But the pattern fit: abduction, torture, murder. And it wasn’t just that; it was Los Angeles. LA was home turf for him. However I explained it, only one thing mattered: the story on the news had tripped the silent alarm at the back of my head, the one that won’t let me sleep until I’ve investigated further. Call it a sixth sense; call it intuition—either way, I’ve learned not to ignore it.
I opened up a second browser window and navigated to Google. I typed in two words—a name. As I hit return, I didn’t know whether I truly wanted to find anything or not. I didn’t really expect to get anything useful on just the name, so I wasn’t surprised when I didn’t. Some images showing half a dozen unfamiliar faces, presumably belonging to men who shared the name. An invitation to view the profiles of individuals of that name on LinkedIn. Even the website of a writer by that name, who apparently specialized in
sensual erotica
. I was pretty sure none of these links would give me what I was looking for.
I left the name in the search field and added
Los Angeles
. Fewer results, but none of them any use. Again, I wasn’t surprised. The type of person I was looking for wouldn’t be much of a social media animal. The type of person I was looking for would try to leave as little trace of himself as possible. Not so different from me, if only in that respect.
I retrieved my beer and took a long pull. I looked out of the floor-to-ceiling window at the black void of the ocean. I thought about the distance from here to California. It was the better part of three thousand miles. About as far away as you could get without leaving the continental United States. I thought some more, and then my hands returned to the keyboard. I deleted the first name and left everything else in the search field: just the last name and Los Angeles.
I got some more Facebooks and the website of a performing arts theater and some more random grains of sand from the Sahara of the Internet . . . and one news article, second from the bottom of the first page. A news article about an event that occurred in the late nineties.
I heard an echo in my head from long ago.
It’s the truth.
I clicked on the link, and the alarm in the back of my head picked up in intensity.
Los Angeles
Sarah Dutton had been found. Not a dead body, but a living, breathing potential witness. Sarah hadn’t exactly been living under a rock for the previous twenty-four hours, but it seemed she’d been similarly cut off from the real world—ensconced in a three-thousand-dollar-a-night penthouse suite in the Chateau Marmont.
Expensive room or not, she was still in the twenty-first century. She’d made it to two p.m. before learning she was feared murdered and the subject of a statewide search, but she’d laid low for another few hours anyway. Allen didn’t think that was particularly odd. She’d never been in that precise situation herself, of course, but she decided it might easily provoke panic in your average young lady. And besides, reading between the lines, Allen decided the fact that she had not been occupying the expensive hotel room alone might explain her hesitation.
The sun was all the way down by the time they got underway, and the evening traffic was typically sluggish. She and Mazzucco made slow progress on the drive back to the palace on Mulholland Drive. The house looked somehow bigger in the dark, the high walls lit from ground level by floodlights.
Walter Dutton was a changed man from their first encounter. Where before he’d looked unkempt and shaken, now he looked rejuvenated. He was dressed in a suit that Allen suspected wouldn’t leave much change out of her monthly paycheck. From the moment he opened the door to them, he seemed impatient. Allen wondered if he was overcompensating, embarrassed about his earlier show of vulnerability.
He ushered them back into the big living room, where there were two other people waiting. The first was another suited man with a silk tie and gray hair at his temples. Allen’s time in DC had attuned her to certain indigenous character types, and she would bet that meager paycheck on this man being Dutton’s senior corporate lawyer.
The other person in the room was easy to place without a detective’s instincts—Dutton’s twenty-two-year-old daughter, Sarah. She sat huddled in a stiff-backed antique chair, cradling her forearms. She was dressed simply, in contrast to the men, just a lavender blouse, jeans, bare feet. Her eyes were red, and she looked almost relieved to see two Homicide cops. A rarity in itself.
Dutton didn’t offer the two of them coffee, didn’t ask them to sit down.
“Detectives Allen and Mazzarello, correct?”
“Mazzucco.”
“My apologies.” He nodded at the lawyer. “This is Jack Carnegie, one of my legal team. And, of course, my daughter, Sarah. I understand you’d like to ask Sarah some questions. We’d like to resolve this as quickly as possible.”
“We’ll try not to take up too much of your time, sir,” Mazzucco said. Allen was impressed: the sarcasm was so reserved, she doubted if it registered with any of the other three. “Perhaps it would be better if we could speak to Sarah alone.”
Carnegie was quick off the mark, just as Allen expected him to be. “That’s . . . not gonna happen, Detective. You can ask Sarah questions, but only in the presence of Mr. Dutton and myself.”
Allen looked at the daughter. “I think that would be Sarah’s decision.”
Dutton shot Allen a glare. Carnegie opened his mouth to object. Sarah cut him off. “It’s okay. I want them to stay.” Her voice sounded steady enough, but Allen caught the flicker of her eyes as they darted up to her father for approval.
Allen quieted the urge to escalate. It would only burn time, time they did not have. “Okay, Sarah, if you’re sure. We’re trying to catch the guy who did this to Kelly, okay? He killed some other people, too, and we’re pretty sure he’ll do it again. We need you to tell us everything you know, even if you don’t think you know anything important. The smallest detail can help us out, okay?”
Sarah nodded and sat up straighter in the chair.
“Why don’t you tell us about last night?” Mazzucco asked. “You were out with Kelly, right? Who else?”
The mention of the name of her murdered friend was enough to make the girl break into a sob. They waited for her to compose herself.
“Yeah. Just Kelly and me . . . and Josh.” Her eyes dropped to the floor as she sensed her father’s glare. Allen wondered if the curfew arrangement had been imposed not because of boys in general, but because of this boy in particular. “We had dinner at Mélisse, then a few drinks at Sloan’s. I was planning on being back here for eleven or so. But then Josh wanted to stay out longer, and he said he could drive me home. Kelly wasn’t feeling so good, so she offered to . . . I mean, she said she could take the . . .”
“Enough, Sarah,” Dutton said with an audible sigh. He turned to the detectives. “I believe what my daughter is trying to say is that she wanted to spend the night with this . . .
Josh
character, but she knew I would know she hadn’t returned home if I got back and saw that the Porsche was missing. In point of fact, that’s exactly how I did know she hadn’t returned and why I alerted the authorities.”
Mazzucco’s brow creased. “You wouldn’t have noticed she wasn’t here otherwise?”
“My daughter lives in the annex, down by the lower pool. She tends to sleep late on Sundays. Chances are I wouldn’t have noticed anything was amiss. She was counting on that, and that’s why I imagine she asked her friend to drive the Porsche home.”
Allen felt a shiver of electricity and exchanged a glance with Mazzucco. She could see he felt it, too. Kelly Boden now fit snugly into the pattern: lone women drivers at night.
“Is that what happened, Sarah?” Allen prompted. “We need to be very clear on this. Did you arrange with Kelly for her to drive the Porsche home?”
Sarah kept her eyes on the floor and nodded reluctantly. “That’s right.”
Mazzucco flipped a page back in his notebook. “This bar, Sloan’s. That’s on Santa Monica Boulevard, isn’t it?”
Sarah nodded.
“Was Kelly planning on driving straight back here?”
“She had to. She left around ten thirty. Right before it started raining. I remember being really worried about her. I tried calling her cell around midnight, just to check if she was okay, but it went straight to voicemail.”
Allen and Mazzucco shared a glance. The Samaritan had probably started killing her by midnight.
Allen glanced down at her notepad and ticked off another question. “Were you aware of any problems with the Porsche? Any faults, any reason it should break down?”
Sarah looked confused. “No. It was new. I mean, I was low on gas, but I warned Kelly about it. I gave her a twenty to put some in the tank.”
Mazzucco raised an eyebrow and made a note on his own pad.
They talked to Sarah for another half hour, but she had nothing else usable to give them, given that she’d had no contact with Kelly after she left the bar. After they’d run through the details of Saturday evening a few times, they asked Sarah to give them chapter and verse on her own movements between then and now. It didn’t take long, and it was all easily checkable. One of the lower-priority tangents that could be checked out by one of the uniformed officers drafted in to help with what had already become a major investigation, along with an interview of the boyfriend. Allen didn’t expect that to be of much use either, since they already knew his alibi: an alibi that would be corroborated not just by his girlfriend but by the security cameras at the hotel.
The interruptions from Mr. Dutton and his lawyer grew more regular and more impatient as they began to go back over the ground already covered, and so they wound up the interview. It had been worth the trip, because the two pieces of information Sarah had confirmed right out of the gate were golden: Kelly Boden’s mode of transport and approximate whereabouts at the estimated time of her abduction. Dutton hustled them out the front door and moved quickly to shut it behind them, as though wanting to close the door on this whole episode. His haste irritated Allen, who couldn’t resist a parting shot.
“One other thing, Mr. Dutton?”
“Yes?” He stretched the word out to a couple of syllables.
“Is this really Marlon Brando’s old house?” she asked after a pause. She ignored the look from her partner.
Dutton shook his head. “No, Detective. That’s a couple of miles from here. And smaller.”
The door closed firmly, just short of a slam.
Mazzucco offered to drop Allen off at her place, since it was on his way. Allen agreed but said that she’d drive. As she started the engine and pulled out of the gate onto Mulholland, Mazzucco shook his head.
“Brando’s house. Nice.”
“He pissed me off,” Allen explained. She thought for a second and asked, “You think that was a little weird? Bringing in a lawyer to babysit and all?”
Mazzucco considered. “Nah. I think he was a little rich, that’s all. Rich guys like to cover their asses until they know exactly what’s going on. They also don’t like the little people knowing their business.”
“So we know Kelly definitely had the Porsche and that she was headed straight for the Dutton place,” Allen said.
“Not straight there. She had to get gas, remember?”
“We might be able to trace that, even though she probably paid cash. Gas station attendants tend to remember nice cars. Helps us to narrow the route down.”
“So we have a pretty good idea what happened. This guy somehow got her to stop on the way, abducted her, and took the car.” He took out his phone, scrolled to find a contact, and held it up to his ear. “Hi. This is Detective Mazzucco, RHD. I’m just calling for an update on a BOLO for a silver Porsche Carrera.” There was a pause. “You’re sure? Yeah, I guess you would, at that. Okay, thanks.” He hit the button to hang up.
“Nothing?” Allen asked.
He shook his head. “They never found Burnett’s BMW either. That’s three for three.”
“And we know they were all within a few miles of the dump site the last time they were seen. Burnett in Laurel Canyon, Boden heading for Mulholland Drive, and Morrow was close by, as well. If the abduction sites are all in the vicinity of the dump site . . .”
“Then the kill site is probably within that radius,” Mazzucco finished. “Probably a house, somewhere private.”
“Do we know if Rachel Morrow broke down yet?”
Mazzucco made another call to MPU, having to wait a few minutes for the administrator to dig up the relevant file from the missing persons database. By the time he got off the phone, Allen was pulling the gray Ford to a stop outside her apartment building.
“She wasn’t a Triple A member. We don’t have a contract phone listed for her, either, so we can’t tell if she tried to call anybody.”
“The Triple A angle didn’t pan out for Burnett anyway. But maybe there’s another way they could have all come into contact with the same person. Maybe they all stopped for gas in the same place.”
“Great minds think alike,” Mazzucco agreed, smiling. Then he sighed and looked at his watch. “I’m going to head back to the ranch, test out some of these theories. We know the Porsche’s tank was empty, but who’s going to remember a Honda Civic from a week ago? I’ll start calling around the gas stations en route from Santa Monica to Mulholland. Maybe I can talk to the people who were on last night.”
“You asked the boss about this overtime?”
Mazzucco opened his mouth to respond and then realized what she meant, nodding sarcastically. “Julia’s fine. I checked in with her a half hour ago.”
“Couldn’t resist. Sorry,” Allen said. “Checking the gas stations is a good idea. I’ll make a couple of calls, too. We need to get people canvassing the neighborhoods around the mountains. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find his kill house.”
She opened the door and got out. As Mazzucco circled the car to get in the driver’s seat, she looked at him, thinking about that call she’d just mentioned. “This is getting big, Mazzucco. I don’t want anybody taking this away from us if we can help it. What do you think Lawrence will do?”