“Garrick is tied in to a home invasion in San Fernando.”
“Sure, I know. Our office is the one that made the connection. But I can’t see why VALSHOOT has so many people’s panties in a twist.”
VALSHOOT, short for Valley Shooting, was the codename for the attack on Andrea Lowry’s house. The incident could hardly have been codenamed MEDEA without raising unwanted questions in Santa Ana.
“There are various considerations involved,” Tess said, hoping this formulation would be sufficiently vague to discourage further curiosity.
It wasn’t. “And one of those considerations required flying in Annie Oakley?”
“What?”
“No offense. That’s what some of us call you around here.”
“Annie Oakley.” Tess shut her eyes. “Great.”
“It’s a compliment. Annie was a straight shooter and ahead of her time. One of the original woman’s libbers, you might say.”
“Well, I guess it’s better than Ma Barker.”
“No one’s gonna call you a barker,” Carson said.
This was so cornball she would have laughed, if she hadn’t been in a room still smelling of cordite and blood. She steered their conversation in a more professional direction. “Can the shooter’s height be determined by the angle of fire?”
The question had a purpose. Abby wasn’t tall.
Carson shook his head. “Crime scene people say the gunman was probably leaning over Garrick, bent low. Which means he could be any height.”
He-or she, Tess thought.
“Both shots were fired at nearly point-blank range. No exit wounds. Coroner recovered the rounds inside the vic’s head.”
“You mean the autopsy’s already been done?”
“It was put on a rush basis. Pretty fancy treatment for a dead gangbanger. I gather there was some pressure applied all the way from Washington.” He gave Tess a shrewd look. “Though I don’t know why D.C. would care so much.”
“Neither do I,” she said evenly.
“I’ll just bet you don’t.”
It might have turned into a staring contest if Crandall hadn’t cut in. “You were saying two rounds were recovered.”
Carson looked away, conceding defeat-for now. “Right. Nine-millimeter hollowpoints. One of them was all mashed up and fragmented. Ricocheted around the skull cavity something fierce. The other’s intact. Ballistics has already matched it to Garrick’s gun.”
Tess ran a finger through some Redwop powder on an end table. “I assume forensics picked up a lot of prints.”
“Whole slew of them, but most probably belong to Garrick or the girls he brought up here. According to the neighbors there were quite a few. The prints sure as hell didn’t get left by any housekeeper. Look at this rat’s nest.”
“How about the doorknob?” Crandall asked.
“Killer wiped it clean when leaving. He’s a cool customer.”
Tess thought wiping the knob was exactly the kind of precaution Abby would take.
“You want a guided tour?” Carson asked. He headed into the kitchen without waiting for their assents. “Lots of beer in the fridge, hard liquor in the cabinets. Nothing else in here but takeout containers and fast food leftovers. No drugs on the premises. Garrick was busted for cocaine a few years ago, but lately he seems to have been staying clean.”
“Not exactly turning his life around, though, was he?” Tess asked.
Carson led them down the hall. “He was still a stone-cold killer. Probably quit the coke because he couldn’t afford a rep as a user. No one hires a hit man who’s got an itchy nose.”
They entered the bedroom. Carson waved at hand at a tall stack of magazines on the floor. “See those? Porn. And over here”-he directed their attention to homemade cabinets constructed of cinderblocks and planks-“a whole library’s worth of X-rated videos. Agent McCallum, if you’ve ever wanted to catch Debra Banger in Sperms of Endearment, this is your chance.”
“I’ll pass.”
“Other than the magazines, which you can bet he didn’t buy for the articles, there’s no reading matter on the premises. Not a book anywhere. This boy’s interests were limited to drinking and fu-uh, fornicating.”
“And killing,” Tess said.
Carson opened a bureau. The drawer was empty. “You know about the gun he kept here. The MK-23. It’s at the crime lab now. There was a silencer with it, kind of banged up, and some other gear.”
Crandall toed the pile of smut, looking thoughtful. “I’m surprised the killer didn’t toss the residence and take the MK, if only to eliminate evidence linking Garrick to the San Fernando raid.”
“Or just to get hold of an expensive piece of hardware,” Tess added.
Carson nodded. “My theory is that the killer got spooked. You know he muffled the shots with the pillow. Tried to, anyway. First shot was probably quiet enough, but the pillow’s stuffing was half blown away, and it wouldn’t have silenced the second shot nearly as well. That report was louder than our friend expected. He knew someone in the building would hear it, so he amscrayed pronto.”
That was possible, Tess thought. But it was also possible that Abby had deliberately left the gun in place so Garrick could be tied to the crime.
“And no one saw him leave?” Crandall asked.
“In this neighborhood, no one ever sees a thing.”
“How about phone records?” Tess asked. “If we know who he was talking to within the last twenty-four hours-”
“Already got ’em. He had two phones, a landline and a cell. The cell received a call from another cellular phone yesterday afternoon. He called that number back from his landline a little later. Later still, he called the same number from his cell. That was at five-forty-two p.m.”
5:42 was right after the assailants fled the scene in Santa Ana. “The first two calls involved preparations for the hit,” Tess said. “The last one was his after-action report.”
“So we assume. But there’s a hitch.” Carson smiled. “Isn’t there always? The other cell was a clone.”
A cloned cellular telephone was a unit programmed with someone else’s ownership data. Tess knew it would be impossible to determine the actual caller. “Do we at least know where the cloned phone was operating from?”
“Somewhere between McFadden and Edinger, near Harbor Boulevard. But that covers a lot of territory. And it’s prime turf for the Scorps. Unless we find the cloned cell in someone’s possession…”
Crandall looked unhappy. “It’s probably already been destroyed or reprogrammed.”
“Probably,” Carson agreed. “These Scorps aren’t so dumb. They do know how to cover their tracks.”
Tess asked him what was happening now.
“We’ve rounded up most of Garrick’s scumbag friends for Q and A. So far it’s all Q and no A. They’re shut up tighter than a nun’s-well, they’re not cooperating.”
“You grilling anyone in particular?”
“Yeah. Shanker.”
Tess remembered Hauser mentioning him. “Ronald Shanker. Her runs the club.”
“His official title is president.” Carson noted Tess’s raised eyebrow. “Oh, yeah. They’re organized, these guys. Got themselves a vice president, a secretary-treasurer, and a sergeant at arms.”
“How corporate.”
“They’re essentially a business concern. Sell ecstasy, coke, crystal meth. Stuff is manufactured in Latin America, and the Scorps do the distributing here in the states.”
“Sounds lucrative.”
“For the top membership, it is. The guys at the bottom don’t get much of a cut.”
“Are the gang members still being held?”
“Some are. Some aren’t. They’ll all be let go before long. Nothing to hold them on. Being a dirtbag isn’t a crime. Though maybe it should be.”
“How about Garrick’s whereabouts before he was shot?”
“He was with his buddies. They were all hanging together last night. The guy who popped Dylan was probably chugging beers with him a couple hours earlier.”
“Where did they hang out?”
“Bar, name of Fast Eddie’s.”
A bar. The kind of place where Dylan Garrick might have met someone. A female someone. “Did he leave the bar alone?” Tess asked.