Chasing Darkness (20 page)

THE CANYON
behind my house was pleasant during the midday hours, with a slight breeze that brought out the hawks to search for rabbits and mice. Somewhere below, a power saw whined in the trees, punctuated by the faint tapping of a nail gun. Someone was always building something, and the sounds of it were encouraging. They sounded like life.

We put the file box and murder books on the dining table, then drank bottles of water. We ate muffins slathered with strawberry jam, standing over the murder books as if we were stealing time to eat like we had stolen the files.

We split the material between us. I skimmed the Frostokovich murder book first, and immediately saw that pages had been removed. Every murder book begins with an initial report by the original detectives who caught the case, identifying the victim and describing the crime scene. Marx and Munson had signed off on the opening crime scene report. Reports relating interviews with the workmen who discovered her body came next, followed by their initial interview with Sondra's parents, Ron L. and Ida Frostokovich. If Marx and Munson interviewed Sondra's girlfriends about the dinner they shared, the report of that interview was now missing. A twelve-page gap in the page-numbering sequence followed the interview with Sondra's parents. The medical examiner's six-page autopsy protocol was intact, but another three pages after it were missing. I didn't bother to flip through the rest of the book.

“They gutted this thing. We've got missing pages all through here.”

Pike was fingering through the files in the box. He grunted, then lifted a ziplock bag containing a silver DVD. The name
REPKO
was written directly onto the DVD and clearly visible through the transparent plastic bag.

Pike said, “Your missing disk.”

A folded letter was stapled to the bag. Pike read it, then passed it to me.

“They sent it to the FBI. SID had it right. The Feds couldn't get anything off the disk, either.”

The letter was from the FBI's lab in San Francisco and was addressed to Deputy Chief Thomas Marx. It confirmed what Pike had just told me.

“But why send it at all? If Marx thought it would clear Byrd or implicate Wilts, why not just destroy it?”

Pike grunted again, and we went on with the files.

The Trinh murder book was also missing material, though not as much as Frostokovich, but the Repko book had been looted. Most of the documents and large sections of each report were missing.

I put the murder books aside and picked out a thin file marked
REPKO
-
PDA
/
PHONE LOG
. The first page was a letter from the president of a cellular service provider addressed to Marx regarding Debra Repko's missing PDA.

The date indicated that Marx had requested the call log almost a week before Byrd's body was found.

I said, “Get this—Marx knew about Debra Repko's PDA. Darcy and Maddux didn't even know about it, but Marx knew and requested the call history.”

“Didn't you ask Bastilla about it?”

“This is from before that. Bastilla must have been pretending.”

Pike moved closer and turned the page.

The next five sheets were the call logs listing the numbers to and from Debra's PDA during the period prior to her death. Handwritten notes in blue or black ink were by each call and most of the calls were identified as being to or from Leverage employees. A few of the calls were simply marked as family, but six of the calls were highlighted in yellow marker. The six highlighted calls had all been made in the ten days prior to her death, and all were to or from the same number. The highlighted number had not been identified. I kept reading.

The next page was a spec sheet showing a picture of a simple basic cell phone manufactured by Kyoto Electronics. It was an inexpensive model that did not fold or take pictures, and likely offered very few features. An accompanying letter was attached to the spec sheet.

Pike said, “She had two conversations with the highlighted number on the day she was murdered.”

“Joe. Bastilla was trying to identify the caller.”

“Looks that way. Looks like they were trying to identify someone else, too.”

Pike drew out a folder that was thick with documents about Wilts, but none of the reports and files were anything I expected. This file was labeled FBI, and contained a letter from Marx to the FBI director in Washington, D.C. It was marked
PERSONAL
&
CONFIDENTIAL
. A short list of phone numbers was attached, including the number that had been highlighted in yellow.

I stared at the page, but the words had lost focus. I pushed past a growing sense of frustration and checked the date. Marx had faxed his request to the head of the FBI only eight days ago—two days before he told the world that Lionel Byrd had committed the murders.

I said, “Joe.”

I gave him the page.

“They aren't protecting Wilts. They're investigating him. It's an active investigation.”

We were reading through the rest of the files when the first car arrived. They didn't scream up Code Three with the lights and sirens, and SWAT didn't rappel from hovering choppers. Gravel crunched outside my door, followed by the soft squeak of brakes.

Pike went to the window.

“It's Marx.”

The Inner Circle had arrived.

MARX AND
Munson unfolded from his Lexus. Bastilla eased up from the opposite direction with a black-and-white Metro car behind her. They saw me at the same time, but no one shouted or tried to knock me down.

Marx was calm, but somehow larger, as if swollen with tension.

I said, “You heartless sonofabitch. You told those people it was over.”

Munson flicked his fingers, telling me to move out of the door.

“Let's go in, Cole. We need to have a little talk.”

“Do you have a warrant?”

Bastilla said, “You're in no position. Act like an adult.”

The uniforms stayed in their car, but the rest of them came inside. Marx glanced at Pike, then frowned at the files and murder books spread over the table. He told Bastilla to gather their stuff, then frowned at me.

“Have you read these things?”

“Enough to know what you're doing. I pushed this thing because I thought you were protecting him.”

“Now you know you were wrong. You should have just let it go, but no, you couldn't mind your business.”

“Yvonne Bennett made it my business, Marx. So do the Repkos and Ida Frostokovich and the other families you've lied to. You told those people it was finished. They've buried their children, but they're going to have to dig them up again. What in hell were you thinking?”

He hooked a thumb at Pike.

“How many people besides you and this one know what we're doing?”

“A few.”

“Poitras is probably helping you, isn't he?”

“Poitras doesn't know anything.”

“We need their names.”

“Forget it, Marx. There's no chance in hell.”

Munson had gone to the sliders.

“Sweet. You got your privacy, you got your view, you have your stolen police property. Not everyone would have the balls to break into a deputy chief's house.”

“You have me confused with someone else.”

Munson laughed. He was probably a pretty good guy and I would probably like him if he was someone else.

“Please, Cole. Really. Who else could it be, the way you've been dogging us. Now we have this problem.”

Pike, floating between the dining room and kitchen, said, “We don't have a problem.”

Munson hit Pike with the grin.

“Look at Pike here. Pike looks like he wants to shoot it out. What do you say, Chief? We could kill'm, say they resisted arrest.”

Bastilla glanced up from stacking the files.

“You're not helping.”

“That was humor. They know I'm kidding.”

Marx looked at me with the unfocused eyes of someone who had considered it and hadn't been kidding.

“We could have gotten the warrants and brought along some boys from Metro, but we didn't. I can't force you to cooperate, but we have to contain this. If Wilts finds out, we may never be able to make the case. That meant lying about our investigation, but now this is where we are, and you're here with us.”

“You believe Wilts killed those women.”

“Yes.”

“Then why close the case on Byrd? Why tell those families it was over?”

“Because that's what Wilts wants us to think.”

Munson pulled a chair from the table and swung his leg over it like he was mounting a horse.

“We believe he engineered Byrd's death so we would close the Repko case—probably because he was scared we might find something on the security disk. He forced our hand with this damned death book. When we realized that's what he wanted, we gave him Byrd to buy ourselves more time.”

Pike said, “Why Byrd?”

Munson shrugged.

“Byrd was already connected to one of the victims—Yvonne Bennett. He's gotta be thinking, when we find Byrd with this picture of Bennett, we'll think it's a slam dunk. If you're asking how Wilts and Byrd are connected, we don't know. Wilts might have picked him because of the Bennett connection, but maybe they knew each other.”

I said, “That's a helluva risk to take, thinking you'll call it quits just because Byrd has the book.”

Marx's lips pressed into a hard line.

“Well, Cole, I guess he thought it was worth the risk, didn't he? Repko wasn't some streetwalker—he screwed up by killing someone close to him, which was a mistake he hadn't made since Frostokovich.”

A knot of anger grew in my shoulders.

“Have you bastards known he's been killing people for seven years?”

Munson made a grunting laugh that caused Bastilla to glance up, but Marx glowered.

“Of course not. Only since the book.”

“You must have known since Frostokovich.”

“Goddamnit. I took care of some things for him, but nothing like this. He was a nasty bastard, all right, but I was investigating one of my friends. You never think someone you know could do something like this.”

“So you let it go? You fixed it for him?”

“Fuck off, Cole. The girl's friends told us about running into him that night at dinner, so we questioned him. He told us he went to an apartment he kept over by Chinatown after seeing them at dinner. Alone. So we had the coincidence of the meetings, and we knew he was a prick, but that was it. We couldn't clear him, but we couldn't find anything solid. You can't make a case on coincidence, so we all went on with our lives. After a while I told myself it was silly to suspect the guy. Hell, he was my friend, and all we had was the coincidental meeting.”

Pike said, “Until Repko.”

“Repko got us started, but it was really the book. When we saw Frostokovich everything came back. Wilts knew some of these girls. Wilts was the common demoninator.”

Munson picked up where Marx left off by explaining they had discovered a connection between Wilts and the fourth victim pictured in the book, twenty-five-year-old prostitute Marsha Trinh. In reviewing her arrest record, it was learned she was one of five prostitutes Wilts had hired for a private party to influence prominent supporters one month before her murder. This contact put Wilts with three of the seven victims. Three out of seven was convincing.

Munson said, “We still have a long way to go, Cole. We can't have you drawing attention to this. The man has to believe he's safe.”

“How close are you?”

“We would arrest him if we had something. We don't.”

“You think he's a flight risk?”

“You never know, but no, I don't think so. People like this, they think they can beat you and some of them do. They get off by thinking they're smarter than us. He wanted us to think Byrd is the guy, and right now he believes we bought it. That's why we played it the way we did. As long as he believes he's safe, we have a shot at making a case. You cannot kill seven people without making a mistake. It cannot be done.”

Munson nodded like he believed it, then stared at me.

“We're busting our asses to make this case, but right now our biggest problem is you, asking around at Leverage, scaring the shit out of the Casik girl, getting Alan Levy worked up—”

I raised my palms, stopping him.

“Waitaminute. How did I scare Ivy Casik?”

Marx scowled at me.

“That's why I hate goddamned private operators like you—you don't know how to handle yourself.”

I looked at Bastilla.

“What's this about, Bastilla? Did you find her?”

“I didn't have to find her. She called. She wanted to file a complaint against you.”

“For what?”

“She said you accused her of being a drug dealer.”

“I asked if she picked up the oxys for Byrd.”

“She heard it as a threat.”

“What did she say about the reporter?”

“There wasn't a reporter, you dipshit. She made it up to get rid of you. Then she got worried she might get into trouble, so she called us to straighten it out.”

I flashed on Ivy Casik. I wondered if Levy had found her and if she had told him the same thing. Then Bastilla put the last of the files in the box and stacked the murder books on top.

“That's everything, Chief.”

Marx nodded, then studied me again. His brow was so deeply furrowed it looked like rows of midwestern corn.

“So what are you going to do? Can we get some cooperation here?”

I glanced at Pike, and Pike nodded.

“I don't like it, but I understand what you're trying to do. I'm not going to sit out the game, Marx, but I won't spoil the play. I'm better than that.”

“We'll see.”

Marx put out his hand. The gesture surprised me, and maybe I hesitated too long, but I took it. He left without saying anything else, then Munson followed with the files. Bastilla was trailing after Munson when I stopped her at the door.

“When you bust Wilts, everything about the chief's prior relationship with him is going to come out. It isn't lost on me that he knows that.”

She arched her eyebrows, and it was as cool a move as anything I had ever seen.

“How nice for you, Cole.”

We listened to them drive away, then I went to the phone and called Alan Levy. Jacob answered again.

“Sorry, Mr. Cole, he isn't in. Would you like to leave another message?”

“This would be easier if you gave me his cell.”

Jacob wouldn't give me the cell, but he promised to page Alan and then hung up.

I put down the phone and turned to Pike.

“Let's go see Ivy. If I scared her, wait 'til she sees you.”

“You don't think she lied?”

“I think she's lying to someone. The question is who.”

We were moving for the door when Alan Levy returned my call. Jacob had come through with the page.