XO (35 page)

No, Dance had not been aware of that.

“He spent eight months in jail. Never drove a car after that. Then that other verse, about the riverside?” At last the smile faded. “I think, I don’t know, but I think something pretty bad happened to her when she was about sixteen. She disappeared for a while. I think she had a breakdown, tried to kill herself. Drowning, you know. That’s the lyrics in the song.”

Was that true? Dance had never heard of this either.

Now the uncomfortable smile faded. “How sad is that? Writing a song
to comfort yourself, because nobody else is there for you? Awful….” Eyes focused intently on his interviewer. “Kayleigh sent me a dozen emails and a few real letters, and you know what I read between the lines in every single one? She needs me, Agent Dance. She needs me bad. If I left, who else would look out for her?”

DEPUTY CRYSTAL STANNING,
Michael O’Neil and Kathryn Dance were in the briefing room of the FMCSO. Acting Chief Detective Dennis Harutyun too.

Dance was reporting about the interview with Edwin. “I’ll have to be honest. He’s very hard to read kinesically. He’s coming off as completely nondeceptive, which either means he’s telling the whole truth or he’s completely delusional.”

“The son of a bitch did it,” Stanning grumbled.

It seemed the woman had grown more self-confident and edgier as the case had progressed. Or maybe it was just Madigan’s absence.

A call to the Joint County Emergency Communications headquarters revealed that Edwin had in fact called 911 to report a Peeping Tom. It was Saturday night, 7:00
P.M.
He was complaining about somebody watching him from the backyard. No details. The dispatcher said to call back if the perp actually trespassed or threatened him.

Charlie Shean’s crime scene team had just gone out to the place and conducted a search for where the intruder might have been. He was due any moment with the results.

O’Neil asked, “Saturday—the night before Bobby was killed. Who could’ve been watching him, who knew he was in town?”

Harutyun said, “We got the notice about a week ago—from Kayleigh’s lawyers—that he might be in Fresno and could be a problem.”

But Dance pointed out, “Anybody could’ve found out where he was.”

“How’s that?” Harutyun asked.

The Monterey detective added that on the fan websites, Sharp had posted that he was going to Fresno “for a while.”

Harutyun took a call, spoke for a few minutes and then disconnected. “Patrol’s canvassing the area around Bulldog Stadium. Cal State. Lotta people. It’s slow going.”

This was to find the woman who’d given Edwin directions at the time of Sheri’s attack. Dance was calling her Alibi Woman.

A moment later Charlie Shean walked into the office. He greeted them all and briefed them about the scene.

In his thick Boston accent, rare in these parts, he said, “We went through his house and collected some trace but it was clean. I wonder if he scrubbed it down, after he gave you permission to search.” A glance toward Dance.

She recalled the faint hesitation before Edwin gave his okay.

“Cigarettes?” Dance had asked them to check.

“No. No lighters or matches or ashtrays. No odor of cigarettes either…. Now, I know from before that the latex gloves in Edwin’s kitchen probably aren’t the same as at the Bobby Prescott homicide. The wrinkle patterns are different. Outside, where the alleged perp was spying on him? Well, we found some shoe prints in the dust, cowboy boots, it looks like, not the sort that garbage men or workers back there would wear. They were distorted because of the wind but at least it hadn’t rained and washed the damn prints away. Can’t tell size, male, female or age. And we collected about thirty samples of trace but the preliminaries are pretty useless. Sorry, Dennis—if there’s anything there, I don’t know how it can help.

“Now, we confirmed that the cigarette from last night at your motel is a Marlboro. We have ash from the site of the Sheri Towne attack—cigarette ash, I mean—but we don’t have the equipment to analyze it proper to tell what brand it is or how long ago it was left.”

It was then that Dennis Harutyun’s assistant came to the door and handed him a sheaf of papers. “These’re those emails you were waiting for, about Bobby Prescott. They finally came in.”

The deputy read them over, laughed. Subdued but for him a significant outpouring of emotion.

He said to the officers, “One of the things I was looking into was another motive for killing Bobby Prescott, by somebody other than Edwin?”

“Right,” Dance said.

“Well, I may’ve found one.”

“Go ahead.”

He said, “You ever hear about these guys, John, Paul, George and Ringo?”

DANCE AND O’NEIL
conducted the search themselves.

It felt good, being with him again, working with him. Some of this was simply the comfort of being with a person you were close to, whose subtle looks and smiles and gestures communicated perfectly, without the need for words.

But part of the pleasure was their combined skills as law enforcers. A
Gestalt
—the whole greater than the sum of the parts. Policing’s a tough business and can’t be done alone. The job can be a nightmare when you aren’t connected with your partner—and that not only makes for a tough working day but it also means the bad guys are less likely to get caught.

Police investigation can be an art form, like ballet, a choreography of technique, purpose, and she felt this in near perfection with Michael O’Neil.

The scene where they were practicing their harmonies was Bobby Prescott’s trailer and what had inspired the search here was the revelation by Harutyun about the Fab Four.

Dance believed she now knew what had been stolen the morning after the roadie had been murdered—by the person Tabatha Nysmith had seen in Bobby’s trailer. And the object of this theft wasn’t Kayleigh Towne memorabilia. Indeed, it had nothing to do with the singer at all or with the stalker—except to the extent that, yes, Edwin Sharp probably
was
a fall guy as he’d claimed all along.

“Well,” she said, somewhat breathlessly, examining a binder from the shelves where she’d noted something missing several days ago, when she was here with P. K. Madigan.

O’Neil stepped closer and together they looked over a spiral notebook in which Bobby Prescott’s father had jotted details about the recordings
he’d helped engineer at Abbey Road Studios in London during the 1960s and ’70s.

Dance recalled that Tabatha had mentioned Bobby’s father’s illustrious career.

It was a breathtaking list of talent from the era: Cliff Richard, Connie Francis, the Scorpions, the Hollies, Pink Floyd and of course the Beatles, who recorded
Yellow Submarine
and
Abbey Road
there. Much of the man’s scribbling was cryptic—notes about synthesizers and amplifier dynamics and acoustic baffles and instruments.

But the most relevant was a carbon copy of a letter to Bobby’s father.

June 13, 1969

Bob Prescott:

Hey mate, thanks for the GREAT job, you’re the best engineer, we mean it. Loved working with you. So, in appreciation for all those sleepless nights the tapes to those songs we did playing around after ‘Abbey Road,’ are yours, all the rights, everything. The list’s below. Cheers!

“Wait,” O’Neil said. “Are those …?”

Dance said in a whisper, “I think they are. My God, I think they are.” At the bottom of the letter were the titles of four songs. None of them was a known Beatles song.

She explained that the composing and recording of the songs on the
Abbey Road
album began in the spring of 1969. It was the group’s last studio album.
Let It Be
was released a year later, though that song was finished by January of ’69.

Dennis Harutyun—the “librarian of the FMCSO,” as Madigan dubbed him—had indeed done some impressive research into the life of Bobby Prescott and his family to see if anyone other than Edwin might have a motive to kill him. The deputy had found some rumors, buried on the Internet, that his father might have had some outtakes of Beatles songs he’d helped engineer in London years ago.

But these weren’t outtakes; they were complete songs, original and unreleased, never heard in public.

“And the Beatles just gave them away?” O’Neil asked.

“The band was breaking up then. They were rich. Maybe they just didn’t care about them. Or maybe they just didn’t think they were any good.”

“The letter’s not signed by any of them.”

Dance shrugged. “A handwriting expert could verify which of the four wrote it. But they talk about ‘after “Abbey Road.”’ Who else could it be? They must’ve stayed around the studio afterward and just thrown a few songs together. Doesn’t matter; they’re still Beatles songs.”

“Bobby got the tapes from his father.”

“Right,” Dance said, gesturing at the shelves. “The perp found out and has been waiting for a chance to kill him and steal them.”

“Waiting for Edwin or somebody like him to show up as a fall guy.”

“Exactly.”

O’Neil said, “So it’s somebody who knew Bobby and his archives and would have heard the rumors about the Beatles songs.” He regarded the lyrics. “Could the perp sell them, though?”

“I’d think at the least he could work out a finder’s fee in the millions. Or maybe he could sell them to a reclusive collector—like that Japanese businessman who got busted for spending fifty million for a stolen Van Gogh. He was going to keep it in his basement, never let anybody see it.”

O’Neil pointed out, “Well, we know the motive. The second question is, who’s the perp? You have any ideas? I don’t know the cast of characters here.”

Dance thought for a moment, looking round the trailer.

A to B to Z …

“I need you to do something.”

“Sure,” the detective said. “Evidence, crime scene? You’re a better interrogator than I am but I’m game.”

“No,” she said. She took him by the shoulders and walked him backward five feet. She then stepped away and examined him closely. “Just stand right there and don’t move.”

As she walked out the door, O’Neil looked around and said, “I can do that.”

A HALF HOUR
later, Dance and O’Neil, along with a contingent of FMCSO deputies, sped through the hazy late-summer afternoon toward a motel off Highway 41.

It was a Red Roof Inn. Decent, clean but surely far below what the guest they were about to arrest had been used to at certain points in his life.

The four cars approached silently.

There were jurisdictional considerations, of course, but Dance and O’Neil weren’t here to claim the trophy, merely to help out. They were happy to let the local constabulary handle the arrest. She had, after all, agreed to let Madigan take the collar and corner the publicity, though it would be FMCSO in general who’d get the credit, since he wasn’t on active duty.

The three police cars and Dance’s Nissan slipped silently up to the motel and parked. With a shared smile and tacit understanding, Dance and O’Neil glanced at each other and wandered to the back of the place, while Harutyun, Stanning and four other deputies sprinted through the halls to the room where surveillance had revealed the suspect was staying.

As they’d guessed, the nervous perp had been anticipating the visit; he’d seen the cars approach and he literally leapt out the window of his room onto an unpleasant patch of grass reserved for dogs doing their business. He righted himself fast, wrapped his computer bag strap around his chest and poised for a sprint, then wisely chose to stop as he glanced at the guns in the hands of Dance and O’Neil, both of the muzzles pointed steadily at his head.

Two other somber deputies, one Latino and one Anglo, joined them in the back. They were the ones who slapped the cuffs on Kayleigh’s producer, Barry Zeigler, and led him toward the parking lot around front. It was Kathryn Dance who took possession of the computer bag that would contain the priceless songs that he’d stolen from Bobby Prescott’s trailer, the morning after he’d killed the roadie.

“YOUR HEIGHT,” DANCE
explained to him.

Zeigler sat, miserable, in the backseat of a sheriff’s office cruiser. The door was open and he was facing outward, hands shackled behind him.

She continued to elaborate, answering his question about how she knew it was he. “The perp would know Bobby pretty well and had probably been in his trailer before. And he’d been somebody who was very familiar with everyone connected with the band.”

The deciding factor was what she told him next: “And he was tall.”