City of Fire (34 page)

Lena gazed through the doorway into the basement. Burell’s corpse had been removed two hours ago, still winking at them as they zipped him up in the body bag. SID techs were packing up, the whereabouts of Burell’s sex organs still a mystery. Like every other crime scene in this case, they were able to document what happened, but they couldn’t come up with a single piece of evidence that pointed to the doer. No fingerprints. No hair or fiber. Just the murder weapons. Twelve bottles of Viagra and a foot-long carving knife that Novak found when he checked the dishwasher.

It was like hitting the void. Until now, she thought. Until Romeo murdered Burell and a picture began to form. Not just a sketch of
what
happened, but their first glimpse at
why.

“We’re not chasing a serial killer, are we, Hank. Romeo’s angry. He’s insane. But there’s a decent chance none of this is random.”

His eyes shimmered in the dim light. “I think we’ve finally caught a break. The blonde lives in Santa Monica. Let’s start with her.”

BARBIE Beckons’s legal name turned out to be Esther Ludina, a twenty-four-year-old female who emigrated from Moscow to Tijuana and now lived in a two-bedroom condo at Eleventh and Ocean Park in Santa Monica. She weighed in at about ninety pounds, stood five and a half feet off the ground in a pair of spiked heels, and wore skintight jeans with her stage name embroidered on a low-cut, semitransparent blouse.

She had been willing to speak with them, off the record and with a frankness Lena didn’t expect. Although both detectives agreed that the description of Romeo they’d worked up on the drive over had enough meat to make the trip worthwhile, Ludina couldn’t provide much more than an offer to shed her doll-like top and show them her boob job.

She knew plenty of men who worked out and had what she called “girlie skin.” It went with the job, she said. Half of them even had English names and were tall. But not one was bald, and that went with the job, too. A buffed head might be sexy in real life, but reflected too much glare, she told them. It looked bad when they switched on the camera lights. It was something she’d noticed as both an actress and director of her first triple-X film,
Barbie Meets the Three Kens.
Something that took the viewer’s eye away from the girl. No good, she said with Russian verve. The only reason guys buy this crap is to look at the girl.

Lena crossed her name off the list and they got back in the car. As they pulled into traffic, she paged through Burell’s
file, found another model, and gave Novak the address. Of the twenty-three women on the Web site, all but a handful lived in or near Romeo’s comfort zone.

They worked the list hard and by the end of the day had cut it down by half. Five women had been home, and six answered their cell phone and agreed to meet them so quickly that Lena thought they might have been waiting for the call. Every one of them had been willing to talk. By the time they reached the twelfth model, a TV was on and Lena understood why.

It was sweeps week. The local news stations were beating the terror drum and speculating on the blind that Burell’s death had something to do with what they were now calling the Romeo Love Murders.

No one could deny that the body count was piling up. Three women were dead, a rock musician with a brand name, and now a sleazy porno operator. But Romeo was no longer just a story. He had become a franchise, consuming the first fifteen minutes of the six-o’clock broadcast, with updates promised throughout the night and more
team coverage
at eleven. When the newsreader offered his own theory that just maybe Romeo got started five years ago by murdering David Gamble, and the reporter in the field shook her empty head and said, “Only time will tell,” Lena stopped listening.

NOVAK’S CELL PHONE
rang. After glancing at the LCD, he mouthed the words
My ex-wife
and pulled to a stop before a run-down apartment house one block east of Main in Venice. It was 11:30 p.m. Lena could hear the rain tapping against the roof. The rush of wind pushing against the car, then letting go. In spite of the weather, Novak gave her a nod and climbed out of the car with his cell phone.

Lena settled back in the passenger seat, watching her partner find cover beneath the building’s open-air garage and letting her mind drift.

Ever since James Brant had been cleared in his wife’s murder, everyone had been looking at Romeo as if he were a
boilerplate serial killer choosing his victims at random. Although she thought the sexual assaults might still be random, and that until last month Romeo was a serial rapist working off the grid, the murders had an entirely different feel about them. Something that hadn’t revealed itself until Burell was tortured and killed.

As she gazed out the window, she mulled it over. Burell’s death read like punishment. Romeo might be angry and psychotic, but when he murdered Burell, he had a motive. A reason Lena could see and touch and understand.

She heard the door open and watched Novak climb in behind the wheel, his face dusted with rain. When he looked at her, she could see sadness in his eyes. Worry.

“What did she want?”

He flipped on the wipers and pulled away from the curb. “It’s Kristin. I think she’s using again.”

It hung there. Novak’s favorite daughter falling off the wagon. When Lena saw her the other night, she thought she was doing better than that. Novak made a left on Lincoln, heading for the freeway a half mile up the road.

“They had a fight,” he said. “When Kristin ran off, she searched her room.”

“What did she find?”

He paused a moment, his mind going. “Sounds like coke. But I need to make sure. Okay if we call it a night?”

She nodded. It was too late to work Burell’s list anymore.

“Who’s got the keys to Holt’s house?” she asked.

He turned, trying to get a read on her.

“I’m not tired, Hank. And we’ve got the autopsy in the morning. I left Holt’s place early, remember.”

“Rhodes has ’em. If you want, we can stop by his place on the way downtown. I’ll go in and you won’t have to deal with him.”

She thought about how Rhodes had spent his day, tagging her brother’s murder on Tim Holt’s dead body. Whether it had been a perfect fit, or if changes needed to be cooked up behind the great blue curtain to make it all fly.

“That’s okay,” she said.

He shrugged and turned back to the road. As the light from a passing car struck his face, she could see him wrestling with his thoughts just as she was.

“It’s been a long day,” he said.

She nodded at him.

“The kind that used to end with a drink,” he said. She caught the slight grin.

“Fuck it,” he said. “I’m not tired either. If you get the keys, I’ll check out my daughter’s stash and meet you at Holt’s in an hour. Sound good?”

“I’ll buy you a Diet Coke.”

RHODES slid the keys across his desk. “Take them, Lena. Do whatever the hell you want. I lost a night’s sleep working that gun and I’m too tired to argue.”

He lit a cigarette and leaned back in his chair. They were sitting in his home office, a converted sunporch that hung over a steep hill halfway up Beachwood Canyon on Glen Alder. But as Lena studied his face, his dark eyes, she didn’t think he was looking at the close-up view of the Hollywood sign, or even the lights strung across the basin leading to downtown. Rhodes had shut her off and was as cold and distant as he was when she’d made the move to RHD.

He tapped the head of his smoke into an ashtray brimming with dead butts. Although Lena had noticed the pack in his pocket this morning, she had never seen him smoke before and couldn’t remember ever smelling it on his breath or clothes. He looked pale and strung out and stiff as a machine. In spite of the leather jacket he wore over his T-shirt, his body now appeared more skinny than lean. Even the scar from the earring he used to wear was more pronounced than just a day or two ago. Not from the dim lighting or even losing a night’s sleep, she figured, but from a case of nerves and what she estimated was a sudden loss of five to ten pounds.

Her eyes moved to the papers on his desk. Her brother’s murder book removed from the binder and piled up in sections. Three spiral notebooks were set beside the telephone, which she guessed were Tim Holt’s journals. When she first
arrived, the notebook on top had been open. Rhodes had marked his place and quickly set it aside.

“Why are you doing this?” she whispered in a hoarse voice.

“It’s over, Lena. Holt shot your brother. Case closed.”

She felt the fire in her belly—a pain that hadn’t been there before—and wondered if she was getting an ulcer. Tito Sanchez might be green enough to go with the flow, but not Rhodes. He was an experienced detective. Cool, thoughtful, inventive, with a wicked sense of humor that used to make her laugh.

Had their meeting so many years ago been a matter of bad timing? Or was it really her good fortune that nothing happened? As she looked at his sullen face smoking that cigarette, she couldn’t be sure.

“I don’t understand why,” she repeated.

He kept his eyes on the window. “In the end I guess you’re no different than anybody else.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Everybody’s got an opinion, Lena. Especially these days. Everybody wants to tell you what they think. That’s okay with me as long as no one crosses the line. As long as nobody thinks they have a right to the facts. Facts have nothing to do with opinion. Facts are facts, and with your brother’s murder, there’s no turning back.”

“You think Romeo picked Holt’s house out of a hat. You think he stepped off his home turf and just happened to kill Jane Doe.”

He wouldn’t look at her and didn’t respond.

Lena pressed forward. “With all the years you’ve put in at the homicide table, you don’t see even the possibility that something’s wrong?”

“Facts are facts. I won’t color them, and I can’t change them. When the DNA comes in, maybe even you will see the light.”

“Who’s pushing this through? Barrera? The new chief? Or is everything coming from you?”

He actually smiled. Leaning across the desk, he raised the window an inch. When he spoke, his words came slowly, deliberately.

“The firearms unit confirmed that the gun Holt took his life with was the same weapon used to murder your brother. It wasn’t a throw-down gun. Holt bought it and we have the receipt.”

“I heard that before. If you can plant a gun, I guess you can plant a receipt.”

“Yeah, sure, Lena. Just like OJ’s glove. I buried the fucking thing when no one was looking.”

“Facts are facts,” she said. “And it seems like you’re the keeper of the facts.”

“I don’t care if you hate me. I don’t give a shit. I spent the afternoon talking to Holt’s doctor. His shrink at the clinic. He told me that your brother’s death had become an obsession for Holt. That he was so fixated on the murder that it slowed down his recovery. Meeting after meeting, all he wanted to talk about was the murder. His shrink said Holt had a lot on his mind. A lot to get off his chest.”

She kept her eyes on him. “Guilty people usually do, right?”

“I didn’t put the words in the shrink’s mouth and I didn’t lead him on. When I called and told him Holt was dead, it was the first thing out of his fucking mouth.”

“What about Jane Doe’s identity?”

He fell back into his chair, looked at her a moment, then shook his head.

He was angry. Visibly attempting to reel his emotions in. Her mind clicked back fourteen hours to the moment she’d seen his signature on the checkout card at the Records Retention Center. The old woman handing her the murder book and blessing her on the way out. As she tossed it over, she heard Rhodes’s girlfriend bang a pot in the kitchen. She looked through the French doors and saw the woman staring at them as she did the dishes. Lena had seen her before. A green-eyed blonde with a gentle face and a figure drawn in
curves. Tonight she seemed particularly moody. When their eyes met, the woman turned away.

“It’s been a long day,” Lena said. “I’d forgotten what you said with Barrera this morning. Holt was jealous. I guess that’s as good a reason as any to take a shot at your best friend.”