“You just going to leave that there?”
I looked behind me and saw I had left the top of the trash receptacle on the floor.
“Sorry.”
I went back and returned the top to its rightful place, then decided it would be best to review the printouts back in the newsroom. At least the editors weren’t wearing hairnets.
Back at my desk I looked through the stack. Angela had found several news stories about bodies being found in trunks. Most were quite old and seemed irrelevant. But a series of stories in the Las Vegas Review-Journal did not. There were five of them and they mostly repeated the same information. They were reports on the arrest and trial of a man charged with killing his ex-wife and stuffing her body into the trunk of his car.
Ironically, the stories had been written by a reporter I knew. Rick Heikes had worked for the Los Angeles Times until he took one of the early buyouts. He banked the check from the Times and promptly took the job with the Review-Journal and had been there ever since. He had made it over the wall and by all accounts was the better for it. The Times was the loser because it had let another fine reporter go to another newspaper.
I quickly scanned the stories until I found the one I remembered. It was a report on the trial testimony given by the Clark County coroner.
Coroner: Ex-Wife Held, Tortured for Hours
By Rick Heikes,
Review-Journal Staff Writer
Autopsy results showed that Sharon Oglevy was strangled more than 12 hours after her abduction, the Clark County coroner testified Wednesday in the murder trial of the victim’s ex-husband.
Gary Shaw testified for the prosecution and revealed new details of the abduction, rape and murder. He said the time of death was determined during autopsy to be approximately 12 to 18 hours after a witness saw Oglevy forced into a van in a parking garage behind the Cleopatra Casino and Resort, where she worked as a dancer in the exotic Femmes Fatales show.
“For at least twelve hours she was with her abductor and many horrible things were done to her before she was finally killed,” Shaw testified under questioning from the prosecutor.
A day later her body was found in the trunk of her ex-husband’s car by police officers who had gone to his home in Summerland to ask if he knew his ex-wife’s whereabouts. He allowed the police to search the premises and the body was found in the car parked in the home’s garage. The couple’s marriage had dissolved eight months earlier in an acrimonious divorce. Sharon Oglevy had sought a restraining order prohibiting her ex-husband, a blackjack dealer, from coming within 100 feet of her. In her petition she said her husband had threatened to kill her and bury her in the desert.
Brian Oglevy was charged with first degree murder, kidnapping and rape with a foreign object. Investigators said they believed he had placed the victim’s body in the trunk of his car with the intention of burying it later in the desert. He has denied killing his ex-wife and said he was set up as a fall guy for her murder. He has been held without bail since his arrest.
Shaw provided jurors with several lurid and ghastly details of the murder. He said Sharon Oglevy was raped and sodomized repeatedly with an unknown foreign object that left significant internal injuries. He said histamine levels in the body were unusually high, indicating that the injuries that caused her body to manufacture the chemical had occurred well before her death by asphyxiation.
Shaw testified that Oglevy had been asphyxiated with a plastic bag that had been pulled over her head and tied closed around her neck. He said several cord markings or furrows on the victim’s neck and a high level of hemorrhaging around her eyes indicated she had been asphyxiated slowly and may have been allowed to lose and regain consciousness several times.
While Shaw’s testimony illuminated much of the prosecution’s theory of how the murder took place, there are still blanks to fill in. Las Vegas Metro Police have never been able to determine where Brian Oglevy allegedly held and then murdered his ex-wife. Crime scene technicians spent three days examining his home after his arrest and determined that it was unlikely that the murder occurred there. The defendant has also not been linked by evidence to a van, which witnesses said Sharon Oglevy was abducted in.
Brian Oglevy’s attorney, William Schifino, objected several times during the coroner’s testimony, asking the judge to stop Shaw from editorializing and putting his personal view of the details into his testimony. Schifino was successful at times, but for the most part the judge allowed Shaw to speak his mind.
The trial continues today. Schifino is expected to mount his defense sometime next week. Brian Oglevy has denied killing his wife since the crime occurred but has not publicly offered a theory on who killed her and set him up to take the fall.
I studied the Review-Journal’s trial stories that came before and after the one I had just read, and none gripped me like the report on the autopsy. The missing hours and the plastic bag and slow asphyxiation were descriptions that matched the murder of Denise Babbit. And, of course, the car trunk was the strongest match of all.
I pushed back from the desk but stayed in my seat, thinking. Could there be a connection here or was I engaged in a reporter’s fantasy, seeing innocent people accused of crimes they did not commit? Had Angela, in her industrious but naive manner, stumbled onto something that was under the radar of all of law enforcement?
I didn’t know—yet. But there was one way to find out. I had to go to Las Vegas.
I stood up and headed toward the raft. I had to inform Prendo and get a travel authorization. But when I got there his seat was empty.
“Anybody seen Prendo?” I asked the other aces on the raft.
“He took early dinner,” said one. “He should be back in an hour.”
I checked my watch. It was after four and I needed to get moving, first home to pack a bag, and then to the airport. If I couldn’t get a flight on short notice, I’d drive to Vegas. I glanced over at Angela Cook’s cubicle and saw it was empty, too. I walked over to the switchboard and looked up at Lorene. She pulled one earphone back.
“Did Angela Cook check out?”
“She said she was going out for a bite to eat with her editor but that she’d be back after. You want her cell number?”
“No, thanks, I’ve got it.”
I headed back to my desk with suspicion and anger growing inside in equal parts. My ace and my replacement had gone off together to break bread and I was not informed or invited. To me it only meant one thing. They were planning their next assault on my story.
That was okay, I decided. I was a giant step ahead of them and planned to stay that way. While they were off scheming I would be off chasing the real story. And I would get there first.
FIVE: The Farm
Carver had been busy all day routing and opening the final gateways that would allow for a test run of data transmission from Mercer and Gissal in St. Louis. It had consumed him and he had not made his appointed rounds until late in the day. He checked his traps and a charge shot through his chest when he saw he had caught something in one of his cages. The screen avatar displayed it as a fat gray rat running on a wheel inside the cage labeled TRUNK MURDER.
Using his mouse, Carver opened the cage and took out the rat. Its eyes were ruby red and its sharp teeth gleamed with ice-blue saliva. The animal wore a collar with a silver identity tag on it. He clicked on the tag and brought up the rat’s information. The date and time of the visit had occurred the night before, just after he had last checked his traps. A ten-digit Internet protocol address had been captured. The visit to his www.trunkmurder.com site had lasted only twelve seconds. But it was enough. It meant someone out there had plugged the words trunk murder into a search engine. Now he would try to find out who and why.
Two minutes later Carver’s breath caught in his throat as he followed the IP—a basic computer address—back to an Internet service provider. There was good and bad news. The good news: it wasn’t a huge provider like Yahoo, which had traffic gateways all over th
e world and was time-consuming as hell to trace. The bad news: it was a small private provider with the domain name of LATimes.com.
The Los Angeles Times, he thought, as something inside clutched his chest. A reporter from Los Angeles had gone to his trunk murder website. Carver leaned back in his chair and thought about how he should approach this. He had the IP address but no name to go with it. He couldn’t even be sure it was a reporter who had made the visit. A lot of non-reporters work at newspapers.
He rolled his chair down to the next workstation. He logged on as McGinnis, having broken his codes long ago. He went to the Los Angeles Times website and in the search window of the online archive typed trunk murder.
He got three hits on stories containing the phrase in the last three weeks, including one published on the website just that evening and due to go into the next morning’s paper. He pulled the latest story up on screen first and read it.
LAPD Drug Crackdown Draws Community Fire
By Angela Cook and Jack McEvoy
Times Staff Writers
A drug crackdown at a housing project in Watts has drawn fire from local activists who complained Tuesday that the LAPD only paid attention to the problem in the minority-populated complex when a white woman was allegedly murdered there.
Police announced the arrest of 16 residents of Rodia Gardens on drug charges and the seizure of a small amount of drugs following a one-week investigation. Police spokesmen said the “peep and sweep” operation was in response to the murder of Denise Babbit, 23, of Hollywood.
A 16-year-old alleged gang member who is a resident of Rodia Gardens was arrested in the slaying. Babbit’s body was found two weeks ago in the trunk of her car at a beachside parking lot in Santa Monica. The investigation traced the crime back to Rodia Gardens, where Santa Monica police believe Babbit, an exotic dancer, went to buy drugs. Instead, she was abducted, held for several hours and repeatedly sexually assaulted before being strangled.
Several community activists questioned why efforts to stem the tide of drug dealing and related crime in the projects did not come before the murder. They were quick to point out that the victim of the trunk murder was white while the members of the community are almost 100 percent African American.
“Look, let’s face it,” said Rev. William Treacher, head of a group called South Los Angeles Ministers, also known as SLAM, “this is just another form of police racism. They ignore Rodia Gardens and let it become a stew of drugs and gang crime. Then this white woman who puts drugs in her body and takes her clothes off for a living goes down and gets herself killed there and what do you get? A task force. Where were the police before this? Where was the task force? Why does it take a crime against a white person to draw attention to problems in the black community?”
A police spokesman denied that race had anything to do with the anti-drug operation and said similar operations have occurred in Rodia Gardens numerous times before.
“Who complains about getting drug dealers and gangbangers off the street?” asked Capt. Art Grossman, who directed the operation.
Carver stopped reading the story. He didn’t sense any threat to him. Still, it didn’t explain why someone from the Times—presumably Cook or McEvoy—had put trunk murder into a search engine. Were they just being thorough, covering all the bases? Or was there something else? He looked at the two previous stories in the archives that mentioned trunk murder and found they had been written by McEvoy. They were straight news stories about the Denise Babbit case, one about the discovery of her body, and the second—a day later—about the arrest of the young gangbanger in her murder.
Carver couldn’t help but smile to himself as he read about the kid getting tagged for the murder. But his humor didn’t let him drop his caution. He plugged McEvoy into the archive search and soon found hundreds of stories, all related to crime in Los Angeles. He was the crime beat reporter. At the bottom of each of his stories was his e-mail address: [email protected].
Carver then put Angela Cook into the search engine and got far fewer stories. She had been writing for the Times for less than six months and only in the past week had she written any crime stories. Before that, she wrote a variety of stories on events ranging from a garbage strike to a competitive eating contest. She seemed to have no specific beat until this week when she shared two bylines with McEvoy.
“He’s teaching her the ropes,” Carver said out loud.
He guessed that Cook was young and McEvoy was old. That would make her the easier mark. He took a chance and went onto Facebook, using a phony ID he had concocted long ago, and sure enough she had a page. The contents weren’t for public consumption but her photo was there. She was a beauty with shoulder-length blond hair. Green eyes and a trained pout to her lips. That pout, Carver thought. He could change that.
The photo was a portrait shot. He was disappointed that he could not see all of her. Especially the length and shape of her legs.
He started humming. It always calmed him. Songs he remembered from the sixties and seventies, when he was a boy. Hard rockers a woman could dance and show her body off to.
He kept searching, finding that Angela Cook had abandoned a MySpace page a few years earlier but had not deleted it. He also found a professional profile on LinkedIn and that led to the mother lode—a blog page called www.CityofAngela.com in which she kept an ongoing diary of her life and work in Los Angeles.
The latest entry in the blog brimmed with Cook’s excitement over being assigned to the police and crime beat, and being trained for the position by the veteran Jack McEvoy.
It was always amazing to Carver how trusting or naive young people were. They didn’t believe that anybody could connect the dots. They believed that they could bare their souls on the Internet, post photos and information at will, and not expect any consequences. From her blog he was able to glean all the information he needed about Angela Cook. Her hometown, her college sorority, even her dog’s name. He knew Death Cab for Cutie was her favorite band and pizza at a place called Mozza was her favorite food. In between the meaningless data, he learned her birthday and that she only had to walk two blocks from her apartment to get her favorite pizza at her favorite restaurant. He was circling her and she didn’t even know it. But each time around he got closer.
He paused when he found a blog post from nine months earlier with the heading My Top 10 Serial Killers. Below it she listed ten killers that were household names because of their cross-country rampages of murder. Number one on her list was Ted Bundy—Because I’m from Florida and that’s where he ended up.
Carver’s lip twitched. He liked this girl.
The mantrap alert sounded and Carver immediately killed the Internet connection. He switched screens and on the camera saw McGinnis coming through. Carver swiveled around and was facing McGinnis as he opened the final door to the control room. He had his key card on a retractable cord that was clipped to his belt. It made him look like a dork.
“What are you doing out here?” he asked.
Carver stood up and rolled the chair back into place at the empty workstation.
“I’m running a program in my office and just wanted to check something on Mercer and Gissal.”
McGinnis didn’t seem to care. He looked through the main window into the server room, the heart and soul of the business.
“How’s that going?” he asked.
“A few routing hiccups,” Carver reported. “But we’ll work it out and we’ll be up and running before the target date. I may have to go back out there but it will be a quick trip.”
“Good. Where is everybody? You alone?”
“Stone and Early are in the back, building a tower. I’m watching things up here until my night shift comes in.”
McGinnis nodded approvingly. Building another tower meant more business.
“Anything else happening?”
“We have an issue in tower thirty-seven. I moved things off it until I can figure it out. It’s temporary.”
“Not that I can tell.”
“Whose blade?”
“Belongs to a private nursing facility in Stockton, California. Not a big one.”
McGinnis nodded. It wasn’t a client he needed to worry about.
“What about last week’s intrusion?” he asked.
“Taken care of. The target was Guthrie, Jones. They’re in tobacco litigation with a firm called Biggs, Barlow and Cowdry. In Raleigh-Durham. Somebody at Biggs—a low-ranking genius—thought Guthrie was holding back on discovery and tried to take a look for himself.”
“And?”
“The FBI has opened a child porn investigation and the genius is the primary target. I don’t think he’ll be around to bother us very much longer.”
McGinnis nodded his approval and smiled.
“That’s my scarecrow,” he said. “You’re the best.”
Carver didn’t need McGinnis to say it to know it. But he was the boss. And Carver owed the older man for giving him the chance to create his own lab and data center. McGinnis had put him on the map. A month didn’t go by that Carver wasn’t wooed by a competitor.
“Thanks.”
McGinnis moved back to the mantrap door.
“I’m going to the airport later. We’ve got somebody coming in from San Diego and they’ll take the tour tomorrow.”
“Where are you taking him?”
“Tonight? Probably Rosie’s for barbecue.”
“The usual. And then the Highlighter?”
“If I have to. You want to come out? You could impress these people, you know, help me out.”
“Only thing they’ll be impressed by will be the naked women. Not my scene.”
“Yeah, well, it’s a tough job but somebody’s gotta do it. I’ll leave you to it, then.”
McGinnis left the control room. His office was up on the surface in the front of the building. It was private and he stayed there most of the time to greet prospective clients and probably to keep clear of Carver. Their conversations in the bunker always seemed a bit strained. McGinnis seemed to know to keep those times to a minimum.
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