Private: #1 Suspect (10 page)

THE STAIRCASE AT Private was a wide, winding spiral, five stories wrapping around the core of the reception entrance on the ground floor. The stairs were inspired by the cross section of a nautilus shell. And by a stone staircase I once walked down at the Vatican.

I was going up the stairs to my office when Sci loped up the steps, caught up with me on four, and said, “Hold on, Jack.” He had a sad look on his face.

My guts took the down elevator.

“What is it, Sci?”

“You’re looking at the bad-news messenger,” he said. “Bruno just called.”

Bruno was Sci’s friend, the high-level tech at the city lab, the one with cop connections who hoped that Sci would one day bring him over to Private.

We walked past Cody into my office.

Sci dropped into a chair, put his feet up on the edge of my desk, and said, “Between us, okay? Or else we’re going to have to hire Bruno. Lose a good contact at the lab.”

“Go ahead. No, wait. I want Justine to hear this.”

“Are you sure?” said Sci.

“Absolutely.”

I got Justine on the interoffice line. She said she’d be right up, and in a minute she came into my office, barely looking at me. She took the chair next to Sci.

Sci said, “The LA crime lab found semen in Colleen’s body. The DNA is consistent with yours.”

“Come on,” I said.

Justine didn’t say it, but I could read it in her face—
Why am I not surprised?

Sci went on, “And apparently the cops have a timeline for the murder. Here’s what I’ve been told. On the day it happened, Colleen used her credit card to buy gas and a few random purchases at the Sunoco on La Cienega. She had lunch alone at the Newsroom Café on North Robertson, and her car was just found at the adjacent parking garage.”

I was seeing it as Sci laid it out. I tried to block out the issue of the semen in Colleen’s body.

“Cops have dumped your phone records, Jack,” said Sci. “Your landline was used during the time period when Colleen was killed, and you say you weren’t home.”

“The killer used my phone?”

“Yeah. Seems like he used it to call a number that was answered and then disconnected after two seconds. That call was to Tommy’s cell.”

“
Christ
. What the hell does that mean?”

What
did
it mean?

“That semen,” Justine said. “If Tommy had sex with Colleen, the DNA would be the same.”

“Right,” Sci said. “His DNA and Jack’s are identical.”

“So the cops are saying what? I had sex with Colleen, killed her, and then called my brother? Or we killed her together?”

“Jack, what I know is that Mitch Tandy wants to get you for this, and if he can get Tommy too it’s a very big day for Tandy.”

TOMMY
.

I had to face it. My goddamned brother could have been involved in Colleen’s death. Had he gone insane? Had he killed Colleen to hurt me?

I thought back to the break that had divided us for good. It had happened when Tommy and I were in the ninth grade, fourteen years old.

April Lundon was a year older.

She was charming and flirtatious and spontaneous. She could walk on her hands and ride a horse bareback, and she’d been to Paris. She’d had a French boyfriend the summer before and knew bedroom French.

She liked to walk between me and Tommy with her hands hooked into the backs of our pants. She said she liked us equally—and we were both crazy for her. April wouldn’t choose.

We agreed, Tommy and I, that only one of us could have the girl. April set the terms, a kissing contest. She would be blindfolded. The best kisser would win. And there was the implied promise that the winner would take
all
.

We were testosterone fueled and cocky. The idea of a “kiss off” was delicious. We both thought we would win, and we never considered the consequences. It never occurred to either of us to just walk away.

The competition was on for a Saturday morning, and a dozen kids showed up at the beach behind the juice bar to cheer us on in this wicked and daring contest.

April kissed Tommy, then she kissed me. I put my whole heart into that kiss, as if I would never kiss a girl again. April picked me.

Then, best two out of three, she picked me again.

Tommy didn’t forgive April and he didn’t forgive me. Our dispute was encouraged by our father, who would favor one of us, then, for no reason we could see or understand, favor the other. He was unpredictable and cruel.

Our bitterness escalated, got dirty, got physical, and lived on after April Lundon was in college, married, a mother of four. Continued even after my father gave me fifteen million dollars and the keys to Private.

Continued even after he was dead.

So there was bad history between Tommy and me, but could he, would he, get revenge by committing murder?

I thought he was capable of it.

But I didn’t know if he had done it.

I stared through Sci and Justine, thinking that I’d go to his office, drag him out, do whatever it took to get him to talk.

I called to Cody, “I need Del Rio and Cruz. Now.”

But Justine reached across my desk and put a hand on my arm.

“Wait,” she said. “Wait until you have enough evidence to box Tommy in.”

JACK MORGAN’S multimillion-dollar crime lab took up the entire lower level of Private: twenty thousand square feet of cutting-edge forensic laboratory, regarded as one of the top independent labs in the country. A service for Private clients, Private’s lab was also a profit center, hired by police departments across the country when they needed fast results and only the most advanced technology would do.

Dr. Seymour Kloppenberg, Private’s own Dr. Sci, was the proud head of this lab, but right now he and Mo-bot were in Mo’s office, a dark cave of a room that Mo liked to call her “cozy hole.” She was burning incense, had scarves draped over the lamps, and photos of her husband and kids saved screens on the dozen computer monitors banked above her desktop.

The local news was on video six, tight close-up of a talking head reporting on the sensational “Murder in Malibu.”

Sci reclined and rocked in a swivel chair, but Mo was on the edge of her seat, visibly angry and agitated. An accomplished warrior on a multilevel, real-time online combat game, Mo sometimes felt the lines blur between game and reality.

The feeling was coming over her, that rush of being in a warrior frame of mind.

As she watched the reporter speak to the camera, Mo assumed her avatar’s personality, thought about weapons in her arsenal, and assembled her virtual army.

The reporter staring back through the screen was Randi Turner, who had been a fixture on Channel 9 for the past couple of years. Turner said to the camera’s eye, “Jack Morgan, CEO of Private Investigations, is widely viewed as the prime suspect in the murder of his former lover and personal assistant Colleen Molloy.”

Pictures of Jack flashed on the screen, and then shots of Jack, his arm around Colleen, running through rain from a restaurant marquee to his car. After that, there was a film clip of them at a Hollywood party, whispering and laughing.

Turner spoke throughout the slide show.

Turner said, “Jack Morgan’s father was the late Thomas Morgan, convicted of extortion and murder in 2003, died in prison in 2006. Like his father, Jack Morgan is said to have links to organized crime.”

Mo had had enough.

She sprang up from her chair and yelled at the TV, “Links to organized crime? Paid off his brother’s gambling debt, you mean.”

“Take it easy,” Sci said. “All this means is that the press is reaching. If they had something on Jack, they wouldn’t need to refer to his father. They wouldn’t have to imply anything.”

Turner spoke from the high-def screen on the wall above Mo’s desk. “Sources close to the police tell Channel 9 that physical evidence found on the victim implicates Jack Morgan, but the nature of that evidence is being withheld from the press.”

“Damn you. Die, bitch!”

Sci grabbed the remote from Mo’s hand and shut the TV off.

Mo said, “I could cut off her head, slice her below the knees, and leave her standing in sections. She wouldn’t even know she was dead.”

“Maureen, emotion is counterproductive.”

“Jack could
never
have killed Colleen.”

“No, he couldn’t, he didn’t, and he won’t get charged. This is just the free press at work, churning the news.”

“Oh, and you’re saying no innocent person has ever gone to prison? That never happens?”

“What do you say? What if you put all this energy into working the case?”

“Sure, I will. But you and I both know,” Mo-bot said, “the only thing that can save Jack is a confession from the killer. A confession that includes an explanation of how he got Jack’s semen into Colleen’s body.”

I WENT THROUGH my voicemail as I drove.

I listened to a message from an edgy Carmine Noccia, heard from Del Rio and Scotty, then got an update from Cruz about the murder at the Beverly Hills Sun. I talked at length to our Rome office, during which time Justine returned my call. I called her back and got her voicemail.

“I’m on the road,” I said. “I’ll try you again later.”

At just after eight p.m., I pulled into my driveway. I was undoing my seat belt when a police cruiser drove up behind me and parked on the shoulder of the highway. The cruiser’s grill lights sent bursts of color across the gates and the stucco wall.

The lights came on in my mind too. I’d been driving on autopilot for the past forty minutes, had driven myself home, although I hadn’t meant to come here at all.

The squad car door slammed behind me. I buzzed down my window, and a flashlight beam blinded me so that I could only see the patrolman’s silhouette.

“License and registration, please.”

I couldn’t swear to it, but I was pretty sure I hadn’t been speeding. I got my license out of my wallet, handed it out the window, reached across the seat to the glove box, and located my registration. Handed that out too.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” said the cop.

I waited. Stared at the yellow tape and the notice on my front door. I listened to the crackling and chirping of the cop’s radio, remembering how two nights ago, right about this time, I’d gotten out of the car right in this spot.

I’d signed the voucher, said good night to Aldo, passed my fob across the gate card reader, entered the house, and stripped down as I made for the shower.

A couple hours after that, I was being grilled by two hardened LA cops who’d determined I was guilty of killing Colleen before I’d said a word.

As I waited for the cop to come back to the car, I thought about being interrogated that night. Detective Tandy’s theory, part of it, anyway, seemed plausible.

Had Colleen come to my house to surprise me?

I could see her doing that. She would have known it was risky, but it was in her character to take a chance that after all we’d had together she could change my mind.

I pictured Colleen curled up in a chair in my living room, waiting for me to arrive. Maybe she’d heard a car stop outside the gate.

I could see her going to the window, peering out into the dark, hearing the whirr of the gates rolling back. Maybe she’d opened the door, called out, “Jack?”

Had someone said, “Hey, Colleen.”

Had he looked just like me?

Had Tommy caught her by surprise, backed her into the house, made her lie down on the bed? Maybe Colleen went for my gun—she knew where it was. But she wasn’t fast enough. Wasn’t strong enough. The gun was snatched out of her hand. And she was shot three times.

Did Tommy really do that?

Another set of images spooled out in my mind’s eye.

In this scenario someone had been tailing
me
.

Say he was watching when I left Colleen’s hotel room the week before. He knew me. He knew Colleen. He wished me harm, and he’d come up with a plan.

I saw Tommy.

Let’s just say he’d kept his eye on Colleen while I was in Europe. At some point in that four-day period, he’d kidnapped her, and an hour before I was due to land at LAX, he’d restrained her somehow and driven her to my house. He’d used her gate key, pressed her finger to the biometric lock…

My thoughts were interrupted by a car door slamming behind me. I heard the cop walking back to my car.

The flashlight beam was pointed at my face again as he handed me my identification.

“Mr. Morgan, do you know why I stopped you?”

“No. I live here. You know that, right? This is my house.”

“This is a crime scene. Why are you here?”

“I need a change of clothes.”

“That’s not happening, Mr. Morgan.”

“Okay,” I said. I started up the engine. It roared.

But the cop wasn’t letting me go. Not yet. He scrutinized my face from behind his light.

I understood why he’d stopped me.

The cops were watching my house in case the killer came back to the scene of the crime.

The cop looked at me as if that was just what I’d done.

JINX POOLE’S FLAGSHIP hotel was set like a diamond tiara at the top of the intersection of South Santa Monica and Wilshire.

I drove my Lambo around the generous, curving driveway to the front doors of the Beverly Hills Sun, handed my car keys to the valet, and went directly through the busy marble-lined lobby to the elevator bank.

A gang of partygoers broke around me, and when they had dispersed, I got into the elevator. I leaned against a cool stone-paneled wall as it rose to the fifth floor, where Marcus Bingham had been strangled to death and where I was staying until my house was mine again.

I headed toward my room, but instead of going in, on impulse I opened the fire door and walked up a flight of stairs to the bar on the roof.

The air was cooling down, and looping strands of pin lights twinkled like stars, illuminating a scene rich with possibilities of sex with a stranger or maybe even romance.

A jazz trio was playing “Polka Dots and Moonbeams” at the far end of the deck, the music wafting across the swimming pool. Couples flirted at the bar, leaned toward  each other on the chaises around the pool. Flaps were closed on the white canvas cabanas.

I stood at the edge of all this hazy, hedonistic optimism, then took a seat at the freestanding bar. I asked the bartender, “What am I having?”

He looked at me, then answered by pouring me a double Chivas straight up.

I’m not a big-time drinker. But if I ever needed hard liquor, this was the night.

I lowered my head so that there was no mistaking my purpose at the bar. I didn’t want company. I wanted oblivion.

But I felt someone’s eyes on me. When I looked up, a woman at the end of the bar was staring at me intently. She was in her late twenties, dark hair tied back into a ponytail, the lines of her slight frame camouflaged by loose clothing that was too dark for California and too big for her.

The woman looked familiar, but I didn’t know her. I looked away, got the bartender’s attention, and ordered another double.

When I looked up from my drink a few minutes later, the woman was gone.