Yesterday's Echo (29 page)

Time to gamble. I broke from behind the tree and hustled along the street. Nobody jumped out from behind a car or out of a tree. Kim's Rav4 was still another fifty yards away. Ten feet before I came even with Moretti's Crown Vic, Streisand's “Don't Rain on my Parade” blared from my front jeans pocket. I pulled out Heather's phone and read the name of the incoming caller. “Tony.” As in Moretti. Instinctively, I whipped around and checked the path to the library. Clear. He must have still been inside and realized that he and Heather had been duped.

I let Barbara keep singing and set the phone on the hood of the Crown Vic. The next time I talked to the cops would be through a lawyer.

I made it to Kim's Rav4 and exited the campus without Moretti catching up to me or being stopped by the campus police. Safe for now, but for how long? If I went home, would there be a black-and-white there waiting for me? Was there already a BOLO for my arrest cycling through LJPD patrol cars?

Nobody but Kim knew I was using her car. The cops probably hadn't ferreted out my friendship with her yet, but in time they would. Home and Muldoon's were out of the question. Kim's would be a risk.

There wasn't a safe play, so I made the only play I had. I headed south on I-5. I'd make the Greyhound bus terminal in fifteen minutes. Adam Windsor's computer was still in there in a locker. Heather had gotten me his NDOC number. It was time to see if my half-asleep epiphany of last night would work. The password to get inside Windsor's secrets.

My eyes were on the road, but my mind was somewhere else.

Moretti.

Why had he come to the library alone? If it had been to arrest me, surely he would have brought Detective Coyote with him. Heather had said Moretti hadn't been Stamp Heaton's partner back when Heaton was taking bribes from Adam Windsor. But that didn't completely rule out Moretti as Scarface. He didn't have to be Heaton's partner, he just had to have been on the take. Or maybe Heather was covering for him and he had been Scarface to Heaton's Stamp.

My cell phone buzzed in my pocket. My breath caught in my chest. Moretti out for a second try? Did he even have my cell number? Easy enough for him to get it if he didn't. I pulled out the phone and checked the screen. I didn't recognize the number and let the call go to voice mail. Twenty seconds later, the voice mail tone beeped.

“Rick, it's Ellison. I got your call. Call me back right away.”

Elk Fenton. He'd missed my morning call when I'd considered going to the police station with the evidence I'd stolen from Windsor's storage locker. Back when things just looked bad, but not horrible. From the urgency in his voice, things may have just gotten worse.

“Rick! Thank God you called!” Elk's voice was in my ear before the first ring ended. The normal effete goofiness replaced with red-lined gravitas.

Nothing good was going to come from this call. I fought the urge to push my foot to the floor and not let it up until I hit Rosarito Beach. Mexico. But ten-dollar lobster wouldn't taste as good if I didn't have a country to go back home to. And stealing Kim's car
would be too big an imposition, even for me.

“Give me whatever it is.”

I found a parking spot a couple blocks back from the bus terminal. Close enough. I figured whatever Elk was going to tell me, was better heard stopped than at full throttle while in control of two thousand pounds of steel and gas.

“I must confess, Rick. I've been following the Windsor murder investigation very closely since we talked the other night.” A hint of the kid who wanted to be included slipped back into his voice. “I hope you don't mind, but I've put feelers out to some of my old contacts at LJPD and the courthouse.”

“And what did you find out?”

“The DA is impaneling a grand jury Monday morning to try to get an indictment against you as an accessory in the Windsor murder.”

The world went silent. Grand jury. Murder. Elk's words hung in the air. A gallows noose waiting to be tightened. I sat back in the driver's seat and stared, but saw nothing. The sun used the car's windshield as a magnifying glass. It felt like a laser cutting my heart out of my chest. The ghost of Santa Barbara had come out from the shadows. No more what ifs, no more hoping for the cops to see the truth. They had their own truth, circumstantial evidence knotted up with a wrong past.

It was Saturday. I still had two days until Monday.

Think. Work. Keep moving.

I turned the ignition on to run the air conditioner. Heat was pulsing inside me as well as out. I needed fresh air just to breathe.

“Why doesn't LJPD just get a warrant and arrest me now? Why go through the charade of a grand jury?”

“I'm sure you're aware of the precarious position the department and the DA are in with the upcoming vote on their very existence. They don't want to take any chances on a bad arrest. But,” his voice grabbed the hint of a lilt, “it tells me they don't have a locked-down case either.”

“They can't. I'm innocent.” It wasn't a plea before a judge or a plea for help from Elk. It was statement of fact. Right now, it was all I had.

“When I worked criminal defense, I made it a practice never to ask my client about their guilt or innocence, but it always helped to have the facts on our side.”

The more Elk talked, the more he sounded like a cocksure defense
attorney and less like the goofy kid whom I wouldn't quite accept as a friend seventeen years ago. I think I wanted him as a friend now.

“I've got five grand in cash and no job, Elk. How much time will that buy me as a retainer?” I thought of the fifty Gs Stone had offered me, but wasn't yet sure how that was going to play out. I wasn't going to give evidence to a possible murder suspect and have him destroy it so I could pay my legal fees.

“I'll do my best to put you together with a top-notch criminal attorney. You'll have to work out your fee with whomever we get, but as I said the other night, there are a few who owe me favors. I'm sure they'll make accommodations.”

“I want you, Elk.”

“I'm not criminal anymore, Rick.” He paused, maybe thinking it over. “I haven't tried a case in two years.”

“I haven't been arrested for murder in eight. We both have some experience at this.”

“I guess we do. Okay, Rick. If things don't go your way on Monday, I'm your man. We'll work out the money issue if the time comes.”

“Thanks, Elk. Ah, I guess I should call you Ellison now.”

“I've been using Ellison since I started practicing estate planning. I thought old-money La Jollans would think I was one of them.” An amused exhale. “It is my given name, but I never realized how silly it sounded until I heard it coming from your mouth. Call me Elk.”

“Okay, Elk.” Niceties aside, I had to find out where I stood. “Why the grand jury now? I know the cops have my golf hat at the murder scene, but they've had that all along. Do they have something new?”

“In fact they do. A jailhouse snitch named Edward Ames Philby. He claims you contacted him the day before Windsor's death, trying to obtain heroin. The police are obviously cutting him a deal on his recent arrest for cocaine distribution.”

Eddie Philby. I'd let my anger get to me and now it was payback time for the punk I bounced out of Muldoon's two nights ago.

Elk continued, “There's something rather odd about the decision to impanel a grand jury, though. Rumor has it that Chief Parks is not on board. And that Detective Moretti went over his head, directly to the DA, because Parks wouldn't sign off on an arrest warrant.”

Chief Parks on my side? Hard to believe. During my one face-to-face with him, Parks had looked at me like I was something he'd just blown into a handkerchief. Whatever his reluctance to lock me in a cage, it wasn't because he'd nominated me for citizen of the year. Something else was at play.

With his porn mustache and suffocating cologne, Moretti was a junior-size version of Parks. Going against his mentor would create a huge rift in a tiny station house. That could be career death. Was Moretti confident that Mayor Albright would be elected governor and take Parks with him, creating a void for the detective to fill? Was this an early sign to show the powers that be that Moretti wasn't afraid to make bold moves when justice was in the balance? Maybe the lone wolf routine at the library was an effort to bag new evidence that he could spring on the grand jury to further separate himself from the chief.

“Philby's lie can't be taken seriously by a grand jury or any kind of jury.” I squeezed the cell phone. “He's obviously dealing to get out of prison time and to get even with me for throwing him out of my restaurant. Anybody under the age of fifty has probably seen the YouTube video of me bouncing him the other night. Hell, they even showed it on the eleven o'clock news.”

“In my experience with grand juries, the twenty-one to forty-nine-year-old demographic is not very well represented.” He sounded lawyerly, like I was already on the clock. “It's more the fifty and above set. Successful and deferential to authority.”

“Well.” I was grasping for any edge now, no matter how rounded. “They probably watch the news.”

“I don't want to be indelicate, Rick. But you seem like a man who takes things head-on. You did when we were younger.” I heard a deep inhale and then a long exhale over the phone. “The video of you escorting Mr. Philby out of Muldoon's was not your finest moment. I wouldn't expect it to be presented to the grand jury, but it will be the invisible elephant in the room for those who saw it. We should probably hope that the jury members missed the news that night.”

That edge I was looking for was as round as a cue ball.

Backpack strapped over my shoulders, head on a swivel, I walked the couple blocks to the Greyhound bus terminal. The Devil Wind scraped its nails along my skin and the sun kept its piercing eye on the back of my neck the whole way. No one else seemed to take notice.

Inside the terminal, I paid my balance on the locker, opened it, and emptied all that remained inside into my backpack. Windsor's laptop, the Angela Albright tape and flash drive, and the Melody tape, joined the payoff ledger, birth certificate, and Heather Ortiz's notes and tape recorder. All the stolen booty from my recent life of crime. If the cops caught me with the Windsor evidence, the grand jury would be superfluous.

I was going to be arrested for murder. Again. The Santa Barbara police hadn't had quite enough evidence, but back then I'd already lost more than I could ever get back.

Colleen.

Now I was more innocent than I'd ever been in Santa Barbara. The police would have to fake a motive, but they had enough physical evidence to put me in Windsor's death room. They were coming for me. If not now, then two days from now. After that, I'd never make bail. I'd be in a cage until the trial.

I had two days, at most, to sift through Windsor's life and find somebody else to point the finger at and keep me from paying for my Santa Barbara sins with my freedom or my life in La Jolla.

I exited the bus terminal on foot, crossed over West Broadway, and entered Horton Plaza. The mall was five stories and six city
blocks of bright colors and odd angles. It was a bit cheery and disjointing for my mood, but I waded through lazy shoppers and found the Starbucks on the first floor. The coffee shop had free Wi-Fi, and Windsor's laptop was new enough to be compatible.

I ignored the frou-frou coffees and ordered a ham sandwich and a two-dollar bottle of water. A small table in the back with a view of the front door served as an encampment. The first bite of the sandwich reminded me that I hadn't eaten all day, and I scarfed it down while I waited for Windsor's laptop to power up.

The Windows tone chimed and the password page appeared. This was it. Time to put my theory to the test. I found Windsor's inmate number in Heather's notebook and typed it into the password box. I hit enter. Dong. Invalid. I tried the numbers backward and got the dong. Next, I put the name Adam in front of the numbers. Dong.

With each new dong, I peered over the laptop toward the front door, half expecting a SWAT team to throw in a flashbang and crash through the smoke.

I tried variations of first and last name with DOC and NDOC, all over again backward and forward. Dong. Dong. Dong.

Dead end.

I slumped back into my chair and fought the urge to hurl the laptop at the wooden menu above the baristas. I'd risked prison time stupidly stealing the computer. An easy way for the cops to make a connection between me and Windsor that was never there. Now, probably the only way to keep me out of jail was to get into the damn thing and shift through Windsor's secrets.

Shut out.

The best thing to do now was wipe it clean of my prints and toss it in a Dumpster or the ocean. I stashed it in my backpack for the time being.

All I had left was Heather's notebook and tape recorder. I turned on the tape recorder and heard a low hiss like the recorder had been turned on but there'd been no sound to record. I let it
run for a few seconds and got more of the same, then turned it off. Next, I flipped open Heather's notebook. It contained information on Windsor's murder and nothing else. Heather must have opened up a new notebook for each dead body she reported on. Kind of like a homicide detective and a three-ring binder murder book. One per customer.

The first page had Windsor's background and important dates. Birth, incarceration, probation, and death. Heather had written his full name down in her initial entry. Adam Nichols Windsor. She'd probably listed it in her article on his death, but I'd passed over it without remembering his middle name. I yanked the laptop out of my backpack and booted it up. When the password screen came on, I tried Windsor's full name backward and forwards with and without the NDOC number.