were you two nights ago? Admit it. Say it so we can all go home.”
Taladyne’s eyes rocked back and forth, as if he’d just spotted the finish line. “Here,” he said after a while. “I was here.”
“That’s the best you can do? Where was your sister?”
Taladyne shivered, his gaze losing its focus and dropping to the floor. “In Seattle,” he whispered. “I was alone.”
Grace traded a dark look with Orlando, who fished a black hood out of his pocket and pulled it over Taladyne’s head. Taladyne whimpered in fear and started shaking.
“Please,” he said. “Please. Why don’t you just arrest me?”
Orlando punched Taladyne in the face with his gloved fists. Then Grace prodded him with the shotgun again.
“Admit it, Jamie. Say it.”
“Please. I want to go back to prison. I’ll do it. I’ll go back.”
Orlando smashed him in the face again. Taladyne couldn’t see the punches coming and made a feeble attempt to protect himself by bobbing his head and blocking his face with his cuffed hands.
Grace leaned closer. “Admit it, Jamie. Say it.”
Orlando beat him again. Then again and again, until the man tumbled off the couch onto the floor.
“Okay, okay, okay. Please stop. Please. I’ll say it. I’ll say it.”
Grace nodded at Orlando, who pulled Taladyne up and yanked the hood off of his head. His face was a mess.
“Admit it,” Grace said. “Say it, and make sure you’re telling the truth. I need to believe you.”
Taladyne looked terrified, his entire body shuddering. “I did it,” he said quickly. “I did it.”
“Did what?”
