A Darkness More Than Night - Страница 6

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While there were other possibilities, McCaleb’s instinct told him the plastic owl was somehow part of the crime scene. He took up the notebook and made the owl the sixth entry on his list.


***

The rest of the crime scene videotape fostered little interest in McCaleb. It documented the remaining rooms of the victim’s apartment – the bedroom, bathroom and kitchen. He saw no more owls and took no more notes. When he got to the end of the tape he rewound it and watched it all the way through once more. Nothing new caught his attention. He ejected the tape and slid it back into its cardboard slipcase. He then carried the television back up to the salon, where he locked it into its frame on the counter.

Buddy was sprawled on the couch reading his paperback. He didn’t say anything and McCaleb could tell he was hurt that McCaleb had closed and locked the door to the office on him. He thought about apologizing but decided to let it go. Buddy was too nosy about McCaleb, past and present. Maybe this rejection would let him know that.

“What are you reading?” he asked instead.

“A book,” Lockridge answered without looking up.

McCaleb smiled to himself. Now he was sure that he had gotten to Buddy.

“Well, there’s the TV if you want to watch the news or something.”

“The news is over.”

McCaleb looked at his watch. It was midnight. He had not realized how much time had gone by. This had often been the case with him – while at the bureau it was routine for him to work through lunch or late into night without realizing it when he became fully engaged in a case.

He left Buddy to sulk and went back down to the office. He closed the door again, loudly, and locked it.

Chapter 4

After turning to a fresh page in his notebook, McCaleb opened the murder book. He snapped open the rings and pulled the documents out and stacked them neatly on the desk. It was a little quirk but he never liked reviewing cases by turning pages in a book. He liked to hold the individual reports in his hands. He liked squaring off the corners of the whole stack. He put the binder aside and began carefully reading through the investigative summaries in chronological order. Soon he was fully immersed in the investigation.

The homicide report had come in anonymously to the front desk of the West Hollywood substation of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department at noon on Monday, January 1. The male caller said there was a man dead in apartment 2 B in the Grand Royale Apartments on Sweetzer near Melrose. The caller hung up without giving his name or any other message. Because the call came in on one of the nonemergency lines at the front desk it was not recorded, and there was no caller ID function on the phone.

A pair of patrol deputies were dispatched to the apartment and found the front door slightly ajar. After receiving no answer to their knocks and calls, the deputies entered the apartment and quickly determined that the anonymous caller had given correct information. A man was dead inside. The deputies backed out of the apartment and the homicide squad was called. The case was assigned to partners Jaye Winston and Kurt Mintz, with Winston as lead detective.

The victim was identified in the reports as Edward Gunn, a forty-four-year-old itinerant house painter. He had lived alone in the Sweetzer Avenue apartment for nine years.

A computer search for criminal records or known criminal activity determined that Gunn had a history of convictions for small-time crimes ranging from soliciting for prostitution and loitering to repeated arrests for public intoxication and drunk driving. He had been arrested twice for drunk driving in the three months prior to his death, including the night of December 30. He posted bail on the 31 st and was released. Less than twenty-four hours later he was dead. The records also showed an arrest for a serious crime without subsequent conviction. Six years earlier Gunn had been taken into custody by the Los Angeles Police Department and questioned in a homicide. He was later released and no charges were ever filed.

According to the investigative reports Winston and her partner had put into the murder book, there was no apparent robbery of Gunn or his apartment, leaving the motive for his slaying unknown. Other residents in the eight-unit apartment building said that they had heard no disturbances in Gunn’s apartment on New Year’s Eve. Any sounds that might have emanated from the apartment during the murder were likely camouflaged by the sounds of a party being held by a tenant in the apartment directly below Gunn’s. The party had lasted well into the morning of January 1. Gunn, according to several partygoers who were interviewed, had not attended the party or been invited.

A canvass of the neighborhood, which was primarily lined with small apartment buildings similar to the Grand Royale, found no witnesses who remembered seeing Gunn in the days leading up to his death.

All indications were that the murderer had come to Gunn. The lack of damage to doors and windows of the apartment indicated that there had been no break-in and that Gunn might very well have known his killer. To that end, Winston and Mintz interviewed all known coworkers and associates, as well as every tenant and every person who had attended the party at the complex, in an effort to draw out a suspect. They got nothing for their effort.

They also checked all of the victim’s financial records for a clue to a possible monetary motivation and found nothing. Gunn had no steady employment. He mostly loitered around a paint and design store on Beverly Boulevard and offered his services to customers on a day-work basis. He lived a hand-to-mouth existence, making just enough to pay for and maintain his apartment and a small pickup truck in which he carried his painting equipment.

Gunn had one living relative, a sister who lived in Long Beach. At the time of his death, he had not seen her in more than a year, though he happened to call her the night before his death from the holding tank of the LAPD’s Hollywood Division station. He was being held there following his DUI arrest. The sister reported that she’d told her brother she could no longer keep helping him and bailing him out. She’d hung up. And she could not offer the investigators any useful information in regard to his murder.

The incident in which Gunn had been arrested six years before was fully reviewed. Gunn had killed a prostitute in a Sunset Boulevard motel room. He had stabbed her with her own knife when she attempted to stab and rob him, according to his statement in the report forwarded by the LAPD’s Hollywood Division. There were minor inconsistencies between Gunn’s original statement to responding patrol officers and the physical evidence but not enough for the district attorney’s office to seek charges against him. Ultimately, the case was reluctantly written off as self-defense and dropped.

McCaleb noticed that the lead investigator on the case had been Detective Harry Bosch. Years earlier McCaleb had worked with Bosch on a case, an investigation he still often thought about. Bosch had been abrasive and secretive at times, but still a good cop with excellent investigative skills, intuition and instincts. They had actually bonded in some way over the emotional turmoil the case had caused them both. McCaleb wrote Bosch’s name down in the notebook as a reminder to call the detective to see if he had any thoughts on the Gunn case.

He went back to reading the summaries. With Gunn’s record of prior engagement with a prostitute in mind, Winston’s and Mintz’s next step was to comb through the murder victim’s phone records as well as check and credit card purchases for indications that he might have continued to use prostitutes. There was nothing. They cruised Sunset Boulevard with an LAPD vice crew for three nights, stopping and interviewing street prostitutes. But none admitted knowing the man in the photos the detectives had borrowed from Gunn’s sister.

The detectives scanned the sex want ads in the local alternative papers for an advertisement Gunn might have placed. One more time their efforts hit a wall.

Finally, the detectives took the long shot of tracking the family and associates of the dead prostitute of six years before. Although Gunn had never been charged with the killing, there was still a chance someone believed he had not acted in self-defense – someone who might have sought retribution.

But this, too, was a dead end. The woman’s family was from Philadelphia. They had lost contact years before. No family member had even come out to claim the body before it was cremated at county taxpayers’ expense. There was no reason for them to seek vengeance for a killing six years old when they had not cared much about the killing in the first place.

The case had hit one investigative dead end after another. A case not solved in the first forty-eight hours had a less than 50 percent chance of being cleared. A case unsolved after two weeks was like an unclaimed body in the morgue – it was going to sit there in the cold and the dark for a long, long time.

And that was why Winston had finally come to McCaleb. He was the last resort on a hopeless case.

Finished with the summaries, McCaleb decided to take a break. He checked his watch and saw it was now almost two. He opened the cabin door and went up to the salon. The lights were off. Buddy had apparently gone to bed in the master cabin without making any noise. McCaleb opened the cold box and looked in. There was a six-pack of beer left over from the charter but he didn’t want that. There was a carton of orange juice and some bottled water. He took the water and went out through the salon door to the cockpit. It was always cool on the water but this night seemed crisper than usual. He folded his arms across his chest and looked across the harbor and up the hill to the house where he knew his family slept. A single light shone from the back deck.

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