Deadly Treatment (19 page)

‘Now that I’ve got your attention, you probably want to know who’s doing this to you.’ She pulled off the ski mask and looked right into his terror-filled eyes.

‘Now, I’m going to give you a chance to pay me for some of the discomfort you’ve brought to my life, something to help me with the grief of losing my husband, something to keep me away from a life of crime. Being the generous and compassionate man that you are, you’d like to help me, wouldn’t you?’ she said as she went through his pockets to find his wallet. Ginger was nodding frantically. Locating the wallet in the front of his pants, she pulled it out, opened it wide, and stared at the wad of hundreds it contained.

‘This will do for a start,’ she said stuffing the notes into her pocket. ‘You have one shot at this, so you’d better pay attention… I’m going to ask you a question and if you answer it correctly, I’ll let you live; but if you lie to me, not only will I kill you, but I’ll kill the rest of your family too. Do you understand me?’

Once again, Ginger nodded.

‘I’m gonna pull the tape back a bit, if you try to call out you will die — okay?’ Ginger was still nodding from the last question.

Shannon peeled the tape back a fraction, enough for Ginger to speak, but nowhere near enough to scream out.’

‘I’ll pay you what you want — I swear,’ he forced out ‘Just let me up and get me a doctor. You have no idea how much pain I’m in — please…’

‘You think I give a shit?’ she spat. ‘Just answer this question and you can get your own damn doctor.’ From the wallet she pulled out his Platinum Amex card and held it up to his face. ‘What is your four digit code?’ She asked.

Ginger thought for a second then told her the number. ‘Eight, four, three, seven.’

‘That wasn’t so hard now, was it? See how easy things can be when you’re honest and charitable,’ Shannon said as a look of relief flashed over Ginger’s face.

‘Now, I’m going to take some cash from your account, and then we’re even. I will take the money and disappear simple as that. A word of warning: if I hear that you’re making an attempt to try to find me, I’ll be back — and believe me, you will not want to see me again — do we have a deal?’

‘Okay,’ Ginger said meekly.

A knowing smile came across Shannon’s face. ‘I forgot to ask one more thing… tell me the code backwards.’

Ginger’s face sank: he knew he’d been found out. Before he could think about calling for help, Shannon was already swinging the crowbar down towards his head.

Back in Vegas, staring into the bathroom mirror, Shannon checked her watch.

‘Oh shit!’ she said out loud, ‘I’m gonna be late.’

T
he three of them were left stunned by the way detective Rodriguez had rushed out of the house.

‘What was that all about?’ Malone asked the others.

Taylor and Erin shook their heads and said in unison, ‘No idea.’

‘I still think we should go up Mulholland and have a look; sitting around here and waiting for a call will drive me crazy,’ Erin announced.

‘I couldn’t agree with you more!’ Malone said, and Taylor quickly agreed.

The blue Ford made its way across the city to the foot of Mulholland Drive at what could best be described as a painfully slow speed. Traffic was diabolically gridlocked due to an accident on the Freeway, and the side streets were no better.

Erin nervously chatted the whole way there and her voice had verged on torture for Taylor. ‘
Why did I agree to come?’
she wondered. For the last twenty minutes, she’d been taking deep breaths and looking out the window at the store fronts in a desperate attempt to tune Erin out, but Taylor was now at boiling point.

‘How about we keep our mouths closed and our eyes peeled as we make our way up the hill? Maybe we’ll spot something the LAFD missed.’ It was Malone’s attempt at tact. He’d been concerned about Taylor and recognized the look of annoyance creeping up on her face; with all the arguments they’d been having about their living arrangements over the past few months, it was becoming a familiar sight.

Erin immediately took the cue, sat up in the back seat, and quietly looked left and right out of the windows. Taylor smiled to herself and continued to stare at the buildings as they changed from stores to homes. Malone was just happy to have averted a crisis.

They pulled up between the open gates of the house driveway and stared open-mouthed beyond the police tape at the blackened ruin that had once been a building.

‘What the hell happened here?’ Erin said, disbelieving her own eyes.

‘They said it was a fire, but this is so much more than that. This, this, is a bombsite,’ Taylor added.

The three of them exited the car, ducked under the tape, and walked slowly towards the wreckage. They stepped over and around debris that littered the driveway as they walked ever closer to where the house once stood. Pieces of wood, stone, and steel grew in size as did the acrid smoky scent of burnt timber the nearer they got to the charred open shell. 

‘No wonder the detective said it wasn’t worth coming up here; there’s nothing left,’ Malone said as he kicked over some unidentifiable part of the house. Once again, the three of them looked at the house. It really was a wasteland. What was left of the cremated outer walls was only thigh height, the internal rooms were impossible to identify due to high-stacked piles of burnt wood and soot. The once beautiful pool and deck had dropped away down the hill leaving a few splintered poles, some twisted steel, and more shattered concrete.

They separated and moved amongst the rubble, none of them searching for anything in particular, just trying to get a sense of what had happened there.

‘I hardly think this could be called suspicious; it looks like the front page of a Beirut real estate magazine,’ Taylor announced, trying to introduce some humor.

Suddenly, Erin let out a gasp and her hand rushed to her mouth. Malone and Taylor swung round to see what the matter was. She was crouching and had picked something up from the ground.

Fearing the worst, she turned the PSP over in her hand to look at the back. There, scratched into the warped, rugged, black plastic were the initials JC.

‘This is Joshua’s; he
was
here.’ Erin held out her hand to show Malone and Taylor the electronic game. ‘I’d forgotten, but he never goes anywhere without it. Look at the state of the protective case I bought for it!’ All of a sudden, she burst out crying; Malone and Taylor looked at each other perplexed by her extreme reaction.

‘If he doesn’t have it, it means he’s somewhere in here!’ she screamed pointing at the debris.

‘I’m sure they would have checked,’ Malone said, trying to comfort her.

‘Checked what? He could be anywhere; fuck, look at it! With the explosion, he could be
everywhere
!’

‘Call the detective and find out what he knows,’ Malone barked at Taylor as he hugged Erin and tried to get the thought of the arsonists bringing the kid there to kill him out of his mind.

Taylor pulled a cell phone from her pocket, tapped it a few times, and after a few moments she began to talk.

‘Is that Detective Rodríguez?’ She paused a moment and then continued, ‘Yeah, hi, it’s Taylor. Look we decided to come up to Mulholland to have a look at the house…’

Pause

‘Yes, I know what you said, but we wanted to see for ourselves…’

Pause

Malone was signaling Taylor to hand him the phone, she waved him off.

‘Look, I’m not going to argue with you. The point is, we’re here, and the place is a write off. Erin has found something that belongs to Joshua, which means that the tourists were right; he definitely was here.’ She turned her back to Malone and Erin and spoke softly into the phone ‘We need to know if the investigators found any…’

Pause

‘Oh, thank god,’ she said as she turned back to the anxious faces of the others and gave them a smile. Together they let out an audible sigh of relief.

‘He said that in cases of suspicious fires, the forensics look for any human traces — the site came back negative.’ Taylor was holding her hand over the mouthpiece as she spoke.

Once again, Malone signaled for the phone; this time she handed it over.

‘That’s good news, Detective,’ he said. ‘Where are you now?’

Pause.

‘Perfect, because I’d like to come and talk to you; I’ve got a couple of favors I’d like to ask.’

With nothing much left to see, the three of them squeezed back into the Ford and started off down the hill towards the LAPD station.

‘He said he’s got the tourist couple back at the station giving a description of the cab driver,’ Malone told them as he drove.

‘Shouldn’t they have done that last time?’ Erin huffed.

‘They gave the basics, but now they’re in with the compositor again.’

‘Maybe we can get to talk to them,’ Taylor chipped in.

‘That’s one of the favors I want to ask,’ Malone said, and then concentrated on the traffic.

The detective met them at reception, and then escorted them to his workspace. He’d added two more chairs to the —his and one guest — allocation, and they all took a seat around his desk. Malone noted how tidy the detective’s desk looked: computer, phone, and only one in/out tray. A folder was lying open in the centre of the desk, but all the pages seemed to be stacked in perfect order. Many people would say that this showed a well-organized and efficient mind; Malone thought it looked like the detective had too much time on his hands.

‘Coffee?’ the detective asked.

The three of them, keen to get on, declined.

Malone opened the dialogue.

‘Are the tourists still here?’

‘Yes, they should be finished with the artist any minute,’  Rodríguez replied checking his watch.

‘Is there any chance Erin can get to talk with them? She knows how Joshua acts generally; she could find out if he was nervous or hurt or something.’

The detective considered the request for a second before responding, ‘I don’t see any reason why not. We can all go in when they’re finished.’

‘Thanks. That brings me to my second favor: can you arrange for us to talk to Louise Hughes the owner of the house, and if possible, can we talk to the owner of the toy warehouse?’

The detective began shaking his head.

‘I can’t see what you could ask either of them that the LAFD — or we — haven’t asked before. In any case, as I said, the toy warehouse case is virtually closed; there’s been no confession, but the investigators are pretty sure they’ve got their man.’

‘But what if my theory is right, and the toy warehouse and the house fires are connected?’ Malone butted in.

‘For now it doesn’t matter. According to the file, the insurance company has paid out, which is a bit quick…’ Rodriguez pondered this for a second. ‘The owner has left town on business, and aside from the investigator, and of course us, the insurance company are the only ones that would have an interest in exploring the connection. From what I’m told, insurance companies usually can’t be bothered with finding out who actually did the crime; arsonists aren’t renowned for having vast sums of cash to pay for the damage they’ve caused. So the insurance company works on a numbers game philosophy; takes it on the nose, ups everyone else’s premium, and goes on with business. Once again, it’s the likes of you and me that end up paying,’ Rodriguez said cynically.

‘But, if there is a connection, then surely talking to the owner could help us…’ Malone stopped for the moment and changed his focus. ‘Okay, but how about the dolly bird, Louise? No insurance has paid out anything for the house yet, have they? And as it’s still suspicious…’

Once again, the detective pondered the request.

‘I’ll get her in here to have a look at the cab driver’s identikit and another look at the passenger. I’m not promising anything, but I’ll see what I can do.’

Malone knew from experience what that meant; soon they’d all be talking to Louise Hughes.

Proud of the image the artist had created from their descriptions, the tourist couple was relaxing over coffee in the boardroom. The detective opened the door and escorted Malone, Taylor, and Erin into the room.

‘All finished, I hear,’ the detective announced.

‘Yep, and if you can’t find him from that, then he must have had plastic surgery,’ the big man boomed, and then looked at the three guests.

‘Who are they?’ he quizzed.

‘I’d like to introduce Erin Costello — she’s Joshua’s mother, and these folks are Michael Malone and his partner, Taylor.’

‘Thank you very much for spotting my boy and coming forward,’ Erin said shaking their hands.

‘Glad we could help,’ the tourist replied. ‘Sorry we didn’t get here sooner, but the little wifey said I was wrong — that it was too dark to really see anything.’

His embarrassed wife shrunk her chubby frame into her chair.

‘So this is the driver,’ the detective said, moving on quickly. Turning the picture towards Erin he asked, ‘Do you recognize him?’

She carefully studied the picture before shaking her head.

‘I’ll go run it through the system and see if it comes up with anything.’

‘You obviously got a good look at my son,’ Erin began as she turned to the tourists,. ‘can you tell me what he was doing?’

‘Like I told them before; he was just standing there beside the other guy outside of the house.’

‘Sure, I heard that; but I need you to think back and tell me about
how
he was standing. How were his arms, hands, and legs? Was he fidgeting around or pulling back, that sort of thing?’

The man’s eyes rolled back as he thought about the boy by the cab.

‘From what I remember, he looked relaxed. He was there all natural looking and playing Space Invaders.’

‘Space Invaders? Do you mean he was playing with this?’ Erin pulled the PSP from her bag.

‘Yep, that looks like it. Happily tapping away on that thing he was.’

Tears found their way to Erin’s eyes as she thought of how these people had been so close to her son; dammit, they could have brought Joshua home. Excusing herself, she left the room.