Lost Hills

by Goldberg, Lee

  After that, the nurse would swab Coyle’s penis, inner thighs, legs, arms, and torso with large Q-tips. The inside of his mouth would also be swabbed, primarily to obtain his DNA, but sometimes a victim’s DNA could be picked up if he licked or bit the victim. Blood and hair follicles would also be taken from Coyle. All of that would go into evidence bags, too.

  “While you’re supervising the swabbing,” Eve said, “I’m going to do some more investigating.”

  “Wise decision,” Duncan said. “Without the bodies, we’re going to need a lot more evidence to make those charges stick.”

  At least she had some time to work. Arresting Coyle on a Saturday morning meant the judicial system would move a lot slower for him than it would if she’d arrested him on a weekday. The courts and other city, state, and county offices were either completely closed or barely staffed on the weekend. Coyle wouldn’t be arraigned until Monday. And, if he chose a public defender, he wouldn’t see a lawyer until then, either.

  “Maybe the search parties in the park will find something,” Eve said.

  “I wouldn’t count on it. Coyle could have dumped those body parts anywhere,” Duncan said. “I’ll go get started on the warrant.”

  Duncan walked to his car and she thought about what he’d said about the bodies. The kids were probably killed around 3:00 p.m. Wednesday and Coyle went to Walmart at 10:30 that night. In between, he dismembered the children, did some “cleaning” at the house, and realized he needed to go shopping for more supplies. He wasn’t going to show up covered with blood. That meant he had to shower and change first, either in the bloody bathtub at Tanya’s house, in his own home, or somewhere else. Whether he disposed of the bodies before or after the Walmart trip, and her money was on before, she didn’t think he had time to go very far. The bodies were within their jurisdiction, she was certain of that.

  They already had cadaver dogs searching the park, but there were other local places to check out. For starters, there was the Calabasas landfill on Lost Hills Road, in the graded hills directly across from the sheriff’s station north of the Ventura Freeway. That’s where the bags of body parts would be if he’d tossed them in any local trash can or dumpster. But he also could have gone to the dump himself.

  Eve spotted Biddle and Garvey chatting with a couple of deputies, made eye contact with the two detectives, and motioned them aside. They joined her.

  “We’ve got to find those body parts,” Eve said. “I need you to arrange a search of the Lost Hills dump and get some divers to check out Malibu Lake.”

  “How about getting a search party into Malibu Canyon along Las Virgenes?” Biddle said, referring to the deep gorge that cleaved the Santa Monica Mountains between Calabasas and the sea. Las Virgenes Road was cut into a mountainside along the ravine and was a scary drive along the edge for anyone afraid of heights. “He could have tossed the bags there. Cars can go off the cliff and not be spotted for years.”

  “We worked a case like that,” Garvey said. “A wrecked Benz with two skeletons was found by firefighters putting out a small brush fire. The bodies belonged to an elderly couple that had been missing for five years. Turns out their kids drove by their corpses every day without even knowing it. That’s some haunting shit. It’d make a great movie. I’ve been pitching it around.”

  There was also the scandalous case a few years back of a woman who was released from custody at Lost Hills station very late one night and then disappeared. Her bones were found in the canyon years later but the details of her fate were still a mystery, as well as a continuing source of bad publicity for the department, thanks to an ongoing lawsuit from her family. Eve doubted Garvey was pitching that story to Hollywood.

  “Go ahead and get a search going there,” she said. “Any place you can think of is worth checking out. Don’t wait to run it past me.”

  “Don’t worry,” Garvey said. “That’s the last thing we’d do.”

  She let that go. “Also do a deep dive into Coyle’s background. There might be something there that will help us. We need as much evidence as we can get before he’s arraigned on Monday.”

  “We’d like to get some sleep first, if you don’t mind,” Biddle said pointedly. “We’ve been up all night watching Coyle’s place.”

  “Right, of course, sorry,” Eve said, embarrassed that she hadn’t thought of that. “Let me hitch a ride with you back to the station and then you can go get some rest.”

  When they got back to Lost Hills, Biddle and Garvey got out and told her they’d be back in a few hours. She took the keys to their Crown Vic and drove out to Mr. Plunger in Canoga Park.

  Eve knew the woman behind the counter was the cheerful voice on the phone the instant she saw her. The woman had a wide-eyed, wide-faced, wide-smiled exuberance that made Eve glad there was a counter between them—it lessened the chance that she would get an unwanted hug. On the wall beside the woman was a big map of the western San Fernando Valley and the communities in and around the Santa Monica Mountains. The map drew Eve’s immediate attention. There were big black-line boundaries drawn on it with a Magic Marker designating Mr. Plunger’s service area: the 118 freeway to the north, Las Virgenes Road to the west, Winnetka Avenue to the east, and south all the way to the Pacific Coast Highway. As far as Eve was concerned, that was also the search parameters for the bodies.

  “Hello, I’m Brandy,” the woman said with a big smile that showed off her perfect teeth, giving Eve a painful flashback to her own teenage orthodontic hell of braces and rubber bands. “How can I help you?”

  Eve flashed her badge. “I’m Detective Eve Ronin, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. One of your plumbers, Lionel Coyle, has become a person of interest in a missing person investigation. I need to get the names and addresses of all of his service calls for the last twelve months.”

  “Sure thing,” Brandy said, turning to her computer terminal. “I’ll print it right out for you or I can email it to you.”

  Eve was startled by the immediate positive response. She’d been expecting at least a little pushback on her request.

  “How about both?” Eve set her card on the counter. “My email address is on the card.”

  “Will do.” Brandy took the card and gestured with a nod to a corner of the room. “Help yourself to some popcorn while you wait.”

  There was a movie theater–style popcorn machine on wheels in the corner of the room. The popcorn looked like it had been there for weeks and the glass was smeared with oil.

  “No thanks,” Eve said. “Do your service vehicles have GPS that allows you to track where they are and where they’ve been?”

  “We aren’t real high-tech around here. Our drivers call in when they arrive at a job and again when they are leaving it. That’s how we know when and where to send them out on their next call.”

  “Have you had any complaints about Lionel Coyle?”

  “Nope,” Brandy said, getting up and walking back to a printer, which was spitting out pages. “The opposite, actually. People seem to like that he’s friendly, he smells good, speaks English, and you don’t see his hairy butt crack when he squats down or bends over.”

  There was a local plumbing company that advertised incessantly on LA radio and TV as “the Smell Good plumber,” so the qualities that mattered to Mr. Plunger’s customers weren’t entirely a surprise to Eve.

  “We actually do a bend-over test before we hire anybody. We have a strict no-butt-crack policy.”

  “That should be your motto,” Eve said.

  “Mr. Plunger, the No-Butt-Crack Plumber,” Brandy said with delight. “I like it.”

  She handed the printout to Eve. It was a spreadsheet with nearly a thousand names and addresses, arranged by date. The number of service calls made sense to Eve. If Coyle worked six days a week, and saw three people a day, and he got a week off each year, that would be around nine hundred calls. There were no service calls last Wednesday or Thursday.

  “Thanks for your help.” Eve he
aded for the door.

  Brandy called out after her. “Will Lionel be coming in to work on Monday?”

  “I doubt it,” she said.

  “How long will he be away?”

  “I’m guessing twenty-five years to life,” Eve said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Eve went back to the Lost Hills station, read the email from Brandy at Mr. Plunger, and opened up the attached spreadsheet of Coyle’s service calls for the last twelve months.

  The list was organized by date. She reorganized it by address and saw that Coyle had visited Tanya’s house twice, both service calls booked through Jared’s home warranty policy insurance carrier. The first call, six months ago, was to fix a leaking pipe under the kitchen sink. The most recent visit was only a week before the murders to fix a leaking toilet. That worried Eve. It meant if any of Coyle’s DNA was found in the kitchen or bathroom, his defense attorney could say it was left during the service calls, not the murders.

  She wanted to cross-reference all of the homes or businesses Coyle visited as a plumber, and the people who lived or worked in those places, to the sheriff’s department database to see if there were any crimes, arrests, patrol calls, or miscellaneous field observations at those same addresses. Miscellaneous field observations were the notes deputies made, and later filed in the database, whenever they saw something suspicious or stopped a suspicious individual without taking any action.

  Eve was especially interested in “dead on arrival” burglary reports. During her time in burglary, the bulk of her reports fit that category. They were the cases when a homeowner was certain somebody had stolen items from their home, but there were no signs of a break-in. On top of that, they couldn’t say what day the item went missing, only the day they first noticed it was gone, and therefore couldn’t point to a specific service worker, like a cleaning lady or electrician, as the culprit. More often than not, it was likely the homeowner simply misplaced the item that they were certain was stolen. But she had a feeling the seemingly worthless items in Coyle’s bottom drawer could be souvenirs stolen from homes he visited.

  It would be laborious and time consuming for Eve to cross-reference the list herself, inputting one address at a time into the search box in the database. But fortunately, she knew that the LASD’s Crime Analysis Unit had different resources and could probably do it within a few hours. The CAU was made up of civilian techies who loved to prove how useful, thorough, and revealing the information in the database could be to law enforcement and how fast they could deliver it. They also saw delivering thorough, high-value responses in “granular” detail as an incentive to get detectives and deputies, who hated paperwork and loathed the boxes they had to fill in on the online forms, to put as many facts as possible into the data they inputted into the system.

  She emailed the list to CAU and followed up by immediately calling one of the techies there, Sue Trowbridge. Eve told Sue that she was working a triple-murder case, had a suspect in custody, and needed the information as fast as possible to make sure he didn’t get back on the street.

  “I’m a big fan of the red velvet cake at Nothing Bundt,” Sue said.

  “Are you asking for a bribe?” Eve asked lightheartedly.

  “I’m asking for a reward. There’s a subtle difference.”

  “You got it,” Eve said. “I’ll throw in a Chocolate Turtle bundtlet if I get the info in two hours. It’s the flavor of the month.”

  “Deal,” Sue said. “And I’m not going to ask how you know what their flavor of the month is.”

  Eve hung up the phone and used the wait time to start filling out reports, doing her part to add to the database and performing the drudgery necessary to get the wheels of justice turning.

  Forty-five minutes later, Duncan wandered over to her cubicle. “I’m going on a donut run. You want anything?”

  “No thanks,” she said. “How did it go with Coyle?”

  “That’s why I need to fortify myself with a glazed old-fashioned. We got the warrant for the swab and I had to witness it. Watching a poor nurse brush the stinking pubes around an ape-loving psychokiller’s junk is not an experience I’m gonna miss in my retirement.”

  “Did Coyle say anything?”

  “Not a word,” Duncan said. “Are you thinking of having a go at him?”

  “I want to be better armed when I do,” Eve said.

  “You onto something?”

  “I might be,” she said. “I’ll let you know if it pans out.”

  “When I get back from my donut run, I’ll check in with the search teams, see what ground they’ve covered and where they plan to go next,” Duncan said. “But we would have heard something if they’d found anything.”

  She nodded and got back to work. Thirty minutes later she got a call from Trowbridge at CAU.

  “I’ve emailed you the matches,” Trowbridge said.

  There were matches. Eve felt a chill go down her spine. “You’re amazing. You’ve earned two bundtlets.”

  “Our pleasure, Detective. Go get the bastard.”

  Eve opened up her email from Trowbridge. Each match listed the address, the crime, the date of the crime, and a wealth of other information, including links to the reports filed by the investigating officers or detectives. There was almost too much information. She quickly dismissed crimes, both major and minor, committed by the people living in those homes or businesses, including disturbing the peace, domestic abuse, drug possession, traffic violations, and nonpayment of child support.

  That left crimes against the homeowners. She set aside crimes that had been solved, including one arson and two burglaries. That left three unsolved burglaries and a rape. Two of the unsolved burglaries were break-ins that seemed to have been committed by more than one person at a time and large amounts of cash and jewelry were taken. In one case, the burglars were captured on security camera video. She dismissed those two cases as well.

  All that remained were a burglary and a rape.

  The burglary case was a DOA report out of Calabasas, an elderly woman who was convinced she was burglarized even though there were no signs of a break-in and nothing valuable was taken. That could either be forgetfulness, to put it kindly, or a promising lead. Eve would check that one out.

  And, finally, there was the rape. A young woman in West Hills walked in her door from work and was raped by a man who was waiting in her home. He was wearing a monster mask and held a knife to her throat. No arrest was made in the case and no DNA was collected. But Eve was still intrigued by the parallels between the unsolved rape and her case, especially with the tenuous Coyle connection. Rather than read the report, Eve decided to call the investigating detective, who worked out of the Sex Crimes Division downtown, to find out more.

  The detective answered on the first ring. “Sex Crimes. Macahan.”

  “This is Detective Eve Ronin, RHD out of the Lost Hills station.”

  “The Deathfist,” he said.

  She kept talking as if she hadn’t heard him say that. “I’m working a triple homicide and you investigated a rape case that might connect with mine.”

  “You’re working a triple homicide,” he said. “Let me ask you a question. Before this, what was the biggest case you investigated?”

  “I’m not doing this dance, Detective. A woman and her two children were murdered and dismembered in her home. I think I’ve got the guy who did it sitting in a cell here. You can help me keep him there by talking to me about a case or you can help him walk by wasting my time with bullshit. What’s it going to be?”

  He sighed. “What’s the case of mine?”

  “It was a rape, eight months ago, in West Hills. The victim’s name was Vickie Denhoff. What can you tell me about it?”

  “It was a heartbreaker. Denhoff is in her early thirties, lives alone, and is an accountant for an insurance company in Warner Center. She wasn’t feeling well so her boss let her go home early. She walked in her house, went to her bedroom, and some guy in a mask jump
ed her from behind, put a knife to her throat, and told her he’d cut her if she screamed or didn’t do exactly what he told her. To prove he was serious, he sliced her just deep enough to draw blood. He forced her onto the bed and raped her.”

  “The man was already in the house when she came home?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Was there any sign of a break-in?”

  “Nope.”

  “Did she describe the mask he was wearing?”

  “Only that it was a monster mask that covered his head completely,” he said. “She closed her eyes through most of it.”

  “Were you able to collect any DNA?” She knew from browsing the report that the answer was no, but she wanted to know why.

  “Have you ever seen that TV show Monk, about that uptight detective who is a clean freak and wants everything to be even?”

  “He had OCD.” “Yeah, well, she’s like him. Can’t stand dirt. So the moment he was gone she didn’t just shower and douche, she did it five or six times, completely disinfected herself, washed her clothes and her sheets before throwing them out, cleaned her entire house, and then called the police. I understand why she did it, of course, but she went to such an extreme that she virtually guaranteed we’d never be able to convict anyone for the rape. Vickie was victimized twice—first by the rapist and then by her own phobias. I felt terrible for her.”

  “She still might be able to help put him away,” Eve said.

  “You think your guy is her rapist?”

  “There’s a connection. He was a plumber who did a service call in her house a few weeks prior to the rape.”