Murder Season

by Robert Ellis

  Lena wrapped one hand around Cobb’s pistol and pulled with the other. His fierce resistance to let go of his weapon surprised her. Still, she managed to pry the gun away and slip it into her jacket. Dr. Frank rolled a small steel table on wheels over and gave Lena a look like that’s all he had. Once they made the transfer, they pushed Cobb out the back door and into the parking lot. Lena swung her car around, and with considerable effort they managed to get Cobb strapped into the passenger seat. Cobb groaned several times. And as Lena climbed in behind the wheel, he reached out for her hand and held it as tight as he had held his gun.

  St. John’s Medical Center was twenty-two blocks east on Santa Monica Boulevard. It would be a grind, stop-and-go traffic with signal lights on every corner. But Lena would never get past the first mile on the Pacific Coast Highway. That’s when Cobb let go of her hand. That’s when she looked over at her new friend, saw him take his last breath, and knew.

  She slowed the car down, tried to get a grip on herself.

  She saw Temescal Canyon Road ahead and made a left turn. There was a park on top of the hill. Pulling into the lot, she found the only spot with a view of the ocean that included palm trees. It was a beautiful view—maybe not quite the one Cobb had photographed in Hawaii … but close enough. She opened the windows to let in the smell of the ocean. When she noticed the pack of Camel Lights on the dash, she lit one and drew the nicotine into her lungs. She couldn’t help it. She wasn’t really thinking anymore.

  She wished Cobb could have lasted long enough to see the palm trees.

  She felt his Sig Sauer in her jacket and pulled it out. Ejecting the mag, she realized that Cobb had held the vet at bay with an empty gun. She smiled—not where it shows, but underneath where it counts. As she smoothed her hand over his forehead, she noticed that the radio was playing softly in the background. The music seemed familiar and she turned up the volume. It was Miles Davis, and she hadn’t heard the cut for a long time.

  “My Funny Valentine.”

  55

  Lena had called Vaughan and given him the news. She had called Clayton Hu as well. In spite of the fact that Bennett was wanted for the murders of six people—a killing spree that until last night began with Lily Hight and ended with Debi Watson—it was his seventh victim that would burn through the system like rocket fuel.

  Bennett was a cop killer now. Even worse, he’d put three rounds into Cobb’s back. No one carrying a badge would show the piece of shit any mercy.

  Lena wanted a look at the spot where Cobb had been shot in daylight. Both Vaughan and Hu agreed to meet her there. She was driving from St. John’s where she’d left Cobb behind. And she was carrying his Sig Sauer, the gun locked up in her glove box for safekeeping.

  The radio had been switched off ever since she left Temescal Canyon Park. All she wanted to listen to was the sound of the engine under the hood. The sound of the machine grinding forward.

  She was heading north on Twenty-sixth Street with the Riviera Country Club on her left. She could see people driving golf carts and hitting little white balls on manicured lawns as if this Saturday was like every other Saturday in sunny L.A. She turned back to the road and lit another cigarette. She wasn’t sure why, but something about seeing those people playing golf fed the rage and only made the day darker than it already was.

  She wanted to hit something. Kick something. Kill it.

  When she reached Sunset, she made a right, rolled through the horseshoe curve and up the hill, then made the left onto Rockingham. The patrol units were gone, a woman in a Land Rover packed with kids drove by—the events of last night seemingly forgotten, or even more likely, entirely missed by all. Although it didn’t look like Vaughan or Hu had arrived yet, she saw a van parked in front of Bennett’s house and imagined that the workers were busy replacing the living room windows. But as she cleared the van, she glanced back at the house and skidded to a stop.

  Bennett was home—his BMW backed into the garage with the trunk open. The door between the house and garage was open as well.

  Lena pulled into the driveway, blocking the BMW and jacking back the slide on her .45. She stepped out of her car, took a last hit on her smoke, and ground the butt into the driveway with her toe. And then she started moving forward. One round in the chamber—the rest, ready to go.

  Entering the garage, it crossed her mind that it would have been more poetic to use Cobb’s Sig Sauer. That if she had ammunition for the gun it would have had more meaning somehow. But Cobb carried a 9 mm, and Lena preferred a .45—particularly when coming face to face with a monster. An alien.

  She had killed people before.

  She had shot them dead in the line of duty. But no matter what the circumstances, no matter what the victim may have deserved, taking a human life carried with it a certain toll that she thought about every day. A price that haunted her and would follow her for the rest of her days.

  But she wondered about Bennett. She didn’t think it would be the same.

  She took a quick peek inside the trunk and spotted his suitcase. Reaching the door between the garage and house, she looked down a long hallway to a set of French doors that opened into the backyard. The house was dead quiet … so quiet that she began to sense something might be wrong. She turned and gazed at the van parked in the street. It took a moment to register, but she realized that it was the same make, model, and color as the van Dick Harvey drove.

  Something was going on.

  Stepping into the house, she moved down the hall without making any sound. She passed a laundry room, a large pantry filled with cooking supplies, a powder room, and finally the entrance to a kitchen. The room was enormous and looked as if it had been remodeled over the past year. She thought about what Cobb had said. No one could afford to live here on Bennett’s salary. Either he married rich or his crimes involved more than—

  She froze.

  There was a man sitting at the breakfast table with a cup of coffee. His face was turned as he looked out the bay window at the pool. She took a deep breath and did a gut check. Her hands were steady. Then she raised the .45 and entered the room.

  The man didn’t seem to notice her and didn’t move. Lena inched closer for a look at his face. As she cleared the counter, she caught the blood splattered against the wall behind his head. Even more blood was pooling on the floor.

  It was Dick Harvey from Blanket Hollywood, and his days ruining other people’s lives for fun and profit seemed to be over. His eyes were crossed, his mouth was open, and he had a bullet hole in the center of his forehead. Remarkably, he still appeared to be sweating through his wrinkled suit.

  Lena steadied herself against the table, her eyes skipping about the room until they landed on the window and spotted Bennett in the backyard. He had a shovel in his hands and was digging a hole in the lawn by the rear fence.

  She hustled out the door and across the yard. As she ran toward him, he looked up and yelped in panic—then started shrieking.

  “Oh my God,” he kept repeating. “Oh my God. I didn’t do it, Gamble. I didn’t do it.”

  Lena’s eyes zeroed in on the gun laying in the grass. The one he was trying to bury. The 9-mm Smith.

  “Jesus Christ—you’ve gotta believe me. This isn’t what it looks like.”

  He threw the shovel down, lunged for the Smith, and dug it out of the grass just as Lena reached him.

  “Drop the gun, Bennett. Then we’ll talk about what it looks like.”

  He pointed the muzzle at her, his hands jittery. “Screw it,” he said. “You’d never fuckin’ believe me.”

  “I’m a better shot than you are. You’ll miss and I won’t. Now, drop the gun and we’ll talk.”

  He was chewing it over. She could see the wild look in his eyes. Every muscle in his face twitching back and forth and out of control. Beads of sweat were percolating all over his forehead. After a long moment, he turned the muzzle away from her and made a slow arc up and around until he found the side of his own head.
Lena grimaced. If the prick blew his own brains out, she was okay with that.

  “This isn’t what it fucking looks like,” he said.

  “Tell me what it looks like, Bennett.”

  “I didn’t shoot anybody. I didn’t kill anybody. I’m innocent.”

  “But that’s what everybody says.”

  He took it in, his body shivering in terror. His gaze shifted to the house. Lena could hear footsteps on the lawn behind her and took a quick peek. Hu was rushing toward them with his gun drawn. Vaughan was behind him with a handful of cops carrying shotguns.

  Lena turned back to Bennett. “It’s over,” she said. “And we already have everything we need. The suit you wore when you met Lily Hight at Club 3 AM. Security video that shows you walking out with her.”

  Bennett’s eyes flicked from face to face. When they slid back to Lena, he pressed the muzzle into his head even harder and began weeping.

  “But I’m innocent.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Innocent. I had my share of hunches, Bennett. But I never really understood why you prosecuted Jacob Gant when you knew that he’d passed a polygraph. Now everything makes sense. You needed someone to take the fall for what you did to the girl. That’s what this is about, right? That’s what this has always been about. When you lost the trial, when you saw your career tanking, you needed a new way out. You needed to keep your eye on things. When Gant got too close and took what he knew to Bosco, you shot them and tried to frame Lily’s father. It made sense, right? Everybody in the city thought it made sense. Tim Hight out for revenge.”

  “I know how it looks, but—”

  “But what?” she said. “On a scale of one to ten, how low can a guy go? You’re off the charts, Bennett. And what about Escabar and the guard? What about Debi Watson? What about your woman, Bennett? Look what you did to her on the very same day she tried to come forward and talk.”

  He shook his head back and forth like he could see Watson’s dead body in the trunk. When he spoke, he spewed the words out with spit.

  “I didn’t,” he said. “I didn’t kill her.”

  “And what about the gun you used? The gun you’re holding to your head? The gun from the drive-by case you worked with Cobb? The gun you knew we’d trace because you needed insurance? You’re a genius, Bennett. A real genius. If all the fall guys you came up with hit the skids and fell down, you had the ultimate backup. You had your old mentor. You had Cobb. By the way, he died this morning. You’re everything you ever were, Bennett. And today you’re even more. You’re a cop killer now.”

  “Stop,” he said. “Stop it.”

  She took a step forward. “Drop the gun, and let’s go.”

  “Don’t come any closer. I’m gonna blow my fucking head off.”

  “You don’t have what it takes, Bennett. You’re a coward.”

  “Fuck you, you stupid bitch.”

  He jerked the gun around and fired a shot into the lawn by Lena’s feet, then bolted into the gardens. There was a gate that opened to a narrow lane and a pair of trash Dumpsters. Lena didn’t see him running down the lane. When she turned back, she caught a glimpse of him hiding against the wall behind the far Dumpster. She traded looks with Vaughan, then Hu, who motioned his men closer. Bennett was surrounded.

  Lena inched forward until she had a clean view. He was sitting on the ground holding the 9-mm Smith on his lap. He was weeping. Mumbling. Out of his fucking mind.

  “Come on, Bennett. Let’s get this over with. Let’s go in before anyone else gets hurt.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  Lena traded looks with Vaughan, then turned back to Bennett. “Sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do.”

  “Not me, Gamble. I only do what I wanna do.”

  “But there’s no place to run,” she said. “No place to hide. You own this.”

  She could see his wheels turning. She could see the machine crashing—his soul tapped out at zero with no fuel and no backup. His eyes inched along the ground, then rose slowly until they found her kneeling before him just ten feet away. He met her gaze and held it. When he noticed her gun pointed at the center of his chest, he smiled at her.

  “Fuck it,” he said.

  Bennett raised the gun, wrapped his mouth around the muzzle, and pulled the trigger. Lena watched as his head snapped back against the wall and the blood gushed out. But the gun didn’t stop firing.

  Hu and Vaughan rushed over. The guys with the shotguns moved in as well.

  It looked like Bennett’s finger had become stuck in the trigger guard. As his body greeted death and began twitching, the 9-mm Smith fired one round after the next, blasting his head away in chunks. The gun didn’t stop firing until the mag finally emptied out.

  And then the sound dissipated. The smoke cleared. And Lena watched with Vaughan as one of the guys walked over to Bennett’s corpse, pulled the pistol away, and tossed it on the ground. When he gave the body a stiff kick with his boot, no one said anything. It seemed like the right thing to do.

  56

  Cobb needed a fresh set of clothes to be buried in.

  Lena remembered that gray suit she’d seen him wearing on video during Jacob Gant’s trial. The one that had looked new and perfectly tailored. Vaughan said he’d ride over with her to pick it up.

  Over the last three days, they had spent a lot of time together. A lot of time not being alone with themselves or their thoughts. A lot of time in bed.

  Lena pulled out of the garage at Parker Center, saw the cameras turning their way from the media camped out around the building, and drove through the red light. Instead of dealing with midday traffic on the 110 Freeway, she decided to take surface streets around Dodger Stadium and pick up the Golden State Freeway on the other side of the hill.

  The press was swarming again. The story of Lily Hight’s murder bigger than ever with a fresh set of storylines and a cast of seven new victims capped off by the killer of all killers—Bad Boy Bennett—a deputy DA who committed suicide rather than face his arrest and prosecution and the humiliation and shame that would have come with it.

  On Saturday night they had confronted the district attorney for his own odd behavior—a no-nonsense meeting ordered by Deputy Chief Ramsey. Ramsey wanted to know what Higgins and Spadell had been looking for that could have been picked up by Club 3 AM security cameras. Ramsey wanted to know what was so important to Higgins that it required breaking into Johnny Bosco’s house and running away when Lena identified herself as a police officer. Spadell never showed up for the meeting and was believed to have fled the city. Higgins refused to talk until he’d had a chance to confer with his political consultants. Ramsey pointed out to the district attorney that burglary was still considered a crime in Los Angeles County and suggested that he confer with his attorney instead of his asshole consultants.

  But if Jimmy J. Higgins had been searching out video that showed him using cocaine, it hardly made any difference now.

  Bennett had been his protégé and everybody knew it. Higgins had overseen Bennett and Watson’s work on Jacob Gant’s trial, hoping to grab as many headlines as he could. He had received a copy of Gant’s polygraph from Buddy Paladino, just as Bennett and Watson had. Yet Jimmy J. Higgins had remained quiet about it, essentially paving the way for the actual killer—an officer of the court—to try an innocent man for a murder he himself had committed. The mayor, a majority of the city council and county supervisors—but not all—were calling for Higgins’s resignation. But even more, the sense of outrage was so pervasive that people were taking it to the streets. The story was just three days old. Higgins had already been attacked twice in restaurants by the kind of people who aren’t prone to acts of violence. He had been chased down the street by a group of college students who saw him exiting a parking garage.

  Higgins was getting what his office had given Jacob Gant, but with one essential difference. Every blow Higgins took, he’d earned.

  Lena exited the Golden State Freeway
, winding her way around the airport until she reached Vineland Avenue. After passing Fiesta Liquors and the Rancho Coin Laundry on her left, she spotted a parking space right in front of Cobb’s apartment building and made a hard U-turn into the curb.

  Vaughan seemed confused. “Why are you stopping?”

  “We’re here,” she said. “This is it.”

  He eyed the run-down building—the lost neighborhood. “I had no idea.”

  Lena tried not to think about it and got out of the car. She noticed a Hispanic woman draping her sheets over the fence to dry in the sun. Across the street a middle-aged Asian woman was watching them from the sidewalk.

  Lena led Vaughan through the broken gate and up the steps to the second floor. Just as before, most of the tenants kept their windows open and they were greeted by the smells of corn tortillas and chicken frying in hot oil. Lena pointed to Cobb’s apartment at the end of the walkway and they turned the corner. She could see that old Mexican woman sitting before her window again, her ancient face still expressionless. Still blank and wrinkled. But this time when Lena met her gaze, something different happened. She sensed a certain recognition in the old woman’s eyes. A certain sadness. And when she looked ahead to Cobb’s door, Lena saw all the flowers and candles that his neighbors had placed around the mat. A snapshot of Cobb taken in the courtyard with an old Polaroid camera had been taped to his door as well.

  “They loved him,” Vaughan whispered.

  Lena nodded, taking in the display as she unlocked the door with Cobb’s keys. She didn’t want to spend a lot of time here. She didn’t want any more memories than she already had. She didn’t want to let in anything new.

  The heat inside the apartment was stifling. Vaughan left the door standing open, gazing at the shabby furniture and gray walls in disbelief. Lena left him there and walked into the bedroom to search through Cobb’s suits. After a few moments, Vaughan stopped in the doorway to watch.

  “You know I keep thinking about the day you came to my office,” he said. “The day you wanted to talk, but wouldn’t do it on the phone. You’d just left Gant’s brother, Harry. He’d told you that Jacob was investigating Lily’s murder on his own. That he’d found something and had gone to tell Johnny Bosco about it.”