Private: #1 Suspect (2 page)

THE CAR WAS waiting for me at LAX. Aldo was out at the curb, holding a sign reading, “Welcome Home Mr. Morgan.”

I shook Aldo’s hand, threw my bags into the trunk, and slid onto the cushy leather seat in the back. I’d done six cities in three days, the return leg from Stockholm turning into a twenty-five-hour journey through airline hell to home.

I was wiped out. And that was an understatement.

“Your packet, Jack,” Aldo said, handing a folder over the divider. The cover was marked “Private,” the name of my private investigation firm. Our main office was in LA, and we had branches in six countries with clients all over the map who demanded and paid well for services not available through public means.

I had worried lately that we were growing too big too fast, that if big was the enemy of good,
great
didn’t stand a chance. And most of all, I wanted Private to be great.

I tucked the folder from Accounting into my briefcase and as the car surfed into the fast lane, I took out my BlackBerry. Unread messages ran into triple digits, so I chose selectively as I thumbed through the list.

The first e-mail was from Viviana, the stunner who’d sat next to me from London to New York. She sold 3-D teleconferencing equipment, not exactly must-have technology, but it was definitely interesting.

There was a text from Paolo, my security chief in Rome, saying, “Our deadbeat client is now just dead. Details to follow.” I mentally kissed a two-hundred-thousand-euro fee good-bye and moved to texts from the home team.

Justine Smith, my confidante and number two at Private, wrote, “We’ve got some catching up to do, bud. I’ve left the porch light on.” I smiled, thinking that as much as I wanted to see her, I wanted to shower and hit the rack even more.

I sent Justine a reply, then opened a text from Rick Del Rio. “Noccia wants to see you pronto, that prick.”

The text was like a gut punch.

Carmine Noccia was the scion of the major Mob family by that name, capo of the Las Vegas branch, and my accidental buddy because of a deal I’d had to make with him six months before. If I never saw Carmine Noccia again, it would be way too soon.

I typed a four-letter reply, sent it to Del Rio, and put my phone back into my pocket as the car turned into my driveway. I collected my bags and watched Aldo back out, making sure he didn’t get T-boned on Pacific Coast Highway.

I swiped my electronic key fob across the reader and went through the gate, pressed my finger to the biometric pad, and entered my home sweet home.

For a half second, I thought I smelled roses, but I chalked it up to the delight of standing again in my own house.

I started stripping in the living room and by the time I’d reached the bathroom, I was down to my boxers, which I kicked off outside the shower stall.

I stood under water as hot as I could stand it, then went into my bedroom and hit the wall switch that turned on the lights on either side of the bed.

For a long moment, I stood frozen in the doorway. I couldn’t understand what I saw—because it made no sense. How could Colleen be in my bed? Her sweater was soaked with blood.

What the hell was this?

A tasteless prank?

I shouted her name, and then I was on my knees beside the bed, my hand pressing the side of her neck. Her skin was as warm as life—but she had no pulse.

Colleen was wearing a knee-length skirt and a blue cardigan, clothes I’d seen her wear before. Her rose-scented hair was fanned out around her shoulders and her violet-blue eyes were closed. I gripped her shoulders and gently shook her, but her head just lolled.

Oh, Jesus. No.

Colleen was dead.

How in God’s name had this happened?

I’D SEEN COUNTLESS dead while serving in Afghanistan. I’ve worked murders as part of my job for years, and I’ve even witnessed the deaths of friends.

None of that protected me from the horror of seeing Colleen’s bloody and lifeless form. Her blood spattered the bedspread, soaking through. Her sweater was so bloody I couldn’t see her wounds. Had she been stabbed? Shot? I couldn’t tell.

The covers were pulled tight and I saw no sign of a struggle. Everything in the room was exactly as I had left it four days ago—everything but Colleen’s dead body, right here.

I thought about Colleen’s attempted suicide after we’d broken up six months ago—the scars were visible: silver lines on her wrists. But this was no suicide.

There was no weapon on or near the bed.

It looked as if Colleen had come into my bedroom, put her head on the pillow, and then been killed while she slept.

And that made no sense.

Just then, my lagging survival instinct kicked in. Whoever had killed Colleen could still be in the house. I went for the window seat where I kept my gun.

My hands shook as I lifted the hinged top of the window seat and grabbed the metal gun box. It was light. Empty.

I opened the closet doors, looked under the bed, saw no one, no shells, no nothing. I stepped into jeans, pulled on a T-shirt, then walked from window to window to door, checking locks, staring up at skylights looking for broken panes.

And I backtracked through my mind.

I was certain the front door had been locked when I came home. And now I was sure that every other entry point was secure.

That could only mean that someone had entered my house with an electronic gate key and biometric access—someone who knew me. Colleen had been my assistant and my lover for a year before we’d broken up. I hadn’t deleted her codes.

Colleen wasn’t the only one with access to my house, but maybe I wouldn’t have to guess who had killed her.

My house was watched by the best surveillance system ever made. There were cameras posted on all sides, over the doorways, sweeping the highway, and taking in 180 degrees of beachfront beyond my deck.

I opened the cabinet doors on the entertainment unit in the living room and flipped the switch turning on the six video monitors stacked in two columns of three. All six screens lit up—and all six screens were blank. I stabbed the buttons on the remote control again and again before I realized the hard drive was gone. Only a detached cord remained.

I grabbed the phone by the sofa and called Justine’s direct line at the office. It was almost seven. Would she still be there?

She answered on the first ring.

“Jack, you hungry after all?”

“Justine. Something bad has happened.”

My voice cracked as I forced myself to say it.

“It’s Colleen. She’s dead. Some
bastard
killed her.”

I OPENED THE front door and Justine swept in like a soft breeze. She was a first-class psychologist, a profiler, smart—hell, brilliant. Thank God she was here.

She put her hand on my cheek, searched my eyes, said, “Jack. Where is she?”

I pointed to the bedroom. Justine went in and I followed her, standing numb in the doorway as she walked to the bed. She moaned, “Oh, no,” and clasped her hands under her chin.

Even as I stood witness to this heartbreaking tableau, Colleen was still alive in my mind.

I pictured her in the little house she had rented in Los Feliz, a love nest you could almost hold in cupped hands. I thought about her twitching her hips in skimpy lingerie, big fuzzy slippers on her feet, sprinkling her thick brogue with her granny’s auld Irish sayings: “There’ll be caps on the green and no one to fetch ’em.”

“What does that mean, Molloy?” I’d asked her.

“Trouble.”

And now here she was on my bed. Well beyond trouble.

Justine was pale when she came back to me. She put her arms around me and held me. “I’m so sorry, Jack. So very sorry.”

I held her tight—and then, abruptly, Justine jerked away. She pinned me with her dark eyes and said, “Why is your hair wet?”

“My hair?”

“Did you take a shower?”

“Yes, I did. When I came home, I went straight to the bathroom. I was trying to wake myself up.”

“Well, this is no dream, Jack. This is as real as real can be. When you showered, had you seen Colleen?”

“I had no idea she was here.”

“You hadn’t told her to come over?”

“No, Justine, I didn’t.
No
.”

The doorbell rang again.

THE ARRIVAL OF Dr. Sci and Mo-bot improved the odds of figuring out what had happened in my house by 200 percent.

Dr. Sci, real name Seymour Kloppenberg, was Private’s chief forensic scientist. He had a long string of degrees behind his name, starting with a PhD in physics from MIT when he was nineteen—and that was only ten years ago.

Mo-bot was Maureen Roth, a fifty-something computer geek and jack-of-all-tech. She specialized in computer crime and was also Private’s resident mom.

Mo had brought her camera and her wisdom. Sci had his scene kit packed with evidence-collection equipment of the cutting-edge kind.

We went to my room and the four of us stood around Colleen’s dead body as night turned the windows black.

We had all loved Colleen. Every one of us.

“We don’t have much time,” Justine said, breaking the silence, at work now as an investigator on a homicide. “Jack, I have to ask you, did you have anything to do with this? Because if you did, we can make it all disappear.”

“I found Colleen like this when I got home,” I said.

“Okay. Just the same,” said Justine, “every passing minute makes you more and more the guy who did it. You’ve got to call it in, Jack. So let’s go over everything, fast and carefully. Start from the beginning and don’t leave anything out.”

As Mo and Sci snapped on latex gloves, Justine turned on a digital recorder and motioned to me to start talking. I told her that after I got off the plane, Aldo had met me at British Airways arrivals, 5:30 sharp.

I told her about showering, then finding Colleen’s body. I said that my gun was missing as well as the hard drive from my security system.

I said again that I had no idea why Colleen was here or why she’d been killed. “I didn’t do it, Justine.”

“I know that, Jack.”

We both knew that when the cops got here, I would be suspect number one, and although I had cop friends, I couldn’t rely on any of them to find Colleen’s killer when I was so darned handy.

I had been intimately involved with the deceased.

There was no forced entry into my house.

The victim was on my bed.

It was what law enforcement liked to call an open-and-shut case. Open and shut on me.

IF YOU’RE NOT the cops on official business, processing an active crime scene is a felony. It’s not just contaminating evidence and destroying the prosecution’s ability to bring the accused to trial, it’s accessory to the crime.

If we were caught working the scene, I would lose my license, and all four of us could go to jail.

That said, if there was ever a time to break the law, this was it.

Mo said, “Jack, please get out of the frame.”

I stepped into the hallway and Mo’s Nikon flashed.

She took shots from every angle, wide, close-up, extreme close-ups of the wounds in Colleen’s chest.

Sci took Colleen’s and my fingerprints with an electronic reader while Mo-bot ran a latent-print reader over hard surfaces in the room. No fingerprint powder required.

Justine asked, “When did you last see Colleen alive?”

I told her that I’d had lunch with her last Wednesday, before I left for the airport.

“Just lunch?”

“Yes. We just had lunch.”

A shadow crossed Justine’s eyes, like clouds rolling in before a thunderstorm. She didn’t believe me. And I didn’t have the energy to persuade her. I was overtired, scared, heartsick, and nauseated. I wanted to wake up. Find myself still on the plane.

Sci was talking to Mo. He took scrapings from under Colleen’s nails, and Mo sealed the bags. When Sci lifted Colleen’s skirt, swab in hand, I turned away.

I talked to Justine, told her where Colleen and I had eaten lunch on Wednesday, that Colleen had been in good spirits.

“She said she had a boyfriend in Dublin. She said she was falling in love.”

I had a new thought. I spun around and shouted, “Anyone see her purse?”

“No purse, Jack.”

“She was brought here,” I said to Justine. “Someone had her gate key.”

Justine said, “Good thought. Any reason or anyone you can think of who could have done this?”

“Someone hated her. Or hated me. Or hated us both.”

Justine nodded. “Sci? Mo? We have to get out of here. Will you be all right, Jack?”

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“You’re in shock. We all are. Just tell the cops what you know,” she said as Sci and Mo packed up their kits.

“Say you took a very long shower,” Sci said, putting his hand on my shoulder. “Make that a long bath and then a shower. That should soak up some of the timeline.”

“Okay.”

“The only prints I found were yours,” said Mo-bot.

“It’s
my
house.”

“I know that, Jack. There were no prints other than yours. Check the entry card reader,” she said. “I would do it, but we should leave.”

“Okay. Thanks, Mo.”

Justine squeezed my hand, said she’d call me later, and then, as if I had dreamed them up, they were gone and I was alone with Colleen.

THE BEVERLY HILLS Sun was one of three exclusive hotels in the chain of Poole Hotels. Located on South Santa Monica Boulevard, a mile from Rodeo Drive, the Sun was five stories of glamour, each room with a name and an individual look.

The Olympic-sized eternity pool on the rooftop was flanked with white canvas cabanas, upholstered seating, and ergonomic lounge chairs—and then there was the open-air bar.

Hot and cool young people in the entertainment business were drawn like gazelles to this oasis, one of the best settings under and above the Sun.

At nine that evening, Jared Knowles, the Sun’s night manager, was standing in front of the Bergman Suite on the fifth floor with one of the housekeepers.

He said to her, “I’ve got it, Maria. Thank you.”

When Maria had rounded the corner with the bedding in her arms, Knowles knocked loudly on the door, calling the guest’s name—but there was no answer. He put his ear to the door, hoping that he would hear the shower or the TV turned on high—but he heard nothing.

The guest, Maurice Bingham, an executive from New York, had stayed three times before at the Sun and never caused any trouble.

Knowles used his mobile phone to call Bingham’s room. He let it ring five times, hearing the ringing phone echo through the door and in his ear at the same time. He knocked again, louder this time, and still there was no answer.

The young manager prepared himself for best- and worst-case scenarios, then slipped his master key card into the slot and removed it. The light on the door turned green, and Knowles pushed down the handle and stepped into the suite.

It smelled like shit.

Knowles’s heart rate sped up, and he had to force himself to go through the foyer and into the sitting room.

Lying on the floor by the desk was Mr. Bingham, his fingers frozen in claws at his throat.

A wire was embedded in his neck.

Knowles put his hands to the sides of his face and screamed.

The horror was in the present and in the past. He had seen a dead body almost identical to this one when he had worked at the San Francisco Constellation. He had transferred here because he couldn’t stand thinking about it.

That night, five months ago, the police had grilled him and criticized him for touching the body before they let him go. He’d heard that there had been other killings, strangulations with a wire garrote; in fact, there had been several of them.

That meant a serial killer had been in this hotel, standing right where he was standing now.

So Jared Knowles didn’t touch the body. He used his cell phone to call the hotel’s owner, Amelia Poole. Let her fucking tell him what he should do.