The Scapegoat, page 9
He looked up and saw that her cheeks were flushed.
She gave him a business card, which he exchanged for one of his own. Her card was superior to his in every way, as he knew it would be.
Maria López, residential property manager.
The ink of her name seemed to sit on the surface of the card, like it was three dimensional. It had a pleasant feel when you ran your finger over it. Super high gloss. Like it was written in blood, but in a good way.
He was in the wrong business.
Nobody got rich in the LAPD, though a few had when they’d left. Private security, high end. That’s where the money was, not down in the gutter with the dead bodies where he was.
He looked her in the eyes and smiled.
“You think of anything else, give me a call, ok?”
“Okay.”
She left quickly, wobbling a little on her heels. The Hollywood boys watched her leave, then after a moment, began to laugh. When they looked back, he waved them in and followed his partner’s lead by pulling on nitrile gloves.
“What was that all about?” Sato said. “You into her or something?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Right. Either the man’s lying up there in a pool of blood, or he’s not here. What he was like as a person doesn’t really come into it.”
“Unless he’s dead.”
His partner said nothing.
He interlaced his fingers to improve the fit of the nitrile gloves.
“I guess she had nice eyes,” he said, casually.
Sato smirked.
“I noticed her eyes myself.”
The two uniforms stood next to them now. A rookie in his early twenties with pale mottled skin, and an older man in his thirties with short sleeves and two chevrons.
“All right fellas, let’s do a walk-through. It’s your turf, but it might be related to our case. I assume everything’s been explained?”
The older man nodded.
“If there’s a body here the lieutenant says you can have it with her blessing. One less in our column at the end of the month.”
The four of them set off through the front hall to a set of stairs. The entrance was cold as the back of it was cut into the ground and it was next to two double garages. As they climbed the stairs, he felt an immediate rise in temperature from the large windows on the floor above. He glanced back at the uniforms.
“You get much trouble out here?”
“Not really. Sometimes we get a DUI. The roads are narrow and twist about, if you’ve had a few drinks, it’s easy to get caught out. Mostly it’s noise complaints. Loud music, parties, barking dogs, like that.”
Coombes nodded. Neighbors were terrible wherever you lived.
“The previous owner here had a pet tiger. It went wherever it pleased. No cage, no chain. I only know about it because a guy broke in to rob the place…and it ate him.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“We were chasing that thing around the yard with the guy’s arm hanging out its mouth. It was my second week on the job. Craziest thing I ever saw.”
They came out on the second floor, or maybe it was the first, since the previous floor was cut into the hillside. He looked around, didn’t see anything obvious. He took a deep breath through his nose, filling his chest. The quickest way to find a corpse was with your nose, but he detected nothing but the hint of citrus and coffee.
They moved methodically through the building, starting from where they stepped out from the stairs.
He opened a door. A bedroom.
Unoccupied, tidy.
He moved on.
A place like this, he figured, it was going to have the best air conditioning money could buy. State of the art. Maybe it could clean the air of bad odors, as well as incoming pollution. It smelled better inside the house than it did outside. Normally, that wasn’t so hard, but not if there was a body.
Another door, another bedroom.
Unoccupied, tidy.
The room was identical to the last. He wasn’t the most imaginative man himself, but that seemed lazy. It was almost Spartan. No frills, just a simple bed frame, nightstand, lamp. These would be the guest rooms. If they were too nice, maybe people stayed too long. It could happen, he supposed, the rest of the house was amazing.
Coombes counted nine guest bedrooms, one master bedroom, a gym, a steam room, five bathrooms, a kitchen diner you could turn a Buick in, and a walk-in refrigerated storage room. It was a bust. They’d seen every room, every closet, and Schofield wasn’t here.
Not dead, not alive.
No sign of a struggle, or of someone leaving quickly to catch an unexpected flight. The house was hollow, like a museum about to close up for the day. Something felt wrong, and he couldn’t identify what it was. He turned to the two uniforms and shrugged his shoulders.
“I guess we’re not going to need you guys after all.”
“That’s all right,” the older one said. “A day without a body is a good day.”
He didn’t like being observed, it inhibited him.
“You mind if my partner and I stay a while longer, bounce ideas around?”
“Not at all. We’ll just take off and get some lunch.”
There was a large clock on the wall behind the man’s head. 11:15. He remembered his time in uniform, you took breaks when you could. Nobody knew what was around the next corner.
When they were gone, he turned to Grace and saw she was sitting on a bar stool at the breakfast bar. She was rotating around and around like a schoolgirl.
“I don’t think this guy is linked to our kidnapping.”
Grace put her hand out and caught the edge of the bar, stopping her spin.
“Me neither. It doesn’t fit.”
It was four months and change since Maria López last heard from Schofield, but the drone video proved that he hadn’t been missing all that time. All it meant was that he hadn’t needed her services. There were any number of reasons for this, fewer trips for business, perhaps the breakdown in a relationship for another.
Yet the place was tidy like it was staged for sale. To his mind, that meant there’d been no relationship breakup because newly single men always returned to the feral creatures they were at heart.
He thought again about his wife and the lawyer. Is that what he was now? Newly single? Julie had cheated on him, but what right had he to get upset about it? He’d been having an affair himself, with Sato.
Whatever was going on here didn’t smell right. The easiest explanation was that the two events were linked, even if that link was currently hidden.
“Maybe Schofield was in the wrong place at the wrong time and saw something he wasn’t meant to see. An innocent bystander that became a loose end for somebody. It happens.”
“You know, Johnny, you never asked how long this guy’s been missing. It’s fourteen days. This guy’s been missing longer than Amy Tremaine. That timeline doesn’t track for anything worth a damn.”
Coombes sighed. She was right.
“Then why are we here?”
“You got me. According to Gantz, the request came from someone high up to find this Schofield character, whether it’s part of this investigation or not. Seems like an odd choice to me to throw another case at us while we’re looking for Walton’s killer and Tremaine’s kid.”
Coombes walked to the window and stared out across L.A.
It was all there, spread out before him. Griffith Park on the extreme left, central Los Angeles and the towering downtown district, and Santa Monica on the right. It was nearly midday, yet the air quality was good and clear. Sharp. No heat shimmer, no smog. A reflection moved across the glass and he turned to face his partner as she moved through the room toward him.
“No sign of a struggle,” she said.
He nodded.
“No sign of anything. Look at this place, it’s immaculate. Straight out of a magazine. There’s something about this place that’s a bit off, don’t you think?”
“What’s off about it,” she said. “Is that we don’t live here, some bloody Nazi does. How much does a house like this cost? Millions. It’s perfect. You know, it’s too bad he’s not lying back there covered in blowfly larvae, because it sounds like he deserved to be.”
There was a darkness to Sato that he found seriously attractive. If her brain could somehow have been put into his wife’s head, everything would’ve worked out between them, he was sure of it.
“What did Tremaine want?”
“To tell me that some psycho has been stalking him for years.”
“Huh. I guess he forgot to mention that before.”
“I guess so.”
They walked through the house and down the stairs in silence. Whatever had happened to Schofield, it hadn’t happened here. Most likely, he wouldn’t be back.
On balance, he thought, Schofield was dead.
After sixteen years as an investigator, you got a feel for these things.
14
Coombes was glad that he and Sato had travelled separately to Anton Schofield’s home, as it gave him the whole drive back to the PAB to process the scene he’d witnessed beforehand between his wife and the lawyer. He’d seen so little of Julie recently that he was almost starting to forget what she looked like. Now, all he could think of was her on the bed with the gag in her mouth with the other man bucking away behind her. There was a good chance this was how he’d remember her for the rest of his life.
And I deserve nothing better, he thought.
What kind of hypocrite was he anyway?
At some point, he was going to have to tell Sato. It wasn’t going to take much detection on her part to figure out that his marriage was over. He wondered how she’d greet that news. The fact that he’d been married had always limited their time together and added a forbidden fruit aspect. With that gone it was possible she’d tire of him very quickly.
He moved to the turn lane and pulled up behind a black GMC Yukon. A moment later, a faded blue Taurus pulled up to his bumper. Coombes frowned and glanced to the open lane to his left in time to see another black SUV slide into place next to him and stop.
A Chevrolet Suburban.
The Suburban’s dark tinted window fizzed open and he saw the two FBI agents from the Walton crime scene that he’d been thinking of as Poured Concrete and Eyebrows because they’d never been introduced. He opened his own window and stared up, into the higher vehicle’s cabin. Concrete’s gray, lifeless face glared back.
“You were warned, Coombes. Pull that shit again and you’ll see the inside of a federal prison. You feel me?”
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
“Stay on your side of the street. This is your last warning.”
“Is this about me finding the tank in the kidnapping video?”
The glare seemed to increase.
“This is about you pulling Harlan Tremaine out of federal protective custody against the will of the US Attorney and the Department of Justice. But why don’t you go ahead and tell us about the tank?”
The feds had heard nothing about it. Interesting.
“As soon as your boss starts sharing information with us, we’ll start sharing it with you. Until then, adios. Now move your vehicles, some of us have work to do.”
“You’ve got some nerve talking to us like that, Coombes.”
“Just one of many fine traits, I can assure you.”
Coombes gave him a humorless smile, then turned and faced front as he closed the window. Seconds later, horns began to honk around them as other drivers tried to pass the blockade. Poured Concrete had chosen a poor spot to box him in, both in terms of traffic density, and his close proximity to the PAB and all the backup Coombes would ever need.
He continued to feel the other man’s fury through the glass. He’d said all he was going to say to the special agent. The Suburban pulled angrily away and a moment later, the Yukon followed suit.
He was back underway.
The feds had got the drop on him because he’d been distracted with thoughts of his wife, but it wouldn’t happen again.
Next time, he’d be ready.
He got to the PAB without further incident and parked up.
Sato had beaten him back and had even picked up lunch for him along the way in the form of a foot-long sub filled with chicken, bacon, mayo, and lettuce. His stomach growled just looking at it. She winked at him and began to drink soda from a can with a straw.
He leaned in close. “I think I love you.”
She laughed and some of her drink came out her nose and landed on the carpeting between her feet. This caused her to laugh some more, then get the hiccups.
“Now I know I do,“ he said at a normal volume, taking off his jacket.
He sat, unwrapped his huge sandwich and took a bite. His jaws mashed it up as he opened his soda. He was onto mouthful three before Sato got her hiccups under control.
“You can’t say things like that to a girl, Coombes.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because she might believe you.”
He wiped mayo from the corners of his mouth. His natural reaction was to tell her that she should believe it, but he’d learned long ago that smart women enjoy being teased, and that information related to the heart should be drip-fed.
“I had a run-in with our federal friends out on the street.”
“What did they want?”
He took another mouthful and thought about how best to answer.
“It seems that John Coombes is an acquired taste.”
She smiled and nodded like she agreed, then turned away from him to put the last of her sandwich in her mouth. She didn’t like to be watched as she ate so he logged in to his computer and opened his email. One email subject caught his eye.
Member list for The Black Feather (eyes only).
He opened the email and went directly to the attachment, ignoring the body text from the detective that sent it. A long list of names appeared, almost a hundred in all. They were listed alphabetically by surname. His eyes went to the first name on the list: Ballard, Charles.
He’d struck out on James Anderson immediately.
Coombes continued to scan the list as he ate and soon came to understand why the email had been marked eyes only. He saw names he recognized. Judges, high ranking members of the LAPD, not to mention many from the world of entertainment and sport.
To his annoyance, Joachim Nelson wasn’t on the list either. Seeing his name would have helped confirm his theory of an overlap between members of The Black Feather and The Hard Limit.
It made little sense to him that the elite represented by some of the names would choose to mix socially or sexually with someone like Nelson, but for all he knew that might be the appeal of the club.
No other names were jumping out at him so he forwarded it to Becker to check for links to Harlan or Amy Tremaine, or to Elizabeth Walton. There were a number of emails from Becker waiting for him, one of which he found interesting.
Becker had taken the abduction video to Rollins, their video expert, who had run it through analysis software that used the focal length of the lens, combined with the height of the camera from the ground and the likely distance to the subjects to calculate the height of their kidnapper. The analysis came back at 5‘ 10“ - 6’ 2″.
Becker then got Rollins’ software to estimate Amy Tremaine’s height.
This came back as 5‘8“ - 5′11″. Since they already knew Amy was 5’ 10″ and she was an identical distance from the point of capture, it could be assumed that the height of the kidnapper was closer to six feet.
It was a solid-gold lead from Becker. He wrote it in his notebook and then on a separate legal pad on his desk containing an overview of victims and suspects’ details. He finished the last of his lunch then looked over at Sato and saw she was watching him closely.
“Everything okay, Johnny?”
She was on to him already.
“Freakin’ fantastic. What are you working on?”
“Looking through Schofield’s socials. He’s on Facebook and Twitter. You should take a look. His profile picture is a profile picture, he’s facing sideways like he’s on a coin. I can’t decide if that’s evidence of a sense of humor, or not. I’m thinking not, based on his brow ridge and broken nose. Anyway, he’s got six followers on Facebook and 856 on Twitter.”
Coombes had seen this kind of disparity before. The larger number of followers represented fake friends, people who followed hoping to be followed back to boost their own numbers. The number of friends he knew that would be real, was six.
“I don’t suppose any of his friends happen to be James Anderson?”
“No, although I do have something interesting. We think he’s dead, right?”
Coombes perked up. “Why? Is he still posting?”
“Kind of. He’s checking in. Restaurants, Starbucks, you name it.”
“Has he posted anything since he was reported missing?”
“He wasn’t posting that regularly in the first place. Let’s see.” Sato looked at her screen, checking both websites. “All right, no. Not a peep for nearly a month. Last thing he posted was a link to a YouTube video with machine guns and watermelons.”
“So either he’s dead and someone else is using his phone, or he’s still alive and has forgotten the check-ins show up on his page.”
“I don’t think you’d forget that,” she said. “We’ve seen before criminals co-opting platform features intended for one purpose to serve another. He’s giving his location on purpose. I think he’s meeting people at these places. Other criminals.”
Sato was pleased with herself and it was a look that suited her. He’d never used the check-in feature himself and didn’t much see the point of it.
“All right, what about these six friends of his?”
“Three of them went to the same school as him, the other three charmers are Russians.”
“Russian-Americans, or the other kind?”
“The other kind.”
“Uh-huh. We’ll look into that later. For now, we need to get into James Anderson’s life. Tremaine says Anderson runs a website about him that sells merch with pictures of his face on it. I want you to check it out, see what kind of a nutcase he is.”
