by Allan Folsom
“Did you get the—?” Their conversation continued in French.
“No, I have neither the key nor the information.” Abruptly Raymond left the shade of the tree and moved on, passing Neuss’s apartment and retracing his steps on Linden Drive, looking like anyone else walking along and talking on a cell phone.
“My picture has been shown on television. The police are everywhere. I have a stolen passport and ticket on Lufthansa flight number 453 tonight for Frankfurt. You have put the machinery in gear for a private jet and new passport, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Cancel it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. There’s no use taking a risk of it later being found out. Not now.”
“Are you sure?” Bertrand asked again.
“Yes, dammit. Tell the Baroness I’m sorry, but that is the way it has worked out. We will regroup and start from the beginning. I’m going to get rid of this cell phone so that in the event of my capture this call cannot be traced to you. Consequently there will be no way for either you or the Baroness to contact me. I will contact you when I reach Frankfurt.”
Raymond clicked off and turned up Gregory Way toward Spalding Drive, where he’d left the car. His plan was to drive to one of the long-term parking terminals at LAX, leave the car there and take a shuttle into the airport itself, then trust in Fate that he could carry off the charade well enough to be ticketed, pass through the security check, and board Lufthansa flight 453 as Josef Speer without incident.
He reached Spalding and turned the corner, then stopped. Two Beverly Hills police cars were pulled over midblock, their light bars flashing. People stood in the street and on sidewalks watching as uniformed officers studied a parked car. His car. The one with the body of Charles Bailey in the trunk.
Nearby an elderly woman was engaged in an animated conversation with one of the policemen while struggling to hold on to the leash of a small dog dancing in circles and barking incessantly at the car. Immediately another policeman walked back to his patrol car, retrieved a tool of some kind, and went back to Bailey’s car. Shoving the tool underneath the latch, he popped the trunk.
A collective cry went up from the crowd as they glimpsed the body in the trunk. The dog barked louder, tugging at its leash and nearly pulling the woman from her feet.
Raymond watched for a moment longer, then turned and walked quickly in the opposite direction, heading back toward Wilshire Boulevard.
2:15 P.M.
LOS ANGELES CITY MORGUE. SAME TIME.
John Barron stood behind Grammie Nomura, watching her as she sketched. Grammie was sixty-seven, Japanese-American, a great-grandmother, accomplished ballroom dancer, and painter of some of the most intriguingly original landscape canvases he’d ever seen. She was also the top professional composite sketch artist for the LAPD and had been for twenty years. Over that time she’d done a thousand composite drawings of wanted felons and half that many more of the missing or dead, people the police were either looking for or trying to identify. Now she sat here over the mutilated body of the purple-haired murder victim trying to draw him as he might have looked a few hours earlier when he was still alive.
“Draw two, Grammie,” Barron said as she worked on the sketch that would be broadcast over every local television station in Los Angeles as soon as she finished. “One as if he had purple hair, one as if he didn’t. Maybe he’d only had it colored in the last few days.” Barron watched a moment longer, then turned away to pace up and down and let her do her work.
Learning the victim’s identity was the key. It was why he was here, pressing Grammie himself. As long as Raymond was free he called the shots, and Barron was determined to cut that freedom short as quickly as possible by cranking up the media blast at him while at the same time working to learn the victim’s identity and then coming at him from the other direction, trying to nail him the minute he used the victim’s identification.
McClatchy had taken Barron’s theory of identity theft to heart as well and immediately sent an advisory to all police agencies in Southern California that their fugitive might be masquerading as a young man with purple hair trying to leave the area by any means he could. He’d followed up by ordering the doubling of police presence at the major departure points—airports, bus and rail terminals—and directing that Raymond’s photograph be distributed to every hair salon, with the expectation that Raymond had already had his hair dyed to match the victim’s, or would attempt to. Last, he’d sent a terse directive to every local police department from San Francisco to San Diego requesting they pull over and identify any white male between the ages of fifteen and fifty with purple hair. “You can apologize later” was his finishing sentence.
“Detective.” Grammie Nomura was looking up over her shoulder at Barron. “This suspect you’re after—I can see it in everything about you. The way you stand, the way you’re walking back and forth and up and down wishing I would hurry up—”
“See what?”
“You want to get him yourself. You, personally.”
“I only want to get him, I don’t care who or how.”
“Then take my advice and keep it that way and just do your job. You let him get into your bones, you’ll get yourself killed.”
“Yes, Grammie.” Barron smiled.
“Don’t take it lightly, Detective, I’ve seen it happen before, and I’ve been around here a whole lot longer than you have.” She turned back to her sketch. “Here, come take a look.”
Barron came up behind her. She was filling in the eyes, making them bright and passionate, little by little bringing the murdered boy back to life. Seeing him touched Barron in his gut and made him despise Raymond even more. Grammie’s perception was right, but her warning was too late. He did want to get Raymond himself. It was already in his bones.
40
MACARTHUR PARK. 3:10 P.M.
Polchak was hunched in the shade of the overhang of brush trying to get some sense of the whole. Red squatted a few feet in front of him studying the ground where the victim had been; the body long taken away by the coroner, the Scientific Investigations people gone as well. Now it was just the two of them, the 5-2’s most senior detectives feeling it out afterward the way they had for years. Old bloodhounds sniffing around trying to understand what had happened and how. And where the perpetrator might have gone afterward.
Red stood up and carefully crossed to the opposite side. “No broken bushes, no scuff marks in the dirt. The kid wasn’t dragged in here, he came because he wanted to.”
“Homosexual thing?”
“Maybe.” Red continued to examine the ground. What he wanted most was some clue as to where Raymond had gone afterward. “Remember the cab? We think Raymond’s in it, he’s not. Maybe the kid thought Raymond was gay because he let him think so.” Red looked over at Polchak.
“He gets on the Southwest Chief in Chicago. Maybe he killed those guys there, maybe he didn’t. Maybe he’s with Donlan, maybe not. But all that aside, he’s on a train that’s due in to L.A. at eight-forty on a Tuesday morning. Yet he’s got a ticket to London on a Monday flight leaving LAX at five-forty. I think it’s pretty safe to say he took the train because of the ice storm in Chicago or he would have been in town on Sunday. But forget the day, the point is he was very determined to come here, and with a gun in his bag. Why?”
Just then McClatchy’s cell phone rang, and he pulled it from his jacket. “Which one?” he said to Polchak, then clicked on. “McClatchy.”
“Hey, Red, it’s G. R.,” a cheerful voice came back. “Having a nice day?”
G. R. was Gabe Rotherberg, chief of detectives for the Beverly Hills Police Department.
“What do you think?”
“Maybe I can help,” Rotherberg said.
“You’re not telling me you got him?”
Polchak snapped around. What the hell was this?
“No, but I think I’ve got one of his victims.”
3:50 P.M.
&nb
sp; Raymond was standing, grasping the handrail and squeezed in among the crush of afternoon commuters taking the green-and-white number 6 Culver City bus south along Sepulveda Boulevard toward the main transit center at LAX.
Vsay ego sudba V rukah Gospodnih. All his destiny was in God’s hands. Everything was for a reason. All he had to do was trust in it. And once again he had.
Walking deliberately away from the police on Spalding Drive, he’d reached Wilshire Boulevard just as a Metro bus was discharging passengers. Boldly he’d approached a plump middle-aged woman getting off and asked her if she knew the way to Santa Monica by bus. At first she’d been startled, but then she’d looked at him and brightened in that way so many women did, as if she wanted to wrap him up right there and take him home.
“Yes,” she’d said. “Come, I’ll show you.”
Immediately she’d walked him across the broad expanse of intersection where Wilshire and Santa Monica boulevards crossed and told him to take the number 320 Metro bus to Santa Monica. How long they’d stood there waiting he barely remembered, but it seemed like only seconds before the bus arrived and he boarded, politely thanking her. He looked out the window as the bus pulled away and saw her watching it. Finally she turned and trudged off, going back the way she’d come, bent over, purse tucked under her arm, the way she’d been when he’d first seen her, the light that had flared up so brightly when she’d been with him extinguished.
Yet for all the help she’d been, Raymond knew she could as easily become a major hindrance, especially if she turned on the TV when she got home and saw his picture and called the police. That was why he’d asked directions to Santa Monica instead of LAX and then waited to ask someone on the bus where to transfer to a bus that would take him to the airport.
“Get off in Westwood, take the number six Culver City bus. Goes right to the Transit Center,” a postal worker in the seat behind told him cheerfully. “A free shuttle will take you right into the airport itself. Easy as pie.”
That was what he had done, getting off in Westwood and waiting on the street corner with a half-dozen others until the number 6 bus came. When it did he made sure he was the last to board it, carefully slipping Charles Bailey’s cell phone under the bus’s front wheel just as he got on, then standing beside the driver as the bus pulled away and hearing the faint crunch as the weight of the bus mashed it into the pavement.
Then he had taken his place to stand among the passengers. There, as on the previous bus and while standing on the street corner waiting for the current one—and despite the public broadcast of his LAPD photograph on television and John Barron’s plea to the public to find him—in jeans, denim jacket, and backpack, L.A. Dodgers baseball cap pulled down and covering most of his dyed-purple hair, not one person paid him the slightest attention.
41
WESTIN BONAVENTURE HOTEL, SUITE 1195. 4:17 P.M.
Barron, Halliday, Valparaiso, and Lee moved carefully. Each wore surgical gloves, and each watched exactly where he stepped and what he touched. The suite was large—a main living room with couch, TV, and work desk. Beyond it was the open door to a bedroom. To the right, a short hallway lined with closets led to the bathroom. Behind them the hotel’s manager and two assistants stood nervously in the open door, watching. It was bad enough the SWAT team had gone through the building like combat troops; now there was a very real possibility a hotel guest had been murdered. It was hardly the kind of publicity they needed.
“Why don’t you wait outside,” Barron said quietly, then ushered them into the hallway and closed the door.
The Bonaventure was perfect. A large upscale hotel, a five-minute walk at most from where Raymond had left the cab after escaping Criminal Courts. How he had encountered and killed the New Jersey consultant Charles Bailey and how Bailey’s rental car had ended up in Beverly Hills was anybody’s guess and the reason Red and Polchak had gone directly there.
The trouble was neither the killing in MacArthur Park nor the murder of Charles Bailey could be attributed clearly to Raymond. Yes, the modus operandi and the timing—both men shot in the head at close range, and both within hours of his escape from Criminal Courts—pointed directly to him. But as yet the police had no hard evidence, nothing that clearly and without question said “Raymond” and showed them the trail he had left. Without that, the killer or killers of both men could have been anyone, and the police were left sifting through straws while Raymond slipped farther and farther from their grasp.
“I’ll check down here.” Barron went down the hallway, checking the closets first, then moving into the bathroom. Like every other room in the hotel, suite 1195 had been thoroughly searched by the SWAT teams, but they had been looking for a fugitive in hiding, not a man who wasn’t there. An empty suite was an empty suite, and they’d moved on.
“I got the bedroom.” Lee had come back from taking his eight-year-old to the dentist and very quickly came up to speed.
“Here.” Barron’s voice suddenly echoed from the bathroom. Halliday and Valparaiso went down the hallway fast, with Lee coming out of the bedroom on their heels.
When they came in Barron was on his knees pulling a plastic trash bag from a small storage cabinet under the sink.
“Looks like somebody tried to hide it,” Barron said. Opening it carefully, he reached into it and lifted out a still-damp washcloth.
“Blood,” he said. “Looks like the same somebody tried to rinse it out. Didn’t work. A couple of used towels in here, too.”
“Raymond?” Lee stood in the doorway, his massive frame filling it.
Halliday looked at Barron. “You shot him. Outside Criminal Courts.”
“Just a burn.”
“Well, a burn is enough to get a DNA.”
“Why would he leave it here, not get rid of it someplace else, a trash can or something?”
“SWAT’s going through the building like a Marine Corps invasion looking for you. What’re you going to do, cover everything? You just do whatever you have to and get the hell out of there as fast as you can.”
Barron put the washcloth back into the bag, then pushed past them into the main room and went to the door and opened it.
The hotel manager and his two-man crew were still there.
“What time was housekeeping here?”
“Early, sir, about eight.” The manager looked past Barron to the others as they came up behind him. “Mr. Bailey saw the maid in the hall when he left and said it was alright to make up the room.”
“They wouldn’t have left towels and a damp washcloth crammed into the storage cabinet in the bathroom.”
“Definitely not.”
“And besides the SWAT personnel, no one else has been in here since.”
“No, sir. Not that I know of.”
Barron glanced around once more, then looked at Lee.
“What about the bedroom?”
“Come see.”
Barron followed Lee into the bedroom with Halliday behind him. An open suitcase sat on a rack in a corner, a closet door was partially open, and the bed was rumpled but unopened, as if someone had lounged on top without pulling back the covers.
“Let’s get a Scientific unit up here fast,” Halliday said quickly, and turned to look at Valparaiso in the doorway. “Room cleaned and made up, then somebody comes in. Whoever it was used the bathroom and bedroom. We have Raymond’s prints. If it was him, it won’t take long to verify.”
“Marty, Jimmy, anybody.” Red’s voice crackled sharply from their radios.
“Marty, Red.” Valparaiso clicked on. “Go ahead.”
“Beverly Hills PD is dusting the car, there’s prints everywhere. Mr. Bailey was shot clean, close range in the back of the head like the deputies at Criminal Courts. More important, we got a double maybe here. Two calls just came in to the BHPD back to back. Young girl in a pizza shop says she’s sure Raymond was in the store maybe an hour and a half ago. Another woman says she helped him onto the three-two-zero Metro bus to Santa Monica
maybe twenty minutes after that. Santa Monica PD is going to cover the bus. You and Roosevelt go talk to the woman. Edna Barnes. B-A-R-N-E-S. Two-four-zero South Lasky Drive. BHPD is there now.
“Jimmy, you and John see the girl in the pizza shop. Alicia Clement, C-L-E-M-E-N-T, at the Roman Pizza Palace, nine-five-six-zero Brighton Way, she’s there talking to the BHPD. Maybe it’s not him, but the pizza shop and the Lasky Drive location are within blocks of each other and where the car was found. I’m assuming it is him. By now he’ll be long off the bus, but he’s on the west side and making mistakes. We’re not there yet, gentlemen, but we’re closing. Good luck, be careful.”
4:40 P.M.
42
CULVER CITY BUS NUMBER 6. SAME TIME.
Raymond felt the bus slow and then stop. The doors opened, and a number of people got off and as many more got on. Then the driver closed the doors, and the bus moved off.
In less than ten minutes they would be at the LAX Transit Center, then on the shuttle into the airport itself. So far so good. He was just a passenger like everyone else. No one had so much as looked at him. Now he looked toward the front of the bus. When he did, his heart came up in his throat. Two uniformed and armed Transit Police had come on with the last passengers. They stood near the bus driver, one talking to her, the other looking back at the passengers.
Slowly, carefully, Raymond turned away only to find an elderly black man with white hair and a full white beard sitting across the aisle staring at him. Raymond had seen him standing earlier, so he must have taken the seat when one of the departing passengers vacated it. Tall and thin and dressed in a brightly colored pull-around reaching to his ankles, he looked like some sort of tribal prince, proud and exceedingly intelligent.
Raymond looked at him for a moment and turned away. Fifteen seconds later, he casually looked back. The man was still staring, and Raymond began to wonder if maybe he thought Raymond looked familiar and was trying to place him. If that were so, and he realized who Raymond was, it would make him very dangerous, especially with the Transit Police on board.