Diagnosis Murder 3 - The Shooting Script (2 page)

Amy was in a great shape, but not in the surgically enhanced sense—also a plus. She was a one hundred percent natural beauty with a lean, strong, supple body. There didn't seem to be a molecule of body fat on her. She exuded so much youthful vitality, she made Cleve feel elderly at forty—but not so elderly that he doubted for one second that he'd have her in bed before the afternoon was over.

They were two irresistible people who wouldn't be resisting each other much longer.

"Do you live here?" she asked.

Cleve shook his head. "This is just where I go to get away from it all."

"Get away from what?"

He shrugged. "The hustle and bustle."

"I thought you liked the hustle and bustle," she said with a sly grin.

"It depends with whom," said Cleve, so smooth his words could be poured. He saw himself as Dean Martin in his prime, only without the singing voice.

"So where do you live?" she asked.

"I got a place in Mandeville Canyon."

It was a loaded and carefully premeditated reply. By calling his house a
place
, he made it seem unremarkable, which made him come across as relaxed, easy-going and self- deprecating—the very definition of charm.

By slipping in that his place was in secluded Mandeville Canyon, he was actually saying he lived in a mind-blowing estate and that he could afford the ridiculous extravagance of owning two magnificent homes, each worth a high seven figures, that were barely twenty miles apart.

If all the subtext in that deceptively simple remark didn't make her swoon, she wasn't a woman.

'The movie business has been very good to you," Amy said.

It was a good thing she was holding on to the rail, Cleve thought, or she might swoon right into the surf.

"It's going to be very good for you, too."

"Starting when?" Amy said, her eyes sparkling with mischief and possibility.

"Starting now," he said.

The formal seduction had begun at lunch at Granita. The informal seduction began six months ago when he saw her picture in an
LA Times
ad for Macy's fall clearance sale. What most people saw, if they noticed her at all, was a fresh faced girl modeling a discounted sports bra. What Cleve saw was a potential action superstar. He tracked her down, talked her into dumping her agent, and immediately began remaking her.

Of course, she knew Cleve was married, and who he was married to. Everybody did. That was half the attraction for her. Maybe two-thirds. She knew exactly what he was bringing to the party. But so far, she'd been doing all the partying. There hadn't been any festivities for Cleve yet.

That was about to change.

After lunch, Cleve invited her to see his "little beach place" just down the road. Amy said sure, left her Volkswagen Bug in the lot, and let him drive.

She'd ceded control of the afternoon to him the moment she'd slid into the hand-stitched leather interior of his Mercedes SL. Of course, she'd ceded control of so much more six months ago.

And now here they were at his beach house on an exclusive stretch of sand on a bright, sunny, perfect California afternoon. What was going to happen next was as inevitable as the setting of the sun, the dawn of a new day, and the thousand-dollar minimum he spent every time he took his Mercedes in for service.

Cleve went inside and uncorked a bottle of champagne.

"I hope you like Dom Perignon," he said, filling their glasses.

"What are we celebrating?" she asked as she joined him.

"The future," Cleve said.

They clinked their glasses together, unaware that they were sharing a toast to their last two hours alive.

CHAPTER ONE

Mark Sloan was many things: A doctor, a detective, and an amateur magician. But he wasn't a great painter, or even a mediocre one. The seascape he was trying to paint certainly proved that to him.

He was sitting outside at an easel on the second-floor deck of his Malibu beach house, trying his best to capture on canvas the inspirational beauty of the frothy surf, the rolling dunes, and the seagulls floating gently on the breeze.

But there was something missing from the painting and Mark had a pretty good idea what it was.

Talent.

What he'd painted looked like a lopsided blue cake being attacked by a swarm of huge, feathered mosquitoes.

Mark wasn't surprised. He'd never been able to draw, much less paint, but the art supplies were a birthday gift last year from his son. Steve thought his father might enjoy painting in his free time as a way to relieve the stress of being chief of internal medicine at Community General Hospital.

At least that's what Steve said. What his son really wanted was for Mark to occasionally find something else to do besides poke into whatever homicides Steve was investigating for the LAPD.

It wasn't that Steve didn't appreciate Mark's uncanny deductive skills. If he didn't, he would have moved to another city and another police department years ago, far from his father's considerable shadow. Steve genuinely admired and respected his father's innate ability to solve crimes and was grateful to have him to turn to. Even so, Steve had few real opportunities to prove his own abilities within the department, and as much as he admired his father, he still wanted to establish his own reputation apart from him.

So every year, Steve presented his father with a new potential distraction in the guise of a birthday present. A set of golf clubs. Elaborate model airplanes to assemble. A fishing pole and two dozen colorful lures.

With his next birthday fast approaching, Mark felt obligated to finally give last year's present a try. At least with this present, he wouldn't break any windows, glue his hand to any tables, or catch his own buttock with a three-hooked galactic spinner. So when Mark got back home from his shift at the hospital late that afternoon, he finally lugged out the easel, the canvas, and the paint onto the deck, faced the ocean, and began work on his masterpiece.

Mark regarded his seascape for a moment and had a great idea. He'd give the painting to Steve as a gift. Better yet, he'd surprise Steve by hanging it in his son's place. Maybe that way he'd get a good present from Steve this year.

There were many advantages to sharing a house with his son and the opportunity to play a joke like this on Steve was one of them.

He wondered how long Steve would keep the feathered mosquitoes on the wall before the painting was destroyed in a freak accident.

The idea amused Mark so much, he was seriously considering the idea of painting an entire series of awful paintings for his son. But he quickly forgot about all that when he heard the two gunshots.

He instinctively turned in the direction of the shots, the sharp cracks still reverberating in the air. It sounded close—maybe only a few houses away. Almost immediately there was another shot, then one more.

Mark bolted from his seat and rushed into the house, snatching up his medical bag and cell phone on the move, dialing 911 as he hurried out the front door.

He identified himself to the operator, reported the shooting, then told her he was a doctor and that he was going to see if anybody was hurt. Mark hung up on her before she could object.

The right thing to do, Mark knew, was to wait for the police to arrive and secure the scene. But it was rush hour on the Pacific Coast Highway and if there were gunshot victims in the house, they might die before paramedics could arrive to treat them.

Mark wasn't going to let that happen.

The houses were aligned along a narrow, private road just below the highway and led to a dead end. No cars were speeding past him. Nobody was running away. No one was screaming. Either the shooter was still in the house or had fled onto the beach.

The front door was ajar at a house midway down the street. He'd walked past the place many times before over the years, but he'd never met whoever lived there. Unlike Mark, most of the residents along this exclusive stretch of beach were notoriously private people, many of them celebrities or high-powered executives. They kept to themselves and never left their front doors open.

Mark knocked on the door, pushing it wide open as he did so and examining it carefully. There were no obvious signs of forced entry. The lock and the door seemed intact. He supposed the lock could have been picked, but if the door had been pried open, there would have been some splintered wood.

"Hello?" Mark shouted. "Anybody home?"

There was no reply. He could see clear across the living room to the back deck and the ocean beyond. The sliding doors were open. The breeze off the water wafted through the room. Except for the rhythmic Sound of the crashing surf outside, it was eerily quiet.

"I'm Dr. Mark Sloan, your neighbor. I heard the shots." Mark put on a pair of rubber gloves and took a tentative step into the house. "I just stopped by to make sure nobody was hurt."

When no one immediately responded, he marched right in, making sure he was loud and obvious about it.

"I'm alone, but the police and paramedics are on their way," Mark said.

He didn't see any signs of a struggle, but plenty of evidence of a romantic interlude. There was an empty champagne bottle in a bucket full of melted ice. Two empty glasses, one smudged with lipstick, were on the coffee table. The entertainment center was on, but whatever CD had been playing was long over. A woman's high-heeled shoes were flung on the floor. A man's tie was shed on the arm of the couch like a snake's skin.

There had been lovers here. But where were they now?

"There's no reason to hide," Mark said. "I only want to help you."

He glanced out the French doors that opened onto the deck. it was late on a weekday afternoon on a beach lined with private homes. The nearest public access was two miles away. If the shooter had run onto the beach, Mark would have seen him. But there was no one on the sand in either direction for at least a hundred yards.

Was the shooter still in the house?

If he was, Mark would find out soon enough.

He followed a short hallway to what he assumed was the master bedroom, listening intently for any sounds of life and peering into each room he passed. His entire body was tense. It was exactly the way he felt watching a horror movie, his muscles coiled in anticipation of a scare at any moment.

Only this time, the horror was all too real.

Mark pushed open the bedroom door and found the lovers. They were lying naked on the blood-splattered bed. The man appeared to be in his early forties, the woman in her late twenties. They had both been shot once in the head and once in the chest. They were beyond his help now, but he knelt beside them and checked their pulses anyway.

Neither one of the victims was holding a weapon, which ruled out a murder-suicide.

This was an execution.

There was nothing more Mark could do here.

He started back towards the hallway when he felt that familiar tingle in his neck, a shiver from his subconscious telling him there was something wrong with what he'd

seen—some telling detail he saw but didn't consciously register.

It was a feeling he'd learned to respect and never ignore, so he reluctantly turned and surveyed the crime scene again. He studied the bodies and the blood spatter that covered the clock radio, bottled water, and lip balm on the nightstand.

What happened here was clear.

The victims had been in bed, making love, when the killer came in. The shooter stopped at the corner of the bed closest to the door and fired four shots. It was over in less than a minute, neither victim having any chance to react. Their killer was cold and remorseless, strengthened by the resolve that comes either from experience, certainty of purpose, or blind rage.

Mark was sure of all those things.

The story was written in the blood and he'd learned long ago that blood never lied.

The blood
.

He knelt beside the bodies and studied the pools of blood, which were thick and mottled with clots that looked like dark red slugs.

Now he knew what he'd seen that bothered him. It wasn't one little, obscure detail. it was everywhere and unavoidable.

The blood
.

Mark glanced at his watch, then back at the bodies again. It was 4:36 P.M. Only five minutes at most had passed since he heard the gunshots. What he saw didn't make any sense; not if he believed his own eyes and ears. So how was it possible? The bodies in front of him held the answer, and he knew if he acted quickly, he could find it.

Mark took a scalpel and a thermometer from his bag and made an incision in the upper-right portion of the woman's abdomen, just beneath the ribs, exposing the liver. He made a small cut in the liver and inserted the thermometer into the organ. After a moment, he pulled the thermometer out and examined the reading, solving one riddle and opening up an other, just as two police officers burst into the room, guns drawn and leveled at him.

"Don't move," one of the young officers said. "Or we will shoot."

"It's okay," Mark said. "I'm Dr. Mark Sloan, I'm the one who called this in. I'm also a consultant with the LAPD."

The officer didn't blink, pinning him with a deadly gaze. "Drop the knife now."

That's when Mark realized how bad things must look to them. They saw a man in surgical gloves kneeling over two dead bodies with a thermometer and a bloody scalpel in his hands.

Mark dropped the blade on the bed and flashed his most avuncular smile. "Perhaps you know my son, Lt. Steve Sloan? He's a homicide detective."

If the officer heard him, he didn't acknowledge it. "Step back slowly from the bed, lock your hands behind your head and face the wall."

Mark did as he was told.

The officer shoved him flat against the wall, expertly patted him down for weapons, then pulled his arms behind his back and handcuffed him.

"You're under arrest," the officer said and began to read Mark his rights.

CHAPTER TWO

Mark sat handcuffed on the floor in a corner of the living room, watched warily by one of the cops, as more uniformed officers arrived, followed by the paramedics and then, finally, by a homicide detective.