Diagnosis Murder: The Death Merchant (10 page)

"It's not our problem, Dad."

"Then why do I feel this intense pressure right behind my eyes?"

"I'm not a doctor," Steve said, "but it sounds to me like you need a vacation."

There was nothing more Wyatt could do in Kauai, so he took the first flight out to Los Angeles. On the way, he turned on his laptop and browsed over the material he'd gathered on Mark Sloan and his son.

He'd analyzed their credit card statements, their phone bills, their DMV records, and managed to get a look at Steve Sloan's service record. Privacy no longer existed for anyone—except men like Wyatt, whose survival depended on it. Wyatt paid a high price for the sophisticated software and database passwords he'd acquired, but it was worth every penny to have unfettered access to bits and bytes of people's lives.

As soon as he landed at LAX in the late afternoon, he rented a car and drove to a storage unit he kept in Canoga Park, a bleak corner of the San Fernando Valley filled with auto body shops, apartments overstuffed with illegal aliens, and warehouses where porno films were shot.

The storage units were covered with gang graffiti and were protected by a live-in manager, who liked to tool around the property in his golf cart and had put rattrap boxes in every corner and alcove.

Wyatt walked up to his little closet. A cheap $10 padlock was all that protected his tens of thousands of dollars' worth of sophisticated electronics and unsophisticated weapons. Anyone who put expensive locks on their storage units might as well put a placard outside that said: GOOD STUFF INSIDE. COME AND GET IT!

He left the weapons, took the electronic goodies, and drove through Las Virgenes Canyon, down the Santa Monica Mountains, and into Malibu, the exclusive beach community for the very rich. Having just left Kauai, Wyatt was struck by the contrasts between the two iconic visions of sandy paradise.

They both had long beaches, palm trees, and almost endless sunshine. What Hawaii didn't have was a Berlin Wall of obscene houses, tall fences, and a traffic-clogged freeway cutting people off from the beach. And even if anybody got to the beach, what little sand that wasn't eroded away was covered with raw sewage, used syringes, and TV production crews hauling in fake palm trees, fake dunes, and swimsuit models to sell the world on a paradise that didn't exist.

But other than that, Hawaii and Malibu were virtually the same.

Mark Sloan lived on an exclusive stretch of Malibu across from the colorfully dated Trancas Market, where people with multimillion-dollar homes shopped for groceries in flip-flops, cutoffs, and sweatshirts and pretended they were beach bums.

Wyatt discovered in his research that Mark bought the house cheap in an auction held by the DEA, who'd taken the prime property from some drug dealer. Mark lived on the top floor and his son lived on the first floor. They shared a front door, but there was separate access to the bottom floor from the beach. That was the door Wyatt used to break in after he disabled the alarm.

Wyatt spent the next two hours methodically and efficiently infesting the house with electronic bugs. He opened up their computers and installed chips that would allow him to capture each keystroke and, when they were on-line, see whatever they saw in real time. The image would be transmitted to his computer and, if he wasn't there, would be captured on his hard drive for later viewing. He used another piece of electronic wizardry to clone their cell phones so he could eavesdrop on their calls at will or, when he wasn't around, have them recorded by his computer for playback.

All the devices he planted were energy parasites powered by their hosts. No need to worry about batteries. In all, he left close to $50,000 in electronics behind in Mark Sloan's house. He thanked Danny Royal for so kindly offsetting that unexpected expense out of petty cash.

When Wyatt finished with the house, he moved into the garage, bugged Mark's Saab convertible, and planted a satellite tracking device under the hood. Wyatt would rely on the Defense Department's array of satellites to pinpoint Mark Sloan's location at any time and relay it to his wireless handset.

Your tax dollars at work, Wyatt thought.

He wouldn't have to risk tailing Mark Sloan; he'd just listen to everything the doctor said and track all his movements from the safety, distance, and anonymity of a computer screen.

Whatever Mark knew or found out now, Wyatt would know it, too.

Mark Sloan's last night on Kauai was spent struggling to sleep, unable to quiet his thoughts, unable to stop thinking about the mystery of Danny Royal.

Who was Danny Royal?

A very smart, very cool-headed individual. Smart enough not only to take a great deal of someone's money, but to know how to disappear afterward.

A man who never relaxed, who never lowered his guard, never letting anyone into his life, living, in every regard, only on the surface. Even his house was utterly devoid of a personality, except for a few crossword puzzle magazines.

With that thought, Mark sat up, got out of bed, and turned on the lamp on the bedside table. He found the stack of recipe cards he took from the Royal Hawaiian, picked out the one that matched the card they'd found in the safe-deposit box, and wrote on it:

Re: Ideal Oven, Ask Jim Lowe. A loose, trendy cook

It seemed pretty straightforward. A note about someone to contact about a piece of kitchen equipment and a chef. But what if it was something more? An anagram, perhaps?

So for three hours Mark tried reorganizing the letters of the first sentence into other possible sentences, but came up with nothing that made any sense.

Deliverance: I'm a Jello Owl.

We laced a vermilion jello.

Cleveland: Wire Joel a Limo.

We've corralled a mini jello.

Lo, a medicinal jewel love,

A love Jew cleared a million.

A vile medical jello owner

In frustration, he removed the re: from the mix, but still couldn't come up with anything any more sensible or even grammatical.

A Camino leveled Jill, Ow.

A clean evil willed mojo.

Jill menaced a olive owl.

A cajoled ill evil woman.

He had even less luck when he moved on to the second sentence of the note: A loose, trendy cook

If Mark had a computer, he figured he could probably come up with a thousand more senseless combinations of words out of what was scrawled on Danny's recipe card.

Maybe the note wasn't a puzzle. It just was what it was— a note about a guy to call for a deal on ovens and a good chef—and he was obsessing over nothing.

Then again, Danny was referring to a trendy cook rather than a chef. It seemed odd. The distinction between a chef and a cook wasn't major, and merely one of perception, but it would certainly make a difference to a man running an elegant restaurant as opposed to a diner. Wouldn't Danny Royal have preferred a trendy chef over a trendy cook?

Mark turned off the light, got back into bed tried to sleep. But again the questions kept coming.

What was Danny Royal running from? Where was he running from? Whom was he running from?

Whom? Now, there was an interesting question. Finding Danny couldn't have been easy, not if it took five years to happen. And that had to be expensive. So whoever it was had deep pockets, patience, and an infinite capacity for vengeance.

And what about the killer? Mark doubted it was the aggrieved individual. This had to be the work of a hired hand. A professional who wanted to make Danny's death look like an accident.

A shark attack, of all things.

So the killer was a professional who wasn't afraid of challenges. He probably relished them.

Whoever the killer was, he had to get scuba gear, a boat, a tiger shark fin. And he'd probably been on the island for a while, watching Danny and learning his habits. Somewhere along the line, the killer must have left some kind of clue, some trace of his existence and his movements. Nobody is invisible.

Mark made some notes on the hotel notepad, reminding himself of things to ask Kealoha to look into when they met for the last time tomorrow.

It wasn't going to be easy walking away from this mystery, but Mark had to concede, as he finally drifted off to sleep, that he'd run out of leads.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Three hours before their flight back home, Mark and Steve stopped at the police station in Lihue to say good-bye to Sgt. Kealoha and see if there were any new developments in the case.

They walked in to find Kealoha and two other detectives going over the paperwork from the accountant and the bank. Kealoha was wearing the clothes he'd had on the day before and looked like he hadn't slept much, if at all.

Mark took a few sheets of paper, torn from his hotel notepad, from his shirt pocket. "I came up with some possible avenues of investigation and some questions you might want to look into."

"First, let me tell you everything we've found out since yesterday," Kealoha said, pointing to a blank dry-erase board mounted on the wall.

"That much?" Steve said.

"Impressive, huh? Turns out Danny Royal's social security number is legit. We traced the number back to Danny Royal of Summit, New Jersey, who was a law-abiding citizen and regular taxpayer right up until the time he died six years ago."

"Figures," Steve said.

"We got some clean prints off Danny's wallet and passports and ran them through AFIS, coming up blank,"

Kealoha said. "Whoever he was, he never served in the military, law enforcement, or spent time in the pokey."

Kealoha motioned to the two tired men behind him, both of whom were on the phone. "We've checked out Royal's credit card statements and phone bills. All he bought on the card were small things from local merchants—no plane trips or anything that might have given us a lead. Virtually all of his phone calls have been to suppliers or local hotels and residences, presumably to confirm dinner reservations."

"Did Jim Lowe's number show up in any of those calls?" Mark asked.

"Not so far." Kealoha said, "though he could work for one of the vendors, or be somebody who just came in to eat at Danny's restaurant one night."

"You get anything off the calls from Danny's house?" Mark asked.

"Almost all of them were to his restaurant or to local hotels."

"Any long-distance calls?" Steve asked.

"Only from the restaurant, and those we've tracked to vendors he was doing business with."

Steve nodded. "He was careful, all right."

Mark offered his notes to Kealoha again. "Perhaps we've let ourselves get distracted by focusing on who Danny Royal is rather than how he was killed."

"I'm going to contact dive shops, see if I can track who rented or bought scuba equipment over the last week, and check with the airlines, see who brought dive stuff along with them," Kealoha said. "I'm also checking every boat rental place on the island and going over any reports of stolen or missing watercraft reported over the last two weeks. Plus, I'm talking to sport fishermen to see if anyone was asking about buying shark fins."

Mark crumpled up his notes and tossed them in a nearby trash can. "You're good, Ben."

"I don't often get a chance to shine," Kealoha said.

Mark held out his hand. "It's been a pleasure meeting you. Good luck on the case."

Kealoha shook his hand. "Ho, az nuts, Doc. Deah wooda be no case witout you, brah. An den da
akamai
killer wooda fooled us lolo mokes. We tanks planny." He grinned at Mark's blank look. "We owe you one, Dr. Sloan."

"That's what I thought you said." Mark grinned back. "Either that, or you said I had hazelnuts in my suitcase. I'll let you know as soon as those sketches come in from the forensic anthropologist."

Steve shook Kealoha's hand. "Gimme a call, brah. We'll talk story, shoots?"

"Shoots, brah, dun deal," Kealoha replied with a grin. Then he added, "You do realize you sound ridiculous trying to talk pidgin, right?"

"You think that's bad," Steve said, "you ought to hear me Jive."

As they turned to leave, Mark gave Steve a look and whispered, "Do people still jive anymore?"

"Hell if I know," Steve replied.

The breakfast crowd at BBQ Bob's mostly tended to be people who looked like stereotypical truckers; thick-necked, heavyset men and women in jeans and faded shirts and baseball caps. They were drawn to a breakfast menu of eggs and potatoes served up with thick slabs of steak, bacon, ham, pork, or sausage, slathered in butter and grease, and, on request, ass-kicking barbeque sauce.

It wasn't the healthiest of diets, unless you happened to be a strict adherent of a low-carb, protein-rich lifestyle, which none of the patrons were.

Knowing all that, Dr. Jesse Travis often wondered if he was violating his Hippocratic oath by co-owning the place and serving heaping platters of cholesterol to people. He tried to appease his guilty conscience by adding granola, fruit cups, and cottage cheese to the breakfast menu, but so far the only people who ever ordered them were the waitresses and, occasionally, Dr. Amanda Bentley and Jesse's girlfriend, Susan Hilliard.

Of course, Amanda, being a pathologist and medical examiner, and Susan, being a nurse, both knew better than to eat up the "hot death" BBQ Bob's served.

"It's not hot death," Jesse corrected Amanda, who sat at the counter, sipping a cup of coffee and regarding the customers. "It's a hearty breakfast."

"It hearty all right," she said. "It goes straight to the coronary arteries."

"How can you say that? The cowboys and explorers and homesteaders and farmers who made this country great, who road horseback over mountain ranges, through snowstorms, and across blistering deserts, they ate like this."

"They also treated fevers by bleeding people and prescribed mercury as a laxative," Amanda said. "Should we still be doing that, too?"

It wasn't easy for Jesse to argue a medical point he didn't believe in. But as a businessman, he believed in catering to the culinary desires of his customers. He had a lucrative breakfast business going, something few barbeque joints could boast about, and he didn't want to lose it. His customers wanted meat, grease, and butter, and in large quantities, so that's what he gave them.