Murder Season

by Robert Ellis

  “My God, it’s her,” Vaughan said.

  Lena stood up and walked over to the television, mesmerized by the image.

  She was sitting at the bar with a glass of white wine. She had on that red lipstick, and was wearing a black dress without a bra. There wasn’t much to the dress, and her breasts were loose and only partially concealed. The bar was lit entirely by candlelight, and Lily seemed to glow more than everyone else in the darkened room. A man dressed in a pinstripe suit was standing beside her, his head lost in the shadows above the frame. But Escabar had called it right. Lily was laughing with the man and rubbing her fingers over his hand.

  “Does she look sixteen to you?” Vaughan asked.

  Lena shook her head and offered a sad smile that didn’t last very long. Nothing about Lily Hight looked like a teenager on the Friday night one week before she was raped and murdered. The sheen of her blond hair. The glint in her eyes. Her spirit and beauty and magnetic smile. On this night, Lily looked like the kind of woman no man could walk away from.

  Lena tried to push through the shock and concentrate on the man Lily was with. There wasn’t much to see, and the camera angle was more than frustrating. She thought he might be wearing a wedding band, but when Lily finally lifted her fingers away, the man cupped his hand and lowered it below the bar. His pinstripe suit appeared expensive. As he turned and pressed his chest into Lily’s bare shoulder, Lena’s eyes zeroed in on the left lapel of his jacket.

  “There’s a mark on his lapel,” she said.

  Vaughan moved closer to the screen and squinted. “I’ve got it. I see it.”

  “Some sort of flaw in the material.”

  “You think it’s from a pin?”

  It seemed obvious to her now. The more she looked at it—but then the shock returned and that anxious feeling swam back through her chest: Lily was gathering her things. The man was helping her off the stool and taking her away. And with only two short steps they were out of the candlelight’s reach. Lily wasn’t glowing anymore. She was passing through the shadows with the man in the pinstripe suit leading her to the door.

  41

  Lena lowered the visor and reached for her sunglasses. She was driving east on the San Bernardino Freeway, and the sun was beginning to rise directly in front of her. It looked like the freeway was burning at the horizon line—like the road was taking her on a straight shot into the flames.

  She wondered if it wasn’t a warning of some kind.

  Martin Orth had more news. He wanted to see her. Apparently, the news was so “good” that they couldn’t talk about it over the phone.

  She hadn’t slept well last night. She’d dreamed about Lily. She’d dreamed about her in that black dress. Lena had been sitting at the bar beside her, trying to get a bead on the guy who was hitting on her. She could see them holding hands. She could see his pinstripe suit. But every time she looked up at his face, his head was gone. Not missing like it had been forgotten by an artist or framed out by a photographer. The man’s head had been cut off. She could see blood rushing down his shirt and cascading all over his hands. She could see Lily cleaning her fingers with a napkin.

  It wasn’t the kind of dream Lena really wanted to stick with her. She had woken up three or four times—jolted out of her sleep in a cold sweat. But after fifteen or twenty minutes passed, she couldn’t help drifting back into the stream. And each time she’d find herself sitting at that bar again, watching Lily walk out of the club with her killer.

  Lena looked at the pack of Camel Lights on the dash, but fought the urge to light one. Within fifteen minutes she had reached the crime lab, passed through security, and was walking down the hall to Martin Orth’s office. Because of the early hour, there weren’t many people around. About halfway down she noticed a fragrance in the air—a new building smell that seemed to permeate the hall. The scent worked like a time machine and brought back memories of being a girl in the second grade and walking to class on her first day of school. Memories of going to work with her dad, a welder who worked on high-rise buildings and forever changed the skyline in Denver.

  Why was she thinking these thoughts? Why was she dreaming these dreams?

  She found Orth at his desk. He was staring at his Mr. Coffee coffeemaker and trying to appear patient while it sputtered and brewed. He looked a mile or two past tired and more than ready to drink the entire pot on his own.

  “Okay,” she said. “Tell me what I need to know.”

  Orth’s eyes moved away from the coffeemaker and found her by the door.

  “You can arrest Hight,” he said. “The blood on his shoe came from Gant. No doubt about it. Hight was at Club 3 AM the night Bosco and Gant were shot. Hight was in the room.”

  Lena sat in the chair by Orth’s desk. His eyes had moved back to the coffeemaker, and there was something wrong with his voice.

  “I’m not arresting Tim Hight for anything,” she said.

  “Why not? The DNA proves that he was there.”

  And so did the cocaine that they found at his house, the street cam photograph of Hight driving away from the club, maybe even the hundred-dollar bills. But that’s all any of it proved—that Hight was there.

  Lena had been chewing it over ever since Orth gave her the results from Lily’s jeans linking her murder to a third man. There had to be another explanation for why Tim Hight was at the club the night Bosco and Gant were shot and killed. After remembering Gant’s brother telling her that Gant and Hight had argued earlier in the day, she’d put it together and thought she knew what the argument was about.

  Gant had to have told Hight that he was on the brink of discovering who really murdered his daughter. Gant would have blurted it out in the heat of the moment.

  He didn’t kill Lily, and he and Johnny Bosco were going to prove it tonight.

  Hight never would have believed him, and so the argument would have progressed. But Hight would have kept an eye on Gant. And Bosco’s involvement would have worked on him over the course of the day. When Gant took off to meet Bosco, Hight might have been stewing on it long enough to follow him.

  “Hight’s the one,” Orth said. “But you don’t look like you’re buying it, Lena.”

  “I’m not,” she said. “We’re way past that, Marty.”

  Orth started laughing. It came from deep inside the man and there was a certain madness to it. Lena had never seen him act this way before. She didn’t know how to take it and even thought that he might be losing his mind.

  “You want a cup of coffee?” he asked.

  “No thanks.”

  Orth started laughing again as he pushed himself out of his chair, poured his brew into a Dodgers mug, and returned to his desk.

  “What is it, Marty? Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” he said, sipping his coffee. “Better than fine. You don’t want to arrest Hight, and that’s a good thing, Lena. A real good thing. But it’s crazy. Life sure gets crazy sometimes.”

  “What’s crazy? What’s happened?”

  He looked at her for a long time. “The gun that killed Bosco and Gant,” he said finally. “We didn’t need the one Hight bought to make a match.”

  She leaned forward. “Ballistics got a hit.”

  He nodded and seemed nervous. “A big one, Lena. The kind that always seem to come at four-thirty in the morning. You ever hear about a woman named Elvira Wheaten? It was a drive-by shooting in Exposition Park. Must have been eight years ago. Her infant grandson got killed, too.”

  It felt like all of the air in the room had been sucked through the vents into the basement. Something inside Lena stiffened.

  Bennett and Cobb’s last big case together.

  She nodded at Orth, but she didn’t say anything. The hairs on the back of her neck were beginning to rise. She could see it—all of it—before her eyes.

  “The gun that killed her,” Orth said. “That’s the gun the shooter used to waste Bosco and Gant. And that’s why life’s so crazy, Lena. We checked wit
h Property. It’s a nine-millimeter Smith. It should have been there. It should have been in the box, but it wasn’t. Just like the blood evidence that went missing during the trial. Déjà-fucking-vu.”

  Lena tried to concentrate on her breathing.

  “Did you check the property request cards?” she asked quietly.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Give me the name of the last person to fill out a card.”

  42

  Cobb lived in a rundown apartment building beside Fiesta Liquors and the Rancho Coin Laundry on Vineland Avenue between the two runways at Bob Hope Airport in Burbank. As Lena studied the motel-styled building from her car, it seemed more than obvious that Cobb’s fall had been a brutal plunge straight to the bottom.

  Cobb wasn’t staring into the abyss. He lived there.

  The building offered a five-foot fence with a broken gate as its only means of security. Lena didn’t see a parking lot and circled the block looking for the white Lincoln. Most of the cars she passed didn’t appear roadworthy and in fact looked like they had hit bottom a few years back as well. More than a handful were jacked up on cinder blocks with their wheels ripped off and their windshields blown out. After Lena had made a second pass by Cobb’s building and gained some assurance that he’d left for the day, she pulled into the lot at a Mexican supermarket two blocks south and headed back on foot.

  She was on automatic pilot now. Out of patience. Out of understanding. Out of everything. She knew that if she touched the wheel with her hands, the fucking plane would crash. If she examined what she was doing too closely, the crime she was about to commit, she might realize that the plane was already going down.

  She approached the building, checking the numbers on the doors. She could see Cobb’s apartment on the second floor at the end.

  She took the steps at a brisk pace. Most of the windows she passed were open and she could smell corn tortillas and hot oil burning. She could hear the mix of different languages—mostly Spanish, but Russian and Armenian, too. When she reached the last apartment before Cobb’s, she was startled by an old Mexican woman sitting by her window. The woman’s face appeared more ancient than old and remained expressionless. Even as their eyes met, there was no recognition of the moment. Just two blank eyes staring forward.

  Lena hurried down to Cobb’s door, gave the bell a ring, and looked over her shoulder as she waited for no one to answer. The old woman had moved her chair so that she could watch her.

  Lena turned back to the door, examining the deadbolt and slipping the picks out of her pocket as quickly as she could. Cobb’s deadbolt seemed to match the quality of the building, and Lena guessed that it probably turned toward the hinges. Inserting her tension wrench, she applied only the slightest pressure and began working the pins with a short hook. She could feel them clicking into place. Within ninety seconds she’d hit the last pin and the tension wrench began turning. When the door popped open, she checked on that old woman again. She was still watching her. Still working that dead stare.

  Lena entered Cobb’s apartment, closing the door and throwing the deadbolt. She didn’t want to spend too much time here. Fifteen minutes at the most. Maybe ten with that woman out there watching.

  She had learned how to pick a lock from a serial burglar she’d arrested while working in Hollywood more than five years ago. Jonathan Redgrave graduated from Stanford with an MBA, but spent the next thirty years of his life working nights and becoming a very wealthy man. She knew from the time they’d spent together in an interrogation room that a successful burglary came down to just three essential components. First, the score had to be worth the risk. Second, you needed to know how to enter the location without being detected. And third, and most important of all, you needed a backup exit just in case everything went to shit.

  Cobb’s apartment was a small, sparsely furnished one-bedroom. She checked the windows. The best way out if things went to shit was through the one in the bedroom, but it would require a twenty-foot drop onto concrete. Lena slid open the window and played through a possible escape in her head. Once she had it down, she decided to search the place in reverse. She wouldn’t begin in the bedroom the way most pros do. She’d work her way toward it.

  The living room and kitchen were a single fifteen-by-twenty-foot space that probably hadn’t seen a fresh coat of paint in fifteen years. The couch was pushed against the wall, and an old kitchen table made of steel tubing and Formica was placed before the window with two chairs. She noted the computer—and the receipts and loose change and unopened mail. It looked like Cobb used the table as a desk and the wall beside it as a combination filing cabinet and bookcase. Stacks of files and papers were piled on the floor by an old TV.

  Lena switched on the computer. While it booted up, she rifled through the files stacked against the wall. Everything she saw appeared to be related to Cobb’s personal finances. Skimming through a recent bank statement revealed that most of Cobb’s paycheck was going to his ex-wife. What money remained bought a life here on Vineland Avenue beside a liquor store and a Laundromat.

  Lena shook it off and glanced at the computer. It was up, but it wasn’t her priority. She checked her watch. Five minutes were gone. She needed to move faster.

  The kitchen drawers and cabinets held no secrets, nor did the refrigerator or freezer. On the sill over the sink she noticed a photograph set in a cheap plastic frame. From a distance she thought that it might be a shot of Cobb with his wife and children before things fell apart. But when she picked it up, she realized that it was the photograph that came with the frame. The people in the shot were models representing an American family that still had a piece of the American dream. They wore big smiles and appeared well rested and well fed.

  She set down the frame, wishing she hadn’t seen it, then checked the cushions on the couch and returned to Cobb’s bedroom.

  She could feel the weight of the clock on her back. She could still see that old woman by her open window in her head. But worse, she could hear her burglar friend telling her that she’d broken his second rule, and it was an important one.

  She ripped through Cobb’s chest—one drawer after the next—disappointed that the gun wasn’t here. She lifted the mattress, and looked beneath the bed. Moving to the closet, she checked the top shelf, searched through Cobb’s clothing, and bent over for a quick look at the floor. And then she stopped.

  It wasn’t the gun. It was a blue binder hidden behind a shoe box.

  She pushed the shoes away and grabbed it. When she read the table of contents—when she saw Lily Hight’s name at the top and noted that the binder was overflowing with paperwork she had never seen before—she didn’t stop to think it over.

  She held it tight and closed the door.

  Then she hustled into the living room for a quick look at Cobb’s computer. The hard drive revealed nothing out of the ordinary. But as she checked his bookmarks and skimmed through his email, she slowed down some.

  It looked like Cobb was a frequent visitor of the dating Web sites. Lena counted at least one hundred e-mails from a woman calling herself Betty Kim. Picking an e-mail at random, Kim was describing her body and what she wanted in a sexual relationship. She called herself “hot,” left nothing to the imagination, and wanted to send Cobb a couple of nude photos. In his reply, Cobb stated that he loved eating sushi and going to the movies. He agreed that she sounded hot and would like to see the photos as soon as possible.

  Lena’s mind shot to the surface.

  She could hear that old woman shouting at someone in Spanish. When the shadow of a man moved across the curtains, she felt the rush of adrenaline and shut down the computer. Cobb was home. She could hear his key in the lock. Grabbing the murder book, she fled into the bedroom and tossed the binder out the window. Then she climbed outside, clinging to the sill, and grinding to push the window closed.

  She heard the front door open. She heard Cobb’s voice through the glass. She made the drop and hit the concrete hard. But sh
e was on automatic pilot now. Out of patience. Out of understanding. Out of everything except bullets.

  A jet flashed through the sky with its landing gear down, the noise deafening, the ground shaking. Lena grabbed the murder book and ran up the street as fast as she could.

  43

  She hung up the phone and turned to Vaughan.

  “It’s a TracFone,” she said. “There’s no name attached to the number. The phone hasn’t been used since.”

  They were working in that corner office at the end of the hall, the one that wasn’t wired for picture and sound. Cobb’s murder books were laid out on the table side by side. They had begun by pulling Lily’s cell-phone bills from both binders for comparison, and unfortunately, they didn’t match. Someone had been calling Lily the week before she was murdered. The calls began the day after she left Club 3 AM with the man in the pinstripe suit and continued with frequency during the week.

  “When was the last call made?” Vaughan asked.

  “Early evening on the night she was murdered. They spoke for seven minutes.”

  “The guy she met at the club,” he said. “The killer.”

  Lena nodded, glancing at the cell-phone bill that had been in the murder book Cobb had given her. “So why isn’t this number listed on this bill?”

  The answer seemed obvious. They were dealing with a group of desperate people. People who felt cornered and had been willing to manipulate and manufacture evidence. People who didn’t want her or anyone else in the future to see that phone number. They were dealing with a man like Dan Cobb who had filled out a property request card from a case he worked eight years ago because he needed a gun. The same 9-mm Smith that was used to murder Bosco and Gant. And in all probability, the same gun that put three holes in Escabar and was used to coldcock his guard before that trash bag went over his head and the man smothered to death.

  Vaughan opened his briefcase and pulled out a thick file. “That’s not the question, Lena. The question is, what did Bennett and Watson use in court?”