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much help all along from the little things most detectives, private or otherwise, called facts.
Tremaine pulled out of the little parking lot, seeing the signs for 20/20 Video and Rubio’s Fish Tacos and the nail salon getting smaller and smaller in his rearview as he headed back to his trailer park, back home.
That night, as Tremaine drove to Crystal Point to meet Evan, he smoked a cig and tried to shut out the thoughts in his head. He knew now was the time to trust himself.
As he’d done so many times on the big waves back in the day. Trust yourself, Tremaine. It might seem crazy, what you’re about to do, but trust yourself, your mind is made up. Trust yourself.
Yeah, just enjoy the night air and drive, he told himself.
He looked out at the PCH, caught glimpses of familiar settings, noticed a Ford Mustang in his rearview. But the encroaching thoughts, the what-ifs, he tried to keep out of his mind. The work it took to shut it all out miraculously allowed him to relax a little.
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Tremaine pulled the Cutlass into Crystal Point, into the Malibu beach park. The lights the city had set up shone but didn’t cast much light. A park really wasn’t an accurate description. More of an area. An area with some grass and trees, benches, and a public bathroom. And if you headed due west, a boardwalk down to the beach.
Tremaine’s was the only car in the lot. There were probably thirty other spaces, all empty. He had the love letters from Dean/Roger in an envelope in his pocket.
He sat down on one of the park benches and stared in the direction of the ocean, which he could hear clearly but couldn’t see because his view was obstructed by the bushes and trees bordering the park.
Some time passed and the noise of the ocean drowned B O D Y C O P Y
out the sound of Evan’s Jeep, but the headlights alerted him that the man he wanted to talk to was present and accounted for.
Evan got out of his Jeep. Tremaine looked at the circle of yellow on the parking lot cement that emanated from the parking lot’s lights. As Evan passed through the semi-spotlight, Tremaine recognized him the way you recognize someone you’ve seen only once or twice before. Evan looked bigger than Tremaine remembered, his figure enhanced by a coat he wore to combat the chill of a Malibu night.
Tremaine stood as Evan neared and said, “Good evening, Evan.”
“Tremaine, how are you?”
The two men stood face to face for a moment and then Donald Tremaine said, “I want to show you some things.”
“All right,” Evan said.
Tremaine and Evan sat down on one of the benches and Tremaine opened up the envelope that held the love letters to Kelly from a man who disguised himself to be a guy named Dean Latham. He kept them in his hand. He didn’t show them to Evan. Not yet.
“Before Kelly was killed, she was having an affair with the man we talked about, Dean Latham.”
“You told me that,” Evan said with some of that same irritated edge from the phone call. “What are you trying to do, rub it in that my girlfriend found someone after me?”
Tremaine showed Evan the letters.
Evan looked at them. Didn’t really read them, just processed what they were.
Evan said, “Look, I told you she was with other guys. I 275
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don’t know what this is. I don’t know who this guy Dean Latham is. And I don’t care. Don’t tell me you had me come all the way out here to prove to me my dead ex-girlfriend was involved with some random guy?”
“No, I didn’t have you come out here just to tell you that. Actually, I want to tell you my theory on the situation.”
“Tremaine, I’m not necessarily interested in your ideas about the behavior of Kelly.”
“Hear me out,” Tremaine said. “It involves you.”
Evan fidgeted on the bench.
Then Tremaine said, “Let’s take a walk.”
Tremaine and Evan headed out the boardwalk to the beach. It was dark and deserted, now the only light was provided by the moon and the stars. Tremaine guided them north toward a cluster of rocks he used as a marker when he surfed this part of the ocean.
“The man who wrote the letters to Kelly went by the name Dean Latham, but in reality, that wasn’t his name,”
Tremaine said. “That was a fake name. In fact, it was a fake name created very carefully by the man himself. This man is dead now. His name was Roger Gale.”
“What the hell are you talking about, Tremaine?”
The two continued walking on the beach. The waves pounded the shore, creating a wall of white noise that Tremaine had to talk over. They reached the cluster of rocks.
Evan leaned against one of the rocks and Tremaine faced him and continued. “Roger Gale, the ad man you said you’d heard of, was living a double life. Most of the time he was a successful ad man. But some of the time, dressed in a disguise, he was a guy named Dean Latham.
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A man who was in love with your ex-girlfriend. Who, if you read those letters, was desperately in love with your ex-girlfriend. As in love with her as you were. As you
still
were up until the day she died.”
Evan said, “What’s your point, Tremaine?”
“There are several kinds of murders in the world, Evan.
Sometimes people kill because they’ve just lost their cook-ies. Serial killers are an example of this. Guy who suddenly thinks it’s his right to kill people and store their body parts in the fridge. That’s called being crazy. Another reason people kill is out of desperation and fear. Gang murders are an example of this. Kids grow up so poor and hungry and angry and desperate that they begin to rationalize killing another man because they think it’s the only way out.
They cloak this kind of murder in a haze of bravado, but this kind of crime really comes from a place of fear—the fear that they’re either going to die or get killed or never amount to anything worth a shit.”
The look in Evan’s eyes began to change. He had a glazed-over, almost hypnotized look as he listened to Tremaine’s diatribe.
“Another kind of murder,” Tremaine said, “is a crime of passion. This is the most interesting of all murders, if you ask me. You know why? Because so often it’s the work of someone who’s not a killer. This kind of murder comes from a place of love. Not necessarily healthy love, but love nonetheless. The love one person has for another. But when they see the person they love with someone else, it triggers something in their hearts that they simply can’t control.
And they’ll do anything to satiate that feeling.”
The waves pounded in the distance, and the moon’s 277
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reflection off the big mass of water provided enough light for Tremaine to see that the look in Evan’s eyes had shifted yet again. From a state of hypnosis to one of anger.
Evan said, “Are you through?”
“No,” Tremaine said. “But the next thing I’m going to tell you, you already know.”
Tremaine stepped forward, moving toward Evan, who was now standing up, no longer touching the rock. This was the moment Tremaine had to trust himself, trust his instincts, trust his mind to have pieced together things properly, trust the fact that he was hired to connect dots, make educated assumptions, work on instinct and intuition.
Tremaine said, “You killed Kelly Burch, Evan, and you also killed a man you thought was named Dean Latham.”
“It’s true what they say, Tremaine—you are insane.”
Tremaine was not deterred.
“You were still in love with Kelly, Evan, she did that to people. You tried to hold on to her, but you couldn’t.
But you never let go of your love. You couldn’t do that either. And one day, you caught Kelly and Dean together and the sight of it made you sick, seeing her with another man. Seeing her want someone else, someone who wasn’t you. So you shot Kelly and you hit Dean over the head, then you suffocated him. It was actually quite clever. You were smart, Evan. Because you didn’t want two people both to have bullets in their bodies from the same gun, you suffocated the stranger. Then you found out it was Roger Gale, looked at his wallet, I don’t know. And once you found out who he was, you knew exactly where to take him. Chainsaw, your company, has done work with Gale/
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Parker. You knew exactly where the agency was. So you took his disguise off and took him there. And you know how you got past the security guards? You got lucky. They were screwing off, who knows? You probably found the code to the building’s alarm on Roger Gale, then walked right in and out. The fact that Roger was found dead at his own agency was sure to confuse the hell out of people.
And as far as Kelly’s murder was concerned? She was a druggie—no money, no job, no family. Just another street murder. And nobody would ever connect the two. How could they? For all intents and purposes, the man Kelly was having an affair with didn’t even exist.”
Evan looked calm. He said, “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“You killed two people, Evan,” Tremaine said. “And you did it with the gun you’ve got in your coat right now.”
Tremaine moved closer to Evan. “And I’m going to take that gun away from you, and then we’ll match the bullet from Kelly’s body with your gun, and you’ll go to jail.”
Tremaine kept walking toward Evan, and as he got closer, a combination of fear and anger and sorrow registered in Evan Mulligan’s eyes.
Evan pulled a gun out of his coat pocket and pointed it at Tremaine’s head. It was a silver and black Walther, now about five feet away from Tremaine’s face. Evan looked at Tremaine as Tremaine looked at the barrel of a gun.
“Congratulations, Tremaine. You figured it out. Only problem is, what makes you think I won’t kill you, like I did them? No one would ever know. No one’s even going to hear the gun go off.”
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John Lopez moved from behind one of the rocks he was hiding behind to another, closer rock. He’d been there, waiting, the entire time. Listening as Tremaine pulled a confession out of the man now pointing a gun at him.
Tremaine heard Lopez, Evan didn’t, not listening for him.
Tremaine made a slight movement with his right hand, un-noticed by Evan, telling Lopez, hang on one more second.
Tremaine knew Lopez was itching to pop out and hold his gun on Evan. But Lopez listened to Tremaine’s sign and stayed still behind the rock, no doubt with his gun cocked, his body clenched and ready for action.
Tremaine said, “Put down the gun, Evan.”
He stepped toward him, closer.
“Take one more step and I’ll blow your head off, Tremaine.”
Tremaine continued toward Evan.
“You’re not going to shoot me, Evan. The only reason you killed those other two people was because your heart told you to. Your heart isn’t telling you to kill me. You can’t do it.”
Sweat began to drip from Evan’s face and his finger clenched the trigger of the gun, tighter, tighter. “You’re a dead man, Tremaine. No one will know. No one’s going to hear anything.”
Tremaine, slowly, carefully, moved closer.
Evan said, “I walked into Kelly’s apartment and a man I’d never seen before was on top of her and they looked at me and laughed. I’ve never felt anything like I felt at that moment. I drove home, so mad I couldn’t see, and I got 280
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my gun. And I drove back to Kelly’s getting angrier and angrier and angrier. And, almost without thinking, I was someone else, I shot Kelly in the face. And then I took the butt of the gun and I hit that fucker in the head. Hard, with everything I had. But I didn’t even feel it.” Evan paused and said, “I couldn’t help it, Tremaine, I couldn’t help it.”
Tremaine was no more than an inch away from the barrel of Evan’s gun.
Evan, sweating, shaking, said, “I’m going to shoot you, Tremaine. I have to. I’m going to shoot you.”
“No, you’re not,” Tremaine said.
In one motion, Tremaine took the gun away from Evan and twisted him around, then shoved him forward, sending him down to the ground, his face now entrenched in the cold sand.
Lopez sprang from behind the rocks and threw some cuffs on the man Tremaine had pinned to the ground.
Before he read the man his rights for killing two people, he turned to Tremaine and said, “You’re not insane, Tremaine. You’re fucking crazy.”
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C H A P T E R 4 0
Sitting at Nina’s house two nights later, Tremaine could feel the fatigue from the stress of the case still flow-ing out of his body. He had wine in his hand, Nina sitting across from him, and Lyle right there on the floor because Nina had suggested bringing him. It was nice, relaxing, and, as he talked to Nina about the final details of the case, he felt good. Good and tired and relaxed.
“Well, Donald, here we are,” Nina said.
“Here we are.”
“It seems like a long time ago that I was introducing myself to you.”
“Indeed. The ups and downs of a case always seem to make the days a little longer.”
Tremaine and Nina sipped their wine, the alcohol hit-B O D Y C O P Y
ting them both in just the right spot. Lyle was on his best behavior as a guest in another person’s house. Dead asleep.
“I had fun surfing the other day,” she said.
“I did, too. You were good. Room for improvement, but you were good.”
Nina smiled. That same smile that actually hurt Donald Tremaine.
They ate some dinner—Nina roasted a bird—and then she suggested doing something that Donald didn’t see coming. She said, “Let’s watch a movie.”
“Good idea,” Tremaine said.
“How ’bout
Insane Tremaine
?”
Tremaine laughed and said, “I’m afraid I don’t have a copy of that one.”
“That’s okay,” she said. “I do.”
They sat in front of the TV, fresh bottle of white, both of them on a small sofa.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve seen this,” he said.
“Well, it’ll be my first time, so I expect some quality commentary.”
“I’ll do my best.”
What transpired over the next thirty minutes was nothing short of hilarious. For Nina, anyway. She kept replaying the section of the video that focused on his falls, and she seemed to laugh harder and harder at each near-death spill Tremaine took.