The Girl Buried in the Woods

by Robert Ellis

  “You’re there?” Upshaw said.

  “I’m here, with two SIS teams out front.”

  “You knew they’d be watching. Is the security system armed?”

  Matt told Upshaw that it was and gave him the name of the manufacturer.

  “That’s an easy one,” he said. “The technology’s five years old. Give me a minute to dig out the password.”

  Matt could hear Upshaw’s fingers working a keyboard. As he waited, he took cover in the gloom across the drive and kept his eyes glued to the second-floor windows.

  “Do you know how to pick a dead-bolt lock?” Upshaw said.

  Matt felt the set of picks in his jacket pocket. “If I have to.”

  “Well, you can forget about it.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re in luck. Robert Gambini owns a smart house.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It means that the locks, the doors, the TV, even the lights and phone can be controlled by his cell phone. It means he can let the UPS guy open the door, leave a package inside, and rearm the system from anywhere in the world. I just found his password. I can do everything we need to do from here. Which door would you like me to open?”

  Matt thought about the Mustang in the garage. “I’m standing outside the kitchen, but don’t do it, Upshaw. Someone could be upstairs sleeping. Ring the phone and let’s see if anyone answers.”

  “You got it.”

  Matt heard Upshaw enter Gambini’s phone number, then listened as the phones inside began to ring through the house. After six rings the house went silent.

  “The call bumped over to his service,” Upshaw said. “By the way, his outgoing message doesn’t mention anyone but himself.”

  “Let’s make sure. Do it again.”

  Matt heard Upshaw reenter the number, then listened to the phones ringing in the house. After another six rings they stopped.

  “If someone’s inside, Jones, they’re either drunk or they’re dead.”

  Matt took a last look at the second-floor windows and stepped out of the darkness.

  “Open the kitchen door,” he said.

  “Here we go.”

  Matt looked through the window at the keypad mounted to the wall in the kitchen. As he watched Upshaw disarm the system, as he watched the green lights shutting down one after the next, he couldn’t help but feel amazed. Once the system switched off, the dead bolt clicked, the door opened, and Matt stepped inside.

  “I’m in.”

  “Good,” Upshaw said. “Call me back when you’re out and you want to rearm the system. No one will ever know you were there.”

  “Thanks.”

  “It was easy, Jones. Too easy. What kind of world do we live in?”

  Matt switched off his phone and slipped it into his pocket. Except for the light by the front door, the house was cast in dark shadows and lit by only the outdoor lights feeding in through the windows. Still, as he moved out of the kitchen and into a dining room, he tried to keep in mind which windows could be seen by the surveillance units outside. Breaking into Gambini’s house wasn’t anything he wanted to get caught doing. Tonight was purely a fishing expedition. He needed to know more about who Robert Gambini was. More about the man’s intent and purpose, and where he might be hiding. They already had the used bags of smack, the hypodermic needle, and the gloves used to murder Grubb, so he wasn’t focused on finding anything specific.

  First things first, he had to be certain that he was alone.

  Matt pulled his cell phone out, switched on the flashlight, and made a quick but thorough sweep through the first floor. The rooms were big and included a living room and a library with a fireplace, a comfortable pair of reading chairs, and built-in shelves overflowing with books. He found Gambini’s office attached to the library, then passed through a den and TV room, a large pantry, and back around to the kitchen. As he took in the furnishings and eyed the art on the walls, he realized that Robert Gambini had taste and style. The art was an eclectic mix of impressionistic watercolors cut against a modern realism depicted in oils with bold, vibrant colors. Matt couldn’t explain why the intelligence he saw behind the things Gambini owned wasn’t a surprise. For whatever reason, after meeting the man he’d expected it.

  He stepped out of the kitchen.

  He’d covered every inch, and the first floor was clear. Before heading back to Gambini’s office for a more careful look around, he climbed the stairs and started down the hallway. The door to each room was open. Moving quickly, he counted three bedroom suites and then, at the end of the hall, the master suite. In each case the beds were made and, as he swept his hand over the pillows, cool to the touch.

  Matt entered Gambini’s master suite, stepped around a stack of books on the floor by the bed, and peeked out the window. He could see the terrace and pool, the trees surrounding the backyard so thick and lush that they blocked out the homes on the other side of the wall. Wrestling with his curiosity, he turned back to the books on the floor and glanced at the titles. There was a biography about Willie Mays here, and another about Abraham Lincoln. A book of poems by Rainer Maria Rilke came next, along with three Lena Gamble thrillers and a copy of Ken Follett’s A Dangerous Fortune. Robert Gambini’s taste in reading matched his eclectic taste in art, only this time Matt couldn’t help being surprised. He shook it off and straightened the stack of books, then backed out of the room. Moving down the hallway quickly, he turned and noticed a door he’d missed along the way.

  Even worse, unlike every other door on the second floor, this one was closed. He gave it a good look. Judging from the width of the opening, it wasn’t a closet.

  Matt pressed his ear to the wood and listened. After several moments, he turned the handle and cracked open the door. Then he sighed with relief.

  It was a laundry room. Like the first floor, the second floor was clear. He was alone. He was safe.

  He took the stairs two at a time and made his way back to Robert Gambini’s home office. At a glance he could tell that Gambini was well organized. The entire room was laid out in a smart but simple way and devoid of clutter. Although there were several files stacked on the desk beside a laptop computer, most were neatly set in a tray on the credenza.

  Matt sat down in the desk chair and skimmed through the tabs. Passing over anything that looked personal, his heart started pounding when he found a file labeled “DMG.” He pushed the others aside and laid out the DMG file in a patch of light feeding in from the windows.

  They were photographs. Surveillance photographs.

  Many of them probably taken the day Sophia Ramirez and Trey Washington shot that video of Robert Gambini laid out on the grassy bank overlooking DMG’s facility down the hill.

  Matt leaned over the desk for a better look.

  They were close-up images taken with a long lens of the workers loading those mysterious fifty-five-gallon drums onto small unmarked trucks. Other images included close-ups of each of the partners, Lane Grubb, Ryan Moore, and Sonny Daniels, with Daniels issuing orders to the drivers as the trucks pulled out.

  But Robert Gambini had taken a lot of photographs from a lot of different places on a lot of other days.

  Matt separated them from the rest and laid them across the top of the desk. Then he pulled his phone out again and switched on the flashlight. The pictures told a story as Gambini followed the trucks out of the city into the desert. It looked like Gambini had found the underground mine the Brothers Grimm had mentioned a few days ago. The gold mine outside Palmdale that had been modernized to accommodate the size of their small trucks. Towering chain-link fences topped with rings of barbed wire surrounded the place. A sign by the front gate warned anyone passing by that this was a hazardous-waste site. Trespassing was forbidden and dangerous to your health. Gambini had covered the entire trek from Elysian Park into the desert—the trucks passing through the gate in the fence, then entering the facility through a pair of heavy steel bay doors before they vanished underground
.

  Matt found the images fascinating but didn’t know what to make of them. After digging through the papers to the bottom of the file, he reached a number of photocopies taken from newspapers.

  Robert Gambini had figured out who they really were. He’d read the same articles Matt had pulled up on his computer. Gambini knew that Grubb, Moore, and Sonny Daniels owned Yellow Brick Legacy Group LLC, a hedge fund on Wall Street. He’d found the Brothers Grimm.

  “Would you like some more light, Detective?”

  Matt nearly jumped out of his skin and looked up. It was Robert Gambini. He was standing in the shadows by the doorway holding a Glock .45 in his right hand.

  FORTY-SIX

  “How long have you been standing there?” Matt said.

  Gambini smiled. “About five minutes,” he said. “By the way, you broke into my home.”

  Matt stared back at him. “I just stopped by for a visit.”

  “I saw the surveillance teams on my way in. I’m guessing that after what happened tonight, you’re not with them. You got the boot, friend. You’re off the case. What may or may not have happened is none of your business anymore.”

  Matt didn’t say anything.

  “Well, which is it, Detective? Should I turn on the lights and let the LAPD know we’re here? Or should I just call nine-one-one?”

  “You don’t want them here anymore than I do, Gambini.”

  “You’re probably right about that.”

  “Why don’t you put the gun down?”

  Robert Gambini shook his head. “No,” he said. “And while we’re at it, slide yours across the floor.”

  Matt gave him long look. After several moments, he pulled his .45 out and slid it across the floor.

  Gambini picked up the pistol and gave it a look. Then he ejected the mag and dumped the bullets onto the floor.

  “You can have it back when I leave, Detective. I have no reason to keep your gun and embarrass you.”

  Matt watched Gambini slip the .45 into his pocket.

  “What’s going on with these pictures you took, Gambini?”

  “Which do you mean?”

  “The trucks. The fifty-five-gallon drums. The mine in the desert.”

  “Hazardous waste would be my guess. They’re burying it underground so that we’ll all be safe.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Gambini laughed. “I don’t either.”

  Matt watched Gambini cross the room and open a closet door to reveal a freestanding safe bolted to the floor. Using his cell phone for light, Gambini dialed in the combination and swung the heavy door open. Even from a distance, Matt could see that the safe was filled with cash. As Gambini began loading a black Halliburton case with the money, Matt noticed the mustard-colored cash straps and realized that they were packets of hundred-dollar bills worth ten K each.

  “You’re gonna hide out?” Matt said.

  “Until this blows over? Sure. Why not?”

  “Blows over? You murdered Grubb tonight.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “You said it yourself last night. Grubb and his partners are trying to muscle in on your business.”

  Gambini laughed, still loading packets of cash into the Halliburton case. “I had Grubb exactly where I wanted him, Detective. I scared him off. He called you for help, right? He was ready to leave on his own. Why bother killing the fool?”

  A moment passed as Gambini’s way through the motive settled into the room.

  Matt shook his head. “Let’s get back to those fifty-five-gallon drums, Gambini. What’s in them?”

  Gambini turned and gave him a look. “What do you think is in them?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I saw you in the plant the same day they had an accident. One of the drums fell over. You were there. What spilled out?”

  “That had to be staged. I didn’t know it then, but I do now.”

  “Staged?”

  Matt nodded.

  “Do you know how much oxycodone is worth these days, Detective?”

  Matt sat back in the chair. Although he was well aware of the answer, he wanted to hear Gambini’s take on it.

  “Oxycodone hit the market more than ten years ago and made forty-five million dollars for the pharmaceutical company that manufactured it. Four years later, sales reached one-point-one billion. Six years after that we’re talking about three-point-one billion. You see where I’m going, Detective?”

  Matt nodded. “You think those drums are filled with oxycodone.”

  “I haven’t opened one up to see. Not yet anyway. But given the fact that these three losers—what do they call themselves, the Brothers Grimm? Given the fact that all three are preppy shitheads from Wall Street and don’t want to get their hands dirty, oxycodone seems more likely than heroin. Do the math. A single eighty milligram tab is worth over fifty bucks, Detective. What’s the price of a single bag of smack? Almost nothing compared to that.”

  Matt remembered the words Grubb had used when he overheard him arguing with Sonny Daniels. Grubb had said the same thing to him at the Red Dragon. Sonny had promised both Grubb and Ryan Moore that there wouldn’t be any risks to what they were doing. No doubt about it, dealing heroin came with an automatic set of risks.

  Matt looked up and watched Gambini snap the Halliburton case shut and then the safe. After locking the closet door, he stepped before Matt still seated at his desk. Matt glanced at the gun he was holding, then looked back up at Gambini’s face.

  “You want their product,” Matt said. “That’s what this is all about? You told Grubb you wanted all of it.”

  “I want everything, Detective. Every single drum. Every single pill. This is my market. There’s no room for anybody else.”

  “Sonny told me they were keeping it in Palmdale.”

  “In a place so remote you’ll never find it. Not even after looking at the photographs I took.”

  “What about the guys driving the trucks?”

  Gambini flashed a knowing smile. “There are only two, and I know where both of them live. Besides, they’re not in on it. They think they’ve been hauling hazardous waste.”

  Gambini crossed the room, then turned back from the door. “I’ll leave your gun in the bushes beside the garage. If you’re smart, you’ll give me five minutes to get out of here. It’s your call. I don’t care one way or the other. I’ll win, you’ll lose—no matter what goes down.”

  Matt didn’t say anything. Once Gambini disappeared down the hall, Matt gathered the photographs and returned them to the file. Then he walked over to the doorway and listened. He could hear the kitchen door open and close, the house going silent again. After a beat or two, he stepped into the kitchen and watched Gambini drop his piece into the garden, then vanish into the night.

  He gave Gambini two minutes. Then he walked out of the house, retrieved his .45, and slipped into the darkness. It took almost ten minutes to work his way past the surveillance teams and back to the car. Tossing Gambini’s file on the passenger seat, he cruised through the neighborhood until he reached Sunset, heading west, heading home.

  He switched off the radio and listened to a hard wind breaking against the car. He thought about his partner, laid up in the hospital and probably worried that he’d never walk again. He thought about the way Lane Grubb had died.

  He felt numb inside, and it worried him.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Matt unlocked the front door and walked inside without switching on the lights. Dropping Gambini’s photographs on the kitchen table, he snapped open the freezer, grabbed the bottle of Tito’s vodka, and poured a glass over ice.

  After a first sip, he felt his stomach begin to glow and stepped into the living room. Out the window he could see that the marine layer had swept by and filled in the entire basin from rim to rim. The night was pitch-black, the sky filled with stars. But his eyes were locked on a handful of buildings at the other end of the city that were tall enough to poke through the h
eavy blanket of fog.

  On any other occasion he would have called the sight remarkable, even surreal and inspiring. But right now, it just seemed spooky.

  He took another sip of vodka, thinking about what had happened tonight. All those separate horrible things. Worst of all, he’d let Gambini walk away. While it may have been true that he’d searched the house and found it empty, how could he have ever taken his mind off where he was? How could he have ever let himself become so absorbed in the photographs Gambini had taken that he didn’t hear the man enter the house? Despite the darkness, how could he have not known somewhere deep inside himself that Gambini was standing in the doorway watching him?

  Gun drawn, ten feet away—for five minutes.

  How could he call himself a detective?

  And if the truth be known, if he hadn’t left Lane Grubb alone at the Red Dragon, the man probably would have still died from an overdose. But at least it would have been by his own hand and not Gambini shoving four more hot loads up his arm in a hideous act of murder.

  If the truth be known . . .

  He turned away from the window. Bypassing his reading chair and even the couch, he headed for the bedroom. And that’s when he began to sense that someone else was in the house. It hit him before he even started down the hall.

  He stopped and listened.

  He could smell her.

  The scent of her skin and hair wafting through the air.

  He stepped over to the doorway and gazed into the dark room. He could see her lying on his bed. He looked at her back and hips. Her long legs spread across his comforter.

  Val Burton was laid out on his bed wearing a white blouse and tight jeans. And she was turning over, leaning on her elbow and measuring him from head to toe with an amused smile on her face.

  “It’s actually not the way it looks, Matthew.”

  He nodded. “Okay,” he said. “How’s it look?”

  “Like I came over to seduce you. Like I want to have sex with you behind my husband’s back.”

  She seemed so straightforward about it. Matt tried to shut down his senses. Crossing the room, he sat on the arm of the chair by the window.