Nine

3

Lakewood, California

Sunday, May 18, 10:08 P.M.

He walked toward the back of the house, wondering if she would follow him. He figured he had a fifty-fifty chance of being ignored. But he heard her footsteps behind him. The back door was open, and he went out without touching it, even though the lab had already dusted for prints. This had been the point of entry, they had been told. A piece of cake for anyone with even the most basic burglary skills.

He saw that no one was in the yard, stepped out into the center of it, and took a deep breath. It would take a while to stop smelling the sour blood smell, but he was glad to be out of the close quarters of the bathroom. And although the evening was warm, it felt twenty degrees cooler outside.

He thought for a moment about killers who tortured their victims, who swept up-no, vacuumed-and generally left crime scenes too clean. He didn’t like any of it, hated what his experience told him-this wasn’t a one-time foray into murder. This was the work of a planner. What else had been planned? Already completed?

The climbing rope. That especially disturbed him. He wondered if it disturbed him because he had a climber’s regard for such a rope, or if he was not paying enough attention to his gut instinct. This scene had immediately reminded him of another, long-ago series of murders.

He cut off that line of thinking. Impossible that it was the same killer.

He turned to look at Ciara. She held her chin up, and in the wash of moonlight on her face, he could see the defiant set of her mouth. Her arms were crossed over her chest. She was tall and dark-haired, in her mid-forties-six or seven years older than he, but with less time in the department.

He thought again of J.D., who had been dead for almost a year now. What a contrast this new partner made to that old man.

Then again, he supposed, by appearance Alex and J.D. themselves could hardly have been more different. When they had first teamed up twelve years ago, Alex-with only seven years in the department-had been the youngest of the one hundred and ten detectives in the LASD Homicide Bureau. J.D. was one of the oldest.

J.D. was an overweight, chain-smoking, hard-drinking black man who had grown up in Compton. His nose had been broken at least twice, and a thick scar gave an odd bend to the end of his left eyebrow. He had been the first person in his family to go to college. He hated heights.

Alex was muscular and athletic, blue-eyed and white. He worked out almost daily, had never smoked, and drank little. He was the first person in the Brandon family to attend what his brother called “a mere state university”-rather than an Ivy League school, or USC, or Stanford. He had spent most of his childhood in Malibu and Bel Air, and loved rock climbing. For a brief time, some of the other detectives had referred to the team as “J.D. and G.Q.” Somehow J.D. had put a stop to that. Probably, Alex thought, with a single look.

Whatever their apparent differences, they were a solid team. Alex’s uncle, a longtime member of the department-his inspiration for joining it-had taught him a great deal about law enforcement, but J.D. took that education to another level.

J.D.’s coolheaded, deceptively easygoing approach appealed to Alex. Walking into the midst of a horrific crime scene, J.D. would light up a cigarette and say, “Let’s not get excited.” Calmly, he’d put the pieces together as only he could. He would sit down in an interrogation room with the most hardened killer, look him straight in the eye, and say, with seeming sincerity, “I understand completely why you did it. Let’s talk.” He had obtained more confessions than anyone else in the department, and never by using anything but his presence, his mind-and something he called “the knack.”

He was brilliant in almost every way except in his care of himself. He had died of a massive coronary. Alex had wept more at J.D.’s funeral than he had at his own father’s. And gone back to work with a vengeance.

Ciara was the only detective in Homicide who had a clearance rate anywhere near Alex’s own. About sixty-eight percent of her cases had been cleared to the point of highly probable suspects named or in custody. For someone as new to Detectives as she was, that was incredible.

He had to admit being impressed by that-he had been in the homicide bureau much longer than Ciara, but she obviously had the knack, too.

Three months ago, his captain had asked him to take her on as a partner, and he had agreed. Every now and then, he saw how much it bothered her to answer to someone younger, but even though they had their ups and downs, for the most part, they got along fine. He just wished she’d learn the proverb about catching more flies with honey than vinegar. He was her last chance, after all-Alex was the only person in Homicide who was willing to be her partner. Behind her back, most of the others referred to her as B.B. Queen. The B.B. stood for Ball Buster.

The few other women in the homicide bureau liked her less than the men did.

Watching her now, he thought dispassionately that she was the kind of woman more likely to be described as handsome than pretty. She worked hard to keep in shape, and even her worst enemies among the males in the homicide bureau eyed her with appreciation when she walked down the halls. Thinking of them, he said, “You tired of working with me?”

“How can you even ask such a stupid question?”

“Marquez goes back and tells the captain what you said in there within earshot of a coroner’s assistant and a lab tech, what do you think is going to happen?”

“The captain’s not going to transfer me out of Homicide. My clearance rate is too high,” she said, but her voice betrayed her lack of certainty.

He stayed silent. She knew as well as he did that success in closing cases might not be enough to keep her from being transferred.

“Aw, come on, Alex. I’ll go out and apologize to Marquez on the front lawn at the top of my lungs if you want me to.”

“No, let him cool off. And aim for something less dramatic and more sincere.”

“You could be right. Maybe after he hangs out there with that puking kid for a while, I won’t look so bad.”

“I feel sorry for that rookie. Lab tech really chewed him out.”

“Serves him right. Maybe next time he’ll go outside to hurl. The stupid bastard used the crapper and flushed it. God knows what evidence is out in the sewer lines now.”

“I don’t think these guys were careless enough to leave evidence in the toilet.”

“No…” She unfolded her arms, and he watched her expression change from annoyance to concentration. “You said ‘guys’-plural. More than one killer?”

“Probably. Wouldn’t be easy for one man to get past Adrianos’s bodyguards and subdue a guy like him. Adrianos never had fewer than two men guarding him. And it’s unlikely one man could hoist someone of Adrianos’s size up over the tub. If there had been a pulley or other device-”

“We should ask Marquez if there was one in the attic.”

Alex didn’t say anything.

She sighed. “I’ll go out there and apologize to him.”

He shrugged. “Like I said, give him a minute to cool off. You’ve been riding his ass since we got here.”

“He’ll live,” she said absently. Her brows were drawn together. “So, which of Bernardo Adrianos’s competitors took care of him before we could?”

“Maybe it wasn’t his competition.”

“Come on, Alex. Guys like Adrianos are never safe. I’m betting someone wanted a piece of his lucrative import business.”

“Another drug dealer? I don’t know. Dealers at his level have hit men at their beck and call. A pro probably would have downed him with one shot and left him where we never would have found him. Whoever killed Adrianos wanted him to be found.”

Alex saw the beam of a flashlight at the back door, and a slender young woman stepped onto the porch. She was wearing a crime lab jacket. She nodded toward them, then crouched down to take photographs of the doorframe.

“What are you doing?” Ciara called to her.

The tech explained that there were tool marks on it that might be useful.

“Unless this place has been robbed before,” she said.

Ciara turned back to Alex. “So if this isn’t drug lord warfare, what other possibilities are there?”

“I don’t know.” He hesitated, then said, “It reminds me a little of the way Jerome Naughton used to work.”

“Who?”

“About a dozen years ago. One of my first cases in Detectives. I was looking for him because J.D. and I were fairly sure he’d murdered his wife. Later, we learned we were right, although we never found her body.”

“Before my time, I guess,” she said, a little stiffly.

“Before you were in Detectives, anyway. Thing that makes me think about Naughton is that he’d hang his victims upside down like this-kind of like a hunter hangs a deer-over a hook above a bathtub. He usually chose abandoned properties or ones that had been vacant for a while.”

“You said his name was Naughton?”

“Yes-but this is not as much like his work as it sounds. For one thing, his victims were always women, and he wasn’t so neat about the blood. In fact, his scenes always had blood all over the place. Supposedly, that was part of the thrill for him. So that doesn’t fit. And I don’t think he used that trick of drilling holes and tying the rope over the beam.”

“Starting to sound like there’s not so much in common after all. But we should check this Naughton guy out. Any idea where he is now?”

“Dead. His fourteen-year-old stepson killed him. Long story, but some people thought the kid might have been Naughton’s accomplice. I’m not sure I agree with them, but no one ever had a chance to really question him at length.” An image of the boy came into his mind-a handsome face beneath old bruises; thin, but strong, with jet-black hair and large, haunted gray eyes. He didn’t think he’d ever forget that kid’s eyes.

“Why not?” Ciara was saying. “No-let me guess-he’s dead, too?”

“No, not as far as I know. He wasn’t questioned, because his grandmother was Elizabeth Logan. She had been looking for him for years.”

Ciara gave him a blank look.

“Logan Cosmetics?” he said.

“Oh. Big money.”

“That’s an understatement. Elizabeth Logan made money and married money. Probably aren’t fifty people in Los Angeles that have as much money as the Logans-if there are that many.”

“You’d know more about that than I do, Mr. Silver Spoon.”

Alex had long ago learned that there were those who would never forgive him for growing up among the wealthy-no matter what had changed since then or how little he regretted the loss of that world. It was a prejudice that wasn’t worth complaining about-but one he’d prefer not to find in a partner.

“Ah, shit, Alex, don’t take offense.”

He stayed silent.

“I’m sorry, all right?” she said.

“Sure.” He watched as the lab tech began to remove the strike plate from the door.

“So Elizabeth Logan took care of her grandson?” Ciara asked, drawing his attention back to her.

“Yes-listen, there really isn’t much in common with the Naughton cases. His victims were always women, and there was never any evidence that the kid participated in the killings.”

“But he murdered his stepfather,” Ciara said.

“Self-defense, or damned close to it. In all likelihood, it was exactly the way the D.A. decided it was-Naughton terrorized the boy, made his life a living hell-even killed the boy’s mother right in front of him. The kid killed Naughton because he believed that was the only way he’d ever get away from him. The sad thing is, he was probably right. Nothing more to it. Otherwise, he would have been brought to trial-money or no money. And as far as I know, the boy has never been in any trouble since.”

“But you’re going to try to find out what he’s been up to lately.”

He smiled. “I might.”

“Personally, I think it’s way too big a stretch. You haven’t heard anything about this kid for a decade, and if this was his sort of gig, he’d have been in trouble before now, right?”

“Most likely.”

“Face it, Alex, this is probably a job done by a pro, a guy who picked his killing spot carefully and was not impulsive. Adrianos pissed off the wrong people, and that’s all there is to it. As for the method-maybe his enemies hired someone new to the trade who enjoys his work.”

“Christ, I hope not.”

“What do you think that nine on the mirror is all about?” she asked.

“Hell if I know. But that’s another thing that doesn’t seem to fit if this is just drug dealer versus drug dealer. What kind of message is the number nine? And who’s supposed to get the message?”

“His business associates. Someone is using this to say they’re all working for new management. Which reminds me, Alex-I wonder where his bodyguards are?”

“Probably welcoming Bernardo to hell.”

“Shit. I guess that means we’ll get called out to some other spoiled meat scene one of these days. Probably closer to Adrianos’s home ground than Lakewood. With any luck, maybe the LAPD will catch it instead of Sheriff’s.”

“Might be on television then,” Alex said, and she laughed.

The sheriff’s department seldom got the media attention given to the Los Angeles Police Department. Alex didn’t think that was necessarily a bad thing.

“Well,” she said, “even if the bodyguards do drop dead inside L.A. city limits instead of somewhere within our jurisdiction, we’ve got the big news here.”

“Something tells me I’ll soon wish he had been found in L.A., too.”

He watched as the tech began to put away her camera and tools.

“I don’t suppose we can hope for latent prints?” Alex asked.

The tech shook her head. “Nothing that will be of use. Because this place has been on the real estate market, we’ve got all kinds of prints everywhere in the house except the bathroom, the back doorknob, and the attic. Those are wiped clean. Same with footprints.” She glanced at Ciara, then added, “Detective Marquez was good about preserving the scene-he let us check the hallway and bathroom floor before anyone other than the first officer on the scene stepped in there. Looks as if his are the only shoeprints on the bathroom floor. There are some others in the hall. They’re odd-I think the killer wore plastic booties or something else that left an indistinct, uniform flat sole mark. Big enough to be a man’s, but don’t try to take that to court-that’s just a SWAG-a scientific wild-assed guess.”

“Any SWAG about the rope?” Ciara asked, and Alex wondered if she was setting the tech up.

“That may be our best lead yet. Sailing supply. Again, a guess. Maybe even for some other special outdoor use-rock climbing? But I don’t think it’s something from a hardware store.”

“Unless I miss my guess,” Alex said, “it’s a common brand of static rope-a rope that’s designed not to stretch. That type of rope is used for rappelling. You can buy them at outdoor equipment and sporting goods stores.”

“You’re a climber?” the tech asked, looking at him with new interest.

“Yes,” Ciara said, “he’s crazy. But he knows rock climbing equipment.”

They were interrupted by Marquez, who came rushing out, nearly knocking the tech down. “Man, when it rains it pours. You’ve got a lieutenant, the FBI, and the L.A. Times on the front lawn.”

“God damn it all to hell,” Ciara said, hurrying past him. “I’m going to close the blinds on the bathroom window. The Times will make it a photo op.”

“Did you say the FBI?” the lab tech asked. “Why would they be here?”

“Bernardo Adrianos was on their Ten Most Wanted list,” Alex said.

He was distracted by the sound of an approaching helicopter and looked up. “Shit. Not one of ours, Enrique. Television. You suppose the neighbors called them, or that knucklehead with the Feds?”

Marquez had other things on his mind. “You’d better not let B.B. Queen get anywhere near a reporter, Alex, or all our asses will be in a sling.”