“That’s exactly what the District Attorney’s office told me,” Kaye said.
Marella smiled, stepped to her desk and picked up a small manila envelope.
“Here you go, Detective,” she said, handing it to Kaye. “Everything is on the thumb drive.” She paused for a beat, then added, “I assumed you would be more interested in what happened before the murders, so I went back several weeks and up until last Friday when she came in and asked to see them. I hope you don’t mind, but I do have to ask you to sign for them.”
“Not a problem. If I need any more records, can I call you?”
“Of course.”
At least Kaye knew what he’d be doing in the morning.
DAY 10
Wednesday Week 2
Kaye opened the thumb drive and found three files. One was named Video, one was named SysLog and one was named TipSheet.
He opened and scanned each of them, then tackled the video archive first. It captured every car that went in and out, with a date and time stamp displayed on the screen. Because he didn’t have Sullivan’s private sign-in sheets for reference, his strategy was to write down the make, model, color and plate number of every vehicle that came through the gate. Then he ran registrations to match a name to each vehicle, did a quick on-line search to try and determine who was who and make sure they were entering legitimately, and logged everything in sequence.
Megan Sullivan was right.
Even at $18M there was a lot of interest in the house above Paloma Canyon Country Club.
It didn’t take him long to start recognizing the same vehicles coming and going and identifying them as local realtors. There were six or seven of them working the house pretty hard, accounting for the lion’s share of the visits. Surprisingly, Sullivan wasn’t one of them, showing up infrequently during the days before the murders. He did learn that Sullivan drove a late-model, white Escalade, but the registration return didn’t match, which puzzled him.
Kaye wondered why she wasn’t around much until he realized that she’d collect her commission as the listing agent and was probably happy letting other realtors do the leg work.
He watched the landscaping crew coming and going on Mondays, and he watched the SecureLife mobile patrol dutifully checked the front gate every morning and every evening. He saw what he assumed was the housekeeping van enter late on the first Friday of the records and Thursday evening six days later, then at least once a week and stay for an extended time on each occasions. But the van’s license plate light was burned out and it was always too dark to read the plate.
Most times a realtor came and went, it was the only vehicle on the video, leading Kaye to conclude that prospective buyers typically rode with their realtors. Occasionally, though, another car would follow the realtor through the gate. None were ever left behind and he classified them as potential buyers, logging them separately for later research as needed.
Ninety percent of the traffic was, understandably, on the weekends, and on some weekdays no vehicles came and went at all. It was clear from the traffic that over the weekend ten days before the murders there had often been more than one realtor with potential buyers on the grounds at the same time. Sullivan arrived early and stayed most of the day. He wondered if there had been an open house, maybe a price reduction, and that had generated new interest. It would have also let people that hadn’t been screened inside to see the house and its contents.
On the day of the murders he watched himself arrive at the front gate and jump up to look over the wall to confirm he was in the right place. An hour later Megan Sullivan arrived and waited ten minutes for an LAPD marked unit to show up before opening the gate. The unit left some thirty minutes later and Sullivan followed about ten minutes after that.
The days following the murders the only footage was of Sullivan meeting people several times a day and letting them in. All of the vehicles were trucks with business logos on the doors, and all of them matched the kinds of businesses Sullivan would likely call to repair vandalism damage. To Kaye, that also explained why the cleaning service van didn’t visit that week. But it also reminded him that the service had never responded to his request for a call.
He hadn’t really expected to get an up-close shot of the shooter, posing for the cameras and holding up his driver’s license in one hand and his rifle in the other.
But it would have been nice.
After exhausting the video log, he tackled the TipSheet file.
It contained a series of instructions for decoding typical lines of data recorded in SysLog. Sample entries were displayed, then broken into bracketed segments; each segment then tagged to an explanation. The last page was a layout of the property in Paloma Canyon, complete with a floor plan of the house, accompanied by a list of installed components and their individual locations and system identifiers.
He sent the file to the printer, retrieved it and opened SysLog. It was line after line, without the TipSheet training wheels.
“Not as bad as I thought,” he muttered to himself, then started at the top.
He’d learned from TipSheet that each line of data represented a specific system event or activity, from alarms to system activations and deactivations to component activity to system maintenance, each dated and time-stamped to the second. His task was somewhat simplified by a bold ‘END OF DAY’ entry and a break between lines before the next day’s entries began.
Keeping TipSheet handy, he studied the file and patterns began to emerge. He soon recognized when the system was armed or disarmed at the console and when the front gate was opened or closed.
He first worked his way through the file cross-checking dates and times he’d logged from the video file against the SysLog entries and checked off those that matched. There were no unsuccessful attempts to open the gate or vehicles unaccounted for, but he wished he had Sullivan’s sign-in sheets to confirm identities.
Next he checked TipSheet to confirm the unauthorized access/intrusion code. He went through SysLog without finding a match, which squared with Marella’s original information. He did find several instances where whoever had entered the house had fumble-fingered the disarm code at the console, but corrected it before an alert was sent to SecureLife.
On two days during the week before the murders, the only entries in SysLog were system diagnostics and the system dump to the SecureLife servers.
It was laborious, time-consuming work, typical of the glamorous life of a detective.
When he matched his logged visits of Gallegos Landscaping to the SysLog data, he noticed a possible anomaly. On the Monday the week before the murders, there were no lines of activity codes between those recording the gate activation to get in and the crew’s exit. But on the day before the murders, multiple lines of activity codes were noted while the landscapers were on site.
The lines showed that the front door had been opened and the system disarmed, then re-armed, and the correct door reset code entered. But there were also multiple lines indicating component activity, with no matching identifiers on the TipSheet.
He went back to the video.
The front camera clearly showed a landscape company truck entering at the matching time recorded in SysLog, then leaving later, again at a matching time. No other vehicles showed on the video.
But someone had entered the house, disarmed the system, then, according to what Kaye could decipher, manipulated components and re-armed the system twenty minutes before the landscapers showed up on video closing the front gate.
He made some notes and grabbed the phone.
“SecureLife, this is Marella.”
“Hi, Marella, it’s Detective Kaye again. I hate to bother you, but I’ve been through the SysLog file and have a couple questions.”
“That’s fine. What do you need?”
“There are entries in the log that have the code ‘GP’, followed by a number, in them and there’s no reference on the TipSheet you included. Thank you for that, by the way.”
/> “Glad it helped,” Marella said. “That GP code means that a group of components was turned off, the 10 identifies which component group it was. It’s meant to save the client time if they want to turn off, say, an entire floor of motion sensors, things like that. They don’t have to stand at the console and do it one at a time.”
“If someone turns off a component, either one or a group, and then turns the system off, does the component come back on line when the system is turned back on?”
“First of all, the system is never really off unless there’s a power outage that exhausts the battery backup, which is designed to last for days. As long as it has power it’s in communication with our operations center. The client can arm and disarm the system at the console, but even when it’s disarmed, it’s on. Components can be turned off, and do not automatically reset when the system status is changed. That has to be done at the console.”
“Why would people turn off components?”
“Lots of reasons, mostly cost and convenience. We charge for data usage and storage, and sometimes you might want the system armed for perimeter security but not have inside motion detectors on, or not want to keep creating video files if a lot of your teen-ager’s friends are coming and going, things like that.”
“Does the system remember that for them?”
“Yes, it does. There’s a display option that lists component groups and reminds clients what’s on and what’s off.”
“Makes sense when you think about it,” Kaye said. “I also noticed that when things get busy with cars going in and out of the front gate there are videos of people arriving, but not leaving. Is that because of the video file limitation and camera time-out we talked about before?”
“Yes. The time-out is to save disk space. For example, if the exterior gate camera is triggered by the motion detector it records for ten seconds and goes off if the keypad isn’t used. If the gate is left open, there’s a designated interval before the camera stops recording. It doesn’t reset until the gate is closed, either from the inside or outside.”
“What about the motion sensor outside the gate?”
“If the gate is open and the system times out, the motion sensor also times out.”
“Seems like a hole in the system to me.”
Marella laughed. “Not really. The presumption is that if clients want to restrict who’s coming and going, they won’t leave the gate standing open.”
“Yeah,” Kaye replied, “I guess that would be logical. Thanks, Marella. Appreciate the help.”
“You’re welcome, Detective. Call me if you need anything else.”
Kaye leaned back and went over the conversation. What Marella had said about disabling components, camera priority and time-outs made him stop and think.
He grabbed his phone again.
“This is Hernan. How may I help you?”
“Hernan, Detective Kaye. Got a minute? We need to talk.”
“For you, sure,” Hernan said. “Is this about the movie producer?”
“Yes.” Kaye gave Hernan a bare-bones run-down of the house’s security system and video log, and asked, “Do your crews have the codes to get inside the houses you take care of?”
“No, we don’t want them and don’t even ask for them. We have no reason to go inside. Why do you ask?”
“I think your guys may have left the gate open up on Paloma Canyon Road. I think somebody else got in.”
“What?” Hernan exclaimed. “Are you sure, one hundred percent?”
“Ninety-nine, yes, unless one of your people somehow got the codes and went inside.”
“Idiotas,” Hernan said sharply and went quiet for a few seconds before continuing. “Detective, can you hold on? I’ll make a call to figure this out. I’ll just join him to our call, if that’s all right. You’ll be on speaker, okay?”
“That’s fine,” Kaye said.
Kaye’s phone went quiet for a moment before Hernan came back on.
“Detective, I have Rigo, the head of the crew that takes care of that house, on with us. His English is pretty good, but I might have to translate some things.”
“That works,” Kaye said. “Hello, Rigo.”
“Hola,” came the response, then, in English, “How can I help you?”
Kaye asked about the gate being left open on the day before the murders.
Hernan went ahead and translated. Kaye’s Spanish wasn’t great, but being a cop in L.A. meant you needed to pick up the basics and he thought he’d be able to tell if Hernan was sandbagging him.
Rigo answered in Spanish, and it took him a minute.
“He says,” Hernan said, “that sometimes they have to leave the gate open, depending on what vehicles and equipment they have that day. He says our large trailers are easier to leave on the street instead of trying to turn them around inside when they leave and it’s too dangerous to back out because the road is so winding. Because they go back and forth so much for tools and equipment, they leave the gate open. He also says that he always has somebody working in the front to watch if the gate is open.”
“Ask him if he’s positive the gate got closed when they left?”
Hernan asked.
“Si,” Kaye heard Rigo say immediately. “Absolutamente.”
“I got that,” Kaye told Hernan. “Rigo, did anybody else come to the house Monday of last week while you were there?”
“Si. La Jefa,” Rigo said. The boss lady.
“Who’s the boss lady?” Kaye asked, not waiting for a translation.
Rigo didn’t answer right away, so Hernan translated and then relayed Rigo’s answer.
“He doesn’t know her name, but he’s pretty sure it’s the lady trying to sell the house. He’s seen her before, and she always gives orders.”
“Pretty sure?” Kaye asked, skeptical.
Hernan questioned Rigo, who hesitated before saying something Kaye didn’t understand.
Hernan laughed and told Kaye, “He’s embarrassed. He says all the blonde gringas look the same to him.”
“Ask him if she was driving a white Cadillac Escalade.”
Kaye understood as Hernan asked the question, and was surprised when Rigo instantly said ‘no’ and then rattled off something he couldn’t follow.
“No Escalade,” Hernan said, chuckling. “He knows a lot more about cars than women. He says the woman was driving a new black Explorer. Said it was really tricked out.”
“He didn’t happen to see a plate number, did he?”
Hernan asked, and Kaye understood when Rigo said the Explorer was so new it only had a temporary paper license plate.
“I got that, Hernan,” he said. “Ask him if anybody else was with the woman.”
Hernan translated, and this time there was a discussion in rapid Spanish Kaye couldn’t keep up with.
“Okay,” Hernan said when he came back. “He thinks there might have been somebody else in the car, but he’s not sure if it was a man or a woman. He said the windows on the Explorer were tinted, and he wasn’t close. He says the car came in, parked close to the front door and the woman he calls La Jefa got out and went inside. His work took him to the back yard for a problem with the pool filter for about twenty minutes, and when he came back out front the Explorer was gone. He never saw anybody else get out.”
“Okay,” Kaye said. “Gracias, Rigo. Eso ayuda.” That helped.
Hernan said something to Rigo in Spanish, then told Kaye the crew foreman was no longer on the call.
“Thanks, Hernan,” Kaye said. “Don’t come down on him too hard about the gate. I’ve been to the house, and he’s right about the trailers and the street.”
“We’ll still have a talk. But he’s a smart kid. I don’t want to lose him.”
Kaye immediately went to his list of vehicles that had come and gone at the house during the time covered by what he had. A black Ford Explorer showed up several times and the plate was registered to a Riley Realty.
He searched it up. On the
home page was the smiling face of Lisa Riley. Forty-ish, blonde, glasses, and big realtor’s smile.
***
Kaye was gathering up to go hunt down Lisa Riley when a notification of an incoming e-mail popped up on his monitor. The header said it was from the City Transportation Department and the subject preview read ‘Requested Video’.
He sat back down and opened it.
Detective Kaye;
Attached is the traffic cam video from Laurel Canyon and Mulholland Drive for the date and time you requested. Please let me know if I need to preserve this copy. The hard drive is still evidence.
Eric Bjornsson, Traffic Evidence Custodian
Kaye clicked on the file attachment. Four different video frames filled his monitor screen, each showing a directional view of the intersection.
He was several minutes into it when he saw a white Hayabusa come up the hill from the south, stop at the light, and turn east on Mulholland.
No sign of the Ferrari first. Could the bike be a false alarm?
He kept watching.
Three signal cycles later he saw the Ferrari approach from the south, enter the left turn lane and stop for the light. Kaye clicked on the frame and expanded it to full screen. It wasn’t a great image in terms of focus, but Kaye got his first real look at Leigh Howell and recognized him as the guy in all the photos when he’d met with Gagnon. He guessed mid-fifties, and Howell had a sun-lined face, crew cut, and broad shoulders. There was no audio, but he imagined he could hear the throaty sound of the Ferrari’s exhaust at idle.
He sent the image to the squad’s color printer, went back to the four-pane view, and resumed play.
The light cycled and the Ferrari turned onto westbound Mulholland. It was the only vehicle that made the turn before the light changed.
And no sign of the Hayabusa.
Cruel Vintage Page 16