Murder Season

by Robert Ellis

  But that was about all that cut through her growing feelings of dread.

  Worse still, on the drive into town she had switched on the radio and listened to Vaughan’s press conference. According to a reporter from KNX, Bennett and Watson were no-shows, along with their fearless leader, Jimmy J. Higgins. True to their word, Vaughan stood at the podium alone. And just as predicted, the fall guy with the stellar reputation got knocked down with the first two questions.

  Are you going to arrest Tim Hight for shooting Jacob Gant? And how could you prosecute a hero—a father who sought justice for his daughter’s murder because your office completely failed?

  Vaughan did the best he could. He tried to remind everyone that two murders were committed at Club 3 AM last night, not one. That Gant was dead, but so was Johnny Bosco. That any decisions would be made after they completed their investigation. That he didn’t want to jump to conclusions, and his office was trying to keep an open mind.

  But nothing he said seemed to make any difference, and Lena thought that she could hear several reporters snickering in the background as he paused to take another question.

  Their voices had become shrill, even moblike, the moment stained with cynicism and open contempt. Before Vaughan could recover, someone shouted a follow-up, If Fred Goldman had put a bullet in O. J. Simpson’s head after the killer stabbed his son to death, would you have prosecuted him? Would you have put Fred Goldman in jail?

  Lena didn’t wait for Vaughan’s response, switching off the radio and trying to clear her mind by concentrating on the road ahead. It was a safe bet that Higgins, Bennett, and Watson were more than pleased with the way things were going as they listened to the press conference from wherever they were hiding. While nothing could change the fact that their reputations had been tainted to the core, within a single day the press had found a new face and a new target. And for everyone following the story, a new memory had been born.

  Lena reached for her briefcase. As she set it on the chair beside her, the fear that Dan Cobb botched the case and arrested the wrong man blew back through her like an ice-cold wind. She noticed her fingers quivering again, and struggled to steady them and to push away the thought. The panic.

  How much worse would it be if the press found out what she and Vaughan were actually thinking?

  She took a sip of coffee, then another as she pulled out Cobb’s murder book and laid it on the table. The three-ring binder Cobb should have been working with for more than a year appeared almost new. Although she had checked before leaving the Westside, she took a second look at the table of contents just to make sure he’d given her the right one. Lily Hight’s name had been written in blue ink at the top, with Cobb and his partner listed below the date of the murder. Lena didn’t recognize the name of Cobb’s partner, nor did she remember seeing any detective but Cobb testify when she watched the trial on TV.

  The murder book was divided into twenty-six sections. Often an investigation required two or more binders—the first containing the chronological record, various forensic reports and photographs, while the additional books were filled entirely with field interview cards and witness statements. The book Cobb had compiled only required one binder. Lena paged through the reports, picking out his initials: DC. It seemed clear that Cobb didn’t delegate much of the workload to his partner, and that he had put the book together himself.

  She paused a moment to see who was seated around her in the café. Satisfied that no one could view the binder’s contents, she flipped forward until she reached the crime scene photographs. The way Lily had been left by her killer. She didn’t spend too much time on any one image. Just enough to get a feel for what Cobb and his partner had walked into.

  None of the crime scene photographs had been made public. Only the jury would have had the opportunity to view them as they were presented as evidence at trial.

  But as Lena skimmed through the series, she began to feel the weight of the crime pulling her in. The rape and murder of Lily Hight had been far more brutal than she imagined, the details recorded by the camera far more violent.

  She could see the girl sprawled out on the carpet by her bed, her left hand clutching the head and shaft of the screwdriver that had been drilled through her chest from behind. But it was her right arm that made the photo all the more difficult to look at. Lily had died trying to reach the handle pressing against her left shoulder blade. From the amount of blood that had wicked through her T-shirt and blouse and pooled on the carpet, the girl had spent a lot of time trying to reach that handle.

  Lena took a moment to collect herself, then turned back to the photo. The girl’s boots and jeans had been tossed in a pile in front of the night table. Her panties had been pushed aside and hiked up to her hips. When Lena noticed the unnatural position of her right foot, she flipped ahead to the coroner’s report.

  Lily Hight’s right ankle had been broken during the struggle. And it was a severe break, a complete break. Lena read the entire report, surprised, if not concerned, by how much detail she had missed watching the trial on television from her desk at work. It was almost as if the TV provided some sort of safe distance, some way of filtering out or smoothing over facts that she would have considered essential to the case.

  This was particularly true of the evidence supporting the charge that Gant had raped the teenager. The rips and tears and bleeding from her genitals. Gant’s semen collected from her thighs and stomach, her panties and vagina. The bruising on her cheeks and jaw and around her neck. The pinpoint hemorrhages in the whites of her eyes.

  There could be no doubt that what Cobb and his partner had walked into was a vision of absolute darkness—a crime brutal enough to stun any detective, even a man like Cobb. As Lena thought it over, it seemed more than plausible that Cobb’s judgment could have been compromised by the horror. That any hope of working a mistake-free investigation could have been in jeopardy the moment he entered Lily’s bedroom and saw her body skewered to the floor.

  The thought lingered as Lena noticed that it was dark outside and checked her watch. The autopsies of Bosco and Gant were due to begin in an hour. Paging to the front of the murder book, she found the chronological record and started reading as quickly as she could.

  * * *

  According to the official record as compiled by Cobb, Lily Hight’s body had been found at 10:00 p.m. by her parents after returning home from dinner on a Friday night. By eleven, a pair of first responders had confirmed the death as a homicide, and Cobb and his partner were on their way. Even though more than an hour had passed, both parents remained hysterical when the detectives arrived. Cobb suspected that both had been drinking heavily that night and made the immediate decision to call for help.

  Lena turned to the Death Investigation Report and read Cobb’s notes, then paged back to the record. From the egregious nature of the crime and with no signs of forced entry, Cobb became convinced that Lily had known her killer. When he asked Tim Hight if he knew anyone who would want to harm his daughter, Hight named Jacob Gant and told him that the twenty-five-year-old had been stalking her. When asked if he knew where Jacob Gant lived, Hight pointed across their driveway directly at Gant, who happened to be watching them from the chair set before his bedroom window.

  Cobb stated in his notes that his primary concern in that first hour was securing the crime scene and helping the Hights deal with their loss until assistance arrived. But during the course of the evening he made initial contact with Gant under the pretense that he might be helpful as a witness. Gant claimed that he had been alone that evening, that he’d gone to a bar by himself and had a couple of beers. By the time he returned home the police were already there. When asked about his relationship with the sixteen-year-old victim, he said only that they were friends and neighbors. But what struck Cobb about the interview was Gant’s demeanor. While Cobb described the Hights as being in extreme emotional distress, he found Gant visibly nervous and afraid, even evasive.

  Lena t
hought back to the conversation she’d had with the detective just a few hours ago in that interrogation room.

  I knew that little shit did it the minute I set eyes on him.

  After that meeting, that moment, that gaze, the case seemed to gain traction toward a single target.

  Lily’s cell phone couldn’t be found and was never recovered. Cobb assumed from the beginning that the killer had had a reason to take the phone and get rid of it. Within twenty-four hours, the service provider came through and the detective thought he knew that reason.

  Gant had left more than a hundred and twenty-five voice and text messages with Lily over the last two weeks of her life. And from Cobb’s point of view, Gant had made a huge mistake, the kind of mistake most criminals make when they’re in a hurry. The phone had been discarded without deleting the messages from the phone company’s server.

  Lena saw a note indicating that transcripts from a selection of messages, what Cobb called Highlights, had been added to the back of the murder book. She counted just over twenty and read through them carefully. Although the sampling wasn’t complete, each message mirrored Tim Hight’s claim that Gant was infatuated with his daughter. Even more, each message portrayed Gant as a young man driven by rage and overwhelmed with jealousy and paranoia.

  Lena sensed movement in the café and looked up. A man was sitting down at the next table but seemed preoccupied with his food. Glancing at her watch, she realized that she only had another ten minutes before she needed to head over to the coroner’s office, and turned back to the murder book.

  With Gant’s voice and text messages in hand, Cobb had no difficulty securing multiple warrants from a judge. And the detective made a decent effort to describe his thoughts as a team of criminalists and detectives took samples from Gant’s body and searched the house. Lena was surprised by the quality of the detective’s writing. Somehow it didn’t match up with the man she had met this afternoon. All the same, it made the reading easier. When she finished, she set the binder down, sipped her coffee, and thought it over.

  The search of Gant’s room had convinced Cobb that he was on the right track. He saw the violent artwork Gant had created for his graphic novel, the close-up view into Lily’s bedroom from the chair. He found a camera with a long lens in a desk drawer. Within hours of seizing Gant’s computer, an SID tech called with news that several nude photographs of the sixteen-year-old victim had been found on the hard drive. While Cobb waited on the DNA analysis and SID reports, he focused on Gant’s alibi and history. Gant claimed to have gone to a bar the night of Lily’s murder, but his story fell apart when no one remembered seeing him there. When Cobb learned of Gant’s troubled youth and the murder of his mother, the detective must have thought that he could see the finish line. And on the following day, he crossed it.

  The results from the crime lab showed Gant’s fingerprints in Lily’s bedroom. But even more, the DNA analysis revealed a hit. A perfect match. The semen samples taken from the girl’s body locked Gant in beyond all doubt.

  Lena wasn’t surprised that Gant hired Paladino after that, or even that his story changed. Most stories change once an attorney becomes involved and knows that his client has just hit the wall. Diffusing the circumstances of a murder—fitting the pieces together so that they make sense in another way—could almost be considered an art. And Lena knew of no one better at it than Buddy Paladino.

  Now Gant was more than Lily’s friend. More than just her neighbor. Now Gant was claiming to have had a secret relationship with the sixteen-year-old—a relationship they had kept quiet because of her age. Now he claimed that his semen was found because he had made love with her that night. That although they had been fighting over the last two weeks and he had left those angry messages on her cell phone, they had made up that night and all had been forgiven. That no one saw him at the bar because it was standing-room-only on a Friday during a Lakers game. That even though he owned a camera, he didn’t need to take the nude snapshots of Lily because she had taken them herself and given them to him as a gift.

  Gant tried to explain away all the details through his attorney. Every piece of the puzzle fit or almost fit or was forced to fit—except one.

  There were still no signs of forced entry. No indication that anyone had been with Lily in the house other than Jacob Gant. All physical evidence collected at the crime scene still pointed to Gant and only Gant.

  And then there was the harsh condition of Lily Hight’s body that neither attorney nor client could explain away. The bruising on her neck. Her broken right ankle. The trauma to her genitals. The fact that she was dead. To Cobb, and now to Steven Bennett and Debi Watson who had just been assigned the case, the way Lily had been left didn’t look or feel much like love.

  19

  Lena gave her protective clothing a final check. She was standing before a locker in the changing room at the coroner’s office, trying to ignore the conclusions she’d reached while reading Cobb’s murder book. Trying to pretend that the flaws in the case weren’t really there.

  But she knew she was fooling herself.

  There was Cobb’s take on the case—and then there was everything else. The lies and loose ends were beginning to pile up. If Cobb’s investigation hinged on the father’s claim that Gant was stalking his daughter, why did Lily keep a picture of Gant hidden by her bed? If Gant’s brother knew that there was something more to the relationship, why didn’t Tim Hight?

  And that was the problem. Hight would have had to have known.

  He sat in that chair in the sunroom every night. He sat in the dark smoking and drinking and snorting cocaine. He was probably watching them the same way he’d watched Lena when she notified the Gants that Jacob had been murdered. He probably tuned in every night.

  But even more telling, if Cobb’s case was as rock solid as it appeared in the murder book, why wasn’t he willing to help? If Cobb had connected all the dots, why the psycho drama? Why all the insanity? Why didn’t he just brief her on the case and wish her luck?

  Lena slipped on a pair of gloves and grabbed her face shield. But just as she reached for the door, her cell phone started vibrating in her pocket. The phone shook five times before she was able to dig it out from beneath her scrubs and see Barrera’s name blinking on the display.

  “I just got a call from Jack Peltre,” he said. “You know him, Lena?”

  From the sound of Barrera’s voice—the low rattle—it didn’t take much to put it together. Jack Peltre was a lieutenant working out of the Pacific Station. More to the point, Peltre was Cobb’s supervisor.

  “I’ve heard of him,” she said.

  “Then I’m sure you’ll be happy to know that it was a friendly call. It was friendly because we’ve known each other for twenty years and that’s what friends do. They take care of each other. And from time to time, they make friendly calls. You know what I’m saying?”

  Barrera was seething. The shit was hitting the fan.

  “I think so,” she said.

  “You think so? Well, they do, Lena. Friendly people like to stay in touch, otherwise they don’t consider themselves friendly. By the way, Peltre mentioned that you stopped by this afternoon. He told me that when you left the building, you took something with you.”

  She glanced across the changing room at the murder book stuffed in her briefcase. There was no point in denying it.

  “I did,” she said. “I took something.”

  Several moments passed. She could hear Barrera grinding his teeth and working a cigar.

  “Bring it to me,” he said finally. “I want to see you in my office. And that’s an order, Detective. I want to see you right now.”

  The line went dead. He’d hung up on her.

  Lena stared at the phone, weighing her options. She was already suited up and figured that she had five, maybe ten minutes—plus the short drive over to Parker Center before Barrera would start looking for her. Lowering her face shield, she gritted her teeth and entered the operati
ng room. There were seven autopsies in progress tonight. Even better, the jar of Vicks VapoRub wasn’t in its usual place in the changing room. She had nothing to block out the abhorrent smell of decomposing flesh and human waste. Nothing to filter away the dense, oppressive odor that permeated every inch of the room.

  The experience was more than overwhelming—something her former partner once told her didn’t get any easier after twenty years.

  But tonight she welcomed it like a wake-up call.

  Without looking too closely, she scanned the room and spotted Sid Kosinski working in the far corner. The two corpses were laid out side by side on stainless steel operating trays. Even from a distance neither Bosco nor Gant looked as if they were resting or had found much peace.

  Mindful of the wet floor, Lena worked her way deeper into the room. Kosinski glanced up at her as she approached. He had begun with Bosco, and appeared to be more than halfway through. As he jotted something down on a clipboard, she turned to Gant and eyed his dead body. She took the shock with her game face on, thinking about how difficult it must have been for his father to stand here and identify his son.

  Without clothing, she could see that the bruises Gant had received were significantly more extensive than what she’d seen on his neck and arms at the crime scene. The wounds from the beatings he had endured stretched across his shoulders, his chest and stomach, then circled around his lower back. His upper thighs were marred as well—almost as if he’d blocked a series of kicks to the groin.

  She had no reason to doubt Gant’s brother on this. No reason to doubt that the number of people standing in line to throw a punch Gant’s way after the NOT GUILTY verdict would have extended across the entire city.

  An image surfaced. She could see Cobb sitting before her with his eyes concealed by those strange glasses. She could remember how still the room became when she asked the detective if he’d hit Gant, if he had hurt him. She wondered what their interviews had been like before Gant signed up with Paladino. She hadn’t seen any transcripts in the murder book. If they were there, she hadn’t found them.