Murder Season (18 page)

No one looked up. Still, she kept her head down and turned her back as she stepped over to the second table and began filling out a property request card. She knew that the evidence was tracked by computer. Anyone paying close attention would notice and could bring trouble for both her and Vaughan. But somehow she managed to push her fears aside.

She wasn’t looking for blood, semen, or even saliva because they wouldn’t be there. The crime scene photographs indicated that Lily’s jeans and boots had been tossed into a pile three or four feet away from where the victim’s corpse had been found.

What Lena needed were skin cells. The kind found beneath the surface of the killer’s hands that would have been exposed if he stripped away Lily’s jeans and boots with any force.

Force was the key issue—the main ingredient—because the cells needed to be alive at the time of the murder. Without force there wouldn’t be enough DNA to detect a transfer.

As Lena completed the request card, writing the case number down and signing her name above her badge number, she couldn’t help but think about the odds. It might have been the right thing to do, but it was a long shot. Even getting Martin Orth to agree to perform the tests was a long shot. It would mean working in secret, jeopardizing his career and putting himself at risk at a time when the crime lab was under so much scrutiny.

And for what?

She should have told Vaughan the truth. She should have told him that what came next was pure desperation. That this is what you did when you ran out of road—hoped that your victim’s killer had been amped up enough to leave skin cells.

She turned to the counter and looked at the old woman behind the wire mesh. One of the two men smiled at her as he left the room. The second detective was dropping off an evidence packet. When he walked out, Lena slid her request card through the slot and waited while the clerk adjusted her glasses and entered the case number into a computer.

“Lily Hight,” the old woman said finally. “Her daddy got the guy. What do you want with this?”

Lena saw suspicion growing on the clerk’s face, her antenna rising out of what looked like a bad wig. She didn’t need to justify her request, nor did she have any desire to. At the same time, the case could have been flagged and she didn’t want the old woman to pick up the phone.

“Just cataloging evidence for my boss,” she said, feigning drudgery. “More reports. More paperwork. You know how it is. I was hoping it hadn’t been moved over to Piper Tech. That’s all I’d need today—another drive across town in this heat.”

The old woman bought it and grinned at her. “Got it, honey. Everything’s still here. I’ll be right back.”

Lena watched the clerk walk down the long aisle and disappear around the corner. The storage room behind the counter was enormous and it would probably take a while.

It was the waiting that she found the most difficult. Standing in a room with plate-glass windows and a view of the hall outside. The fact that so many people were walking by. The basement corridor was the quickest route between the building and the parking garage across the street. Lena checked her watch, realizing that it was almost noon. When she looked up, she saw Barrera and Deputy Chief Ramsey and turned back to the counter. When the door opened behind her and she heard Barrera’s voice, the dread hit her in a flash like dragon’s breath.

“Gamble?”

She pulled herself together and turned. Barrera was holding the door open with Ramsey behind him in the hall. She didn’t have time to think about what she was still showing on her face.

“Just wanted to give you a heads-up,” he said. “That piece-of-shit gossip reporter’s out. Dick Harvey. He was released this morning. It sounds like he blames you for his arrest and wants to get even. I wouldn’t spend too much time watching TV.”

Lena could hear footsteps behind her—the old woman starting back down the aisle. Timing was everything if life. She took a deep breath.

“Great,” she said. “Thanks for the tip.”

Barrera took in the room, picking up on something, then shaking it off. Lena was waiting for him to say something like, what the fuck are you doing in here? Instead, he told her to keep an eye out for Harvey, called him a rotten piece of shit again, and closed the door.

“That the boss, honey?”

Lena turned around as Barrera and Ramsey walked off. The old woman was standing behind the wire mesh holding an evidence box. She nodded at her and watched as she unlocked the window and pushed the box across the counter.

“Yeah,” she said. “That’s the boss.”

28

It wasn’t a very large box.
As Vaughan pulled out of the lot heading for the freeway, Lena cut through the tape with a key and opened the carton. Inside she found an inventory of the contents and checked to see that everything was there. The girl’s jeans, her boots, a belt, and a pair of socks—it didn’t add up to much. A note attached to the list indicated that what remained of the teenager’s other clothing—her T-shirt and blouse—had been frozen and placed in the vault at the lab because both items contained blood evidence from the victim’s wound.

Vaughan reached the freeway and shifted lanes, steering the car east toward the San Bernardino Freeway. “If it’s possible that the killer’s DNA was transferred to her clothing, why didn’t they send it to the lab before the trial?”

“I’m sure they did.”

“Then why are we doing it again?” he said.

Lena tried not to show any doubt. “Because they weren’t looking for what we’re looking for. Think about what they already had. Gant’s semen. His saliva. Why waste time and money when they already had everything they thought they needed? It wouldn’t have made sense after they locked Gant in. They had their man.”

“Right,” he said. “I keep thinking that they knew about the lab screwup before the trial, not one week in when it was too late. But this clothing has been handled. It would have been examined for hair and fiber. The lab would have gone over every inch, looking for bodily fluids. After that, it was thrown in this box and sent to storage. What could be left?”

Lena didn’t say anything; she was still wrestling with the same question.

What could be left?

She turned and looked out the window. The air was no longer transparent, the city barely visible through the brown haze. According to a weather report she had heard on the drive into town, the city would break another record as temperatures climbed to 117 degrees. She wondered when the heat would break—and when the case would break.

The drive out to the crime lab only took another ten minutes. As Vaughan parked, Lena glanced at the sign and admired the building. Officially named the Hertzberg-Davis Forensic Science Center, the new crime lab was set on the campus at Cal State University and housed the LAPD’s Scientific Investigation Division as well as the Sheriff’s Department Scientific Services Bureau. The facility was capable of handling evidence from more that 140,000 criminal cases every year—the people who worked here were dedicated to their jobs. The fact that the evidence went missing in one of the city’s biggest cases was more than unfortunate for everyone.

Lena hadn’t been out to the lab since the verdict. As she followed Vaughan into the building, she sensed something was wrong before they got through security and reached the elevators. It was the same odd feeling she had experienced yesterday morning as she entered Parker Center. When they found Martin Orth in his office and he looked up from his desk, she could see the concern in his eyes. He glanced at the evidence box she was carrying, then looked back at her. Was it concern? Or was it fear?

“What’s going on, Marty?” she said.

He grimaced, pushing his chair away from his desk as he stood up. “Take a look across the hall,” he said.

Lena turned with Vaughan and gazed through the glass window at the two men in the conference room. Howard Kendrick, the chief administrator of the crime lab, was seated at the table watching the second man pace along the far wall while talking to someone on his cell phone. Lena didn’t recognize him. Although he appeared to be somewhere in his late fifties, it was obvious that he still worked out. He was sturdy and tall with wiry hair that had been dyed an unnatural reddish brown and looked like it might be a piece. His face appeared frozen, his rough skin stitched so tight across his cheeks, she couldn’t get a read on him.

“Who is he?” she said.

Vaughan answered for Orth. “Jerry Spadell,” he said in a quiet voice. “A former investigator with the DA’s office. A shadow from Higgins’s past. A goon.”

Orth gave Spadell a last look, then shut the door and returned to his desk. “He might be with Higgins, but Bennett sent him over.”

“What is it?” Lena said. “What’s going on?”

“That story in
The Times.
They want us to go through the lab again and see if we can find those DNA samples that went missing. It’s all for show.”

Vaughan leaned against the windowsill. “Kendrick agreed?”

Orth nodded. “For what it’s worth, I’ve never thought that we actually lost them. Just that someone mislabeled them. That’s why it’s a waste of time. The samples are invisible. You could be staring right at them and still not see them.”

Lena pushed the evidence box across the desk. “We need a favor.”

Orth read the label on the carton—his eyes changing as they passed over Lily Hight’s name. When he opened the box, Lena started to say something but he waved her off.

“I already know what you want, Lena. The timing’s not so good right now.”

“It’s a big favor,” she said. “An important favor.”

He met her gaze, mulling it over. “Let me ask you a question first,” he said finally.

“Anything.”

“Yesterday you had one of our guys dust Lily Hight’s bedroom for prints. I’d like to know why.”

She paused a moment, worried that she might have misread Orth. It was possible that he might not be the ally she thought he was. That he was about to repeat everything Barrera had said to her last night—that she was scaring the shit out of everyone. That her request to dust the room bordered on the ridiculous—and in the end, Steven Bennett was right. Just do the job you were asked to do. Get Hight for the double murders at Club 3 AM, and let go of the past.

She glanced at Vaughan, then back at Orth. “We had time to kill,” she said. “Paladino was doing a press conference on the front lawn. We couldn’t get out.”

“But the crime scene was at Club 3 AM, not the house.”

Lena shook her head. “There’s something about the girl’s room that’s not right. I found things that shouldn’t have been there. And there’s something wrong with her father that has nothing to do with what happened the other night. If I wasted everybody’s time, I won’t apologize because I’d do it again, Marty. If someone has a problem with that—if someone complained—they should have called me, or even Barrera, not bothered you.”

“No one complained,” he said. “But you might want to stop by the Latent Print Section when you get a chance. I just got a call. They finished up this morning. Your reports should be ready in another hour.”

Lena studied Orth’s face, suddenly aware that she had missed something important. It wasn’t criticism that the SID supervisor had in mind. Instead, she sensed an undercurrent of support. For some unknown reason, Orth was on their side and had every intention of—

“What did they find?” she asked.

Orth glanced at the door, then turned back to her and lowered his voice. “Jacob Gant’s fingerprints,” he said. “All over the room. The closet, the dresser, every handle on every drawer. And they’re fresh prints, Lena. They’re exceedingly clean. No doubt about it—Gant was in that room within the last two weeks of his life. And he was looking for something. You got any idea what it might have been?”

29

She didn’t know what Gant had been searching for.
But whatever it was, it probably got him killed.…

Lena scooped up Johnny Bosco’s keys, slipped the chain-of-evidence form into her briefcase and left the building. While Vaughan had been anxious to get back to his analysis of the trial, she had spent the past two hours screening additional security videos pulled from Club 3 AM with a forensic analyst from the Photographic Unit. The analyst, Henry Rollins, had examined every image recorded that night.

Unfortunately, nothing had changed.

Tim Hight, a man who made his living working with cameras, had managed to avoid every lens in the building. The fire escape on the north side of the structure remained a blind spot and the most likely point of entry.

But Rollins had also given Lena an update on the street cam photo that captured Hight driving away from the club that night. The resolution of the image had improved significantly. To Lena, the shadow on the passenger seat was beginning to take on definition and look more like a gun than a flashlight. While Rollins agreed, he wasn’t ready to commit and said that the enhancement process would give them a definitive answer soon.

After reviewing Jacob Gant’s fingerprints for another hour with an analyst from the Latent Print Section, Lena was out of time and had to move on.

There could be no doubt that Gant had been in Lily Hight’s bedroom within the past two weeks, and that he had entered and exited the room through the window. Lena remembered the tree outside, and wondered how often Gant made the climb while Lily had been alive. How many nights he’d spent in her bed.

For reasons she couldn’t explain or even support, Lena’s first thought upon hearing the news from Orth had been that Gant was looking for the girl’s cell phone. But hiding a phone was different than hiding a photograph in a memory box. If the phone had been in the bedroom, she didn’t think it could have remained hidden for so long. Too many people had been looking for it. An entire year had gone by. But even more, how could the victim have even managed to hide it? The killer had delivered a mortal blow. Once the screwdriver was driven into her back, nothing else could have occurred but death.

Yet, Gant had to have been looking for something. Something important enough to risk breaking into the house.