by Allan Folsom
It was in the moment of relief afterward that Raymond saw him—a tall, slim young man in T-shirt, blue jeans, and jean jacket, standing off to the side, chatting with an attractive young woman. A backpack over one shoulder, his blond hair dyed purple. Even if he was younger, his build and facial configuration were close enough to Raymond’s to be workable, especially if one considered the notoriously poor quality of passport photographs. The purple hair could be a problem—he would have to find a way to dye his own hair, and it might call attention to him later—but the young man was the closest match to himself in the room and time was of the essence, so he would find a way to work around it.
A moment more and then two, and the young man walked away from the girl and went to the centerpiece of the buffet, a table overflowing with sweet rolls, breads, and fresh fruit.
Raymond picked up his briefcase and did the same. Loading a plate with melon and grapes, he struck up a friendly conversation in German, telling the young man he was an actor from Munich staying at the hotel and was in L.A. to play the villain in an action movie opposite Brad Pitt. He had heard that a German group was attending a hotel function and, feeling particularly lonely and having the morning off, had decided to join them, if for nothing more than to chat about the homeland.
His target responded immediately with warmth and good humor. In a matter of moments Raymond realized he had struck gold. Not only was the young German free-spirited like the others, but he was smitten with Hollywood movies, confiding that he would like nothing more than to be an actor himself; moreover, by his own admission, he was homosexual and—clearly sizing up the well-dressed, deeply handsome Raymond—ever eager for adventure.
Raymond had to smile. He’d opened a trap and a rabbit bounded in. As quickly, he snapped it closed behind him. It was almost too easy.
Feigning his own homosexuality, Raymond led the young man, who now gave his name as Josef Speer from Stuttgart, to a corner table, where they sat down. While young Josef flirted, Raymond did an equally frivolous dance, most particularly coaxing Speer to show him his passport and driver’s license—on the pretext that if he was ever going to consider becoming a movie or television actor he needed to be photogenic and, as unflattering as passport and driver’s license photos usually were, they were often used by professional casting directors as a measure of how a person’s face played before a camera in the worst situations. It was a lie, of course, but it worked, with the gullible Speer enthusiastically opening his backpack and pulling out both passport and wallet to proudly show off his photographic likenesses. The passport photo was of inferior quality, as Raymond had suspected, and with his hair colored purple, and the right attitude when he presented it, he was reasonably certain he could pass as Speer. The driver’s license, while helpful, was less important. What he wanted was to make sure Speer had credit cards. And as the young German opened his wallet and handed him his driver’s license, Raymond saw he had at least three; one, a Euro MasterCard, was all he would need.
Raymond lowered his voice and looked the young German in the eye, in a heartbeat changing from seduced to seducer. He found Josef very attractive sexually, he said, but he would never consider a rendezvous at a hotel where he was staying because it left him too vulnerable to blackmail. If they were going to have a “mutual exploration,” as Raymond put it, better they do it somewhere away from the Bonaventure. Speer agreed, and within moments they were walking out of the function room and into the lobby.
As they entered it, Raymond briefly froze. The lobby was filled with anxious and noisy hotel guests. Beyond them, stationed at the exits, were a dozen uniformed police.
“What’s going on?” Speer asked in German.
“No doubt they are looking for homosexuals.” Raymond grinned lightly, trying to decide what to do next. Then he saw the hotel employee in the dark suit who had come into the room with the SWAT sergeant. With Speer at his side, Raymond approached the hotel employee, asking in a thick German accent what was happening. The police were looking for an escaped killer, he was told. A SWAT team was searching the hotel, evacuating people floor by floor. Raymond repeated the story to Speer in German and then told the hotel man they were on their way to a specially arranged tour of Universal City Studios and asked if it was safe and permissible for them to leave.
The man studied them for a moment and then produced some kind of two-way radio and spoke into it, saying he had two of the German tour group who had an appointment and wished to leave the building. A moment later the SWAT team sergeant pushed through the crowd and walked brusquely up to them. Raymond swallowed but that was all.
“They are part of the student group,” the hotel man said. “They just came from the function room.”
SWAT looked from one to the other carefully. Still Raymond held his ground. Then SWAT’s radio crackled; he answered in some sort of police-speak and then looked to the hotel man.
“Alright, let them out the rear door,” he said abruptly, then walked off.
“Danke,” Raymond said after him, then followed as the hotel man led them across the lobby and past a police guard to a rear door leading to a street already secured by the authorities.
“Thank you,” Raymond said in a thick accent.
And then he and Josef Speer stepped into the bright California sunshine and walked unmolested toward Charlie Bailey’s rental car parked two blocks away.
A car with the New Jersey consultant’s body still in the trunk.
11:30 A.M.
34
612A ORANGE GROVE BOULEVARD, PASADENA, CALIFORNIA. 12:10 P.M.
Dr. Janet Flannery was probably sixty and easily ten pounds underweight. Her hair was a mixture of gray and black and was cut short, but not stylishly so. It was the same with her clothes, an off-the-rack beige pantsuit and a lighter beige blouse, both of which fit her reasonably well. The furnishings in her small office—a coffee table, a couch, and two overstuffed chairs—were equally plain. The idea, of course, was for everything to be serviceable but not stand out. Attention in a psychiatrist’s office was to be on the patient, not the therapist or the surroundings.
“You want to make a change in your life and leave Los Angeles.” Dr. Flannery folded her hands in her lap and looked at John Barron sitting on the couch across from her.
“Not just L.A. I want to leave California,” Barron said over the hum of the small white-noise fan sitting on the floor behind him. The reason for it, he knew, was so that conversations between therapists and patients could not be overheard in the next office or in the waiting room outside. “I would like to do it as soon as possible.” Barron pushed his fingertips together. Red McClatchy’s session with him a short while before, as threatening and frightening and formidable as it had been, had only served to magnify the scope of his horror and strengthen his resolve to take Rebecca and get away as quickly as he could.
“I must remind you, Detective, that your sister is in a place she is used to and in surroundings where she’s comfortable. Is there not some alternative for you?”
“No.” Barron had prepared an explanation for this sudden emergency request that Rebecca immediately be prepared to leave St. Francis and go with him to a strange, new, distant place. “You heard about what happened on the Amtrak train yesterday.”
Dr. Flannery nodded. “You were there.”
“Yes, for all of it. I’ve been thinking for some time that I’d rather do something else with my life. Yesterday put me over the top. I’m going to leave the LAPD as soon as I can. But before I do anything or say anything to anyone I want a destination for Rebecca.” Barron hesitated. He was trying to be careful and not reveal any more of himself than he already had. “As I said on the phone, it all needs to be strictly confidential, just between you and me. When Rebecca’s ready, I’ll inform my superiors.”
Thirty minutes earlier, in an act of complete resolve, he had done what he had thought he never could do: file the Donlan report as Red had asked and with his signature at the bottom. Immediate
ly afterward he’d left Parker Center, knowing that despite the terrible risk of officially collaborating in an LAPD cover-up of murder, filing and signing the report was a necessary action. He had to cover himself with the 5-2 while Rebecca was being prepared and he found a new place for her. But once she was ready and Dr. Flannery had found a site for her in some other state, he would pack as many of their personal belongings as he could into his Mustang and call his landlord to cancel the lease on his house. After that he would call in sick and take off, sending McClatchy a formal letter of resignation from somewhere on the road.
The idea was simply to vanish. He had enough money put away so they could live for the better part of a year while he looked for a job. He was still young; he would change their names and they would simply start over. It seemed reasonable, even doable. And he doubted Red or any of the others would spend the time or money trying to find and silence a man who was keeping silent anyway and whose sister could say nothing even if somehow she learned what had happened and wanted to. But until that time came, he knew, he had to play along and stay on the job and act as if he had taken Red’s talk to heart and had every intention of fulfilling his oath and staying on the squad for the rest of his professional life.
Dr. Flannery studied him for a long moment in silence. “If those are your wishes, Detective,” she said finally, “I will see what I can do.”
“Do you have any idea how long it will take?”
“In her current state, I’m sorry, no. It will take some looking into.”
“Okay.” Barron nodded gratefully and stood. “Thank you,” he said, realizing that as much as he wanted to get out, as much as he needed to get out, Rebecca’s situation could not be resolved in a day or maybe even a week. It was something he had to accept.
He was turning for the door, his mind still fully on Rebecca and Dr. Flannery, when the sudden chirp of his cell phone startled him. “Excuse me,” he said, and lifted the phone from his jacket.
“Barron,” he answered by rote.
“What?” he asked sharply. Immediately his demeanor changed. “Where?”
35
MACARTHUR PARK. 12:40 P.M.
Barron’s Mustang banged over the curb, and he drove across the grass to pull up beside Red’s unmarked Ford. Behind him four black-and-white units had set up a perimeter, and beyond them uniformed officers were keeping back a growing crowd of onlookers.
Barron stepped quickly from the car and walked toward a dense grouping of bushes near the water.
As he neared he could see Red and two uniformed officers standing to the side talking to a male indigent in tattered clothes and a big rat’s nest of hair. Then Barron was there, reaching the bushes just as Halliday pushed carefully out through them, pulling off surgical gloves.
“White male,” Halliday said. “Purple hair. Shot three times in the face at close range. No clothes, no IDs. Nothing. Unless somebody calls in a missing person or we get a fast make from his prints, it’s going to be a helluva long winter before we know who he is.”
“Take a look yourself,” Halliday told Barron.
Red left the uniforms and came toward them, and Barron went in where Halliday had been.
The victim lay on his side in the dirt, dressed only in his socks and underwear. Most of his head was gone, but there was enough left to see that his hair had been dyed purple. Whatever clothes he might have been wearing were missing.
“What is he, twenty-one, twenty-two?” Barron stepped out from the bushes as people from the Scientific Investigations Division arrived. “Clean, manicured nails. He wasn’t a bum. Looks like somebody wanted his clothes.”
“Any guess when?” Red was looking at Halliday.
“Thirty minutes, maybe an hour ago. What’d he say?” Halliday indicated the indigent, still talking to the uniforms.
“Not much. Said he went in there to take a leak and almost pissed on the body. Scared the bejesus out of him, and he started yelling.”
The three detectives stepped back to give the Scientific Investigations people room to sift the area.
“All but naked, like the deputies in the Criminal Courts elevator.” Red watched the SIU people. There was an anger and intensity about him Barron had never seen before.
“You’re thinking Raymond,” Halliday said as the first contingent of media arrived. As usual, Dan Ford was in the lead.
“Yeah, I’m thinking Raymond.”
“Commander.” Dan Ford was looking at Red. “We know a young man was killed here. Are you tying Raymond Thorne to the crime?”
“Tell you what, Dan—” McClatchy looked at Ford, then to the reporters as a group. “You and the other folks talk to Detective Barron. He can speak for the investigation as well as any of us.”
Immediately McClatchy beckoned Halliday and the two walked off. Barron glanced after him. That was it, Red’s way of telling him he was back in his good graces, whatever rift there had been between them gone with his filing of the Donlan report. Moreover, the rules were still intact. Resolve any differences inside the squad.
“Is Raymond the suspect here, John?” Ford asked. Behind him more reporters moved in. Video cameras were rolling, microphones shoved forward. Then Barron saw another unmarked car pull in, as Red and Halliday reached Red’s car. The doors opened and Polchak and Valparaiso got out. There was a brief exchange, and then the two detectives started across the grass toward where the uniforms still talked with the rat-haired indigent and the bushes where the Scientific Investigations people were working the body.
“Who’s the victim?” someone called out from the crowd.
Barron looked back to them.
“We don’t know. Except it’s a male, twenty-something, shot multiple times in the face,” he said sharply and with a sudden rush of anger. “Yeah, Raymond Thorne is a suspect in this, probably the suspect.”
“Victim been identified?” a reporter shouted.
“Did you hear what I said?” Barron’s edge and anger was still there. Initially he thought his emotion was directed at Red—his simple way of patting him on the head and welcoming him back into the squad for what he had done—but standing in front of Dan Ford and the other reporters, the cameras and microphones taking in everything, he realized McClatchy was only a part of it. The real problem was him, because he cared. Cared about the cold-blooded murder of Donlan, the dead kid in the bushes, and the kid’s mother and father and the awfulness they would carry in their hearts for the rest of their lives once his identity was learned and they were told. Because he cared about the people killed at Criminal Courts and their children and their families. And because he could still not, after all these years, get the murder of his own mother and father out of his mind. Moreover, there was something else. Something that suddenly came to him now as he stood in the heat and smog of midday looking out to this congregation of media and their focused electronic paraphernalia: This thing with Raymond was his fault. He had been the booking officer; he was the one who had stood there in Parker Center and let Raymond toy with him—as if Raymond had known all along what had happened to Donlan—and trick Barron into revealing his inner feelings, thereby proving to Raymond that his suspicions were fact. Barron should have understood there and then how canny and dangerous Raymond was and done something about it, at the very least warned the guards to be especially vigilant. He should have, but he hadn’t. Instead he had exploded at Raymond’s coyness, thereby giving the gunman all that he wanted to know.
Abruptly Barron looked to Dan Ford. “I want a favor, Dan. Put Raymond’s picture on the Times front page. Big as you can make it. Can you do it?”
“I think so.” Ford nodded.
Immediately Barron looked to the rest. “This is the second time today we are asking for the public’s help in finding Raymond Thorne. We would like to continue with his picture on every newscast and have you continue to urge anyone who sees him, or even thinks they’ve seen him, to call nine-one-one immediately. Raymond Thorne is a vicious public enemy.
He is armed and should be considered extremely dangerous.”
Barron stopped as he saw the coroner’s van move past the black-and-whites and drive over the grass toward the bushes where the dead boy was. Abruptly his attention swung back to the media people and to the video camera directly in front of him.
“I have a word for you, too, if you’re watching, Raymond.” Barron paused, and when he spoke next it was with the same quiet and mock concern Raymond had shown him the day before in Parker Center.
“I’d like to know how you’re feeling, Raymond. Are you alright? You can call nine-one-one the same as anyone else. Just ask for me—you know my name, Detective John Barron, Five-Two Squad. I’ll come and pick you up myself, anywhere you want. That way nobody else gets hurt.” Barron hesitated once more, then went on just as quietly. “It would be easiest for everyone, Raymond. You most of all. There are nine million of us and only one of you. Do the math, Raymond. It’s not hard to figure the odds.”
Finished, Barron said, “That’s all,” and walked off to where Polchak and Valparaiso talked with the head of the Scientific Investigations Division. If he had done nothing else in his speech to the cameras and his plea for the public’s assistance, he had just made the war with Raymond personal.
36
BEVERLY HILLS. 1:00 P.M.
Raymond parked Charlie Bailey’s car in the 200 block of South Spalding Drive within sight of Beverly Hills High School, took the second Beretta from Charlie’s briefcase, and slipped it into Josef Speer’s backpack as a backup to the Beretta in his waistband. Then he took the pack and got out, locked the car, and walked the short block to Gregory Way.