by Robert Ellis
Orth didn’t seem to understand what was going on. Nor did Lena, although she immediately remembered the clip Vaughan had shown her of Cobb on the witness stand. He had been holding one of Lily’s boots when he lost his composure and said he needed a glass of water. She thought it might have been the right boot, but wasn’t certain.
She set the left boot down on the table and began with the right. Nothing about the boot seemed out of the ordinary. The leather wasn’t scratched or stained. The lining remained free of any marks.
And then she turned it over. She picked up the left boot, glanced at the sole, then discarded it.
Lily Hight’s right ankle had been broken during the attack. And now she could see how it had happened. The sole of her right boot wasn’t just worn. It looked like someone had blasted away the rubber with a high-speed grinder.
She could feel Cobb’s eyes on her. She knew that they had never left her. When she looked up at his face—his hardened, brutal face—he nodded slightly and it felt like an electric shock working across her shoulder blades.
“Lily was trapped in the passenger seat of a moving car,” she said. “She was trying to get out. Trying to escape. That’s how she broke her ankle. In a moving car.”
Orth took the boot for a look of his own and seemed stunned. Cobb sat down on a stool and began rubbing his knees.
“I was on the stand when I noticed,” he said. “I saw it and knew that I’d fucked up. But we need to make sure of something, and I couldn’t do it after the trial without people noticing.”
“Make sure of what?” Orth asked.
Cobb didn’t answer the question. Instead, he asked the SID supervisor to dress the mannequin in Lily’s T-shirt and blouse and place it in a sitting position on the table. Lena suddenly realized what Cobb was up to.
It was all about the screwdriver that the killer had plunged into Lily Hight’s back. It was all about the holes the murder weapon punched through her clothing—a T-shirt that would have clung to her skin, and a blouse that was loose enough to move. It was all about the fact that when her back was straight, the holes in the two pieces of clothing didn’t match up.
Orth shook his head and gasped as he noticed.
Then Cobb began pushing the mannequin forward an inch at a time from the waist. When the holes in the two pieces of clothing finally merged into one, it was clear to everyone in the room.
Lily Hight had been leaning away from the killer with her foot out the door of the car when he plunged the screwdriver into her back.
“My God,” Orth said.
47
Vaughan walked out of his house, took three steps, then spotted Lena standing in front of the white Lincoln parked in his driveway and stopped dead in his tracks. His body locked up. He looked afraid and uncertain.
“What’s going on, Lena?” he said quietly. “Are you okay?”
His eyes were zeroed in on Cobb behind the wheel. When they rocked back over to her, she nodded. She’d made a mistake. She should have called him on the drive over and told him what happened. She gave him the bottom line as quickly as she could.
“Cobb’s the one who tipped off Paladino,” she said. “Lily wasn’t murdered in her bedroom. The crime scene was staged.”
Vaughan didn’t move. “What are those marks on your neck? Are you sure this isn’t some kind of trap?”
“It’s not a trap, but things aren’t cool. We need to talk, Greg. Let’s go.”
He seemed reluctant, but climbed into the backseat nonetheless. When Cobb offered his hand, Vaughan shook it without saying anything—his eyes big and glassy and still absorbing the shock.
Cobb drove south on the Pacific Coast Highway heading for Tim Hight’s house. While they drove, Lena gave Vaughan a detailed briefing on what had happened at the crime lab. Vaughan took it in with some reservation until Lena mentioned Lily’s right boot. He had seen Cobb’s performance on the witness stand with his own eyes, and now the reasons behind it were clear.
The drive took less than fifteen minutes. As Hight’s house came into view, Cobb pulled over to the curb and switched off his headlights. The moment reminded Lena of the first time she and Rhodes had set eyes on the two houses. Every window in the Gants’ house radiated a warm incandescent light. But for the glow of a police scanner in the sunroom, every window in Hight’s house was dark.
“You see the head of his cigarette,” Cobb whispered.
Lena nodded. “I see it.”
“He just sits there,” Vaughan said. “Listening to his scanner and staring at Gant’s house. Why do you think he does it?”
“Because he knows,” Cobb said.
“Knows what?”
“The killer’s still out there, Vaughan. The one who took his daughter away. He loved her.”
Lena glanced at Cobb. “We can put him in the murder room at the club. He saw what happened to Gant. He’s known all week.”
“Why hasn’t he said anything?” Vaughan asked.
“Same reason I didn’t,” Cobb said. “He’s probably scared. I am.”
Vaughan moved closer to the window. “So where did you find the blood?”
“In the driveway by the back door,” Cobb said.
They were talking about something Orth mentioned before Lena and Cobb left the crime lab. The possibility that SID hadn’t mishandled the evidence, and that the blood found its way to the driveway as the killer moved Lily’s body into the house.
But Lena wasn’t really listening to them. She was thinking about the gun the killer was using. The gun she’d originally thought Cobb had pulled out of Property. The 9-mm Smith that had been traced back to the drive-by shootings of Elvira Wheaten and her grandson eight years ago. Before tonight she had attributed the use of this weapon to what she considered Cobb’s poor judgment and lack of self-control.
Before tonight when she found out who Cobb really was.
Now she realized that the killer had to be using this particular gun for a reason. The question was why? Why would anyone use a weapon that he knew could be identified so easily? And who walked into Property calling themselves Dan Cobb and filled out that request card? Who walked out with the gun?
Higgins couldn’t have pulled it off. Bennett seemed just as unlikely. And Lena had seen Debi Watson’s swollen boobs. No one would have mistaken her for Dan Cobb.
But Jerry Spadell was different. Way different.
Spadell had been out of the loop for years, yet still would have known how everything worked. The Property Room was open 24/7, the clerks were civilians. He would have had access to Cobb’s badge number through the DA’s office and known how to make a counterfeit ID. He would have timed his visit for late at night. But even more, Spadell knew how to use a gun. Lena imagined that he had more than enough experience to handle whatever was asked of him as long as the money was good. And Spadell had that grizzled look of a guy who knew how to pull the trigger and not look back.
She wondered if that’s what they were really dealing with now.
A man who raped and murdered Lily Hight, then hired Spadell to kill four more people in order to clean things up. The man Lena had caught with Spadell breaking into Bosco’s house in Malibu. The man who was searching through security videos from Club 3 AM, and ran away when Lena knocked on the door.
The district attorney of Los Angeles County.
Jimmy J. Higgins in a pinstripe suit.
The flow stopped—the inner dialogue. She didn’t like it. Something about it didn’t feel right. Not yet anyway. Not without an answer.
Why that gun?
Her mind surfaced. Vaughan was saying something about Bennett, Watson, and Higgins leaving an electronic trail on their computer network. E-mails that had to be there but were buried in the system. When they quieted down, Lena turned to Cobb.
“Why that gun?” she said. “Why is the killer using a gun he knew would be traced?”
She could see him tossing it over, but he didn’t say anything.
“Why?” s
he said.
“I’ve been thinking the same thing, Gamble. And there’s only one answer.”
“What’s that?”
Cobb gave her a look. “He wanted it to be traced.”
“But that’s not an answer.”
“I know,” he said.
A sudden burst of bright light flooded the interior of the car. Lena checked the rear window and saw a white van rolling through the curve slowly. As the van idled by, she turned and watched the driver park in an open space five cars up the block. After several minutes, the door opened and Dick Harvey hopped out carrying a small video camera.
He looked up and down the street, but didn’t see them. Cobb’s Lincoln never would have registered. And he seemed too preoccupied by Tim Hight’s house. He was staring at the sunroom—Hight’s silhouette and the bead of light from his cigarette still visible in the dim light cast from his police scanner.
Lena traded looks with Cobb and Vaughan, but no one said anything.
Harvey was taking a second look around the neighborhood. Satisfied that no one was around, he slipped through the gate and into Hight’s yard. Lena watched as he zigzagged his way through the shadows and finally reached the window. After adjusting the lens, he brought the camera up to his eye.
Hight was suffering. And Harvey wanted the shot for another episode of Blanket Hollywood. Thus was the credo of the lowlife. The worldview of modern scum as seen on every TV network every night.
48
Debi Watson hadn’t returned her call, and Lena worried that the more time the deputy DA took to think it over, the less likely she was to open up and talk. In spite of the hour, Lena had left a second message on Watson’s service when she returned last night and a third this morning as soon as she got up. If she didn’t hear back by noon, she decided to show up at her office and force the issue.
Lena hadn’t slept well last night. She couldn’t stop thinking about that 9-mm Smith. She agreed with Cobb. The killer was using the gun because he wanted it to be traced.
But the question was why? And it was feeding on her.
It seemed more than obvious that it had something to do with what happened eight years ago.
Lena had spent the morning reading about the drive-by shootings of Elvira Wheaten and her grandson. She hadn’t remembered the case when Vaughan first mentioned it to her. But she remembered the eyewitness, Wes Brown, who had been murdered three months after Bennett and Higgins won the trial and Higgins took office. At some point it dawned on her that her memory had been jogged for a reason. Wes Brown had a brother who owned a small record label. She didn’t know Reggie Brown, but she knew people who did and managed to get his phone number.
Although Brown agreed to talk to her and even lived near Lena in the hills above Sunset, he refused to meet in any place other than the exact spot where his brother had been gunned down. That spot happened to be in a small park across the street from the empty lot where Wheaten and her grandson had been killed. Apparently, there were two picnic tables underneath the trees. Reggie Brown’s little brother had been playing chess at the table closest to the street on both days. And that’s where she could find Reggie in forty-five minutes.
Her cell phone chirped. Vaughan had sent her a text message. He was at Parker Center working with Keith Upshaw from the Computer Crime Section. They were just getting started. Upshaw had played a key role in the Romeo serial murders a few years back. He was young and brilliant, an ex-hacker that Chief Logan had recruited after speaking with a judge who didn’t want to see Upshaw go to jail. If anyone from the DA’s office deleted their e-mails thinking that they were history, Lena knew that Upshaw would find them and bring them back to life.
She checked her watch, grabbed a bottle of water, and headed out the door. The location in Exposition Park was a half-hour drive south on Western Avenue. But Lena wanted to avoid the traffic in Koreatown. After twenty minutes working surface streets, she made a left turn and started to cut back to Western. The neighborhood changed and she could see the long line of young African-American men standing at the curb waving down cars. She didn’t need to look at a street sign to know where she was. The street was nicknamed the Avenue of the Ghosts because the young men were as thin as stick figures, and their warm brown complexions had been bleached out to a pale gray from a life on crystal meth. They looked like skeletons—horrific Halloween displays that packed guns, dealt crank, and had no chance of finding their way back.
The sight was more than unsettling and she was grateful when she saw Western Avenue ahead and finally reached the park nestled in between a library and an elementary school.
She found Reggie Brown sitting at the picnic table smoking a cigarette and drinking sweet tea. He looked like he might be twenty-five, and was dressed in a pair of black slacks, a red T-shirt, and a Rolex that he wore loose like a bracelet. As Lena approached the table and introduced herself, she didn’t sense any animosity at all.
“I checked you out,” he said. “You’re David Gamble’s sister. We’ve got the same thing goin’ on, huh?”
Lena shrugged and sat down. “You tell me, Reggie. I’m working with a detective—Dan Cobb—do you remember him?”
“Of course, I do. DC. That’s what we used to call him.”
“I know that it’s been eight years. That you might have forgotten details.”
He took a hit on his cigarette. “I haven’t forgotten anything, Lena Gamble. And I never will. I lost my brother just like you did. Have you forgotten anything?”
A moment passed with Lena not sure how to put it into words. “Something happened,” she said finally. “Something that’s come up in a murder case this week. Something that might point back to eight years ago.”
Brown paused a moment to consider what she was saying. His eyes were bright and expressive.
“I don’t know what you’re dealing with now,” he said. “But you’re right about one thing. Eight years ago something happened, and his name was Steven Bennett. I’m surprised Cobb didn’t tell you. He knows as much as I do.”
She looked away, trying not to show any surprise. Why would Cobb hold out on her after last night?
“Tell me about Bennett,” she said.
“He’s a motherfucker. A world-class motherfucker. Wes was sitting at this table. The empty lot’s right over there across from the library. He hears the shooting and hides underneath the bench. He sees Mrs. Wheaten go down. He sees the faces in the car as they drive off. He hears them laughing. My brother knew what he had to do. He helped Cobb ID every one of them.”
“But then he wouldn’t testify in court,” she said. “He couldn’t come out in the open. It would have been suicide.”
Brown grimaced at the thought. “Snitches wear stitches,” he said. “Wes knew it. I knew it. Cobb knew it.”
“But Bennett didn’t?”
“That’s why he’s a motherfucker, Lena Gamble. Bennett knew it just the same as everybody else. The difference was that he didn’t care.”
“He kept the pressure up,” she said. “He wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
“He’d call three or four times a day. And he wasn’t asking anymore, okay? He was telling. He was screaming at Wes. He was threatening my brother with jail time.”
It hung there. In the heat of the day. Lena could feel the rage building inside her. She wished Vaughan was with her to hear this.
“But your brother didn’t give in,” she said finally.
Brown pushed his tea aside. “The trial comes and goes, and it turns out they didn’t even need Wes. Bennett and Higgins win the thing outright, and Higgins becomes the next DA. The crisis in the neighborhood is finally over. No one knows what Wes did. Everything’s fading into the past.”
Lena could sense what was coming—what had to be coming—from the expression on Brown’s face.
“But it didn’t fade into the past,” she said quietly. “After the trial—after the election—Bennett called back and told your brother that it wasn’t over.�
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Brown nodded, lowering his head and wiping his eyes as the memory welled up before him. When he spoke, his soft voice shook in agony.
“It happened the next day,” he said. “They waited until everybody could see. Bennett sent a cop to the house. When he saw Wes with his friends, the cop flashed a big dumb-ass smile at him, tipped his hat as if to say thanks, and drove away. Two hours later, Wes was sitting right where I’m sitting. Wes was doing what he liked best, sitting here and playing chess. Me and my mom don’t think he saw it coming, okay? He was still holding a piece in his hand. Still making a move when they gunned my baby brother down.”
Brown dropped his cigarette on the grass and didn’t move to pick it up. His eyes were turned inward, lost in the past.
“Did Bennett ever call back?”
Brown shook his head. “No,” he said. “He never did. But last year I saw him at Club 3 AM. Once in a while I’d go. Once in a while he’d be there. I’m not sure how a guy like Bennett gets in, okay? But somehow he did. He’d sit there at the bar and stare at me like he wanted me to know that it was him. Like he’d taken Wes away from us and there was no way anyone could ever prove it. Those green eyes of his. A friend of mine who served in Iraq called them desert eyes … snake eyes. They don’t move and they don’t blink. They just push through you and shoot back.”
“Is that all you ever saw him do there?”
“I’d watch him try to hit on chicks,” he said. “But all they ever did was look at the piece of shit and laugh. He stopped coming after a while. Maybe Johnny Bosco told him to get lost. I asked Bosco about it more than once.”
Lena dug into her pocket for a cigarette and lit up. The sun was in her eyes and she moved to the other side of the table and sat beside Brown in the shade. She looked at the fence around the park, at the empty lot on the other side of the street.
When Bennett couldn’t bully an eyewitness into risking his life, he fingered him and had him killed. There was a theme to the man. A method. A sense of repetition. And finally, an answer to the question, why that gun?
