Authors: P. A. Brown
“Except we got no wits who saw this Bobby
character again, right? After he was seen with Bellamere he vanished, until he
turns up dead. We know he worked porno. Probably hustled, too.”
“No record.”
Martinez’s irritation grew. “Do we have anyone
else?”
“No,” David conceded. “Then let’s do like we
planned. If we can’t find anything from his employment, we put him on the back
burner. I still think he’s good for it and something’s going to show up.”
“You got the warrant then?”
“Ever know me to fail?”
David dropped the photos into his briefcase,
clicked it shut, and stepped away from Martinez’s unmarked.
“Let’s do it then.”
Tuesday,
1:15 pm, Western Avenue, Hollywood, Los Angeles
FROM THE PERFUMED corridors of
Beverly Hills to the piss-drenched streets of a low-rent apartment on Western
took less than forty minutes. Chris felt like he’d traveled to another planet.
Was this why Bobby hadn’t wanted to bring him home the night they connected up?
He made his way along the dimly lit corridor on
the first floor, easing by a pile of filthy blankets and trying to keep his
Dockers from touching anything. When the blankets moved, he nearly jumped out
of his nerve-mangled skin.
A gaunt, dirt-blackened face peered up at him
hopefully.
“Dollar, mister?” A cracked, wheezing voice asked.
“Spare a dollar?”
A life spent in L.A. had inured Chris to the
multitude of panhandlers and street people who lived out shadow lives on the
fringes of his world. He sometimes dropped careless coins into the battered
guitar cases of street musicians, or the hands of old women who followed their
steel shopping carts like faithful dogs as they wended their way along the
cracked sidewalks of East Hollywood. They always seemed to him to be searching
for memories that had fled them long ago.
Was this what Bobby would have come to? Once his
looks had faded with age and abuse, would he have moved from this shabby
apartment to the streets, just one more failed dreamer?
He felt sick as he fumbled in his back pocket for
a handful of coins and dropped them into the outstretched hand, refusing to
meet the man’s rheumy eyes.
On the second floor the muffled screams of Eminem
came from farther up. When a baby’s screams joined Eminem, Chris winced.
Bobby’s roommate turned out to be a skinny
teenager with a vague Midwestern accent and a head full of dreadlocks, which
Chris figured had less to do with the Rastafarian cult than a refusal to brush
her hair. Her lemon bright T-shirt bared one shoulder and most of her midriff,
showing off a skull tattoo and belly-button ring.
Chris held out his hand.
“Chris Bellamere.”
She stared at his hand for several heartbeats,
then touched his fingertips. “Skull. You another cop?”
When she grinned she displayed tobacco stained
teeth. Chris stared—she had filed her incisors down into pale spikes. She
proudly fingered the skull tattoo on her hip, then stared pointedly at his
crotch. He felt himself shrivel up inside his boxers. A horrible thought occurred
to him. Bobby hadn’t been bi, had he? Had he slept with this creature?
“The cops were here?” he asked.
She disappeared into the apartment, forcing him to
follow. She patted a yellow and brown flowered sofa. When she sat, her sagging
belly flowed out around her too-tight jeans. Her pierced navel looked inflamed.
She grinned again and bounced on the sofa. “They were here, asking all kinds of
questions. You a friend of Bobby’s?”
She seemed pretty jazzed about being questioned by
the police. Like it was all a game. “If you ain’t a cop who are you? One of his
tricks?” She smiled slyly.
“Do you know the names of the cops who were here?”
“Nah. They left me a card; it’s around here
someplace. Who reads that shit, right?”
“What did they look like?”
“One of them was this fat Mex, the other guy was
big, had stuff all over his face. Can’t say either one of them turned my crank.
Why can’t I get a cop looks like Brad Pitt? This is Hollywood, ain’t it?
Oughtta be a law.”
“What did they want to know?”
“Who Bobby was seeing.” She giggled. “Like he
dated the guys he was porking. I told them Bobby never brought his tricks home
with him.”
“I was hoping to find something that would tell me
what Bobby had been up to the last weeks of his life.”
“You and the cops both. Say, you one of his
tricks?” She looked him up and down and licked her lips. “Bobby could get ’em,
that’s for sure.”
“So he didn’t keep an address book or anything?”
She scratched at a festering pimple on the side of
her nose. “What’s in it for me if he did?”
Before he could ask her what she meant, she
vanished into a back room. She returned several minutes later with the last
thing Chris would have expected.
A Palm Pilot.
She held it out. “I didn’t tell the cops about it.
They would have just taken it from me. Now what good’s that to me? I gotta
survive too, y’know.”
Chris took the device from her. He fumbled in his
wallet and found two twenties and a ten. He offered them to her.
She looked up at him. “You wanna buy it?”
“If you got the power adapter to go with it.”
She eyed the money, then hugged the PDA to her
chest. “That’s all? Maybe I should just give it to the cops.”
He pulled another twenty out, showing her his
wallet was now empty. She scurried out of the room and came back with the AC
adapter. She snatched the bills from him.
He left before she could change her mind.
Tuesday,
2:40 pm, DataTEK, Studio City
“What exactly was it you wanted,
officers?”
The officious CIO of DataTEK, Peter McGill, had
been joined by a fox-faced woman who glared at everyone in Peter’s outer office
as if they were personally responsible for her extra workload.
David handed the warrant to McGill.
“Specifically we want to see any records that
relate to Mr. Christopher Bellamere’s employment with you in the last ninety
days. We need to see records of where he worked when he was off-site and who he
worked for.”
McGill nodded brusquely at the fox-faced woman.
“Mildred can provide that for you. She’s our director of human resources. Was
there anything else?”
“We also have a list of items we are to secure
from Mr. Bellamere’s work cubicle, including any computer equipment he may have
worked on.”
McGill frowned. “That equipment is company
property. Will it be returned?”
“The equipment in question will be held for the
duration of our investigation; then it will be returned to you.”
McGill glared at Mildred. “I want him off our
payroll,” he snapped. “Can you start the ball rolling on that?”
“You might want to reconsider, Mr. McGill.” The
woman glanced at David, then murmured something in a low voice to her boss.
McGill’s glare was transferred to David. Then he
reluctantly nodded at her. “I’ll consult with our legal department, then. Mildred,
can I count on you to get the documents these gentlemen require?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ll leave that in your capable hands, then.
Gentlemen.” McGill nodded at David and Martinez, then retreated to his office
and closed the door.
David and Martinez followed the woman into the
hallway.
“Not a happy camper,” Martinez said. He eyed the
HR director uneasily. She led them down the hallway to a second office, where
she asked them to wait.
They did as she directed, and after they had
cooled their heels for twenty minutes she returned, producing a sheaf of papers
that she handed to David. He glanced at them and saw Chris’s name on top.
“Mr. Bellamere’s hours and work locations for the
last three months. Will you need a list of contacts at those businesses?”
“Yes, we will,” David said. “We’d like to start at
Mr. Bellamere’s desk. Can you have someone show us the way?”
She nodded. “I’ll bring that contact list by there
later.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
He and Martinez retreated to the hall, where they
waited for their escort. Eventually another woman showed up to lead them to
Chris’s cubicle. Like the last time, his phone was blinking and several
handwritten notes littered the desk.
An outraged Becky Chapman planted herself in front
of David. “What are you doing?”
“Police business,” Martinez said, all but shoving
the warrant under her nose. Becky backed up a step, but continued to glower.
“We only need this black box, right?” David
muttered after crouching to determine how many computers Chris had at his desk.
He found only one under the monitor.
Still kneeling, he opened his cell and dialed the
station, and asked to be put through to a computer-forensics technician. Soon
the whiny voice of someone who sounded as though he was barely out of grade
school came on the line.
When the tech found out what they were doing he
sighed and said, “Okay, is the computer still on?”
“Yes.”
“Unhook the colored network cable at the back.”
David found a blue cable that plugged into what
looked like a telephone jack. He described it to the tech. “That’s it. Unplug
it, then unplug the power. Once it’s off, unhook everything else and bring it
back here.”
“This is related to a murder investigation,” David
said, trying to keep his voice low, aware of eavesdroppers. “How soon can you
get to it.”
“As soon as I can get to it,” the bored-sounding
tech said before hanging up.
David did as he was told. He hefted the black box
onto the top of Chris’s desk and found Becky still there, glaring at him.
“What are you doing?” Her contempt was open.
“Where are you taking that?”
“Computer-forensics lab.” She turned away in
disgust. The disgust deepened when Tom Clarke appeared beside her. “What are
you doing here?”
“Peter is concerned about the corporate image,”
Tom said. “He wanted me to help these gentlemen get what they needed as quickly
as possible.”
Translation: get what they came for and get out.
David took advantage of Tom’s arrival. He pointed to Chris’s workstation.
“Are there any other machines that Mr. Bellamere
would use?”
“Nah, that’s his only workstation,” Tom said. “So,
did you finally get around to arresting Bellamere?”
“Are you aware of something he should be arrested
for?”
“His lifestyle, for one. The guy’s clearly up to
something. Late all the time. Out on so-called service calls. No one really
knows what he’s doing when he leaves here.”
David thumbed through a couple of the files
Martinez had pulled from Chris’s file cabinet. They all bore company names and
clear dates.
“He appears to keep meticulous records.”
“He might have been telling DataTEK one thing, but
I’ll bet you find he wasn’t doing half the work he claimed.”
“You are so full of shit,” Becky said. “If Chris
didn’t do his work, why was he always called back? When half of those companies
put in requests for our services, they ask for Chris. They don’t want anyone
else touching their systems. Wonder why that is, eh, Tommy?”
Tom’s lip curled at her. “He’s snowed you all,
hasn’t he?”
“Yeah,” she said. “He’s snowed us all by doing the
best work anyone in this company can produce.” Her brown eyes turned toward
David. “You believe who you want, but Chris isn’t cheating anyone. And he
hasn’t done anything illegal, either.”
She turned and stalked off. Tom lingered, then
sauntered after her a couple of minutes later. Once in the elevator David
shifted the weight of the computer in his arms.
“You were right, that guy has it in for Chris,”
David said. “You get the impression he thinks he should have Chris’s status in
the company?”
“That girl doesn’t think so,” Martinez said. “If
he wasn’t a faggot I’d think something was going on between them.”
“It doesn’t always come down to sex, you know.”
“Since when?”
David stared at the elevator door the rest of the
trip.
Tuesday,
3:10 pm, Western Avenue, Hollywood, Los Angeles
Chris’s BlackBerry vibrated as
he escaped Bobby’s building.
“Yeah?” he murmured.
“What the hell kind of trouble you getting
yourself into now?”
Chris recognized Becky’s voice instantly. “Hi to
you, too, Chapman. To tell the truth, I figured my life was getting way too
tame, so I thought I’d liven it up a bit.”
“Right.” Her normally husky voice dropped several
octaves and he could almost imagine her looking around, searching for
eavesdroppers. “I’m in the bathroom.”
“Gee, Chapman, thanks for sharing that.”
“The cops just came in here with a big story about
having a warrant to search your workspace. They’ve taken your PC.”
Chris nearly slammed the car door on his fingers.
He stared sightlessly out the tinted window at the traffic on Western. A
black-and-white crawled by and he felt like shrinking down in his seat, away
from the watchful eyes.
“What?” he finally managed.
“They’re after you hard, man. I don’t know what
they think you did, but that little shit is right there in the middle of it,
spinning all kinds of stories for them.”
“Little shi—you mean Clarke, don’t you.”
“What are they doing, Chris? What do they want?”
“Damned if I know. I mean that, Becky. They got
some crazy idea I’m involved in something I’m not and they aren’t listening to
anybody, least of all me.”
“If I was you I’d find myself a good lawyer and
give it to them. Jesus, you hear about them railroading innocent people, but
you never expect...Get a lawyer, Chris. Now. Before this goes any further.”
“Already done.” Chris started the car. He glanced
at the dashboard clock. Nearly three-thirty. “In fact I think I’ll give him a
call now, let him know what’s going on.”