Murder Season (8 page)
“Where was the receipt?”
Street answered for his partner. “He’s got an office upstairs. We found it in his desk with a stack of other receipts. Looks like he was trying to write it off as a business expense.”
Lena felt someone move in behind her. It was Barrera. He reached for the evidence bag and examined the receipt.
“Business is business,” he said. “Find the gun. Tear the place apart.”
She had asked Mifune to remove his instruments
from the table and wait outside. Barrera was seated on the couch in the living room, out of sight but within earshot. Hight remained in the kitchen, alone for the last thirty minutes with whatever was going on inside his head. She didn’t think that time would soften him. The man had been running on fumes for more than a year. When she finally entered the room, he was staring at that empty pack of cigarettes.
“What’s happened?” he said. “Why is this taking so long?”
Lena opened a file she’d pulled from her briefcase. “Do you keep a flashlight in your car, Mr. Hight?”
“I don’t think so. Why?”
She found the surveillance photo and set it down on the table. Hight looked at himself behind the wheel and seemed amazed that his ride home had been documented. Lena pushed the photo closer, pointing at the dark object on the passenger seat.
“What do you think this is?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“On the seat beside you. What do you think it is? What’s your best guess?”
Hight didn’t answer and seemed confused. Leaning over the table, he tried to study the image.
“We’re not talking about six days ago,” she said. “It’s more like six hours. You’ve just left Club 3 AM. You said that you don’t keep a flashlight in your car. So what is it, Mr. Hight? What’s on the passenger seat of your car?”
His eyes returned to the photograph. “I don’t know. It could be a shadow. It’s nothing.”
Lena tossed the receipt for the gun on the table.
“A shadow?” she said.
Hight’s body stiffened as he realized what was in the evidence bag. Beads of sweat began to percolate on his forehead. His mouth quivered. Lena pulled a chair away from the table and sat down. Nothing about her voice or manner was confrontational.
“Where’s the gun, Mr. Hight?”
He took a deep breath and shuddered as he exhaled. He tried to look at her, but couldn’t. He seemed embarrassed. The room went quiet again.
“Make it easy on yourself,” she said. “You’re so close. Just tell me where it is.”
Another long moment passed. “I can’t remember,” he whispered finally. “I don’t know what I did with it.”
“You mean you got rid of it. After you left the club, you tossed it.”
He shook his head. “No. I mean I can’t remember where I put it. It came in the mail and I put it somewhere. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was confused.”
Lena sat back in the chair, unable to hide her disappointment. “That’s your story? You bought a gun, but you can’t remember what you did with it. You were at Club 3 AM last night, two men were shot, but all you took with you was your shadow.”
The cynicism in her voice registered on his face, though only for a brief moment.
“I think I should call my lawyers now.”
Lawyers.
He didn’t have one attorney. He had more than one.
“I do, too,” she said. “And here’s what you’ll need to tell them. It won’t work, Mr. Hight. What you’re doing. What you’re trying to get away with. It won’t work.”
“I’m not trying to get away with anything.”
“Sure you are. You’re trying to get away with murder. But all that depends on it looking like a crime of passion. And you’ll need public opinion on your side to pull it off.”
“If I had killed Jacob Gant, it would have been a crime of passion.”
“But what happened last night wasn’t a crime of passion,” she said. “And that’s your problem. It doesn’t look like it. It doesn’t feel like it. So how do you expect your lawyers to sell it?”
“If I’d murdered Jake, it would have been,” he repeated with less conviction.
“I can only speak for myself and the people I work with, Mr. Hight. The whole thing looks planned. Everything you did looks scripted, like you spent a lot of time in that chair in the sunroom thinking it over from every angle. Watching the Gants from your window and letting it eat you up from the inside. You dreamed about murdering Jacob Gant. Like you said, you wished for his death over and over again.”
A beat went by. Then another, and Hight started weeping like a man overcome by his memories. His ghosts.
“But Jake murdered Lily,” he whispered into his hands. “My girl. That’s how a crime of passion works.”
Lena spotted a box of tissues on the counter and brought them over to the table.
“You planned it, Mr. Hight. You bought the gun six weeks ago. We checked. It’s not registered. You followed Gant to the club last night. You knew the layout and waited on the fire escape.”
“I haven’t seen him since the trial. I told you that.”
“You shot an innocent man. You shot Johnny Bosco.”
“I didn’t. I couldn’t. I liked Johnny. He was nice to me.”
Lena lowered her voice. “You shot him in the back. You’ll need to tell your lawyers about it because that’s what it really comes down to. The gristle on the bone. You shot an innocent man in the back.”
His body shivered—a tremor from deep within that came and went.
“Why do you keep repeating it?” he said.
“Because you’re playing us. Because you’re trying to take the city down with you. No matter what I might feel for your loss, you’re hurting other people now. You shot Bosco and then you killed Gant just the way you dreamed about it. You took care of business. You wasted him. You disfigured him beyond recognition. Just the way you wanted to. Just the way you planned it.”
“No.”
“When you talk to your attorneys about selling what you did as a crime of passion, remember the details and don’t leave anything out. You took the time to pick up your shell casings, Mr. Hight. You took the time to go through their wallets and make it look like a robbery. You knew Bosco. Everybody knew he carried a lot of cash. So you took his money and tried to make the murders look like something else. You tried to cover your tracks. And then what?”
“I didn’t do any of these things.”
“And then what?” she repeated. “You stayed behind to watch. You got lost in the crowd outside the club because you wanted to see the fallout. You called ahead and sent your wife to Bakersfield. You came home and mended the wound on your hand that you’ve been trying to hide from us. You made a drink and sat down in your chair by the window. And then you waited. You waited for the news to arrive next door. Your dream came true. You made sure it came true. Jacob Gant is dead.”
Lena paused a moment, her words settling into the room.
“That’s not a crime of passion,” she said finally. “That’s the death penalty, Mr. Hight. That’s a trip to the dead room. That’s a ride on a gurney and a needle in the arm.”
He looked up from the floor. His eyes had hollowed out, and the tears were gone. He hadn’t weakened or given anything up. But he was looking through her now. All the way through her—his jaw tight, his gaze bitter and ice-cold.
People are capable of anything.
Given the right circumstances, the most gentle and meek can lash out in a single instant to become the most vicious and unforgiving.
It was the great lesson she had learned from her first partner in the division. Her last partner. Humanity can be shed as easily as clothing. Everything you know about someone can change in the blink of an eye. For anyone who works in law enforcement, this was the premise, the foundation, the key to survival.
She was standing in the foyer. Barrera had stepped out onto the back porch, smoking a cigar, and talking to the deputy chief on his cell. As she watched Mifune work with Hight in the kitchen, it occurred to her that Hight wasn’t necessarily as disappointed with the way things had turned out as he showed himself to be. He had dreamed about killing Jacob Gant, and the botched trial had given him the opportunity to realize that dream. A shrink would probably call it the quickest way through the grieving process. A shortcut to closure. Gant would never appear in an interview, never be seen in public, never be an issue again. He was nothing more than a memory now.
The thought faded as she climbed the stairs to the second-floor landing. Carson and Street were searching through the master bedroom at the end of the hall. Toward the front of the house she could see a small guest room, well furnished with large double-hung windows and a decent view of Venice and the ocean at the bottom of the hill. A door was open to her left. She noted the unfinished stairs leading to the attic and could hear a pair of detectives moving things around. Across the hall she found Hight’s office and walked in.
It was a large room with the same footprint as the living room. And like the room below, window shutters kept the space in a perpetual state of near darkness. She understood why when she noticed the large TV mounted on the far wall. She looked at the glass coffee table, the leather couch and chairs. The room served as both an office and a screening room. As she walked over to the desk, she realized that Fred Wireman, a senior detective due to retire next year, was searching the closet. Like Carson and Street, Lena knew Wireman to be extremely thorough.
“Lots of movies, huh,” he said.
Lena nodded, eyeing the bookshelves. Hight’s library of films looked to be as extensive as the music collection she had inherited from her brother. Several thousand titles filled the shelves from floor to ceiling. Skimming through the collection in the dim light, it took a moment to grasp that they were sorted by the director’s name, not the title of the film. Because this information wasn’t printed on the spine, Hight had to possess a certain knowledge of each film’s history. All the same, some of Lena’s favorites were here. Films by Truffaut and Bresson, Buñuel and Bertolucci. Works by Hitchcock, and Huston, Kubrick, Kurosawa, and Herzog.
It all registered even though she was thinking more about Jacob Gant’s murder and the memories that had surfaced while she examined the gunshot wounds to his head. She was looking for John Ford. When she found Hight’s copy of
The Searchers,
she pulled it from the shelf.
The cover was a reproduction of the original poster: John Wayne and Jeffrey Hunter on horseback with their rifles set on their saddles. Across the image the words,
He had to find her …
were repeated twice. Still, nothing registered.
“Hey, Fred,” she said. “Are you into movies?”
“Since I was a kid.”
“You ever see this one?”
She turned and held out the cover. When he read the title, he smiled.
“One of my favorites,” he said. “Along with
Stagecoach, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,
and
My Darling Clementine
.”
“Someone shoots someone in the eyes. This is the movie, right? Without eyes, you can’t enter the spirit world.”
Wireman thought about it for a moment, started to nod, then stopped as he put it together. “That’s the one,” he said. “Of course, it doesn’t prove anything.”
“I’m not saying it does. All it means is that he owns the film and probably watched it once or twice.”
“More than once or twice would be my guess, Lena. Before Hight’s career tanked and he moved to reality TV, he directed
Prairie Winds
. The poster’s over here on the wall.”
Wireman swung the closet door shut, revealing the framed poster. Lena crossed the room. She had seen the film more than once and liked it. Once with her brother, and once with Rhodes.
“You look surprised,” he said.
“I didn’t realize it was him. What went wrong? Why’d he stop making movies?”
Wireman shrugged and got back to work. “Shit happens, I guess. Seems like he got more than his share.”
Lena noticed a second door
in the hallway. Because it was slightly more narrow than the door leading to the attic, she assumed that it opened to a closet. But when she gave the handle a push, bright sunlight flooded the entire landing and swirled around her feet.
It turned out to be another bedroom. Lily Hight’s bedroom.
And there was a feeling inside—something undefined and difficult to absorb.
The girl’s room was almost the size of her father’s office across the hall. On the left, Lena could see a walk-in closet—a chest of drawers and a bathroom. On the right, a small desk stood beside a pair of bookcases and two sets of windows facing the Gants’ house on the other side of the drive. Curiously, a window was cracked open, a slight breeze filtering warm air into the air-conditioned room.
Lena walked in, letting the door drift shut behind her. As she stepped into the middle of the room, she looked at the double bed pushed against the far wall, noted an armchair, the computer, and various keepsakes the sixteen-year-old had collected before her death. But what struck her most was the condition of the room itself. That feeling she got when she first opened the door.
One year ago this bedroom had been a crime scene. After the investigation, the space would have been released and the Hights given the names of several companies specializing in bio waste and crime scene cleanup. It seemed as if their work had been thorough. Even the white carpet looked spotless. But it was more than that. What struck Lena about the room was that the Hights didn’t appear to have sealed it off. Unlike most families who have suffered a devastating loss, the room had the odd feeling of openness that comes from continued use.
She moved over to the bed. Pillows were propped up against the headboard with several books stacked by the lamp on the night table. An impression left by a body was visible on the mattress. On the carpet by the window Lena noticed marks from the chair and was surprised that the carpet fibers hadn’t filled in after the cleanup. The chair must have been placed in front of the window for a long time before someone moved it closer to the bed.
