Ramsey stared at her for a moment. His eyes felt like needles.
“How long have you worked homicide, Gamble?”
“Long enough to know that this wasn’t a robbery, and that the killer wasn’t a pro. This was about something more personal than that. Something between the two.”
“I’m with you on that,” he said. “But I know the identity of the victim and you don’t. Tell me why you think it’s personal, Detective. I need to hear you say it.”
“If tonight was about a robbery, the coke wouldn’t be here. And if this was done by a pro, these wallets would have been left in their pockets. No pro would’ve taken the cash. Just a single credit card from Bosco’s wallet because everybody knows he’s loaded. One card with a decent credit line that wouldn’t be noticed for a day or two. That’s all it would take to bleed the account dry.”
Another moment passed as Ramsey considered what she had said. Lena traded looks with Rhodes, then moved to the counter and unzipped the evidence bag. She was tired of waiting. Tired of being tested at a crime scene that was stuck on hold. She pushed the leather wallet aside and pulled out the one made of nylon and Velcro. Ripping it open, she found the driver’s license and held it up to the light.
The victim was twenty-five years old. As her eyes slid over the name, those tremors began working through her fingers again. Lena finally understood why the deputy chief appeared so stunned. Why Barrera had been unable to look her in the eye all night. Why it didn’t matter that Escabar had shut down the club before calling 911 and all the Ferraris were gone. And why it didn’t even matter if the victim’s soul was lost forever between the winds.
The deputy chief had called it right. The kid with his lights punched out was more than an asshole. More than a motherfucker. And, in the end, he would be more trouble dead than alive.
She felt someone move in behind her and realized that it was Ramsey looking over her shoulder at the license. He was staring at it, but not seeing it-everything turned inward and lost in the black.
“Jacob Gant,” he whispered in a voice taut with emotion. “Now you know why we need you, Gamble. Now you know why we’re fucked.”
4
Payback.
A killer overdosing on rage.
Lena didn’t need to do the math as she exited Bosco’s office and headed for the stairs.
Jacob Gant raped and murdered his sixteen-year-old neighbor Lily Hight. Six weeks ago he’d walked out of an L.A. courtroom a free man. Tonight the big wheel turned-yin finally met yang-and he was dead.
Gant’s crimes were executed with extreme brutality. After assaulting the girl in her home, he drove a foot-long screwdriver into her back and watched her bleed to death.
The NOT GUILTY verdict had stunned everyone in the courtroom, producing utter silence for almost ten minutes with only the faint sound of Lily’s father, Tim Hight, weeping in the background. Lena could still remember the moment-still hear the sound of Hight sobbing. Like everyone else, she had watched the trial on television from her desk. The shock of the verdict worked like an infection. In a single instant, the entire city knew what had happened in that courtroom and felt sickened by the result.
But the tent was bigger than Los Angeles. Jacob Gant’s trial for the murder of Lily Hight had juice and flowed like a river rising over its banks wherever satellites and computer servers and smartphones could take it. Particularly after Gant’s initial arrest when Lily’s father had given the district attorney’s office snapshots and home videos of his beloved daughter, his only child, to be distributed to the media outlets.
The images fed a fire that could no longer be contained. In the world of senseless murders, Lily Hight was what came next: a gorgeous blonde with striking blue-gray eyes and a gentle but outgoing spirit. An innocent teenager who faced the ultimate violation just as she had begun to flower. A grieving father who tried to protect his grieving wife and maintain their privacy, but seemed to look years older every time he was photographed.
And then there were the rumors that began soon after Gant’s arrest, salacious stories appearing in the rag sheets that the twenty-five-year-old killer and his teenage victim were lovers.
The public’s outrage to the crime, their compassion for Lily and her father, seemed to burn without end and evolve into near myth. Lily Hight’s image began showing up on coffee mugs and T-shirts months before the trial. Street artists blanketed the city with her face on posters and wall paintings that read IS JUSTICE REALLY BLIND? Local TV news stations from coast to coast could point to interviews with teens who claimed to have known Lily, or met Lily, or seen Lily and wanted to be just like their friend.
It was another circus. Another media trial set in L.A. Another slam-dunk murder case in which every piece of evidence collected at the crime scene pointed to one person and only one person.
Jacob Gant raped and murdered his next-door neighbor Lily Hight. And the LAPD blew it. The district attorney’s office blew it.
Again.
Blood samples were mishandled by SID techs at the crime scene and misplaced in the lab.
Again.
DNA analysis of semen collected from the victim pointed beyond all doubt to Jacob Gant, but like the blood evidence, it went missing and couldn’t be found in the lab.
Again.
Two deputy district attorneys, outmatched by Buddy Paladino, sat back and watched the defense attorney rip their rock solid case apart while making them look like bunglers and fools in a way that only Buddy Paladino could do.
Again.
A killer was released, free to enjoy the pleasures of life here in the City of Angels or anywhere else he wanted to go.
Again and again and again.
Lena hit the stairs, feeling the words ripple through her body until she reached the club’s foyer on the main floor. She was looking for Dante Escabar, but didn’t see him behind the bar. Someone had turned down the lights, and the place was empty now. Just the spent coffee cups left behind by a division callout, the detectives finally released and sent home. She pulled a stool away from the bar and sat down. When she noticed the pack of cigarettes left beside an open bottle of bourbon, she fought the urge and pushed them away. Her mind was still skipping through the details. Still reeling. But there was anger, too. Anger at the situation and for what she was being asked to do.
Payback.
A killer overdosing on rage.
A father who could claim both reason and cause. In some circles, even the moral high ground.
Other than Jacob Gant’s family, no one in the city would have a problem with his death tonight. Far from it. Lena imagined that when the news broke, the bars would be packed with people celebrating. But the party wouldn’t last very long. Once Tim Hight was arrested for killing the man who murdered his daughter, once Lena put the case together and slapped the cuffs on the grieving father’s wrists-a father in ruin doing what any father might do …
“Are you okay?”
She turned and saw Rhodes walking into the bar. She tried to find her voice, and it came out deep and scratched.
“I was going to ask you the same thing,” she said.
He shrugged without an answer, crossing the darkened room for a peek out the window. Lena could hear the press corps still shouting at the patrol units holding them back. After a while, Rhodes joined her at the bar.
“The coroner,” he said. “Barrera asked me to show him the way up when he gets here.”
“Who got the call? Who got lucky?”
Rhodes gave her a look. “Besides you?”
She nodded. “Besides me.”
“Ed Gainer,” he said.
“Well, he’s not gonna like the stairs.”
“You’re right. Eddie won’t like the stairs.”
Rhodes reached for the pack of cigarettes, found a lighter beside a tray of spent candles, and lit up. When he passed it over, Lena shook him off. Neither one of them really smoked. Although tonight more than qualified as a crisis, she was no longer in the mood. Instead, she looked at the scar on Rhodes’s left earlobe. It was in the shape of an X, and she liked looking at it. His brown hair was cropped short again, his body lean and trim from daily jogs around Hollywood Reservoir. He looked good. The gunshot he’d taken to his left shoulder a few years back-a distant memory that only surfaced when it rained.