City of Echoes (9 page)

He reached the 134 Freeway and started up the ramp, feeling like maybe he really had lucked out. But after the first mile, he wasn’t so sure. That car was in his rearview mirror again. The man in the silver Nissan.

CHAPTER 18

Matt walked into the house, flipped on the lights, and opened the front curtains. He’d seen the man in the silver Nissan twice in a single day. He didn’t believe in coincidence. At the same time, the guy had been easy to shake. So easy that Matt didn’t know what to make of it.

Willing to wait and see what might happen next, he filed it away, grabbed a beer out of the fridge, and sat down at the kitchen table with the Millie Brown murder book. He took a few moments to clear his mind of all that had happened since he got the call two days ago and realized that his best friend was dead, gone. In spite of his exhaustion, he wanted a clean read on the Brown case before he closed his eyes. A take without bias or any thought of Cabrera or Frankie Lane or even what his imagination, his instincts, were trying to tell him right now.

He lived just north of the Palisades in the hills overlooking Potrero Canyon Park, Santa Monica, and the Pacific Ocean. He couldn’t really tell what style the architect would have called his house. At times Matt thought the place looked like a ranch, other times modern, but most days it looked just like what it probably was—a run-down box with a carport attached. It was the dark spot in the neighborhood. The house everyone had hoped would be knocked down when the old woman who had lived here finally died.

But Matt had been lucky enough to know her grandson, Kevin Hughes. And when the real estate bubble burst, Matt had steady work as a patrol officer and could afford the lowered mortgage rate.

He liked the place because he could see the ocean from the living room and kitchen, even his bedroom. He liked watching the deer and coyotes that lived in the park and often climbed the hill at night to sleep in the grass behind his house. But more important, he liked the place because it was made of wood. He had ridden out two earthquakes since moving in. The house creaked and swayed but moved with the hill and didn’t fall down.

His mind surfaced and he checked the front window. The marine layer was as thick as a steam room, but he could still see most of the street. The Nissan hadn’t followed him home. He pushed a fresh piece of nicotine gum against his cheek, thought about that Marlboro again, and knew that he was ready.

He opened the murder book, read through the preliminary reports, then flipped to the chronological record and dug in. From what he could tell, Grace and Rodriguez shared equal time contributing to the murder book. And while Rodriguez was a decent writer, Grace seemed even better, his descriptions so well composed that they might have been pulled out of a crime novel.

But what struck Matt most was the tone he could hear coming from both detectives.

It seemed more than clear that finding Millie Brown’s body staked to the ground with her face slashed had changed them. That getting their hands on the killer had become more than a mission. That anything or anyone that got in the way of their success would be confronted and convinced otherwise, using whatever means necessary. That included the crime lab. They spent every favor and were first in line every time. They enlisted Orlando and Plank and used them to assist, until Ron Harris was singled out and arrested.

Curiously, Harris wasn’t their first suspect. A man working for the construction company that Millie’s father had hired to remodel their home looked good for the murder from the very beginning.

Matt’s eyes lingered on his name. Jamie Taladyne.

Five years ago Taladyne had been accused of sexually assaulting a young woman while remodeling a dormitory at one of the schools on the Westside. Even worse, he had been convicted but ended up serving only two years of a ten-year sentence due to overcrowding.

Matt hadn’t been aware of a second suspect and flipped through the sections of the binder until he found a photograph of Taladyne and a transcript from his initial interview with Grace and Rodriguez. Taladyne was twenty-nine years old, of medium build, with light brown hair and striking, almost hypnotic sky-blue eyes. He had contact with Millie on a daily basis. According to an entry made by Rodriguez, Taladyne’s coworkers often saw them talking together. After the murder, a carpenter came forward claiming that Taladyne had admitted he was infatuated with the girl and couldn’t get her out of his mind. During the interview, Taladyne claimed that she had often flirted with him and teased him. That on one occasion she had removed her clothing and put on a bathing suit with her bedroom door open because she knew that he could see her as he cut drywall in the room across the hall. Taladyne denied his coworker’s claim of infatuation but said he liked the girl just the same. He had no reason to hurt her. He was at home that night alone, and probably at that hour, in bed getting some sleep. When asked if he would take a polygraph, Taladyne agreed without a moment’s hesitation. When he passed the test, Grace and Rodriguez cut him loose.

Matt checked the window again as he took a sip of beer and thought it over. Jamie Taladyne seemed like a perfect fit but had found a way to pass a polygraph. Within a week of the murder he’d been dropped as a suspect.

Matt paged ahead and found the coroner’s report, skimming through it quickly. Damage to Millie Brown’s vagina seemed to suggest that she had been raped, but no semen had been found anywhere on her body. No pubic hairs from the killer were found, nor were there any scratches, abrasions, or bite marks that might indicate a struggle. Matt grabbed the second murder book, opened it to the coroner’s report, and found the same conclusions. Faith Novakoff had been raped as well, yet her body showed only minor signs of the assault, and her killer had left nothing behind.

It seemed strange, but Matt let it go.

Pushing the second binder aside, he returned to the first and continued reading. Ron Harris came later in the investigation because finding him required interviews with people who knew Millie, a review of her text messages and e-mails, and DNA analysis of unwashed clothing found in her laundry hamper.

Millie Brown had been more than sexually active. Semen samples had been taken from two pairs of jeans, three bras and T-shirts, and five pairs of panties—what amounted to a week’s worth of clothing. DNA analysis pointed to a single individual and did not match the samples taken from Jamie Taladyne. After Grace and Rodriguez sifted through the evidence and spoke with Millie’s best friend, they realized it was more than likely that the semen had come from her science teacher in high school, Ron Harris.

Matt could tell that something changed when Grace and Rodriguez realized that their primary murder suspect was the victim’s teacher. Someone who had broken what amounted to a sacred trust. Although they had enough to pick up Harris over the weekend, they waited until Monday, maximizing the shock value by pulling him out of his classroom in a pair of handcuffs. Grace made a note that when he looked back at the school from the car, every window was awash with the faces of teachers and students, every one of them peeking out from the shadows, frightened and stunned—a trust broken forever.

From that moment on, the investigation moved in a straight line and at high speed. Grace and Rodriguez sweated Harris out for fifteen hours in the box, often letting Orlando and Plank fill in for them when they needed a break. They offered food and coffee to Harris, bagging up everything the man touched and rushing it out to the crime lab for DNA analysis. They listened to his denials that Millie wanted out of the relationship and was threatening him with exposure. They listened to his numerous claims that he had no involvement with Millie on any personal level and that whomever they had been speaking with had lied to them. When Grace presented Harris with copies of the e-mails and text messages he had written to Millie—overwhelming evidence that SID had downloaded from the girl’s computer and cell phone—Harris left himself open to the endgame and agreed to a polygraph.

It was a mistake, Grace noted in his report. The same one so many guilty people make when they’re trying to convince detectives that they’re innocent. Harris failed the polygraph and was held overnight.

By the following afternoon, preliminary results were in from the lab. Harris’s DNA matched the DNA from the semen found on Millie’s clothing. Within two hours Grace and Rodriguez, along with Orlando and Plank and a team of SID criminalists, had a warrant and were searching Harris’s house.

They knew exactly what to look for because Dr. George Baylor, working side by side with Dr. Art Madina, one of the most talented medical examiners in the coroner’s office, told them what to look for.

Millie Brown had been murdered with a razor blade.

And they found it in Ron Harris’s toolbox in his garage. A razor blade set inside a box cutter.

A moment passed. A moment long enough to revive those hideous images of Jane Doe’s cut-up face. Matt gulped down half the bottle of beer, trying to shake them off and hoping that he wouldn’t dream tonight.

Baylor was part of the original team, most likely a hired professional whom the district attorney’s office relied on to back up the county’s findings and testify in court. But that only upped the ante and made the list of questions bigger than it should have been.

Grace and Rodriguez had Ron Harris so locked in, the man took his own life.

Matt got up and started pacing. His imagination was still trying to skip ahead. Every answer to every question pointed down a road that ended a mile or two back. Either way, no matter how you cut it there was a madman out there. Some sick fuck from another planet.

He glanced at the clock on the stove. It was one thirty in the morning. He was new at this. He needed someone to talk to. He thought about his dad.

CHAPTER 19

Frankie’s service picked up after seven rings. Matt listened to the outgoing message. When he heard the beep, he paused a moment, wondering if he shouldn’t just forget it.

“It’s me, Frankie,” he said finally. “Sorry about the late-night call, but I know why you lost it this morning. We need to talk. Call me back when you can.”

He switched off the phone. One thirty in the morning. He needed to talk to someone. He found Cabrera’s cell number and punched Call. Cabrera picked up after a single ring.

“What the fuck?”

Matt ignored the attitude. He could tell from the sound of Cabrera’s voice that he’d been awake, even though he was probably in bed and lying down.

“In the Millie Brown case there was a second suspect, Jamie Taladyne. Grace and Rodriguez dropped him from the list when they found Ron Harris.”

“You called me after going forty-eight straight to tell me this?”

Matt opened the slider and stepped out onto the rear deck, trying to choose the right words. There was no view of Santa Monica or Venice Beach tonight. Just the park at the bottom of the hill buried in an eerie fog.

“You saw what Grace was like tonight,” he said. “Something’s wrong.”

“Something’s wrong?” Cabrera pulled the phone away and muttered a few unrecognizable words in frustration. “Harris was doing the girl,” he said. “She wanted out and had his perverted ass up against the fucking wall. He smoked her and tried to make it look like it was done by some sick fuck. The science and everything else worked like a compass, Jones. All his shit pointed north. Taladyne was never on the map.”

“How come you know so much about it, Denny?”

“Because you left the murder book behind when you split this afternoon, and thanks to the lab putting us on hold, we’ve got nothing to go on with our own case.”

Matt leaned against the rail, gazing at his neighbor’s house and lowering his voice. “You seem so sure this isn’t our case. Grace took those pictures of the girl’s body. You want to know why?”

“I don’t think so, Jones. I don’t think I do.”

“He had a meeting tonight with a doctor by the name of George Baylor. Baylor would have been a witness for the prosecution if Harris had lived long enough to go to trial. Grace wanted him to see the pictures. It was so important to him that he couldn’t wait until morning. He drove over to Baylor’s house in the middle of the night.”

A long moment passed. When Cabrera eventually spoke, the anger and frustration in his voice had been transformed into genuine concern.

“How did you come by information like that?” he said. “Better yet, don’t tell me, Matt. You need to listen to me, man. You’re talking crazy and you’re gonna get yourself in trouble. You’re gonna get yourself fired.”

Matt shook his head. “Something’s wrong, Denny. We need to find Taladyne. We need to talk to him and see what’s up.”

“Listen to me, man. You’re not listening.” Cabrera paused, as if thinking it over, then came back. “I won’t let you take me down with you, Jones. Do you understand? It’s not gonna happen. Do you have any idea where I came from? My father was a day laborer who stood outside the fence at the Home Depot on San Fernando Road and hoped to make a buck any way he could. My mother cleaned rooms at a Motel 6 in Sun Valley. They busted their butts for me. They’re the two greatest people I’ve ever met or even heard of. I’m not just the first kid from my neighborhood to graduate from college. I was the first kid to make it all the way through high school. I like my job, man, and I don’t wanna lose it. I wanna make it a career.”

Matt didn’t know what to say. He understood where Cabrera was coming from. Although he didn’t agree, he understood and could accept his partner’s reasoning for everything he had just said. But halfway through, Matt had been looking past his house and noticed a red LED light blinking from the street. As he strained to see through the fog, he noticed the outline of a car, the red light coming from something like a GPS device mounted on the dashboard.

It was the car in his rearview mirror. The silver Nissan.

“I’ve gotta go,” he said.

Cabrera was incensed. “Were you listening to me? Did you hear anything I just said?”

“I heard everything, Denny. I understand—believe me, I do. But right now I’ve gotta go.”