Hot Start (11 page)

“Actually,” I said, “I’m looking into the Hollister murders.”

“Oh, OK.” Giamatti’s Adam’s apple made like a pogo stick. “I thought maybe you were a gardener or something, not a cop.”

“I get that a lot. You’re Mr. Giamatti, correct?”

“How’d you know that?”

“Saw you on the news.”

He ran a hand anxiously across his mouth. “Look, I really don’t have anything more to add to what I told your colleagues already, and I really don’t want to get involved any more than I already have. So if you’ll excuse me . . .” He picked up after his poodle and hurried on, glancing back at me and yanking on the dog’s leash when it stopped to sniff.

I’m not saying the guy was guilty of anything, but he sure did seem to behave that way.

I sat in my truck and sent an e-mail to Hollister’s other former pilot, Evan Gantz, saying I needed to talk to him at his earliest convenience. I didn’t say what it was about.

A
NARROW
, meandering game trail led into the hills. The grade was moderately steep, the midday temperatures broiling. I wished I’d remembered to carry a bottle of water. Far below me, I could see my truck where I’d parked it alongside the road. Above me, no more than a couple of hundred meters, I could see the stand of oak trees near where I believed the sniper had done his work, but after about ten minutes of traversing sun-baked, boulder-strewn switchbacks, I was exhausted. Just ahead of me, a lonely creosote bush offered the only shade around. I decided to take ten and was about to park myself when I encountered the snake.

I heard his rattle before I saw him, that distinctive sound that commands instant attention and revs your heart into overdrive. He was coiled below the bush, his tail upright and vibrating, his brown triangular head raised and aimed my way.

“A mature Western diamondback,” I remember thinking. “Now that is one fine-looking killer.”

I’d eaten a few of his relatives during survival training. Drank their blood too. They didn’t taste like chicken, like everyone always says. They tasted like raw, uncooked reptile. Standing there, well within his combat radius, I hoped word hadn’t gotten around. We sized each other up for a second or two before he retreated down the hill, disappearing into the rocks. Perhaps he’d concluded the day was too hot and that I wasn’t worth expending the energy on, or that I was entitled to some professional courtesy. Either way, I felt like I’d won the big spin. Fifteen minutes after resting in the shade that Mr. Snakey had graciously vacated, I was back on my feet and climbing.

Remote as it was, the hilly location I’d zeroed in on from the flats below was far from undiscovered. Empty beer cans, cigarette butts, gum wrappers, and one used condom were scattered under the scrub oaks in a clearing roughly the size of a 7-Eleven. Gazing out between boulders, some as big as hay bales, I had an unobstructed view of the Hollisters’ pool and beyond it, a vast stretch of the Pacific. I’ve seen my share of well-conceived snipers’ nests. This one was as good as they came: obscured from view; a perch from which to fire down rather than up; a restricted avenue of access; and multiple, easily defended fallback positions.

If I were trying to kill me from long range, where would I set up and take the shot?

I studied the dirt and clambered over the rocks, searching for ejected shell casings and makeshift shooting platforms— rock piles or fallen logs over which a shooter in a prone firing position could have leveled the barrel of his rifle. I did find a couple of casings, but they were rusted and .22 caliber— too old and too small to have been involved in the Hollister murders. After hunting nearly half an hour, I found nothing incriminating. The heat was starting to get to me yet again. I needed to sit and cool off. This time, fortunately, I encountered no snakes. Back in the day, I would’ve laughed at how sweltering it was. The heat didn’t bother me back then. Nothing did. Now just about everything seemed to, except flying.
Face it, Logan, this getting older thing sucks.

I could hear a metallic clinking that grew by the second. Somebody, or something, was coming up the trail—fast. Within seconds, the sound was accompanied by a dog barking and by a man mangling the lyrics to and melody of the Beach Boys’ “I Get Around.” His singing wasn’t off-key. He was felony off-key.

A Labrador appeared, enthusiastically following a scent trail, zig-zagging with her nose down, into the clearing. She had a choke chain around her neck, from which jangled a small collection of tags. Obscured in shadow as I was, she didn’t see me at first.

“Somebody’s having a good time,” I said.

Startled, the dog skidded to a halt, backed up and began barking at me, which, mercifully, prompted her equally startled owner to stop singing.

“Don’t worry,” the old man said, grabbing her collar, “she’s friendly. Only real danger you face is getting licked to death. Lola, chill out.”

He was marathon runner-thin, shirtless, and wearing cargo shorts, clutching a water bottle in his right hand, his feet clad in well-worn hiking boots. A thicket of curly silver hair carpeted his chest, while a silver ponytail hung out the back of his sweat-stained, “Old Guys Rule” baseball cap. I guessed him to be nearly eighty.

“She looks pretty harmless to me,” I said as she came running, tail thumping side-to-side, and tried repeatedly to lick me on the lips.

“You look a little overheated,” the man said.

“I forgot to bring water.”

He handed me his bottle and told me to drink as much as I wanted. I took a few sips and handed it back, thanking him. His eyes were the color of gunmetal.

“Never seen you up here before.”

“First time,” I said. “Quite the view.”

“That it is. On a clear day, you can see Catalina from up here.”

He said he lived down near the road and pointed to the McMansion I’d used as a landmark to find my way up the hill. His dog was now playfully jabbing a stick against my leg, trying to get me to throw it.

“Lola and I come up here every afternoon,” he said. “She loves it.”

“I can tell. Sweet pooch.”

“The sweetest. She gets me out of my studio and up here where I can clear out the cobwebs. Beats lying on the shrink’s couch. Cheaper too.”

He said he was a painter, still lifes mostly, and that his name was Theodore Danzig, but that everybody called him TD.

“Played a little football at UCLA back before the Civil War.” He gave me a wink and held out his right hand. We shook. “Not too often I see people up on the trail this time of the day. Too darned hot.”

“I’m looking for something.”

“Well, I sure hope you find it.”

“Actually,” I said, “it’s about Roy Hollister.”

“The big game hunter?”

I nodded.

“You can see his house right down there,” TD said, pointing. “Are you a detective?”

“More or less. I’m looking for evidence.”

He stared at the ground, nodding to himself. “Now it makes sense,” he said.

“What does?”

“That night, those three gunshots.”

He told me he’d been immersed in a book, a biography of Paul Cezanne, when he’d heard a shot—
pow
—followed seconds later by two others in quick succession:
pow, pow
. He said he hadn’t bothered calling 911.

“You hear all manner of strange stuff up here in the middle of the night,” the old man said. “Kids partying, girls screaming, laughing, guns going off, firecrackers. Hard to tell the difference sometimes. Most of the time you can’t tell where any of it’s coming from, from the way the sound bounces around all these canyons. Unless it sounds like somebody’s in real trouble, I just let it go. Maybe that night, I shouldn’t have.”

I followed him to the edge of the clearing, to a spot behind the charred, waist-high remains of an oak tree that looked as if it had once been hit by lightning. The field of view past the stump, far down the heights, was unrestricted, all the way to the Hollisters’ swimming pool and beyond. He reached into a back pocket and retrieved a worn leather wallet, undid the fat rubber band holding the wallet together, and pulled out a crumpled business card.

“Lola sniffed this out, right here, the day after that poor couple died down there. Don’t ask me why I kept it. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Picking up trash. Protect the earth. All that sixties stuff you never hear about anymore. But then I saw the news. I probably should’ve called the police, but I guess it just slipped my mind.”

He handed me the card.

“Hollister, 439 Madera Ln.” was scrawled in smeared blue ink on the back in a ragged, hurried hand, along with a local telephone number. Printed on the front of the card was “Helping Endangered Animals Thrive.” The silhouette of a black rhino formed the acronym, HEAT.

Below the rhino was a post office box and the name, “Dino Birch, Chief Executive Officer.”

NINE

T
he army had trained Dino Birch to be a sniper. Roy Hollister and his wife had been killed by a sniper. Birch had made it his life’s purpose defending rare and exotic wild animals. Hollister had made his fortune helping facilitate the deaths of those very animals. As far as Rancho Bonita police were concerned, the discovery of Birch’s business card and what was presumed to be Birch’s handwritten notation of the Hollisters’ home address jotted on the back, were proof positive that they definitely had the right suspect in custody. As I watched police crime scene investigators scour the clearing, thanks to my tip, I wasn’t so sure.

Only the world’s most incompetent killer would’ve accidentally left a business card behind. Granted, you hear about stupid crooks all the time—the bank robber who hands the teller a demand note written on his own deposit slip; the masked gunman who sticks up a KFC forgetting that his girlfriend is working the counter that night—but leaving your card, and with the victim’s address handwritten on the back, no less? Either Birch had been felony careless or, as he claimed, he’d been framed.

Two detectives were questioning TD Danzig. Danzig was petting his dog, Lola, who was happily licking herself at his feet. One of the cops excused himself and walked over to me. He’d introduced himself a few minutes earlier as Daryl Kopecky. Trim, midthirties, dress shirt and tie. A .40-caliber Smith & Wesson was cradled in a pancake holster on the right hip of his khaki Dockers.

“This was one spot we missed when we went looking up here in the hills, the shooter’s position,” he said. “We really appreciate you letting us know about it, Mr. Logan. And just for your information, we also found that bullet in the wood beam, right where you said it was.”

Far below, I could see other detectives and police personnel milling about behind the Hollister mansion. A ladder, probably the same one I’d used, was propped beside the vine-covered trellis.

“Looked to me like a NATO round,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” Kopecky said. “I really can’t discuss specifics.”

“Understood. But let’s say for the sake of argument that it was a NATO round, 7.62 millimeter. According to the news, that would be the same caliber bullet the coroner found inside the Hollisters. And that to me begs the question: Does Dino Birch own a rifle of that caliber?”

“Again, I’m sorry. I can’t discuss specifics. The investigation’s ongoing.”

“You would’ve told me if he did own a rifle of that caliber,” I said.

“What makes you think that?”

“Let’s just say I can read people pretty well. I used to do it for a living.”

The detective folded his arms. “Like I said, the investigation is ongoing.”

“Without a murder weapon, your case is purely circumstantial.”

Kopecky bristled. “We know Birch trained on the 300 Winchester Magnum when he was in the army.”

“And a lot of Win Mags fire a 7.62 round. That still doesn’t get you where you need to be evidence-wise, not by a long shot—no pun intended.”

“We have a witness who puts him at the scene shortly before the shootings occurred.”

“Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable.”

“How do you know that?”

“I just do.”

Kopecky was starting to lose his patience with me. “I’m still somewhat unclear, Mr. Logan, how you came to be here.”

I explained to him for the second time my relationship with Gil Carlisle and how Carlisle had asked me to help him assess whether his nephew, Birch, was worth the expense of hiring a private defense team.

“No, I get all that,” Kopecky said. “What I don’t get is how you knew to look up here, how you found that bullet hole in the wood, the ballistics? Because without that, there’d probably be no business card.”

“I wouldn’t put too much weight on that card, Detective. Birch wouldn’t have left it up here. Nobody’s that dumb.”

“You’d be surprised,” the detective said.

“And you’d be wrong. This is the position where the shots came from, but I guarantee you, Birch didn’t leave that card up here. And he would not have fired that shot into the wood, missing his intended targets by that much. Somebody else did the shooting. Somebody who wasn’t trained in the service as a sniper.”

“How do you know that?”

“Military snipers are taught ‘one shot, one kill’—never waste a single round and give up your position. Birch was trained as a military sniper. That bullet I found in the wood? That was the shooter’s first round. He squeezed it off to zero his weapon, minutes, maybe hours earlier, to make sure his scope was accurately sighted, to make sure he wouldn’t miss before turning the weapon on his victims. That’s something a civilian hunter would do.”

“You just told me you’re working for Birch’s uncle. You’d say anything to defend him.”

“If that’s true, why did I call you guys and tell you about the bullet, or this place?”

“I don’t know,” Kopecky said. “You tell me.”

He was eyeing me the way cops do when they’re mulling your guilt or innocence. Squinting, head slightly cocked.

“You know, detective, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say you’re looking at me like I’m a possible suspect.”

“What makes you think that?”

I didn’t say anything. I just looked at him, waiting. People hate lapses in conversation. They compulsively fill in the gaps. Sometimes even cops say things they shouldn’t.