Cut to the Quick (21 page)

Scoville parked his car around the corner and sprinted back. He skirted through the neighbors’ yard, reaching over their unlocked back gate to pull the release. He knew they were still at their cabin in Big Bear. Their aged black Labrador wagged his tail and licked Scoville’s hand, thinking the neighbor was there to feed him, as the Scoville family watched over the dog when the owners were traveling.

At the rear of the neighbors’ yard, Scoville scampered up an oak tree, placing his feet on nails that Dahlia had driven into the trunk for footholds. Dena had told him about Dahlia’s covert entryway onto their property. Easing
over the spikes on top of his fence, he dropped into soft dirt behind the pool house.

He cursed when he tripped a motion-activated light. He waited for Dena’s face to appear at one of the back windows. It did not.

Creeping around the side of the house, he peered into the kitchen. It was dark and empty. The dining room was too, although in the thin light from the night lamps, he saw a black blob on the light area rug. Could it be a black T-shirt?

Taking advantage of the old Tudor’s many windows, he spotted more cast-off articles of clothing. The sight of each one was like a tender stab wound from a needle. Finally, he came upon them, the nightlights in the house and the diamond-shaped panes of glass creating a broken, dreamlike haze to the nightmare that was occurring before his eyes.

Crowley had Dena bent over a couch. Her back was arched, and she crushed the cushions between her fists.

Scoville could hear their moans. He watched. In spite of himself, he watched. He saw things differently. Maybe the freak had been right. The world would be a better place without Bowie Crowley.

EIGHTEEN

M
ore calls
to Bennie Lusk,” Vining said. “Must have been a big sports weekend.”

It was Tuesday morning.

Vining and Kissick sat at one end of the large table in the conference-room-turned-war-room while Ruiz and Caspers took up the other. Each wielded a highlighting pen as they pored over pages of telephone records. Vining and Kissick were investigating Mark Scoville, and Ruiz and Caspers were on the trail of Lauren Richards’s stalker, Dillon Somerset.

Vining and Kissick had learned that Lusk was a bookie who worked out of a hair salon in Burbank. Scoville’s incoming and outgoing cell phone calls over the past twelve months showed an escalating number of calls to Lusk, which indicated a worsening gambling problem.

“Wish we could get Scoville’s credit card data,” Vining said. “I bet he gambles online.”

“I’ll take that bet and raise you.” Kissick grinned. “Gambling is squeezing out the rest of his life. His business calls have cycled down, while his gambling-related calls have ramped up. Another call to the Wynn in Vegas. We can contact their security. If Scoville’s a player, they would know what kind of dough he throws down.”

“We know what makes him throw up,” Vining said. “You heard about our two cadets seeing Scoville lose his cookies in the street in front of Mercer’s house.”

She felt energized, pumped up by the hunt. They were inching closer, peeling away the layers. Soon, she hoped, there would be that rare but glorious moment when they broke through and the truth spilled out like molten lava.

The other hunt, however, lurked in the background. She thought of Nitro sitting on a bed in a ward at the Big G, and counted down the hours until his release. She occasionally slipped from her slacks pocket the cropped photo she’d made of his eyes. Each time, it gave her a little
shiver. She wanted Nitro at the Big G and not in jail for a reason. She had to act quickly.

The ticking clock on Nitro’s incarceration had motivated her to call Lieutenant Owen Donahue with the Tucson P.D. She told him she’d like to come out and look through the Johnna Alwin homicide case files, as they might shed light on an unsolved attempted murder in Pasadena. He said anytime. That was Vining’s problem: time.

She couldn’t go to Tucson now, yet she had to. Was that T. B. Mann’s plan? Pull her in too many directions, make her lose focus and let another murderer go? Let
another
murderer go?

“Somerset seriously needs to get a life.” Caspers leaned over his documents with one arm circled around them on the table, as if protecting his plate from voracious brothers at dinnertime. “He called Richards like twenty times a day. One-minute calls. Calling and hanging up. Here’s one that lasted three minutes. He probably connected with her and she told him to kiss off. She was cute, but man, no chick’s worth that. Wake up, brother!”

“I’m having a bad feeling that Somerset is gone for good.” Ruiz always frowned when he was doing detailed work, his dense eyebrows nearly forming a solid line. “His parents say he goes backpacking in these wilderness areas, and he’s sometimes gone for weeks. He’s into that survivalist, living-off-the-land crap.”

He shook his head, his yellow marker motionless in his hand, not seeing the task in front of him but seeing his chance to snap the cuffs on a major bad guy fading away, and with it his big chance to prove his mettle as a homicide investigator. He was still having a hard time swallowing the fact that Vining had displaced him. It was a crock what Sergeant Early had told him about
being rotated out as part of routine cross-training. He knew it. Worse, everyone knew it.

Vining tapped a highlighter pen against a page. “Dena Hale was spreading sunshine when talking about how everything was hearts and flowers between her and Scoville. What wife wants to put up with this level of gambling? These are not friendly wagers on a couple of favorite teams. This is a lifestyle.”

“But Nan, he wins as much as he loses.” Kissick joked, spouting the gambling addict’s stock rationalization. “I spoke this morning with the owner of Drive By Media, the firm that wanted to merge with Marquis. He said Mercer thought Scoville was cooking the books. The real reason Scoville didn’t want the merger to go through is because it would be revealed that he’d sucked the firm dry. Mercer felt Scoville had talked him into investing in Marquis not to expand but because he needed money to keep the doors open.”

“Dena Hale …” Caspers let the name hang in the air.

After a beat, Vining said, “She’s hot,” timing it precisely to chime in with Caspers’s identical pronouncement. She cackled maliciously.

Caspers was defensive. “She is. She’s way hot.” His cell phone rang, giving him an out. “Whassup, peckerhead? I’m gonna be there. You gonna be there? Ten o’clock. Later.”

Ruiz gave his partner a baleful look. “You’re going someplace at ten o’clock tonight? Better not be draggin’ your ass in here tomorrow.”

“It’s my buddy’s girlfriend’s birthday,” Caspers said. “Don’t sweat it, T. I’m young.”

“Youth is wasted on the young,” Ruiz countered.

“Old people love to say that,” Casper complained. “It’s a crock.”

Vining drew the highlighter across the page. “Tuesday,
August first, eleven-ten a.m., incoming call, sixteen minutes long from an eight-one-eight area code. I haven’t come across this number before, have you, Jim?”

Kissick looked at the sheet she slid in front of him. He shook his head. “Eight-one-eight. That’s most of the San Fernando Valley, with a gazillion people.”

Vining picked her cell phone up from the table. “Let’s see who answers.” She placed the call and just as quickly ended it. “Number’s out of service.”

“Sixteen minutes,” Kissick said. “Scoville’s calls to his bookie barely last ten. Calls to his wife are done in less than five. He spends more time talking to his golf buddies than his wife.”

He looked at Caspers. “Alex, you know who would be good to ask about your tattoo? Cameron Lam in SES. He’s fluent in a couple of Chinese dialects. You know him?”

“Cam Lam. Sure I know him. Great guy,” Caspers said. “Why would I want to ask him about my tattoo?”

“To make sure it says what you think it says.”

“I don’t
think
it says anything. It says ‘crouching tiger.’ ”

Kissick rose from the table. “Just looking out for you,
brother
.”

“Thanks, man, but I’ve got it under control.”

“I’ll find out who that eight-one-eight number belongs to.”

“Wait a sec.” Vining wrote a phone number on a scrap of paper and handed it to Kissick. “Another incoming call from a number we haven’t seen before. Call was made yesterday at one-thirty-six in the afternoon. Eight minutes long. Area code nine-three-seven. Where’s nine-three-seven?”

“I’ll check it out.” Kissick left the room.

She punched in the number on her department-issued cell phone.

After it rang several times, a man answered with a gruff “Hello.”

“This is Detective Vining of the Pasadena Police Department. Who’s this?”

“With whom would you like to speak?”

“The owner of this cell phone. Who are you?”

“I guess I’m the owner now, so you’ve reached the party to whom you wish to be speaking.”

He was talking loud enough for Caspers and Ruiz to hear. They cracked up.

Vining’s patience was thin. “And you are?”

“King Richard,” he responded with gusto and a vaguely British accent.

Vining played along. “And where’s your kingdom, King Richard?”

“The Strip, my lady.”

Something about his speech put Vining in mind of an actor from the old movies she watched at night. Richard Harris or maybe Peter O’Toole. “You mean the Sunset Strip?”

“The same.”

“This phone doesn’t belong to you, does it?”

“They say that possession is nine-tenths of the law.”

“King Richard, did you steal it?”

“My lady, I’ve held many an occupation in my day, but I’ve never stooped to thievery.”

“How did you come to be in possession of this phone?”

“What if you answer a question for me first?”

Vining didn’t like the idea of that. “Ask your question.”

“What do you look like?”

That sent the men in the room over the edge.

“King Richard, I really need your help here.” She resorted to the “take pity on the poor police lady” and “you seem like the kind of man who can get me out of a fix” strategies. She suspected he knew he was being played, but he gave her the information she needed.

King Richard lived on the streets in the Sunset Strip area. He had been foraging through a public trash can, still brimming since the holiday had postponed the garbage collection, when he had heard a phone ringing.

“And here we are, Detective Vining. It’s our destiny.”

While keeping King Richard on the phone, Vining wrote a note to Kissick, who contacted the West Hollywood sheriff’s station.

After a couple of minutes, Vining heard sheriff’s deputies arrive and confiscate the phone without incident. King Richard was a well-known local character. The phone’s sign-on greeting indicated that it belonged to someone named Abby. Helpfully, she had a number in her contacts list labeled
Work
. Vining caught her there.

“I thought I’d left my cell phone in the airport bathroom,” Abby said. “I reported it to their lost and found.”

“A homeless man found it in a garbage can on the Sunset Strip.”

“Sunset Strip?” Abby exclaimed. “That man stole it. That he-she or whatever he was. Here he was warning me that someone might steal from my bag and
he
stole my cell phone.”

Abby relayed the story of her and her girlfriend’s Sunset Strip encounter with the curious man who called himself Jill.

The tiny hairs on the back of Vining’s neck prickled. This could be the oddball clue they needed.

“How old do you think he was?”

“Hard to tell. He had on heavy makeup. Forty?”

“Height and weight?”

“Wasn’t real tall and he had on heels. Sandals with heels. And a French pedicure … Short, dark brown wig.” Abby’s voice trailed off as she recalled the scene. “He might have been five foot eight. Not fat, not thin.”

Vining took notes. “Eye color?”

“Brown, I think. That reminds me. He had binoculars. He said he was looking at a hawk’s nest on top of a building.”

“Any scars, tattoos, distinguishing characteristics?”

“He had tattoos on his arms and shoulders. I don’t remember what they were. But I remember he was ugly.”

“How so?”

“Big hooked nose. Old acne scars on his face and neck. And with the makeup on top of it …”

Vining told Abby they’d return her phone after they’d retrieved any fingerprints from it. She told Kissick, “Our cross-dresser stole Abby’s phone, made the call from the Sunset Strip, and dumped it. Scoville’s office is on the Strip.”

“I tracked down the owner of the eight-one-eight number,” Kissick said. “Mr. Huan Yu Kang of Panorama City. He thought he lost his phone July twenty-ninth at the Municipal Court in Van Nuys. He was there suing his brother-in-law, who wouldn’t pay fifteen hundred bucks he owed on a truck Kang had sold him.”

“Small-claims court?” Vining said. “Wonder what other cases they had on the docket on July twenty-ninth. Doesn’t tell us where the sixteen-minute call to Scoville on August first originated. We’ll need a warrant to get the cell site data from the phone company to find out which phone tower the call pinged from. How good is your contact at AT&T?”

“We’ll see. Want to take a ride out to the Van Nuys courthouse?” Kissick looked at his watch. “We can stop by the hair salon in Burbank where Scoville’s bookie has
his shop. And we can get a Cupid’s hot dog when we’re in the Valley.”

Vining sadly shook her head as she gathered her work materials.

“Come on, Vining. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

“Tell that to my G.I. tract at three in the morning.” She led the way out the door.

He followed her to her cubicle. “Take a Zantac. I have some in my desk.”

“Zantac’s your solution for everything.”

Leaning in, he said, “Actually, sex is my solution for everything.”

She looked over her shoulder at him. “Is that a one-size-fits-all solution?”

“If the shoe fits …”

She headed out. “Some shoes
are
more comfortable than others.”

He thought about that. He didn’t know what it meant, but it sounded good. He followed her.