Bones Read online

  “A home?” said Balter. “No.”

  “What about a rental property?”

  “No.”

  “Any idea where they could be, sir?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Of course?”

  Balter said, “I manage their money, I don’t get involved in their personal life.”

  “Mr. Weir seems concerned.”

  “I’m sure he is.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “He’s more involved with their personal life.”

  Moe Reed returned to the office and gave a thumbs-up. “Marc Green didn’t want follow-up. He recalled something else Selena told him.”

  “Sudden memory jog?” said Milo.

  “My feeling is he didn’t want to bring it up in front of his mother. Apparently, Selena had started dating someone a few months before she died. Marc can’t remember exactly when but he thinks it was three, four months ago when she told him. An older guy.”

  “How old?”

  “She didn’t say. Marc says she was embarrassed about it, so could be there was a serious age gap. The juicy part is she kept up that confession habit of hers, told Marc the guy liked it rough. And so did she, the two of them fit together like a socket and a wrench. Her words.”

  “Sounds like something a guy would tell her.”

  “I agree, Loo. So now we have a dominance thing consistent with Sheralyn and DeMaura. Maybe on that level Selena wasn’t that different from the others. What do you think, Doc?”

  I said, “It does put things in a new light.”

  Milo said, “An older guy into rough. She say anything else about him?”

  Reed said, “No, no, it’s likely some swinger she met at one of those parties, right?”

  Milo said, “Older. Simon Vander would sure qualify. And so would Huck, he’s thirty-seven, which is eleven years older than Selena. The net does seem to be tightening. And things could be even nastier than we thought.”

  He summarized the news of the Vanders’ return and disappearance.

  Reed said, “Simon’s sounding more like a victim than a bad guy. Unless he did bad things and needs to keep a low profile . . . to me, it still smells like Huck’s our prime guy. We need to find him, we really do, Milo.”

  First time he’d addressed the boss by name.

  Optimal workplace adjustment.

  CHAPTER 26

  At seven p.m. the following day, an LAPD press release offered Travis Huck’s name to the media. The timing was fine-tuned: too late for the papers or the six o’clock news, early enough for a feed to the eleven o’clock broadcast. Or in D.C. Henry Weinberg’s words, “a trickle, not a flood, we’re vulnerable, Lieutenant.”

  Departmental spinners described Huck as a “person of interest” and included “a prior felony conviction.” None of the four women found in the marsh was mentioned by name. The Vanders never came up.

  In the interim, Milo and Reed and I did walk-throughs of both Vander residences. We hit the beach house first, found no evidence the family had ever lived there. Soggy leather furniture sat on purple wall-to-wall. The smell was salt, rust, an old-paint sourness that shouted disuse. Oars and a man’s wetsuit in the closet said the place hadn’t progressed much past bachelor pad.

  Heavy twin doors at the mansion on Calle Maritimo opened to a loose chain of high, broad vanilla rooms, tastefully if blandly furnished, floored with golden limestone. Family photos tilted on a couple of mantels, abstract art hung in the spaces where windows didn’t dominate. A grand piano took up a corner of a cavernous back room. A spinet piano sat in Kelvin’s sky-blue bedroom.

  Travis Huck’s quarters consisted of a smallish room past a vast caterer’s kitchen and a lav. Twin bed, IKEA dresser, aluminum reading lamp. Monastic, but cheered by an ocean view. Placement in the service wing said the space had been designed as a maid’s room.

  No signs of struggle or body fluids there, or anywhere else, but Milo called for a crime scene team. The legal assistant Buddy Weir sent to keep watch looked alarmed, but she checked with the attorney and he told her to cooperate.

  Given a huge backlog, the techs were expected “within days,” and Milo’s call to the crime scene office didn’t change that. He tried the chief, couldn’t get through, smiled grimly.

  Moe Reed said, “Keeping it in low gear?”

  “Heaven forbid, kiddo.”

  Reed smiled. “I’m learning.”

  I left the detectives to their frustration and drove home. The discovery of Selena’s lover had scrambled my theories about the three other women being a rehearsal for her; the case was boiling down to another hideous pattern of sexual sadism.

  A killer building up his confidence. Selena, the unlucky upgrade.

  I phoned Marc Green to see if there was anything more to tease out.

  He’d been hovering on the brink of rage. My voice pushed him over.

  I waited until he stopped shouting. “I know it’s tough, but I still need to ask. Is there anything more you—”

  “More? All that shit I just told them isn’t enough?”

  Slam.

  I drove to the Crenshaw District and paid a second visit to Beatrix Chenoweth, Big Laura’s mother. Ready to serve as an anger receptacle again. If anyone was trained for that, I was.

  She saw me in graciously, served coffee and chocolate wafers. Waited me out as I approached the topic with as much tact as I could muster.

  She said, “Let me understand this: You want to know if Lurlene liked being hurt?”

  “We’ve found evidence of that in other victims, so—”

  “The answer is yes, Doctor. I didn’t mention it the first time because . . . because I was so stunned when you all dropped in. I’ve been thinking about calling, but talking about that kind of thing is hard. I won’t pretend Lurlene and I were close, but she was my child. Imagining what happened to her hurts me terribly.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Any progress?”

  “Not so far.”

  “But you’ve got other victims who . . . oh, Lord . . . Lurlene’s time on the streets, part of me has been waiting for this.” Thin, square shoulders rose and fell. Her hands shook. “Did she like being hurt? When she was a child, just the opposite, Lurlene was the one hitting other people and getting in trouble over it. I kept telling her being big meant she needed to be doubly responsible.” Frown. “It wasn’t until later, when I realized what a problem her weight was, that I knew I’d said exactly the wrong thing . . . did she like being hurt . . . apparently, yes. I’m talking about later, when she was out of the house. Working.”

  She grabbed for a hankie, stanched a sudden burst of tears. “As if that’s a job.”

  Clearing her throat, she put steel in her voice: “A couple of times when she came by—for money—I noticed bruises. Here. Here.” Fingering both sides of her own neck. “At first I wasn’t sure they were bruises. Lurlene was dark, took after her father. And the first time she was trying to cover it, wearing a scarf. Which is exactly why I noticed, Lurlene never wore scarves. I spotted something purple beneath the fabric, put my finger there, and she slapped it away.”

  Wincing. “Hard, not just a love pat. But I can be as pigheaded as she can and I persisted and she got terribly angry and ripped it off—the scarf—and said, ‘Happy?’

  “I said, ‘I’m not happy if someone hurt you, Lurlene.’ She said, ‘No one hurt me in any way I don’t want to be hurt.’ Then she smirked. I was appalled and that amused her. She rolled up her sleeves and I said here it comes, she’ll show off her needle marks, what else does this girl have planned to disappoint me? But instead, she displayed more bruises on her wrists. I was repelled and turned away and that fueled her up. She told me people were willing to pay for extras and she had the confidence to handle anything. So of course, I got preachy. Told her dangerous ways led to—why bore you? She laughed at me and left.”

  Smiling. “That’s the whole of it, sir.”

  I said, “You’ve b
een through a lot.”

  “My other girls are doing well. May I pour you more coffee?”

  “Laura, too, now it’s a hat trick,” said Milo.

  I’d pulled up to the station just as he stepped out the front door and began walking.

  “All this exercise,” I said. “I’m starting to worry about you.”

  “Afternoon constitutional at a non-aerobic pace,” he said. “Walls tend to close in when I’m feeling useless. You probably jogged five miles this morning.”

  We passed the same houses and apartments. This time the sky stayed gray and the air was soupy and lazy.

  He said, “Airport cops found the Vanders’ Lexus in the LAX longterm lot, but we can’t find evidence Huck flew anywhere.”

  “Oldest trick in the book.”

  “Young Moses and I have been canvassing nearby hotels and motels anyway. Same for fancy places from S.F. to Santa Barbara, looking for the Vanders. We also tried private charters. Zippo on all counts. This is smelling like a wild man on a rampage and he’s long gone.”

  “Four sadistic sexual murders, playing with the bones of three victims,” I said. “Then Duboff, then the Vanders? Hard to see a theme there.”

  “Does there need to be?” he said. “That asshole in Kansas killed women, men, kids, whoever he found in the house. Same for Ramirez, Zodiac, blah blah blah.”

  “In those cases the males were collateral damage.”

  “The same could be true here. How about this for a theoretical: Huck works for the Vanders for three years, develops a letch for Nadine. Before he can have his way with her, he needs to get rid of Hubby and Kid.”

  “He manages to get them back from Asia?”

  “He lied about something that got them back. These guys, it’s all about control, right? Can you think of a better power trip than moving rich folk around like chess pieces? We come nosing around about Selena, he figures it’s only a matter of time, so he splits.”

  I thought about that. “A family emergency might’ve worked as ruse. Simone’s been hurt, or she’s sick. Simon and Nadine trusted Huck, no reason to verify. But how does Duboff fit in?”

  “When we nab Huck, we’ll find out. Let’s face it, Alex, when you cut through all the bullshit, this ain’t a whodunit. We had the prime suspect in our sights right off the bat—he had good reason to sweat.”

  Ten steps later: “God only knows what Huck was doing all those under-the-radar years before the Vanders took him in. So, of course, he repays them in a metaphysically consistent manner.”

  “No good deed,” I said.

  “I’m amending it,” he said. “No good deed goes un-tied-up and bloodied and degraded and dumped like garbage.”

  “Too long for a bumper sticker.”

  CHAPTER 27

  Limited TV exposure brought in thirty-four sightings of Ed-ward T. Huckstadter aka Travis Huck.

  Milo and Moe Reed spent two days chasing air.

  A man who’d worked at the Youth Authority when Huck was in custody informed Reed that Huck had “given him the willies. Always crybabying about something, but those eyes of his . . .”

  “Mean?” said Reed.

  “Crafty, you know? Like when they’re plotting something. I woulda never let him out.”

  “He do anything bad while he was in?”

  “Not that I remember, but so what, I was right. Those types get all coiled up and wait like snakes.”

  Huck’s name didn’t show up on the passenger logs of trains and buses leaving L.A., but a Metro ticket paid for in cash would’ve provided easy escape. After some lawyerly hedging, Buddy Weir consented to have the Vanders’ Lexus examined at the LAPD motor lab.

  “But please, Lieutenant, no damage. I don’t want Simon and Nadine returning home to that kind of thing.”

  No one was paying attention to Silford Duboff’s murder, but I couldn’t let go of it. I called Alma Reynolds, listened to the phone ring.

  No voice mail, and she’d bragged about no cell for her or “Sil.” Maybe no computer or TV either; I wondered if she’d heard about the search for Travis Huck.

  She’d retired from teaching college, hadn’t mentioned another job. I called Milo to see if the file contained a work number. He was over at the airport, re-scanning departure records, and I spoke to Moe Reed.

  He said, “Let me check . . . here it is, doctor’s office, West L.A. What are you figuring she can tell you?”

  “Probably nothing.”

  “You do this a lot, huh? Helping out.”

  “When he asks.”

  “He ask you to check Reynolds?”

  “Sometimes I improvise.”

  “Yeah,” said Reed. “He told me that.”

  Given Alma Reynolds’s lifestyle, my bet was on some sort of holistic practice for her employer. But her boss turned out to be a conventional ophthalmologist in a conventional building on Sepulveda near Olympic.

  The waiting room was full. Small-print brochures for LASIK were the preferred reading material.

  Reynolds’s job title was office coordinator. The receptionist at the front seemed happy for a break in routine. About my age, with short dark hair and an easy smile.

  “Sorry, she’s gone to lunch.”

  “Two forty-five,” I said. “Kind of late.”

  “We were swamped all morning, I guess she didn’t have time till now.”

  “Any idea where she eats?”

  “This about her boyfriend?”

  “It is. She talk about him?”

  “Just that she misses him. Wants to see whoever did such a terrible thing pay—you don’t wear contacts, do you?”

  “Nope.”

  “Thought so,” she said. “Your eyes are that natural gray-blue, with colored lenses they tend to overdo the blue . . . Alma likes Mexican, there’s a strip mall three blocks west.”

  The mall provided easy parking and six ethnic restaurants. Alma Reynolds was the sole patron of Cocina de Cabo, sitting in a blue, molded-resin booth, enjoying blue corn fish tacos and a can of Coke Zero. Despite the heat, she had on the same mannish wool slacks, below a white V-neck that made her look ten pounds lighter than the work shirt she’d worn at the station. Long gray hair was tied back in a ponytail, and I thought I spotted makeup around wrinkle lines. Bright blue eyes made me wonder about cosmetic lenses.

  I waved. She slapped a hand on her chest. “Stalking me?”

  “Only in the service of public safety. May I sit down?”

  “Can I stop you?”

  “If it’s not a good—”

  “Just kidding. Sentarse. I think that’s the right word, when in Cabo, do as the Caboans do.” Her big jaw jutted and the blue eyes lowered to her taco. “Sil was a vegan. I eat fish from time to time.”

  “I was wondering if you’ve come up with any other ideas.”

  Her mouth narrowed. “Citizen participation? The answer is no.”

  “One thing we’re still trying to figure out is how Sil fits the other murders.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t.”

  I waited.

  “That’s all,” she said. “Maybe he doesn’t. One of those lunatic copycats. Unless the scumbag who lured him over was trying to hide something about the first murders.”

  “Lured him with a promise to help him solve the other murders.”

  The hand on her chest shifted and I spotted a glint of gold. She moved her fingers back into position. “Yes.”

  “Do you think it could’ve been someone who knew Sil well enough to push his buttons?”

  “Such as?”

  “A friend, even an acquaintance who understood his attachment to the marsh.”

  “His friend was me,” she said. “Same for acquaintance.”

  “Limited social circle.”

  “By choice. People can be so tiresome.”

  “What about someone who knew him indirectly—through his work?”

  “That’s a possibility, but he never mentioned a name.”

  “We can’t se
em to find a membership roster for Save the Marsh.”

  “That’s because it’s not a real group. In the beginning—after Sil rescued the marsh from the B.S. boys, Billionaire Scum—a board was established. But that was just rich people trying to feel virtuous. No meetings were ever held. For all practical purposes, STM was Sil.”