“Parmenter crashed the party.”
“Looks like it.”
“What was the conflict over?”
“Don’t know but Parmenter had thought he was destined to be Jay-Z and bitched about not getting fame and fortune fast enough. The case went nowhere because there was no evidence other than the bullet and no one was willing to talk. The D assigned to it retired shortly afterward and no one picked it up.”
“How’d Petra discover the link?”
“She asked around about rifle murders and someone had a vague recollection. She searched, found it, learned ballistics had been done but there’d been no match to any previous shooting. So she rushed through a comparison with O’Brien. Not expecting anything, then boom, same .308 rifle.”
I said, “A hunter for hire.”
“Looks like it. We’re gonna be expanding the search to any similars. How’s the rest of your day looking?”
“Open.”
“Excellent.” He finished the two slices, cut another one, chewed and swallowed, got orange juice out of the fridge, filled a glass and finished it in one long gulp.
“The team’s meeting in an hour.”
“Hollywood?”
“No, my place because I first-dibbed the big room.”
Chapter 11
The largest interview room at West L.A. is down the hall from Milo’s office. Not used much; detectives downstairs have their own spaces, and the cold, lab-like ambience makes it wrong for meetings with the families of victims. Talking to multiple suspects is possible, but isolating suspects is the rule and exceptions are rare.
Milo uses the place for group meetings, rolling in a couple of whiteboards, lugging chairs and long tables from wherever he finds them, furnishing boxes of pastries he picks up at a bakery in West Hollywood.
Today’s group was the two of us, Petra, Raul, the three “baby D’s” he sometimes got to work with him, and an older bald man with a white brush mustache sprouting under a sunburnt nose.
Milo and Petra stood near the whiteboards, markers in hand. The rest of us sat facing them.
Petra began by introducing the stranger as Hawes Buxby, the original investigator on the Jamarcus Parmenter murder. The retired D, eyeglasses hanging from a chain around his neck, had dressed for the occasion in a wide-lapel gray suit, royal-blue shirt, and tan tie patterned with red fleurs-de-lis.
When he heard who I was he shot me a quizzical look. The type of scrutiny you give a strange animal in a zoo.
Of the young D’s, only Sean Binchy matched Buxby’s level of formality. His suit was the usual narrow-lapel navy blue, his shirt fresh and white, his tie a Technicolor display of flamingos and palm trees. The tropical touches and Doc Martens harked back to his days as a ska-punk bass player.
Alicia Bogomil, clean-jawed, intense and sharp-eyed, long hair still blue at the tips, wore a fitted brown leather bomber jacket, black turtleneck, and skinny black slacks.
Moe Reed, chronically enlarged by power lifting, had on an unstructured charcoal sport coat sewn from a miracle fabric that stretched past the point of apparent danger, a gray T-shirt, and thigh-accommodating Barbell jeans.
Both boards were nearly filled.
The first held headshots of Marissa French, Paul O’Brien, and Jamarcus Parmenter, each topped by a question mark. A second grouping showed crime scene shots for all three victims. Marissa’s revealed where she’d been dumped. An adjacent photo showed her clothes and purse on the floor of Paul O’Brien’s bedroom.
Next to that was a blowup of Dr. Basia Lopatinski’s Cause of Death summary with gamma hydroxybutyrate and diazepam ringed in red.
O’Brien was memorialized slumped in the corner of his balcony, Jamarcus Parmenter in gold-embroidered baggy black sweats, sprawled on his back with car bumpers visible on the periphery of the photo.
Night-dimmed parking lot.
Two other images featured Parmenter as a living being: a thirteen-year-old mugshot and a six-year-old DMV portrait. Five-six, a hundred thirty-eight. Had he survived, he’d be twenty-nine.
In the arrest photo, Parmenter wore long dreads and sported flat eyes and a sullen look. In the later image, his hair was neatly clipped, tattoos brocaded his neck, and he offered a crooked, almost boyish smile. But no additional nuance in the eyes.
On the next board was a photo of a red laser beam up-slanting from Paul O’Brien’s third-floor balcony to a window on the fourth floor of the prison-like building next door. Slightly rightward of the kill-spot.
That was followed by brightly illuminated views of a white-walled, black-floored room, empty but for a trio of large water heaters, a mass of HVAC equipment, and hefty ductwork, all to the left. To the right was open space, the front wall centered by a high, square window.
Below that, photographs of two double-width gray metal doors, one ajar.
The final illustration returned to the shooter’s lair and showed the single window open, a red beam arcing down toward O’Brien’s balcony.
Petra pointed to a single yellow marker on the windowsill.
“As you can see, this is all of it forensically and even this is just a little disruption of the dust where the rifle, a bipod, or a stand may have rested. But no prints, hair, skin flakes, zero.”
Alicia said, “Too bad the guy isn’t a shedder. Would the window be high enough for him to shoot standing?”
“If he was up to five-nine, he could be upright. Taller, there’d likely be some stooping.”
“Which could throw off aim,” said Sean. “That level of accuracy, some kind of rest was probably used.”
“From that distance?” said Moe. “That and a good nightscope.”
“Even with all that, it’d take a steady hand,” said Sean.
Alicia said, “Sounds pretty professional.”
Petra said, “If you’re wondering about someone with military experience, so was I. But I checked with a few sources and verified what I already suspected: Serious military snipers prefer hollow points or bullets they customize themselves in order to maximize internal damage. That doesn’t rule out a pro who downgraded because basic equipment was all he needed. Including choice of firearm: Winchester 70 Featherweight. But why go easy if you don’t have to?”
Hawes Buxby said, “I got one of those. Featherweights. Used it for deer, back when.”
“Exactly,” said Petra. “You and a gazillion other shooters.”
Milo said, “He could’ve downgraded because he is military and wanted to distract away from it. Not that civilian means unskilled. There’s a precise element to both shootings. Leaving nothing behind and hitting the neck off center, which Basia says would’ve maximized the odds of getting the jugular, the carotid, and the trachea with one shot.”
Buxby shook his head. “I was figuring a one-off gang deal on Mr. Parmenter. Now we’ve got a slick assassin?”
“Open season on sketchy guys,” said Alicia.
Silence.
Petra broke it. “Next issue: How’d the shooter get into a full-security building? Anyone want to guess?”
Sean said, “It wasn’t that secure.”
“Bingo. Despite the locked door up front and a gate across the sub-garage, there are two service entrances.”
She tapped the photos of the wide gray doors. “This one, on the southern wall perpendicular to the entrance, was dead-bolted, but this one, on the rear wall, wasn’t. Both are key-op but the back door isn’t a dead bolt, just a latch. Which hadn’t been turned. We walked right in and this is what we found.”
Her next tap landed on a rising delivery ramp followed by a shot of a dim, cavernous space filled with cartons.
Petra said, “The ramp goes up two full stories, bypassing the garage and ending up in this cheerful place. It’s massive and windowless and a mess. Filled with the boxes you see here and here and here, along with tools, stacks of garbage cans and bags, rolls of insulation, replacement AC units.”