The Dark Halo, page 25
Coombes saw an intercom unit was mounted on a post so he pulled alongside, powered down his window and pressed the button. A screen lit up showing him a live feed of his own face. The resolution was horrific. He could see every pore in his skin, every hair follicle. His eyes were bloodshot, his pupils large and dangerous. He needed a week’s sleep, a shave, maybe even a couple of pints of blood.
A woman with a bored British accent answered.
“Can I help you, sir?”
Coombes held his badge up to the camera.
“Yeah. Open the gate. Police business.”
The screen went black and a second later the gate opened out toward him on hydraulic arms. He drove through the gap then up the driveway. It was the first time he’d been here and he drank it all in. Her recent setback notwithstanding, Olivia had done all right for herself. The rich couldn’t help it if they kept getting richer, it was their burden.
He parked in front of a sprawling Spanish Colonial mansion where his childhood sweetheart apparently now lived. He smiled to himself. Police business. He’d never used that expression before, not once. The woman’s tone had triggered something inside him that he didn’t know was there.
Thomas Garvy stood at the door waiting with an expression that was hard to read. He was wearing a gray three-piece-suit and a light pink shirt. The top of his shirt was open, his tie pulled down and to one side like he’d started to take it off, then changed his mind. Coombes could smell the Scotch on him from four feet away. It was ten in the morning, and Garvy was at least halfway through a bottle. He’d hoped to avoid Olivia’s husband and all the baggage that went with it, but his day wasn’t exactly working out the way he wanted.
“Coombes,” Garvy said, dryly. “I don’t think she wants to see you.”
“Most people don’t.”
“She’s in a dark place, come back another time.”
“That’s not how this works.”
Garvy shrugged and stepped aside to let him in. A large reception room lay beyond with a black and white marble floor like a chess board. Oil paintings were spaced out along the walls. Dark rectangles with thick gold frames. Miserable people and miserable landscapes. He looked at them blankly, wondering how much they were worth. His reverie didn’t last long as it was interrupted by the unmistakable sound of gunshots within the building. Coombes reached for his piece, his head snapping around to Garvy to assess his threat potential.
“Easy. It’s just Olivia working through her feelings.”
Garvy pointed to a door and Coombes turned toward it.
“Wait. I wanted to thank you for what you did. I’d be lost without her.”
There’d always been some bad energy between him and Garvy over their shared history with Olivia, but he could see now that the conflict on the other man’s face had cleared. Garvy was looking at him like nothing had gone before.
Drunk, but at peace.
Coombes nodded, then turned and went through the door and down a narrow corridor. Once again, he heard gunshots. They were in groups of three, separated by a two second pause. At the end of the corridor, he came to a doorway and he paused there to take in the scene.
It was a full-size bowling lane.
Polished maple and pine floor, automated ball return tunnel and pin reset machine. Coombes had never seen one in a private residence before. He’d heard that Clinton had one installed in the White House back in the day, and though it was probably an urban legend, he’d always chosen to believe it. A paper target was fixed to the end wall. A simple black silhouette against a white background. The drywall around the target was peppered with stray bullet holes, some as much as five feet away.
Olivia Sutton stood with her back to him dead center of the lane. She was in tight blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and wore both ear and eye protection. Her hair was pulled back behind her head into a long ponytail. She was holding an automatic in a two-handed grip. The shots were as regular as clockwork. Calm, deliberate. Controlled. Her stance was good, arms rock-steady and professional.
The shots were tearing through the already-destroyed 10-spot in the middle of the silhouette’s chest. Based on this performance, it was fair to assume that the wild misses were all Garvy’s. He noticed that someone had used a marker pen on the target to add the outline of some hair.
It looked like his hair.
The shots stopped, the slide locking back with a distinctive clack. She put the pistol down next to the spent magazines, took off her ear protection and dumped them on the table.
“You’re not welcome here, Johnny. I don’t want to speak to you, I don’t even want to look at your face.”
“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry about your brother.”
She turned sharply toward him. Her eyes wild with anger.
“Don’t you dare say that. You’ve got no right.”
“Maybe, but it’s true.”
She stared at her feet and removed her safety glasses. The leg of the glasses pulled at some strands of hair which fell down next to her mouth.
“I don’t understand,” she said, her voice dropping away. “There’s no way he’d do this to me, never mind kill all those people. My brother was a good man. He wasn’t…a monster.”
Coombes thought about relatives of killers he’d spoken to before. None of them saw it coming, none of them believed it after the fact. It was how people coped, with denial. He wondered if he wasn’t in his own way falling into the same trap. Nicolas Sutton wasn’t family, but they’d been friends once and maybe that was affecting his judgement.
“He confessed to everything.”
She nodded. “So I was told.”
“He had your dad’s old gun. He gave me no choice.”
“Why are you here, Johnny? Why are you really here? Do you want my forgiveness, is that it? I’m not that person. You know what I wish? I wish you’d left me in that damn trunk. Another ten minutes the medic said. Couldn’t you have done that for me? I would’ve died and known nothing about all this, about Nicky. But no. You had to be the big hero and save me. Thanks for that. I now live in hell. Go get your medal and leave me alone.”
He’d known she wouldn’t be happy to see him, but this was worse than he’d expected. She wished she was dead.
“I’m sorry. The truth is, I don’t believe it myself. It doesn’t smell right. You know what it is? It’s like a movie where the killer has been right in front of the detective all along. You know how often that happens? Never. It’s bullshit.”
Olivia turned to face him properly.
“Thank you for saying that.”
It was the first time he’d had a proper look at her face since he’d arrived and it scared him a little. She looked destroyed, and he supposed it was him that had done that to her. It made him uncomfortable and he reached into the breast pocket of his suit jacket for his notebook and deliberately took a moment to find a blank page.
“You saw nothing of the person that abducted you?”
“Nothing. I parked in my usual spot. Got out, started to walk toward the elevator and my vision goes dark. It was fast, like someone flipped a switch and the lights went out. Next thing I know I’m in the trunk of a car with a taste of flowers in my mouth and a sore head.”
“Go on.”
“I started screaming and the fucker opened the trunk real quick like he was standing waiting for it. He hit me with a taser. It was excruciating, my whole body seized up, I thought I was having a heart attack. Then he held that shit over my mouth again and I passed out.
“Next time I came around, there was a plastic bag over my head. I could hardly breathe the air was so thick. There was no doubt in my mind that I was going to die. I kept passing out from lack of oxygen. Finally, I woke up and you were standing over me.”
Coombes said nothing for a moment and skimmed the notes he’d made in his notebook. He’d found in the past that constant eye contact could cause a victim to shut down, they needed moments of apparent privacy to recover.
“When he opened the trunk you didn’t see his face?”
“All I saw was a baseball cap and sunglasses. My vision was washed out from being in the dark and suddenly getting full sunlight. It was blinding.”
He nodded.
“Facial hair? Scars? Tattoos?”
Olivia shook her head.
“Did he say anything to you?”
“No, nothing.”
“Did he smell of anything?”
Olivia paused. “Yeah, actually. Gasoline.”
That figured. The killer had set her dad’s house on fire. Coombes was silent for a moment. They had arrived at the moment he’d come here for and he didn’t want her to dismiss it.
“Why would Nicky say he’d done it if it wasn’t true?”
“I don’t know, and it’s all I’ve been able to think about. He must’ve thought it was the only way to save me.”
“That’s interesting, I hadn’t considered that.”
She looked at him hopefully.
“You think it’s possible?”
“I do, but that’s not the same as saying he didn’t do it. People are not always who we think they are, everyone has secrets. Was your brother having problems with anyone, business, personal, something like that?
“You knew Nicky. He was mercurial. Anything could set him off, but it usually meant nothing. He wasn’t someone to hide how he felt, he’d just explode and get it all off his chest at once. He could be in a huge argument with someone, then see the same person again twenty minutes later, and he’d not understand why they didn’t want to talk to him.”
“Is it possible he had enemies?”
She sighed.
“He made a new enemy every day. Every time he opened his mouth.”
Coombes recalled the way Nicky had spoken to him at his father’s service. It wasn’t hard for him to imagine someone taking his comments to heart. Had he simply crossed paths with the wrong person and got into an argument?
“How was Nicky’s relationship with your father?”
Olivia Sutton’s face soured.
“They were too much alike. They argued constantly. About the business, about nothing, about me.”
“Why about you?”
“Dad thought I should work for the family business. I’m a corporate lawyer, not a realtor. What would I do in his business? It was stupid. Dad wasn’t used to hearing the word no, he thought he could change anyone’s mind by shouting at them for fifteen minutes. Nicky always defended me.”
That about wrapped things up for him. He closed his notebook and returned it to his pocket. He noticed her chest deflate, like she’d been holding her breath and had suddenly relaxed. He’d seen the same thing many times before and it always meant something was being held back. She walked him back up through the building the way he’d come in.
He turned to her as they walked.
“I want you to understand something, Olivia. My department considers this case closed. We had a lot of pressure to solve it and nobody wants to change their minds. This is a win for them and they’re going to be running the flag up. Finding this guy now is going to be difficult, I won’t lie to you. He’s a ghost.
“About the only advantage we have is that he thinks no one is looking for him. So do not mention that aspect of our conversation to anyone, not even your husband. I came by to check you were all right. That’s all, okay? In the meantime, you should avoid watching television for the next couple of days. In fact, you might want to get out of town, somewhere news crews won’t find you.”
She nodded and was quiet for a moment.
“It wasn’t Nicky, I know it wasn’t.”
They were in the main entrance now, with the checkerboard marble floor.
“You know what that means if it’s true, don’t you?”
She frowned, not understanding.
“Well,” Coombes continued, his voice lowered. “If it wasn’t him, then the person that did this is still out there. He could start all over again. It was only really chance that we noticed the killings for what they were in the first place.”
“You think I’m in danger?”
“No, I don’t. Coming after you would expose Nicky’s innocence. He went to a lot of effort to frame your brother, so he’ll want to avoid anything that could unravel all that.”
They walked down the steps into the courtyard. There had always been an easy physical intimacy between them but that was gone. There was a space now, and in that space, an invisible wall now existed. He’d killed her brother; the wall would never go away. He got into his car, started the engine, and opened the window.
Her face looked blankly down at him, devoid of life.
“If that bastard comes back for me, I’ll be ready.”
Coombes pretended not to hear this.
“One last question. Was Nicky seeing someone?”
“You mean a therapist?”
He tilted his head.
“Was he dating someone.”
“No.”
Olivia’s cheeks turned scarlet, embarrassed by her mistake. No doubt this meant that Nicky had been seeing a therapist. It was an interesting detail, but he knew from experience that it probably meant nothing. In the social circles Nicky moved in, seeing a therapist was as normal as visiting a dentist. It might even have been part of his court-mandated anger management program.
“Do you remember his last relationship?”
“If you’re asking for her name, I don’t have it. He might not have known it himself. They seemed to come and go. Probably literally. I think he met them on one of those gross hook-up apps you install on your phone. I doubt he saw any of them more than once. I haven’t seen him with one of those skanks in almost a year. He had turned his life around.”
Coombes nodded. It confirmed his theory. Not only was Nicky not gay, he was a serial womanizer. Until recently, it appeared.
“Maybe he met someone special?”
She smiled sadly. “I hope so.”
He looked at the dark halo of her eyes and saw that they’d gone dead, like an artist’s sketch.
“Olivia, I don’t think you should be around guns. Get some rest.”
She said nothing, and after a beat he put the car in gear and drove off leaving her standing there. He glanced in the door mirror and watched her get smaller and smaller, before the driveway twisted and she was gone.
He wondered if he’d see her alive again.
39
Grace Sato answered her door wearing faded blue jeans and a navy T-shirt that left a band of midriff showing. Her hair was all over the place, she had no shoes or socks on and, judging from the large neck hole on the T-shirt, no bra. Her smile was quick and natural, her eyes lighting up as they saw him.
“Johnny! Come in.”
Her apartment was small, not much larger than a motel room, and he found himself looking at her bed through the open door of her bedroom. The sheets were all crumpled up, and it occurred to him that she might not be alone.
“Is now a bad time? I could come back.”
She seemed to understand what he was thinking.
“Oh. There’s no one else here, I’m a mess. You want a beer or something?”
Her cheeks had a rose tint spreading across them and her smile was gone.
“I’m good. Just here to pick your brains.”
“I thought maybe you were here to finish our discussion.”
Coombes knew what discussion she was talking about, and he didn’t want to get into that again. Not now, not later. He looked around and saw that she had a single chair in front of her television. There wasn’t even a coffee table. He turned back.
“How did it go with FID?”
“They grilled me pretty good,” Coombes said. “How about you?”
“Less than an hour, not bad. You followed policy, Johnny, you’ll be fine.”
His face contorted awkwardly.
“I showed Lass a photograph of Sutton. He doesn’t think it’s our guy.”
“Oh, shit. Come into my office.”
She walked into her bedroom and sat on her bed. There was nowhere else in her whole apartment for them to sit together. He sat next to her. The room smelled feminine. Flowers, strawberries, and something else. It was the smell of her body, he thought. A nice smell, a fertile smell. Coming here had been a mistake.
What kind of person didn’t have a spare chair?
“Is it how you imagined it?”
“What?” He asked.
“My bedroom.”
“Grace, can we not do this? We’re partners.”
“I know you want me, Johnny. Why not admit it?”
“Whatever it is, it’s my problem.”
“What if we have the same problem?”
He stared at her and said nothing. It couldn’t be true.
“How is this a mystery to you? That old woman in the hotel elevator saw it straight away and she’s not a detective.”
“It’s smaller,” he said eventually. “Your bedroom, I mean. I also imagined a big window with shades that never got closed, like you didn’t care who saw what.”
“Then you do know me.”
“I’m not here to talk about this.”
“All right, but it’s not going away.”
He nodded and tried to get back to where he was when he’d arrived at her apartment. It seemed to be a lifetime ago.
“I was thinking about Sutton’s confession. I don’t have brothers or sisters, so I wanted to ask you. If someone took one of your siblings, would you trade your life for theirs? Would you say you were a serial killer if that kept them alive?”
“I don’t know. If you were trying to buy time, I guess you might.”
“What would make you do what I’m suggesting, without doubt?”
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, her head still tilted back toward him. Sato stayed like that for a while, thinking. He wanted to kiss her, and plenty more besides.
“A child. If I was a mother and someone took my kid, I’d do anything.”
It was perfect. Missing piece of a puzzle perfect. Only, the missing piece came from a different puzzle and, even knowing this, Coombes couldn’t get over how well it fitted.
“Jesus. Too bad Nicky didn’t have a kid.”
