Terminal (A Lomax & Biggs Mystery Book 5) (8 page)

Muller shrugged. “I don’t know what I did, but apparently I did it well. Is there anything else I can do for you guys?”

“For starters,” Terry said, “find out if Mr. Bower plays golf.”

CHAPTER 17

MULLER SPENDS HOURS
on end searching for, sifting through, and trying to make sense of mountains of data. I once told him his job was like looking for a needle in a haystack.

He laughed. “Anyone can find a needle in a haystack,” he said. “All you need is a metal detector. My job is more like if someone gave you a picture of a snowflake that was taken by a black-and-white security camera in a 7-Eleven. Then they send you out in a blizzard and tell you to find that flake.”

We filled him in on the Yancy case we had just inherited.

Muller is a big kid at heart, and before we were even finished, he was grinning like an eight-year-old whose mommy and daddy told him they were taking him to Disney World.

We didn’t have to tell him what we wanted. We just turned him loose. He was back thirty minutes later, still smiling. “Most cop fun I’ve had in a long time,” he said. “I started by pulling Bower’s phone records. Besides calling each other, he and Bernstein have one number in common.”

“Tell us it’s the burner phone,” Terry said.

“It’s the burner phone,” Muller said, a triumphant geek grin on his face. “I still can’t trace it, but if Bower is dialing the same dude who you think hired Bernstein to kill the doc, then Yancy’s unfortunate encounter with the Prius is looking less and less like an accident.”

Terry gave him a thumbs-up. “Now tell us that Bruce Bower is a golfer.”

“Bruce Bower is a golfer,” Muller said, “and he’s got the credit card charges for greens fees and lessons to prove it. He doesn’t belong to a private club, which means he doesn’t store his clubs in a locker. He has to carry them wherever he plays. Most guys just leave them in their car. It makes their lives a lot easier.”

“It also comes in handy if you run someone down, and they’re not quite dead,” Terry said. “You just pull the old nine-iron out of the trunk, line up your shot, and swing—hole in one.”

“Good job,” I said.

Muller held up a hand. “Dude, I’m not nearly done. I figured if the two perps are connected, let’s see if the two victims have anything in common.”

“We already know that Kraus is a doc, and Yancy worked for a drug company,” I said. “Did they know each other?”

“Yancy was the Vice President of Brand Development for Chilton-Winslow Pharmaceuticals. His key product areas were cardiovascular, joint care, and—you’re going to love this—reproductive endocrinology, which is corporate speak for ‘the guy was in charge of selling shit to fertility docs.’”

“So Kraus was Yancy’s customer,” I said.

“He was Yancy’s
best
customer,” Muller said. “But it’s much more interesting than that. Did you know that Big Pharma pays doctors for using their products?”

“Isn’t that illegal?”

“You mean is the government concerned that bribing a doc to use your drug instead of your competitor’s could possibly cloud his medical judgment? It’s illegal as hell, but if everybody out there stopped doing illegal shit, we’d all be out of work. Also, since every law has loopholes, every drug company has a team of lawyers looking for the holes. One of the ways they get around the bribery thing is by openly paying the docs consulting fees and royalties.”

“Kraus is loaded,” I said. “His house alone is probably worth close to twenty mil. Can you dig into his finances and find out if any came from Chilton-Winslow?”

“I’ve already dug. There’s a government website that keeps track of how much money Big Pharma pays out to doctors. Even if the rep takes the doc out for a burger and a beer, the dollar amount has to be reported.”

“And how many burgers and beers did Chilton buy for Kraus?” Terry asked.

“Last year, they paid him a little over six million dollars. Most of that was in cash, but some of it was in seminar expenses.”

“Define
seminar
,” I said.

“I found these on Google images,” he said, tapping the screen on his iPad. “Here’s one of Yancy and Kraus at a sales meeting in Rio. And here’s another one—this time with their wives—on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean.”

“That would be your basic floating seminar,” Terry said. “You got anything else?”

“Just one more thing,” Muller said, dropping his voice to a whisper. “But I had to go off the reservation to get it. It’s definitely not LAPD approved, but I guarantee you it’ll make you happy.”

“Lay it on me,” Terry said.

Muller flipped his hand up in the air and tossed something in our direction. Terry caught it and let out a whoop.

Skittles.

CHAPTER 18

TEN MINUTES AFTER
Muller gave our investigation something we could actually investigate, we were summoned to Kilcullen’s office.

The only vegetables in sight were in a Styrofoam cup on his desk, but the celery looked limp and the carrot sticks were dry and slightly gray from lack of attention.

“Catch me up on where you are,” he said.

“We’ve got good news and bad news,” Terry said. “No arrests yet, but we’ve added the possible homicide of a drug company executive to our Crimes To Solve list.”

“The mayor is going to tear us a new one,” Kilcullen scowled, the ugliness of his political obligations fouling his normally engaging Irish-cop smile. “Give me the good news.”

“That was the good news,” I said. “We just picked up a traffic accident fatality from West LA. Eli did the autopsy, and he thinks it may not be as accidental as it looks.”

“Who gives a shit?” Kilcullen snapped.

“The victim worked for a drug company that paid Dr. Kraus six million dollars last year,” Terry said, “so Lomax and I decided a shit was definitely worth giving.”

Six million dollars was all it took for the familiar Kilcullen twinkle to return to his eyes.

“I’m listening,” he said, plucking a shriveled carrot from the
cup. He took a bite, tossed the rest in the wastebasket, then sat back and listened without uttering a word until we got him up to speed.

“The fact that Yancy’s company was paying Kraus to pimp their drugs only confirms that the two victims were in cahoots,” he said when we were done. “But lots of docs take payoffs from drug companies. Where’s the motive for killing them? And if there is one, who’s behind it?”

“We don’t have a clue, boss, but there’s a good chance Bruce Bower knows,” I said. “We’re going to pay him a visit and ask him some questions.”

“Bad idea,” he said. “If a couple of new cops show up and grill him about a traffic accident he thinks was wrapped up weeks ago, he’ll know he’s under suspicion.”

“We’re not going to say a word about Yancy,” I said. “As far as Bower knows, that’s not even on our radar. Our cover story is that we’re doing some follow-up work on the Kraus murder, and we’re contacting everyone Cal Bernstein called over the past few months. We have no idea if we’ll get anything from him, but since we don’t have enough evidence for a search warrant, we figure it’s worth a shot.”

Kilcullen responded with half a frown and zero recognition of the fact that we were one step ahead of him. “I don’t know if questioning him is the best way to go,” he said. “Why don’t I call Mel Berger at the mayor’s office and have him find us a judge who will issue a warrant as a favor?”

“Fuck Mel Berger,” Terry said. “The last time you called him for a favor he never let us forget it. Do you want to call him again and tell him you can’t get the job done without his muscle?”

“Terry’s right,” I said. “If Bower thinks he’s one of dozens of people we’re crossing off our list, he’s not going to suspect anything, and he’s not going to panic.”

“Don’t worry about it, boss,” Terry said. “I promise I’ll use every ounce of finesse I have in my body.”

“They pay me to worry, Biggs. And for the record, you’ve got all the finesse of a rutting bull moose. Let Lomax do the talking, because all you have to do is spook this guy once, and you’ll never find the smoking gun.”

“Point well taken,” Terry said. “And for the record, we’re looking for a smoking nine-iron.”

CHAPTER 19

THE BOWERS LIVED
in Brentwood, which would normally put them a notch or two above the Bernsteins on the socio-economic food chain. But that was offset by the fact that their house was just off Sepulveda, where the noise and the fumes of the 405 freeway made it one of the least desirable areas of their affluent zip code.

“According to the accident report, they were driving from here to Century City to get ice cream,” Terry said as soon as he parked in front of their one-story bungalow on Homedale Street. “I can understand making a forty-minute round trip to score weed, but who the hell drives that far for raspberry ripple?”

“Great question,” I said. “That should be at the top of the list of things you don’t ask them.”

“I know the rules, Mike. I’m just pointing out the obvious.”

“And to quote a sage Irish philosopher, you point with all the finesse of a rutting pig.”

“Rutting bull moose,” Terry corrected.

“Aha! You
were
paying attention,” I said. “I believe our supreme leader also advised you to ‘let Lomax do the talking,’ so if your mouth suddenly goes on autopilot, pop a few Skittles in there to keep it busy.”

“You really expect me to do my job without talking?” he said as we walked up the driveway.

“Why not? Harpo Marx made a dozen movies—never said a word.”

“Harpo had a horn he could honk,” he grumbled.

I rang the doorbell, and an attractive, fiftyish woman greeted us with a smile which disappeared as soon as I flashed my shield and said, “LAPD. Is Bruce Bower at home?”

People with nothing to hide are often intrigued, even delighted, to have a cop drag them away from their humdrum routine. I’ve had more than one person joke about who they’d like to play them in the movie version of our brief interview.

But this woman did not appear to be intrigued, and she certainly wasn’t delighted. “Bruce is not well. I’m his wife Claire. Can I help?” she said, her body tense, her defense mechanisms on point.

“We’re doing some follow-up on a shooting that happened yesterday, ma’am,” I said. “We’re going through the shooter’s cell phone records, and we’re sorry to disturb you, but we have to touch base with everyone he spoke to recently.”

“You mean Cal Bernstein?” she said, looking somewhat relieved. “Terrible, terrible thing. We saw it on TV. Bruce was very upset.”

“It won’t take long, ma’am. Just a few routine questions,” I said, doing my best to sound like a TV cop who has to do a quick scene with a minor character before he gets to confront the real killer. “But if Mr. Bower isn’t feeling well, we can come back another time. We’ve got a lot of people to check off our list.”

I only gave her two options. Answer
a few routine questions
and get it over with in a hurry. Or send us away and have the specter of a police investigation hanging over her head. I had no doubt which one she’d take.

“Come in,” she said, leading us into the living room.

The man sitting on the sofa didn’t look much like the picture on Bruce Bower’s driver’s license. He’d aged about twenty years, his skin was dry and papery, and his hair was gone. Not
just the curly mop of silver gray on his head, but his eyebrows, lashes, and most likely, his pubic hair as well.

I knew the look. I’d lived with it while Joanie was dying. The ravages of chemo.

“Bruce, the police are here to ask you some questions about Cal Bernstein,” she said.

He nodded. “Terrible, terrible thing. We saw it on TV,” he said, echoing his wife word for word.

“Were you two close?” I asked.

“Close?” he said, his voice as frail as the frame it was coming from. “I’ve only known him a few months, but you could say we had become kind of chummy.”

“Where’d you meet him?”

A simple question, but he rubbed his hand across his chin, vetting the answer in his head before he spoke. “A support group. Cal and I were both dying of cancer. I guess he beat me to it.”

“I’m sorry to hear about your illness,” I said. “What else can you tell us about this support group?”

“It’s called Living With Dying,” he said, looking at his wife. “Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday night at eight a bunch of people who are gearing up for the final curtain meet in the basement of Our Lady of Mercy Church in Santa Monica and talk.” He looked back at us. “You probably think it’s depressing as hell, but we all have a lot of laughs.”

“It’s true,” Claire said. “Bruce always comes back from those meetings so energized.”

“Did Mr. Bernstein ever talk about killing anyone?”

“Did he ever talk about killing anyone?” Bower repeated. “Of course not.”

Cops have built-in lie detectors, and between their body language and their verbal choices, the Bowers had given up about half a dozen tells that they were either dancing around the truth or flat-out lying.

“Do you have any idea why he’d shoot Dr. Kraus?” I asked.

“The man had a brain tumor,” Claire said, grabbing the question as her husband fumbled for an answer.

“Good point, good point,” Bruce said. “I’m not a doctor, but I would guess that could screw up somebody’s thinking and make him do crazy things.”

I nodded like they’d made perfect sense. “Thank you both for your help. We’re sorry for your troubles and wish you both the best.”

Claire escorted us to the front step. “That was very taxing for my husband,” she said. “I hope you won’t be needing him anymore.”

“No, ma’am,” I said. “We’ve got everything we need for our report.”

“So, Detective Biggs,” I said as soon as we were on the road, “Cal Bernstein is terminal and kills Dr. Kraus. Now it turns out that the man who accidentally mowed down Wade Yancy also has one foot in the grave. I don’t believe in coincidence, and I know a dozen judges who don’t believe in it either. What’s your take?”

Terry ran an imaginary zipper across his lips and made the turn from Homedale to Thurston.