by Robert Ellis
“Cut them. Killed them. Left them there to die. Now take me back to prison. I belong in jail.”
A moment passed. Then, to Taladyne’s horror, Orlando removed his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, and grabbed the .38 revolver he’d set down on the table. A grin spread across Grace’s face, like he could read Taladyne’s mind and enjoyed it. As Matt watched, he thought about the things Lieutenant McKensie had said to him in his office earlier in the day.
I never liked that guy. I never liked anybody who liked that guy. I always thought Bob Grace was a piece of shit.
McKensie’s take didn’t even begin to cover it.
Matt moved closer to the window screen, drawing his .45 and gently pulling back the slide to chamber the first of eight rounds. He wasn’t sure why, really. He was just as outmatched as Taladyne. If he made a move, if he did anything at all, Taladyne would be the first one to die. Either Orlando would shoot him in the head with the revolver, or Grace would get him in the chest with the shotgun. Either way, Taladyne was circling the drain, and Matt couldn’t do anything but watch.
The next few minutes seemed to unfold in slow motion, just like the images he had in his head of an unconscious Frankie driving his car off the cliff with his eyes closed. He watched Grace get up and step away from the couch. Then Orlando pushed Taladyne’s forehead back, jammed the revolver into his mouth, and kept repeating the words “Fuck you, you sick motherfucker” through clenched teeth. Taladyne was weeping now, the tremors quaking through his entire body at a more frantic pace. He reached up and clasped Orlando’s gloved hand with both of his own, almost as if in prayer. He tried to pull the gun out of his mouth. He tried to yank the thing out with his fingers still quivering, any strength he might have had eaten away by the terror. And Matt could tell that this was exactly what Orlando wanted: Taladyne’s hands close enough to the gun to be painted with blood spatter.
CHAPTER 42
Orlando pulled the trigger. The sound of the single shot in the small room was deafening.
Taladyne’s head snapped back, his body wilting onto the couch. But then, after the house had absorbed the echo from the gunshot, Jamie Taladyne’s body started moving again. His eyes were wide open and fixed in a grotesque thousand-yard stare, his body twisting and convulsing, with blood spewing everywhere. Orlando didn’t seem to know what to do and started to panic. He tried holding him still with his knee. He grabbed his chest and pushed down. All Matt could hear were the springs from the cushions clinking as Taladyne bounced up and down, his shoes banging against the table and skidding on the hardwood floor. Grace stepped closer to watch. The horror seemed to go on forever, the corpse staring back at them from the other side. Matt looked at Orlando and knew that he was scared shitless. On and on and on, Taladyne’s bones rattled in the dark and dingy room. On and on, until Grace had seen enough and gave Taladyne a vicious kick in the head with his heel.
And then it was over. Then Taladyne’s body quieted and finally came to rest. Orlando didn’t seem to trust it at first but eventually let go of the corpse, his chest heaving. Grace took a step back, still staring at Taladyne’s ruined face while chewing a piece of gum.
“We need to get out of here,” he said in a quiet voice. “Now pull yourself together and make it look right.”
“What about a note?”
“We don’t need one. He was broke. Find his checkbook and a stack of bills.”
Orlando nodded anxiously. “The piece of shit couldn’t even die right.”
Grace gave him a look, then started down the hall toward Taladyne’s bedroom. Backing into the darkness, Matt rushed to the other end of the house with his gun still drawn. When he reached the lighted window, he lowered his body and peered over the sill. Plank had spread the contents of the cardboard box across Taladyne’s bed. They were clippings from newspaper articles, and he was taping them to the wall above a small desk. Matt guessed that there were more than a hundred pictures of Ron Harris and Millie Brown, Faith Novakoff and Brooke Anderson. Even from across the room he could read the headlines, which announced Harris’s suicide and Taladyne’s arrest and eventual release as a suspect.
When you added them all up, the press clippings taped to a wall in a run-down house told the story of a man obsessed with a killer and his victim. When you added them up, they told the story of a convicted rapist who had done time, a nobody who wanted to be a somebody. They told the story of a man watching a killer, studying a killer, and finally becoming a killer in his own right. A man who blamed the LAPD for his plight. A man who had lived in hiding and became a copycat.
When you added it all up, this was just the way Grace needed the story to be told. Just the way he’d framed it out for Taladyne a few minutes ago. The day wasn’t even over and he had his scapegoat, his chump, a new dupe wrapped and ready to go.
Matt watched him enter the room and gaze at the wall. A certain glow was showing on his face.
“I’ve got a few more to put up,” Plank said.
Grace lowered the shotgun to the floor and leaned it against the wall. “I think we’re good, Edward. I think that’s enough. Put the rest in one of his desk drawers. He’s a collector, you know what I mean? He saves things. He collects.”
Plank shrugged, then gathered the remaining press clippings. When Orlando walked in, Grace unlocked his phone, appeared to sort through two or three windows, and held out the screen.
“Here’s his cell number,” he said. “Now call Jones and tell him that we’ve got a lead on Taladyne. Give him the address.”
Orlando dug into his pocket for his phone. “You’re gonna let him find Taladyne?”
“We’re gonna let him find everything and call it in. We’re gonna let him close the case. He’ll be the city’s next hero, his first case, and we got our man. We’ll be in the clear.”
“But what about Taladyne’s sister? What’s she gonna say about this?”
Plank dumped the remaining press clippings into the top desk drawer and grabbed the shotgun. “She’s gonna say the same thing any sister would say when they find out their brother’s a mad dog fuck killer. He was a good man. I never saw any of this crap. He didn’t do it.”
Grace smiled again. “And she can say it all she wants.”
Orlando nodded, entering the number and lifting the phone to his ear.
And then time stopped.
Life stopped.
Everything started spinning into the black, and on this night, it couldn’t be written off as a dream.
Matt’s cell phone was ringing.
He could see their faces through the window. They were staring at him, their eyes big and wild and panicky. He could see Plank raising the shotgun just as he started to turn away and lost his footing. He could hear the blast as his body tumbled down the hill. The sound of glass shattering and gunshots from the semiautomatic that he’d seen holstered to Orlando’s belt.
Everything was rushing by in a jumbled blur—until the moment the world went chemical.
He could feel the sudden pain cutting into his upper chest and left shoulder. The agony mixed with terror and disbelief as he rolled to the bottom of the hill, slammed against a tree, and came to a stop.
He’d been hit.
CHAPTER 43
He’d been shot . . .
Hard. Deep. Blood all over his shirt and shimmering in the moonlight on the lawn. A 9 mm round that felt like it was still buried in his shoulder.
If it had been a .45, the roll down the hill would have been endless.
He tried to pull himself together. He’d fucked up. He should have done something to help Taladyne, no matter who he was. You’re either true or you’re false. You’re either real or you’re not. Taladyne was going to die no matter what—
Matt winced at the back and forth playing in his head. He’d witnessed a murder. He should have done something.
The gun was still in his hand. Orlando had just taken another shot, which hit the tree. As if on automatic pilot, Matt scrambled to his knees,
gritted his teeth, and started shooting. The .45 sounded like a cannon. He pulled the trigger five times in four seconds, watching all three men lunge out of the way as the rounds ripped through the walls and into what was left of the bedroom window.
Orlando peeked over the sill and took another shot. Matt put two more rounds in the wall just below the window frame.
And then it became quiet. No one returned fire. No one peeked over the sill.
Matt glanced back at his wound and spun toward the gate. Ejecting the mag with one round chambered, he slammed his last eight into the gun handle. He knew that he didn’t have the means or the time to get locked into a firefight. He knew that the odds of three against one didn’t work out in the real world. Even worse, he could feel the blood oozing out of the hole in his shoulder, the pain beginning to burn through the shock like a white-hot branding iron.
He covered the wound with his hand and stumbled through the gate onto the sidewalk. As he tried to canter up the hill, he could feel the weakness in his legs but thought that it might be more about fear than his loss of blood.
He wasn’t dizzy. His mind remained clear.
But then he reached the corner and heard Grace’s voice. Darting into the shadows behind the row of bushes, he parted the branches ever so slightly. They were running across the street. They’d found his car, his ride, his way out.
All three of them. Orlando hadn’t been wounded.
He tried not to panic. Tried to keep cool. He could hear Grace saying something about the new deal and that everything was still good—maybe even better. He could see Orlando handing Plank a couple of spent cigarette butts from the ashtray and that cup of coffee Matt had bought at the 7-Eleven, then pulling the floor mat out of his car and rushing back into the house. He could see Orlando shaking out the mat in the living room while Plank dropped a cigarette butt on the sidewalk and another by the front door. Even better, he placed Matt’s coffee cup on a table beside Taladyne’s corpse. It didn’t take much for Matt to realize what they were up to. It was all about putting Matt at the crime scene. It was all about letting SID discover the evidence on their own—hair and fiber and a DNA trail so focused that it would stop on the head of a dime.
When Grace started talking to someone on his cell phone, Matt didn’t need to hang around to know that the picture had just been repainted and that once it dried, nothing about Taladyne’s death would look like a suicide.
Shots fired in Echo Park. One man dead and believed to be Jamie Taladyne, the primary suspect in the murders of Faith Novakoff, Brooke Anderson, and LAPD detectives Kevin Hughes and Frankie Lane, from the North Hollywood Division. Homicide detective Matt Jones exchanged gunfire with his supervising officer and two detectives from the Hollywood Division as he fled the house. Jones is known to have been friends with both Hughes and Lane and may have carried out the execution-style murder of Taladyne as an act of revenge. Jones should be considered armed and extremely dangerous.
Matt bolted to the end of Macbeth Street and made a left. The exertion caught up to him, his loss of blood quickening. His eyes flicked from house to house in the neighborhood. When he spotted an old Toyota pickup parked in the driveway before a house with its first-floor lights out, he pushed his hand against the wound and sprinted across the lawn.
The windows were up, the doors locked.
He turned and looked at the freestanding garage. The door on the side was cracked open and he could hear the sound of a clothes dryer tumbling in the background. Eyeing the house for a moment, he turned back and stepped into the garage, searching for a rag or cloth or anything he could use to slow down the bleeding. He spotted a sink in the gloom and saw the washer and dryer against the far wall. Inside the dryer he found a load of wet bras and panties.
He let out a groan, then caught himself as he noticed the laundry basket on the washer filled with clean white towels. Tossing the underwear back into the dryer, he carried the basket over to the sink. The tap water was ice cold, and he wiped the sweat from his face before ripping away his shirt and dabbing the wound. The pain came from a place he’d never been before or ever even imagined could exist. Sharp, biting, two miles past the last exit on the way to doom. He clamped his jaws down and muscled through it, grateful that he didn’t pass out or vomit.
As he took a moment to pull himself together, he glanced about the garage, looking for anything that might help him short-circuit the ignition and hot-wire the Toyota pickup outside. He saw a small toolbox on the shelf and grabbed a hammer, a couple of screwdrivers, and a pair of pliers. When his eyes landed on the toilet bowl plunger by the sink, under any other circumstances he would have laughed out loud at the memory of what life had been like as a sixteen-year-old growing up in Jersey. He would have thought about his aunt and how hard she’d worked to take care of him and keep him on the right path.
Still, Matt didn’t need a key or a coat hanger or even a set of auto jigglers to break into a car.
He grabbed the plunger, holding the bulb under the tap water. Then he hurried out to the pickup, sealed the plunger over the door lock, and gave it a hard push.
The locks blew open, and he was in.
But the house lights had popped on as well, and an old man was opening the front door.
“Who’s out here?” he was shouting. “What are you doing to my truck?”
Matt watched the old man start down the walkway. He looked ornery and maybe even a little crazy. Despite his age, it didn’t seem like he was going to back off.
Matt reached for his badge and pulled out his .45. “Get back in your house,” he said. “I’m a police officer. Now go inside and get me the keys.”
The old man appeared stunned that Matt had asked him for his keys. He looked unsure, his eyes moving from the .45 to the hole in Matt’s shoulder, then over to the badge. When the old man didn’t move, Matt grabbed him by the shirt and pushed him toward the house.
The old man grunted and groaned. “I’ve seen badges like that on the Internet. Stop pushing me. You’re getting blood all over me.”
Matt shut it all out, unable to worry about what he was doing. He shoved the old man into the house with as much force as he could muster and spotted several sets of keys on a rack by the door. On the second-floor landing he could see a young woman shielding a boy and girl, who Matt guessed were seventeen or eighteen.
“I’m a police officer,” he repeated. “No one’s in danger here. I need your pickup, simple as that.”
The boy let out a muffled “Yeah, right,” while the old man grabbed the phone and dialed 911. Matt ignored it and rushed outside. Gathering up the towels, he climbed into the Toyota and turned the key. He wished that the pickup hadn’t been red and so easy to spot but shrugged it off as he backed into the street. The old man had pressed his face against the living room window, his eyes crazed, screaming into the phone. Matt looked away, shifting into drive and speeding off.
He could hear the sirens already approaching the neighborhood and thought about Grace’s phone call. The Hollywood Freeway was no more than a mile off. When he reached Sunset Boulevard, he felt a sense of relief in spite of the blood seeping through the towel and dripping onto the seat, in spite of the flashing lights in his rearview mirror and the sound of sirens in the night. They were heading for Taladyne’s house. It would probably take them another five minutes before they made the connection between Grace’s call and the old man’s.
His cell phone started ringing. As he dug it out of his pocket, it crossed his mind that Grace was sick enough to call and wish him luck. But when he slid the lock open and glanced at the caller ID, it was better than that.
It was his partner who had become lost. It was Cabrera.
CHAPTER 44
“I’m hit,” Matt said.
“How bad?”
“I don’t know. Upper left shoulder. They killed Taladyne, Denny. They planted the murder weapon on Ron Harris so Taladyne goes down for everything else, like he’s a copycat. I heard it. I saw it. Now eve
rything we talked about is real.”
“Taladyne gets a pass for killing Millie Brown but goes down for Novakoff, Anderson, and maybe even this fourth girl, who’s still missing, Anna Marie Genet. Grace sets him up for killing Hughes and Lane, but it sounds like you’re taking the fall for Taladyne. It’s on the radio, Matt. Not a police radio. KNX picked it up off a scanner. Grace wants the world to know. They’re saying you executed the man. There’s no way they can let you tell your side of the story. No way Grace is gonna let you talk.”
Matt spotted the entrance to the Hollywood Freeway just ahead. He tried to get a grip on himself as he made the turn and vanished into the sea of traffic heading north. The sirens were beginning to fade into the distance now. His mind still seemed clear, just that swirling feeling in his stomach; just the blood dripping onto the seat like sand through an hourglass.
“Where have you been?” Matt said.
“I turned off my phone. I’m sorry. I’m just leaving Leah Reynolds’s place. Grace kept calling and leaving messages about the press conference. I didn’t want to fuck things up, so I turned it off.”
“Fuck what up?”
“Are you ready?”
“Ready for what?”
“Taladyne,” Cabrera said. “He didn’t rape her.”
A long, dark moment passed. Just the sound of the freeway in the background. Some kid in a Subaru with straight pipes whizzing by in the night. It felt like the pickup was floating a foot or two above the road. The lights through the windshield were beginning to glow like neon. He thought about Taladyne’s alibi. He hoped that he’d been lying and that it didn’t exist. He hoped that Taladyne’s story about a job in Mint Canyon wasn’t true. That at the very least Taladyne died for the murders he committed.
“He didn’t rape her, Matt. He didn’t do it. The whole thing was bullshit. The whole thing was about money. Reynolds made it all up.”
The house on a beach called paradise, he thought. The home of a young woman who didn’t live with anyone and didn’t have a job. He’d had a feeling that something was wrong as he looked at her sitting on the couch with her legs folded beneath her body. He’d had a feeling but couldn’t see it for what it was. He misread the signs. He’d been confused by her apparent gentleness and the shadow cast by what he thought had been done to her. He’d seen Reynolds as a victim.