Lost Light

2

Angella Benton died on her twenty-fourth birthday. Her body was found crumpled on the Spanish tile in the vestibule of the apartment building where she lived on Fountain near La Brea. Her key was in her mailbox. Inside the mailbox were two birthday cards mailed separately from Columbus by her mother and father. It turned out they were not divorced. They each just wanted to write their own birthday wishes to their only daughter.

Benton had been strangled. Before or after death, but most likely after, her blouse had been torn open and her bra jerked up to expose her breasts. Her killer then apparently masturbated over the corpse, producing a small amount of ejaculate that was later collected by forensic technicians for DNA typing. Her purse was taken and never recovered.

Time of death was established as between 11 p.m. and midnight. Her body was found by another resident in the apartment building when he left his home at 12:30 a.m. to take his dog for a walk.

That was where I came in. At the time I was a detective third grade assigned to the Hollywood Division of the Los Angeles Police Department. I had two partners. We worked in threes instead of pairs back then as part of an experimental configuration designed to close cases quickly. Kizmin Rider and Jerry Edgar and I were alerted by pager and assigned the case at 1 a.m. We met at Hollywood Division, picked up two Crown Vics and then drove to the crime scene. We saw Angella Benton’s body for the first time approximately two to three hours after she had been killed.

She lay on her side on brown tile that was the color of dried blood. Her eyes were open and bugged, distorting what I could tell had been a pretty face. The corneas were hemorrhaged. I noticed that her exposed chest was almost flat. It looked almost boyish and I thought maybe this had been a private embarrassment to her in a city where physical attributes seemed often to outweigh those on the inside. It made the tearing open of her blouse and lifting of her bra all the more of an attack, as if it were not enough to take her life, the killer also had to expose her most private vulnerability.

But it was her hands that I would remember the most. Somehow when her lifeless body was dropped to the tile, her hands fell together. Off to the left side of her body, they were directed upward from her head, as if she were reaching out to someone, almost beseechingly, begging for something. They looked like hands from a Renaissance painting, like the hands of the damned reaching heavenward for forgiveness. In my life I have worked almost a thousand homicides and no positioning of a fallen body ever gave me such pause.

Perhaps I saw too much in the vagaries of how she had fallen. But every case is a battle in a war that never ends. Believe me, you need something to carry with you every time you go into the fight. Something to hold on to, an edge that drives you or pulls you. And it was her hands that did it for me. I could not forget her hands. I believed they were reaching to me. I still do.

We got an immediate jump on the investigation because Kizmin Rider recognized the victim. They had been acquaintances. Rider knew her by first name from the gym on El Centro where they both worked out. Because of the irregular hours that came with her job on the homicide table Rider could not keep a regular workout schedule. She exercised at different times on different days, depending on her time and the case she was working. Often she had encountered Benton in the gym and they had struck up a conversational relationship while they worked side by side StairMasters.

Rider knew Benton was trying to establish a career in the film business on the production side. She worked as a production assistant for Eidolon Productions, the company headed by Alexander Taylor. Production schedules used all twenty-four hours on the clock, depending on the availability of locations and personnel. It meant that Benton had a gym schedule similar to Rider’s. It also meant that Benton had little time for relationships. She told Rider that she’d had only two dates in the past year and that there was no man in her life.

It was only a surface friendship and Rider had never seen Benton outside of the gym. They were both young black women trying to keep their bodies from betraying them as they went about busy professional lives and attempted to scale steep ladders in different worlds.

Nevertheless, the fact Kiz knew her gave us a good jump. We knew right away who we were dealing with-a responsible and confident young woman who cared about both her health and her career. It eliminated a variety of lifestyle angles we might have mistakenly pursued. The negative from the break was that it was the first time Rider had ever come across someone she knew as the victim of a homicide she’d been assigned to investigate. I noticed right away at the scene that it put a pause in her step. She usually was quite vocal when breaking down a crime scene and developing an investigative theory. At this scene she was silent until spoken to.

There were no witnesses to the murder. The vestibule was hidden from street view and offered the killer a perfect blind. He would have been able to move into the small space and attack without fear of being seen from outside. Still, there had been a risk to the crime. At any moment another resident of the building could have come home or left and come upon Benton and her killer. If the dog walker had taken his pet out an hour earlier he possibly could have ventured into the crime in progress. He could have saved her, or possibly have become a victim himself.

Anomalies. So much of the work entailed study of the anomalies. The crime had the appearance of an attack of opportunity. The killer had followed Benton and waited for the moment she was in the blind. Yet there were aspects of the scene-its privacy, for example-that suggested that he already knew about the vestibule and may have been waiting there, like a hunter watching a bait trap.

Anomalies. Angella Benton was no more than five feet five but she was a strong young woman. Rider had witnessed her workout regimen and knew first-hand of her strength and stamina. Yet there was no sign of a struggle. Fingernail scrapings produced no skin or blood belonging to anyone else. Had she known her killer? Why hadn’t she fought? The masturbation and the tearing open of the blouse suggested a crime of psychosexual motivation, a crime perpetrated alone. Yet the seeming lack of any fight for life suggested Benton had been completely and quickly overpowered. Had there been more than one killer?

In the first twenty-four hours our purpose had been to collect the evidence, make notifications and conduct first interviews of those immediately connected to the crime scene. It was in the second twenty-four that the sifting began and we began to work the anomalies, trying to crack them open like walnuts. And by the end of that second day we had concluded that it was a staged crime scene. That is, a scene designed by the perpetrator to convey false ideas about the crime. We concluded we had a killer who thought he was smarter than us, who was sending us down the psychosexual-predator road when the reality of the crime was something altogether different.

The thing that tilted us in this direction was the semen found on the body. In studying the crime scene photographs I noticed that drops of semen stretched across the victim’s body in a line suggesting a trajectory. However, the individual drops were round. It was common investigative knowledge in regard to blood spatter evidence that round drops are formed when blood drops directly down to a surface. Elliptical-shaped drops occur when blood is spattered in a trajectory or at an angle to the surface. We consulted the department’s blood spatter expert to see if the norms of blood evidence extended to other bodily fluids. We were told it did, and that for us cracked open an anomaly. We now theorized that the possibility was high that the killer or killers had planted the semen on the body. It had possibly been taken to the crime scene and then dripped onto the body as part of an intended misdirection.

We refocused the investigation. No longer did we view it as a case in which the victim wandered into the kill zone of a predator. Angella Benton was the kill zone. It had been something about her life and circumstances that had drawn the killer to her.

We attacked her life and work, looking for that hidden thing that had set the plan to kill her into motion. Someone had wanted her dead and thought they were clever enough to disguise it as the work of a hit-and-run psycho. While publicly we pumped the sex-slayer angle into the media machine, privately we began looking elsewhere.

On the third day of the investigation Edgar took the autopsy and the mounting paperwork duty while Rider and I took the field. We spent twelve hours in the offices of Eidolon Productions located at Archway Pictures on Melrose. Alexander Taylor had his moviemaking machine taking up nearly a third of the office space on the Archway lot. There were more than fifty employees. By virtue of her job as a production assistant, Angella Benton had interaction with them all. A PA stands at the bottom of the Hollywood totem pole. Benton had been a gofer, a runner. She had no office. She had a desk in the windowless mail room. But no matter, because she was always on the move, running between offices at Archway and back and forth from productions in the field. At that moment Eidolon had two movies and a television show shooting at separate locations in and around Los Angeles. Each one of those productions was a small city unto itself, a tent city that packed up and moved from location to location almost every night. A city with another hundred or more people who could have interacted with Angella Benton and needed to be interviewed.

The task we had was daunting. We asked for help-additional bodies to help with the interviews. The lieutenant could spare none. It took the whole day for Rider and me to cover the interviews at the company headquarters at Archway. And that was the one and only time I spoke to Alexander Taylor. Rider and I got a half hour with him and the conversation was perfunctory. He knew Benton, of course, but not well. While she was at the bottom of the totem pole, he was at the very top. Their interactions were infrequent and short. She had been with the company less than six months and he had not been the one who had hired her.

We got no hits during that first day of interviews. That is, no interview we conducted resulted in a new direction or focus for the investigation. We hit a wall. No one we talked to had an inkling of why someone would want to kill Angella Benton.

The following day we split up so each detective could visit a production location to conduct interviews. Edgar took the television production out in Valencia. It was a family-oriented comedy about a couple with an only child who connives to keep her parents from having more children. Rider took the movie production nearest her home in Santa Monica. It was a story about a man who takes credit for an anonymous valentine sent to a beautiful coworker and how their subsequent romance is built on a lie that grows inside him like a cancer. I had the second movie production, which was being shot in Hollywood. It was a high-action caper about a burglar who steals a suitcase with two million dollars in it, not knowing that the money belongs to the mob.

As a detective three I was the team leader. As such, I made the decision not to inform Taylor or any other administrators of his company that members of my team would be visiting the production locations. I didn’t want advance notice to precede us. We simply split up the locations and the next morning we each arrived unannounced, using the power of the badge to force our way in.

What happened the next morning shortly after I arrived at the set is well documented. I sometimes review the moves of the investigation and wish I had gotten to the set one day sooner. I think that I would have heard somebody mention the money and that I would have been able to put it all together. But the truth is we handled the investigation appropriately. We made the right moves at the right time. I have no regrets about that.

But after that fourth morning the investigation was no longer mine. The Robbery-Homicide Division came in and bigfooted the case. Jack Dorsey and Lawton Cross ran with it. It had everything RHD likes in a case: movies, money and murder. But they got nowhere with it, moved on to other cases and then walked into Nat’s for a ham sandwich and a jolt. The case more or less died with Dorsey. Cross lived but never recovered. He came out of a six-week coma with no memory of the shooting and no feeling below the neck. A machine did his breathing for him and a lot of people in the department figured his luck was worse than Dorsey’s because he survived but was no longer really living.

Meantime, the Angella Benton case was gathering dust. Everything Dorsey and Cross touched was tainted by their luck. Haunted. Nobody worked the Benton case anymore. Every six months somebody in RHD would pull out the file and blow off the dust, write the date and “No New Developments” on the investigative log, then slide it back into its place until the next time. In the LAPD that is what is called due diligence.

Four years went by and I was now retired. I was supposedly comfortable. I had a house with no mortgage and a car that I’d paid cash for. I had a pension that covered more than I needed covered. It was like being on vacation. No work, no worries, no problems. But something was missing and deep down I knew it. I was living like a jazz musician waiting for a gig. I was staying up late, staring at the walls and drinking too much red wine. I needed to either pawn my instrument or find a place to play it.

And then I got the call. It was Lawton Cross on the line. Word had finally gotten to him that I had pulled the pin. He got his wife to call and then she held the phone up so he could speak to me.

“Harry, do you ever think about Angella Benton?”

“All the time,” I told him.

“Me, too, Harry. My memory’s come back, and I think about that one a lot.”

And that’s all it took. When I walked out of the Hollywood Division for the last time, I thought I’d had enough, that I’d walked around my last body, conducted my last interview with somebody I knew was a liar. But I’d hedged my bet just the same. I walked out carrying a box full of files-copies of my open cases from twelve years in Hollywood homicide.

Angella Benton’s file had been in that box. I didn’t have to open it to remember the details, to remember the way her body looked on the tile floor, so exposed and violated. It still drove the hook into me. It cut me that she had been lost in the fireworks that came after, that her life had not become important until after two million dollars was stolen.

I had never closed the case. It had been taken away from me by the big shots before I could. That was life in the LAPD. But that was then and this was now. The call from Lawton Cross changed all of that in me. It ended my extended vacation. It gave me a job.