“Kind of like the contestants on the show. Stodgy white guy, minority, hot-headed youth, the woman…Bingham, Stone, Kresge, Sandy. And after they were gone, who was left? Old me versus young Dillon McKennah.”
“I think you’re pissed off about something, Mike. Why don’t you just tell me?”
“The game was rigged, Aaron. I know it. You wrote your quote ‘reality’ show like it was a classic Hollywood Western or war movie. You knew how it was going to come out from the beginning. You followed the formula perfectly.”
“And why the fuck would I do that?”
“Because I think you’re trying to get a movie financing package moving with Dillon McKennah. That caper film he was talking about. He’d shot himself in the foot with Town House and that other crap he appeared in. He needed a bump — for both of you.”
Felter was speechless for a moment. Then he looked down. “We talked about a few things, that’s all, Dillon and me. Hell, you and I talked about Stories. That’s my business. Oh, come on, Mike. Don’t embarrass yourself. It was a fucking pissant reality show. There was no guarantee of a bump.”
“But it did get Dillon a bump. A big one. And you know why? Because of the robbery. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that was a classic Act Two reversal — according to the formula of scriptwriting. You know how that works. Big plot twist three-quarters of the way through. Guns of Navarone? The young Greek girl, Gia Scala, the supposed patriot, turns out to be the traitor. She destroys the detonators. How’re the commandos going to blow up the German guns now? We’re sitting on the edge of our seats, wondering.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“The robbery, Aaron. The attempted robbery. It was all set up, too. You arranged the whole thing. That’s what made it more than boring reality TV. My God, you even added a dash of COPS. You got the attempt and Dillon’s Steven Seagal karate moves on security camera and that night it was on YouTube and every network in the country. TV at its best. You think there wasn’t a human being in the country who wasn’t going to turn on the second episode of Go For Broke and watch Dillon and me slug it out?”
“I don’t know what—”
O’Connor held up a hand. “Now, don’t embarrass yourself, Aaron. On the set of Homicide Detail, we had an advisor, a real cop in the LAPD. He’s retired now but we’re still good buddies. I talked to him and told him I had a problem. I needed to know some facts about the case. He made some calls. First of all, the gun that Sammy Ralston had? It was a fake gun. From a studio property department. The sort they use on TV sets, the sort I carried for seven years. Second, turns out that his phone records show Ralston called a prisoner, Joey Fadden, in Lompoc prison a few weeks ago. The same prisoner that you interviewed as part of that series you shot on California prisons last year. I think you paid Joey to get Ralston’s name…Ah, ah, ah, let me finish. Gets better. Third, Ralston keeps talking about this mysterious biker named Jake who put the whole thing together and nobody knows about.”
“Jake.”
“I dug up my fake shield from the TV show and went to the bar on Melrose where Ralston said he met with Jake. I had a mug shot with me.”
“A—”
“From Variety. It was a picture of you and your assistant. The big one. The bartender recognized him. You got him to play the role of Jake, costume, fake tats, the whole thing…I just walked past his office, by the way. There’re posters on his wall, too. One of them’s Brokeback Mountain. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal. Jake. Think about it.”
Felter said nothing but his expression was essentially: Shit.
“Dillon knew about the setup. He knew about the fake gun. That’s why he took on a guy who was armed. He wasn’t in any danger. It was all planned. All planned for the bump.”
O’Connor shook his head. “I should’ve guessed before. I mean, the final hand, Aaron? You know how most poker games end: Two guys half-comatose from lack of sleep and one beats the other with three sixes over a pair of threes. A four-of-a-kind versus a straight flush? That only happens in the movies. That’s not real life.”
“How could I rig the game?”
“Because you hired a sleight-of-hand artist as the dealer. You saw his card tricks when we met him…I ran him down. And I checked the tapes. There were no close-ups of his hands. I’ve got his name and address. Oh, and I also got the phone number of the gaming commission in Nevada.”
The man closed his eyes. Maybe he was thinking of excuses and explanations.
O’Connor almost hoped he’d say something. Which would give the actor a chance to throw out his famous tag line from the old TV series. Save it for the judge.
But Felter didn’t try to excuse himself. He looked across the desk, as if it were a poker table, and he said, “So where do we go from here?”
“To put it in terms of television, Aaron,” Mike O’Connor said, pulling several thick envelopes out of his briefcase, “let’s make a deal.”
A TEXTBOOK CASE
A Lincoln Rhyme story
Physical evidence cannot be wrong; it cannot perjure itself; it cannot be wholly absent.…Only human failure to find, study, and understand it can diminish its value.
1
The worst I’ve ever seen,” he whispered.
She listened to the young man’s words and decided that was a bit ironic, since he couldn’t have been more than mid-twenties. How many crime scenes could he have run?
But she noted, too, that his round, handsome face, crested by a crew-cut scalp, was genuinely troubled. He had a military air about him and didn’t seem the sort to get flustered.
Something particularly troubling was down there — in the pit of the underground garage they stood in front of, delineated by yellow fluttering tape, the pit where the woman had been murdered early that morning.
Amelia Sachs was gearing up at the staging area outside the bland apartment building in this equally style-challenged neighborhood of Manhattan, East Twenty-sixth Street. Here were residential low-rises from the 1950s and ’60s, some brownstones, restaurants that had been born Italian twenty years ago and had converted to Middle Eastern. For greenery, short, anemic trees, striving grass, tiny shrubs in huge concrete planters.
Sachs ripped open the plastic bag containing the disposable scene suit: white Tyvek coveralls, booties, head cap, cuffed nitrile gloves.
“You’ll want the N95, too,” the young officer told her. His name was Marko, maybe first, probably last. Sachs hadn’t bothered to find out.
“Chemical problem? Bio?” Nodding toward the pit.
The N95 was a particulate respirator that filtered out a lot of the bad crap you found at some crime scenes. The dangerous ones.
“Just, you’ll want it.”
She didn’t like the respirators and usually wore a simple surgical mask. But if Marko told her there was a problem inside, she’d go with it.
Worst I’ve ever seen…
Sachs continued to pull on the protective gear. She was claustrophobic and didn’t like the layers of swaddling that crime scene searchers had to put up with, but were necessary to protect them from dangerous substances at the scene. More important, the outfit protected the scene from contaminants police might throw off — their hairs, fibers, flecks of skin and other assorted trace they might cart about with them. (One man had nearly been arrested because a tomato seed had linked him to a murder — until it was discovered that the seed came from the shoe of a Crime Scene officer, who’d neglected to wear booties…and who was soon, thanks to Lincoln Rhyme, a former Crime Scene officer.)