He wasted little time talking to the reporters, moving swiftly into the limo that had been arranged to pick them up. “Aren’t you joining me?” he asked, lowering the window as Dunn closed the door that separated them. “You worked so hard, I thought we might celebrate.” He sniffed the air around her, his nostrils identifying the scent of her rage and fear, but nothing else that told him she was his. “Urasawa maybe?”
One hand to her face as if to shield her mouth from the cameras’ prying eyes, Dunn leaned into the car, the smile she wore for the reporters congealing into an ugly grimace. “Our services to your mother’s estate are concluded, Mr. Nolent.”
He fingered the sketchbook in his lap. “I’m sorry, but you seemed to admire my work so much, I thought that you and I might – ”
He reached out for his attorney’s unadorned hand, which she withdrew at a speed that surprised him. “You’re out of your fucking mind if you think I’d ever have anything to do with you. Good-bye!”
Scanning the faces of the people around her, Christophe raised the window, hoping the paparazzi hadn’t captured the tense exchange. Had she forgotten who he was? With just a phone call to one of the major magazines, he could obliterate Michelle Dunn and her media-hungry partners, these so-called defenders of justice who raided his mother’s estate of its assets but never shook his hand, never touched him unless it was for the cameras. But what did she matter? She and the rest of the minions his mother’s money had bought were no more than servants, there to do his bidding, not the other way around.
“Let’s get out of here!” he muttered to his driver through the open glass partition. As the small knot of reporters and deputies receded in the rear window, Christophe Nolent settled into the leather seats for the ride to his home in Bel-Air, knowing God was on his side.
A LONE FIGURE stood at the rear entrance of the county jail, collar of his suit jacket turned up against the stinging rain, wondering why God was punishing him. He’d stood for a half hour, waiting, then watched as Christophe Nolent slithered by him, had a brief conversation with one of his attorneys, then pulled off in a Bentley limo, burning rubber as if leaving the scene of a crime.
Which he was, the little shit. First crime being the murders of those women, and the second, beating the rap because his slickster attorneys had got him off on a technicality. But no one would remember it that way. All they’d remember – the cops he used to work with here and those at his current job in Simi – was that Steve Firestone had fucked up again, and now a serial killer was back on the streets.
What the hell was he supposed to do?
His former coworkers in the department would have never had Nolent on their radar if it hadn’t been for him. He was the one who watched the news and pored over the LAPD bulletins on the murders of several women that Robbery-Homicide detectives believed were the work of a single killer. He was the one who reached out to Lieutenant Kenneth Stobaugh when they found Tiffany.
Tiffany Rutherford was an exotic dancer, like the other vics in the LAPD’s bulletins. She worked at a club in West LA, although she lived in Simi, out in Ventura County. She was found near the entrance to a remote park at the north end of town, skin flayed from her body and chunks of flesh removed from her stomach and arms. Firestone had caught the case with his partner, Kraig Tytus, nice guy but a wuss, threw up all over the crime scene. Steve had seen much worse than that in his fifteen years as a Homicide detective in the LAPD, although he had to admit that in his ten years at Simi, there hadn’t been one as brutal as this.
But rather than hold on to the sensational case and sew up that promotion to chief of the Detective Unit he’d been coveting, Steve had swallowed his pride and picked up the phone a couple of days after Tiffany was found, and called Lieutenant Stobaugh. “Just don’t tell me Detective Cortez or Justice is working it from your side,” he’d tried to joke with his former boss.
Stobaugh had refused to laugh about it, merely referred him to Billie Truesdale, who had been a fairly new transfer from one of the divisions into RHD when he was there but who had almost ten years on the job now. She’d shown up that afternoon wearing a boxy blazer, fitted trousers, and no makeup. Women that butch and that dark had never been Steve’s type, which probably was fine with her, from what he’d heard through the grapevine.
“Mind if I look around?” she’d asked as she stood in the tiled entryway of Tiffany Rutherford’s town house that day.
“Why the fuck else would I’ve called you?”
“Look, Firestone, I got no beef with you, okay?”
“You think Cortez and Justice feel the same way?”
“That’s the past, forget about it!”
Steve felt his fists unclench and his shoulders go down an inch or two. Maybe Truesdale meant it, maybe she didn’t, but at least she looked him in the eye when she said it. Maybe it was because she knew the sexual-harassment charges those bitches had filed against him were bogus, just sour grapes because he’d slept with one and not the other.
“You find anything of interest when your team went through the place?” Truesdale was asking him.
He shrugged. “For a stripper, she sure bought a lot of clothes.”
“You mean for her act?”
Steve shook his head as he led her upstairs. “According to her employer, she did a straight-up thong song at the Three-Way. What I mean is, she bought a lot of professional-looking clothes, like the girls wear on those Law & Order shows.”
The master bedroom’s wenge-wood bed and expensive perfumes on the dresser hinted at a sophistication out of step with the suburban setting. The adjacent walk-in closet was jammed with skirted suits, soft blouses, and flowing dresses, tags on a full third of the garments. Truesdale pulled out a tiny knit dress with the tag still on it, in a tiger print like Steve’s ex-wife used to wear and that probably would have suited the petite detective, if this dyke ever wore dresses.
“And look at all the receipts.” Steve gestured to an accordion file on a desk in the corner. “Maybe her family can return the shit with the tags still on and get their money back.”
Truesdale had donned a pair of gloves and started fingering through the file, making notes as she went along. “Your vic spent good money on her clothes. More for some of these outfits than I bring home in a week.” She flipped through some more receipts, pausing at one near the front. “It looks like Tiffany went shopping the day she was murdered.”
“No shit, Sherlock.” Steve tried but couldn’t keep the acid from his voice. “We’ve already talked to the salesladies where she bought the stuff on that receipt. They recognized her from the picture we had but didn’t remember anyone with her.” Steve and Tytus had used the high school graduation photo sitting on the desk, Tiffany’s California-girl looks striking even then. Taken no more than three or four years before, it was more flattering than her driver’s-license picture, not to mention the postmortem photo taken by the coroner, the girl’s face rendered unrecognizable by the butcher who’d killed her.
Truesdale extracted a crumpled piece of paper that was wedged in a corner of the file. “You talk to the customer-service department too?”
Wondering what he’d missed, Steve could feel his shoulders stiffen. “The people working the counter that day were off when we went through,” he’d lied.