Murder Season (27 page)

The building offered a five-foot fence with a broken gate as its only means of security. Lena didn’t see a parking lot and circled the block looking for the white Lincoln. Most of the cars she passed didn’t appear roadworthy and in fact looked like they had hit bottom a few years back as well. More than a handful were jacked up on cinder blocks with their wheels ripped off and their windshields blown out. After Lena had made a second pass by Cobb’s building and gained some assurance that he’d left for the day, she pulled into the lot at a Mexican supermarket two blocks south and headed back on foot.

She was on automatic pilot now. Out of patience. Out of understanding. Out of everything. She knew that if she touched the wheel with her hands, the fucking plane would crash. If she examined what she was doing too closely, the crime she was about to commit, she might realize that the plane was already going down.

She approached the building, checking the numbers on the doors. She could see Cobb’s apartment on the second floor at the end.

She took the steps at a brisk pace. Most of the windows she passed were open and she could smell corn tortillas and hot oil burning. She could hear the mix of different languages—mostly Spanish, but Russian and Armenian, too. When she reached the last apartment before Cobb’s, she was startled by an old Mexican woman sitting by her window. The woman’s face appeared more ancient than old and remained expressionless. Even as their eyes met, there was no recognition of the moment. Just two blank eyes staring forward.

Lena hurried down to Cobb’s door, gave the bell a ring, and looked over her shoulder as she waited for no one to answer. The old woman had moved her chair so that she could watch her.

Lena turned back to the door, examining the deadbolt and slipping the picks out of her pocket as quickly as she could. Cobb’s deadbolt seemed to match the quality of the building, and Lena guessed that it probably turned toward the hinges. Inserting her tension wrench, she applied only the slightest pressure and began working the pins with a short hook. She could feel them clicking into place. Within ninety seconds she’d hit the last pin and the tension wrench began turning. When the door popped open, she checked on that old woman again. She was still watching her. Still working that dead stare.

Lena entered Cobb’s apartment, closing the door and throwing the deadbolt. She didn’t want to spend too much time here. Fifteen minutes at the most. Maybe ten with that woman out there watching.

She had learned how to pick a lock from a serial burglar she’d arrested while working in Hollywood more than five years ago. Jonathan Redgrave graduated from Stanford with an MBA, but spent the next thirty years of his life working nights and becoming a very wealthy man. She knew from the time they’d spent together in an interrogation room that a successful burglary came down to just three essential components. First, the score had to be worth the risk. Second, you needed to know how to enter the location without being detected. And third, and most important of all, you needed a backup exit just in case everything went to shit.

Cobb’s apartment was a small, sparsely furnished one-bedroom. She checked the windows. The best way out if things went to shit was through the one in the bedroom, but it would require a twenty-foot drop onto concrete. Lena slid open the window and played through a possible escape in her head. Once she had it down, she decided to search the place in reverse. She wouldn’t begin in the bedroom the way most pros do. She’d work her way toward it.

The living room and kitchen were a single fifteen-by-twenty-foot space that probably hadn’t seen a fresh coat of paint in fifteen years. The couch was pushed against the wall, and an old kitchen table made of steel tubing and Formica was placed before the window with two chairs. She noted the computer—and the receipts and loose change and unopened mail. It looked like Cobb used the table as a desk and the wall beside it as a combination filing cabinet and bookcase. Stacks of files and papers were piled on the floor by an old TV.

Lena switched on the computer. While it booted up, she rifled through the files stacked against the wall. Everything she saw appeared to be related to Cobb’s personal finances. Skimming through a recent bank statement revealed that most of Cobb’s paycheck was going to his ex-wife. What money remained bought a life here on Vineland Avenue beside a liquor store and a Laundromat.

Lena shook it off and glanced at the computer. It was up, but it wasn’t her priority. She checked her watch. Five minutes were gone. She needed to move faster.

The kitchen drawers and cabinets held no secrets, nor did the refrigerator or freezer. On the sill over the sink she noticed a photograph set in a cheap plastic frame. From a distance she thought that it might be a shot of Cobb with his wife and children before things fell apart. But when she picked it up, she realized that it was the photograph that came with the frame. The people in the shot were models representing an American family that still had a piece of the American dream. They wore big smiles and appeared well rested and well fed.

She set down the frame, wishing she hadn’t seen it, then checked the cushions on the couch and returned to Cobb’s bedroom.

She could feel the weight of the clock on her back. She could still see that old woman by her open window in her head. But worse, she could hear her burglar friend telling her that she’d broken his second rule, and it was an important one.

She ripped through Cobb’s chest—one drawer after the next—disappointed that the gun wasn’t here. She lifted the mattress, and looked beneath the bed. Moving to the closet, she checked the top shelf, searched through Cobb’s clothing, and bent over for a quick look at the floor. And then she stopped.

It wasn’t the gun. It was a blue binder hidden behind a shoe box.

She pushed the shoes away and grabbed it. When she read the table of contents—when she saw Lily Hight’s name at the top and noted that the binder was overflowing with paperwork she had never seen before—she didn’t stop to think it over.

She held it tight and closed the door.

Then she hustled into the living room for a quick look at Cobb’s computer. The hard drive revealed nothing out of the ordinary. But as she checked his bookmarks and skimmed through his email, she slowed down some.

It looked like Cobb was a frequent visitor of the dating Web sites. Lena counted at least one hundred e-mails from a woman calling herself Betty Kim. Picking an e-mail at random, Kim was describing her body and what she wanted in a sexual relationship. She called herself “hot,” left nothing to the imagination, and wanted to send Cobb a couple of nude photos. In his reply, Cobb stated that he loved eating sushi and going to the movies. He agreed that she sounded hot and would like to see the photos as soon as possible.

Lena’s mind shot to the surface.

She could hear that old woman shouting at someone in Spanish. When the shadow of a man moved across the curtains, she felt the rush of adrenaline and shut down the computer. Cobb was home. She could hear his key in the lock. Grabbing the murder book, she fled into the bedroom and tossed the binder out the window. Then she climbed outside, clinging to the sill, and grinding to push the window closed.

She heard the front door open. She heard Cobb’s voice through the glass. She made the drop and hit the concrete hard. But she was on automatic pilot now. Out of patience. Out of understanding. Out of everything except bullets.

A jet flashed through the sky with its landing gear down, the noise deafening, the ground shaking. Lena grabbed the murder book and ran up the street as fast as she could.

43

She hung up the phone and turned to Vaughan.

“It’s a TracFone,” she said. “There’s no name attached to the number. The phone hasn’t been used since.”

They were working in that corner office at the end of the hall, the one that wasn’t wired for picture and sound. Cobb’s murder books were laid out on the table side by side. They had begun by pulling Lily’s cell-phone bills from both binders for comparison, and unfortunately, they didn’t match. Someone had been calling Lily the week before she was murdered. The calls began the day after she left Club 3 AM with the man in the pinstripe suit and continued with frequency during the week.

“When was the last call made?” Vaughan asked.

“Early evening on the night she was murdered. They spoke for seven minutes.”

“The guy she met at the club,” he said. “The killer.”

Lena nodded, glancing at the cell-phone bill that had been in the murder book Cobb had given her. “So why isn’t this number listed on this bill?”

The answer seemed obvious. They were dealing with a group of desperate people. People who felt cornered and had been willing to manipulate and manufacture evidence. People who didn’t want her or anyone else in the future to see that phone number. They were dealing with a man like Dan Cobb who had filled out a property request card from a case he worked eight years ago because he needed a gun. The same 9-mm Smith that was used to murder Bosco and Gant. And in all probability, the same gun that put three holes in Escabar and was used to coldcock his guard before that trash bag went over his head and the man smothered to death.

Vaughan opened his briefcase and pulled out a thick file. “That’s not the question, Lena. The question is, what did Bennett and Watson use in court?”

Leafing through the papers, he found another copy of the cell-phone bill and set it beside the other two. Most of the numbers had been blacked out with a Sharpie—the bill featuring only those calls that came from Jacob Gant. But even a permanent marker couldn’t cover the text underneath once they turned the bill into the bright light. The number from the TracFone had been removed.

A moment passed like they’d hit a gap in the universe. They were dealing with a dirty cop and a triad of dirty prosecutors.

Lena lowered her voice. “You want to bet that the copy Paladino received didn’t include this phone number, either?”

Vaughan still appeared stunned. “No,” he said slowly. “I wouldn’t take that bet. I think the same thing’s going on with the e-mails Gant sent the girl.”

“How?”

“I was reading these while you were on the phone. They don’t match, either. The version in the murder book Cobb gave you makes Gant sound like an angry man who’s threatening to hurt Lily. The version from the binder you found in Cobb’s closet reads like Gant was worried about her and offering help.”

Vaughan set the two e-mails down. While Lena read them, he returned to his briefcase and found the version Bennett and Watson had used in court. As Lena examined the third document, she couldn’t help thinking about how much this ripped at her faith and trust.

“They submitted an edited version,” she whispered.

He gave her a look. “You ever hear of the Michael Skakel case?”

She nodded. “Ethel Kennedy’s nephew. He was tried for the murder of Martha Moxley. They were kids. She was fifteen at the time.”

Vaughan pulled a chair over and sat down. “The prosecutor took audio recordings of Skakel talking about masturbation and his fear of being seen and edited them to sound like he was confessing to the murder and afraid he might get caught. When Skakel appealed his conviction, the judge turned out to be just as ignorant, just as morally challenged as the prosecutor.”

Lena reached for the murder book she had taken from Cobb’s apartment. The binder was stuffed with hundreds of documents that weren’t included in the book she had received from the detective just a few days ago. As she paged through the binder, she saw something she recognized and stopped. It was a copy of the polygraph results Paladino had sent to Higgins, Bennett, and Watson. But there was something stapled to the back of the report. It turned out to be a letter addressed to Bennett. A letter from Cesar Rodriguez, the forensic psycho-physiologist who had performed the polygraph on Gant. As Lena started reading she began to realize that Rodriguez was making a plea to Bennett on Gant’s behalf. According to Rodriguez, there was no indication whatsoever that Gant had anything to do with Lily Hight’s murder. In all his years working for the LAPD’s Scientific Investigation Division, Rodriguez had never seen a case so clear-cut and was willing to champion Gant’s cause and put his reputation on the line.

It was a plea that Bennett obviously saw fit to ignore.

For Lena, reading Rodriguez’s letter burned in her chest like a white-hot sun drying up rain before it could hit the ground. Trial attorneys playing with the facts like politicians running for office happened every day. She knew that. But this was something different. Something beyond sleazy. Something beyond sick.

“I want to meet with Bennett,” she said.

“Why? You look pissed off, and these people are dangerous. I don’t want to scare you, Lena. But all of a sudden, we’re sitting in the same seats Bosco and Gant sat in.”

She shook her head. “I need to see him about something. Would you call him for me? I don’t have his number.”

Vaughan gave her a long look, but finally picked up the phone and dialed Bennett’s office.

“Tracy, it’s Greg,” he said into the phone. “Is he available? I need to talk to him. It’s important.”

Vaughan listened to Bennett’s assistant for several moments, then thanked her and hung up.

“What happened?” Lena asked.

“He’s not in his office,” he said. “He went to lunch.”

“Where?”

“Tracy said he’s with Watson.”

“Do you have his cell number? Where are they?”

Vaughan shot her another look, then lowered his voice. “She thinks they’re at the Bonaventure.”

44

The security director at the Bonaventure
didn’t look like he wanted to play ball. Lena had asked him to use his pass key to open a tower suite on the twenty-fifth floor. It was clear to Lena that he knew the suite was leased by the district attorney’s office. It was just as clear to her that he had a good idea of what was going on inside. The only tangible card she held was that Roy Romero had spent twenty years carrying a badge and had been a good cop.