Mortal Faults

33

Tess arrived at the crime scene shortly before noon. The neighborhood was as unprepossessing as she’d expected. Crandall, in the passenger seat of the Bureau car, glanced up at the two-story apartment building in distaste.

“I lived in a place like this when I was starting my own business.” His expression indicated that the memory wasn’t a happy one.

“Didn’t you start more than one business?”

“Three in all. No success with any of them. I guess I was meant to be a fed. It’s in my genes.”

“There are worse things to be.”

“True. I could be a biker, like Dylan Garrick.”

“You could be dead, like Dylan Garrick.”

“That, too.”

It was the most he’d said to her today. He still mistrusted her for keeping Abby’s secrets. Tess couldn’t really blame him, but he would have to work with her now. Hauser, trying to keep a low profile on MEDEA, hadn’t wanted a swarm of L.A. agents descending on Santa Ana. He’d authorized only the two of them to check it out, while the rest of the squad worked the case from the field office in Westwood.

They climbed the stairs to Garrick’s apartment, identifiable by the yellow crime scene tape across the door. Tess stripped away the tape and unlocked the door with a key she’d obtained from the Santa Ana resident agency.

From behind her on the landing, Crandall said, “Carson wanted us to wait for him before we went in.”

Carson was the supervisory agent who managed the RA. He’d been driving behind them when they left Civic Center Drive, but apparently they’d lost him along the way. Tess wasn’t going to wait. “He’ll be here soon enough. Let’s look around on our own.”

She pushed open the door and went in, trailed by Crandall. The first thing she saw was the bloody stain on the futon where Dylan Garrick’s head had lain. There were spatter patterns on the wall. More dried blood was dimly visible on the soiled short-nap carpet. The body was gone, as were Garrick’s handgun and the pillow used to muffle the two shots.

Criminalists had gone over the apartment, dusting for prints and bagging fibers and other trace evidence. Tess saw black ferric oxide on some surfaces, silver nitrate on others. The walls and larger objects in the room had been decorated in more elaborate shades, from gaudy Pinkwop and Redwop powders that were processed with a portable laser, to fluorescent greens and oranges that luminesced in ultraviolet light. Whoever dusted the place had been thorough. Tess wondered if Abby’s prints had been among those collected.

In her career she had visited many crime scenes, enough of them to make the experience almost routine. But there was one she had never forgotten-the bedroom of the house she’d rented in a Denver suburb, where Paul Voorhees had been murdered by the serial killer Mobius.

Other shocks had shaken her life, but finding Paul was the one that lingered. She’d never felt the same about a murder scene. Other people could crack jokes and act casual in the presence of death. Not her. She stood in Dylan Garrick’s apartment as she would stand in a church-hushed and solemn.

In one hand she carried a folder of crime-scene photos from the morning conference. She slipped out a picture of the body and studied it, getting a better sense of how Garrick had been positioned. He’d been beaten before he was shot-pistol-whipped with his own firearm. The photo showed the damage to his face, including a broken nose that left a trail of dried blood snaking down to his upper lip. The gun itself, dropped on the floor, had dried blood on the barrel.

Could Abby have hurt him that way? Cracked the gun across his face, crunching bone? Tess wanted to say no. Yet she couldn’t forget Abby at the Boiler Room, carving her steak with grim enthusiasm, the knife gripped tight in her hand. She’d been riding a wave of rage and hate, and there was no telling how far she’d ridden it later that night.

Of course she’d denied everything. But she had no alibi. And although there was no obvious way for her to track down Garrick, she was resourceful. She could have figured something out. She could have come here.

If she had, she came as Garrick’s guest. The lock on the door had not been tampered with. Garrick let her in-or came home with her. Typically, in her work with stalkers, Abby would arrange to meet the guy in some seemingly accidental way, ingratiate herself with him, gain access to his home. She wasn’t above holding out the promise of sexual favors. She…

Tess looked more closely at the photo. “You see this?” she asked Crandall.

“What?”

“Garrick’s pants. They’re open. Unzipped.”

Crandall shrugged. “Guys hang around with their pants open when they’re alone. You know, for comfort. Not me,” he added hastily, “but-some guys.”

She barely heard him. She was thinking of Abby’s M.O. “Mmm.”

“What does that mean?”

“It meant nothing. It was just mmm.”

Crandall started to ask something else. A voice from the doorway interrupted him.

“Crack the case yet?” It was Senior Supervisory Agent Dwight Carson, who’d finally arrived.

A tall, paunchy man testing the Bureau’s weight limit, Carson was from somewhere down south originally, a fact he liked to advertise by putting a little extra corn pone in his voice when he remembered to. Tess found him friendly enough, but behind his geniality there was an agenda, of course. He had been left in the dark about MEDEA. He didn’t know what the L.A. office was involved in. Naturally he wanted to know.

“Never seen this much interest in our friendly neighborhood Scorps before,” he observed as he stepped inside. He called the bikers Scorps, apparently to save the effort of pronouncing the extra syllables.

“It’s a zero-tolerance policy,” Tess said mildly. “We’re cracking down on premeditated homicides.”

“Not really the Bureau’s bailiwick.”

“It is today.”

“Evidently. Still seems like a lot of trouble to go to for a piece of”-he caught himself before cussing in front of a lady-“uh, piece of work like Dylan Garrick.”

“Garrick is tied in to a home invasion in San Fernando.”

“Sure, I know. Our office is the one that made the connection. But I can’t see why VALSHOOT has so many people’s panties in a twist.”

VALSHOOT, short for Valley Shooting, was the codename for the attack on Andrea Lowry’s house. The incident could hardly have been codenamed MEDEA without raising unwanted questions in Santa Ana.

“There are various considerations involved,” Tess said, hoping this formulation would be sufficiently vague to discourage further curiosity.

It wasn’t. “And one of those considerations required flying in Annie Oakley?”

“What?”

“No offense. That’s what some of us call you around here.”

“Annie Oakley.” Tess shut her eyes. “Great.”

“It’s a compliment. Annie was a straight shooter and ahead of her time. One of the original woman’s libbers, you might say.”

“Well, I guess it’s better than Ma Barker.”

“No one’s gonna call you a barker,” Carson said.

This was so cornball she would have laughed, if she hadn’t been in a room still smelling of cordite and blood. She steered their conversation in a more professional direction. “Can the shooter’s height be determined by the angle of fire?”

The question had a purpose. Abby wasn’t tall.

Carson shook his head. “Crime scene people say the gunman was probably leaning over Garrick, bent low. Which means he could be any height.”

He-or she, Tess thought.

“Both shots were fired at nearly point-blank range. No exit wounds. Coroner recovered the rounds inside the vic’s head.”

“You mean the autopsy’s already been done?”

“It was put on a rush basis. Pretty fancy treatment for a dead gangbanger. I gather there was some pressure applied all the way from Washington.” He gave Tess a shrewd look. “Though I don’t know why D.C. would care so much.”

“Neither do I,” she said evenly.

“I’ll just bet you don’t.”

It might have turned into a staring contest if Crandall hadn’t cut in. “You were saying two rounds were recovered.”

Carson looked away, conceding defeat-for now. “Right. Nine-millimeter hollowpoints. One of them was all mashed up and fragmented. Ricocheted around the skull cavity something fierce. The other’s intact. Ballistics has already matched it to Garrick’s gun.”

Tess ran a finger through some Redwop powder on an end table. “I assume forensics picked up a lot of prints.”

“Whole slew of them, but most probably belong to Garrick or the girls he brought up here. According to the neighbors there were quite a few. The prints sure as hell didn’t get left by any housekeeper. Look at this rat’s nest.”

“How about the doorknob?” Crandall asked.

“Killer wiped it clean when leaving. He’s a cool customer.”

Tess thought wiping the knob was exactly the kind of precaution Abby would take.

“You want a guided tour?” Carson asked. He headed into the kitchen without waiting for their assents. “Lots of beer in the fridge, hard liquor in the cabinets. Nothing else in here but takeout containers and fast food leftovers. No drugs on the premises. Garrick was busted for cocaine a few years ago, but lately he seems to have been staying clean.”

“Not exactly turning his life around, though, was he?” Tess asked.

Carson led them down the hall. “He was still a stone-cold killer. Probably quit the coke because he couldn’t afford a rep as a user. No one hires a hit man who’s got an itchy nose.”

They entered the bedroom. Carson waved at hand at a tall stack of magazines on the floor. “See those? Porn. And over here”-he directed their attention to homemade cabinets constructed of cinderblocks and planks-“a whole library’s worth of X-rated videos. Agent McCallum, if you’ve ever wanted to catch Debra Banger in Sperms of Endearment, this is your chance.”

“I’ll pass.”

“Other than the magazines, which you can bet he didn’t buy for the articles, there’s no reading matter on the premises. Not a book anywhere. This boy’s interests were limited to drinking and fu-uh, fornicating.”

“And killing,” Tess said.

Carson opened a bureau. The drawer was empty. “You know about the gun he kept here. The MK-23. It’s at the crime lab now. There was a silencer with it, kind of banged up, and some other gear.”

Crandall toed the pile of smut, looking thoughtful. “I’m surprised the killer didn’t toss the residence and take the MK, if only to eliminate evidence linking Garrick to the San Fernando raid.”

“Or just to get hold of an expensive piece of hardware,” Tess added.

Carson nodded. “My theory is that the killer got spooked. You know he muffled the shots with the pillow. Tried to, anyway. First shot was probably quiet enough, but the pillow’s stuffing was half blown away, and it wouldn’t have silenced the second shot nearly as well. That report was louder than our friend expected. He knew someone in the building would hear it, so he amscrayed pronto.”

That was possible, Tess thought. But it was also possible that Abby had deliberately left the gun in place so Garrick could be tied to the crime.

“And no one saw him leave?” Crandall asked.

“In this neighborhood, no one ever sees a thing.”

“How about phone records?” Tess asked. “If we know who he was talking to within the last twenty-four hours-”

“Already got ’em. He had two phones, a landline and a cell. The cell received a call from another cellular phone yesterday afternoon. He called that number back from his landline a little later. Later still, he called the same number from his cell. That was at five-forty-two p.m.”

5:42 was right after the assailants fled the scene in Santa Ana. “The first two calls involved preparations for the hit,” Tess said. “The last one was his after-action report.”

“So we assume. But there’s a hitch.” Carson smiled. “Isn’t there always? The other cell was a clone.”

A cloned cellular telephone was a unit programmed with someone else’s ownership data. Tess knew it would be impossible to determine the actual caller. “Do we at least know where the cloned phone was operating from?”

“Somewhere between McFadden and Edinger, near Harbor Boulevard. But that covers a lot of territory. And it’s prime turf for the Scorps. Unless we find the cloned cell in someone’s possession…”

Crandall looked unhappy. “It’s probably already been destroyed or reprogrammed.”

“Probably,” Carson agreed. “These Scorps aren’t so dumb. They do know how to cover their tracks.”

Tess asked him what was happening now.

“We’ve rounded up most of Garrick’s scumbag friends for Q and A. So far it’s all Q and no A. They’re shut up tighter than a nun’s-well, they’re not cooperating.”

“You grilling anyone in particular?”

“Yeah. Shanker.”

Tess remembered Hauser mentioning him. “Ronald Shanker. Her runs the club.”

“His official title is president.” Carson noted Tess’s raised eyebrow. “Oh, yeah. They’re organized, these guys. Got themselves a vice president, a secretary-treasurer, and a sergeant at arms.”

“How corporate.”

“They’re essentially a business concern. Sell ecstasy, coke, crystal meth. Stuff is manufactured in Latin America, and the Scorps do the distributing here in the states.”

“Sounds lucrative.”

“For the top membership, it is. The guys at the bottom don’t get much of a cut.”

“Are the gang members still being held?”

“Some are. Some aren’t. They’ll all be let go before long. Nothing to hold them on. Being a dirtbag isn’t a crime. Though maybe it should be.”

“How about Garrick’s whereabouts before he was shot?”

“He was with his buddies. They were all hanging together last night. The guy who popped Dylan was probably chugging beers with him a couple hours earlier.”

“Where did they hang out?”

“Bar, name of Fast Eddie’s.”

A bar. The kind of place where Dylan Garrick might have met someone. A female someone. “Did he leave the bar alone?” Tess asked.

“I told you, no one’s talking.”

“How about employees of Fast Eddie’s?”

“We talked to the bartender. He’s as tightlipped as the rest of ’em. Word is, he’s an honorary Scorp himself.”

“And no one saw him come home?” Tess pressed.

“Folks in this building aren’t too talkative, either, like I said. Besides, the guy was always coming and going at all hours. Believe me, we’re following up every available angle. We’ve got this thing covered.”

“I’m sure you do,” Tess said, though she was pretty sure there was one angle they had missed. Her gaze panned the bedroom, and she noticed Crandall watching her with unusual concentration. The look on his face disturbed her. He seemed to be reading her thoughts.

“Now if you’ll excuse me,” Carson said, “I have to use the can.”

Tess frowned. “Here?”

“Scene’s already been processed. There’s no harm in it.”

Tess knew there wasn’t any harm. But using Dylan Garrick’s toilet seemed… disrespectful, somehow. What made it worse was that Carson grabbed one of Garrick’s porno magazines for reading matter before disappearing into the bathroom.

Crandall tapped her on the arm. “Let’s talk,” he said quietly.

She didn’t like the sound of that. “What do you think we’ve been doing?”

“Let’s talk about something else. On the landing.”

She followed him out of the apartment. He stood looking over the parking lot, not facing her.

“Something wrong, Rick?” she asked, keeping the tone light.

He still didn’t look at her. “I know something funny went down at Andrea’s house yesterday. Making me stay outside while you cleared the premises-that wasn’t standard procedure. Was Abby in there? Did you send her away before I came in?”

She hesitated a long moment. “You don’t want me to answer that.”

“God damn it. I knew it had to be something like that.” He finally turned to her. “She killed Dylan Garrick, didn’t she?”

Tess gave him an honest answer. “I don’t know who killed Garrick. Abby denies having anything to do with it.”

“You already interrogated her?”

“I asked her,” Tess corrected. “Not interrogated. Asked.”

“That’s why you disappeared from the field office after the briefing. You had to do a little briefing of your own.”

“I didn’t brief her. I asked her what she was up to last night.”

“Is she alibied?”

“No. But she says she had no way of tracking down any of the assailants.”

“And you believe her?”

“I’m not sure what I believe.”

He thrust his hands into his pockets. “We cannot keep a lid on this, Tess. We have to tell the ADIC.”

“No, we don’t.” She said it firmly, leaving no room for discussion.

“Then how about Hauser?”

“I’m not saying anything to anyone until I find out what happened.”

“You can’t keep covering for this woman.”

“Just let me handle it, Rick.”

“You’ve been handling it ever since the Rain Man. You’re in really deep. I’m not sure you still have a professional perspective on the situation.”

“Are you saying I’ve lost my ability to make sound judgments?”

“Where Abby Sinclair is concerned, quite possibly.”

“She doesn’t have any sort of hold on me. I just want to be careful, that’s all. I’ll keep you out of it. Carson can take you to the RA. You can talk to some of the people they’ve rounded up.”

“And where will you be?”

“Running down some ideas of my own.”

Crandall sighed. “It’s getting harder and harder to back you up on this. What if she’s gone rogue? What if someone else dies? The congressman, even?”

“There’s no chance of that.”

“How do you know? You can’t say what she might do. We need to tell Michaelson and get it out in the open.”

“It hasn’t reached that point yet.”

“I think it has.”

She felt a flutter of dread. “You’re not planning to go to the higher-ups on your own, are you, Rick?”

“No. I wouldn’t do that.” But he said it with less conviction than she’d hoped.

“Just let me handle it,” she said again.

“Right. So far you’re handling everything just great.”

Crandall walked back inside. Tess stared after him. He wouldn’t rat her out. She was almost sure of it.

But he would never again be her friend.