L.A. Bytes

by P. A. Brown

  Chris shook his head.

  “Where did the blood come from?”

  Chris stared stubbornly at his lap.

  248 P.A. Brown

  Ronaldson sighed. A gust of sour breath wafted across the table. “I’m here right now, Chris. Talk to me. It’ll go easier for you if you do.”

  “You want their number?” Chris asked.

  “You’re not helping yourself by refusing—”

  “Not refusing, just delaying.”

  “By refusing to answer my questions, you’re only hurting yourself.” Ronaldson shook his head. “I’m sure Detective Martinez would tell you the same thing.”

  Proving this guy didn’t know Martinez at all.

  Ronaldson kept scratching away in his notebook. “Who were you at that house to see? The dead guy or the woman? Was Terry the owner of the house?”

  Chris shook his head, feeling a wave of dizziness wash over him. He blinked and forced his eyes to focus. He had to stay alert, when all he wanted to do was close his eyes and sleep for a week.

  He was seriously beginning to regret leaving the hospital. Even Dr. Finder looked better than this guy.

  “Something wrong, Mr. Bellamere?” Ronaldson didn’t sound overly alarmed. “You don’t look so hot. Something happen to make you feel sick?”

  Chris dug his nails into the palm of his hand. His fi nger nails had crusted blood under them. The pain helped. A little.

  “Have you called him yet?”

  “Yeah, we called,” Ronaldson said. “He said the same thing I’ve been telling you. Talk to us while we wait for him.”

  Another thirty minutes passed. Ronaldson went out and returned fi fteen minutes later. There was a commotion outside in the hall and Chris looked up when the door fl ew open. A lean-faced African-American woman wearing lieutenant bars leaned in the room.

  “Sergeant,” she said curtly, only to be pushed aside by a fuming Martinez whose dark face was suffused with blood.

  L.A. BYTES 249

  “What the devil is going on?” Martinez’s scowl deepened when he saw Chris. His eyes narrowed into slits. “What the hell are you doing here, Chris? And where in the name of God is David?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Wednesday, 12:00 am, Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station, Valencia Chris jumped to his feet. “Ask them if they found anyone else in the house. They won’t tell me—”

  “What house? What’s going on?”

  Ronaldson pointed a thick fi nger at Chris. “You, sit.” He glared at Martinez. “Detective, if we could talk. Privately. ”

  “You can use my offi ce, Detective,” the lieutenant said. “This way, please.”

  Martinez backed out of the small interrogation room.

  Ronaldson stood to follow.

  “Hey, what about me?” Chris half rose again.

  Martinez’s face softened. “Just wait here, Chris. I’ll sort this out and be back.”

  Chris sank back down into his chair. While he’d put Martinez up against these sheriff bumpkins any day of the week, he still didn’t like it. Not one bit. He was desperate to know where David was, refusing to believe he’d been caught in that fi re. David was too smart to let Terry’s killer take him by surprise.

  But worry gnawed at him. Unable to sit, he paced the narrow confi nes of the room, skirting the table and chairs in his need to keep moving.

  Where was David?

  § § § §

  More time passed. Even his watch slowed to a crawl. Chris kept staring at the door, and the glass wall beside it. Were they watching him even now? What did they expect him to do? Break out into spontaneous confession?

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  No doubt they thought he had something to do with Terry’s death. Under the circumstances he would have suspected himself too.

  Would they believe his story that Terry called him? What proof could he offer? The call he had made to Terry’s cell might help, if they bothered to trace where Terry’s cell was when the call came through. Ramsey could attest to the time he left The Nosh Pit, but unless they could pinpoint Terry’s death, he doubted that would prove helpful.

  Chris threw his head back and rubbed his forehead with his jacket sleeve. He’d really fucked things up this time.

  He spun around when the door cracked open. Martinez slipped into the room.

  He shook his grizzled head. Ice formed around Chris’s heart.

  “David—” he gasped.

  Martinez came around to Chris’s side of the table and gripped the nearest chair. Hard. His knuckles were white. The chair creaked under his grip. “Where is he, Chris? I’ve tried calling his cell. He’s not responding. You have to tell us everything you know.”

  “I don’t...” Chris wearily sank into the other chair, no longer trying to hide his exhaustion or pain. “Somehow he followed me—I don’t know how or why. I swear. He must have got there when I was in the house—”

  “What were you doing there?”

  Chris glanced at the glass, knowing they were watching on the other side. Ronaldson. Maybe even the lieutenant. Santa Clarita was a small, insular community. It wasn’t used to nasty homicides marring that image. They’d want to wrap this up as soon as possible. Even if they dumped it in the lap of an innocent man.

  It didn’t matter. He had to tell Martinez everything he knew if it meant fi nding David.

  “Terry called me.” Chris told him about the work he had done for Terry and the hospital. “He stumbled onto something. I just L.A. BYTES 253

  don’t know what.” He recounted the conversation he’d had with Terry.

  “Could Bolton be the hacker?” Martinez asked. “I thought David had eliminated him.”

  “He could be,” Chris conceded. “But I doubt it. Somebody was in the house with Terry. I heard them.”

  “They found gas cans by the rear door,” Martinez said.

  “How did Terry...die?”

  “Gunshot to the right front temple. Exited out the back of his skull.”

  Chris glanced at the mirrored window again. Nausea cramped his gut. Poor Terry. He didn’t ask about his wife. He couldn’t stand to hear it. Not right now. “What’s going to happen to me?”

  “They want you to take some tests for combustibles. Your GSR test came back negative, you haven’t fi red a weapon recently. The blood’s problematic.” Martinez frowned. “They want a statement, but, the truth?” Martinez sighed. “They’re not quite sure what to do with you. They seem willing to believe you weren’t involved in Terry’s death, but...”

  “They want me to be guilty of something,” Chris fi nished for him.

  A ghost of a smile crossed Martinez’s face. “Something like that.”

  “Can I leave?”

  “They’re not arresting you for anything. I can’t guarantee that won’t change if they fi nd new information. The lieutenant wants to know if you’d take a lie detector test.”

  “Uh, I don’t know...” Chris wished he could talk to a lawyer, but he knew what they’d advise him. No poly. But if it would get him out of here so he could look for David, then he’d do it.

  “Sure, I guess. Right now?”

  “It will have to be set up. Maybe tomorrow.”

  “So, can I leave now?”

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  The door opened again and Ronaldson entered. He was sweating even more than the fi rst time, his face looked sheathed in grease. He pushed his limp hair back, where it stuck to his scalp.

  “You can go, Mr. Bellamere,” he said. “I expect we’ll want to talk to you again. Make sure you’re available.”

  “Trust me, I’m not leaving the state.”

  “Good,” Ronaldson said, and held the door open for him.

  “We’ll be in touch.”

  After they tested his skin and his clothes for gas, which proved negative, and he repeated what he had told Martinez, Chris followed Martinez out of the station to his brown Crown Victoria.

  “I got permission from Li
eutenant Peters to revisit the scene. I want you to show me where you found David’s Smith

  & Wesson.”

  They drove back to Terry’s. The house was sodden rubble, the lawn trampled to mud. Yellow crime scene tape had been strung around the yard. When they stepped out of the car a sheriff ’s deputy came around the side of the building. The air stank of fi re and gas and death.

  “This is a secured crime scene—”

  Martinez fl ashed his badge and after a hasty phone call to the station, they were allowed on the property. Martinez grabbed a torch out of his trunk and followed Chris behind the burnt out house. He kept the powerful light on the ground just in front of them and Chris studied the chewed earth, looking for landmarks.

  “It was around here,” he fi nally ventured, kneeling on the wet, trampled ground. Martinez obliged by focusing the light on the ground in front of him.

  The small yard was hemmed in by a fence along the back and boxwood hedges on each side. The hedge extended between the two houses almost into the front yard and looked solid as L.A. BYTES 255

  stone in the low light. If David had fallen here, how did the Sandman get him out? Chris hadn’t been inside long enough for him to drag David around to the front of the house and into a waiting car. He had to have taken him over the fence or the hedge immediately after the fi re.

  Chris remembered his efforts to move Terry. Could the Sandman even move a big guy like David?

  Chris crawled. The light wavered then began following him.

  The ground was torn here; he could imagine heels dragging across the rain-dampened ground. He stared ahead, at a shadowy indent in the boxwood hedge. He waved his arm at Martinez.

  “Shine it over there, on the bushes.”

  Martinez did as he asked. Chris stayed on the ground, knowing he would miss too much if he tried to walk. His left hand skidded on something wet and he sprawled onto his stomach with a soft umph. The light vanished and rough hands grabbed him and hauled him to his knees.

  “You okay? Chris—”

  Chris held up his hand. It was covered in viscous red. “Shit!”

  He scrambled to his feet and grabbed the torch. The ground at his feet was red with blood. David’s blood? The killer’s? In the baleful light of the torch, he spotted something metallic. With numb fi ngers, he lifted the St. Michael’s medal he had given to David just last week.

  Martinez was instantly on his cell. All Chris heard was

  “forensics team,” and “Code Thirty.” He swung the powerful beam of light along the ground toward the hedge while Martinez talked. The dark shadow proved to be one of several ragged holes in the ill-kempt fence. More wet redness stained the outer edges of branches—

  “You have to give them the jewelry, Chris,” Martinez said.

  “It’s evidence—”

  “It’s David’s.”

  “You’ll get it back.”

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  Chris wanted to refuse, but he knew he couldn’t. He clutched the bloody medal against his chest and felt like weeping.

  Reluctantly he handed it to Martinez, who passed it off to the watching deputy.

  “Let’s take a look,” Martinez said, letting his hand hover over Chris’s shoulder. “They dragged him through there.” He pointed at the hedge. “Peters is sending a forensics team out. In the meantime don’t touch anything.”

  Chris turned away. He hurried toward the front of the house, rounding the hedge and shining the light down the dark passageway beside the neighboring house.

  A car turned onto the street, a van following. Ronaldson hopped out of the lead car. A greyhound-thin Latino man in a tan business suit emerged from the passenger’s side. The van discharged three men in baby blue sterile suits lugging spotlights and suitcases. Trailing cables, they set up the lights on the lawn between the burnt house and the hedge.

  Within thirty minutes the spots went on, driving away the night. The blood on the trampled ground immediately leaped into focus.

  “Over here,” Chris called.

  When Martinez added his voice, the two deputies left the forensic team to their work and followed Chris and Martinez around the back of the house next door.

  “They dragged him through there,” Chris pointed.

  “They?” Ronaldson looked skeptical.

  “David’s not a little guy,” Martinez said with more patience than Chris could have mustered. “I doubt if anyone short of Andre the Giant could drag him around alone. Not if he was unconscious, and trust me, he wouldn’t let anyone drag him around if he wasn’t unconscious.”

  Chris was all too aware of Ronaldson’s eyes coming back his way repeatedly. Was he trying to fi gure out Chris’s place in all this? Chris knew he didn’t swish, but he also didn’t do anything to L.A. BYTES 257

  hide his orientation. Some people picked up on it right away. He suspected Ronaldson was doing just that. With that knowledge, Ronaldson had to wonder at Chris’s presence and his obvious distress over David.

  Armed with their own powerful torch and a second one Ronaldson had, they had no trouble picking up the trail.

  Ronaldson lingered at the hole in the hedge; Chris and Martinez were more interested in where the trail went next.

  Chris was the fi rst to spot it.

  Two distinct round drops of blood on the back doorsteps of the house next door. Chris stared at the door with a crazy kind of hope.

  “Jesus, they took him in there.”

  Ronaldson came over when Martinez called him. He studied the door intently. Then he glanced at Martinez, ignoring Chris.

  “We canvassed the area. This house came up empty.”

  “Or they just weren’t answering the door,” Chris snapped.

  “Imagine that.”

  Ronaldson was joined by his partner, who he laconically introduced as José Otélo. The two deputies approached the wooden door. Ot é lo rapped on it sharply. There was no response.

  Otélo banged the door a second time, harder. When there was still no response, he glanced at his partner and nodded. Both of them slipped on police issue gloves; Ronaldson tried the door. It opened easily.

  Chris suddenly had memories of another door. Would history repeat itself? Would they fi nd another body on the other side?

  Would they fi nd David?

  He watched the two detectives enter the dark house. Martinez followed, leaving only Chris outside, his legs too weak to carry him.

  Suddenly the house was full of lights and there was a fl urry of activity and rising voices. Chris bolted up the steps into a tidy, crowded kitchen.

  258 P.A. Brown

  A woman—at least Chris assumed she was a woman, though her face was bloody and her clothes baggy and shapeless—sat in a ladder back chair, her hands bound behind her back with soiled strips of duct tape. More duct tape was in Ronaldson’s hand and had obviously just been removed from the captive’s face. Otélo was on his cell, calling for an ambulance.

  She stared at Chris, wild-eyed, the whites of her eyes standing out against her bloody and bruised face.

  A surprisingly gentle Ronaldson knelt by the chair, while Otélo used a pair of scissors to cut the bindings on her hands.

  “Ma’am? An ambulance is on the way. Can you tell us what happened here?”

  Her voice was high-pitched and edged in hysteria. “I was making supper. Gerry’s gone to San Diego for a conference so I was just making a bowl of soup.”

  Chris looked at the stove. There was a blackened pot containing what might have been cream soup. Both pot and soup were ruined, though Chris doubted she would be hungry for anything for a good long time to come.

  Otélo got a bottle of cold water from her fridge. She sucked on the bottle greedily. It seemed to help her fi nd her voice.

  “They came in the back door. I didn’t know what was happening at fi rst. I thought there was three of them, until I saw what they had done to that poor man...”

  Chris perked up. Poor man? He stepped forward. “What
man?

  What did he look like?”

  Ronaldson threw him a dirty look. Chris subsided only when Martinez touched his arm.

  “Go ahead, ma’am,” Ronaldson said. “What did they look like?”

  She shook her head, ringlets of sweat and blood-stiffened hair falling over her pale face. “They wore masks. Those black things, with holes...”

  “Balaclavas, ma’am?” Otélo suggested.

  L.A. BYTES 259

  She nodded gratefully. “Yes, they wore those. Except the third man. They had him all tied up too.”

  “Can you describe them? How big were they? Tall, short?

  Heavy—”

  “The one they had tied up was big, the other two were both smaller than him. The one guy wasn’t any bigger than me; the other man was burlier, dark haired.”

  “Anything else?”

  She shuddered and wouldn’t look at anyone. “He had an accent. Oh, and a beard.” Her nose wrinkled. “The smaller man stank.”

  “Stank, ma’am?”

  “Like he hadn’t had a shower in weeks.”

  Otélo wrote that down. “What kind of accent did the other one have?”

  Her voice grew small. “I don’t know... French, I think. But rough French, not like what you hear on TV.” She shook. “I was so sure they were going to kill me.”

  “You’re safe now, ma’am.”

  She stared up at him as though to ask “Are you sure about that?” but all she did was rub her arms and wipe a tear that leaked from her bruised eye.

  “The man who was taped. What can you tell us about him?”

  “Like I said, he was big,” she said. “They dragged him in here between them and dumped him there—” She indicated another chair at the tiny kitchen table. Chris could see fresh blood on the wooden ladder-back.

  “Was he alive?” he whispered.

  “Yes, he was. But they had most of his face covered in duct tape. But even with that I could tell they had beaten him pretty bad.”

  Chris winced but refrained from saying anything more when Martinez’s hand tightened painfully on his arm.

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  “What did they do then?” Ronaldson asked.