by Robert Ellis
Morphine. The Greek god of dreams.
Rhodes stepped over to the computer, eyed the screen saver, and gave the mouse a tap. When the computer woke up, a word processor was running that seemed to contain Joseph Fontaine’s last words. Lena joined Rhodes by the monitor and read the note.
“If they think we’re gonna buy this as a suicide,” he said, “they’re crazy.”
“It would’ve worked if we didn’t know who Jennifer Bloom really was.”
“It still might, Lena. If we’re out of the mix. What did Justin Tremell say to you in the interrogation room?”
She turned back to Fontaine and gazed at his corpse. “Jennifer McBride had met someone who wanted to help her. A client she called her personal patron. Someone from Beverly Hills who liked it kinky and made her dress up in a nurse’s costume.”
“A costume they bought and planted on their own,” he said. “It’s all there. They set Fontaine up and did everything except give you his name.”
Lena agreed. There was no doubt about the play or what Dean Tremell wanted them to think. Fontaine was their fall guy. Someone who talked to Ramira. Someone Dean Tremell wanted to get rid of just as much as Jennifer Bloom. And if they could turn her into a whore, then making Fontaine look like her client and victim was easy. The one who sent her the fifty thousand dollars and hired a hit man to take her out. A doctor with a guilty conscience who took his own life six days before Christmas.
“Let’s check the rest of the house,” Lena said.
“You think Greta Deitrich’s here?”
“Where else could she be?”
They searched the rooms on the second floor, then made a sweep through the third floor bedrooms and attic. The exercise proved fruitless and burned up almost half an hour. Returning to the kitchen, Rhodes located the door to the basement and they headed downstairs. The footprint seemed to mirror the exterior of the house and had been divided into separate rooms. They found a wood shop that didn’t look like it had been used in a long time. Three more rooms that probably once served as a home office, but which, like the wood shop, no one used anymore. Beside the utility room, a small greenhouse opened to the side of the house where the hill had been carved out. As they reached the end, they came to a storage room and found shelves packed with oversized items bought at Costco.
Greta Dietrich wasn’t here.
They headed back toward the steps. As they passed the laundry room, Lena noticed an alcove and paused. The shelves were lined with canned goods, bins of onions and potatoes, and bottles of olive oil. And that’s when she spotted the freezer in the corner. It wasn’t an upright. Instead, it opened like a chest and couldn’t have been more than a few years old.
She lifted the handle and pulled the door up, the frosty air rising into her face. As the mist cleared, she gazed into the ice box and tried to focus. She didn’t see what she expected to see. Not a single pizza was here. Not a frozen dinner or a bag of vegetables. The longer she stared at the contents, the more she thought she might be in a grocery store. There were at least a hundred small packages carefully stacked in three rows. Each package was approximately the same size and wrapped in plain white butcher’s paper. And each was labeled and dated by hand with a Sharpie.
No more than ten seconds had passed since she first opened the lid. It just felt longer because the realization was such a big step. Because she had to break through the uniformity of the packages to see the darkness and understand what she was really looking at.
Rhodes picked up a package and read the label. “Does this say what I think it does?”
Lena glanced at it. Greta Dietrich was here.
41
We need to talk,” Rhodes said. “Before anything else, we need to talk.”
They were sitting in the Crown Vic. Parked in Fontaine’s driveway. Passing a cigarette back and forth.
“They’re wrapping things up,” he said. “They’re killing everybody who knows.”
Lena nodded without speaking, took a deep pull on the smoke, and passed it over. It didn’t feel like there was enough nicotine in it.
“You said that it looked like Ramira had been dead for a couple of hours,” Rhodes said.
“Two hours. No more than that.”
“Do you think Klinger’s good for the murder? Did it look like he’d been inside the house for that long?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But Ramira’s knuckles were scratched. He fought back. And Klinger looked roughed up.”
“What do you mean, roughed up?”
“I saw his face. He had a black eye.”
Rhodes shook his head. “He didn’t get that from Ramira.”
“How could you know that?”
“After I dropped you off last night,” he whispered. “After you picked up your car, I drove over to his place.”
A moment passed in the darkness. Their eyes met.
“I thought you might be right,” he said. “I thought they might try to close the case and stamp Albert Poole’s name on it. I needed to take that off the table, so I did.”
Another moment passed. Longer than the first.
“Is Poole off the table?” she asked.
Rhodes looked at her again and nodded with assurance.
Lena reached for the cigarette. “Klinger’s hands are dirty, Stan. And so are Chief Logan’s. But there’s no proof that either one of them murdered Ramira. I didn’t see it happen. I only caught the aftermath. Klinger could have been there for a lot of reasons. He was searching the place. He found the file.”
“If that’s what you think, then why did he let you walk out with it?”
She shook her head. “It was his moment. His call. I can’t answer that.”
“What else?” Rhodes asked.
“There’s a theme to the murders.”
“What theme?”
“Bloom was found in the trash outside Tiny’s. In the garage on Barton Avenue we found a meat grinder. Ramira was stabbed with an instant read thermometer. And now we’ve got Greta Dietrich on ice.”
“So Ramira’s murder fits,” Rhodes said. “This guy we’re looking for did all of them.”
Lena shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Her voice faded. The car became quiet. She could see Rhodes thinking it over. Weighing the odds. After a few minutes, he broke the silence.
“When I was at the hospital last weekend, I met this guy in the waiting room. He was from L.A. and we started talking. After a while I asked him what he did and he told me that he was a professional seat filler.”
“What’s a seat filler?”
“I asked him the same thing. Do you ever watch those awards shows on TV?”
Lena shook her head.
“Me, either,” Rhodes said. “So he told me that when a celebrity goes out for a smoke or needs to use the bathroom, this guy takes their seat. When they come back, he gets up and leaves.”
“What’s the point?”
“He said that the TV producers don’t want to see empty seats when the cameras pan through the audience. They want the place to look full, so they hire professionals to fill the seats.”
“Okay,” she said. “So why do I need to know this?”
Rhodes took a drag on the smoke and passed it back. “He said that celebrities don’t like being looked at. It makes them feel uncomfortable, and they don’t like feeling uncomfortable. You have to trade places without making eye contact. If you can’t pull it off, you’re fired. He said it’s not as easy as it sounds.”
“So, this guy makes a living not looking at people.”
“I know,” Rhodes said. “He was an idiot. But the reason I mention it is because of Dean Tremell. That’s who he is. A guy who’s connected and doesn’t want anyone to make eye contact. A guy who’ll pay people whatever they want so that he can walk on air. How do we get to him? And other than Barrera, who can we trust?”
Two big questions without answers. Lena glanced out the window at Fontaine’s mansion. The windows wer
e dark again. They had left the place exactly as they found it.
“What you’re saying is that we need to call this in.”
Rhodes’s eyes were on her. “And we both know what it looks like inside the house.”
“It looks exactly the way Tremell wants it to look.”
“Everybody’s dead, Lena. Everybody who knows. Except for me and you and the witness, everybody’s gone.”
“Avadar thinks that the witness bolted.”
“Then it’s just me and you.”
“There’s one more,” she said.
“Who?”
“A police commissioner. Senator Alan West.”
“You still got the ID blocker working on your cell?”
She nodded.
“Then maybe you better call nine-one-one.”
She could see the fear on his face as soon as the door opened. The two bodyguards standing beside the senator bristling with suspicion.
“Relax,” West said to the men. “They’re friends.”
The suspicion never left the bodyguards’ eyes, but they took a few steps back just the same. They were big men. Two heavyweights wearing dark suits and rough faces with no interest in hiding the fact that they were armed. As Lena entered with Rhodes, she looked around the house and wondered if two of these guys would be enough. The senator lived just north of the Strip in the hills off Hedges Place. The house was big and modern and designed to take advantage of the views.
And that was the problem. There were too many windows. And too many views.
West sent his bodyguards off and led them into the living room. The spark in his blue eyes was gone, and so was the smile she remembered when they met last week. He was dressed casually in a sweater and slacks and appeared distraught.
“I can’t reach Denny,” he was saying. “I’ve been trying all day, and I can’t reach him.”
Lena gave him a look as he sat down by the fireplace. “You’re not going to,” she said.
West became quiet after that and lowered his head.
“Tell us about the book you were helping him with,” she said. “Tell us about Formula D.”
West attempted to pull himself together, but not with much success.
“Why don’t you tell me what happened to Denny,” he said in a quiet voice.
Lena traded looks with Rhodes, who sat on the couch and reached inside his pocket for his pad and pen.
“Denny was murdered,” she said. “His house, ransacked.”
“Did you find anything?”
“A file.”
“What was in it?”
“Transcripts from interviews for his book. We haven’t had a chance to read it yet.”
“Why not?”
“Fontaine’s dead, too.”
It hung there. The weight of the moment pressing down on them. West sat back in his chair and gazed out the window. His face had turned as gray as his hair.
“Then I guess I’m next,” he whispered.
“You’re a police commissioner. A former U.S. senator. We can provide as many uniformed officers as you want or need.”
West shook his head. “The chief’s in bed with the district attorney. The district attorney’s in bed with anyone who’ll write a check. You’re forgetting that I know the players. One of them can afford to write a lot of checks.”
“You mean Dean Tremell.”
West nodded. “How close are you to putting a case against him together?”
“We’ve identified the girl. We know why she was murdered, but don’t have much detail.”
“Denny was a good reporter. Very thorough. His notes will probably carry you over the hump.”
“We hope so,” Lena said.
“Is there any way we could talk after you’ve read them. All of a sudden I’m not feeling very well.”
“You were that close?”
“Jennifer’s son died after using the medication,” he said. “She came here to find out why. She met Tremell through his son. I don’t really know the details. Denny had all that. But it sounded like she sat in on one of the kid’s focus groups and got noticed. The old man has a weakness for good-looking women and fell for her. She played along until she gathered enough information to confront Fontaine. From what Denny said, she had Tremell wrapped around her finger. Once she convinced the doctor to talk, she showed up at my office. She didn’t have much faith in the system, so she went to Ramira the same day. She was smart. Denny was her insurance policy.”
His voice died off. His eyes were still fixed on the hills outside the window. Still fixed on the memory.
“We’ll talk after we’ve read Denny’s transcripts,” Lena said.
“I appreciate the courtesy. But there’s one thing you need to know before you go.”
“What’s that?”
“I spoke with Denny last night. I was trying to convince him that we needed help. A friend of mine works for the FBI over in Westwood. It seemed like the right move.”
“What did Denny say?”
“The same thing he’s been saying all along. He needs more information. It’s not time yet.”
“What information?”
“He wanted to confirm something, then turn over everything to you.”
“Confirm what?”
“The name of the man who murdered Jennifer.”
“Denny had a name?”
West turned and finally looked her way. Their eyes met.
“Nathan G. Cava,” he said.
42
Nathan G. Cava was thirty years old, stood five feet ten inches off the ground, and weighed one hundred and eighty-seven pounds. He had blue eyes and blond hair—cropped short but not buzzed—and a tan complexion. From the width of his neck, he looked rugged. From the slope of his shoulders, more than just sturdy. Unfortunately, the information was ten years old. Everything after that read like a blank sheet of paper. Another black hole.
It was 7:00 a.m., Thursday morning, five days before Christmas. They had spent the night working out of the captain’s office with Barrera and Sanchez. Rhodes had a call into his contact over at the DMV and was sitting at his desk on the floor. Barrera was waiting on his friends in Washington, but hadn’t heard back and was snoozing in his chair. In another three hours, they would lose Sanchez because he was still locked into testifying in court.
Lena took a sip of coffee, comparing her notes with the interviews Ramira had conducted. Any doubt about the track they were on was completely gone now. The motive for the murders, ultra clear.
Joseph Fontaine had supervised the clinical trials for Formula D. The problem was that he had a financial interest in the outcome. According to Fontaine, both he and Tremell knew that the drug was dangerous before they won FDA approval and launched the advertising campaign. Jennifer Bloom had used her body to get close to Tremell and proved more than convincing. When she put the pieces together and ended the affair, she confronted Fontaine and threatened to expose the doctor with what she knew. Fontaine realized that he would be ruined either way and decided to talk. It seemed clear to Lena as she read his interview that Fontaine was looking for a deal somewhere down the road. That he thought he would be better off if it looked like he was cooperating and felt some degree of remorse for the things he had done.
But it would have been an upward climb for the wealthy pediatrician. Had he survived, the rock he was pushing never would have made it to the top of the hill.
Fontaine had run more than one clinical trial, yet only presented the FDA with the results from a single study that turned out positive. Everything real had been buried. Articles were written and published in medical journals that amounted to pure fiction. Key members of the FDA motivated by politics and religion were paid off with cash and the withdrawal of a new morning-after pill that Anders Dahl Pharmaceuticals had been developing. Fontaine admitted that he had lied for the money. And that Tremell knew that he was selling poison, but thought that he could fix the formula while he raked in even more cash. Kids were dy
ing, but that didn’t seem to matter. From what Lena could tell, Tremell had been more concerned about his investor’s expectations that the new drug would be delivered on time.
She turned back to her notes. A few hours ago Rhodes had pulled an article published yesterday in The Times. Apparently, Tremell was at odds with several board members from his company over his annual bonus. The board had already agreed to give Tremell seventy-five million dollars for a job well done. According to the newspaper, Tremell thought he deserved a hundred million.
Lena tried to imagine what it must have been like when Tremell learned that Jennifer Bloom had played him for a fool. That it had been Tremell himself who gave her the goods. That she had seduced the old man and won him over until she could prove that he had killed her son.
The woman who cast spells.
The words had been resurrected. Flushed with new meaning and an overwhelming power that burned clean and true.
They had their hands on the motive. But Lena knew that they still didn’t have a case.
She gazed across the table, letting the reality soak in. Sanchez was sorting through the ATM and surveillance pictures of the witness. As he spread them out, Lena eyed the photos and noted the leather jacket and Dodger cap. The dark circles under the kid’s eyes and the wasted expression on his face. Avadar hadn’t checked in yesterday from the bank. That could only mean that their witness hadn’t made another try with Bloom’s ATM card. That he was still missing. Still lost—or maybe worse.
“You need to call the coroner’s office,” she said.
Sanchez looked up. “You think he’s dead?”
“You need to make the call,” she said. “Get them copies of these pictures and ask them to go through the list of ODs they’ve picked up over the last three days.”
Sanchez agreed. Before he could say anything more, Rhodes burst into the room.
“Anyone here ever heard of Vinny Bing, the Cadillac King?”
Barrera shrugged. Lena shook her head.
“He’s got a show on cable,” Sanchez said. “It sucks.”
