Killer Ambition Read online

  “Did Brian know the story?”

  Janice sighed again. “Not while his mother was alive. She refused to discuss it. Estelle considered the whole business of that script a sickness, and after Tommy died she was too angry to discuss it. All she wanted to do was get away from it all. She didn’t care anymore whether Tommy was right or wrong. In my opinion, she was profoundly resentful—watching him unravel month by month, and then in the end…well, you know. The truth was, she hated everything and everyone associated with that script. And that meant Hollywood. Her way of dealing with that was to move them out to Arizona and never speak of it.”

  I don’t know whether I’d have done the same thing. But I sure didn’t blame her. “And after Brian moved in with you, did you tell him about his father?”

  “Eventually, yes. Brian was a little guy when Tommy died. Barely nine years old. All he knew was that mommy seemed angry all the time and he believed it was his responsibility to make her happy. A task doomed to failure. Add that to his confusion over why daddy had abandoned them and you have a very sad child. Estelle was smart enough to get him therapy, and heaven knows she loved him dearly, so in spite of it all, he grew up into a sweet boy. But I could tell he was still confused about what had happened to Tommy. So I had to tell him the truth. I explained to him how and why it all happened, that his father was just too sad to go on living and his mother was angry about losing him because she loved him.”

  “And that helped?”

  “It seemed to. He’d periodically ask me questions about what had happened, what his dad told me, what he’d done about the theft of the script. Brian even bought the DVD of the movie. He watched it over and over again.”

  So many things were clearer now. “Did he ever tell you that he wanted to avenge his father, clear his name by proving he’d originated the idea for the movie?”

  “No. I mean, he was upset at the idea that someone might have stolen his father’s script and that it had pushed his father…over the edge. But he never spoke of wanting to do anything about it. I mean, what could he do? The whole issue is long in the past now.”

  I didn’t want to tell her that Brian had indeed found a way to do something about it. So I wrapped it up, thanked her for her time, and gave her my number. She assured me that if she heard from Brian, she’d be in touch immediately. “He’s a lovely, gentle soul. Please believe me, he would never hurt anyone.” My silence provoked her to add, “I know, someone in the family always says that, and then you find the body.” The remark was so unwittingly accurate, it left me speechless. Janice exhaled and said, “Don’t worry, Ms. Knight. If this girl is with Brian, I’m sure she’s just fine and she’ll turn up soon.”

  The bitter irony made my throat tighten. I barely managed to choke out a “thank you” before ending the call. When I got out of the car, the smell of greasy food filled my nostrils. It turned my stomach. I opened the door to the restaurant, intending to tell Bailey I’d wait outside, but she was already standing at the register.

  “Man, you eat fast. Don’t you believe in chewing?”

  A waitress behind the counter brought over a bag that gave off the smell of bacon and something sweet. Bailey handed it to me. “I ordered yours to go.”

  Bailey finished paying. “Our pal Brian is on the move. He just bought a ticket to Paris using Hayley’s iPad.”

  17

  Bailey hustled me into the car and pulled out onto Sepulveda Boulevard. For some reason my appetite returned with a vengeance. I was aiming a forkful of the hash browns at my mouth, but we hit a dip in the road, and it missed and bounced off my chin instead. Flicking a piece of potato out of my bra, I asked, “Where exactly are we rushing to?”

  “The station. Got to call my contact with the cell site info.”

  Bailey’s contact might be able to tell us what cell sites the iPad accessed when Brian bought the plane tickets. And, hopefully, that would lead us to Brian. “Think he’s dumb enough not to know we can trace the signal?”

  “He might think he can outrun us—”

  And he might be right. Thus, Bailey’s rush. “Do we know what name he bought the ticket under?”

  “I didn’t ask. We can do it at the station.”

  As Bailey navigated the morning traffic, I tried to stuff some food down. But after a few sudden stops and sharp turns, I gave up. I decided I didn’t want to be Exhibit A for a new definition of pancake makeup.

  We headed straight for Bailey’s desk, and while she made the call to her contact I poked through her in-box. It looked like we already had a few reports from Dorian. Bailey fished them out and scanned them.

  “Anything?” I asked.

  “Dorian found no evidence of forced entry or struggle at the party house.”

  That’s what we’d named Russell’s house in the hills. “We didn’t expect to. Did she recover any trace evidence to put Brian there?”

  Bailey scanned the page again. “Doesn’t say in this report. But I know she lifted some prints.” Bailey flipped to the next page. “She notes plant debris on Hayley’s body that looks similar to some debris on the undercarriage of the car—”

  “So he took her with him to the ransom drop in Fryman Canyon.”

  Bailey nodded, then handed the reports to me. “We’ll need to find Brian’s prints on something official so we can give Dorian something to compare to whatever she lifted at the house.”

  I scanned the reports, then ran out to the vending machine to get some water. And since I was wearing old jeans, a faded sweatshirt, and no makeup, I of course ran into Graden.

  He, on the other hand, was a sight for very sore eyes. His crisply pressed lieutenant’s uniform showed off his lean, well-muscled frame, and his perennial light tan enhanced the wide cheekbones, sandy brown hair, and hazel eyes. Graden Hales was a man who very seldom got turned down. Surprisingly, that popularity had not turned him into an ass.

  I told him about finding Hayley. “You’d think I’d know better than to get my hopes up by now.”

  Graden shook his head, his expression sad but resigned. “You never will. No one does. Hope dims over time, but it never completely goes away.” He kept it light, but I heard the serious message underlying his words. It occurred to me that he might be referring to us.

  The odds of getting back with Graden had been pretty slim. Even though I could now accept that my reaction to his Googling me wasn’t rational, the hell of being “that girl” in the small Northern California community after Romy’s abduction was still fresh enough to make me cringe. And so when my mother and I moved to Los Angeles, I kept my traumatic family history from everyone—including Bailey and Toni. My childhood therapist and now friend, Carla the Crone (as I’d called her), had always told me that my secretiveness was unhealthy and very likely stemmed from my irrational feelings of guilt for not having saved Romy. Though I recognized the truth in what she said, and in Bailey’s and Toni’s urgings that Graden shouldn’t be thrown out as untrustworthy, it had taken all I had to make myself give him another chance. And he knew it.

  “Listen, I’ve got to get some work done around the house this weekend,” he said. “You around early next week?”

  “It’s hard to say, the way things are going. But if I am, you want to—”

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t know what I was going to say. I might’ve been about to ask if you wanted to paint my room.”

  “The answer’s still yes,” he said, with a smile that warmed me from head to toe. “But I get to pick the color.”

  Graden headed off to his meeting, and when I got back to Bailey’s desk, she was just ending a call.

  “And?” I asked.

  “The iPad’s in New York.”

  “How’re we going to get out there in time to—”

  “We’re not. I put in calls to NYPD. I’m e-mailing them all the info, photos of Brian, all that jazz. They’ve put out the alert.”

  “So I guess it’s that time,” I said. Time to notify Raynie and
Russell of Hayley’s death. I couldn’t even begin to tell Bailey how much I dreaded this meeting, but her expression told me I didn’t need to.

  “You don’t have to do this, Rache.”

  “Yeah, I do.” I couldn’t let Bailey go it alone. And I couldn’t let my own history get in the way of doing my job.

  Bailey sighed heavily. “Do you want to get the parents together or tell them separately?”

  I flashed back on the scene at Russell’s house. “They all seemed pretty easy with each other. It might be best for them to have everyone together.”

  Bailey stood up. “I agree. And besides, it’s bad enough having to give this news once.”

  No argument there. Bailey dropped me at the Biltmore and went back to her apartment in Larchmont Village so we could get cleaned up and look professional when we delivered the news.

  We arranged for everyone to meet us at Russell’s house and we were ushered into the living room, where the parents were seated on separate sections of the couch that was in front of the fireplace. There was a heavy tension in the room. I knew they were steeling themselves against the pain of hearing what we’d come to tell them. The words we were about to utter in the next few seconds would change their lives forever. It made me wish there was a giant life clock I could reach into and push back the hands, take us all to a time when Hayley was here, safe. Raynie jumped up to offer us something to drink, and when we declined, she offered us something to eat. I recognized the defense mechanism, a way to delay the blow. Because maybe if it was delayed long enough, it wouldn’t come. But of course, it had to. Bailey told them, as gently as she could, that Hayley had been found dead in the trunk of Brian’s car.

  Russell roared, “Brian? Brian who?”

  He was trying to distance himself from the fact of Hayley’s death, but it was a valid question nonetheless. I told him. And when I explained who his father was, I watched Russell carefully. He blanched and then his eyes fixed on a point across the room in a hundred-yard stare.

  “How in the hell did he and Hayley…?” he asked, looking bewildered.

  “We think Brian sought her out,” I said.

  Russell covered his face with his hands, then rubbed his temples. He choked back a sob and began to pound the arm of the couch. “No, no, no!” He spit the words out as though they were rocks that’d been stuck in his throat. Then he suddenly jumped to his feet and began to storm around the room. “That goddamn crazy asshole! That psychotic son of a bitch raised a fucking lunatic of a kid! I want that piece of shit obliterated!”

  Throughout all this, Raynie keened like a wounded animal, arms wrapped around her midsection, rocking back and forth. “No, no, no, no!” Her agony was almost too painful to witness. She folded forward and hugged her knees, head on her lap.

  I could see that Bailey was feeling the heartbreak as deeply as I was. We did what we could to console them, but nothing can make you feel more useless than trying to assuage the pain of losing a child. It was a tragedy like no other. The death of a son or daughter upends the universe—parents predecease children, not the other way around. And I knew that the hole we’d just torn in Russell’s and Raynie’s lives today would never be fully healed.

  Before we left, Bailey and I promised to do everything in our power to bring Brian to justice. Raynie nodded and whispered, “Thank you.”

  But I knew what she was thinking. We could catch Brian, we could take him to trial, we could get him convicted and locked up forever. But we could never bring Hayley back.

  18

  We headed back downtown in silence. In the past few hours, the sky had gone from a deep, penetrating blue to an ominously heavy cloud bank of blacks and grays. We drove through a darkness that made mid-afternoon feel like the dead of night. I rolled down the window and the thick damp breeze clung to my face and crawled down my neck. A weird stillness filled the air, as though the planet were waiting for something.

  At the corner of Fifth and Broadway, a man in a black top hat, dressed in jeans and a black blazer, waited at the light. He was sitting on a piece of canvas stretched across the frame of a walker, except the walker had four wheels and a basket. When the light changed, he popped up and pushed the contraption across the street, whistling the chimney-sweep song from Mary Poppins.

  Bailey and I watched him. “Fellini wasn’t really stretching much, was he?” I said.

  Bailey’s mouth twisted in a half smile. I knew it was all she could manage. “Want to head over to the coroner’s?” she asked.

  “Sure. And we need a specialist to look at that plant debris.”

  “Dorian’s probably already got someone.” Bailey got back on the freeway and headed for North Mission Road. “I’ve been wondering whether the aunt…”

  “Janice.”

  “Right. Whether she was lying? Now that we know Brian’s in New York, since he used Hayley’s iPad there…”

  I’d been thinking about that too. “She sure didn’t sound like she had anything to hide. But then again, you never know.”

  Bailey nodded. “Just wondering.”

  “Did you ever find out what name that ticket to Paris was purchased under?”

  Bailey smacked the steering wheel. “Damn. I’ll check into it when we get back.”

  The coroner’s office was a bust. The pathologist who was assigned to our case, Dr. Vendi, wasn’t available, and Scott was out in the field, so I couldn’t bribe him into giving us a look at any preliminary notes. Bailey left instructions to bag and tag the plant debris for analysis, just to be on the safe side, and we drove back to the Police Administration Building.

  “Graden said he’d tell the brass about Hayley,” I said.

  “I’m sure there’ll be a presser of some kind pretty soon, then. You better get ready.”

  The murder of a superstar director’s daughter was big news, and that meant both Bailey’s shop and mine would be under siege. “I’ll make the call when we get upstairs.” It really wasn’t a DA’s bailiwick to talk to the press before there was a suspect in custody, but Vanderhorn would want in on it anyway. Thanks to yours truly, he could legitimately claim that the DA’s office was working closely with the LAPD. Just as Bailey was pulling into the parking lot, the clouds opened up and big fat drops began to splatter the windshield.

  She looked up at the sky. “I got a feeling this one’s going to be the real deal.”

  As if to prove her right, a deafening clap of thunder boomed and a jagged streak of lightning cut across the sky.

  “Damn, it’s the apocalypse,” I said.

  “And not a bit too soon.”

  As we headed for Bailey’s desk, I was, for a change, presentable and ready to run into Graden. Of course that meant there was no way I was going to see him.

  Bailey picked up a manila envelope that was on top of her in-box stack. “Looks like we got Brian’s birth records.” She handed the envelope to me and picked up the phone.

  I pulled out the records and saw the little tiny footprint. No one could have predicted that innocent little foot would turn out to be the foot of a vicious killer.

  “He bought the Paris ticket under ‘Shandling,’” Bailey said.

  I put down the birth record. He’d purchased the tickets to New York under his real name. “Why would he use the alias?”

  “Maybe because it doesn’t matter anymore, because he’s outta here.”

  “I suppose. Or maybe it’s a deliberate mislead? Like, in case we hadn’t caught on to his true name yet, he used his alias again to make us believe he’s going to Paris?”

  “But if he’s trying to distract us, why not buy two tickets and make it seem as though Hayley’s still with him?” Bailey asked.

  “Not worth the expense?” I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Too many possibilities,” Bailey said. “Not enough answers.”

  “Have we made any progress on trying to nail down where the e-mail ransom note came from?”

  “I’ll check. But it doesn’t mat
ter. We already know Brian sent it. The most we’ll get is his IP address.”

  “I’m just hoping for something to back up Legs Roscoe—”

  “What? He’s rock solid. A little weird maybe, but solid.”

  “Some corroboration wouldn’t hurt. Anyway, what about the calls on Russell’s cell—the ones after the kidnapping? Any progress on those?”

  “Not yet. We’re working on it.”

  Damn. I could feel Brian slipping farther away by the minute. Another boom of thunder exploded outside and now the rain fell in torrential sheets. The downpour was so heavy, I could hear it pounding the pavement below. Workers who were just five steps from their offices got drenched before they could reach the door.

  I looked up at the heavy gray sky. I usually prefer bright, sunny days, no matter how hot. Not today.

  19

  Hayley’s murder was the lead story on the evening news. Hairsprayed news anchors on every channel salivated as they blasted the headlines across the country. I knew it was a harbinger of things to come if the case ever went to trial. But I didn’t get time to worry about it.

  Forty-eight miles northwest of downtown, the canyons and hills above Malibu, still only thinly covered by shallow-rooted grasses and young shrubs after the rampant wildfires of last summer, shed layers of earth under the pounding rain. Mudslides sent filthy rivers pouring across all four lanes of Pacific Coast Highway. At the end of the highway closest to Santa Monica, the ebbing ground dislodged rocks and heavy boulders, one of which hurtled off the California Incline with meteoric force and landed on the roof of a car, crushing the driver’s skull. The car spun sideways, forming a blockade, and four vehicles behind it piled into each other like dominoes.

  Farther north, high up in the mountains above Mulholland Highway, where the rain fell as though the clouds had torn apart from the weight, the water found a barren stretch of an old sunbaked trail. Pounding down the newly formed channel with a mighty force, it tore through a small, incongruous mound of freshly turned soil. And exposed an outstretched hand.