Night Moves

Chapter 5

The moment I’d arrived at Evada Lane, I’d switched to work mode: hyperfocused, aiming for logic, suppressing emotion. As I drove home, the vile reality of what I’d just seen hit me.

This was more than murder. It was erasure. An outrage had begun with dispatch, shifted to butchery, ended up with clinical choreography on that blandest of stages, a suburban house.

L.A.’s vastness and varied geography offered a universe of dump sites. Why Evada Lane? Why the Corvins?

Maybe by tomorrow morning the truth would boil down to the odd duck on the block, a sadistic psychopath closeted in his own upscale lair.

A vicious hermit who spied? Had Trevor Bitt, parting his curtains a smidge, watched the family drive away for their Sunday dinner and embarked on a personal Grand Guignol?

That said nothing about motive but it did solve a whole lot of logistical problems.

A brief walk separated Bitt’s property from the Corvins’. Once he’d made it to the end of their driveway with a plastic-bagged package, flipping the gate latch would’ve provided privacy, courtesy of three walls of impermeable hedge.

After that, trip the flimsy lock and defile thy neighbor.

Why the Corvins?

Maybe because there’s nothing like years of proximity to breed resentment.

Rosy idealists like to think throwing people together breeds tolerance and goodwill, but often it accomplishes just the opposite. The Corvins hadn’t cited any conflict with Bitt, just curt rebuffs. But who knew how he felt?

Hostility grew deep roots in a certain type of psyche. Sometimes it didn’t take much to trigger action.

The TV next door playing too loudly.

The kids fighting noisily.

Or, if I was right about Chet being the target, it could simply boil down to too many obnoxious comments by a blowhard with the capacity to irritate a saint.

Chet ridicules, Bitt says nothing. Chet keeps going, Bitt stews. Imagines. Plots.

One of the quiet ones.

His landscaping, all that stay-away flora. What if he kept the world at bay because he had a lot to hide? Unhealthy appetites, a grotesquely violent fantasy life that had spilled over to murder?

On the other hand, Trevor Bitt might be an artist who craved isolation in order to ply his talents. Or just a guy who enjoyed his privacy.

I’d research him tomorrow. After I figured out what to tell Robin. Meanwhile, drive and try not to think about the horror in Chet Corvin’s den.

I put the radio on, already tuned to KJazz. Lucked out and got the first few bars of Stan Getz playing “Samba Triste,” one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever recorded.

That helped but only until the song ended. Then came a bunch of public-service announcements and I started to feel human again.

In the early-morning hours, crossing from the Palisades into Brentwood, not a pleasant sensation.