by Lee Goldberg
She kept her arms at her side.
Steve sighed. "I have a warrant. How hard do you want to make this on yourself?"
She reluctantly held out her hands in front of her. Steve ran the swabs over her hands and up her arms.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
Steve glanced at the swabs, then showed them to Mark. The swabs was peppered with tiny black particles.
"Checking for gunshot residue," Steve said, then held up the swabs for her to see. "And you're covered with it."
"Of course I am," Lacey said, irritated.
"Maybe this would be a good time to read you your rights," Steve said.
"I didn't kill my husband or that woman," she said. "I'm starring in an action movie, Detective. We were filming a shoot-out last night. Naturally I'm covered in gunshot residue."
"Then you won't mind if we search your house," Steve said, not that he needed her permission. He slipped the swabs into plastic containers and sealed them with evidence tape. "The crime-lab techs will be here in fifteen minutes."
"Be my guest." Lacey sat back down on the couch. "Just don't drop any bloody gloves on the property while you're at it."
Her pointed allusion to the O. J. Simpson case, and all that it implied, wasn't lost on Steve. The O. J. debacle had been on his mind from the instant he first saw Cleve Kershaw's body. What Steve found interesting was that it was already on her mind, too.
Mark and Steve left Lacey McClure's compound as soon as the crime scene mice and some uniformed officers arrived, which was shortly after nightfall. Steve knew that, at best, he only had an hour or two head start on the media. He wanted to get to Amy Butler's place and find out what he could before the reporters showed up there.
Mark was silent during most of the drive from Mandeville Canyon to Amy Butler's apartment in Hollywood, twenty miles east and several socioeconomic classes away. He was mulling everything he'd seen and heard since he'd discovered the bodies.
"I can see you thinking," Steve said. "I can almost hear it."
"It's a difficult case," Mark said.
"Just the celebrity aspect and all the media attention that comes with it," Steve said. "Otherwise, the murder itself is no mystery."
"It is to me," Mark said.
"That's because it's so mundane," Steve said. "Don't let the celebrity part fool you: This is simple murder, like most of the cases I deal with every day and that you never get involved with. A married man is found murdered in bed with his mistress. Happens daily. Nine times out of ten the killer is going to be the spouse or lover of one of the victims."
"So before we met Lacey McClure, before she even said a word, she was already your prime suspect."
"Even more so after she opened her mouth. If cheating on her wasn't enough reason to kill her husband, his financial misdeeds were," Steve said. "Factor in the gunshot residue on her hands and her lousy alibi, and it's obvious. Lacey McClure killed Cleve Kershaw and his lover, too."
"So why didn't you arrest her?"
"If she wasn't a movie star," Steve said, "I would have."
"You're telling me she gets special treatment just because she's a celebrity?"
"Of course she does. We arrest people every day and nobody cares what happens. But a celebrity's case gets intense public scrutiny," Steve said. "We can't make a single honest mistake. If we arrest a 'normal person,' and a few hours or a day later find out we were wrong, we let him go and we apologize. Nobody hears about it. If we make the same mistake with a star, the next day the media is all over us and everybody is saying the police are incompetent and corrupt."
"So even though you think you have enough circumstantial evidence to bring her in, you're going to wait."
"At least until we know more about Amy Butler. I want to be sure it wasn't somebody out of Amy's life that pulled the trigger," Steve said. "Besides, there is one advantage to dealing with a celebrity."
"What's that?" Mark asked.
"Lacey McClure is recognizable all over the world. She can't skip town and disappear. So I can wait to arrest her until I've covered every detail, which is a fancy way of saying 'until I'm sure I've covered my ass.'"
"Then you have a serious problem," Mark said.
"I do?" Steve asked.
"Even if Lacey McClure is guilty—and I'm inclined to agree with you that she is—there's still a mystery you have to solve."
"Which is?"
"The murder makes absolutely no sense."
"Sure it does. It's about jealousy or money or both," Steve said. "Take your pick. They're both right at the top of the short list of reasons why people kill each other."
"I'm not talking about the why, I'm talking about the how," Mark said. "I heard the gunshots at four thirty, but when I got to the scene five minutes later, I discovered the victims had already been dead for at least thirty minutes. So who fired the shots I heard and for what reason? How did the shooter get away? What really happened this afternoon?"
The next time Mark glanced at his son, he could almost hear him thinking, too.
CHAPTER FIVE
"Amy was always the lucky one," Elsie Feikema said, taking a deep drag on her cigarette and blowing the smoke out slowly.
"Not today," Steve said, leaning against the kitchen counter, across the room from where Elsie sat on the couch, her legs drawn up to her chest, one arm hugging her pale knees.
"Today was the exception," Elsie said.
"I'll say," Steve replied, trying not to inhale too much of the smoke blown in his direction. He glanced over at his father, who was listening to the conversation while quietly poking around the two-bedroom apartment.
The place was decorated with space-age, '70s furniture and quirky swap-meet finds. Lava lamps of all sizes were scattered throughout the apartment; Mark went around the room, admiring each one of them.
"She was always winning. For example, at McDonald's, whenever they'd hand out those scratch-and-win cards, she always won an entire, free meal," Elsie said. "Me? I got small fries, maybe a small drink."
"It's not quite the same as winning the lottery though, is it?" Steve said.
"But in a way she did, that's the thing," Elsie said. "About two years ago, she started waiting tables at the pizza joint where I worked. Of course, she had other aspirations. Nobody who's a waitress in this town wants to be a waitress, you know?"
"And in other towns waitressing is a career goal?" Steve said.
If the place didn't smell like an ashtray, he'd be enjoying his interview. It was playing out the way he liked it. The person open, maybe too open, letting him just sit back and mostly listen, while another detective, in this case his dad, was free to snoop around unobserved.
In fact Mark was, at that very moment, drifting unnoticed by Elsie into the short hallway leading to the two bedrooms.
"In LA, every waitress is an aspiring actress," Elsie said. "I was taking a different route. I was modeling on the side. When my old roommate moved out to live with her boyfriend, I asked Amy if she wanted to share the rent with me on this place. She did, but it was a little steep for her. So, to help her make a few extra bucks, I showed her how to get into modeling."
Elsie shook her head about something and took another long drag on her cigarette. Steve didn't bother prodding her; he knew she'd keep talking.
"I've modeled merchandise in a hundred throwaway fliers, newspaper ads, and department store catalogs," Elsie said. "Nothing ever came from it for me. Who really notices the woman in the ad, smiling like a lunatic about the discount toilet bowl cleaner she's holding? Amy does one newspaper ad for a crummy sports bra and she's discovered by a big-time movie producer."
"That's what you meant by winning the lottery," Steve said.
"Cleve Kershaw is sitting on the can one morning, leafing through the newspaper, and finds his next star, the next Lacey McClure," Elsie said. "I was in the same ad. I was in a sports bra, too. He looked right past me. I'm good-looking, aren't I?"
"Breathtaking," Steve sa
id.
Elsie studied Steve for a moment. He tried hard to look sincere. She was about the same age as Amy, and wasn't in bad shape, but to Steve it was like comparing the filet mignon at Sizzler to the one at a five-star restaurant. Same fine cut of meat, far different flavor.
Apparently Steve passed the sincerity test, or at least came close enough, because she exhaled another stream of smoke and decided to continue her story.
"So Kershaw tracks her down, tells her he's gonna make her the next big thing. He gets her to quit her job, then foots the bill for her living expenses, acting lessons, and martial arts training. He even buys her a bunch of new clothes and expensive gifts to reward her for all the effort she was putting in," Elsie said, with more than a little envy in her voice. "Can you believe it?"
Hearing that, it wasn't hard for Mark to pick out which bedroom belonged to Amy. A large, flat-screen television dominated one wall, an elaborate sound system occupied an other. Half-melted scented candles were arrayed throughout the room—not so much for romance, he guessed, than to combat the smell of her roommate's cigarettes.
"How did her boyfriend feel about that?" Steve asked.
"Amy didn't have one," Elsie said, "but even if she did, it wouldn't have mattered, because this was strictly business. She wasn't sleeping with Kershaw. I mean, c'mon, you know who he's married to, right?"
Amy Butler certainly did, as Mark discovered. In the drawer of her nightstand he found a stack of lifestyle and movie magazines, each with dog-eared pages marking a Lacey McClure interview or a review of one of her movies. He also found a pair of nunchaku—two pipes strung together with a short length of chain. But on this set, the pipes were covered with rubber so they couldn't do any harm. They were for training.
"Maybe Cleve intended to make Amy the next Lacey McClure in more ways than one," Steve said. "They were killed in bed together."
Surprised, Elsie caught her breath for a moment, smoke floating in her half-open mouth like a layer of fog.
"Then things must have changed," Elsie said. "I mean, it's not like Amy wasn't entertaining some fantasies about the guy dumping his wife, but she knew they were fantasies. He was married to Lacey McClure, a rich, beautiful movie star. Why would he toss her out of bed for a waitress who models discount sports bras?"
"Did Amy have any enemies?" Steve asked.
"She wasn't Mary Poppins or anything, there were people who didn't like her," Elsie said. "But nobody hated her or wanted to hurt her, at least not that I know about. Even if somebody did, Amy could have handled it. If I were you, I'd start checking hospitals."
"Why?" Steve asked.
"Because Amy would have gone down fighting," Mark said emerging from the hallway, clumsily twirling Amy's nunchaku in his hand. "She'd been studying Tae Kwon Do for some time. I saw her uniform and her brown belt."
He abruptly lost his grip on the nunchaku, sending it spinning into a bookshelf, where it narrowly missed shattering one of the lava lamps.
"Sorry about that." Mark picked up the weapon and set it down in front of Elsie. "How long had Amy been training?"
"Off and on for years, when she could afford it," Elsie said. "When Amy was a kid, her mother got assaulted on the street by some mugger. So it was important to Amy to be able to take care of herself."
"Was she any good at it?" Steve asked.
Elsie leaned forward and snubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray as if she were squishing a bug with it. "Good enough to kick the gun out of a guy's hand and make him eat it."
A harsh, unnaturally white light suddenly seeped in through the closed drapes of the window.
"What the hell is that?" Elsie asked.
Steve went to the window, parted the drapes, and peered at the street.
The lights were coming from atop a CNN satellite broadcast truck parked across the street to illuminate the building and create a backdrop for the reporter on the sidewalk, who was facing a cameraman and delivering a live report.
In a moment, more reporters would be showing up, and they'd all want to talk to the Elsie Feikema about her murdered roommate. Within the hour, Elsie's face would be on TVs from LA to Minsk. She was about to become an instant celebrity. All it took was a double murder.
Steve closed the drapes and turned to Elsie. "I think your luck is about to change."
* * *
There were six television sets on the wall in Police Chief John Masters' office at Parker Center, and on every one of them he saw the same image. He saw Lt. Steve Sloan brushing past reporters camped outside murder victim Amy Butler's Hollywood apartment building, mumbling a brusque "I have no comment at this time," before hurrying to his car.
But that wasn't what caught the chief's attention.
One of his TVs was connected to a TiVo, a digital video recorder which allowed him to freeze live footage as if it was already on tape. He aimed his TiVo remote at one of the screens and froze the broadcast, backed up a few frames, and found what he was looking for.
While the cameras were focused on Steve, nobody paid any attention to the man with the grocery bag walking down the sidewalk and around the corner behind him. But Masters recognized the flash of white hair and the merry stride that belonged to only one man.
And now, in the frozen image, he could see the man glancing over his shoulder, a mischievous smile under his white mustache.
Dr. Mark Sloan.
It was obvious to Masters that Steve had timed his dive into the pack of reporters to coincide with Mark discreetly slipping out the back door of the building. Masters assumed Mark waited around the corner, out of sight of the reporters, for Steve to pick him up.
As much as the chief disliked the idea of Mark being involved in the case, he was thankful that Steve was smart enough to keep his father away from the media. If Mark Sloan had been on camera, it would have made it look like the LAPD was incapable of handling a high-profile murder case without the help of a civilian.
It was only a brief reprieve. Masters knew it was inevitable that the press would find out that Mark Sloan discovered the murders and that he was up to his neatly trimmed mustache in the investigation.
Ever since Masters had become chief of police, he'd tried to sever the department's ties to the meddling doctor. It didn't matter to Masters that Mark had an impressive record when it came to solving difficult cases. In the chief's opinion, the more successful the doctor was, the more incompetent it made the LAPD appear.
That opinion didn't change even after Mark Sloan foiled a plot by a corrupt city councilman to implicate the chief in the murder of a police officer, if anything, the experience only strengthened the chief's belief that Mark Sloan undermined public confidence in the LAPD.
His one attempt to co-opt Mark Sloan, by appointing him as a member of a special civilian task force examining cold cases long abandoned by the LAPD, had backfired badly. Mark Sloan discovered there was a killer who'd masked his murders by making them appear to be the work of other serial killers. As a result, scores of convicted serial killers were appealing their convictions, forcing dozens of complex cases to be retried, taxing the already overburdened resources of the LAPD and the district attorney's office.
And now Mark Sloan was inextricably involved in a high-profile celebrity murder case. Even without his involvement, the case was a ticking bomb for the LAPD. There was no question the bomb would explode; the question was how to contain the damage to the department when it did.
He muted the sound on the TVs and turned to look at the city from his window. It's what he always did in times of crisis. It centered him, like a needle in a compass pointing true north.
The ex-football player and former Marine reminded himself he was the chief of police of the city of Los Angeles. This was the city he was sworn to protect. To do that, the people had to respect him and his officers. So it was essential to maintain the authority and prestige of the LAPD.
The last major celebrity case, involving statutory-rape charges against actor Abel Marsh, who play
ed the lovable and wise inner-city priest on the hit TV series Heaven Sent, put the LAPD on trial, too. The department was accused of entrapment, sloppy evidence-handling and coercing false statements from witnesses. There was just enough truth to the accusations to topple the previous LAPD regime and bring Masters to power. He didn't relish the idea of history repeating itself, but he knew that to some degree it was unavoidable.
Celebrity murder cases always became scandals.
And, more often than not, he knew that the detectives who got stuck with the case were probably working the last investigation of their careers. The white-hot intensity of the media was too much. Every blemish on their records would be exposed, every personal failing revealed, every weakness exploited. Most cops in that situation retired immediately after the trial, leaving humiliated, disgraced, and disgusted. A few lucky ones got book deals, or ended up being portrayed by Greg Harrison, Greg Evigan, or some other has-been Greg in a low-budget TV movie.
All of a sudden, Mark Sloan's involvement in the Lacey McClure case didn't seem bad at all.
It was fortuitous, in fact.
Masters allowed himself a smile. If he played things right, when all of this was over, it wasn't the department that would face the scrutiny of the press and the wrath of the public.
It would be Dr. Mark Sloan.
Chief Masters wasn't the only man at that moment who, after watching the local evening news, stood at his office window, contemplating the inevitable ramifications of what was already becoming known as "The Lacey McClure Case."
The law firm of Tyrell, Dinino & Barer occupied three floors of a building at the corner of Beverly Drive and Wilshire Boulevard, at the geographical epicenter of wealth and power of Hollywood.
Arthur Tyrell was a large man, affectionately described as "big-boned" by his mother and "double-wide" by his father. He wasn't fat, but he was large, and he liked to live large, too.
When Tyrell looked out the window of his mahogany- paneled corner office, he saw the exclusive stores and restaurants of Rodeo Drive, a street devoted to thriving on the outrageous excesses of the rich and self-absorbed. And he saw the buildings that housed the major talent and management agencies, which swarmed like blood-thirsty mosquitoes over the biggest stars, feeding on their obnoxiously bloated salaries ten percentage points at a time.