His eight-year-old son, Zachary, ran up to him. “Mom needs money,” he said excitedly. “We’re going shopping. She said we could pick out two toys. I want a Spider-Man suit and those sticky gloves he uses so I can climb walls. Felicity wants more stupid Barbie dolls. She already has hundreds of them. As soon as she gets them, she rips their heads off.”
“What are you running around by yourself for?” Van Buren said, his brows raising. “It’s dangerous for a kid your age. This is a public place. Where’s your mother and sister?”
“In the gift shop.”
“Tell her I said it’s okay to use her credit card.”
“But…she needs money for taxicabs and things.”
He reluctantly reached into his pocket, pulling out three one-hundred-dollar bills and placing them in his son’s outstretched hands. His wife was a spender. He preferred cash because it left no paper trail. The only problem was that he didn’t know if she was handing out his money to some no-good beach bum or tennis pro. Their sex life was terrific, but a man should keep track of his wife, particularly one as young and beautiful as Eliza. Ruffling his son’s hair, he said, “Run along now, champ. Daddy has a business meeting. Tell your mother to be back by lunch so we can beat the traffic. You don’t want to miss Santa Claus, do you?”
“I’m not a baby, Dad,” the boy said, trying to look tough. “I know Mom is Santa Claus. Don’t worry, I won’t tell Felicity.”
After his son ran off, Van Buren saw a tall, striking blonde striding rapidly toward him. Her movements were stiff, almost robotic. She leaned forward slightly when she walked, and her head swiveled from side to side as she constantly checked her surroundings. He wished his men were this alert. If they’d kept their eyes open, he wouldn’t be in the present predicament. He stood and pulled out a chair. “How did you like the new helicopter?”
“Fine,” she said, sitting down and crossing her shapely legs. “It would have been nice if you’d met me in the city, Larry. To make me fly to this godforsaken town on Christmas Eve is bullshit, let alone inconvenient. I have a family, you know, and the last few days haven’t been pleasant.”
In all the years he had known her, Van Buren had never seen her smile. She was the coldest woman he’d ever known. When he looked into her eyes, it was as if he were staring at a slab of concrete. No emotion, fear, humor, compassion, basically no human characteristics whatsoever. How could she possibly have a family? Just the thought of it was ludicrous. Her work was excellent, though, and her services were in great demand. She had worked in Russia, Iran, China, Africa, and all over Europe. No matter how difficult the job, she always performed flawlessly. Through no fault of her own, this time she had failed. What had kept him awake the night before was whether or not he should allow her to continue. What he’d asked her to do was so simple, it was almost laughable for her degree of talent. That’s what made the situation unbearable. Dismissing her was a sticky situation. His nerves forced him into small talk. “Are you still living in Vegas?”
“No,” she said bluntly. “I never lived in Vegas.”
“What have you got against Santa Barbara? We come here every year around Christmas. Most people think it’s paradise. Hardly any crime, pristine beaches, even a polo field. Look at this place,” Van Buren said, gesturing. “The ambience is magnificent. You can’t find this in LA.”
She flagged a waiter over and asked him to bring her a glass of orange juice. The look on her face said Van Buren had dropped down another notch for not asking her if she wanted anything. “I don’t live in LA.”
“Oh,” he said, “when you mentioned meeting there, I assumed—”
She cut him off. “Never assume. And where I live is confidential. It’s not a game, Larry. You know the rules.”
“Absolutely,” Van Buren said, fearing she might get angry and throw him across the room. She was as strong as most men, but she dressed as if she’d stepped out of a fashion magazine. On a rare occasion when he’d caught her intoxicated years back, she’d explained that women didn’t bulk up like men, regardless of how much weight they lifted. The only time a woman’s muscles showed was when she flexed. The majority of female bodybuilders took steroids. Even then, most of them resembled an ordinary woman in street clothes.
She drank the orange juice in one swallow, slamming the glass down on the table. “I don’t have time to shoot the breeze. Tell me what you want me to do.”
“Nothing,” he said, shrugging. “We struck out, so that’s the end of it. I’ll keep pursuing it, of course, but your end of it is finished. I’m in no way unsatisfied, although it would have been better if things had gone as planned.” He dropped his hand to his side, sliding a slim leather briefcase to her side of the table. “I needed to find this material fast,” he added. “I would have never gone to such extremes if I wasn’t pushed against the wall. Like I said, I know it’s not your fault.”
The waiter came by and placed the bill on the table. Van Buren looked down and scribbled his name and room number. When he looked up, the briefcase and the woman were gone.
Chapter 12
Friday, December 24—10:00 A.M.
Hank Sawyer entered the detective bay at the Ventura Police Department and checked to see if Mary Stevens was at her desk. When she wasn’t in the field, the detective wore short skirts and tight-fitting sweaters, causing the men in the unit to develop suspicious bulges in the lower half of their bodies. She should get along great with Carolyn, Hank thought. He was certain the probation officer was going to get hurt one of these days.
Before talking to Mary, he stopped at the coffeepot and pulled out a Styrofoam cup, filling it first with half a cup of milk and three packages of sugar. The coffee had probably been there since seven o’clock that morning, and Hank needed the milk to coat his stomach.
He had been appalled when he’d heard how Carolyn had taunted Raphael Moreno, talking on the phone and demeaning him until he’d snapped and crushed her cell phone. He had to give her credit, though. She’d managed to get Moreno to talk, even though he hadn’t told her much of anything worthwhile and Preston had screwed it up. He adored Carolyn, but she took too many risks when it came to her job. She manipulated and baited dangerous criminals on a regular basis. Many times she went to the jail with her boobs popping out and a skirt that barely covered her ass. One of the deputies swore she’d showed up one time without underwear and spread her legs in front of a rapist. Hank doubted if a Catholic girl would have gone that far. With Carolyn, though, anything was possible. Defense attorneys knew the moment a case fell into the probation officer’s hands that their clients were going to serve twice as much time in prison. The attorneys instructed their clients to keep their mouths shut, but Carolyn could get a Doberman to drop a steak at her feet. Not only was she able to aggravate violent offenders’ prison terms by her unconventional interview techniques, she’d provided vital information in dozens of unsolved crimes. If Carolyn was willing to risk her life and let disgusting criminals gawk at her body to nail them, Hank found it hard to fault her.
Mary dressed the way she did to prove a point. In the past, many rapists went free due to the fact that their female victims had been dressed provocatively at the time of the crime. Mary felt women should be able to walk the streets naked without fear of being sexually assaulted. Hank was old-fashioned. When a woman dressed scantily and paraded down the street, she was asking for trouble.
Having graduated UCLA with a degree in biology, Mary had hired on with a medical research company, then quit to enter the police academy after her father was killed in the line of duty. Police work was in her veins. In addition to her father, two of her uncles were detectives in Los Angeles.
The woman worshipped her father. No wonder, Hank thought. Jim Stevens had been a decorated officer. He’d been working a gang slaying when he was killed. Mary conducted her own investigation and managed to uncover the killer, the primary reason she’d decided to quit her job and enter law enforcement.
“What
have you got for me?” Hank said, poking his head in the opening to her cubicle.
“A mother of a hangover,” she said, massaging her temples. “I stopped by the party after I cleared the Goodwin homicide. Bad decision.”
“You don’t have time to nurse a hangover,” Hank snapped at her. “Finish what you’re doing and come to my office.”
“At least we didn’t have another murder,” she called out. “I was afraid we’d have three by now.”
“It’s early.”
Hank’s office was a partitioned space like Mary’s, but it was considerably larger. In addition, he had a window. These were the perks you got after twenty-three years as a cop, he thought sourly. When Mary appeared, he picked up a folder and threw it at her. “While you were partying, I stayed up all night organizing the particulars of these crimes. I thought you wanted to be a lead investigator. If I’d been given a chance like that, I’d still be snooping around the crime scenes.”
Mary leaned over and picked up the papers off the floor. Vernon Edgewell walked by and whistled. “Where’s the preliminary lab report on Porter, Vernon?” Hank barked. “Go to the lab and sit there until they give it to you, understand? And if we page you again and you don’t answer, I guarantee you’ll be out of a job by the end of the week. Then you can kiss your big career with the FBI good-bye.” He turned his attention back to Mary. “Stop wearing short skirts. The chief caught sight of you the other day and asked me to have a word with you.”
Mary’s shoulders rolled forward. “Guess we’re gonna cancel Christmas.”
“Damn right,” Hank said, dropping down in his chair and yanking his tie off.
She quietly sat down. “Are you through spewing lava or should I get Bender so you can jump on him, too? He’s the only guy left in the office.”
The other detectives were chasing down leads, interviewing witnesses, and picking over the crime scenes. The department wasn’t that large, and with the holidays, the two homicides were a nightmare. “What do you have on Porter?”
Mary closed the file, balancing it on her lap. “Not as much as we have on Goodwin.”
“Shoot,” he said, gulping down his cup of lukewarm coffee, then tossing the empty cup in the trash can.
“The lab confirmed that it was Neil Sullivan’s fingerprints on the syringe. Just so you’ll know, I picked up the report at five o’clock this morning.”
“Incredible,” Hank said, shaking his head in disbelief. “His whole story was shit.”
“There’s more,” she said, clearing her throat. “The substance in the syringe was a mixture of heroin, cocaine, and strychnine. Looks like we’ve got ourselves one hell of a crime.”
Things like this didn’t happen in Ventura, he thought. “Was Porter injected with the same stuff?”
“Don’t know yet,” Mary said. “The killer didn’t leave us a specimen, so we have to wait for the autopsy.”
“Did you have any luck with the Asher woman?”
“No,” she said. “I’ve left three messages on her machine. My guess is she’s avoiding us. Just because Sullivan’s fingerprints are on the syringe doesn’t make an airtight case, Sarge. He could have come home late, gone into the bathroom to brush his teeth without turning the lights on, then touched the syringe without knowing it. Haven’t you ever gone to the bathroom without turning the lights on?”
His mind spun back to the days when he’d been drinking. He’d staggered to the bathroom plenty of times in the dark, sometimes so tanked, he missed the toilet. “I’m not going to hang a case on it,” he told her, rubbing the side of his face. “It might substantiate an arrest, though. I don’t buy all these accidents and coincidences. Those are for defense attorneys. When you start thinking like a defense attorney, you’ll be back in uniform.”
Mary handed him several sheets of paper. “Here’s what we have at present,” she said. “A Siemens wireless router was found inside Neil Sullivan’s property. Evidently, it was connected to his security system. It provided an unknown person with the ability to watch Sullivan in any room that had a camera, including the backyard, where the killing more than likely took place. Because of his artwork, there were cameras everywhere. As you know, there was nothing on the surveillance tape. Sullivan must have turned it off. The last date it recorded was in November.”
Hank leaned back in his chair. When a homicide was fresh, he fueled himself on outrage and adrenaline. Before he could solve it, however, he had to understand it. That meant a clear, focused mind.
“I’m not sure how the setup worked,” Mary went on. “Our technical people think someone might have been spying on Sullivan, possibly the killer.”
“I don’t understand,” Hank said. “Isn’t this router, or whatever it’s called, part of the security system?”
“No, I called the security company this morning. It’s not their hardware.”
“Interesting,” he said, his arms folded on top of the desk as he listened intently. In cases this serious, time was limited. It was better to memorize things than to have to scrounge them up at a later date. The new breed of detectives used their Palm Pilots and laptops; then when they lost them or their computers crashed, they ended up with nothing. The only thing he had to worry about losing was his mind.
“Unfortunately,” Mary said, “the router had been wiped clean, like everything else in the house. We do have unidentified prints, of course, but unbelievably few. We have Carolyn’s prints on file, but we only found one set in the house.” She ran her finger around the neckline of her sweater as she read through the rest of the report.
“Stop doing that,” Hank said, his eyes drawn to her cleavage.
Mary looked up. “What?”
“Forget it.”
“Don’t you think it’s strange that the guy’s sister left only one set of prints in his house? You’d think her prints would be all over the place.”
“He cleaned it.”
Mary smiled. “If I ever need a housekeeper, I’ll know who to hire. Some prints were the victim’s. The other prints probably belonged to the housekeeper and Melody Asher. Then there’s another set, which may or may not be the killer’s. If it is our killer, his prints aren’t on file. Hard to believe we’re dealing with a first-time offender.”
“There is no such thing as a first-time offender,” Hank told her. “It’s first-time caught.”
“Amen on that one,” she said, twirling a strand of hair around her finger. “I’d really like to hear what Melody Asher has to say about Sullivan, particularly as to his alibi.”
“Tell me about it,” Hank said, tossing his feet on his paper-strewn desk.
“I left before the father got there last night. Did he tell you anything worthwhile?”
“Stanley Caplin?” he asked, tugging on his left ear. He’d never handled a serial killer before, so he was overly anxious. For now, though, they had to treat the two murders as separate crimes. A good night’s sleep would put things in perspective. “What was I saying? Ah, Daddy claims Sullivan is a drug dealer. Maybe our playboy artist stiffed his suppliers so he could buy himself that fancy Ferrari. The guy’s sleeping with a gorgeous broad who has more money than God and he wants to marry a schoolteacher. Doesn’t add up. Tell me more about this router.”
“Since we haven’t been able to question Neil Sullivan,” Mary said, “we have to consider that the lab might be mistaken and he set up the router himself. He spends most of his time in that pool house he converted to a studio. Maybe he wanted to keep his eye on the house. The problem is we didn’t find a computer or monitor anywhere on the property that was linked to the router.”
Hank couldn’t rule out the possibility that Laurel Goodwin’s death was a result of Neil’s indirect actions. Thugs could have killed her as a warning. He’d handled a single drug deal that had gone bad. When he’d arrived on the scene, the floor had been covered with blood and bodies. The next time, it might be Neil. “There’s another possibility,” he said. “Laurel Goodwin’s divorc
e wasn’t final. Her father claimed the husband called her a few days ago to make certain she signed off on the property settlement. She wasn’t there, so the father talked to him. The husband may have found out about Sullivan and killed her.”
“Why kill her?” Mary reasoned, tapping her pen against her teeth. “If the guy was jealous, he would have gone after Sullivan.”
“She may have had dozens of lovers. Her husband filed for divorce, not her. In most cases, the woman files. According to her father, Jordan Goodwin is on a ship somewhere in the Atlantic.”
“Have you confirmed that?” Mary asked, jotting down notes on the file folder he’d given her.
“Not yet,” Hank said. “We’ve put in a call to the navy, but they haven’t got back to us yet. What we need to do is to map out what the crimes have in common. There was no router on the Porter property. Also, no syringe left behind. Someone picked the lock in the door leading to the garage, but there was no forced entry with Goodwin. It really doesn’t matter about the swimming pool, because the Porters didn’t have one. The killer dragged the body outside, even though it appears that the murder occurred inside the house.”
Mary snapped to attention. “It’s the same, don’t you see? He thinks water destroys the evidence. He threw one victim in the pool, and the other he left out in the rain.”
“Manny in narcotics says there’s some potent smack on the street. Was the heroin in the syringe high-grade?”
She excitedly flipped through the pages. “Yes,” she said. “So was the coke.”
“Okay,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Both ladies are closet users. They may have started out snorting coke to stay thin, and before they knew it, they were hooked. The drug dealer is the guy on the motorcycle. Upscale women like these two don’t know how to shoot dope. He makes a home visit, then finds out the drug kills them.”
Sullivan’s Justice Page 12
