City of Echoes (6 page)

Matt watched Cabrera step away and attempt to pull himself together. Then he turned back to Lane and found him still kneeling on the ground, still fidgeting and checking his back. He knew that people experienced grief in different ways. Because Lane had been Hughes’s partner, because Matt knew Lane himself, he felt like he owed him something. He owed him, but not right now. Not today with Cabrera around and their murder case circling the drain.

“Denny’s right, Frankie. We’re looking for the bandit. We don’t have time for this. We need to get out of here.”

Lane shrugged and took a hit on his smoke, as if he hadn’t heard what either one of them just said. He stood up and started leafing through one of the murder books. Matt could see Millie Brown’s name printed on the spine.

“Brown was murdered eighteen months ago,” Lane said. “It took a year to bring Ron Harris to trial. Your partner’s right. Harris couldn’t take it and killed himself after the first day. In all that time the department never released a single detail about how Millie Brown was murdered or the condition her body was in when they found her. Because Harris hung himself, nothing was made public in court. These are photographs from the girl’s crime scene. Take a look.”

Lane found the page he was looking for and passed the binder over to Matt.

“How’d you get this, Frankie?”

“Grace gave it to me and Hughes ten days ago. Now take a look.”

“Why would Grace give you guys his murder book?”

Lane’s eyes shifted. “Take a look.”

Matt finally gave in, lifting the murder book closer. There were four photographs set in a plastic sleeve. Four photographs of a nude Millie Brown stretched out on her stomach on the ground. Matt couldn’t be certain from just four photos, but the wounds appeared to be confined to the girl’s face. Harris had posed her body to maximize the shock for whoever found her. Her arms and legs were spread open. Her wrists and ankles had been tied to stakes driven into the ground. Although it was difficult to see with all the blood, it looked like what was left of the girl’s face was resting on a pane of mirrored glass about the size of a sheet of copy paper.

As Matt examined the images, memories began to surface about the girl’s murder and the horrific cloud it had cast over the city. The story had been impossible to escape, particularly in the six weeks leading up to the trial. Millie Brown had been a senior in high school and the daughter of Congressman Jack Brown. A popular girl of uncommon beauty with natural blond hair, refined features, and friends and family who loved her. A girl with a bright future who had been raped and murdered and had met a particularly gruesome end that was never described in any detail. Ron Harris was married with two young children, denied any involvement in Brown’s death, but claimed to have had “a secret but consensual affair” with the girl, his student, over the last three months of her life. His claim had come late and only after Grace and his partner, Leo Rodriguez, plus a second team of detectives confronted him with overwhelming evidence of his guilt.

The public was expecting another big-city murder trial, as well as the media circus that went with it. The kind of trial LA seemed to have made its own over the past few decades. The public needed it for closure. The breadth and weight of the crime demanded it. Public opinion polls were crystal clear: most of the angels living in the City of Angels wanted to see Ron Harris burn. But Harris had other ideas, and after the first day of trial, after the prosecution had presented its opening statement, he returned to his cell and denied the public the revenge they sought and the justice they needed. Harris had a plan, a way out, tying a bedsheet around his neck and leaping into the void.

Coward that he was.

Matt’s mind surfaced. He noticed that Cabrera had moved in behind him and was gazing over his shoulder at the photographs. He wasn’t sure how long his partner had been there and paused a moment to give him more time. He could see Lane just a few feet away holding his place in the second murder book with his finger. Lane was staring back at them, waiting and trying to keep still, without much success.

“Okay, Frankie,” Matt said after a while. “We’ve had our look.”

Lane opened the second murder book and traded it for the first. The place he had been holding turned out to be another set of four crime-scene photographs slipped into a plastic sleeve. Matt studied each image with great care, adjusting the binder so that Cabrera would have a better view. Like Millie Brown, Faith Novakoff had been stripped of her clothing and staked to the ground with her nose and forehead resting on a mirror. Like Brown, the only wounds on her body appeared to be confined to her face, which was unrecognizable because of the profuse bleeding.

Matt looked up from the binder at Lane. “What were they shot with?”

“They weren’t shot, Matt. They were slashed.”

A moment passed. “Just their faces?”

Lane met his eyes, then nodded and took a deep pull on his smoke. “With a box cutter. A razor blade.”

Matt returned to the photographs, ignoring the chill wriggling up his spine. The heavy bleeding indicated that both victims had been alive when they were slashed. Death hadn’t been easy for either one of them, nor would it have been quick. He looked back at Lane.

“You said nothing was ever made public, Frankie. Who made the connection?”

“The photographer here at the crime scene. A criminalist and an SID supervisor out at the crime lab. All three had worked the Millie Brown case. After that, Hughes and I requested the same medical examiner. Art Madina performed the autopsy. He saw it, too.”

“But Harris is dead,” Matt said.

Lane shrugged. “Copycat.”

“What did Grace say?”

“The same thing.”

Cabrera grimaced. “How?”

“We’re living in the age of the Internet,” Lane said. “It’s been eighteen months since Brown was murdered. The dam could’ve sprung a hundred leaks. I think that’s the way Grace put it.”

“The way he put it,” Cabrera said, shaking his head. “What’s this gotta do with what we’ve gotta do?”

Lane took another pull on his smoke, remaining quiet for several moments as he wrestled with something in his head. When he finally spoke, his voice had a frenzied shake to it.

“I don’t think Hughes was killed by some yuppie asshole fuck with a piece,” he said. “I think he was gunned down by the same freak who did Faith Novakoff right here under this tree . . . and I think I’m fucking next.”

It hung there, over their heads and caught in the canopy of the oak tree. Matt filled his lungs with air and exhaled slowly, his mind going. He didn’t want the wave of doubt and absurdity that he was feeling in his gut to resonate in his voice.

“Do you have anything to back up what you’re saying, Frankie? Anything at all that connects anything to anything else?”

Lane seemed to be drowning in a pool of self-doubt, his eyes wagging back and forth across the ground. “Maybe we stumbled onto something. Maybe we hit it blind.” He glanced at Matt and shook his head, then turned back to the memorial and stared at the picture of Faith Novakoff stapled to the tree. “Maybe we hit a nerve. Something crazy we never saw coming. All I know is that there’s no way that asshole in the papers shot Hughes during a holdup. Hughes was too smart for that. He would’ve seen the prick coming. I can feel it, man. It has to be connected to Novakoff’s murder. Something I can’t see that’s fucking everything up. My partner’s gone, for Christ’s sake. Nothing’s gonna bring him back.”

Lane turned away to hide his face. Matt could tell that he was weeping. As he reached out for Lane’s shoulder, he was thinking about the way Hughes’s wife had taken it, and feeling like he’d just been cut in half again.

CHAPTER 12

The sight of Lane turning his face, the sound of the detective weeping on the very spot where Faith Novakoff had been found raped and murdered and staked to the ground—

Lane had forced him to take both murder books, hoping that he would read them and see things the way he did. Even as Matt sat in the passenger seat for the ride back to Hollywood, paging through the crime-scene photos and listening to Cabrera’s nonstop criticism of everything that had happened over the past hour—berating Lane and discounting his skills as a detective, accusing the man of being mentally unstable and emotionally wasted, a fool and a moron, an imbecile and a coward—he couldn’t shake the sights and sounds of Lane’s paranoia and obvious breakdown.

He found it unnerving and even now kept quiet and ignored Cabrera as best he could for the rest of the drive. What troubled him most was that Lane’s fall seemed so out of character. It didn’t fit with the person he’d known as Hughes’s partner—the beers, the talks, the trips to Dodger Stadium, the meals the three of them had shared. It didn’t fit with any of the things Hughes had told him about Lane on his own. Hughes had liked Lane and admired him and said that he had learned more from Lane than from anyone he’d ever worked with. That once you got used to his idiosyncrasies, he was a great guy and an even better detective. The kind of guy you’d want close by if the ground opened up and your world fell in.

Cabrera pulled into the lot behind the station and found a spot close to the building. Matt grabbed the murder books and followed his partner through the rear entrance, passing the holding cells and entering the detective bureau. When Cabrera headed for his cubicle—what they used to call the homicide table when they had real desks—Matt glanced at his own but kept moving. There were two detectives standing beside the coffeemaker just this side of Grace’s office.

“Is he in?” Matt said.

They gave him a measured look. One of them said, “I don’t think so,” before they walked off.

The door was open. Matt didn’t see Grace inside, but his laptop was in plain view. Even better, the portable drive was still sitting right beside it. He walked in and pulled a chair up to the desk. The computer was already awake. After plugging in the portable drive, he waited a beat for the computer to recognize the device, then opened a window and found the video file. Before leaving for breakfast and the autopsy, Matt had e-mailed a copy of the file to Henry Rollins, a forensic analyst from the Photography Unit whom he had worked with many times while assigned to narcotics. He’d sent a copy to himself as well but at the moment didn’t want to take the time to boot up his computer, log on to the network, and download the file.

He needed reassurance more quickly than that.

He needed something to break the spell Lane had cast over their investigation of Hughes’s murder. No matter how ridiculous the assertions Lane made might seem, Matt needed to see the video one more time to feel it.

He clicked open the file and watched as the clip began playing on the screen. He could see Hughes’s silhouette in the SUV. He could make out the figure of a man in a hooded sweatshirt standing by the driver’s-side door with his gun up and ready.

“Who the hell are you?”

Matt turned to the door and saw the two detectives he’d passed in the hall staring back at him. Both appeared to be in their forties but shared little else in form other than the heavy look in their eyes. The big round one on the left had dark hair, olive skin, and a goatee. The short one on the right looked thin and gaunt, with gray hair and pockmarked cheeks.

“Matt Jones,” he said. “Who the hell are you?”

A moment passed, but then their eyes flushed with recognition.

“The new guy?” the big one said.

Matt nodded. The two detectives walked into the room with outstretched hands. The big one did most of the talking, introducing himself as Joey Orlando and then pointing to his partner at the homicide table, Edward Plank. Plank seemed preoccupied with the video playing on the laptop. Once Orlando noticed, he looked back at Matt and seemed uncomfortable as well.

“You caught a tough break,” he said. “The toughest. Anything we can do, anything at all, just ask.”

Plank nodded but kept his eyes on the screen. When Matt turned to the laptop, the gun was flashing, and Plank was shaking his head in disbelief.

“Anything at all,” Plank said in a low voice.

Grace walked in and tossed a FedEx envelope on his desk. Matt watched as his eyes went from the video clip on the laptop to the spines of the murder books Lane had given him to read.

“You guys meet?” Grace said.

Orlando nodded. “Just now.”

“Good,” Grace said. “I think you’re gonna like it here, Jones. Orlando and Plank are two of the best.” He turned to Orlando. “I need to talk to Jones. How ’bout you two guys giving us a minute?”

“Sure,” Orlando said. “Good meeting you, Jones.”

Matt nodded back just as Grace began closing the door. “Same here,” he said.

CHAPTER 13

Grace pushed the laptop aside as he sat down, the surveillance video still rolling in a loop on automatic replay.

“Cabrera told me that Lane was a wreck. He thinks that whoever killed Faith Novakoff murdered his partner. Now the killer’s out to get him. It sounds to me like Lane hit the wall and needs help.”

Matt didn’t say anything. He was troubled by Cabrera’s “private” talks with Grace. This time it seemed innocent enough. Still, there was a theme to it, a rhythm, and he didn’t like it.

Grace glanced at the binder with Millie Brown’s name on the spine. “He and Hughes stopped by about a week and a half ago. They showed me pictures from the Novakoff crime scene. They wanted to hear how things went with the Brown investigation.”

“What did you say?”

“That I felt sorry for them, Jones. That I was glad it was their case and not mine.”

Matt slipped a piece of nicotine gum between his cheek and gum, wishing it was a Marlboro.

“You called it a copycat,” he said.

Grace nodded. “Harris hung himself. He’s dead. And we had him by the short hairs. There was too much evidence. Too many people coming forward. Every move we made pointed in the same direction. That’s why he hung himself. He listened to the deputy DA’s opening statement and knew that there was no way out, Jones. He listened and he did the math. In one day everything added up to zero. Ron Harris was an asshole.”