Nine

14

Los Angeles, California

Monday, May 19, 7:20 P.M.

Alex felt the drag brought on by a lack of sleep, the urge to call it a day, but decided not to delay talking to Ty Serault’s former employees. Other than looking for matches to the climbing rope, and the work Ciara was doing on Catalina, they had too little to go on to ignore this possible link.

He tried calling the former Crimesolvers USA employees. Dwight Neuly was in and willing to talk to him if he could make it soon-at eight-thirty, Neuly needed to meet with the editor of the student film he had directed. Alex looked at Eric Grady’s address. It was closer, but Neuly was available now, so he made the drive to USC, where Neuly had agreed to meet him. He called ahead to the campus police, and after meeting with them briefly, parked off Jefferson, near the halls that Star Wars built.

Neuly was as cooperative as any student at the end of a term was likely to be. After talking to him, Alex was fairly sure he had no connection to the murders. He would check further into his financial health, but to all appearances, he was not in need of money. Neuly claimed that he had spent the last week trying to finish a project for a film class. He had pulled out a Palm PDA and beamed the names and phone numbers of five members of his postproduction crew to Alex’s own Palm-telling him that any time they couldn’t vouch for, his roommate could.

When he got back to his car, Alex called in and checked his messages. A reporter from the Los Angeles Times wanted to know if he would verify that anticoagulants were injected into the three victims discussed at the press conference today. Alex swore. On top of everything else, they’d have to figure out who was leaking information to the press.

He looked through the files again, resisting the idea of driving back to the Santa Monica area, where Eric Grady lived. He studied Grady’s employee ID photo. Grady had mugged for it-Nola had said he was a clown, and apparently he took the role on from the beginning. Most of the other employees had posed with serious expressions bordering on grim, but Grady’s face was close to the lens and grinning.

He called the phone number in the file and learned that the number was no longer in service. He started to thumb back through the file to see if another contact was listed on Grady’s application. He paused as he came to the copy of Grady’s driver’s license photo, attached to his Immigration and Naturalization Service I-9 form, which required proof of citizenship.

The man in the photo on the license was not Grady.

Or, more probably, the man on the employee ID badge wasn’t.

There was some resemblance-thin faces, dark hair cut in an identical style, dark eyes-but Alex immediately noticed that even in the employee photo, taken at its odd angle, the differences were readily apparent-the jaw-line, the shape of the earlobes, the noses.

He cussed himself out for wasting time talking to Neuly, then ran a DMV check on the driver’s license for Grady.

The answer came back quickly. Eric Grady was deceased.

He asked for a date of death.

“Last year. July fifth. That’s a presumed DOD.”

He looked at the application. “Eric Grady” had applied for a job two days after he was dead. The employee who used his name and driver’s license had been hired by Ty Serault on July 7.

He called the homicide bureau and got one of the detectives on duty to run a computer check for him, to look up all the information available on Grady’s death.

The call came back within minutes. “He was a John Doe for over half a year. One of our cases-in fact, you should talk to Ciara. It was hers.”

“I will. Tell me what you have, though.”

“He was twenty-two, hadn’t been seen since a Fourth of July party last year in Malibu. At first, no one missed him. His body was found in Carbon Canyon in February of this year. Didn’t identify him immediately, but Ciara brought a forensic anthropologist in on it. Got the age and sex, and from there, Ciara put it all together. Theory was that he wandered off drunk from the party sometime after midnight on July fifth-he was found not all that far from the party house-stumbled in the dark and fell to his death.”

He thanked the detective and hung up. For a few moments, he sat in the car, resting his forehead on his fists on the steering wheel. Angry at himself for not seeing the differences in the photos earlier, Alex also wondered what kind of background checks Serault was doing.

So the phony Eric Grady was in a position to take calls-or hear of other calls-from people who thought they were seeing FBI fugitives in various parts of the country. He had joined the Crimesolvers USA staff just after the real Eric Grady died, used his ID and probably his references to get the job. He left the staff not long after the body was found, perhaps fearing publicity about the case would expose him.

But the identification of John Does didn’t make the news as often as the public supposed. For that matter, murders didn’t always get attention from the media. Alex just happened to be working on three cases that had the full attention of the country at the moment.

He looked at the goofy photo of the young man on the ID badge. The clown. Some clown. He’d sure as shit brought the circus into L.A. County.

Alex got back on the freeway, heading toward the last known address for the phony Eric Grady. He tried calling Ciara but only got her cell phone’s voice mail. She might be on her way back from Catalina, out of cell phone range. He left a message for her.

He called Serault Productions and asked for Nola Phillips.

“Nola? I’m hoping you can help me out here. Who takes the photos for the employee ID badges? Is that done there at the studio, or off-site?”

“We do it here. One of my jobs. I take the photos and then laminate them onto a badge.”

“Do you keep the negatives?”

“I take them with a digital camera, but yes, I keep the files. Why?”

“Eric Grady. His photo was a little-”

“Dumb? Yeah, I thought so, too. But that’s the one he wanted on his badge.”

“Do you have any others of him?”

“I’ll look.”

“He worked for you for eight or nine months and left about two months ago, right?”

“Yes, I think so. It’s in the files we made for you.”

“Anyone else worked at his desk since he left?”

“No, I don’t think so. We haven’t filled that position yet. Ty wanted to wait until summer. We start taping new segments in August, so we hire in June and July.”

“How late will you be there tonight?”

“Until eleven or so.”

“Mind if I come by again?”

“Not at all.”

“I’ve got another stop to make, but I have a feeling it won’t take long. I’ll call when I’m on my way from there.”

Eric Grady’s “apartment” turned out to be a rented private mailbox. The store in which it was rented was closed for the night. Alex turned around without getting out of the car and called Nola to say he was ten minutes away.

Ciara called back before he reached the studio. She hadn’t had any luck on Catalina, but she was bringing several boxes of papers back to the office, to continue following up on the next day. He told her what he had learned about the Crimesolvers employee.

“Eric Grady? God damn, this means we’ll have to reopen that one. This is going to be so hard on the family.” She was silent for a moment then said, “I can see how perfectly his identity would work for someone else, though. He was from Missouri, a good student, well-liked, but a little restless. He had decided to take a few months off from school, and his family disapproved. So, they weren’t communicating much. He worked as an extra in some films and made friends here, too, mostly in the Topanga Canyon crowd. He ran out of money, but he was one of those guys who could always find someone to stay with. I think that was losing its charm, though-he told some people at the party that he was thinking of going back home.”

“So everyone here thought he went back to Missouri, and everyone in Missouri thought he was still out here.”

“Right. So it was autumn before a missing persons report was filed by his family, and months before anyone even knew that the party was the last time he was seen. No progress was being made on it. I got called out to a scene that was just John Doe’s bones in a canyon, and we didn’t make the connection at first.”

“The remains were skeletonized?”

“Completely. In fact, we never recovered the complete skeleton-predators had made off with the smaller bones. We didn’t know it was Grady until the dental came in.”

Alex glanced down at the open folder on the seat next to him, open to the copy of Eric Grady’s driver’s license. He saw the young, hopeful face in the photo, and closed the folder.

“Well,” he said, “now we know what happened to his wallet.”

Nola was waiting in the reception area, standing very still and looking even a little more pale, ignoring the banter of the security guard who now sat at the receptionist’s desk. Her blue eyes were fixed on Alex’s face as he came in, and he tried to smile for her. She didn’t smile back.

You know, he thought. You looked at his employee records and now you know.

The guard slid a sign-in sheet toward him, and he filled it in and then silently followed her down the hallway, this time not to the glowing kingdom of dinosaurs and stars, but to a larger room on the opposite side of the hall. She flipped a switch and fluorescent ceiling lights hummed to life.

Four metal desks. Three were decorated with framed photos and plants. One was cleared off. She pointed to the empty desk as if accusing it and said, “That one was-” She had started to say, “Eric’s,” but caught herself. She dropped her hand. “That one was his.”

“Thanks.” He started toward it.

“He wasn’t Eric Grady.”

He turned toward her and said quietly, “No. Eric Grady is dead.”

She clenched her fists. “Did that asshole-who is he, anyway? The guy who worked here for almost a year, pretending he was Eric.”

“I don’t know. Not yet.”

“Did he kill the real Eric?”

“I don’t know that either.”

“Probably yes.”

“Maybe. At the very least, he didn’t report Eric Grady’s death.”

“Oh, right, and then he went around hanging people upside down over bathtubs!”

He didn’t reply.

She splayed her hands out in front of her and said, “Sorry, sorry. I just-I’ll be okay. I will. Really.”

He asked if she had called Ty Serault.

She shook her head.

“Do me a favor and call him. Ask if he would mind if I had a crime lab technician come in and dust the desk for prints.”

“Do you need his permission?”

“It’s just easier this way.”

“Okay.”

She went to one of the other desks and picked up a phone.

While she made the call, he looked the desk over without opening it, then stooped to look beneath the chair. No wads of gum stuck to the underside. He put on a pair of disposable gloves and carefully opened the top desk drawer without touching any of the surfaces a person would usually handle when opening it. He looked into it and smiled.

“He wants to talk to you,” Nola said, holding the receiver toward him.

He took it from her, and she strolled closer to the open desk but didn’t touch it.

“Detective Brandon?” Serault was saying. “I can’t tell you how shocked I am.”

“Who does the background checks on your employees?”

“My HR person calls the references.”

“And all of Eric Grady’s checked out fine. Except it wasn’t Eric Grady who came to work for you.”

“I can’t believe this. I can’t, really.”

“I’ll want to see any payroll checks this employee endorsed. We’ll also want to talk to the people he worked with.”

“Anything. Anything.”

He paused, then said, “Mr. Serault, given the subject matter you cover on the program-”

“I know, I know, I should have been more alert than most. I can’t tell you how embarrassing this is.”

“I was about to say that you might want to increase security all the way around. If not for your own sake, for the sake of your employees.”

“Yes. Yes. I see that now. Whatever you say. You let me know what I should do.”

Alex nearly told him that at just this moment he was a little too busy to be doing private security analysis for free, but a thought struck him. “I know someone who’d probably enjoy coming out here and giving you advice. Retired sheriff’s deputy. I’ll ask him to give you a call. His name’s O’Brien.”

Serault readily agreed to this, and after offering more avowals of his chagrin, finally allowed Alex to get back to the task at hand.

He called for a crime scene technician, then moved back over to the desk.

As Nola watched, he opened other drawers, but he found little of interest.

“What made you smile when you looked in the first drawer?” she asked.

It was still open and he pointed to the pencils in the pencil tray.

“Mr. Phony is a pencil chewer.”

“That’s right!” she said. “He gnawed on the end of pencils all the time.”

“With any luck, we’ll get his fingerprints off the drawer pulls and his DNA off the pencils. By the way-can you warn the security guard that a crime scene technician is on his way over here?”

She made the call, then said, “Let’s go into my office. I printed out some photos for you.”

He followed her across the hall. His cell phone rang. It was Captain Nelson.

“I was just about to call you, sir.”

“I should hope to God you were.”

“Excuse me a moment, sir.” He covered the phone and told Nola that he would join her in a moment.

“You need privacy?” she asked.

“I’ll go in the other room. I should lock it up to make sure nothing’s disturbed anyway. Could I get the key from you?”

She handed a key ring to him.

Once back there, he said, “I’m sorry to make you wait, sir. I was about to take a look at some photos of a man I believe to be connected with this set of cases.” He told him about Eric Grady.

“Good work. Let’s get rolling on this.”

“If I may ask, sir, what prompted you to call me?”

“I’m over at the crime lab. They told me they were sending a tech out at your request. Keep me posted, Brandon.”

“Yes, sir.”

He locked the room. Nola’s door was closed, and he knocked softly.

“Come in,” she said.

She was standing near the desk, looking at a photo of the man she had known as Eric Grady.

“I can’t believe I didn’t notice the difference.”

“Not your fault,” he said, handing back the keys.

She didn’t answer. She gave him the stack of photos. “The one on top is the most normal.”

He thanked her, glanced through the others, then said, “It’s much better than the others. You said this is a digital photo, right?”

“Yes.”

“I’d like to fax this copy to my office, and get a copy of the file, too.”

“No problem.”

The tech arrived. He dusted for prints and gathered the pencils and a few other materials from the desk that he thought might be promising for identification evidence. Before he left, he told Alex that he thought he had picked up some good latent prints from areas of the desk that had probably been touched only by the suspect.

Alex began questioning Nola again. She had a good memory for details, but he doubted much of what the pretender had told her was true. Still, sometimes liars gave away more of the truth than they intended.

The story of the Eric she had known was surprisingly similar to the one Ciara had told him of the real Eric. He thought the pretender must have known Eric Grady, or at least talked to him at length. Alex would have to learn more about the crowd Grady had been in contact with in Topanga.

She said, “He dyed his hair.”

“What?”

“It wasn’t the same color all the time. But a lot of guys do that, you know.”

“Always dark?”

“Yes. But sometimes too dark. And his roots were lighter than his hair. I think his natural color is lighter.”

“Any sports, hobbies?”

“None that he ever talked about. I didn’t like him much.”

She burned a copy of the photo files onto a CD and handed it to him.

She stared for a long time at the photo they had faxed, her head bent over it. He saw a tear slide down her nose, saw her brush it away. She took off her glasses and covered her face with her hands.

“Nola-” He put an arm around her shoulders. She took a great hiccuping breath, turned her face into his shoulder, and wept in earnest.

“Harmless! I told you he was harmless. Jesus Christ, he probably killed the real Eric. A killer, and I worked with him on a show about killers. God, I saw him almost every day. A fucking murderer. And I told you I thought he was harmless.”

He waited until she had calmed down. She stepped away, pulled four tissues from a box on her desk, and blew her nose noisily. He almost smiled.

“I can’t stay here,” she said. “I’m going home.”

“You okay to drive?”

She nodded and gave him a watery smile. “Thanks. I don’t cry much, but when I do, I guess I really go for broke.”

This time, he did smile.

In the parking lot, she suddenly turned and gave him a brief hug, then hurried to her car without looking back. She wouldn’t touch him again, he knew. It was a liability of the job.

He had come to such moments many times, when he stopped being the person with the interesting job, the curious occupation. No one really wanted murder to come close to them. It had come close to Nola now. She would no sooner reach for him than she would reach to touch a corpse.

He told himself it was just as well.