Murder Season

by Robert Ellis

  She pushed the thought away and looked back at what was left of Gant’s face. The two rounds that had blown out his eyes carried more meaning now. The killer’s personal rage for his victim remained all too clear. Yet the possibility that Gant had been murdered for what he’d seen—what he’d discovered—seemed just as clear.

  Kosinski moved in beside her. “Some of these bruises have to be more than ten days old, Lena. Look at the change in color.”

  She nodded. “I can’t stay, Sid. How come you started with Bosco?”

  Kosinski met her eyes, then tipped his head toward the double doors that opened from the hallway behind them. Lena peeked over his shoulder. District Attorney Jimmy J. Higgins was watching them from the other side of the glass and seemed more than a little edgy. But at least she knew what had happened to that jar of Vicks VapoRub. She could see Higgins smearing the gel all over his handkerchief and pressing the cloth against his mouth and nose. He had a wild look in his eyes like a man huffing glue.

  Kosinski lowered his voice. “He said he’s got a meeting tonight. He wants whatever I can give him before he goes.”

  “Why doesn’t he come in?”

  “Because he’s a chicken shit. I don’t even know why he’s here. I could have given him a call.”

  “It’s Bosco,” she said. “They were friends.”

  “What kind of friends?”

  She shrugged.

  “Well, Higgins asked me to do something I could never do, Lena.”

  “Clean the report,” she said. “Don’t mention what you found in Bosco’s nose.”

  Kosinski gave her a long look and then nodded. “What kind of a DA would ask for something like that?”

  She wished that Higgins’s request would have surprised her, but it didn’t. If the DA could press the deputy chief of police, he would have had no problem trying to corrupt a medical examiner. She turned and took another peek at him. He had stepped away from the window and was shouting at someone on his cell phone. She wondered if it was Vaughan taking the verbal beating on the other end of that phone. She wondered if Cobb’s supervisor had made another call on the “friends network”—this time to the DA because that’s what friends do.

  But Lena had her own reasons to be troubled by the cocaine found at Club 3 AM.

  She still didn’t understand why Dante Escabar had left it at the crime scene. And his explanation that somehow he had overlooked it—that he’d rushed to inform the owners about the murders and protect their clients by shutting the place down—didn’t ring true. The quantity alone raised serious doubt. In the end, finding that much coke would jeopardize the club’s place as an oasis for the A-list just as much as Bosco being seen with Jacob Gant after the trial. Escabar had both the time and opportunity to clean things up, but hadn’t. Lena felt certain that he’d had a reason. Something she couldn’t see yet.

  Kosinski pointed to the worktable. Bosco’s stomach had been removed and set on a plastic tray.

  “I was just about to pull the slug,” he said. “That’s what you came to see, right?”

  She nodded and followed the medical examiner over to the worktable, then watched as he selected a clean scalpel.

  20

  Unable to reach Vaughan on her cell, Lena hustled through the basement to the elevator at the end of the hall. She had taken the shortcut from the garage and entered Parker Center using the rear doors. It was after-hours—dark and still with just the sound of two guys talking in the distance. As she passed the men’s locker room, she could hear them through the door. They were laughing about something, and she envied them for their apparent lack of worry and concern, for what sounded like a carefree moment between friends.

  The single bullet that had ended Johnny Bosco’s life entered his body from the back, missing his spine and ripping through his aorta. When the slug entered his stomach, a cheese burrito was waiting for it like a block of foam. Kosinski estimated that Bosco had eaten the burrito within twenty minutes of his death. The result was a perfect nine-millimeter slug. Once the slug from Jacob Gant’s abdomen had been removed and the second autopsy completed, both would be hand-delivered to the crime lab. Still, it didn’t seem like much of a priority. Not without Tim Hight’s gun.

  The elevator opened on the third floor. Lena hurried down the hall and entered the section floor. The overhead lights were dimmed and no one was around. As she passed Barrera’s desk and started down the aisle, she looked through the glass off the staff room and saw him waiting for her in the captain’s office. He was sitting at the conference table, smoking what was left of that cigar and tapping the ash into an empty can of diet Pepsi. Several cartons of Chinese food were set on the table as well, along with his cell phone and a charger that he’d plugged into the wall. She pushed open the door. Barrera nodded at her and pointed to a chair. He looked thin and weary—the circles beneath his eyes three or four shades darker than she remembered seeing this morning.

  “Give it to me,” he said.

  She lifted the murder book out of her briefcase and slid it across the table. Barrera pulled it closer without taking his eyes off her.

  “Cobb called Bennett,” he said in a low, raspy voice. “Bennett called the DA. The DA tried to get hold of the chief, but couldn’t reach him. When he tried the deputy chief, Ramsey refused to take his call, so he tried Peltre. Then Peltre found me. That’s what friends are for.”

  He let it sit there, working his cigar and thinking it over before he continued.

  “You’re scaring the shit out of everybody, Lena. Cobb, Bennett, Higgins—they want you fired. They want worse than that—more than that. They’d like to do the same thing to Vaughan, but they can’t. If they did, Bennett or Watson or Higgins would have to take over the case, and none of them want this one. Vaughan’s safe. He’s ruined, but he’s safe. But you’re not safe. The deputy chief might be using you because of the way your last two cases turned out, but you’re too green to be safe. You understand what I’m saying? There’s only so much give before your value runs out. No one on the sixth floor gives a shit.”

  Lena nodded and kept quiet, her mind locked on Cobb. He’d made a move—not to his supervisor, but to Bennett. She didn’t like the feel of it.

  Barrera leaned forward in his chair. “What I said to you this morning, what the deputy chief told you at the briefing—everything still stands. Your job is to build a case against Hight for the murders of Johnny Bosco and Jacob Gant, and to do it in a hurry. Taking another look at Lily Hight’s murder isn’t part of this investigation, nor will it ever be included. Why do I even have to say it, Detective? We need to put this behind us so that we can move forward, not back. Hight’s a third rail. Touch him the wrong way and you’re dead. We’re all dead. And you’re thinking that maybe we tried the wrong asshole? No wonder everybody’s in a shit fit. I’m in a shit fit, too. The guy who murdered Lily Hight got shot last night. His name’s Jacob Gant, and he’s dead.”

  Lena glanced at the binder, then back at Barrera. “All I asked Cobb was how he cleared Hight for his daughter’s murder, Frank. It was a righteous question. Anyone would have asked it. And I need that murder book for background. What Cobb thinks I said or thinks I think is his business, not mine.”

  “If that’s all it is, then why is Vaughan reviewing tapes from Gant’s trial?”

  She shrugged, wondering if a shrug counted as a lie. In this case it probably did.

  “I didn’t know that he was,” she said. “But my guess would be that it’s for the same reason I need that murder book. We’re trying to get caught up. We’re working as fast as we can.”

  He met her eyes and held the look for a long time. She wasn’t certain that he believed her, and she felt rotten for deliberately misleading him. But then, without prompting, he shoved the murder book back across the table.

  “Okay,” he said, still measuring her. “Okay. All you’re doing is catching up. You need background. But I’ve gotta know what’s going on. You walk into Pacific unannounce
d and ask for something like this … I want to know about it first from here on out. Okay?”

  “Okay,” she said.

  Barrera leaned back in his chair, striking a match and relighting that cigar. “Now tell me what you did to this gossip reporter.”

  Lena’s mind went blank. She didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “Dick Harvey,” he said. “What did you and Rhodes do to him outside Club 3 AM last night?”

  Dick Harvey. The memory clicked, but it seemed so long ago—like a month had been lost in a single day.

  “He got past the line and broke into my car,” she said. “We found him hiding in the backseat with a new set of auto jigglers.”

  “His attorney says that you roughed him up. He’s taking pictures and posting them on Harvey’s Web site.”

  “Taking pictures of what?”

  “Cuts and bruises.”

  “Has Harvey been released?”

  Barrera shook his head. “No, he’s still in. His attorney took the shots during a visit. What did you do to the man?”

  “He wouldn’t get out of the car, so we dragged him out. It was by the book. We cuffed him and read him his rights. We thought he might be using. He tried to bite me, but he settled down. When we left, he was fine.”

  “Bite you?”

  She nodded without a reply, then watched Barrera glance at his cell phone as if he was waiting for a call.

  “They’re saying that he had a video camera with him, Lena. That somehow whatever Harvey recorded that night is gone. You know anything about that?”

  She knew a lot about it. Before they chained Harvey to the streetlight, before the patrol unit arrived, Rhodes had taken the cameras they found hidden in the reporter’s baseball cap and eyeglasses and erased everything on the drives. All Dick Harvey had from the night were memories. She was about to tell Barrera about it, but he didn’t seem all that interested anymore. A bottom-feeder like Dick Harvey was the least of his problems right now. Especially if Harvey couldn’t produce any video to back up his claims.

  “I didn’t think you knew anything,” he said. “When I talked to Rhodes, he didn’t, either. It’s probably for the best.”

  “Where’s Rhodes?”

  “Following a lead in San Diego. Tito turned it up this afternoon. Their case broke wide open. They should be back in three or four days. When was the last time you got any sleep?”

  “I’m good.”

  “You don’t look it,” he said. “You eat? You want some Chinese food?”

  “I had something a couple hours ago.”

  “Well then, go home and get some rest. I need tomorrow to be better than today.”

  She didn’t say anything. She didn’t take what he’d said as a slight. And for reasons she couldn’t explain, she wished that Rhodes wasn’t out of town. But after slipping the murder book into her briefcase and heading for the door, she turned back.

  “Who is Dan Cobb?”

  Barrera seemed surprised by the question and took several moments to think it over. When he finally spoke, his voice had changed and become more reflective.

  “He used to be a good cop,” he said.

  “Then you know him.”

  Barrera nodded. “I know him. You’re sitting at his desk.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re sitting at Cobb’s desk. You replaced him.”

  Time seemed to stop. Barrera was gazing at her from his chair on the other side of the table. Lena could feel the hairs on the back of her neck lifting away from her skin.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  Barrera looked at the cartons of Chinese food and pushed them away. “Cobb had personal issues,” he said. “He went on leave and was reassigned. It’s over now. Let’s leave it at that.”

  She didn’t want to leave it at that. But when Barrera’s cell started ringing and he waved her out of the office, she walked onto the section floor and moved in behind her desk. It was made of oak, and like all the furniture on the floor, it was the same age as the building. She gazed at the file holder, the papers strewn across the top. She could almost see Cobb sitting in her chair.

  And then a memory surfaced—something she had noticed when she was first promoted to the division and assigned the desk. Something she’d become used to because she saw it every day. She cleared the papers away from the right side of the desktop and found the mark on its surface—a small section of the oak finish that hadn’t faded over time. It was a rectangle the size of a snapshot, just like the one she had seen taped to Cobb’s desk earlier in the day. That discolored photo of the sun setting into an ocean behind a grove of palm trees; the shot he’d taken in Hawaii fifteen years ago.

  She took a step back.

  Cobb had been sent away on leave, demoted and reassigned. When he asked to see her ID this afternoon, he knew exactly who she was.

  Not just the new deal, but his replacement.

  21

  Personal issues …

  She could see it now. Cobb standing in front of the door with his hands in his pockets stirring change. When he’d asked to see her badge, Cobb had been playing her.

  Lena blocked it out as she turned up the volume on her cell. It was Vaughan, calling back, and she could barely hear him.

  “Where are you?” she said.

  “Looking for you on the third floor. Barrera said you just left.”

  “I’m across the street in the garage,” she said.

  “Doing what?”

  “Waiting on the next shift change. I’m trying to hitch a ride home.”

  “I’ll see you in five minutes.”

  She walked down the aisle to the guard shack, pushing the keys to the Crown Vic through the slot in the window. There was no point in driving the car home. Beck had called and her TSX was en route from the Westside. After tonight she would be anonymous again. Invisible.

  She told the guard that she’d left the car on the second floor and gave him the space number. The old man smiled, then looked past her and shrugged—the air conditioner in his shack was too loud to speak over. But even without words, she understood what he meant.

  It was late and hot, and summer was three months early.

  She gazed across the street. Vaughan had just exited the building and was headed for the visitor spaces in the VIP lot. As he reached what looked like a Ford crossover, he spotted her on the sidewalk and waved, then pulled his car around to pick her up. Within minutes they were cruising on the freeway toward Hollywood Hills. Lena settled into the leather seat, listening to the hum of the engine and studying Vaughan’s face in the soft light from the dash.

  “How bad was it?” she said.

  “The press conference? We’ve got bigger problems than that, Lena.”

  “I was thinking about Higgins. I saw him at the coroner’s office. He was shouting at someone on the phone. I thought it might be you.”

  Vaughan flashed a tired grin at her. “It wasn’t me,” he said. “I got it in person about fifteen minutes ago. We had a meet and greet in his office. When he was done, I thought I’d see if I could find you. I’m glad I tried.”

  “I met Cobb,” she said.

  “Higgins told me.”

  They were passing Echo Park. Lena glanced at the lake, then began to recount her meeting with Cobb in the interrogation room. By the time they reached the Beachwood exit and started up Gower Street into the hills, she had filled in Vaughan on most of what she’d read in the murder book. He seemed particularly interested in the photo Lena had found in the memory box by Lily Hight’s bed. The picture of Jacob Gant that Cobb’s investigation had missed. Vaughan saw it exactly the same way she did.

  No one would keep a photograph of her stalker hidden beside her bed. Hight’s claim that Gant had been stalking his daughter didn’t make sense.

  The road steepened as it twisted through the hills. When they rolled out of the last curve, Lena pointed out her driveway and Vaughan made the turn. She could see the TSX park
ed in front of the garage—the metallic-gray finish glistening beneath the outdoor lights. Beck had delivered her car as promised and left to make his next pickup in Burbank. The TSX may have been two years old, but looked new.

  She turned back as Vaughan passed the garage and pulled to a stop beside the house. He kept the engine running—the air-conditioning—and seemed to be taken with the view of the basin below. It was a remarkably clear night, the lights from the city shimmering through the heat all the way to Long Beach.

  “Would you like to come in?” she asked.

  He loosened his tie, still gazing at the city below the hill. “Can I get a rain check?” he asked. “I’ve got the kids this week. I need to go home and give their nanny a break. Maybe spend an hour or two watching them sleep.”

  “I understand.”

  Vaughan became quiet. Lena could tell that he wasn’t seeing the view anymore, but thinking something over, so she waited. After several minutes, he turned to her.

  “When Higgins left the autopsy to ream me out tonight, he told me about Cobb calling Bennett. I thought it was strange. If Cobb had a problem handing over the murder book, why didn’t he just say something to his supervisor?”

  “I felt the same way,” she said.

  “And why was there any problem at all? From his point of view, the case should have been over a long time ago.”

  Lena nodded. “If it didn’t end for him with the verdict, it should’ve ended last night.”

  Vaughan leaned against the door to face her. “There was this case in New York,” he said. “Suffolk County, Long Island. Very similar circumstances, Lena. A seventeen-year-old was accused of murdering his parents for their money. The detective was a seasoned bull known for pushing suspects over the edge. The DA backed him up just like Higgins. The prosecutors went for the jugular just like Bennett and Watson. Unfortunately for the kid, he didn’t have a defense attorney like Buddy Paladino. He ended up spending half his life in prison for a crime he didn’t do.”