The Dark Halo, page 1
THE DARK HALO
David Stanley
Paper Street Publishing
Paper Street Publishing
Copyright © 2023 David Stanley
The moral right of the author has been asserted
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the publishers
ISBN (ebook) 9781916176362
ISBN (paperback) 9781916176379
www.davidjstanley.com
www.paperstreetpublishing.net
This book is for
Lindsey and Connor,
who continue to not kill me in my sleep
Contents
1. Chapter 1
2. Chapter 2
3. Chapter 3
4. Chapter 4
5. Chapter 5
6. Chapter 6
7. Chapter 7
8. Chapter 8
9. Chapter 9
10. Chapter 10
11. Chapter 11
12. Chapter 12
13. Chapter 13
14. Chapter 14
15. Chapter 15
16. Chapter 16
17. Chapter 17
18. Chapter 18
19. Chapter 19
20. Chapter 20
21. Chapter 21
22. Chapter 22
23. Chapter 23
24. Chapter 24
25. Chapter 25
26. Chapter 26
27. Chapter 27
28. Chapter 28
29. Chapter 29
30. Chapter 30
31. Chapter 31
32. Chapter 32
33. Chapter 33
34. Chapter 34
35. Chapter 35
36. Chapter 36
37. Chapter 37
38. Chapter 38
39. Chapter 39
40. Chapter 40
41. Chapter 41
42. Chapter 42
43. Chapter 43
44. Chapter 44
45. Chapter 45
46. Chapter 46
47. Chapter 47
48. Chapter 48
About the Author
1
The wine bottle lay on its side, several feet back from the edge of the bed, like a finger pointing. He paused to squat down and study it. A thick film of dust covered the outside. An expensive wine no doubt, stored for years in a cellar. The dust was smudged around the middle where fingers had held it and a dark red stain had formed under the open end, spreading out across the pale cream carpet. Though the scene had already been photographed, Coombes was careful not to accidentally kick the bottle as he approached the body.
Milton Vandenberg was propped up on pillows facing the television, his face as still and white as a glass of milk. On top of the sheet, in the valley between his ancient legs, lay three empty pharmaceutical bottles. The pills, the wine. It told a story; one he’d seen play out many times before. A businessman, down on his luck, checks into an expensive hotel then checks out without paying. Only, Vandenberg wasn’t down on his luck. Far from it. The man was senior executive officer at Pacific Pictures, notable for their Stick Shift driving movies. The latest in the franchise had recently crossed the billion-dollar mark at the global box office and showed no sign of stopping.
Vandenberg fit an emerging pattern; rich, powerful, and dead.
Coombes turned his attention to the containers in the old man’s lap. He was able to read the label without having to move them. Diazepam, 10 mg. The drug was the generic form of Valium, an anti-stress medication that had been around for a long time. The label indicated that each bottle held a hundred tablets.
He shook his head.
Assuming they’d been full, three hundred was a lot to swallow. Even spread out over half an hour, it would be heavy going and require a strong desire to get to the end. Combined with the alcohol, 3000 mg would certainly be enough to see the old man over the rainbow bridge. This was no cry for help.
Grace Sato spoke behind him.
“What do you think?”
“Looks legit,” he said. “No sign of force.”
He avoided saying the word suicide, it bothered him.
“One less for us to worry about then.”
“Maybe. I don’t see a note.”
“Come on, Johnny. Not this again. They don’t all leave notes. Women leave notes, men not so much. Half the men I know can’t write anymore. Maybe he sent a text or an email, that’s more a man’s speed. Quick, clean, no emotion.”
Vandenberg didn’t look like the type of man to send a text. Not at the end of his life, not ever. As for emails, he probably had people to send those for him. He was from a previous generation, one that used telephones to make calls. Someone that believed in the importance of the face-to-face. The shaking of hands. If anyone was going to leave a note, it would be this guy. Coombes could almost imagine the large, looping cursive a man like this would’ve produced, full of confidence and entitlement.
“This is the sixth in two months.”
He’d finally said it out loud.
Grace paused, her eyes moving slowly over his face.
“You think there’s a serial out there posing kills as suicides?”
It sounded crazy when she said it back to him. Maybe it was, but that didn’t make it any less possible. The rich were dying, and not from the usual causes. He turned away from her gaze, back to the body. It was easier to look at Vandenberg’s corpse than Grace’s face right then.
She didn’t buy it. The doubt was there, even some humor. She was treating it like a joke. Grace preferred to be the one with the oddball theory, he was the straight man. He was the senior partner. His job was to be the voice of reason, the hand on the leash.
He looked at the items on the nightstand.
A telephone, a lamp, and a hotel branded notepad. Next to that, the items Vandenberg had added. Theoretically, anyway. A large wine glass, a cell phone, an alligator skin wallet, and two silver dollars. Coombes didn’t see a lot of silver dollars, but he’d found that people often kept hold of them like they were lucky charms. The coins hadn’t done Vandenberg any good, that was for sure. Eisenhower looked off, unimpressed, toward the door. The glass had a small ring of wine residue at the bottom, but no visible trace of powder. Sometimes people would grind up pills and add them to a liquid to avoid the repetitive swallowing action which could cause vomiting. If you vomited, you were back to square one and may not have enough of the drug left to get the job done. It appeared the wine was simply a favorite, used to see out the remainder of his life.
What he saw was a classic scene, perfect in every detail.
A little too perfect, he thought.
Then there was the bottle on the floor, as if the old man had dropped it in the final seconds as life left his body. Perhaps knocking it off the nightstand in a panic after realizing what he’d done. That was the problem with suicides, he thought. You filled in what you didn’t know with crude guesses and didn’t care too much how well they fit the facts. As soon as you concluded it was a suicide, the job was to establish a rough narrative for what happened before washing your hands of it.
Homicide, that was his mandate. One person killing another. Suicides were free, they didn’t appear in any unsolved figure, so no time was given to them beyond examining the scene and informing the next of kin.
He imagined himself stretched out on the bed.
If Vandenberg was drinking from the glass, he would’ve dropped that, not the bottle. But it wasn’t the glass on the floor, the glass was safely on the nightstand. The wine bottle didn’t track, and he was pretty sure that the stain on the carpet was the affectation of a killer, intended to look like a blood stain. If he test-dropped a hundred near-empty wine bottles, Coombes would lay money on none of them producing that type of stain. The shape of the bottle seemed to preclude it from happening.
Grace spoke softly.
“Is this because of Sutton?”
Theodore Sutton was a suicide they’d attended six weeks earlier. The father of a school friend, Sutton’s death had felt personal. He’d spent a lot of time at the Sutton home growing up, and he’d looked harder at the case than he would otherwise.
But cases kept coming, and a probable suicide was soon forgotten.
“Yeah. Sutton opened my eyes.”
“The man’s old, Johnny. Maybe he had a terminal disease.”
Coombes turned to face his partner. “He did. Life.”
A smile appeared on her face until she saw he wasn’t amused.
He had no love or time for the entitled rich, but her attitude to the man’s death was getting old. Worse, was the knowledge that her reaction would be as nothing compared to what he could expect from his lieutenant if he suggested adding six homicides to the unsolved total. A storm was heading his way, and his own partner didn’t have his back. He walked past her. A man in his early twenties now stood in the doorway with a uniformed officer. Coombes read the name he’d written earlier on his notebook. Eric Lyle.
“You found the body, Mr. Lyle?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You sat him up like that?”
“No way, man. He was like that already.”
“You didn’t move th
“I didn’t touch him, I swear.”
Coombes leaned forward, crowding the younger man.
“You didn’t check his pulse?”
“No sir, it was obvious he was dead.”
“I see. How long did you study medicine before you got this job?”
Next to him, Grace laughed into her hand.
Lyle frowned; his face pinched with confusion.
“What?”
“Just a suggestion, Lyle, but if anyone else asks what happened here, tell them you checked for a pulse to confirm he was dead before you told the manager.”
“I don’t understand.”
“That man was probably worth half a billion dollars. You don’t want a family member or his company suing you because prompt action could’ve saved him. By the time you found him, it was too late. Yes? If he was in a coma your negligence killed him.”
The youth’s eyes grew wild and panicked.
“I checked his pulse, I forgot. He was dead.”
Coombes nodded slowly. The kid was getting it.
“When you were at the bedside, did you touch anything else?”
The confusion was back. Lyle had zero poker face. He hadn’t approached the bed at all, not to check the pulse, not for anything.
“No, sir.”
Coombes pointed at the floor.
“Was that bottle like that when you found Mr. Vandenberg?”
“Yes, sir.”
Coombes made a note of this in his notebook and resisted the urge to smile. Truthfully, he wished everyone called him sir. Working in a high-end hotel had conditioned the kid to be polite, it’s where the high dollar tips were.
“Did you turn off the TV?”
Lyle looked surprised.
“Yeah. The volume was up crazy high, I could hear it in the hallway. That’s why I found him actually, I was going to ask him to turn it down before anyone complained. When he didn’t answer the door, I used my key. I thought he’d gone out and left it on.”
“Where was the remote?”
Lyle pointed to the bench the TV sat on.
“Right where it is now. I put it back exactly where I found it.”
Coombes glanced at Grace. Her head was tilted over. She saw it. Nobody would leave the remote there while they took an overdose. Not if the television was on. Vandenberg would have it next to his hand, or up next to his cell phone. Somewhere within easy reach. A lot of hotels glued the remote to the nightstand now, but not this place.
Then there was the volume to consider.
He was willing to accept the old man’s hearing might not have been a hundred percent, but for Lyle to be troubled by it out in the hallway had to mean it was deafening inside the room.
“Did you adjust the volume before you turned the TV off?”
Lyle thought about it for a moment, then shook his head.
“I don’t remember.”
Coombes walked over to the console table and, holding the edges of the remote control in place with his gloved hand, pressed the on button. Sound filled the room. A news channel, KCAL9. An attractive woman doing a piece to camera, almost breathless with excitement. More about the shoot-out in Santa Cruz. He could feel the reporter’s voice inside his chest.
He turned the TV off.
The only reason for setting the volume so high was to announce the body to the world. To lure someone in here, like bait on a fishing line. The killer wanted his latest masterpiece to be discovered. It could’ve been hours before Vandenberg was missed, and many hours more before he was traced here. The killer needed the hit of exposure like any other junkie chasing a fix, and he needed it as soon as possible.
“Okay, kid, that’s all. Remember what I told you.”
Lyle nodded wordlessly and turned to go.
“Wait, just a second.”
Lyle turned back, nervous. “Yeah?”
“You said your key opens this door. Does it open any door in the hotel?”
“Far as I know.”
“All right, that’s all.”
He walked to the window and looked out.
When he visited crime scenes, he liked to take in what the victim had seen before they died. It was his version of walking a mile in another man’s shoes. For a five-star hotel, the view was depressing. Parking lots the size of football stadiums and, next to them, the gray river of the 110 packed with pre-lunch traffic. It would make anyone want to end it all.
He took another look at the victim before he left.
There was little doubt in his mind that what he was looking at was staged, and because of that, it was a murder. No true suicide was this clean.
2
Sato was silent as they left the hotel suite and walked down the hallway toward the elevator. The carpeting was thick, Coombes could feel his shoes sinking into the pile as he walked. It was something that would have offset the sound of Vandenberg’s television, but the killer had taken no chances and set the volume to maximum. As they approached the elevator, he glanced up to scan for security cameras. He saw nothing. Either the hotel didn’t have any, or they were well concealed. In his experience, cameras were rarely concealed, being visible was part of their function.
If you knew you were being recorded, you behaved yourself.
They got on the elevator and he thought through what would happen next. The hotel would be keen to push for a suicide narrative. It was bad for business, but nothing like the poison of a murder. They’d want the investigation to close down as soon as possible and would resist giving up security footage without a warrant.
The doors opened and they got out in the lobby.
A man with a pained expression walked sharply toward them, his small leather shoes squeaking on the marble. This would be the hotel manager, he supposed. Coombes leaned in close to Sato’s ear and whispered what he wanted her to do before they could be overheard.
“Detectives. I hope we can make this as quick as possible, so that we can get back to normal. My name’s Henry Dalton, I’m the day manager. Anticipating your arrival, I pulled the hostess who dealt with our…unfortunate guest from behind the desk so that she could speak with you. If you would come this way.”
Dalton led them to a seated area on the opposite side of the lobby from the elevators where an attractive woman sat. She rose to her feet and looked vacantly between their three faces before settling on Sato’s.
Coombes could hardly blame her on that front.
“This is Anna Lomax; she’ll be able to answer your questions.”
“Please sit down, Miss Lomax, this won’t take long.”
Lomax sat again, and Coombes sat opposite her. Sato turned to the manager.
“Would you be kind enough to direct me to the restroom?”
The manager grunted and moved off to the side then pointed toward the back of the hotel. Coombes took out his notebook and wrote Dalton and Lomax’s names on it before he forgot.
“You checked in Mr. Vandenberg this morning?”
“Yes.”
“How did he seem to you?”
She shrugged. “Fat.”
Coombes laughed. The bluntness of youth.
“I mean did he seem happy, sad, worried, anything like that?”
“Oh,” her face colored. “He seemed happy, I guess. Excited maybe.”
Coombes nodded as he wrote in his notebook.
“That’s good. Was he alone?”
“I think so.”
“You’re not sure?”
“No, but he’s usually alone when he checks in.”
“He’s been here before?”
“Oh yeah, he’s a regular. Every week. I know it’s Friday when he checks in.” Her voice trailed away to nothing. “I feel bad about saying he was fat before.”
“That’s all right. How long had Mr. Vandenberg booked the room for?”
“Officially, his departure time was tomorrow morning, but he never stayed later than 3 o’clock.”
Coombes smiled, like they were sharing a joke.
“What do you think he was doing?”
“The first time he came here, there was a woman with him. She didn’t come to the desk, she kind of hung back while he checked in. He kept looking back at her, as if to make sure she was still there. Then they got in the elevator together. I only remember because she was a real knockout, like a model.”
