Private: #1 Suspect (25 page)

“TAKE A LOOK at this,” I said to Tommy.

I cued my iPhone to Mo-bot’s video and handed the gadget to my brother. He pushed the “play” button, and I heard the tinny sound of reporters shouting to get my attention outside my office on a day I would never forget.

“This is you being taken to the hoosegow,” my brother said. “That’s a rough crowd.”

“Keep looking. You see someone we know?”

“Huh. Clay Harris. What’s he doing there?”

“He works for you, Tom.”

“Part-time. He’s a charity case, believe me.”

“So you had nothing to do with him being there?”

“Hell, no. What are you saying? That I knew you were going to jail? And that I called Clay? Why would I do that?”

“Let’s go talk to him,” I said.

“Now?”

“No better time than now.”

“If you say so. I’ll tell Annie I’m going out for a while. I’ll meet you at the car.”

A few minutes later, Tommy met me in the driveway. He was wearing a jacket, different shoes. He walked around to the back of my car.

He ran his hand over the Lambo’s left rear haunch and along the crease to the door. His jacket fell open, and I saw the gun stuck in his waistband.

“Christ,” he said. “What the hell happened to your car?”

“I went to the supermarket. When I came out…”

“I’ve got a great body shop guy. I’ll give you his number. But as good as Wayne is, this is never going to look the same again,” Tommy said. “It’s a damned shame.”

“Get in, will you?”

“Are you allowed to drive?”

“Get in. Try not to shoot yourself in the dick.”

Tommy got into the car. I pulled out onto West Sixth, toward the 5 going north. I figured it would be forty-five minutes to Santa Clarita at this time of night.

“Why do you want to talk to Clay?” Tommy asked me.

Clay Harris had worked for my father as an investigator, and when I took over Private, he was on the payroll.

I didn’t like him, but he was great at surveillance. He could stay on a tail or sit in a vehicle for days at a time. He looked like an unemployed factory worker, could blend into a crowd on the street. And he knew his way around electronics.

But he was a cheat and a liar.

Clay Harris had fattened his expense report. He had done work on the side. And one day he sold photos of a client in a compromising position. I found out.

That’s when I fired him.

Next day, Harris went to Tommy, who gave him a job.

Thinking about him now, standing in the crowd, smirking as I was marched off to jail, put Clay Harris in a new category. He disliked me. He had the skills to hurt me. And I couldn’t say murder was out of his league.

I said to Tommy, “I want to talk to Clay about Colleen.”

I TOOK THE 5, heading toward the Tehachapi mountain range linking Southern and Central California.

Clay Harris lived on a dirt road in an isolated area made up of remote ranches, parks, and forest service land. From the satellite view, I knew his house was at the edge of a three-hundred-acre parcel, marked for development then abandoned when the bubble burst in 2009. Harris’s house was two miles away from any other man-made thing.

I took the 126 to Copper Hill Drive, which sent me past a minimall and then a cluster of migrant-worker housing. After the development, there was nothing to see but dry scrub and low hills, copses of native trees, and miles of flat land untouched by the hand of man.

“Here’s our turn,” I said, taking a left onto San Francisquito Canyon Road.

Tommy had been talking about himself since we left Hancock Park, filling the air with self-aggrandizing stories about his bodyguard service to celebrities, the stunts the A-listers pulled. But he stopped talking as my headlights lit up the chain-link fence and signs reading “Harris. No Trespassing.”

I slowed as the house came into view, parked on the shoulder, turned off my headlights.

The house was at the end of a long drive, placed far back on the property; a ranch-style rambler, white with dark trim and a plain front porch.

There was a clump of mature native oaks in the yard and more oaks at the fence line, but what grabbed my attention was a brand-new Lexus SUV at the top of the drive.

I knew how much Clay Harris had earned when he worked for me, and assuming Tommy hadn’t quadrupled his income, the Lexus didn’t fit. Unless someone had given him about seventy-five thousand dollars.

I reached across my brother and opened the glove box, took out a gun.

“I don’t think you have a license for that,” Tommy said.

“Let’s just keep this between us, okay, Junior?”

We got out of the car and edged along the chain-link fence, getting cover from the trees. The gate latch was open, an oversight on the part of Mr. Harris, I thought. We were still thirty feet from the porch when the motion detector found us.

Lights blazed.

A siren blared across the open land followed by a fusillade of bullets.

Harris was unloading a semiautomatic, and shots were whizzing through the trees. Then there was a pause in the shooting.

Had Clay Harris seen us? Or was he just firing in response to the alarm? Thinking coyote. Or bear. Or,
If you’re on my property, you’re dead.

I whispered, “You take the back door and I’ll take the front.”

“No, Jack.
You
take the back.”

“Fine,” I said.

It wasn’t fine.

I hadn’t planned for a shootout.

In fact, as of right now, I had no plan at all.

WE WERE TRESPASSING.

If I called out Harris’s name and he wanted to shoot me, he could get a bead on my voice and nail me. Legally.

I dropped to the ground and pulled myself across the yard with my elbows until I had reached the side of the house, out of gunshot range.

With my back to the wall, I negotiated piles of junk and brush as I made my way to the back entrance.

I held my gun with both hands, using my foot to push the door open. Hinges creaked and I stepped into a mudroom. I expected shots or at least a challenge, but I heard nothing.

A light glowed from the center of the house, and I made for it. Using the wall as a guide, I moved forward, past garments hanging from hooks, stacks of newspapers, and towers of boxed, empty beer bottles. Clay Harris was one of those people who didn’t throw things out.

The mudroom led to the small, narrow kitchen. Pots and pans were piled on the table and in the sink. Garbage stank. There was an off-center door at the end of the kitchen, which led to a dining room.

I stepped around a table that was heaped with boxes of files and hoarded crap, kept moving toward the beams that framed the entrance to the living room. I peered around the corner into the larger room.

Clay Harris had his back to me. His gun was still in his hand, and his hands were over his head. He was facing my brother, who had his weapon pointed at Harris’s chest.

Harris was saying, “Tom. What are you doing? This is stupid. I’m not gonna say anything about that girl.”

I stepped into the room, gripping my own gun in both hands. I shouted, “Clay, drop your gun.”

Harris turned, saw me, said, “Shit,” and tossed his gun onto an easy chair.

At the same moment that the gun hit the chair, Tommy fired two shots in quick succession. Harris put his hands to his chest. He said, “Oh, fuck,” then dropped to his knees and toppled facedown onto the floor.

I went to Harris, put a hand to his neck.

He had no pulse.

“For God’s sake, Tom. I wanted to
talk
to him.”

Tommy put his gun back in his belt.

“I feel for you, I really do,” my brother said. He looked for his two shell casings, collected them, put them in the front pocket of his jeans. “Things don’t always go the way you want. You wanted to talk to Clay, and now he’s dead.”

I stood up, facing my brother. “You think I don’t know what just happened here.”

“It was self-defense, Jack. That’s the truth. But I guess you’ll never know for sure. Did I shoot that scum because he was going to shoot me? Or did I shoot him because he would give me up?”

Tommy was mocking me, shifting his weight from one leg to the other, moving his hands up and down like they were trays on a scale.

He went on. “Was Harris a dangerous lunatic with a loaded gun? Or was he going to tell you that I hired him to kill Colleen?”

I stared at Tommy, then looked back at the body of Clay Harris. There was an angry-looking bite mark in the fleshy part of his right hand between thumb and forefinger. The bite had been so hard, it had left a clear dental impression, a distinct bruise in the flesh where teeth had clamped down.

I took a handkerchief, the investigator’s number one basic tool, out of my jacket pocket. Keeping an eye on Tommy, I used the handkerchief to pick up Clay Harris’s phone.

I dialed 911.

TOMMY’S FACE WAS knotted with anger and disbelief. He asked, “What the fuck are you doing?”

The operator came on the line, said, “What is your emergency?”

I disguised my voice, spoke softly with a Spanish accent. “I heard shots fired in a house on San Francisquito Canyon Road.”

I gave her the house number and said that I’d gone inside to see if someone needed help. That I’d found one person in the house, a man, and he’d been shot.

“Is he breathing?” the operator asked me.

“No. He’s dead.”

“What’s your name?”

“I’m sorry. I can’t say.”

I hung up the phone.

Tommy was asking me again what I thought I was doing, repeating that he’d shot Clay Harris in self-defense.

I wasn’t sorry that Harris was dead, but it would have been better for me if he’d lived, if we’d gotten him to turn on Tommy and testify that they’d conspired to kill Colleen.

Tommy was highly agitated, his cockiness entirely gone. He was saying, “Jack, let’s get the fuck out of here. I’ve got to get rid of my gun.”

His only concern was to get rid of the gun. One thing I had to say about Tommy: He was a shit, just like my dad.

I aimed my camera phone at the bite mark on Clay Harris’s hand, took three or four shots to be sure I got what I needed, frames that included both his bitten hand and his dead face. Then, I left the house by the open front door.

I disarmed the car with the remote, and my headlights flashed a hundred yards away. I walked along the dark roadway with Tommy following.

There wasn’t another car traveling on this road. Not a soul.

I reached the car and got in behind the wheel. Tommy was at the passenger side, trying the door, but I’d locked it. He yanked on the handle several times, then pounded on the window with the heel of his hand. He cursed at me, sounding completely desperate.

He was still begging me to open the door as I started the engine.

“Jack. Come on. Please open the door. You know I was just horsing around. You know he was going to shoot me. You know he was worthless.”

I let the window down a couple of inches. “Tell it to the cops,” I said. “You’re very persuasive, Tommy. They’ll be here in a couple of minutes. Or you can start walking. Maybe you’ll get away.”

“Jack. You don’t want to leave me here. Come on. Don’t do that. I’ll tell them you were here. I’ll say you did it.”

I buzzed up the window and pulled out onto the road that stretched from nowhere to nowhere two miles in both directions.

When I was back on Copper Hill Drive, I called Eric Caine and filled him in.

Then I just listened to what my Harvard-educated, street-trained lawyer had to say.

ERIC CAINE SAT next to me in an interrogation room at the police station downtown. He looked calm, like he’d had a good lunch, a nap, and had checked the balance on his retirement account and found that it was good.

My stomach felt like it was full of snakes.

They hadn’t said why they wanted to see me, but I was pretty sure Mitch Tandy hadn’t summoned us to North Los Angeles Street so he could tell me that I was a great guy.

I forced myself to think of fluffy clouds and rainbows, not that Tandy had sworn to put me in a federal prison for life for killing Colleen.

Tandy got comfortable in one of the two metal chairs across from us. Then Ziegler came in with a bulky manila envelope. He made a big production of pulling out a chair, putting the envelope down on the table, and taking his seat, snapping a rubber band on his wrist.

Like he was onstage.

Like he wanted all the attention.

What was up?

Other than the rubber band tic, neither cop gave any sign of emotion.

Tandy said, “I suppose you know what this is about.”

“Why don’t you tell us?” Caine said. “My client has a busy schedule. I’m sure you do too.”

“Does the name Clay Harris mean anything to you?” Tandy asked me.

He knew full well that I had known Harris.

Three days had passed since I’d stared down at Harris’s dead body. I hadn’t heard anything about the shooting since then. And I hadn’t heard from my brother.

Caine was speaking for me.

“We both know Clay Harris. He worked for Private for, what, three years, Jack? He was terminated in ’09 for extortion.”

“He’s dead,” Tandy said. “He was shot in his house out in the boondocks three days ago. An anonymous tipster called it in.”

“I’m sorry to hear that Harris is dead,” Caine said. “What does that have to do with Jack?”

The snakes writhed in my belly. Had I left a fingerprint at Harris’s house? Had my car, with its crumpled rear panel, been seen by a passerby? Had Tommy gone to the police and said that I was the shooter? I’d considered these possibilities many times, but I was sure that I hadn’t touched anything in Harris’s house. I hadn’t left any trace, I was pretty damn sure.

Ziegler opened the envelope, rummaged around, took out a sheet of paper. I’d learned to read upside down when I was three. Ziegler had a report from the LAPD’s forensic lab.

Ziegler said, “Someone took a bite out of Clay Harris’s hand. The ME matched the bite mark to Colleen Molloy’s dental chart. Looks like she bit Harris. Probably the last thing she did before he shot her.”

I already knew what the LAPD lab knew. Sci had matched that bite mark to Colleen’s charts too.

I waited for Ziegler to speak again. I guessed he was hoping I’d blurt something out, give him something on me that he didn’t have already. The silence seemed to go on forever.

Caine said, “This isn’t
48 Hours,
Detective, and we don’t
have
forty-eight hours. You matched the bite on Harris’s hand to Colleen Molloy’s teeth. You want to know if we’re interested? We are.”