by Matt Coyle
It didn’t take much of an imagination to come up with a couple of candidates for the nicknames. I thought of the stink of cologne left on my carpet the night of the first break-in of my house. The scent I’d smelled on both Detective Moretti and Chief Parks. It had been one of them. And whoever it was hadn’t been looking for evidence to put me or Melody in jail. They’d been looking to destroy evidence to keep themselves out of jail. Suddenly, I remembered Moretti’s tough guy in-my-face routine at the Brick House and the cleft lip scar under his mustache. Maybe he’d been clean shaven in his earlier days on the La Jolla Police Department.
Scarface.
I put Moretti in his early forties. The time frame worked. A little snooping and I could find out if he’d been working for LJPD fourteen years ago and who he’d partnered with back then. Maybe Stamp. Stamp could have been a real last name or a nickname. Either way, if he wasn’t Moretti’s partner, he could have been a cop from the San Diego Police Department. Windsor might have had women on more then one circuit. If Stamp was just a nickname penned by Windsor, he might be tougher to uncover. But I still had Moretti.
Then what? Take the information to Chief Parks? Not my biggest fan. And he was the kind of chief who’d thicken the thin blue line of protection around a fellow cop. Go to the state attorney general? What did I really have? A ledger with dates, dollar amounts, and nicknames that I’d stolen from a storage unit. I’d get laughed or chased out of Sacramento. That was a fate best left for politicians.
Maybe Heather Ortiz would be interested. A corruption scandal in LJPD tied in with a murder. In the days of dwindling subscriptions and shrinking newspapers, that was the kind of catnip any reporter would find hard to resist. Break the big story, turn it into a book, and then go on to be the next Ann Rule writing true crime.
But even for a newspaper reporter, I didn’t have much. I needed more. There had to be something that could tie things together, point a more convincing finger. The laptop. I’d probably never figure out the password, but maybe I could find someone who could or find a way around it. I slipped the laptop case into my backpack. As I did, I noticed the time on my watch: 6:28 p.m. That annoyingly efficient woman would be by to boot me out any second. I quickly used the bottom of my shirt to wipe down any surface I thought I’d touched. The desk, the drawers, the light switch.
Finally, I rolled the door up and peeked outside. No sign of the woman. I slid the door back down and closed the lock. I turned to leave and caught glimpse of a golf cart coming at me out of the corner of my eye. Dusk had squeezed the light out of the day, but I could still make out a female form behind the wheel. I brought my free hand to my face and turned away from the cart. I fought the urge to sprint to my car. Instead, I hunched over slightly and shuffled slowly toward it, letting out a breathy sob every few steps.
The car was fifty yards away. The golf cart thirty, and closing fast. I kept my hand to my face and kept up the fake crying. Even so with the backpack, the ball cap, jeans, a sweatshirt, and an athletic build, I doubted I pass for an elderly, wealthy La Jolla banker, even in the diminishing light.
“Can I give you a ride to your car, Mr. Windsor?” Same woman. The cart now crept a respectful twenty feet behind me on my unprotected side. The question in her voice sounded more for my identity than for the offer of a ride.
“I’m okay.” I kept my head down and sobbed into my hand.
“Are you sure?”
I waved my hand above my head, kept sobbing, and kept walking. Finally, the golf cart slowly passed behind me and headed down the row of buildings. When it turned right, I sprinted to my car, got in, tossed the computer and backpack onto the passenger seat, and gunned it for the exit. I wanted to beat the woman to the front gate and leave before she could get a good look at me.
I made it to the gate in less than ten seconds and rolled over the pressure plate that opened it. The gate slowly opened inward and I waited for enough space to slide through. I kept my head angled away from the camera that sat on the right side of the gate. The golf cart turned around the last building and approached me from the left. It was twenty yards away and didn’t have headlights. The woman could never get close enough to get a good look at me through the dark. The gate inched another foot open, and I stepped on the gas. I looked back at the cart and the woman pointed something at me with her hand.
A beam of light hit the side of my face just before my car broke free of the gate.
Exposed.
Muldoon’s
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
I took a right out of the parking lot onto Sorrento Valley Road and whipped a U-turn at the first break in the divider and gunned it onto the 805 South. I had to fight the temptation to mash the gas pedal to the floor.
The woman had seen me.
If she’d recognized me from my picture in the U-T and called the cops, the least they could get me on was unlawful trespassing. The most, accomplice to murder, after the fact. Maybe even before the fact.
Headlights filled my rearview mirror as one would expect on the freeway. Still, the feeling of being followed crept back up my spine. Probably just the echo of the woman splashing the flashlight on me. I took my exit off the freeway and a few cars behind did the same, as would naturally happen any night. Still, I pulled into a gas station off Genesee and watched a couple SUVs and a dark sedan pass by.
Something didn’t feel right.
I’d parked my car around the corner from my house and had just made it to my neighbor’s driveway when I caught a glint of light and movement out of the corner of my eye.
Cars whizzed past on the road, but they were expected. Moving headlights were an intermittent constant any night of the week. This was something different, something out of place.
I lived on Clairemont Mesa Boulevard, but my section of the main drag through Clairemont was really a frontage road. A sprawling, disjointed mall sat across the street, separated by four lanes of traffic. It was really a series of strip malls shoved together at right angles. The out-of-place light and movement had come from the mall parking lot.
I glanced at the lot before I hit the walkway to my house. There were five or six cars parked next to the only two businesses still open after seven p.m., a wireless phone store and a pet shop. One car was parked alone down near the waist-high evergreen hedge that separated the parking lot from the lawn next to the sidewalk. It sat opposite my house, facing me. It could have been a store employee’s, instructed not to park in front of the shop. But the spiked hair on my neck told me it wasn’t. The make was a dark Chevy Impala, maybe purple or blue. Could it have been the sedan that passed by when I pulled into the gas station?
The parking lot’s lone light pole stood forty yards to the left of the Impala and cast only enough light to put the car in shadow. Headlights from a passing car glinted off something behind the windshield, then the night refilled the vacuum. I couldn’t see inside the car through the dark, but I sensed someone behind it watching me. An off-duty cop? A private investigator? One of Stone’s toughs? All three were just different versions of the same bad news.
I considered not making the turn up the walk to my house and to just keep walking until I circled around to my car. I could stay in a motel tonight while I figured out how to fix my broken life. Or I could find out who was inside that Impala and decide what to do about it.
My life wasn’t going to mend on its own. Too many people were still poking at it.
I took the turn and went up to my front door and into the house without a backward glance. Once inside, my cell phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out and saw Muldoon’s number on the screen. I let it go to voice mail. If it was Turk, I’d said all I needed to that morning. The call might have been from Pat or Kris or some other employee wishing me well. I wasn’t ready yet for anyone’s well-wishes. I was too busy trying to figure out how to deal with the people who wished me ill.
I went into my bedroom and changed into dark clothes. I left the light on and went down the hall. Hop
efully, whoever was watching my house would think I was still in there. I grabbed the Bushnell binoculars I used at Charger games out of the hall closet and looked for my black Callaway golf hat. It took me a second to realize it was still in an evidence bag down at the Brick House. Instead, I pulled Melody’s black Giants cap off the closet’s shelf and put it on.
It fit perfectly.
I went into the kitchen and slung my backpack onto the table, then quickly went to a cabinet and grabbed a box of Ziploc freezer bags. I pulled the flash drive and the videotapes that I’d taken from Adam Windsor’s storage unit out of the backpack, shoved them into plastic bags, and then buried them down deep into the forty-pound bag of dog food in the kitchen broom closet. My personal safe.
I grabbed my backpack and went out into the back yard. I crept along the grass on the side out my house, hunched over so as not to show above the wooden fence that guarded the backyard. There wasn’t any dog crap to worry about stepping in. The thought of Midnight’s poisoning spat adrenaline through my body, and I wondered what I’d do if I found Moretti in that car across the street.
I stopped my creep ten feet from front gate, slowly brought my head up, and raised the binoculars to my eyes. It took a second to narrow down the focus and find my target. But the dark Impala was still there, pointed at my house.
The windshield was tinted, but I could make out a shape inside. The shape had its own pair of binoculars. Pointed at the front of my house. The old cop instincts were still good even if my last weeks on the force had been all bad. I kept the Bushnells pinned on the figure in the car, and it kept its binos pinned on my house. Minutes passed and my arms started to get tired, but I kept the field glasses pressed to my eyes waiting for the person in the car to drop his so I could ID him.
Finally, the binoculars came down, and I caught a glimpse of a face though the tinted windshield. More like an outline in shadow. The face looked down and all I could see was the dome of a head. The person was vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. I felt it more than saw it. I’d seen just enough to know the person wasn’t Moretti, Stone, or the two toughs.
This was someone else who had a reason to follow me. I was running out of friends and replacing them with enemies.
The face came up and the binoculars back to its eyes. Then he brought a cell phone up to his mouth. A social call, or was he telling a superior I was down for the night and he was clocking out?
I needed to find out who was in that Impala and who he was working for, but I had to move quickly.
I slid back down below fence level, put the binoculars in my backpack and edged my way to the back corner of the yard. Zelda, my neighbor’s miniature beagle, sniffed at me under the fence. She knew me well enough not to bark and probably missed her occasional playmate, Midnight. She wasn’t alone.
I scaled the fence, out of view of the street, and dropped down into my neighbor’s yard. Zelda shimmied up to me, her ass wiggling as much as her tail. I didn’t have time to play. I went though the yard and over another fence into the backyard of a house that sat on the street behind mine. There was a light on over a patio in front of the lawn I now stood on. A dog started barking inside the house. Roared was more like it. I’d heard the roar before, but had never seen the dog connected to it.
A sliding glass door opened on the left side of the house, and a dog’s head appeared at chest level. An American Mastiff. The head alone was the size of a pony keg. I didn’t stick around to see its body. I shot around the opposite side of the house and heard the beast howling and thundering along the patio. Then a man’s voice.
“Zeus, what is it?”
I launched myself onto the fence to the front yard and jack-knifed over it. I hit the ground and sprinted down an empty street with Zeus’s Baskerville howl echoing through the night. He and his master had given up the chase in their backyard, but I didn’t stop running until I got to my car.
I got in and backtracked the path I’d taken earlier that night, going an extra block on the street behind my house before I turned up onto Clairemont Mesa. I couldn’t risk my car being spotted if the man in the Impala was sweeping my street though his binoculars.
Traffic was light and I pulled into the section of the mall that fingered off at a right angle from the one opposite my house. I drove up to the corner where the fingers met, paused at the stop sign, and looked over to where the Impala had been parked.
The space was empty.
I scanned the lot and caught brake lights at the far exit. Too far away to tell if it was the Impala, but I had no other options. I goosed it toward the car, which turned left out of the parking lot onto the main road out of the mall. Fifty yards away, my headlights hit the car broadside.
The Impala.
It turned right out of the mall onto Clairemont Mesa and veered into the left turn lane at the stoplight that fed onto Claire-mont Drive. The light was red. I had time to catch up. I exited the parking lot, but had to wait for passing traffic before I could get behind the Impala. The light turned green and my target turned left. More traffic. The light went to yellow. I shot out through a narrow gap in traffic and made it through the intersection on the red.
The Impala was half a block ahead of me. I closed to within ten or twelve car lengths and kept it there. Just another pair of headlights in the rearview mirror. I followed it down Balboa Ave and across Mission Bay Drive.
I was in Pacific Beach now, Clairemont’s big brother, and La Jolla’s red-headed second cousin.
The Impala turned right on Lamont Street, and by the time I made the turn it was gone. I took a chance and turned right at the next cross street. I saw brake lights die up ahead in the tiny parking lot behind Lamont Street Grill. The door to the Impala opened and a face emerged as I passed behind it. A face I knew and had hoped never to see again. The mustache was gone and there was less hair on his head now.
But it was him.
Jim Grimes.
Detective Jim Grimes, Santa Barbara PD. The man who’d tried to put me behind bars for Colleen’s murder.
Muldoon’s
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Detective Grimes.
Why the hell was he in San Diego tailing me? Had something new come up with Colleen’s murder? Even if it had, he wouldn’t be running a solo operation in San Diego Police Department’s jurisdiction. Grimes was by the book. He’d go through the proper channels. Staking me out alone in another PD’s backyard wasn’t proper in anyone’s book.
No, there was some other reason he was here that had nothing to do with Colleen or the Santa Barbara Police Department. Whatever the reason, I was the target. And of all the men who now had me in their crosshairs, Grimes scared me the most.
He hadn’t liked me from the start. Even before he thought I was a murderer. I was young and cocky and he was older and old school. Plus, he knew about my father, and I’d sensed he felt rotten apples fell from rotten trees. I’d bumped up against him at cop softball games way back when I was a rookie on the force. A lot of leg lifting and marking territory by both of us. He never mentioned my father, but I’d felt it in his attitude from the beginning. I was tainted and it was just a matter of time until my defective genes got the better of me.
I parked and followed the detective down the sidewalk. He’d turned the corner and must have been headed for the front door of Lamont Street Grill. I peeked around the corner and caught a glimpse of him just before he disappeared through the gate that opened into the restaurant’s enclosed courtyard. He had a leather portfolio in his hand.
I knew Lamont Street well. It was the restaurateur’s restaurant. California comfort food prepared expertly. And the chef knew his way around a stockpot. His tomato garlic dill soup was a pool of crimson heaven. But dinner would have to wait. I had to find out if Grimes had come here for a quiet meal alone or to show someone the contents of his portfolio. No doubt, it had a file in it with my name on it.
I took a quick glance though the window in the gate before I o
pened it. A flash of outside diners, but no sight of Grimes. I entered the red brick courtyard that had seven or eight dinner tables. Half of them had diners. None of them were Detective Grimes. I scanned the windows that lined the main indoor dining room. Not there either.
I went up the steps under the wooden trellis and entered the restaurant. It opened onto a narrow foyer with a tiny hostess station just outside of the kitchen. A tan, blonde woman, probably just hours removed from the beach a few blocks down, welcomed me to the restaurant.
I quietly told the hostess I was waiting for someone and didn’t want to be seated until she arrived. There were two dining areas I hadn’t been able to see from the patio. One was down the steps from the foyer to the right and the other was in a separate room to the left of the hostess stand. Entering either would probably raise the heads of semiobservant diners. Especially if one of them was a cop.
I headed for the bathroom to the left of the kitchen and just past the entry into the small dining room next to the hostess station. I peered into the room over my shoulder and caught a glimpse of the back of Grimes’s head. And the front of someone else’s.
Timothy Buckley. Melody’s lawyer.
The two of them were sharing a table and probably Grimes’s report on me.
I went into the men’s room and locked myself inside the lone stall, in case either of them needed to pee. The walls of the stall closed in on me like the bars of a jail cell.
Grimes and Buckley? What the hell was going on? Was Grimes moonlighting for Melody’s defense team in hopes of turning the case onto me and finishing the job he’d started back in Santa Barbara? It didn’t make sense. If he was down here to put me behind bars, why wouldn’t he have teamed up with the La Jolla Police Department? Maybe he’d retired and become a P.I., now free to pursue me on his own.
