Diagnosis Murder: The Death Merchant (16 page)

As the plane lifted off the runway and into the night sky toward Los Angeles, Mark tried to get comfortable in his aisle seat and went over again what little he knew about the case.

Five years ago, four of Roger Standiford's employees kidnapped his daughter, Connie, and buried her alive, thinking she'd be fine with some water and a tube for air. They were tragically wrong.

Standiford paid the $4.5 million ransom and was told where to find his daughter. But he got there too late. She was dead.

That's when the FBI entered the investigation. Meanwhile, the fugitives divided the money and fled, underwent massive plastic surgery, and created new identities for themselves. They successfully eluded the FBI, and the investigation stalled.

As the months wore on, the Standiford case became less and less of a priority. The agents moved on to more pressing cases, revisiting the Standiford case only when time allowed or new developments came up.

But there were no new developments, at least not that the FBI knew about.

At some point, perhaps a year or two down the line, Roger Standiford was contacted by a professional bit man who offered his specialized services to wealthy victims of violent crime. The hit man offered to find the fugitives and kill them, making their deaths look like accidents. Standiford hired him, and somehow this death merchant found one of the fugitives, Stuart Appleby, living in Hawaii under the name Danny Royal.

The hit man tried to make Appleby's murder look like a shark attack and, when that failed, burned down Appleby's house and his restaurant to eradicate any clues and send a warning to the remaining fugitives. In doing so, the killer boldly announced his presence.

Mark had only two clues to go on, neither very promising. One was Steve's observation that Appleby liked puzzle magazines. The second was the discovery of a souvenir menu postcard from the restaurant with a note written on it: RE: IDEAL OVEN, ASK JIM LOWE. A LOOSE, TRENDY COOK. Was the note significant or just a meaningless reminder Appleby had written to himself?

Out of desperation, Mark tried to track down Jim Lowe and, based on the puzzle magazines, even tried arranging the words on the card into others sentences. Neither effort had led anywhere.

That was all he had to go on.

The more he thought about it, the more he realized he didn't really have anything at all.

Mark's initial strategy had been to try to find the fugitives before Standiford's hit man could. But now he could see that wasn't going to work.

He needed a new strategy. There was only one.

Instead of chasing the fugitives, he'd chase their pursuer. The downside was he had even less to go on and, like the hunt for the fugitives, he would be taking a path that had already been well traveled by the FBI.

Even so, Mark started thinking about how he might begin. First, he'd contact Sgt. Ben Kealoha in Kauai and see what, if anything, the detective's investigation into the staged shark attack had revealed. Then he'd see if Steve could help him compile a list of violent crimes involving wealthy families, the killer's client base. It would take time, but once Mark had that list, he could question the families one by one, see if they'd been contacted by the hit man, and hope a lead would turn up.

It occurred to Mark that there was another approach he could take that might yield faster results.

If Mark could find a recent violent crime involving a wealthy family, he might be able to establish contact with them before the hit man did. If he could do that, it might be possible to trap the hit man when he came calling.

That was a lot of ifs, and there were no guarantees any of them would pan out before the hit man found the three fugitives and killed them.

It almost seemed futile.

Mark asked himself why he was putting in so much effort to save the lives of three killers, and almost immediately felt guilty for the thought.

Roger Standiford and Jesse had asked him the same question, and Mark didn't think twice before answering. He didn't doubt the strength of his convictions before, so why was he now?

Weariness and frustration, he told himself. That was all it was. A good night's sleep and some genuine progress in the investigation would erase any thoughts of giving up.

In the meantime, he decided to give his mind a rest, to think of something else besides the case. So he glanced to his right, past the passenger beside him, to the view out the airplane window.

There was no view. Only darkness. Mark sat up in his seat, trying to peer down at the landscape below. More darkness.

So much for a distraction.

That's when Mark noticed, for the first time, the man sitting beside him. He was a young man, perhaps in his late twenties, dressed casually in khaki pants and a sand-colored Tommy Hilfiger sweater over a white T-shirt. The man was slumped in his chair, staring intensely at a Bellagio cocktail napkin on his open tray table. A woman had written her name across the top and her phone number below it, the Las Vegas area code included.

Mark glanced at the man's troubled face.

"Is she pretty?" Mark asked.

"Indescribably," the man answered, his voice tinged with longing and sadness.

"Did you click?"

"Like crickets," the man said.

"Is that good?" Mark said.

The man grinned. "Oh yeah."

"So why aren't you thrilled that she gave you her phone number?"

The man sighed and glanced at Mark. "I'm getting married next week."

Mark nodded. "Oh, I see."

"I didn't go looking for this. I came into town on business. I was sitting in the hotel bar, having a drink, and we just struck up a conversation. I wasn't even trying. It never happened like that for me before."

'That's probably why it happened so smoothly. You were just being yourself."

"She was the most beautiful woman I've ever seen," the man said. "It was as if she'd stepped out of my fantasies."

"My name is Mark Sloan." Mark offered his hand. The man shook it.

"Joey Tremont."

"Do you love your fiancée, Joey?" Mark asked. "Yes," Joey said.

"You're a week away from the biggest commitment of your life," Mark said. "I didn't see this woman you met, but I'm guessing her allure went beyond her physical appearance and sparkling conversation. She represented freedom, excitement, possibility, and youth—everything you fear you're giving up by getting married."

"Aren't I?"

"Of course not," Mark said. "You're about to embark on a personal adventure far more exciting and full of possibilities than anything you've experienced before."

"You don't understand," Joey said. "This woman was like something out of the Sports illustrated Swimsuit issue."

"Your life is about to change, whether you marry the woman you love or pursue this woman you just met. The question is, which change is going to make you a better person, give you lasting happiness, and offer you the chance to explore all your untapped potential?"

"That's a loaded question," Joey said. "It's obvious which choice you think I should make."

"It's not my life," Mark shrugged. "Either way you choose, this woman could easily become the biggest regret of your life."

"That's a big help."

Joey stared at the napkin for a long moment, then crumpled it up and stuffed it into the ashtray in the armrest between the two men.

"Now I'll always have something to fantasize about," Joey said with a grin. "The road not taken."

"Every life has one or two, Joey."

"Maybe I should tear it up so some other guy doesn't find it and give in to temptation," the man said, glancing out the window. There were lights below as they passed over Victorville, a mining town ninety-seven miles northeast of Los Angeles.

Mark felt that sudden, breathtaking thrill of revelation when one of the blurred notions in his head unexpectedly sharpened into a clear, undeniable truth. The picture was still taking shape as he picked the napkin out of the ashtray.

The man turned and looked at Mark incredulously.

"Don't tell me you talked me out of it just so you could call her," Joey said. "Nothing personal, but I don't think you're her type. Or age."

But Mark wasn't listening. He lowered his tray table, spread the napkin out in front of him, and stared at it. The woman's name was across the top, her area code and phone number written underneath. Her name was two words. Her phone number was ten numbers, spaced in groupings of three, three, and four numbers.

"What are you doing?" Joey asked.

"Solving a puzzle," Mark replied. "It's a word game I've been struggling with. The name and phone number on your napkin gave me an idea how to figure it out."

He took out his pen and wrote
Re: Ideal Oven
on one line and then, below it, wrote
Ask Jim Lowe
. And below that he wrote
A loose, trendy cook.

And then Mark smiled to himself.

"Well?" Joey asked. "Did you find a hidden message?"

"No," Mark said. "I found a hidden person."

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

How could he have not seen it before? It was a puzzle, and a simple one at that.
Ideal Oven
was two words, an anagram for a person's name. And there was a V in the name of only one of the fugitives:
Diane Love
.

And in the sentence below, the letters were spaced in groupings of three, three, and four, just like a phone number.

Mark took out his cell phone and matched the letters in the phrase
Ask Jim Lowe
with the numbers they represented on the keypad.

275 546 5693.

It didn't look to him like a valid phone number, but he knew he was on the right track. The numbers had to be scrambled in some way. He wasn't even sure those were the right numbers. What if Appleby had to incorporate a 1 or a 0? There were no letters associated with those numbers on a telephone keypad, so what work-around would Appleby have used?

Mark wasn't a mathematician, but he guessed there were thousands of possible combinations for those numbers. How could he narrow down the possibilities?

That was the question that nagged him for the rest of the short flight and on the forty minute drive from LAX to Malibu.

As soon as he got home, Mark rushed straight to his laptop computer, turned it on, and opened his word processing program. He typed down what he knew:

Ideal Oven = Diane Love

Ask Jim Lowe = 275-546-5693.

A loose, trendy cook =?

He studied the remaining undeciphered phrase as he picked up the phone and dialed the number he'd come up with from
Ask Jim Lowe
. Before he finished dialing, his call was interrupted by a recorded message:

"We're sorry, your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number and dial again."

Mark hung up the phone and stared out at the beach. He couldn't see the surf in the darkness, but he could hear the waves breaking against the shore. It was the same way he felt about the message on the screen in front of him. He couldn't see the answer yet, but he was certain it was there.

Steve came up the stairs from the first floor, where he had a bedroom, a bathroom, and a small kitchen. Both his bedroom and his kitchen opened directly onto the beach. The second floor, where Mark lived, had two bedrooms, two baths, a gourmet kitchen, and a large deck that faced the ocean. The beach house was, in essence, a duplex linked by a staircase in the entry hall. This allowed Mark and Steve to share the same house but have separate spaces to call their own. Even so, Mark's kitchen had become their meeting place, and Steve usually came and went through the front door, unless he brought home a date.

"I thought I heard you come back," Steve said, then noticed the open laptop. "Couldn't wait to check your E-mail?"

"I think I broke the code on the recipe card we found in Danny Royal's safe-deposit box," Mark said. "I mean, Stuart Appleby's safe-deposit box."

"I know what you meant," Steve pulled up a chair beside Mark. "What have you got?"

Mark explained what he'd deciphered and the riddles still left to unravel. Steve looked the numbers.

"There must be ten thousand possible combinations of those numbers," Steve said. "Where do we start?"

Mark tapped the screen below the remaining undecoded phrase. "Right here."

A loose, trendy cook

Mark decided to play a hunch. "If the first line is a name and the second line is a phone number, maybe the third line is a place. A city separated from the state by a comma."

"It's worth a shot." Steve took a pencil and wrote the phrase across the top of a legal pad with plenty of space between each letter. Then, below it, he made a list of the fifty states.

Together, Mark and Steve tried to match the letters of the phrase with the name of a state. Twenty minutes later, they succeeded.

Colorado
.

"It fits with something I learned while I was in Las Vegas," Mark said. "Diane liked to ski. It makes sense she'd settle in Colorado."

Mark went to his bookshelf, pulled out an atlas, and looked up the state of Colorado.

"What letters do we have left?" Mark asked.

"O, T, E, N, K, Y, and S," Steve said.

Mark compared the list of cities and towns in Colorado with the remaining letters he had left. He found a match al most immediately.