Killer In The Hills (A Jack Rhodes Mystery)

by Stephen Carpenter

  “I understand you feel the need to take care of things yourself,” she said. “And I know why you’re doing it.”

  “Why am I doing it?”

  “Because you grew up without a father and if the girl is your daughter you don’t want to abandon her the way you were abandoned,” she said. “Don’t have to be a shrink to figure that out.”

  “Maybe,” I said. The thought had occurred to me as I had tossed and turned the night before.

  “But it’s so…reckless,” she said. “You’re smarter than that. I don’t know if I can go through that kind of thing again—worrying about you.”

  “That sounds like a threat.”

  “Maybe it is,” she said. “If you get involved in anything dangerous I can’t stand waiting around, worrying. I can’t do it, Jack.”

  “I understand.”

  “I have to go, I’m at work now,” she said. “We’ll continue this conversation later.”

  “Okay,” I said. “What are you wearing?”

  “No,” she said. “You don’t get that.”

  I heard her cut off the call and I put my phone in my pocket and watched the traffic on Franklin until they opened the restaurant and I went inside and ordered coffee and waited.

  Melvin arrives five minutes after I’m seated. We order, and soon he is forklifting massive helpings of huevos rancheros into his mouth. He has a side of hash browns and another side of country biscuits and gravy with plump breakfast sausages. I have my usual eggs Benedict. Our collective cholesterol count is approaching numbers equaling the national debt when he takes his last bite of gravy-soaked biscuit and washes it down with coffee and dabs his mouth carefully.

  “This is official FBI business now,” he says. “Talked to the deputy director this morning. The internet sex thing means we’re into it and we can leverage the LAPD to cooperate. The Director called LAPD Chief an hour ago and arranged a meeting for us at LAPD Cyber Crimes in an hour. Apparently a very big deal.”

  “Gonna deputize me?” I say.

  “I’m gonna send you packing if you even slightly screw up,” Melvin says. He means it and he knows I know it.

  Melvin has a lot of leeway as a Special Agent. He has turned down several offers to become deputy director, choosing instead to remain in the field. He has also refused the numerous citations he had been awarded in his eighteen-year career. He is the best agent on the ground, and in return for his quiet, indispensable performance he has gotten to do pretty much whatever he wanted. Melvin has never screwed up. He has stayed out of the limelight of the press—despite the infamous cases he has brought to resolution, often with his S&W 500. He earned the nickname “Cowboy” after gunning down a record number of fugitives: two serial killers, a cop-killer, a kidnapper, and a Mexican druglord whose name was on the Ten Most Wanted list for almost as long as Whitey Bulger’s. In my research I have interviewed around a hundred uniformed cops, detectives, FBI agents, prosecutors, and, once, an Inspector with Scotland Yard. I have shot with them at ranges, sparred with them in gyms, gone on ride-alongs, and there is no one better than Melvin. I once saw him put a bullet through the forehead of a paper target figure from forty yards. One shot, with a pistol, from a cold draw. I used to fight Golden Gloves and mixed martial arts, and won a regional second-place, in my youth. Most of the cops I’ve sparred with were in my class—light heavyweight—and I have held my own, usually. I sparred with Melvin once. I won’t do it again. Melvin has the qualities of any great hunter—endless patience, constant awareness of everything around him, and a calm, quiet demeanor that can switch to deadly action in a heartbeat. The only man he’s ever hunted but didn’t catch was me. This is a source of irritation for Melvin, but also of grudging respect. He has called upon me a couple of times to consult on profiling particularly slippery suspects.

  “Bureau’s full of smart guys,” he once told me. “Great investigators, dedicated lawmen. But they’re Boy Scouts. Sometimes they’re not the most imaginative people in the world. But you got that dark, crazy thing going on in that head of yours. You know how to think like a bad guy. And that’s useful. As long as you don’t go rogue on me.”

  “I only went rogue once,” I had said. “And I saved someone’s life.”

  Melvin had grown quiet when I said that. Years ago, when I was charged with a murder I didn’t commit, I had run. I found the killer and shot him, just before he shot Melvin. The life I saved was Melvin’s, and we had never spoken of it until that conversation, and we have never spoken of it since.

  We finish breakfast, which Melvin insists on paying for. We are on the government dime now, and that means everything must be meticulously recorded. A file has been opened, a case number assigned, and everything we do from this point will be scrutinized and entered as evidence in the event of a trial, or a post-mortem review.

  We leave the Best Western and get back in the Town Car and back onto the Hollywood freeway, heading for LAPD headquarters.

  As we lurch through the morning rush hour into downtown, curtains of rain suddenly ring down so hard I wonder if we should stop at the zoo and start choosing pairs of animals.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Investigator Wen lets Melvin and me into LAPD headquarters at the garage entrance, then escorts us through the metal detector, where Melvin has to give up his gun and cuffs again. This time we also have to hand over our phones and any other electronic devices before Wen leads us to the elevator and we ride up in silence.

  Investigator Wen doesn’t look like a cop. His jet-black hair is long and straight, almost to his shoulders. He is short and skinny and he wears thick, round glasses in heavy black frames, and a wispy black goatee. The only thing that gives him away as LAPD is the ID card clipped to the waistband of his faded, torn jeans. The ID bears his photo and title: Chief Investigator, LAPD Cyber Crimes Division. He looks like he’s about seventeen.

  Wen escorts us to a floor with a serpentine hallway that curves down to a ramp of narrow stairs.

  “What’s with the M. C. Escher design?” I ask.

  “The hall is curved to absorb and deflect electronic signals within all spectra,” Wen says. “Basically, it confuses them.”

  “I’m confused already,” I say.

  We reach a set of double doors at the end of the hallway.

  “You should be honored,” Wen says to me. “To the best of my knowledge, you’re the first civilian ever to set foot in here, except for some techies and the vending machine guy.”

  “Boldly going where no man has gone before,” I say. No one responds. No one gets me.

  Wen pushes the double doors open and we are in another world. LAPD Cyber Crimes Command Center is huge—probably taking up the entire Floor Which Has No Number. There are no corners. The walls meet in careful curves, the ceiling is a low rotunda, and every surface is covered in some kind of soft gray spongy material. Here and there are a few light fixtures, recessed in the soft gray material, but the space is illuminated mainly by the electronic glow of countless flat screens in dozens of cubicles. Twenty or thirty young people sit before their screens, tapping away.

  It takes my eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness as Wen leads us to his command post. He sits at an ergonomic wire-frame chair and his long, thin fingers start flying across a keyboard so fast that I begin to feel dizzy.

  “Whoever set up the girl’s website was an idiot,” Wen says. “Took us about five minutes to track the site to a physical address.”

  He is talking while typing, occasionally glancing up at four large screens before him, which scroll a tsunami of hieroglyphic source code.

  “We tracked the site to an apartment in West L.A., but when SWAT got there the place was abandoned,” Wen says. “You can see.”

  Wen hits a button and the big screen in the center of the array before him shows us SWAT helmet-cam video of an empty apartment. I recognize the room from the video I watched last night—the boy-band poster on a wall, and a teddy bear on a sagging daybed. I look away.

>   “They left electronic tracks all over the place,” Wen says. “We even found credit card numbers from people who paid for the, ah, private viewings. We have officers interviewing the cardholders now.”

  Wen hits another key and prints out several sheets of paper.

  “Here’s everything we’ve got so far,” Wen says, and hands the papers to Melvin. “Names and addresses and bank accounts of the person or persons who rented the apartment, phone records, VIN numbers, you name it, you got it.”

  “Good work,” Melvin says, and folds the papers into his jacket pocket.

  “It was a total cakewalk,” Wen shakes his head. “Like I said, whoever set up the site, they were either very dumb or very lazy.”

  “Or they wanted to be tracked,” I say.

  Wen blinks at me through his thick glasses. “Hadn’t thought of that,” he says.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  We reach the garage level and pick up our gear and get back in the Town Car. I turn on my phone for the first time since I spoke with Nicki and see I have thirty-eight new messages. I scroll through them as Melvin gets on his cell and starts passing Wen’s information along an endless chain of law enforcement agencies.

  Most of my messages are from restricted or blocked numbers. The only ones that have ID are a few TV networks, Nicki, and one call from a movie studio. I start listening to the messages, deleting the ones from Fat Zach and others of his ilk, as well as the calls from the TV networks. Before I get to Nicki’s message, call-waiting interrupts. I look at the ID—the movie studio that called before, Panorama Pictures. Despite my better instincts, I take the call.

  “Hello,” I say.

  “Mr. Rhodes?” says a young woman.

  “Yes.”

  “I have Elli Erlacher for you,” she says. “Are you available?”

  Elli Erlacher? The name pings somewhere in my head, but it isn’t until I hear Elli’s voice that I finally place him.

  “Jack,” Elli comes on the line after a few moments. “How the hell are ya, man?”

  “Okay, Elli,” I say. “You?”

  “Just been watching all of this crazy shit,” he says. “How ya holding up, dude?”

  A casual listener would assume this was a conversation between two old friends, when in fact I have probably spent less than an hour of my life talking with this guy, on two or three occasions, over fifteen years ago.

  “Okay,” I say. “What’s up, Elli?”

  “Look,” he says, “I know the timing is messed up, but I’ve been meaning to call you for a long time so we could get together. I know you don’t get to L.A. very often.”

  “Don’t much care for it.”

  “Tell me about it,” he says. “I gotta get out of town at least once a month or I go apeshit. Listen, how’s your afternoon? Can you get together for lunch?”

  “I’m a little busy right now, Elli,” I say. “What is it you need?”

  “Well, I’d rather go into it when we have time to discuss it fully, but we want to be in business with you, Jack. Very much so. Are you in town long?”

  Only long enough to find out who murdered my wife and whether or not I have a daughter, you arrogant jackass.

  “Hard to say,” I tell him. “I’ll have to get back to you.”

  “Understood,” he says. “Let’s check in with each other while you’re here. I definitely want to get together before you leave town.”

  “Right,” I say. “I gotta go, Elli.”

  “Okay, man,” he says. “Hang in there.”

  I hang up.

  Elli Erlacher. What a tool.

  I had met him when we were both starting out—me as a struggling screenwriter, Elli as assistant to a talent manager with a big firm in town. I had just sold my first screenplay, right out of Cal State, and Elli’s boss represented a young actress who was cast in a supporting role. I had written the script after seeing Ingmar Bergman’s Persona in a film studies class and was inspired to write my own independent film. My script was a deeply heartfelt exploration about a college girl’s slow progression into madness and I titled it The Descent of Anna K. A low-budget production company bought the script and, ten months and twelve rewrites later, it had become Slaughter on Sorority Row. It was the first and last movie I ever had produced.

  I spent one day on the set and, since there was nothing for me to do except stand around getting more and more pissed, I left. I ran into Elli in the parking lot and we traded stories and stole a couple of wrap beers from the grip truck, then promised to keep in touch before we parted ways. A year later, when Elli got a job as a baby executive at a real movie studio, my agent set up a meeting and Elli and I reminisced in his tiny office for fifteen minutes, then promised to keep in touch. We had drinks once after that, then I never heard from him again, but noted from the trades that he had climbed up the ladder quickly at Panorama Pictures. He became President of Production when his predecessor got wasted on roofies and absinthe at an after-Oscar party and was discovered by the party’s host, in his own bedroom, in flagrante delicto with an underage, overambitious actress. The dish around town was that Elli had arranged the liaison and then tipped off the party’s host, thus removing the final obstacle to his rightful position at the top. This was only rumor, of course, but nobody ever got rich in Hollywood by overestimating the integrity of a studio executive.

  My agent in New York had deflected several movie offers for my books, as they became more popular. I had no interest in coming back to this hateful city, partly because of the death of my fiancée, and partly because writers in Hollywood are treated like house slaves—you don’t have to work the fields, but if you fall out of favor with your Master you’re horse food. I assumed the call from Elli was an attempt to reestablish our close personal friendship and make a book deal while I happened be in town. Of course, that deal would include the rights to my story about Penelope and Karen. A real class act.

  The rain has diminished to drizzle by the time we exit the freeway and head into West LA, to the apartment where the webcam video was shot. I’m not looking forward to it, but Melvin wants me to take a quick look around to see if anything jogs my memory. I’ve been stretched across the backseat, staring out of the rear window of the car, lost in thought, and it suddenly occurs to me that I’ve seen the same black Hummer behind us for about ten minutes. When the Hummer follows us down the exit ramp I lean forward from the backseat to say something.

  “Black Hummer, dealer plates,” Melvin says, before I can open my mouth. He doesn’t look back. He hasn’t even turned his head for the entire ride, as far as I could tell.

  “I see him,” the driver says.

  Melvin types something on the small keyboard installed on the Town Car’s console, and we take a circuitous route to the apartment on Sawtelle Boulevard. A few blocks before we reach our destination the Hummer slows down until it disappears in the heavy lunchtime traffic behind us and is gone.

  “You call that a car chase?” I say.

  No one says anything.

  “Would it kill you guys to at least crack a smile or something?” I say.

  “It might, if you ever said anything funny,” Melvin says.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  There wasn’t much to see at the apartment on Sawtelle, which was on the second floor of a ratty two-story building. A detective from West LA Division met us there, along with the building’s manager, a nervous middle-aged Asian woman who said nothing. The apartment was a cramped studio with a cheap desk, a daybed, and a teddy bear. Nothing jogged any memories, and I didn’t like being there any longer than I had to, so we left after about fifteen minutes. The manager led us out the back way, through the underground garage and out into a small courtyard. Melvin and I walked across the drizzly concrete courtyard, then through a gate and into an alley, where a different car—a gray Chevrolet sedan—picked us up, with a different driver at the wheel.

  Melvin rides shotgun and I sprawl in the backseat as we crawl through traffic in the gray car,
in the gray drizzle on Wilshire Boulevard. We stop at a drive-thru and order lunch at Jack in the Box, which we eat in the car while parked at a strip mall. I polish off two cheeseburgers and watch Melvin type on a laptop and talk on his cell. From what I can gather, he is already getting reports from FBI field agents, LAPD detectives, Cyber Crimes investigators, and somebody from the Treasury department. I can tell from his tone that none of it sounds promising.

  I look at my watch for the tenth time in an hour. I am bored out of my skull and seriously considering taking the next plane to New York when Melvin gets off a call and turns to me.

  “You bring anything decent to wear?” he says.

  “Why?” I say. “Did somebody from Jack in the Box complain?”

  “We’re going out tonight,” he says.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Hollywood is business disguised as a party, and the party is in full swing at the Hotel Molique when Melvin and I arrive. The sleek, circular, brushed aluminum bar is packed three bodies deep with fabulous people. The hostess greets us—a stunning young woman in a tiny black designer dress. She glances at my off-the-rack navy sport coat, then makes Melvin and me wait until our party is complete before we will be seated. We are waiting for a retired guy from Vice, who is going to give us the down-low on this infamous place. Melvin is wearing a black Dolce & Gabbana suit that fits him like horsehide on a hardball. A few people at the bar glance at him, looking right past me.

  The dining room is huge, with a domed ceiling covered with a trompe l’oeil sky painted over it. As the minutes tick by, the lighting changes subtly, causing the painted sky scenic to transform from late afternoon to magic hour, as cinematographers call it. Everyone else calls it twilight, but this is not a place where everyone else is welcome.

  “I feel like a pound mutt at the Westminster Dog Show,” I say to Melvin as we stand there, waiting. Melvin glances at my clothes.

  “They probably think you’re my harried, underpaid assistant,” he says.