#1 Suspect jm-3 Read online

  A light glowed from the center of the house, and I made for it. Using the wall as a guide, I moved forward, past garments hanging from hooks, stacks of newspapers, and towers of boxed, empty beer bottles. Clay Harris was one of those people who didn’t throw things out.

  The mudroom led to the small, narrow kitchen. Pots and pans were piled on the table and in the sink. Garbage stank. There was an off-center door at the end of the kitchen, which led to a dining room.

  I stepped around a table that was heaped with boxes of files and hoarded crap, kept moving toward the beams that framed the entrance to the living room. I peered around the corner into the larger room.

  Clay Harris had his back to me. His gun was still in his hand, and his hands were over his head. He was facing my brother, who had his weapon pointed at Harris’s chest.

  Harris was saying, “Tom. What are you doing? This is stupid. I’m not gonna say anything about that girl.”

  I stepped into the room, gripping my own gun in both hands. I shouted, “Clay, drop your gun.”

  Harris turned, saw me, said, “Shit,” and tossed his gun onto an easy chair.

  At the same moment that the gun hit the chair, Tommy fired two shots in quick succession. Harris put his hands to his chest. He said, “Oh, fuck,” then dropped to his knees and toppled facedown onto the floor.

  I went to Harris, put a hand to his neck.

  He had no pulse.

  “For God’s sake, Tom. I wanted to talk to him.”

  Tommy put his gun back in his belt.

  “I feel for you, I really do,” my brother said. He looked for his two shell casings, collected them, put them in the front pocket of his jeans. “Things don’t always go the way you want. You wanted to talk to Clay, and now he’s dead.”

  I stood up, facing my brother. “You think I don’t know what just happened here.”

  “It was self-defense, Jack. That’s the truth. But I guess you’ll never know for sure. Did I shoot that scum because he was going to shoot me? Or did I shoot him because he would give me up?”

  Tommy was mocking me, shifting his weight from one leg to the other, moving his hands up and down like they were trays on a scale.

  He went on. “Was Harris a dangerous lunatic with a loaded gun? Or was he going to tell you that I hired him to kill Colleen?”

  I stared at Tommy, then looked back at the body of Clay Harris. There was an angry-looking bite mark in the fleshy part of his right hand between thumb and forefinger. The bite had been so hard, it had left a clear dental impression, a distinct bruise in the flesh where teeth had clamped down.

  I took a handkerchief, the investigator’s number one basic tool, out of my jacket pocket. Keeping an eye on Tommy, I used the handkerchief to pick up Clay Harris’s phone.

  I dialed 911.

  CHAPTER 119

  Tommy’s face was knotted with anger and disbelief. He asked, “What the fuck are you doing?”

  The operator came on the line, said, “What is your emergency?”

  I disguised my voice, spoke softly with a Spanish accent. “I heard shots fired in a house on San Francisquito Canyon Road.”

  I gave her the house number and said that I’d gone inside to see if someone needed help. That I’d found one person in the house, a man, and he’d been shot.

  “Is he breathing?” the operator asked me.

  “No. He’s dead.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t say.”

  I hung up the phone.

  Tommy was asking me again what I thought I was doing, repeating that he’d shot Clay Harris in self-defense.

  I wasn’t sorry that Harris was dead, but it would have been better for me if he’d lived, if we’d gotten him to turn on Tommy and testify that they’d conspired to kill Colleen.

  Tommy was highly agitated, his cockiness entirely gone. He was saying, “Jack, let’s get the fuck out of here. I’ve got to get rid of my gun.”

  His only concern was to get rid of the gun. One thing I had to say about Tommy: He was a shit, just like my dad.

  I aimed my camera phone at the bite mark on Clay Harris’s hand, took three or four shots to be sure I got what I needed, frames that included both his bitten hand and his dead face. Then, I left the house by the open front door.

  I disarmed the car with the remote, and my headlights flashed a hundred yards away. I walked along the dark roadway with Tommy following.

  There wasn’t another car traveling on this road. Not a soul.

  I reached the car and got in behind the wheel. Tommy was at the passenger side, trying the door, but I’d locked it. He yanked on the handle several times, then pounded on the window with the heel of his hand. He cursed at me, sounding completely desperate.

  He was still begging me to open the door as I started the engine.

  “Jack. Come on. Please open the door. You know I was just horsing around. You know he was going to shoot me. You know he was worthless.”

  I let the window down a couple of inches. “Tell it to the cops,” I said. “You’re very persuasive, Tommy. They’ll be here in a couple of minutes. Or you can start walking. Maybe you’ll get away.”

  “Jack. You don’t want to leave me here. Come on. Don’t do that. I’ll tell them you were here. I’ll say you did it.”

  I buzzed up the window and pulled out onto the road that stretched from nowhere to nowhere two miles in both directions.

  When I was back on Copper Hill Drive, I called Eric Caine and filled him in.

  Then I just listened to what my Harvard-educated, street-trained lawyer had to say.

  CHAPTER 120

  Eric Caine sat next to me in an interrogation room at the police station downtown. He looked calm, like he’d had a good lunch, a nap, and had checked the balance on his retirement account and found that it was good.

  My stomach felt like it was full of snakes.

  They hadn’t said why they wanted to see me, but I was pretty sure Mitch Tandy hadn’t summoned us to North Los Angeles Street so he could tell me that I was a great guy.

  I forced myself to think of fluffy clouds and rainbows, not that Tandy had sworn to put me in a federal prison for life for killing Colleen.

  Tandy got comfortable in one of the two metal chairs across from us. Then Ziegler came in with a bulky manila envelope. He made a big production of pulling out a chair, putting the envelope down on the table, and taking his seat, snapping a rubber band on his wrist.

  Like he was onstage.

  Like he wanted all the attention.

  What was up?

  Other than the rubber band tic, neither cop gave any sign of emotion.

  Tandy said, “I suppose you know what this is about.”

  “Why don’t you tell us?” Caine said. “My client has a busy schedule. I’m sure you do too.”

  “Does the name Clay Harris mean anything to you?” Tandy asked me.

  He knew full well that I had known Harris.

  Three days had passed since I’d stared down at Harris’s dead body. I hadn’t heard anything about the shooting since then. And I hadn’t heard from my brother.

  Caine was speaking for me.

  “We both know Clay Harris. He worked for Private for, what, three years, Jack? He was terminated in ’09 for extortion.”

  “He’s dead,” Tandy said. “He was shot in his house out in the boondocks three days ago. An anonymous tipster called it in.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that Harris is dead,” Caine said. “What does that have to do with Jack?”

  The snakes writhed in my belly. Had I left a fingerprint at Harris’s house? Had my car, with its crumpled rear panel, been seen by a passerby? Had Tommy gone to the police and said that I was the shooter? I’d considered these possibilities many times, but I was sure that I hadn’t touched anything in Harris’s house. I hadn’t left any trace, I was pretty damn sure.

  Ziegler opened the envelope, rummaged around, took out a sheet of paper. I’d lear
ned to read upside down when I was three. Ziegler had a report from the LAPD’s forensic lab.

  Ziegler said, “Someone took a bite out of Clay Harris’s hand. The ME matched the bite mark to Colleen Molloy’s dental chart. Looks like she bit Harris. Probably the last thing she did before he shot her.”

  I already knew what the LAPD lab knew. Sci had matched that bite mark to Colleen’s charts too.

  I waited for Ziegler to speak again. I guessed he was hoping I’d blurt something out, give him something on me that he didn’t have already. The silence seemed to go on forever.

  Caine said, “This isn’t 48 Hours, Detective, and we don’t have forty-eight hours. You matched the bite on Harris’s hand to Colleen Molloy’s teeth. You want to know if we’re interested? We are.”

  CHAPTER 121

  Ziegler twisted in his seat. He’d delivered the news as if it had caused him physical pain.

  “We’re all interested, Caine,” he said. “We actually want the one who killed her.”

  I exhaled. It didn’t matter that Ziegler and Tandy saw my relief. They had evidence that Colleen had bitten Clay Harris. Their evidence was now our evidence.

  Apparently Tandy felt the same way. He said, “We’re going to concede that Colleen bit Harris. But, Morgan, before you and your attorney start throwing confetti around, let me say that this bite mark isn’t conclusive. It doesn’t mean that because Colleen Molloy bit Harris, he killed her. You understand that, right?”

  The bitterness was in his tone if not his words. Tandy had been wrong about me and that had to be killing him. I wished I could tell him that in the past couple weeks he’d funneled me through a meat grinder with a very sharp blade, that he was a bad cop, that someday he was going to pay.

  I stifled myself.

  “Colleen fought for her life,” I said. “I’m glad about that.”

  Caine tapped the table, half a signal to me to shut up, half a signal to the detectives to keep talking.

  “So you’ll be happy to hear that we also have this,” Ziegler said. He opened the envelope again and dumped out a chunk of metal. It was a hard drive. It looked like the one that was taken from my security system the night Colleen was killed.

  I stopped breathing.

  “What’s this?” Caine asked.

  “It’s Jack’s hard drive, with video evidence that Clay Harris carried Colleen Molloy into Jack’s house. It’s time-stamped with the date and hour that approximate Molloy’s time of death. We found it in Clay Harris’s shack of junk. And that indicates that he took it from Morgan’s house and brought it home. This, along with the bite mark…”

  Clay Harris had killed Colleen, but he didn’t have the ingenuity to have done it on his own. And he didn’t have a motive either.

  Tommy had a motive-to put me in a hole for the rest of my life. But he didn’t have to do the killing himself. Harris had been willing to do it for a year’s salary, which he’d spent on a car.

  It just made sense that Tommy had directed the action from the beach outside my bedroom window and that Harris had called him as soon as Colleen was dead.

  Caine said, “My client is cleared of the murder charge.”

  “We’ve spoken to ADA Eddie Savino,” Tandy said. “He’s meeting with the DA tonight. I think Morgan is going to be free of Molloy’s murder, but here’s the thing, Mr. Caine…”

  I saw something I didn’t like in Tandy’s eyes, a flash, a warning.

  “We’ve got another dead body,” he continued. “Clay Harris was shot dead, and Jack, if he killed your girlfriend, that’s classic motive to kill him.”

  “I didn’t do it,” I said.

  “Are you charging Jack with Clay Harris’s murder?” Caine snapped.

  “Not yet,” said Tandy. “We’re watching you, Morgan. You and your brother.”

  CHAPTER 122

  Tandy’s reluctance was palpable as he gathered himself to give me evidence about Clay Harris’s murder. If Tandy was looking at Tommy for the crime, I had reason to hope that Tommy had left some trace of himself behind.

  It got real quiet inside the interrogation room, except for the soft thwacks of Len Ziegler snapping the rubber band on his wrist. Tandy sat back in his seat, feigning nonchalance.

  Finally he spoke.

  “Tommy was pulled over for speeding on the night Clay Harris was killed. He was driving a new Lexus LX 570 that belonged to the victim. He’d been drinking.

  “He couldn’t explain to the patrol officers why he had Harris’s car. He also couldn’t say where he’d been for the previous few hours or what he was doing in Canyon Country.”

  Last time I saw Tommy, he was outside Harris’s house. Cops were on the way. He had to have gone back inside Harris’s house to get the keys to the Lexus. Dumb move, Tommy. Very dumb.

  “We’re holding Tommy on a DUI and possession of a stolen vehicle for now,” Tandy said. “We’re not done yet.”

  For a slim moment, Tandy’s expression was open and I could read his mind as if it were a newspaper headline. Tandy felt sick that he had nothing against me.

  Maybe he could read my expression too.

  He had nothing on me. He had nothing.

  There was a big celebration going on inside my head. I grinned my face off and did the touchdown dance all over the end zone. Champagne corks blew and bubbly ran down my face. The fans stood up in the stands and cheered, and I was lifted into the air.

  Caine wore serenity like a custom-made suit, but his right eyelid twitched. It was a wink, just for me.

  I stood up and said, “It’s been a pleasure, detectives. I’m late for a meeting.”

  I walked out of the police station with my lawyer. I could stop worrying about going back to the Twin Towers, spending a year or two in court being humiliated before being locked away at Lompoc for twenty-five to life.

  I was free, again.

  “Fucking say something, Jack.”

  I clapped Caine’s shoulder and grinned at him.

  “Happy day, Eric. Oh, happy day.”

  CHAPTER 123

  Colleen’s friend Mike Donahue and I were at Santa Monica Airport, where I kept my Cessna 172 Skyhawk.

  I’d told Donahue that I’d flown with Colleen a few times, and that she’d taken over for me when we were in the air. She had done a couple of loop-the-loops and had shrieked with laughter every time.

  Now Donahue wanted to do it too.

  We ducked under the wing, and I said to him, “It’s not like you see in the movies, like flying a plane is a step or two over driving a car. In a plane, you control the mixture of fuel and air that goes to the engine, you monitor exhaust temperatures, you reset the compasses. It’s ninety-nine percent procedure and checklists. A minor screwup on the ground means something entirely different when you’re in the air.”

  “Like what, for instance, Jack? No. Don’t tell me.”

  “For instance, you forget to put the gas cap on. Gas just vaporizes out of the tank. Your plane turns into a glider, and you don’t want that.”

  Donahue pointed, said, “Is that the gas cap?”

  “Yes.” I smiled at him. “The cap is secure.”

  We finished the walk-around, and I gave Donahue a leg up to the cockpit. I got into the pilot’s seat, strapped in, and adjusted Donahue’s headset so that we could talk and he could hear my conversations with the control tower.

  I was cleared to taxi to the active runway, and Donahue stared straight ahead, unblinking, as we rolled.

  We stopped at the end of the taxiway and I went through another checklist, reported to the tower, and began my takeoff. As always, because of the way the propellers turned, the aircraft pulled to the left, so I gave it some right rudder as I built up speed.

  I watched the airspeed indicator, and when we got up to about sixty, I came back a touch on the yoke.

  The nose angled upward and we climbed. And I exhaled.

  It was a beautiful evening. The sun was going down, leaving a luminous band of sky-blue
and pink along the horizon. I headed west and took us out over the ocean. Colleen used to call out the many hues of blue and green as the water went from the shallows to the deep.

  I told Donahue that right here, at this altitude and distance from land, was where Colleen liked to take the controls.

  “I’ll think of her flying,” Donahue said to me, “but I’ll just be a passenger.”

  “Maybe you’ll fly some other time,” I said.

  I took the plane into the clouds, and for a few moments there was nothing to see but condensation wicking across the windshield. Then we were above the castles in the air, and for a passenger and the pilot too, it was easy to put motors and magnetos and gas caps into the back of your mind, just feel the magic and the majesty of flight.

  Donahue was smiling broadly as we sailed above the pastel-colored cotton balls of cumulus, and then his voice came to me loud over my headset.

  “I changed my mind,” he said. “I’d like to take a turn at the controls, boy-o.”

  I told Donahue how to do a loop-the-loop, and he did as I said. He pulled lightly up on the yoke. The plane climbed straight up, curved, and flew upside down. Donahue screamed in a very manly way, then yelled into the mic, “This is what we call ass over teakettle.”

  His laughter almost popped my eardrums.

  Donahue completed the loop and we were heading west again. He took his hand off the yoke and reached out to me. I matched his palm with mine, and we looked at each other, grinning like fools.

  Our way of saying good-bye to our dear, sweet friend Colleen.

  CHAPTER 124

  I got home at around nine p.m., still jazzed from too much adrenaline and not enough sleep.

  I locked the front door behind me, walked around the house and checked the windows, went to the newly improved security system monitor station and ran through the front- and back-door security tapes, reviewing them on fast forward. I didn’t see anyone in my driveway or approaching my deck from the beach, and the log showed that the alarm hadn’t gone off.