by Tyler Dilts
“Yes,” he said.
“So you no longer consider him a friend?”
“No.”
“Why?”
Robbins paused. He didn’t want to answer. He looked at me, at Jen, and at me again. “Shortly after my wife and I were divorced, she began dating him.”
“And that upset you?”
“Yes.”
“That’s interesting,” Jen said. “In the divorce papers you signed, she gave her reason for leaving you as infidelity. You cheated on her.”
He was quiet and shifted his weight back and forth between his feet, probably wishing we were all sitting down. Because no question was asked, he didn’t offer an answer.
“You’re not denying that?” she asked.
“No.”
“But you got upset when Waxler and your wife started dating?”
“Yes.”
“Interesting.”
He couldn’t keep a solid grip on his tongue, though. “Have you ever been in love, Detective?” he asked. He stood a little taller than Jen.
She nodded. I tried to catch her eye, but she kept her gaze drilling into Robbins. “Yeah,” she said, “have you?” Game, set, match.
“Look,” he said, his hand working the keys in his pocket, “I’m not sure what it is you’re trying to do, but if you’ll just get to the point, I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”
“Good,” I said. “We’re trying to figure out who killed your ex-wife.”
His mouth opened and he reached out his hand as if to take hold of something for balance, but in the expansive emptiness of the foyer, there was nothing close enough.
“Think we were too hard on him?” Jen asked. We were eastbound on Rosecrans Avenue, heading back toward the San Diego Freeway. We’d just passed the new studio complex that was hard at work putting the South Bay on the entertainment industry’s radar screen. From what I’d heard, the only noticeable effect its opening had had—aside from employing a handful of security guards and maintenance people who could barely afford the bus ride in to work from their homes in Inglewood and South LA—was to raise the prices in the swanky restaurants across the street from merely overinflated to completely absurd.
I thought about Jen’s question. “No,” I said, “and who cares if we were? He can go up to his rooftop garden, sit on a chaise lounge, and sip a martini while the sun sets into the Pacific and a twenty-two-year-old rubs his face in her breast implants. That ought to make him feel better.”
“There’s always that,” she said.
“And besides,” I said, “we’ve finally got a case.”
It was after midnight when Ruiz sent us home. We had more than enough for full search warrants on Waxler’s house and office—and enough probable cause for an arrest even if the searches came up dry. The lieutenant had talked to Paula about the autopsy, and she’d agreed to rush it through, moving Mary Ellen to the head of the line first thing in the morning. Ruiz’s plan was to gather as much evidence as we could to link Waxler to the two murders and then move hard on him. None of us disagreed. If all went as planned, we would be arresting Daryl sometime before dinner tomorrow.
For me, this meant another night of counting the ridges and points in the acoustic ceiling above my bed. I’d finished off a bottle of Grey Goose with my second vodka and orange juice. I’d stopped there, I told myself, because I didn’t have another cold bottle, and only people who drink too much do things like drink warm vodka.
As I looked at the ceiling, though, I couldn’t stop thinking about what I’d said to Jen in the car on the way to the murder scene. I hadn’t meant to tell her about Megan. I hadn’t meant to tell anyone at all. Only three people knew that Megan had been pregnant—the medical examiner who had performed her autopsy, her mother, and me. And I only knew because I’d used LBPD connections to get my hands on an unauthorized copy of the ME’s report on her death. That was that, I thought, no secrets left.
I wondered if there was any irony there. The last real fight that Megan and I ever had was shortly after I’d first partnered with Jen. It had been about secrets. We had celebrated Megan’s birthday a few days before. I’d enlisted Jen’s help to pick out a present, and Megan was concerned about the details of our life that I might have shared in the process. She was angry about all of the secrets, she said—or, more accurately, she yelled. Because I didn’t know what she was talking about, I yelled back. Of course, I was too dim to realize until much later that she wasn’t hurt by the secrets I might be telling, but rather by those I might be keeping.
Later, when sleep finally came, I dreamt of Daryl Waxler crossing the classroom toward Beth, with a kukri raised above his head.
TWENTY-SIX
By ten thirty the next morning, we had the makings of a solid case against Waxler. Two victims, same MO, and he’d been romantically linked to both of them. It was too much to be only a coincidence. We just needed something concrete to make the case, and we were confident we’d get it from the autopsy, the search, or the interrogation. With any luck, we’d get it from all three.
“Hey, Boss,” Marty said as Ruiz made his way from the coffee room to his office.
“Yeah?”
“Anything?”
“Nothing new. Paula’s going to brief us as soon as she’s through. Kincaid’s got the search and arrest warrants.” He took a sip of too-hot coffee and grimaced at the pain on his tongue. “Just keep going on the background.”
Last night’s canvas of Mary Ellen’s California Heights neighborhood had yielded nothing, and neither had Marty’s recanvassing this morning. Dave put his current project, a jelly-filled croissant, down on a folded paper towel on his desk and asked, “Are we moving on Waxler as soon as we hear from Paula?”
“Maybe,” Ruiz said. “We might wait until quitting time. I want to take him down at home.”
“We should wait,” I said. Taking him at work meant splitting the squad in order to exercise both warrants at the same time. Otherwise, someone might be able to tamper with evidence in the house between the time of Waxler’s arrest and the time the search began. Mostly, though, I knew I couldn’t be in two places at once and couldn’t bear the thought of missing either the bust or the search.
“Probably for the best,” Marty said. “Keep the squad together. Won’t need as much outside backup. Fewer cooks.”
Ruiz agreed. We all looked into the center of the room, waiting for someone to add something to the conversation. No one did.
We were beginning to entertain thoughts of lunch when Paula called to tell us that she was on her way to court in Long Beach and would stop by on her way with the results of Mary Ellen’s autopsy. The crime scene technicians had found several fibers that we might be able to use to ID a perpetrator. The hope was that Paula would be able to add to that body of evidence, ideally with a bit of Daryl Waxler’s DNA. On the phone she’d told Ruiz she was ten minutes away. It seemed longer.
Jen was at her desk, one of Pat Glenn’s enormous sample kukri knives in her small hand. Every now and again, she’d toss it, spinning into the air, and then catch it by the handle. She didn’t seem to be thinking about it. I did. I couldn’t stop imagining two or three severed fingers bouncing in splashes of blood on her desk calendar. After what seemed like a very long time, she stopped throwing the kukri and began twirling it in her hand, like a uniform spinning his nightstick in a Joseph Wambaugh movie.
Marty spoke for the rest of us. “Uh, Master Po?”
She turned her head and looked at him.
“You mind putting that thing down? You’re making us nervous.”
“Sure,” Jen said. She didn’t put the knife down, though. She just held it in front of her stomach and looked down at the fluorescent light shining on the brushed stainless steel blade.
“Hey,” Dave said, his eyes bright with inspiration, “bet you can’t throw that thing and stick it in the boss’s door.”
She looked at him, eyebrows raised. “How much?”
He lea
ned over onto one butt cheek and extracted his wallet from his hip pocket. Flipping it open, he ran his finger between the bills, his lips moving with the count. “Sixty bucks,” he said.
Jen held up the knife, aimed the point at Ruiz’s door, sighted down the top of its curved blade, tested its heft with two bends of her wrist, and then looked back at Dave. Just as she was about to speak, Paula Henderson came in with the lieutenant on her heels.
“Nothing momentous,” Paula said, stopping in the middle of the room between the islands formed by our clustered desks. “But a few interesting findings.” She took off her glasses and let them hang from the chain around her neck. The file folder in her hands held copies of her report for each of us. She spoke as she handed them out. It felt like the first day of class. “Most important,” she said, “it was the same murder weapon—no doubt about that. And the findings are consistent with a single perpetrator too.”
We nodded in unison. Just as we had expected.
“We also found a few fibers that might prove useful and a single hair,” she added.
“What color?” Jen asked.
“Brown.”
Jen looked at me. “Any DNA?” I asked.
“Not sure yet,” Paula said. “We’re trying to salvage some from a bit of root that was still attached to the shaft. Even money we’ll get it.”
“So he wasn’t as careful this time around,” Marty said.
“I don’t know if I’d say that, exactly,” Paula replied. “But here’s where it gets interesting. This time, there were fewer wounds. The first victim had too many wounds to count, remember? Not this time around. He cut her abdomen sixty-two times. Maybe half, two-thirds as many as with the first victim.” She gave us a minute to let that sink in. Thrill killers virtually never decrease the severity of their attacks. The opposite is nearly a universal truth—the violence escalates.
“Could he have been interrupted?” I asked.
“Doubtful,” Paula said. “He had plenty of time after the abdomen to sever the wrist. That was postmortem by several minutes at least. And he had some difficulty there.”
She reached out to take the kukri that was still in Jen’s hand. “May I?” she asked. Jen took the dull edge of the blade in her palm and passed the knife, handle first, to Paula. “See the downward curve in the belly here?” She pointed to the hollow inside the curve of the cutting edge. “Well, the point caught on the floor before hacking all the way through.”
She held her wrist up alongside the curve so we could visualize how the blade’s progress would be impeded in an attempt to chop through something on a flat surface. “Didn’t even make it through the bone, actually. Gave it three tries before he realized the problem. Then he picked up her arm and sawed the hand off.”
“Prints?” Marty asked.
“No. A powder residue. Hypoallergenic latex gloves,” she answered.
“We can match the hair, though,” Jen said. “We don’t need prints.”
“Even without DNA, I can give you a hair match with reasonable certainty,” Paula said.
“What about the ‘interesting’ findings?” Dave asked.
“She already told us,” I said.
“She did?” Dave raised his hands off his lap. “Funny, I don’t remember going to the bathroom. How’d I miss that part?”
I tried not to let any of the anger percolating in my stomach come out in my voice, but I’m not sure I succeeded. “Well, Detective, if you’d been paying attention, you would have noticed that the crime Paula has just described was committed in a more methodical manner than the first. The perpetrator was calmer, less excited.”
“Yeah?” Dave said, the retort skirting the edge of his capacity for convincing rebuttal.
“Yeah,” I said.
“And what’s so interesting about that?”
“Predators, thrill killers, serials—they don’t work that way. They get more excited as they go along. Not less. He didn’t get off on it as much this time.”
Paula said, “Danny’s right. Even though we got a few bits of evidence, it appears the perpetrator was far more careful with this victim than with the first.”
“He had privacy this time around,” Dave said.
“That’s true.” Paula held up the copy of the report. She decided to make a break for it rather than get pulled into the disagreement. “I think you’ll find everything else you need in here,” she said. “Give me a call if you have any questions. I’ve got to get to court.”
Ruiz stood up and put out his hand. She shook it. “Thanks for coming by, Paula.”
We all nodded and mumbled our own thank-yous. As Paula walked out of the squad room, we turned to the lieutenant, waiting to hear our next play. If he had told me to buttonhook behind the old Ford on the hike and then go long to the stop sign and look for the pass, I would have. Instead, he just said, “I’ll call Kincaid,” went into his office, and closed the door.
Jen and I were parked in an unmarked Crown Vic outside Waxler’s office, two rows away from his black Range Rover, waiting for him to come out, get in, and drive home. By my watch, we’d been there almost long enough to have popped into the AMC megaplex across the parking lot to catch a movie when he finally ambled between the flanking palm trees in the lobby atrium and out through the glass doors that fronted the building. He was dressed in the latest business casual—khakis and a long-sleeve black polo shirt, just baggy enough to make you wonder where the fabric ended and the bulging flesh began. He had a tweedy sport coat slung over one shoulder and carried a brown-leather briefcase in his other hand. He spent a confused moment at his car door, the briefcase on the hood, juggling the coat from left to right as he patted his pockets searching for the car keys.
The rest of the Homicide Detail, along with Kincaid, half a dozen uniforms, and the Crime Scene Unit, were waiting, conveniently out of sight, a block and a half from Waxler’s Palos Verdes home. When Marty answered his cell phone, I told him we were on our way.
Someone had done his homework. Just after Waxler’s Range Rover slid through the gated driveway entrance, a black-and-white swooped around the corner and screeched to a stop in the entryway, its bumper little more than an inch from the edge of the stone wall that fronted the property. When the gate began its automatic roll back to a closed and secure position, its leading edge caught on the steel-and-rubber push bar mounted on the cruiser’s front end, leaving just enough room for the other vehicles, filled with cops and technicians, to squeeze through the remaining opening. Jen followed them up the driveway.
Waxler stood in the open garage and watched the police vehicles pile up in his driveway. One by one, each car came to a stop, its doors opened, and its occupants rose out. We held back as Ruiz, with a sheaf of court-approved documents in his hand, approached Waxler.
“Daryl Waxler?” Ruiz asked.
“Yes,” Waxler replied, his voice soft, hinting at his growing certainty that more than a dozen cops appearing unannounced in your front yard cannot, by any possible imaginative stretch, be construed as a good sign.
Ruiz spoke in a clear, slow monotone. “We have a search warrant here, authorizing us to search the entirety of these premises for any evidence or potential evidence relating to the murders of Elizabeth Williams and Mary Ellen Robbins.”
Waxler still looked confused. “Mary Ellen?” he said, his voice falling. “Her too?” His eyes wandered across the sea of strangers in his driveway, assembled to comb through his home and all of its contents with the hope of finding that one damning piece of evidence that would send him to Quentin to wait in line for a needle in the arm. His inability to recognize this new reality confronting him was completely understandable. For just a second, the befuddled confusion on his face almost made me feel sorry for him. Almost. For just a second.
Ruiz took hold of Waxler’s elbow and led him out to the unmarked unit next to which stood Dave and Marty. “Mr. Waxler,” the lieutenant said, “I’m going to need you to sit here in the backseat while we exec
ute this warrant. Watch your head.”
As the realization began to sink in, Waxler asked, “Can I call my attorney?”
“Oh, you’re not under arrest,” Ruiz said, knowing with absolute certainty that within an hour or two he very well would be.
“I’m…I’m free to go?”
“Of course,” the lieutenant said.
Waxler looked at the interior of the rear doors. There were no handles. They opened only from the outside. He turned his face back to Ruiz, his expression signifying his understanding of just how “free to go” he really was.
I was running my gloved hands across the bottom of Daryl’s underwear drawer when Marty stuck his head in the doorway. “Danny,” he said, “you’re going to want to take a look at this.” I followed him down the long hall and through the granite-countered kitchen into the garage. A tech was photographing the interior of the refrigerator on the far wall. Another tech stood on the edge of the driveway under the raised garage door, recording the entire search process with a digital video camera.
“What’s going on?” I said.
“We got something,” Marty said.
Ruiz and Kincaid walked in from the yard, with Jen and Dave close on their heels. We all converged on the open refrigerator at the same time, turning our attention to Marty.
“What’s up?” Kincaid asked him, brushing a few stray blond hairs from his forehead.
“I wanted to make sure everybody was here for this,” Marty said. The photographer moved out of his way, and Marty stepped up to the door of the refrigerator, his reflection visible in the glossy black luster of its surface.
“Nothing much down here,” he said, pulling open the lower door. Inside were six-packs of Coke and Mountain Dew, big bottles of Gatorade, and a few dozen twenty-four-ouncers of Aquafina. He closed the door. “Up on top’s where it gets interesting.”
The freezer was empty but for three items, each wrapped in white butcher paper and spaced evenly apart on the bottom shelf. We all moved in closer for a better look. The two on the left might have been steaks or chicken breasts, but the item farthest to the right was larger and oddly shaped, like a lopsided triangle with one of the points shaved off. There was something familiar about its shape and proportions.