Fair Warning - Jack McEvoy Series 03 (2020)

by Connelly, Michael

  “Are we in the right house?” Rachel asked.

  “Yeah, I checked the address,” I said. “Why?”

  “The LAPD must pay its DNA techs a lot better than I thought.”

  “Plus, buying DNA from Orange Nano can’t be cheap.”

  Next we moved through a modern kitchen with an island counter that divided the space from a large TV room that looked out onto a pool. Nothing seemed amiss. Held by a magnet to the refrigerator was a color photo printed on cheap copy paper that depicted a naked woman with a ball gag in her mouth.

  “Nice fridge art,” I said.

  “We need to check upstairs,” Rachel said.

  We found the stairs by retracing our steps and going down the other hallway. Upstairs there were three bedrooms, but only one that appeared to be in use—the bed was unmade and there were dirty clothes in a pile next to it. A quick sweep of these rooms produced no people and no sign of trouble.

  We went back down the stairs. There were two closed doors at this end of the hallway. Rachel opened these with her sleeve-covered hand. The first was to a laundry room. Nothing there. The second was to the garage, and that’s where we found Hammond’s lab.

  And where we found Hammond hanging from a noose fashioned from an orange industrial power cord.

  “Shit,” I said.

  “Don’t touch anything,” Rachel said.

  “Hands in pockets. I got that.”

  “Good.”

  But I pulled one of my hands out of its pocket with my cell phone. I pulled up the keyboard and tapped in 9-1-1.

  “What are you doing?” Rachel asked.

  “Calling it in,” I said.

  “No, not yet.”

  “What do you mean? We need to call the police.”

  “Just hold your horses for a minute. Let’s see what we’ve got here.”

  “We got a dead guy hanging from the crossbeam.”

  “I know, I know.”

  She offered nothing else as she moved in closer to the body. There was a wooden chair kicked over on its side below the body, which I assumed was that of Marshall Hammond.

  The body was suspended completely motionless in front of Rachel.

  “Record this,” she said.

  I moved from the phone app on my cell to the camera app and started a recording.

  “Recording,” I said. “Go.”

  She circled completely around the body once before speaking.

  “I’m assuming the car out front is his,” she said. “So we are to assume that he went somewhere, came home, and then just came in here and threw that extension cord over the beam.”

  The garage had an open ceiling where there was some cross-planking for storage up above. The center support beam had been used as Hammond’s gallows.

  The body was suspended about two feet above the concrete floor of the garage lab. Rachel continued to slowly move around it without touching it.

  “No damage to the fingernails,” she said.

  “Why would there be?” I asked.

  “Second thoughts. Often people change their mind at the last second and claw at the noose. They break their fingernails.”

  “Got it. I think I knew that.”

  “But there is slight chafing on both wrists. I think he was bound either at the time of death or shortly before.”

  She looked around and saw a cardboard dispenser that held rubber gloves, most likely used by Hammond during DNA processing. She put on one glove and then used that hand to right the chair that had been knocked over during the hanging. She stepped up onto it so she could get a closer view of the noose and the dead man’s neck. She studied it for a long moment before telling me to put on gloves from the dispenser.

  “Uh, why?”

  “Because I want you to steady the chair.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do it, Jack.”

  I put my phone down on a table, then put on the gloves. I came back to the chair and held it steady as Rachel stepped up onto the armrests so she could get a downward view of the noose and the knot behind the dead man’s head.

  “This doesn’t work,” she said.

  “You want me to look around for a ladder?” I asked.

  “No, I’m not talking about that. I think his neck is broken and that doesn’t really work.”

  “What do you mean doesn’t work? I thought that’s what happens when you hang yourself.”

  “No, not often with suicide by hanging.”

  She put her ungloved hand on the top of my head to steady herself as she climbed off the arms of the chair. She stepped down off the chair, turned it on its side, and positioned it as it had been when we entered the garage.

  “You need a big drop to break the neck. Most hanging suicides basically die from strangulation. It was the execution hangings back in the day where you’d get the broken neck. Because you drop through a trap door, fall ten or fifteen feet, and then the impact snaps the neck, causing instant death. You ever heard that phrase Build my gallows high? I think it was a book or a movie or something. Whoever said that wanted to get it over with quick.”

  I raised my hand, pointing at the dead man.

  “Okay, then how did he get a broken neck?”

  “Well, that’s the thing. I think he was dead first and then hung up like that to make it look like a suicide.”

  “So somebody broke his neck and then hoisted …”

  It hit me then: Somebody broke his neck just like the four AOD victims.

  “Oh, man,” I said. “What is going on here?”

  “I don’t know but there has to be something in this lab that helps explain things. Look around. We have to hurry.”

  We searched but found nothing. There was a desktop computer but it was thumbprint protected. There were no hard files or lab books. Two whiteboards mounted on the walls had been erased. It became pretty clear that whoever had hung Hammond from the rafters—if the dead man was Hammond—had made sure that whatever the lab tech was doing with the female DNA he bought from Orange Nano was wiped clean as well.

  There was a refrigerator that had racks of test tubes presumably holding DNA samples. I pulled one tube out of its slot and read the printing on the tape over the rubber seal at the top.

  “This stuff is from GT23,” I said. “Says it right here on the tube.”

  “Not a surprise,” Rachel said.

  “There’s nothing else here,” I said. “Just a dead guy and that’s it.”

  “We still have the rest of the house to check,” Rachel said.

  “We don’t have time. We have to get out of here. Whoever did this probably spent all night searching the place. Whatever was here is gone and probably so is my story.”

  “It’s not about your story anymore, Jack. This is bigger than your story. Check the printer.”

  She pointed behind me. I turned and went to the printer in the corner. The tray was empty.

  “Nothing here,” I said.

  “We can print the last job,” Rachel said.

  She stepped over and looked at the printer. Still wearing a single glove, she pressed the menu button on the printer’s control screen.

  “Little-known fact,” she said. “Almost all modern printers print from memory. You send the job from your computer, it goes into printer-buffer memory, and then it starts to print. It means the last job is in memory until a new job comes in.”

  She clicked on the “Device Options” tab and chose the “Print Memory” option. The machine immediately started humming and was soon printing pages.

  We both stood there watching. The last job was a big one. Many pages were sliding into the tray.

  “The question is who printed this,” Rachel said. “This guy or his killer?”

  Finally the printing stopped. There were at least fifty pages in the tray. I made no move to grab the stack.

  “What’s wrong?” Rachel asked. “Take the printouts.”

  “No, I need you to take them,” I said.

  “What a
re you talking about?”

  “I’m a reporter. I can’t just come into some dead guy’s house and take printouts from his computer. But you can. You don’t have to live by the same standards I do.”

  “Either way it’s a criminal act and that trumps your journalistic ethics.”

  “Maybe. But just the same, you can take the pages and then give them to me as my source. Then I can use them—stolen or not—in a story.”

  “You mean like we did before and it cost me my job?”

  “Look, can you just take the pages, and we can talk about this later? I want to either call the police or get the hell out of here.”

  “All right, all right, but this buys me into the case.”

  She scooped the thick sheaf of documents out of the tray.

  “It’s not a case,” I said. “It’s a story.”

  “I told you, it’s more than that now,” she said. “And I’m totally in.”

  “Fine. Split or call it in?”

  “Your car’s been sitting out there for at least a half hour. It was most likely seen by a neighbor and if not, there are probably cameras on every house. Too risky. I say we secure the documents and call it in.”

  “And we tell them everything?”

  “We don’t know everything. This is going to be Burbank PD, not L.A., so they won’t connect the dots to the other murders. Not at first. I think you run your original cover story about researching DNA data protections and say you followed the bouncing ball to this guy and this lab and here you are.”

  “And what about you?”

  “I’m your girlfriend and I just came along for the ride.”

  “Really? My girlfriend?”

  “We can discuss that later too. We need to find a place to hide the printouts. If they’re good, they’ll search your car.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I would if it was my call.”

  “Yeah, but you’re better than everybody. I have so many files and other junk in the back of my Jeep they won’t know what it is if they look.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  She handed me the stack of documents.

  “Then, as your source,” she said, “I am officially giving these to you.”

  I took the stack.

  “Thank you, source,” I said.

  “But that means they’re mine and I want them back,” she said.

  27

  After camouflaging the printouts in the paperwork debris that monopolized the back seat of my Jeep, I dialed 9-1-1 on my cell and reported finding the body to the Burbank Police. Ten minutes later a patrol car arrived followed by a rescue ambulance. I left Rachel in the Jeep and got out. After showing my driver’s license and press pass to an officer named Kenyon, I assured him that the RA and its EMTs were not necessary.

  “They respond on all death calls,” Kenyon said. “Just in case. Did you go inside the house?”

  “Yes, I told the dispatcher that,” I said. “The door was open and something seemed wrong. I called out, rang the doorbell, nobody answered. So I went in, looked around, continued to call out Hammond’s name, and eventually found the body.”

  “Who is Hammond?”

  “Marshall Hammond. He lives here. Or lived here. You have to ID the body, of course, but I’m pretty sure that’s him.”

  “What about the woman in the Jeep? Did she go in?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’re going to have to talk to her.”

  “I know. She knows.”

  “We’ll let the detectives handle that.”

  “What detectives?”

  “They also roll on all death cases.”

  “How long you think I’ll have to wait?”

  “They’ll be here any minute. Let’s run down your story. Why were you here?”

  I gave him the clean version: I was working on a story on the security of DNA samples submitted to genetic-analysis companies and it led me to want to talk to Marshall Hammond because he ran a private lab and also had a foot in law enforcement. This was not a lie. It just wasn’t a full explanation. Kenyon wrote down some notes while I spoke. I glanced back at the Jeep casually to see if Rachel could see me talking to him. Rachel had her eyes down like she was reading something.

  An unmarked police car arrived on scene and two men in suits emerged. The detectives. They spoke briefly to each other and then one headed toward the front door of the house while the other came toward me. He was mid-forties, white, with a military bearing. He introduced himself as Detective Simpson, no first name. He told Kenyon that he would take it from here and to file his paperwork on the call before EOW—which I was pretty sure meant end of watch. He waited for Kenyon to walk away before addressing me.

  “Jack McEvoy—why do I know that name?” he asked.

  “Not sure,” I said. “I haven’t done much in Burbank before.”

  “It’ll come to me. Why don’t we start with you telling me what brought you here today to discover this body inside the house.”

  “I just told Officer Kenyon all of that.”

  “I know, and now you have to tell me.”

  I gave him the exact same story, but Simpson stopped the narrative often to ask detailed questions about what I did and what I saw. I believed I handled it well but there was a reason he was a detective and Kenyon was a patrol officer. Simpson knew what to ask and soon I found myself lying to the police. Not a good thing for a reporter—or anybody, for that matter.

  “Did you take anything from the house?” he asked.

  “No, why would I do that?” I said.

  “You tell me. This story you say you’re working on, were you looking at any sort of impropriety involving Marshall Hammond?”

  “I don’t think I have to reveal all the details of the story, but I want to cooperate. So I’ll tell you the answer is no. I knew very little about Hammond other than that he was a second-tier buyer of DNA samples and data and that made him of interest to me.”

  I gestured toward the house.

  “I mean, the guy ran a DNA lab out of his garage,” I said. “That was pretty curious to me.”

  Simpson did what all good detectives do: he asked his questions in a nonlinear fashion so the conversation was disjointed and seemed to be all over the place. But in reality, he was trying to keep me from relaxing. He wanted to see if I might slip up or contradict myself in my answers.

  “What about your sidepiece?” he asked.

  “‘Sidepiece’?” I said.

  “The woman in your car. What’s she doing here?”

  “Well, she’s a private detective who helps me with my work sometimes. She’s also sort of my girlfriend.”

  “Sort of?”

  “Well, you know, I’m … not sure about things, but it doesn’t have anything—”

  “What did you take from the house?”

  “I told you, nothing. We found the body and then I called the police. That’s it.”

  “‘We’ found the body? So your girlfriend went in with you from the start?”

  “Yes, I said that.”

  “No, you indicated you called her in after finding the body.”

  “If I did that, I was wrong. We went in together.”

  “Okay, why don’t you stay right here and I’ll go talk to her.”

  “Fine. Go ahead.”

  “Mind if I look around in your vehicle?”

  “No, go ahead if you have to.”

  “So, you are giving me permission to search your vehicle?”

  “You said ‘look around.’ That’s fine. If searching means impounding it, then no. I need my car to get around.”

  “Why would we want to impound it?”

  “I don’t know. There’s nothing in there. You’re really making me regret calling you guys. You do the right thing and you get this.”

  “What is ‘this’?”

  “The third degree. I didn’t do anything wrong here. You haven’t even been in the house and you’re acting like I did something wro
ng.”

  “Just stay here while I go talk to your ‘sort of’ girlfriend.”

  “See, that’s what I mean. Your tone is bullshit.”

  “Sir, when we are finished here, I’ll explain how you can make a complaint to the department about my tone.”

  “I don’t want to make a complaint. I just want to finish here so I can go back to work.”

  He left me there and I stood on the street watching him interview Rachel, who had stepped out of the Jeep. They were too far away for me to hear the exchange and confirm that she was telling him the same story I had. But my pulse kicked up a notch when I saw she was holding the stack of printouts from Hammond’s lab in her hand while talking to Simpson. At one point she even gestured toward the house with the stack and I had to wonder if she was telling the detective where she had found the paperwork.

  But the conversation between Simpson and Rachel ended when the other detective came out the front door of the house and signaled his partner over for a huddle. Simpson broke away from Rachel and spoke to his partner in hushed tones. I nonchalantly walked over to Rachel.

  “What the hell, Rachel? Are you going to just give that stuff to them?”

  “No, but I could tell you were going to give him permission to search the car. I have certain protections for my clients, so I was prepared to say it was work material I had with me and not part of any search they might conduct. Luckily, he never asked.”

  I was not convinced it was the best way to protect the cache of paperwork from the lab.

  “We need to get out of here,” I said.

  “Well, we’re going to find out right now if we can,” she said.

  I turned and saw Simpson walking toward us. I was ready for him to say that the case was now a murder investigation, that my vehicle would be impounded, and that Rachel and I would be taken to the station for further questioning.

  But he didn’t.

  “Okay, folks, we appreciate the cooperation,” Simpson said. “We have your contact information and will be in touch should we need anything else.”

  “So, we can go?” I asked.

  “You can go,” Simpson said.

  “What about the body?” Rachel asked. “Is it suicide?”