Murder Season

by Robert Ellis

  They laughed together, but only briefly.

  “I saw it as an asset,” Paladino said. “The two of them being distracted like that was good for our side. I’m just surprised Bennett stayed with her this long. Despite his wife and kids, I’ve always read him as the kind of guy who thrives on variety. The kind of guy who can’t go deep and needs a cheerleader by his side to keep telling him he’s not an asshole.”

  Paladino’s words lingered—his irritation for the man and his resentment were obvious. Lena went with the vibe and could see Bennett and Watson thinking that their slam-dunk case was set on automatic and had plenty of fuel. She could see them taking everything for granted while feeding on the media attention, the spotlight, the public’s approval and good wishes. She could even see them fucking each other at the Bonaventure and thinking that this high-profile trial would push them over the top.

  But in the end, Paladino was right. Steven Bennett couldn’t go deep.

  The defense wanted an independent examination of the semen found on Lily’s body, and the two deputy district attorneys couldn’t produce the evidence. And then everything began to unravel. Paladino saw his opening. But even more, Paladino saw the end. Jacob Gant wasn’t on trial anymore. Bennett and Watson and the LAPD were.

  Lena could still see Paladino standing behind his client in the courtroom. Still see his hand on Gant’s shoulder. Still hear his smooth voice laying it out for all to see …

  If you want to say somebody did something and get that printed in a newspaper, you need at least two sources to say it’s so. That’s what it takes to get a story printed in a newspaper. Two sources to say it’s so. But we’re not talking about a story in a newspaper. We’re here in this courtroom today talking about matters of life and death. And what we need right now are two sources to say it’s so. What we need right now is verification. If you’re gonna put a young man away for the rest of his life—if you’re gonna stick a needle in his arm, steal his life away and put him to death—you need to know exactly what he’s done. You can’t think you know, you can’t hope you know, and you can’t weigh the odds and make a best guess. You need certainty. Absolute certainty like the world is round and the sun rises in the east. You need verification. If you can’t verify, then you can’t vilify. And that means you can’t convict.

  “You okay, Lena?”

  Her mind surfaced. Paladino had moved to the other couch and was looking at her with concern.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I was thinking about something.”

  “You’re not fine,” he said. “The way I see it, you’ve got a big fucking problem. One that I can’t help you with. Lily Hight was raped and murdered by a monster. He’s still out there. And everybody in the DA’s office knows he’s still out there.”

  She wasn’t sure if she heard Paladino right. “What are you saying?”

  “Higgins, Bennett, Watson—they know, Lena. They’ve always known. Jacob Gant was innocent. They knew that before the trial.”

  A beat went by. Then another, more corrosive than the first. She gave Paladino a hard look. His smile was gone and she could tell that this wasn’t a play or some kind of test. It was the reason that he had agreed to meet with her. The reason he had agreed to talk. As the implications began to surface, she tried to find her voice but it came out broken and scuffed.

  “What you’re saying is crazy, Buddy.”

  “Actually, I would have used the word insane.”

  He got up and walked over to his desk. When he returned, he passed a file to her from across the table.

  “We didn’t just ask for a polygraph, Lena. We begged for one. When they kept refusing, I hired someone to perform the test. Someone I thought carried weight with the department. Someone I thought the district attorneys office would listen to. Someone everyone trusts.”

  Lena ripped open the file and skimmed through the report. When she saw that the polygraph had been performed by Cesar Rodriguez, that feeling of dread became overwhelming. Until his retirement last year, Rodriguez had been known as the best forensic psycho-physiologist in SID. In the midst and horror of the Romeo murder case a few years back, Rodriguez had been hand-picked for the job of weeding out the innocent from their list of suspects.

  Paladino may have been saying something, but Lena wasn’t listening anymore.

  She was reading the report, chewing up the results in big, horrific chunks. Rodriguez had asked Jacob Gant fifteen questions. And in each case Gant’s answers showed no signs of deception. The questions were specific and included everything anyone would have needed to know. After examining the data, she paged back to Rodiguez’s conclusions: Jacob Gant was in love with Lily Hight. He was angry and jealous for two weeks, but for only two weeks. He had made up with her on the afternoon of her death. He had made love with her early that evening. And never once had he ever hurt her, hit her, raped her, or stabbed her. When he left her that evening, Lily was alive and standing in the kitchen.

  Had Lena been handed the results of this polygraph, she would have cut Gant loose and never thought about him again. Any detective she had ever worked with would have done the same thing.

  She looked up from the report at Paladino. He was trying to rein in his anger. Trying to cope with his rage and hold everything in. Still, it was there—underneath, where it counts.

  “You showed them this report?” she said.

  “Yes,” he said quietly. “I sent all three of them copies.”

  “When?”

  His jaw tightened. “Six weeks before the trial.”

  31

  They’d known …

  Lena walked out of the Rite Aid at Fifth and Broadway, ripped open a pack of Camel Lights, and lit one. As she drew the smoke into her lungs, she could feel her body resisting. But it wouldn’t work. Not tonight. She took another hit, bigger this time, then released the smoke and climbed into her car. After jacking the AC all the way up, she cracked open the window and reached for her cell phone.

  They had known that Gant was telling them the truth. They had gone to trial knowing that they were prosecuting the wrong man. An innocent man. Someone who had lost his mother in a homicide at the age of fourteen. Someone who had lost a second time with the rape and murder of Lily Hight. Someone who should have been cut loose and held free of suspicion. Someone who had gone through enough and deserved to be handled with care.

  And then there was the malignancy. The blowback. Everything that cut to the bone.

  Because of them and only them, Jacob Gant had been someone who’d spent the last six weeks of his life being chased and beaten by packs of angry dirtbags. Because of them, Gant had been someone who ended up dead in a nightclub bathroom with both eyes shot out of his head.

  Someone with a soul. Someone trying to find the real killer. Someone lost in the wind.

  Lena took another drag on the smoke, the main wheel in her gut making the turn of turns.

  Paladino had sent Higgins, Bennett, and Watson the results from Gant’s polygraph six weeks before the trial. By now Lena knew enough about all three of them to understand how it played out. Like Paladino had said, what happened before the trial had just as much impact as what went on in the courtroom. Higgins, Bennett, and Watson had seen the media frenzy, the city swept up in emotion over Lily Hight’s murder. They had worked the press corps hard. Although interviews had been ruled out by the judge, their message was ever-present and they remained the subject of countless news stories in print and on radio and TV.

  But now they were faced with admitting that they had committed the fuckup of all fuckups. Gant didn’t do it, and they had the wrong man. If the keepers of the keys kept a list of the biggest fuckups in the city’s grand history of fuckups, all three of them would have been catapulted to the top of the list—shoo-ins to make the Fuckup Hall of Fame.

  She could see them sweating it out. She could see Higgins working with his consultants to come up with some sick plan. All three standing at the edge of the cliff and staring at the ro
cks below. All three sitting on top of the fuckup list.

  Lena could see it.

  They were too far in to pull out. Too far gone to fess up.

  A moment passed. A long one. She noticed the cigarette burning between her fingertips, took a last hit, and flicked the butt onto the street. Sliding open the lock on her cell, she found Vaughan’s number at the office and made the call. He was still there, and picked up on the first ring. But when she began to give him an update—when she began to give him the news—he cut her off in a voice that sounded more than strange.

  “I can’t talk now,” he said. “Let me call you back. Five minutes.”

  He hung up before she could even say okay.

  Lena sat in the car, trying to keep her imagination at bay. She was parked in a metered space on West Fifth Street with plans to drive out to Johnny Bosco’s place in Malibu for an initial look that she should have done yesterday. It was getting late, but she didn’t want to move until Vaughan called back. Except for the pharmacy on the corner and the Mexican place across the street, most of the businesses on Fifth had already lowered their security grilles. Magic hour had passed two hours ago and the city was making its transition from the people with jobs who inhabited its streets during the day to the people with shopping carts who roamed the sidewalks at night.

  She held everything in and waited, sipping bottled water and trying to keep her eyes off the clock on the dash. When Vaughan finally called back, his voice still sounded off and she realized that it was fear.

  “Something’s happened, Lena. They went through my office when we were out at the crime lab. They went through everything.”

  Lena closed her eyes. “What did they take?”

  “That’s the problem,” he said. “I can’t tell. I have video from the trial. The transcripts. Background notes. Some of Bennett’s files. The trial map and supporting evidence. That’s all still here, but in what form? I haven’t had time to go through everything. If they took something small—a letter or a report—there’s the chance I’d never know.”

  Lena noticed the background noise from Vaughan’s phone—the sound of a bus lumbering up the street. Vaughan had left the office to call her back using his cell.

  “Where are you?” she said.

  “Outside the building. There’s something wrong with the phone in my office.”

  “You think they’re listening?”

  He paused a moment and she could hear someone he knew say hello in passing. When Vaughan came back on, his voice was still peppered with anxiety.

  “I found something in the handset,” he said finally. “I left it there. I’m no pro, but I’m sure they’ve planted more than one. What am I missing, Lena? This has got to be about more than a couple of asshole deputy DAs blowing a trial.”

  Lena didn’t reply, searching for the best way to tell Vaughan what she was thinking. The math was simple. It began with Cobb—the way he slapped together the murder book and the information he chose to leave out. She remembered the way Watson had looked at her in the meeting room and now realized that her read on the woman had been all wrong. There was Bennett’s outburst in Vaughan’s office today. The bug Vaughan found in his phone. And then there was that goon they saw at the crime lab this afternoon—Jerry Spadell, supposedly launching another search for the missing DNA samples. All these separate events working in concert had to be considered, then cut against the fact that every one of them knew Jacob Gant had passed a polygraph and the case never should have gone to trial.

  Lena could guess how it added up.

  It was all about darkness now, keeping everything hidden and lost. And now it was about survival as well. In the end, Lena decided to tell Vaughan everything she knew.

  32

  Cobb took a big bite out of his second chicken taco, squirting guacamole and taco sauce all over the Bud Light sign hanging in the window. After washing the taco down with just maybe the best sweet tea he had ever tasted, he wiped the spill off the sign with his thumb and gazed through the glass.

  He was inside a hole-in-the-wall Mexican place called El Rancho—on his tired feet and using the Bud Light sign for cover.

  Gamble was talking to someone on her cell. She’d been parked in front of that Rite Aid for more than twenty minutes—burning gas on her way to nowhere. Cobb had been following her ever since she left Parker Center. Although he had no clue what went down in Buddy Paladino’s office, it had enough octane to it that Gamble’s first move was to buy a pack of smokes.

  Cobb was just across the street. So close that he could count her eyelashes from here—read the tea leaves and tell her future from here.

  All things being equal, she lit up that Camel like she needed it. Cobb took it as a sign that she was on the ropes. That the fucking new deal was having a bad day and couldn’t make the cut. That he had guessed right about her—that he had known who she was the minute he set eyes on her.

  He finished the taco and tossed the paper wrapper in the trash. When the girl behind the register asked if he wanted another, he checked on Gamble’s status and ordered two more to go. Then he returned to his place behind the Bud Light sign and peered up the street.

  Loser No. 2 was in a white van parked one block up on the other side of Broadway. He, too, had been following Gamble ever since she left Parker, but was unaware of Cobb and looked too stupid to figure it out.

  All the same, Cobb found the man curious. He was a busy little guy in a sweat-stained suit. And he wasn’t just keeping an eye on things. He was shooting video of Gamble. Cobb glanced at her still talking to someone on the phone, then looked back at the van. Every once in a while he could see a reflection in the rear window, the kind made when headlights from a passing car spike a camera lens hidden behind tinted glass.

  Cobb had caught a glimpse of the little guy’s face when he parked the van outside Paladino’s office. He seemed familiar, but Cobb saw the cuts and bruises on his left cheek and kept drawing blanks. Either way, Loser No. 2 looked like a dickweed.

  He heard the girl behind the register call out to him. Tossing two bucks and change on the counter, he grabbed the bag and moved to the door. When his eyes zeroed in on Gamble, she was just switching on her headlights and looked ready to roll.

  It was okay, he told himself. As long as his knees didn’t lock up, he had plenty of time.

  He waited for her to pull into the street, then walked as fast as he could manage over to his Lincoln parked two cars back. Before jumping inside, he gazed down the street and found her car in traffic. West Fifth was a one-way street with access to the 110 Freeway. She was shifting lanes and heading for the entrance about four blocks ahead. He could see the white van just pulling in behind her.

  Cobb tossed the bag of tacos on the passenger seat, jerked his car into traffic and made the green light at Broadway. Within a few minutes he was cruising three cars behind the white van on the 110, traveling south. Traffic was heavy and tight, no one moving over 50 mph. Gamble had remained in the right lane and was making the transition to the Santa Monica Freeway for a return trip to the Westside. Cobb settled back in his seat, keeping his eyes on them and trying not to let his mind wander.

  But he couldn’t pull it off. He couldn’t get Buddy Paladino out of his head. Gamble had spent the better part of two hours in his office. Why? What could they have said to each other that took so much time?

  He played through a list of possibilities in his head. None of them worked in his favor. He wolfed down those tacos, thinking everything over from different angles and breaking into a sweat. Images of his own demise surfaced—some of them violent and bloody. Images of being tortured flashed though his mind as well—accompanied by mass quantities of pain. By the time he came out of his trance, he could see Gamble and Loser No. 2 peel off the freeway, heading north on the Pacific Coast Highway. He slowed some, giving them room as they passed through a number of signal lights. But then the road cleared, and Gamble picked up speed. It was a sudden burst of motion, like a jet at t
he end of a runway thrusting forward to reach air speed.

  The white van dropped back and finally pulled over and gave up. Cobb tried to keep his eye on her taillights, but she was stretching the car out—a V6 with 280 horses and 254 pounds of torque—he’d looked it up.

  She must have spotted them. She must have known that they were there. She must have decided to end it once she found enough road.

  Cobb checked his speedometer. He was doing ninety and still couldn’t carry her bags. He wanted to hit something. Smash something. When he looked back at the road, her taillights had vanished into the night. She was gone.

  33

  Johnny Bosco’s house in Malibu was on the 29000 block of Cliffside Drive overlooking Dume Cove. It was a big modern job on a narrow lot, the rooms put together like blocks, the exterior painted three or four shades darker than the sand the blocks sat on. As Lena made her approach, she noticed a gold Chrysler 300 in the drive and passed the house by.

  She had expected Bosco’s place to be empty. She wasn’t sure why because it made more sense that someone would be here. Still, it threw her.

  She turned the car around and kept things slow, taking another look. The lights were on in the room closest to the water, and she could see the flicker from a television in the same room. But that was about it. The rest of the house remained dark, and no one had bothered to turn on the exterior lights.

  Lena pulled into the drive and got out. She could smell the ocean in the cooler air and was grateful for the breeze. As she walked up the steps, she noticed that the front door had been left partly open. The door was made of glass, the view limited to the foyer. But she could hear two men talking over the sound of the TV, and rang the doorbell.

  She waited a good ten seconds. When no one responded, she opened the door and noticed that the men had stopped talking and the TV had been turned off. She called out in a firm voice, identifying herself as a police officer. When the men inside switched off the lights, she backed out and returned to her car.