Watch Him Die

by Craig Robertson

  *

  When they stood on the other side of the door, the claustrophobia of the interview room slipping away, Giannandrea turned to her with a tight, satisfied smile. ‘Tam Harkness. After all this time. That’s got to feel good.’

  ‘Yes, but there’s only one problem.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I don’t think he killed her.’

  CHAPTER 14

  Their shift was meant to start at eight but Salgado pushed through the doors of the giant glass cube that was LAPD headquarters on West 1st Street just after six. The three hours’ sleep he’d had was full of thoughts of Ethan Garland and of a kid dying of thirst and starvation.

  His nerves were jangling with the growing certainty that they were on to something bigger. It excited him, scared him, energised him. Sleep wasn’t an option. Sure, they’d need to put their hands up soon and get more people on the case, but he wanted it for them as long as possible, to get as deep into it before it had to become part of something they couldn’t handle alone.

  This day had to get started and he wanted to get a jump on it before anyone else did. Except that when he got to his desk, O’Neill was already there.

  ‘You’d think you might want to make an early start on something like this,’ she chastised him without even turning to see who it was.

  ‘It ain’t even . . .’ He gave it up. She’d probably been there half the night.

  ‘How’s the kid doing?’

  The monitor to her right was running the video feed. The now familiar sight of the young man slumped against the wall. It was less than twenty-four hours since they’d first set eyes on him, caged and abandoned, but they both burned with frustration at not being able to get to him.

  ‘Nothing much has changed from what I can see. He’s sleeping a lot, then gets restless, then frustrated and tugs at the chains till he wears himself out. Then he sleeps and repeats. He might be getting weaker, but I could just be seeing what I’m expecting to see.’

  They watched the screen together, helplessly mesmerised by the lack of action, waiting for his head or hands to move, waiting for proof of life.

  ‘There’s a report on my desk from one of the docs, Dorothy Sinclair, and not surprisingly the prognosis isn’t good,’ she told him. ‘She says that putting a definitive timetable on it isn’t possible as there are too many unknowns. We don’t know when he last had water and how much of it he had. His body weight and level of hydration at the start of the deprivation would also be a factor, plus alcohol intake prior to the deprivation would hasten the process. However, she has listed the symptoms and progression of continued dehydration. In progression, they are darkened urine, thirst, visual disturbance, rapid heartbeat, confusion, weakness, disorientation, and finally organ failure. She says the kidneys will probably go first but progressing to heart and liver.’

  ‘What’s our move, Cally? We’ve got to find this kid fast.’

  ‘We wait for Elvis and the DNA. Until then, I’m working my way through missing persons, looking for anyone that might fit this guy.’

  ‘Then let’s split it. I need to do something or I’ll go crazy.’

  *

  They’d been at it an hour when Charlie Randall, the cold case assignee from CCSS, pushed through the door and headed straight for Salgado’s desk. With his long frame, lugubrious features and time spent chasing the long dead, he’d been christened the Undertaker. Salgado saw him coming and knew that he brought news but couldn’t read whether it was good or bad by the man’s perennially gloomy features.

  ‘What’s up, Charlie?’

  Randall perched himself on the edge of the desk, looking happy to have a rest.

  ‘I’ve been chasing down the provenance of the purse that was locked away in Garland’s cabinet. The one said to belong to the Black Dahlia. Case is still open so we had to keep them in the loop anyway, but I hoped we could get a line on the bag, maybe get an idea where Garland could have got it from. I spoke to them last night.’

  The murder of Elizabeth Short was possibly the most infamous murder in a city awash with them. In January 1947, a woman walking on the west side of South Norton in Leimert Park saw what she thought was a store mannequin dumped on an empty lot. When she looked closer, she realised it was the body of a young woman, completely severed at the waist, drained of blood and washed. Her face had been slashed from the corners of her mouth to her ears.

  Beth Short, just twenty-two, had been strung up by her wrists, her corpse posed. A rose tattoo on her thigh had been cut off and inserted in her vagina.

  The press labelled her the Black Dahlia and it stuck. Men were arrested, men confessed, but no one was ever convicted of her murder. Her story became legend, laced with sex, corruption and tales of gangsters and crooked cops. Books were written, movies made, and Elizabeth Short never rested in peace.

  The case had never been solved, so had never been closed. Responsibility for it had been passed down through generations of detectives whose main responsibility was to talk to the press any time some new claim hit the media.

  ‘Who’s in charge of that now?’

  ‘Howard Kelsey. You know him?’

  ‘Howie? Yeah, I know him. He’s one of the good guys. So, what did you get?’

  ‘Well . . .’ Randall’s drawl suggested there was good news and bad. ‘First thing is the purse. A black bag, same shape as the one in Garland’s collection, and a single black shoe were found on top of a trash can at a restaurant, Delmonico’s, in the 1100 block of Crenshaw Boulevard. A guy named Robert “Red” Manley identified the bag as belonging to Beth Short. Manly was the last person known to have seen her alive but that was six days before she was killed.’

  ‘Was this Manley a suspect?’

  ‘Yep. He was their number one guy. But they interviewed him, put him through two lie detector tests and he aced them. But . . . well, there’s a couple of buts. First, the bag that Manley said belonged to Short is still in the case file in archives. I got Howie to check and he says it’s still there. Or at least there’s a bag and no reason to think it’s the wrong one.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And Frankie Wynn, the name that was tagged with the purse. You know Howie, so you know he’s not the kind who’s just going to take ownership of a case like that and sit on it. He knows the file. In the initial investigation, around sixty people came forward to confess that they killed Elizabeth Short. Since then, it’s something crazy like five hundred people who’ve come forward and said they did it. But of those sixty or so immediately following the killing? One of them was a man named Frankie Wynn.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Uh huh. Now, this guy’s statement was taken but he was quickly dismissed as either crazy or an attention seeker. He couldn’t give them anything to show he knew more than what was in the papers, so they kicked him to the kerb. The guy had said he worked at a restaurant, wait for it, Delmonico’s on Crenshaw, but when they followed up, the owner had never heard of anyone named Frankie Wynn.’

  ‘That’s wild. So, he’s given a fake name or a fake job, and that fake job just happens to be where the victim’s bag and shoe were found. Like what, three miles from the scene? How can this make sense?’

  ‘How the hell do I know? But I do know that Howie Kelsey is going to want that purse and anything we get on Garland’s collection.’

  ‘This is our case, Charlie.’

  ‘It’s an unsolved homicide, Salgado. Probably the number one unsolved in the history of the LAPD. Good luck holding on to it.’

  ‘Bullshit. Anyway, how the hell could Garland have known who killed the Black Dahlia when the LAPD doesn’t? He was guessing.’

  Randall shrugged lazily. ‘His collection doesn’t suggest a man who would be guessing about something like that.’

  Salgado stared back, not sure what to say or think. The telephone rang and saved him the trouble for a while. ‘Salgado.’

  ‘Detective, I have a result for you. The first DNA back from one of the b
ody parts we found in the cellar.’

  He could hear the tone underlying Elvis’s bland statement. If excitement could ever truly be described as laid-back, then this was it. Elvis wanted to be asked. Elvis knew it was good.

  ‘Which part?’

  ‘It’s the finger, and it’s a match to a known victim.’ Elvis paused for effect. ‘High profile.’

  Salgado felt the hairs on the back his neck prickle and pay attention. ‘Are you going to tell me who?’

  ‘Walker Wright.’

  ‘Walker fucking Wright? Are you shitting me?’

  The look on Charlie Randall’s face suggested he was equally surprised at hearing the name.

  ‘Nope.’

  Salgado was now sitting upright in his chair, waving an arm as non-frantically as he could towards O’Neill.

  ‘You’re a sonofabitch, Elvis. No doubt?’

  ‘One chance in a billion that it isn’t.’

  *

  Walker Wright had been as high profile as it got in the summer of 2019. He dominated front pages, news bulletins, political speeches and LAPD man hours. There had even been overtime.

  He was a TV weatherman for one of the local cable affiliates. That made him a very minor celebrity by Tinseltown standards, but it did mean people knew his face.

  So, there was some coverage when he didn’t show for his shift and couldn’t be found anywhere. His mother didn’t know where he was, nor his girlfriend or neighbours. Walker Wright had just vanished.

  It didn’t raise too much hoopla at first. He was a grown man, entitled to throw away his career by enjoying a couple of days of no-show. The company’s view was simple. If he turned up safe and well then they’d fire his ass. If he didn’t, they’d mourn the loss of a great talent in the entertainment news industry.

  Walker did turn up. A little at a time.

  A severed finger was sent to a rival news station along with a note saying it was his. His mother was called to examine it and said, yes, it was her son’s. A long white scar that he got after falling from his bike as a kid. It was Walker’s, she was sure.

  CBS Los Angeles got the next package. Two fingers. Like the first one, they had been cut, seemingly, from the same right hand.

  There was chatter that it was all a big publicity stunt, that the station was in on it. If that really was what it was all about then it worked better than they could have hoped. Walker was soon the most talked about weatherman in America. It left LAPD on the pointed end of a very sharp stick that was rammed up their asses and they could do nothing about. They had nothing.

  They knew the last known sighting of Walker was on the 210 heading east towards San Bernardino. The cameras couldn’t find him again after that and it was thought that maybe he’d turned off somewhere near Rancho Cucamonga. And that was all they had. No credit card use, no phone use. Nothing.

  Eventually, Walker faded from first item up to second to fifth to the slot before the goofy ‘and finally’ piece. The conspiracy nuts kept it alive online for a while longer until they too got bored.

  They never did find the rest of Walker Wright. Just three fingers and a man missing, presumed murdered.

  *

  ‘Walker Wright? Seriously?’

  O’Neill was as surprised and disbelieving as Salgado had been.

  ‘Yep. Garland has a severed finger. So, either he’s somehow bought it, same way he bought some of that other shit on his walls or . . .’

  ‘Or he’s killed him himself. Even if he didn’t kill him, it follows that he might have known who did.’

  ‘He killed him,’ Salgado said.

  ‘Your gut?’

  Salgado shrugged. ‘My gut. Your brains. Everything we know about it and him. You doubt it?’

  ‘No.’ She turned away from him, still talking. ‘I used to watch his mother on TV. Walker Wright’s mother. A strong woman getting broken bit by bit. Made me feel bad that we couldn’t find her boy, couldn’t give her some kind of peace. Even though we never worked the case, I felt like we’d let her down. The LAPD, you know what I mean?’

  ‘Nature of what we do. We’re always letting people down.’

  She shook her head. ‘Not true and you know it. But we did let that woman down. Till now. We’ve got a chance to do something about it.’

  Salgado stood, arms crossed across his chest.

  ‘I’m listening and I’m all for finding what’s left of this guy, but how do you figure we’re going to find him when a squad couldn’t find him before?’

  O’Neill tipped her head to the side and looked at him like she couldn’t believe he was quite so dumb.

  ‘Because we have an advantage they didn’t have. We know who killed him.’

  CHAPTER 15

  Narey fell through the door of their house on Belhaven Terrace, a bag of shopping in each hand, and closed the world out with a shove of her backside. The door shut out the tumult of rush hour traffic on Great Western Road and all the problems on the other side of it, if only temporarily. She enjoyed the silence while it lasted, closing her eyes over and enjoying a couple of moments of stand-up snoozing.

  It lasted as long as it took for her daughter to realise she was home. An excited howl of ‘Mummy, mummy’ floated through from another room, swiftly followed by little feet running over wooden floors and rugs. Alanna swung round the corner at impressive speed and ploughed straight at her. Narey didn’t have time to put the shopping down and instead had to settle for hugging both the bags and her daughter as a mop of fair hair buried itself at her waist. It felt good. Better than anything had done all day.

  ‘Hey, sweet pea. How are you? I’ve missed you!’

  Alanna didn’t answer, not in words, but buried her head deeper before she finally emerged, eyes shut and grinning maniacally.

  ‘Did you miss me?’

  ‘Yeah!’

  Yeah was her favourite word. A bit ahead of cheese and just in front of Bing, her favourite TV show. None of those words made Narey particularly proud of her parenting skills but needs must. If the price to be paid for catching bad guys while raising a child was that her daughter ate a bit too much dairy and was fascinated by a whiny anthropomorphic bunny rabbit then she could live with that.

  ‘Yeah? Good. Because I really missed you.’

  Other footsteps came into the room, skin slapping against the floorboards. ‘Hey, I missed you too so I’m hoping I get a hug as well.’

  ‘I think I’ve just about got energy for that. Come on, sweet pea, let’s go hug Daddy. Mummy could do with it.’

  ‘That bad?’ Tony Winter strode across the room and took the bags of shopping from her, stooping to kiss her full on the lips.

  Narey allowed herself a sigh. ‘Not that bad. Long day. Confusing day. Nothing a hug and glass of wine won’t cure.’

  ‘Why confusing?’ Tony was barefoot in jeans and a T-shirt. He put an arm round his wife, her holding their daughter, and the three of them shuffled together towards the living room.

  ‘Well, I don’t want to talk about it. Obviously.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘But . . .’

  Winter looked at her over Alanna’s head, the surprise obvious on his face. He looked down at the child. ‘Come on, darling, let’s get your mum a glass of wine. I don’t think she’s feeling well. She actually wants to talk to us about her job. About one of her cases. Remember this when you’re older, the day mummy let us into her world.’

  Narey mouthed a reply that no three-year-old should hear but accompanied it with a grin. ‘Let’s call it a one-off. And after this one is asleep.’

  ‘No sleep. No sleep.’

  ‘What? No, of course not. Come on, sweet pea. Mummy wants to hear all about your day. Did Daddy sing “Wind the Bobbin Up” for you?’

  ‘Yeah!’

  ‘Ah, never mind. We can always report him to social work.’

  ‘Oi! Daddy heard that.’

  ‘Daddy was supposed to. Daddy’s got a voice like an electric drill.’

/>   *

  Alanna finally fell asleep while still murmuring demands for one more story. Narey and Winter turned her light off and sighed in unison before taking their tiredness to the sofa with a couple of glasses of Rioja. He took the corner and let her stretch out on her back with her head on his lap, letting slip a sigh that was somewhere between relief and exhaustion.

  It was a full minute before she spoke and even then it was no more than a warm-up.

  ‘Have you heard from Uncle Danny?’

  Winter nodded, mid-mouthful. ‘I got a text from him this morning. He and Pauline are in Naples and going on to Rome tomorrow. He says he hates cruises and is bored out of his mind, but the old bugger is obviously loving it.’

  ‘That woman is the best thing that could have happened to him. If he’d stayed single much longer, he’d have turned feral.’

  ‘Turned? Danny was born feral. But you’re right, she’s just what he needed, even if he’d never have admitted it.’

  She went quiet again. He waited.

  ‘So, there’s this case I’ve been working on.’

  ‘Thomas Harkness.’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘You didn’t have to. There hasn’t been another case in months that has affected you like this one has. Your mouth twitches every time his name or Eloise Gray’s is mentioned. It’s Harkness, right?’

  ‘Right. Or at least, maybe it is. We’ve got firm evidence tying him to her killing and we’re going to charge him.’

  ‘And yet the tone of your voice tells me this doesn’t make you happy. Wait. Do you have a body? Have you found Eloise?’

  She blanked him. Tony was a journalist, a reporter for the Scottish Standard, and she insisted on strict demarcation lines between his job and hers.

  ‘No comment. Not till tomorrow at the earliest.’

  He sat up straighter, shifting her from where she lay. ‘You’ve found her? Christ. Where?’

  ‘I’m saying nothing. You know I’m not giving you a heads-up on this. And it’s not what I want to talk about. It’s Harkness.’

  He huffed, knowing she wouldn’t be shifted. And he got it. If he started turning up exclusive after exclusive from her cases, then she’d be facing a disciplinary panel in no time.