by Tyler Dilts
“You on the job?” I asked.
“Used to be. LA County sheriff. Pulled my thirty and got out.”
“Now you manage a few rental properties?”
“Own ’em,” Harlan said, tilting his head slightly to the right. “How’d you figure that?”
“Locks. Light timers. Hedges trimmed away from the windows. Steel strip in the doorjamb. Somebody knew what they were doing.”
The corner of his mouth turned up a bit as if it was attempting to smile but was long out of practice. It only lasted a second, though. “Elizabeth’s dead, isn’t she?”
Jen raised her eyebrows at his use of her first name.
“Yes,” I said. “She is. Murdered.”
“Son of a bitch.” His shoulders slumped, and his ramrod posture relaxed, as if his strength and will were leaking out of his body, leaving him old and weary. “You know who did it yet?”
“No. That’s why we’re here. Did you know her well?”
“I suppose so. I just live across the street there.” He gestured vaguely with his arm. “Saw the lights on and no car in the driveway. That’s why I came over.”
“You don’t know of anyone who might have meant her harm, do you, Mr. Gibbs?” I asked.
“Harlan.” He thought for a moment. “Can’t say as I do.”
“Boyfriends, ex-husbands, anything like that?”
“Nope.”
“She have much company?”
“Well, not that I kept tabs or anything, but no. Not much.” He looked over at Jen. “Can’t say as I ever noticed her with a man here. Not like a date, I mean.”
“Notice anyone at all?” I asked.
“Just that friend of hers, Angela, I think her name is. And her sister.” Jen scribbled a note on her pad.
“Do you have a last name on the friend?” I asked.
He shook his head, and a glint of light reflected off his scalp. I walked back toward the front door and pointed at the steel strip in the jamb. “Any problems in the neighborhood?”
“Just the usual,” Harlan said. “I believe in being cautious.”
“Thanks, Harlan,” I said. “One more thing, though. It was pretty ugly. There’s going to be a lot of media. Probably will get a news van or two out here.”
“Fucking vultures.”
“Just wanted to give you a heads-up.”
“Appreciate it, Detective. Give me a shout if there’s anything I can do. She was a good kid.” Harlan nodded at Jen and went out the door, the Magnum dangling at his side. Through the screen, I watched as he paused, rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes, and stepped off the porch. We listened to his footsteps growing fainter as he walked down the driveway.
I went to the door and locked the dead bolt on the security screen.
“Wish you’d done that before,” Jen said.
Thumbing through Beth’s address book in the kitchen, I scanned the first names that were penciled in, looking for Angelas. There were two. One lived in Arizona. The second was Angela Markowitz, in Huntington Beach. I peeled a blue Post-it note off the pad next to the phone to mark the place and then added her name and address to my notes.
Jen was sitting on the floor, rummaging through the garbage.
“Think I got the friend.” I looked down at her. “Anything?”
“She ate a lot of frozen dinners.” Jen held up an empty carton of 1 percent milk and looked at the expiration date. “And she kept her milk too long.” She held the carton to her nose and squinted at the odor. “Expired two weeks ago.”
In the other room, I started with the bookshelves. They were tall and made of satin-lacquered pine. I scanned the titles. The shelf on the left seemed to be devoted to academic volumes. A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, and Teaching Shakespeare into the Twenty-First Century filled the top shelves. Below these books was an array of British and American literature, the titles of which I had heard often. I knew I had read many of them at some point in my life but, for whatever reason, couldn’t remember much about them. A Tale of Two Cities, Heart of Darkness, Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, For Whom the Bell Tolls. The bottom shelf had been reserved for the really thick books—five Norton anthologies and two different editions of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. I found myself wondering what all morons wonder when they look at a collection of books like that and ask, “Have you read all these?” Too late for an answer to that question.
The shelf on the right was more my speed. That one was filled with popular fiction, with a few biographies and memoirs sprinkled here and there and even a science book or two—the kind of stuff you find at the front of the store in Barnes & Noble. I scanned the novels. Beth obviously had a soft spot for mysteries. I followed the alphabet through the Sue Grafton titles from A Is for Alibi all the way to Q Is for Quarry. She also had series written by Patricia Cornwell, Sara Paretsky, James Lee Burke, Lawrence Block, and Dennis Lehane. I’d read more than a few of them myself, and these I actually remembered.
There was a stack of mail on the dining room table. Nothing terribly interesting. Two credit card bills, four mail-order catalogs, and half a dozen ads and solicitations. I opened the bills. Between the two cards, she owed a bit less than eighteen hundred dollars. She’d only made two charges in the last month, one for gas, and the other at Mum’s, a downtown restaurant.
I walked around the room. On the coffee table in front of the sofa were copies of last week’s Time, Newsweek, and Entertainment Weekly. A week’s worth of the Los Angeles Times was stacked neatly under one end of the table. How did she manage to read so much?
I turned around to face the entertainment unit. Framed pictures were scattered among the other items on the shelf. There were two pictures of Beth with her sister, one with a woman I assumed was her mother, two graduation photos of her in different-colored gowns, and one of her standing alone at the beach, with the golden light of a setting sun illuminating her face.
I picked up the last photo and stared at it for a moment. There was a brightness in her smile, a glow in her expression, that made it hard to look away. I tried again to place her face. Seeing her in the picture made me wonder if I actually had seen her before. I couldn’t imagine that I wouldn’t remember her.
On the shelf below the VCR were a number of videotapes. Without bending for a closer look, I counted three versions of Hamlet, two each of Macbeth, Richard III, and Romeo and Juliet, and single copies of Much Ado About Nothing, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Julius Caesar, King Lear, and Twelfth Night. Beth was serious about her Shakespeare.
I pushed the power button on the small bookshelf stereo. The display lit up, indicating there was a CD inside. Expecting Mozart or Bach or some other classical composer I’d never be able to identify, I pushed the play button.
As I recognized the opening notes, I felt as if I was losing my balance. I reached out to the shelf to steady myself. The CD was Springsteen’s Born to Run, and I closed my eyes as I listened to the first lines of the first track. I jabbed the stop button and rubbed my face with both hands.
“Danny?” I looked up to see Jen staring at me, her eyes searching my face. “You all right?”
I nodded, but apparently not very convincingly. Jen kneeled down and looked me squarely in the eyes. “C’mon, partner,” she said, “you’re getting a little weird on me here. What’s wrong?”
FOUR
A little less than a hour later—most of which time we’d spent digging through Beth’s file cabinet and desk drawers—Jen and I were just completing the list of all the items we’d be back to catalog and collect as evidence when Jen’s cell phone rang.
“Tanaka,” she said, placing it to her ear. I watched her nod her head as she listened. “We’ll be heading out soon.” A few more nods. “Sure thing, Boss.” She folded the phone and slipped it back into the pocket of her jacket.
“We’ve got to head back to the squad and get with Marty and Dave,” she said. “See if anything adds up yet.”
“Ruiz gonna b
e there?”
“Yep.”
“I smell a task force coming on.”
“Well, we’ve got to do our part if the chief’s ever gonna make mayor.”
I sat back down in front of Beth’s notebook computer and saved the file I’d been looking at—a three-and-a-half-year-old letter to her mother about how she was enjoying the new teaching job. She had liked the conditions, she wrote, and the administration seemed supportive. There were more letters, lesson plans, old term papers, lecture notes, and even a few short stories. It seemed as if Beth had saved on the hard drive just about everything she’d written in the last few years. There were dozens and dozens of files that stretched back as far as 1993. I wanted to take a look at the rest of them. If we weren’t able to come up with any other solid leads off the physical evidence and interviews, there would be a lot here to sort through.
I also wanted to get into her e-mail account. Technically, we’d need a court order for the company to release her password and allow us access. Maybe we’d get lucky and someone from the Computer Crimes Squad would be able to bypass the red tape. I shut down the ThinkPad and folded it closed.
“Ready?” Jen asked.
“You go ahead. I’ll be out in just in a minute.” I got up from the desk chair and stood for a minute next to Beth’s bed as Jen walked into the other room. I took another look around and studied the furnishings: the bed with its off-white comforter, the windows with their frilly white curtains edging the matching miniblinds, the light gray carpeting just beginning to show signs of wear in front of the closet and bathroom, the oak desk and bookcases piled with papers and books. Taking a deep breath through my nose, I tried to identify the slightly sweet scent in the room. Was it a faint hint of perfume or just a bit of leftover air freshener? I wasn’t really sure what I was hoping for, but whatever it was—a hunch, a sign, an epiphany, anything—it never came.
As I walked through the kitchen and living room, shutting off the lights as I went, I heard the distinctive sound of strips of crime scene tape being ripped from a roll. I locked the door behind me, and Jen made a yellow and black X across the security door with the tape, the bold block letters proclaiming, “Long Beach Police Department Crime Scene—Do Not Enter.”
Outside, the air was clean and crisp. The late fall nights were just beginning to grow colder. Standing on the porch, we peeled off our latex gloves and slipped them into our pockets. “What do you think?” I said.
“I think we need to find some fucking clues.”
As we walked down the driveway, I noticed a dark figure sitting on the porch of a house across the street. When he lifted his hand and nodded his head, I realized it was Harlan Gibbs. I pulled the passenger door of Jen’s Explorer closed behind me, and as she settled into the driver’s seat, I asked, “Does that count?”
At the station, Marty, Dave, Jen, and I sat around the small table in the coffee room that was adjacent to the three larger rooms that housed the Homicide Squad. I sat with my back to the worn avocado green sofa and faced the refrigerator, both of which must have been nearly as old as me. I read the note that was taped to the Frigidaire’s door: “To whoever stole my lunch on Tuesday be warned. I will not rest until I find you. And when I do, I will kill you. Sincerely, Bob.” A box of Dunkin’ Donuts and five fresh cups of coffee sat on the tabletop in front of us. I was eyeing a chocolate-iced buttermilk when Lieutenant Ruiz came in. His eyes were tired, and the crags in his face seemed deeper, adding a hard decade to his appearance.
“Long night, huh, Boss?” Dave asked, biting into a maple bar.
“Yeah,” Ruiz said. He sat down and took a glazed doughnut out of the box and dropped it onto a napkin on the table in front of him. “Just left the school. Media all over the place.” His voice was rough and gravelly. He had already been talking for hours. “The brass decided not to issue a statement until eleven forty-five.”
“What went out on the air?” I asked.
“You didn’t watch?” Ruiz asked.
“Nope,” Jen said.
“Didn’t miss anything,” he said, looking down at his doughnut. “All the local stations led with the West LA shooting. We made the second slot. Unconfirmed reports of a murder, sketchy details at present—the usual.”
“Why’d they hold off?” Marty asked. He took a swig of coffee, wincing at the taste.
“The chief’s hoping we’ll find the doer before the morning news.” He paused and looked at our faces, one by one. Apparently, he didn’t see what he’d been looking for. “We’re not going to, are we?” No one replied. “Well, what do we have?” he asked.
“Canvas came up dry, no wits. Nobody noticed anything unusual,” Dave said. “We’ll have some uniforms go around the neighborhood again tomorrow, but I wouldn’t count on anything.”
“Big surprise there.” The lieutenant seemed disappointed, but not surprised. He turned to Marty. “Anything?”
“Not yet.” Marty sipped on his coffee again. “Classroom’s a high-traffic area, though. A hundred fifty to a hundred seventy-five people through there every day. The techs are gonna be at the scene all night picking up latents and trace evidence. Doubt they’ll come up with anything useful.”
Ruiz turned to Jen and me. “I don’t suppose that by any chance you two found a psychotic ex-husband,” he said, without a trace of irony in his voice.
“Nope,” Jen said. “Sorry.”
“Running a few people, though,” I added.
The lieutenant’s eyes opened wider—that was the closest he came to looking hopeful.
“The sister’s girlfriend,” I said, “and an ex-deputy sheriff neighbor who popped in on us.”
Dave looked up, licked some maple from the edge of his mouth, and said, “Girlfriend?”
“Yeah,” Jen said, “they were all naked and oiled up, rolling around on the living room floor when we showed. Wanted me and Danny to join in.”
Marty and I couldn’t help but smile.
“You like either one of them?” Ruiz asked, refusing to acknowledge the joke.
Jen kicked me under the table, suspecting I’d make some lame crack about liking one of the lesbians. She was right, I was tempted, but she didn’t need to kick me. The lieutenant clearly wasn’t in the mood.
“Too soon to tell,” I said. “Might be something with the cop. Got kind of a weird vibe off him.” I thought about old Harlan for a moment. “Don’t see him with a blade, though.”
“Who ran the MO? Any matches?”
“No similar murders locally in the last five years,” Dave said. “We’ll see what we get from the state and the feds. You know how they are on weekends, though. Might have to wait a while.”
“I’ll get on it in the morning, start sweet-talking people. Maybe get ’em to move their asses on this,” Ruiz said. He took the doughnut in his fingers and lifted it an inch or so off the table before placing it back down on the napkin. “Chief wants a task force.”
None of us was thrilled with the prospect. Sure, the extra manpower would be helpful, but everyone from the chief and the DA to the mayor would be jockeying for control, trying to take credit for any successes we had and pass the buck on any failures. Task forces, in my experience, are always more about politics than solving crimes.
“Who’s running it?” Marty asked.
“So far,” Ruiz said, “it’s me. But we gotta come up with something quick, or he’ll hand it off. Kick it upstairs.”
“Oh joy.” Dave stuffed another bite of his maple bar into his mouth. “Nobody runs a murder investigation like a douche-o-crat.” Ruiz walked out, leaving his glazed doughnut uneaten.
It was after one o’clock in the morning Marty and I volunteered to stay to start on the paperwork while Dave and Jen went home to get some sleep. We sat alone in the squad room. The bare cinder block walls were lined with bulletin boards, file cabinets, bookcases, and long tables. At the far end of the room were a door and window that led into the lieutenant’s office. Three clusters, with two d
esks each, took up the bulk of the floor space. There was an unusual stillness to the place. We shared the floor with several of the other detective squads—Violent Crimes, Missing Persons, Burglary, Fraud, and Computer Crimes—but as far as we could tell, we were the only ones pulling an all-nighter.
While Marty typed with his index fingers in one corner of the room, I three-hole-punched photocopies of the initial reports and inserted them into the thick three-ring binder that would become the murder book. Everything would go in there—copies of the crime scene and ME’s reports, notes on interviews, witness statements, evidence logs, anything and everything pertaining to the case. With any luck, the last pages would be arrest reports.
“Who pulled the autopsy?” I asked.
Marty swiveled around in his desk chair. “Paula,” he said.
Paula Henderson was a round, fiftyish woman with white hair and a pleasant smile. She always wore her bifocals on a chain around her neck. She was also the city’s chief pathologist and the best ME in southern Los Angeles County.
“Ruiz call in a favor?” I asked Marty.
He shook his head. “Somebody upstairs. She was pissed off about it too. Friday night and all. Least until I told her about the vic. Then she was all business. You know how she gets.”
“You tell her we’d be here?”
“She’s gonna give us a call soon as she has the preliminaries.”
“You wanna call it a night?” I asked. “I don’t mind waiting.”
“Naw. I’ll just wind up staring at the ceiling again. Empty house still weirds me out.” Marty’s fourth wife, Joan, had moved out only a few weeks earlier. He seemed to be taking it well. Maybe he was used to it by now.
“I’ll go make some more coffee,” I said.
When the phone rang at three fifteen, Marty was “resting his eyes” on the couch in the coffee room. I caught it on the second ring. “Homicide, this is Beckett.” I expected to hear Paula’s voice on the other end. I didn’t.
“Daniel?” Geoffrey Hatcher was the only person besides my mother who ever called me by my full first name. He covered the crime beat for the Press-Telegram and was the only reporter whom I wouldn’t have hung up on simply as a matter of principle. I’d dealt with him on a few cases since I’d joined the Homicide Squad, and he’d always been straight with me. He never complained about holding back on details that might interfere with our investigations, and when he said “off the record,” he meant it. Once he’d even helped us plant a misleading story that fingered the wrong suspect so the real perp would come out of hiding. For a reporter, Geoff was a pretty stand-up guy, but that didn’t mean that I had anything to tell him.