by Tim Weaver
I read out the registration plate for the Lexus.
‘I think it belongs to a guy called Isaac Mills.’
‘Mills?’
‘Yeah. Or it could be a company car.’
‘Who’s the company?’
‘Seiger and Sten. It’s some sort of legal firm.’
After a short pause, I heard him start walking again.
‘Is there anything that’s going to burn me here?’
‘There shouldn’t be,’ I said.
‘That’s not the most reassuring response you’ve ever given me.’
‘It may or may not be tied into the investigation you sent me. To be honest, it’s probably more “may” than “may not”. There’s something going on here.’
‘“Something going on”?’
‘This guy just turned up at Black Gale.’
‘All right,’ Task said. ‘I’ll call you back in a bit.’
Looking along the side of the Perrys’ house, I tried to get a sense of what had caught Mills’s attention. I walked it out: it took five seconds to go from the front to the back and yet Mills had spent much longer here – at least a minute at each of the homes. The electric meter – enclosed within a grey plastic box – was at the back of the house, the gas meter below that, but when I opened them up, there was nothing else inside. There were some empty recycling bins here too, and a group of flower pots, but whatever had been growing in them was long dead.
I moved down the slope to the Daveys’. They had some broken trellising propped against the side of their house, the rusting hulk of an old barbecue a bit further along, and the same electric and gas boxes and recycling bins. I checked the bins and boxes but, as at the Perrys’, couldn’t find anything amiss. It was the same story at Randolph and Emiline’s: their recycling bins were stationed at the side, instead of around the back like the others, but they too were empty and the gas and electricity boxes seemed fine.
I returned to the Perrys’, confused, frustrated.
There had to be something.
I dropped to my haunches next to the flower pots, trying to see if there might be something hidden under one of them. The only things I found were woodlice and weeds.
‘You got anything?’
I looked up: Healy was standing at the corner of the house. He glanced over his shoulder, past the entrance to Black Gale then out to the moors, presumably making sure we were definitely alone, and took in the granite path that connected the front of the house to the back garden, the pots, and then me.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Nothing.’
‘Something here got his interest.’
‘I know. I just don’t know …’
But then I stopped.
We both saw it at the same time: a half-brick in the wall, right at the bottom of the house, with no cement around it. It had been completely disguised by a couple of the flower pots, and was partly covered by the drainpipe, which sat flush against the edge of the brick. I shifted my weight and leaned in; Healy dropped down beside me.
‘So what have we got here?’ he said under his breath.
Gripping the brick, I started trying to lever it out. It wasn’t easy: even without the cement around it, there was very little space to get my fingers along the top, but I kept at it, gently rocking it from side to side and pulling towards me every time it did.
Eventually, it dropped out, clinking against the granite.
I grabbed my phone, switched on the light and shone it into the dark of the cavity wall. At first I couldn’t see anything, but then I spotted it: a small black unit, almost entirely hidden from view on the extreme left of the hole.
‘What can you see?’ Healy asked.
‘Something’s been put inside here.’
Reaching in, I grabbed hold of the unit and brought it out. It was roughly the size of a mobile phone and, because it was clearly switched on, it was warm to the touch. As I held it in my hand, showing it to Healy, it buzzed gently, alive; from one end of it, wires snaked off into the cavity wall, still connected to somewhere else.
‘What the hell is that?’ Healy asked.
‘It’s a hard drive.’
He frowned. ‘A hard drive? For doing what?’
I looked at the wires coming out of it.
They were audio leads.
‘I think someone’s been listening to us.’
Late-Night Call
1985
Los Angeles | Tuesday 23 July
As soon as Jo got back to the station, she started ticking boxes. All detectives had to fill out a form that outlined the basic components and elements of the murder they were investigating, which acted as a memo to the Sheriff and, in theory at least, would be read by every officer in the department so that patterns could be spotted and acted upon more quickly.
It took her an hour, and then she spent another hour going over teletypes, the overviews of crimes that had taken place within Los Angeles County, looking to see if she could find any links between the man in the tub and other murders that had occurred inside the nearly 5,000 square miles that the department covered. There was nothing.
Pretty soon after, the phone on her desk burst into life.
‘Jo, it’s Dan Chen.’
‘Danny. What you got for me?’
‘Looks like the tub was filled with muriatic acid. I thought it might be as it’s easy to get hold of. You can pick it up in any hardware store with no checks at all.’
‘That’s a cleaning compound, right?’
‘Yeah. Folks use it for brightening concrete, masonry, that sort of thing. It’s in pool solutions and drain cleaners as well. I’ll know for sure once we’ve done a proper autopsy but I’d say he was in there two days max. Muriatic acid is a lower-grade hydrochloric acid, less pure, but it still does the job. If he’d been a week in that stuff, we’d have been scooping him out with a spoon.’
‘Our killer must have used a shitload?’
‘Well, it was a twenty-five-gallon bathtub, and we estimate that there was about ten gallons of muriatic acid in there. That’s just a best guess for now, but I don’t reckon we’ll be far off. Generally, you can only pick up one-gallon containers in your local hardware store – so that might make it easier to find out who left him in there.’
Jo understood what Chen was driving at: someone buying ten one-gallon containers of muriatic acid was going to draw attention to themselves. She tried to think of the quickest way to run down that lead. Probably grabbing a Yellow Pages, getting the numbers for as many hardware stores as possible, and just phoning around until she got a hit. There was a caveat, though: it relied on the acid being bought all in one go and recently enough for someone to recall it. If the killer was smart, he’d have picked up the acid from different hardware stores over an extended period of time.
‘Did you manage to lift any prints?’ Jo asked.
‘No. The hands are too damaged.’
‘Dental?’
‘You might be able to get something from that. Forensics are coming over to take casts this afternoon. Bone takes longer to break down, so if we’re lucky our vic’s teeth will still be pretty good. I’ll let you know as soon as I’ve got anything else.’
‘I appreciate it. When are you cutting him open?’
‘Maybe tomorrow.’
‘“Maybe”?’
‘We’ve got three Night Stalker victims on the slab here, and half the suits in the city turning up later because everyone’s shitting their pants about how this is playing out in public. It’s a circus, but I just do what I’m told.’
‘All right, Danny.’
‘Sorry, Kader.’
He meant the apology, too, she knew that.
‘You know I’d rather be working with you, right?’
Jo smiled. ‘Who wouldn’t?’
She made light of it, but it was frustrating. Everything was subordinate to the Stalker. She understood it, but it hurt cases like hers and made them more likely to fail, because time frame was everything, al
ways. The irony was, standing in a mortuary for eighty minutes was the last thing she wanted to do, but detectives were legally mandated to attend autopsies. And if she was going to have to watch the guy being carved open, she’d rather have just got on with it.
‘One last thing, Danny,’ she said. ‘What about the bullet wound?’
‘Ah, yeah. Stippling suggests the gun was close to the cheekbone when fired – an inch at most – and the bullet is a .22. But it’s damaged. You want a best guess?’
‘Always.’
‘Ballistics won’t be able to do much with it.’
And even if they could, Jo thought, something told her it wouldn’t get her very far. If a man took the trouble to try and dissolve a body in a tub of acid, he’d take the time to buy an untraceable gun for thirty bucks from some fence at the bus terminal.
‘All right,’ she said, ‘keep me up to date, okay?’
‘I will.’
‘And enjoy the visit from City Hall.’
‘I won’t.’
She put the phone down and returned to the teletypes she’d already been over. This time, though, she changed direction, pausing in her efforts to try and ID Gabriel Wilzon, or match details of his murder to others in the county. Instead, she focused on possible sightings of a red station wagon with a Caraca car sticker on it.
Again, she came up with nothing.
Undeterred, she headed downstairs to Records and started going through the archives, only coming up for air an hour later when she hit another wall. Back up at her desk she grabbed a White Pages, even though – in her gut – she knew Caraca was unlikely to be a surname: windshield stickers tended to celebrate sports teams, cite political campaigns or slogans, or foist humorous messages and jokes on to the world. What they didn’t do was announce your family name in big, bold type.
But then she had a thought.
What if it was the name of a family business?
Jo quickly amassed the details of the twelve Caracas living in the greater Los Angeles area and then switched to the Yellow Pages, feeling a charge of electricity as she did. Business names were just the sort of thing you’d put on a windshield sticker.
Inside a minute, she’d found something.
Caraca BuildIt.
They were a supplies yard, out in the City of Industry. And there was something else: when she ran a DMV check, she discovered they owned a fleet of seven vehicles. One of them was a Volkswagen Quantum.
It wasn’t red, it was maroon.
But it was a station wagon.
She grabbed her phone, dialled their number and asked to be put through to the manager. When he finally picked up, she introduced herself and asked his name.
‘Paolo Caraca,’ came the gruff-sounding response.
‘Were any of your vehicles out and about on Saturday or Sunday night, sir?’
A confused pause. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, any chance you or one of your employees took one of your vehicles for a spin on the weekend?’
‘What?’ He made the question sound like an affront. ‘No, of course not.’
‘Because a vehicle matching the description of the Volkswagen Quantum you have registered to Caraca BuildIt was seen at a motel over in West Hollywood, is all.’
‘Is this a joke?’
‘No, sir, it’s definitely not a joke.’
‘Well, whoever told you that is a liar,’ Caraca said.
‘You don’t own a maroon Volkswagen Quantum?’
‘Yes, I do, but all of our vehicles – including the one you speak of – are locked up by me every afternoon from five until we open the next morning at seven. And Sunday we close, so it’s impossible that my staff would be out on a Saturday night or Sunday.’
Jo paused, looking down at her notes.
His anger sounded real, virtuous.
‘Anyone else have keys to the garage?’
‘No, just me.’
‘And you weren’t in West Hollywood on the weekend?’
‘West Hollywood? I live in Fontana.’
He meant it was a sixty-mile, ninety-minute drive away from his house, so what the hell would he be doing at the Star Inn? Jo looked down at her notes, thinking, any charge of electricity gone. ‘How many employees do you have over there, Paolo?’
‘Twenty-three.’
‘Okay. I’m going to need you to send me over a list of them.’
Jo got home just after eight.
Ethan was already asleep, his bedroom warm and dark, the fan on its fastest setting. He was only wearing a diaper and he’d long since discarded his blanket, kicked off to the side of the crib. She watched him for a while, thinking about the motel, about the body in the tub, and then – feeling as if she were, in some way, contaminating the purity of her son’s room – she left again, ghosting along the hallway to the living room. Ira was on one of the couches watching the Angels, a bottle of beer held in place on his stomach. It was so hot in the living room – so shut in, the door to the yard closed, the windows locked – she was only wearing a vest and panties. Ira was in even less – just his boxers.
‘Your dinner’s in the oven,’ he said.
‘Thanks. I’m starving.’
‘How was your day?’
She shrugged.
Ira shifted on the couch as Jo removed a plate of quesadillas from the oven, the tortillas stuffed with refried beans, avocado and tomatoes. She got a beer for herself.
‘Jo? You all right?’
She collapsed on to the sofa next to him, and he put an arm around her. ‘These taste great,’ she said finally, wolfing down the quesadillas, and when Ira saw that she didn’t want to talk about her day he gave her another squeeze and they sat watching the ball game in silence.
‘I’ve had such a headache today,’ Ira said eventually.
‘Aw, sorry, honey. There’s some Excedrin in the bathroom.’
‘Yeah, I grabbed some earlier.’
‘Is it any better?’
‘Well, luckily I’m a big, strong boy,’ he said, ‘so I’ve just about pulled through,’ and then he squeezed her again. ‘Although they say massages are good.’
‘Do they?’
‘Good for the head, apparently.’
‘And which head are we talking about here?’
That made Ira laugh. She put the side of her face against his shoulder, brought her knees up on to the couch and closed her eyes for a while. She felt absolutely beat.
Five minutes later, her pager started buzzing.
‘Shit,’ she said quietly, sitting up.
‘Just leave it,’ Ira replied.
She thought about it for a moment, about all the reasons not to haul herself up off the couch and see what Lieutenant Hayesfield wanted now, but then she set down her plate, kissed Ira on the cheek by way of an apology and retrieved her pager.
But it wasn’t Hayesfield.
It was Bennett, one of the detectives who worked the graveyard shift. She liked him about as much as she liked Greg Landa; they were both misogynists, it was just Bennett – in his fifties and newly divorced – never bothered trying to hide it. He wasn’t snide and devious like Landa; he was uncomplicated, wearing his lasciviousness like a badge. She went through to the phone in the bedroom and then paused, taking a long, preparatory breath before punching in the number.
Bennett answered after three rings.
‘Ben, it’s Jo Kader.’
‘Kader. What you up to tonight?’
‘Not much.’
‘I bet you were snuggling up to your man, right?’
‘It’s way too hot for that, Benny.’
‘Too hot? What, for a young woman like you?’
‘I got your page,’ she said by way of a response.
Bennett audibly sighed, as if she’d disappointed him.
‘A guy just phoned for you,’ he said, abruptly.
‘Who was he?’
‘Some cop from the LAPD.’
She frowned. ‘The LAPD? What did
he want?’
‘He wants you to call him.’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I got that part. But did he say what about?’
‘It’s about your bathtub case.’
That stopped her. ‘What about it?’
‘He reckons he knows who your killer is.’
18
The Perrys’ house seemed quieter than ever.
We stayed where we were at the front door for a moment, looking along the hallway towards the kitchen, and then took off our shoes – using the softness of the carpet to our advantage – and split up: Healy headed upstairs; I went through to the living room.
I didn’t move furniture, didn’t touch anything for now, I simply looked, only climbing on to the sofas at the end of my search, to peer along the upper edges of picture frames and the tops of dusty bookcases. I couldn’t see anything suspicious, but the wall cavity in which we’d found the hard drive was on this side of the house, and if it was wired up to some other device – perhaps more than one – the wires either had to come through here, or through the bedroom above me.
I looked again.
This time, I moved books on shelves, cushions, ornaments, picture frames. I did it all quietly, as slowly and as carefully as I could, but then I opened the lid on a cigar box, now being used to store pencils, pens and paper, and the lid came away entirely in my hand, its mechanism totally broken. The whole thing clattered to the floor, the contents spilling out.
Shit.
Upstairs, I heard Healy shift.
I moved into the hallway and looked up the steps to the landing. He was at the top, a frown on his face, arms out in a What was that? gesture. I held up the empty cigar box and rolled my eyes, then returned to the living room, getting down on my hands and knees and scooping up the spilled pens, the pencils, paper, an eraser.
That was when I heard something.
It was a very gentle hum, a noise that faded into the background, but one I was certain I hadn’t heard when I’d first entered. It was coming from the floor. I pushed the cigar box aside and, still on all fours, hands pressed into the carpet, leaned down and looked under the sofa closest to me.