by K. T. Tomb
“Right,” Mark replied.
“Alright. Well, let’s get her in here and take a look.”
Chapter Three
He watched the entrance of the restaurant closely through his rear-view mirror.
He knew that the ex-cop would end up here soon. And that was perfect. Exactly what he wanted. All he had to do was wait. He slumped lower in the front seat as he watched the front door of the high-end restaurant open. False alarm, he thought to himself. Well, it’s only a matter of time, he thought and he settled down to wait. About a half hour later, the ex-cop showed up. He could tell that the man was absolutely frantic. He sat up sharply when the second man exited the restaurant. Finally, he thought. Let it begin. He watched as they paced back and forth, talking and talking. They didn’t know what to do. That was fine with him. He knew this would not be easy. He knew that there was a lot that could go wrong. But he also knew that if he followed his plan, he would have his revenge. He watched them pull out of the parking lot, waited until he counted to “fifteen-one-thousand” and pulled out after them. He kept his distance and followed them through the desert until they pulled into a parking lot.
This is a surprise. I didn’t expect them to come here, he thought to himself. I guess it really doesn’t matter where they get help—I knew they would go down fighting. But they will go down. He circled the building once, noted the name and address of the businesses located within, and drove away.
Chapter Four
“Well,” she said, “cause of death is pretty obvious.”
I snorted, trying not to laugh. The bullet hole in her head had been a dead giveaway for me.
“Shot through the head, close range. There’s gunpowder residue on the skin surrounding the bullet hole and there’s burning on the edges of the entry wound, which indicates a very close range shot,” Alex said.
“That means she knew her attacker—someone got close enough with a gun to not alarm her. At all,” Mark extrapolated.
“That makes sense to me,” I said rather pointlessly. The look on Alex’s face let me know that my statement was, indeed, rather pointless.
“Right. So here’s where things get interesting,” she replied. “First, there is no bullet hole in the passenger side seat. Also, there is no blood on the outside of the car. That means she was shot somewhere else, and then meticulously moved from wherever she was killed to your car. Second, her internal temperature is at about ninety-degrees Fahrenheit, which means she was killed between 4 and 6 hours ago. It also explains why there is such a large amount of blood in your vehicle—she was killed, and then immediately transferred to it. If she was moved right before you found her, the amount of blood in the car would have been minimized because the blood would have begun to pool. So that gives us an approximate time of death and an approximate location. Third—”
“Wait,” I interjected. “How does that give us an approximate location?”
“She was killed and then moved to my car, almost immediately,” Mark said. “That means that the person who killed her broke into my car, took my gun, killed her and moved her while my car was parked,” Mark explained.
“So where were you parked for the amount of time that it would have taken for someone to pull all of that off at about… seven p.m.?” I asked, mentally counting six hours back from one a.m.
“I’m thinking about that,” Mark said. “Believe me, I’m thinking about that.”
“As I was saying,” Alex interrupted us, “third, it tells us something very important about this killer.” She smiles knowingly.
“What would that be?” I asked, too tired to think straight.
“We know that he—or she—is watching you. Both of you.”
Her words hung ominously in the air as Mark and I looked at each other, incredulous. Alex was sharp, I had to give her that. It made sense too. This was a neat, clean kill. It had been well planned, and well executed. Whoever was responsible for this murder knew where Mark would be, and they knew my schedule well enough to know where I would be, so after they killed her, Mark would come straight to me without too much dilly-dallying. Mark and I pondered that for a moment, each of us lost in our own private thoughts.
“So,” I said, slowly looking at Mark, “where were you around seven p.m.? Where was I around seven p.m.? And where can this have taken place, that is close enough between where you were, and where I was that someone could do this so quickly and not be noticed?”
“And,” Mark added, “where is my gun? Because I know that she is killed with my old service piece. I always carry that piece with me. Maybe if we can find where she was killed, we can find my gun and match the ballistics?”
The last statement was finished as a question clearly directed at Alex. He even arches his eyebrow a little. While Mark and I were musing aloud, Alex had been stretching the corpse out on a table, gently, almost lovingly removed the corpse’s clothing, and looked the rest of the body over. Once the clothes were off the corpse, she rolled the body over and examined the exit wound.
“I might be able to do you one better Mark,” Alex said, looking at Mark.
“Okay, that would be great,” Mark said. “What do you mean though?” he finished lamely.
“Well, are your old cases still a matter of public record?” Alex asked.
“As far as I know,” Mark replied, still in the dark.
“So if I can get old police reports, I might be able to match the ballistics from one of those cases to… this!” And with a sickening squelch, she pulled free a large hunk of metal.
“Is that…” I started to ask.
“Yup,” Alex replied excitedly. “The bullet lodged against the back of her skull. That’s why the exit wound doesn’t look as bad as it should from such a close range wound,” Alex explained.
“That would be great,” Mark said with a yawn.
I almost stifled a yawn of my own. They were contagious; I couldn’t help it. I passed my hand over my face and rubbed my eyes. Mark was slouching in his chair. It was plain to see he was beat, and I couldn’t blame him. He must have been exhausted. Plus, if he was out having a couple of beers, I’m sure he must be feeling ground down. Alex noticed it too.
“Say,” she said. “When is the last time you guys slept?”
“Well,” Mark said, looking at me, “I woke up around six a.m. yesterday morning. So I’m going on about twenty hours.”
“Yeah,” I replied “I’m not much better. And to be honest, I’m for shit right now. My head is in a fog. I can do with some shuts.”
“Shuts?” Alex asked.
“Shut-eye,” Mark replied, answering for me. “Shuts was what we called ‘shut-eye’ back in college.”
“Oh,” Alex giggled.
“Mark, I gotta get some sleep. I’m gonna take off for a little bit. Where should we meet in… well, this morning?” I asked. It was a pale attempt at humor. It went completely unnoticed.
“Well…” Mark said, “you’re all the way on the other side of Santa Clarita, right?”
“Yeah,” I replied. “North suburbs.”
“Jeez,” Alex said. “That drive can take you three or four hours.”
“Yeah, well, I better get going now then, huh?” I replied, more snappish than I meant.
“Alright buddy,” Mark replied. “I’ll meet you at your place in the morning.”
“Mark,” I said scoldingly, “you gotta get some sleep too.”
“Okay, fine,” Alex interjected.
“What?” Mark and I asked in sync.
“You boys just crash at my place. I’ll give you guys a key and directions to my apartment. I’ll stay here, do the autopsy and look for any anomalies. You guys go get some sleep, and come back around say… nine a.m.?”
“That would be great, Alex,” I said. “We would really appreciate it.”
“Yeah,” Mark said. “I’m gonna end up owing you. Big time.”
“Well,” Alex said, giving me a look I knew all too well, “I’m sure I can think
of a way for you to make it up to me.”
I didn’t respond; inwardly I sighed. Alex was good looking. She was smart. She had an uncanny way of helping you without making you feel like you owed her. It’s a quality I really valued in a woman. But in my line of work, a regular relationship was… difficult at best. A nightmare at the worst. There was a lot of dishonesty on my part, and that was not really something I could help. If I was honest, more often than not, I was single in a matter of moments—sometimes longer, depending on how soap-boxy the particular woman was feeling.
Mark had the good sense not to say anything, either. Instead, we murmured our thanks, and assurances that we did, in fact, owe her, and took her key and a set of directions. Mark and I didn’t speak on the way to Alex’s apartment.
We entered Alex’s apartment, in silence. Her apartment was immaculate. Well-organized, clean and clutterless. Mark and I looked at each other, and I acquiesced immediately, making my way over to the couch. I lay down and fell asleep almost immediately to the soft sound of the shower running.
Chapter Five
Glurggle-lurggle-gurggle hssssssssssh. BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. A sound like an alien breathing followed by what had to be the country’s alien-invasion alarm woke me up. I looked around the room, alarmed and then was assailed by the pleasant smell of fresh coffee. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes, cracked my neck and stretched.
“Morning, sleepyhead.”
Not even nine a.m. and Mark was giving me shit.
“You might want to take a quick shower before we go back to the lab,” he suggested.
“Yeah, yeah. What’s got you so chipper this morning? Didja forget about the dead chick that showed up in your car?” That wiped the smirk right off Mark’s face. “I’m sorry,” I immediately apologized. “I didn’t sleep that well.” It wasn’t an excuse for my snippiness, I told myself. It was a good reason for it.
“No, it’s fine. I’m just… just trying to stay positive. I gotta think that… that somehow, someway, we’re gonna break this thing open enough to go to the police. Then my name—and not to mention yours—will be cleared.”
“Wait, I agree that you need to stay positive. And hopeful. But how, or why, in the world does my name need clearing?” I asked.
“Well, you got involved with me,” he said with a grim smile. “That means that there are people who can give eyewitness statements putting you and me together the night of the murder. That means that at the very least, you would be charged as an accessory. At the worst, co-conspirator.”
“Son of a bitch,” I swore.
“Well, that’s the right attitude,” Mark said sarcastically.
“You’re right. I think I’m just cranky.” I turned my head as far to the left as I could, trying to loosen a crick that had developed while I slept on Alex’s couch. “Maybe a shower will help. While I’m taking care of that, why don’t you try something for me,” I said.
“Okay, what’s that?” Mark asked.
“Try and remember everything you did yesterday and put together a timeline. I’ll think over my own while I’m in the shower and then when I get out I’ll write it down. You write yours down and we can compare and see if there’s any overlap. But start with what you do first thing in the morning—sometimes thinking sequentially will jog your memory and you’ll come up with something you might have missed.”
“Yeah,” Mark said. “I can do that. Although, if I remember something I have previously forgotten, how will I know?”
I just grumbled a dissatisfied noise at Mark and prepared to take a shower. That’s when I realized I didn’t have any clothes. But Mark was wearing fresh clothes.
“Hey Mark,” I shouted from the bathroom.
“What? I’m trying to think out here!” he shouted back.
“Yeah, well if you don’t want to have to think about me walking around naked all day, do you think you can make some more clean clothes magically appear? And maybe a towel?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Mark said. “Alex had a… long-term relationship… a couple of years ago and the guy apparently left a bunch of clothes here. She was going to donate most of them, but never got around to it.”
“Mark, all I care about is getting a long day’s worth of grime off me, and putting on some clean clothes that I can work in. Not one of my date suits.”
“Why the hell do you have separate suits for dates?” he asked, clearly on the verge of heaping shit on my already aching neck and shoulders.
“Why the hell don’t you?” I shot right back.
Mark chuckled, opened the bathroom door and handed in a pair of jeans, an old, well-worn but clean T-shirt and some fresh socks. I would skip borrowing some strange dude’s underwear—I would just have to free-ball it for the day. Hopefully, we could get this thing wrapped up by then. The hot water felt great on my neck and for a moment, I just blanked my mind and relaxed. I stood there, the heat eventually numbing my skin and I relaxed into that state of blissful unawareness that eventually led a person to think in a very detached way.
Breakfast was eggs with some bacon. Then I worked on my novel for a while—I wrote romance novels under a pseudonym for fun; it’s the great irony of my life—then I received the call to see if I was available yesterday night. Since one of my regulars canceled, I was suddenly available. I called the hotel to see if I could still get a room. Most of my clients expected high-end accommodations when they employed me, so I called the Ritz-Carlton to make sure I could still book a penthouse suite. I paid over the phone, and then, since I did not have anything going on the rest of the afternoon, I packed up my laptop, my notes and my clothes for the date that night. Then I drove to the rental car place, picked up the Porsche Cayman GTS in fire-engine red. I always rented a sports car for dates. At a couple hundred a night, it’was well worth the appearance. My oh-seven Chevy Silverado didn’t make a great impression. Then I drove to the hotel, checked in around three. I worked on the book a while longer, showered, dressed and then headed out to dinner. That took me from outside my house in the northern burbs to the high-society, beach scene of Santa Monica. I don’t think I did anything out of the norm for one of my date nights.
I realized with a slight shock that I was using up the hot water quickly—it was going from warm to room temp fast. I lathered up with some soap, rinsed, toweled off and dressed.
I put on the borrowed clothes and exited the bathroom, heading straight for the kitchen table where there was, thankfully, a hot, deep cup of coffee waiting for me. I added cream and sugar. I didn’t normally add the extra calories, but today I felt like I could use a bit of a sugar high. Mark sat down a steaming plate of eggs and sausage links.
“Wow,” I said. “You should sleep over more often. I don’t think last night even counts as a first date, and you’re pulling out all the stops.”
“Shove it, you little shit stain.” Mark gave me crap right back. “I am trying to do something nice, help you cheer up a bit. You’re crankier’n a bear outta hibernation a month early.”
“I’ll try to be nice,” I responded. “Thanks for the breakfast.”
“No problem,” Mark said.
I ate a couple bites of eggs and two of the four links of sausage, and then I got to work. I stood up, coffee in hand and rummaged through just about every drawer I could find, looking for pen, paper and if at all possible, a road map of the greater LA area.
“Aha! Finally!” I shouted, carrying the map back to the kitchen table, along with a black and a blue pen and paper. “Here’s what I’m gonna do,” I told Mark. “I’m gonna write a number on the map—then on the paper, that number will have a description of where I was, how long I was there, and what I was doing. I’ll use the blue pen. Then, you do the same thing, but with the black pen. We’ll cross-reference, and hopefully we come up with something similar, where we stayed put for say… an hour…” I trailed off, not quite sure where I was going. Mark picked right up on what I was saying, though.
“If there is a long enough overlap i
n an area where neither of us moves, then we’ll have a rough idea of where to start looking for my gun. If we find my gun, or even a casing or something, then at least we’ll know we’re in the right place,” he finished.
“And Mark,” I said, “I’ve got this… hunch.”
Mark sniggered.
“Could you have used a cornier detective word? What the fuck is this? Mystery, Inc. and Scooby-Doo?”
“Shut up, asshole,” I replied. “Fine, I’ve got this theory that the person who did this, they’ve got to know their area really well, right? They’ve got to know our schedule well enough to know when we’d be close enough to pull this off, and they would have to know the location where they killed her well enough to not be seen. So we’re looking for a pretty specific person.”
“Yeah,” Mark said. “Or someone who is so regularly on the site that he’s not at all suspicious when someone else on site notices him.”
I got to work mapping out my day. It pretty much followed the main highways south and west into the high-end area of Santa Monica. I even, in the interest of being accurate, mapped out the route we took—as much as I could remember of it—to Alex’s office. If you can call it that. I finished up my part of numbering the map and writing out my descriptions, and flipped it around so that Mark could get started. He numbered the map as well. He then deliberately looked at the map and wrote down a description of each number on the paper. We looked at each other to compare notes.
There was one striking similarity. We both had spent time at the rental car location. A long amount of time.
“Mark,” I said, looking at him. “I just remembered something.”
“Oh yeah?” he said. “What’s that?”
“At the rental car place… I remember it took me a really long time—probably closer to two hours than one—because the car that I needed to rent for last night had been in the shop all week. It was the only one of that make and model that they had in stock and they were expecting it back yesterday. I was the first person to come in and ask for it. Since it wasn’t there, I got a big discount on the rental. And I had to wait for it to get back to the lot.”