The Scapegoat, page 11
It was calm, peaceful.
A murder victim had lived here, but she hadn’t died here. The last breath she’d taken in the apartment had been happy, oblivious to any coming danger.
Sato gazed around, a dreamy look on her face.
He walked around the island unit into the living area. A flat-screen television was mounted on the wall to the south next to a partly open door. He pushed the door wider and stuck his head inside. A small bedroom, used only to store clothes and shoes.
Coombes stepped back into the living area.
Unlike in his own home, seating was arranged at right angles to the television which showed nothing but glare from the two windows on either side.
A telescope was set up on a tripod by the north window. It was aimed downward, into the city.
He put his eye to the eyepiece and an apartment two blocks over filled his vision. It appeared to be unoccupied and contained nothing of interest, but at night that might change. He saw a bedroom, a shower stall, and part of a living room. As with the apartment he stood in, there were no drapes, no privacy glass.
He’d misjudged Walton based on the formal business clothing she wore while working for Tremaine. The former governor probably liked the image she’d presented to him, but this telescope was who she really was.
Curious, maybe a little kinky.
The kitchen was small but functional.
Counters were clean and empty, except for a 6-bottle wine rack. One bottle missing. He looked at the drainer and the sink. Empty. It had, he supposed, been a number of days since she’d last been here. The hob looked new and unused.
He opened a cupboard next to the oven expecting to see pots and pans and instead found ten bottles of champagne. His nose wrinkled, remembering the scene at his own home, his wife with her lawyer friend.
The next cupboard he searched was full to overflowing with salted snacks. Chips, nuts, pretzels, puffed corn. Walton was a woman after his own heart. He found four more bottles of champagne in the refrigerator, along with two cases of beer, and some dips.
They were wasting their time; there was nothing here to move the investigation on. Grace stood watching him. It looked like she’d reached the same conclusion.
He pointed to the door of the freezer.
“Fifty bucks says the only thing in the freezer is ice cubes and vodka.”
“I’ll take that action,” she said.
He opened the door. Three clear plastic drawers lay inside, all heavily frosted from lack of use. The top drawer was the coldest and looked the most used. He pulled it out and smiled.
“One bottle of Grey Goose, one tray of ice cubes.”
“Shit.”
The next drawer was empty and slid awkwardly on its runners. It looked like an inch of snow had fallen inside. A small smile curled on his lip, but he said nothing. He tried the last drawer and his smile vanished.
Three cartons of ice-cream.
“You almost had me there, Johnny.”
He took out his wallet and pulled out a fifty.
“Keep it,” she said. “Take me for dinner when we close this.”
“I figure I’d be doing that anyway.”
“You should be careful what you say next, Coombes.”
There was a fire in her eyes that he’d seen before, although never during work hours. He nodded and put his money away. The fire was what he loved about her most of all.
“Tell me what you see,” he said.
“She didn’t cook here, that much is obvious. There’s a lot of alcohol, snacks, and ice-cream. I don’t know about you, Johnny, but I’ve never once drunk champagne on my own. I figure she used this place solely to entertain. It’s her love nest.”
A twitch started on his face, and he glanced away.
“What?”
“Nothing. Anything else?”
“Well, I hadn’t figured Elizabeth Walton for a beer drinker.”
“Me neither,” Coombes said.
“So she kept her work and personal lives separate. She was dating someone.”
“Looks like it,” he said. “Let’s check the master bedroom.”
Bedrooms always revealed the most about a person. A public space like a living room or a kitchen the guard was always up. Anyone could walk in there. Family, friends, even a plumber. But the only people that got to visit the bedroom were people you wanted there, people that were going to see everything about you.
Elizabeth Walton had been 61 years old, but the first thing he saw in her bedroom was a teddy bear. Light brown, with short furry hair and a pink heart on each paw. The bear sat on a console desk under another television. The bear faced the bed, yet its small black eyes seemed to look right at him as he stood in the doorway.
Fairy lights had been draped over the top of the bed’s headboard, leftovers perhaps, from a Christmas gone by.
Like the main space, the north side of the master bedroom was a glass wall. To his surprise, it led out onto a patio area with loungers. Unlike the balcony next to the living room, this outdoor space was at least as large as the bedroom it joined.
He could see City Hall pushing into the skyline.
Coombes saw City Hall about ten times a day and had never once thought of people looking at it from their bedroom window. He shook his head to clear the mental jam this caused him and tried to focus on the case.
Opposite the window, was a walk-in closet.
On quick inspection, it appeared that two women were living in the apartment. A woman that wore business clothing, and one that wore sexy, revealing clothes. He saw dresses that would’ve been risqué on a twenty-five-year-old. Sato nodded her head appreciatively.
Beyond the closet was the ensuite.
The layout meant anyone standing outside the front door would hear the shower running through the wall.
Coombes frowned as he walked back through the closet into the bedroom.
Something didn’t fit right, but he couldn’t place it.
Like a five-star hotel, everything was clean and tidy, with nothing left lying out, except for the teddy bear. It was a different type of living, minimalist. The apartment had almost no storage space or surface areas for anything you didn’t need.
He pulled open the nightstand drawer and whistled.
Handcuffs, leather straps, a vibrator, and something that looked like a table tennis bat, but with spikes all over it. One thing was for sure, there was a side to Walton that she couldn’t explore while at her residence within the former governor’s home.
“I told you, Johnny,” Sato said, suddenly next to him. “This is her love nest. She used it to get laid and whatever else using that shit.”
She poked the spiked bat with a gloved finger like it was about to explode.
The spikes would leave a mark, he thought, but there’d been nothing like that on Walton’s body. Which meant she wielded it, she wasn’t the recipient. He wondered what someone got from being struck by the paddle, what need did that fulfill?
They returned to the living room and looked silently out the floor-to-ceiling windows at downtown Los Angeles spread out below. The view was amazing and it would be better still at night. The apartment would cost a fortune, he reflected, far more than Elizabeth Walton earned working for Tremaine. She had to have some other source of income.
It wasn’t hard to work out what that was.
Barnes told him the dog kidnappers always knew who to hit, that they seemed to have inside information. Walton had that information. Her work supporting Tremaine’s foundation gave her access to lists of donors, past and present. Names, addresses, size of donation. Coombes didn’t like it, but everything was beginning to fit together.
Perhaps even the reason she was killed.
Taking her employer’s daughter crossed a line and he couldn’t see her willingly being a part of that. He recalled the photograph of Elizabeth Walton and Amy Tremaine that sat on her office desk. Shoulder to shoulder, a big smile on their faces. There was a bond in that picture that looked a lot like family.
No matter how bad things got for her, Coombes believed Walton would’ve come forward to help Amy. Identified her conspirators.
He noticed a Wi-Fi router underneath the TV with two steady green lights.
“No laptop or tablet,” he said, almost to himself.
“I don’t think she came here to work, Johnny.”
He turned to look at Sato.
“No doubt, but I was thinking back to Schofield’s place. Assuming he had a computer, and I do, then either he took it with him as he fled, or it was taken by whoever killed him.”
“You think he’s involved in any of this?”
Coombes thought for a moment. “No.”
“A coincidental overlap then?”
He left that alone. Coincidence stuck in his throat.
“Let’s see what ponytail has to say.”
Adam Finley was still in the corridor outside the apartment where they’d left him. His head down, fingers typing into his cell phone. It looked like he had Facebook open, updating a world that didn’t care about his treatment at the hands of the LAPD.
Finley’s face flushed as he saw them and he put his cell quickly away. Coombes cut right to it.
“Does this building have security cameras?”
“Electric locks on public doors; deadbolt and mortice on private doors. Nobody likes being watched.”
Coombes nodded. It was what he expected; he’d seen no cameras and he’d been looking for them. He took out his notebook and turned to a new page.
As he’d noticed many times before, the appearance of his notebook changed the dynamic of a conversation. Finley’s eyes flickered nervously back and forth between his eyes and the pen in Coombes’ gloved hand.
“How often did you see Elizabeth Walton?”
“Once or twice a week.”
“And when would that be?”
“Weekends. Friday afternoon to Sunday night.”
“You ever see a man with her?”
“There was always a man with her. Sometimes they didn’t last a whole weekend. She’d be here on Friday with one, and I’d see her on Sunday with another lover.”
“Friends, maybe? Business associates?”
“I know what I saw.”
Finley was leaving something out. He was judging her about her dating frequency for sure, but there was something else. A negative energy that felt like fury. Coombes wondered if he was racist and thought for a second as he considered the best approach.
“Did she have a particular type of man that you noticed?”
“That’s for sure. She liked them young.”
Coombes felt a tingle move up his spine.
“How recently did you see her with a date?”
“Saturday.”
“Early forties, short black hair, about six feet?”
Finley’s eyebrows knitted together.
“That sounds about right.”
Coombes took out his cell phone and pulled up a screen grab from the drone footage of his suspect walking behind Amy Tremaine in his smart clothes. The reconnaissance run. He sized the picture to clip off the victim and turned the phone toward Finley.
“This him?”
“Yes…I think so.”
“Which? Yes, it’s him, or you think it’s him?”
“It looks like him, I can’t swear to it. Look, I didn’t care much for the way she lived her life, but Lizzie was nice to me. She would ask me how I was, if I was having a good day. Nobody else in here treats me like that. When she walked past, it was her I looked at, not some guy she was with. It hardly seemed worthwhile looking at someone I knew wouldn’t be around for long.”
Coombes understood.
“You wished the two of you had a relationship.”
“It took me a long time to realize that she was nice to everyone. I thought she liked me; I thought I was special. Seeing her bring those men here was hard, a stab in the back. The age of those men, I knew she didn’t see me at all. Not like that.”
“But you kept putting yourself in places where you would cross paths?”
Finley nodded, his gaze down at his feet.
“She was beautiful. I would’ve done anything to be with her.”
“All right,” Coombes said. “Back to the man in the picture. Did you notice anything about him? Accent, tattoos, anything?”
“I never heard him speak. None of those guys spoke much.”
“Just take a minute,” Sato said. “Where were you when you saw them?”
“The parking garage. One of the tubes needed to be replaced.”
“How close were you when you saw them?”
“Fifteen feet? I saw her Lexus drive in so I came down the ladder so I could see her properly. Her smile was always the highlight of my day.”
Grace nodded, her face full of compassion.
“Picture him in your mind, try not to think about her. They walk up, you say a couple of words, then they walk over to the stairwell exit, yes?”
Finley’s eyes lit up and he turned to Coombes.
“There was one thing. He walked like you do.”
“Really. And how’s that?”
“Like you’re in charge, like you own the place.”
Sato smiled as if Finley had told a joke, but Coombes wasn’t smiling. Anderson was ex-military; he had no doubts left. An officer, like he’d been.
Amy’s kidnapper had been here four days ago, right where they were standing.
Adam Finley’s face changed as he thought about Walton’s date. About her killer. Coombes took a business card out and began to write on it.
“This man,” Finley said, “you think he murdered her, don’t you?”
“He’s a person of interest in a related investigation. If you see him again, I want you to call me, day or night. Here’s my card, I’ve written my cell number on it.”
Coombes had a new thought and swore.
“Wait here, Finley. Sato, you’re with me.”
He walked back into the apartment, putting his notebook away as he went. The kitchen again. He hadn’t been thinking clearly the first time. Hadn’t known what to look for. The clue was right there with the empty surfaces, the empty sink and drainer.
He found the dishwasher and opened the door. A stale smell rose to meet him; it hadn’t been turned on. Not even a third full, not worth running it. He pulled out the top tray and took several photographs with his cell phone.
“What you got, Johnny?”
“The Holy Grail,” he said.
There were four wine glasses inside the dishwasher. Two regular-shaped glasses, and two champagne flutes. The larger glasses had a red wine stain at the bottom. He lifted one out and held it by the stem up to the light. There was a soft pink bruise at the rim. Lipstick. He returned it to the dishwasher and took the other glass. No bruise.
The surface was covered with fingerprints.
Best fingerprints he’d ever seen.
He turned to Sato and saw she had an evidence bag ready. Grace held the top open as he lowered the glass carefully inside, then she sealed the bag shut. He decided to leave the killer’s champagne flute where it was for now. The best chance at complete prints was on the wider glass, but if there was a problem with the legality of the first glass, the flute might give them a second chance at the same information.
Sato’s cheeks were flushed as she looked up at him.
“Nice work, Johnny.”
17
The three of them were silent on the elevator going down. Coombes gazed up at the ceiling and resisted the urge to smile. The kidnapper’s fingerprints. He could hardly believe their luck. He’d expected nothing coming here, but this wasn’t nothing. The doors opened in the lobby and they got out.
Adam Finley nodded his head wordlessly, then turned away.
Learning that he’d likely seen the killer hadn’t improved Finley’s day one iota. Coombes and Sato walked across the polished marble and through the door to the stairs down to the parking garage. It was poorly lit and there were no cameras.
This was where they should’ve found Walton’s body.
The stairs were narrow. Falling into step behind his victim would not have aroused suspicion. From behind, it would’ve been easy for Anderson to snap her neck by rotating her head sharply to the side, or by slitting her throat and allowing her to bleed out on the stairs in front of her.
As he reached to open the fire door, Sato touched his arm to stop him. When he turned to her she kissed him on the mouth. Coombes felt himself blush in the half-dark. Her eyes were alive with mischief and something else.
“What was that for?”
She shrugged, casually. “Just checking something.”
“Oh yeah? Like what?”
“To see if it’s still there.”
“It’ll be there until I’m dead, Grace.”
“You always know what to say to me, Johnny.”
Coombes smiled and opened the door. He couldn’t afford to let himself get distracted by Sato. Amy Tremaine was still out there somewhere, needing him. He decided to believe she was still alive, there was no upside to thinking she was dead.
They got back to the Charger and he drove around to the exit. This time the roller door opened on its own and he nosed out into the bright February sunshine. After almost a minute, a space appeared in the inside lane and they were out onto South Hill Street.
He thought about the spiked paddle in Elizabeth Walton’s nightstand. She liked to be in control in the bedroom, perhaps she’d been in charge of the whole operation. He dialed a number he’d not long added to his cell phone and put it on speaker so that Sato could hear.
“Barnes. Who’s this?”
“You don’t write, you don’t call…”
“Now’s not a good time, Detective Coombes.”
“Then I’ll be quick. Did the dog kidnappings start about a year and a half ago?”
“Near enough, why?”
The same length of time Walton had lived in the apartment.
“Just chasing down a lead on my side of the street.”
“That bullshit ambush was not my call. You were right before, we need to work together. I don’t think Henderson cares how we get to the end now, as long as we get a good result. What do you think? Shall I sound him out, see what he says?”
