City of Fire (14 page)

But then she found the drops of semen in the den, and Rhodes discovered the murder weapon in the dishwasher. Brant’s alibi fell apart, his wife’s colleague opened the door to spousal abuse over an unwanted pregnancy, and Lena caught Brant in a lie during their interview. Thinking it over, she realized that she didn’t want Brant to be the one. That she secretly hoped he wasn’t the one as each new piece of the puzzle fell into place. This was a crime on the list of many other crimes that didn’t need to happen. Brant may have been prone to domestic violence but, like Jose Lopez, was not a psychopath and could have taken a time-out and sought counseling. He could have walked away.

She looked back at the man, struck by an overwhelming feeling of disappointment. As he drained the bottle of water and tossed it in a nearby trash can, she studied his face, comparing it with the face of the man who had been found guilty of dumping his pregnant wife into the San Francisco Bay. Outward appearances yielded nothing, she thought. In both cases, they could have been neighbors, friends, even relatives, and Lena would never have guessed what was really going through their minds. She wondered at what point in their lives they crossed the line. She wondered what the experience might have been that set them off. How their thought processes worked from thinking about the crime to actually performing it. How much time they spent wondering if others could read what they were thinking.

It defied explanation, yet it was there. James Brant thought he could beat the box but failed.

“What about the control questions?” Paladino blurted out.

Lena turned away from the door and moved in beside Novak. Rodriguez was scrolling forward on the time line.

“Here’s the first control question,” he said, pointing at the screen. “‘Have you ever stolen anything?’ Your client answered yes, and you can see his lack of response. His
blood pressure and heart rate, everything remains stable. He stole candy from a drugstore as a child and answered truthfully.”

Paladino shrugged it off. “So did everybody else. What came next?”

“‘Have you ever been arrested for anything other than drunk driving?’” Rodriguez said. “He answered no, and again there’s no sign of deception. There’s no overt physiological response.”

“I should have been given the opportunity to review the questions before they were asked.”

“I’m sorry, Counselor, but I understand why you’re disappointed with the results. Every time I repeated a question specific to the crime, I got the same response. Look at his perspiration level jump when I asked him if he ever struck his wife.”

“How did you phrase the question?”

“‘Other than last January, have you ever hit your wife?’ Your client answered no. It’s a fair question and it’s specific enough to exclude the incident he mentioned in his statement. If we dig into his past, I think you’ll find a history of spousal abuse. I think we’d learn that he struck his wife several times. Look at his heart rate and blood pressure. When I asked if he murdered her, they’re off the chart.”

Paladino’s anger was out in the open now. “Hey, wait a minute. This test was performed on a computer, not a polygraph instrument.”

“It’s digital,” Rodriguez said. “It’s more accurate than an analog system.”

“What if there’s a software problem?”

Lena looked at Novak and caught the faintest of smiles. Paladino was doing Paladino, dancing his way through another shell game as if getting ready for court.

“This equipment is working perfectly,” Rodriguez said.

“Maybe it is,” the attorney said. “But maybe it isn’t. I can’t tell because I’m not an expert in computer science. All I know is that I see a heart rate and some indication that my client is breathing. But can this machine detect a lie?”

Everyone remained quiet.

Rodriguez narrowed his eyes. “You know the answer to that question without asking, Counselor.”

Paladino shook his head. “All I know is that there’s a reason why the ACLU calls this stuff voodoo science.”

“Call it what you want, Counselor, but your client was most likely attempting to be deceptive when he answered these questions. If you’d like a copy of the results, I’d be happy to print them out.”

Paladino flashed that vicious smile of his, stepping away from the table and checking his watch. “I’ll take a pass on that, Mr. Rodriguez. Unless there’s any objection, I think I’ll show my client the door.”

He waited a beat with his back turned. When no one said anything, he stepped into the hall. Lena’s eyes flicked to Brant, sitting at the desk in the other room, trying to get a read on him. Their eyes met and she realized that Brant had been staring at her.

“Let’s get out of here,” Paladino said.

Brant looked away from her and jumped to his feet, his face flooding with relief. Lena watched with the others as Brant exited the section with his attorney and vanished around the corner. When she heard the elevator open and close, she glanced at Sanchez and Rhodes, then turned to her partner, still staring through the doorway.

“He’s loose,” Novak said. “He’s free.”

THE marine layer was so thick, the night so dark, Lena couldn’t see the ocean as they made a right on West Channel and started working their way into the hills. Sanchez lived at the beach in Playa Del Rey and had offered to give Lena a lift back to the crime scene where she’d left her car. The clock on the dash read 10:15 p.m., but as she looked out the windshield at the bright wall of fog, it felt later than that. Maybe two or three days later.

She had reached the point where caffeine no longer had an effect. The entire team had, and she wondered how Sanchez was managing the narrow road. He looked exhausted and hadn’t said a word for the last twenty minutes. As she thought it over, she realized that he had been quiet for most of the day. While they’d waited on Paladino, she’d seen Sanchez walk away from his desk two or three times with his cell phone.

Sanchez made a left on Oak Tree and rolled over the wooden bridge. Idling past the death house without looking at it, he pulled over and stopped behind Lena’s car.

“You okay driving, Tito?”

“Sure, Lena. How ’bout you?”

“I’m good,” she said. “But you’ve been pretty quiet.”

He paused a moment, thinking it over. “Problems at home.”

“Bad?”

“Bad enough.”

Lena knew that Sanchez was three years in on his second
marriage. She had never met his wife but heard that they were particularly close.

“I love my work,” he said. “And I love my wife. It pisses me off sometimes when I think maybe I can’t have both.”

“She doesn’t like the long hours.”

He laughed. “She’d be happier with a nine-to-fiver, but she’ll get over it. She always has. One night with a banker and she’d be crying foul.” His eyes moved to the clock. “I better drag my ass home.”

Lena grabbed her briefcase and climbed out, watching him turn the car around. As the taillights faded into the night, she spotted the parking tickets on her windshield. There were three, stacked neatly beneath the wiper. Fighting off the urge to tear them up, she stuffed the tickets into her briefcase and glanced through the fog at the death house. She could barely see it and was about to turn away when she noticed the light in the trees.

It was a beam of light, rippling across the treetops, then vanishing into the backyard. She kept her eyes on the canopy, wondering if the stray shaft of light wasn’t from Sanchez’s car as he made the turn and drove back down the hill on the other side of Rustic Canyon Park. But when the beam reappeared, the path it cut was too narrow and jittery to be from any car.

Someone was on the property.

She popped open the trunk, dumped her briefcase inside, and grabbed a flashlight without turning it on. Legging it down the street, she stopped before the house and listened. She could hear her heart beating, the sound of the stream behind her, but nothing else. Only silence coming from the back of the house, and the sight of that intermittent light jiggling overhead.

She stepped beneath the crime scene tape, walked to the end of the drive, and started into the yard.

She moved slowly, one step at a time, estimating her range of vision through the fog at less than twenty yards. When she reached the backyard, she heard someone mutter something and stopped for a look around the corner.

Someone was standing on the rear terrace fiddling with the lock on the back door. The light she’d seen had come from a flashlight cradled in the figure’s arms.

Lena reached for her gun, drew the weapon from her holster, and stepped around the corner. Eyeballing the figure, she inched her way along the back of the house. The figure was taking on detail now. It was a man and he had his back turned. A large man with brown hair wearing a wrinkled white shirt.

It was Brant, fumbling with a set of keys. Apparently, he didn’t use the back door often and couldn’t find the right key.

She stopped just short of the terrace. Her flashlight was a high-powered model that could produce a light almost as oppressive as the sun. She pointed the lens at the man and switched it on. Brant nearly jumped out of his skin. Jerking his body around, he shielded his eyes with outstretched hands and started shaking.

“Who’s there?” he shrieked. “Who is it?”

“What do you think you’re doing, Mr. Brant?”

He picked up on her voice. “It’s you,” he shouted. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“You’ve got the question right,” she said. “And now I need an answer.”

She could see his eyes trying to penetrate the light. After a moment, he noticed the gun in her right hand. A .45-caliber semiautomatic with a black finish that weighed a mere 25.6 ounces but held nine plus one rounds when fully loaded.

“Why are you pointing that at me?”

“This is still a crime scene,” she said. “Maybe you didn’t notice that the house is sealed. Or maybe you’ve forgotten why. I don’t really give a shit.”

He took a step toward her. She pushed the business end of her gun into the light so that he could get a better look at the weapon. She wished her heart would stop beating so fast.

“Easy, Mr. Brant. You probably don’t want to do that.”

He stepped back and lowered his hands. “This isn’t necessary. This is crazy. Put that thing away.”

“You haven’t answered my question,” she said. “And I’m
no mind reader. I don’t know why you’re here or what you’re up to. I can only tell you what I know for certain.”

“What’s that?”

“If anything happens here tonight—if you should lunge toward me, if you should accidently trip or fall—you’re going to die, and I’m not.”

She tightened her grip on the gun. His eyes flicked to the muzzle, then rocked back as if he knew it was a .45.

“Nothing’s gonna happen here,” he shouted.

“Then take a deep breath and tell me why you’re trying to break into the house.”

“It’s my house. Everything inside it belongs to me.”

“You’re committing a crime, Mr. Brant.”

“All I want are my clothes. It’s the truth. That’s why I’m here. I’m sneaking into my own fucking house for a clean pair of underwear.”

Lena paused a moment, appraising the man. That crazy look in his eyes. His sleeves were rolled up, and she noted the muscle definition in his forearms. There was no question in her mind that he was stronger than her. More powerful than her.

“That’s what friends are for,” she said calmly. “Why don’t you go to a friend’s house, borrow a change of clothes, and get some rest?”

“Friends? That’s a good one. Every friend I’ve got thinks exactly the same thing you do.”

“And what’s that?”

He paused a moment, then spit on the flagstone. “That I murdered Nikki. Fuck those assholes. I don’t have any friends.”

“Then get a room at a hotel.”

He lowered his eyes and didn’t say anything. Lena took one step onto the terrace and stopped, estimating the distance between them at ten feet.

“Where’s your car?” she asked.

“In the lot at the park. I’ve been driving around ever since my lawyer dropped me off.”

“I want you to remove your car key and drop the ring on the ground.”

“What about my keys to the office?”

“Like I said before, I’m no mind reader. I don’t know which key goes where. You’ll have to get another set from somebody at work.”

He gave her a long, pissed-off look and shook his head, then removed the key with his right hand and tossed the ring onto the flagstone. Lena took another step to her left, offering the angry man a wide path to the backyard.

“You can leave now, Mr. Brant. Someone will let you or your attorney know when you can come back. When they do, you’ll be able to use the front door.”

He didn’t say anything. He started to, but stopped. Then he closed his fist around the key and marched toward the rear fence with his flashlight. Lena switched off her own, watching Brant’s ghostlike figure vanish into the fallen clouds. She heard him climb the fence, drop down on the other side, and swear. When the beam of light started up the hill toward the park, she holstered her gun and filled her lungs with a load of fresh air.

She paused a moment to take it in. She could smell the ocean, but also the earth.