“Not yet.”
He pulled his hand out of the vase. “How did the kitchen look to you?” he asked.
“How do you mean?”
“Lived in?”
“Pretty much,” I said. “Leftovers in the fridge, frozen dinners in the freezer and a marked-up calendar.”
“Marked up?”
“Dates circled.”
“Any notes? Appointments?”
“Not on the pages I looked at, but I only checked this month and last.”
“No doctor appointments?”
“No, why?”
“Lots of medication in the master bathroom,” he said.
“The only bathroom,” I pointed out.
“Well, there were prescription bottles in there with Henri’s name on them.”
“And the doctor’s name?”
“Different doctor on every bottle.”
“That’s odd.”
“Not if he was working some kind of scam to get drugs,” Jakes said. “You go to a doctor and give him symptoms, but symptoms you know fit your phony ailment so that you know what meds he’s going to prescribe.”
“And you can’t do that with the same doctor twice?”
“Not without raising a red flag.”
“So Henri was selling drugs? Prescription drugs?”
Jakes shrugged. “Either that or he just liked them. He ever seem high when he was at work?”
“No . . . not that I can remember.”
“Maybe he got high at home, then.”
I was still leafing through the book, and when I got to the Rs, something jumped out at me.
“Bingo.”
“Whaddya got?”
I put my finger on the name and said, “Nate Russell.”
Chapter 56
Jakes came over and sat next to me. We both stared at Nate’s name in the dead man’s address book. Then we looked at each other.
“Any others?” he asked.
“Wait.”
I had been looking through the book page by page. Now I turned to specific pages that corresponded with the names of all the dead men.
“Here’s Jackson Masters,” I said. “I missed it. It’s under J, not M.”
“Any others?”
“No,” I said, “Just those two.”
“Nate’s father said he was gay.”
“But Jackson . . .”
“I know,” Jakes said. “He was supposedly a stud.”
“He could still have been a stud,” I said. “Just . . .”
“For the other team.”
“Or both.”
Jakes sat back, and so did I.
“Well,” he said, “it’s a connection. He knew Jackson because he worked with him on your soap.”
“Right.”
“But Nate Russell didn’t work on a soap,” Jakes said. “He auditioned but never got a part. So how would Henri know him?”
“I just had a thought,” I said.
“Do I want to hear it?”
“If you’re here with me,” I asked, “who’s looking for Nate Russell?”
“There
are
other cops working on this, Alex,” Jakes said. “We’ve got an alarm on him, and I’ve got somebody watching his mother’s house.”
“Your captain never changed her mind about bringing her in?”
“No—I only would have been able to charge her with obstruction. Let’s keep our eye on the ball right here, Alex.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I was just wondering.”
“This connects Henri to Nate,” he said, tapping the book.
“Maybe they went to the same bars,” I offered. “Maybe Henri was doing hair on the side.”
“Yeah, maybe . . .”
He continued to search the living room, but another thought came to me. How did we know the killer didn’t find what he was looking for after he killed Henri?
I decided not to ask.
I finished with the book and closed it. The only thing it told us was that Henri knew Nate. We also knew Henri knew Jackson Masters. What we didn’t know was if Nate knew Jackson.
I watched Jakes kick at fallen seat cushions and look behind drapes. I watched him skirt a leather ottoman that had been kicked over on its side. In fact, he did it several times.
“Okay,” he said finally. “I’m done. Let’s take that book with us. We’re just going to have to find Nate Russell and sweat him.”
“And his mother?”
“Yeah, her, too.”
He started over to me and tripped over the fallen ottoman.
“Damn!”
“Wait a minute,” I said.
I got up from the sofa and walked to the ottoman. It was brown leather, and was not part of a set. It had been bought separately from the rest of the furniture in the room.
“I’ve seen this style before,” I said, bending over and righting it. “It should have—Yes, there it is.” A small leather loop stuck out. We hadn’t seen it before because the ottoman had been lying on top of it. I put my finger through the loop and pulled. The side of the ottoman fell open, revealing two drawers.
“Let me guess,” Jakes said. “Pottery Barn?”
“Probably QVC,” I said. “Let’s just hope the killer didn’t see it.”
I opened the top drawer and it was empty.
“Damn,” Jakes said.
I closed it and opened the second drawer. “What’s your police word for
bingo
?” I asked.
“Bingo,” he said.
I reached into the drawer and came out with a large leather-bound scrapbook.
“Open it,” he said.
“Don’t you want to?”
“You found it,” he said. “I would’ve missed it if you hadn’t been here, Alex. You do the honors.”
I opened it.
Chapter 57
It could have been naked photos of the men he’d slept with. It could have been a scrapbook of his favorite baseball teams. It could even have been a collection of his favorite cartoon strips. Or it could have been a stamp collection. But it wasn’t.
“A scrapbook of newspaper articles,” Jakes said, looking over my shoulder.
It started with pieces about certain TV shows. The clippings were from different papers, including
Variety
. New shows holding auditions, old shows looking for new blood. A red
X
had been marked through some.
“Jakes, this isn’t Henri’s. This looks like a guy keeping clippings of his failures.”
“Keep turning pages,” Jakes said. “Let’s find out who this belongs to. It’s a sure bet that whoever was keeping this book was here looking for it and killed Henri.”
I started turning pages quickly until Jakes said, “Whoa, whoa, slow down. Look.” He pointed. “Notes in the margin.”
The handwriting was cramped. I turned the book sideways so we could read them. One word leaped out at us.
“Mom?” I said.
“Not only ‘Mom,’ ” Jakes said, pointing to the line that said,
Mom did this!
“This is Nate Russell’s scrapbook,” I said. “How did Henri get it?”
“That’s a good question,” he said. “Come on, let’s go.”
“Where?”
“Someplace quiet where we can go through this book, inch by inch,” he said.
“Don’t you have to take this in as evidence?” I asked.
He smiled at me and said, “Eventually, but right now it’ll do more good in my hands.”
We found a small bar that appeared to be a cigar smokers’ club. In fact there was a huge humidor next to the bar. Jakes picked out a table in the back, left me with the book and went to get us some drinks. He came back with a beer bottle and a red wine.
He sat and we continued to peruse Nate Russell’s scrapbook. The contents were 100 percent made up of newspaper clippings that had to do with TV auditions—and murders. Each time we found an article on one of our victims, Nate had written something about his mom in black marker.
Mom did this!
This one was Mom’s fault.
This looks like Mom.
One even said
, “Oh, Mom,”
with many exclamation points after it.
I turned my head to look at Jakes. “Do you really think Nate believes that his mom could be the killer?”
“From what he’s written here, I think he
knows
his mom is the killer.”
“Then are you going to arrest her?”
“Not on what I have here, no,” he said. “I’d need Nate to make a statement, and even then it would only be his opinion. No, I need evidence before I can arrest her.”
“So how do we get evidence?”
“Well, there are a few ways we could go,” he said. “We could go back to Henri’s neighborhood, see if anyone saw someone fitting the mother’s description in the area. Or we could go and show her this book, see if she cracks.”
“Oooh,” I said, “I like that one.”
“Or I could reexamine all the cases, question all the neighbors again about seeing someone like her in the area.”
I made a face. “That sounds time-consuming.”
He smiled. “That’s what detective work is all about,” he said. “It’s legwork, reports and lots of time eaten up.”
“Let’s do the second one,” I suggested. “It’s faster.”
“The problem with that is, if she doesn’t crack, then we’ve warned her that we know she’s the killer.”
“She couldn’t be the killer by herself, though,” I said. “Hey, did we ever find out if she has another son?”
“Yeah, I did find out,” he said. “There’s another son, Nick, who is away in Chicago.”
“Doing what?”
“We’re still trying to find that out,” he said.
“O’Hare is a major airport,” I said. “He could get here fast if she needed him.”
“So you think the mother’s not only our killer, but she brought the other son into it?”
“We know she’d need help to do some of the things the killer did,” I argued.
“What about Nate?”
“These notations sound to me like they come from someone who’s complaining about what his mother did.”
Jakes closed the book, picked up his beer and sat back.
“Are you going to take that book in and do whatever you have to do with it as evidence?” I asked.
“That would be the smart thing,” he admitted. “I haven’t really been doing the smart thing lately, though.”
“What else would you do with it, then?”
He shrugged. “Take it home, keep studying it? Put it back? Maybe our killer will come back looking for it, the way we did.”
“But the killer already looked for it, and Henri ended up dead.”
“That’s true,” Jakes said. “I’m also going to have to check on this Nick in Chicago. I’ll have to check with O’Hare and see if he’s taken any flights out here.”
He fell silent then. He seemed to want to think about things for a while, so I grabbed my wineglass and sat back, my shoulder almost touching his.
Jakes finally decided he had to go back to Parker Center. That meant I couldn’t go with him.
“I have to coordinate with my partner and report to my boss,” he said.
“I understand,” I said. “She wouldn’t like seeing me in your office. Or your presence, I guess.”
“It’s the weekend,” he said. “Spend the rest of it with your daughter. Come on, I’ll take you home.”
In the car I asked, “What are you going to do with the book?”
“I’ll take it with me to my office,” he said. “Even after I log it in as evidence, I’ll be able to go through it—although it’s probably told us all it’s going to.”
“That Adrienne Russell is a murderer?”
“With somebody’s help, maybe her son’s. Nate probably knows all the answers.”
“So find him, and find the answers, right?”
“Right.”
He pulled up in front of my house.
“When am I going to see you?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “First I have to convince my boss that a woman who looks like Mrs. Butterworth is a killer, and then I need to find the evidence to legally prove it.”
“So in an hour or so?” I smiled.
He smiled back. “Maybe a little longer than that. A couple of days, at least. Let’s shoot for Monday.”
He kissed me good-bye, and then I kissed him good-bye and got out. He had driven away before I realized I forgot to tell him that Monday night I’d be at the Academy of Television for my taping of “An Evening with the Leading Ladies of Daytime.”
Chapter 58
I did as Jakes suggested. I spent the weekend playing with my sweet little girl, under the watchful eye of the man Jakes still had watching her. It was hard to believe that Sarah needed protection from her own father. I’m not sure why, but deep down I clung to the thought that he loved her. Which only made him a bigger puzzle to me.
I went to work on Monday and quickly became consumed with some on-set problems. There was an argument between the director and one of the actors over the way a scene should be played. The actor walked off the set screaming he quit, so production came screeching to a halt. To make a long story even longer . . . I had to tape some scenes from a future episode to make up for the scenes not being taped by previously mentioned pissed-off actor. It happens. Unfortunately, it screwed with my time frame. At the end of taping, I realized I had to be at the Academy in North Hollywood in one hour!
It was too late to go home, so I ran up to wardrobe and asked if I could borrow something for the event. At those kinds of shindigs a nice business suit seemed to be the preferred dress code, so I pulled a tailored blue suit with a somewhat plunging neckline and a little lace ruffle around the neck and cuffs. Conservative with a twist. I put the suit on and did the best I could with my hair in the time I had.
I ran out of the studio, almost breaking a heel, jumped in the Porsche and hurriedly drove to North Hollywood to the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Remembering I hadn’t called Jakes, I yelled out, “Call Jakes! Call Jakes!” Nothing happened. “Stupid Bluetooth!” I shouted as I was weaving my way up Highland to get to the 101 to the Valley. Then it dawned on me that the Porsche didn’t have Bluetooth. Oops! I’d have to call him once I got there.
I was the last leading lady to arrive, so I ran up to the front of the Academy, making my way through a rather large crowd of fans and industry people.