“Good idea.”
“Did the security gate have a record of the truck?”
“One. Ten days prior to the murders. No plate number, though.”
“Your lab turn up anything on the door opener?”
“They’re still working on it. They did match the fibers on the doorknob to the rope found in the bed, like you said. We also recovered fibers from the kid’s doorknob. More on another across the hall.”
“Same thing at the Palisades scene,” I said. “At least we know now why the kids didn’t bolt. Our guy tied their doors shut.”
“Had it all figured out, didn’t he?”
“Seems that way. There’s one thing I’m not buying, though.”
“What’s that?”
“Both families leaving their front doors unlocked. But if they didn’t, how’d the guy get in?”
By then we had reached the parking structure. Barrello hesitated, looking for his car on the bottom level. After a moment he spotted his Taurus several rows back. “That’s been bothering me, too. Lemme know if you come up with anything,” he added, heading for his car. “See you tomorrow.”
I nodded, still unable to shake the feeling I was missing something.
I hadn’t come up with an answer by the time I arrived at my Suburban, two levels up. Instead, I found a problem of a different nature leaning against my fender: Lauren Van Owen. “Damn, Van Owen,” I said, plucking a handwritten note from my windshield. “What do you want now?”
“Two minutes of your time.”
Instead of replying, I read the note, which turned out to be an irate message from somebody on the bomb squad. “We’ll have to stop meeting like this,” I said, crumbling the note and shoving it into my pocket. “People will think we have something going on.”
“Let them,” Lauren replied. Although she had removed a blazer she’d been wearing in the lobby, she still appeared composed and businesslike-gray silk blouse, wool skirt, midheight heels. Her blond hair, neatly clasped for the news conference earlier, now fell loose on her shoulders.
I fished my keys from my pocket. As I reached past Lauren to unlock my car door, I smelled a faint hint of her perfume. Crisp, elegant. “How’d you find me?”
“It wasn’t hard,” Lauren answered with a slight lift of her shoulders. I’ve seen you driving this rust-bucket before. I just checked the parking structures, found your junkmobile, and waited.”
“I hate to disappoint you, this being TV news-sweeps month and all, but I have nothing to say to you.”
“I promise I won’t bother you after this,” begged Lauren. “Just hear me out. I think we can help each other.”
“Oh, sure. You say you want to help, but you’re wearing that look you news types get just before asking some unwary schmuck how he likes clubbing defenseless baby seals.”
“You don’t like me much, do you?”
“What’s to like?”
Something flickered in Lauren’s eyes, something I couldn’t decipher. She glanced away before I could nail it down. When she turned back, it was gone.
“Let me tell you something,” she went on, her voice hardening. “I’ve been scrambling all my life. I got where I am because I’m willing to do whatever it takes to get a story, even if it means stepping on a few toes. Maybe even a whole roomful of toes. And if I wind up offending a couple chauvinist pricks like you in the process-tough.”
“Nice speech, Van Owen. Did you practice it in the mirror?”
Lauren’s cheeks flushed. “You can be a real bastard, Kane.”
“There’re plenty who would agree with you on that.”
“You realize we’re not all that different, you and I.”
“Excuse me?” I said. “To the untrained ear, it sounded like you just said we have something in common.”
“We do. You think what you’re doing is important. Well, I feel the same about my job. Like you, I work a twenty-five-hour-a-day job that’s never done, busting my hump doing more than any other three people combined-all the while taking orders from higher-ups with half my ability.” Lauren gazed at me angrily, then shifted gears. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining. I love what I do, but it’s cost me. I’m a single mother with no social life and a few more wrinkles than I had last year, a three-bedroom condo with a leaky roof and a big mortgage, and a nine-year-old daughter I don’t have time for. Sometimes I get up in the morning and wonder what I’m doing with my life. Sound familiar?”
When I didn’t respond, Lauren continued. “I’ll level with you. This story is my ticket to network. I want it so bad I can taste it.”
“Yeah? What’s it taste like?”
Lauren smiled. “Chicken.” Then, more seriously, “Look, when this is over, I could be in Washington, maybe New York. But I need an angle. Network is sending their top guys down here to cover the story. Unless I come up with a lock on this thing-something they don’t have or can’t get-I’ll get lost in the shuffle.”
“Van Owen, I don’t understand why you’re telling me this. Just because you have problems, you expect me to be your source?”
“No. At least not the way you think.”
“What, then? You know that all task force releases have to go through channels. Some pencil pusher named Snead is the unit’s sole news liaison. Even if I wanted to, which I don’t, I couldn’t help.”
“What’s Snead like?” asked Lauren, playing for time. “Off the record.”
“Off the record? Grab a dictionary and look up dickhead.”
Lauren smiled again, then said, “Listen, I don’t have it all worked out yet, but if these murders continue, there’ll be a news blitz like you won’t believe.”
Again I didn’t respond. Unfortunately, I knew she was right.
“And if the killings aren’t stopped, heads will roll.”
“What are you getting at, Van Owen?”
“I’m saying that if things get nasty, it might be helpful for you to have a friend in the media. And vice versa.”
“You scratch my back, I scratch yours?”
“Something like that. What do you say?”
Without answering, I opened my car door and slid behind the wheel. I started the engine, but before pulling away, I rolled down my window. “I’ll think about it,” I said for the second time that morning. “It won’t make any difference, but I’ll think about it.”
11
She was magnificent. Jewels of sweat sparkled on her chest and shoulders, staining her leotard in revealing patches from breasts to abdomen. She had a dancer’s body: long, shapely legs, small breasts, and lean, muscular arms. Weeks earlier she’d cut her hair in a medium-length pageboy, and as she moved, her honey-colored locks rose and fell like golden wings. Her stunningly beautiful face was set in concentration as she exercised with others in the aerobics class, her expression betraying nothing of her thoughts. But occasionally, if he watched closely, he could see her lips lifting in a fleeting smile as she found her image in the mirror.
Proud of her body, he thought, watching from the second-floor observation balcony. And with good reason.
Newport Beach Family Fitness, once a racquetball club, had been converted to a gym and aerobics center after the original establishment failed. Two center courts had been combined to form an exercise studio, but the sixteen-foot-high glass walls and an observation deck at the back still remained, providing a perfect vantage from which he had studied her for weeks. And over those weeks, while standing unnoticed, he had learned much about her.
He knew she finger-combed her hair from her forehead when pensive, pursed her lips in a pout when irritated, glanced at her ostentatiously large wedding ring when bored. Despite her pride in her figure, he knew from observing her with others that she didn’t like to be touched. He knew her schedule, her clothes, her car-everything but where she lived. And before long he would know that, too.
He had followed her on a number of occasions, even before she’d been chosen. Each time, as she had turned at last for home, he had been stopped short of his goal.
Does everyone in this city live behind one of those ridiculous security gates?