The Scapegoat, page 6
“You believe that display case angle then?”
“It’s certainly believable.”
Sato was silent as he lined them up on the 710, heading north.
“I take it you don’t think so?”
“It just seemed like he was trying to diminish her, that he couldn’t imagine a woman being strong. If a man had been in that tank, he would’ve said squat about the cracks.”
“You’re probably right, but that doesn’t mean it’s not valid.”
“You don’t get it, Johnny. There’s a constant barrage of shit women have to put up with; running us down, robbing us of agency. That’s when we’re not being strangled, and drowned, and murdered. I’m sick of it.”
Coombes nodded, then after what he hoped was a suitable interval, reached over and turned up the AC. There was a white noise aspect to the car’s air conditioning that he had always found relaxing.
His mind returned to the unsecured crime scene at The Hard Limit. The rate the view counter had been jumping under the video of Amy Tremaine made it more and more likely that other members at the club would recognize the tank, even if the owners hadn’t seen it yet.
It was only a matter of time.
Coombes discounted the idea of inviting uniforms from Mid-Wilshire to trample over all the evidence, he needed someone he could trust.
He knew just the guy.
9
Billy Lass stood guarding the doorway to the club with a huge grin on his face. Three men were arranged around his feet in various states of having their ass handed to them. Bouncers, Coombes supposed. Big men, with shaved heads. Each seemed to have a freshly broken nose, presumably something they picked up trying to gain access to the club.
“Hey, Billy. How’s the family?”
“Not bad. Looks like little John’s getting a baby brother or sister.”
Coombes smiled. “That’s fantastic news.”
“It’s something all right. I got three hours sleep last night with the one we’ve got.”
Lass had been his partner many years ago and had named his son after him.
“When do you guys leave for San Francisco?”
“Couple of weeks. I’m going to miss this place.”
Coombes nodded and made a mental note to see his old friend before he left town.
“These guys give you any problems?”
“That big one there,” Lass pointed at one of the men on the sidewalk. “He scratched my knuckle as he collapsed.”
Billy laughed, amused with himself.
“Anybody get inside before you showed up?”
“Nah, you’re good. The geek squad went in about forty minutes ago wearing moon suits. The club owner is sitting in that lime-green Honda over there, and the bar manager is in the black Firebird across the street next to your Charger.”
Coombes turned his head to look at each car but he could see little inside. If they took off before he interviewed them it could take a while to run them down, but interviewing them before he saw the scene was likely a waste of time and he’d spent a long time looking for this tank.
The two men could wait.
“All right, we’re going to go inside, see what we’re dealing with here.”
Billy nodded and stepped to the side.
“SID left gloves and shoe protectors inside the door.”
Grace looked at Lass and did her best to smile.
“Billy.”
“Grace.”
Inside, the club had a smell he couldn’t identify. He was pretty sure he didn’t want to identify it and pulled on the shoe protectors quickly. A flight of stairs opened out into a large industrial space that was painted black. There was a high ceiling with a mezzanine level above and a doorway to what were probably private rooms.
The tank Amy Tremaine had been put into was in the middle of the floor, the cracks she’d made in the glass lit up by a portable light unit. The SID technicians had obviously finished processing the tank because they were both over at a bar packing up equipment.
Coombes approached the tank and studied the star fractures.
He held his gloved fist up for scale. About three inches across, four or five inches between them. A crack extended out from one toward the other, stopping just short. If the two had connected, it might’ve been enough to break the glass.
Coombes leaned in close and tilted his head up to see the top edge. It looked like a thin green line.
“Still think that’s a display case, Johnny?”
There was a hard cynical edge to Grace’s voice.
“No, but it’s no aquarium tank either.”
“What then?”
“A custom build maybe. Garcia was right, the glass is too thin.”
“Don’t you start with that sexist crap.”
He turned to Sato. Her cheeks were flushed with anger, her eyes piercing.
“Look for yourself. It’s quarter inch, Garcia said it should be half inch.”
He waited until she looked up before continuing.
“This takes nothing away from her, okay? She’s a fighter.”
Coombes didn’t like having to justify himself, but he was willing to cut Sato some slack. Too many of the victims they saw were women who had met their fate at the hands of a man. Things landed differently for her and they always would.
He headed over to the bar and noticed that his shoe protectors kept sticking to the floor. He had a fair idea why, and he did his best to shut it out.
The technicians had a line of metal cases ready to go.
“Detective Coombes,” he said.
One of the technicians looked up.
“I’m Yeager, this is Ramirez.”
“You guys get anything from the tank?”
“Not a damn thing, it’s been wiped down,” Yeager said.
“Which is more than you can say for the floor,” Ramirez said.
The technicians laughed, but Coombes couldn’t get there. He’d busted his ass trying to find the tank and it was all for nothing.
His cell phone vibrated. Billy Lass.
“Billy, what’s happening?”
“The owner’s back with the bar manager. Should I send them up?”
“May as well,” Coombes said, before disconnecting.
He turned to Yeager.
“What about the other rooms?”
“It’s set up like a karaoke place, except instead of singing, people get tied up and whipped. We saw no evidence that your victim was back there. My opinion? They came to use the tank, then left.”
Two men and a woman appeared at the doorway. The woman was a knock-out, which he figured made her a bartender. That left a man in his thirties with longish feminine hair and a man that looked like an accountant.
“Which one of you is the owner?”
“That would be me,” said the man with long hair. “Don Chase.”
He held out a hand to shake, but Coombes ignored it.
“We’re going to need a list of your members, Chase.”
“Can’t do it.”
“You think I can’t get a warrant?”
“I’m sure you could, I’m saying that it wouldn’t do you any good. We don’t have a list of members. If we don’t keep a list we can’t be compelled to hand it over. Our members like their privacy and we learned the hard way from our previous club.”
“How do you control access if you don’t know who they are?”
“Members are given a key fob. There’s no ID on it, just an anonymous token.”
“What’s that?”
“The way the developer put it, it’s like a gift card for Netflix. Those cards have no value until it’s added by a cashier, the recipient scratches off a panel and there’s a code to type in. The code gives you access to the gift value, but not the identity of who bought it, or their credit card number. Our key fob has RFID, you hold it up to the panel downstairs and it reads the token.”
“All right. Then I’ll need a list of your credit card transactions.”
“Oh, that was just for the gift card example. We use a cash app.”
“What about buying drinks at the bar?”
“Same answer. If you dig into that you’ll find names but they’ll all be John Doe, or Jane Doe, something like that. No one puts a real name into a cash app, it defeats the point.”
The owner smiled; his eyes full of fuck-you.
Coombes absorbed it for a moment, then reached out and grabbed Chase by the hair, yanking his head backward as he frog-marched him over to the tank of water.
“Hey, hey, hey!”
“Did you see the video?”
“I saw it! I saw it! Let go of my hair!”
Coombes tightened his grip, twisting the man’s hair in his fist. The SID technicians turned to watch the show, curious to see where it went next.
He was a little curious himself.
“One of your customers half-drowned a woman. I want names.”
“I don’t have names, I told you.”
“How many members do you have?”
“I’d have to check my laptop.”
“Guess.”
“Over seventy.”
“How many of them are men?”
“Forty? Forty-five?”
“How many are muscular military-types in their early-forties?”
“What? I don’t know!”
“Listen, Chase. We can come back when you’re open and get IDs directly. Keep coming back until we get the person we want. Maybe you don’t go out of business, maybe you do. I’m saying I can live with it either way.”
“All right. There’s maybe three men like that but I still don’t know their names.”
“Am I not being clear enough?”
“They busted up my tank! If I knew who did it I’d tell you, okay?”
“John, let him go.”
Coombes turned to see Grace behind him.
“He can’t tell you what he doesn’t know, besides, we don’t know if it was a member. The club is on social media, I just looked. Over a hundred thousand followers. The tank is in a lot of the pictures. It’s more likely our guy saw it there than he was a member.”
“And if he didn’t?”
“If he didn’t, putting this man in hospital is unlikely to change anything.”
He released Chase and raised both of his hands in frustration.
“We found the tank and we get nothing from it?”
“Not true. We found out for sure Amy didn’t die here. That’s not nothing. Harlan Tremaine will be very glad to hear it. He might even get some sleep tonight.”
Grace rested her hand on his arm.
It looked like nothing, but the gentle pressure of her fingers through his suit jacket cooled him down. He could feel the red mist dissipating and calmness returning.
As the rage left him, an idea took its place.
He turned back to the owner and the other man shrank away from him.
“You said that you had a club before this one, what was it called?”
Chase eyed him carefully, looking for the angle.
“The Black Feather, why?”
“Another club for perverts?”
The owner bristled. “BDSM enthusiasts.”
“And the tank was at your previous club?”
Chase’s face froze. He saw it now, the land mine under his foot.
“I’ve answered enough questions, Detective. You want any more, you’re going to have to charge me with something. I’m sure my lawyer will tell me to say nothing, however.”
Coombes smiled.
A refusal to answer was still an answer.
The tank had been at the previous club, and that club had been raided. It was likely to him that some, if not all, the names that were now protected by anonymous tokens were previously exposed when Chase had been forced to hand over his list of members’ names.
All he had to do was reach out to vice and get a copy.
“I think we’re done here, Mr. Chase.”
10
Cora Roche worked at Titan Two Reality, a special effects company based in Burbank, a block north of Warner Bros and Disney Studios. It looked like any other industrial unit, but the inside walls were lined with Plexiglas cases containing robots, monsters, dinosaurs, and aliens. Many were familiar to Coombes from movies he watched before he met his wife.
He approached the front desk and leaned into a young man’s airspace.
“We’re here to speak to Cora Roche.”
“Can I ask who you are and what it’s regarding?”
“No.”
The man’s eyebrows shot up at that and it looked like he was about to say something else when Coombes clenched his teeth and leaned forward some more. It bored him that mindless drones like this thought they had the right to his identity and his business simply because they were the first point of contact.
The man forced a smile and picked up his phone.
While he waited for Cora to come out front, Coombes stepped back from the desk and stood next to Sato who looked like she was holding a laugh inside.
“Jesus, Johnny. It’s like you’re not even housebroken.”
“You know, Grace, you’re easily in my top ten favorite partners.”
Her mouth opened into a little O that pulled at something inside his chest.
After less than a minute, a woman with blue hair came out from the back. She wore dark eyeshadow and lipstick, had full sleeve tattoos, and was entirely clad in black. Her eyes swept nervously around the room before fixing on him. Somehow, he looked like what she expected. As she approached, he counted seven piercings in one ear, four in the other.
“Cora Roche?”
“Yes?”
“Detectives Coombes and Sato, LAPD.”
Her shoulders sagged. “This is about Lizzie.”
“That’s right.”
Roche rocked back on the heels of her biker boots and took a deep breath. Her face turned pale like she was about to pass out. They didn’t have time for that, he needed to pull her back.
“What is it that you do here, Miss Roche?”
“I design prosthetics for movies and TV.”
Coombes pointed at an alien in one of the cases.
“Like that?”
“No, that’s creature effects. I do wounds. Cuts, bullet holes, exposed bone.”
He nodded casually, like he often met someone who spent their day designing injuries, and glanced around the reception area. There were people standing about drinking coffee and laughing like they were in a Starbucks.
“Is there somewhere we can speak privately?”
“My manager’s on vacation, we can use her office.”
They followed her past the reception desk and through a door marked staff only to a long corridor. A chemical smell hung in the air and it seemed to draw closer as they moved deeper into the building. Roche moved through a door which opened automatically and they entered an airlock space with a second door that opened after the first closed behind them.
They were in what looked like a lab, with two long tables and amber-colored lighting overhead. Ten women wearing white coats sat working at the tables, none of them looked around at them. The chemical smell was now like a soup, he didn’t know how any of them could stand it.
Empty, disembodied faces were suspended down the center of the tables. He recognized some of them, they were the faces of actors.
Sato looked at them in disbelief.
“These are silicone?” She asked.
“The skin is, the hair is real. Every strand is put in by hand, it’s a labor of love. In a mid to long shot you can’t tell the difference between a stunt man and an actor.”
Coombes said nothing.
A mask of this quality would be extremely convincing on security footage, either to establish an alibi or to cast blame elsewhere.
They came to an office and went inside. Coombes took out his notebook, his eyes fixed on the woman with blue hair. The room was small and seemed to become smaller still with the door closed. Out of sight of her co-workers, Roche’s demeanor crumbled and tears rolled down her cheeks.
“What happened to Lizzie is too much, I can’t think about it.”
“The two of you were close?”
“She was my best friend. My only friend.”
“I’m sorry for your loss, Miss Roche. We’ll try to get through this as quickly as possible. When was the last time you saw each other?”
“I last saw her the day after New Year’s but we spoke almost every day. I guess you know that already. It’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”
Coombes nodded.
“And how was she when you last spoke?”
Roche shrugged. “The usual. Excited, distracted. All that charity stuff really got her going. Helping other people, that’s what she was all about.”
“Was it normal for the two of you to go so long without meeting?”
Roche dug a tissue out her pocket and blew her nose.
“Some months were busier than others. January and February were usually pretty quiet but I was used to her losing herself to the cause. She was focused, mission-orientated.”
He studied Roche for a moment.
The colored hair, the piercings, the dark makeup. She was a very different person to Elizabeth Walton, with her prim business suits and starched white shirts. They appeared to be at opposite ends of the spectrum, to say nothing of the age difference between them.
Despite this, a deep bond had formed.
“How did you and Miss Walton come to know each other?”
“We went to the same yoga class. I sucked big time and she took me under her wing. She had a way of making everything fun and I stopped being embarrassed about sticking my ass in the air. Later we took a self-defense class together, it just kind of built from there.”
Cora Roche looked at the floor and seemed to go somewhere else, perhaps thinking about how the self-defense class hadn’t helped her friend when she was being strangled.
“Was she having problems with anyone?”
“She never told me if she was and she told me everything.”
“What about relationships? Was she dating?”
