Gridlock: The Third Ryan Lock Novel

by Sean Black

  The pattern trailed up the staircase, red breadcrumbs leading towards a corpse. Lock stood back. Should he follow the trail or call the cops?

  A faint moan from upstairs gave him his answer. Skirting a smear of blood, he started to climb the stairs.

  He took them at a steady clip, skipping the globules of blood as he went. Drops of sweat slid down his back. A click from somewhere beneath him was followed by a rush of cold air from the vents, as if the house itself was reading his mind. He checked his watch. It was dead on the hour, which suggested that the air-con coming on was a coincidence of timing rather than anything more sinister.

  He reached the landing and stopped. He listened for the sound and it came again, but this time it had a rasping quality, like the wind rattling through the slats of window blinds.

  It seemed to be coming from behind a door at the far end of the landing. Lock walked towards it, wishing he’d taken the chance and borrowed Ty’s gun.

  He toed the door with his left foot. It opened with an ill-tempered creak. His guts twisted in on themselves as he realized that the sound hadn’t come from the door but from the creature lying on the bed. He couldn’t bring himself to call what was on the bed a man – or a woman. It was human-shaped, but only just.

  He rushed over and started to untie Vince Vice’s left leg, which, freed from its restraints, kicked out, catching him on the side of the head.

  Lock rose to his feet, aware for the first time since he had entered the room that the plasma screen facing the bed was switched on. Two women writhed together on a bed.

  Vince Vice’s face was like a carved Venetian mask with black holes for eyes. Reaching over his body, Lock freed an arm, allowing Vice to roll over to one side into the recovery position. The movement brought a series of screams and an elbow, which had been pared down to bare bone, crashing into Lock’s chest.

  Lock ran to a closet, found some spare sheets and used them to mop up the blood. Within seconds the first sheet was saturated. He grabbed another, clearing the blood from Vice’s face, then jamming a third bundled sheet against his groin which was a mass of gore and shredded soft tissue.

  The creature strained to speak.

  ‘Raven,’ Vice whispered.

  Thirty-five

  Moorpark was Cop Land. A suburb of spacious ranch homes thirty-five miles north-west of Los Angeles, it had the highest concentration of law-enforcement personnel of any area in Greater Los Angeles. It was where the people who dealt with the worst that the metropolis had to offer, the endless litany of casual violence and bad choices, retired at night to raise their families. It was a long commute if you worked downtown or in one of the outlying areas, like East Los Angeles, but the compensation for those long drives was that, for the price of a parking spot on the Westside, you could get a good-sized four-bed detached house. Your daytime might be filled with ghetto nightmares but at night you could retire to the white picket fences of Moorpark to live the dream.

  It was for those reasons that Marilyn Stanner’s husband, Lawrence, had suggested they move out there. That and the fact that they had found a house they had both fallen in love with. They had lived there for more than eight years now and Marilyn had never regretted their decision.

  She liked the house, she liked the street they lived on, she even liked the neighbors. It was also nice to be among people she felt could understand what it was like for her to be married to a man who worked in law enforcement.

  Lawrence put in long hours, and while he tried to save weekends for them, that wasn’t always possible. But when he was at home she had his full attention. As soon as he walked through the door, usually with flowers, he would change into shorts and a T-shirt and they would laze about the pool, drinking wine or firing up the barbecue.

  He was a good man, reliable and solid. He cared about the job but not to the exclusion of her. She looked forward to seeing him, and that was more than many wives could say after so many years of marriage.

  She was in the kitchen, scrubbing the counters, when the doorbell rang. She took off the rubber gloves she was wearing. The doorbell rang again.

  ‘Okay. Okay, I’m coming,’ she called, flustered.

  She opened the door to a neatly dressed man in his late thirties. His truck was parked behind hers in the driveway. It looked like the kind of vehicle used by building contractors. He must have got lost and, on seeing her car in the driveway, stopped for directions.

  ‘Mrs Stanner? Mrs Marilyn Stanner?’ he asked her, with a smile.

  She was taken aback. She had no idea who this man was but he certainly seemed to know her. ‘I’m sorry. Do I know you?’

  The man cut her off. ‘It’s about Lawrence. Your husband.’

  Marilyn felt her face flush. ‘What about him?’

  ‘May I come in?’ the man asked, making a face that spoke of spared embarrassments.

  Marilyn folded her arms but the gesture was undercut by a nervous peek at the surrounding homes. ‘If you could tell me what this is about?’

  The man smiled again, awkwardly this time. ‘It’s of a personal nature. It’s about your husband and a young woman called Raven Lane.’

  Marilyn had heard the name from Lawrence. The young woman the man had just mentioned was being stalked. She had turned to the LAPD for help and Lawrence had been assigned to her case. Then some people had been killed and Lawrence had said that the cops thought she was behind it.

  She had caught sight of Raven’s picture in a file Lawrence had brought home. It had struck her as unusual because he always made a point of leaving work behind at the office. The picture had got her thinking. Raven Lane was young and pretty, and when Lawrence had mentioned her, a sparkle had appeared in his eyes.

  She had dismissed any thought that he might have got involved with her almost immediately. Lawrence wasn’t the type. And, anyway, what would a woman like that want with Marilyn’s husband?

  But now this man was here and suddenly Marilyn wasn’t so sure about anything any more.

  ‘You’d better come in,’ she said, opening the door and ushering him inside.

  Thirty-six

  Response times in this part of Hollywood Division were fast. The first LAPD radio car had arrived within three minutes of Lock’s phone call. An Emergency Medical Service ambulance had followed quickly on its heels. The paramedics disappeared inside and stayed out of sight as more and more LAPD units swarmed the scene. Lock briefed the cops on what he had found and gave the paramedics what information he had before he was cuffed, taken out of Vice’s house and placed in the back of a radio car.

  A full ten minutes later a chopper appeared, buzzing low. At first Lock took it for a local news-station helicopter until he saw the Helicopter Emergency Medical Service livery on the side of the fuselage and a couple of patrol officers clearing a space for it to land in the street outside. The front door opened and four EMS technicians appeared carrying a stretcher, a body stretched out on top of it. An oxygen mask covered the face rather than a blanket. Vince Vice was still alive, but judging from the gaunt features of those carrying him it was a close-run thing.

  A gurney was flicked out, the stretcher laid on top, and they wheeled Vice out towards the street. They passed the car on the way and Lock glimpsed the bandages covering Vice’s eyes, medical tape holding them in place. One hand dangled free, clenching and unclenching into a fist, a hint of the agony he must be feeling beneath the cloud of morphine.

  Waiting for the ambulance to arrive, Lock had tried to get a name or a description out of Vice but Vice had incanted Raven’s name like a mantra before lapsing into unconsciousness. It didn’t help Lock much.

  The officer in the front of the radio car in which Lock was sitting shifted round, shooting a smirk in his direction. ‘He fight you, huh?’

  Lock gave him a grim smile in return. ‘If this had been down to me, he’d be dead.’

  As the gurney shifted from sight, Lock noticed a cluster of LAPD officers at the gate, suits from Robbery Homicid
e Division starting to appear among all the uniforms. Lock recognized one from television. Strickler. Strickling. Something like that. He was about five foot ten, with cropped grey hair. From his body language and that of the other men around him, Lock guessed he was the head honcho. He was looking at Lock now, and made his way over to the radio car.

  Next thing Lock knew the officer was taking the cuffs off him and pulling him out of the vehicle.

  ‘Mr Lock, I’m Lieutenant John Strickling, Special Homicide Division. You want to tell me what’s going on here?’

  Lock squared his shoulders. ‘I can tell you everything I saw and heard since I got here, sure.’

  Strickling gave the briefest of nods. ‘I’d appreciate that.’ He waved over a couple of other detectives and together they formed a small huddle around Lock as he took them through his journey to the house. He pinned down times, knowing that would put him in the clear for any involvement with what had happened to Vice.

  ‘So you wanted to speak to Mr Aronofsky about how he had treated your fiancée?’ Strickling asked, when he had finished.

  ‘Something like that,’ Lock agreed.

  The front door of the house was open and Strickling glanced towards the bloody entrance foyer. ‘Only someone beat you to it. Do you know when your girlfriend, Ms Delaney, was here?’

  Lock told him. Strickling went quiet for a moment. ‘And you’re sure on both those times?’

  ‘Give or take five minutes either side.’

  ‘Huh,’ said Strickling, frowning.

  ‘It gives us a problem, doesn’t it, Lieutenant?’

  Strickling stared at Lock, deadpan, too much of a pro to say anything. ‘You think?’ he asked Lock finally.

  ‘I don’t think so, I know so. Between Carrie seeing him alive and me finding him, Raven Lane’s been in custody. Which also means that unless we find whoever’s responsible for these killings fast, more people may end up dead.’

  Thirty-seven

  Carrie had spent all day on the phone, filling in some of the gaps relating to the Cindy Canyon murder and chasing down what she could about the Russian businessman Raven had seen in Vegas. Cindy had last been seen alive at her apartment in Marina Del Rey, an upmarket area just south of Santa Monica, which had grown popular with singles over the years, since international cabin crew from nearby LAX had begun to spend their layover days in the area.

  The LAPD believed that, as well as her work as an adult-movie star, Cindy had done some escorting on the side. She also stripped, working rarely and always as a featured dancer.

  The three activities were commonly intertwined. Adult movies didn’t pay well but they gave a young woman a profile that meant she could charge ten times the amount she would normally earn by escorting and stripping. And although the stripping was common knowledge, the escorting was usually hotly denied by the women involved.

  Carrie also learned that, along with Las Vegas and, to a lesser extent, New York and Washington DC, Los Angeles was the epicenter of the American sex industry. Huge sums of money were involved. The adult-movie industry was worth billions, amounts that actually exceeded the revenue generated by Hollywood. Of course, ask any man on the street whether he ever consumed pornography and the answer was invariably in the negative. This meant that the men involved were even more elusive than the consumers of movies. Someone who was capable of paying an escort like Cindy Canyon several thousand dollars for an evening’s companionship wasn’t the type of man who would wish to have his identity known. The LAPD also told Carrie that girls like Cindy attracted not only Hollywood’s A-list but also heavyweight figures from the world of business and politics. Any vice-related murder in Los Angeles was always handled with care: once you started turning over rocks, there was no knowing who might scuttle out, blinking, into the sunlight.

  According to a neighbor, the last person to see Cindy had been a security guard at the complex when she had returned home in the late afternoon. After that there was no record of her leaving and her phone records, at her apartment and for her cell phone, had yielded nothing of value. Cindy, it seemed, had simply vanished into thin air – until her head had appeared in a newspaper vending machine in downtown.

  The LAPD had canvassed everyone who lived in the apartment complex and run their names through local and national databases but, apart from the usual Driving While Under the Influence convictions, and some minor drug or assault charges, no one had seemed suspicious. Of course, now the LAPD had a link back to Raven, they were playing it as some kind of adult diva rivalry gone nuclear. It wrapped everything up nice and neatly. But Carrie wasn’t so sure.

  The evening had brought a chill to the air and a swell to the ocean running in underneath the house. Lock walked into the kitchen from the garage, throwing a set of car keys on to the marble counter. He looked like hell.

  ‘You okay?’ Carrie asked him, concerned.

  ‘Vice was attacked. I just spent the last two hours convincing Robbery Homicide that it wasn’t me. Other than that, I’m terrific.’

  Carrie scrambled from her place on the couch, grabbed the remote for the TV and clicked it on. The glass and steel house came immediately into view, crime tape, ochre yellow in the fading light, marking its boundaries. ‘How bad?’

  ‘Bad. And I think whoever did it left him just about alive as some kind of warning.’

  ‘You think Raven did it?’

  Lock shook his head. ‘Not unless the cops drove her there from custody. She was with me in Vegas and then she was arrested.’

  Carrie whistled as she sank down on the couch. ‘So she’s innocent?’

  ‘Looks that way.’ Lock rolled his shoulders. ‘You find anything on the Russian she met in Vegas?’

  Carrie picked up a yellow legal pad from the table. ‘Gregori Istanyovich. Fifty-four-year-old Russian oligarch. Richer than dirt. Various business interests. Not straight-up Mafia but connected. Likes beautiful women. That’s what you already had, apart from the name.’

  ‘And someone didn’t like him seeing Raven either. Sounds like he got off lightly if all he had was threats.’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s how he sees it, Ryan. I spoke to a contact in the Justice Department. Istanyovich is pissed about getting dragged into all of this. He wants to find out who’s behind these threats as much as we do.’

  ‘Well, good luck to him,’ Lock said. ‘Because right now none of us has a goddamn clue who that is.’

  Thirty-eight

  It was late by the time Lawrence Stanner finally got on the freeway for the long drive home. He’d called his wife to see if she wanted him to pick up dinner but there had been no answer and then her cell phone had gone straight to voicemail. After that he’d gotten the call about Vice. They were right back at square one and Raven’s attorney was already doing some major grandstanding, pressing for her client to be released, even though they still had some fairly solid evidence tying her to the first two vics.

  Turning into his street, Stanner noticed the white contractor’s truck behind his wife’s red Suburban. Perfect. Company was the last thing he needed. He didn’t recognize it as belonging to anyone they knew. God, he hoped she wasn’t having someone give them a quote on the kitchen she wanted.

  There was no space to park behind the truck so he pulled up alongside his wife’s Suburban and got out. Something jarred in him.

  His twenty-five years as a cop meant that he knew when something was off kilter. Stanner’s right hand immediately fell to his service weapon as he glanced back at the strange truck. The hairs at the back of his neck were on point. His heart was beating a little faster.

  He ducked under the big bay window at the front of the house, then took a quick peek. The living room was empty, and everything was as it should have been. Oprah Winfrey’s face filled the forty-inch TV screen that he’d had mounted on the wall. Oprah was like a living goddess to Marilyn. She never missed an edition. But Marilyn wasn’t sitting on the couch watching this one.

  Stanner pulled back
the slide on his Glock and dropped the safety, keeping the gun at his side, out of sight of the casual observer. He glanced back across the street to Doug Preston’s house. Doug was recently divorced and worked for the county sheriff but his car was absent from his drive. If he’d been home, Stanner could have asked him for help. Better to appear paranoid than dead – that was one lesson he’d taken away from his work with the TMU. Safety first.

  He ducked back under the bay window and returned to his car. For a moment he thought about calling the local Moorpark deputies but he checked himself. He was a cop. He was armed.

  He skirted down the side of the house, listening hard for his wife’s voice. Flattening himself against the wall, he took his time, waiting until he reached the corner before he stepped out.

  There was a sudden movement behind him. He went to turn but before he could face whoever had been lurking around the corner he felt a slashing pain and his neck was suddenly wet. A man’s arms wrapped around him from behind and he took another blow, this time to the side of his head. The last thing he saw was the fading sunset on the horizon, a soft orange ball settling itself above the swimming pool at the rear of the house. Then came sudden night.

  Thirty-nine

  Day was breaking in Malibu, and while Carrie was taking her turn in the shower, Lock sat on the end of the bed and watched live coverage of a man and a woman’s bodies being removed from a quiet suburban street in Moorpark. If the window of opportunity for Raven to kill Vice had been wafer thin, and hinged on Lock knowing about it, there could be no doubt in anyone’s mind that she couldn’t have committed what the media had already dubbed the Copland Killings.