Omerta

by Larry Darter

  Hurst told the interviewer the year his wife went missing, the couple was headed for divorce, and Hurst confessed to pushing, shoving, and slapping Valerie. He admitted to having a physical confrontation with Valerie Hurst at their South Salem home the last night he saw her. He also came clean about lying to the NYPD when he reported Valerie missing in New York City four days later.

  “I told the police that after I put Valerie on a train to Manhattan, I had a drink with a neighbor and later spoke with Valerie by phone,” Hurst said. “That wasn’t true. I only intended to convince the detectives that my wife went missing in the city. I was hoping that would just make everything go away.”

  The interviewer asked Hurst if he knew where Valerie’s body was.

  “You’d like the details from me if I knew where Valerie’s body is and about what happened to Fiona, I suppose,” Hurst replied. “I’m not about to go that far. I think what you want to hear about is what I did with Valerie. I think you want me to go through the details about Fiona. By telling you those things, I’d be pleading guilty. By pleading guilty, I’d go back to Los Angeles, California, and do my time.”

  To Drew, it sounded as if Hurst admitted he had the answers to those questions, answers he could only have if he was the killer. But he wasn’t about to answer the questions because he’d go to jail.

  During the rest of the episode, Hurst tried to make it sound as if he was misunderstood and persecuted by his own family and now by the media and police who accused him of being a murderer. Hurst denied he had ever murdered anyone.

  Drew switched off the television. He found the interview compelling but had seen nothing he believed could be used to support Hurst’s arrest. He picked up the phone and called Ortega, who he knew had also been watching.

  “What did you think, Rudy?” Drew said.

  “It intrigued me,” Ortega said. “Watching it gave me a sense of what Hurst is like and confirms my belief he killed his wife and Fiona Silverman. But I saw nothing that gets us any closer to an arrest warrant.”

  “I agree,” Drew said. “But we have five more episodes, five more chances for Hurst to incriminate himself.”

  After hanging up with Ortega, Drew thought about Hurst. It had been his first opportunity to look at the man beyond only photographs. Hurst was small and thin, with gray-white hair. He wore a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. Outwardly, Hurst didn’t seem like a monster who killed and dismembered people until you looked into his predator’s eyes.

  * * *

  There was enough in the next four episodes to hold the interest of Ortega and Drew. They kept watching the next one, and the next. But each time they came away with the feeling that Hurst had tiptoed right up to the line of admitting guilt several times but had never stepped over it and incriminated himself.

  The one thing Drew found most disturbing was when Hurst related the experiences of dismembering Herbert Turner’s corpse. He described it all clinically, with no outward show of any emotion. When the interviewer asked Hurst if he had any regrets about it, Hurst joked that he should have separated the body parts at the joints the way butcher’s do instead of sawing through solid bone.

  Both detectives intended to watch the last episode, but both had long since lost hope Hurst would slip up and give them what they needed. That’s why what happened in the finale astounded them both.

  Chapter 36

  In the last episode of Bedeviled: The Life and Deaths of William Hurst, the interviewer focused on Fiona Silverman. Drew and Ortega were both watching with interest from their respective homes.

  “When did you last speak with Fiona Silverman, Bill?” the interviewer asked.

  “Early December, the year Fiona died,” Hurst said

  “By telephone?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Who called who?”

  “Fiona phoned me,” Hurst said.

  “Without getting too personal, what did you talk about?”

  “Fiona called to tell me the New York authorities were coming to interview her in Los Angeles,” Hurst said. “They had reopened Valerie’s case months before.”

  “Isn’t it true you loaned or gave twenty-five thousand dollars to Fiona Silverman shortly before her death?”

  Hurst nodded. “What else was I supposed to do?” he joked.

  Drew wondered: Had Hurst just admitted Fiona Silverman had been extorting him?

  Finally, the point in the show Drew had been waiting for arrived.

  “I’d like to show you something, Bill,” the interviewer said, producing a sheet of paper. He laid in on the table in front of Hurst. An image of the document appeared on a split-screen as Hurst looked at it. All that was on the paper was the word “CADAVER” and Fiona Silverman’s address, printed in block letters. It was a copy of the infamous cadaver note.

  “According to the police, someone wrote and mailed that note to the Beverly Hills Police Department before police discovered Fiona Silverman’s body in her Los Angeles home,” the interviewer said. “Colloquially, the police refer to it as the cadaver note.”

  “Interesting,” Hurst said.

  “Something else that’s interesting, Bill, is the envelope. The writer misspelled Beverly as Beverley when addressing it. What are your first impressions about the note?”

  “I suppose all I’d say is whoever wrote the note had to be involved in Fiona’s death,” Hurst said. For the first time, he seemed shaken.

  The interviewer produced an envelope and placed it on the table in front of Hurst.

  “A young man in Los Angeles who handled Fiona Silverman’s affairs after her death gave us that envelope,” the interviewer said. “What can you tell me about it?”

  “It has my name and address as the return,” Hurst said cautiously. “It’s addressed to Fiona.”

  “According to the man who gave that to us, it’s the envelope you used to send Fiona the twenty-five thousand dollar check,” the interviewer said.

  “I see.”

  “As you notice, the information on that envelope is all printed in block lettering.”

  “I suppose it is.”

  “Bill, we asked a world-renowned handwriting analysis firm to compare the writing on that envelope there with the note someone wrote and mailed to the Beverly Hills Police Department. Do you know what they told us?”

  “I can’t imagine.”

  “They told us that the same person authored both the writing on the envelope and the note. Knowing that you addressed the envelope, that means you also wrote and mailed the cadaver note.”

  Hurst stared at the interviewer without comment.

  “What can you tell us about what happened to Fiona Silverman?” the interviewer said. “A moment ago, you said whoever wrote that note had to be involved in Fiona’s death. Bill, did you kill Fiona Silverman?”

  “I’m going to stay away from killing Fiona,” Hurst said. “I won’t talk about that.”

  The interviewer asked another question, but Hurst stood up from his chair and excused himself, saying he was going to the bathroom. Then he walked off camera.

  There was the slam of a door off-camera, and then the interviewer noted for the audience that when given an opportunity, Hurst failed to deny he had killed his longtime friend, Fiona Silverman. Then things got even more interesting.

  Off-camera, the voice of William Hurst rambled, “There it is. You’re caught. What the hell did I do? Killed them all, of course.”

  Hurst had walked off camera, still wearing a wireless microphone. In a bizarre turn, Hurst had muttered the words to himself while alone in the bathroom, apparently not realizing the microphone was still hot and broadcasting his words.

  Drew leaped up from his chair and did it fist pump. “Got you, asshole!” he shouted.

  Drew reached for his phone to call Ortega, but the phone rang when he picked it up.

  “I can’t believe it!” Ortega exclaimed. “The asshole confessed on national television.”

  “We got him, Rudy
.”

  “Listen, head to the bureau and start writing an arrest warrant,” Ortega said. “I have Brooks’ home number. I’ll call him with a heads up and meet you there. We’ll take the warrant to an on-call judge and get it signed.”

  They hung up. Drew grabbed his jacket and left his apartment for West Bureau.

  Hurst was beyond their reach for the moment. Parham’s crew had filmed the show at a townhouse Hurst had leased in Tampa, Florida, after his prison release. On parole, Hurst could not leave the state. Drew and Ortega feared once Hurst realized what he had done, he would again go on the run and disappear. They wanted to get the warrant signed and served without delay.

  Drew had finished typing the warrant by the time Ortega arrived at the bureau from his home in Woodland Hills. Together they took the warrant to an on-call judge who read it and signed it with no questions.

  Back at the bureau, Drew phoned the Tampa Police Department in Hillsborough County, Florida. He reached an on-duty supervisor who agreed to serve the warrant as soon as he received it and would hold Hurst for extradition. Ortega faxed the warrant to Tampa Bay, and then the detectives settled in to wait for the Tampa cops to call them back.

  Epilogue

  When the Tampa police arrived at his residence to serve the Los Angeles County arrest warrant, the officers found Hurst packing. When the police arrested him, officers seized a fake passport, a Mission Impossible-style latex mask, a loaded nine-millimeter handgun, $44,000 in cash, and enough marijuana for about three hundred joints. They also found a map of Cuba, leading them to speculate Hurst was planning to leave the county. Later, police learned they had only caught Hurst at his home because he was awaiting a UPS shipment from a friend in New York containing another $117,000 in cash and some personal items.

  When Hurst’s attorneys struck a deal with a Tampa prosecutor to drop the convicted felon in possession of a firearm and drug charges, his attorneys agreed to Hurst’s extradition to California. Two days later, Ortega and Drew arrived in Tampa to escort Hurst back to Los Angeles.

  The same afternoon, the detectives were back on a plane with a handcuffed Hurst and the weapon seized by the Tampa cops. That evening the detectives booked Hurst into the Los Angeles County Jail or Bauchet as LAPD cops called it because of the facility’s location on Bauchet Street.

  Ortega and Drew attended the arraignment two days later when a Los Angeles County judge held Hurst to answer a first-degree murder charge in Fiona Silverman’s death and ordered him held without bail as a flight risk. The detectives had finally cleared the Silverman’s murder by arrest.

  * * *

  A month after Hurst’s hearing, where a judge set the trial date, Rudy Ortega put in his paperwork and took his retirement. Two weeks before, the detectives had learned the DNA evidence collected from the Mills’ house in Venice did not identify her killer. Ortega said he was tired of waiting and wanted to pull the pin. Drew didn’t blame him.

  Later the evening after Ortega’s retirement party, Drew stood on his balcony patio, leaning forward on the black steel railing, looking out at the lights of the city and thinking about its black heart. He knew his own life would always beat to its background cadence. His mind wandered to the Mills case and where to go next with it. With Rudy retired, the responsibility for getting justice for Sienna Mills was now on his shoulders. Drew thought about the words of The Homicide Investigator’s Creed. No greater honor will ever be bestowed on you as a police officer or a more profound duty imposed on you than when you are entrusted with the investigation of the death of a human being. He recommitted himself to making sure justice was done for Sienna Mills.

  Drew didn’t hear Lucy until she stepped out on the balcony. He turned and saw her framed in the open doorway and wanted to go to her immediately. But he held back. She was wearing designer jeans and a yellow shirt he’d bought her for her last birthday.

  “I thought I’d come by and see how you’re doing,” Lucy said. “I’ve been reading about the case in the paper.”

  Drew nodded. “I’m okay, Lucy,” he said. “How are you?”

  “I’m good.”

  “How are we?” Drew said.

  Lucy smiled a little.

  “Drew, I don’t know how we are,” she said. “That’s why I’m here.”

  There was an uneasy silence as she stood beside him beside the rail and looked out at the city.

  “Drew, I hope you understand why I needed some time.”

  “I do.”

  “Let me finish. I rehearsed this all day. I’d like the chance to say it. It’s going to be very hard for me, for us, if we continue seeing each other. It’s going to be hard if you can’t open up and talk to me, and most of all, if you continue putting what you do for a living above all else.”

  Drew waited for her to finish.

  “So you have to understand why I needed to take a step back and think it all through.”

  Drew nodded, although Lucy wasn’t looking at him. That part bothered him more than her words.

  Then she turned to him. “I love you, Drew. I want to keep that alive because it’s one of the best things about my life. I know it will be hard to go on, but maybe the easy things aren’t worth much, anyway.”

  Drew went to her then and took her in his arms.

  “That’s probably right,” he whispered.

  They held each other for a long while. After several minutes, they pulled apart long enough to lie down on the patio lounger together. They lay beside each other, just holding on to one another for the longest time. Drew knew there were still secrets he carried, secrets he couldn’t share with Lucy just now. But he knew he would avoid the blackness of loneliness for at least a while longer.

  “Do you want to go away this weekend?” Drew asked. “Get away from the city? We could take a trip out to Catalina.”

  “That would be great—we could use the time.”

  Lucy looked at him with a sly smile. “So, have you just been waiting around for me to come back? No sleepless nights filled with worry you had lost me forever?”

  Drew shook his head.

  “I didn’t know if you were coming back, Lucy,” Drew said. “I just hoped.”

  About the Author

  LARRY DARTER is an American crime fiction writer. His Malone novels include Cold Comfort, Live Long Day, Foul Play, and Black Deeds, and he is the author of the T. J. O’Sullivan crime thriller novels.

  You can connect with me on:

  https://www.larrydarter.com