Killer Ambition Page 5

  Bailey started the car and pulled out of the parking lot.

  “Did you have unis door-knock the neighborhood?” I asked. Any activity over the past few days at Russell’s house in the Hollywood Hills could provide a crucial lead.

  “Yeah. No one heard anything weird. The closest neighbor’s assistant was home waiting for a FedEx package, and he remembered hearing car doors slam at the house on Monday morning, but no screams, no sounds of struggle. Nothing unusual.”

  Damn it. We needed to catch a break here. We didn’t have time for these friggin’ dead ends. I tried hard to keep myself from imagining what might be happening to Hayley at this very moment. “What’s up with all these assistants?” I asked irritably. “Why couldn’t this neighbor just sign the notice and leave it taped to the door like the rest of us?”

  “Yes, let’s blame the assistant for not breaking the case for us. That makes perfect sense.”

  I hate being busted for irrational crankiness. I was about to come up with a suitably cutting remark when I noticed that Bailey was driving like we were responding to a robbery in progress. “Why are we heading back to Hollywood? Shouldn’t we at least stop by the Galleria while we’re out here and see if we can figure out where Brian works—or, rather, worked?”

  “Because I’ve already got someone tracking down his employment records, and it occurred to me that it might be more important to hit his apartment first.”

  She was right, so I shut up and tried to hang on to my stomach as Bailey flew down the winding Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Laurel Canyon climbs from Studio City in the San Fernando Valley up and over the ridge and snakes down the other side into West Hollywood. It’s a storied canyon that was once home to a variety of megatalents, like Frank Zappa, Jim Morrison, Steven Tyler, and Joni Mitchell, and currently home to my bestie Toni LaCollier, who lived at the top of the hill off Kirkwood—though in all honesty she couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. Toni was already a Special Trials prosecutor when I got transferred into the unit. We’d bonded so fast we agreed that we had to have been sisters in a past life. Her tiny house in the canyon hadn’t been much when she bought it—a lot of the houses in the area had gone to seed—but Toni had the gift of artistry and style. Within six months, she’d turned the run-down “fixer” into a unique little gem.

  The canyon retains a lot of bohemian-type charm—the Country Store, where everyone shops for munchies, still sports a hippie-style psychedelic sign—but the main canyon road, originally designed to handle only Sunday cruising, has become a primary artery for the burgeoning Valley population that travels into Hollywood. As a result, the road turns into a parking lot at least three times a day.

  Luckily, we’d missed the morning-drive slog and Bailey made it into West Hollywood in less than twenty minutes. Brian’s apartment was in one of those typical nondescript buildings—a box with square windows in the heart of Hollywood on North Vista Street. The building across the road had tiny balconies where tenants grew plants and stored kids’ toys and bicycles, evidence that humans lived there. Brian’s building didn’t have any of that. The only visible signs of individuality were the differing curtains, and one hanging crystal ornament. It probably made a nice rainbow when the sun hit it. I miss unicorns.

  Brian’s landlord was frowning suspiciously at the uniformed officers who’d shown up to secure the place. He was short, and his wifebeater T-shirt strained to cover a paunch that looked like a second-trimester pregnancy. The plaid Bermuda shorts and black socks with slippers completed the look nicely.

  “If Drew knew about the hunks you ran into on the job, he’d go out of his mind,” I said.

  “Yeah, I’ll bet Graden would lose a lot of sleep too.”

  Bailey introduced herself to the landlord and held out her badge. He took it and squinted for a moment, then pulled a pair of filthy glasses out of his shorts pocket, put them on, and scrutinized the identification before handing it back to her.

  “And you? Who are you?” he asked me in a heavy Middle Eastern accent.

  “Rachel Knight, deputy district attorney. I’m a prosecutor in the Special Trials Unit.”

  “Easy to say. Let’s see some ID, Ms. Special Attorney.”

  “Look, Mr.—,” Bailey began, her voice showing the strain of holding back words she’d regret.

  “Gardanian. And I own the building, so I have the right—”

  In no great mood to begin with, and out of patience, I brandished my badge and held it under his nose, just to shut him up. He took it and gave it the once-over, then handed it back to me.

  “Okay.” He waved us in, then shuffled back into his apartment.

  A uni who was a classic mesomorph with bulging biceps—the type I used to think was dreamy back in high school—gestured for us to follow him down the hall to Brian’s apartment. He flashed us an amused look as we fell in behind him.

  “He give you guys trouble too?” I asked.

  “He tried to shake us down,” the uni said. “Claimed the tenant took the only key and he’d have to charge us for the time and trouble to get another one made.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. So I told him not to worry, we had a skeleton key that would work on all doors. Then we showed him our battering ram. All of a sudden he remembered he kept a key for emergencies.”

  We got to the end of the hall and he gestured to the open door on the left.

  “You cleared it?” Bailey asked. “No one here?”

  “Empty. From the looks of it, I’d say whoever lived here isn’t coming back.”

  Bailey and I walked in. The apartment had that damp mildew smell that old, poorly maintained buildings get. The threadbare but richly stained sofa and badly nicked wooden coffee table in the living room told me this had probably been a furnished apartment. I realized that we shouldn’t be tromping around in what might be another crime scene.

  “Shouldn’t we get everyone out of here and call Dorian?” I asked.

  Bailey sighed. “Too late. I couldn’t take the chance that Brian might be holding Hayley here, or that she might be…”

  I nodded. If there’s a victim who’s potentially wounded or in danger, you don’t call the criminalist and wait to process the scene. Bailey had rightly called in the cavalry. But that meant that by now at least a dozen officers had already barged in and checked every nook and cranny, so our being here wouldn’t make a whole lot of difference. But that didn’t mean I wanted to be in the zip code when Dorian arrived.

  Bailey and I kept our hands to ourselves to at least avoid adding our prints to the hundreds left by all the unis as we made our way through the tiny one-bedroom. And I saw that the uni was right: the place was vacant. The closets and medicine cabinet were standing open and empty, and there was nothing on the pine nightstand or dresser. I noticed that the bed was made neatly, but the cover was mussed—as though someone had sat on it.

  “Did any of you guys sit on the bed?” I asked the uni.

  “Not that I saw. But I’ll check and confirm.”

  “Has anyone door-knocked the tenants?” Bailey asked him.

  “Jennings, Kowalski, and Lopez took the duty. I think there’s only, like, twelve units, so they’re probably about done now. I’ll tell ’em you’re here.”

  Bailey nodded and I watched him walk away. She caught me enjoying the view. “You still shopping?” she asked.

  “No, Sister Mary Catherine. But there’s no law against looking, is there?”

  Bailey smiled. Her cell rang and she moved to a corner to take the call. I went to check out the kitchen. Using a dish towel, I opened the refrigerator. Not much there. Just a pint of milk, a half-eaten loaf of potato bread, and a near-empty jar of peanut butter. That told me Brian hadn’t left in haste. He’d eaten down his food reserve, knowing he was going to leave. But he also might’ve been too poor to keep a lot around. Bailey was still on the phone when the uni came back. I thought it might be time to find out what they called him when he was at home. No harm i
n asking a guy’s name, right?

  “Hey, Ms. Knight—”

  “Call me Rachel. And you are…?”

  “Justin.” He held out his hand. “Justin Wagner. Nice to meet you.”

  As we shook I noticed he had brown eyes and really long dark lashes. Memories of the cornerback I’d crushed on in high school came flooding back and I had to force myself to focus on the task at hand.

  “Did we get any response from the tenants?” I asked.

  “Yeah, Kowalski got something. He’s out in the hall. You want me to bring him in?”

  I glanced at Bailey, who was still on the phone. “No, that’s cool. I’ll talk to him.”

  Justin turned to lead me out and said over his shoulder, “Oh, and none of us ever sat on that bed.”

  Kowalski delivered on the cliché with a Marlon Brando, thick-shouldered build, though he looked a little too buttoned-down to do the whole “Stella!” routine. I introduced myself and asked what he had, and he hooked his thumbs under his Sam Browne and stood “at ease” with legs apart as he spoke. “The old lady on the next floor in 2A, Iris Stavros, said she saw Brian on Monday, around noon. He was with a short blonde girl.”

  We’d show her a photo to make sure, but it had to be Hayley. And noon. According to the time stamp on Russell’s text, that would’ve been after the proof-of-life photo was sent but before the e-mailed ransom demand.

  “How did she happen to see them?”

  “They were coming in as she was going out. She said she was on her way to the store to get some milk.” He glanced upward as if to make sure Iris wasn’t listening, then lowered his voice. “You ask me, she was gonna buy something a little stronger.”

  Iris Stavros might turn out to be an important witness. If she also turned out to be a heavy drinker, it’d be a real problem when she hit the stand. I’d have to do a lot of checking before I put her on a witness list. “Did she notice any signs of struggle or force, anything unusual?”

  “No. Matter of fact, she said she’d seen the girl around here many times in the past couple of months. Seemed to her that they were boyfriend and girlfriend.”

  But none of that meant Hayley hadn’t been kidnapped. Brian could’ve been hiding a gun, in which case Hayley wouldn’t have dared to struggle. Or maybe at that particular time, Hayley hadn’t known she was being kidnapped. She didn’t necessarily have to know that Brian took the photo of her at the Hollywood Hills house in order to use it later as proof of life. In fact, it would’ve been smart of him to keep everything looking normal for as long as possible. That way he wouldn’t have to worry about controlling Hayley until it was absolutely necessary.

  “Did you ask her how well she knew Brian?”

  “Said she’d known him a little less than a year, but that he seemed okay. He’d help her with groceries, that kind of thing. She didn’t say he was a ‘nice young man,’ but that was the gist of it.”

  “Thanks, Stanley.”

  He frowned. “Name’s Evan.”

  “Right, I was just kid—”

  Evan squinted at me. “Stan’s my brother.”

  Of course he was.

  8

  Bailey joined us in the hallway, a worried look on her face. Without preamble, she tersely ordered the unis to stand guard on Brian’s apartment until our criminalist got there, then headed for the car. I trotted to catch up and jumped in as she gunned the engine.

  I quickly brought her up to speed on what I’d learned, aware that whatever she’d just heard on her phone call wasn’t good, because she was taking it out on the gas pedal. Bailey listened to my report without comment as she whipped down Hollywood Boulevard. I wrapped up my assessment of Iris Stavros and asked, “Want to tell me why we’re traveling at warp speed, Captain Kirk?”

  “The news release paid off, sort of. We got a tip from a guy at a cybercafé in Silver Lake. Claims he ‘sniffed’ someone sending a ransom note.”

  “Sniffing,” the hacker’s term for spying on someone’s Internet mailings, is incredibly easy to do in a cybercafé. Don’t ask me how they do it, I’m a computer Luddite. I only know about it because Graden is a computer whizbang, and he’d told me stories from some of the hacking cases he’d handled.

  “That’s all? I mean, that’s great, but…” The call had taken a lot longer than it should have for just that.

  “Brian, or whatever his real name is, had a lot of jobs before he landed the gig in the Sherman Oaks Galleria. The first sign of him in L.A. was about a year ago. He was a busboy at the Pinot Gris. Three months later, he turned up as a waiter at the Hungry Pig. Two months after that, he applied for a security job at a Bank of America a few blocks away from the Hungry Pig. He hung on to that job for four months, and then he landed his job as a jewelry store manager in the Galleria.”

  The progression was unremarkable. They were the typical low-level jobs young adults took to make ends meet until they figured out a career goal. And the move from security guard to jewelry store manager made perfect sense to me. I shrugged. “Doesn’t seem all that unusual.” But Bailey’s expression looked ominous.

  “Not until you factor in the locations. Except for the Galleria, every single one of those jobs was within walking distance of Russell’s studio. And the Galleria? That was just a stone’s throw from Hayley’s school.”

  I tried to make the pieces fit, but no matter how I turned them around in my mind, they refused to fall into place. “I would’ve said that sounded like Brian had been stalking Hayley for the past year, but he spent most of his time circling Russell’s studio.”

  “Right. And we can check with the parents, but I doubt Hayley hung out at daddy’s studio much.”

  “No.” Not at this age. She had her own world. And so did daddy.

  Bailey pulled up to the cybercafé, charmingly named Head of Steam. It looked like any Coffee Bean, just with more tables. As we searched the room for our tipster, I got a strange and unappealing glimpse into the future: everyone there was transfixed by a computer screen, and most wore headphones. Though there were signs of life as we know it around the cash register, the rest of the café was eerily quiet; the primary sound was the clicking of laptop keys, the conversations virtual, not verbal. Was this where we were headed? Eye contact traded for Skype, personal discourse traded for e-mails or, worse, blogs? Thankfully, further depressing predictions were curtailed when our tipster spotted us and waved us over.

  Pierced nose and lower lip, greasy black hair combed up in back and into long spikes at the sides of his face, skinny jeans that had room to bag on even skinnier legs, and black high-top sneakers. It came as no surprise to me that his name was Legs Roscoe. With the preliminary introductions completed, we got right down to business.

  “I was just hanging out—”

  “Sorry to stop you, but do you remember what day it was?” I asked.

  “Yeah, it was Monday. Had to be well after five o’clock.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  “Because my last class ends at four and traffic’s a bitch that time of day. So I couldn’t have gotten here much before that.” Legs dipped his head. “I, uh, didn’t mean to ‘sniff’ anyone, it was just an inadvertent thing. I don’t usually run into any—”

  I held up my hand. “Don’t sweat it. We’re not here to bust you.”

  This seemed to calm Legs down considerably. He nodded vigorously, practically bowing at the waist in his seat. “Cool. Thanks. Cool. Well, so I catch the drift that this dude was saying he had this girl and not to call the cops—”

  “Did you catch anything about money?” Bailey asked.

  Legs sniffed and used a paper napkin to wipe his nose. I wondered whether the nose ring got in the way when he had a cold. I decided not to ponder that question.

  “Nah, I guess I just caught the tail end of it. Reason I noticed, though, was the girl. You know, the one whose picture was just on the news? She came into the café while he was typing. Real pretty. Dude seemed pissed that she was there.�
�

  “What made him seem pissed?” Bailey asked. “Did he grab her? Yell at her?”

  “No, nothing like that. He just seemed, I don’t know…annoyed? He didn’t let her sit down. Soon as she showed up, he packed up his laptop and they left.”

  “Did he hold on to her arm? Push her?” I asked.

  Legs looked off to the left. “Not that I remember. And tell you the truth, I didn’t think much of the whole deal. Seemed like a goof. The only reason I called you guys was because of the news flash about the girl.”

  “So she didn’t look scared or upset?” I asked.

  “Not to me. I mean, she wasn’t laughing her ass off or anything. But she didn’t look freaked.”

  “Do you think you’d recognize the guy if I showed you a photo?” Bailey asked.

  Legs shrugged. “Couldn’t hurt to try.”

  Bailey pulled up Brian’s photo on her cell and held it in front of Legs.

  He gave the photo a hard look, then nodded. “Yeah, that’s the dude. No question.”

  “Thank you, Legs,” I said. Bailey took his contact information and we stood to leave.

  “So I assume the girl’s been kidnapped,” he said.

  “Not necessarily,” I semi-lied.

  “But you’d appreciate it if I didn’t say anything about this conversation, wouldn’t you?”

  The abrupt shift caught me off guard. I looked at him for a long moment. This was pretty savvy for any civilian, let alone the pierced counterculture specimen in front of me. “I can’t stop you from talking, but yeah, it wouldn’t hurt if you’d keep it to yourself.”

  “Got it.”

  We started to leave, but I turned back, too curious to let it go. “You said you had a class on Monday that got out at four o’clock. What class was that?”

  “Not a class exactly. More like a weekly consultation. I’m finishing my Ph.D. in neuroscience.”

  “So it’ll be Dr. Legs Roscoe soon.”

  “Actually, Dr. Lawrence Roscoe. But yeah. Hopefully.”

  At times like this I love my job.

  9