by Coyle, Matt;
“I guess I know why you didn’t return my calls.” Leah’s hands were splayed out on the table. A predator ready to pounce or a disillusioned woman trying to contain her anger.
“I … I left my phone at home in San Diego.” My arms hung limp at my side.
“Because you didn’t want there to be cell tower evidence that you were in Santa Barbara when you killed Tom.” Her face flushed red. “You planned the whole thing. You convinced yourself that Tom killed Colleen and felt that gave you the right to be judge, jury, and executioner. You were going to kill him cold blooded and make your escape so you wouldn’t have to pay for your actions. It wasn’t heroic. It was vengeance.”
“But I didn’t kill him.”
“I know. I called and woke him up two hours ago when I found, this …” She pointed at the gun. “This thing. I came up with a stupid lie for the call so I didn’t have to tell him that I was checking to make sure you hadn’t murdered him.”
“Your calls to my cellphone saved his life.” I didn’t have an excuse and didn’t know of an apology to absolve cold-blooded murder. I didn’t know of one when I was a cop and still didn’t now that I was on the other side. “You saved me, too.”
“I don’t think I did, Rick.” She relaxed her hands and her whole body slumped. Tears welled in her eyes. “I don’t think you can be saved. I don’t think you want to be saved. You’re trapped in a death spiral that you created. Good versus evil.”
I stood clothed, but fully exposed.
“There’s a good man inside you. I’ve seen him. I was falling in love with him.” She wiped a tear away from her eye. “But I think he’s losing the fight.”
“You can give the clothes to Goodwill or just throw them out.” I picked up the gun and the burglar tools and put them in the duffle bag. “Thanks for taking care of me and figuring out the person I really am quickly enough to keep me from doing something I wouldn’t be able to live with. The man inside me losing the fight was falling in love with you, too.”
I loaded up the duffle bag and walked toward the front door.
“Where are you going?”
“Home.”
“Could you … I can’t …” Leah shook her head.
“What?”
“I haven’t been able to get a hold of Jim Grimes. It’s not like him not to return my calls.” She wrapped her arms across her chest. “It’s not fair of me to ask now after … after the things I said.”
“I’ll go by his house and try to track him down.” I let go a breath. “I don’t have a phone to try to contact him or to let you know what I find out.” I’d left the burner phone in a trash can by Stearns Wharf last night.
“Wait.” Leah ran down the hall and came back with an iPhone. “This is my backup for work.”
She handed it to me and our fingers touched when I took it. A bolt of electricity shot through me and buzzed both men fighting inside me.
We looked at each other. The silence between us acknowledging what we both felt. Warmth spread across my chest and, for an instant, I felt the good man inside me was winning.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
GRIMES. HE HADN’T returned my calls after I received his message about the payphone Friday night. I’d pushed it to the back of my priorities when I plotted Tom Weaver’s murder. I called his number as I headed over to the address Leah had given me for him. No answer. The call went straight to voicemail but the mailbox was full. Shit. It sounded like Grimes hadn’t returned anyone’s calls since he left me that voicemail.
PIs working a case don’t ignore calls from the person that hired them. Jim Grimes was laid up somewhere. In a hospital or in his car in a ditch. Or he was dead. The odds, unfortunately, favored the latter.
I thought of Midnight waiting for me at home and called Moira before I got to Grimes’ house.
“Jesus Christ, Cahill, you were going to call me last night.” Her hole punch voice frenzied.
“Only if something went wrong. Everything’s okay.” Not if Grimes was dead. A bridge yet to cross.
“Everything’s okay doesn’t tell me what I need to know, Rick.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t play stupid. I know you and what you’re capable of. When you tell me to prepare to meet you in the middle of the night with Midnight, I know what you were planning to do.” A deep, brittle breath. “Did you do it?”
“No. And I’m not going to.” As far as I knew. “But I’m not exactly sure when I’ll be home.” I thought of Grimes and the unreturned calls. “It could be later today or a couple days. My neighbor is going out of town. Could you go by and pick up Midnight? His food is in the pantry.”
“Midnight is fine. I’m already at your house. I couldn’t just wait around for you to call. Where are you?”
I didn’t have many friends, but I had one no one could replace.
“Santa Barbara.”
“What the hell are you doing up there?” She knew my past.
“I’m not sure anymore.” I ended the call.
Grimes’ house was on West Micheltorena Street, just a few blocks from the apartment Colleen and I lived in for our too-short time together. The house was a small cottage with light blue shiplap on a block with a view of the Santa Ynez Mountains through old-growth trees.
No car in the driveway. I parked in front of the house and peeked inside the garage. The rear wheel and side of a dark sedan were visible. Grimes drove a dark blue Chrysler 300. Shit. If his car was home that meant he should be too.
Home. Not answering his phone. Dead.
I walked over to the front door and knocked. And held my breath. No noise inside. Another knock followed by the doorbell. Nothing. I didn’t expect Grimes to answer, but prayed he would. I tried the doorknob. Locked. I walked over to a wooden side gate and went into the backyard, then into the garage. The car inside it was a blue Chrysler 300. Grimes’ car.
I looked inside. Thankfully, he wasn’t in there. I tried the door leading into the house. Locked. I went out into the backyard. The lot dropped away in the back and the house had a wooden deck. I went up the stairs and tried the sliding glass door. Locked. The drapes were drawn over the back windows. Next, the kitchen door. Locked.
I went back out into the front and scanned the street. Clear. No one that I could see staring out windows either. I opened the trunk of the rented Corolla, opened the duffle bag, and slipped on a pair of nitrile gloves and grabbed my lock pick set. It was right next to the modified murder weapon I almost killed Tom Weaver with. I went back through the gate and into the garage. The door into the house was easy. I wiped it down with my shirt to erase my prints from my earlier attempt to enter the house and unlocked the door in forty-five seconds.
I’d gotten good with the pick set. I used it whenever there was a locked door between me and finding the truth. I used it following hunches without consideration of the law. My father’s credo. Sometimes you have to do what’s right even when the law says it’s wrong. I’d become the sole determiner of what was right and wrong. Even when my gut, my hunches, my certainties were wrong.
Today I hoped they were. The second I opened the door into the house, I knew they were right. The hint of death floated in the air. Cloying and putrid. Early in its hunger for decomposition, but unmistakable. Grimes or somebody else was dead inside his house. I shut the door and stared at it. I had to call the police. A call to dispatch about the smell of death from someone who’d smelled it before would be enough to get a squad car to Grimes’ house. I didn’t have to go inside and contaminate a crime scene to confirm.
Except I did. Grimes and I weren’t friends, and we were barely partners, but we’d both worked to try to bring justice to Krista. Him within the law, me whatever it took. Different tactics, but the same goal. The truth. He might have gotten closer than I did.
Maybe that was why he was dead. I had to see his body. To get a look before a police department I still didn’t trust did. I owed Grimes that much.
I held my b
reath then opened the door and closed it quickly behind me. The door opened into a small laundry room with a stacked washer/dryer. I went into a galley kitchen and then into a living room.
And found Grimes. He sat in a leather chair in front of a TV. The TV was off. So was he. Permanently. His body slumped to the left. Left arm dangling below the arm of the chair. Dried thick black blood matted his gray hair above his right ear and ran down his neck, frozen like river runoff in an Alaskan winter. A black winter. A handgun lay on the floor a couple feet to the right of the chair.
Grimes and I had spent most of the last fourteen years as enemies. We still weren’t friends even after working Krista’s death together, but I think we’d developed grudging respect for one another. At least, I had. I’d never know now how he felt about me. He’d been a cop and a PI. He’d dedicated his life to finding the truth. He deserved better than an anonymous death. Body decaying, waiting for someone to discover it.
I let go the breath I’d been holding and inhaled death with my next one. I didn’t want to get any closer to inspect the body. The manner of death would be an easy call for the medical examiner. Another ex-cop eats his gun. Or in this instance, shoots himself in the temple. A shock, but the statistics would say, not a surprise. Except that it wasn’t true.
I hadn’t known Grimes well, but I knew a bulldog on the scent. That’s what he was the night he left me a message about the payphone. That’s what he’d been the whole time he investigated Krista’s death. We may not have agreed on everything, but he was on a quest for the truth as much as I was.
His death looked to be over a day old. That would put it back to the night he called me about the payphone. When he left a message that he had to check something out.
Whatever it was had gotten him killed. Which meant that Krista and Colleen’s killer had gotten onto him and maybe onto me. I may have been wrong about Weaver and Mitchell, but I hadn’t been about Krista’s killer not being some random drunk driver. He was out there covering his tracks and the real reason he killed Krista.
I scanned the living room for a computer. None. I searched the rest of the house. No computer. I went back into the garage and searched the Chrysler 300, even popping the trunk. No computer. No notebooks. No evidence of what Grimes found out the night he died.
I unlocked the front door, opened it, and went outside. I took off my gloves and closed the door behind me, careful to use my bare hand on the doorknob.
With Grimes dead inside his house, I knew my mission wasn’t complete. It just had a new target. One I couldn’t see yet.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
A TWO-MAN SQUAD car pulled up in front of Grimes house at ten fifteen a.m. Ten minutes after I called 911. And twelve minutes after I wiped down everything I’d touched inside the house except the front door and put the homemade supressor in the trash can of a home five houses down from Grimes’. The gun was still in the duffle bag. I might need it before I left Santa Barbara. For self-defense. Or something else.
The police would need a warrant to search my car and didn’t have probable cause at this point. But all it would take was for someone to peek in my duffle bag in the trunk and fudge up some PC.
I could explain the gun. Not the silencer. I found the gun on the street downtown. I didn’t even notice its serial number was filed off. I was going to turn it in to the Santa Barbara PD on Figueroa Street after I checked up on Jim Grimes who wasn’t returning calls.
A silencer was used for one thing. Killing humans. No story could spin that.
I told the police officers on the scene the truth, but not the whole truth. My usual practice. That Grimes and I were investigating the death of Krista Landingham for her sister, Leah, and that neither Leah nor I had been able to get a hold of Grimes for a day and a half. I stopped by his house to check on him and went inside when I tried the front door and it was unlocked.
The unlocked door was part of the whole truth I left out. Actually, a lie. SBPD didn’t need to know that I broke in. If I hadn’t, no one would have discovered Grimes’ body for days, maybe weeks, evidence decaying with the body.
The patrolman asked me to stick around for the detectives to arrive. I knew I didn’t have a choice and sat in the back of their squad car with the door open while they put up crime scene tape around Grimes’ house.
I called Leah.
“I’ve got bad news about Grimes,” I said.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” A quaver in her voice.
“Yes. I’m sorry. How did you know?”
“A man like Jim Grimes doesn’t just disappear and stop returning calls.” She let out a deep sigh. “I hoped I was wrong. How did he die?”
“It’s set up to look like a suicide.”
“Set up?”
“He called me and left a message on my voicemail after you came to my hotel room the other night. He said that the last call Krista received the night she died was from a payphone on State Street and that he had to check something out. I called him a couple times, but he didn’t return my call. That was the last I heard from him.”
“You’re telling me this now?”
“You’re right. I should have told you about the payphone Friday night.”
“But you were too busy planning Tom’s murder, weren’t you?”
I didn’t say anything. No more lies and I didn’t want to say the truth out loud.
Leah hung up without another word. The warm touch of our hands together this morning seemed a long time ago.
Ten minutes later a white Ford Fusion G-ride drove up. Detectives Mitchell and Flora got out of the car and walked over to the patrolman manning the crime scene. Great. Detective Mitchell, who I’d accused of breaking into my hotel room and assaulting me. Shouldn’t he be busy working Krista’s case? He walked under the tape and inside the house.
Detective Flora peeled off and walked over to me in the patrol car. Good. Maybe Mitchell realized that he should recuse himself from dealing with me. Not that a cop had to. This wasn’t the federal government.
I got out of the squad car before someone decided to close the door and lock it.
“Cahill.” Flora stuck out her hand and gave me a curt smile.
I shook her hand.
“Can you tell me what happened, beginning with why you came by Jim Grimes’ house?”
I gave her the same ninety percent truth that I gave to the patrolmen earlier.
“Why did you go inside the house?”
“I knocked and rang the doorbell and no one answered and I just naturally tried the doorknob. It turned, so I went inside.”
“Did you touch anything inside the house?”
“No. As soon as I opened the door, I smelled …” I’d smelled death too many times in my life. As a private investigator. As a cop. And as a husband.
“Smelled what, Mr. Cahill?”
“Death.”
Detective Mitchell walked up behind Detective Flora. The man who had been second on my kill list.
“Where were you yesterday?” Maybe Mitchel didn’t buy the suicide. Good. Maybe he saw me as a suspect. Bad.
“In San Diego.”
“Why are you back in Santa Barbara?”
“I didn’t like how things ended with Leah Landingham.” That part was true.
“Shit.” Mitchell looked over my shoulder. “What’s he doing here? There’s not even a TV truck here yet.”
“Jake!” Detective Flora nodded at me then looked back at Mitchell. He’d cracked out of turn and revealed his true feelings about a fellow brother in blue in front of a civilian. Though I hardly qualified as a civilian and nothing surprised me when it came to cops. Especially those in Santa Barbara.
I turned and saw a Black Ford Fusion pull to the curb beyond Mitchell’s car. The car Grimes confirmed that Weaver drove while on duty and the car I’d convinced myself that he drove by Krista’s house the night before she died. I wanted so badly for the piece to fit that I’d ruled out the hundreds of Black Fusions in Santa Barbar
a owned by citizens quietly living their lives.
I thought Weaver and he were buddies. And Weaver didn’t strike me as the kind of cop who liked to step in front of a TV camera. Just the opposite. The door to the Fusion opened and the driver got out. Now I understood Mitchell’s comment.
Captain Kessler strode over to us. Blond hair jelled back in a perfect wedge, beach volleyball sunglasses, business suit tailored perfectly to show off his fit body. He should be strutting down a catwalk not up to a crime scene.
“Rick. Detectives.” He put his hands on his hips. “What have we got?”
Mitchell stared at the ground while Flora filled in Kessler on what I’d told her.
“So, Rick, the door was unlocked and you just walked right in?” Kessler’s lips pulled tight, his wraparound sunglasses hiding his eyes.
“Yes.”
“Are you sure the door was unlocked?”
“How else would I have gotten inside the house?” What was Kessler’s game? Did he suspect I’d picked the lock? Why?
“However you got inside, you committed an unlawful entry.” Kessler was suddenly playing hardball. He’d been more politician when we had a private talk in his office. Showing off for Mitchell, a detective he knew didn’t respect him?
Mitchell glanced at Kessler and furrowed his brow.
“Grimes was a friend.” He might have become one after we cracked Krista’s case. “He hadn’t returned my or Leah Landingham’s calls since Friday night. I was concerned about him, so I opened the door and went inside.”
“Detective Flora and I are done with Mr. Cahill, Captain. I was about to send him on his way.” Mitchell somehow coming to my defense. If he’d only known what I’d planned for him before I learned the truth. “We have his contact info.”
“I’d like to question him back at the station,” Kessler said.
“Are you arresting me, Captain?” Reflexes stiffened my body.
“No.” A reptile smile beneath the insect eyes. “As a courtesy to me and the department and the memory of Jim Grimes, I’m asking you to follow me down to the station where we can talk in a less hectic environment.”