Authors: Michael Connelly
“Yes, that is the standard extension rate.”
I did the quick, rough math.
“Let’s see, that would be about eighteen thousand less than I make for six months now. So you want me to take less to help
you stay out front with this story. And let me guess…”
I picked up the document and started flipping through it.
“… I’m betting I no longer get any medical, dental or pension benefits under this contract. Is that right?”
I couldn’t find it and I guessed that there wasn’t a clause on benefits because they simply did not exist.
“Jack,” Kramer said in a calming tone. “There is some negotiation I can do financially, but you would have to pick up the
benefits yourself. It’s the way we’re going with this now. It’s simply the wave of the future.”
I dropped the contract back on his desk and looked up at him.
“Wait till it’s your turn,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“You think it ends with us? The reporters and the copy editors? You think if you’re a good soldier and do their bidding that
you’ll be safe in the end?”
“Jack, I don’t think my situation is what we’re discuss—”
“I don’t care if it is or it isn’t. I’m not signing this. I’d rather take my chances on unemployment. And I will. But someday
they’re going to come for you and ask you to sign one of these things and then you’ll have to wonder how you’ll pay for your
kids’ teeth and their doctors and their school and everything else. And I hope it’s okay with you because it’s simply the
wave of the future.”
“Jack, you don’t even have kids. And threatening me because I do is—”
“I’m not threatening you and that’s not the point,
Crammer
. The point I’m trying to make is…”
I stared at him for a long moment.
“Never mind.”
I got up and walked out of the office and straight back to my pod. Along the way I looked at my watch and then pulled out
my cell phone to see whether I had somehow missed a call. I hadn’t. It was nearing one
P.M
. in Washington, D.C., and I had heard nothing yet from Rachel.
Back at the cubicle I checked the phone and the e-mail and I had no messages there either.
I had been silent and had avoided intruding on her till now. But I needed to know what was happening. I called her cell and
it went right to voice mail without a ring. I told her to call me as soon as she could and clicked off. On the slim chance
her phone was dead or she had forgotten to turn it back on after the hearing, I called the Hotel Monaco and asked for her
room. But I was told she had checked out that morning.
My desk phone buzzed as soon as I hung up. It was Larry Bernard from two pods away.
“What did Kramer want, to hire your sorry ass back?”
“Yeah.”
“What? Really?”
“At a reduced rate, of course. I told him to cram it.”
“Are you kidding, man? They’ve got you by the balls. Where else are you going to go?”
“Well, for one thing I’m not going to work here on a contract that pays me way less and takes away all my benefits. And that’s
what I told him. Anyway, I’ve got to go. Are you making the checks on the story today?”
“Yeah, I’m on it.”
“Anything new?”
“Not that they’re telling me. It’s too early, anyway. Hey, I Tivoed you on CNN yesterday. You were good. But I thought they
were supposed to have Winslow on. That’s why I put it on. They were promoting it at first and then he wasn’t on.”
“He showed but then they decided they couldn’t put him on the air.”
“How come?”
“His penchant for using the word
motherfucker
in every sentence he speaks.”
“Oh, yeah. When we talked to him Friday I picked up on that.”
“Hard not to. I’ll talk to you later.”
“Wait, where are you going?”
“Hunting.”
“What?”
I put the phone down on his question, shoved my laptop and files into my backpack and headed out of the newsroom to the stairwell.
The newsroom might have at one time been the best place in the world to work. But it wasn’t now. People like the axman and
the unseen forces behind him had made it forbidding and claustrophobic. I had to get away. I felt like I was a man without
home or office to go to. But I still had a car, and in L.A. the car was king.
I
headed west, jumping onto the 10 Freeway and taking it toward the beach. I was going against the grain of traffic and moved
smoothly toward the clean ocean air. I didn’t know exactly where I was going but I drove with subconscious purpose, as though
the hands on the wheel and the foot on the pedal knew what my brain didn’t.
In Santa Monica I exited on Fourth Street and then took Pico down to the beach. I pulled into the parking lot where Denise
Babbit’s car had been abandoned by Alonzo Winslow. The lot was almost empty and I parked in the same row and maybe even the
same space where she had been left.
The sun had not burned off the marine layer yet and the sky was overcast. The Ferris wheel on the pier was shrouded in the
mist.
Now what? I thought to myself. I checked my phone again. No messages. I watched a group of surfers coming in from their morning
sets. They went to their cars and trucks, stripped off their wet suits and showered with gallon jugs of water, then wrapped
towels around their bodies, pulled off their board shorts and changed into dry clothes underneath. It was the time-honored
way of the pre-work surfer. One of them had a bumper sticker on his Subaru that made me smile.
CAN’T WE ALL GET A LONGBOARD?
I opened my backpack and pulled out Rachel’s legal pad. I had filled in several pages with my own notes from the survey of
the files. I flipped to the last page and studied what I had put down.
WHAT HE NEEDED TO KNOW
Denise Babbit
1. Details of prior arrest
2. Car—trunk space
3. Work location
4. Work schedule—abducted after work
5. Visual—body type—giraffe, legs
Sharon Oglevy
1. Husband’s threat
2. Hiscar—trunkspace
3. Work location
4. Work schedule—abducted after work
5. Visual—body type—giraffe, legs
6. Husband’s home location
The two lists were short and almost identical and I felt sure that they held the connection between the two women and their
killer. From the killer’s angle, these were all things that he would seemingly need to know before he made his move.
I lowered the car’s windows to let the damp sea air in. I thought about the Unsub and how he had come to choose these two
women from these two different places.
The simple answer was that he had seen them. They both displayed their bodies publicly. If he was looking for a specific set
of physical attributes, he could have seen both Denise Babbit and Sharon Oglevy onstage.
Or on computer. The night before, while composing the lists, I had checked and found that both the
Femmes Fatales
exotic revue
and
Club Snake Pit
had websites that featured photographs of their dancers. There were numerous photos of each dancer, including
full-length shots that showed their legs and feet. On
www.femmesfatalesatthecleo.com
, there were chorus-line shots that showed the dancers high-kicking at the camera. If the Unsub’s paraphilia included leg
braces and the need for a giraffe body type, as Rachel had suggested, then the website would have allowed him to research
his prey.
Once a victim was chosen, the killer would need to go to work identifying the woman and filling in the other details on the
lists. It could be done that way but I had a hunch that it wasn’t. I felt sure that there was something else in play here,
that the victims were connected in some other way.
I zeroed in on the first item on both lists. It seemed clear to me that at some point the killer had acquainted himself with
the details of each of his victims’ legal affairs.
With Denise Babbit, he had to have known of her arrest last year for buying drugs and that the arrest took place outside the
Rodia Gardens housing project. This information inspired the idea of leaving her body in the trunk of her car nearby, knowing
that the car might be stolen and moved but ultimately traced back to that location. The obvious explanation would be that
she had gone there again to buy drugs. A smooth deflection away from the true facts.
With Sharon Oglevy, the killer had to have known the details of her divorce. In particular, he had to have known of her husband’s
alleged threat to kill her and bury her out in the desert. From that knowledge would spring the idea of putting her body in
the trunk of his car.
In both cases the legal details could have been obtained by the killer because they were contained in court documents that
were open to the public. There was nothing in any of the records I had that indicated that the Oglevy divorce records had
been sealed. And as far as Denise Babbit went, criminal prosecutions were part of the public record.
Then it hit me. The thing I had missed. Denise Babbit had been arrested a year before her death but at the time of her murder
the prosecution was ongoing. She was on what defense lawyers called “pee and see” status. Her attorney had gotten her into
a pretrial intervention program. As part of her outpatient drug-abuse treatment, her urine was tested once a month for indications
of drug use and the courts were ostensibly waiting to see if she straightened out her life. If she did, the charges against
her would go away. If her attorney was good, he’d even get the arrest expunged from her record.
All of that was just legal detail but now I saw something in it I had overlooked before. If her case was still active, it
would not yet have been entered into the public record. And if it was not part of the public record, available to any citizen
by computer or visit to the courthouse, then how did the Unsub get the details he needed to set up her murder?
I thought for a few moments about how I could answer that question and decided that the only way would be to get the information
from Denise Babbit herself, or from someone else directly associated with her case—the prosecutor or the defense attorney.
I leafed through the documents in the Babbit file until I found the name of her attorney and then I made the call.
“Daly and Mills, this is Newanna speaking. How can I help you?”
“May I speak to Tom Fox?”
“Mr. Fox is in court this morning. Can I take a message?”
“Will he be back at lunchtime?”
I checked my watch. It was almost eleven. Noting the time gave me another stab of anxiety over still not hearing anything
from Rachel.
“He usually comes back at lunch but there is no guarantee of that.”
I gave her my name and number and told her I was a reporter with the
Times
and to tell Fox that the call was important.
After closing the phone I booted up my laptop and put the Internet slot card in place. I decided I would test my theory and
see if I could access Denise Babbit’s court records online.
I spent twenty minutes on the project but could glean very little information about Babbit’s arrest and prosecution from the
state’s publicly accessed legal data services or the private legal search engine the
Times
subscribed to. I did, however, pick up a reference to her attorney’s e-mail address and composed a quick message in hopes
that he received e-mail on his cell phone and would return my request for a phone call sooner rather than later.
From: Jack McEvoy <
[email protected]
>
Subject: Denise Babbit
Date: May 18, 2009 10:57 AM PDT
Mr. Fox, I am a reporter with the Los Angeles Times working on the ongoing story about Denise Babbit’s murder. You may have
already spoken to one of my colleagues about your representation of Denise, but I need to speak with you as soon as possible
about a new angle of investigation I am following. Please call or e-mail as soon as possible. Thank you.
Jack McEvoy
I sent the message and knew that all I could do was wait. I checked the time on the corner of the computer screen and realized
it was now after two
P.M
. in Washington, D.C. There seemed no way that Rachel’s hearing could have lasted this long.
My computer dinged and I looked down and saw I had already gotten a return e-mail from Fox.
From: Tom Fox <
[email protected]
>
Subject: RE: Denise Babbit
Date: May 18, 2009 11:01 AM PDT
Hi, I cannot respond to your e-mail in a timely manner because I am in trial this week. You will hear from me or my assistant,
Madison, as soon as possible. Thank you.
Tom Fox
Senior Partner, Daly & Mills, Counselors at Law
It was an automatically generated response, which meant Fox had not yet seen my message. I got the feeling I would not be
hearing from him until lunchtime—if I was lucky.
I noticed the law firm’s website listed at the bottom of the message and clicked on the link. It brought me to a site that
boldly trumpeted the services the firm provided its prospective clients. The firm’s attorneys specialized in both criminal
and civil law and there was a window marked Do You Have a Case? in which the site visitor could submit the particulars of
their situation for a free review and opinion from one of the firm’s legal experts.
At the bottom of the page was a listing of the firm’s partners by name. I was about to click on Tom Fox’s name to see if I
could pull up a bio when I saw the line and link that ran along the very bottom of the page.
Site Design and Optimization by
Western Data Consultants
It felt to me like atoms crashing together and creating a new and priceless substance. All in a moment I knew I had the connection.
The law firm’s website was hosted in the same location as the Unsub’s trip-wire sites. That was too coincidental to be coincidence.
The internal portals opened up wide, and adrenaline dumped into my bloodstream. I quickly clicked on the link and I was taken
to the homepage of
Western Data Consultants
.