Voodoo River (v0.99)

by Robert Crais

  I sat in one of the lobby chairs and opened it. Inside was a typed note:

  Mr. Cole, I regret that I am unable to return the photograph as promised. An associate identified the gentleman, and, as you know, we have acted accordingly. I hope you do not think me small for exceeding the parameters of our association. As I told Mr. Pike, the man with the rifle is always there. Regrettably, the child remains unknown, but perhaps now there will be fewer such children.

  There was no signature, but there didn’t need to be.

  I folded the letter and put it away as Lucy crossed the lobby. The Ho-Jo door was flooded with a noonday light so bright that Lucy seemed to emerge from a liquid sun. She said, “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  “You ready?”

  “Always.”

  We went out to her Lexus and drove to the airport. It was hot, but the sky was a deep blue and vividly clear except for a single puff of white to the east. Lucy held my hand. She released me to steer through a turn, then immediately took my hand again. I said, “I’m going to miss you, Lucy.”

  “Oh, me, too, Studly.”

  “Ben, too.”

  She glanced at me and smiled. “Please let’s not talk about the leaving. We still have time.”

  I kissed her hand.

  We turned into airport parking and went into the terminal, still holding hands, walking as close as two people can walk, as if the most important thing in the world was to occupy the same space and share the same moment. We checked the flight information. I said, “The plane’s here.”

  We walked to the concourse, and I didn’t like it much. In a few days we’d make this drive and walk again, only then I would be leaving. I tried not to think about it.

  We met Jodi Taylor as she came off the plane. She was wearing jeans and a satin vest over a red top, and she was clearly Jodi Taylor. Not hiding now. The pilot was falling all over himself to walk with her, and a guy in a charcoal suit was trying to cut in on the pilot. She looked nervous.

  I said, “Pardon us, gentlemen,” and led her away from them.

  Lucy said, “How’re you doing?”

  Jodi nodded. “I’m okay.” She didn’t look okay. She looked the way you might look if you’d spent the past couple of days with an upset stomach.

  A little girl in a Brownie uniform approached. She was holding what looked like a napkin and a ballpoint pen. Her mother had encouraged her. The little girl said, “Miss Taylor, may I have your autograph?”

  “Sure, honey.” Jodi signed the napkin and tried to smile, but the smile looked weak. Nervous, all right.

  When the little girl was gone, I took Jodi’s hand. “You sure you want this?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I’m sure.”

  “What about Sid and Beldon?”

  Jodi’s face grew hard. “I know what I want.”

  Lucy took Jodi’s other hand, and we walked out of the airport.

  We brought Jodi to pick up Edith, and then the four of us went to visit Chantel Michot. I had called in advance and Chantel was waiting. There was a lot they wanted to talk about.

  IF YOU LOVED VOODOO RIVER, BE SURE TO CATCH

  ROBERT CRAIS’S

  SUNSET EXPRESS

  COMING IN APRIL 1996

  FROM HYPERION.

  HERE’S THE FIRST CHAPTER.

  PROLOGUE

  The sky above the San Fernando Valley that Saturday morning was a deep blue, washed clean of the dirt and chemical particulates that typically color LA. air by a breeze that burbled out of the San Gabriel Mountains and over the flat valley floor and across the high ridge of the Santa Monica mountains. Mulholland Drive snakes along the crest of the Santa Monicas, and, if you were walking along Mulholland as Sandra Bern-son and her father were doing that morning, you would have been able to look south almost forty miles across the Los Angeles basin to the tip of the Long Beach peninsula or north some thirty-five miles across the San Fernando Valley and through the Newhall Pass to the deep purples of the Santa Susanna mountains and the peaks surrounding Lake Castaic. It was a day of unusual clarity, the far horizons magnified as if by some rare trick of optical law that might even allow you to see into the lives of the sleeping millions in the valleys below. Sandra Bernson later said that as she watched the small private airplanes floating into and out of Van Nuys Airport in the center of the valley that morning, she imagined them to be flying carpets. On mornings like these, she later said, it was easy to believe in magic.

  Sandra was a fifteen-year-old honor student at the prestigious Harvard-Westlake School, and her father, Dave Bernson, was a television writer and producer of moderate success, then working as the supervising producer of a popular series on the Fox Television network. The Bernsons lived in £ contemporary home on a small private road ofFMulholland Drive in Sherman Oaks, approximately one mile west of Beverly Glen, and they left their home at exactly 6:42 that morning. Both Sandra and Dave were able to tell investigators their exact departure time because it was Dave’s habit to call out when their walks began so that they could time themselves. They intended to walk east along Mulholland to Warren Beatty’s home approximately one mile east of Beverly Glen, where they planned to reverse course and return. Their typical walk would cover four miles round-trip and take almost exactly fifty minutes. On this particular Saturday, however, they never made it to Beatty’s and they didn’t complete the walk.

  On this Saturday, Sandra Bernson saw the deer.

  They proceeded east from their home, climbing one of Mulholland’s steeper grades to a high, flat stretch of road abreast of Stone Canyon Reservoir. That is Sandra’s favorite part of the walk because she can see the valley to the north and the reservoir to the south, and just before they come to Beverly Glen Canyon they reach the Stone Canyon overlook. The overlook is built into the top of a little knoll there beside Mulholland, with manicured walks and observation points and benches if you want to sit and admire what realtors like to call a 360-degree jetliner view. Sandra remembers that as she and her father reached the top of the overlook she saw the deer creeping up from the valley side of Mulholland, sniffing and listening, and she whispered to her rather, “Look, Dad!”

  “Mule deer. See the size of his ears? It’s a buck, but he’s already shed his horns. See the knobs above his eyes?”

  The deer heard them. It looked in their direction, its huge ears cocked forward, and then it bounded across Mulholland and the overlook’s little parking lot and disappeared. Sandra said, “I wanna see where he goes!”

  She slid across the overlook’s low wall and ran to the edge of the knoll just as the buck vanished near a cut in the slope that had caught a lot of dead brush and beer cans and newspapers and brown plastic garbage bags. Dave arrived at her side a moment later. Everything caught by the cut looked old and dusty and weathered as if it had been there for a very long time, except for the garbage bags. They looked shiny and new, and Sandra was using them as a landmark to point out to Dave where she had last seen the mule deer when she saw the hand sticking out of the bags. The nail polish was very red and seemed to gleam in the breathtakingly clear morning sun.

  It never entered Dave’s mind that the hand might be a movie prop or helong to a mannequin; the moment he saw it he knew it was real. It looked real, and it also looked dead. Dave recalls that he considered working his way down to the body, but then says that he remembered things like clues and evidence, and so he led his daughter back to Mulholland where they flagged down a passing Westec private security car. The security cop, a twenty-ejight-year-old ex-Marine named Art Bell, parked his unit and went to see for himself, then returned to his car and reported the find to the Westec offices. In less than eight minutes, two LAPD patrol units arrived on the scene. The uniforms observed the hand protruding from the plastic, but, as had Dave Bernson, decided not to venture down the slope. The uniforms relayed their observations in code by radio, then secured the area to await the arrival of the detectives.

  Dave Bernson offered to wait also, but by
that time Sandra had to pee real bad, so one of the uniforms drove them home. Forty minutes after Sandra Bern-son and her father were returned to their home, and thirty-nine minutes after Sandra began calling her friends just as quickly as she could to tell them about this incredibly gross thing that had just happened, the first detective unit arrived on the scene.

  Detective Sergeant Dan “Tommy” Tomsic and Detective-two Angela Rossi were in the first car. Tomsic was a powerfully built man who’d spent a dozen years on the street before making the transfer to detectives. He had almost thirty years on the job, and he viewed the world through suspicious, unblinking eyes. Angela Rossi was thirty-four years old, with twelve years on the job, and had been Tomsic’s partner for only five weeks. Rossi spoke her mind, was entirely too confrontational, and, because of this, she had trouble keeping partners. So far Tomsic didn’t seem bothered, but that was probably because he ignored her.

  Eleven minutes after the first car, the senior detectives arrived on the scene. Detective Sergeant Lincoln Gibbs was a tall, thin African-American with mocha-colored skin, a profoundly receding hairline, and tor-toiseshell spectacles. He looked like a college professor, which was a look he cultivated. He had twenty-eight years on the job, less than Tomsic, but more time in grade as a detective sergeant, so Line Gibbs would be in charge. He arrived with Detective-three Pete Bishop, a twenty-two-year veteran with an M.A. in psychology and five divorces. Bishop rarely spoke, but was known to make copious notes, which he referred to often. He had a measured IQ of 178 and a drinking problem. He was currently in twelve-step.

  The four detectives got the story from the uniforms and the Westec cop, then went to the edge of the overlook and stared down at the hand. Gibbs said, “Anybody been down there?”

  One of the uniforms said, “No, sir. It’s undisturbed.”

  The detectives searched the ground for anything that might present itself as evidence—scuff marks, drops of blood, footprints, that kind of thing. There were none. They could see the path that the body had followed as it slid down the slope. Scuffs on the soil, broken and bent plants, dislodged rocks. Line followed the trail with his eyes and figured that the body had been dumped from a point just at the rear of the parking lot. The body was between twelve and fifteen yards down a damned steep slope. Someone would have to go down, and that presented certain problems. You wouldn’t want to follow the same path as the body because that might disturb evidence. That meant they’d have to find another route, only everything else was steeper and the drop-off more pronounced. Line was thinking that it might take mountaineering gear when Angela Rossi said, “I can get down there.”

  The three male detectives looked at her.

  “I’ve done some rock-climbing in Chatsworth and I work terrain like this all the time when I’m backpacking.” She pointed out her route. “I can work my way down the slide over there, then traverse back and come up under the body. No sweat.”

  Dan Tomsic said, “That goddamned soil is like sand. It won’t hold your weight.”

  “It’s no sweat, Dan. Really.”

  Rossi looked like the athletic type, and Gibbs knew that she had run in the last two L.A. marathons. Tomsic sucked down three packs a day, and Bishop had the muscle tone of Jell-O. Rossi was also fifteen years younger than the rest of them, and she wanted to go. Gibbs gave his permission, told her to take the camera, and Angela Rossi went back to the car to trade her Max Avante pumps for a busted-out pair of New Balance running shoes. She reappeared a minute later, and Gibbs, Tomsk, and the others watched as she worked her way down to the body. Tomsk frowned as he watched, but Gibbs nodded in approval—Rossi seemed graceful and confident in her movements. Tomsk was praying that she wouldn’t lose her balance and break her damned neck—one slip and she’d flop ass over teapot another sixty or eighty yards down the slope.

  Down below, Rossi never once entertained the notion that she might fall. She was feeling absolutely confident and more than a little jazzed that it was she who had taken the lead in recovering the body. If you took the lead you got the promotions, and Rossi made no secret that she wanted to become LAPD’s first female chief of detectives. It was a goal she had aggressively pursued since her days at the academy and, though there had been what she called her Big Setback, she still hoped that she could get her career back on track and pull it off.

  When Rossi reached the body, she could smell it. The sun was rising and the dark plastic was heating quickly and holding the heat. As water evaporated from the body it collected on the plastic’s inner surface, and, Rossi knew, it would be humid and damp inside the bag. The victim’s abdomen would swell and the gases of decay would vent. Decomposition had begun.

  Line called down to her, “Try not to move the body. Just take the snaps and peel back the bags.”

  Rossi used the Polaroid to fix the body’s position for the record, then pulled on rubber surgical gloves and touched the wrist, checking for a pulse. She knew that there would be none, but she had to check anyway. The skin was pliant but the muscles beneadi were stiff. Rigor.

  Rossi couldn’t see much, as yet, but the body appeared intact and double-bagged in two dark brown plastic garbage bags. The bags were secured around the body with silver duct tape, but the job appeared to have been done hastily. The bags had parted and the hand had plopped out. Angela Rossi peeled the bags apart to expose the shoulder and head of a blond Caucasian woman who appeared to be in her early thirties. The woman was clothed in what looked like a pale blue Banana Republic T-shirt. The shirt was splattered with blood. Rossi couldn’t see the woman’s lower body. The woman’s left eye was open but her right eye was closed and the tip of her tongue protruded between small, perfect teeth. The hair on the back and right side of her head was ropey and matted with blood. Much of the blood was dried, but there was a shiny, wet quality to much of it, also. The skull at that portion of the hair appeared depressed and dark with blood, and brain matter and ridges of white skull were obvious. The woman’s nose was straight and her features rectangular and contoured. In life, she would’ve been pretty. Angela Rossi had an immediate sense that the woman looked familiar.

  Tomsk yelled down, “Don’t pitch a goddamned tent down there. What’s the deal?”

  Rossi hated it when he spoke to her that way, but she clenched her jaw and took it. She’d been taking it more and smarting off less since the Big Setback. Anything to resurrect the career. She called back without looking at them. “Caucasian female. Early diirties. Blunt force trauma to the back of the head.” She pushed the garbage bag back farther, exposing the victim’s head and shoulders. She saw no additional injuries and wanted to peel back the bags even farther, but was concerned that the body would dislodge and tumble down the slope, possibly taking her with it. She took more pictures, then said, “The blood around the wound appears to be tacky, and it’s wet in some spots. She hasn’t been here long.”

  Bishop said, “Lividity?”

  “A little, but it could be bruising.”

  Above her, Line Gibbs was growing impatient with all the conversation. He didn’t like Rossi perched on such a steep slope, and he wanted to call in the criminalist. He said, “What about a weapon?” Murderers almost always dumped the murder weapon with the body.

  He watched Rossi lean across the body and feel around the bags. She moved out of sight twice, and each time he tasted acid because he diought she’d fallen. Another Tagamet day. He remembers that he was just getting ready to ask her what in hell was taking so long when she said, “Don’t see anything, but it could be under the body or in the bag.”

  Gibbs nodded. “Leave it for the criminalist. Take some more pix and get back up here.”

  Rossi took the remainder of the roll, then worked her way back up the slope. When she reached the top, the others crowded around to see the pictures. All of the male detectives pulled out reading glasses except for Gibbs, who wore bifocals.

  One of the uniformed cops said, “Hey. She looks like somebody.”

  Rossi sai
d, “I thought so, too.”

  She didn’t look like anyone to Gibbs. “You guys recognize her?”

  Bishop was turning the pictures round and round, as if seeing the victim from every possible view was important. All the turning was making Tomsk nauseated. Bishop said, “Her name is Susan Martin.”

  The Westec cop said, “Holy Christ, you’re right. Teddy Martin’s wife.”

  All four detectives looked at him.

  The Westec cop said, “They live right over here in Benedict Canyon. It’s on my route.” Benedict Canyon was less than one mile from the overlook.

  Gibbs said, “I’ll be damned.”

  The four detectives later testified that they thought pretty much the same thing at the same time. Teddy Martin meant money and, more important than money, political power, and that meant the case would require special handling. Dan Tomsic remembers thinking that he wished he had called in sick that day so some other asshole wouldVe answered the call. Special cases always meant special trouble, and investigating officers almost always caught the short end of the deal. Teddy Martin was a rich boy who’d made himself even richer; a successful restauranteur and businessman who used his wealth to cultivate friends and social position and notoriety. He was always having dinner with city councilmen and movie stars, and he was always in the newspaper for giving millions of dollars to all the right causes. Tomsk knew the name because Teddy Martin had opened a new theme restaurant with a couple of movie star partners that his wife had been nagging him to take her to and pay sixty bucks for a couple of pieces of fish just to ogle some second-rate movie props and maybe eyeball some closet-fag actor. Tomsk hated guys like Teddy Martin, but he kept it to himself. Guys like Teddy Martin were headline grabbers and almost always phonys, but a phony with the right connections could end your career.

  Pete Bishop said, “It’s gonna be a headliner. We’d better call the boss.”