The Scapegoat, page 21
“Open up. LAPD. Detectives Coombes and Sato.”
“Cassidy’s not here.”
“She’s not here when I see she’s not.”
“Have you got a warrant?”
“You’re parolees, I don’t need a warrant. It’s like searching your cell.”
The woman’s nose wrinkled. Either from remembering her incarceration, or from the effort of thinking. She unhooked the door chain and stood aside to let them in. Coombes saw that she was only wearing a T-shirt and underwear. The T-shirt didn’t cover the underwear, or her last rib.
“Is there anyone else in the apartment, ma’am?”
“Just me. Cassidy and Rosalie are out.”
He walked past her down the hall, sidearm aimed low in front of him, braced for Stone or Marks to come charging out one of the doorways.
He wasn’t going to be blindsided twice.
“Hey,” Sato said casually. “I have those exact same briefs.”
“Really?”
“No.”
He smiled. Sato was on a roll.
The apartment had two bedrooms. The living room had been converted into a third, which was now the largest bedroom. It was obvious to him that this room belonged to Stone.
She wasn’t there.
He checked each of the other rooms, the bathroom, closets, anywhere big enough for Stone to hide in, then holstered his weapon. He went over to the woman who had answered the door, noting that she still hadn’t bothered to put any more clothes on.
“I told you, she’s not here.”
“Yes, you did. Where is she? At work?”
“How would I know?”
“What’s your name?”
“Riley Atkins.”
“Do you like her?”
“No, she’s a bitch.”
“And crazy,” Coombes offered.
“She humps her boyfriend with the door open.” Atkins imitated the throes of passion, her hands moving dramatically through her hair. “Oh! Oh! Oh! Who does that? What a skank.”
“If you help us, Riley, we help you. Stone goes away.”
“She’s not at work. When Cassidy works her shift, she stays here. She can walk across the street and she’s there. When she’s off-shift she stays with that asshole at his place.”
“Which is where?”
Atkins shrugged. “It’s up by Dodger Stadium, that’s all I remember.”
“Victor Heights?”
“No, but it’s like that.”
“Angelino Heights?”
“That’s it.”
“Street address?”
“Hey, I’m just glad when the bitch is gone.”
Some of the houses up there were old and had basements. A good place to put Amy Tremaine. Echo Park Lake was virtually on the doorstep, which meant Marks was probably home ten minutes after the money exchange.
“What color is her Jeep?” Sato said.
“Red, like a tomato.”
“And the boyfriend’s car?”
“Black. I don’t know what kind it is, it’s old.”
He nodded at Grace and they made their way back to the front door.
“There is one thing,” Atkins said.
Coombes turned back. “Oh yeah? What’s that?”
“They called it the orange tree house. It sounded like an upscale coffee store but it was obvious from the context they were talking about his place. It was so I wouldn’t know where he lived, like I care where that witch parks her broomstick.”
33
Sato pulled away fast, forcing their Dodge into a gap in traffic that didn’t exist a moment before. They were closer to Marks and Stone than at any other time and he felt good. He called Gantz and summarized their last two hours. Beginning with the ID for the blonde; her address and vehicles from the parole officer; and an approximate address for Marks from her housemate. He thought it was solid detective work, but a long pause from her said otherwise.
“So. Angelino Heights, that’s all you’ve got? Are you kidding me?”
Maybe he summarized too much.
“Angelino Heights and two museum-grade vehicles.”
“That’s thin and you know it. A defense attorney would eat us alive. It’s certainly not enough probable cause for a search warrant. We can’t arrest someone for having a classic car, even knocking on their door is pushing it.”
“It’s not a big area, Ellen. I’m asking for you to get someone to drive over and look for either of these vehicles. We’re forty minutes out. By the time we get there a single person could have covered every street.”
She seemed to think about it, like she needed one more push.
“A tomato-red Jeep. You could probably drive past the end of a street and see it. This would take ten minutes, max. How we proceed from there legally we work out later, but if we miss them, they’re gone forever.”
“I’m sorry, John. That’s just not enough.”
It wasn’t what he’d expected her to say and rage overflowed inside him.
“Enjoy your next call with Tremaine, Lieutenant.”
Coombes cut the call and tossed his phone into a cup holder.
“I can’t believe she didn’t go for that,” Sato said.
“You and me both.”
Their front passenger tire hit a pothole and the purple crease flashed through his vision again. His head tipped over to the side and his right arm fell off the door armrest. It was all he could do not to scream at the sudden pain in his head. His injury wasn’t through with him, not by a long shot.
“Shit,” Sato said. “These roads get worse every day.”
Coombes tilted his head back on the headrest and spent the next couple of minutes controlling his breathing, his eyes closed behind his sunglasses.
He couldn’t wait to get reacquainted with Nathan Marks.
They were on the 101 about half-way to Angelino Heights when his cell rang. Sato answered it using the in-car hookup before he saw the caller ID. He figured Gantz had either changed her mind, or was calling back to chew him out for the way he’d spoken to her before.
“Lieutenant?”
“No, it’s Becker.”
Coombes realized they hadn’t kept him in the loop and felt bad.
“What’s new, Mark?”
“What’s new is that we just had a visit from a dozen FBI goons who ransacked your desk pretty good before Block got there and shut them down.”
“Did they get into my computer?”
“They tried, but they got nowhere. I guess they expected to find your login in your desk drawer somewhere like on a TV show.”
The only part of this he couldn’t believe was Block coming to the rescue.
“Block really kicked them out?”
“Some SWAT guys happened to be in the building. They bounced those feds pretty hard; they won’t be coming back any time soon.”
“Did they take anything?”
“Far as I could see they left empty-handed but there were a lot of bodies. They might’ve taken photographs of whatever they wanted. It’s messed up pretty good, John. All your Post-Its, your papers, your mail. It’s like a tornado passed through.”
He thought of Grace’s carefully drawn Kenji letters.
“What about my desk?“ Sato said.
“Yours is okay. They went straight to John’s, knew right where it was, then got tossed out on their ass before they could get any further.”
Coombes wondered how the feds would know where he sat.
“This is a desperate move. They put everything into those GPS trackers solving the case and have nothing left now it’s gone to shit.”
“No doubt,” Becker said. “Question is, did you leave anything on your desk that would help them?”
He thought about it. The computer was protected by a password; his cell phone, tablet and notebook were all with him, which only left his legal pad.
“Yeah, my overview of the main players. They now have Marks. I didn’t have time to add Stone’s name or the Nolan Sawyer alias before I left. But that’s all.”
“I think we can assume that won’t hold water, John. When the feds look at Marks on the database, their system will tell them who ran the last search. They’ll figure the hand-off play and will look at who else I’ve been investigating. That’ll give them the whole nut.”
“Damn, you’re right.”
“Anyway, that’s only part of the reason I called. You were right about Marks getting a real driving license from the DMV to back his fake ID.”
His breath caught in his throat.
“You have his address.”
“It’s in Hollywood. Apartment 23, 731 Cole Avenue.”
He felt himself deflate.
“That’s Stone’s address, we were just there. Her roommate says he’s in Angelino Heights somewhere. We’re headed there now.”
Becker sighed.
“I’ve seen nothing linking them to property there.”
That didn’t surprise him, there was no point hiding out where you could be found.
“All right. Take a look at rental properties in the area, maybe he’s in an Airbnb. Stay off any federal databases, assume you’re burned. In fact, use your tablet. They’ll be scraping your web traffic from your terminal’s IP address.”
“Leave it with me.”
They disconnected. Although Becker had given him nothing, the call had given him an idea on how they could find Marks before they got there and had to drive up and down looking for his car. Sato glanced over at him as he worked on his iPad.
“You got something?”
“Maybe. We can’t use Street View to look for their cars, but if there’s an orange tree out front, I might be able to see it. I figure they weren’t calling it the orange tree house because it had a jacaranda.”
“Nice!”
On screen, he drove the camera car along the streets of Angelino Heights, turning the camera to look at the passing buildings. If the process helped them save five minutes, it might be the difference between catching Marks before he took off, or the difference between saving Amy Tremaine and finding her dead body.
It took him ten minutes to check every street and he had returned one definite and two possibles. Possibles, because he wasn’t certain he was actually looking at oranges or if they were peaches or even some kind of flower. This being the case, he decided they should go to the definite first, despite the fact that it was the farthest away. Which also made it the closest to Dodger Stadium, which Riley Atkins had mentioned.
He returned his focus to the road in front of them.
They were approaching their exit and he realized their route would cover the same ground as during the ransom exchange, only in reverse. Glendale Boulevard, Bellevue Avenue past the bottom of Echo Park Lake, then on into the heart of Angelino Heights.
Coombes took out his Glock, ejected the magazine and saw the ammunition inside. He put it back into his gun and re-holstered it. Next, he checked each of his two extra magazines that he kept on his belt. Fully loaded. He expected nothing else. They’d been with him the whole time, there was no possibility that he’d been sabotaged somehow.
It was routine, and routine always calmed him prior to conflict.
“So, you putting this guy in the ground or what?”
“It might not be my decision, Grace. You know that.”
They took the exit ramp off the freeway.
“I mean, it’s not like you don’t need a new car, right?”
She remembered Tremaine’s offer. He turned to her and said nothing.
“If you were that guy, Johnny, I wouldn’t be with you.”
“I’m not going to face Marks with a fruit basket or a bunch of flowers. I’m lucky to still be alive after our last meeting. You know what he did to those guys in the veterinary hospital. You want me to be like the guy eating nothing but smoothies through a straw?”
“Of course not.”
“Then I don’t know what you want from me.”
“Yes, you do.”
They moved along Bellevue Avenue in silence.
“By the way, I saw what happened back there when we hit the pothole. You almost passed out. You should be in hospital, John. Is it Amy that you’re doing this for, or is it pride?”
When Sato called him John, he was in the dog house.
“I don’t know how to stop,” he said, almost to himself.
“What you said about the FBI putting everything into the GPS trackers?”
“Yeah?”
“What if we’ve done the same? What if Amy Tremaine’s kidnap has nothing to do with Elizabeth Walton’s murder?”
“Trust me, I know.”
They were quiet for a moment before Sato spoke again.
“You want to tell me where we’re going?”
“Turn left at Douglas Street then right at the intersection with Allison Avenue, heading toward the stadium. It’s a couple of houses in.”
34
Coombes’ mouth was dry, his vision sharp. His heart rate was spiking as the adrenaline flooded his blood stream. Marks had got the better of him the last time they met and he was determined it wouldn’t happen again. He spoke to Sato, his gaze fixed on the road.
“Regardless of what we see parked outside, I want you to keep going then make a U-turn at the end of the street and double back so we can watch the house from the hidden side.”
“And then?”
Coombes shrugged.
“Simple. Confirm they’re in, call for backup.”
She shot him a look of disbelief. He supposed that was fair, he wasn’t exactly a calling-for-backup kind of guy. There was no satisfaction catching bad guys if someone else did the heavy lifting for you. He lived for the click-click-click of handcuffs tightening around some dirtbag’s wrists, their face pressed into asphalt. Sato reached the intersection and turned.
Time seemed to slow down.
The first thing they saw was the tomato-red Jeep.
The second was a man getting out of a black car.
It was Nathan Marks.
Marks slammed the door, locked it, and turned toward the house. His body moved easily in the manner of someone with nothing to worry about, someone with their own theme tune in their head. At the last second, he glanced across and saw their Dodge rolling slowly down the street toward him. His eyes locked on first the car, then on Sato behind the wheel, before finally landing on Coombes.
Time returned to normal speed.
Marks’ body tightened up, and instead of running back to the GTO as Coombes expected, he made a break for the house and went inside.
“Shit!”
“We are so made,“ Sato said.
“Park in front of his car, box him in.”
“On it!”
She swung across the road, blocking the Pontiac from moving forward and hit the strobes on the light bar that sat next to the rearview mirror.
They emptied out, leaving both doors open, and drew their weapons. He was on the sidewalk side of the car, which offered poor angles in the event of a firefight, so he moved around the hood to join Sato on the driver’s side.
They moved along the side of their car, then along the side of the GTO. Marks’ muscle car forced him to bend low to use it as a blind. When they got to the hood, Coombes had to get down on his hands and knees and work his way along to look around the fender.
The kidnappers’ house, an American Craftsman, was set back from the sidewalk and raised up on a bank of earth to combat the steep angle of the street as it dipped down onto Sunset. A long flight of concrete steps led up to the front door, with the orange tree to the left.
He heard no movement from the house and the street was quiet. Coombes drew back from the fender and sat with his back against the rear wheel. He took out his cell phone and texted Becker.
Marks @ 1390 Allison Ave. Run background.
He put his cell into silent mode then put it back in his pocket. If the FBI were intercepting his text messages, so be it. By the time they scrambled HRT and got to his location, it would all be over anyway.
Sato leaned in close and spoke softly.
“You think he’ll try to slip out the back?”
“It’s possible,” he said. “We’re close to the corner, so there’s probably a way out over a fence onto Douglas, or down, through a lot of back yards, onto Sunset.”
Sato watched him closely, her face close enough to his that her breath was landing on his cheek. The adrenaline in her body had caused a rose tint to spread across her perfect doll-like face and her pupils to expand in her dark brown eyes. He’d seen a similar look on her before under very different circumstances and he glanced away to keep his mind in the moment.
They needed to draw Marks out quickly, he thought. Not give him time to think about escape, or about digging in like a tick for a prolonged stand-off. They needed this over, fast. The longer it went on, the more danger Amy’s life would be in.
“All right,” he said. “I’ve got an idea but it’s a bit of a Hail Mary. I want you to cover me and be ready to shoot him if it goes sideways.”
Sato said nothing.
She didn’t want to shoot anyone.
“Grace, I need to hear you say it.”
“I’ll murder anyone to protect you.”
Not quite what he was going for, but it would do. He stood and walked out, away from cover, along the middle of the street. When he was standing opposite the kidnappers’ house, he turned square-on and put his Glock back in his holster.
Putting his gun away was a demonstration of power. He didn’t need the gun, because it was already over.
The other man stood watching at a large window.
“Hey, Marks!” Coombes shouted. “You’re done. We have the whole area locked down. Come on out with your hands up.”
Marks stared at him through the glass.
The ex-Marine was projecting power in a different manner, with a thick silver pistol that extended down his leg past his knee. Even at this range, Coombes could identify it. A Desert Eagle .50. He’d heard the weapon could shoot through an engine block so he doubted his standard-issue LAPD bulletproof vest, currently in the trunk of the Dodge, would provide much protection.
