Yesterday's Echo (17 page)

Melody must have hid the drive in the dog food the morning the police told her about Windsor and took her downtown. She'd stayed behind in the kitchen a few minutes while I talked to the detectives. Was this why Melody had wanted to come back to my house tonight? Was she going to show me whatever was on that drive? Or was she going to try to take it back without me knowing?

Maybe there was evidence on it that would exonerate Melody and point the finger at someone else. Like Peter Stone. I went into the spare bedroom that served as my office and turned on the computer. After it booted up, I plugged in the flash drive and opened it. A menu appeared on my computer monitor.

There was only one folder on the menu, entitled with the letter
A
. I clicked the icon next to the title and the computer made a whirring sound and then a video image appeared, time stamped nine years ago.

A video image of a naked woman sat on the end of a bed with her head down. The camera shot was static, from the foot of the bed, and elevated. The bed was unmade and had only a fitted sheet on the mattress. There was a small leather case next to the woman
and she held a hypodermic needle in her right hand. She crossed her left leg over her right knee at the ankle, spread her toes with her left hand, and plunged the needle into the
V
formed by her big toe and the one next to it.

Back on the beat in Santa Barbara, some of the hookers shot heroin between their toes to hide the track marks.

The woman dropped the needle and raised her head. She was young, early twenties, and pretty. But she was pale and more skinny than healthy, and her blue eyes were too old for her face.

A young Angela Albright stuck a finger into her mouth and fell back onto the bed in slow motion, like a leaf falling from a tree.

The video cut to another scene and it only got worse. Same room, same bed, same camera angle. Same Angela Albright. Only this time she was with a man. He put some money on the night-stand next to the bed and the two of them had sex. The clip didn't have any sound, but none was needed. The sex was rough, consensual, and demeaning.

More scenes of the same followed. Different men, multiple men, women. Always the same room and same camera angle. I got the sense that none of the participants knew they were being filmed, not even Angela. The camera was hidden, but someone had to have put it there. Adam Windsor?

Now Angela's drunken babbling in Muldoon's that night made sense. The manila envelope that had fallen out of her purse and she'd been so quick to grab back up; blackmail money. She'd been looking for the devil to pay him off, but I'd sent her home before he arrived. Adam Windsor showed up later. Video of the potential next First Lady of California shooting smack and turning tricks would be worth a lot of blackmail dollars. It was also a good enough motive for murder. Had Angela gone home, sobered up, and then tracked down Windsor in Melody's motel room and killed him?

It didn't seem possible. The drunk she'd been on would still be there when she woke up the next morning or afternoon. But the flash drive showed she knew her way around heroin. She might still
know where to get it and someone else might have been holding the needle. Her husband? He had more to lose than anyone. Angela had said he'd been campaigning in L.A. that night, but Los Angeles was only a two-hour drive away. That left plenty of time to put down Windsor. But why kill him and not take the flash drive?

How did Melody end up with it and why weren't the police knocking down my door right now looking for it? Surely Melody knew that, at the worst, the flash drive would widen the field of suspects. Unless there was something on it that could hurt her.

I continued fast-forwarding through the images, looking for anything different from the debauchery I'd been scrolling through for the last half hour.

Something changed and I hit play to slow down the action. The room was different from the one in all the other scenes. Expensive furnishings, mood lighting. The angle of the camera was different, too. Much lower and off to the left. To the right, beyond a luxurious bed, the corner of a floor-to-ceiling window caught a high-up view of the Eiffel Tower at night. Next to it, below, the very top of a hot air balloon could be seen. Except this one was festooned with neon lights.

Paris. Casino. Las Vegas.

A couple seconds later, Angela jumped onto the bed. She looked healthier than in the other scenes. And happy. She beckoned to someone off screen and a man came toward the bed from the left. In profile, you could see one dead eye and a square chin.

Peter Stone.

He got on the bed and they started to make love. No money exchange. Nothing rough or demeaning. They looked like the sex meant more that just a physical release. I fast-forwarded and a minute later the screen went black. The Angela Albright show was over.

I sat back in my chair. Peter Stone, Angela Albright, Adam Windsor. Where did Melody fit in? Windsor and Melody had been married, but when? Before this? During? The time stamp was nine years old. Up until three weeks ago, Windsor had been in prison
for the last eight years. Where had Melody been when the scenes on the flash drive went down? And why did she have the drive now? Were she and her ex-husband running a blackmail ring that picked up where it left off when he got out of prison? Or had she grabbed the drive so she could break a
National Enquirer
-style story that would catapult her onto journalism's big stage?

And what about Stone? Was a nine-year-old sex tape with a beautiful woman really something to fear? He may have tried to rebuild his image of a onetime casino owner, but everyone still knew he was from Vegas. Sex tapes were almost part of the Vegas résumé. It might be reason enough for murder to Steven or Angela Albright who had visions of the governor's mansion, but not Stone. Maybe he still loved Angela and was protecting her, but not from infidelity. The Albrights had only been married for six years, the tape was nine years old. There had to be more. Maybe it was behind the storage unit door that the key Melody left behind opened.

I drained three more beers and went to bed with more questions than answers.

In a moment between sleep and awake, something happened and my bedroom became very small. I opened my eyes and tried to listen with them. I didn't see or hear anything, but I felt something. I slowly pulled the sheets back and got out of bed. Then I heard a noise in the kitchen.

Someone was inside my house.

I suddenly wished the clerk at the gun shop had been willing to sell me something under the counter without a paper trail.

I crept out of my room in the dark. The cool night had hushed back down and closed silent around me. My cell phone sat on the table by the front door in the living room. Without Midnight, or a gun, the phone was my best defense. My eyes adjusted to the darkness, and I kept the lights off. I made it into the living room, ten feet from the phone, when a tiny beam of light shot out from the kitchen. A large, dark figure followed behind it.

I froze. My heart pounded in my ears. The light traced slowly across the room and then suddenly locked on my face. I jerked to the left and bolted for the door.

But he was too close.

I turned to face him before he reached me. He was dressed all in black, including a ski mask. Two inches of lightning crackled in his hand as he lunged at my chest. A stun gun.

Instinct took over.

I blocked his lunge with my left forearm, spun to my right, and caught his yarn-covered jaw with a right cross. It took him by surprise and the mask wasn't much protection. He staggered back a step. I bounced on the balls of my feet with my hands held high.
Ski Mask stabbed the stun gun at me again. This time I caught his arm and yanked it down on my rising knee. He yelped and the stun gun thumped onto the carpet. I kicked it away and went to work.

He tried to crowd me with his superior size. But I pistoned a left jab just as he stepped in with a looping right. The jab had a lot of shoulder behind it and snapped his head back as his blow bounced off my extended arm. I dug a right uppercut to his belly and followed with a left hook flush on his cheek. He stumbled against the wall. I grabbed at the back of his jacket to pull it over his head and finish him with a hockey punch, but caught his ski mask instead. It came off in my hand.

Even in the darkness he couldn't hide. The younger version of the hard boys who jumped me looking for Melody. He wasn't so tough without his big buddy backing him up. He lunged at me and I shot a straight right that caught him dead between the eyes. I heard the crack and the impact shot through my knuckles all the way up my arm. He slumped to his knees and threw both hands up to his nose.

My turn.

I bent over and grabbed his coat to yank him up. He was going to pay for poisoning Midnight. I noticed too late that one hand had slipped off his nose onto the floor. Lightning jolted me under my rib cage. My body clenched into a fist, and the world turned white. And then it went black.

“Where's the flash drive?” A voice echoed in the dark.

An alarm clock buzzed inside my head, and my body felt like a wrung-out dishrag. My mind was clogged with unformed thoughts bumping into each other. I blinked a few times and then held my eyes open. The living room was now lit. A spiderweb dangled down at me from the ceiling. Then the Gen Y tough guy's mug filled up my world. His nose now had a kink in it. A drop of blood hung from its tip, threatening to splash down onto me.

“Where the fuck is it!” His voice was thick, caught in his crooked nose.

I struggled to push myself off the floor, but my hands were bound together underneath me. I was naked, tied up, and about to be the M in an S&M scene. The kid kicked me in the side, and I stopped moving and starting hurting. He held the black rectangular stun gun above my head and thumbed the trigger. An orange bolt of electricity danced in front of my face.

“Last chance, dude.” The blood drop finally gave way and splatted onto my forehead. “Where's the flash drive?”

My mind started to clear. If he'd had a real gun, he would have shown it to me by now. Maybe he would stun me to death. Or just kick me in the side a few more times. I could yell for help, but more pain would be sure to follow. I could lie and try to buy some time. Or I could just tell him the truth and give up the only leverage I had in a game I wasn't sure I wanted to play anymore.

“What flash drive?” The game wasn't over yet.

“I warned you, dude. Now you gotta feel the heat.”

“Hold on!” I braced for the shock that didn't come. “If I had this flash drive, why didn't you find it when you poisoned my dog and broke in here last night?”

He squinted and his blond eyebrows came together. “I didn't poison any dog. What kind of an asshole do you think I am?”

Irony was lost on him.

“Look, I don't have it. Whoever broke in last night must have it.” I angled my head toward him. “If you leave now, I won't call the cops.”

“You're not going to get the chance.” He thrust the sparking gun at me.

“He says he doesn't have it. Says someone broke into his house last night and took it.”

A surf-dude voice bounced around in my short-circuited brain. My eyes fluttered and then he came into view, standing in the entry to the kitchen holding a cell phone to his ear.

“I don't know.” He looked over at me. “I think he's lying.”

The plastic flex-cuffs around my wrists bit into my skin and
numbed my hands. Hundreds of pinpricks stung my fingers. I scanned the living room and tried to envision a weapon that I could use with my hands tied behind my back before they went completely numb.

“Okay. I'll call you back.”

I wondered who was on the other end of that cell phone. Stone? The Albrights? His mountain-sized partner? Whoever it was, they were directing the action. The kid was strictly muscle. And soft muscle, at that. He'd gotten lucky with me. If he was a pro, the tough-guy union had lowered its standards since my days as a street cop.

“Who you talking to? Stone?” I arched my neck to look at him. “You really want to risk jail for him?”

He walked over and looked down at me. His eyes got small and his smile got big. Pain was on the way. He kicked me in the ribs, and it felt like my chest caved in on my lungs. Bile pushed up my throat. I rolled onto my side and brought my knees up to protect my chest.

“No more bullshit.” He gave me a squinty smile and raised his boot above my rib cage. “Tell me where the flash drive is, or I'll break every fuckin' bone in your body.”

“Okay.” I spit sour bile onto the carpet. “I'll tell you where it is.”

“It's behind the bookcase.” I nodded toward the large maple bookcase, that had once been my father's, against the wall directly across from me.

“Where behind the bookcase?”

“I taped it to the back.” I raised my cuffed hands off my back. “Take these off and I'll show you.”

“Nice try. Get up.” He pointed to the corner of the room next to the bookcase. “Go stand over there unless you want the bookshelf to flatten your ass.”

I rolled over onto my stomach, and a sharp stab in my side reminded me of the goon's last kick. I pushed my head into the carpet and inchwormed up to my knees. From there I stepped into a squat, one leg at a time, and then finally up. It had been a while since I'd been upright. I liked things better that way. I walked over and stood in the corner of room with my back to the bookshelf, my fingers brushing against its side.

“You try something stupid and you won't wake up the next time I put you to sleep.”

I heard him move. When I thought he was on the opposite side of the bookcase and could no longer see my hands, I wedged my dying fingers between the case and the wall.