Diagnosis Murder 3 - The Shooting Script (11 page)

Mark slipped the wiretap transcript into his jacket pocket as she approached. Lacey dropped the gym bag on the floor at the edge of the table and slid into the booth beside him so she could face Steve.

"Care for a piece of pecan pie?" Mark asked. "It's quite good here."

"No thank you," Lacey McClure said.

"You'll regret it," Steve said. "This is the best grub in LA."

Lacey gave the restaurant a quick, appraising glance, taking in its scraped linoleum floor, cracked red-vinyl booths, red-and-white checked tablecloths, and vintage, rusted-tin soft drink placards nailed to the faded, paneled walls.

"You eat in this dump a lot?" she asked.

"I own this dump," Steve said. "Want to autograph an 8x 10 for the wall? If you don't have one on you, maybe you can sign your mug shot for me later."

Lacey slid the gym bag over to Steve with her foot. "There's $300,000 in cash in that bag."

"Is that a bribe?" Steve asked.

"It's not for you," Lacey said. "Unless you were the man who called me an hour ago on my private line, offering to sell me evidence that would keep me out of jail."

"It wasn't me," Steve said. "What kind of evidence did he say he had?"

"He didn't. All he told me was that it would cost $300,000," Lacey said. "That seems to be the going rate for a shakedown these days."

"So why not just pay him? Why come to me?"

"Because I don't pay extortion. That's why I left Cleve. This money is bait; I want it back," she said. "And if this guy really has evidence that clears me, I want it to go directly to the police so there's no question about where it came from."

"You had $300,000 in cash just lying around your house?" Mark asked.

"I toss my spare change in a jar every night," she said. "Don't you?"

"How many people have your private number?" Steve asked.

"Just my agent, my manager, and Cleve," she said. "Until today, nobody else ever called me on it."

Steve lifted up the bag and unzipped it just enough to peek inside. It was filled with neatly wrapped bundles of hundred-dollar bills. "Where and when is the meet?"

"The Santa Monica Pier." She glanced at her watch. "In forty minutes."

"That barely gives us time to get there," Steve said, "and no time to put a wire on you or mount a proper surveillance."

"He knew what he was doing," Mark said, then glanced at Lacey. "Is he expecting you to deliver the money yourself?"

She nodded. "He told me to wear this sweatshirt."

Mark frowned. "He knows your private number and that you own a UCLA sweatshirt? He's either someone close to you or he's been watching you for some time."

"I know," she said. "And it creeps me out."

"Let's move." Steve slid out of the booth and picked up the gym bag. "We'll figure out a plan on the way."

* * *

Compared to the elaborate attractions at any of the half-dozen amusement parks in Southern California, the carnival rides at the Santa Monica Pier were about as exciting as the quarter-a-ride kiddie cars found outside of grocery stores, only twenty times more expensive.

The brightly painted midway with its arcade games and cotton candy and loud music tried to capture the energy of a county fair, but it was like trying to energize a decomposing corpse by slathering it with make-up and sticking a Game-boy in its mouth.

Instead of lovingly evoking a bygone era, the pier exuded desperation and decay, which was also an apt description of the thin, wiry man who approached Lacey McClure as she sat at a table in the food court, $300,000 in cash in the gym bag under her chair.

The man was unshaven, with long, greasy hair tied into a ponytail. It looked like a squirrel had crawled onto his head and died. He wore an untucked flannel shirt over baggy cargo pants and a crusty pair of Timberlands.

"You're Lacey McClure, aren't you?" the man said, his thin smile showing only a hint of his nicotine-stained teeth.

"Yes, I am," Lacey said.

"I love your movies," he said.

"How nice," she said. "Which one is your favorite?"

He reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out a Hi8 camcorder cassette, and tossed it on the table in front of her. "This one."

She stared at the tape as if it were a dead rat. "I can buy that for $29.95 on the Internet. What makes you think I'd pay you $300,000 for it?"

"It isn't that one," he said. "Think of this as an unauthorized sequel."

"How do I know I'm not buying a blank tape?"

He took a camcorder the size of a box of cigarettes out of his pocket, slipped the cassette into it, then placed it on the : the tiny screen facing Lacey. What she saw made the color drain from her cheeks.

"You bastard," she hissed.

He grabbed the camcorder, ejected the tape, and handed the cassette to her. "You got a funny way of saying thank you.,,

The man pocketed the camcorder, reached under Lacey's chair, and dragged out the gym bag. "But this will make up for it."

He unzipped the bag, glanced at the cash, then closed it again.

"Did you make any copies of that ugly little tape?" she asked.

The man only grinned, giving her a good look at his teeth this time, before turning his back on her and walking away.

That's when he saw Steve Sloan standing at the mouth of the food court, arms held loosely at his sides, staring at him with the flinty determination of a frontier marshal waiting to draw on a gunfighter.

The man turned around the way he came, realizing only then why Lacey McClure, who now had a smug smile on her face, had chosen that table. He was being herded into a bottleneck. The only other way out was a crowded, narrow pathway between the arcade games and the bumper cars.

But he had no choice. He weaved quickly among the tables toward the pathway, his eyes scanning the crowd ahead of him for adversaries.

He should have been looking at his feet.

Mark Sloan stuck out his leg as the man passed, sending the blackmailer tumbling to the ground. A ponytailed wig flew off the man's head into the bumper car arena, where it became roadkill.

Steve was on the man an instant later, yanking the blackmailer's arms behind his back and slapping on handcuffs be fore pulling him to his feet. The man's fake yellowed teeth were knocked loose, revealing the pearly whites hidden underneath.

"Nice move, Dad," Steve said to his father, who sat at one of the tables, casually enjoying a bag of popcorn.

"Sometimes the simplest methods are the best," Mark said with a smile, drawing his leg back under the table.

CHAPTER TEN

Mark and Steve watched the video on a television set they wheeled into the captain's office. The man Steve apprehended at the pier sat in an adjoining interrogation room while Lacey McClure sat out in the squad room, giving her statement to a detective.

The video was taken outside the Slumberland Motel, a purple-painted cinderblock eyesore near the intersection of the Pacific Coast Highway and Kanan Dune Road. Mark and Steve had driven past it a thousand times and wondered how it had survived on such a valuable piece of "Malibu-adjacent" property. The Slumberland had always looked like the kind of place that had condom vending machines in the front office and vibrating beds in each room.

The date and time the video was shot was stamped in the corner of the screen. It was the day of the double murders. The time was 3:13 P.M.

Lacey McClure drove up in her vintage Mustang and parked beside a huge Cadillac Escalade in front of the last room at the far end of the low-lying, one-story building. The number on the room door was 16. She got out wearing the same tight black tank top and gray shorts she'd been wearing when Mark and Steve first met her. The only slight attempt she made to obscure her identity was a pair of dark sunglasses and a baseball cap.

There was an excited, girlish bounce to her step as she hurried to the room and knocked on the door. It was opened an instant later by a man in his late twenties with the chiseled, blow-dried good looks of an aftershave model.

The man swept Lacey up in his arms, lifting her off her feet as they embraced in a deep, passionate kiss. She wrapped her legs around him and they tumbled back into the room, the man closing the door with a swift kick.

There was a quick cut in the film, and then they saw the motel from a different angle. The cameraman was on a hill side at the end of the building, looking down on the back window of the last room on the end. The shades were half-drawn, leaving just enough of the window open to see Lacey, her naked back to the camera, straddling her lover on the bed and grinding rhythmically against him. When she bent over to kiss him, her body resembled the poised tail of the scorpion that was tattooed on her lower back.

The time was 3:47 P.M.

There was another cut, and then the motel room was seen from the front again, only from an angle that also showed the gas station across the Pacific Coast Highway and an LAPD patrol car speeding past, lights flashing.

Lacey emerged from the motel room, gave her lover a long, languorous kiss, then got into her car and drove off. The time stamp was 4:35.

The tape ended. Mark stared at the blank screen as if he still saw images flickering past. He was replaying the video again in his mind, time stamps and all. Steve studied the rigid expression on his father's face. It was an expression Steve had seen many times before. His father had become a guided missile locking on to its target. The only way to stop him now would be if he self-destructed.

"Now I
know
Lacey McClure killed Cleve Kershaw and Amy Butler," Mark said.

"Why are you so certain?"

"Because now confusing facts of the murder make perfect sense," Mark said. "It was all contrived to give her this airtight alibi."

"This video doesn't prove anything. Whoever made this could have stamped any time and date on there if he wanted," Steve said. "It could have been taken two days, two months, or two years ago."

Mark shook his head. "The time and date are accurate, I guarantee it. You'll be able to corroborate everything. I'd start by checking the number of the patrol car we saw going by. I'll bet it was the two officers responding to my 911 call."

"If you're right, and the time stamp on this video is accurate, then there's no way Lacey McClure could have fired the shots you heard," Steve said. "Or even the shots you didn't hear an hour earlier."

"That's why there's no question she did it."

Steve stared at his father. "I'm not sure that's the best argument to make in front of a jury, assuming this case ever gets that far."

"It will," Mark said, his eyes blazing with determination. "I'd like a copy of that tape."

"No problem," Steve said. "You think she arranged everything at the pier today to get this tape into our hands?"

"Not directly, but I'm sure she manipulated events to her advantage," Mark said. "Lacey McClure is very shrewd, Steve. It would be a big mistake for either one of us to underestimate her intelligence."

"Then let's start with Nick Stryker," Steve said. "Maybe we'll learn something from him that will help us crack her."

"Who's Nick Stryker?"

"The guy who supposedly tried to shake down Lacey at the pier with this video," Steve said, tossing an evidence baggie onto the table containing Stryker's driver's license and other ID. "He's a licensed private detective."

"I should have guessed from the name," Mark said, examining the IDs.

"Maybe that's why he picked it," Steve said. "Somehow Zanley Rosencrantz doesn't evoke the same rugged image, does it?"

Nick Stryker looked a lot healthier without the wig and false teeth. His tall, lanky frame fit uneasily into the rigid metal chair he was sitting in, prompting him to shift constantly in a futile effort to get comfortable.

The fact was, nobody could get comfortable in the seat. It was designed that way. One leg was also shorter than the other, to keep whoever was sitting in the seat off balance throughout their interview.

The seat was also positioned so that Stryker was forced to look at his own reflection in the mirror, which hid observers on the other side. It had been crafted, like a funhouse mirror, to narrow and stretch his face, to make him appear to himself as weak and sickly.

Changing his seat to one of the two across from him wasn't an option. He was handcuffed to the armrest.

Steve came in alone, careful to take a seat that wouldn't obscure Mark's view of Stryker from the observation room.

"How you doing, Zanley?" Steve asked.

"The name is Stryker, Nick Stryker. And I don't appreciate being handcuffed to this chair."

"Lacey McClure doesn't appreciate being blackmailed," Steve said.

Stryker snorted with derision. "Blackmail is the extortion of money or something of value from a person by threatening to expose embarrassing information or criminal acts. I didn't make any threats. Therefore, I didn't commit blackmail. Therefore, you got nothing on me."

"Then what would you call demanding $300,000 in cash for that video?"

"A bargain price," Stryker said. "I could have sold it to the tabloids for twice as much. But I felt I owed her first crack at it."

"Why's that?"

"Out of respect for Cleve. He was the one who hired me to follow her. He suspected she was having an affair. Ironic, huh?" Stryker said. "Cleve is banging some bimbo and he's worried his wife isn't being faithful."

"I thought they were separated."

"If they were, why would he care who she was boinking?"

"They weren't living apart?"

"He went home every night," Stryker said. "And so did she, except when she was shooting a movie someplace else."

"So how is it you're respecting Cleve Kershaw by selling Lacey the video you made of her cheating on him?"

"She's his next of kin," Stryker said. "I'm making sure the dirty laundry I found for him is staying in his family. I'm being discreet, ergo, respectful."

"As long as you're being so respectful, why not just give the tape to her?"

"There's a matter of my fee," Stryker said. "Cleve got killed before he could pay me. I incurred expenses."