Perfectly Good Crime

by Dete Meserve

  By the time I drove along the Pacific Coast Highway to Geoffrey’s Malibu, the early-morning haze had burned off and the ocean glittered in the sunlight. I found Jake sitting at a table on the patio with a picture-perfect view of the sun-drenched beach. Instead of taking in the view, he had his head down, his phone pressed to his ear. He was listening intently, his jaw clenched. “Got to run, but we’ll figure this mess out later.” He tossed the phone on the table and waved at me to have a seat.

  “Everything okay?” I asked.

  He shook his head and drained the last of his cocktail. “Can’t get anything done. The department is in chaos with all the swatting going on.”

  Swatting involves fake 911 calls. In LA it almost always involves celebrities. Swatters call in and say there’s a violent crime underway at some celebrity’s home. The police send a team there with guns drawn—but it’s a prank. There’s almost never a crime.

  I shook my head. “I cover the crime beat every day. How come I rarely hear about swatting incidents?”

  He took off his aviator shades and folded them next to his phone. “We don’t want the pranksters to get more notoriety. Even if we send an entire SWAT team over to a celebrity compound, the media won’t hear about it if it turns out to be a prank.”

  The waiter, a twentysomething guy who had the kind of camera-ready looks that made me think “aspiring actor,” handed me an inch-thick wine list. I never drank during working hours, and not for any reason except blatant vanity. I can’t afford the calories. Women reporters have come a long way, but those with expanding waistlines mostly don’t get their contracts renewed. So I ordered some spring water and Jake ordered a scotch and soda. I had the feeling he was still on duty and wasn’t supposed to be drinking, but I wasn’t going to call him on it.

  Jake leaned on his elbows and lowered his voice. “Swatting was used as a planned diversion during the El Mirasol robbery. During the time the thieves were on the property, we received two calls about a gunman on Beyoncé’s Malibu property. We sent a dozen police officers to her home, but there was no gunman. That left us with little manpower when we got the report on the El Mirasol burglary a few minutes later.”

  “Why haven’t police figured out how to trace these swatters?”

  “It’s not easy. Sometimes swatters use services for the deaf that allow them to type their message and have it spoken by an operator. They also have other technology available to hide their numbers. Apps and such.”

  “There are apps to make anonymous prank calls?” I said with a laugh, then picked up my phone and pretended to search for one. “I’m going to download one right now.”

  I looked up from my phone and found Jake looking at me. His serious expression was gone and that big grin swept across his face. “This is why I’ve always liked you, Kate. You report on tragic stuff, yet you are still funny and normal.”

  He looked at me expectantly but I didn’t know what he was hoping I would say in reply. “Thanks. Not always sure about the normal part though.”

  “I guess it’s no secret that I’ve had a…thing for you since—well, for a while now.” He stopped talking. I wasn’t sure if I should fill the silence or if he was planning to say more.

  “From your expression, I guess you didn’t know.” He swallowed hard. “Well, this is awkward…”

  “No, I’m—”

  “I thought you knew. I mean, I’ve been giving out all the signals.”

  Thankfully, the waiter arrived with our drinks, and Jake immediately gulped down half of his scotch and soda.

  “Look, Jake. I’m flattered but…I’m seeing someone.”

  “It’s not that fire captain Hayes, is it? You’re going to make me insanely jealous if you ended up falling for one of those rescue guys.”

  I nodded. “It is that fire captain Hayes.”

  He sat back in his chair and ran his hands through his hair. “You know, I saw you interview him a few months back. You were covering the story about his rescue of the boy caught in Malibu Canyon whitewater. I had the feeling that something was going on between you two then but hoped I was wrong. It was the first time I ever saw you flustered on air.”

  “I wouldn’t say I was flustered on air. Ever, actually.”

  “Well, you definitely were then,” he said, his words slurring a little. “So if I rescued a boy from rushing water and swung from a helicopter performing CPR, you might have fallen for me instead?”

  “Look, I hope this doesn’t, you know, change things between us. Because I really like working with you and—”

  “Don’t worry,” he said, waving his hand. “It doesn’t change anything.”

  From the look on his face, I knew this was going to change everything.

  Chapter Three

  My report on the El Mirasol burglary opened every newscast for the rest of the day on Channel Eleven. But it wasn’t my reporting or the exclusive inside information Jake had given me that was making it the top news story. Viewers were lured in by Josh’s shots of the stately greenhouse, the natatorium, the tennis courts, and the rampant luxury.

  TV news viewers aren’t used to so much eye candy. Most of the time, crimes aren’t committed in these uber sanctuaries. Audience members are more accustomed to seeing crime scenes in gritty neighborhoods, not in mansions with greenhouses and eighteenth-century chandeliers.

  My Twitter feed heated up as viewers started responding to my tweets about the El Mirasol and Chateau de Soleil burglaries. One viewer with 250,000 followers retweeted my story with the comment, “Why do the super rich have to give their homes such pretentious names?” But the post that fueled the most response was from one viewer who tweeted, “60,000 square feet? Those rich people deserve to be robbed.” That got hundreds of retweets and responses like one from Andrea London that read, “I’m sick of hearing about the poor, poor billionaires,” or GavinLA who wrote, “How am I supposed to have sympathy for someone who has 25 bathrooms?”

  As I sat at my desk in the newsroom the next morning scrolling through all the tweets and replies, I realized I had been wrong about this being a fluff story. LA is a nonstop news town where anything could—and did—happen. But even here, where viewers could easily suffer from sensational story overload, the news of someone targeting mega estates and robbing them of millions had viewers riveted.

  Hannah interrupted my thoughts. “Another burglary.” With her oversize slate gray glasses and her hair pulled up in a messy bun, she could easily have passed for a hipster librarian. “Thieves got away with five million dollars worth of stuff this time.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Soundtrack of my life. The police scanner. This estate is in Rolling Hills. La Villa de la Paz.”

  “Why do these people give their homes such exotic names?”

  “These are estates, not homes. And one way to differentiate them from your ordinary ten-or twenty-million-dollar home is to give them a name or a brand. Did you know that the owners of El Mirasol actually hired a branding company to develop the name?”

  I wasn’t surprised she knew something like that. We’d hired her as a full-time associate producer after a stint as our intern because she had a strong intuition for news. But what we didn’t know then was that she could locate impossible-to-find information on the Internet by searching what’s called the “deep web,” the part of the Internet that isn’t indexed by standard search engines. Using a search engine, she said, is like dragging a net across the surface of the ocean; a great deal may be caught in the net, but there’s a lot of buried information that standard search engines can’t see or retrieve. By searching the deep web, Hannah often found information other producers and reporters didn’t have.

  “Problem is,” she said, “Susan’s already on the La Villa de la Paz story.”

  I frowned. “Since when is Susan taking on breaking news?”

  “Since she sniffed a ratings winner. Everyone’s into this story. CNN had an expert on sa
ying the Russian mafia might be behind it because it would take an organization that big to pull this off. Do you think you can get another exclusive inside-the-grounds report on this one?”

  “It’s gotten…complicated.”

  She rolled a pen between her hands. “Everyone’s warned me not to ask about your source, because they say you won’t ever tell who it is. They say that not even David knows.”

  I nodded. “They’re right. If my source was found out, it could severely compromise his position. It’s better for everyone if you don’t know who he is either.” I stood. “I’m going to get David to assign this story to me. Can you dig up some facts about La Villa de la Paz and e-mail them to me?”

  I headed to David’s office and found Susan already in there. Dressed in a sapphire sheath dress with a chunky antique-glass necklace, she looked like she was headed to a dinner party even though it was ten in the morning.

  “Even most celebrities don’t have homes like La Villa de la Paz,” Susan was saying. “A top celebrity might own a estate that costs five, ten, maybe twenty million. Oprah or Ryan Seacrest might have more expensive homes, but they’re the exception. The current owner bought La Villa de la Paz for fifty-three million.”

  “The owners are in a wealth stratosphere that’s beyond even the biggest-name celebrities,” I added, making my case that this was a news story, not an entertainment piece.

  “You can’t imagine the extravagance. The Turkish spa alone cost over five million dollars to build,” Susan said.

  David clasped his hands together. “I think you both should work on this story.”

  “Together?” Susan said, as though he had just suggested we become partners on Dancing with the Stars.

  “Team coverage,” he said.

  I’d done plenty of team coverage before but not with the entertainment reporters. Maybe it was snobbery, but I didn’t consider entertainment a real news beat, so working on a story with the entertainment reporters didn’t happen often. Actually, it never happened.

  “Susan, nab an interview with the owner,” David said. “Kate, get to the scene and see what’s going on.”

  “This story is going to be big and you know why?” Susan asked. “Because people suspect the super rich are enjoying the highest rewards without really deserving them. From the way viewers are responding to this story, I think they enjoy seeing some of the uber rich taken down a little.”

  “This is the news we’re doing,” I said quietly. “Not entertainment. We need to treat this like any heist or high-stakes burglary we’ve ever covered. We have to remain objective. No matter what we think viewers want.”

  David rolled his sleeves. “Kate’s right. This story gives viewers a look inside the exclusive world of the leisure class, but let’s not assume that everyone wants to ‘take them down.’ For many of our viewers, the wealthy have a hallowed, revered status—they represent the ideal that anyone can become rich if they work hard enough.”

  While Susan worked on getting an interview with the owner of La Villa de la Paz, Josh and I raced to Rolling Hills, situated on the crest of Southern California’s Palos Verdes Peninsula. Neither of us had ever covered a crime in this exclusive part of the California coast, so Josh, who has the sense of direction of a homing pigeon, actually had to use a GPS app on his phone to find the place.

  Meanwhile, our social media producer, Amy Guzman, sent me a text pleading for more tweets about the heists, saying they were generating record retweets and favorites. The station was using the story in its promos, playing up the extravagant items, the opulence, and the lavish lifestyles.

  The day had turned into such a heavy news day that there was utter chaos in the control room as they struggled to put a schedule together. That morning the head of the Department of Water and Power had resigned because of a scandal involving $30 million in ratepayers’ money that had been handed over to an unknown nonprofit organization. At lunchtime, the mayor was a passenger in a police SUV that struck a female pedestrian in a downtown crosswalk. Meanwhile, thirteen sheriff’s deputies had showed up at the home of a famous pop singer to investigate an egg-throwing melee that had caused $25,000 in damages. Still, my heist story was going to open the next newscast.

  Reporters were allowed to stand inside the courtyard of the estate but not on the grounds. A cool breeze blew sweet, yet unfamiliar, scents from the Moorish gardens and orchards sequestered behind tall iron gates. Even from our limited vantage point, we had 180-degree views of the entire LA basin, from the Pacific Ocean below to the San Gabriel Mountains and the sandy beaches of Santa Monica to the north.

  It baffled me to think that there were many homes this extravagant in LA—not to mention throughout the rest of the world. And I was sure viewers would be surprised to learn that so many enjoyed such over-the-top wealth that thieves could easily steal millions of dollars in cash and high-end goods in under twenty minutes.

  My phone rang and I grabbed for it in my purse, hoping it would be Jake. Or Eric. Instead, the name Hale Bradley flashed up on the screen.

  “Dad,” I said, apparently too loudly, because a nearby reporter from Channel Nine, who was recording her stand-up, flashed me a crabby look.

  “Katie, I’m coming to LA on Friday,” he said.

  I walked down the driveway, away from the reporters’ camp. “What for?”

  My dad is a bit of a Capital Creature, which means he spends weeks in DC and only comes home to California for brief stints before he’s called back for hearings, fundraisers, and other work. But in the months before midterm elections, I could count on him being home a lot more as campaign fundraising reached a fever pitch.

  “I’m attending a few fundraising events. With control of the Senate at stake, this year is a game changer for the party.”

  “Should I get in touch with Lisa to get on your calendar? Maybe lunch? Dinner?”

  “All of those are already spoken for this trip, sorry. So I’m going to ask you to do two things for me while I’m there. First, I want you to go to a few of these fundraisers with me.”

  “Dad,” I groaned.

  “Yes, I know how much you love political fundraisers,” he said with a laugh. “But it’s the only way I’m going to see you. Plus, you must meet the candidate we’re backing for governor. She can be a valuable resource for you as a reporter.”

  “Thanks.” Meeting the possible future governor of California would be a plus for my career, but I was more interested in meeting the politician who would fix the potholes on my commute to work.

  “Which brings me to my second request. I was talking with Andrew Wright, executive vice president at American News Channel, and he’d like to talk to you about some opportunities there. He’s going to be in LA later this week as well. I’d like you to meet with him.”

  This had to be my dad’s fourth or fifth attempt to get me a political reporting gig. From his vantage point, the Bradley family political dynasty was incomplete if his only child continued to report on breaking news and didn’t enter the political arena at some point. I’d told him plenty of times I wasn’t interested in covering politics, but as the majority leader of the Senate, my dad was used to getting what he wanted.

  “I’ve already told you I’m not interested in leaving LA.”

  “This is the second time he’s asked to meet you. What kind of leader am I if I can’t arrange a simple meeting between a top journalism executive and my own daughter? Do your old man a favor on this one.”

  I sighed. “As long as it’s clear that I’m not looking to jump into political reporting—”

  “Wonderful. Lisa will set it up. See you Friday.”

  He hung up, like he always did. He never said “Good-bye” or “Take care” or any of the niceties other people use before hanging up. In his book, those were a waste of time, throwaways that didn’t convey actual feeling.

  I headed back up the driveway. “Police just announced that they aren’t going to make a statem
ent. Neither are the owners,” Josh said when I reached the top. “Strange, right?”

  I nodded. “And if they’re not talking, what’s the story angle? All we know is that this is yet another multimillion-dollar heist.”

  I watched several other reporters record their stories in front of the estate. The reality of television news is that sometimes all we have is a “money shot,” only a few shards of information, but to make our deadlines, we have to make it look and sound like so much more.

  Searching my e-mail, I found the one from Hannah outlining the information on La Villa de la Paz. The house read like a fairy-tale castle on steroids, but it wasn’t giving me a way into the story or anything new to say.

  I walked to the end of the driveway and looked over the rugged coastline hugging the Pacific Ocean, trying to find my lead. What could I say about such an extravagant view and place that didn’t sound clichéd? I turned to look down the hill at the uniform red-roofed mansions, each with its own jewel-like turquoise pool, shimmering in the golden sunlight. But when I lifted my gaze a little, I saw downtown LA, the cluster of skyscrapers appearing like tiny spires in the smog, but nonetheless recognizable even from this distance.

  That’s where I found my lead. A few minutes later, I recorded my report.

  “Less than twenty miles from Downtown Los Angeles, where forty percent of residents in adjacent areas are living in poverty,” I said, “is the gated city of Rolling Hills, California, nestled on the peak of the Palos Verdes Peninsula. This month, the average price of a home on the market here is over eight million dollars. Rolling Hills’ best-kept secret is a fifty-thousand-square-foot estate named La Villa de la Paz, meaning Town of Peace. Earlier today, that peace was disturbed as thieves stole more than five million dollars’ worth of luxury goods in under twenty minutes. But while the hacienda looks impressive from the street, what’s not visible are five subterranean levels accessible only by a labyrinth of elevators, passageways, and secret stairs. Once below, you’ll find a tennis court built to U.S. Open standards, a Turkish bath, a chapel, an English library, plus thirteen bedrooms and twenty-five bathrooms. It even comes with its own geothermal energy system—”