“Got it,” Tippin called out, trying to keep up with the rest of the team with his face down in his portable computer. Jackie kept pace with him, one hand on his shoulder, guiding him where to go so he wouldn’t have to stop researching. “Call came from Room 928.”
“Who’s it registered to?”
“A . . . uh . . . shit. It’s register to a Roy Hobbs.”
“Who’s that?” Fairmont asked.
“That means nothing to me,” Parks said. “Let’s get going.”
The group B-lined it for the front desk and Parks retrieved his identification and addressed the man behind the front counter.
“Can I help you, sir?” the man asked with a rather peppy smile. His nametag read Justin. He was in his early thirties, thin with sharp, angular features and a recently shaved head of reddish-brown hair that did nothing for his complexion. In a town so focused on looks and appearances, Parks wondered how the kid had gotten a job that required him to be the face of a major hotel.
“Yes,” Parks began. “I’m Detective Dave Parks. We have it under good authority that someone staying in this hotel may be in danger or possibly worse. We need to be taken to his room immediately.”
“Are you sure, sir? Nothing’s been reported.”
“Would you mind calling the room?”
“Not at all, sir. What room?”
“Nine twenty-eight.”
The desk clerk paused for a moment then picked up the phone and dialed the room number. Parks wondered about the man’s reaction to the room number. Who was Roy Hobbs? The name was familiar.
“There’s no answer,” the desk clerk replied hanging up the phone. “Would you like me to take you up there?”
“No,” Parks said. “Just the key. Thanks.”
The man was miffed but searched for a room key and handed it over.
“You don’t want me in that room,” Parks said, stopping the desk clerk. “Who is Roy Hobbs?”
The man paused, wondering how much he should say.
“Some of our clientele like to remain anonymous,” the desk clerk answered. “They use aliases.”
“So Roy Hobbs isn’t a real name? Who’s really staying in that room?”
“You have to realize we’re under the strictest of confidentiality—”
“Uh, Parks,” Tippin interrupted.
“—and that forbids us from simply giving out names—”
“What is it, Milo?” Parks asked.
“Roy Hobbs.”
“What about it?”
“It’s Robert Redford’s character’s name from The Natural. He’s a baseball player.”
“Shit, you were right,” Wilkes hissed.
Parks spun on the desk clerk. “Is Kyle Oni in that room?”
“We’d lose business if we told people every person who stays here,” the desk clerk said, trying to stand his ground.
“On second thought,” Parks added, “I don’t need you calling anyone about this. Come with us. Show us where this room is.” As they started for the elevators, Parks stopped Wilkes. “Two of you stay here in the lobby and keep an eye out. If for some reason this guy is still here, we need to make sure we have every angle covered.”
“I’ll stay with Ramirez. Take Hayward,” Wilkes agreed. “We know what to do.”
“Perfect. Thanks.”
The desk clerk led the group to the elevators, where a bell hop was waiting with the doors open to one of the cars. The entire team piled in, each appearing nervous and agitated.
“When did he check in?” Parks asked.
“Monday afternoon,” the clerk replied. “Said he couldn’t go home. What with what all happened to him in the news. Are you aware of what they’re saying?”
“So he checked in Monday afternoon?” Parks wasn’t interested in answering any questions or letting any information the department may have had out into the world.
“Just after two in the afternoon actually.”
“Any complaints or visitors to his room since then?”
“No complaints. Just ordered room service. Other than that, only his agent and lawyer have been here to see him. No one else. There’s no one in any of the neighboring rooms either. He was specific about wanting privacy, and since we’re not overbooked . . .”
“All right,” Parks said as the doors chimed and opened up. “Where is it?”
“Down the hall,” the clerk pointed. “Near the end. On the right.”
“Okay. Hayward, stay here with him.” Parks nodded toward the desk clerk. “Keep him back. Make sure if anyone else pops out of their rooms to keep them inside. We don’t know what we’re dealing with. Guy may still be there, may be gone. We’re not sure what kind of poison we’re dealing with here either.”
“Yes, we are,” Jackie corrected him. “If he did use the passionflower, then we’ll all be fine. Just so long as we don’t touch it.”
“All right.” Parks said. “You hear that, everyone? Don’t touch anything. Everyone make sure you’re wearing gloves no matter what.”
Parks checked each member of his team to make sure they were all wearing their latex gloves, as he wanted no one to take any chances with this case.
“It might not even be our guy,” Moore whispered next to Parks.
“We had him in our interview room on Monday,” Parks said, referring to Oni as if that said it all.
“Trust me,” Jackie said, shaking her head. “It’s him.”
“Let’s just check it out.” Parks reached for the door and knocked on it three times. “Kyle Oni? LAPD. Please open up.” After thirty seconds without a reply and hearing no movement, Parks knocked again, even louder, and stated his identity once more.
“All right,” Parks said, looking back at his team. “We’re going in. Everyone be ready. Hayward, notify me if you see anything suspicious.”
“Will do,” Hayward replied, wiping the sweat off his brow.
“You stay out here until we stabilize the room, understand?” Parks said, looking to Jackie. She was disappointed but understood and nodded. “Milo? You ready?”
Tippin nodded, somewhat shaken up but with his computer put away and his gun drawn. To Parks he was like a kid with a water pistol. He wondered if it was the wisest choice to let him follow but knew this was what the kid was trained for.
“Okay, then,” Parks said. “Let’s do this.”
Parks took the dark-gray keycard with gold lettering on the front that the desk clerk had given him and slid it through the slot until the red light turned green and the door unlocked. He pulled down on the handle and pushed the door open. Parks paused as the smell of alcohol hit him, as if the room had been soaking in wine for the past few days.
“Kyle Oni. LAPD. Identify yourself if you can hear me.” Parks stepped into the room, checking every direction in the hallway while Moore covered his back. They inched their way down the hallway to the first door on the left, which led to the bathroom. Moore moved into the bathroom while Fairmont moved up to cover Parks’s back. Tippin stayed behind Fairmont, his gun pointed to the ground. Inside the bathroom were six bottles of wine, each one emptied, with the bathroom sink clogged and filled with another two bottles.
“Moore?” Parks asked.
“Kenwood. Beringer. Francis Coppola. Pinots. Cabernets. Sauvignons. We have everything from Two-Buck Chuck to hundred-dollar bottles in here.”
“Okay. Let’s keep going. Kyle Oni?” Parks called out again, working his way down the hallway. In the next room, on mute on a TV played a movie with Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan. On the dresser next to the TV were another dozen bottles of wines. Most stood upright while several lay on their sides, having drained out as wine was spilled all over the white carpet. Parks worked his way further into the almost blindingly white room with black furniture, quickly swinging his gun around and aiming it at a body that lay in a bed. He was able to tell immediately that it was too late to save him.
The Palisades Poisoner had claimed his fifth victim.
; Kyle Oni lay on the unmade king-size bed with several dozen of the passionflowers laid across his nude body. Also on the bed, in between the various flowers, were several bunches of grapes, most still on the vine, and another six emptied bottles of wine.
“Oh my God,” Fairmont said, taking a step back from the bedroom.
“We’re clear,” Moore said, putting her gun away. “Damn. Looks like Dionysus had a party in here.”
“Isley,” Parks called out. “Isley, get in here. Jackie! And Fairmont. I need pictures. Now.”
The sound of Jackie’s pumps could be heard across the floor as she made her way into the room and gasped at the sight of Kyle Oni’s body.
“Is that the passionflower?” Parks asked Jackie.
“Yes.” Jackie nodded. “Those are them.”
“Dave,” Moore whispered as she composed herself and moved in closer. “Look.”
“What?” Parks whispered back.
“The flowers,” Moore said. “The petals on each one.”
“What about them?”
“There are ten of them on each flower.”
Parks didn’t comment but took it in and pondered what this meant, if anything, to the killer and what his ultimate aim might be.
“Excuse me,” Fairmont said, beginning to take pictures of the body.
Parks turned to Moore. “I want this entire floor sealed off. Get anyone staying in any other room on this floor relocated. And I want everyone on this floor interviewed too.”
“I’m on it,” Moore said.
“Hey, boss,” Fairmont said from behind Parks, trying to get his attention.
“What is it?” Parks asked, turning around.
“What’s that?” Fairmont said, nodding toward the body. “In his hands. What is it?”
Parks leaned in and saw in each of Oni’s hands, partially hidden by flowers, were two halves of a small four-by-six photograph that had been ripped down the middle.
“You get pictures?” Parks asked.
“You’re good to go.”
Parks used tweezers to pluck the halves from Oni’s hands and held the two pieces together. In the photo were two teen-aged girls, one Caucasian, the other of Spanish descent, staring at the camera, with large smiles on their faces. Both of the girls were attractive, full of life, and Parks felt a chill run up his spine.
Who were these two girls?
And what did they have to do with the trail of corpses that were being left by a sadistic madman?
22
After Fairmont finished taking pictures of the crime scene and Moore scanned the room for prints and fibers, they collected a total of twenty flowers, ten white and ten purple, a number that Parks took to have significant meaning for the killer. The entire room was dusted, gone over with every piece of machinery the LAPD had to offer in the form of forensic science. Exactly 234 bottles of wine were photographed, dusted, bagged, and tagged before being shipped back to the station.
Was all the wine from one order? But if so, from where? And who placed the order? And how did it get into the room without anyone seeing anything?
Parks already had Tippin trying to research it.
Two hours later, Kyle Oni’s body was zipped up in a body bag and escorted downstairs to the vehicle that would take him to Amy Tanaka’s lab to be autopsied.
Parks had hoped they had gotten there in time. They had never been this close to a murder, with the exception of Charles Wyler’s, which hadn’t even been directly committed by their killer. This time Parks hoped they would be able to find something that would help them.
Seven hours later, Parks felt like kicking the wall or punching something hard. He knew this wasn’t the example he was supposed to set for his team, but he was sick and tired of this. The stress was getting to him, and he knew it. He needed to control himself. Have another cup of coffee or something. Anything. He saw the Rubik’s Cube on the corner of his desk and picked it up and began to fiddle with it, letting his mind wandered. This was all it seemed they did any more. There were no clues. No evidence. At least none that helped further their investigation. Nothing turned up. There were no connections between any of the victims.
How was that even possible? There had to be some reason each victim was chosen.
“Boss? Boss?” Moore tried to get Parks’s attention and failed. “Dave?”
“Wha . . . huh? What?” Parks said, turning from the Rubik’s Cube which he had the entire red side completed.
“What’s going on?” Moore walked up to Parks to keep their conversation from the rest of the room as she handed him a Hershey’s bar. “You look like you’re spacing.”
“I’m, uh, um, sorry,” Parks apologized, setting down the Rubik’s Cube (green side completed) and taking the candy bar. “Something has to change.”
“What do you mean?”
“This case. It’s not working for us. We’re not getting anywhere. We’re making no progress. We simply stand by and wait for the next victim to show up.” Parks stared at his group, along with Wilkes and his two men, not sure what to say.
“It isn’t like that. You know it’s not.”
“So what do we have on Kyle Oni?” Parks said, ignoring the comment as he ripped open the chocolate bar and looked to Fairmont.
“According to the gossip mags—”
Parks cut him off. “I want facts, not gossip.”
“Boss, no disrespect, but Oni was a celebrity. Gossip may be as close to the facts as we get with this guy. And in this town, that may be a lot. I mean, who pays more attention to the rich and famous than the paparazzi? Who knows who was watching him and when and where? Maybe something was even caught on tape.”
“You’re right. Sorry. Check it all out. See if anyone was particularly focused on Oni. See if they have anything. Take Tippin with you to check it all out. Maybe we’ll get lucky. But what were you going to say?”
“Rumor has it he was with Caroline Maddox for the past six months.”
“The actress?” Parks asked.
Everyone knew who Caroline Maddox was. One of the hottest women on the planet, Caroline Maddox had been on the cover of Maxim twice in the last two years and was a Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone favorite. She sold copies. Besides that, the three movies she had made in the last two years, though sordid thrillers that were more commonly referred to as “trash,” had raked in big money, especially considering the cheap price tag it took to make them. She currently had a film in theaters, a European noir where she played a femme fatale, a role that was gaining her Oscar talk, her first in five years since playing the abused witness of a violent gangster in a Scorsese drama.
“Yup,” Fairmont said.
“They’re together?”
“According to the online blogs.”
“But what about the whole . . .” Wilkes looked around the room, not sure who he might offend, making sure to carefully choose his words. “Gay thing.”
“Like Oni was the first closeted gay celebrity with a ‘girlfriend,’” Parks said sarcastically, finishing his candy bar and picking back up the Rubik’s Cube. “But if she was his ‘girlfriend,’ then find her and bring her in. We need to question her. Also, if he was seeing some guy . . . bring him in as well. We need everyone involved here. Agents. Managers. Coaches. Those two aren’t going to be a piece of cake after this, I can tell you. Oh, and teammates as well.”
“We already got a list going,” Fairmont said, writing something down in his notepad before digging into his pocket for another piece of Nicorette.
“So what about these passionflowers that were found all over Oni? What do we know about that?” Parks turned to Jackie and sat down, hoping she’d take over that part of the discussion.
“Based on the 911 call, we’re assuming Kyle Oni was murdered today, right?” Jackie asked from her position at the table.
“Right,” Parks confirmed.
“And when did he come out? I thought I heard someone say he came out publicly, is that correct?”
&n
bsp; “It broke sometime late Sunday night early Monday morning,” Parks said.
“All right,” Jackie said, disappointed. “It doesn’t matter. I mean, you probably already know to figure out his timeline, but it doesn’t matter for what I was thinking.”
“What’s that?” Parks asked.
“I hate to say this, but I kinda wished he’d been killed on Sunday. Or Saturday. That would have helped us a lot.”
“How so?”
“In narrowing down the list of suspects,” Jackie explained. “See, the flower has meaning. The killer chose it on purpose. But if Oni hadn’t outed himself to the entire world, then the list of suspects could possibly have been limited to those who knew he was gay.”
“You’re saying those flowers we found all over his body have some sort of gay connection?” Wilkes asked.
“Let me explain,” Jackie said. “I’m getting ahead of myself. The passionflower is an interesting flower. Yes, it has what you call a ‘gay connection,’ but it also has a strong religious connection. Particularly where the passionflower got its name from. The Passion of Christ. If you look at the flower . . .” Jackie turned in her seat to point to the five different enlarged photos of the flower that were up on the murder board. “The stigma here, in the center of the bloom. Many believe these to symbolize the three nails used in the crucifixion. Next we have the stamens. I’ll try to spare you all the technical details of the flower, so just go with what I’m saying. The stamens are located behind the stigma and in front of the petals. They’re usually representative of Christ’s five wounds. The most recognizable feature of the passionflower, though, is the corona.”
“It comes with its own beer?” Fairmont joked.
“No,” Jackie replied, not letting the joke get to her. “The corona is this part.” She pointed on the diagram to the area she was talking about. “Anyone want to guess what this symbolizes?”
“The crown of thorns worn by Christ,” Parks answered, barely audible.
The Poisonous Ten Page 18