The Dark Halo, page 4
He searched through the folder of clips. There were no cameras in the hotel hallways, or on the space in front of each elevator. There was a camera facing each fire door on the stairwell, but from a quick skim, nobody had used the stairs all day.
Coombes sat back in his chair, vexed.
He’d expected nothing from the hotel security footage, but this wasn’t nothing. The footage had been altered somehow. He had avoided looking at the footage the night before because he’d assumed it would just show Vandenberg going to his room without incident. Whenever an investigation flamed-out like that at the end of a day, the next day never recovered. It was better to go to sleep positive for the day to come than crashing and burning, at which point sleep would be impossible.
Now that he had the files he needed sorted and the timelines in place, he reset them all and played it all back from the beginning. This time, during the long shot of Vandenberg waiting he noticed what could be an elbow behind a pillar to one side of the elevator. Someone waiting and hiding from the camera. He kept the clip playing, after Vandenberg had got on and watched the doors start to close. The figure darted from behind the pillar to catch the door of the elevator. It took less than a second, and it was at the limit of the camera’s range, almost out of shot.
It had to be the killer.
Coombes enlarged the long shot of the lobby and slowly scrubbed through the footage to see if there was anything usable. There wasn’t, it was garbage. The picture degraded so badly with the enlargement, he couldn’t tell if the figure was a man or a woman. He froze the best frame on screen.
It was worse than the Bigfoot clip from the 80s, it could be anyone.
He selected the video from the rear elevator camera and cued it up on the 12th floor, just before the picture went black the second time. The doors opened. No-one was standing in front of the doors waiting, he could see the floor. After a moment, the doors began to automatically close again. As before, a hand caught the edge of the door, interrupting the time-out. As soon as this happened, the cameras had gone black.
This, he suspected, was not a coincidence. The footage hadn’t been erased; it hadn’t been captured in the first place.
“Johnny. What did we get on the cameras? Is it Jack or Shit?”
He turned and saw Sato staring at his stubble like she wanted to touch it.
“Very perceptive. What we have is a ghost, let me show you.”
She leaned in close as he ran through it. Watching the different feeds on screen, listening to what he said and nodding. It wasn’t until after he’d finished that she spoke.
“So, either there’s a fault with the elevator that cuts the camera when the emergency door release is triggered, or else our killer did something to it. If it’s the former, he’d have to be a hotel employee past of present to know about it.”
“Right.”
“Can you go back to when the hand stops the door on 12?”
He reversed the footage to line it up.
“There,” Sato said, pointing.
Coombes saw it for the first time and had to use the slow-motion control to get it back on-screen. The camera had captured four frames of video showing an arm reaching out, wrist extended, before cutting out.
“A diver’s watch.”
“A Rolex,” she said. “That’s a Submariner. It’s iconic.”
“Maybe…or a knock-off from a market stall.”
“Let’s suppose this isn’t a hotel employee,” she said. “After all, the hotel link only works for Vandenberg, not for any of the others. The most likely scenario is that the killer knows the victims, or moves in the same circles as them.”
“If the Rolex is real, what does that get us?”
“It’s something, Johnny. Isn’t it?”
Someone killing off the rich and powerful would be unpopular upstairs without adding that the perpetrator might be another rich person. He turned to Sato. She was still leaning down next to him, her face close enough to kiss. He smiled awkwardly.
“Sorry, Grace. You’re right, it’s good. A start of a profile.”
“Take a break, let me have a look at the video.”
His wife hadn’t been this close to him in two months.
“Sure.”
With the security footage behind him, he was left with no new material to chase down leads so he spent the next half hour arranging for SID to pay a visit to the hotel to look into the unfortunately timed camera failures. He was told that without an active murder case number it would likely take 10 days before it could be fitted into the work schedule and to call back if that situation changed. By the time the call ended the Vandenberg crime scene photographs were available and he began looking through them. The old man looked whiter than he remembered, like a store mannikin wearing a $10,000 suit.
Nothing fresh was coming to him so he decided to go back to the other cases he’d identified to see if anything new came to him in light of Vandenberg’s murder. He pulled the pictures up again, not expecting much. The same grim scenes appeared before him. Rather than a physical print, the digital format allowed him to zoom right in on the smallest detail with only marginal loss in quality.
He sat close to the computer screen, zooming and panning.
The first picture, of Theodore Sutton, was the cleanest. It was just a man’s body hanging from a ceiling in front of a panoramic window. The room was stripped bare for renovation work that might now never happen. A single chair lay on its side next to his foot on a wooden floor. Behind him, a cloudless blue sky. The floor was so deeply polished that he could see a partial reflection of the body hanging above it. Nothing else was in shot.
They called it a short drop.
It was almost always from stepping off a chair or a table, whatever first came to hand. Sometimes the drop was only two feet from start to finish. It was definitely not the way to go, Coombes thought. At a bare minimum, the drop should be equal to the height of the person before the fall is arrested. The goal was to fracture the second cervical vertebrae at the base of the skull, not suffocate slowly to death. A characteristic of short drop crime scene photographs, were the scrape marks that would be left wherever the victim’s hands and feet could reach as they tried desperately to reverse their decision.
There was no sign of that here. Sutton’s feet couldn’t reach the floor, his hands couldn’t reach the walls. He selected a close-up of Theodore Sutton’s head and shoulders. Coombes would’ve expected to see claw marks around his neck as Sutton fought to relieve the pressure from his belt with his hands. There was nothing.
A possible explanation was that someone had strangled Sutton beforehand, then placed his dead body into the belt loop to frame it as a suicide. It was an explanation that made the most sense to him since there was considerable overlap in the injuries sustained by strangulation and those from hanging victims. Namely, crushing injuries to the structures of the throat and petechial hemorrhaging in the eyes and face.
Without taking his eyes off the screen, he picked up his coffee cup and drank half the contents. The belt was about an inch wide. Coombes reflected that manual strangulation by hands would produce finger marks wider than an inch. A garrote, on the other hand, might be too thin and leave narrower damage, inconsistent with the belt. Some other kind of ligature would have to have been used. It struck him that he was looking at it. The belt. If the killer had used the belt as a garrote, then everything would line up perfectly.
There was no evidence to support this theory, and even to his own ear it sounded fanciful. A belt would require more strength to apply. To be successful, the killer’s arms and shoulders would be tremendous. A body builder, or a wrestler, that’s the kind of body shape you’d need. He sighed. Anything he found regarding the death of Theodore Sutton would be tainted by their prior relationship. He’d be accused of seeing things he wanted to see because he didn’t want to accept a far simpler truth.
That he’d killed himself.
A long time ago, the man in the picture had been a friend to him. A father-figure when his own father had been absent. Since Sutton’s death, he’d thought many times about the two summers he’d pretty much lived in their house in Silver Lake. He remembered no signs of depression, or even sadness, but people changed. Life happened. A lot of times, people with depression hid it like it was something shameful or embarrassing. Yet as he looked at the scene there was something almost serene about it.
Sutton’s demons, if he had any, were gone now.
He switched back to the wide shot and zoomed in on the knocked over chair that Sutton appeared to have used to climb up. His foot should’ve been able to reach it. Not enough to save himself, but enough to kick it farther away as they windmilled desperately beneath him. The chair was too close to the body, and Coombes thought it was an affectation, like the wine bottle in Vandenberg’s hotel room. A prop, placed there to tell a story.
He moved on to the next suicide, Harry Ryan.
The scene was grim. A businessman sitting at his desk in a luxury leather chair looking straight into the camera lens. The top of his head was missing along the hairline, and the contents were on the wall behind him. Coombes had no sympathy for people who chose to shoot themselves knowing others would have to deal with the aftermath. That a family member could find their body. The visceral contrast between Ryan’s death and that of Sutton’s was jarring. It was hard to put the two together and see any link between them, and he hadn’t. Not then.
Two high profile suicides weren’t a pattern, they weren’t even a coincidence. Rich people could be depressed the same as anyone else. Everyone had problems, and many weren’t money-related. Sato’s thought about ill health was a good example. You could be fine one day, then told you had six months to live the next. A dire prognosis made many want to skip to the end. No-one wants to suffer. But six suicides in two months was a high number in such a small section of the community.
A non-pattern, pattern.
Coombes moved the picture so that the top of the image was cropped off and he didn’t have to look at it. The top half was so powerful, you saw nothing else. He zoomed in again, this time on the desk in front of Ryan.
The desk was busy and his eye moved slowly along it looking at each item. Left of center was a large iMac, a keyboard, a mouse, and a small wooden stand holding an iPhone at an angle. Along the front, were framed photographs. They faced away from the camera, but Coombes knew they were pictures of the man’s wife and children. The two frames featuring Ryan’s youngest children were face down on the desk, presumably so that he didn’t have to see their faces as he emptied his brains onto the wall. Then there was a desk lamp, cordless headphones, and a large black mug overflowing with pens. He caught a glint in the corner of the image and tracked back for a better look. Hard to say what it was, the angle was all wrong.
He switched to high angle shot of the desk.
Two coins, one stacked on top of the other.
Silver dollars.
A shiver went down Coombes’ spine. What were the odds the coins would appear at two suicides six weeks apart? Nobody used them as a form of currency anymore, though plenty remained in circulation.
He opened the file for Gordon Sellers.
The man sat on a floor with his back against a wall. Next to his body was a long gas cylinder, now empty. A hose led from the cylinder to a clear plastic bag that was drawn loosely around Sellers’ head. It was known as an exit bag. The bag filled with an inert gas, in this case helium, displacing the oxygen the body needed to survive. Because there’s no build-up of carbon dioxide the body suffocates without complaint.
It was a relatively peaceful scene, but Coombes gave that little attention. His eyes moved quickly over the image and soon found what he was looking for on the corner of a small table to the right of Sellers’ shoulder. He double-checked all the crime scene photographs.
With the exception of Sutton, every scene featured two silver dollars. It was the killer’s signature, and it was enough to take to Gantz.
Coombes opened a notepad app and made a list of all the so-called suicides, the date they died, and the cause of death. He included Sutton, despite the absence of silver dollars at the crime scene, then sat back on his chair to let his mind soak up the details.
Theodore Sutton 10/12 hanging
Harry Ryan 10/18 self-administered GSW
Gordon Sellers 10/25 inert gas exit bag
Simon Keehan 11/01 cyanide
William Morgan 11/15 drowning
Milton Vandenberg 11/22 drug overdose
After close to a minute, he pulled up his calendar and looked at the dates.
All the deaths occurred on a Friday, except for Sutton, who died on a Saturday. He sighed. A day out. Again, Sutton didn’t fit. Teddy had been good to him and he wasn’t ready to give up on him just yet. Coombes wondered why he preferred the idea of his friend’s father dying by serial killer opposed to taking his own life. Surely a suicide was better than a murder?
There was something else wrong with the dates.
It was obvious that a name was missing between Keehan and Morgan.
6
Pacific Pictures was located on a strip of land next to the L.A. River between Griffith Park and Glendale. There was no archway entrance, or Golden Era movie magic about the place, it was simply an industrial unit that could just as easily have been selling windshield wiper motors. He reversed his detective car, currently a Dodge Charger, into a space facing the office. A row of parked vehicles sat directly outside. Sixteen vehicles total, twelve cars, four SUV. Low-end Far East brands for the most part, the kind that ran for a million miles without complaint, with a couple of BMWs and Audis making up the rest. In Los Angeles, homicide cases always came down to automobiles in one form or another, and it was worth keeping an eye on what people were driving. Nobody took the bus to a killing. Nobody walked.
He turned to Sato.
“Is this what an eight-billion-dollar company looks like?”
“They look set to burn the building down for the insurance.”
“You got that right.”
Coombes cut the engine and the push of chilled air from the air conditioning came to a halt. He always waited until the last moment before turning off the engine. As long as the engine was running, he could sit in a car all day. The cool air and vibration relaxed him. He swung the door open and stepped out onto the asphalt. The surface was in poor condition, he could feel it through his shoes. He closed the top button of his suit jacket then walked toward the entrance, Sato taking quick steps to catch him up.
A man in his twenties with prominent Adam’s apple and a piece of metal in his nose looked up. His eyes widened in alarm as he saw the two of them standing there. Coombes’ suit jacket covered his badge and gun, but that never mattered. After eight years on the job, he might as well have LAPD tattooed on his forehead in inch-high letters.
He asked to speak to Vandenberg’s assistant and was escorted down a hallway to a meeting room to wait. He guessed that the room was used for internal meetings only, for sure they didn’t bring producers or actors into a place like this. A long table divided the room in two, one end piled high with what he supposed were scripts, and the other end had a prime view of the cars parked out front. Although there were plenty of seats, Coombes remained standing, his attention alternating between the window and the door. Sometimes people made a run for it, and it never seemed to be the ones he expected.
“What do you hope to get from this?” Grace asked.
“A confession.”
She laughed. “And short of that?”
“The usual. Find a lead, eliminate dead ends.”
“I just figure it’s a bit of a long shot.”
“A couple of years ago I heard a story about an actor. A famous one, not somebody you never heard of. Anyway, she was really beautiful, was always on those hottest lists in men’s magazines, but she was never seen with any men. People started to talk, you know? Then she starts dating the plainest man you could imagine, looked like he might try sell you cheese in a deli. Guess why?”
“Because he asked her on a date?”
“Correct. Her looks had been scaring men off for years. Nobody thought they were good enough. The bottom line is, it’s always worth asking. Maybe you don’t get the answer you want, maybe it leads you in a new direction, but you can’t do this job typing on a keyboard. Murder is a people business. You need to see their face.”
“Johnny, look at me.”
He turned and looked at her. There was a smile in her eyes, they had a sparkle. She was cracking herself up.
“What?”
“It’s always worth asking.”
“You disagree?”
“In this case, no I don’t. I like your story. Although I do wonder why she always waited to be approached, was she not able to talk to men first?”
“Is that what you do, Grace?”
“When the man is too stupid to recognize a flirt, you have to. But I like how special I feel when a man makes the first move. It’s romantic. It makes me feel attractive and special.”
She was making strong eye contact, which wasn’t easy given her height. Her head was tilted way back looking up at him. He said nothing. He didn’t know what she wanted.
“I’m guessing your wife made the first move, huh?”
The door opened and a woman walked in full of energy, like she had better things to be doing than talk to a couple of dumb cops. Her hair was piled up on top of her head in a neat bun and her clothes looked like they cost more than most of the cars through the window.
