Burn (11 page)

This simple formula of proportion was the reason why Timms's boss, Captain Garland Graham, had been appointed by the chief to scramble a twelve-detective investigation into the murder of Gregor Tavlin. Tavlin's celebrity may have been modest by Tinsel town standards, but his ties to Doren Lomax—by extension, to the department itself—made the case a matter of high public scrutiny.

Doren Lomax, besides being Gregor Tavlin's former employer, happened to be the longest-sitting current member of the Civilian Board of Police Commissioners.
With aftershocks of Rodney King, O. J. Simpson, Rampart Division, and assorted lesser scandals still rippling from the epicenter of too-recent memory, the department intended to walk this case home and put it to bed without a peep.

Graham had divided his investigative force into two teams. Team One's focus: Gregor Tavlin's year post-Lomax Enterprises, including his scholarship foundation and his lengthy roster of Hollywood clientele.

Timms had been assigned to walk point on Team Two: the Lomax Enterprises era.

Late Wednesday morning, the crew assembled around an octagonal table in one of the new multiuse pods off the squad room. The murder book, a fat blue binder containing a record of everything collected in the Tavlin investigation so far, served as a centerpiece.

Detectives Joe Reese and Ruben Carvajal took the first turn. Their previous night's stakeout of the house on Palisades Beach Road had marked a possible new player. Timms studied color printouts of digital photos of the visitor who had climbed the gate to the property just after sundown.

“That's him leaving the property this morning, few minutes past five, ” Reese said. They'd obtained permission from a neighboring homeowner to park a few numbers up for the night. “Walks right past us without giving a glance. Had a rental parked in the pay lot up the beach.”

Carvajal took it from there. “Guy checks out of the Hotel California on Ocean Ave around six. We talked to the desk on our way back. Night manager marked him right off, said he remembered the guy had an unusual scar above his eye.”

“Must have been riding shotgun, ” Timms said,
thinking about the car accident story Kindler had fed him yesterday.

Carvajal said, “When?”

Timms shook his head. “Never mind. Scarface here, how was he registered?”

“Under the name Ronald McDonald. Paid cash for the room, ” Reese said. “Goes straight from there to LAX, checks in the rental under the name Guy Smiley, then hops a nonstop United flight to Baltimore.”

Timms studied the photo a moment longer, then tossed it onto the table. He looked at the group. “Opinions?”

“We could cross-check the passenger list with NCIC, OCIS, definitely Baltimore PD, ” Reese suggested.

“Maybe we should go ahead and x-ref the Maryland telephone listings for Willy Wonka while we're at it, ” Aaron Keene said.

“I could put a Baltimore phone book up your ass, ” Drea offered. “You can x-ref it with a hand mirror.”

“Children, ” Timms said.

“He started it.”

Keene curled his hand and stroked it back and forth in front of him. Timms ignored the gesture. Every circle had a jerk; Aaron Keene just happened to be theirs. When it came to working a suspect, Timms had seen Aaron Keene play a hand as close to the vest as anybody. But around the shop, Keene pretty much wore his asshole on his sleeve.

“I talked to SID this morning, ” Drea said, moving on, repeating for the group what she'd already given Timms. Among other things, the Scientific Investigation Division performed forensic analyses of evidence items. Timms had handed over the Lomax letter, and the envelope containing it, to SID's Questioned Documents section, who
had returned their findings to Drea Munoz two hours ago. “Computer workup of the handwriting samples basically clinches it. The signature's a forge.”

“Big surprise, ” Keene said.

“Somebody wants to ding this guy Kindler for something, ” Timms said. “But whatever he's into, it smells to me like some other cop's problem.”

Aaron Keene said, “So we can sign off on this zero now?”

“I'm not signing off anything yet, ” Timms told him. “What have you got?”

“How about an actual lead?” Keene opened the file folder he'd brought with him and passed a sheet of paper. “This is an arrest record for a Lomax Enterprises employee named Benjamin Corbin.”

The name rang a bell. Timms pulled the murder book and flipped to the running index of conducted interviews. “That's the driver, ” he said for everybody's benefit, thumping the page with his finger. “Goes by Benjy We talked to him August 8.”

“I ran the employee files for priors and popped a flag on this guy, ” Keene said. “Dinged for misdemeanor possession in ’89 and ’91. Hammered April ’95 for intent to distribute plus possession of an illegal firearm. Drew a dime at Chino, served three with good behavior.”

Drea passed the arrest sheet to Timms. “So the guy's got a record. What's the flag?”

“Lomax Enterprises runs security checks on all new employees, ” Keene said. “But there's no background on this in Corbin's file. I just got off the phone with the flack.”

“Todman, ” Timms said.

“Who explains to me that they're aware of the record, and the conviction, but Corbin is a special case, ”
Keene went on. “Friend of the family. David's old high school buddy, roommate in college, even dated the sister Heather at one point.”

“No kidding.”

“According to Todman, ” said Keene. “Seems Benjamin hooked up with a bad crowd along the way, made some bad moves, got in a little trouble, but hey. Happens to the best of us, right? Everybody deserves another chance. So when Corbin makes his paper, David and Heather plead his case to Daddy, who brings him on at the company and gives him a shot. Guy's been clean since then, at least on the screens.”

“Funny, ” Timms said. “I don't remember Mr. Corbin mentioning any of that in his interview. Or anybody else, come to think of it.”

“Could be they closed ranks around Corbin because of the record, ” Carvajal said. “That'd sound about Tod-man's speed to me. Felon on the payroll, more dirty laundry they don't need aired, he'd want to keep it away from the reporters.”

“I have a gut feeling, ” Keene said, “that says we put a tap and a tail on Corbin, we'll find our boy before long.”

Timms nodded, despite his own gut feeling. He was learning to live with it; he'd had it ever since this case began.

The odds had been stacked against them from the start, even setting aside the family involved. Clearance statistics for dump cases—cases in which a victim was killed in one location but discovered in another—always suffered due to the absence of an immediate crime scene. Time was a perpetual enemy. Time between the murder and the discovery of the body. Time for weather, traffic, wildlife, and water-dropping helicopters to compromise the body and the dumpsite itself.

Based on the initial evidence, the picture they'd assembled looked something like this:

Somebody puts a large dent in Gregor Tavlin's brain pan and loads him into the trunk of his own car. They don't take special precautions—a drop cloth, for example—because they have a plan. The plan involves driving Tavlin's Alfa up into the smoke-filled hills. Removing the body from the trunk and situating it behind the wheel. Emptying a bottle of booze over everything and tossing it into the car for appearances, but doubting it will matter. Because they finish by sending the car over in a bashing, smashing tumble, leaving it where it finally comes to rest, directly in the path of the wildfire marching toward the sea.

The nature of the wound and the method of disposal sent mixed signals. The blow to the head—intimate, but delivered to a turned back—suggested anything from an altercation with a personal acquaintance to old-fashioned random assault. Neither scenario suggested a professional job.

The disposal of the body, however, was leagues beyond anything the average citizen generally thought to attempt after they'd snapped and killed somebody. The dump spot itself seemed interesting, less than a mile from state land. Drea believed the dumpers may have hoped to create jurisdictional confusion in the event somebody found the body before the fire did its job.

At least two perps seemed likely: one to drive the Alfa, one to follow in another vehicle. With Tavlin in the driver's seat and the Alfa's transmission in neutral, the second vehicle could have been used to push the convertible off the road toward oblivion.

Reese and Carvajal had turned up the most promising lead so far. On July 30, according to miscellaneous
Lomax Enterprises employees, Gregor Tavlin had paid his first return visit to Lomax corporate headquarters since leaving the company the previous year. He'd apparently demanded a meeting with Doren Lomax, who was not in the office at the time. According to Lomax's executive assistant, Doren's son David had fielded the call in his father's absence.

There had been rancor. According to the executive assistant, the two men had left the building together, taking their argument to lunch.

To the knowledge of the executive assistant, David Lomax did not return to the office from lunch that day. Neither did she know the specifics of his disagreement with Tavlin.

A search of the hard drive of the personal computer Tavlin kept at his home in Palos Verdes turned up a voice message from David Lomax in the inbox of Gregor Tavlin's answerphone software. The message was date-stamped July 30, 3:30
P.M.
The same day they'd left the office together. In his message, Lomax had asked for a second meeting late that evening back at his office in the corporate building.

The building itself had no security cameras, but it did have a keycard entry system. Every full-time employee had a personal ID badge that allowed access to the facilities after regular business hours. According to the company's information technology department, each security card contained an embedded smart chip that allowed the system to record a log of all after-hours traffic in and out of the building. Daily records were backed up on a network server; at month-end, these logs were archived on CD-ROM and purged from the main system.

When Timms and his team had requested the archival
disc for the month of July, they'd waited two days before receiving word that said disc—the only existing record for the night of July 30—seemed to have vanished into the same thin air David Lomax currently occupied.

An LAPD data recovery specialist had worked with the company IT department to retrieve the purged files from the network. No dice.

Meanwhile, a security manager for Club Maximum, a man named Luther Vines, stated during an interview with Timms and Drea that he'd personally checked out the July archives to David Lomax on the morning of August 1. When asked why he imagined a corporate executive had come to him with such a request, Vines had been unable to speculate. He'd simply been in the main office for an early meeting; he'd run into David Lomax in the lobby on his way in; and he had badge-level clearance to the security back offices where the archive CDs were stored.

David Lomax, of course, had been unavailable for comment.

The team had yet to discover the person who had seen Gregor Tavlin between the dates of July 31 and August 2. By the time they'd obtained search warrants for David Lomax's office and Silver Lake bungalow, the heir apparent—the last person known to have seen Gregor Tavlin alive—was officially 84 hours MIA.

On the morning of August 6, the day of Gregor Tavlin's public memorial service, Team Two and SID techs had searched David Lomax's office and his house in Silver Lake. Doren Lomax had attended both searches with lawyers.

It had been a delicate operation. Foul-ups were not an option. They didn't make a move without consultation
from the district attorney's office, and they followed the book like an instruction manual.

Three days later, SID returned expedited forensic analyses of items collected during the search. The showpiece had come from the cushions of David Lo-max's living room couch: his company security badge.

The blood smears on the clear plastic card carrier had been typed against the samples collected from the trunk of Gregor Tavlin's car. Both came up AB-negative, with an antigen profile shared by one person in 10, 000. DNA cross was still in the works, but the likelihood of a match didn't get much higher.

They didn't have a murder weapon, and they didn't have a motive, and they weren't any closer to a case they could hand over to the D.A. than they'd been on day one. But they hadn't found David Lomax yet, either.

“Okay, ” Timms said. He nodded at Keene. “That's good work, Aaron. See if you can get the paper together for the tap and tech support on Corbin. Home landline only.”

“Already working on it, ” Keene said.

“You've got something cooking, ” Drea said.

Timms looked at everybody. Everybody looked back at him.

“I've got a thought, ” he said. “But it'd have to be a group vote kind of thing. A vote we never had, because I never brought it up.”

Drea shrugged. “We're not getting any younger.”

Timms kept one eye on Keene while he laid it out.

“Today we get our ducks in a row. This afternoon, I'll leak the security badge to Melanie Roth at the
Times.
Give her enough room to make deadline for tomorrow's edition. Then we stick on Corbin close as we can for the next 48, see if anything shakes loose.”

He looked around the table again. Aaron Keene wore a smirk. Everybody else just sat with it for a minute or two.

Carvajal spoke first. “Don't have much up our sleeves if that badge gets thrown out of court down the road.”

“Nope, ” Timms agreed. “Not yet. But if Lomax turns out to be our boy we need a hell of a lot more than the badge anyway.”

“Good luck getting Graham to sign off, ” Drea said.

“I think we can rule that out. Once more for clarity: This discussion never took place.”

Timms waited. Keene looked at a fingernail, still smirking. Drea, Reese, and Carvajal sat by.

“Any vote cast is a vote no, ” Timms said. “No pressure, no blame. We move on.”

Silence.

“Okay” Timms said. “Joe, Ruben, go home until your pagers go off, or your alarm clocks, whichever comes first. The rest of us can hold down the fort until then. Meeting adjourned, unless anybody's got anything else.”