Word was that Groff had been a less than stellar beat cop, but he had the good sense to marry the daughter of a deputy chief several years ago. After that, it was a fast track to lieutenant in Robbery-Homicide. In the last hour, O’Reilly had seen nothing to dissuade him from the view that nepotism still ruled supreme within LAPD’s upper echelon.
The guy’s mind was definitely a two-cylinder job. Groff had asked McKenna to submit voluntarily to a gunshot residue test. The doctor seemed only too happy to oblige, and why not? The shooter had used a rifle, which was much less likely to leave residue than a shorter barreled handgun. And unlike blood, gunshot residue was easily removed with soap and water. Even if McKenna was the shooter, O’Reilly was certain that their GSR test would show nothing. Groff had managed only to create an evidentiary record that could be used against them in court.
The lieutenant impatiently drummed the table with his fingers while the woman thumbed through her notes and summarized aloud some of McKenna’s remarks.
After a minute or so Groff said, “I know what the guy said. I wanna know what you think.”
“The timeline’s a little tight, but doable,” she said. “It’s about a fifteen-minute drive from the hospital to Erickson’s home. Even if McKenna was with his father until 7:45 or so, he could’ve made it there and climbed up the hillside behind Erickson’s place by eight-fifteen.”
“Six minutes before the 911 call came in,” Groff offered.
She nodded. “Erickson’s next-door neighbor says she called a few seconds after hearing the rifle shot. So the shooting probably occurred no earlier than eight-twenty.”
“How far is it from the shooting scene to McKenna’s home?” Groff asked.
“About three and a half miles, due east. Depending on where he parked, it might’ve taken eight to ten minutes to climb back down the hill to his car, then another fifteen minutes to drive home. He could’ve been pulling into his driveway by 8:45, eight-fifty at the latest.”
Groff plucked at his lower lip while seeming to think about the timeline. Then he said to the woman, “Tell me again about that rapist case you dug up.”
“It was a few months ago,” she said. “The rapist was targeting employees at McKenna’s hospital. He went after young women. All the rapes happened within a few blocks of the hospital, all of ’em at night. It went on for a few weeks, until one night a patrol unit finds the guy buck naked, tied to a tree. I hear he looked like he’d been put through a wood chipper. He was barely alive. When he finally woke up, he copped to the rapes.”
“Did the rapist give a description of the guy that mashed him?”
“Nope. Said he never saw it coming.”
Groff said to her, “Find out if McKenna knew any of the rape victims.” He turned to O’Reilly. “Whatta you think? You think McKenna did Erickson?”
O’Reilly came around the table and took a chair. “I don’t see it. This guy’s not stupid, and he’s not nuts. He’s not gonna whack Erickson right after getting into a brawl with him. It’s too obvious. Besides, there’s no shortage of people who hated Erickson’s guts. There’re probably a couple hundred people grinning at their TV this morning.”
The detective’s thoughts flashed on the football player’s wife who, during questioning, had acknowledged her husband’s longstanding physical abuse. O’Reilly couldn’t fathom the tangled mess of emotions that she was grappling with at that moment.
Groff said to O’Reilly, “Tell us about the Tartaglia case.”
O’Reilly had been waiting for the question. His answer would determine whether he remained on the Tartaglia murder investigation. LAPD brass ruled by fiat in high-profile cases, and if Groff sniffed a likely connection between the murders of Erickson and Tartaglia, he’d yank the case out from under O’Reilly and assign it to one of the homicide teams at the downtown headquarters.
“Last Friday night, Katherine Tartaglia drove to a restaurant across the street from University Children’s for a meeting with McKenna. She was shot three times in a parking lot before she ever got out of her car. Someone, probably the killer, took her purse, then went to her house and cleaned it out. Stereo equipment, TV, computer, jewelry — everything.”
The truth was, O’Reilly thought his case was anything but a simple robbery-homicide. The shooter had tried to make it look like one, but there was one small detail that didn’t fit. There wasn’t a single computer CD or flash drive anywhere in Tartaglia’s house. She either didn’t have any, which hardly seemed likely, or the killer took the time to scoop up a bunch of flash drives and CDs used to store computer files, while leaving behind over seventy music CDs that were sitting right next to where the stereo had been.
More likely, O’Reilly thought, the killer knew exactly what he was doing. There was something in Tartaglia’s computer files that the perp didn’t want anyone to see.
“We’re still waiting on the M.E.’s report,” O’Reilly continued, “but it’s gonna show that she died from gunshot wounds to the head and chest, probably nine-millimeter. Nobody heard any shots, so the killer was probably using a sound suppressor.”
What he didn’t tell Groff was that the medical examiner had found no gunpowder residue around any of the bullet entry wounds. In fact, there was no residue at all on the body, which meant that the killer was probably standing at least ten feet away when he put two tightly grouped shots into the victim’s chest and a bull’s-eye in her forehead. This was no ordinary shooter.
“Does McKenna have an alibi?”
“He was in the restaurant waiting for her at the time of the shooting. The owner remembers seeing him there. I’m not done looking at that — I still have to view a security video and pinpoint when he left the hospital. But so far, his alibi is holding.”
O’Reilly hoped the omission — okay, lie — wouldn’t come back to bite him. Records from Tartaglia’s phone company confirmed that her mother had called her a few minutes before the murder. The mother remembered her daughter saying something about McKenna being nearby while they had their little mother-daughter chat. When pressed, though, the mother couldn’t remember exactly what her daughter had said.
There was something squirrelly about McKenna. O’Reilly felt certain the guy wasn’t telling them everything he knew, but that didn’t necessarily make him a murderer. More importantly, he didn’t have a clear motive for McKenna. At least, not yet. Tartaglia was about to come into a sizable chunk of money, but her will listed her parents as the beneficiaries.
There was one interesting lead relating to motive — at least his instincts told him so. Dr. Barnesdale had remarked that when Tartaglia left University Children’s to join Zenavax, it had stirred a firestorm of controversy that proved embarrassing to Elmer McKenna. The younger McKenna had mentioned her working for his father, but not the controversy.
Similarly, Tartaglia’s boss, a senior vice president at Zenavax, hadn’t mentioned the rift when O’Reilly spoke with him by phone the morning after the murder. The detective wanted to have another discussion with the people at Zenavax — this time, in person — to probe that issue. He was also going to ask them about Tartaglia’s research involving those autopsy cases at the Coroner’s Office.