Cut to the Quick (30 page)

“What does he read?”

Vining looked at the cover of the book she held. “Everything. Mostly science fiction and history. He’s got some of the classics that my daughter’s been reading in her classes.”

Caspers was searching the large closet in the main room.

The only item of interest they’d found was a collage of photos of Lauren Richards covering the bathroom wall. Most of the photos appeared to have been taken without her knowledge. Richards’s head had been sliced out of many of them. The detectives hadn’t found the heads. It was curious that Somerset had defaced only some of the pictures.

So far, they hadn’t found women’s clothing, wigs, or makeup in Somerset’s apartment. However, they were intrigued by the size of Somerset’s mother and her fake hair.

“All this guy wears is khaki pants, white dress shirts, jeans, and T-shirts. Check this out.” Caspers held up a hanger with a T-shirt emblazoned with “Grateful Dead”
and the band’s logo of a skeleton in a top hat. “Maybe he’s not such a nerd after all.”

“The kids in Emily’s school are wearing those vintage rock band T-shirts.” Vining saw that Caspers coveted the shirt. “They wearing them in the clubs, too?”

“They look good under a leather jacket.”

“My mom used to be a deadhead.”

“No way.”

“Yep. Back in the day. She was a wild girl. All of her old clothes are still at my grandmother’s house in Alhambra. I’ll go through them and see if I can find any rock band T-shirts for you.”

“Cool.” Caspers searched the pockets of a pair of Somerset’s pants. “So did your mom go to all the Grateful Dead concerts?”

“She went to a lot of them. She wanted to be a hippie, but she was a little young when that whole Haight-Ashbury thing was going on.”

“She must have smoked a little weed in her day.”

“Yes, she did.”

“What’s she doing now?”

“Dating a sales manager for a company that makes foam packaging and taking golf lessons so she can be part of his country club crowd. Hoping he’ll be husband number five.”

“She’s been married four times?”

“Yep. My sister and I have different fathers. Neither of us knows our dads.”

“Really? Here I thought you had this normal, boring family.”

“Good.”

“I’m the one with the normal, boring family,” Caspers said. “You’ve never met your dad?”

“Never.”

“Do you know anything about him?”

“Not much.” Vining opened the futon that Somerset used as both a couch and bed. She pulled it away from the wall and exclaimed, “Aha!” as she held up a string of condoms. “Found his stash.” She looked at the expiration dates on them. “These are pretty old. Shows he was hopeful.”

“Three condoms is a stash?”

“What’s that? A Friday night for you?”

“I’m just saying …”

“I shoulda stopped while I was ahead.” Vining dropped to her knees and searched the futon mattress.

She didn’t know why she’d told Caspers so much about her family. She wasn’t trying to hide anything. She just didn’t enjoy talking about it. She had researched her father. He’d received an honorable discharge from the Army in the late seventies. In the eighties, he’d done time in prison for selling drugs. After he’d gotten out of prison and completed parole, the trail went cold. She’d seen photos of him. While she had her mother’s facial features, she had her father’s dark coloring, height, and slender build. She wondered if he’d seen her on the news and had any clue that she was his daughter. She wondered if he was dead.

Beside the bed was a pair of Nike athletic shoes. She turned them over and studied the soles. She got to her feet with one and walked closer to a window for more light.

“Look at this.” A dark brown substance covered part of the tread on the sole. “This look like dried blood to you?”

“Could be.” Caspers took the shoe from her. He probed the sole with his gloved finger. “I think it’s blood. If it’s from the crime scene, it shows that Somerset was there even before he started camping out at Mercer’s house.”

Vining, instead of elation, felt empty. Somerset as the murderer felt cold to her while Scoville and the mysterious Jack Jenkins glowed.

Vining and Caspers were on their way out when Vining said, “The refrigerator and freezer.”

“What about them?”

“Did you check them?”

“No.”

“We need to check them out.”

Caspers rubbed his hands together. “Maybe Dillon’s got drugs in there.”

“That too, but there’s something more important we’re looking for.” Vining waved her hand. “Something very important. Something missing from the crime scene.” She waggled her fingers in front of him. “This is a hint, Alex.”

“The hand!” Caspers raised his index finger.

“The hand,” Vining confirmed. “Possibly still wearing Mercer’s USC class ring.” She went into the kitchen and opened the freezer door.

TWENTY-SEVEN

M
ark Scoville
sat at his desk in the Marquis offices. His eyes had grown accustomed to the dark. He didn’t want the lights on. He felt as if he was living in darkness anyway.

He held a photograph in a silver frame, seeing it dimly
by the light from the street and the moon. It was of his older brother, Ludlow Jr., at age three playing on the rug beneath that same desk while the old man did paperwork on top of it. The shot looked spontaneous, but Scoville’s mother later told him that it had been staged by his father to imitate a famous photograph Ludlow Sr. had admired of President Kennedy at work in the Oval Office while John-John played on the floor.

Scoville picked up another framed photo of his father as a much older man. A toddler again played beneath the desk—Scoville’s own son, Ludlow, the old man’s pride and joy in his sunset years. His hope for the future. There was no such photo of Scoville and his father taking the roles of the slain president and his now-dead son. The only two photos of Scoville the old man had in his office were a family group shot when his brother was alive and a more current one of the three generations of Scoville men—grandfather, father, son—taken shortly after the old man’s diagnosis.

Scoville had never known a time when he hadn’t lived in someone’s shadow. He’d thought his father’s death would finally liberate him. But like brainwashed prisoners of war for whom the gates are finally flung open, he chose to stay inside his cell. He knew no other way.

He took his bottle from his desk drawer and poured the last of the Grey Goose vodka into his coffee mug over ice culled from the employee lunchroom. The mug, a joke gift from his secretary, was imprinted with the message “You don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps.”

He swirled the vodka until it was chilled and took a sip. From his desk he could see one of the firm’s most prominent and profitable billboard faces, with an ad for a blockbuster swashbuckling pirate movie. The cleavage of the female costar, pushed up and out in a leather
bustier, was at Scoville’s eye level. Normally, he would have found such a coincidence amusing and entertaining. Tonight, it only made him think of Dena. Lately, the only way he could think of Dena, in spite of his efforts to shove the image from his mind, was of her bent over the back of the couch with Crowley ramming her.

He opened a bottom drawer of the desk and felt for Jenkins’s gun. He was going to lock the drawer and leave it alone. Let it be. But it called to him. Just like that bottle of Grey Goose called to him. He heard the siren call of his dark angel, and he heeded. Could Jenkins have been right? Does everyone have a killer within?

Scoville set the gun on the desk and peeled back the scarf. It had been years since he’d fired a gun, but he knew how to shoot. His father had liked guns, owned some, and made sure his sons knew their way around firearms. Dena had of course gotten rid of his father’s collection when Luddy was born.

Using the scarf, he picked the gun up by the barrel. Something had been filed off from an area on the grip. Jenkins had said the gun was untraceable. Scoville didn’t know enough about things like that to know if it was even possible.
SIG SAUER
was etched on the barrel.

Scoville smiled. It sounded macho. The silencer made the gun seem criminal. He’d never fired a gun with a silencer, and wondered how it sounded.

Taking down his father’s old unabridged dictionary, he stood it on a shelf against a row of books. He stepped back. Aiming the gun with both hands, he shoved his finger onto the trigger with the scarf around it, held his breath, and fired. The gun made a sharp clack, like a nail gun. The noise both surprised and thrilled him.

The bullet had made a precise hole in the dictionary. He took it down and saw that the bullet had lodged in the middle of the S’s, between “sordid” and “sorehead.”

He again stepped back and took aim, this time with one hand, feeling more comfortable with the gun. He squeezed off two rounds in quick succession, enjoying the adrenaline rush. He took down the dictionary to throw away later.

Sitting at his desk, he tapped his finger on his keyboard to wake up his computer and did a search on Sig Sauer. He found a photo of his weapon and learned it was widely used in the military, prized for its reliability and durability. He again picked up the gun and admired it anew.

Still holding the gun with the scarf, he walked to the window and aimed the gun at the heart of the starlet on the billboard, which for him was at the contact point of her two mounded breasts. He stood spread-legged, gripped the gun in both hands, and uttered a sharp, “Clack!” as if he’d fired it, jerking his hands up with pretend recoil. He imagined a perfect spot of red between those breasts, lasting just a moment before a trickle of blood appeared, followed by a torrent. The starlet’s face became Dena’s. She blinked and said, “I’m sorry, Mark. I love you,” as the life faded from her eyes.

He paid her no heed, but turned his attention to her handsome male costar, the dashing pirate. The actor morphed into Bowie Crowley. It was an easy leap, as the actor also had long tousled hair and too-sensitive-for-this-world eyes. Scoville finished him off with a bullet right between those eyes.

“Clack!”

Recoil.

They were both bloody and dead. Scoville’s feeling of triumph was fleeting, and was soon overwhelmed by despair.

He was not a killer. Despite what Jenkins had said, he couldn’t be turned into a killer any more than he could
be turned into an Olympic athlete. You either have that in you or you don’t.

He should call the cops right now. He wasn’t in any trouble with the police yet. He hadn’t lied to them. Well, just a little. He should call those detectives. They’d probably make him wear a wire, meet with Jenkins, and try to get him to talk about how he’d murdered Oliver and Lauren. He could do that. That shouldn’t be too hard.

On the other hand … His fury against Crowley and Dena was like a slow burn within him. He knew Dena had been thinking of leaving him. He’d felt it in his bones. Seen it in the slight, disdainful curve at the edge of her mouth when she spoke to him. He’d known that it was the beginning of the end when she got sober and stayed sober and he didn’t. He’d tried it for a while. Sure, he felt healthier, and it was nice not being hung-over. Ultimately, though, he’d concluded that reality was highly overrated. Reality couldn’t hold a candle to getting a good toot on. He wasn’t even talking about getting drunk. He just wanted those blurred edges. That’s all. He knew his drinking lately had been over the top, but it hadn’t always been that way. For years, all he sought was that nice, fuzzy haze. Ahh … That’s better. It made the whole thing tolerable. But Dena had bought into the entire A.A. religion. All or nothing.

Maybe she would leave him, in spite of a divorce damaging her image. She’d take her substantial income with her. She’d been living paycheck to paycheck when they’d first met, but she was pulling down good money now, even though she didn’t think so. He’d resisted putting her name on the deed to the house, but was forced to when they’d refinanced to get a lower interest rate. They’d needed her income to do the deal. Her name was on nearly everything now. Maybe she’d planned it all along. She’d leave and force him to sell out. She’d slowly
and steadily built an investment portfolio of her own. He’d get part of it as community property under California law. Still, he’d be screwed. Her career was heading up. One of the big networks had been talking to her about joining its morning show. His career …

Well, he knew where his career was headed.

He peered into the coffee mug and the dwindling vodka. He took a miserly sip.

But if Dena died, he’d keep the house and the business and most of her assets. He was trustee over the portion she’d set aside for the two kids until they were twenty-five. He considered that his money too, for the time being. Plus she had a handsome life insurance policy. He and his son, Luddy, would make a fine life for themselves. He’d marry again, to someone who was actually nice to him. Someone less flashy than Dena. Less self-absorbed. Less beautiful, even. He’d settle for merely attractive. That was an acceptable trade-off for loyalty. As for Dena’s daughter, Dahlia, he couldn’t care less. She would be eighteen soon anyway. He’d kick her out that same day, if she hadn’t already left on her own like she was always threatening to do.

Maybe murder wasn’t as tough as he was making it out to be.

Scoville played out the thread. He could murder Crowley and Dena, and then, in a twist, plant the gun on Jenkins. He knew Jenkins lived with his mother out by the Salton Sea. Jenkins said she owned a gas station and mini-mart out there. That couldn’t be hard to find. Jenkins wanted Crowley dead for some reason. Others must know about that. There must be a connection between Jenkins and Crowley that made Jenkins leery of killing Crowley himself.

On second thought, instead of planting the gun on Jenkins, it would be cleaner if he just killed him too. He
could make it look like a suicide. He’d turn Jenkins’s crazy murder plan back onto him. It would serve the freak right. Jenkins would get just what he deserved.

Scoville toyed with the scarf-cloaked gun and took another sip of vodka, feeling his blood pressure rise with indignation at the thought of Jenkins trying to turn him into his patsy. Guys like that were always getting the upper hand on him. Tried to walk right over him. His own father was like that. The old man had even had the nerve to call him a pussy. Because he wasn’t a manly man, he’d taken crap from bolder men his whole life.