Killer Ambition

42

“Don’t go there, Rachel,” Eric said. “You’ll never figure out who leaked. The only thing we can do now is push them off with a ‘no comment’ until we have a move to make. In the meantime, Vanderhorn wants you to give him some background on the case-”

“When?”

“This afternoon-around two thirty.”

“Good. I might have answers from Dorian by then, and if they’re the right ones, Bailey’s going to make an arrest.”

“Then it’d probably be better to get you in to see him sooner.” We exchanged a look. Vanderhorn needed more time than most to absorb information. Asking him to catch the facts of a case on the fly was like asking a dog to catch a medicine ball. “Let me find out if he can move something.” Eric told Melia to place the call. One minute later she buzzed him, and he picked up the phone. Eric explained the situation to Vanderhorn’s secretary. Another minute later he said, “Fine,” and hung up.

“He’ll see us in an hour. Stop by here and we’ll go together.” I nodded and stood up. “And try not to look like that when we go.”

“Like what?”

He ignored me. “See you in an hour.”

I did know what I looked like: pissed and annoyed. I think Vanderhorn makes a horse’s ass look smart and I didn’t want to help him look any better for the camera. On the other hand, he was the one who’d have to field most of the questions if we filed the case. If he looked bad, we looked bad. Talk about your paradox.

I forced myself to concentrate on the work I hadn’t been able to finish the day before, but couldn’t stop looking at my phones, waiting for one of them to ring and hoping it would be Dorian. You know the old saying about watching water to see if it boils. So finally, with twenty minutes to go before our meeting with Vanderputz, I gave up and reviewed the reports. I’d need to dumb it all down into sound bites, so I spent the remaining time thinking of simple ways to summarize the case.

At the appointed time Eric and I arrived at the anteroom outside Vanderhorn’s office, where his secretary, Francine Jefferson, sat. She was in her sixties but she didn’t look a day over forty. Smart, no-nonsense, and with a peppery sense of humor. No one understood how she put up with Vanderhorn. My theory was that she’d taken him on because she loved a challenge. Now she looked at me over the top of her reading glasses.

“You jumped into it this time.” She shook her head. “I don’t like saying I told you so-”

“Yes you do, Francine. You love it.”

“A little bit. And I know you’re not going to listen, but I’m going to say this anyway: Get out now, while you still can, because this case is going to be a bona fide nightmare.”

The buzzer on her desk sounded, telling us that Vanderhorn was ready to receive.

She shook her head at me. “You know what that means.”

The district attorney has the primo spot on the eighteenth floor, even though it isn’t a corner office. Spacious and tastefully furnished with a leather couch, several swivel chairs, and a large cherrywood desk that had nothing on it but framed photos of himself and his lovely, shockingly age-appropriate wife and teenage daughters, it had an expansive one hundred eighty-degree view of the city. A pricey-looking telescope stood on a tripod in the corner, and I wondered whether Vanderhorn was a peeper. The happy thought of him getting busted for it was interrupted by the man in question.

“Have a seat, everybody.”

Vanderhorn looked like someone who should command respect. At six foot three, he was imposing but not freakish, and his thick shock of white hair, strong features, square jaw, and brown eyes with just the right amount of creasing to look experienced but not old photographed alarmingly well. And did I mention that he had a year-round tan? Now, he leaned way back in his massive leather chair and steepled his hands in front of his chest.

“I understand there’s a possibility that you might be asking to file charges against Ian Powers,” he said, lifting one eyebrow and then the other as he looked from me to Eric. Boomer, a golden retriever that belonged to a childhood friend of mine, used to waggle his eyebrows just like that. I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing and nodded. “Tell me about the case,” he said.

I did, in as few words and in words with as few syllables as possible. “Right now, I’m waiting for the test results of the bloodstain on Brian Maher’s trunk, the hair removed from Jack Averly’s Mustang, and any prints that may have been lifted. I’ve also given Ian’s laptop to Cliff Meisner to check out.”

Vanderhorn frowned, and for a moment I thought he was about to ask something intelligent, like whether there might be any privileged material on the laptop that could cause problems in court.

“Well, I’m not sure you’ll have enough even if those…items match up to Ian Powers. What’s your theory?”

Oh, jeez. I took a deep breath to keep from saying something I’d enjoy but regret, and dived in. “The Mustang has already been determined to have soil and plant debris on it that are unique to Boney Mountain, where Brian’s body was found. The same debris was found on Brian’s Toyota and on Hayley’s body.”

“So maybe that proves they were all up there, but how do you prove it was at the same time?”

“With the remaining evidence. If the hair in Averly’s car is Ian’s, and if there are prints in Averly’s car that come back to Ian, and if there is any evidence that ties Ian to Brian’s Toyota, then we’ll have tied both dead kids to Ian and to Jack Averly and his car.”

“Did you ever find the ransom money?”

“No. But that would’ve been easy to hide.” Vanderhorn leaned back in his chair again and looked at me through narrowed eyes. “And Ian Powers definitely could have found out about the kidnapping right away,” I continued. “Russell’s phone records show he called Ian within minutes after he got the first text from Hayley’s phone.”

“So your theory’s that he found out about the kidnapping and jumped in on it? Why? What’s Powers’s motive?”

That, finally, was a good question. “We believe it has to do with the theft of Brian’s father’s screenplay.”

Vanderhorn’s brow knitted. “And the thinking is that this boy, Brian, had some kind of proof that his father’s screenplay was stolen and that Ian killed him to keep it from coming out?”

I knew where this was going and I wished there was a way to head him off, but I was stuck. “Yes.”

He straightened up in his chair and looked down his nose at me. He’d gotten hold of an actual idea and he was damn proud of it. “Well, if Brian had enough proof to make Ian Powers that nervous, then why did he resort to kidnapping Hayley? Why not just hire a lawyer? With all the potential money in a lawsuit like that, any lawyer would’ve been glad to take the case on a contingent fee basis.”

“That is something we’re looking into. Obviously we don’t have the answer to that yet-”

“Don’t you think you should? Before you start filing murder charges and…whatnot on this man, don’t you think you should have that motive nailed down?”

I opened my mouth to answer, but Eric stepped in.

“Actually, Bill, as you know, we don’t have to prove motive, and it’s very possible we’ll never know the whole backstory to this thing. But if the evidence does pan out as Rachel described, I think we have to file the case.”

Vanderhorn’s expression said he didn’t care much for Eric’s reasoning. Filing murder charges on a major Hollywood figure like Powers had “campaign fund disaster” written all over it. Vanderhorn would cling to the lack of motive like a man hanging on to a slippery rock at the edge of a waterfall, to avoid losing that kind of support.

Seeing his reaction, Eric added, “We’d certainly file if it were anyone else, Bill. And if we don’t, you can expect there’ll be victims’ rights groups who’ll accuse you of playing favorites.”

Predictably, the possibility of public backlash was what got Vanderhorn’s attention. Hollywood was powerful, but he couldn’t win an election if everyone outside of Hollywood hated him. Vanderputz was on the horns of what was, in his world, a true dilemma.

“I want to see those reports. I’ll make my decision then.”

That concluded the proceedings, and Eric and I headed back to our humble neck of the woods.

“Now I’m praying the evidence doesn’t come back to Powers. If I have to keep dealing with crap like that, I’ll go postal.”

Eric shook his head sadly. “Now you did it. The gods of trial are sure to punish you. The minute you say you don’t want it, that’s when you get it.”

I laughed. “Thanks, Eric, I needed that.”

“I wasn’t kidding.”

“Neither was I.” I waved to him and walked back down the hall to my office.

Ten minutes later, I got a call from Bailey.

“Put on your flak vest. We’ve got Ian’s prints and hair in Averly’s Mustang and Ian’s thumb and index print on the trunk of Brian’s car. And we’ve got Averly’s prints on the interior driver’s door handle of Brian’s car-”

“So how do you see it?” I asked. “Averly drove Brian’s car to the airport with Hayley’s body in the trunk, and Ian drove Averly’s car?”

“Possibly, but here’s the best part: Remember that bloodstain on the trunk of Brian’s car?”

“Of course.”

“Well, it’s a mixture of Hayley’s and Ian Powers’s-”

“Holy shit-”

“Wait, it gets better: that bloodstain is right next to Ian’s thumbprint.”

I sucked in a lungful of air. “No kidding?” That was one hell of a lot of circumstantial evidence. But it all hinged on the blood. Prints were great, but we’d never be able to say when they got there. Same with Ian’s hair. But a mixture of Ian’s and Hayley’s blood. That was undeniable. Then why was I nervous? Would I feel this way if the defendant was just an Average Joe? Probably not. The thought rankled.

“Right? One hell of a case. But I gotta run. Got to bring the brass up to speed and get them ready for an arrest. I’ll have the reports walked over to you so you can start filing.”

Bailey sounded stoked, so I didn’t want to be a buzzkill and tell her that I wasn’t flying solo on this one, that Vanderhorn would make the final call on whether to file-and that his approval was by no means a foregone conclusion. “I’m on it.”

Of course, this meant I’d have to go back to Vanderhorn immediately. Two meetings in one day. Talk about cruel and unusual punishment.