Private Vegas Read online

  He greeted the jury, then said, “I’m going to make this short and sweet.

  “My client, Mr. Del Rio, is entirely innocent. He did not beat Ms. Carmody. Didn’t lift a hand to her, had no reason to, and never would.

  “On the thirteenth of June, having not had contact with Ms. Carmody in six months, Mr. Del Rio called to tell her that he had come across a small camera that she had left in his house way back before they broke off their relationship.

  “Ms. Carmody said, ‘I thought I’d lost that camera. Well, yes, I’d like to have it back.’

  “And Mr. Del Rio said, ‘When would be good for you?’

  “They agreed on a time for the return of this little camera, so the next evening, Mr. Del Rio went to Ms. Carmody’s house, where a witness saw Ms. Carmody open the door for Mr. Del Rio, who then entered the house.

  “Once he was inside, Ms. Carmody made tea, and these two people had a polite conversation in the parlor lasting about fifteen minutes and consisting of pleasantries and the return of the Coolpix. Mr. Del Rio never touched Ms. Carmody, unless you count the cheek kisses that were exchanged when Mr. Del Rio left Ms. Carmody.

  “After Mr. Del Rio left Ms. Carmody’s home, he went to his own place in Venice, took a six-pack out of the fridge, and spent the rest of the evening watching The Fog of War on the Sundance channel, alone. At eleven, he went to bed.

  “That’s the end of the story.

  “Or at least, it should be.

  “But when Ms. Carmody was questioned by the police after she had suffered a traumatic head injury, she identified Mr. Del Rio as her attacker, a statement that cannot be corroborated.

  “In legal circles, this is referred to as he-said-she-said, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is really what this case is about.

  “To continue with this story, late that night, approximately six hours after Mr. Del Rio left her, Ms. Carmody called an ambulance, and en route to the hospital, in this profoundly traumatized condition, she was interviewed by a detective, Sergeant Michael Degano.

  “Sergeant Degano videotaped the interview with his phone camera, and when he asked Ms. Carmody who had beaten her, he showed her a picture of Mr. Del Rio, at which point she said Mr. Del Rio’s name.

  “After that, she went into surgery, and she survived that surgery but has not spoken again; she has been in a coma ever since.

  “It’s reasonable to ask, Why would Ms. Carmody name Mr. Del Rio as her attacker if he never touched her?

  “I would suggest that she recognized his picture, and that she even remembered that he had come to visit her that evening. I would further suggest to you that Ms. Carmody had suffered so much injury to the brain that she was an unreliable witness for herself.

  “So what happened then is that the police had their suspect, and they had no reason to look for another. They had testimony from the victim, and because Mr. Del Rio had been in Ms. Carmody’s house, they had evidence placing him at the scene.

  “Mr. Del Rio had a cup of tea, and left his fingerprints and DNA. He was witnessed going into the house, but he wasn’t seen coming out.

  “But in fact, he did leave Ms. Carmody’s house, and she was fine when they said good-bye. After that, while Mr. Del Rio was watching TV in his own house, someone went into Ms. Carmody’s house and attempted to kill her. Someone else did that. Not Mr. Del Rio.

  “In the old days, there were colorful terms for the unfortunate sap who took the blame. He was called the dupe. The fall guy. The patsy.”

  Rick didn’t like being characterized as a fool, but he thought Caine was doing a great job telling what had happened. Over at the prosecutor’s table, Dexter Lewis played with his pen like it was a drumstick: tat-tat-tat on the tabletop, just enough sound to draw the jury’s attention and, maybe, break Caine’s rhythm.

  But Caine didn’t acknowledge the sound, didn’t look at Lewis at all. He walked to the jury box, all six foot three of Harvard-educated success story.

  Caine said, “So now we have the whole short and not-so-sweet story. Someone beat Ms. Carmody. She had a subdural hematoma and an intracranial hemorrhage. She had brain damage, ladies and gentlemen, and during a semilucid moment as she was being taken by ambulance to the hospital, she named my client.

  “But Mr. Del Rio didn’t lift a hand to Ms. Carmody.

  “He’s the scapegoat, the designated fall guy. He didn’t beat up his friend Vicky. Someone set Rick up. Or Rick was at the wrong place at the worst possible time. We don’t know who attacked Vicky Carmody or why it happened.

  “But this we know for sure: Rick Del Rio didn’t do it.”

  PART TWO

  SEPARATED AT BIRTH

  Chapter 16

  BY 11:20 A.M., two of Private’s top investigators, Emilio Cruz and Christian Scott, had rung fifteen doorbells on both sides of PCH, had talked to as many housekeepers and homeowners, had collected surveillance footage from security cameras, and were now reviewing the footage on their fleet-car computer.

  Scotty was blond, lithe, had been a ballet dancer until he ruined his knees. He became a motorcycle cop with CHiPs and was eventually promoted to deputy sheriff. He was bright and motivated, and a very agile athlete.

  Jack had brought him in as an investigator last year and was still floating him, pairing him with other investigators until he found him a partner.

  Cruz was senior to Scotty.

  First thing most people noticed about Cruz was his good looks: the black hair he wore pulled back in a ponytail, and his muscular build. Cruz was a former light-middleweight professional boxer, born and raised in the ’hood, and had highly developed street smarts. At age twenty-eight, after he retired from the ring with his brains intact, Cruz went to work as an investigator for LA’s district attorney, Bobby Petino.

  Petino and Cruz were second cousins, and Petino had told Jack about this smart young investigator, saying that he thought Cruz had a dynamite future. Jack thought so too. He hired Cruz and teamed him up with Del Rio.

  The partnership had stuck.

  Cruz had wanted to be in court for his partner this morning, but he had to get a handle on who had firebombed Jack’s car.

  Scotty downloaded the video to their hard drive, opened the file, said, “This is from the house across PCH. Camera one. Faces the road.”

  “Roll it,” Cruz said to Scotty.

  Scotty pressed Play. The camera was pointed across the highway, right at Jack’s house, and the angle took in the wall and the Lamborghini that Jack had parked outside his gate.

  As they watched, cars flashed past on the road. Then, on the screen, a sedan with its high beams on came toward Jack’s house. And stopped.

  Scotty reversed the clip, then forwarded it in slow motion.

  “Whoa,” said Cruz. “Freeze that.”

  It was too dark to see anything about the color or make of the car beyond the fact that it was a dark sedan, probably a Chevy. The time stamp read 4:27 a.m.

  “I can’t read the plates at all,” Cruz said. “Not a single number.”

  “Going to forward it now,” Scotty said.

  The car in the center of the frame didn’t move, but a few other cars passed in the background, both directions. When the road was clear, a figure got out of the backseat and ran toward Jack’s Lambo.

  “Here we go,” said Cruz.

  Scotty tried to refine the image, but no amount of fine-tuning brought up the shadowy figure’s face. Still, they could see what he was doing: making chiseling motions on the rear flank of the car.

  “He’s doing something with the gas tank,” said Scotty.

  “I see that. And now where is he?” Cruz said.

  Scotty reversed the clip, played it forward, saw the guy linger near the tank, then duck behind the car and disappear; he was out of sight for four seconds.

  “I think he’s putting a charge under the chassis. This was planned,” Scotty said. “Well planned.”

  “So was this a plan to torch a car?” Cruz mused. “Or a plan to
torch Jack’s car?”

  “Look here, Emilio. There’s your fire,” Scotty said as flames flashed from beneath the car.

  The dark figure fled from the Lambo and ran to the car waiting for him on the shoulder, which started up before he’d closed the rear door. A moment later, the sedan was gone, and the fire was lapping over the fenders of Jack’s quarter-million-dollar car.

  “Shit,” said Cruz. “There’s Jack.”

  The two men stared, mesmerized, as Jack came out of his house and watched his car burn. He just stood there until, moments later, the car went up and Jack was blown off his feet.

  “Some kind of timing device. What do you think?” Scotty said, stabbing the Stop button.

  Cruz said, “I think if there’s any evidence on the remains of that Lamborghini, it’s going to be a miracle.”

  Chapter 17

  DR. SCI ARRIVED at Private’s underground lot at just after two in the afternoon. He nosed his 1967 Spider into his spot, then extracted his silver Halliburton case from the passenger seat and went to the back door to Private’s forensic lab that ran underneath half of the building.

  Standing at the entrance, Sci reached up, touched the mezuzah in the doorframe, then pressed his hand to the biometric plate. The doors opened, admitting him to the airlock, and closed with a whisper behind him.

  The metal and explosives detectors scanned him, and after Sci had spent twenty seconds under the UV light, the second set of doors opened and he stepped into the clean, cool, well-lit lab.

  He paused inside the entrance, did a quick check of the various stations around the perimeter of the large room. Criminologists wearing lab coats worked in their bays, which were equipped with the best forensic tools in the world.

  Sci waved to Mo-bot, who was crossing the room with a sound tech, then entered his glass-walled office at the hub. His computer recognized him and flashed on. He set his briefcase on a tabletop, removed the flask he was transporting, and read his e-mail.

  About ten years earlier, when Dr. Sci, whose given name was Seymour Kloppenberg, was twenty, he had graduated from MIT with a PhD.

  LA County, still recovering from the humiliation of the O.J. Simpson trial, had refurbished its forensic lab to the tune of a hundred million dollars, and Dr. Sci was hired right out of school.

  Sci was rotated around the numerous forensic disciplines—DNA, trace analysis, toxicology, ballistics—so he could find his niche. But during this training program, Jack Morgan heard about Sci and offered him a job as chief forensic scientist and head of Private’s lab. He told Sci that he wanted the lab to become a profit center.

  Sci had been dubious. No independent lab could match the county’s facilities.

  Jack said, “It’s yours to outfit, Sci. I want only the best of everything. And I’ll make you an equity partner.”

  Sci was sold on this rare and terrific opportunity. He equipped and staffed Private’s new lab one division at a time. He cut no corners. And soon, law enforcement departments from all over the country hired Private’s lab when they required impeccable work done fast.

  Of course, Private’s clients came first.

  Sci had just returned from the LA County lab with a sample from the gas tank of Jack’s impounded car. He also had a digital chip loaded with 3-D images from all angles of the remains of the Lambo, as well as a preliminary report from the head of the LA Regional Crime Lab, a man Sci had worked with for years.

  Sci put the disk into his computer, then made a slide of the gunk from Jack’s car. He loaded the slide into the new Olympia 9000 gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer and watched it start its run.

  As the machine worked, Sci called psychologist and senior investigator Dr. Justine Smith on the interoffice line.

  Her image came up on the screen. She was wearing a tailored black-and-white-checked jacket, a silk blouse, and a strand of rough-cut rubies around her throat. Her hair was twisted up and held loosely in a few combs, making her look like a figure in a painting by Botticelli.

  Dr. Sci had a crush on Justine, but it was safe to say that he was only one of many men who were crazy about her.

  He said, “Justine, you were there. What happened this morning?”

  “I wish I had some neat observation, but all I saw was the fire, Sci. That’s it.”

  “Let’s go over it anyway.”

  “Whatever I can do to help,” she said.

  Chapter 18

  JUSTINE’S OFFICE WAS on the fourth floor, fifteen seconds by elevator above Sci’s lab. Sci could have gone upstairs or asked Justine to come down, but generally speaking, Sci found virtual contact as informative and satisfying as meeting IRL. And it was usually faster.

  He said to Justine’s image, “What’s the first thing you remember?”

  “Well, I was asleep, when suddenly Jack bolted up in bed. It was an abrupt movement. He gets nightmares, you know.”

  “Yes. He’s told me.”

  “Anyway, I thought he was dreaming, but then I saw light on the wall. And I smelled smoke. Something was burning.”

  “Did you hear an explosion?”

  “Not then. Jack told me to get dressed and he ran out to where he’d parked the car. I ran after him. It took me a moment to realize that the fireball was Jack’s car.

  “And then, there was a blast,” Justine said, “and that knocked Jack off his feet. He’s not hurt, Sci, but I worry about what this means. If it was personal, was blowing up the car the whole point? Or was it a warning? You know, at any given moment, a lot of people are pissed off at him.”

  The machine at Sci’s right blinked to show that the analysis was complete, but it also flashed the words No match.

  “This is odd,” Sci said, turning the screen so that Justine could see the display. “See, the gas tank was BLEVE’d. Blown out, so the explosive was in the tank. However, our spectrometer is calling the explosive ‘unknown.’”

  “An unknown chemical? That has to be a first.”

  “I’m going to have to research this compound, but I can tell you what it was packaged in. Latex.”

  “Like a glove?”

  “Or like a condom. Yep. The machine is telling me we’ve got some spermicidal lubricant here.”

  “Let me get this right. Someone put explosives in a condom? Then put the condom in the gas tank?”

  “Correct. A charge was set under the car to start the fire, and when the fire got hot enough, it melted the latex. That put this chemical in contact with the gas, and boom. That’s my theory, anyway. That’s why there was delay on the explosion. The latex was a delay device.”

  “And what does that tell you?”

  “This is the kind of thing a teenager would think up. A teenager with access to a car and a total disregard for life.”

  Chapter 19

  MY OFFICE OVERLOOKS downtown LA, and the late-afternoon sun was high and hot, glancing off the glassy skyscrapers across the street, blazing over the fast-moving traffic below.

  Dr. Sci was talking to me on the interoffice network, the picture on my screen so high-def, I could see the individual stitches on the seams of his bowling shirt. He was telling me that there was a new chemical explosive at loose in the world.

  “I’m calling it barium trichlormanganate for now,” he said. “I can’t find any reference to its properties.”

  “What’s special about it?” I asked.

  “It requires extreme heat and contact with gasoline to make it ignite,” he told me. “Works fine on a burning car.”

  “Yes, it does.”

  Sci explained how the explosive had been packaged and ignited, went on to say that this new compound was novel but not versatile. He said that there were numerous easily obtained explosives that would work as well or better, including a Molotov cocktail tossed through the car window.

  “So this doesn’t make a lot of sense,” I said.

  “In my humble opinion, this is the kind of thing that a teenager or a gang of teenagers would do, not terrorists or, say,
organized-crime types.”

  “Cops told me that mine is the sixth car in two months to go boom in the night,” I said.

  “That fits with my theory,” Sci said.

  I said good-bye to Sci just as I heard a commotion outside my office. My assistant, Valerie Kenney, came through my door in a huff.

  Val is five eleven, a striking twenty-five-year-old African American woman who went to BU on scholarship, then got her master’s in criminology, also on scholarship, at the University of Miami. Same time she was going for her master’s, she was working nights as a clerk in the back rooms of the Miami PD and helping her mother with an out-of-control younger brother.

  Last year, she learned that I was looking for an assistant and she applied for the job; she accepted the offer with the understanding that she’d get a promotion to investigator in the future if and when I thought she was ready.

  In the short time Val had been working for me, I found her to be smart, disciplined, willing to do any kind of work needed and without being asked. She was also very funny. Val didn’t rile easily. But she was riled now.

  “It’s your brother,” she said. “He showed up downstairs and says he’s coming up here right now. He has no appointment that I know of and no apologies either. You want to see him, Jack? Or you want me to call security?”

  My identical twin, Tommy, was named for my miserable father, Tom Morgan. Tommy is older than me by three minutes, arrogant, a bully, and very likely a killer. I’ve never been able to prove that last, but I have good reason to believe it.

  “Call security,” I said. “No, I’ll do it.” I went for my phone but never reached it.

  Tommy brushed past Val, managing to touch her inappropriately on his way through the door.

  “Oh nooo,” he said with a bright, mocking tone. “Bad Tommy’s here.”

  “What do you want?” I asked him.

  “How’d you like twenty million bucks?” he said. “Got time for me now?”