Private Vegas (31 page)

Lewis was enjoying this too much. He had an ugly smile, which he had probably been told his whole life was his best feature. When Rick faced the ADA, he looked like a hurricane in a bottle. Furious. Uncontainable.

“Charges? I’m
out
, asshole.”

“I’m charging you with the assault and battery you committed against me. Asshole. Arrest him, Officer Brinker.”

I stood by and watched as the cuffs came out. Rick looked at me wildly. “I’ll be out in an hour, right, Jack?”

Caine said, “Don’t make a statement, Rick. Don’t say anything. We’ll meet you at Central Booking.”

My guts twisted. Not
this
. Not after all this.

Rick couldn’t be going back to jail.

I WAS DRIVING back to the office after Cruz, Caine, and I had spent half the day at Central Booking. We were there for moral support, but we saw Del Rio for only a moment before he was taken away to be processed and then locked up pending his arraignment.

I’m a graduate of Twin Towers Correctional myself, and I can tell you that it’s worse than its reputation as an overcrowded, gang-infested sewer, a brutal, dehumanizing hellhole you couldn’t dream up if you wrote horror films for a living.

And I was more worried about Rick than before. Unlike in the Carmody case, Rick had actually assaulted an officer of the court in full view of about fifty witnesses.

It didn’t look good for Rick. Not at all.

I was on the freeway, thinking of taking Justine out to lunch, bringing her up to date on what had just happened, when my phone rang. I glanced at it out of habit, thinking whoever it was, they could wait. But I changed my mind when I saw Luke Warren’s name on the caller ID.

The captain was my connection to a couple of loathsome serial felons from a godforsaken, landlocked pile of rocks called Sumar. I had offered to help the captain for free.

I said my name, and he got right into it.

“I’m at the Armstrong Hotel, Jack, over on Brampton. There was a murder here forty-eight hours ago, but it’s not my precinct, no reason for anyone to call me. Except for something a witness said to the first cop on the scene. The witness is sketchy, but I think he can ID the Sumaris.”

“You said it’s a homicide?”

Warren said, “Could be more than one.”

THE ARMSTRONG HOTEL was a cheap joint on a run-down block at the fringes of the Cypress Park neighborhood. It didn’t look out of place here with its peeling paint, blown-neon signage, cracked and empty swimming pool out front. It was hardly a hotel. More like a crash pad for locals who had no place to go.

I locked my car outside the front door, saw Captain Warren through the plate glass; he was leaning against a planter that divided the front desk from the furniture in the lobby. He straightened up when he saw me, came out, and told the uniformed cop at the door that I was working with the LAPD.

“Glad you could make it,” he said, shaking my hand.

I said, “No problem. Glad you caught me.”

The lobby had already been processed by CSU investigators who had left evidence of their own: yellow tape at the doorways, markers beside blood evidence, fingerprint powder on every surface. I asked Warren what had happened.

“First, I want to say, this isn’t my case. I got my hands on it anyway, because if I can help, the Northeast Division will take it.”

“So where are you with this, Luke?”

He ran a hand through his hair, looked past me to the front desk, as if he were trying to back up the film and see it from the beginning.

“Not far enough. It seems like two guys checked in to room four-oh-three at around ten on Saturday night,” he said. “They checked out before three Sunday morning, and their room was professionally cleaned. Practically sterilized.

“We’ve got a dead woman behind the front desk, and the computer has been trashed, hard drive removed. Surveillance camera’s gone.

“As for why, we don’t know. We don’t know who did it either, but we’ve got a lead. Hang on, Jack. I’ll get our witness.”

I said, “Mind if I look around?”

“Keep your hands in your pockets, okay?”

The furniture was aquamarine vinyl, looked pretty much the way it had when it was manufactured in the seventies, and that went for the planter of plastic plants as well. The front desk had taken most of the punishment. The computer that must have been there was gone, and there was a dried lake of blood on the floor, spatter on the Formica. It didn’t look like the victim had put up a fight.

I was checking out the hole where the security camera had been ripped from its mount when Warren came over with a skinny, fortyish man wearing polyester pants and a wifebeater under a loud print shirt.

He said, “Jack, this is Kevin Fogarty. He’s the night doorman. He’s the one who found the victim—the desk manager, Lois Bird. Kevin, this is Jack Morgan. He’s an investigator. Why don’t you tell him what you saw?”

WE STOOD NEXT to the vending machines, the night doorman saying to Captain Warren, “I told you, I hardly know anything.”

It was one in the afternoon, but Kevin Fogarty smelled of alcohol. When Warren had a chance to run his name, I was pretty sure he’d be looking at a long sheet littered with misdemeanors and outstanding warrants.

Fogarty pulled a bent half of a cigarette from the hip pocket of his shiny slacks, lit up, and when he’d framed his thoughts, he said, “I’m not going into any court to testify against anyone. Just be sure you hear me. I don’t do that. That’s not me. I like to keep a low profile.”

“Go ahead with what you saw,” I said.

Fogarty took a long draw on the cigarette, coughed violently for too long, then: “Like I said, I saw these two guys coming in around ten on Saturday night. They was carrying brown paper bags, so they’d brought their own bar service, I guess. They were with these two women, heavyset. Bleached blondes.

“The four of them seemed like they’d been drinking for a while. They were at the elevator as I was going out on my break. All giggly, like the party was
on
, something I’ve seen maybe a hundred million times.”

Warren said, “But something was different, right, Mr. Fogarty? You saw something that made you remember them?”

“Like I told you and the other five cops I spoke to, one of the guys was wearing a muscle shirt, no sleeves. He had some tattoos on his arms. They were like stripes going around the biceps and all the way down, and maybe words written above the stripes. He pinched one of the ladies, hard. She yelped, but that’s all I saw. I remember that noise she made.”

There was more smoking, coughing, and encouragement to finish the story before Fogarty continued.

“When you showed me their pictures,” Fogarty said to Warren, “I thought maybe I recognized the guy with the striped tattoos. He has a lot of hair. And a big nose.”

“Did you see them again?”

“No. I came back from my break. There was nothing happening, so I told the girl at the desk to call me if she needed me. I went to an empty room right here on the main floor and I watched TV and fell asleep. When I come out here, at like three a.m., the girl, Ms. Bird. She’s on the floor over there and she’s dead.

“I called 911. I stayed here. I talked to the cops. And then, a little while ago, the boss calls me and fires me. Because I was sleeping on the job. I’m not even mad about that. If I’d been on the door, I would be dead too, right, Captain? I’d be dead too.”

“Tell about the back door, Mr. Fogarty.”

“It was open, okay? The girl had the key. So she musta given it to someone, because the rear service door was hanging open. You got enough? Because I gotta go down to the office for my check.”

“Thank you,” Warren said to Fogarty. “You’ve been a big help.”

We watched the ex-doorman leave through the front door. Then Warren said to me, “I hate those guys, Jack. I hate that they’re in LA, I hate what they’re doing, and I hate that they’re so slippery. I’ll bet we don’t know the half of what they’ve done. It’s their game and they keep getting away with it.”

“I want to see their room,” I said.

CAPTAIN WARREN PUSHED open the door to room 403, lifted the tape so I could go in before him. He said, “This room and the one next door were likely booked as a suite. The door between them was left open.”

The room was dingy blue, identical prints of a beach scene hanging on three walls and dusty gray draperies flanking windows that overlooked Cypress Avenue to the north.

A king-size bed, stripped bare, backed up against a wall and faced an armoire that held a TV and six open, empty drawers. The wall-to-wall carpet was a dark blue pattern designed to defy stains.

Hotel rooms are one of the worst possible places to collect forensic evidence, just below a strip club in Hollywood and the city dump. Hundreds of people had slept in this creepy room, all of them leaving prints, a blooming field of germs and too much DNA.

“Detectives from the Northeast got here within six minutes of Fogarty’s call,” said Warren. “They closed off the lobby and did a floor-to-floor canvass. When they saw four-oh-three, they locked it down. CSU was here for most of the last thirty-six hours, but as of ten this morning, they packed it in. They’re coming up empty.”

Just like they had in the lobby, CSU techs had left evidence of their own here; fingerprint powder was everywhere, white microfiber jumpsuits were wadded up behind the door, and discarded swab wrappers littered the place.

“CSU took the bedding?”

Warren said, “Hell no. The bed was naked when the cops got here. I’m still trying to get my mind around that. Same deal in the adjoining room.”

Wiping down phones and doorknobs was Cleanup 101. But people didn’t take bedding out of a room unless they were serious pros mopping up a homicide. In my one meeting with Gozan Remari and Khezir Mazul, I hadn’t made them as clean freaks. I thought they were pigs.

Assuming the Sumaris had been here and had been accompanied by two women, what had happened to those women? Had the Sumaris’ past pattern of sexual assault gone over the edge into murder?