Murder Season (3 page)
“How long have you worked homicide, Gamble?”
“Long enough to know that this wasn’t a robbery, and that the killer wasn’t a pro. This was about something more personal than that. Something between the two.”
“I’m with you on that,” he said. “But I know the identity of the victim and you don’t. Tell me why you think it’s personal, Detective. I need to hear you say it.”
“If tonight was about a robbery, the coke wouldn’t be here. And if this was done by a pro, these wallets would have been left in their pockets. No pro would’ve taken the cash. Just a single credit card from Bosco’s wallet because everybody knows he’s loaded. One card with a decent credit line that wouldn’t be noticed for a day or two. That’s all it would take to bleed the account dry.”
Another moment passed as Ramsey considered what she had said. Lena traded looks with Rhodes, then moved to the counter and unzipped the evidence bag. She was tired of waiting. Tired of being tested at a crime scene that was stuck on hold. She pushed the leather wallet aside and pulled out the one made of nylon and Velcro. Ripping it open, she found the driver’s license and held it up to the light.
The victim was twenty-five years old. As her eyes slid over the name, those tremors began working through her fingers again. Lena finally understood why the deputy chief appeared so stunned. Why Barrera had been unable to look her in the eye all night. Why it didn’t matter that Escabar had shut down the club before calling 911 and all the Ferraris were gone. And why it didn’t even matter if the victim’s soul was lost forever between the winds.
The deputy chief had called it right. The kid with his lights punched out was more than an asshole. More than a motherfucker. And, in the end, he would be more trouble dead than alive.
She felt someone move in behind her and realized that it was Ramsey looking over her shoulder at the license. He was staring at it, but not seeing it—everything turned inward and lost in the black.
“Jacob Gant,” he whispered in a voice taut with emotion. “Now you know why we need you, Gamble. Now you know why we’re fucked.”
Payback.
A killer overdosing on rage.
Lena didn’t need to do the math as she exited Bosco’s office and headed for the stairs.
Jacob Gant raped and murdered his sixteen-year-old neighbor Lily Hight. Six weeks ago he’d walked out of an L.A. courtroom a free man. Tonight the big wheel turned—yin finally met yang—and he was dead.
Gant’s crimes were executed with extreme brutality. After assaulting the girl in her home, he drove a foot-long screwdriver into her back and watched her bleed to death.
The
NOT GUILTY
verdict had stunned everyone in the courtroom, producing utter silence for almost ten minutes with only the faint sound of Lily’s father, Tim Hight, weeping in the background. Lena could still remember the moment—still hear the sound of Hight sobbing. Like everyone else, she had watched the trial on television from her desk. The shock of the verdict worked like an infection. In a single instant, the entire city knew what had happened in that courtroom and felt sickened by the result.
But the tent was bigger than Los Angeles. Jacob Gant’s trial for the murder of Lily Hight had juice and flowed like a river rising over its banks wherever satellites and computer servers and smartphones could take it. Particularly after Gant’s initial arrest when Lily’s father had given the district attorney’s office snapshots and home videos of his beloved daughter, his only child, to be distributed to the media outlets.
The images fed a fire that could no longer be contained. In the world of senseless murders, Lily Hight was what came next: a gorgeous blonde with striking blue-gray eyes and a gentle but outgoing spirit. An innocent teenager who faced the ultimate violation just as she had begun to flower. A grieving father who tried to protect his grieving wife and maintain their privacy, but seemed to look years older every time he was photographed.
And then there were the rumors that began soon after Gant’s arrest, salacious stories appearing in the rag sheets that the twenty-five-year-old killer and his teenage victim were lovers.
The public’s outrage to the crime, their compassion for Lily and her father, seemed to burn without end and evolve into near myth. Lily Hight’s image began showing up on coffee mugs and T-shirts months before the trial. Street artists blanketed the city with her face on posters and wall paintings that read
IS JUSTICE REALLY BLIND?
Local TV news stations from coast to coast could point to interviews with teens who claimed to have known Lily, or met Lily, or seen Lily and wanted to be just like
their friend.
It was another circus. Another media trial set in L.A. Another slam-dunk murder case in which every piece of evidence collected at the crime scene pointed to one person and only one person.
Jacob Gant raped and murdered his next-door neighbor Lily Hight. And the LAPD blew it. The district attorney’s office blew it.
Again.
Blood samples were mishandled by SID techs at the crime scene and misplaced in the lab.
Again.
DNA analysis of semen collected from the victim pointed beyond all doubt to Jacob Gant, but like the blood evidence, it went missing and couldn’t be found in the lab.
Again.
Two deputy district attorneys, outmatched by Buddy Paladino, sat back and watched the defense attorney rip their rock solid case apart while making them look like bunglers and fools in a way that only Buddy Paladino could do.
Again.
A killer was released, free to enjoy the pleasures of life here in the City of Angels or anywhere else he wanted to go.
Again and again and again.
Lena hit the stairs, feeling the words ripple through her body until she reached the club’s foyer on the main floor. She was looking for Dante Escabar, but didn’t see him behind the bar. Someone had turned down the lights, and the place was empty now. Just the spent coffee cups left behind by a division callout, the detectives finally released and sent home. She pulled a stool away from the bar and sat down. When she noticed the pack of cigarettes left beside an open bottle of bourbon, she fought the urge and pushed them away. Her mind was still skipping through the details. Still reeling. But there was anger, too. Anger at the situation and for what she was being asked to do.
Payback.
A killer overdosing on rage.
A father who could claim both reason and cause. In some circles, even the moral high ground.
Other than Jacob Gant’s family, no one in the city would have a problem with his death tonight. Far from it. Lena imagined that when the news broke, the bars would be packed with people celebrating. But the party wouldn’t last very long. Once Tim Hight was arrested for killing the man who murdered his daughter, once Lena put the case together and slapped the cuffs on the grieving father’s wrists—a father in ruin doing what any father might do …
“Are you okay?”
She turned and saw Rhodes walking into the bar. She tried to find her voice, and it came out deep and scratched.
“I was going to ask you the same thing,” she said.
He shrugged without an answer, crossing the darkened room for a peek out the window. Lena could hear the press corps still shouting at the patrol units holding them back. After a while, Rhodes joined her at the bar.
“The coroner,” he said. “Barrera asked me to show him the way up when he gets here.”
“Who got the call? Who got lucky?”
Rhodes gave her a look. “Besides you?”
She nodded. “Besides me.”
“Ed Gainer,” he said.
“Well, he’s not gonna like the stairs.”
“You’re right. Eddie won’t like the stairs.”
Rhodes reached for the pack of cigarettes, found a lighter beside a tray of spent candles, and lit up. When he passed it over, Lena shook him off. Neither one of them really smoked. Although tonight more than qualified as a crisis, she was no longer in the mood. Instead, she looked at the scar on Rhodes’s left earlobe. It was in the shape of an X, and she liked looking at it. His brown hair was cropped short again, his body lean and trim from daily jogs around Hollywood Reservoir. He looked good. The gunshot he’d taken to his left shoulder a few years back—a distant memory that only surfaced when it rained.
Rhodes stepped behind the bar and found a plate to use as an ashtray. “I guess Hight held it together for as long as he could,” he said. “I’ve never met him, but during the trial he looked okay. Wearing down maybe, but okay.”
Lena nodded again without answering. No one in the division had met Tim Hight because his daughter’s murder investigation had been handled by local detectives on the Westside. The case didn’t ignite until prosecutors released those family snapshots to the press. By the time the public met Lily Hight, Jacob Gant had already been arrested and moved from his parents’ home in Venice to an isolated cell at Men’s Central Jail.
Rhodes leaned on the bar directly across from her. “After tonight people will think that Tim Hight’s a hero. They’re gonna say that he did what we couldn’t. That he did what he had to do. That he finally got justice for his daughter.”
“He’s not a hero,” she whispered.
“It doesn’t make any difference, Lena. They’ll call him one.”
The words settled in for a while.
“He’s not a hero,” she repeated. “He didn’t shoot Gant, lay down the gun, and wait to face the music. He walked into the room and shot Johnny Bosco first. And he shot him in the back, Stan. Then he tried to make it look like a robbery and ran away. He hit the wall and blew.”
“I agree, but it won’t play that way. It’s still poison for us. Sugarcoated poison. Leave it to the LAPD to set the bad guys free and send the good guys to jail.”
Lena remained quiet because she knew that what Rhodes had just said was true. Barrera and Deputy Chief Ramsey knew how it would play as well.
She started to reach for that pack of cigarettes after all, but stopped when she heard movement in the foyer behind her. It was a group of about ten people walking toward the front entrance as if on autopilot. She recognized the mayor’s chief of staff, a city councilwoman from Hollywood, and the LAPD chief’s new adjutant, Abraham Hernandez. It seemed like a good guess that this was the group who had been whispering in the darkness from the balcony outside Bosco’s office. When she saw Steven Bennett and Debi Watson, she reached out for Rhodes and gave him a nudge.
Bennett and Watson were the deputy district attorneys who had brought the case against Jacob Gant to trial. Until Buddy Paladino humiliated them in front of a courtroom wired for TV and the electronic universe beyond, they were considered to be two of the best and brightest deputy DAs in Los Angeles. Particularly Steven Bennett, whom the district attorney had taken to and was grooming to replace him if he won reelection for his third term in office. Tonight, it looked like Bennett and Watson were anything but the best and brightest. Tonight, they were shuffling their feet and keeping their heads down. Tonight, they were passing the investigator from the coroner’s office at the door—mere shadows of their former selves—and leaving another crime scene in shame.
She found Dante Escabar in the courtyard
at a table by the pool. Although it seemed clear that he wanted to be alone, she pulled a chair out and sat down. Several moments passed before he even acknowledged her presence. He was deep within himself, sipping bourbon and brooding on automatic, with sheets of sharp blue light from the water ricocheting off his dark eyes.
“I’ve already told you people everything I know,” he said finally.
He hadn’t looked up, but was still staring at his drink. The ice was melting away.
“Sometimes in the heat of the moment details get left behind,” she said.
“Heat of the moment? Is that what the LAPD calls it?”
She could hear the fury in his voice. The venom. Escabar was younger than his partner by at least ten years. He was a handsome man with clear brown skin, a strong frame, and black hair as fine as silk cut just above the shoulders. Lena knew very little about him because Bosco had been the front man for Club 3 AM. She thought that she could remember reading somewhere that Escabar had spent his childhood on the street. That it had been a long climb that began at a taco stand on San Fernando Boulevard. That he met Bosco, who gave him a job and eventually took him under his wing. A few months back
The Times
photographed Escabar’s home on Mulholland Drive and the actress he was living with. The climb was part of his history, but Lena wondered about his temperament. She watched him take a long pull on the glass, his eyes settling somewhere over by the pool.
“How much will you benefit from Johnny Bosco’s death?” she said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“How much will you make?”
Escabar finally turned to her. “You’re right, Officer. After tonight I’ll be rich. I’ve been sitting here, counting it in my head. All that fucking money. While you assholes have spent the last three hours trying to cover for the fact that every one of you fucked up, I’ve been out here celebrating the murder of my best friend.”
A long moment passed. A long stretch of jagged silence.
“I know it’s not easy,” she said. “The timing’s worse than bad. But I need to clear a few things up and I need to do it quickly.”
Escabar took another swig of bourbon. “Sounds like you need to clear up more than that. You’re way off base.”
“I hope so,” Lena said. “But I still need an answer.”
“This isn’t about my partner. This is about that asshole kid.”
“How much are you gonna make from your partner’s death?”
Escabar glanced back at her, shaking his head at the inevitable. “Nada,” he said. “Nothing. Not a single cent. I’m lucky to be one of seven partners. More than lucky.”
“Who are the other five? Studio execs?”
“Three of them are. The other two are actors. If you want their names you’ll have to call our lawyer. But no one profits from Johnny’s death. The club grew out of his business with the studios. This was his place. His idea. Nothing changes, not even the split. He’s got family on the East Coast. South Jersey. A mother and father. If you really want to waste time, talk to them. Maybe they killed their own son tonight. It’s either that or you’ve gotta face the fact that Johnny Bosco’s dead because the LAPD couldn’t cut it. Someone else had to put Jacob Gant down, and he fucked it up. He killed Johnny. He’s even more lame than you are.”
