Private: #1 Suspect (11 page)

TWO YOUNG BUSINESS guys in neon-colored shirts sat down in the empty seats at the end of the bar. They ordered screwdrivers, talked about the stock market and their shrinking expense accounts that wouldn’t cover a free weekend at the Beverly Hills Sun.

I blotted out their voices by concentrating on the music and the glowing scotch in my glass. I thought about Sci’s report of that two-second phone call made from the landline inside my house to Tommy’s cell phone at around the time of the murder.

That call was bad for me because it seemed to establish that I had been in my house when the crime went down.

But I hadn’t made that call.

I hadn’t called Tommy, so…had he called himself from my phone to make it seem that I had been home?

Or had Tommy commissioned a hit?

Had Colleen’s killer called Tommy from my house to tell him that Colleen was dead? Job done. Had Tommy been right outside on the beach, and that’s who Bobbie Newton saw, thinking Tommy was me?

I sat on that barstool, but in my mind I was driving to Tommy’s house. I wanted to confront my brother, to beat the truth out of him. And then I wanted to keep beating him until he didn’t look anything like me. So that, guilty or not, he could never play my double again.

But Justine was right.

I needed proof. Without it, the semen in Colleen’s body would be enough evidence to convince a jury that I was her killer.

I emptied my glass, left cash on the bar, and took the stairs down to the fifth floor.

I turned toward my room and again I noticed the woman who had been sitting at the bar a half hour before. Now she was on the far side of the elevator bank, twenty feet away. Her back was turned to me and she was fumbling in her handbag as if looking for her key.

I had twenty-twenty vision, and as a pilot I’d been trained to see anomalies from the air: a puff of dust, a moving shadow, a glint of steel ten thousand feet down in the dark.

I noticed this woman, but I blocked out that something was wrong with her attitude, her posture, her looks—something.

I walked away from her. I put my card key into the slot, opened my hotel room door—and felt a stunning blow to the back of my head.

I went down.

When I came to, the pain radiating from the back of my head was dazzling. I recognized the sunburst patterns on the carpet under my chin. I was on the floor of a room at the Beverly Hills Sun.

I closed my eyes, awoke to the shock of ice water in my face. The woman I’d seen at the bar and then again in the hallway was stooping over me, her hands on her knees, and she was cursing. I didn’t understand her thick Irish accent, but I knew her eyes.

They were Colleen’s eyes.

I said, “Colleen,” and she began cursing again. Through the pain, and as my vision cleared, I saw that although this woman resembled Colleen, she was older.

“Siobhan?”

The cursing intensified.

I pulled myself up into a sitting position and screamed back into her face, “I don’t understand you. Shut up, shut up, shut
up
.”

“Aym nah shuh’in’ up, Jack-o,” Colleen’s sister shouted into my face. “Nah ’til ye tell me why you kilt ’er.”

I’D BEEN BEATEN twice in the past twenty-four hours and both times by people who had loved Colleen. First Donahue had clocked me. He’d also apparently told Siobhan where to find me. And now I’d been clobbered by Siobhan.

The couch was a beauty, eight feet of down-filled cushions. I took a seat and put my feet up on the coffee table next to the sap Siobhan had used to knock me down.

Siobhan was tough, but she brought me a pillow, then took a bottle of water out of the bar fridge and gave it to me. She sat in the chair across from me and stared at me.

“Start talkin’,” she said.

I did. I told her repeatedly that I hadn’t killed Colleen. I explained where I’d been when Colleen had been shot, and I told her how much I cared about her sister.

“You made love to her,” Siobhan said accusingly. “Colleen called to say you took her to bed before you left Los Angeles. Do you deny it?”

“No, I don’t.”

“You were fooling with her.”

“I loved her. Just not enough to give her what she wanted,” I said.

I thought about Colleen’s last birthday. We’d gone to dinner at Donahue’s, sat at the same table where I’d sat with him last night. Donahue and a gang of waiters had brought out the birthday cake and sung to Colleen.

She had started out very happy that night.

I had known that, after a year of going out, what Colleen wanted for her birthday was a ring.

I had let her down. The best I could do had hurt her, terribly.

“You loved her? Then I don’t understand ‘not enough,’ ” Siobhan said. Her lips trembled. Tears slid down her cheeks. “Why would you have taken her to bed if you meant nothing by it?”

“Why did you sap me?”

“I had to do it.”

I paused to let her words stand alone.

“I missed her, Siobhan.”

I wanted to say more, but nothing I said would make sense, even to me. It had been a mistake to sleep with Colleen. If I hadn’t gone back to her hotel with her, maybe she’d still be alive.

Siobhan struggled to interrogate me through her grief.

“And so, if you didn’t kill Colleen, who did? Aren’t you supposed to be good at this sort of thing—investigating murders?”

Siobhan was sobbing now.

I stood up, reached out my arms to her.

She shook her head no.

“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s okay.”

She came to me and I held her as she cried.

“Find the bastard. You owe that to Colleen.”

“If it can be done, I’ll do it.”

“I miss her,” Siobhan choked out. “I loved her so much. She and I were best friends. Never a cross word. No secrets. I don’t know how I’m going to go on without her.”

“I’m so sorry, Siobhan. Losing Colleen—it’s a terrible thing.”

My voice cracked and then both of us were crying. It had been years since I had let myself cry. Sadness for Colleen swept through me. Holding her sister felt to me like saying good-bye to Colleen again.

Maybe Siobhan felt as if Colleen were saying a last good-bye to me.

Siobhan pulled away from me but gripped my arms tightly as she looked up at my face.

“You really did love her, didn’t you, Jack? So why didn’t you do the right thing by her?”

“I thought I did. I set her free.”

DEL RIO’S OFFICE smelled of pepperoni pizza.

It was after nine, and he and Cruz had been working on the Beverly Hills Sun murder all day and now well into the night, comparing and contrasting the five murders that had been committed in California hotels in the past year and a half.

The first two killings had been six months and a hundred miles apart, so no one thought they were linked.

Victim number one, Saul Cappricio, was found strangled in Jinx Poole’s San Diego hotel. Victim number two, Arthur Valentine, was discovered decomposing at the Seaview, a third-rate hotel in LA.

By the time the third victim, Conrad Morton, had been found garroted in the San Francisco Constellation, also a Poole hotel, the cops were looking for a connection—but even with several police departments involved, or maybe
because
three departments were involved, no viable suspect had turned up.

To date, five businessmen, including Maurice Bingham, ages thirty-five to fifty-one, had been strangled with various types of ligatures in their hotel rooms. The men had not worked for the same companies; all had different occupations, lived in different cities. Three were married and two were not.

Right now, Del Rio was at one computer cross-checking phone logs. Cruz was at a second computer, examining credit card charges.

Cruz said, “Bingham used the same escort service as Valentine, who also charged up six hundred bucks for two hours of patty-cake.”

Del Rio leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. “All of them used hookers. Not the same service, though. Is that a lead or is that just what road warriors do?”

“I feel a business trip coming on,” said Cruz.

“Crap. Me too.”

“It’s a lead,” Cruz said. “The escort services are a lead, not a coincidence. Maybe a hooker with a thrill for the kill is moving from one place to the other.”

Del Rio could see how the next few days were going to go: interviewing prostitutes and johns and widows. He turned off his computer and threw the pizza box into the trash. He put on his jacket.

A list of escort service names and numbers chugged out into the printer tray.

Del Rio said, “Get the lights, will you, Emilio? I’ll meet you here tomorrow morning at eight. We’ll stop first for coffee.”

MITCH TANDY WAS poking around the side of the house, looking for anything out of place. He wanted to find something tangible that could link Jack Morgan to the Molloy murder.

He thought about the glove in the O. J. Simpson investigation, found near Simpson’s property line. The glove was conclusive evidence, but through a freak of prosecutorial incompetence, it had ended up helping the defense.

If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.

The Simpson investigation had been the shame of the LAPD.

Never mind. This was today.

Ten guys from the crime unit were out on the beach. Divers were doing their thing in the shallows, looking for metal. Inside, CSIs were going over the house again.

Jack Morgan was smart, but he wasn’t perfect. And if he’d overlooked anything in his cleanup of the crime scene, Tandy was sure something that could indict him would be found.

Tandy heard Ziegler call out to him.

“I’m over here,” he answered.

Ziegler joined Tandy where he stood inside the stucco fence that separated Jack Morgan’s house from the raging river that was the Pacific Coast Highway.

Tandy asked, “Find anything?”

“No.”

Tandy said, “He leaves his spunk in her. Doesn’t even use a rubber. That’s risky behavior. Like suicidal.”

“Or it’s his brother’s spooge.”

They’d been over this before. The complication of twin brothers with identical DNA. The kind of thing that could introduce “reasonable doubt” into a jury deliberation. When they’d interviewed Tommy, he’d had an alibi for the time of the murder. His wife said he was home. Swore it. Unshakably.

Still, she could have been lying.

“Tommy or Jack. It was one of them. And only Jack has a motive.”

Ziegler said, “What’s that over there?”

“What?”

Ziegler pointed at a disturbance in the mulch at the base of a bougainvillea vine, hidden in the shade of the fence.

Tandy used his foot to push away the pine bark.

For a long moment, they both stared.

“I’ll get the camera,” Ziegler said.

Tandy nodded, stooped down, and continued to stare. This was the evidence they needed. The rush was indescribable. It was why, with all the endless footwork, dead ends, and bureaucratic hassles, he just loved being a cop.

Moments like this one.

The idiot had left the smoking gun behind.

I HEADED INTO my office at eight the next morning, still with a headache pounding like a jackhammer into a spot directly behind my right eye.

Cody was on the phone, but when I passed his desk, he held up his hand, signaling me to wait. He said into his headset mic, “Yes, sir. I’ll see if he’s in.”

He scribbled on the back of an envelope, “Chf Fescoe.”

“I’ll take it,” I said.

I went to my desk, snatched the phone off the hook, and said, “Mick?”

“Jack. This is a heads-up. Call your lawyer.”

“What happened?”

“Tandy and Ziegler found your gun.”

His words were like a fastball to the gut. I felt sick. I lost focus. My mind skipped over the events of the past three days as I tried to make sense of what he was saying.

Words came out of my mouth. “Found it where?”

“In your front yard. Buried under a vine.”

“
Planted,
you mean. I reported it missing the night Colleen was killed.”

“I understand that, Jack. Fact is, it’s your gun, a custom Kimber, registered to you. Your prints are on it.”

“Only my prints?”

“Yes.”

I sat down. Cody brought in my Red Bull, set it down on a coaster that he positioned just so. It took him a little too long to leave. I stared at him until he exited and closed the door behind him.

“Jack?”

“I’m still here, Mickey. Say again. Where exactly did they find the gun?”

“Under some mulch, just inside your gate. Your Kimber is a .45, same caliber as the slugs that killed Colleen Molloy.”

“The killer used gloves,” I said. “That’s why only my prints are on the gun. He left it where the cops would find it.”

“I hear you. Ballistics is running a comparison now,” said my friend the police chief, not committing himself. I pictured him: a big man, six-four, wide smile, me standing with him and Justine six months ago, cameras flashing and Mickey Fescoe thanking us for catching a killer.

He’d certainly trusted me then.

Fescoe’s voice softened. “Are the slugs taken from the victim a match to your gun, Jack?”

“Maybe. Probably. I still didn’t kill her. If I wanted to get rid of my gun, would I actually be that dumb? Mick. I’m asking you. Would I really bury the murder weapon outside my front door?”

“Call your guy Caine. Do what he tells you.”

“Thanks for calling, Mick.”

“No problem. Don’t leave town.”

“I’m staying at a nice hotel. Got everything I want right there.”

“Are you okay?”

“What? Sure. I’m okay for a guy who is being set up to take the rap for a murder I didn’t commit. I’m absolutely fine.”

“I’ll take you out to dinner when this is all over,” Fescoe said.

I told him it was going to be a pricey meal.

Cody came in again as I hung up. He said, “Sorry,” went behind me, turned on my computer, and called up my schedule.

I stared at it blindly.

Cody said, “We’re all set up in the conference room, Jack. Meeting starts in fifteen minutes.”