Cole Perriman's Terminal Games (14 page)

MH: Get out of there! Get away from her! Right now!

NG:
Lieutenant
Grobowski.

MH: Let me talk to her. I demand to talk to her.

NG:
Will ya listen?
I’m with the police.

MH: The—?

NG: The Los Angeles Police Department.

MH: Oh my God.

NG: Please identify yourself, ma’am.

MH: Oh my God. Oh my God.

NG: Ma’am, please.

MH: How do I know who you really are?

NG: Will ya please—?

MH: What’s happened to her?

NG: I can’t tell you that over the phone.

MH: Why not?

NG: Please identify yourself.

MH: What’s happened to her?

NG: Could you tell me where you’re calling from?

MH:
What’s happened to her?

NG: Where are you calling from?

MH: Why?

NG: I need to talk to you. I want to come see you.

MH: No.

NG: Ma’am, please try to understand—

MH: I’ll come there.

NG: What?

MH: You’re at her apartment, right?

NG: Yes, but—

MH: I’ll come there. I’ll be there in a couple of hours.

NG: Ma’am—

(MH hangs up; dial tone)

“Really blew it this time,” Nolan grumbled, staring at the machine and holding his temples between his fingers.

Clayton and Nolan had just listened to the tape of the truncated conversation five times in a vain attempt to make some sense of it.

“Cut yourself some slack,” Clayton replied. “What were you supposed to do?”

“Should’ve kept her on the line a few seconds longer. Should’ve found out more.”

“Didn’t sound like she was in a real talkative mood.”

“We’re supposed to know how to handle the wallflowers—how to draw ’em out.
You
should have talked to her. You wouldn’t have fucked up like that.”

“They gotta
want
to be drawn out,” Clayton said. “Besides, she said she’d come here. Maybe she meant it.”

“What kind of odds do you want?” Nolan snapped. “You wanna bet hard cash?”

Kim Pak, the precinct’s computer expert, stepped in from another room.

“You said it’s a ‘Marianne,’ you’re looking for, right?” Kim inquired.

“You got it,” Nolan said, suddenly hopeful. Clayton and Nolan followed Kim to the adjoining office-bedroom.

“It’s all in her computer,” Kim said. “Her address book, her appointment book, her guest list for the party.”

Kim led Nolan and Clayton into the office and plopped himself down in front of the enormous color monitor. “Three names like that on the guest list,” he said, perusing the screen.

Nolan looked over Kim’s shoulder and shook his head. “Three. Shit. Marian Baxter, Mary Anne Vernasco, Marianne—Hey, Marianne Hedison. That name’s familiar.”

“Lotta local celebrities on this list. Seen her on television, maybe?”

“No, it’s not that, it’s—” Nolan snapped his fingers. “That woman! The one at the hotel!
I knew
I’d heard that voice before.”

“What woman?” Clayton asked.

“A woman in the hallway. She was staring at the bloodstain at the Quenton Parks. I asked her name.” Nolan pulled a little notebook out of his pocket and flipped some pages. “Here it is, Marianne Hedison, interior designer. Damn! It was her! She was at the scene of the Judson homicide! Kim, you said she had some kind of address file in that machine of hers?”

“Sure did.”

“Run down Marianne Hedison for us. If she was on the guest list, I’ll bet her address and phone are in there, too. And she mentioned an ‘Auggie’ on that tape. See if you can find him, too.”

“Will do.”

Nolan turned to Clayton. “If she doesn’t come to us, we’ll go to her,” Nolan said.

“Sounds good,” Clayton said. “Come on. Let’s talk to some of the neighbors.”

*

“What’s happened to her?”

“I can’t tell you that over the phone.”

“Why not?”

The three phrases rolled across her brain in a recurring loop. The loop played over and over and over again. It was identical each time it played.

“What’s happened to her?”

“I can’t tell you that over the phone.”

“Why not?”

The memory loop closed around itself, locking out all other parts of the conversation. To save her life, she could not remember what the man had said after her desperate
“Why not?”

Was it then that he had told her he was a cop?

No, it must have been earlier.

Or
did
he tell her he was a cop?

Did she only imagine he told her that?

Did she believe he was a cop?

What
did
she believe?

“What’s happened to her?”

“I can’t tell you that over the phone.”

“Why not?”

Marianne looked at the speedometer. Seventy-eight miles an hour. A cautionary voice inside her brain admonished her how treacherous this highway always was when it rained. She was probably hydroplaning over a sheet of freshly liquefied mud. At the first need to brake or make the slightest turn, she would undoubtedly lose control and careen off the highway.

Undoubtedly.

Not that she could muster a lot of concern for her life right at the moment. It just seemed grotesquely unfair to add an automobile accident to …

…
what?

What had happened?

Did she dare even imagine it?

Marianne gently and ever-so-slightly tilted the steering wheel to the left, urging her car past a vehicle in the right lane. The pickup was dallying along at a leisurely rate of no more than sixty miles an hour. Its driver honked as she hurtled past. She could almost hear the driver cursing at her.

“Hey, what’s the matter, you crazy bitch? You wanna kill everybody on the road?”

The pickup’s horn vanished into the back of the night in a howling, descending Doppler glissando. The loop kept right on playing like a stuck record.

“What’s happened to her?”

“I can’t tell you that over the phone.”

“Why not?”

She felt the road shift slightly, horizontally, dangerously beneath her barreling vehicle, then hastily reshape itself to the contours of her wheels again.

Slow down, dammit. You wanna kill everybody on the road?

The voice seemed peculiarly irrelevant to the activities of her body. It had no effect whatsoever on her right foot, imbedded cozily and heavily in the accelerator.

Few cars were out on the highway.

Who’s crazy enough to drive on a night like this?

But the very lack of traffic seemed somehow tormenting as the highway yawned vacantly ahead. Highway lights whirled by, forming vulgar streaks and sparkles of phosphorescent psychedelic tempera all across her windshield. The lights multiplied, increasingly filling the space ahead, bizarrely suggesting sluggishness rather than speed. Los Angeles grew proportionately more distant the longer she drove toward it. She was halfway to the city now, but the remaining distance had doubled in the meantime and would repeatedly continue to do so in geometrically increasing increments all the rest of the way. Time and space were stretching and magnifying wildly with every passing moment.

She would never reach Renee’s apartment at this rate.

“What’s happened to her?”

“I can’t tell you that over the phone.”

“Why not?”

Never.

01010
LOOP

The taller of the two men was lean and muscular and had a full mane of well-kept brown hair. He looked like a model—and indeed, Nolan had learned earlier that he was one. The tall man stood behind the armchair, gently rubbing the shoulders of a shorter man, who was sitting in the chair.

The one in the chair was a bit portly. His hair was thinning and he had a small mustache. He looked like an accountant, but actually he was a photographer. Stricken, he stared into the space beyond the oriental carpet on the living room floor. Both men wore pajamas and bathrobes.

“I want to see her,” the seated man said, his voice choked with emotion.

“Tony, don’t,” the taller man said soothingly.

“I want to see her,” the other repeated. “I won’t believe it till I see her.” A tear rolled down his check. He wiped it defiantly away.

Nolan remembered his feeling upon viewing the corpse.

You don’t want to see her. Trust me. You really don’t want to see her

“Mr. Drexler, please try to put it out of your mind,” Nolan said quietly. “The coroner’s team has already taken the body away.”

Tony Drexler broke down in quiet sobs. The taller man bent over and held him tightly. Then he said to Nolan, almost in a whisper, “Can’t I go talk to the neighbors now? They must be terribly upset.”

“I understand your concern, Mr. McKeever,” Nolan said. “But I must say no. The other officers are questioning them right now, and we have to try to keep all potential witnesses separate for the time being. I hope you understand.”

Roland McKeever nodded.

“We’ll try to finish up soon,” Nolan heard his partner say. “We know it’s been a terrible night. In the meantime, I apologize if we go back over some of the same ground as before. It’s just routine. And if you remember any little details you haven’t already told us, please say so. They might turn out to be significant.”

“We’ll help however we can,” McKeever said.

Nolan stood and watched the two men carefully as Clayton continued the questioning. He was grateful to have his partner take control of the situation, at least for the moment.

McKeever and Drexler faithfully told the same story they had related in their separate preliminary interviews. During the Sunday night party, they had asked Renee Gauld to come over for a snack and a drink the following evening. When she didn’t show Monday night, McKeever had called and left a message.

McKeever said that neither he nor Drexler had been especially concerned at first. They figured Renee had found something more exciting to do. Later that night, they discussed the fact that neither of them had seen her since the party. They asked a couple of other residents. No one else had seen her either. But even that wasn’t really unusual. A little later—at about eleven forty-five—McKeever called again. The machine still answered. That made them wonder. By now, Renee ordinarily would have called to ask McKeever to feed Lucifer.

“Her cat,” Clayton reiterated.

“That’s right,” McKeever said. “I’ve got a key to her apartment. Whenever she expected to be gone for the night, she’d ask me to feed Lucifer. Well, Tony and I started to worry, but we didn’t want to admit it. I told Tony I’d stop by her apartment. Just to feed the cat, I said. When I went into the apartment. I was surprised that she hadn’t cleaned up after the party—hadn’t cleaned up at all. She hadn’t turned out the lights, either. I decided to look around.” He paused, trying to control his emotions.

“And that’s when you found her,” Clayton said.

McKeever nodded. “Then I went straight to her phone and called 911.”

“And you didn’t move or touch anything?” Clayton asked.

“No,” McKeever said. “Actually, I
did
bring Lucifer back with me.”

Seemingly at the sound of his name, Lucifer the cat padded softly into the room and jumped up onto Drexler’s lap. Lucifer cozily rubbed his face against Drexler’s arm. Drexler held his hands away from the cat for a moment, as if stunned by its presence. Then he cautiously began to pet it. Nolan noticed something odd about the animal.

“What happened to its tail?” Nolan asked.

“He’s a Manx,” Drexler replied simply.

“A tailless cat—who ever thought that one up?” Clayton snapped.

Drexler looked taken aback, but did not answer. Nolan glanced at his partner in surprise. That show of irritation was the only emotion he’d seen in Clayton since they’d arrived at the murder scene.

“It just seems kinda freakish,” Clayton said with an embarrassed shrug.

Nolan gazed at the contentedly purring cat. Its oddness offered him a small but welcome distraction from the matter at hand.
Are they bred that way, or does this kind get their tails lopped off at birth?
The Manx did seem to Nolan to be lacking some of its essential catness. But Lucifer did not seem to mind.

Clayton cleared his throat and went on with the interview. The rest of
his questions had to do with the party itself—who was there, what had transpired? The whole building, every apartment, had been open, and all the residents had invited guests. After about 8:00
p.m.
, the place had been full of people coming and going. The party was officially over at midnight, but there were stragglers, small gatherings going on after that.

“What about security?” Clayton asked.

“A guy at the front door,” McKeever said. “But he wasn’t checking off names. He was just supposed to handle any obvious crashers or anybody who got drunk and ugly. No one did.”

“So anybody who looked okay got in?”

“The security guard asked whose guests they were.”

“Was there an overall guest list?”

“No, each of us made up our own,” Drexler said.

“But anybody could have overheard a name and used it,” McKeever interjected. “And there were whole groups coming in at once. And last minute invites and friends of friends. They won’t all be on the lists.”

“Did someone make sure everybody left?”

“The security guard went around to each unit and said goodnight,” McKeever said. “I guess nobody called for help.”

“What time was that?”

“About one o’clock, a little after.”

“Did the deceased have a date?” Clayton asked.

“Yeah,” McKeever said. “Larry somebody or other.”

“Larry Bricker,” Drexler added. “A writer.”

“The guy who writes the scary books?” Clayton asked.

“I think so,” Drexler said. “Seemed like a nice guy.”

“Did she argue or fight with him?”

“1 don’t think so,” McKeever said.

“We really didn’t see that much of her during the party,” Drexler explained. “Still, we would have heard about it if there had been a scene.”

“Was Bricker still here when the party was over?”

“I have no idea,” McKeever said.

“I thought I saw him leave,” Drexler said.

“Would you have seen him if he came back?”

“Not necessarily.”

“Was she the flirtatious type?”

Drexler and McKeever smiled at each other sadly.

“She’s … she was a friendly person,” McKeever said. “She liked to flirt.”

“Excuse me for asking,” Nolan broke in, “but was she promiscuous?”

“Jesus,” McKeever said, with just an edge of anger.

“I’m sorry. I have to ask.”

“Let me put it this way,” McKeever said. “She wasn’t exactly exclusive. But I don’t think she’d have done anything deliberately to make a date jealous, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

Clayton closed his notepad. “Thank you, gentlemen. That’s all we need to know right now.”

“We’d appreciate it if you’d discuss this as little as possible with the other residents,” Nolan said. “Particularly the circumstances under which you discovered the body. More importantly—don’t give any information to the press. Keeping details out of public circulation can be crucial when it comes to pinning down a suspect.”

Clayton added, “Tomorrow, we’ll want you and perhaps some other tenants to help us check the apartment more closely to make sure nothing’s missing. But tonight you should try to get some sleep.”

Drexler’s expression became inexpressibly pained. His head dropped forward. “There had to be something,” he said, his voice reedy with anguish. “There had to be something we could have done.”

And Nolan felt an echo of that guilt and regret in himself, although he couldn’t imagine why.

Nolan and Clayton left the two men alone. Back in the victim’s living room, they found the three uniformed officers gathered together and checking interview notes. No one had turned up anything helpful or even anything blatantly contradictory. Several people said they had seen Larry Bricker leave, and the security guard seemed to have made his rounds efficiently. No one knew an Auggie. No one knew a Marianne Hedison, either.

“We’ll have to check out Bricker and the security guard,” Nolan said. “One of them might have been the last to see her alive—maybe the very last.”

“Want to go roust them out tonight?” Clayton asked.

“I’d better hang around here for a while,” Nolan said. “Gotta wait for that hysterical lady who’s supposed to be on her way here. I’m sure anxious to see if she’s really the one I met at the Judson scene. I’ll bet money she is—but what the hell does it mean?”

“Maybe the two killings are connected,” Clayton said.

Nolan looked back at him with a hint of curiosity. “Yeah? How’re they alike? They’re not even the same MO.”

“I don’t know. Maybe just that neither of them makes any sense.”

“You’re looking for sense? This one might’ve made plenty of sense to a boyfriend hopped up on some designer drug.”

“Yeah, I know. And these don’t look like professional hits. But neither of them was clumsy, either—not like a spur of the moment thing, not like an amateur. There was planning. Both times the killer found just the right time and place and got away clean—like a stalker. And we’re dealing with high-profile victims.”

“What’re you thinking? There’s no sign of a serial going around. And here there’s no favorite weapon or method or scenario or anything like that.”

“Who says there has to be a method?” Clayton replied. “Who says there had to be a scenario?” Clayton’s eyes were flashing around the premises.

Reconstructing the crime.
Nolan knew that his partner was good at that. And Clayton’s intuitions were often sound, but Nolan just wasn’t ready to buy this particular idea.

“You really think there’s some connection?” Nolan said. “Why? Just because they were both well heeled? That’s nothing.”

“Still, there is the woman,” Clayton said.

“And what does that tell us?”

“I’m not saying it tells us anything. We don’t know, is all. Can’t rule out anything.”

“Damn, I hope she shows,” Nolan said.

It was now three-thirty in the morning. Nolan and Clayton began to delegate duties to the other officers. To begin with, somebody was to call the company that provided the security guard. Then Nolan could meet with the guard himself and get a statement from him. While Nolan and Clayton were assigning other tasks, Kim stepped into the room and handed Nolan a computer printout.

“I found a Marianne Hedison listed in the address files,” Kim said. “It’s a Santa Barbara number.”

“Let’s give it a try,” Nolan said. He and Clayton stepped into the condo unit, and Nolan dialed the number from Renee Gauld’s office telephone. After several rings, he heard an answering machine make a very brief, standard reply.

“It’s just her machine,” Nolan said. “At this time of night it doesn’t necessarily mean she’s not there.”

“Is that the same voice as the phone call?” Clayton asked.

“Can’t tell,” Nolan said tiredly. He redialed the number and let Clayton listen to the recording.

“Does it sound like the voice on the tape to you?” Nolan asked.

“Could be,” Clayton said. “It’s hard to tell. The woman who called here was as hyper as hell.”

Nolan and Clayton stayed behind as most of the officers dispersed to tend to their assignments. Nolan and his partner sat in the living room, waiting silently but none too patiently. Nolan stared out the window again.

Not a good night to drive in from Santa Barbara. If that’s what she’s doing.

The night was still rainy, and although no lightning was visible, thunder could be heard to the west. The rain was steady and solid and insufferably monotonous. Nolan didn’t care if it started coming down an awful lot harder or just plain stopped. He only wanted
something
to change.

He wanted—or
thought
he wanted—to talk to Clayton about his flood of feelings tonight. But he was either too tired or too confused to initiate the conversation. He wasn’t sure which.

Maybe I’m suffering from serious burnout.
He found himself thinking about Crazy Syd’s offer of a sheriff’s job way up north. Maybe cops didn’t undergo this sort of crisis in the laid-back wilds of Oregon.

Then something outside caught Nolan’s eye. Two bright lights had interrupted the night. A dark red Nissan Maxima pulled hurriedly to a stop in the no-parking zone out front. The car lights blinked out.

“We’ve got company,” Nolan heard Clayton say.

*

Marianne turned off the car engine and gazed through the dripping windshield at the looming condo. An outdoor light illuminated the front doorway. There were also lights on in several of the windows, making the building look warm and inviting. Marianne sat looking at the condominium, imagining every window in the building lit, the party in full swing, people moving inside, laughing, talking.

She remembered that Renee had invited her.

She shuddered.

Then she saw the silhouettes of two men standing in the doorway.

Better not keep them waiting.

She stepped out of the car and awkwardly straddled a large puddle. She felt extremely self-conscious about her every move, as if walking itself were an unfamiliar activity. The lights seemed to bob and jump about drunkenly with every step as she strode toward the entrance. Her legs felt weak and uncertain, like those of some infant animal.

The door swung open in front of her. The two men rushed out, pulling their collars up against the rain. An umbrella opened in front of them like some kind of big black jonquil that bloomed only at night.

“Marianne Hedison?” a voice inquired.

She nodded.

“We tried to call,” the voice said. “You’d already gone. Thank you for coming.”

Marianne couldn’t see the men’s faces as they stepped to each side of her, taking both of her arms. Their firm and confident hands felt comforting as they securely led her toward the house. She wasn’t accustomed to feeling less graceful than the people around her.

They ushered her into the blindingly lit hallway and closed the door behind them. They shook the rain off their overcoats like two dogs.

“Hell of a night,” one of the men said. His broad face immediately filled up her entire field of vision. She barely looked at the other man, who seemed to fade into the background. The large-faced man was staring at her. Did something about her look strange? Then her breath caught slightly as she realized …

It’s him. The cop at the hotel.

The two men introduced themselves, but Marianne didn’t hear their names, which hardly seemed important at the moment.

“What’s happened?” she asked quietly, feeling a surge of inexplicable calm—the kind of ghostly calm that comes when the truth, no matter how awful, is about to make itself understood.

The two men looked at each other with concern.

“Let’s go upstairs,” the man in the background said.

*

“There’s been a homicide,” Nolan told Marianne Hedison once she was seated in the deceased’s living room. When she made no response, he said, “A murder.”

She still said nothing; he studied her closely. Yes, it was her, all right. But she looked very different than she had at the hotel. Her hair was wet and her clothes looked frumpy—an outfit this sort of woman would only wear around the house. She also wore no makeup and had dark circles under her eyes.
Looks like she’s been crying.

But she wasn’t crying now. And while she certainly seemed confused and frightened, she was also remarkably subdued, as unlike the startled woman at the hotel as anyone could get. She didn’t even wince at the word “murder.”

Nolan also could not help noticing that, even in her present disheveled condition, her features were at once delicate and striking. When he’d seen her at the hotel, he assumed that her beauty was a great contrivance, something coddled and crafted every day with deliberation and care. Apparently he had been wrong.

Finally, the woman said, “It was Renee.”

Nolan nodded.

“Tell me how it happened,” she demanded softly.

“We can’t go into that just yet,” Clayton interjected. “We have to ask you some questions.”

“She was taking a bath, wasn’t she?” the woman continued in a severe whisper without so much as a pause. “She was in the bathtub and he grabbed hold of her and pushed her under. He cracked her head, more than once.”

Nolan felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. He looked at Clayton. He could tell from his partner’s face that they were thinking the same thing.
How does she know?
Had someone in the building phoned her? But McKeever and Drexler were the only ones who actually knew how the victim had died—and even they hadn’t known that her head had been injured, and they had claimed not to know Marianne Hedison. Besides, they had been warned not to talk to anyone about it, and she had supposedly been on her way here all this time.