The Dark Halo, page 19
“Obviously it was possible, Bostic. Whoever took control, turned off all that stuff, right?”
“That’s beyond the horizon, I never saw that before. Those systems are protected.”
“I’m Homicide, I don’t care about anything else. If this crash is the result of some glitch in your software tell me now and it stays between us, okay? I have a killer to catch and I don’t want to get sucked down a tunnel of bullshit.”
“I swear to you, that’s what the data says.”
Coombes straightened from his bent-over position pretending to understand what the laptop’s screen showed. He looked again around the rows of cars, trucks, and SUVs that filled the lot. It was perfectly still with no movement. He took a deep breath and let it out again. He ran his eyes once again over the crumpled front of the Tesla.
“I’ll give you this much, Bostic. This car took some punishment. A bit longer on the brakes and your customer might have made it.”
“Oh, you’re right about that. I’d guess he was maybe four or five seconds from being able to walk away from this. I’m done here, you mind if I look inside?”
“For what purpose?”
Bostic smiled and shrugged his shoulders. “To see.”
The tech was a ghoul who wanted to be where a man had died, a crime committed. His first instinct was to tell him where to go, but he decided to see where it went.
“All right, but no selfies. I don’t want this on social media.”
“That’s not me, you’ve got nothing to worry about.”
Bostic walked around the side and slid into the driver’s seat. Coombes followed to see what Bostic was doing.
“The airbag didn’t deploy.”
“Right.”
Coombes hadn’t registered the airbag failure, even though it had been in the report. He’d been too busy looking at the comet tails of blood spatter that filled the interior like a Jackson Pollock. Bostic smiled at him, his whole face lighting up.
“That thing about the coins is bullshit, isn’t it?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Like I say, I follow the case you’re working on. The Ferryman. I figure that if you’re working this case, it has to be part of that case, they’re not giving you extra work to pad out your day. Therefore, this is a Ferryman victim. Judging by the door’s removal, the victim survived the initial impact and they were trying to save him.”
Coombes looked calmly at him and said nothing.
“If he was still alive, there were no coins on his eyes.”
He’d underestimated Bostic, but again he decided to let it continue.
“I can’t comment on active investigations.”
The tech laughed. “That deadpan delivery, I love it!”
Bostic returned to looking around the destroyed car’s interior. The man’s eyes crawling slowly over everything like he was trying to memorize it, his huge glasses like retro TV screens. By his own admission, he was a true crime fan, this would be a fantasy come true for him. His head came to an abrupt stop as he looked at something.
He straightened his arm, his finger pointing.
“Detective, look. A camera. That’s not one of ours.”
Coombes squatted down next to Bostic and looked along his arm. There was a small black dot on the passenger side door. It looked like a drop of dried blood, only it was way out on its own, away from the other spatter. He took out his pocket flashlight and shone it toward the door. The lens shone. The car had been processed, but nobody had caught the lens.
Bostic had a good eye.
“Shit, you’re right.”
“It’s pointed at the driver. You think someone watched him die?”
Coombes nodded, disgusted.
He walked back to check the door that had been removed, but there was no sign that a camera had been added to it. Too close to the driver, he supposed. Or too visible. Bostic climbed out the car. He looked excited by the discovery of the camera. Coombes was tempted to show him a picture of Blackstone’s face, see how funny he found the situation then.
Coombes pulled out his notebook and pen.
“Who could do this, control the car remotely?”
“A half dozen people at the company, maybe a couple more former employees. Then you have state actors like Russia, China, Israel, Great Britain, and the US of course. Spy shit.”
He nodded and wrote it all down.
“How close would our guy have to…connect like this?”
“To the car? Anywhere in the world, it’s like a cell phone.”
A moment went by after Coombes had written this into his notebook. He was missing something. All computer people were alike, they lost the ability to speak to humans the more they interacted with computers.
“Why did you ask if I meant the car, what else would we be talking about?”
“The camera. Some of our models have built-in cabin cameras on the rearview, but this one didn’t. I’m guessing it’s wired into the power for the door mirror to get an angle on the driver, but there’s no link to the network there and it might not have the bandwidth to support video anyway. Got to punch through a lot of metal there. I doubt it could transmit more than half a mile, probably less.”
The Ferryman had been close.
It figured. He’d have to be able to see the off-ramp exit.
“How long would it take to add the camera?”
Bostic tilted his head over, eyes turned up to the left, imagining it.
“Open the door, unfasten the panel, pop it open. Drill the hole, mount the camera, wire it in, pop the panel back into place, double-check the lens alignment on a monitor while sitting in the driver’s seat. That’s it. Ten minutes?”
“What about keys, alarms, all that?”
“If I was going to do this, I’d use the driver’s own key after it had been valet parked. Somewhere I might also be able to get a little privacy.”
Coombes smiled. “Nice.”
He wrote valet parking in his notebook and drew a heavy box around it.
The technician folded up his laptop and returned to his car. In his own way, Bostic carried out his own investigations, only of machines that had gone wrong. Coombes wondered how much he earned, and what his life was like driving around in a sports car, pressing a couple of keys solving a puzzle right there, then driving away someplace else.
No corpses, no grieving family.
It was the kind of job Julie would choose for him.
Bostic’s Tesla pulled silently alongside and the window powered down.
“Coombes. The guy you’re after knows EVs like the back of his hand. Really knows them, you know? You’re looking for an engineer.”
He supposed that EV was electric vehicle.
“Someone like you?”
Bostic grinned. “I wish. I could do the camera, sure, but I couldn’t highjack the OS like that. I’m strictly debug-only. The guy you want? If he did this alone? He’s a genius.”
He nodded morosely.
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“Have a better one, Detective.”
The Tesla powered smoothly away, leaving him standing on his own. One thing was for damn sure, Billy Lass didn’t remotely control a car, he had problems picking up emails.
He made a call to arrange for the car to be re-processed and for the whole passenger door to be taken to the crime lab for disassembly and forensic analysis. He imagined a nice juicy fingerprint carelessly left behind on some interior surface by the Ferryman, waiting to be discovered. He disconnected and began to walk back toward his Dodge. His cell phone rang before he could return it to his pocket. It was Sato’s cell.
“Hi, Grace. What’s up?”
“I’m downtown at City National Plaza. You’re going to want to get here as soon as possible. Olivia Sutton’s been abducted. There’s blood, Johnny, it could be our guy.”
28
Olivia had been abducted from the parking garage on her way to work, which was a corporate law office nestled high up in the building above. No doubt a nice corner office with a view across the city. As he understood things, Olivia Sutton was a multi-millionaire with a vast personal fortune and chose to work because she enjoyed it.
That must be nice, he thought.
He parked his Dodge as close as he could get to the taped-off section and sat there for a beat looking at his right hand. His fingers were shaking. He clenched his hand into a fist then straightened them out again. The shaking persisted. An image came to him of Olivia in the bar that day, the extra button undone, her cheeks flushed with anger.
Goddammit.
He picked his iPad off the passenger seat and got out the car. The weight of the tablet as he carried it was enough to stop his hand from shaking, a trick he’d learned while serving in Afghanistan. He gave his name and badge number to a uniform with a clipboard and made his way toward a towering African-American in a three-piece suit. Jed Hollings. Coombes recognized the detective due to his height, which barely fitted in the parking garage. There weren’t many cops he had to tilt his head to look in the eye and he didn’t much enjoy it.
“I don’t like waiting around for people, Coombes, and I don’t see how this connects with your serial. This is an abduction, not a murder.”
“Relax, Hollings. This is your case and that’s not going to change. That said, there is a potential overlap with my case that could help both of us.”
“Oh yeah? What’s the overlap?”
“Olivia Sutton’s father is potentially the first victim of my killer.”
Hollings was silent for a moment while he thought this over. Coombes didn’t bother to mention that he knew both victims.
“That must’ve been months ago, why come back for her now?”
Coombes shrugged.
“I don’t know, but I don’t like the timing. Her father’s home in Silver Lake was set on fire last night. It’s where he apparently killed himself, so obviously I’m wondering if it was to destroy evidence missed at the first crime scene.”
“Your killer tying off loose ends?”
“Seems that way.”
Hollings’ face softened, perhaps thinking he could backdoor into solving a serial and the effect this might have on his career.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Work the case as normal, anybody that comes to your attention loop me in. I’m assuming there’s been no contact, no demand?”
“Not as far as I know.”
If Coombes was right, there would be no ransom demand, because money was not the motive. He turned to the section of the parking structure where Sato stood looking down at the smooth concrete. If he was right, Olivia Sutton was already dead.
Something inside him clamped together.
He’d barely seen Olivia for years, yet feelings for her persisted. Some people were like that, they remained a part of who you were long after they left your life.
He saw Vogler, the young forensic technician that had worked the Harry Ryan and Anthony Price scenes. Coombes finished up with Hollings and walked over.
“We’ll have to stop meeting like this, people will talk.”
“This one’s a friend, Vogler. No jokes.”
“Okay. How did you get on with that shoe print?”
“Still working it.”
Coombes looked at the dark splashes of blood on the concrete and wondered what it meant. It appeared to be a small amount, from a minor impact. The tension across his chest began to ease. Olivia hadn’t died here.
The blood was at the end of the parking bay, between her Range Rover and the spot next to it, which was empty. She’d parked in her private space, marked on the wall in front of her for all to see, then walked to the rear of her SUV where her abductor was waiting. Perhaps hiding behind the bulk of her own vehicle, ready to grab her up, into a waiting trunk.
Her cell phone lay next to the SUV’s rear wheel. It looked like it had been stamped on repeatedly, it was destroyed. A lot of energy, a lot of anger. Silver-gray scrape marks led across the polished concrete to the blood trail. It seemed that the cause of the blood loss was from being hit on the head by her attacker to control her. He thought about Olivia, filled with fire and attitude. She was athletic, bordering on muscular. She was a fighter.
Coombes imagined a new scenario.
This time, instead of hitting her, her attacker grabs her from behind, pinning her arms around her waist before lifting her off her feet and carrying her toward the open trunk. Olivia would do what anyone would. She’d arc her head backward into her abductor’s face, into his lips or nose, causing the drops of blood.
Making it his blood, not hers.
Either way seemed just as likely. What was less likely, was that the Ferryman was in CODIS, the FBI’s DNA database. They’d be able to use it to match or eliminate suspects later, but that wouldn’t do her any good now.
“I’m sure she’s okay, Johnny.”
Coombes turned and saw Sato watching him, head tilted to one side. He nodded, lacking the conviction to agree with her. It made no sense to abduct Olivia and keep her alive.
“How did your thing go, with Blackstone’s car?”
A subject change. Sato read him like a book.
“Someone took control of his car remotely and accelerated it into the other vehicle. The technician thought it was the work of an engineer and a genius, so Billy Lass is in the clear.”
“I don’t get it, Johnny. The killer wants Blackstone dead, fine. Why go to all this effort when he could just shoot him?”
“I’ve been thinking about that. Blackstone’s wife said he used to spend all his time in that car. She said something like she was a widow long before he died. Each death is somehow tailored to the person. Harry Ryan was a gun nut, Gordon Sellers a diver, and so on. There’s some twisted logic at work here, but the main reason is because he enjoys it. It’s a challenge.”
Her eyes lit up while he was speaking.
“Grady had that song Falling for You.”
“Ellis.”
“Right. I keep thinking of him by his stage name.”
A decade earlier, the song had been everywhere. It had been impossible to turn on a radio without hearing it. A significant portion of Steve Ellis’ fortune probably came from that song alone. He nodded. It aligned perfectly with his theory, almost too perfectly. In the world he now lived, catapulting a man from the top floor of a building was perfect.
Vogler was now hunched over on the concrete with a jewelers’ magnifying rig attached to his head, and was swabbing the dried blood onto cotton buds and placing them into test tubes for analysis. A tube for each drop, in case they were from separate people. Vogler was a good kid. Thorough. If they had any chance at all of finding the Ferryman on CODIS, this forensic technician was the one to make it happen. Coombes heard a disturbance behind him and saw a large man in a bright shirt trying to push his way past a couple of uniforms. He turned away.
“Let’s get out of here.”
“Why? Who is he, Johnny?”
“Thomas Garvy, Olivia’s husband. We are not on good terms.”
“What a surprise.”
Coombes said nothing.
He thought about Olivia’s cell phone. There would’ve been a tight window to pull off the abduction, but her attacker had found the time to spend ten to twenty seconds ramming his shoe repeatedly onto her iPhone. That felt personal. Why not put it in front of his tire and drive away over it?
For the first time, the Ferryman had shown emotion.
29
They caught a favorable flow of traffic and were in Culver City in less than twenty minutes. He spent the whole drive thinking about Olivia, and if she was still alive. The idea that she was a fighter took turns giving him hope, then causing despair. Was strength a quality that made her more likely to survive, or to get her killed? He parked in his usual spot under the walnut tree and asked Sato to wait in the car for a moment.
Sofia Lass opened her front door. She looked exhausted. Beautiful, but exhausted. A big smile spread across her face.
“Johnny! What a lovely surprise.”
“I’m looking for Billy, is he here?”
“Oh, no. He busy working.”
She angled her head, a confused look in her eyes. It was as if she was saying But surely you know this? The penny dropped and everything became clear to him. Either Lass hadn’t told his wife he’d been suspended, or else she thought it was all behind him. Sofia thought he was back on the job and that they were working together again.
She thought Billy was working the Ferryman case.
And where would she get an idea like that?
“Sofia, I’m a little embarrassed. The truth is, I knew Billy wasn’t here. What it was, was my partner and I were in the area and we got to talking about how you guys had kind of named your little boy after me. My partner, she loves kids, is there-”
“She wants to see John? Of course!”
Sofia looked around him toward his car.
“Where is she? You left her in car like suitcase?”
She punched his arm, hard. He laughed, what else was he going to do. Coombes had a feeling she liked hitting him, it was something she’d always done since they first met. He didn’t know what lay behind it, and for sure he wasn’t going to dig into it.
“I’ll be right back.”
Sofia was smiling harder than ever.
Coombes returned to the Dodge and explained the situation to Sato in a lowered voice. He expected her to be angry at the way he’d represented her, but he found no trace of it on her face. She immediately understood the play, and her part in it. Back at the front door, Coombes noticed that Sofia had pulled her hair back into a ponytail and was now wearing shoes. He introduced them, and Sofia led them inside.
“I put John down but I think he’s still awake.”
Sato made a show of looking around.
“You have a beautiful home, Sofia.”
Sofia giggled. “Thank you.”
They walked down the hall to a door he’d never been through before. The master bedroom. Sofia opened the door and the three of them stood in the doorway looking in. The room was half-dark, the shades drawn. He saw the Lass’ bed and, next to it, a child’s cot with flat wooden bars all the way around.
“That’s beyond the horizon, I never saw that before. Those systems are protected.”
“I’m Homicide, I don’t care about anything else. If this crash is the result of some glitch in your software tell me now and it stays between us, okay? I have a killer to catch and I don’t want to get sucked down a tunnel of bullshit.”
“I swear to you, that’s what the data says.”
Coombes straightened from his bent-over position pretending to understand what the laptop’s screen showed. He looked again around the rows of cars, trucks, and SUVs that filled the lot. It was perfectly still with no movement. He took a deep breath and let it out again. He ran his eyes once again over the crumpled front of the Tesla.
“I’ll give you this much, Bostic. This car took some punishment. A bit longer on the brakes and your customer might have made it.”
“Oh, you’re right about that. I’d guess he was maybe four or five seconds from being able to walk away from this. I’m done here, you mind if I look inside?”
“For what purpose?”
Bostic smiled and shrugged his shoulders. “To see.”
The tech was a ghoul who wanted to be where a man had died, a crime committed. His first instinct was to tell him where to go, but he decided to see where it went.
“All right, but no selfies. I don’t want this on social media.”
“That’s not me, you’ve got nothing to worry about.”
Bostic walked around the side and slid into the driver’s seat. Coombes followed to see what Bostic was doing.
“The airbag didn’t deploy.”
“Right.”
Coombes hadn’t registered the airbag failure, even though it had been in the report. He’d been too busy looking at the comet tails of blood spatter that filled the interior like a Jackson Pollock. Bostic smiled at him, his whole face lighting up.
“That thing about the coins is bullshit, isn’t it?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Like I say, I follow the case you’re working on. The Ferryman. I figure that if you’re working this case, it has to be part of that case, they’re not giving you extra work to pad out your day. Therefore, this is a Ferryman victim. Judging by the door’s removal, the victim survived the initial impact and they were trying to save him.”
Coombes looked calmly at him and said nothing.
“If he was still alive, there were no coins on his eyes.”
He’d underestimated Bostic, but again he decided to let it continue.
“I can’t comment on active investigations.”
The tech laughed. “That deadpan delivery, I love it!”
Bostic returned to looking around the destroyed car’s interior. The man’s eyes crawling slowly over everything like he was trying to memorize it, his huge glasses like retro TV screens. By his own admission, he was a true crime fan, this would be a fantasy come true for him. His head came to an abrupt stop as he looked at something.
He straightened his arm, his finger pointing.
“Detective, look. A camera. That’s not one of ours.”
Coombes squatted down next to Bostic and looked along his arm. There was a small black dot on the passenger side door. It looked like a drop of dried blood, only it was way out on its own, away from the other spatter. He took out his pocket flashlight and shone it toward the door. The lens shone. The car had been processed, but nobody had caught the lens.
Bostic had a good eye.
“Shit, you’re right.”
“It’s pointed at the driver. You think someone watched him die?”
Coombes nodded, disgusted.
He walked back to check the door that had been removed, but there was no sign that a camera had been added to it. Too close to the driver, he supposed. Or too visible. Bostic climbed out the car. He looked excited by the discovery of the camera. Coombes was tempted to show him a picture of Blackstone’s face, see how funny he found the situation then.
Coombes pulled out his notebook and pen.
“Who could do this, control the car remotely?”
“A half dozen people at the company, maybe a couple more former employees. Then you have state actors like Russia, China, Israel, Great Britain, and the US of course. Spy shit.”
He nodded and wrote it all down.
“How close would our guy have to…connect like this?”
“To the car? Anywhere in the world, it’s like a cell phone.”
A moment went by after Coombes had written this into his notebook. He was missing something. All computer people were alike, they lost the ability to speak to humans the more they interacted with computers.
“Why did you ask if I meant the car, what else would we be talking about?”
“The camera. Some of our models have built-in cabin cameras on the rearview, but this one didn’t. I’m guessing it’s wired into the power for the door mirror to get an angle on the driver, but there’s no link to the network there and it might not have the bandwidth to support video anyway. Got to punch through a lot of metal there. I doubt it could transmit more than half a mile, probably less.”
The Ferryman had been close.
It figured. He’d have to be able to see the off-ramp exit.
“How long would it take to add the camera?”
Bostic tilted his head over, eyes turned up to the left, imagining it.
“Open the door, unfasten the panel, pop it open. Drill the hole, mount the camera, wire it in, pop the panel back into place, double-check the lens alignment on a monitor while sitting in the driver’s seat. That’s it. Ten minutes?”
“What about keys, alarms, all that?”
“If I was going to do this, I’d use the driver’s own key after it had been valet parked. Somewhere I might also be able to get a little privacy.”
Coombes smiled. “Nice.”
He wrote valet parking in his notebook and drew a heavy box around it.
The technician folded up his laptop and returned to his car. In his own way, Bostic carried out his own investigations, only of machines that had gone wrong. Coombes wondered how much he earned, and what his life was like driving around in a sports car, pressing a couple of keys solving a puzzle right there, then driving away someplace else.
No corpses, no grieving family.
It was the kind of job Julie would choose for him.
Bostic’s Tesla pulled silently alongside and the window powered down.
“Coombes. The guy you’re after knows EVs like the back of his hand. Really knows them, you know? You’re looking for an engineer.”
He supposed that EV was electric vehicle.
“Someone like you?”
Bostic grinned. “I wish. I could do the camera, sure, but I couldn’t highjack the OS like that. I’m strictly debug-only. The guy you want? If he did this alone? He’s a genius.”
He nodded morosely.
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“Have a better one, Detective.”
The Tesla powered smoothly away, leaving him standing on his own. One thing was for damn sure, Billy Lass didn’t remotely control a car, he had problems picking up emails.
He made a call to arrange for the car to be re-processed and for the whole passenger door to be taken to the crime lab for disassembly and forensic analysis. He imagined a nice juicy fingerprint carelessly left behind on some interior surface by the Ferryman, waiting to be discovered. He disconnected and began to walk back toward his Dodge. His cell phone rang before he could return it to his pocket. It was Sato’s cell.
“Hi, Grace. What’s up?”
“I’m downtown at City National Plaza. You’re going to want to get here as soon as possible. Olivia Sutton’s been abducted. There’s blood, Johnny, it could be our guy.”
28
Olivia had been abducted from the parking garage on her way to work, which was a corporate law office nestled high up in the building above. No doubt a nice corner office with a view across the city. As he understood things, Olivia Sutton was a multi-millionaire with a vast personal fortune and chose to work because she enjoyed it.
That must be nice, he thought.
He parked his Dodge as close as he could get to the taped-off section and sat there for a beat looking at his right hand. His fingers were shaking. He clenched his hand into a fist then straightened them out again. The shaking persisted. An image came to him of Olivia in the bar that day, the extra button undone, her cheeks flushed with anger.
Goddammit.
He picked his iPad off the passenger seat and got out the car. The weight of the tablet as he carried it was enough to stop his hand from shaking, a trick he’d learned while serving in Afghanistan. He gave his name and badge number to a uniform with a clipboard and made his way toward a towering African-American in a three-piece suit. Jed Hollings. Coombes recognized the detective due to his height, which barely fitted in the parking garage. There weren’t many cops he had to tilt his head to look in the eye and he didn’t much enjoy it.
“I don’t like waiting around for people, Coombes, and I don’t see how this connects with your serial. This is an abduction, not a murder.”
“Relax, Hollings. This is your case and that’s not going to change. That said, there is a potential overlap with my case that could help both of us.”
“Oh yeah? What’s the overlap?”
“Olivia Sutton’s father is potentially the first victim of my killer.”
Hollings was silent for a moment while he thought this over. Coombes didn’t bother to mention that he knew both victims.
“That must’ve been months ago, why come back for her now?”
Coombes shrugged.
“I don’t know, but I don’t like the timing. Her father’s home in Silver Lake was set on fire last night. It’s where he apparently killed himself, so obviously I’m wondering if it was to destroy evidence missed at the first crime scene.”
“Your killer tying off loose ends?”
“Seems that way.”
Hollings’ face softened, perhaps thinking he could backdoor into solving a serial and the effect this might have on his career.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Work the case as normal, anybody that comes to your attention loop me in. I’m assuming there’s been no contact, no demand?”
“Not as far as I know.”
If Coombes was right, there would be no ransom demand, because money was not the motive. He turned to the section of the parking structure where Sato stood looking down at the smooth concrete. If he was right, Olivia Sutton was already dead.
Something inside him clamped together.
He’d barely seen Olivia for years, yet feelings for her persisted. Some people were like that, they remained a part of who you were long after they left your life.
He saw Vogler, the young forensic technician that had worked the Harry Ryan and Anthony Price scenes. Coombes finished up with Hollings and walked over.
“We’ll have to stop meeting like this, people will talk.”
“This one’s a friend, Vogler. No jokes.”
“Okay. How did you get on with that shoe print?”
“Still working it.”
Coombes looked at the dark splashes of blood on the concrete and wondered what it meant. It appeared to be a small amount, from a minor impact. The tension across his chest began to ease. Olivia hadn’t died here.
The blood was at the end of the parking bay, between her Range Rover and the spot next to it, which was empty. She’d parked in her private space, marked on the wall in front of her for all to see, then walked to the rear of her SUV where her abductor was waiting. Perhaps hiding behind the bulk of her own vehicle, ready to grab her up, into a waiting trunk.
Her cell phone lay next to the SUV’s rear wheel. It looked like it had been stamped on repeatedly, it was destroyed. A lot of energy, a lot of anger. Silver-gray scrape marks led across the polished concrete to the blood trail. It seemed that the cause of the blood loss was from being hit on the head by her attacker to control her. He thought about Olivia, filled with fire and attitude. She was athletic, bordering on muscular. She was a fighter.
Coombes imagined a new scenario.
This time, instead of hitting her, her attacker grabs her from behind, pinning her arms around her waist before lifting her off her feet and carrying her toward the open trunk. Olivia would do what anyone would. She’d arc her head backward into her abductor’s face, into his lips or nose, causing the drops of blood.
Making it his blood, not hers.
Either way seemed just as likely. What was less likely, was that the Ferryman was in CODIS, the FBI’s DNA database. They’d be able to use it to match or eliminate suspects later, but that wouldn’t do her any good now.
“I’m sure she’s okay, Johnny.”
Coombes turned and saw Sato watching him, head tilted to one side. He nodded, lacking the conviction to agree with her. It made no sense to abduct Olivia and keep her alive.
“How did your thing go, with Blackstone’s car?”
A subject change. Sato read him like a book.
“Someone took control of his car remotely and accelerated it into the other vehicle. The technician thought it was the work of an engineer and a genius, so Billy Lass is in the clear.”
“I don’t get it, Johnny. The killer wants Blackstone dead, fine. Why go to all this effort when he could just shoot him?”
“I’ve been thinking about that. Blackstone’s wife said he used to spend all his time in that car. She said something like she was a widow long before he died. Each death is somehow tailored to the person. Harry Ryan was a gun nut, Gordon Sellers a diver, and so on. There’s some twisted logic at work here, but the main reason is because he enjoys it. It’s a challenge.”
Her eyes lit up while he was speaking.
“Grady had that song Falling for You.”
“Ellis.”
“Right. I keep thinking of him by his stage name.”
A decade earlier, the song had been everywhere. It had been impossible to turn on a radio without hearing it. A significant portion of Steve Ellis’ fortune probably came from that song alone. He nodded. It aligned perfectly with his theory, almost too perfectly. In the world he now lived, catapulting a man from the top floor of a building was perfect.
Vogler was now hunched over on the concrete with a jewelers’ magnifying rig attached to his head, and was swabbing the dried blood onto cotton buds and placing them into test tubes for analysis. A tube for each drop, in case they were from separate people. Vogler was a good kid. Thorough. If they had any chance at all of finding the Ferryman on CODIS, this forensic technician was the one to make it happen. Coombes heard a disturbance behind him and saw a large man in a bright shirt trying to push his way past a couple of uniforms. He turned away.
“Let’s get out of here.”
“Why? Who is he, Johnny?”
“Thomas Garvy, Olivia’s husband. We are not on good terms.”
“What a surprise.”
Coombes said nothing.
He thought about Olivia’s cell phone. There would’ve been a tight window to pull off the abduction, but her attacker had found the time to spend ten to twenty seconds ramming his shoe repeatedly onto her iPhone. That felt personal. Why not put it in front of his tire and drive away over it?
For the first time, the Ferryman had shown emotion.
29
They caught a favorable flow of traffic and were in Culver City in less than twenty minutes. He spent the whole drive thinking about Olivia, and if she was still alive. The idea that she was a fighter took turns giving him hope, then causing despair. Was strength a quality that made her more likely to survive, or to get her killed? He parked in his usual spot under the walnut tree and asked Sato to wait in the car for a moment.
Sofia Lass opened her front door. She looked exhausted. Beautiful, but exhausted. A big smile spread across her face.
“Johnny! What a lovely surprise.”
“I’m looking for Billy, is he here?”
“Oh, no. He busy working.”
She angled her head, a confused look in her eyes. It was as if she was saying But surely you know this? The penny dropped and everything became clear to him. Either Lass hadn’t told his wife he’d been suspended, or else she thought it was all behind him. Sofia thought he was back on the job and that they were working together again.
She thought Billy was working the Ferryman case.
And where would she get an idea like that?
“Sofia, I’m a little embarrassed. The truth is, I knew Billy wasn’t here. What it was, was my partner and I were in the area and we got to talking about how you guys had kind of named your little boy after me. My partner, she loves kids, is there-”
“She wants to see John? Of course!”
Sofia looked around him toward his car.
“Where is she? You left her in car like suitcase?”
She punched his arm, hard. He laughed, what else was he going to do. Coombes had a feeling she liked hitting him, it was something she’d always done since they first met. He didn’t know what lay behind it, and for sure he wasn’t going to dig into it.
“I’ll be right back.”
Sofia was smiling harder than ever.
Coombes returned to the Dodge and explained the situation to Sato in a lowered voice. He expected her to be angry at the way he’d represented her, but he found no trace of it on her face. She immediately understood the play, and her part in it. Back at the front door, Coombes noticed that Sofia had pulled her hair back into a ponytail and was now wearing shoes. He introduced them, and Sofia led them inside.
“I put John down but I think he’s still awake.”
Sato made a show of looking around.
“You have a beautiful home, Sofia.”
Sofia giggled. “Thank you.”
They walked down the hall to a door he’d never been through before. The master bedroom. Sofia opened the door and the three of them stood in the doorway looking in. The room was half-dark, the shades drawn. He saw the Lass’ bed and, next to it, a child’s cot with flat wooden bars all the way around.
