City of Fire (44 page)

Fellows looked at Finn sitting in the passenger seat. “I don’t give a shit who he is. Shut up. I’m in a hurry.”

“They’ve found you. They know who you are.”

“I thought I told you to stop.”

Finn quieted down and shrugged. Then Fellows tore into the plastic bag, selected a brown vial, and opened a clean syringe. He had been using anabolic steroids for more than five years. Ganabol, a form of boldenone, stacked with a dose of Sustanon 250, was his clear favorite. While Ganabol couldn’t be counterfeited, Sustanon 250 came in redijects, so he didn’t have to buy so many needles.

He drew two milliliters of Ganabol into the syringe, the equivalent of a hundred-milligram dose. Then he pulled his trousers down, searching for an injection site in his upper thigh.

“You spend so much time talking about purity,” Finn said. “You won’t even eat the things you cook up in the lab. Clean food makes a clean body. So why do you do this to yourself?”

“You wouldn’t be here if I didn’t,” he said through clenched teeth.

“How can you be so sure?”

Fellows jabbed the needle through his skin and hit the plunger, watching the synthetic form of testosterone enter his body. When the syringe was empty, he yanked it out and reached for the Sustanon 250 package.

“You’re getting an abscess,” Finn said. “Better shoot this one in your other leg.”

“I see it. Why are you acting like such a loser?”

“I don’t know, Martin. Maybe you should take a look in your rearview mirror.”

Fellows checked the mirror as he ripped the packet open with this teeth. Lena and her bullshit partner were sitting in a Crown Vic two cars back. He shrugged, snapping the needle onto the rediject and stabbing himself in the thigh. A moment later, he felt the anger drift away, his body flooding with a tranquillity that only the stack could provide. It wasn’t as if he were high. He was just good. Good and stacked and ready to roll.

He zipped up his pants, started the car, and pulled away from the curb. Slowly. Easily. The office was just down the road.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Finn asked.

“Back to work.”

“Are you insane?”

Fellows didn’t say anything.

Finn shook his head. “They’re following us, Martin. They’ve got your license plate and the make and model of your car. They know your name, and one of them is on the phone. Once they get a blood sample, they’ll match the DNA and you’re dead. If you’re dead, then I’m dead, too. Why don’t you get it? What’s wrong with you?”

Fellows’s eyes rocked back to the mirror and he saw Lena’s partner barking into a cell. He could feel the anger coming back, the rage that shouldn’t be here for another half hour but was. For a moment he thought about jamming on the brakes, dragging them onto the street, and squeezing the life out of them with his bare hands.

“But they’re armed,” Finn said. “They’ve got guns.”

Fellows curled his lip and looked at his friend and spotter in the passenger seat. A regular mind reader.

“Then tell me what to do,” he screamed.

“Let me take the wheel, Martin. I can fix this.”

He checked the mirror, thinking it over. Oddly enough, the Crown Vic was slowing down. As the car reached the corner, it made a U-turn and headed back, vanishing in the distance.

“They’re not interested in you right now,” Finn said. “Only your DNA and finding Harriet. They’re on their way to your house.”

Fellows shuddered, his world evaporating before his eyes. They’d found him. They knew. He checked the mirror again. Two men he didn’t recognize were following him in another Crown Vic.

“You can’t handle what’s ahead on your own,” Finn said.

“You want to drive the car?”

Finn nodded. “There’s no real need to pull over. Just let go of the wheel, Martin. I’ll take care of the rest.”

LENA spotted the van in the driveway and pulled before the house. The front door was open and she could see painters working inside.

“You sure about the address?” Novak asked.

“This is it.”

“Then if he’s keeping Harriet Wilson here, she’s dead.”

Lena tried not to think about it and got out of the car. The house wasn’t what she expected. It sat too close to the neighbors and had too much glass. She turned and gazed at the ocean half a mile off, then looked back at the deck on the second floor. If Fellows’s life required privacy, and she was certain that it did, he probably didn’t spend too much time here.

They hustled up the steps. As they reached the door, a Japanese man in white overalls climbed off a ladder in the foyer and shouted, “He no here.”

His voice bordered on shrill. Lena didn’t like the man’s face and flashed her badge as he approached them. He looked about fifty, his arms and hair dusted with flecks of paint, his eyes and mouth devoid of any laugh lines.

“He no here,” he repeated. “He pack bag and stay with friend.”

“Who’s the friend?” she asked.

The man shrugged. “We start yesterday. He stay with friend. He no like fumes.”

“We don’t either,” Novak said. “You’re gonna have to split.”

The man looked at them as if he didn’t understand or didn’t want to.

Novak took a step forward. “Pack up and go. Police business.”

Lena pulled a generic business card out of her pocket. After writing her name and number down, she handed the card to the painter. Once his crew started packing, she and Novak entered the house. Because they were still waiting on the warrant, their initial search would be limited to Harriet Wilson, dead or alive.

She glanced at the first floor. The painters were pulling their tarps away, revealing a living room and dining room that were starkly furnished. Except for a blender, the kitchen counters were bare. They checked the closets and found a door leading downstairs to a basement. The windows had been covered with black paint. A poster of Arnold Schwarzenegger training at Gold’s Gym in the 1970s hung on the wall beside the furnace and a full-length mirror. In the middle of the floor was a rack of hand weights, a bench, and a barbell. Lena examined the barbell, calculating the weight.

“How much?” Novak asked.

“Three hundred pounds.”

“What about the hand weights?”

“Another hundred each.”

She saw the glint in Novak’s eye as they hurried upstairs. The worry. At some point they would have to confront the madman. At no point would they be able to overpower him.

The thought lingered, following her into the foyer. The front door remained open, the painters driving off. Lena honed in on the stillness but couldn’t stop moving. They climbed the steps to the second floor, drawn by the light to the master bedroom at the front of the house. She gazed at the twin beds and spotted a Bible on the table, but didn’t stop to think about it. Instead, she ripped open the closet door. When Novak switched on the bathroom light, she eyed the sink and counter.

“Guess he doesn’t have much use for a brush or comb,” Novak said. “But there’s enough here for the lab.”

More than enough, she thought. There were two razors. Two tubes of toothpaste. Two toothbrushes and two empty vials of something called Ganabol set beside two spent needles. There was two of everything for a man without a friend a waitress had called Two Lunch.

They doubled back, passing the stairway and turning the corner. The door at the end of the hall was sealed with a hasp and padlock. Lena searched the wall for a light switch and flipped it on. As she moved closer, she could hear Novak’s rapid breathing and was aware of her own. They were in Martin Fellows’s house, Romeo’s house—juiced up and staring at a locked door.

And then someone called out their names. Loud. Nervous. Lieutenant Barrera. It had taken a moment to cut through.

“You got the warrant?” Novak shouted.

“I’ve got it,” Barrera said. “Where are you?”

“Up here.”

Novak gritted his teeth, breaking the door down with a hard kick. They took a step forward and stopped. As Lena’s eyes adjusted to the dim light, it occurred to her that Fellows hadn’t locked the door to keep people out. Instead, he’d sealed the room to keep something inside.

Barrera gasped from behind them. “Jesus Christ.”

A half inch of dust blanketed everything in the room. The grime on the windows was so dense that it mimicked a coat of paint, blocking the sunlight and casting the room into a permanent state of gloom. Lena noted the furniture. It didn’t match the rest of the house and appeared dated. And it didn’t go with the wallpaper, which was obviously a child’s. As she thought it over, she guessed that Fellows had probably grown up in this room but switched the furniture out.

“What are those two boxes?” Barrera said.

Lena turned back to the bed. Two packages about the size of shoe boxes were resting on the pillows. They were wrapped in brown paper and she could tell that they had come through the mail but never been opened.

She slipped on a pair of gloves and moved toward the bed, the dust on the floor so thick she left tracks as if
walking on the moon. As she picked up the first package and wiped it off, the air about her face seemed to vanish. She read the postmark, then the label and return address. She felt her pulse rising and grabbed the second box. Both packages were addressed to Martin Fellows and had been sent from the Hollywood Crematorium.

“What is it?” Barrera said. “What are they?”

Lena read the names on the labels, noticed the dates, and did the math. “His grandparents.”

“His what?”

“His grandparents. Their ashes were sent to this address twenty-one years ago.”

She felt the chill. The flash. The monster taking on more definition now. She looked at Novak standing beside Barrera by the door. She heard the footsteps on the stairs. SID was here.

“He was raised by his grandparents,” Novak said. “This is his childhood home.”

“What are you saying?” Barrera asked.

She met her partner’s eyes. They were bright and alive and everything was in perfect sync.

“Two of everything,” Novak said. “He’s got a second house.”

WITHIN an hour the contents of the bathroom had been logged into evidence and were speeding down the 10 Freeway in a black-and-white cruiser to the lab.

Barrera stayed behind but was spending most of his time on the phone. Lena could hear him as she combed through Fellows’s desk in the living room. Barrera was standing outside the front door talking to his new best friend, Stan Rhodes. And it sounded as if Rhodes was doing the background work on Fellows but hadn’t come up with anything. Tito Sanchez, his trusted partner, was coordinating surveillance with the Special Investigation Section. Fellows would be monitored for the twenty-four to forty-eight hours the lab needed to deliver a preliminary result. SIS had been on the job since Novak had made the initial call. After leaving the Pink Canary, Fellows drove to the mall in West Hollywood. From what Lena could tell, both Barrera and Rhodes took this as a sign that Fellows didn’t know he was being followed. But as she mulled it over, she felt uneasy about it. If she wanted to shake a tail, the first thing she would have done was find a parking garage with multiple exits in a congested neighborhood. The mall at Beverly and La Cienega fit the bill.

Lena stopped listening, yanked the last drawer open, and spotted Fellows’s checkbook and bills. She started with the bills, but couldn’t find a single statement that wasn’t related to the house in Venice. As she opened the check register and skimmed through the entries, every check Fellows wrote
matched the utility companies that serviced this address. There was no evidence of a second residence.

Her eyes drifted across the room. A painting was over the mantel. Something familiar that she couldn’t place.

She got up from the desk. The painting wasn’t an original, but a print matted behind glass. A young woman with blond hair stood on a corner at night waiting on a red light as men in suits openly stared at her naked body. The buildings in the background were littered with graffiti. Moving closer, she realized that the graffiti hadn’t been painted with a brush. Instead, it was inked in by hand and the buildings had the look and feel of a tattoo artist working on skin.