Private Read online

  “Okay, I remember most of this pretty well. Bottom line, Christine and her mother, Peggy Castiglia, were in a coffee shop on the corner of Rowena and Hyperion. The girl is facing Hyperion and she sees two guys throw a girl into a van—”

  “Two guys?”

  “That’s what she said. She couldn’t be sure that the abducted girl was Wendy Borman. And we couldn’t establish Wendy’s time of death close enough to say if she was killed within the time the Castiglias were eating.”

  Bruno sighed. “But she saw two guys. In effect, that was pretty much the beginning and end of our investigation. Nothing else was turned up.”

  “Was Christine able to give a description of the men? Of either of them?”

  Bruno shuffled through the pages and came up with an Identi-Kit approximation of a young man with curly hair and glasses. His features were regular, almost bland. Not much help there.

  He turned the book so Justine could see it.

  “This drawing tells me Christine didn’t get a good look at his face,” Bruno said. “The perp had dark hair and glasses, and that’s all she saw.”

  “Too damn bad, huh?”

  “Yeah, but I’m remembering now. Christine also saw the back of the second guy. He was shorter and had longer, straighter hair than the first guy. Great news, huh? That eliminates all but a couple of million white males in LA.”

  “Did she look at mug shots?”

  “No, we couldn’t get her to. The mother rushed her daughter out of here like her hair was on fire. Nothing we could do to change her mind.”

  “She was eleven,” Justine said. “So she’d be sixteen now, high school sophomore.”

  “I never really stop thinking about Wendy Borman,” said Bruno. “Here’s the Castiglias’ last known address.”

  Justine said, “Thanks, Mark. One more thing that might help me. I could use an introduction to the best cop you know in cold cases.”

  He nodded his head slowly. “Consider it done.”

  Chapter 58

  IT TOOK CRUZ the rest of the day and into the night to get anywhere near the film star Bob Santangelo—and he only managed it by hanging outside Teddy’s Lounge like some goofy groupie waiting for the actor to head out to the street with his entourage.

  Cruz drifted a ways behind a bodyguard through the mob scene. He got to the pearly gray Mercedes at the curb as it started to roll. He pressed his badge up to the tinted glass of the windshield, and the car jerked to a stop.

  The back door opened, and a bodyguard climbed out. Asian or Samoan. Big. “What do you want, sir?”

  “I just have a couple of questions, then Mr. Santangelo can be on his way.”

  A voice came from inside. “It’s all right.”

  Santangelo was in the backseat. He was tanned, with short brown hair and ten o’clock shadow. He sported a brown leather bomber jacket like the one he’d worn in The Great Squall. The actor slid over, and Cruz got in beside him.

  Once again, the gray sedan moved off from the curb.

  Cruz said, “My name is Emilio Cruz. I’m a private investigator.”

  “What the hell?” Santangelo said. “I thought you were a cop.”

  “Sorry to disappoint,” Cruz said.

  “So what is this? Is Ellen having me followed?”

  “I don’t know your wife.”

  “But you know her name is Ellen. Tell me what this is about and do it fast. When we get to Gower, that’s the end of the ride.”

  “I’m investigating the death of Shelby Cushman.”

  “Jeez. Poor Shelby. I’m serious. I couldn’t believe it when I heard.”

  “You knew her for a while? How long, Bob?”

  “Just a couple of months. You ever meet Shelby? Well, she was one sweet lady. Plus she was hilarious. Here I am, married, have everything, and all I really wanted was to be with Shelby. I fell in love with her. I think I actually did.”

  “Where were you when she was killed? Sorry to have to ask.”

  “I was flying to New York with Xo,” he said, indicating the muscle in the front seat. “I had dinner with Julia Roberts at Mercury that night. Check it out if you need to.”

  “I will. If you had to name someone who might have wanted to hurt Shelby, who would it be?”

  “I don’t know, man. Her dealer? Orlando something. She borrowed some money from me to pay him once. I never actually met the dirtbag. He set up a lot of girls at the spa.”

  The actor leaned toward the driver, told him to pull over. He said, “This is your stop, Mr., ah, Cruz.”

  Cruz smiled and shook his head. “Drive me back to Teddy’s. That’s where my car’s parked. Now that we’re such good friends.”

  “Teddy’s,” the actor said to his driver. “I don’t want to see you again,” he said to Cruz.

  “Only at the movies, dude.”

  Emilio Cruz settled back into the plush leather. The case was starting to make some sense, at least. Shelby Cushman, the girl with the golden heart and a rich husband, also had a drug dealer. Maybe she was hooking to support her habit.

  Andy wasn’t going to like that, and neither was Jack. Nobody liked hearing that somebody they loved was a junkie.

  Chapter 59

  UNCLE FRED was on his mobile, leaning against a wall in a corner of my office with his back to the door when I walked in. It had been almost a week since he, David Dix, and Evan Newman had hooked me in with a major assignment and a big bonus sweetener. So far, I felt we had barely earned the retainer.

  Fred had looked worried then. Now his forehead was so rumpled he reminded me of one of those Chinese dogs. Football was not only his livelihood, it was his passion, the one thing he’d found to love in life. He’d told me as much a dozen times or more, ever since I was a kid. If the game was fixed, his world would become a sinkhole.

  Fred said into the phone, “He’s just walking in now. I’ll get back to you.”

  The big guy who used to tousle my hair when I was small came toward me with a limp that betrayed his bum knees. He shook my hand with both of his, then sat down heavily in a chair.

  “I thought we were supposed to meet on Friday,” I said.

  “I got a call last night, Jack. I didn’t want to tell you about it over the phone.”

  He reached into his pocket, pulled out a pack of smokes, put them back, said, “I’m trying to cut down. This doesn’t help one bit.”

  Colleen came in to say good night. “I put Mr. Moreno’s phone number in your briefcase. You’ve got a phoner with the office in Rome at seven a.m. tomorrow. About the retainer for Fiat. Need anything else, Jack?”

  “Thanks, I’m fine. Good night, Molloy.”

  She closed the office door.

  “So how are you doing with our project?” Fred asked me. “Please tell me we’re somewhere.”

  “We’re making progress. I think Del Rio is onto something interesting. It’s going to take a couple of days to check it out. Tell me about the phone call.”

  “Barney Sapok,” Fred said. “I’ve known him for, I don’t know, fifteen years. He’s never called me at home before.”

  Fred reached for the cigarettes again, resisted. “He said our friends in the ‘gaming industry’ are poking around, coming to the same conclusions we did. Something’s not kosher this season.

  “I should’ve come to you earlier, Jack. I just didn’t want to believe it. Now I’ve got mafiosi asking questions the commissioner should have asked. But didn’t. Whatever’s going on, I’ve got to know before they do.”

  “I’m not going to let you down. This whole operation is at your disposal.”

  “I know. You’re my guy. You were always the smart one.”

  I walked my uncle to the elevator, then stepped back as the doors closed.

  I stood for a moment and watched as the numbers above the elevator counted down. I thought about the Mob looking into those iffy plays that had sent final scores skidding sideways in the last moments of the games, moments that had probably cost o
rganized crime multimillions. Someone would have to pay for that.

  But who had been clever enough to fix pro games with dozens of cameras and millions of witnesses watching any suspicious move? For the life of me, I couldn’t figure how it could be done.

  Chapter 60

  SCI’S APARTMENT WAS on the top floor of a run-down building that had once housed a printing press, back in the days when some people in Los Angeles actually read.

  The space was open, with metal columns supporting the high ceilings. Photos were being projected onto white walls in a looping slide show: the Vatican at night, the Tatshenshini River in the wilds of Alaska, the quad at Harvard, an aurora borealis, the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem shot from a high floor at the King David Hotel. Some of Sci’s favorite things to behold.

  A twelve-foot-long tiger shark was suspended above the space by chains attached to a framing timber.

  Trixie, Sci’s lab monkey rescue, was perched atop her cage, greedily eating banana chips, while Sci, seated in front of his computer, chatted with his beloved Kit-Kat by webcam.

  Her pretty face and large body filled the screen.

  “You’re very anxious tonight,” she said. “This case has really upset you, hasn’t it?”

  “It’s all about sick fantasies that have turned into real murders. Sound about right, Kat?”

  “Ja. That’s how these rotten killers operate. Happens all over the world.”

  “Only this time, there’s no pattern we can see.”

  Sci knew that Kat was a biochemist. He also knew she was married and that she lived in Stockholm, but he didn’t know Kit-Kat’s actual name. They had no plans to meet, because that would ruin everything, wouldn’t it?

  “I called because I found something for you, Sci. It’s just a whisper. I can’t confirm it. Rumors of a wireless spy-bot program that originated in the US. It lets the user grab the signal of a particular cell phone and clone it. Undetected.”

  Sci felt his heart pumping pure liquid hallelujah. He’d often imagined such a program, and now Kat was telling him that it existed.

  “Tell me everything, Kat, my sweet girl.”

  Trixie the monkey shrieked, threw down her snack, and ran across her rope line. She leaped to Sci’s shoulder, where she squatted and chattered at Kat’s image on the screen.

  “Hello, beautiful Trixie…. Anyway, this program seemed a little familiar, Sci. So I chased down a different program that’s a few years old but with a similar signature. That program was created by a gamer called Morbid. Don’t take this for more than it is, darling, please. It’s an educated guess, built on a rumor. I have been searching everywhere, though.”

  “Kat, I can’t thank you enough. This is the closest thing I have to a lead yet.”

  “I have to go in a few minutes,” Kat said. “I have just enough time…”

  Kat unbuttoned her blouse, and techno music with a complex melody and a pounding beat came over the speakers. Sci’s thoughts about a spy program moved to the back of his mind as he locked Trixie in her cage and turned to Kit-Kat.

  The very large, very lovely woman took a clip out of her thick blond hair and began to slip out of her clothes. “Tell me what you like tonight, my lover,” she said. “Then I will do the same.”

  Chapter 61

  LATER THAT NIGHT, Sci sat in the shadow of the fearsome, wondrous shark, his fingers on the keyboard, his eyes on the screen.

  Since signing off with Kit-Kat, he’d run the name Morbid through his browser, coming up with trash bands Morbid Angel and Morbid Death, and morbidity in every absurd category imaginable.

  When he’d exhausted Google and Bing, he signed on to one geek message board after another, searching for references to a spy-bot that cloned cell phones wirelessly and to a programmer called Morbid.

  He ransacked every board he subscribed to and came up dry. So Sci e-mailed his good friend Darren in India. Darren worked for a major Internet provider and he responded to Sci’s e-mail with links to exclusive websites that were restricted to high-level tech professionals. Darren also sent Sci his IDs and passwords.

  Sci made coffee and then prowled the back corridors of the Internet. He struck gold on a supergeek board he hadn’t even known existed, and that in itself was news. He plucked the name Morbid from a recent thread and read a post saying: “Morbid-the-great has taken to the streets. Rumor has it he’s a key player in a combat game IRL called Freek Night.”

  Sci was virtually bolted to his chair, both excited and afraid that this lead might run into a wall. This was why Private was the best—they had the best resources, and they weren’t constrained in ways the police were. They operated with their own sense of justice.

  Using his friend’s ID, Sci posted a query about Freek Night, and he got an instant message from a member who believed Sci to be Darren.

  “Darren, dude. What I can tell you. Freek Night is so sick, it’s transcendent. It takes fantasy to a new level—real life.”

  “How do you know about this?”

  “A gamer named Scylla posted a couple of times on Extreme Combat. He said he was recruited into the game. Could be bullshit tho. I tried to get in myself. Never got a reply.”

  “First I’ve heard of it,” Sci replied as Darren.

  “Because you live in a dungeon in Mumbai. LOL. In most places, murder is not a game. Even so, Scylla must’ve been high when he wrote that post.”

  Sci bookmarked the site, guessing that yes, Scylla was high. Like many addicted gamers, he no longer separated his real life from his virtual one—or even knew the difference. He’d become his screen name, invisible and invincible.

  Sci searched the gamer board Extreme Combat until he found a post from Scylla: “Our game is warriors vs. sluts,” he had written. “Come Saturday night, think of me!”

  A new thread was later started by a member called Trojan: “Saturday plays. Sunday pays. Scylla flew off his own terrace. Flying is easy. It’s hitting the pavement that’s hard.”

  Sci opened the site’s user profile pages and found that Scylla had listed his name as Jason, his address as Los Angeles.

  It was four a.m. in Los Angeles when a board administrator noticed that “Darren” was using an unapproved IP address and blocked Sci from the board.

  Sci made fresh coffee. His fingers were stiff, and his hands were shaking.

  He cupped his mug until his fingers relaxed, then he trawled a legitimate news blog for a man named Jason who had fallen from a terrace in Los Angeles the night Marguerite Esperanza was killed.

  He found an article in the Times online, read it twice, then he called Mo-bot.

  She growled at him, “Late-night phone calls are one of my least favorite things, Sci. Right behind having my tits in a mammogram sandwich.”

  Sci told her what he’d found, and she listened to all of it before saying, “So who is this Morbid? I’m out of rocks to turn over. I’m calling Jack.”

  “Let him sleep. I guess this will hold until morning.”

  Chapter 62

  I PICKED UP the phone, yelled into it, “Not yet!” then I chucked it back onto the nightstand.

  I’d been dreaming, actually peering into the downed CH-46, looking into the cargo bay. I could almost see my subconscious, and I’d made a decision about what to do next.

  Now the dream was gone.

  What was the question?

  What had I decided?

  The phone rang again. My annoying death threat caller had never called back once I’d answered and hung up.

  This time, I looked at the faceplate. It was Sci.

  He said, “I’ve got a lead on Schoolgirl.”

  Chapter 63

  A HALF HOUR LATER, I was at Starbucks, drinking an orange-mango Vivanno with Sci. He was wearing blue pajama bottoms with smiley faces and a Life Is Good T-shirt with a pink heart in the center of his chest. His hair was flattened into a bowl shape from his motorcycle helmet. I would’ve ribbed him about his wardrobe, but I was still tired and he was so intense
ly, deadly serious.

  I stirred my smoothie with a straw and tried to focus on what he had on his mind.

  Sci said to me, “The thing is, some guy named Jason did go off his terrace right after the Esperanza girl was found dead. It was a suicide, according to LAPD.”

  “Jason is a programmer?”

  “He’s in public relations. Was.”

  “I don’t get it. Explain the connection to me again.”

  Sci sighed. He knew that I wasn’t like him. I know my way around a computer, but I’m no geek.

  “Look,” Sci said, trying again. He grabbed a shaker of cinnamon and a shaker of chocolate powder, one in each hand.

  “The cinnamon is a wireless program that can clone phones and send and receive messages, okay? The chocolate is a combat game—in real life. It’s called Freek Night.”

  He clinked the two shakers together, said, “What these two items have in common is a gamer who uses the screen ID Morbid.”

  I said, “Explain to me the part about the computer games again.”

  “Most of the really popular ones are war games. Mo-bot plays one of them. World of Warcraft. It’s an MMORPG, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, that is ongoing twenty-four hours a day around the planet. It has eleven million players a month.”

  “War games on the computer. Trust me, that has to be better than the real thing.”

  “Most of these games concern big wars with armies. The gamers play to take over countries or planets, past, present, or future. It’s addictive, seriously addictive. It feels real. Get that? You with me so far?”

  “Yep,” I said.

  “A few games are one-on-one, where the players fight like old-time samurai or Roman warriors. Sometimes they have teammates or allies, like war buddies.”