City of Echoes (12 page)

The wind picked up, jogging Matt’s mind to the surface. He looked back at the mountain just as Orlando and Plank followed Grace over the rim. Once they disappeared, he let his eyes drift down the slope until they came to rest on the SID techs examining the trail. He remembered that feeling he’d had last night, the sense that someone had been hiding out here and watching them. It was the reason he’d parked at the top of Beachwood Drive and hiked in from the east. Eyeing the trail, he had a better than decent view but knew that he was still too far off. He needed to close the distance by at least half.

Matt zipped up his sweatshirt and started walking. He glanced at the SID techs, then let his eyes wander through the harsh landscape as he hiked around another sharp bend. He was looking for a place where he might feel safe. A hiding place with an up-close-and-personal view. A place that a sniper might call
home
.

The face of the mountain steepened to his right, and as the fire road straightened out, he was struck by an explosion of color on the eastern side of the slope. Moving off the path and up the mountain, he realized that they were poppies the size of his palm. Vibrant yellows and reds, brilliant oranges and blues, the flowers carpeted the entire ridge as they swayed back and forth in the wind. It seemed so strange, so peculiar. This was late October, not April, and the poppies were in full bloom. It seemed like nature had lost its way and no longer knew what day it was.

He scanned the mountains, searching for another patch of color, another aberration, another sign of spring in the hostile landscape. When all he saw was gray, he climbed further up the ridge until he reached the top. And that’s when he found it. A boulder that had rolled down from the mountain peak until it reached the ridge and what was a bird’s-eye view of the crime scene.

He was less than a hundred yards away, and two or three stories above the spot where the girl’s body had been found. A grove of bushes on the other side of the boulder provided a perfect blind. When Matt noticed that several branches had been bent back or broken and tossed to the side—branches that were high and would have obscured the view—he could feel it in his gut. The killer had been here last night. The madman had been watching.

Matt checked the ground, looking for further confirmation. The soil was loose and dusty, so finding a footprint seemed unlikely. But he noticed something shiny caught in the leaves of a bush with thorns. A small piece of paper—or was it foil? Digging into his pocket for a vinyl glove, he slipped it on and plucked the piece of trash out of the leaves.

It was a small wrapper from a Fifth Avenue candy bar.

The wrapper didn’t mean anything on its own. Hundreds of people hiked these trails every day. If he had headed east, he would have picked up the trail to Mount Hollywood and the two-acre garden overlooking Griffith Observatory and the entire LA basin known as Dante’s View. Still, he dropped the wrapper into his shirt pocket and made a mental note to collect samples of the branches that had been tossed to the ground. Living skin cells containing DNA could easily have been transferred to the twigs, particularly if it had taken any effort to break them off.

He turned back and gazed down at the crime scene. He thought about the way Jane Doe had been left to die alone in the darkness. The things the killer had done to her.

Why did everything seem so familiar? So close to home?

Matt didn’t think that it was something he’d seen in real life or even at a movie theater. It had to be déjà vu. The thoughts, the feelings, the pictures in his head had to be an illusion of some kind. Even so, it made him anxious. He wished that he’d had the chance to interview the man who heard Jane Doe scream and called it in, but Grace had spoken with him alone.

He thought it over one more time.

There was the very real possibility that the killer had been here last night, sitting on this boulder and watching them process the crime scene. The feeling might have been coming from his gut, but he thought that he could count on it. And the breadth of the view, the trimmed-out blind, seemed to back that up. The killer liked to watch his victims being discovered. He liked to see what happened after they were dead. It was part of the kick. Part of his sickness. Part of the ritual—

It suddenly dawned on Matt why all of this seemed so familiar. It wasn’t something he’d seen. It was something he’d read.

CHAPTER 23

The killer was making some sort of demented statement. The way each young woman had been bathed and then soiled and staked to the ground, the wounds to their faces, the spilling of blood onto sheets of mirrored glass. Matt had been thinking about it ever since he knelt down before Jane Doe. The idea that her murder resembled the ritual slaughter of an animal. That something about it originated in stories from the Old Testament, from Homer or even Hesiod. That the killings of all three students were part of a religious ritual performed by a modern-day freak.

But it had been the trail to Mount Hollywood that triggered the memory. The idea of a garden planted on top of the mountain by an actor, Dante Orgolini, in the 1960s. The majestic view the garden offered of Los Angeles, from downtown all the way west to the Santa Monica Bay and the Pacific Ocean.

Dante’s View.

Just the thought of it had given birth to a memory.

Matt had read
The Divine Comedy
in Mr. Peterson’s English class as a sophomore in high school. An illustrated hardcover edition was on one of his bookshelves beside his desk in the den. Although the drive home would cost him the rest of his morning, he had to return at some point to pack a bag for his stay at Laura’s. In terms of traffic, late morning was by far the best time of the day.

He found the book buried in a stack of oversized art books on the bottom shelf, then crossed the room to sit in his reading chair by the window. As if on automatic pilot, he checked the street for the silver Nissan. He’d checked once or twice this morning from his car but hadn’t seen the man and guessed that he was getting some rest after a long night.

He glanced back at the book, feeling the weight of the epic poem and its meaning in his hands.

It was all about greed. All about the predatory desire for wealth, status, and power. The seven Ps carved into Virgil’s forehead, each one removed by an angel as he passed through the seven terraces of the seven deadly sins. Matt turned to part two in the poem,
Purgatorio
, and began skimming through it as quickly as he could. He already knew what he was looking for. When he came to the passage, he read through it and stopped to think it over.

The penitents were bound and laid facedown on the ground for spending too much time pursuing material possessions. Too much time thinking earthly thoughts. Too much time chasing money and screwing everybody they could to get more. Too much time ignoring what little humanity they might possess in favor of the animal living beneath their soiled flesh . . .

A long moment passed. He noticed that his hands were trembling slightly. His fingers. The churning in his stomach was back. The dread.

He was staring at his first real piece of the puzzle, and everything about it felt dark and twisted and out of control. But even more, he knew in his gut that a critical error must have been made in the Millie Brown murder case. Grace wanted to believe that they were chasing a copycat. But Matt could see it now. Killers this vicious only come in ones.

CHAPTER 24

Matt saw them talking in the conference room. Cabrera was sitting in a chair at the table. Orlando and Plank stood over him with their hands on their hips. Everyone in the room looked agitated and pissed off.

When Matt opened the door, all three immediately stopped talking. In spite of the obvious bad vibes, he walked in and joined them at the table. The silence had a certain weight about it. After a while Orlando turned and gave him a hard look up and down.

“What are you holding in your hand?” he said.

Matt tossed two evidence bags onto the table. The first contained the wrapper from the Fifth Avenue candy bar. The second was filled with sections from the branches he suspected the killer might have touched. When he explained what they were, the anger and suspicion showing on Orlando’s face only seemed to intensify. Joey Orlando was a big man. A powerful man. And Edward Plank, no matter how much smaller in size, stood right beside him, scooping up the evidence bags and stuffing them into his pockets.

Orlando took a step forward and then another, until he was standing in Matt’s face. It looked like his goatee needed a trim. He was wearing a red tie, and Matt noticed a salsa stain on his shirt just above the pocket.

“You need to stand down, Jones. Way down. You need to work your own case.” He glanced over at Cabrera, then turned back. “And by the way,” he said, “the bullshit you’re trying to sell that says there’s something wrong with the case we made against Ron Harris—that’s not gonna go over very well around here. We don’t need dumb guys working at the homicide table, Jones. Mind your own fucking business and work your own shit and we’ll get along just fine. Keep sticking your nose in my shit, and nothing’s gonna work for anybody. Got it?”

Matt held the man’s gaze, which wasn’t easy. “Are you speaking for yourself, Orlando? Or is this coming from Grace?”

The big man seemed stunned that Matt had the audacity to say anything that wasn’t a direct reply.

“I just asked you a question, Jones. Do you understand what I’m saying or not?”

Matt paused to think it over, knowing that it would piss off Orlando. Pissing off Orlando seemed like the way of the future.

“I got it, Joey,” he said finally. “I got it good.”

“Then get the fuck out of my way.”

Orlando pushed him aside with a meaty hand and stomped out of the room. Plank followed him out, sporting a mean little sneer between those pockmarked cheeks. When Cabrera stood up and tried to make it to the door, Matt grabbed him and pushed him back into the chair.

“Who else have you told?” Matt said.

Cabrera shrugged. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He tried to get up, but Matt had him by the shoulders and pushed him down again. “You told those guys what we talked about last night, Cabrera. You broke a trust. As backstabbers go, you’re pretty fucking good at it, man. Now I want to know who else you’ve talked to. Did you tell Grace? Are you pimping for him? Tell me the truth, you shithead. I can tell when people lie. Who are you talking to?”

“You need to fuck off, Jones. And by the way, we’re partners. I don’t take orders from you.”

Matt gritted his teeth and pushed harder. “Who did you talk to?”

“No one, you jerk. Why would I? They might think I’m as crazy as you are. Now step back and get out of my face.”

“We need to find Jamie Taladyne.”

“Everybody around here’s looking for Jamie Taladyne.”

“Orlando said that?”

Cabrera nodded. “You need to listen to what he just told you, Jones. There was a message to it. Keep your ass out of his shit.”

Matt stepped back, leaning against the plate-glass window, his mind going at a hundred miles an hour. He had what felt like confirmation now. Something was wrong with the case against Ron Harris. Something big enough that Orlando felt the need to take him on even though two witnesses were in the room. It was the classic move of a bully, someone who expected his victim to stand down and stay down.

Cabrera leaned back in his chair, eyeing Matt for a few minutes with a counterfeit smile on his face.

“Like it or not, we’re partners, Jones. It’s like you said the other night in Grace’s office. It’s about trust and watching the other guy’s back. It’s about knowing when to take and when to give back. It’s about an understanding. How did you put it? I remember now. It’s about two becoming one.”

Cabrera’s insincerity—the words he used—settled into the room like nerve gas. Matt wanted to tell the prick to eat shit. Instead, he tried to reel in his emotions and asked about the license plate.

Cabrera laughed at him. “You said it was supposed to match up to a silver Nissan. According to the wife of the man who owns the car, that plate number goes with a Lincoln that’s parked in the long-term lot over at Burbank airport.”

Matt gave him a hard look. “Did you check to see if it’s still there?”

Cabrera shrugged without a reply.

“Thanks for doing me the favor, Denny. I appreciate the effort.”

“The way you say it, doesn’t sound like you mean it, Jones.”

Matt didn’t reply. Fearing that he might strike the man, that he might hurt him, he took a deep breath and walked out of the room. Their partnership still had some kinks to it. The dynamic duo still had a ways to go . . .

CHAPTER 25

Matt read the sign on the door. It turned out that Dr. George Baylor was a plastic surgeon with an office in a medical building a block away from the Los Angeles County + USC Medical Center and the coroner’s office. He wasn’t sure why Baylor being a plastic surgeon surprised him, but it did.

He tried to open the door but found it locked. When he noticed the buzzer, he pressed the button and reached for his ID. He guessed that the office was closed for lunch and just hoped that Baylor ate in.

After two or three minutes, the door popped open and a middle-aged woman with a young face and gray hair peeked out. Matt raised his ID and held it against his chest.

“I’m trying to reach Dr. Baylor,” he said. “It’s important.”

“Would he know what it’s about?”

“Yes.”

Her eyes went to his name on the ID, then flicked up to his face. “Let me see if he’s in.”

She pulled the door shut and turned the lock. She obviously knew whether Baylor was in or not, but Matt didn’t mind, because she seemed nice. After waiting another few minutes, the door opened to reveal Dr. Baylor himself.

“Come in,” he said with a broad smile. “Please, come in.”

Baylor shook his hand, then led him through the empty lobby and into his office. After offering him a chair, the doctor walked over to his desk and sat down.