Killer in the Hills (3 page)

CHAPTER NINE

I hang up with Melvin, after making quick plans for the morning, then return to talk with Nicki, and our call is interrupted by a blocked number. I answer it.

“Jack,” says a wheezy, nasal voice. “Fat Zach. Where’s your daughter?”

I cut off the call without responding, and return to my conversation with Nicki. The phone on the nightstand rings. The ID says CHANNEL 7 NEWS. Call-waiting beeps again on my cell. I tell Nicki I’ll call her first thing in the morning. She is not happy. Then I turn off my cell and ring the front desk and tell them to hold my calls.

I get up and go to my bag on the floor of the closet and take out my MacBook and turn it on. I Google “Karen Penelope Rhodes” and find her website at the top of the list of results: “BabyKare.com.” I hesitate for a second, then click on the link and watch the webcam video of the girl.

She is pretty, with her mother’s wide blue eyes and small mouth. Her short blonde hair is pulled back in a tiny, curled ponytail. She is wearing a white midriff top with a little pink bow at the center of the low neckline, and white panties. She speaks directly into the camera, her wide eyes projecting innocence and sexuality at the same time, as she talks for two minutes about how much she is attracted to older men. She is whispering, pretending that she has to be quiet or her parents will hear her. She is suggestive but not graphic. I pause it halfway through and look with longing at the minibar key on the nightstand. I take a deep breath and continue watching. She ends the video with a sales pitch for a “private webcam experience” for $1.95 a minute. A counter in a small window at the bottom of the site’s homepage claims over a million views. I snap the MacBook shut and pick up the minibar key. I sit on the edge of the bed, the small key in my tight fist, staring at the little refrigerator across the room, four steps away.

I get up, walk across the room, go to the window, open it, and throw the little key out into the rain. Then I take off my clothes and get in the shower and stand under the hot water for a long time.

CHAPTER TEN

A few hours later I’m sitting in a booth in the back corner of the 101 Coffee Shop, just off the lobby of the Best Western, waiting for Melvin. Quick access to the Hollywood Freeway is not the only reason I chose to stay here. Melvin preferred the Beverly Wilshire, especially since I was picking up the tab, but there’s no way the Beverly Wilshire could compete with breakfast at the 101.

I was the first and only customer when I arrived. It was too early for the hipsters and the rockers and the Hollywood crowd, and the wannabe Hollywood crowd, and the once-was Hollywood crowd, and the never-were-and-never-will-be Hollywood crowd. I had arrived before the coffee shop opened, starved for food and desperate for coffee. I had barely slept, even after four Benadryls and a thousand fluffy white sheep, jumping over fields of Nicki’s green flannel pajamas. When the restaurant opened I took a booth in the back and spent my time waiting for Melvin draining a pot of coffee and studying the menu.

I had spoken with Nicki briefly, while I was waiting for the restaurant to open and she was on her way to work. I was standing outside, on Franklin Avenue. The rain had stopped, but everything was wet and the sky threatened with low clouds. The cold, clean air felt good, and I was glad to be out of my room and talking to Nicki, but Nicki was still not happy. She had seen the news about Karen Penelope Rhodes.

“What do you expect to accomplish by staying there?” she had asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Well, what are you going to do next?”

“I’m not sure.”

“When do you plan to come home?” she said.

“Have to wait and see.”

She made a sound, a kind of exasperated sigh.

“First of all, there’s a high probability the LAPD is going to want me to stick around,” I said. “Why go back home when they’ll probably call me in a couple of days and tell me to come back here?”

“Because I care about you, and you have no business getting involved in any of this,” she said. “You need to get Joel on it. He’s your lawyer and you need to let him handle it and get out of the way.”

Her point was arguable, but her point wasn’t the point.

“Are you speaking as an attorney now?” I said.

“I’m not your attorney anymore,” she said. “I’m the person who loves you and knows you well enough to worry that you’ll get yourself into trouble. Again.”

“The trouble came to me,” I said. “I didn’t go looking for it.”

“Stop talking like a character from one of your books,” she said. “I miss you and I worry about you.”

“I miss you too, and I’ll be back as soon as possible,” I said.

“And you have no idea when that will be,” she said.

“No.”

Another sigh.

“I’m only going to ask this once, because I know you’ll tell me the truth,” she said. “Is the girl your daughter?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s possible she is.”

She didn’t make a sound for half a minute. I began to wonder if the connection was dropped.

“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.