Naked Addiction

by Caitlin Rother

  “Seth,” he said, trying to regain his attention. “Have you ever been fingerprinted?”

  “Nope.”

  It occurred to Goode that Seth might have been arrested and released before he was booked, thanks to a well-connected family attorney. “Well then, how would we know they were your prints in the apartment?”

  “I don’t know. I just thought—” Seth trailed off and shook his head, glancing away.

  “You thought what?”

  He stared right into Goode’s eyes, probably the same way he did when he was closing a deal. “I was concerned you were going to think I did it. And I didn’t.”

  Smart boy. “Well, that’s not out of the realm of possibility,” he said. “We aren’t ruling anyone out as a suspect right now. When did you last see her?”

  Leaning his arms on the table, Seth glanced up at the wall clock as if it might help tell his story. “Well, I left her apartment around two thirty on Saturday afternoon. We’d stayed up all night—” he said, pausing, “getting to know each other. So we slept late and then just lounged around for a while. She said she wanted to take a long bath and do a few things before she and her friend met us at Pumphouse. Said she’d be there at eight or eight thirty. I got to the bar at eight fifteen and she wasn’t there. Keith showed up at nine and we had a few beers. I called her around nine thirty and got her machine. I called one more time around ten, but there was still no answer.”

  “Did you leave a message?”

  “No. We ended up leaving and went to a party out by San Diego State. It seemed a little strange considering we’d gotten along so well, but I just figured she freaked out at how fast things were going and blew me off. I mean, I met her in a bar, you know? I hardly knew her. There are a lot of flakes out there.”

  Yes, there definitely are. “What about you?” he asked Keith, who was doodling on a lined yellow pad, and seemed startled by the question.

  “What?” he asked, letting out another chirp.

  “Why were you at her apartment yesterday? I saw you coming down the fire escape.”

  Seth now seemed just as startled as Keith and just as interested in his friend’s answer. Everyone knows murderers often revisit the scene of the crime.

  “I was—”

  “You were what?” Goode interrupted. He stared at him. Hard. Waiting.

  “I was looking for Seth and I thought he might be there,” Keith said, his fingers tightening around the pen. “One of our clients was antsy to close a deal and Seth wasn’t answering his cell.”

  “How would you know where Tania lived?”

  “What do you mean?” Keith asked, chirping again.

  “Well, unless you were both there Friday or Saturday night. Were you?”

  Keith and Seth looked at each other, confused, both shaking their heads.

  “Where did you get that idea?” Seth said, his brow furrowed.

  Goode couldn’t see why they would hide a threesome thing, but how else would Keith know where Tania lived? Then he heard the fear creep into Keith’s voice.

  “Seth was the one who hooked up with her, he just told you that,” he said.

  “Okay. How about answering my first question?”

  “Which one?” Keith asked, his hand shaking around the pen. “He was with me at the Pumphouse Saturday night like he said, then we went to that party.”

  “Right. So maybe you both stopped over at her apartment on the way.”

  “No,” they chorused.

  “We’re good friends but we’re not into that kind of action,” Seth said.

  “So maybe you went alone to her house after the party?” Goode said, hammering at Seth.

  “No,” Seth said in a very measured tone, as if he were trying not to get angry. “Keith and I left the party together around one thirty. I dropped him off at his house and then went home.”

  “Keith, I’m waiting. How did you know where Tania lived?”

  Goode could tell that he had Keith in a precarious position, and he folded just as he’d expected. Only the answer wasn’t what Goode had anticipated.

  “This is going to sound like I was spying, but I wasn’t,” Keith said. “I saw Seth pick up Tania in his car outside the bar Friday night so I followed them, just to see what was going on. Sorry, dude. I know that sounds weird. But you have such a way with women. I was trying to learn something.”

  Goode decided to drop the issue, for the moment anyway, and tucked away the details of this strange relationship for more thought later. “Okay. Seth, let’s get back to the time you spent with Tania. Did you use a condom?”

  “She said she was on the pill,” Seth said.

  Goode wondered if he was the only man on the planet who wasn’t in denial about AIDS and STDs. Not that he had anything to worry about these days. He didn’t have sex with anyone but himself. However, unsafe sex by the suspects in this particular case was a good thing, at least in terms of facilitating DNA matches.

  “I think we’d better take a trip to the station and take some samples,” Goode said, sighing, as if it were a big hassle.

  “What kind of samples?” Seth asked quietly.

  “Saliva for DNA testing. We’ll need to rule you out as suspects,” Goode said. “This appears to be a sexually-related crime.”

  “You seem to be referring to both of us here,” Keith said.

  “As a matter of fact, I am.”

  Keith scrunched up his face and let out a whine. “Aw, man.”

  “Why,” Goode asked, “is that a problem?”

  “No, I’ve just got a couple big prospects today and I don’t have time for this,” Keith said. “I also don’t understand why you need a sample from me.”

  “Yeah. Me neither,” Seth said. “I already told you I had sex with her. Of course you’re going to find traces of me, you know, wherever.”

  “Standard procedure,” Goode said.

  He didn’t tell them there was no such thing.

  Chapter 14

  Sgt. Stone

  “Why don’t you two settle in and make yourselves comfortable here, and I’ll get us some coffee,” Sergeant Stone told Tony and Helen Marcus as he led them from the lobby into his office.

  It was 11 A.M. and Stone was expecting a call any minute from Byron about the autopsy results. He was going to bring in Goode and make it a conference call—if he could remember how to do it on the phone system.

  “Do you have anything yet on the bastard who killed my daughter?” Tony growled. “The memorial service is tomorrow in Beverly Hills and I’ll bet you he shows up.”

  “No, sir, I’m sorry we don’t. But you might be right, so I’ll be sure to have one of my men there,” Stone said. “Detective Goode, whom I believe talked with both of you last night, will come up to do surveillance. I’ll be right back with the coffee.”

  Stone went into the kitchenette across the hall, where he could watch them interact without them knowing and look for any suspicious behavior. As he observed them trying to hang their jackets on the backs of their chairs, the slippery material kept sliding onto the floor. Tony finally gave up and draped his blazer over his knees. Helen left hers on the floor, where it lay in a crumpled pile of cream-colored linen until Tony picked it up and put it in his lap.

  Stone had seen many parents who had lost a child. It was never pretty. The Marcuses both looked exhausted and hungover, their eyes bloodshot and red around the rims. Stone, who’d been sober for ten years now, thought he’d detected that sweet smell of scotch on Helen. It could have been some bad perfume, but that seemed unlikely given that she was carrying a Fendi purse. She sat stiffly in her chair and kept snapping and unsnapping the thing, open and closed, while Tony rubbed his hands over each other. It seemed they were doing everything possible to avoid breaking a composure that could crack any minute like ice dropped into a cold drink. Stone wasn’t eager to see the raw emotions that lay underneath the façade, unless, of course, they had something to do with their daughter’s murder.

&n
bsp; “How do you like your coffee?” Stone called from the hallway.

  “Black,” Tony said.

  “Just cream for me,” Helen said hoarsely. “With Sweet ‘N Low if you have it.”

  “I’ll check around, ma’am.”

  Those closest to the victim were always suspects, and although it was highly unusual for a parent to kill his or her own child, Tania’s seemed awfully anxious. Before they’d arrived that morning, Stone had told Slausson and Fletcher to do background checks on them just in case, and nothing came up but a few speeding tickets. They also had been victims of a recent car burglary in their driveway.

  Stone filled three Styrofoam cups with fresh brew from the coffeemaker, which he balanced on his binder, and walked them slowly and carefully into his office. He’d almost made it to the desk when one of the cups fell, splashing its contents on the floor in front of Helen.

  “Oh, God, look what I did,” Stone said. “Did I get any on you?”

  He reluctantly looked up from the floor to see a tie-dyed pattern of brown stains on her linen suit. “Oh, geez, look at your skirt. I’m so sorry,” he said. “Let me run and get some napkins.”

  The sound of Helen cackling followed him into the hallway and into the kitchen, where he searched frantically through the kitchen cupboards for paper towels, napkins, or anything absorbent.

  Oh, no. What did I do? Now she’s lost control.

  Stone poured a new cup of coffee for Helen. When he returned to his office with it and a handful of napkins, she was dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. She’d been crying, not laughing. Apparently, his were not the only raw nerves in the room. He handed her the coffee and some fresh tissues from the box on his desk, then used the napkins to mop up the brown puddle at her feet.

  “I’m so sorry about your suit,” he said, embarrassed. “Please send me the dry cleaning bill.”

  “That’s all right,” she croaked. “It’s par for the course, I guess.”

  The phone rang. It was Byron. “Yeah, hold on,” Stone told him. “I’ve got to figure out this conference call thing in the office next door.”

  He excused himself, went into the neighboring office and closed the door. He didn’t want the Marcuses to hear any graphic details in case they told the media something that could harm the investigation. Those goddamned reporters were always pushing that “right to know” crap on innocent people.

  Stone fiddled with the phone until he had Byron and Goode patched in on the call before filling them in on the new high-priority status of the case.

  “You guys aren’t going to believe this,” Byron said.

  “Okay, shoot,” Goode said.

  “There were two areas of semen deposits.”

  “What do you mean?” Goode and Stone said simultaneously.

  “Well, in and on her body, if you know what I’m saying.”

  “Not exactly,” Goode said.

  “Well, there was some crusty semen on her stomach and there also was some left in her vagina, so we took samples of both and we’ll have them tested for DNA—ASAP,” Byron said.

  “Really?” Goode asked, his mind racing with possibilities, one of which was to outlaw all acronyms.

  “So you know what that sounds like, right?”

  “I’m not sure,” Goode said, “What?”

  “Sounds like a threesome to me. Unless it was one guy who missed the target the first time.”

  “Could be,” Stone said.

  “Byron might be right,” Goode said. “That fits with my line of thinking after interviewing my two witnesses this morning. They were acting suspiciously like suspects. Coincidentally, they both denied the ménage-a-trois theory, but I got them to give voluntary saliva samples down at the station. Talk about dumb luck.”

  “Maybe not so dumb,” Stone said. “Good work, Goode.” He made use of the stupid pun on the detective’s name as often as possible. He knew it was childish, but he figured what the hell.

  “But wait. I’m not done. There’s another weird thing,” Byron said, pausing for effect.

  “Well, don’t keep us in suspense,” Goode said.

  “She wasn’t strangled to death.”

  “What do you mean?” Goode said. “Those were some nasty marks on her neck.”

  “Well, the pathologist said there were no pinpoint hemorrhages in the whites of her eyes and no internal bruising or bleeding under the ligature marks,” Byron said. “That means her heart had already stopped when someone tied something around her neck and pulled until they broke the skin.”

  “So—” Stone said, “where that does leave us?”

  “It means at this point they can’t say what killed her.”

  “You’re kidding me,” Goode said. “That’s never good.”

  “No, it isn’t. But hopefully, we’ll know more when the tox results come back,” Byron said, referring to the toxicology tests, which would show what, if any, drugs were in Tania’s system when she was killed.

  The last time Goode had asked why those tests always seemed to take so many weeks to come back from the ME’s office, his buddy, investigator Artie Hayes, explained that they took time, and with all the death going around, the lab was pretty backed up. But now that their case had been put on the fast track, they would get a quicker turnaround.

  “Wow. That’s a lot to digest,” Goode said. “Thanks. I think.”

  “So what was the time of death?” Stone said.

  “Saturday between 9 and 10:30 P.M.”

  Stone told the detectives he had to cut the small talk short because Tania’s parents were waiting next door. Byron signed off after saying he planned to head over to the crime lab to make personal contact with the techs and go over what tests they were doing, but Stone said he’d already gone down there first thing after the chief’s visit, so they’d already been forewarned.

  “Goode, Tania’s parents said the memorial service is tomorrow morning at ten in Beverly Hills, so you’ll need to drive up for that,” Stone said. “You have anything to add?”

  “I just had a thought.”

  “Don’t hurt yourself,” the sergeant said, chuckling.

  “Now that we have this double-semen theory, I’ll be very curious to see those DNA results. I sent Seth and Keith on their way and suggested they might want to stay in town. I’ll check out their timeline for Saturday night with the bartender and we should have Slausson or Fletcher talk to whoever threw that party at SDSU. For all I know the bartender is playing CYA along with these two. I also think I ought to head up to LA early to check out some of her ex-boyfriends and other folks I found in the diary. What do you think?”

  “Sounds promising.”

  “You think the RCFL will have those emails ready for us yet?”

  “You’re feeling awfully optimistic, today, Goode. You know they don’t get things done overnight.”

  “Yeah, well, I have a feeling there will be some juicy stuff there. Especially after reading her diary. London said he’d have the phone contact list for me this morning, so I’ll stop by his office right now and see where we are.”

  “Not a bad idea, but be nice, Goode. I heard London is new, just in from Washington, DC. I don’t know anything about him.”

  “You know me, chief. Charm’s the word.”

  “So what’s your gut so far?”

  “Well, based on her lifestyle, it could easily be a case of Mr. Goodbar. But it could just as easily be someone she already knew. The short-term problem is that it’s going to take some time to weed through the chaff before we can see who’s important. I’m betting there’s some drug tie-in, possibly through the beauty school, or maybe through the Pumphouse. Something hinky is definitely going on with Seth Kennedy and Keith Warner, but I’m not sure what their deal is yet. We’ll have a better idea once we get the DNA tests. I’m guessing they’ll show proof of the threesome. You sent over the cigarette butts for DNA tests, too, right?”

  “Absolutely. George, down at the crime lab, is on top of all of that
. Anything you’re not telling me?”

  “No, nothing solid, really. I’ll fill you in as soon as I get a better handle on things. And don’t worry. It’s all good.”

  Chapter 15

  Goode

  So Tania wasn’t strangled to death, but she probably was gang-banged, Goode thought as he was driving east on the freeway. Not a pretty picture.

  When Goode arrived at the RCFL office, John London came right out after the receptionist buzzed him. He was a young, stern-looking guy, with very closely cropped hair, and all business.

  “Come on back,” London said. “I’ve found some interesting stuff for you.”

  Pleased to hear this after his rough morning at the beach, Goode was determined to be optimistic that his day was turning around. “Well that’s a nice surprise, Mr. London,” he said. “We’re going to get along just fine.”

  London’s serious expression gave way to a slight smile. “Since this is my first case here in San Diego, I wanted to start off right so I worked straight through the night,” he said.

  First, he explained, he copied the contents of Tania’s hard drive and cell phone so as not to disturb the originals. Then he started searching her texts and emails for any mention of cocaine, methamphetamine or other recreational drug use. He, too, had seen the white powder on the tabletop when he’d come to collect his hardware. Unfortunately, though, that was a dead end. So, he printed out all the incoming and outgoing emails for the past year, and put them in a thick binder for Goode. He had just started searching her Internet browser history, and most of what had come up so far were porno sites. As he handed Goode the phone contact list as promised, he said he hadn’t gotten to everything else she’d stored on her cell, like photos, calendar, schedule, and such.

  “Damn, she sure knew a lot of men,” London said. “I’m not sure how she had enough time to do everything she was doing professionally and still collect so many of them. You might be interested in the emails from the past couple of weeks, where she’s talking about setting up an escort service with this other woman.”