City of Echoes (23 page)

He’d been shot . . .

Hard. Deep. Blood all over his shirt and shimmering in the moonlight on the lawn. A 9 mm round that felt like it was still buried in his shoulder.

If it had been a .45, the roll down the hill would have been endless.

He tried to pull himself together. He’d fucked up. He should have done something to help Taladyne, no matter who he was. You’re either true or you’re false. You’re either real or you’re not. Taladyne was going to die no matter what—

Matt winced at the back and forth playing in his head. He’d witnessed a murder. He should have done something.

The gun was still in his hand. Orlando had just taken another shot, which hit the tree. As if on automatic pilot, Matt scrambled to his knees, gritted his teeth, and started shooting. The .45 sounded like a cannon. He pulled the trigger five times in four seconds, watching all three men lunge out of the way as the rounds ripped through the walls and into what was left of the bedroom window.

Orlando peeked over the sill and took another shot. Matt put two more rounds in the wall just below the window frame.

And then it became quiet. No one returned fire. No one peeked over the sill.

Matt glanced back at his wound and spun toward the gate. Ejecting the mag with one round chambered, he slammed his last eight into the gun handle. He knew that he didn’t have the means or the time to get locked into a firefight. He knew that the odds of three against one didn’t work out in the real world. Even worse, he could feel the blood oozing out of the hole in his shoulder, the pain beginning to burn through the shock like a white-hot branding iron.

He covered the wound with his hand and stumbled through the gate onto the sidewalk. As he tried to canter up the hill, he could feel the weakness in his legs but thought that it might be more about fear than his loss of blood.

He wasn’t dizzy. His mind remained clear.

But then he reached the corner and heard Grace’s voice. Darting into the shadows behind the row of bushes, he parted the branches ever so slightly. They were running across the street. They’d found his car, his ride, his way out.

All three of them. Orlando hadn’t been wounded.

He tried not to panic. Tried to keep cool. He could hear Grace saying something about the new deal and that everything was still good—maybe even better. He could see Orlando handing Plank a couple of spent cigarette butts from the ashtray and that cup of coffee Matt had bought at the 7-Eleven, then pulling the floor mat out of his car and rushing back into the house. He could see Orlando shaking out the mat in the living room while Plank dropped a cigarette butt on the sidewalk and another by the front door. Even better, he placed Matt’s coffee cup on a table beside Taladyne’s corpse. It didn’t take much for Matt to realize what they were up to. It was all about putting Matt at the crime scene. It was all about letting SID discover the evidence on their own—hair and fiber and a DNA trail so focused that it would stop on the head of a dime.

When Grace started talking to someone on his cell phone, Matt didn’t need to hang around to know that the picture had just been repainted and that once it dried, nothing about Taladyne’s death would look like a suicide.

Shots fired in Echo Park. One man dead and believed to be Jamie Taladyne, the primary suspect in the murders of Faith Novakoff, Brooke Anderson, and LAPD detectives Kevin Hughes and Frankie Lane, from the North Hollywood Division. Homicide detective Matt Jones exchanged gunfire with his supervising officer and two detectives from the Hollywood Division as he fled the house. Jones is known to have been friends with both Hughes and Lane and may have carried out the execution-style murder of Taladyne as an act of revenge. Jones should be considered armed and extremely dangerous.

Matt bolted to the end of Macbeth Street and made a left. The exertion caught up to him, his loss of blood quickening. His eyes flicked from house to house in the neighborhood. When he spotted an old Toyota pickup parked in the driveway before a house with its first-floor lights out, he pushed his hand against the wound and sprinted across the lawn.

The windows were up, the doors locked.

He turned and looked at the freestanding garage. The door on the side was cracked open and he could hear the sound of a clothes dryer tumbling in the background. Eyeing the house for a moment, he turned back and stepped into the garage, searching for a rag or cloth or anything he could use to slow down the bleeding. He spotted a sink in the gloom and saw the washer and dryer against the far wall. Inside the dryer he found a load of wet bras and panties.

He let out a groan, then caught himself as he noticed the laundry basket on the washer filled with clean white towels. Tossing the underwear back into the dryer, he carried the basket over to the sink. The tap water was ice cold, and he wiped the sweat from his face before ripping away his shirt and dabbing the wound. The pain came from a place he’d never been before or ever even imagined could exist. Sharp, biting, two miles past the last exit on the way to doom. He clamped his jaws down and muscled through it, grateful that he didn’t pass out or vomit.

As he took a moment to pull himself together, he glanced about the garage, looking for anything that might help him short-circuit the ignition and hot-wire the Toyota pickup outside. He saw a small toolbox on the shelf and grabbed a hammer, a couple of screwdrivers, and a pair of pliers. When his eyes landed on the toilet bowl plunger by the sink, under any other circumstances he would have laughed out loud at the memory of what life had been like as a sixteen-year-old growing up in Jersey. He would have thought about his aunt and how hard she’d worked to take care of him and keep him on the right path.

Still, Matt didn’t need a key or a coat hanger or even a set of auto jigglers to break into a car.

He grabbed the plunger, holding the bulb under the tap water. Then he hurried out to the pickup, sealed the plunger over the door lock, and gave it a hard push.

The locks blew open, and he was in.

But the house lights had popped on as well, and an old man was opening the front door.

“Who’s out here?” he was shouting. “What are you doing to my truck?”

Matt watched the old man start down the walkway. He looked ornery and maybe even a little crazy. Despite his age, it didn’t seem like he was going to back off.

Matt reached for his badge and pulled out his .45. “Get back in your house,” he said. “I’m a police officer. Now go inside and get me the keys.”

The old man appeared stunned that Matt had asked him for his keys. He looked unsure, his eyes moving from the .45 to the hole in Matt’s shoulder, then over to the badge. When the old man didn’t move, Matt grabbed him by the shirt and pushed him toward the house.

The old man grunted and groaned. “I’ve seen badges like that on the Internet. Stop pushing me. You’re getting blood all over me.”

Matt shut it all out, unable to worry about what he was doing. He shoved the old man into the house with as much force as he could muster and spotted several sets of keys on a rack by the door. On the second-floor landing he could see a young woman shielding a boy and girl, who Matt guessed were seventeen or eighteen.

“I’m a police officer,” he repeated. “No one’s in danger here. I need your pickup, simple as that.”

The boy let out a muffled “Yeah, right,” while the old man grabbed the phone and dialed 911. Matt ignored it and rushed outside. Gathering up the towels, he climbed into the Toyota and turned the key. He wished that the pickup hadn’t been red and so easy to spot but shrugged it off as he backed into the street. The old man had pressed his face against the living room window, his eyes crazed, screaming into the phone. Matt looked away, shifting into drive and speeding off.

He could hear the sirens already approaching the neighborhood and thought about Grace’s phone call. The Hollywood Freeway was no more than a mile off. When he reached Sunset Boulevard, he felt a sense of relief in spite of the blood seeping through the towel and dripping onto the seat, in spite of the flashing lights in his rearview mirror and the sound of sirens in the night. They were heading for Taladyne’s house. It would probably take them another five minutes before they made the connection between Grace’s call and the old man’s.

His cell phone started ringing. As he dug it out of his pocket, it crossed his mind that Grace was sick enough to call and wish him luck. But when he slid the lock open and glanced at the caller ID, it was better than that.

It was his partner who had become lost. It was Cabrera.

CHAPTER 44

“I’m hit,” Matt said.

“How bad?”

“I don’t know. Upper left shoulder. They killed Taladyne, Denny. They planted the murder weapon on Ron Harris so Taladyne goes down for everything else, like he’s a copycat. I heard it. I saw it. Now everything we talked about is real.”

“Taladyne gets a pass for killing Millie Brown but goes down for Novakoff, Anderson, and maybe even this fourth girl, who’s still missing, Anna Marie Genet. Grace sets him up for killing Hughes and Lane, but it sounds like you’re taking the fall for Taladyne. It’s on the radio, Matt. Not a police radio. KNX picked it up off a scanner. Grace wants the world to know. They’re saying you executed the man. There’s no way they can let you tell your side of the story. No way Grace is gonna let you talk.”

Matt spotted the entrance to the Hollywood Freeway just ahead. He tried to get a grip on himself as he made the turn and vanished into the sea of traffic heading north. The sirens were beginning to fade into the distance now. His mind still seemed clear, just that swirling feeling in his stomach; just the blood dripping onto the seat like sand through an hourglass.

“Where have you been?” Matt said.

“I turned off my phone. I’m sorry. I’m just leaving Leah Reynolds’s place. Grace kept calling and leaving messages about the press conference. I didn’t want to fuck things up, so I turned it off.”

“Fuck what up?”

“Are you ready?”

“Ready for what?”

“Taladyne,” Cabrera said. “He didn’t rape her.”

A long, dark moment passed. Just the sound of the freeway in the background. Some kid in a Subaru with straight pipes whizzing by in the night. It felt like the pickup was floating a foot or two above the road. The lights through the windshield were beginning to glow like neon. He thought about Taladyne’s alibi. He hoped that he’d been lying and that it didn’t exist. He hoped that Taladyne’s story about a job in Mint Canyon wasn’t true. That at the very least Taladyne died for the murders he committed.

“He didn’t rape her, Matt. He didn’t do it. The whole thing was bullshit. The whole thing was about money. Reynolds made it all up.”

The house on a beach called paradise, he thought. The home of a young woman who didn’t live with anyone and didn’t have a job. He’d had a feeling that something was wrong as he looked at her sitting on the couch with her legs folded beneath her body. He’d had a feeling but couldn’t see it for what it was. He misread the signs. He’d been confused by her apparent gentleness and the shadow cast by what he thought had been done to her. He’d seen Reynolds as a victim.

“She admitted it?” he said.

“I sort of think she’s wanted to talk about it for a long time. It took a while to draw it out of her. It took all day.”

“What did she say?”

“That she and Taladyne had a thing going, just friends until one night it turned into more than that. She dug the guy. Taladyne saw it as a one-night stand. You can guess what happened after that. She got pissed off and made it look the way it looked. At first it was a joke. She just wanted to scare him and get back at him. But when Taladyne was arrested, things got out of control. It happened in her dormitory, so her lawyer sued the university, and now all of a sudden there was a lot of cash on the table. A college kid from nowhere staring at a five-million-dollar settlement. She licked her lips and said
show me the money
.”

It settled in like a cloud of poison gas. Everything snowballing into chaos. Matt checked the rearview mirror. He could feel his body slowing down. Darkness edging in—along with the idea that Grace had made yet another catastrophic mistake.

Matt pulled out of it. “Frankie found Taladyne,” he said. “That’s why he was in Mint Canyon. Taladyne claimed that he had an alibi for the night Novakoff was murdered. A job interview the next morning at a Ford dealership. He checked into a Motel 6 on the night of the murder. He used an alias and paid the bill in cash.”

“You sure about that?”

Matt nodded, then remembered that he was on the phone. “McKensie knows that Frankie made an appointment with the manager, but neither one of them knows why, because he didn’t show up.”

“You want me to call McKensie?”

“He’s got the guy’s number. They’ve talked. I’m sure he’d remember if he’d met Taladyne.”

“What about your status, man? And what about McKensie? After tonight everything’s upside down. We’re in the wind. We’re roadkill. Both of us.”

Matt paused a moment. He needed to get to Laura’s but just remembered that the protection detail from Metro Division was still at the house and probably waiting for him. He pulled the towel away from his chest and glanced at the wound as he chewed it over. A memory surfaced from earlier in the day. The things McKensie had said to him outside Frankie’s apartment.

“Call him, Denny. Tell him everything. If he wants to meet, don’t do it. If he checks out Taladyne’s alibi and calls you back, then we know we can trust him.”

“Where are you gonna be?”

“Hughes’s house,” he said. “And one more thing. Tell him Jenna Marconi is a dead end. Frankie was seeing someone else. Marconi turned out to be Taladyne’s sister.”

“Frankie’s girlfriend already came forward, Matt. It was on the radio. They released Frankie’s name after they talked to her.”

“Who is she?”

“A neighbor,” he said. “She lives in the building next door. They hooked up a couple of months ago.”

CHAPTER 45

They were standing beneath a lamppost in the yard beside the garage, drinking coffee. Just the two of them. The same two cops who had been duped by Orlando and left Laura alone while they went on break.