Murder Season (13 page)

Lena turned to the Death Investigation Report and read Cobb’s notes, then paged back to the record. From the egregious nature of the crime and with no signs of forced entry, Cobb became convinced that Lily had known her killer. When he asked Tim Hight if he knew anyone who would want to harm his daughter, Hight named Jacob Gant and told him that the twenty-five-year-old had been stalking her. When asked if he knew where Jacob Gant lived, Hight pointed across their driveway directly at Gant, who happened to be watching them from the chair set before his bedroom window.

Cobb stated in his notes that his primary concern in that first hour was securing the crime scene and helping the Hights deal with their loss until assistance arrived. But during the course of the evening he made initial contact with Gant under the pretense that he might be helpful as a witness. Gant claimed that he had been alone that evening, that he’d gone to a bar by himself and had a couple of beers. By the time he returned home the police were already there. When asked about his relationship with the sixteen-year-old victim, he said only that they were friends and neighbors. But what struck Cobb about the interview was Gant’s demeanor. While Cobb described the Hights as being in extreme emotional distress, he found Gant visibly nervous and afraid, even evasive.

Lena thought back to the conversation she’d had with the detective just a few hours ago in that interrogation room.

I knew that little shit did it the minute I set eyes on him.

After that meeting, that moment, that gaze, the case seemed to gain traction toward a single target.

Lily’s cell phone couldn’t be found and was never recovered. Cobb assumed from the beginning that the killer had had a reason to take the phone and get rid of it. Within twenty-four hours, the service provider came through and the detective thought he knew that reason.

Gant had left more than a hundred and twenty-five voice and text messages with Lily over the last two weeks of her life. And from Cobb’s point of view, Gant had made a huge mistake, the kind of mistake most criminals make when they’re in a hurry. The phone had been discarded without deleting the messages from the phone company’s server.

Lena saw a note indicating that transcripts from a selection of messages, what Cobb called
Highlights,
had been added to the back of the murder book. She counted just over twenty and read through them carefully. Although the sampling wasn’t complete, each message mirrored Tim Hight’s claim that Gant was infatuated with his daughter. Even more, each message portrayed Gant as a young man driven by rage and overwhelmed with jealousy and paranoia.

Lena sensed movement in the café and looked up. A man was sitting down at the next table but seemed preoccupied with his food. Glancing at her watch, she realized that she only had another ten minutes before she needed to head over to the coroner’s office, and turned back to the murder book.

With Gant’s voice and text messages in hand, Cobb had no difficulty securing multiple warrants from a judge. And the detective made a decent effort to describe his thoughts as a team of criminalists and detectives took samples from Gant’s body and searched the house. Lena was surprised by the quality of the detective’s writing. Somehow it didn’t match up with the man she had met this afternoon. All the same, it made the reading easier. When she finished, she set the binder down, sipped her coffee, and thought it over.

The search of Gant’s room had convinced Cobb that he was on the right track. He saw the violent artwork Gant had created for his graphic novel, the close-up view into Lily’s bedroom from the chair. He found a camera with a long lens in a desk drawer. Within hours of seizing Gant’s computer, an SID tech called with news that several nude photographs of the sixteen-year-old victim had been found on the hard drive. While Cobb waited on the DNA analysis and SID reports, he focused on Gant’s alibi and history. Gant claimed to have gone to a bar the night of Lily’s murder, but his story fell apart when no one remembered seeing him there. When Cobb learned of Gant’s troubled youth and the murder of his mother, the detective must have thought that he could see the finish line. And on the following day, he crossed it.

The results from the crime lab showed Gant’s fingerprints in Lily’s bedroom. But even more, the DNA analysis revealed a hit. A perfect match. The semen samples taken from the girl’s body locked Gant in beyond all doubt.

Lena wasn’t surprised that Gant hired Paladino after that, or even that his story changed. Most stories change once an attorney becomes involved and knows that his client has just hit the wall. Diffusing the circumstances of a murder—fitting the pieces together so that they make sense in another way—could almost be considered an art. And Lena knew of no one better at it than Buddy Paladino.

Now Gant was more than Lily’s friend. More than just her neighbor. Now Gant was claiming to have had a secret relationship with the sixteen-year-old—a relationship they had kept quiet because of her age. Now he claimed that his semen was found because he had made love with her that night. That although they had been fighting over the last two weeks and he had left those angry messages on her cell phone, they had made up that night and all had been forgiven. That no one saw him at the bar because it was standing-room-only on a Friday during a Lakers game. That even though he owned a camera, he didn’t need to take the nude snapshots of Lily because she had taken them herself and given them to him as a gift.

Gant tried to explain away all the details through his attorney. Every piece of the puzzle fit or almost fit or was forced to fit—except one.

There were still no signs of forced entry. No indication that anyone had been with Lily in the house other than Jacob Gant. All physical evidence collected at the crime scene still pointed to Gant and only Gant.

And then there was the harsh condition of Lily Hight’s body that neither attorney nor client could explain away. The bruising on her neck. Her broken right ankle. The trauma to her genitals. The fact that she was dead. To Cobb, and now to Steven Bennett and Debi Watson who had just been assigned the case, the way Lily had been left didn’t look or feel much like love.

19

Lena gave her protective clothing
a final check. She was standing before a locker in the changing room at the coroner’s office, trying to ignore the conclusions she’d reached while reading Cobb’s murder book. Trying to pretend that the flaws in the case weren’t really there.

But she knew she was fooling herself.

There was Cobb’s take on the case—and then there was everything else. The lies and loose ends were beginning to pile up. If Cobb’s investigation hinged on the father’s claim that Gant was stalking his daughter, why did Lily keep a picture of Gant hidden by her bed? If Gant’s brother knew that there was something more to the relationship, why didn’t Tim Hight?

And that was the problem. Hight would have had to have known.

He sat in that chair in the sunroom every night. He sat in the dark smoking and drinking and snorting cocaine. He was probably watching them the same way he’d watched Lena when she notified the Gants that Jacob had been murdered. He probably tuned in every night.

But even more telling, if Cobb’s case was as rock solid as it appeared in the murder book, why wasn’t he willing to help? If Cobb had connected all the dots, why the psycho drama? Why all the insanity? Why didn’t he just brief her on the case and wish her luck?

Lena slipped on a pair of gloves and grabbed her face shield. But just as she reached for the door, her cell phone started vibrating in her pocket. The phone shook five times before she was able to dig it out from beneath her scrubs and see Barrera’s name blinking on the display.

“I just got a call from Jack Peltre,” he said. “You know him, Lena?”

From the sound of Barrera’s voice—the low rattle—it didn’t take much to put it together. Jack Peltre was a lieutenant working out of the Pacific Station. More to the point, Peltre was Cobb’s supervisor.

“I’ve heard of him,” she said.

“Then I’m sure you’ll be happy to know that it was a friendly call. It was friendly because we’ve known each other for twenty years and that’s what friends do. They take care of each other. And from time to time, they make friendly calls. You know what I’m saying?”

Barrera was seething. The shit was hitting the fan.

“I think so,” she said.

“You think so? Well, they do, Lena. Friendly people like to stay in touch, otherwise they don’t consider themselves friendly. By the way, Peltre mentioned that you stopped by this afternoon. He told me that when you left the building, you took something with you.”

She glanced across the changing room at the murder book stuffed in her briefcase. There was no point in denying it.

“I did,” she said. “I took something.”

Several moments passed. She could hear Barrera grinding his teeth and working a cigar.

“Bring it to me,” he said finally. “I want to see you in my office. And that’s an order, Detective. I want to see you right now.”

The line went dead. He’d hung up on her.

Lena stared at the phone, weighing her options. She was already suited up and figured that she had five, maybe ten minutes—plus the short drive over to Parker Center before Barrera would start looking for her. Lowering her face shield, she gritted her teeth and entered the operating room. There were seven autopsies in progress tonight. Even better, the jar of Vicks VapoRub wasn’t in its usual place in the changing room. She had nothing to block out the abhorrent smell of decomposing flesh and human waste. Nothing to filter away the dense, oppressive odor that permeated every inch of the room.

The experience was more than overwhelming—something her former partner once told her didn’t get any easier after twenty years.

But tonight she welcomed it like a wake-up call.

Without looking too closely, she scanned the room and spotted Sid Kosinski working in the far corner. The two corpses were laid out side by side on stainless steel operating trays. Even from a distance neither Bosco nor Gant looked as if they were resting or had found much peace.

Mindful of the wet floor, Lena worked her way deeper into the room. Kosinski glanced up at her as she approached. He had begun with Bosco, and appeared to be more than halfway through. As he jotted something down on a clipboard, she turned to Gant and eyed his dead body. She took the shock with her game face on, thinking about how difficult it must have been for his father to stand here and identify his son.

Without clothing, she could see that the bruises Gant had received were significantly more extensive than what she’d seen on his neck and arms at the crime scene. The wounds from the beatings he had endured stretched across his shoulders, his chest and stomach, then circled around his lower back. His upper thighs were marred as well—almost as if he’d blocked a series of kicks to the groin.

She had no reason to doubt Gant’s brother on this. No reason to doubt that the number of people standing in line to throw a punch Gant’s way after the
NOT GUILTY
verdict would have extended across the entire city.

An image surfaced. She could see Cobb sitting before her with his eyes concealed by those strange glasses. She could remember how still the room became when she asked the detective if he’d hit Gant, if he had hurt him. She wondered what their interviews had been like before Gant signed up with Paladino. She hadn’t seen any transcripts in the murder book. If they were there, she hadn’t found them.

She pushed the thought away and looked back at what was left of Gant’s face. The two rounds that had blown out his eyes carried more meaning now. The killer’s personal rage for his victim remained all too clear. Yet the possibility that Gant had been murdered for what he’d seen—what he’d discovered—seemed just as clear.

Kosinski moved in beside her. “Some of these bruises have to be more than ten days old, Lena. Look at the change in color.”

She nodded. “I can’t stay, Sid. How come you started with Bosco?”

Kosinski met her eyes, then tipped his head toward the double doors that opened from the hallway behind them. Lena peeked over his shoulder. District Attorney Jimmy J. Higgins was watching them from the other side of the glass and seemed more than a little edgy. But at least she knew what had happened to that jar of Vicks VapoRub. She could see Higgins smearing the gel all over his handkerchief and pressing the cloth against his mouth and nose. He had a wild look in his eyes like a man huffing glue.

Kosinski lowered his voice. “He said he’s got a meeting tonight. He wants whatever I can give him before he goes.”

“Why doesn’t he come in?”

“Because he’s a chicken shit. I don’t even know why he’s here. I could have given him a call.”

“It’s Bosco,” she said. “They were friends.”

“What kind of friends?”

She shrugged.

“Well, Higgins asked me to do something I could never do, Lena.”

“Clean the report,” she said. “Don’t mention what you found in Bosco’s nose.”

Kosinski gave her a long look and then nodded. “What kind of a DA would ask for something like that?”

She wished that Higgins’s request would have surprised her, but it didn’t. If the DA could press the deputy chief of police, he would have had no problem trying to corrupt a medical examiner. She turned and took another peek at him. He had stepped away from the window and was shouting at someone on his cell phone. She wondered if it was Vaughan taking the verbal beating on the other end of that phone. She wondered if Cobb’s supervisor had made another call on the “friends network”—this time to the DA because that’s what friends do.

But Lena had her own reasons to be troubled by the cocaine found at Club 3 AM.

She still didn’t understand why Dante Escabar had left it at the crime scene. And his explanation that somehow he had overlooked it—that he’d rushed to inform the owners about the murders and protect their clients by shutting the place down—didn’t ring true. The quantity alone raised serious doubt. In the end, finding that much coke would jeopardize the club’s place as an oasis for the A-list just as much as Bosco being seen with Jacob Gant after the trial. Escabar had both the time and opportunity to clean things up, but hadn’t. Lena felt certain that he’d had a reason. Something she couldn’t see yet.