Naked Addiction (30 page)

“I’m not insane,” she said. “And I told you I didn’t kill anyone.”

“Well, temporary insanity then. You know, a crime of passion.”

Clover stopped moving.

Is she considering my proposal?

“They’ll believe you,” he said. “I know they will.”

“Be quiet,” she said, tightening her grip before she pulled him down a dirt slope with her.

Still dizzy, he tried, unsuccessfully, to let his mind go blank.

This is the end.

Norman felt a rush of relief as they stumbled a few feet down onto another ledge that he hadn’t realized was there. Even so, they were that much further from Goode and not close enough to yell up at him anymore. He could see Goode, staring down at them and then up the coast.

That’s when Norman heard a beating noise, a low thunder. As it grew louder, he realized it was the dull roar of an aircraft approaching. Maybe the sheriff’s air rescue helicopter or the U.S. Marines were coming to save him. Goode or someone else must’ve called for help.

“You hear that?” Clover asked. She whirled them both around to see a helicopter about a half mile to the north, heading right for them. Her fingers were still gripping his arm and he had no idea what she was going to do. When the chopper got close enough, a man with a bullhorn leaned out and said: “Drop your weapon. Let the hostage go.”

Norman’s toes were only a few inches from the edge. He could see nude people sprawled out on towels below, their faces turned up toward the copter. There were no more ledges, only the final drop.

He felt Clover let go of his neck and step away, but he stood still, not wanting to move for fear she was still pointing the gun at the back of his head. She stepped forward so she was standing next to him and took his hand. The gun was still in her other hand, but she wasn’t aiming it at anyone.

“Look at those people down there. They seem so free,” she said softly. “I want to be free.”

Is she going to try to take me with her?

“Drop your weapon and let the hostage go,” the man with the bullhorn repeated.

The wind whistled in Norman’s ears and blew the hair into his eyes. “Clover, it doesn’t have to end this way,” he said. “I don’t want to die. You don’t have to either.”

“I was never planning to hurt you or anyone else,” Clover said, dropping his hand and the gun, too. Leaning into his face, she kissed him on the cheek. “Bye, Norman.”

Then, in one swift motion, she stepped off the cliff. Partway down, as her body sliced through the air, she spread her arms out like an angel, a strange smile on her face. Oddly, it seemed to slow her fall a bit.

“Oh, my God,” Norman whispered.

She hit the sand a couple of seconds later, a crumpled mess of bones. He stepped back from the ledge and stared out at the ocean, shaking. He heard footsteps behind him and felt a hand on his shoulder.

“Hey, kid. You okay?” Goode asked, kneeling down and putting Clover’s gun in his pocket.

Norman nodded. He felt numb. In shock, really. “Yeah, I’m all right, I guess. You?”

Goode nodded back. “Yeah, I just wish I could’ve stopped her from jumping.”

“I know,” Norman said. “But you can’t blame yourself. . . .I guess some people just don’t want to be saved.”

They looked down at the beach, where a crowd of naked people and a few surfers in their wetsuits had gathered around the body and were craning their necks to watch the helicopter descend.

“Please move back,” the bullhorn voice said.

The people scattered like insects, grabbing their towels and running, their flesh jiggling. The sand blew every which way as the copter set down on the shore.

As Norman stood there next to the detective, he felt happy to be alive. But at the same time, he felt slightly ashamed that he’d ended up with a story out of this.

“That poor girl,” Norman said. “She was so mixed up, I don’t know what to think. . . . Did she really kill those people?”

“It sure looks that way, kid,” Goode said. “I searched her room an hour ago and I found a box with the tips of red fingernails, a lock of red hair, and a ring with Keith Warner’s initials. And you can print that this time.”

“Maybe not,” Norman said.

“What do you mean?” Goode asked.

“Well, right before she jumped, she told me she didn’t kill anyone, and that she never planned to hurt me or anyone else. She said she was about to go talk to Tania on Saturday night, but some guy wearing a baseball cap backward got to Tania’s apartment ahead of her, so she never went in.”

“Really?” Goode asked, growing silent. “No shit.”

“Then she said she wanted to be free, and she just jumped, almost like she thought she could fly.”

The two of them stood there for a minute before Goode blurted out, “You sure you’re all right, kid? I’ve got to go.”

Chapter 49

Goode

G
oode jogged back to his van in the parking lot, his mind racing with what had just happened. Now he wasn’t sure what was going on. Why would Clover deny being the killer if she was about to kill herself? She had nothing to gain by lying.

He was sure Stone would have the telephonic warrant for Clover’s bedroom by then, and he wanted to get back there to secure the gilded box before it disappeared. He also felt a moral obligation to be the one to personally notify Mrs. Stratton about her daughter’s suicide, a duty he did not relish on her wedding anniversary. However, he took some solace in the fact that she’d come on to him that afternoon—on said wedding anniversary.

As he ran through the suspects and witnesses in his head, the only guy he could remember wearing a baseball cap backward was Jake. The problem was, Jake had no apparent motive. That said, if he
had
murdered Tania, it would make sense for him to return to the alley to see if she was still there, maybe wait until the cops arrived so he could tell them he’d just happened upon her. Then he could touch the body, accidentally on purpose, so he’d have an excuse in case they found his DNA on her. If that’s the way it played out, Goode would feel like a sap.

He punched Stone’s number into his cell phone so they could come up with a game plan. While he was waiting for the sergeant to answer, he rifled through his little notebook for the scribblings he’d made about the men in the diary entries.

There it was. The notation about J., the guy Tania had made out with at the strip club. Jake didn’t seem like her type, but then again, she’d been all about experimentation.

Stone sounded a little harried. He was right in the middle of setting up a press conference at headquarters for the chief to reassure the public that the residents of La Jolla and Pacific Beach were officially safe now that Clover Ziegler was dead.

“I’d tell him to hold off if I were you,” Goode said.

“What now?” Stone groaned.

Goode filled him in and Stone was just as befuddled as he was about the new lead. They agreed to hold off on the press conference for a few hours while they pursued the Jake angle further, starting with a quick call to Goode’s buddy, Artie, who happened to be the ME’s investigator assigned to this series of murders. Byron was over at the hospital with his wife and new baby, so Stone dubbed Goode the lead detective for the moment.

As Goode drove to Clover’s house, he called Artie. Now, more than ever, he was chomping at the bit for Tania’s toxicology results and a definitive cause of death. With this mix of clues, he felt in his gut that these answers were key. What the hell had Jake been doing in her apartment? And furthermore, why would he have killed her?

“Artie, dude. Please tell me all those test results are in,” he pleaded. “I’m dying here.”

“Hey, Goode. You’re in luck. I was just getting ready to call you guys,” Artie said. “You know how you said you found coke and meth at either end of Tania’s table? Well, she’s got some alcohol, an extremely high level of methamphetamine, a small amount of amphetamine, a barely detectable level of ephedrine, and a small amount of Rohypnol in her blood. But no cocaine.”

“What’s that mean in English?”

“Based on the autopsy report, I’d say it means that someone knocked her out with a date-rape drug, got all excited, but then lost it on her stomach, if you know what I mean. Then I’d say she did some meth, probably as the Rohypnol was wearing off. Only it looks like it was such incredibly pure meth that she died from a heart attack or arrhythmia. Then someone tied something around her neck, really tight, to make it look like she died of strangulation.”

Before Goode could absorb all that information, Artie went on. “But, wait, listen to this. In Sharona Glass’ body, we found coke but no meth, and this time, she was strangled
before
she died. What do you make of that?”

Goode paused for a minute, then ventured a guess. “Well, given the sexual nature of this case, I suppose she could’ve allowed someone to tie off her air passage, possibly as foreplay, cutting off oxygen to the brain to try to get even higher.”

“Could be.”

“Or maybe the killer pretended to be playing around, but had planned to kill her all along.”

“That also could be.”

“Or the third option is that she was doing some coke and someone she knew came up and choked her from behind. Her body’s position on the floor looked like she was pulled backwards.”

“Right. By the way, there were no signs of struggle on Tania’s body other than her broken nails. And, oh yeah. I meant to tell you—I took a closer look at them and they weren’t broken off. They were torn off. Like the killer wanted souvenirs.”

Goode sat silently for a minute, as he tried to process it all.

“Goode, you there?” Artie asked.

“Yeah, sorry. That was a lot to take in all at once. Thanks.”

Goode tried calling Stone back, but the line was busy. He didn’t want to waste any time, so he called the crime lab and asked to speak to George. They called him G-man because his lifelong—yet unfulfilled—dream was to join the FBI.

“Hey, G-man, I don’t know if you’ve already sent these results on to Sergeant Stone, but I’m following a train of thought here. Did we ever hear what caliber gun shot Keith Warner?”

“Yeah, the ballistics tests came back last night. It was a nine millimeter,” George said.

Goode pulled Clover’s gun out of his pocket. It looked like a nine millimeter, but they’d have to run a test on the bullet to see if it matched the one that shot Keith.

“How about the crusty splooge on her stomach? Was there a match with Paul Walters?”

“The DNA tests aren’t back yet.”

“How ‘bout those cigarette butts?”

“The two in Tania’s trash were Camels, but they were the only ones that were the Turkish Gold brand. The other two you guys gave me, from Alison Winslow and Jack O’Mallory, were Camel Lights and regular Camels.”

“Please tell me you have a match with the ones in the trash.”

“You bet.”

Goode’s heart was practically beating out of his chest. “The suspense is killing me,” he said.

“The butt you got from that Jake kid, the one who found the body, was Turkish Gold brand, too. You pulled it out of his planter, right?”

“Righto.”

“And guess what?”

“What?” Goode was feeling the kind of euphoria he’d heard about from drug users, but this was the real thing.

“Well, the guy had taken only a few puffs, so there was plenty of paper left to pick up traces of the high-purity methamphetamine he must have had on his fingers. And just in case you’re still wondering, his DNA tests match too. We not only have his cigarette butts from the first victim’s trash, but his DNA matches a hair we found embedded in the second victim’s neck wound.”

“You are kidding me.”

“No, I’m not.”

“So the meth on the Camel butt must have been on his fingers, right?”

“Yeah, like he’d been swimming in it. More than likely, he’s been cooking it.”

Goode’s brain was spinning. A biochemistry master’s program indeed. Free access to a lab was more like it—a particular bonus if it was full of graduate student geeks who didn’t recognize that weird chemical smell.

He still didn’t have a motive for Jake, but he couldn’t argue with the forensic evidence. If Jake was cooking meth, he had to be selling it, too, and that would explain why Goode found no meth stash at Seth’s house. So why hadn’t One-Eye mentioned Jake during the interview? Maybe because the two of them had a side deal, and if Seth took all the heat, One-Eye and Jake could lie low until the cops stopped coming by. Theoretically, anyway.

So if Paul gave Tania the date-rape drug late Saturday afternoon, Goode figured that Jake must have come over while she was still groggy, they did the meth, and it gave her a heart attack. But then why the strangulation wounds? Maybe Jake freaked out, and wanted it to look like someone else did it. Seth was an easy target because he and Tania had been seen dancing in public on Friday night and had a date planned for Saturday. But then, where did Sharona and Keith fit in?

“Hello?”

“Yeah, sorry. My mind was going in a million different directions,” Goode said. “You done good, G-man. You’re all right.”

The detective still had a lot of dots to connect, but he felt like he was very, very close. At least now he could tie Jake to the crime scene and to Tania’s and Sharona’s bodies.

“Hey, one other thing,” G-Man said. “Seth Kennedy’s fingerprints were all over the plastic wrap on the heroin. Stone was telling me all of his stories—‘I was framed,’ ‘Someone planted this stuff,’ and ‘My dead best friend did it’—and I’m here to tell you that they are all unadulterated bullshit.”

“I figured, but I am still so glad to hear you say that. I can’t wait to watch his face when I tell him. You’ve made my day twice in five minutes.”

When Goode called Stone back this time, he answered right away. And when Goode filled him in on all the details he’d just learned, along with his theories of how they fit together, Stone was just as excited as he was.

“Damn, Goode, you are good,” he said.

“I know you’ve just been chomping at the bit to say that,” Goode said, although he had to admit that he couldn’t blame him. “Thanks, dude. I mean it.”

Once Stone told him the telephonic warrant for the items in Clover’s room had come through, they agreed that the sergeant should get back on the horn to obtain additional warrants to search Jake’s house and his lab at UCSD. The sergeant would meet Goode at Jake’s house so Slausson and Fletcher could run up and hold the lab until the warrant came through, just in case Stone and Goode missed Jake in PB. If they all moved fast enough, they could stop the kid from dumping his most recent batch of meth, even if the warrants were still being processed. They both were convinced that Jake wouldn’t have set up a lab off campus. Why bother when the state was paying the rent?

“Don’t forget I’ve still got some unfinished business to take care of at Clover’s house first,” Goode said. “I’ll drive over the hill to PB and meet you as soon as I can.”

As predicted, Goode did, in fact, feel like a sap. He felt stupid for not connecting Jake’s UCSD biochemistry program and the high-quality meth angle sooner. But then again, it hadn’t occurred to Stone either. And it had been there the whole time, right in front of their faces.

He was grinning as he pulled into Clover’s driveway, but his good humor faded as soon as he started thinking about the task at hand—notifying Rosemary Stratton of her only daughter’s death. After briefing Slausson and Fletcher on all the new developments, he sent them off to UCSD. Then, he stuffed a pair of latex gloves and a couple evidence bags into his jacket pocket, tried to calm down for a minute, and walked up to the front door to do the deed.

Rosemary Stratton cried fitfully in Clover’s room, where she clutched her daughter’s nubby blanket as Goode packed the gilded box and its contents carefully into the evidence bags. She stopped for a moment to tell him something that she’d just remembered.

“I asked Lucia for the name of the young man who came over earlier to put that gift in Clover’s room,” she said, dabbing her eyes with a tissue. “She didn’t remember his name, but she did say that he looked silly with his baseball cap on backward.”