The Dark Halo, page 13
“You’re starting to sound like me, Grace.”
“I can live with that.”
“Did it say how much he was worth?”
“No. Hang on, I’ll Google it.”
The traffic moved forward again and he saw a CHP officer ahead directing traffic. It occurred to him that the crime scene was the obstruction. He pulled his badge off his belt and held it in the palm of his right hand. Next to him Sato whistled.
“Seven point eight billion.”
She used a hard b so there was no room for doubt. Coombes groaned. Things were about to take an unpleasant turn, that was for sure. He held his badge up to the windshield and the Highway Patrol officer waved him toward a gap between the two Mustangs parked across both lanes.
He drove slowly between the vehicles.
The Beverly Hills PD had taped off a huge section of street around the restaurant where the murder took place and two adjacent properties. It seemed like overkill to Coombes, but he’d encountered this before. It meant that what was inside was going to be bad. The worse it got, the farther the crime tape seemed to be positioned. No doubt signaling a desire of the officers involved to get away from what they’d seen.
He parked up next to a couple of BHPD SUVs and ducked under the tape a uniform was holding up for them. There was a box of disposable gloves and slip-on shoe protectors next to the patrol cops at the door and Sato and Coombes gloved up first, then bent down to pull on shoe protectors. He turned his head toward her and saw her face was tight with fear. They stood up and looked at each other.
“Grace, why don’t you hang back here?”
“And do what, Johnny? Hold your coat?”
The conversation was going as well as he imagined.
“Just giving you the option.”
“I’m a homicide cop, same as you. Don’t dick-block me, okay?”
Her nostrils were flared with anger, her jaw clenched shut. She had a point, but it didn’t feel right to not offer her a choice. He held up his hands in surrender.
“I will try and keep my dick out of your way.”
“Let’s not be hasty. I might need that thing one day.”
The uniformed officers laughed. There was a desperate edge to it, like they were thankful for the levity. Sato walked into the restaurant and Coombes followed her inside. He was shaking his head, a smile on his face. Dark humor was a good sign, she only needed to get used to the sight of dead bodies and she was all set.
They walked through the dining area toward the back. He glanced about. The place looked expensive, the furniture, the decor. Everything he saw told him that steak and fries would cost him three figures. It was the type of restaurant that put wine glasses out on empty tables, then took them away again as soon as they seated you.
Not his scene, that was for sure.
According to the initial report, Price was found in the kitchen by Sarah Brooks, the bar manager, who was opening up. Brooks, who also happened to be his ex-wife, noted a strong smell as she entered the premises and made her way to the kitchen to investigate. Expecting to find a backed-up sewage line, she instead she found her ex-husband sitting in a chair, murdered. Brooks passed out and hit her head on the corner of a steel-coated island unit and spent the next twenty plus minutes unconscious on the floor. When she came around, she was able to call for help using her cell phone, before passing out for a second time.
Over to their right, he saw a young LAPD forensic tech called Vogler talking to his BHPD counterpart next to cases of equipment. They nodded at each other. The smell was becoming hard to ignore, it was like a soup, the air was saturated with it. Sharp, acrid. Strong chemicals mixed with body fluids. His eyes watered. Sato took a cloth out her pocket and held it over her nose and he did the same.
His smile was long gone, like it had never happened.
Sato fell back as they approached the kitchen doorway so that they arrived at the same time. Despite their conversation, he had his left arm ready to catch her in case she decided to follow the lead of the bar manager. Her pride notwithstanding, he’d be damned if she was going to contaminate his crime scene.
They walked into the kitchen and swore loudly.
Anthony Price was sitting in an office chair next to a meat counter. He was wearing a pale blue shirt, black suit pants, and slip-on dress shoes. The blue shirt was unfastened and spread wide, exposing the full horror of what had happened to him.
His throat was gone, leaving a deep hollow space where it had been and, further down, a ragged hole a foot long had appeared in his abdomen. On the floor between his $1,000 shoes lay his intestines, or what was left of them, in a semi-liquid pink slurry. Both his hands were slick with blood, and a knife lay on the tile under his right hand.
Four bottles of drain cleaner sat on the counter, next to two silver coins.
Another grim tableau from the Ferryman.
He glanced at Sato. She had one gloved hand against the wall to brace herself, the other still up at her face. Her eyes did a slow blink, her head tilting down toward the floor like she was falling asleep, then she seemed to recover. Her chest inflated and her head came back up, eyes wide. She nodded that she was okay, so he turned back to the victim. He moved forward to get a closer look, taking care where he placed his feet.
Why the office chair. Why not one of the dining chairs?
Wasn’t that a better message?
He slid Price’s shirt cuff up his right arm and saw dark bands around his wrist. Coombes had seen it more times than he could count during his career in law enforcement. Price had been bound with steel handcuffs while the Ferryman had forced the corrosive down his throat. He nodded to himself, understanding.
The office chair had arms, the dining chairs did not.
Coombes stepped forward, between pools of blood, then pivoted his hips to close in on the other man’s right shoulder. Where the Ferryman must’ve stood. He tightened the cloth over his nose and leaned in close. The victim’s mouth was badly blistered from the liquid that had passed over it. Industrial strength drain cleaner, designed to break down fat and oils, and all the other things humans are made from. He pulled back, giving himself some space.
“What’s your take, Johnny?”
There was a patch of blood in Price’s dyed black hair. Coombes used his thumb and forefinger to part the hair around it. There was some kind of mark on the skin, a contusion, long and rounded at the edge.
“Victim was struck over the head here, with something like a baseball bat or a pipe. Once subdued, our killer sat him here and handcuffed his wrists to the chair arms. Probably his ankles too. When our victim came to, these bottles were emptied down his throat, one after the other. The cuffs were then removed and he was either handed the knife or it was left nearby, within reach.”
“You think Price cut himself open?”
Coombes nodded.
“He was dissolving from the inside out. It must’ve felt like he was on fire. I’m sure he just wanted it to end, and get all that stuff out of him as fast as possible. A pretty pointless goal when his throat was being eaten away.”
When he was speaking, he had to hold the cloth back from his mouth and nose. The smell was disgusting, he needed fresh air. He reversed his previous movement to get back over to the doorway. He looked at the corner of the metal unit that the bar manager had struck with her head, then at the pool of blood she’d leaked onto the floor. There was a lot of it, maybe as much as a pint. It was a serious injury; she was lucky to survive. He froze. There was a pattern in the blood, the tread of a shoe. It distorted the straight lines above. He moved his head back and forth, up and down. The pattern appeared and disappeared.
He went through into the restaurant and waved the forensic tech over.
“There’s a shoe tread in the secondary blood. The bar manager’s. You can only see it from some angles. See if you can get a photograph of it, I think it’s the killer’s.”
Vogler’s eyes lit up and he nodded enthusiastically.
“You bet.”
“Put some kind of scale in the shot, so we can calculate a shoe size.”
The tech nodded again and entered the kitchen. Grace frowned.
“I don’t understand. How could blood from the bar manager have the killer’s shoe print in it if she arrived after the killer left?”
“It’s like a latent fingerprint. The prints are there the whole time, but it needs some kind of reagent to make it visible. In this case, it was the way her blood pooled on top of it, and maybe the fluorescent tube above it casting a flat light.”
“You think we’ll get anything else?”
“No, I don’t. This wasn’t a mistake, this was luck.” He paused, looking at her. She still wasn’t right. It was fair enough; Price was hardly looking his best. “It’s early, Grace, but do you want to get lunch somewhere? I’m starved.”
She laughed a little, despite herself.
“You fucker!”
“I really could use some chili right now. Or meatballs in a nice, thick gravy.”
There was more color in her face, she was coming out of it.
“You’re disgusting,” she said. Then, after a beat, “thank you.”
19
It wasn’t exactly on his way home, but Coombes decided to pay another visit to the Metro Grand and see if he could speak to Lawson, the security guy there. There was something about the keycards that he couldn’t put his finger on. Removing the cards after the kill did seem like a memento, as Lawson had suggested, but what if it was something else? What if the reason the two keys were taken was to hide something? As far as he knew, no other mementos had been taken from any of the other Ferryman crime scenes, and removing them called attention to the fact that it wasn’t a suicide.
A blandly beautiful woman smiled at him as he approached the front desk. He explained who he was and that he wanted to speak to Lawson, or whoever was on duty. Her off-the-rail smile disappeared in a blink of his eye, replaced by something else. Disgust, maybe. He was here about the murdered guest. She made a phone call in a hushed voice, then told him to take a seat and wait.
Five minutes passed before a man approached.
This would be Lawson, he thought. He was older than he was expecting, but pretty much everything else matched the mental image he’d compiled. Either these jobs attracted a certain type of man, or the man changed because the job required it. Form follows function. Lawson was heavyset from sitting all day, eating candy and burgers, then going home for some brewskis.
Coombes stood as the other man spoke.
“Help you?”
“I’m Detective Coombes, we spoke on the phone.”
Lawson nodded. “Sure, I remember.”
“I had a couple of follow-up questions and I was in the area.”
“No problem. Come into my office.”
He followed Lawson back the way he’d come. The big man dragged his left leg a little and his rounded shoulders had a strange movement as he moved his left foot forward. A knee injury, Coombes thought, and not a new one. They came to a door with SECURITY written on a silver plate. Lawson held the door for him and he walked through, around the other man’s belly, into a windowless space filled with computer screens.
Coombes glanced around the room. The hotel’s grandeur hadn’t made it past the door, that was for sure. This was a blind spot, something the public weren’t meant to see. The room smelled of sweat and fried food. He could practically taste the air, and by proxy, Lawson himself. The place was a mess. Whatever Lawson had been doing during the five-minute wait, it wasn’t cleaning up. A power play then.
Make the detective wait, show him who’s boss.
A faded calendar hung on the wall, a Playboy-type image of a young woman in a swimsuit next to a pool. By modern standards, tame. It was dated July, 1967. The calendar was older than he was, which made the model in her seventies.
He turned to see Lawson holding up a mug.
“Get you a coffee?”
Coombes didn’t like to judge, but he was pretty sure the mug had never been washed since the day it had been bought.
“I shouldn’t. It’s a long drive home if you know what I mean.”
“Trust me, I know. Take a seat.”
They sat, and he pretended not to notice what appeared on Lawson’s screen when his big hand nudged the mouse. He instead put his head down and peeled back his notebook to the page he had about the hotel security as the other man quickly closed his browser.
“This won’t take long, just a couple of questions.”
Lawson said nothing. Coombes continued.
“Okay, you said before that the locks on the doors were computerized and there was a record. A door access log.” Coombes looked up. “Who opened the door, what time?”
“That’s right.”
“Is that every time the door opens and closes?”
“No, only when you unlock it and enter the room.”
“If a guest opens the door for room service, that wouldn’t be logged?”
“That’s right,” Lawson said again.
Coombes nodded and wrote unlock only in his notebook.
“If a guest loses their key during their stay, you issue them with a replacement?”
“Of course.”
“How do you control replacement keys?”
“We ask for the credit card used with the booking, but there was no replacement key with your victim. Our system logs replacements and your dead guy didn’t have one.”
“That answers my next question. You said previously that these keycards are only active for the duration of a guest’s stay, right? They don’t open that door after that?”
“God no, you can only imagine. That would be a security nightmare.”
“The cards that you get back, from guests or staff leaving, they’re recycled?”
Lawson nodded.
“If they were never stolen, we’d get an easy ten years of use out of them. What tends to happen is that we change our branding so all the old keys get trashed and we get new ones made with new logos or what have you.”
“The cards come back, you change the code and they’re good to go again?”
“That’s it exactly.”
Coombes said nothing for a moment, watching Lawson carefully.
“And who does that?”
Lawson straightened, his mood changing in a heartbeat.
“I get the cards back, I blank them out, wipe them down then pass them through to the front desk. When they need a key they run them through the machines up front.”
“But you can do them here as well, right? On this computer. The staff keys are done here, correct? Not at the front desk.”
“Listen, pal-”
Coombes held up his finger.
“Take it easy. You’ve seen the news; you know what’s going on here.”
“Yeah, and you’re not going to pin it on me.”
“When you make staff keys, do they come into this office?”
The question seemed to derail Lawson.
“Yeah. I make the key, explain that their codes are logged every time a door opens, all that. So they don’t lose them or think about stealing something. There’s also this welcome pack for new employees and they sign for everything at the end so they can’t turn around and say they never got the key or something.”
“Make a key for me right now. Pretend I’m a new employee. At the end we can cancel it out, I just want to see the process.”
Lawson still looked angry but he nodded anyway. He opened his top drawer and pulled out a rectangular box and removed the lid. It was full of plastic key cards. He took one out and placed it just in front of his keyboard and brought up one of the programs already running on his computer. The way the screen was angled, Coombes could see what Lawson was doing. There was a square box in the middle of the screen with different form fields for name and address, employee number, cell phone number. There were two tabs at the top Staff and Guest, and three buttons down the side that said Erase, Print, and Cancel.
“I need your details.”
“Fill in anything, it doesn’t matter. You can delete it all after, right?”
“Of course.”
It was what he thought. Everything could be changed later, it was digital.
Lawson filled in the form with random keystrokes and numbers, then moved the mouse over to Print. He clicked it, then picked up the keycard and ran it down a slot on the side of the monitor. A small green LED pulsed in the corner. He put the card on the table between them. Coombes picked it up by the edges and turned it over. There was a magnetic stripe on the back. It was not a complex task. A child could do it. He saw that the keyboard’s keys had a surface texture, not counting the food and other substances Lawson’s fingers had added. The crime lab would get nothing from the keyboard except diabetes or an STD.
“Is that it?”
“That’s it.”
He looked at Lawson with a level gaze. The security man didn’t see a problem with his setup. It was a joke.
“What’s your first name, Lawson?”
“Bret.”
“Bret, I’m going to need you to dump these cards into another receptacle. I’ll be taking this box, it’s evidence now. The same goes for your mouse. You will also need to have your fingerprints taken for elimination purposes. Tomorrow’s fine.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Your door wasn’t locked. The drawer where you keep the cards wasn’t locked. Your screensaver has no password. Odds are, the Ferryman came in here while you were taking a comfort break, printed himself a card then came back after and deleted it. With a bit of luck, his fingerprints are on that box.”
Lawson glanced at the box like it was a severed hand.
“Is this cop humor?”
“No.”
He called dispatch and had patrol come to pick up the evidence. He signed the chain of custody form while a young officer sealed two evidence bags with the box and the mouse. He decided it would probably also be worth getting a tech to fingerprint Lawson’s door handle, the edge of the door, and the underside of the drawer handle.
