The Girl Buried in the Woods

by Robert Ellis

  Matt was just grateful he was watching all of this on an empty stomach.

  His cell phone pulsed and then stopped. He pulled it out of the cup holder and checked the face. He had forty-three unread text messages and nineteen voice messages that he hadn’t listened to. Returning the phone to the cup holder, he turned up the heat and tried to settle down.

  His plan for the night was vague. He wanted to spend the early hours keeping an eye on Colon. Later, when things quieted down, he wanted to drive back to the medical center and see how Cabrera was doing.

  He glanced at the clock on his dash—10:03 p.m.—then back across the street. Colon had just exited the restaurant and was marching down the steps to her limousine. Apparently, her bodyguard was the designated driver tonight, and her go-go boy, the mayor of Los Angeles, had decided to stay home.

  Matt watched the limo drive off, heading for Sunset. He waited for a car to pass, then pulled away from the curb. After a few minutes, he realized that the limo was heading for the Hollywood Freeway. Following them down the ramp, he didn’t become concerned until they exited onto the 110 Freeway, and then again onto Solano Avenue. It seemed obvious that Colon was planning to visit Sophia Ramirez’s family. And at this late hour, the reason for her visit couldn’t be good.

  He watched the limo circle the block from a distance. When it turned up Casanova Street, he spotted the news van parked outside the Ramirezes’ home, switched off his headlights, and pulled to the curb.

  He waited a few minutes until Colon and her bodyguard were ushered into the house. His stomach was going, the feeling of impending doom back again at full strength. Slipping out of the car, he crossed the street and hurried through the gate into the park. Bushes five feet high bordered a low chain-link fence, and he moved quickly up the lawn. When he reached Sophia’s house, he knelt down and parted the branches.

  His view was up close and personal. He could see the camera operator and sound technician preparing to shoot a scene in the Ramirezes’ living room. Colon was seated on the couch between Sophia’s mother and father. A producer was talking to them with a female reporter standing beside him reading her notes.

  Matt checked his watch. At 11:00 p.m., the camera lights went hot, the producer stepped aside, and the reporter took her seat in front of the couch. They were up, and it didn’t take much for Matt to realize that the broadcast was live.

  He sat down on the grass—his eyes wide open. Although he couldn’t hear what they were saying, he had a good idea of the gist. Just as she had controlled the conversation at the Sunset Cantina, Colon was doing all the talking while pointing her finger at just about everybody in the room. Sophia’s mother, Lucia Ramirez, had begun weeping the minute the lights went hot and the reporter held out her mike. Sophia’s father, Angel, listened to Colon with his eyes narrowed and kept nodding in agreement.

  No doubt about it. Colon was taking Matt down just as she promised.

  Matt hustled down the row of bushes, through the gate, and climbed back into his car. He could see the bright camera lights casting shadows onto the Ramirezes’ front lawn and across the street. He waited in the darkness, his stomach churning. After a few minutes, the camera lights shut down. Five minutes after that, Colon was marching across the lawn to her limo with her bodyguard-turned-driver in tow.

  Matt lowered his head until the limo passed, then turned his car around and began to follow a safe distance behind. He guessed that Colon’s bodyguard wasn’t paying much attention, but he let another car fall in between them just in case. Matt’s first thought was that they were making a return trip to Hollywood, but they passed the entrance to the freeway and continued south until they reached the Santa Monica Freeway.

  Maybe Colon had done enough damage and was on her way home for the night.

  The limo exited onto Western Avenue, then snaked its way through the neighborhoods on surface streets. When they reached South Gramercy Place, the limo turned up the drive before a Spanish-style house in the middle of the block. Matt shut down his headlights and pulled over. He could see an electronic gate opening. Once the limo vanished behind the wall, the gate closed and the houselights came on.

  Matt looked up and down the street. It was a quiet neighborhood of large homes—some, he guessed, might even be called grand. Each home was different than the next, and all were set six to ten feet above street level, with steps leading up from the sidewalks. Palm trees towered above, lining both sides of the street. Even at a glance, Matt could tell that a city councilwoman who had crossed the border as a child with nothing more than what she was wearing couldn’t afford to live in a neighborhood like this one. The price of Colon’s house couldn’t be bought and paid for on her salary.

  Matt glanced at the clock on the dash and decided to hang out until the bodyguard left. As he waited, memories of what had happened over the past few days began to surface. Looking back at the house, the city councilwoman’s corruption seemed so over the top and so out in the open—he had to admit that in a certain way he was fascinated by her. He settled back in the seat. He wasn’t sure if it was a fascination with evil or just the shock that people like Colon exist in the world and that so many of them seem to get away with it. As he thought it through, the idea that somehow their past would catch up with them almost seemed too naive to say aloud.

  Of course, Matt realized that this was exactly the same dilemma his uncle, Dr. Baylor, had wrestled with before he went insane and became a serial killer. The former plastic surgeon had obviously concluded that if he couldn’t rely on karma to rid the world of this blight—if he lived in a place where someone’s past atrocities were never going to come to light—then it was his duty to weed the garden on his own.

  Matt started to count the number of murders his uncle had committed in order to, as the doctor put it, make the world a better place, but stopped himself. The idea that he had covered the same ground and arrived at the same place as his uncle sent a chill up his spine.

  He tried to let the thought go. He didn’t want to kill Colon. It hadn’t even entered his mind.

  He glanced out the window, wishing he had a cigarette. He could hear police sirens in the distance, along with the sirens from an emergency vehicle and a fire truck.

  He turned back to Colon’s house and noticed a set of headlights switch on near the garage on the other side of the wall. The electronic gate opened, and a Honda Accord started to amble down the drive. Matt watched the car pull into the street and head off in the opposite direction. The bodyguard-turned-designated-driver didn’t seem like he was in too much of a hurry tonight.

  Matt kept his eyes on the taillights. Once they vanished around the corner, he turned back to the house and started the car. He was about to pull away from the curb when the sound of the sirens and a sea of flashing lights engulfed the entire neighborhood. Matt sat back in the seat and saw first responders running toward Colon’s house. Someone slammed their fist into the driver’s side window and shouted at him. He turned, startled, and found Jack Raines glaring at him through the glass.

  “What are you doing here, Jones?”

  Matt jumped out of the car. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  Raines started running toward Colon’s house with his partner, Billy Hudson. Matt chased after them, watching a crew of cops pounding on the front door. When no one answered, one of the heavier men kicked the door down.

  And then they were in. Running through the house, shouting, and clearing rooms until they’d worked their way to the family room off the kitchen.

  That’s when everyone stopped. That’s when Matt felt the Grim Reaper touch him between his shoulder blades.

  They were dead. Murdered and left in a way that seemed particularly gruesome.

  The bodyguard was lying on the floor with his eyes open and his tongue hanging out of his mouth. Blood was draining from the hole in his forehead and pooling on the tiled floor. The city councilwoman had been laid out on her back. Her eyes were jutting out of their sockets, her ne
ck heavily bruised and obviously broken. When Matt took a step closer and knelt down, he could see that the back of her head had been crushed in and that she had died the same hideous death as Sophia Ramirez.

  “What are you doing here, Jones?”

  Matt looked up and saw Raines still glaring at him.

  FIFTY-ONE

  They wouldn’t let him leave. His keys had been taken away from him, along with his badge and gun. For the second time in as many nights, Matt was sitting in the back seat of a patrol unit with its LED light bar flashing.

  Only this time he could feel the dread.

  A crew from the Forensic Science Division had been there for two hours. The investigator from the coroner’s office had arrived an hour and a half ago with two assistants and the meat wagon. A handful of cops in uniforms had canvassed the street, talking to neighbors and rushing back to Colon’s house to turn in their field interview cards.

  He could feel the dread all right.

  Despite the late hour, most of Colon’s neighbors were standing outside watching the investigation and flashing hard and guilty looks at Matt sitting in the cruiser. Although the street had been sealed off, news that a member of the city council had just been murdered tended to attract media attention quickly. And now, every TV station in the city, every newspaper and blog, was camped out on the corner. The glare from their camera lights was impossible to escape—the neighborhood so bright that it could have been high noon.

  Matt tried to keep his head turned away but wasn’t sure that it would help. Even from this distance, every camera on every tripod could reach out with their long lenses and get their close-up.

  Matt couldn’t seem to settle down—his heart was pounding in his chest, his mind sprinting ahead of itself.

  He kept thinking about what Val had told him. The warning both she and Burton had delivered.

  You’re being set up. Something’s going on that shouldn’t be going on. It’s not natural. Everybody on the list is bought and paid for. When Raines and Hudson interviewed you in the interrogation room it was laughable, if not illegal. And what’s with the chief? You’re off the case, but then you’re back on—only it’s our little secret. Things don’t work that way, Matt.

  Not unless you’re being set up.

  The car doors snapped open, and Matt flinched. He watched Raines take the seat beside him, then Billy Hudson climbed in behind the wheel. Raines tossed a large manila envelope on the floor and started leafing through the pages on his clipboard.

  “Doesn’t look good,” Raines said in a big voice. “Doesn’t look good, Detective.”

  He turned and gazed at Matt for a long time. “There’s a brand-new Escalade parked beside Colon’s limo. It still has that ‘new car’ smell. The vehicle’s registered to the bodyguard. You see the size of that guy, Jones? The man didn’t drive a Honda.”

  Matt looked away. “I just told you what I saw, Raines.”

  Raines poked him in the chest with a finger. “The trouble is, Jones, no one in the neighborhood saw a Honda. They saw you. They saw your car but no Honda. This is a murder case. If you’re gonna make things up, you gotta do better than that.”

  Matt shook his head. “I’m not making anything up.”

  Hudson laughed from the front seat. “Come on, Jones. You had every reason in the world to kill that stupid bitch.”

  Matt glanced at Hudson, then back at Raines. “From what I could tell, you could fill the Rose Bowl with the number of people who wanted Colon dead.”

  “Yeah,” Raines said. “But none of them were following her around tonight, and you were. We’ve got witnesses who saw you in your car outside the Sunset Cantina. Two neighbors say you ran into Elysian Park outside the Ramirezes’ house. They said you were hiding in the bushes, Jones.”

  “And what if I was?”

  “Why didn’t you answer your phone all night? Why didn’t you reply to a single text message?”

  Matt turned and met Raines’s gaze. “Maybe I didn’t feel like it.”

  Raines laughed. “Didn’t feel like it, Jones? I think you killed the bitch. I think you’d had enough of her bullshit. After what she did to you today, anybody would’ve had enough of her bullshit. I think you were trying to make it look exactly the way that girl died. The bodyguard gets a bullet to the head just like Moe Rey did. Colon gets strangled and beaten to death just like Sophia Ramirez. Too bad you didn’t have time to throw them in a hole somewhere and let the neighborhood dog sniff them out.”

  Hudson leaned closer and whispered. “Sort of your warped signature kind of thing, right, Jones? Detective School 101? Connect the two double murders and we’re so stupid, we draw a line from dot to dot and you’re free and clear.”

  Raines shook his head. “It’d be easier if you just said you did it, Jones. The coroner’s investigator examined Colon’s body. She’s got a broken neck, a broken face, and half her skull fell out of her head. He called the murder personal. He called the killer angry. You hear that—just like you.”

  “I’m not angry, Raines. I was just sitting out here enjoying the fresh air and waiting for the moon to rise.”

  “Yeah, sure, Jones. Sitting here playing with yourself. Let’s face it—with your uncle and all—it’s in your blood, man. You killed the bitch. It doesn’t matter that she deserved it or even that the world’s a better place now. Sooner or later you’re going down for it.”

  Matt’s mind cleared suddenly. “What do you mean, sooner or later?”

  Raines looked back at him and shrugged.

  Matt grimaced. “You don’t have enough to hold me, do you?”

  Raines lowered his head and appeared to be chewing it over. “Not yet,” he said in a quieter voice.

  “I want my things back. I want everything back.”

  Raines looked like he was in pain as he passed over the large manila envelope. Matt ripped it open and dug out his badge, his keys, and gun.

  “You know what, Raines?”

  “What, Detective?”

  “There’s no physical evidence in that house because I never went inside until you guys got here.”

  “That’s your side of the story, Jones.”

  Matt opened the door, got out of the cruiser, then turned back and looked inside.

  “Did it ever occur to either one of you guys that Gambini wanted me out of the way just as much as he wanted Colon dead? Tonight, he got both.”

  Raines shook his head but didn’t say anything.

  “By the way, Raines, I carry a forty-five. The hole in the bodyguard’s head was made by a twenty-two.”

  Raines nodded. “The same caliber as the gun the bodyguard was licensed to carry. And it was fired tonight. Nice touch, Jones, killing a guy with his own goddamn gun.”

  Matt turned away and walked off. Glancing at the media people on the corner, he got into his car and lit up the engine. The other end of the street looked clean—just a handful of cruisers and a couple of barricades. Matt decided that he’d take the clean way out and drove to the other end of the block. When he made the turn at the corner, he noticed that his fingers were trembling. He could barely hold on to the steering wheel.

  FIFTY-TWO

  Visiting Cabrera at the hospital would have to wait for another day—if there was another day. Matt headed home, well aware that he was being followed. When he looked at the rearview mirror, he could see three patrol units right behind him.

  He tried to ignore them but had to admit that with Gambini missing, he wasn’t really sure what to do. The feeling that there was something wrong with the case seemed so overwhelmingly out in the open now. With every curve in the road, with every turn, he checked the rearview mirror and the patrol units were still there. Again and again—all the way home.

  Chasing the wrong man. Everything upside down.

  Matt looked ahead to his house and saw two black-and-white cruisers parked in front of his lawn. As he pulled into the carport, the cops were staring at him from inside their cars. He could see t
hem talking on their cell phones. The expressions on their faces were blank, mean—no need for a trial to decide who’s guilty this time around.

  We just know it’s him.

  Matt unlocked the front door and stepped into the living room without turning on the lights. Lowering the venetian blinds, he peered through the slats and watched the three patrol units that had been following him park in the shadows underneath the oak trees on the other side of the street. Even more disconcerting, two cops got out of their cars and started walking around the side of the house.

  Matt stepped into the kitchen, carefully avoiding the LED lights from the clock on the stove. Through the window he could see the two cops moving to the base of the deck and examining the steps and sliding door. One of them was whispering into his cell phone.

  His home had become a prison, and he needed to break out.

  He stepped into the hallway, closing the kitchen and bedroom doors to mask the light from his cell phone. Thumbing through his speed dial list, he found Burton’s number, and hit “Enter.” After two rings, the prosecutor picked up and, despite the late hour, didn’t sound tired.

  “Are you okay, Matt?”

  “I need to get out of here.”

  “I’ll open the gate.”

  “I’m being followed.”

  “I expect you are,” Burton said. “But unless they’ve got paperwork, they’ll have to wait outside.”

  Matt slipped the phone into his pocket, opened the kitchen door, and fished through his laptop case for his meds. Popping three pills into his mouth, he downed them with bottled water and glanced out the window. The two cops who had walked around to the back of the house had multiplied by three. Now there were six of them out there keeping watch in the darkness.

  It was an eerie feeling. Matt being a cop, a homicide detective—and here he was watching himself check the mag on his .45 and slip three more into his pocket like a lowlife readying for a shoot-out.