The Girl Buried in the Woods

by Robert Ellis

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “No, I mean it. I’m starting to feel dizzy.”

  “That’s because the rope’s cutting off the blood supply to your head.”

  “Well, Jesus Christ, I don’t wanna turn into a goddamn vegetable, Matt. Cut me down.”

  “Maybe later. I wanna know what happened first. You made Moe Rey dig his grave and shot him in the back of the head. You heard Sophia Ramirez running away. You knew she’d witnessed the murder.”

  “She screamed, but I don’t want to talk about her.”

  “Why not? You killed her. You squeezed the life out of her with your bare hands.”

  Burton closed his eyes as if replaying the murder in his head. “I don’t want to talk about the girl.”

  “But you strangled her to death.”

  “I couldn’t help it. She saw everything, and I panicked. I couldn’t let her get away.”

  Burton shook his head back and forth like he was trying to free himself of the demons in his head. When he opened his eyes, his voice wasn’t much more than a whisper.

  “I killed her,” he said. “Let’s leave it at that. You need to cut me down, Matt. I don’t want to die like this. I don’t want Val to see me like this.”

  Matt picked up the table that had fallen over and placed it back on the desk beneath Burton’s feet. While it may have taken the weight off the prosecutor’s neck, the rope remained taught and Burton was trapped with no way down.

  “If you don’t talk to me, Mitch, I’m taking the table away, and you can die the death you deserve. Now what about the city councilwoman? What about Dee Colon and her bodyguard?”

  “What about them?”

  Matt shrugged. “Why did you murder them?”

  “Who said I did?”

  “Nice try, but I mean it. I’ll take the table away and walk out of the room. Now why did you kill Colon?”

  He seemed to need to think about it and didn’t say anything.

  Matt shook his head in disgust. “The gun that greased Moe Rey is the same gun that greased the bodyguard. You probably haven’t heard, but ballistics matched the slugs. You let me take the heat for the murders, then planted the gun in Robert Gambini’s house. That’s the only way all this could have happened. I heard that they found the gun in a drawer by his bed.”

  Burton remained silent, but it looked like his wheels were turning. A guilty man chewing over his options with a rope around his neck.

  “I thought it was a nice touch,” he said finally.

  “Which part?”

  Burton tried to loosen the noose, but it was still too tight and wouldn’t give.

  “All of it,” he said in a scratchy voice. “Dee Colon was a psychotic bitch addicted to herself and other people’s money. One of those ‘mirror-mirror on the wall’ types, right? She knew that something had to be going on with Sonny Daniels. It was only a matter of time before she figured things out. Her big mistake was that she went after you and did it publicly. I’ll never know why she seemed to hate you so much.”

  “I think she felt the same way about a lot of people. Users and takers and backstabbers usually do.”

  “True enough, but her hate for you was different. It seemed like she was jealous of you. Like she was competing with you in a race only she could see. And by that time, you were becoming a problem, too. When they let you walk after Lane Grubb was murdered, when we sat in the chief’s office and he told us that you were off the case, but you were really still on—something had to give.”

  “And so you set me up.”

  Burton laughed and gave him a quick look. “It was easier than I thought it would be. But please don’t hold it against me, Matt. I really do need to be cut down now.”

  Matt pulled the table away. Burton’s eyes got big as his body began to swing through the dim light again.

  “Tell me how easy it was to set me up, Mitch. I wanna hear it in your own words.”

  “It seems like you’re taking it personally. I asked you not to do that.”

  “You know the more you kick your legs, the more strain you’re putting on your neck. If you’re not careful, it could snap.”

  “Please, Matt. Put the table back on the desk or cut me down.”

  “Tell me how easy it was to set me up for a double murder.”

  Sweat was percolating all over Burton’s face. From the glint in his eyes, terror had set in like an infection.

  “Well just think about it,” he said. “You were fascinated by Colon. You were following her. You were trying to figure out why she was putting so much effort into destroying your career—it was just perfect. After I did her, after I killed them, I drove down the driveway and saw you parked at the curb. I could hear the sirens in the distance. It was just so perfect. By the way, she died like a bitch, whining and begging for her life. My only regret is that I didn’t drive a stake through her heart.”

  A moment passed, Burton’s body still drifting through the shadows. Matt took a step closer and looked up.

  “It’s time to talk about Lane Grubb,” he said.

  “He OD’d on heroin.”

  “He was murdered.”

  Burton shook his head. “I didn’t say that he wasn’t. I just meant that I don’t know anything about it.”

  “You didn’t shoot him up?”

  “I wouldn’t have known how to shoot him up. I thought Robert Gambini got rid of Grubb. He tried to run him down in the street earlier that night. I was sitting at a table by the window in the café with those detectives. You were on the sidewalk. We saw the whole thing. Everybody did.”

  An image surfaced. Gambini’s Mercedes parked in the garage the way it shouldn’t have been. Matt kept his thoughts to himself.

  “Yeah, I guess we did,” he said. “We saw Robert Gambini drive off. And now, after everything you’ve done, after all this, he got away with all the money. You and his uncle Joe ended up with squat. How’s that feel?”

  Matt’s eyes were pinned to Burton’s as he asked the question. When Burton’s face remained blank, waves of doubt began to surface on their own.

  Who were the three men driving the Lincoln Continentals?

  Where was Robert Gambini?

  Where was all that cash?

  But even more, why, when Matt had walked up Gambini’s driveway earlier in the day, why did he get that odd feeling that the house had gone into a deep sleep? Was it a premonition? A sign?

  SIXTY-THREE

  Two shots from a pistol rang out. Matt could hear Angel Ramirez shouting at someone. Then two more shots pinged off the walls in the hallway. Matt heard the sound of people running and turned to the door with his gun up and ready. Angel burst into the room first, then tripped and fell onto the floor. Behind him, a man holding a pistol in his right hand was breaking through the darkness.

  Matt pointed his .45 at the man’s chest. “Drop the gun, Sonny.”

  Sonny Daniels couldn’t keep his mad dog eyes off Angel. “It’s his fault,” he said in a loud voice. “Everything that’s happened is his goddamn fault. He doesn’t belong here.”

  Matt grimaced, trying to hold back his anger. “He’s a material witness in a double homicide, Sonny. He’s not going anywhere. I told you to go home. Now I’m telling you to drop the gun.”

  “But I’ve lost my money.”

  Matt could hear the sirens approaching and guessed that they were still a mile off.

  “What about the mine in the desert?”

  “It’s his fault. I’ve lost everything.”

  Matt tried not to show anything on his face, but it was difficult. The Brothers Grimm had been cleaned out.

  “Shut your mouth and drop the gun, Sonny.”

  The pistol was shaking in Sonny’s hand. As Matt measured the man, a grim thought flashed through his head, rekindling all the rage and darkness within him—the idea that all the violence and all the deaths, including Sophia’s murder, could be reduced to Sonny’s sick attempt to milk more money out of a person
al fortune he already owned. He looked at the greedy man who had just lost an estimated $900 million, then looked at him some more. He seemed so petty. So rotten, cheap, and small.

  Matt’s cell phone started vibrating in his pocket. The rhythm to the pulse indicated that the call was urgent. Matt kept his .45 pointed at Sonny and, with great care, fished the phone out of his pocket. When he saw David Speeks’s name blinking on the face, to everyone’s amazement, he took the call.

  “I’m busy, Speeks. I’m in a situation right now.”

  “I just thought that you needed to know something.”

  “What do I need to know?”

  “The FBI came through, Jones. The crime lab. The report on the gloves is in, and you won’t believe the results.”

  “Try me.”

  “They lifted the fingerprints of the man who shot Lane Grubb up with all those bags of smack, and they don’t belong to Robert Gambini.”

  Matt could feel it in his soul now. Like a mind reader or a fortune-teller or a blackbird riding the upper winds in the light of the moon, he could have switched off the phone because he already knew.

  “Who do the prints belong to, Speeks?” he said quietly.

  A moment passed with guns drawn. Everyone in the room was staring at him incredulously. Everyone was listening to his side of the conversation. Angel, Burton, and Sonny. All in shock that he took the call.

  “Who do the prints belong to?” he repeated.

  Speeks cleared this throat. “Sonny Daniels, Jones. He killed his own partner. He murdered Lane Grubb.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “One hundred percent. Sonny was arrested in college for sexually assaulting a woman. His prints are in the system.”

  “Thanks.”

  Matt slipped his phone into his pocket. He’d known the answer the minute he set eyes on Gambini’s Mercedes in the garage. Lane Grubb wanted out of the Brothers Grimm. He wanted out of the scheme, and he’d been afraid of his partners. Despite his addiction to drugs, he’d known that he wasn’t safe. He had called Matt and wanted to come in. He’d said that he was ready to talk—ready to tell Matt everything.

  And Sonny ran things. Sonny couldn’t let that happen. Somewhere in this world, Sonny Daniels kept a black Mercedes that needed body work.

  Matt looked up at Burton, still wrestling with the noose around his neck. Glancing down at Angel on the floor, he saw him staring up at Sonny with his hands raised in the air. It was almost as if Angel thought he could block the bullets if the gun fired. But then Matt’s eyes worked their way back to Sonny and stayed there. Except for the sound of the rope rubbing against the wooden beam above their heads, the room had gone completely silent. Time seemed to have stopped, everything white hot and radioactive now. When Matt spoke finally, his voice was low and slow and burning like a grass fire.

  “Give me the gun, Sonny. Do the smart thing. Hand it over so we can call it a night.”

  It happened slowly—so very slowly—Sonny turning away from Angel and pointing his pistol at Matt, then giving him a look and shaking his head.

  “Because of his daughter, Jones, because of him, I lost my money. A lot of money. I’m not going anywhere.”

  Matt grimaced again, his .45 hot and ready. “I’ve asked you three times, Sonny. Maybe it’s four times or even five—I really don’t remember. Lower the gun to the floor and step away.”

  Sonny gazed back at him with those eyes of his and shook his head again. When the corner of his lips turned, he looked just like Satan.

  “Wrong answer,” Matt said.

  He pulled the trigger three times, the heavy .45-caliber rounds exploding into Sonny’s chest as the sound of thunder cracked and roared through the room. Then he pulled the trigger four more times just to make sure. Matt saw the muzzle flashing and could smell the cloud of gunpowder rising in the air. Sonny was out of luck and didn’t have time to respond. His body snapped back on its heels and dropped onto the floor like a bag of dirt.

  There was no real need to check. Sonny’s face had “forever dead” stamped all over it. But Matt checked anyway, then looked up at Burton still hanging from the noose.

  “You ready to come down, Mitch?”

  Burton didn’t say anything. He just stared back at him with those big glassy eyes of his and then nodded. Matt raised the .45, aimed at the rope lashed to the beam, and fired a single shot. As Burton plunged to the floor and rolled onto his side, Matt could hear the cars and trucks pulling to a stop on the street out front. He slipped the .45 into its holster and helped Angel get to his feet. Then he cuffed Burton and switched on the lights. He didn’t want the first responders to enter a dark house. He was hoping that there wouldn’t be any more shooting tonight.

  SIXTY-FOUR

  It was 6:17 a.m., still more than a half hour before sunrise, and Matt had gone another night without sleep. Knowing that he would be back on medical leave after he finished his report and updated the Chronological Record in the murder book, he had left the crime scene at Burton’s house and driven directly to the station in Hollywood. He took a sip of coffee as he sat before his laptop and tried to put what had happened over the past two days into words. There were moments he knew that he would carry with him until the end of time. There were memories he knew that as long as he lived, he could never—

  “We need to take a drive, Jones.”

  Matt looked up and saw McKensie staring back at him.

  “What is it?” Matt said.

  McKensie flashed an ironic smile. “Hollywood Reservoir. Some Wall Street guy who works East Coast time went jogging about an hour ago. He says he saw two bodies floating in the water. Two dead guys. I thought you might want to be there when we fish them out.”

  Matt shut down his laptop and grabbed his coffee. The drive to the reservoir on top of the mountain should have taken fifteen minutes, but McKensie was jacked up and made it in ten. Two open workboats with outboard motors were lashed to the dock, the first skiff being used by Ed Gainer and two assistants from the coroner’s office, along with a pair of LAPD divers ready to go in their wetsuits, masks, and scuba gear.

  They began their search for the two bodies at the spot where the jogger claimed to have seen them. Matt wasn’t surprised when they struck out. The reservoir had the look and feel of a large lake. He imagined that the corpses were on the move, drifting with the currents. After exploring the reservoir from one end to the other, they followed a bend into a small cove.

  And that’s when Matt saw them.

  They were hovering about three feet below the water’s surface facedown. Still, Matt had a pretty good idea who they were going to turn out to be. When he glanced over at McKensie, he could tell that they were on the same page.

  The sky had become lighter, the sun rising on the other side of the mountain.

  Matt gazed into the water from his seat on the second workboat. The corpses were fully clothed. Despite the cold water, decomposition had begun to set in and the bodies were beginning to bloat some.

  He turned and watched the divers slip into the water from the first skiff. Using boat hooks, they rolled the corpses over and began guiding them back to the surface.

  Matt gave McKensie a nudge and pointed. “It’s them,” he said. “That’s Robert Gambini, and that’s Ryan Moore.”

  “Looks like they’ve seen better times, Jones. Every dog has his day, I guess.”

  The divers gathered the corpses into fishnets, keeping everything in place. Once the victims were wrapped, Gainer’s assistants hoisted them onto the skiff.

  “Let’s get them back to shore,” Gainer said. “By now Speeks should have the tent set up, and we’ll take a quick look.”

  The water’s surface was as smooth as glass, the low hum from the small outboard motors filling the canyon. With the mist rising into the cooler air—the sky clear and a deep blue—the morning seemed peaceful enough. But as Matt looked up and saw the hills littered with patrol units and their flashing lights, as he lowered his gaze an
d eyed Gambini and Moore through the fishnets—dead as dead gets—the feeling was two or three times past eerie.

  No one said anything the entire way in. Just the hum of those outboard motors and the sound of the wake they were leaving behind in the calm waters.

  Matt could see the lab’s evidence collection truck parked beside the coroner’s van. Under the trees a large tent had been pitched that included lights mounted on stands and a long worktable.

  The two boats came into their slips side by side. Matt followed McKensie onto the dock, standing back as the bodies were lifted onto gurneys and rolled up the ramp. Once the work lights were fired up, everyone entered the tent and the flap was lowered for privacy.

  It took five minutes to extract the corpses from the fishnets and another five minutes to empty their pockets and check their IDs. Because everything was wet, evidence bags were set aside until later. As Gainer began his preliminary examination of the bodies, Matt didn’t see any evidence of foul play and stepped closer.

  “Why don’t you save us some time, Ed.”

  Gainer turned to him. “What are you asking me to do?”

  “Roll them over and let’s get a look at the back of their heads.”

  “You mean you want to cut to the chase, Jones?”

  Matt caught the wry smile, the glint in his eyes, and nodded. “I think everyone here’s got a good idea of what happened to these guys.”

  Gainer’s smile broadened, and he rolled the bodies over with the help of his two assistants. As Speeks broke out a handful of UV flashlights and eye protection, the tent went dark.

  Matt switched on his UV flashlight and stepped closer. But the truth was he could see what happened to both Gambini and Moore from two feet away in the dark. Blood was still oozing out of the small holes in the back of their heads. The double murder was exactly what it appeared to be at first glance.

  McKensie stepped in beside Matt, eyeballing the victims. “They were executed,” he said.