City of Echoes (31 page)

“I’m Jeff Kaplin,” he said. “This is my partner, Steve Vega.”

Matt shook their hands. “You guys out of Westwood?”

“No,” Vega said. “DC.”

“Lieutenant McKensie said you wanted to talk.”

Kaplin nodded. “We do, but not just yet, Jones. We think that Dr. Baylor may have committed another murder two nights ago.”

“Who?”

“Kim Bachman. She was twenty years old. She weighed less than a hundred pounds.”

“In Hollywood or the Valley?”

Vega shook his head. “New Orleans,” he said.

The idea had its own way of settling in. Dr. Baylor on the move.

Matt took a step back, measuring the two FBI agents as he thought it over. Both of them were in their midforties and seemed confident and at ease. But even more, both of them appeared to share an expression of being in a perpetual state of curiosity and wonder. Kaplin’s curly blond hair had started to turn gray. He looked like he was in decent shape—a walker, Matt guessed, not a runner, who came off like a university professor. His partner, Steve Vega, had black hair and dark eyes and a physical presence that would have to be considered Kaplin’s opposite. He was half a foot shorter and a good fifty pounds heavier but built like a powerhouse.

Matt leaned against the desk and turned back to Kaplin. “If you think it’s Baylor and it’s been two days, why didn’t the murder turn up in the news?”

“We needed confirmation that the body found in the doctor’s house was Joey Orlando. We didn’t get that until this morning.”

“Tell me about the girl.”

Kaplin brushed his thumb and forefinger over his mustache. “She was a college student. She was found like the others, but that’s all over the Internet now. Depending on how you look at it, the murder could have been committed by anybody—but we don’t think so.”

Matt kept his thoughts to himself. It all seemed too neat and too quick. New Orleans would have been a new setting for Baylor. A new city. And the doctor had been wounded. How could it even be possible? How could he have been able to select his next victim with so little time?

“What about the girl’s parents?” he asked.

Vega opened a file folder and pulled out an e-mail from the New Orleans Police Department that included several crime-scene photos of the girl’s nude body staked to the ground, along with before and after shots of her face. Until two days ago Kim Bachman had been an innocent-looking young brunette with light brown eyes. Now her face was mutilated, the moment of her death frozen in a grotesque smile that stretched from ear to ear. Matt stared at the photograph, still unable to comprehend how anyone, no matter what their psychological issues, no matter what their past, could do this to another human being, or any living thing. It almost seemed as if the killer intentionally picked out the most pure, the most gentle, in order to underline their transformation from all that was beautiful in this world to all that was hideous.

Matt checked the first page. According to the time and date stamp on the header, the e-mail had been sent in the last hour and must have been printed here at the station. He thought about that pack of nicotine gum in his pocket, nixed the idea, then looked over at Kaplin and Vega, who seemed to have quieted down.

Both of them were staring at the before and after snapshots of the girl’s face. And their expressions had changed. That perpetual state of curiosity and wonder no longer seemed so enduring. Matt didn’t need to ask why.

“Tell me about her parents,” he repeated in a quiet voice.

Vega nodded like he was trapped in a state of delirium. Once he managed to raise his eyes, Matt collected the e-mail printouts and returned them to the file.

“She has a mother,” Vega said. “Heidi Bachman. Her father died in his sleep five years ago from a heart attack.”

“What does the mother do?”

“She’s a caregiver. A hospice nurse living in Baltimore.”

“Did you guys get a copy of my statement?”

Kaplin and Vega nodded.

“Then you know the doctor’s motive,” Matt said. “It’s more about the parent than the actual victim. It sounds like Heidi Bachman committed herself to helping others. There’s no way that a hospice nurse would make Baylor’s list.”

Kaplin gave him a look, then sat down at the desk and pulled the computer closer. “This one might,” he said. “She made headlines a couple of years after her husband died. The local media in Baltimore wouldn’t give up on it and kept the story going for most of the following year. If Baylor was in the hunt, there’s a better than fifty-fifty chance that he knew about her.”

Matt joined Vega, huddling behind Kaplin’s back as the agent opened an article from the
Baltimore Sun
’s archives dated twenty-four months ago. As he began reading, he realized that the article was a summary of the entire case. Apparently, Heidi Bachman had taken on a new patient, a woman in her sixties dying of cancer. After her first visit to the house, Bachman learned that the woman was married, that she and her husband were extremely wealthy, and that they had no children or family. No heirs.

Matt looked at the photograph of Bachman’s patient, Janet Cameron, standing in front of her home with her husband, Bill. They were holding each other and showing smiles that seemed quiet and genuine. Still, Matt’s pulse quickened as he looked at their house in the background. It was set in the countryside, and he could see horses in the fields on both sides of what could only be called an estate and mansion.

Kaplin pointed to the first paragraph on the following page. “The wife only lasted five or six weeks. But in that time, Bachman cozied up to the husband real nice and they got tight. We don’t think that it was a sexual relationship. Cameron had lost his wife and was distressed and vulnerable. Bachman was young enough to be his daughter, had his trust, and held his hand.”

Matt nodded. “And she had no plans of letting go of that hand. No plans of walking away from the treasure chest.”

“Funny you should put it that way,” Vega said. “But yes, she became his crutch. His most valuable asset, the daughter he never had. The old man’s friends said that she forced herself into his world. She had his ear and started managing his life—pushing his friends away and isolating him. Anything she could do to make it look and feel like the two of them were family, she did.”

Kaplin turned to Matt. “Everybody could tell that something was wrong. But if they said anything to Cameron, it worked in Bachman’s favor. He dropped them, and they never heard from him again. When the old man died, no one was surprised that she had become the sole beneficiary of his estate.”

“How did he die?” Matt asked, even though he could feel the answer stirring in his gut.

Vega smiled. “The same way her husband did. He had a heart attack in his sleep.”

It clicked, the three them staring at the possibilities. When Kaplin spoke up, his voice was quieter, more matter-of-fact.

“The coincidence didn’t sit well with anybody,” he said. “Detectives from Baltimore PD took statements and tried to sort things out. An autopsy was performed. According to the medical examiner, the old man’s pipes were clean. There was no sign of heart disease.”

“How much did she collect from her husband’s death?”

“Half a million off a life insurance policy,” Kaplin said. “She claims she dumped his ashes into the Chesapeake but doesn’t remember exactly where.”

Matt had guessed right. “So you think she’s good for both of them.”

“We do,” Kaplin said. “But Cameron’s tox screen came back just as clean as his arteries. The detectives had no choice.”

“She walked,” Matt said. “They set her free.”

Vega smiled again. “They cut her loose and gave her the key to the vault with all of the old man’s money. He was worth more than fifty million dollars. And that’s why we think it works, Jones. That’s why we think the killer might be Baylor, on the move through the South and looking for a way out of the country. Heidi Bachman’s profile fits every one of the doctor’s victims like a glove. She’s a piece of shit, just like all the rest. A greedy black widow who he’d say deserves to be punished. That’s what this is about, right? Taking the one thing away from them that they can’t live without? The one thing they can’t buy back or replace? The one thing they love?”

Matt nodded, his mind racing. “Where was her daughter’s body found? What part of New Orleans?”

Vega gave him a strange look and hesitated. “What you were just talking about a few minutes ago,” he said finally. “The words you used—treasure chest.”

“What about it?”

“A security guard found her in the middle of the night. She was staked to the ground by one of the levees near Treasure Chest Casino. It’s a riverboat down there.”

A moment passed, and then another. Long and dark and all ripped up. Matt felt the tingle rising up his spine. It was a sign from the doctor, a note, a message, another strike against greed by a madman.

Treasure Chest Casino.

It had to be him.

Baylor could have known about Heidi Bachman before he even got started in Los Angeles. For all Matt knew, she could have been the one who inspired him. The first victim to make his wish list. But even more, Heidi Bachman would have been considered the prize, the gold ring, because unlike all the others who had lied and cheated to steal their way to the top of the shit pile, only Bachman had committed one, possibly two murders in order to get her hands on the money.

It had to be him. It had to be Baylor.

Matt turned and spotted Cabrera staring at them through the glass. He waved him into the office and, after everyone was introduced, looked back at Vega.

“Has Bachman identified her daughter yet?”

“Last night.”

“In person?”

Vega nodded. “Yeah.”

“Any chance that the media covered it?”

Kaplin sat back in the desk chair and laughed. “Are you kidding? When they figured out who the girl’s mother was, everybody showed up. It was a circus.”

“We need to see that videotape,” Matt said.

CHAPTER 54

Matt figured that the waitress knew something was up the moment she got a look at their faces and grabbed a couple of menus. Now, as she set down their plates and topped off their coffees, her eyes went straight to Cabrera’s tablet computer and stayed there.

They were sitting by a window at Denny’s in the strip mall across the street from the movie studios at Sunset and Gower. The same table they had shared on the way to Hughes’s autopsy. The same middle-aged waitress with the same dyed red hair. Matt doubted that she could see an image on the tablet with all the glare. And even if she could, he didn’t think it would mean anything to her.

Still, as they got started on their bacon and eggs French-toast specials, neither he nor Cabrera could take their eyes off the screen.

It was him, dressed in pale blue scrubs with an ID pinned to his chest pocket.

Dr. George Baylor helping Heidi Bachman as she struggled through the press line from the front entrance of the coroner’s office to a black limousine idling in the darkness on the other side of the parking lot.

The NBC affiliate in New Orleans had posted the clip on its website as part of the station’s coverage of the murder investigation. The camera appeared to be directly in front of Bachman, backing up as she marched forward, the handheld image rock steady. From the ruined look on her face, Matt guessed that the doctor had achieved all that he could have hoped for. From the look on Baylor’s face, the sparkle in his eyes, and the dimples on his cheeks, the experience had been pure bliss.

Somehow he had found a way in. He had shepherded Bachman through the identification process and stood by her side as the sheet was lifted away and the woman’s memories of her daughter were forever changed.

Forever mangled. Forever tattooed to her being and her mind.

A title graphic had been laid over the images at the top of the screen. Beside a photo of the twenty-year-old murder victim laughing with her friends at a bar in the French Quarter were the words
Special Report: Murdered Coed Identified. Who Killed Kim Bachman?

Matt looked back at the victim’s mother. Although Cabrera had turned the sound down on the tablet, he could hear the faint voice of a reporter asking the woman how she was feeling right now. When she didn’t answer, someone shouted from the crowd, “Did you murder Bill Cameron? And what about your husband? Did you kill him, too?” Bachman remained silent, clenching her teeth and pressing forward through the gloom. She was dressed like nouveau riche, cheap and tasteless and adorned with designer labels, on a body that appeared bent but strong and noticeably dreary. As Matt watched her push a reporter out of the way with her fists, he thought that he detected something more than grief showing on her face.

Something more than even Grace or the doctor possessed.

He thought that he could break through her grim mask and see who she really was. Someone cold and calculating and devoid of human emotions. A conniving bitch, a complete blank who had probably earned a good living on her own but murdered two men because she thought that she deserved more and more, and even more than that.

The treasure chest.

Matt watched her climb into the limo, bark instructions at the driver, then snap the door shut. As the car eased through the press line and started to move off, the strobe lights switched to full auto, and night became day in a series of rapid-fire bursts. The light was blinding, and Matt could see Dr. Baylor shielding his eyes as he slipped into the shadows and disappeared into the crowd. While Kaplin and Vega were headed to New Orleans on a late tip that the doctor might have stayed at Le Pavillon Hotel, Matt guessed that they would find the room clean and the trail ice cold.

The shot on Cabrera’s tablet ended and switched to real time, cutting to a female news anchor as she interviewed a senior investigator from the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit. A close-up photograph of Dr. Baylor’s face had been placed over a map of the United States with the cities lining the Gulf of Mexico highlighted as possible escape routes.

Matt turned away and gazed out the window at the people on the corner waiting for the light to change in the oppressive heat.