Motive (11 page)

“Really,” I said.

“What?”

“I’m grasping but maybe the building’s the link,” I said. “What if Hennepin had reason to be there—running an errand for the Grosses—and she got sniffed out by the same predator who went after Ursula?”

“So everything I’ve worked on Ursula—the money motive, Richard, some unhappy boyfriend—was a total waste of time and there’s some random psychopath stationed on Avenue of the Stars looking for random prey?”

It’s never random. I said nothing.

“Great, that’s fantastic, beautiful. Phantom of the office building?
Even if I thought it made sense, why would he strangle and overkill-butcher one victim, wait four-plus months, and do another one execution-style?”

I said, “Well—”

“You’re gonna tell me it’s the signature, not the M.O., right?”

I smiled.

He said, “So what’s this guy signing his name to? The joys of cuisine?”

“Marissa may have stumbled upon it a few minutes ago. Pride of ownership.”

“He cooks a meal so he owns his victims? Why that, specifically? His mommy starved him in the crib? Insufficient breast-feeding?”

He strode away a second time, walked out to the middle of the road, and stood there, arms folded across his barrel chest. As if challenging a car to appear.

None did. Not a sound other than bird peeps. Beautiful place. Ursula Corey had left it, expecting a lovely day sweetened by altruism toward her children, only to die on oily asphalt.

When Milo returned, I said, “It wouldn’t need to be someone who’s at the building regularly. People come in and out. Occasional would be enough. That could explain four months between victims.”

“Reed studied those tapes. No one iffy entered or exited the morning Ursula was killed.”

“Define iffy.”

“In the case of a motorist, a tag that traces to a criminal record. In the case of a pedestrian, lurking, loitering, acting generally creepy or spooky, any sort of purposeless behavior.”

I said nothing.

He said, “Okay, it was a waste of time. Any better suggestions, genius?—aw, sorry, you’re the last person I should go off on. It’s just that this is nuts. The last thing I expected.”

“Same here.”

“God, I hope it’s
not
the building. Even compiling a list of employees and staffers would be impossible, people come and go.”

He turned toward the house. “Meanwhile, I’ve got a freaky food diorama in there. Boneless
chicken …
 and guess where there also
isn’t
a camera?”

“The house.”

“The house for sure, but more to the point, the entrance to the goddamn development. Why they even bother with a gate is beyond me, the people they hire have no experience and anyone can walk through, which is obviously what happened. Probably after dark. Asshole with a picnic basket, he could just carry it in. On foot.”

I said, “He’d need to get into the house. Was the alarm set?”

“Marissa doesn’t remember, which probably means it wasn’t. And no signs of break-in, so for all we know, a door was left unlocked. Safe neighborhood and all that.”

“For someone to be aware of lax security, he’d have to be familiar with the area and/or the property. There’s a guard out there, now. When did he come on duty?”

“Eight a.m., and no one was in the booth between eight p.m. and then. Logical, huh? I had Sean and Moe canvass the neighbors about intruders, unusual vehicles, anyone walking on the road. Nada.”

I said, “With properties set this far back and with darkness, you’d have to be looking to spot anyone. Any indication the food was cooked in the house?”

“Just like Hennepin, the place was left spotless, though he did use plates and cutlery from the house. So he either pre-prepared his munchies or cleaned up compulsively.”

He swore under his breath. “I came, I saw, I catered.”

I said, “Marissa said Richard didn’t have a key but Ballou contradicted that. Be good to find out how Richard got hold of it.”

“As a matter of fact, lad, I can supply that data, because after I got Marissa’s call, I phoned Richard. His story is that when he decided to
sell the house, he came over and retrieved one from a secret hiding place he and Ursula had, in case they ever got locked out.” He pointed. “Over there, in the barn. But before you get too excited, Richard’s been in San Diego for two days. And I didn’t just take his word for it, I confirmed with the Manchester Grand Hyatt. His card-key record has him out of his room between seven thirty and ten p.m. last night but his bar and restaurant tabs confirm drinks paid for at eight thirty and dinner at nine fifty.”

“Dinner with who?”

“Clients. I called the hotel restaurant and they back him up. Richard and several Asian gentlemen.”

“Stay-at-home loner traveling on business,” I said. “That’s a switch.”

“A hundred twenty miles to San Diego ain’t Phnom Penh, but yeah, it’s different and Corey talked about it, he needs to get out more and schmooze now that he doesn’t have Ursula. I’m not saying I can’t be fooled but, Alex, he did not sound overjoyed. More like overwhelmed. Out of his element.”

“He have any opinion about what happened here?”

“He thought it was insane. Guess we can reach a consensus there.”

We checked with the crime scene techs. Short said, “Nothing so far, Lieutenant. It’s been wiped down super-carefully.”

Milo said, “Any sign of cooking?”

Tall said, “Not for a long time. I had a place like this, I’d be dishing up barbecue every Sunday.”

Short said, “You had a place like this, you’d have someone cook for you.”

“Nope,” said Tall. “Rich doesn’t have to mean lazy.”

“Who said that?”

“I just did.”

“Great,” said Short. “Here I was, thinking I’d learn something today.”

Back at the cars, I said, “I’d still try to find out if Kathy Hennepin was ever in that office building.”

Fishing out his phone, he called the Grosses’ accounting firm, got voice mail, hung up. “Too complicated to leave a message. Anything else?”

“Hennepin’s chef boyfriend—Kleffer—was alibied solidly, but now we’ve got two dinner scenes.”

“Darius the Elusive returns? Not ever talking to him was sloppy, huh? Maybe I’m slipping.”

He grabbed my hand, shook it vigorously. “Thanks.”

“For what?”

“I slip, I could fall. Sometimes you supply a net.”

The following morning Milo called and asked if I’d take another look at the Hennepin murder book. I said, “Sure,” and six minutes later, Sean Binchy was at the door delivering the blue folder.

The request, just a formality. I supposed that defined friendship.

I went to my office and read after Robin had gone to her studio, concentrating on linking Katherine Hennepin to Ursula Corey any way I could.

The only thing they seemed to share was death followed by creepy culinary displays. I gave the files another try. By the fourth go-round, I might as well have been reading Sanskrit.

When you hit a wall, take another route. I refocused by stepping away from the details.

Milo’s initial reaction to the dinner scene at Ursula’s was to take it personally. Understandable response to surprise and frustration. But what if he was at least partially right and the killings were a power play against authority?

Making fools of the cops by setting up crime scenes designed to misdirect, because detectives play the odds. We all do.

Spot an eighty-year-old woman hobbling your way down a dark city street and your blood pressure, pulse, and respiration are unlikely to spike.

Switch the scene to a husky young male swaggering toward you and your sympathetic nervous system jams into high gear.

Sure, it’s profiling and sure, it’s imperfect. Get close enough to that old woman and realize she’s a guy in drag whipping out a gun and you’ve lost out to limited thinking. But for the most part, things
are
what they seem and we all bank on that.

Try living randomly and see how far it gets you.

When it comes to police work, professional judgments about a crime are often formed early, sometimes during the first moments of viewing a crime scene. That can lead to tunnel vision and rushes to judgment. But more often than not, seasoned detectives’ expectations are met because patterns do exist and ignoring patterns is stupid and reckless.

A bright detective keeps a sliver of mind open. Milo’s one of the brightest but his assumptions had just been churned to sludge.

He wouldn’t be forgiving himself anytime soon, but I was coming to believe that he deserved a pass. Because the slaughter of Katherine Hennepin
was
a textbook example of an overkill slice-job by someone the victim knew well. And the assassination of Ursula Corey
did
bear the hallmarks of a for-hire hit prompted by money or passion or both.

A pair of textbook cases that had skidded way off the page. A couple of obvious prime suspects who’d alibied out.

Was blowing probability to bits the big thrill for the monster who’d choreographed, directed, and starred in all this violence?

Were the killings little more than stage shows? Dinner for two, the props?

But why
these
two women? The victims mattered. The victims always matter.

Full circle …

I brewed coffee, drank too much of it, walked around the house and out to the garden and back, developing a killer headache that proved oddly reassuring.

Dinner for two. Pleased at his first tableau and repeating it? Because something about setting up a cozy culinary scene made his penis hard and flooded his shallow mind with pulsating memories?

Or did it all reduce to an ad for himself? Just another
look-at-me
vanity production.

Murder as bragging.

If so, how many other women would be sacrificed to a metastatic ego?

Were we dealing with someone who’d never matured properly due to abuse or neglect? Or one of those mutants who defy explanation?

If I was right about his wanting to humiliate law enforcement, he’d probably had run-ins with the cops and come out on the losing end.

An underachiever who’d overestimated his own intelligence, convinced himself his failures were someone else’s fault.

Yet, for all that, a man sufficiently clever/smooth/innocuous to worm his way into Katherine Hennepin’s apartment.

To stalk Ursula Corey in a basement parking lot without her suspecting anything until it was too late.

Shooting her in the face fit an ego run amok.

Look at me look at me look at me
.

No shortage of attention whores in L.A. Showbiz and haute couture and politics wouldn’t exist without them. But presidents and movie stars and supermodels get to flaunt themselves publicly. Our boy wasn’t able to.

Or he’d tried and failed.

So he’d retracted like a venomous mollusk, concealed by a shell of anonymity?

A guy you wouldn’t worry about if you saw him walking toward you.

If you noticed him at all.

Profound, Delaware. You are hereby christened the Grand Duke of Generic Psychological Guesswork
.

After photocopying Katherine Hennepin’s enlarged DMV photo, I showered, but didn’t shave, put on a T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers, and drove to Century City.

Leaving the Seville in the pay lot of the office building directly across the street, I climbed the broad steps leading to the structure where Ursula Corey had died.

Rather than enter the lobby, I stood around, slightly left of center, studying the foot traffic in and out.

No spew of humanity, just a thin but steady parade of people looking purposeful.

I did my best to look aimless, figured clothes that didn’t fit in would help. No one noticed or cared. The flow parted around me and resumed; I might as well have been a traffic cone.

Invisible man. Was that the way
he
felt all the time?

Maybe a smidge of odd behavior would help. I lowered my head, bobbed up and down, pretended to study at the ground, a loner caught up in a private world.

When that failed to raise a reaction, I looked up and altered my facial expression: sneering at the universe.

That caught the eye of a few people and made them frown and widen the berth they gave me. But no slowing of pace. Now I was a traffic cone soiled by dog shit.

Finally, a pair of young brunettes in short skirts muttered something that sounded cruel as they stilettoed past.

Then: more invisibility.

I supposed it made sense. Kids are taught not to stare and people are repelled by abnormality.

But maybe it was more than that. Because despite all the so-called social networks and the transitory clans they breed (the yoga community,
the yogurt community, the Yogi Berra community), ultimately, we all drive solo. And that can lead to self-absorption.

More so in California where nice weather and cinematic promises of happy endings can erode any but the most passionate or paranoid person’s sense of threat.

I’d just proven to myself how tough it was to get anyone to pay attention. Had that helped the killer take Ursula Corey?