by Tim Weaver
23
Confused, I hung up without leaving a message.
Patrick had been calling the police.
And the police had been calling him.
Going back to Google, I went looking for Detective Inspector Kevin Quinn and found brief mentions of him in a number of media stories dealing with investigations in London. A murder. An assault. A robbery at a jewellery store in Hatton Garden. I read through each of them, but while they were dealing with serious crimes, they seemed relatively unambiguous and I couldn’t see a link to Black Gale.
I began tapping out a rhythm on the edge of the laptop, trying to imagine how or why Patrick would have contacted a cop in London and if it was actually relevant to my search. Even if it wasn’t, it was odd, an irregularity I didn’t like: he’d never lived there in his life, and had spent his entire career in Manchester and the north-west.
Returning to the document, I wrote down the duration of each of the eleven calls between Patrick and Kevin Quinn, trying to spot a pattern. The first call had been the sixteen-minute one, and that was the longest. The others varied in length, some lasting as little as fifty-two seconds and as long as eleven minutes. When I switched to the dates the calls were made, they were haphazard too: they started on Wednesday 2 September, nearly two months before Halloween, and continued at apparently random intervals over the course of the next five weeks. The last contact between Patrick and Quinn was on Friday 9 October at 9 p.m.
Where had this relationship come from?
Had I missed something in my background check on Patrick?
I went back through my original notes on Patrick, on Francesca, on their house, their life together, his PR business, even her work as a nurse at Westmorland Hospital in Kendal. I tried to link the calls from Quinn to anything the Perrys had done in the time leading up to them going missing, but every route soon hit a dead end. Neither of them had connections to London. So why was Patrick making these calls?
I checked my watch, saw that I’d been going almost three hours, and knew the car would likely be ready now – but as I started to pack up, something stopped me.
What if I’ve got this the wrong way around?
I couldn’t see the connection between Patrick and Kevin Quinn, didn’t get why Patrick would pick up the phone that first time and call a detective in a city he had no association with, let alone how that conversation would go on to last sixteen minutes.
But what if Quinn hadn’t always been based in London?
I redialled the same number for him, heard it ring the same amount of times, and then, as soon as his voicemail kicked in again, I got my answer in Quinn’s voice.
I hadn’t noticed it the first time, because his accent was so soft.
He was from Manchester.
It could have meant that, before he made the switch to London, Quinn knew Patrick; he could have been a friend, a schoolmate. It meant they could even have grown up together. But given how little they talked to one another over the two months I had records for, how long Patrick had been a journalist, and the type of crime stories he’d written during his time at the paper, something else seemed much more likely: before Quinn went to the Met, he’d been working for the Greater Manchester Police.
He was one of Patrick’s sources.
As that hit home, something else pulled into focus: if Patrick had re-established contact after Quinn’s move south, it wasn’t to catch up, or to relive old times. The sort of relationship they had didn’t work like that, however much they might have got on.
Rather, it meant Patrick needed something from Quinn.
Something only a cop could get him.
The Suicide: Part 1
1985
Los Angeles | Wednesday 24 July
Jo approached Runyon Canyon Park from Mulholland.
When she pulled in through the north entrance, there was only one other car waiting. It was a white Toyota Camry, parked next to the trail that led out to the East Ridge. She slipped the Oldsmobile in beside it, her wheels kicking up red dust as she braked, and inside the Camry she saw a man in his sixties, trim, with a moustache and grey hair. It was hard to see much more than that: the sun was starting to come up now, cutting across the eastern flanks of the Santa Monica Mountains, and it filled his front windows with colour. Jo killed the engine and got out at the same time as he did.
‘Detective Kader?’ the man said across the roof of the Camry.
She nodded. ‘Yeah, that’s me.’
‘I’m Ray Callson.’
They met beside the trunk of the Camry and shook hands. He was over six feet, in good shape, handsome in a weathered, fatherly sort of way, but when he moved it was slowly. Somehow, to Jo, it didn’t feel like it was down to a physical impairment – his stride was smooth, his grip strong, his green eyes sharp and focused; instead, it felt like something else was affecting him, something more abstract and hidden. He had the kind of look that cops got sometimes, especially after a lot of years: a fatigue that wouldn’t wash out, a slow, corrosive burn. Maybe it was a case. Maybe it was this case. Maybe this was what you became when you worked in a city like this your whole life.
Callson popped the trunk of the Camry and took out a blue three-ring binder. It was an LAPD murder book. On the other side of their cars, the trail split, one of them heading south, pretty much through the centre of the park, the other immediately climbing west. He used the binder to gesture to the western branch.
‘You up for a walk, Detective?’
She nodded. ‘Absolutely.’
He locked up his car and led the way. July had been so hot that the trail had baked hard, a spider’s web of cracks levering open the ground beneath them. It was still early – not yet 7 a.m. – but it was light, the sky streaked amber and pink, and, as they walked, Callson remarked on the unexpected clarity of the morning. She listened to him talk about the weather, about the colour of the mountains in the sun, about how beautiful the city looked on days when it wasn’t sitting under a blanket of smog, and she thought how different he seemed from the men she worked with, how unlike a cop he sounded. She’d never met Callson before, and had only spoken to him briefly on the phone the previous night, but there was something benign about him, in his manner, that made her feel instantly at ease in his company. It was the total opposite of how she felt most of the time in the squad room.
‘How long you been a detective?’ he asked her, his fingers still clamped on the binder. She noticed he didn’t wear his wedding ring on his hand, but on a band around his neck. He had a shirt on but no tie, and the ring swung gently in the V at his collar.
‘Since ’78,’ she replied.
‘You enjoy it?’
‘Yeah,’ she said, but then thought of the body she’d found in the tub the day before, of the panic that had gripped her on the way out this morning. ‘Most of the time.’
‘That’s about as much as we can hope for, right?’
‘Right,’ she said, and watched him for a moment, just ahead of her, his breath coming more quickly now but the smoothness of his gait hardly changing. Whatever was up with him, whatever it was that she’d glimpsed back at the cars, it definitely wasn’t physical. ‘What about you? How long have you been working for the LAPD?’
‘I joined in 1950.’
‘Thirty-five years. Wow.’
‘Wow is right. A long time. It’s not technically thirty-five: there was three years in Vietnam somewhere in all of that and, believe it or not, I actually retired at the end of ’83 and spent last year playing golf. But then they got so overloaded with all the shit that’s going on in this city at the moment that they came back to me in February with a better deal – more money, not so many hours. So here I am again.’ He smiled at her. ‘I actually know a couple of the guys over there with you in the Detective Bureau. We worked the Hillside Strangler back in the day.’
‘You were on the Strangler team?’
He nodded. ‘Reminds me a bit of this Night Stalker stuff: total jurisdict
ional nightmare, everyone wanting a piece of the pie.’ His lips flattened; a flash of defeat. ‘Anyway, like I say, I know a few of your people. You met Gary Perez?’ She nodded. She knew Perez but had never really talked to him. ‘He’s a good kid, Gary. Decent. Principled. What about Greg Landa?’
Landa.
She pictured him, obese and smirking, chewing on another Altoid as he’d stood there in the motel room the day before.
‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘I know Greg.’
‘I’ve worked with Greg on a couple of things.’
Jo forced a reply: ‘That’s cool.’
Callson watched her for a fraction of a second.
‘I think we can both agree that Landa’s a Grade-A asshole,’ he said.
A smile twitched at the corner of Jo’s mouth.
Callson returned it and then continued climbing the trail. ‘You need to play the game,’ he said, ‘and pick your battles. Just know that we’re not all like Greg.’
She didn’t know if the we he was referring to was men or cops – or both – but whichever one it was, she could tell Callson meant every word of what he was saying. She’d never heard a cop talk like this in her ten years at the LASD.
Ahead of them, the trail levelled out, the path bending away to the south before starting another, gentle climb, and as it did, the hillside dropped away on their right to reveal the summits and hollows of the Hollywood Hills. Jo couldn’t remember the last time she’d been up here but, whenever it was, the weather had been nothing like this. She could feel sweat running off her face, on her arms, down her back. Callson, too, was perspiring: a long, thin patch had darkened his shirt, the stain tracing the ridge of his spine, and every so often he would wipe sweat from his hairline with a finger.
A few minutes later, he pointed ahead of them, to where the path got steeper, the scrub closing in on either side, thick knots of black sage and buckwheat forming waist-high walls, and said, ‘It’s just up here.’ The path dog-legged back on itself again, into another climb, but Callson didn’t go any further; he stopped, pointing to a tiny, trampled offshoot from the main trail.
‘That was where they found him,’ Callson said.
They walked over to it, Jo trying to prevent the sweat getting into her eyes, and then took a couple of steps along the new path. It didn’t lead anywhere, just into a thick tangle of scrub, but she soon spotted crime-scene tape, tied to the branches of a tree twenty feet from her and hanging like a noose.
‘Donald Klein,’ Callson said from behind her.
‘That was his name?’
‘Yeah. Monday morning, a woman was out walking her dog here and found his body lying about where you are now. Klein had eaten his gun. The bullet was a .22.’
Suicide.
And not only that. The same type of bullet that Donald Klein had used to blow his brains out had also been used to kill the man that Jo had found in the acid bath.
So had she found her murderer?
Could it really be this easy?
As she looked at the spot in which Klein had been discovered, she thought of Lieutenant Hayesfield. Cases involving murder-suicides, domestic homicides, killings witnessed by police, or when suspects were caught fleeing from the scene, he called ‘self-solvers’, as they were straightforward, self-explanatory and progressed through the system easily, from the squad room to the courtroom. There was an added bonus, too: they also quickly improved Hayesfield’s clearance rate.
‘It was definitely suicide?’ Jo asked Callson.
‘The ME says yes.’
She looked back at him. ‘And what do you say?’
‘I’d say it’s the most likely scenario. The trajectory of the bullet – the way it travelled so close to the nasal cavity – that would be hard, though not impossible, to replicate if you were trying to make a murder look like a suicide. If someone killed Klein, they’d have had to press so hard into the chin with the gun – in order to get the bullet to go where it did – that there probably would have been evidence of the weapon on his face: scratch marks from the rear sight, maybe an imprint from the barrel or ejection port.’ Callson paused, then shrugged. ‘Like I say, suicide is most likely …’ He faded out, turning in order to take in the view. They could see even more of the city from up here: the skyscrapers of Downtown; Griffith Park; the mountains and the valley beyond. ‘Suicide also makes sense given what was in the trunk of Klein’s car.’
He stepped towards her, handing her the binder, before returning to the path again, mindful of crowding her while she worked. Jo nodded, appreciating the gesture, and opened the murder book. Her eyes zeroed in on what was found in the trunk of Klein’s car, and then the photograph of him, the sun glinting off its glossy surface.
She studied Klein’s face. He was twenty-three, red-haired and awash in freckles, his eyes flecked green and brown and his nose crinkled at the bridge where it must have been broken and badly reset. The picture of him in the file was an arrest photograph, taken in 1983, when he was caught with six ounces of marijuana in a parking lot at the back of a Trader Joe’s in Toluca Lake. He was given a ninety-day sentence. As Jo flicked through the pages of the file, she could see that that had been his only arrest. Since his release in May 1984, he’d been working in the kitchen of a steak and seafood restaurant in Sherman Oaks.
‘Anything more on the vic?’ Callson asked.
Jo looked up, shaking her head. ‘No. He called himself Gabriel Wilzon in the guestbook at the motel, but – like I said on the phone last night – that wasn’t his real name. That alias, it’s a dead end. There are no prints for “Wilzon” because the acid managed to leach the skin from his fingers, and Chen at the ME’s office said dental analysis was going nowhere fast. But, you know …’ She shrugged and watched Callson nod. He understood where her thoughts had landed: if Klein was the guy who’d tried to dissolve a body in a tub of acid, maybe their chances of ID’ing Wilzon just improved.
She looked from the book to the patch of scrub where Klein had shot himself, then back to the book again. Callson was the lead detective, arriving at the scene an hour after the discovery of the body on 22 July, and his work was easy to follow and exhaustive. As she turned a couple more pages, she saw that a pale blue 1983 Ford Fairmont was registered to Klein and that had been the car he’d left in the lot, in pretty much the exact spot in which Jo had left her Oldsmobile. Photos showed the Fairmont in situ, doors open, the cream-coloured interior visible. It was a mess: soda cans, wrappers, the red-and-black uniform he wore at the restaurant. Callson had already confirmed the chronology: Klein finished his shift at 11.30 p.m., and two separate witnesses saw the Fairmont pulling into the north entrance of Runyon Canyon at around midnight.
Her eyes shifted to the photos of the Fairmont’s trunk.
Inside were ten one-gallon containers of muriatic acid. It was the same acid that had been used in the tub at the motel. All ten containers were empty.
‘His prints are all over them,’ Callson said. ‘Whatever else is going on, Klein definitely handled that acid.’
Jo looked up. ‘Whatever else is going on?’
‘Bad choice of words,’ Callson said, smiling.
Except now she remembered what Callson had said to her earlier, his turn of phrase when she’d asked him if it was definitely a suicide: The ME says yes. She took a couple of steps closer to him, coming back on to the trail, as her Casio watch beeped to announce the half-hour. Seven-thirty, and it was hotter than any day she could ever remember. She pinched the material at the front of her shirt and began to fan it back and forth, trying to circulate some cool air. Callson glided a finger across his brow, a thick band of sweat beaded across his skin. She waited for him to say something else, to expand on his last comment, but he didn’t, so she pushed him: ‘Detective Callson?’
He looked at her.
‘You don’t think this is cut and dried?’
He didn’t reply for a moment, and she could see a minor conflict playing out behind his eyes. He grimaced a
little and glanced out at the view.
‘Detective Callson?’ Jo asked again.
‘Ray’s fine,’ he said to her, not changing position, except for a slight narrowing of his eyes. Finally, his gaze strayed to the spot where Donald Klein had been found.
‘Ray, you don’t think this is cut and dried?’
‘Well, I definitely think Klein was involved.’
She eyed him. ‘But?’
‘But I don’t believe he was working alone.’
24
The town of Keighley was only a short drive from Skipton so, as soon as I picked up my car, I headed south to the address that Ewan Tasker had given me for Isaac Mills.
The vehicle was fixed to the extent that it no longer whined or hissed as I drove it, and the front looked better, but it was still misshapen and easy to spot, so I parked it a couple of streets away from Mills’s house and walked the rest. Rain dotted my face as I approached his road, a cul-de-sac on a slope with a park at the top. Halfway up I spotted his home: a large cottage, set behind an imposing set of gates. His Lexus was on the driveway and there were shutters at the windows.
On my left was a sheltered bus stop, one side of it Perspex glass, so I pulled up the hood on my jacket and moved under the roof. The rain was getting harder now, but I could see enough, and as I watched Mills’s home – satisfied I was at a safe enough distance – I got out my mobile phone and switched focus.
Scrolling back through the call log, I found the landline for Kevin Quinn, the detective that Patrick Perry had been in contact with in the months before he vanished.
His former source.
I saved the number and then called Ross again, asking if he’d ever heard of Quinn before. He hadn’t, and he said Quinn wasn’t a friend of his dad’s.
There seemed little point in pressing him because I was already fairly certain that Quinn wasn’t someone Patrick had been to school or university with, so I hung up and gave myself a moment to think. If I called Quinn, I could ask him outright what his connection to Patrick had been and see where it took me – but there was a decent chance I’d spook him and then he’d bring down the barricades. I paused, my thumb hovering over Dial. It was a risk, whichever way I went, but then it was a risk standing here in the rain, three hundred feet from the front door of a man who might have bugged the homes of nine missing people – so I called Quinn’s landline.