The Dark Halo, page 22
“Why would he abduct his sister?”
An answer came to him all too quickly.
“She just inherited half his business, maybe the house in Silver Lake too.”
“You think she’s dead?”
Coombes looked at Sato, wishing she hadn’t said it.
“I hope not, but why else would he take her?”
“Even if she inherited everything, killing her wouldn’t undo it. The business and the house would become part of her estate. Her husband would get it.”
“I know that, Grace. Maybe he’s angry, not thinking straight. Hell, we are also saying he’s a serial killer so maybe his elevator doesn’t go to the top floor.”
“It’s too neat, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.”
Coombes stood and walked to the whiteboard. A copy of the artist’s impression was taped to the edge for quick access. He took it down and set it on his desk then used his tablet to bring up photographs of Nicolas Sutton. There were a lot to choose from. Sutton was rich, single, and attractive, Google had a warehouse filled with his face. Coombes found an image of Nicky looking slightly to the left like the suspect in the drawing and sized the image on screen to match. The three of them stood and looked down at the two images side by side.
Again, he found it hard to get past the dead charcoal eyes.
“I don’t know, Johnny.” Sato said. “I honestly don’t think that drawing looks like anyone other than you on a really bad day.”
He ignored this comment and pointed to the suspect’s mouth. On the drawing, one of the front teeth was squint.
“Sutton’s teeth are straight.”
“Still though,” Becker said, “nose and jawline are close to perfect.”
That much, he had to agree with.
If he was being objective, Sutton was a better fit for the Ferryman than Jake Curtis ever was, even excluding the shoes. The eyewitness had never mentioned the suspect having a beard and nobody who’d seen Curtis would forget that. He’d entertained the idea that the beard was fake, and that Curtis simply removed it before carrying out any of the kills. Now that he accepted the writer was not the killer, he could see how desperate that really was.
“All right. Let’s dig into Nicky’s life, see what we find. Health, financials, relationships. See if we can match the partial fingerprint from the Haylee Jordan crime scene and if we can nail down his location during any of the kills. Perhaps that shoe print had been in Anthony Price’s kitchen for a while-”
Sato cut him off.
“Johnny, aside from what Price and the bar manager left on the floor, that thing was spotless. You could’ve eaten off it. There’s no way Sutton walked through there a month before and his perfect shoe prints were still there. The kitchen staff would walk over that spot all night; you’d get like thirty overlapping prints in ten minutes flat.”
Coombes glared at her.
“Did you check if the shoes had been reported stolen?”
“A pair of Nikes? No.”
“They cost him $27,000. If someone stole them, he’s going to have reported it to claim on insurance, I guarantee it.”
Sato’s eyebrows shot up at the price, but she skipped over it.
“And if he hasn’t reported it?”
Coombes sighed. The logic of it was inescapable.
“Then either he doesn’t know they’re missing, or he’s the Ferryman.”
33
When he stuck his head around his lieutenant’s door, he found her slumped forward, holding her desk phone to her ear like a gun. She jumped slightly, startled by his appearance, having apparently not heard his knock. Coombes held his hand up to apologize and leave, but she waved him in impatiently, bracelets jangling.
The Nikes hadn’t been reported stolen, which came as no surprise to him. Sato had also found a memorabilia website with photographs of the shoes in a glass display case, apparently shot in Sutton’s own home. It looked like the case was mounted to the wall like a painting, to the side of a very large television. Not in a drawer, or a safe deposit box.
It was impossible to see a scenario where Sutton hadn’t noticed the shoes were missing unless he was on vacation the whole time, which he was not. It remained a possibility that the shoe imprint came from a different shoe of the same size and type and that the other links between Nicolas Sutton and the case were merely coincidental. He’d counted them up; it would be a total of eight coincidences if Sutton was not their man, and that wasn’t something they saw a lot of in Homicide.
Gantz finished her call and looked at Coombes with real interest.
“John. I’m hoping you’re about to tell me Christmas is a day early this year.”
“It’s kind of a good news, bad news situation.”
Gantz sighed and sat back in her chair. “Please tell me it’s not Lass.”
Coombes smiled. He’d already forgotten about Billy Lass.
“We think its Nicolas Sutton.”
Gantz frowned. “Sutton. Why do I know that name?”
“His sister was abducted from a parking garage yesterday.”
“Right. Is her abduction related?”
“Looks like it.”
“And the bad news?”
“Nicky and I were friends in high school, I practically grew up in their home. If you recall, his father’s suicide was actually where I started to piece this together. I also dated his sister for about six months.”
“Shit. Shit. Shit.”
Gantz turned away from him and looked off into space, her left index fingernail tapping out a staccato beat on a leather mat that was spread out in front of her computer.
“Who knows of your friendship?”
“Everyone on the task force.”
She turned to look at him. “Wallfisch?”
He nodded again. If Wallfisch knew, then Block knew, they were tight. Since he was a useless piece of skin, he’d assumed from day one that the captain had pressured Gantz into installing Wallfisch on the task force so he had a man on the inside.
“Does Wallfisch know Sutton’s a suspect?”
“You think I’d tell that buffoon anything before I told you?”
“Right now, who knows?”
“You, me, Sato, and Becker.”
“Keep it that way. Telling McCreary is the same as telling Wallfisch.”
“What about Gonzalez? Becker won’t like keeping it from her.”
“It’s your ass, John. You trust her?”
“A hundred percent.”
“All right. Have Wallfisch and McCreary chase rabbits and beat the grass while the four of you tie this thing up. We don’t need forever. As soon as you’re ready to arrest Sutton, you can clue in the clown car and by then it’s too late for any damage.”
The clown car.
Combes smiled, it was a perfect description of Wallfisch and McCreary.
“You got it.”
“I suppose you realize that it’s going to look like you let Sutton continue to kill because your friendship made you blind to his guilt? The press is going to have a field day, John, I don’t even want to think about lawyers.”
“The facts won’t back that up. Nicky and I haven’t been friends since we were teenagers and I can hardly be held accountable for the actions of every person I’ve known.”
“I’m not sure that’s going to matter, you know what this town’s like. Make it a good arrest, you understand? Flawless. And for God’s sake, stop calling him Nicky, it sends the wrong message.”
When Coombes returned to his desk, he found a Post-It Note in Sato’s handwriting stuck to his keyboard. A phone number and the word Tesla. Grace was on her computer, headphones on. Maybe I should get a set of headphones, he thought. Coombes pulled off the Post-It, scrunched it into a ball and fired it into his waste basket. Sean Bostic wanting another true crime fix no doubt. The Ferryman was a big case and Bostic probably figured he had his foot in the door.
The note reminded him of Bostic’s idea about Blackstone’s Tesla being altered while in a valet parking lot. It was an idea worth checking, not to mention a perfect task for Wallfisch and McCreary, as he suspected it would take the rest of the day to run down.
He found Wallfisch at his desk with a tablet in his hands. It looked to Coombes like the detective was playing poker, which in his experience was played for money, not for the hell of it. He pretended not to notice and positioned himself so that the screen was facing away from him.
“I’ve got something for you and Don.”
Wallfisch stared at him with dead eyes and said nothing.
Coombes outlined what he wanted and heard in his own voice how much it sounded like busy-work, rather than what it was, a solid avenue of investigation.
“Sounds like a job for a couple of rookies to me.”
Coombes smiled like he’d got the answer he wanted.
“All right. I’ll tell Gantz that you and Don want off Ferryman so she can return you to rotation for new cases. Maybe you’ll get another serial killer, maybe it’ll be a rich kid with a bumped knee. We’ll see.”
Wallfisch sighed. “Give me ten minutes.”
“Sure, finish your game. You got that two pair.”
“I’m on my goddamn lunch break, Coombes.”
He smiled again and returned to his desk.
There were two types of detective, he thought. Those that worked their lunch around a case, and those that did the opposite. He knew the only reason Wallfisch hadn’t fought the assignment harder was because it offered him the chance to work at his own pace, which was similar to that of a tortoise.
With Wallfisch and McCreary dealt with for now, Coombes thought about the best way to proceed with Nicolas Sutton. So far, all they had was circumstantial evidence, none of which was strong enough to get a search warrant. He decided to do what all cops did in this situation, and checked the criminal database.
As with Jake Curtis, he expected nothing. As with Jake Curtis, he was wrong.
Fourteen entries, ranging from bar fights to a DUI. It appeared that Sutton’s aggressive nature was not improved by the presence of alcohol in his blood stream. The most recent altercation was six months earlier, when he knocked a man unconscious with a beer bottle. The man was hospitalized by the incident, but Sutton escaped jail time in favor of court-mandated anger management sessions and a fine of $10,000.
Coombes sat back on his chair and sighed.
One law for the rich, one law for the poor.
It was an assault with a deadly weapon charge and his booking prints were therefore on file. He frowned. Even the partial fingerprint from the Haylee Jordan crime scene should’ve been good enough for a match. That left three possibilities: Sutton was innocent; there was a problem with the print; or the print was the boyfriend’s, not the killer’s.
He pulled up the photographs of the bathroom and the hinged glass shower door where the print had been recovered. The door had a curved metal edge that you pulled to open the door. The print was found on the back of the edge, facing into the shower stall. He enlarged the picture so that the front of door filled the screen. An idea came to him, and he reached around the desk divider to tap on Sato’s desk. She pulled off her headphones.
“Grace, check this out.”
She wheeled herself around next to him on her office chair.
“What you got, Johnny?”
“All right, this is Haylee’s shower door where we got our partial print. Here’s my question, how would you open that door?”
Sato reached out her left hand, fingers cupped into a C-shape as if to hook into the fold of metal. She then pantomimed moving it to the left as if the folding door was opening.
“Like that I guess?”
Coombes smiled, but said nothing. Sato frowned.
“Why, how would you do it?”
“The print was processed as coming from the killer’s right hand, but even a right-handed person would open that door with their left hand. Nobody would twist their right hand 180 degrees and pull across the whole of their body, it’s not natural.”
Sato looked at the screen again, then back.
“Okay. So, the lab scanned the wrong side of the film?”
“I think so, yes.”
“Then we have a left fingerprint, not a right. Does that help?”
“We’ve been trying to ID someone by the wrong hand. Sutton’s in the system. If he’s our guy, all we have to do is flip the print and run it through AFIS again.”
She nodded. “I like it. Call the lab.”
He got bounced around before he was put through to the technician who had processed the original evidence, a man called Harry Flynn. Coombes laid out what he suspected happened in a neutral tone without mentioning that people had died as a result of the mistake, keeping those nukes held back in case Flynn became difficult.
“Detective, I’m looking at the film right now, it was not scanned backward. The print you have is correct.”
“Do me a favor, Flynn. Indulge me. Flip the print, run it through AFIS.”
“All right, but you’re wasting your time.”
He heard a clack and realized Flynn had placed the phone on his desk while he worked on his computer. The tech was angry at the suggestion of a mistake. Coombes turned to Sato.
“He’s going to run it flipped.”
“Why is Sutton in the system?”
“A bar fight over a woman, he put a man in hospital.”
There was a shuffling noise as the phone was picked back up.
“I don’t understand, Coombes, but that got a hit.”
“Give me the name.”
“Nicolas Sutton. N I C O L A S, no h. I’ll send it over.”
“Thanks for your help, Flynn.”
“Look, Detective. It shouldn’t have worked. The film is the wrong way around.”
He didn’t know what to do with that.
“What hand is the print from? The left?”
“Just a second,” Flynn said. “No, the right.”
Coombes disconnected and shook his head. Again, with the right. The original forensic technician must have correctly identified the hand from the wrong side of the film. But why would Sutton have used his right hand to open the door? Perhaps the fingerprint itself was the clue. His hands were covered in Haylee’s blood. There might have been more blood on his left hand and he was simply trying to avoid touching surfaces.
He supposed he’d add this to his list of questions for the Ferryman.
“Well?” Sato asked.
“It’s time to have a word with Sutton.”
34
Nicolas Sutton lived in an upscale neighborhood south of Mulholland Drive. A thick, twenty-foot-high hedge grew around the property, the only accessible view of the house being a wide driveway and a car port projecting out from the side of the building. Coombes parked across the exit and looked at the car that sat on the concrete apron.
A silver Hyundai.
The vehicle was heavily rusted and it didn’t look like it had been washed in at least a decade. Not the type of vehicle he figured belonged to Sutton. A car like this wouldn’t help him sell million-dollar properties, he’d want something high-end. Aspirational. A big SUV, or a sports car.
The only use he’d have a car like this, was to move a body.
Coombes stepped out the Dodge and walked down the side of the Hyundai. A small sign close to the ground listed a security company that claimed to monitor the property, but he saw no cameras as he approached the door. Sometimes, a sign alone was enough. He knocked, then stepped to the side and drew his Glock. After a moment, a middle-aged Latina came to the door wearing a blue apron. She was short and heavy-set, with eyebrows like caterpillars. Her head tilted up to look at him, fear already on her face.
“Yes?”
“Who are you?” Coombes said.
“Romina. I clean for Mr. Sutton. Are you police?”
Coombes re-holstered his weapon.
“LAPD. Detectives Coombes and Sato. Is he here?”
“No sir, just me.”
“We need to come in, Romina. Won’t take long.”
“I’m not allowed to let anyone in.”
Coombes took off his sunglasses, folded the legs with exaggerated care, and put them in his shirt pocket. He said nothing, and instead clenched his jaw as if anger was building inside him. Her eyes darted about. He leaned closer to her, crowding her personal space.
“I suppose it’s okay,” she said. “Since you’re police.”
He smiled at her, but put no light in it and she shrank away from him. He saw enough monsters to know how to look like one. She backed away from the door and he pushed his way inside before she could change her mind.
The interior was sparsely furnished, with white walls and no decoration. A man’s home, with no feminine touches. He had no doubt that Nicolas Sutton brought women back here, but none stayed long enough to soften up the way it looked. Surfaces were empty, like a home dressed for sale, or a hotel room. He turned to Romina.
“How often do you work here?”
“I come Tuesday and Friday afternoons while Mr. Sutton work.”
“When did you arrive here today?”
“Ten minutes ago.”
“You’re a fast worker, the place is spotless.”
“No, no. I show you, come.”
She walked through the house and they followed along behind. They reached a door made from a dark brown wood and she opened it for them. Inside, was a large bed in the middle of the room. The end didn’t touch a wall and there were no night stands.
“I make bed for him last time, see? Turn down corners, fix pillows. Today, it’s not messed up, it’s the same. He must be tripping. He gone.”
“You think Mr. Sutton is on vacation?”
“Sí, sí. On vacation. Usually, he tells me not to come.”
