Santa Fe Dead

14

CUPIE CLOSED HIS cell phone and turned to Vittorio, who was driving. "U-turn, pal.”

“What’s going on?”

“That was Eagle on the phone. He got a call from Rome from some guy named Wells, who says his wife and son may have been kidnapped. We have to go and check out his Malibu house for any evidence of same.”

Vittorio shrugged. “Okay.” He whipped the car around and gunned it.

“And let’s not get arrested on the way.”

“Aren’t you carrying tin?”

“Yeah, but I don’t like to use it with a cop for something as light as a speeding ticket.”

Traffic was easy for L.A., and soon they were on the Pacific Coast Highway, heading north.

“You ever been out here?” Cupie asked, as they came to the long string of cheek-by-jowl beach houses that composed most of Malibu.

“No,” Vittorio said. “With these houses jammed together like this, how does anybody get to the beach?”

“That’s the idea,” Cupie replied. “Nobody does, unless he has the keys to a house. Keeps out the riffraff. It’s a long walk from the nearest public beach to out here.”

“I thought all the beaches in California were public.”

“There’s public, and there’s public.”

They passed the turnoff for the little shopping center that passed for Downtown Malibu and soon turned off the highway into a driveway blocked by a guard shack and a bar across the drive. A uniformed guard stepped out of the shack and waited for them to come to a halt. For a moment he eyed the odd pair: a cherubic man in a seersucker suit and an Indian dressed in black. “Can I help you?” he asked.

Cupie flashed his LAPD badge, the slightly smaller version that retired cops toted. “We’re here at Mr. Don Wells’s request to inspect his property. The password is Featherweight.”

The guard went back into the shack, checked something on a clipboard and pressed the button that raised the bar. He waved them on.

Vittorio followed Cupie’s directions. “You been out to this place before?”

“A few times. These are some of the most expensive houses in the United States. Over there,” he said, pointing at a large house that backed up onto the beach. “See the sign? Wells.”

Vittorio pulled into the driveway. Cupie’s car was a gray Ford Crown Victoria, chosen because it looked like an unmarked police car, just for occasions like this. Nobody was going to call the cops, if they thought the cops were already there.

Cupie found the key in the window box. He pulled a wad of latex gloves from a coat pocket and handed a pair to Vittorio. “Don’t touch anything, even with these, unless you have to. We don’t know what we’re going to find, and if it’s bad, we want to be investigators, not suspects.”

Vittorio nodded.

Cupie unlocked the door and tapped the alarm code into the keypad. “Alarm was armed; that’s a good sign.” He led the way down a long entrance hall, more of a gallery, really, hung with a collection of abstract paintings. “Let’s stick together,” Cupie said, “and be careful.”

“Come on, Cupie, you think I don’t know how to deal with a crime scene?”

“Four eyes are better than two.” Cupie produced a flashlight about four inches long. They walked into a large living room with glass sliding doors overlooking a porch and the beach at one end. The room was a good forty feet long, Cupie reckoned. “Great for entertaining a hundred and fifty of your closest friends, huh?”

“I could get my closest friends into a jail cell,” Vittorio remarked. “This place looks like a platoon of maids just left.”

Cupie used his flashlight to illuminate corners of the spotless room. He looked under sofas and chairs, too. Nothing in the living room. They moved into the next room, a library, with a spacious home office off one end. Nothing.

They retraced their footsteps and crossed the hall into a large dining room, then through a swinging door into a kitchen, appropriate for a large restaurant. The block holding all the kitchen knives was full-no empty spaces-and everything was perfectly neat.

“Upstairs,” Cupie said. “Stay close to the wall, behind me, and don’t touch the banister.” There was a huge master suite upstairs that included two dressing rooms and two baths. Vittorio looked in the closets. They crossed the hall and walked into another bedroom.

“The kid’s room,” Cupie said, “but weird. No rock posters, no sports-team pennants. I’ve never seen a kid’s room this neat.”

Vittorio checked the closets, too. “This place is untouched by human hands,” he said.

Cupie led him back downstairs and to the kitchen. “Guesthouse at the other end of the pool,” he said. He opened a sliding glass door and walked the length of the fifty-foot pool. The front-door key worked in the guesthouse door, too. They found two bedrooms and a sitting room, and the place smelled a little musty, as if unused for a while. “Let’s walk the perimeter of the property,” Cupie said.

They did so, finding no footprints outside ground-level windows, no sign of forced entry. They reentered the house through the kitchen sliding door. Cupie called Ed Eagle’s office.

“He’s out for an hour or so,” the secretary said.

Cupie thanked her, hung up and called Eagle’s cell phone.

“Eagle,” he said.

“We’re in Malibu,” Cupie said. “The house is clean as a whistle. Any criminals operating here had a lot of house-cleaning experience.”

“Lock up and wait in your car to hear from me,” Eagle said. “I’m almost to the Tano Norte house.”

EAGLE PULLED INTO the driveway and stopped in front of the house. It was a typical Santa Fe home for an affluent family, he thought. Looked to be seven or eight thousand square feet, richly landscaped with native plants, guesthouse fifty yards down a flagstone path. He walked around the house and found nothing more surprising than a four-car garage, then he went back to the front door and found the house key under the firewood rack.

He rang the bell a couple of times and, getting no response, tried the front door, which turned out to be unlocked. The alarm system was not armed, either. “Hello!” he shouted, but got no answer. He turned right and came to the kitchen, a big room, with all the usual top-end appliances: SubZero fridge, Viking range, two Miele dishwashers. Not very different from his own kitchen, he thought.

He checked the dining room next door, then walked into the living room, which seemed to be in perfect order. He walked across a hallway to a large study, with many books on the shelves, then left it through another door and came to what seemed to be a wing of bedrooms. Directly ahead of him was a set of large double doors. He opened one of the doors and stepped into the master suite. Immediately, he detected a familiar odor, but he couldn’t place it. He stopped and thought about it, then it came to him.

It smelled like a butcher shop.