The Scapegoat, page 4
He was used to dealing with murder victims, people that were definitely dead. Though he suspected Amy Tremaine was dead, he had to work on the premise that she wasn’t, that she could be saved if he could find her in time. Like Schrödinger’s cat, she was both dead and alive at the same time and the pressure this caused was exhausting.
He ordered his coffee to go in case he had to leave early and got a table facing the door. It occurred to him that the server hadn’t asked his name yet the barista had put the coffee down in front of him regardless. He turned the paper cup around and saw that it had COP written on it. He would’ve laughed, except that some ugly backstory probably lay behind it.
At least it isn’t PIG, he thought.
He plugged his thumb drive into his tablet and brought up footage for the day before the kidnapping. Looking first for Amy, then for the figure that had leapt out the Ford Transit. Her timing was almost identical to the day of her abduction, less than a minute difference. She walked through shot, calm and assured, oblivious to the coming danger. He saw no one that matched the kidnapper, or anyone else that was acting suspiciously.
Coombes jumped the footage on eight hours then left it playing back at four times normal speed while he drank his Americano. He wasn’t sure when she finished work, so he had to sit and wait. Eventually, she entered shot at ten past seven. Amy looked tired, but showed no concern about her safety. If one of her clients had threatened her that day, he would have expected to see something on her face.
Grabbing her on her way home was never going to be ideal for the exact reason he had already found. Amy had no fixed finished time. She was a conscientious worker and finished whatever she was working on before heading home, even if that meant working late. He supposed there might also be days when she finished early, depending on workload.
Short of tracking her movements with a GPS tag, it would be impossible for anyone to guess when she would enter the abduction zone.
The mornings were a different story.
Her timing then was consistent, controlled by the D Line timetable. She used the same Metro service every morning got off at virtually the same time and walked to work via Starbucks for a last-minute pick-me-up. Her routine was highly predictable and made the task of abducting her painfully easy.
Based on this realization, he decided to focus on morning footage, going backward one day at a time. He was able to quickly locate her each day. Confident, happy. Believing that her work helping others was making a difference.
He found what he needed on the second-to-last file.
Seventeen days before he bundled her into the van, her kidnapper walked along the street directly behind her. Close enough, that he could’ve reached out and put his hand on her shoulder. As they were about to exit the frame, the man stopped to look around, seeing the potential of the area as a kidnapping point.
The trees planted on the sidewalk before and after limited visibility and caused pedestrians to move in a uniform manner. After the abduction there was a direct feed onto West 5th Street, then a straight shot onto the 110. It appeared to be a professional risk assessment and it came to Coombes that the man was likely from a military or law enforcement background.
This was the moment it was decided, he thought.
Coombes paused the video to analyze the man’s appearance. On this day, he was wearing a dark-blue suit jacket over navy jeans, with a white shirt with no tie. Smart, but casual. He wore a pair of wrap-around sunglasses with legs that that sat straight and didn’t hook around the ear. On his wrist was a watch on a green fabric bracelet known as a NATO strap.
A military field watch.
The watch had 12 and 24-hour times on the hour markers and was simple but durable. A Hamilton, he thought, perhaps a Seiko or a Timex. A design classic, but something of a relic.
Modern soldiers wore digital watches encased in chunky black plastic. Field watches were from a bygone era and as a result, were either worn by officers who wanted to distance themselves from the lower ranks, or sons who had inherited a war watch from their father.
Coombes added the information to his notebook and circled military background.
He considered the man’s change of dress. It was a complete overhaul from the man in track pants, sneakers and warm-up jacket that had sprung out of the van to abduct her. This smart-casual look would not have alarmed anyone, Amy Tremaine included.
It was the perfect camouflage.
Grabbing Amy off the street in broad daylight in the heart of downtown was dangerous. The location was less than a mile from LAPD headquarters, and both marked and unmarked vehicles were in the area all the time. Once she got off the Metro, it would’ve been a five-minute walk to Starbucks and another five minutes back to her office. Most of that route was too exposed or had too much traffic to make for a viable kidnap point.
It meant that instead of a ten-minute window to capture her, it was more like 15 seconds as she passed in front of the electronics store.
This was their one shot, all or nothing.
So why take her here, not as she left her home?
Her apartment in MacArthur Park was far from the safety of her father’s home in Brentwood. She’d rejected his lifestyle and his values, but that hadn’t taken the target off her back.
Barnes thought the area around her apartment offered many more potential abduction points and he had to agree. The agent had concluded that the reason they hadn’t taken her there was because they didn’t know where she lived.
In the light of the earlier footage, that made no sense.
A kidnapper that ran recon on a target three weeks prior to an abduction wouldn’t just recon one end of the route, they’d do the whole thing. They’d track her all the way home, traveling with her on the Metro, right up to the door of her building.
Coombes shook his head.
The kidnappers didn’t need Elizabeth Walton for anything.
Now that he knew which day to look at and how his perpetrator was dressed, he could re-trace their route using Metro security cameras. Somewhere there’d be footage that could identify him. He added this to his notes and finished his coffee. When he put his cup down, he glanced at the image frozen on his tablet just as the power saver turned the screen black.
He caught a glimpse of something at the last second.
Coombes woke the screen again.
Amy Tremaine and her abductor right of center frame, moving to the left as before. Behind them, however, another man was looking straight at them. Coombes dragged the playhead and saw the second man’s head turn as they walked past.
He scrubbed the playhead backward and forward, faster and faster, amplifying the small movement. The second man’s head followed Amy perfectly. Watching her every moment. Coombes paused on a frame when he was facing straight toward the camera.
The second man was tall and muscular, with a shaved angular head.
He looked like bad news.
The worst news you could imagine.
Like a killer who would think nothing of murdering innocent young women once they were no more use to him. If it was indeed a two-man operation, he had to be looking at the driver. Coombes zoomed in tight on the paused video with his fingers. There was almost no degradation in image quality. The man’s face was sharp and unobstructed. They’d be able to run it through facial recognition for an ID.
Coombes smiled.
Maybe the morning hadn’t been a wash after all.
6
Coombes returned to the Police Administration Building, the headquarters of the LAPD, and the home of Robbery-Homicide. He needed to start assembling the pieces he had so far to see if a picture was forming, and to help him decide where to go next. He decided first to get Gantz up to speed with the kidnapping of Amy Tremaine and the arrival of the FBI. When he finished, she sat back in her seat and looked him in the eye.
“All right, I’ll bite. What do you want?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“John, the entire time you’ve worked here, you’ve never once updated me on a case unless I asked you to. So, you want something. Spit it out.”
“I could ask you the same question, couldn’t I? You’ve never come to a crime scene before and told me how to conduct business. What’s that about?”
“Tremaine has enough money to burn down the department. My presence was to reassure him that he was in good hands and that I had my best man on the case.”
Coombes shifted from foot to foot and she smiled at his discomfort.
“So. What was it you wanted?”
“I passed Becker’s desk on the way in. He’s sitting there like he’s waiting to have a tooth pulled. I get why you didn’t want him to lead the investigation, but if he’s doing nothing, I’d like to bring him into this. I have a lot of numbers to run down and any one of them could lead to Amy Tremaine. I figure all hands on deck, no?”
Gantz nodded.
“That’s a good idea, but office duty only, okay?”
“Lieutenant?”
“He is not to go outside the building, are we clear? I promised his wife.”
A void opened up inside him. He knew what she was going to say, but he asked it anyway.
“What happened?”
Gantz sighed, her eyes dipping down to her hands for a moment.
“He said he was cleaning his gun and it went off. Missed his head by a quarter inch.”
“But you don’t believe that.”
“Of course not, and neither does his wife. His service weapon is now in my drawer. Not everyone is ready for retirement and he’s been a cop for a long time. My concern is that he could put himself in danger intentionally, or otherwise. So, he stays in the building until he’s end of watch, no exceptions. Aside from that, use him how you wish.”
Coombes nodded and walked to the door. Becker needed to keep his mind busy, he thought. To feel useful. Benching him like this was the wrong move.
“John? You look like you spent the night on a sofa.”
He turned back, surprised by her insight.
“There are worse places to be.”
Gantz made a knowing face.
“Keep trying, Coombes, it’s all you can do.”
He nodded and left the room.
If he knew one thing about himself, it was that he wasn’t going to keep trying. Not with Julie, not anymore. He was done.
A tall paper to-go cup sat on his desk. A Starbucks Grande, his second of the morning. There was another on Sato’s desk, although she was currently absent. It made him feel bad about the way he’d handled the psychiatrist issue. She’d caught him by surprise, that was all. Now, because of his reaction, she thought she needed to apologize by getting him a coffee.
The coffee was the same temperature as the sun, Sato wasn’t long back. It would be an easy ten minutes before he could drink it so he set the cup to one side and transferred the pictures he’d taken at the crime scene from his cell phone onto his computer. After he’d done this, he spent a couple of minutes reviewing them on the big screen. It was easy to miss details in the heat of the moment, or on his cell phone.
No new details were popping out for him, so he moved the photographs to a new folder on his network drive. He remembered the drone footage of Amy Tremaine’s abduction and transferred that over as well.
While Coombes waited for the large files to transfer, he wrote a brief message on a Post-It Note and stuck it on top of Sato’s coffee cup.
Sorry for being a dick. J x
He walked across the detective bureau to where Becker’s desk was located and saw from the other man’s face that he’d gone from a simple tooth extraction to a double root canal.
“Mark, I need a huge favor.”
Becker’s pained expression cleared and he smiled.
“John. Didn’t see you there. What can I do for you?”
“I need help running down some details. It’s not sexy, but I need someone sharp and I immediately thought of you. Do you have a minute?”
“In fact, I’ve got four days to fill. What do you need?”
Coombes laid out the basics of the case so far, the screenshots he’d taken of Walton’s cell phone and the long list of unidentified phone numbers that he needed to convert into names and addresses. It was grunt-work of the worst kind, suitable for a newly-qualified rookie, but it was enough for a light to return to Becker’s eyes.
“I’m on it.”
“Don’t slow-walk this one, Mark, I need it ASAP. There’s plenty more where this came from if you want it.”
Becker took no offense and appeared grateful at the prospect. Coombes had been in the same position himself more than once. When faced with long hours with nothing to do, the smallest job would be stretched to fill the time available.
Sato was back at her desk when he returned, her head in a book.
A Post-It was sitting on the lid of his own coffee with three Kanji characters carefully printed on it. Coombes pointed his cell phone at it to translate it.
Forgiven.
He peeled off the note and stuck it to his cubicle wall. There was a small collection of notes up there already. Kanji was an art form to him; he could look at it all day.
His coffee had finally reached drinking temperature and he drank the top third in a rush. Coombes stood and looked over the divider at Sato and noticed for the first time that she was wearing nitrile gloves.
“What are you reading?”
“Walton’s journal. She wrote everything down on paper. Stream of consciousness stuff. What it means, I can’t say. I should’ve left it with Dr. Kenner, see what she made of it.”
“Read something.”
“All right.” Sato cleared her throat. “January 6. Saw a teenage girl in Walgreens today. Her ass was hanging out and she had a busted lip. Fourteen years old, if she was a day. A middle-age man was hauling her down the aisle by her arm. It was impossible to tell if he was a date, or her father. I suppose I’m in no position to judge. Out of curiosity, I followed them. She picked up a pregnancy test. I said nothing, it was already too late.”
“All the entries are like that?”
“Pretty much.”
“What’s that ‘no position to judge’ mean?”
“I assume she saw something of herself in the girl.”
“Anything to move the case on?”
“No, but she’s a riot. She could’ve run a podcast with this stuff.”
He drank some coffee while he thought things over.
“All right, give me five minutes to make some notes and I’ll catch you up on the rest of my morning. In the meantime, I want you to look at recent social media posts made by Elizabeth Walton, Amy Tremaine, Harlan Tremaine,” he paused to check his notebook, “and someone called Cora Roche.”
He spelled the last name as Sato wrote it down. Her head came back up.
“Looking for what?”
“Links between them, changes in circumstance or behavior. Find out if Walton was dating someone. You wouldn’t believe how often a victim posts a happy picture with their killer before it all goes to shit.”
Sato nodded, like she could imagine it all too easily.
Coombes turned back to his computer and opened a new spreadsheet. Using an existing template, he quickly mapped out a timeline for the day, separating the Walton events into one column and the Tremaine events into another. He included when the LAPD became involved, when they arrived on scene, and the same for the FBI.
When he finished, he stared at the row representing the fifty-six-minute window where Harlan Tremaine said he had ‘disappeared’. It wasn’t unusual for people to lose time. Hell, he probably lost five minutes himself every time he went into the shower stall.
Fifty-six minutes.
That was a lot of time to lose.
Coombes supposed that part of his problem with Tremaine’s statement was that he had a pre-existing idea about who the man was from his time in office: his appetite for keep-fit and bodybuilding; his stance on guns; and his love of gas-consuming cars and SUVs.
The man’s posturing was pure testosterone, virility, and adrenalin. This was at odds with someone who spaced out for almost an hour at the sight of a dead body. His eyes continued to move over the data.
On the face of it, the two crimes split easily in two.
The only chronological overlap between the two columns was the time period where he’d extrapolated when Amy Tremaine had to have left her apartment, and the time she spent riding the Metro to Pershing Square. Since she was a victim, this was no overlap at all. There was plenty of time for Walton’s killer to get across town and abduct Amy.
He realized that Sato hadn’t seen the footage yet.
“Grace, leave that just now I’ve got something to show you.”
Sato rolled her chair along the floor until she was sitting next to him.
Coombes played the clip of the abduction first, then the earlier clip of the reconnaissance run. She sat in stony silence as the events unfolded, her eyes moving around the screen. He could tell that she was imagining herself in Amy’s position, which was not the reaction he’d had. He moved clear so that she could replay each one herself.
After she’d watched each clip three times, he cut in.
“What do you think?”
“That’s definitely our guy,” she said. “Do the FBI have this?”
“They have the abduction; I don’t know if they found the other one.”
She studied him for a moment.
“You don’t want them to have it, do you?”
“If we give it to them they’ll shut us down, if they don’t know, they can’t.”
“It’s easier to ask forgiveness than get permission?”
Coombes smiled. “One of my favorite quotes.”
“No kidding. Ok, so this is our guy. What can we do with it? Is this going to be enough to identify him? You can only see this side of his face and his ear. It could be anyone.”
He nodded. She wasn’t wrong.
“I let you see it three times for a reason. It was kind of a test. I figure that if you didn’t notice, neither would they, assuming they got this far.”
Sato’s eyes flicked back to the screen and he began to replay the scene then paused it with the background figure looking straight at the camera. She still hadn’t seen the man, her eyes focused instead on the foreground.
