Dangerous Games

by Prescott, Michael

  Or a glorified ditch, Tess thought. She commented, “I’m surprised they even call it a river.”

  “It was a river once. Damn fine river jumping with steel-head trout. There were grizzlies on the banks, forests of willows and cottonwoods. That was in the 1760s, when the Spanish came here and found the Gabrielino Indian settlements. By the middle of the next century it was all gone—fish, bears, trees, and most of the Indians, too. Improvements had been made, you see. That’s how the settlers thought of it, at any rate.”

  “Fascinating.” Michaelson didn’t hide his exasperation. “I’m sure we’d all benefit from your historical insights if we didn’t have a murderer on the loose.”

  “Sorry. I get kind of caught up in my subject…Chief.”

  The meeting ended. Tess was gathering her papers when Michaelson called to her. “McCallum. One minute, please.”

  Maybe Crandall had squealed, after all.

  She waited until Mason and the supervisors had departed and she was alone with the AD.

  “You gave me all the strong leads, right?” Michaelson asked. “You’re not holding anything back?”

  “Of course not,” she lied.

  “Not keeping anything to yourself—you know, for a little freelance work?”

  Crandall must have said something. She met Michaelson’s gaze. “I don’t operate that way.”

  “Yes, you do. You’re always going off the reservation. That’s how you played it during the Mobius case.”

  “It’s a good thing I did,” she said, then regretted the words.

  Michaelson appraised her. “And maybe it would be a good thing if you did it again?”

  “I’m just doing my job.”

  Michaelson dropped his gaze, losing interest. “Be sure that’s all you do.”

  Tess relaxed. He’d been merely fishing. He didn’t know anything.

  She left the office. Either Crandall hadn’t seen her notes, or he hadn’t passed on the information to the AD. She’d gotten lucky. She wondered how long her luck would hold.

  In the hall she bumped into Mason. He regarded her with an amused look. “Sounds like somebody got sent to the principal’s office.”

  She smiled, a little warily. “Were you eavesdropping?”

  “Just surmising. The chief didn’t sound too happy with you.”

  “He’s not happy being called Chief, either.”

  “Into each life, a little rain must fall.” Mason’s grin faded. “I guess, under the circumstances, that’s a bad choice of words.”

  “I’m afraid I never properly introduced myself.”

  “Oh, I know who you are, Agent McCallum.”

  “My antisocial behavior is already that notorious?”

  “I wouldn’t call it antisocial. It’s more like you don’t play games. I’d call you a curmudgeon, but you’re too young for that particular appellation. An iconoclast, maybe. Or hell, just a rebel.”

  “That’s me. Rebel without a cause.”

  He chuckled, a rich, throaty sound. “I didn’t think anyone under the age of forty remembered that one. James Dean was my hero when I was growing up.”

  She appraised him skeptically, estimating his age at early forties. “You’re not old enough to have been a James Dean fan.”

  “Oh, he died before I was born, but I related to him anyhow. Must’ve been your typical teenage death wish. I even rode a motorcycle for a while. Nearly got myself killed on the damn thing more than once.”

  “I’m sorry you didn’t get to finish your history lesson. I did find it interesting.”

  “It was for your benefit. You seemed to have an interest in the subject. Which made you unique in that crowd.”

  “Bureau employees aren’t necessarily known for their patience. How long have you been consulting on the case?”

  “Since right after it started. Since Angela Morris.”

  “It’s been hard on you, I bet.”

  “Harder on the victims and their families and the case agents working their butts off to solve this thing. Me, I just sit in on some meetings and put my two cents in every now and then, and everybody ignores it, which is their privilege. They’re federal agents, and I’m a lowly municipal bureaucrat. I don’t expect them to listen to me.”

  “I’ll listen,” Tess said.

  It was his turn to appraise her. He nodded. “Yes, I believe you will. If you’d like, I can finish the history lesson now. Maybe over a cup of coffee.”

  “You’d be fraternizing with the enemy.”

  “You’re not my enemy. And I wouldn’t be fraternizing.”

  She glanced at his left hand and noticed he didn’t wear a wedding ring. “Are you, um, asking me out?”

  “I guess so. Out for coffee, anyway. As first dates go, it’s pretty low-stress.”

  She was flattered, even though she was sure things would never go anywhere between them. He wasn’t her type, or something. He wasn’t…

  He wasn’t Paul. Always she came back to that.

  “Tess?” He simulated a polite rap on her noggin. “You still in there?”

  “Sorry. Drifted away. Uh, I think I have to take a pass for now. Work, you know.”

  “Work. Yeah, there’s always work to do.”

  “I…I’m not making excuses….”

  “Sure you are. But it’s okay. Let’s face it, the history of the LA River isn’t all that mesmerizing a topic.”

  She’d hurt his feelings. “Ed, don’t take it like that.”

  “Hey, it’s okay.” He squeezed her arm, an almost paternal gesture. “I took a shot. Didn’t pan out. But if you change your mind, let me know. I’ll be around.”

  “All day?”

  “Mostly. On days like this, they need me here.” He answered her unspoken question. “Days with rain in the forecast.”

  She checked her watch as she walked away. Nearly ten thirty. If the Rain Man planned to strike at six P.M., there were only seven and a half hours to go.

  As she was heading back to the squad room, her cell phone buzzed. “McCallum,” she said, taking the call.

  “Agent McCallum—Detective Owen Goddard. You left a message on my voice mail.”

  “Thanks for getting back to me, Detective. I need to talk to you about an old case.”

  “I’m listening.”

  She didn’t want to have this conversation in the field office. “It might be better if I could talk to you in person.”

  “I expect to be at my desk for the rest of the morning.”

  “Give me half an hour. I’ll see you then.”

  She went to her workstation and opened the desk drawer to get out her notes. But something was wrong. The contents of the drawer had shifted slightly. Paper clips that had been resting in a plastic dish were scattered. Pens that had been lined up along one side of the drawer were in disarray.

  Hastily she searched her notes and was relieved to find that the page of her notebook summarizing Madeleine Grant’s interview was still there. Crandall hadn’t taken it. But he could have seen it.

  If he’d been looking. It was possible the contents had shifted when she shut the drawer earlier. She couldn’t be sure. And she couldn’t ask any of her squad mates if Crandall had been poking around her workstation. None of them would tell her a damn thing.

  She didn’t like not knowing. If Crandall had returned for a second look, then he was clearly suspicious of her. Maybe her anger at finding him at her desk had sparked his curiosity. Or maybe she was overreacting.

  She hoped so.

  15

  Tess took the San Diego Freeway south to the Culver Boulevard exit and parked outside the LAPD’s Pacific Area station. She found Goddard in the detectives’ squad room, seated at one of many gray metal desks butted together to form common work areas.

  The squad room did not compare favorably to the one at the field office. At the Bureau, the atmosphere was corporate, white-collar, while the Pacific station had a decidedly blue-collar feel. Cheap swivel chairs with squea
ky casters rolled on the well-worn beige carpet. Potted plants that looked half-dead sat atop dented file cabinets. A copy machine idled in a corner, under a wall-mounted TV, volume off, tuned to CNN.

  She took a seat at Goddard’s desk, where a spread of documents lay on a green blotter in no apparent order. “You McCallum?” he asked. “You caught me on a good day. My partner’s testifying in court, and I’m catching up on some paperwork. Now what did you want to see me about?”

  “A case you handled last year, involving a police officer named William Kolb.”

  “I remember.” Suddenly Goddard seemed uncomfortable. The ballpoint pen in his hand tapped the blotter in a nervous rhythm.

  “You don’t sound happy about it.”

  “It’s never fun when you’re dealing with a bad cop.”

  Tess thought there was more to his attitude than he was letting on, but she allowed it to pass. “Why don’t you tell me about the case?”

  “I assume you know the basics—the kitchen fire in Kolb’s apartment, the stuff the fire department found. The engine company brought in a squad car, and the patrol guys called for an investigator. My partner and I were catching calls that day.”

  “Kolb lived in Mar Vista, as I understand. Good neighborhood?”

  “Best he could afford. His apartment was no showplace, but I don’t think he cared. He wasn’t exactly known for hosting dinner parties.”

  “Antisocial?”

  “Unsocial is more like it. You know how the neighbors always say the guy was quiet, kept to himself? In this case it was true.”

  “Did he have friends on the force?”

  “A few. No enemies, far as I could tell.”

  “Did you know him?”

  “He was patrol; he worked a different division—we might’ve crossed paths now and then, that’s all.”

  “Did you know he was a cop when you went to his apartment?”

  “All I knew was that the fire department had found some suspicious items in plain view.”

  “And when you found out he was a cop…?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It must have come as a surprise.”

  Goddard squinted at her. “I know what you’re saying. You want to know if it affected the way we handled the case. The answer is, you bet it did. If he’d been a civilian, we would’ve taken twice as long to make the arrest. Everything was expedited once we found out he was LAPD.”

  “Why?”

  “First, because we were afraid it would be taken away from us. High-profile cases get snatched up by Robbery-Homicide downtown. And second, there’d been criticism of the department for letting criminal complaints against police officers languish until the statute of limitations expired. We’d been getting some bad press, including an exposé in the Times. I saw Kolb as an opportunity to repair the damage.”

  “When you say the investigation was expedited…”

  “My partner and I walked into the apartment at nine hundred hours, and we’d cleared the case to the DA’s office by fifteen hundred hours the same day.”

  “Record time.”

  “I can’t take too much credit. The case was open-and-shut. We didn’t need a warrant for the evidence in plain sight, only for a search of Kolb’s computer, and we found a judge who signed off telephonically. We brought in a tech from the computer crime squad, who found digital pictures of the woman Kolb was stalking.”

  “Madeleine Grant.”

  A nod. “And he found copies of e-mail messages Kolb sent her. There was no reason for Kolb to keep the stuff, except I guess he got off on it. A lot of these guys do.”

  “So you had him cold.”

  “Absolutely. We did all this while he was still on duty. At the end of his watch, we made the arrest.”

  “How did you handle it?”

  “We waited for him outside the West LA station house. He went quietly.”

  “Did he make bail?”

  “No, the judge set it high. All indications were that this would be a high-profile case. There was pretty strong media coverage in the first few days.”

  “I take it things didn’t work out the way you expected.”

  Goddard didn’t answer. The pen started tapping again. Tess began to think that this was more than a nervous habit. It seemed almost like a signal—as if he were sending her a message: Read between the lines.

  She didn’t pursue the question immediately. “Did Kolb show any remorse?”

  “He didn’t show a goddamn thing. He was giving us the thousand-yard stare. You’d get more information out of a prisoner of war.”

  “How about his record? Any problems in that area?”

  “A few civilian complaints, nothing too serious. You work the streets, you’re going to rub some people the wrong way. Professional Standards—what we used to call Internal Affairs—looked at him once or twice, gave him a couple of wrist slaps.”

  “I’ve heard he had an interest in Mobius.”

  “I was wondering if you would ask about that. He had a book of clippings about that case. It was all in there, everything the Times and the newsmagazines had to say. Including some stuff about you.”

  “Nice to know I have a fan. Did you ask him about Mobius?”

  “We asked. He didn’t tell us anything. Name, rank, and badge number—that’s all we got out of him.”

  “What’s the penalty for stalking in California?”

  “Maximum is three years in state prison.”

  “Kolb got one year.”

  “That’s right. With good behavior he served out his sentence in ten months.”

  “Pretty light sentence.”

  “I doubt he thought so.”

  “They didn’t exactly throw the book at him, did they?”

  No answer.

  “I thought California was ahead of the curve as far as antistalking statutes are concerned,” Tess said.

  Goddard shrugged. “We are. But the whole area is dicey. Problem is, you’re dealing essentially with a thought crime. You need to establish that the stalker’s intent was to place his victim in a state of fear. So you’re dealing with two states of mind, his intent and her fear. Both are subjective. What looks like stalking to one person might look like a prank to someone else.”

  “Kolb was planning more than a prank. He had the paraphernalia he needed to kidnap Madeleine Grant. That ought to show plenty of intent. The DA could have gone for the maximum. He didn’t, though.”

  Tess let the statement hang in the air, an implied question. Goddard said nothing. He tapped a staccato code with his ballpoint.

  She took a shot. “Was it political pressure? Going easy on a police officer to avoid giving the department another black eye?”

  She thought he might give her a wink and a nod, but he surprised her.

  “That’s bullshit.” Goddard took a breath, then added in a softer voice, “We police our own around here. This is still one of the cleanest departments in the country, I don’t give a damn what anybody says. There were problems, but we cleaned house. We take all kinds of crap for the problems and get no credit for the cleanup.”

  Apparently she’d been misreading his signals. “I didn’t mean to be confrontational. But if it wasn’t to protect the department, why wouldn’t they have gone harder on him?”

  “You’d have to ask the DA’s office about that.”

  “Why? Is it a secret?”

  “It’s out of my area. Once the case is handed to the DA, they’re in charge.”

  “It’s still your case.”

  “I’m not running the show. They are. Any decisions have to come from their office.”

  “Why do I get the sense that there’s something funny going on here?”

  Goddard looked at her. No, not at her. Through her. His voice was flat and firm. “The case was handled by Deputy District Attorney Richard Snelling. He’s on the eighth floor of the Criminal Justice Center downtown.”

  “And if I see him, I’ll get some answers?”

&nbs
p; There was no expression on his face. “I can’t say what you’ll get.”

  “Then I’ll have to find out for myself. One more thing, Detective. Madeleine Grant tells me that she called the LAPD with some suspicions regarding Kolb’s recent activities.”

  “She called me.”

  “She seems to feel the call wasn’t taken seriously.”

  He still wasn’t meeting her gaze. “I take every call seriously.”

  “So you’re pursuing the lead?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You’re not saying much of anything all of a sudden. Why wouldn’t you follow up on a tip like that?”

  His voice was toneless. “You think Kolb has something to do with the kidnappings?”

  “Not necessarily. I’m just curious why you’d be so cavalier about her call. She was right last year, wasn’t she?”

  “Sure she was.”

  “You don’t sound entirely certain.”

  “I can’t be responsible for what you read into my answers.”

  “No, you can’t. Thanks for your help, Detective.”

  Tess left the squad room, thinking that Kolb wasn’t the only one who knew about the thousand-yard stare.

  16

  Abby spent an hour in her condo, cutting notches in the key blank with a pair of Curtis clippers, then filing down the rough edges. She added the duplicate key to her already crowded key chain. Somehow she intended to find the padlock it fit. She had a feeling that when she did, she would learn a lot more of Kolb’s secrets.

  In the meantime she wanted to know why he’d returned home so early. She drove her Miata across town to the supermarket where he was normally stationed. She parked two blocks away and approached cautiously, ready to beat a hasty retreat if Kolb had shown up.

  He wasn’t there. A different guard was on duty. She put on her best ditzy persona and sashayed up to him. “Hey, where’s the guy who’s usually here?”

  The guard looked her over. “Who wants to know?” he asked with what he apparently believed was a rakish smile.