Nola had noticed the same phenomenon during her interviews at the yacht club. Men talking about Haven morphing into bobblehead dolls.
“Ah, gentlemen . . . the woman drank spray tan and forgot to say when, so maybe you could sound just a little less rape-y when you’re talking about her. Oh, Julia Louis-Dreyfus! Stop the tape.”
“What?” Tony asked. “Are we back to shoes? When you twist the heels, do they transform into vibrators? ‘Cause that’s the only explanation for all the fuss women make over them.”
“It’s not shoes. On your ten. By the velvet rope.”
There was no mistaking him. Even in a throng of professionally handsome faces, Bryan Burnell stood out in a crowd. The same Bryan Burnell who’d told Nola just the night before that he wouldn’t be caught dead at the film festival, had been caught on video not dead, but whispering intimately with an exotic woman with dark skin, fierce cheekbones, and a body borrowed from Zoe Saldana. Nola was outwardly calm, but inside, a great tornado of emotions was starting to swirl. Feeling the falling barometer, Tony took a shot at damage control. “Hang on, Nols, before you arrest, try, and hang the guy in absentia, maybe try to keep an open mind.”
Sebastian was scanning the frozen computer screen. “Who are we talking about?”
“The liar liar pants on fire whispering to his lover, whose girl-delts are way too muscled up to pull off that strapless little cocktail number,” Nola replied.
“There’s that open mind I was talking about,” Tony said.
“I don’t need an open mind. I have open eyes.”
“Maybe she’s just a friend he bumped into,” Tony suggested. “Or a woman he stopped seeing before he met you. Or maybe he was seeing her, but after last night he called her and said he’d just gone out with the most irresistibly insane woman on the planet, so, ‘Hasta la vista, sexy muscled ho.’ ”
Sebastian zoomed in on Bryan’s gal pal. “I can tell you one thing about her. She’s either a writer, a producer, or a director. See that white badge she’s wearing? They only give those to people who have films in competition. If you want, I can isolate her image and email it to the submissions committee. Once I have her name, I can hack her driver’s license, credit card statements, whatever you like.”
“Thanks, Baz, but turning cyber-stalker over a guy is just a notch below baking Ebola muffins on my crazy-girl bucket list,” Nola said sourly. “It doesn’t matter who she is. I’m mad because he lied. He steered us away from the park last night because a film event was going on. He said he never went near all the festival hoopla, but obviously he was just afraid we’d run into his girlfriend.”
“Or . . .” Tony paused to think of a logical explanation. When none appeared, he gave up. “Yeah, I got nothing. He’s toast.”
Nola scooped some frosting off the last cupcake and licked it off her finger. “Oh, he’s beyond toast. He’s those burnt little pieces that fall off and make creepy crumbs at the bottom of the toaster. The irony is . . . mentioning how much he hated all the cameras and the hoopla is what made me think to look through all this footage in the first place. Wow, he must have thrown up a little in his mouth when he realized he gave me that bright idea.”
“Well, upside, at least I don’t have to worry about him dismembering you in the woods.” Tony popped Nola’s icing-scraped cupcake in his mouth. Thanks to Tony, waiters all over Santa Barbara were under the mistaken impression that Nola always cleaned her plate.
Nola wiped her frosting finger with a napkin. Pissed that the last pristine dress in her closet now had guy-who-had-a-hot-girlfriend associations, she tapped Sebastian on the shoulder. “Baz, please fast-forward to the next scene, like I intend to do with my life.”
Half an hour later, they were still watching video. The harder Nola tried not to scan the crowd to see more of Bryan and his mystery date, the more she was aching to do it.
“You’re prettier than she is,” Tony said, out of the blue.
“Why would you say that? I’m not even thinking about her. Or him. And why do men think telling a woman she’s pretty is the solution to everything?”
She hadn’t meant to sound so petulant, but it was really maddening. Friends always said you were prettier and smarter and funnier, even if you weren’t. It was like putting a Band-Aid on a heart attack. Thank you for thinking I’m so vain that comparing me favorably to the other girl will make me feel better. Still, people had to say something, and it was nice of Tony to try, so why was she being such a Quaker Instant Bitch?
“And by, ‘Why would you say that?’ I mean, ‘thank you,’” she added.
They kept fast-forwarding. There were two more videos showing Charley interacting with the crowd. In the first, he was singing about a young guy with a skinny tie and pancake butt who was dropping him some change. The second showed a woman in old-school Versace handing him a dollar. Both skinny-tie guy and Versace woman gave and received big warm smiles. They were hardly America’s Most Wanted.
The next video was an interview with Ben Affleck. Charley was visible in the background, but nobody was paying any particular attention to him. They were about to fast-forward again when a couple swept in from the street and stopped right in front of Charley’s open guitar case. Gus Gillette and Monica Crawford-Wilson were engaged in a heated argument. It was impossible to make out what they were saying over the crowd noise, but their animosity was visceral. Tony and Nola raced to shout, “Stop the tape!”
Sebastian hit pause, and the image froze. Monica’s right hand was clutching Gus’s arm to stop his forward progress, and her left was holding something. “Can you zoom in on her left hand for me?” Nola asked.
Sebastian zoomed in till the grainy object became clear enough to make out. It was an Evian bottle. Monica’s glamorous, Samurai leather chic and bottled water were making it harder and harder to believe that her preferred social group was the Camelbak-and-bandana crowd.
Zooming in revealed something else unexpected. Monica was wearing the same badge as Bryan’s girlfriend, only instead of white, Monica’s was blue.
“Blue badges are for festival volunteers,” Sebastian explained. “They take tickets, pass out programs. It’s cool ‘cause they get to see all the movies for free.”
Monica didn’t strike Nola as the volunteer type, but there were bigger issues at hand. They started the tape again and watched in slow motion. Gus and Monica shared a few more angry words, then he pulled away and stormed out of frame. When Charley started to sing, Monica shot him a look that served as a restraining order. He immediately stopped playing and made a small bow of apology. Contemptuous, she strode off and disappeared into the crowd.
Tony turned to Nola. “How are you at reading lips?”
“Better than I am at reading men, obviously, but I didn’t catch a word. We’ll have to get a good sound tech to filter out the crowd noise and bump up the background.”
In spite of not knowing exactly what had been said, Nola was feeling a surge of excitement. They had video of Monica and Gus having a fight and poor Charley having had the bad luck to sing about it.
“Why would they be fighting?” Tony wondered as they watched the scene a second time. “Gus wanted to kill Larry’s project as much as Monica did.”
Nola considered Monica’s glamorous Japanese garb and Evian bottle again. “Maybe our Glamourai terrorist is a double agent.”
“Say what now?”
“I know it’s weird, but go with me. If Monica and Larry are secretly working together, appearing to be anti-development puts her above suspicion, which makes her the perfect go-between to approach Gus with a bribe.”
Tony picked up the thread. “Okay, so, following your logic trajectory, Monica makes the offer, but Gus is dying so he doesn’t need the money, and maybe he’s seen Larry and Haven sharing that look we saw earlier, so he turns it down. Probably tells her he’s already written a speech against the deal, which leads to a fight.”
“Exactly!” Nola said beaming. “Then Monica tells Larry she and Gus foug
ht, and Charley made up a song about it and bang! Both Gus and Charley turn up dead.”
Tony smiled. “Dude just shot him, click, click, click . . .”
“So, are you guys saying Larry killed both of them?” Sebastian was still playing catch-up.
“Or had somebody do it for him,” Nola replied. “But, hang on, I’ve got more. With Gus dead, Larry gets Haven to rewrite the speech, then, rather than pay her off, he kills her too. It’s a threefer. Ta da!”
Tony shook his head. “Sorry, you lose me there. You saw how Larry was looking at Haven. The only way he didn’t want her was dead. When I interviewed them together, he was practically spraying the furniture to scent-mark his territory.”
“So?” Nola shrugged. “He got over it. Show me a beautiful woman, and I’ll show you a man who is tired of fucking her.”
Sebastian looked up from his computer screen. “I don’t think that’s true.”
Honestly, he was so adorably naïve she just wanted to eat him up. “Sorry, Baz, you’re probably right.”
“There’s something else bugging me,” Tony said. “If Monica’s working with Larry, wasn’t it a little counterintuitive for her to Ocean Spray the Coastal Commission?”
Nola shrugged. “They took a calculated risk. The attack turned all the commissioners in Larry’s favor, right? I think Monica’s been head puppeteer since she joined that group, and those boys are just too full of themselves to realize she’s pulling the strings.”
“Clever girl,” Tony said admiringly.
“Me or her?”
“Both.”
“Thanks. For the record, I still think Larry killed Haven.”
Tony didn’t agree, but you couldn’t have everything. And there was always a chance Larry had paid Monica and her crew, or some other outside party, to do the job for him. Nola needed to find out if either Larry or Monica was AB positive. She promised Sebastian another dozen cupcakes if he’d hack Jillian’s surgery files. Dr. Benioff would only have Jillian’s blood type, but if she was an O, Monica couldn’t be AB. At least that would rule her out. Before Sebastian could get started, Juan entered from the squad room with big news.
“ROTC70 just posted a communiqué on the UCSB message board.”
Sebastian pulled it up on his computer. The words were culled from the lyrics of an old Phil Collins song: “I can hear it coming in the air, hold on. Can’t you feel it coming in the air? Hold on. Hold on.”
“Coming in the air.” Tony didn’t remember the song, but the hint was obvious.
“Hope that doesn’t mean Ian’s moved from flammable liquid to gas.”
“I was thinking airwaves,” Juan said. “Like they’re planning to cut in on the local news or something.”
Nola stared at the lyrics on the screen. “Wait. There’s a word missing. I can feel it coming in the air . . . tonight. They purposely left out the word ‘tonight.’ What’s going on tonight?”
“The Euclidian Variation!” Sebastian shouted. “Holy shit, they’re going to hit the premiere!”
Nola, Tony, and Juan exchanged a look. The kid was right. High-profile, loaded with press, the premiere made a sweet target, and Monica was a volunteer, which gave them someone on the inside. An attack coming in the air. It was unlikely they’d be swooping in on helos blasting “The Flight of the Valkyries” à la Apocalypse Now, so what else could it be?
“The theater ventilation system,” Tony said. “Ian might have made some kind of gas bomb.”
A random thought popped into Nola’s head. “Christ, Tony, what if it isn’t something Ian’s cooking up in the bathtub? What if it’s two canisters worth of deadly military poison?”
“You mean those weapons that were missing up at Vandenberg?” Juan asked, eyes wide. “Holy crap!”
Tony raised his arms to calm the alarm. “Hey, let’s tamp it down for a second. Nols and I both saw all twelve canisters present and accounted for yesterday, and Burnell gave us his word they were never missing.”
“Yeah, and now we know what that’s worth,” Nola replied, acidly.
The premiere was still hours away; there was plenty of time to mobilize. A tad neurotic when it came to romance, Nola was a Jedi George Washington when it came to her job. In a matter of minutes, she’d formulated a plan of attack and was calmly handing out assignments. She’d call Vandenberg and double check that all twelve canisters of SE40 were still safe, then turn her attention to tracking down Monica. Tony would head out with a team to search Malcolm and Ian’s apartment. Ancillary teams would search Kyle’s apartment and the car wash. Sebastian would try to trace the Phil Collins post back to its source, then do whatever he could to find Larry and Monica’s blood types. Juan would check the national gun database to see if Larry had a permit for a .38 and get the video to a sound lab. Of course, Sam would want to alert the theater and the festival directors himself.
“Sam is going to have puppies when I walk in with this. You want to come with, Tony?”
“Behind you in a minute,” he said, waving her on.
When Nola and Juan were out the door, Tony turned to Sebastian. “Listen, kid, obviously tracking that message has first priority, but when you’re done with that, do me a favor. Email the image of the woman with Burnell over to the festival publicity department. MacIntire might not care who she is, but I’ve got an inquiring mind.”
Fifty-One
Nola’s grandmother Catherine religiously watched the morning news shows. On particularly crazy days, she’d text to let Nola know that “hells-a-popping.” It was hells-a-popping and then some at the Santa Barbara Police Department as Nola, Tony, and Sam rushed to get ahead of the situation.
Ian’s professor had surfaced on his Channel Islands dive boat. He called Tony back, but the news wasn’t good. There were dozens of dangerous recipes for nasty gasses that any half-smart chemistry student could access online, and Ian was more than half smart. The scraggly little fart was on the Dean’s List. The university chem lab had all the building blocks to make any number of gas bombs, and what Ian couldn’t steal from school he could easily procure from a plethora of websites.
In light of the impending threat, Sam easily convinced Judge Peña to issue warrants for every area they needed to search for signs of chemical-bomb making.
As arranged, Tony took a team to Malcolm and Ian’s apartment while Nola and Juan headed out to Larry’s ranch. Monica’s easy access to ten secluded acres and various out-buildings made Rancho Perdido a likely staging area for whatever ROTC70 was planning.
When Nola and Juan arrived at the gatehouse, they flashed their warrant at Larry’s security team, warning them not to alert anyone on the premises that the police were on their way. Jeeps in communication with a search helicopter fanned out to cover the ten-acre spread. Nola and Juan took a small group of officers to search the house. A maid let them in. They were already spreading out downstairs when Jillian came storming down from her bedroom, fit to be sedated. The reddish-brown bruises around the compression wrap had turned a healing yellow-green that was barely visible under a thick layer of creamy beige foundation. With the mucus drains gone, she looked furious but healthy.
Monica and Larry were both away, so Nola presented Jillian with the search warrant, saying they were looking for anything that might tie Monica to ROTC70. She kept it vague, with no mention of Larry’s guns or things that might be coming in the night. If Jillian didn’t bother to actually read the document, it was her bad.
Juan’s firearm check revealed that Larry had permits for a .38 Colt automatic, an authentic Nazi Lugar, and the .44 Magnum that Clint Eastwood had wielded in the first Dirty Harry movie. He’d bought the .44 at a charity auction for a children’s hospital and presented it to Jillian on her fortieth birthday.
Nola thought giving a gun to a woman turning forty bordered on insanity. Even letting her hold a knife to cut the birthday cake seemed risky. But perhaps that was just her own psychosis.
Juan had also uncovered Larry’s membership at
the Montecito Gun Club. It was a private shooting range with a chic French restaurant and a steam room. Members, worn out from unloading a torrent of bullets into dummy targets, could relax over dinner or a schvitz. Unless Larry just went for the asparagus millefeuille and the pore-opening steam, he was most likely a pretty good shot. Sam had talked Peña into including the .38 in the warrant, but Nola didn’t want to spook Larry or Monica by mentioning it to Jillian.
Out-of-her-mind angry, Jillian phoned and got Larry out of a meeting with his architects. Nola could hear him yelling over the phone. He demanded to speak to Nola, but she wasn’t about to waste precious time listening to him rant. As she went room to room searching for signs of aerosol-bomb making, Jillian trailed behind her, holding the cell phone in the air so Larry could ream her out via speaker. When he finally went hoarse from shouting, he hung up, and Jillian dialed Monica. Eerily, Monica’s ever-present cell went unanswered.
When Jillian saw Juan literally going through her dirty laundry, she stormed off, calling to the maid to help her find her Vicodin. Nola took advantage of Jillian’s temporary absence to grab the .38 from Larry’s library and hustle it out to Juan’s car.
A thorough search of the main house failed to uncover any suspicious gas containers or aerosol-diffusing apparatus. The police chopper and the jeeps covered the ranch from end to end with the same result. Tennis court, stables, pool area: all clean. And aside from a near-empty bottle of Oxycontin and some Diet Coke, Monica’s guest house was chemical-free. Glancing out the guest-house window, Nola thought she saw Oprah Winfrey watching all the activity from a hilltop cabaña on the next property. Boy, she thought, I must really need sleep.
Searching Monica’s closets, she wondered again why a girl with so much expensive silk underwear would ally herself with the “property is theft” crowd. Sure, Malcolm was rock-star sexy, but so were the boys at the Montecito Country Club.
If Monica was a double agent working for Larry, as Nola suspected, maybe she wasn’t taking part in tonight’s activity at all. All this searching might be just a waste of valuable time and resources. On the other hand, she could have jumped sides at some point and put in with the bad boys just for fun. It was impossible to know.
Marry, Kiss, Kill Page 21