Fire Point (18 page)

61

A group of college girls, dressed Malibu-casual in shorts and T-shirts, crowded the corridor as they waited for the teaching assistant to open their classroom. Gretchen, her freshly cropped hair dyed bright blue and sporting oversized black-framed glasses with clear lenses, pushed past them, toting a heavy backpack. No one gave her so much as a second glance. The more unique or out there your ‘look’, the more anonymous you became on a preppy college campus.

The college was women-only, one of a dwindling few in California. The total enrollment was under five thousand students, fewer than some LA county high schools. But what Barnes College lacked in numbers it more than made up for in tuition. A four-year undergraduate degree program would cost a cool one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in fees alone. Female-only also made for a lower alumni endowment, which meant financial aid was sparse. As a result it tended to draw students from higher-income groups and offered places to those who might not have had offers from other colleges.

As Gretchen had described it to Krank, it was for ‘dumb, rich, self-entitled white bitches and granola lesbians’. Certainly all the students she had seen so far that morning pretty much fitted her description. They didn’t have to work a job. They stayed in campus dorms. They all had brand new cars paid for by Daddy. At the same time, as far as Gretchen was concerned, they held themselves up as some kind of downtrodden minority. They were women born on third base who thought they’d hit a triple but resented not being at home plate. They represented everything she had come to despise. Killing them would be a service to the nation.

At the end of the corridor, she ducked into a restroom. She walked straight into a stall and closed the door. She opened the backpack, took out the contents, primed them, set the timer and waited for the one occupied stall to clear. When the bathroom was empty she climbed out, leaving the stall door locked from the inside.

Outside in the main college square she sat and waited. Groups of girls flitted past. A tweedy professor hustled from his car with a stack of papers. No one looked at her twice.

She waited for the series of pops from inside the building she had just exited. She pulled out her cell phone and hit the number for campus security. Someone picked up straight away.

‘Hi, listen, I just came out of Broughton Hall and I think I heard gunshots. It sounds like someone’s shooting at people,’ she said.

Before the person at the other end of the line could ask for her name or any additional details, she killed the call, stood up, and walked quickly toward the main dorm buildings. Within seconds blue-uniformed security officers were peeling out of buildings. She counted twelve. They immediately began directing anyone walking on campus back to their dorm. They were panicked.

She followed the directions the students had been given. The main entrance to the dorm was open. A heavy-set woman in security uniform was busy shooi
ng co-eds ins
ide. ‘Everyone to their rooms and wait for the all-clear.’

A young blonde student asked about her friend who was in a lecture. She was told that everyone in a class would have to stay there until the all-clear was given.

Gretchen smiled to herself as she listened to the conversation escalate. The blonde student argued that she wanted to go check on her friend, and wasn’t it a free country? The female security officer responded that freedom of movement was suspended until they had clearance. It went on for a few more rounds before the blonde girl finally relented. Gretchen ducked out of a fire door and headed back to her bike.

The all-clear would come as soon as they found the pack of firecrackers rigged to a timer. It would be put down to a prank. Security would be heightened for a day or two. No one would make any connections between this and Brentwood. If the Brentwood killers had been on campus, they would have done more than play a prank. That would be the thinking anyway.

As she straddled the bike, she called Krank. It took a couple of tries before he picked up – signal was spotty up in the canyon where the Ranch was.

‘How did it go?’ he asked.

‘Too easy,’ she said. ‘Like shooting fish in a barrel.’

‘I was thinking more along the lines of a barbecue, but whatever. You heading back?’

‘Yeah. See you in twenty,’ said Gretchen.

62

Tarian was still sleeping when Lock woke. He didn’t envy her the morning. He knew from experience that, after bereavement, mornings were the worst. The slow, creeping sense of dread as your new reality formed itself in your mind. Today would be the day she had to tell her two surviving children about what had happened. It would not be easy. It was better that she slept.

He leaned over and kissed the top of her head. She barely stirred. He got up and headed into the bathroom. He showered, dried off and got dressed. He dug out a complimentary bag of toiletries, brushed his teeth and rinsed with mouthwash, then went into the living area and stepped out onto a balcony that looked over a deep shelf of beach and beyond that the ocean. It was going to be hot. A breeze had picked up as the Santa Ana winds whipped down through the canyons.

His phone brought him the latest local news. No arrests had been made in the Brentwood killings. The search was ongoing and the LAPD were ‘actively pursuing several promising leads’, which could mean almost anything. He read on. A house in the Hollywood Hills, believed to be linked to one of the killers, was being searched. A number of bodies had been found. Lock’s mind flashed back to the haunting green-black video excavated from Marcus’s hard drive by Li Zhang. He wondered if the girl was among them and whether her parents had yet had the knock at their door that brought closure and fresh torment in equal measure.

Scrolling down, other local news was light. A chimpanzee had escaped from the LA zoo. A bad crash on the 405 with three fatalities. An alarm at a women’s college in Malibu that had turned out to be a prank. The rest was sports news and weather. He’d already worked out the day’s weather – hot, dry and windy.

He walked back inside and through to the bedroom. Tarian was still fast asleep. He debated waking her. He grabbed a piece of paper from the desk and wrote a note, asking her to call him. He left it where she would be sure to see it. The last thing he wanted was for her to think he was ducking out on her, but right now the absolute best thing for her was rest. She would need whatever last reserves of energy she had remaining over the next few days.

He could have stuck around, waited for her to wake, and spent the morning with her. If Krank and the others had been found, he would have. But they were still out there, and right now he felt that he was more in Charles Kim’s head than anyone else.

63

Two LAPD Hollywood Division patrol cars were parked nose to nose at the entrance to the Hollywood Hills property. Lock pulled up in his Audi and got out, Ty with him. He’d spent the night poring over the data from the hard drive that Li had cracked, a copy of which was also with the LAPD. Lock had made sure that, straight from the jump, he and Ty had given their full co-operation.

Ty sipped from a cup of coffee as they walked toward the two patrol cars. ‘How’d your evening go?’

‘It was fine,’ said Lock.

‘Tarian holding up?’ said Ty.

Lock ignored him as one of the patrol officers, a barrel-chested Hispanic sergeant, walked over to them. Lock introduced himself and Ty, name-dropping the two detectives who had said they’d keep him as informed as they could, and quickly explained the circumstances. The sergeant was polite but wasn’t going to give away much more than was in the public domain.

‘So far we got three vics. All female. All buried out back next to some kind of firing range. House has been occupied until recently, either before the shooting in Brentwood or shortly thereafter. That’s about as much as I know,’ he told them.

‘The house belong to Charles Kim?’ Lock asked.

‘Not directly. Some kind of family trust deal. But he was living there with his crew,’ said the sergeant.

‘He leave anything interesting behind?’ said Lock. ‘Only I found some fairly heavy-duty ammunition at his apartment.’

The sergeant shook his head. ‘Some milk in the fridge, clothes, but nothing like that. You have any other ideas where he might be holed up?’

‘None,’ said Lock.

Lock and Ty walked back to their car. Lock called Tarian’s cell. She was awake but sounded groggy. She thanked him for staying with her and for the note. She was fine. If she needed him, she’d call.

They headed back down into Hollywood. It was only mid-morning but the crazies and tourists were already out on the streets. Lock kept driving. The trail was cold. Los Angeles had twelve million people and there was no guarantee that Krank and the others were even there. In a few days the story would start to fade. The longer it took for them to be found, the less likely it would happen. People did just disappear. Krank and his crew had money, resources, and they’d already proven that they were good at vanishing into thin air.

At the same time, they weren’t career criminals. They weren’t robbing banks or kidnapping for ransom. They were cult-like. They clearly had an axe to grind with society or, more specifically, with women. They were operating like a terrorist cell. That made them even harder to locate.

Career criminals had associates, patterns, places they tended to hang. The three people currently on the loose, if it was three and not more, had each other. Lock could feel his frustration grow as he drove, and Ty kept flipping through the contents of the hard drive on his tablet computer. They were missing something. Lock knew they were.

‘Anything good?’ he asked Ty.

‘Just lots of crazy shit. Blog posts. Message-board stuff. None of it makes any sense. AFC, alphas, the natural order, they got their own language.’

‘AFC?’ Lock said.

‘Stands for “average frustrated chump”. Like a dude who’s a regular Joe.’

‘You wanna drive?’ Lock said. ‘Let me take a look.’

‘You think you speak crazy better than I do?’ said Ty. He smiled. ‘Wait. You don’t need to answer that one.’

‘Very funny,’ said Lock. He pulled the car over. The two men got out and switched seats. Ty pulled back out into the traffic. Lock began swiping at the screen as he scrolled through the fevered thoughts of one small corner of the internet.

‘Where we headed?’ said Ty, as they came to a freeway on ramp.

Lock didn’t look up. ‘Santa Monica. I want to check on Tarian.’

For once Ty bit back whatever wisecrack was on the tip of his tongue. He spun the wheel of the Audi, powered up the ramp and merged onto the freeway heading west.

64

Having checked in with the front desk, Lock called Tarian from the lobby. Before he left he had told her not to answer her hotel-room door unless she was expecting someone. Hotel security, whom Lock had found to be more than capable, had instructed housekeeping to let their guest know ahead of time if they needed access. The front desk were also being extra vigilant in not allowing anyone who wasn’t a guest or a verified visitor near the suite. The suites came with a hefty price tag and were typically used by celebrities or high-net-worth individuals so security around them tended to be fairly high level.

Not that Lock anticipated Krank turning up to finish the job. Tarian had already identified both him and Gretchen. Forensics would likely confirm their guilt. The more Lock had thought about what had happened at the house, the more convinced he’d become that the killers had left Tarian alive deliberately. Going by the wounds evident on the other victims, they’d had the firepower to get access to the bathroom. So why hadn’t they? There was one obvious answer. They didn’t care whether they left behind a witness or not. In fact, a witness who could identify the killers to the authorities might have been a positive. So far it was a hunch.

Lock proceeded to the bank of elevators that would take him to the suite. As he waited he thought about the material he’d read that had been recovered from Marcus’s computer. Lock wasn’t a big internet guy. Like a firearm, it was a tool. Something he used when he needed to. From the sheer volume and the records of when material had been accessed, Marcus had spent a huge part of his time reading blogs, writing his own, or commenting on various message-boards that revolved around what they called the ‘manosphere’. After a while it appeared that Marcus had discovered an extreme edge where it wasn’t sufficient for young men to pick up and sleep with as many women as possible – not that Lock fully understood even that mentality.

As a young man and then an adult, Lock had never lacked female attention. He had never sought it out. He had never had to. He was, he guessed, what Marcus would have called a natural alpha, possessing certain qualities without being aware of them. Thinking about it, he guessed that much of his attractiveness lay in his self-containment. He had never needed a woman to be content until he had met Carrie. Losing her had devastated him. Work had allowed him to cope. Since her death he had found some women attractive but he had never been able to open himself up with them like he had with her. Part of it was the fear of another loss. He wondered if that was what had attracted him to Tarian. She was beautiful. She found him attractive and didn’t hide it. But she was married. Or had been. And now? If he’d gotten a call from her a few months down the line telling him she’d left Teddy, that would have been one thing. But this scenario, her family killed in front of her, hardly made for the start of a fairytale happy-ever-after.

The elevator doors opened. Lock stepped out. He spotted the man lurking in the hotel corridor. He was wearing a jacket that was better suited to Maine in winter than LA’s year-round sunshine. He had a ball cap pulled down low over his eyes. He was about five nine and had some weight to him. He was standing with a clipboard making a show of inspecting a fire alarm. The fire point was about twenty yards from Tarian’s suite.

The man hadn’t heard the elevator doors opening, or he was ignoring Lock’s presence. Lock drew his SIG Sauer 226 in one fluid motion. There was already a round in the chamber. He was good to go.

He aimed for the man’s back. ‘Keep your hands where I can see them,’ he said to the man. ‘They drop out of sight, I drop you.’

The man froze. The pen he was carrying fell from his hand. ‘Take it easy, man,’ he said.

‘Leave the pen. Turn round,’ said Lock, advancing on the man.

The man did so, his hands up, one still clutching the clipboard. He was sporting oversized black-framed ‘nerd’ glasses and a hipster goatee. He shot Lock a smug smirk. ‘Take it easy, brother,’ the man said. ‘I just want to speak to the lady.’

‘She’s not speaking to anyone,’ said Lock.

‘Then let me hear it from her, and I’ll be on my way. Know what I’m saying?’

Lock grabbed his shoulder, spun him round so he was facing the wall, and jabbed the muzzle of the SIG into the back of his neck. ‘What is that know-what-I’m-saying bullshit anyway?’ Lock asked him. ‘Is it like some kind of verbal tic?’

‘Hey, hey,’ the man protested. ‘Chill. I’m just doing my job, Homes.’

Lock lifted the back of the man’s jacket and frisked for a gun, then leaned in closer. ‘Tell me to chill again, in fact say one more word to me, and I’m going to beat you so hard you’ll need new kidneys. You understand me, asshole? Nod for yes.’

The man nodded.

‘Paparazzo?’ Lock asked.

The man nodded again.

‘How did you know Tarian Griffiths was here?’ Lock asked.

This guy twisted his head round.

‘This time you can use words,’ Lock told him.

‘One of the security guys gives us tips. We usually stay outside and catch people as they leave. But we knew this lady wasn’t leaving.’

Of course he does, thought Lock. ‘Name?’

‘No way, man. A journalist has to protect his—’

Lock slammed a fist into the guy’s right side. He let out a gasp as all the air left his lungs and doubled over. Moving in, Lock spun the guy round and fished for a wallet. He found it tucked into the front pocket of his pants, flipped it open and pulled out a California driver’s license. He noted the name, tucked the card back in the wallet and handed it over. ‘Listen, asshole, you’re not Woodward or Bernstein. Real reporters don’t stalk the survivors of mass shootings on private property with a video camera, then post it on the internet. You’re a douchebag paparazzo. Now, you are going to tell me the name. It’s not a matter of if but when. And if you tell anyone about this, remember I just got your name and address. So you say anything, I will hunt you down. We’ll have a shorter chat than we’re having now, and no one will ever find your body. And while we’re at it you may have adopted the lingo, but your accent tells me you’re from freakin’ Connecticut. Now, are
we clear, homes?’

‘Marco Jacks. That’s the guy who told me.’

‘Thank you,’ said Lock, lowering his SIG and placing it back in its holster. He dug out his cell and texted Ty.

He spun the guy back round. He put one hand on his shoulder and made sure to maintain eye contact. ‘Okay, listen to me. This hotel and, especially, this person are off limits now. Spread the word. If I catch you or any of your colleagues here I will cause pain. I’m not a cop. I don’t have to play by the rules and I won’t. Do you understand what I just told you?’

‘Yeah. I understand.’

‘Good,’ said Lock, as the elevator doors opened and Ty strode out with his game face on. ‘Tyrone, show this young man to the exit.’

Ty didn’t say anything. Ty rarely had to. His mere physical presence ensured co-operation. The paparazzo went limp to the point at which Ty had to tap his face and tell him to straighten up.

He grabbed the guy’s collar and navigated him past Lock, marching him back toward the elevator as Lock knocked at the door of the suite and waited for Tarian.