The Dark Halo, page 5
“I’m Carly Rogers, I was Mr. Vandenberg’s executive assistant, which I guess means I drew the short straw.”
She smiled pleasantly enough, like she was telling a joke, but he knew the truth when he heard it. He wouldn’t be much of a cop if he didn’t. They sat down. He took out a notebook and a pen and turned it to a blank page.
“All right. It took us longer than I would have liked getting here, and I can tell you’ve got other things to do, so if you don’t mind, we’ll get right to it. A bit of background first. How was Mr. Vandenberg to work for? Was he well-liked? Was he aggressive? I’m just trying to get an accurate idea of who he was in case that’s relevant.”
“He could be tough to work for sometimes, sure. He was the boss, there was a lot of pressure on him. He never said please or thank you, he never said good job or you look nice today. When you did well, he would sometimes give a small nod. That was it.”
“Let me put it this way,” Coombes said, repositioning his chair so he could cross his legs so that his left shoe was resting on his right knee. “When the news broke that he had passed away, were people smiling and laughing, or were they sad?”
“We were upset, of course we were. We still are. Truthfully, we’re also worried about our jobs. The studio was close to collapse when he arrived. Everything we achieved is because of him. His investment, his leadership, the people he brought in. That’s all at risk now.”
“So, you never saw anyone happy by what happened?”
“No, never. We’re like a family here.”
Coombes looked around the room at framed posters for the studio’s movies that lined the walls. Pacific Pictures’ output was exclusively violent and most of the posters featured an explosion, not to mention actors holding guns. The posters for the Stick Shift movies dominated but another franchise about spies caught his eye. The inspiration for Vandenberg’s hotel keycard switch. He debated whether such information was worth watching eight terrible movies to find out. He thought not.
Coombes turned back to Carly Rogers.
“Mr. Vandenberg was high profile and outspoken. I assume that a few people along the way sent him mail, threatening him.”
He saw something in her eye, a flash of recognition. Disgust.
“He got mail like that. Mostly from people upset when they hadn’t been hired. Some became angry, you know? We never passed stuff like that on to Mr. Vandenberg, he made it clear early on that he didn’t want to know. Some got angrier when he didn’t respond. I wondered if that was the best way to go, if a simple reply might have calmed them down. Nobody likes to be ignored.”
“What did you do with this correspondence?”
“At first we just deleted it or trashed it, but one of our security people advised us to keep it, so for the last seven years that’s what we’ve done.”
“Good. We’ll need to see it.”
Her face twisted nervously.
“You don’t think he killed himself, do you? Why else would you be here?”
“We’re here to make sure we get it right.”
Sato spoke for the first time.
“How many people work at Pacific Pictures, Miss Rogers?”
“About a hundred, indirectly. Most of the crew are self-employed, have their own LLCs, same with the scriptwriters. It was one of the changes that Mr. Vandenberg brought in. Studio runs like a production company, with a low fixed overhead. Unless we hire someone, they cost us nothing. Most end up being exclusive to us anyway, they like our flexibility.”
“Is there more to Pacific Pictures than this one office?”
“What were you expecting?”
“You don’t have a lot? Fake buildings, sets, studio space, tours?”
“Our movies are shot on location. Canada, South America, Asia. Our last was shot in South Africa. The locations are part of the movie. If we find a good location, we’ll even write it into the script. There’s no need for plywood buildings with a $200 million budget.”
“Wow,” Sato said. “That’s a lot of money.”
“We like to give people something worth the ticket price.”
Coombes smiled to himself. Grace was an expert at drawing people in. Her process was always the same. She’d act dumb and the interviewee, usually male, would relax and enjoy filling her in. Then she’d hit them with the real question.
“Has anyone recently left under a cloud?”
Carly Rogers’ face soured.
“About six months ago, one of our writers.”
“Name?”
“Jake Curtis.” She pointed at one of the spy posters. “He wrote all of the Firestorm movies. Our second-biggest earner, losing him was a big loss for us.”
Coombes smiled. He liked Curtis for it already. The staging of Vandenberg’s hotel room fit with the killer being a writer, someone aware of the importance of details and what they could tell you if they were presented in the right way. He took over the interview again.
“Why was he fired?”
“He tripled his price and wanted double digit points off the front end. Nobody gets points off the front end, never mind double digits. Mr. Vandenberg laughed him out the office, told him he’d go back to Olive Garden and find another writer. That’s where-”
Her mouth popped open in a little O, remembering something.
“Let me guess,” Coombes said, wearily. “He told Vandenberg he was going to kill him on the way out the door?”
She nodded, then began to sob.
“People say things they don’t mean all the time, don’t they?”
“Tell me what he said.”
“I don’t like to say, it was disgusting.”
“Miss Rogers, there’s nothing we haven’t heard, okay? A good day for me is one where I don’t stand in someone’s brains by mistake. Harsh language I can deal with.”
She took a moment to assemble the words in her head.
“He said, ‘I’m going to f-word kill you, you f-word old c-word.’”
Coombes laughed. “Writers, eh? They’re a colorful crowd.”
She used the back of her hand to wipe tears off her cheeks and nodded again.
Grace angled her cell phone toward him with a picture of Jake Curtis. He was young, tan, muscular, and had a beard like a swarm of bees. Next to his name was his age, 26, and his estimated net worth, which was about 500 times Coombes’ yearly take-home.
“Did Mr. Curtis send threatening correspondence?”
She looked like she was going to be sick.
“That would be one way of putting it.”
“What did he send?”
“A pig’s head.”
“No kidding,” Coombes said, impressed. “How’d you know he sent it?”
“He sent it by courier. His name was on the receipt.”
He couldn’t decide if Jake Curtis was an idiot or a sociopath. He’d made no attempt to hide his identity, even though he could safely assume they’d know who’d sent it. A pig’s head. It was ballsy, for sure, but hardly likely to make Vandenberg change his mind about giving him more money. It wasn’t a spontaneous act, either. It would take time to source the head, it wasn’t like an angry e-mail that could be sent in a blind rage in a matter of moments.
“When was this? Six months ago, just after he left?”
“No. Last week.”
He glanced at Grace and she nodded.
“Why would he do that after all this time?”
Carly Rogers thought about it for a moment, then flinched.
“We put out a casting call for the new Firestorm movie. First one he didn’t write. I guess he found out and got upset. I should’ve thought about that before, but I didn’t.”
The issue was clearly still causing Curtis pain. In six months, it didn’t seem like he’d moved on at all. The franchise was his baby, and it had been taken away from him.
Grace cleared her throat.
“Who replaces Mr. Vandenberg as CEO?”
“I guess Bud Kopek, he’s second in command. The board will have to approve it first, then approve a new chief operating officer to fill his space.”
Coombes uncrossed his legs and stood up. He’d heard enough. Corporate structure bored him. They had a strong lead and he didn’t want to waste time on some suit moving to a different desk.
“We’re going to need an address for Curtis.”
“Of course.”
They went back through to the front office. Carly Rogers copied down an address from memory onto a blank Rolodex card. While she did this, Coombes turned to look at the man with a piece of metal through his nose. It looked like shrapnel. Who would want something like that? It boggled his mind what people did to their bodies. Carly passed him the writer’s address and he gave her his business card and asked her to send all of the threatening correspondence.
He paused in the doorway to put his sunglasses on, then stepped out onto the short path that led back to the parking lot and their vehicle. Next to him, Sato was silent.
“Jesus, Grace. Just say it, whatever it is.”
“You shut me down, Johnny. I wasn’t finished with her.”
“What? The corporate stuff?”
“Yes!”
He unlocked the doors of his Charger and they got in. The car’s interior was probably over a hundred and twenty. He started the engine and cranked up the air conditioning.
“You think this is about someone wanting the old man’s job?”
“No. I think this is about you not wanting your friend’s father to be a suicide.”
“I’ll give you that.” he said, his fingers spread open in front of an air vent. “What I don’t get is that it took her ten minutes to remember that someone threatened to kill Vandenberg. You’d thing that might’ve stuck more in her mind, wouldn’t you?”
“Maybe people said it to him all the time. Look at the movies they make. People dying left and right. I bet he was a tyrant to work for. Staff were probably doing cartwheels down the corridor when they heard he was dead.”
“I’ll ask for a list of everyone who sent him a severed head.”
“You’re insufferable, Johnny. Do you know that?”
Coombes smiled. Other people had said the same thing, one of them had married him. Sure, he was prickly on the outside, but he was funny and that went a long way.
7
The first thing he did when he got back to the PAB was run Jake Curtis’ name through the criminal database. It was more out of habit than hope. Another box to check in a sequence that would no-doubt end with him being excluded from the investigation. As he hit enter, he visualized the message that typically appeared saying there were no results, but instead found himself looking at a long list of entries.
Coombes smiled.
Twelve counts of grand theft auto, four assaults, three of extortion, and one indecent exposure charge involving a girl of twelve. Despite all the evidence against him, Curtis had walked on every charge. The record showed he’d get arrested, charged, booked, held overnight, then get released within a day. None of the cases made it to trial due to lack of evidence or recanted testimony. It was a pattern he’d seen many times before. Every time a criminal got a free pass, they thought they were invincible and the crimes escalated until there was enough to put them away. Nobody got scared straight anymore, it was a myth.
Except he had never been convicted.
Curtis had moved from Miami to L.A. and reinvented himself. That was something he didn’t see too often, certainly not the level of success that Jake Curtis had achieved. Fresh coast, fresh start.
Coombes began to look through the list of charges.
It appeared that Curtis and his brother Trent had run a classic car theft operation in and around Miami where there was both plentiful supply and demand for such vehicles. The cars were old enough not to be fitted with trackers or immobilizers, yet rare enough to maintain high residual values. The brothers’ success brought them to the attention of law enforcement, and that scrutiny eventually made it impossible for them to operate.
Coombes picked up his phone and dialed the number for the Miami PD. The crimes were almost a decade old, there was a chance that the person he wanted no longer worked there. When the call connected, he asked if a Sergeant Gale still worked there. He was told she did, and was now a Lieutenant. He explained the subject of his call and waited to be put through.
“All right. What’s that little shit done now?”
Coombes laughed. He liked Gale already.
“You remember him, then?”
“Oh, big time. For a while he was in and out the station every couple of weeks. I have relatives I’ve seen less often than that punk. So, what did he do?”
“He’s a person of interest in a homicide.”
Gale sighed.
“I guess it was only a matter of time before he killed again.”
“Who did he kill in Miami?”
“His father. Pushed him down a flight of stairs.”
“That’s not in the database.”
“He was a juvenile at the time and that stuff is all sealed or purged. Whatever you’re looking at, half of it is missing, trust me. In the case of his father, he was brought in but not arrested or charged. He’s one of those Teflon guys, nothing seems to stick. Whenever we arrested him before, he always hid behind his brother. Each would blame the other for their crimes, it was a reverse alibi setup. Smart for a couple of street kids. Instead of backing each other they did the opposite, choking the investigation. Each time it could’ve been either one, but not both. Back then, no one could tell them apart.”
“All right. So, his brother was never a suspect?”
“His alibi was airtight. He was incarcerated at Okeechobee at the time.”
“What was suspicious about his father’s death?”
“He fell face-first down stairs. Typically, we see people fall backward going down stairs, forward going up. Also, it looked like his neck had been broken after the fall. Wade Curtis was a big man and he could easily have overpowered his teenage son. We figured Jake pushed him at the top then finished him off at the bottom while he was incapacitated.”
“No alcohol or drugs in his system?”
“Actually, yes to both, but that was just who Wade was, he probably hadn’t been sober for 30 years. In any case, the levels were not enough to make him blackout and fall to his death. Being honest, Wade was a piece of shit and probably beat both of his boys and their mom on a regular basis. He was also the main suspect in three ongoing rape cases.”
“Did that influence the investigation?”
Gale was silent for several seconds.
“Yeah, I guess it did. Nobody was trying too hard to solve his case. The world was a better place without him in it, you know? The night he died, some of us hit a bar and had a few drinks. We weren’t broken up at all.”
It was a point of view Coombes could easily understand.
“Is the Wade case still open?”
“No. It was ruled accidental. One of his shoelaces was undone. It seemed plausible that he’d stood on his own shoelace and tripped himself up.”
Gale wasn’t reading anything from notes, this was from memory. He could tell by the way she was speaking. Remembering details from a case this old meant there was something about it that got under her skin. That something was wrong.
“You don’t believe that?”
“I think Jake undid the shoelace after to make it look like an accident. In the crime scene photographs, the lace still carried the indentation from having been tied. If the old man had forgotten to tie it that morning then the indentation would have come out from being untied overnight. In fact, I’d imagine the lace would’ve snapped. Then there was internal bleeding. The M.E. estimated Wade bled for several minutes before he died, which doesn’t track with him breaking his neck during the fall.”
“Like Jake had a few things to say before he killed him.”
“Exactly.”
He wound up the call with Gale and disconnected.
All the pieces were coming together nicely. Staging a death as an accident wasn’t a million miles from staging one as a suicide. Fifteen years old, and Jake Curtis was already creating narratives for cops to follow. It was pretty impressive, and it was hardly surprising that Curtis had gone on to write movies.
Coombes made some notes from the call while the details were still fresh. He had enjoyed speaking to Gale, there was a warmth that had come down the phone line from her and he didn’t want the buzz to end too soon.
8
Coombes sat on a barstool, staring into space. He’d arrived half an hour early for a meeting with Olivia Sutton and was using that time to sort through his thoughts on the investigation. Of the deaths so far, Theodore Sutton and Milton Vandenberg’s deaths felt different to the others. Sutton’s, because it didn’t fit the pattern, and Vandenberg’s because of the killer’s rush to expose the death. Either one potentially indicating a personal connection between the victim and killer.
He looked up as Olivia stepped through the door.
She was wearing a white shirt, navy suit jacket, and a tight red skirt that showed the muscle of her thigh as she walked. She was stunning. He stood as she approached, a smile already on his face.
“Olivia. My god, you look amazing.”
“And you look like shit, Johnny, but I always liked that about you.”
He smirked. She’d never hidden the appeal of his wrong-side-of-the-tracks heritage. He made a show of checking his watch.
“I don’t have to be back at my desk for a couple of hours if you want to take this somewhere private.”
“Still a creep, eh? How’s that working out for you?”
“I made Detective 3 last year. RHD.”
“Robbery Homicide. That’s a big deal, well done. I guess that’s why I’m here, isn’t it? Although I don’t see how dad’s passing is anything but his own fault.”
“We’ll get to that in a moment.”
The bartender appeared. Young, long greasy hair, bad teeth.
“Help you, miss?”
Olivia ignored the bartender and made an awkward face at Coombes.
