Chapter Four
Ten days ago Lt. Anna Amari had stood in a West Hollywood hotel room with a dead body that might or might not belong to one “Jeff Bailey.” And all she had to show for it was a severe tension headache.
Her partner, Detective LeRon Polk, had gone through the security video from the Star Struck Hotel.
Even though the video quality was (as Polk put it) “medium shitty,” Amari could clearly see that the man who’d registered was not their corpse. Their as-yet-unidentified vic had died in that bed, but the room had not been his.
This man was slighter, had dark hair, and was obviously shorter than Bailey.
They had two males tied to this room, one via the front desk, the other by a blood-soaked bed. And either male—or neither—might be named Jeff Bailey.
Also, the hotel thoughtfully honored their guests’ privacy by positioning security cameras only in the lobby.
Consequently, Amari had no footage of the victim anywhere else in the hotel, nor of the man who’d registered as Jeff Bailey. And zero footage of the two together—anywhere.
Even the assumption that only “Bailey” and the victim had been in the room was unsupportable—”Bailey” might be the killer, or an accomplice, or none of the above. A third party might have been there. A fourth. A fifth …
The bull pen of the Sex Crimes Division was set up in an old-fashioned way for such a cutting-edge facility—the Police Administration Building at 100 West First Street across from City Hall was new enough you could almost smell the fresh paint. Sex Crimes needed a constant interchange of ideas, so cubicles or separate offices (except for the captain’s) were out.
Seated at her desk with a morning cup of black coffee, Amari raised a hand to her temple and rubbed, making small concentric circles with three fingers.
Both her desk and Polk’s nearby were relatively free of clutter. Polk’s was particularly spare, because he was compulsively neat; Amari’s side, however, came a close second, because other than evidence, she kept most things in her head.
Beyond her phone and desk lamp, the clutter was pretty much limited to one Dodgers coffee cup and three Dodgers bobble heads: Jackie Robinson, Sandy Koufax, and a very dreadlocked Manny Ramirez. No one in the division dared touch them—they were her holy trinity.
The joys of Anna Amari’s life were her work and a passion for the Los Angeles Dodgers. The latter had been passed down to her by her late father.
Polk said, “Rubbin’ your head like Aladdin’s lamp again, huh? Think a genie’ll pop out? You do know it’s only Monday, right?”
“Weekend was too short,” she said.
“That’s ‘cause you had me workin’ both days.”
She shot him a murderous look, but he survived it somehow.
After a frantic weekend in the Southland, the bull pen seemed a haunted house this morning, only a few other detectives scattered here and there. All the sex crimes detectives had heavy caseloads. Hell, all the detectives anywhere in the department had heavy caseloads, from Central Division to Hollenbeck, from Mission Division to Pacific and all points between.
The city was averaging around two homicides a day. Crime was up, good publicity down. That the cops had dubbed the killer “Billy Shears”—essentially giving that gift to the media—had pissed off everybody from the captain on up, until the shit, as was shit’s wont, started rolling back down hill.
Amari was at the bottom of that hill.
Well, actually, Polk was; but she didn’t have the energy or the ill will to do any more than just share the misery with him.
On the other hand, it wasn’t every day she got a call from the chief himself, and on her cell phone on the way to work, at that.
“Would you like to explain, Lieutenant Amari, how it is that Fox News knows that this department has come up with a comical name for a killer but not a name for the victim?”
“I take responsibility for the case, sir, but not for the uniformed officers out of Hollywood Division. As for not identifying the victim, we’ve exhausted every traditional avenue—AFIS and CODIS come up empty. He’s not the room’s registrant. Fingerprints, DNA gave us nothing, so far. We are still waiting on some lab results.”
“What about dental?”
“Sir, we can’t do dental without knowing the dentist.”
This had made the chief look stupid, which was really a smooth move on her part, she at once knew.
“Well, I would like a progress report, Lieutenant, if you ever do make any progress.”
And he hung up on her. Imagine that.
She told Polk about the call from the chief, and for once her partner was speechless. On the other hand, his expression was eloquent; it said, How the hell much trouble are we in?
She ignored the unspoken question, asking him, “Any word from the lab yet?”
“There’s a backlog. You know what it’s been like the last couple weeks.”
“So the chief is calling personally to say hustle it up, and the lab crew are sunning themselves. Well, at least local news ran the drawing.”
“Yeah,” Polk sighed, “pretty much every broadcast since Saturday night. And the newspapers ran it yesterday. So that’s good.”
“It is if we got some hits out of it.”
“We did get hits.”
“Could you be more specific, LeRon?”
“You talking legit leads, or total calls?”
She didn’t like the sound of that. “Legit leads, LeRon.”
“Uh … that’d be zero.”
“Not a one?”
“Not a one, Lieutenant.”
“Out of how many calls?”
“Four.”
“Four? A city this size, and we’re on every newscast, and every paper, and we get four freaking calls?”
Polk nodded. “There were half a dozen obvious cranks. Four were what you might call … sincere. But none amounted to anything. I even checked the FBI Kidnapping and Missing Persons web page. If you were wondering how desperate I got.”
Without realizing it, she began rubbing her right temple again. “Who the hell is this guy, anyway? If he wants his murder solved, why can’t he cooperate, goddamn it?”
“Thoughtless prick.”
“He’s from out of town,” she said grimly. “Gotta be. Let’s e-mail a link of the drawing that’s up on our website to the Doe Network, and the Forgotten Network, too.”
These were websites dedicated to finding the identifies of missing people.
“Somebody somewhere has to know this guy,” Polk said.
They had gone back to the hotel repeatedly to interview staff and guests—nothing. Various routes had been used to try to identify the victim—nothing. With the crime lab in slow motion, this case was already starting to feel like an unsolved murder.
“Okay,” Amari said, realizing she was rubbing her temple, and stopped. “We’re not having any luck with IDing the vic—what about the killer?”
Polk gave her a look that said, What about him?
She answered the unasked question sternly: “This guy’s definitely going to kill again.”
“With us gettin’ no help from the crime lab, he will,” Polk said, shaking his head. “We haven’t got jack. Maybe I should check that FBI Missing Persons web page again and see if our lab rats turn up there.”
“What about video from other buildings, LeRon? Traffic lights?”
“I’ve been taking DVDs home at night like a coach studying game films. There’s nothing there, Lieutenant. The only shot where I saw the guy who rented the room comes from a traffic cam, and he ducks his damn head. Like he knew it was there, and avoided the sucker.”
“He was in his car?”
“Yeah.”
“So this is where you turn the whole case around, right, LeRon? And surprise me with his license number?”
”Wrong. Mud smeared on the plate. Kinda artfully smeared, but smeared.”
“And the car?”
“Silver Honda Accord.”
Amari snorted derisively. “And how many of those in California?”
“Lieutenant … there’s no chance of tracking that car, with no more than we have.”
She rubbed concentric circles on her clean desktop with the same three fingers that had massaged her temple. Maybe the desk had a headache, too. “What have we missed?”
Polk considered that briefly. “Something, probably. This was a brutal, bloody kill. There should be plenty of forensic shit to help us along.”
The lab again.
Amari’s mouth tightened to a slash. “Then … god-damn-it … there’s probably only one way we’re going to catch this son of a bitch….”
Polk’s face was solemn as he nodded. “Catch him when he screws up on the next one.”
Her sigh started at her toes and seemed to make its way through her psyche before emerging from her mouth.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s back up a step. Our victim was not the guy who registered at the front desk.”
“Check.”
“So … if we assume for the sake of argument that ‘Bailey’ is the killer, we have him registering on the day of the murder, well before the murder. Plenty of time for him to take his weapon up to that room and stow it somewhere … somewhere convenient for his purpose … ready and waiting for when the vic showed up.”
“Yeah,” Polk said. “Maybe what we have is a homophobic killer—he picks up a gay guy, lures him to a hotel room, and then butchers the poor bastard. Because he sees gays as evil or something, and oughta be killed.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself, LeRon. Same scenario works for a closeted gay man who lures a pickup to that room to have sex with him, and then murders his sex partner out of shame and guilt.”
“Killing himself, in a way.”
“Either of those scenarios makes sense of a sort. But there are others that work just as well. Let’s focus on what we do know.”
“Okay, Lieutenant.”
“The vic is from out of town.” Amari rose. She thought better on her feet, and pacing alongside their nearly abutted desks was a common practice of hers. “That’s not a fact, but is it an assumption we can buy?”
“I buy that,” Polk agreed. “Nobody in Southern Cal seems to’ve ever seen the dude before.”
“So … how does a guy from Bum Fart, Utah, end up at the Star Struck in West Hollywood?”
Polk shrugged. “If he’s a gay man, a closeted one from out of town here to play … or work with a little play on the side … he might well know all about the Star Struck.”
“Granted,” she said. “But remember—he wasn’t booked to stay there. He’s not Jeff Bailey. Or anyway he’s not the guy who checked in calling himself Jeff Bailey.”
Polk frowned at her.
“What, LeRon?”
“We don’t believe he was a guest in room four twenty-five,” Polk said tentatively. “But could he have been a guest in some other room? Who got picked up in the hotel bar by the guy in four twenty-five?”
“That means he hasn’t been around to check out in the last ten days.”
“Not when he’s cooling his jets in the morgue, he hasn’t.”
“Right. Check with the Star Struck and see if there were any deadbeats—any guests there who skipped without paying in the last week and a half.”
“Damn good thinkin’, Lieutenant!”
“If that’s the case, and he was a guest, his stuff would still be there. It’s worth a try, LeRon—call the hotel.”
Polk did so, and he was still holding the receiver in his hand when his expression turned disappointed and he shook his head at Amari.
As he hung up, she said, “Well, the basic idea is a good one. See if you can get a couple of the Explorers to call around to all the hotels in town, starting with West Hollywood and the surrounding area, and see who’s skipped out on their room in the last ten days, leaving their stuff behind.”
The Explorer program allowed interested high school–age kids to learn about law enforcement by helping out doing menial office activities, freeing up officers to get out on the street.
Amari’s cell chirped. She plucked it from her jacket pocket. Caller ID: WOMACK.
The head of the Sex Crimes Division, Captain Charles Womack, owner of the immediately recognizable gruff tenor in her ear.
“You and Polk need to get your butts out to Griffith Park.”
“Care to be more specific, Cap?” Amari asked, not unpleasantly. “Last time I looked, Griffith Park is forty-two hundred acres.”
“Mount Lee. The Hollywood sign.”
“Not really….”
“Really. Dead nude girl.”
It would be.
“Better haul ass,” Womack said. “Sounds like we’ve got a real sicko this time.”
Womack clicked off; then so did she, feeling a tug in her gut.
Turning to Polk, she said, “We’ve gotta shake it.”
“What is it?”
“Murder scene.”
“Billy Shears again?” Polk asked.
He almost seemed eager—another Shears murder would mean a chance at fresh clues. A twisted way to think, but every cop who worked on serial murders wound up doing it.
And Billy Shears had all the earmarks of a serial.
Amari shook her head. “Don’t think so. Female victim. Womack said this killer’s a real ‘sicko.’ “
“And Billy Shears isn’t?”
Her sentiment exactly.