Diagnosis Murder 6 - The Dead Letter (6 page)

"That's why you don't want to line a campfire with wet rocks," Amanda said. "The rocks will explode."

Steve gave her a look. She shrugged.

"I was a Girl Scout," she said. "And a troop leader."

"Of course you were," Steve said.

Amanda cocked her head towards the body in the bin. "You think this is Stryker?"

"You tell me," Steve said.

"I can't—at least not yet," she said. "The victim was nearly cremated. There's almost no skin or subcutaneous tissue left. Call me in the morning after I've had a chance to do some cutting. I might even have a cause of death for you by then."

"How did he end up in the trash bin?" Steve asked.

"You tell me," Amanda said.

Steve looked back at the corpse and considered the possibilities. If the victim was Stryker, the killer could have tossed him in the trash and set him aflame to make a statement. Then the killer torched the office to destroy Stryker's files and any evidence that might lead to him.

Considering Stryker's methods and his line of work, the scenario wasn't as contrived as it might otherwise have seemed.

Another possibility also occurred to Steve. This wasn't the first time he had come upon a body torched in a trash bin. A few years back, he'd pursued a psycho who got his kicks dousing drunks and derelicts with gasoline and setting them on fire. One of the victims was found in the trash bin he called home.

Steve didn't think the two cases were related. The psycho was dead; he'd set himself on fire as Steve closed in to arrest him. But that case reminded Steve that trash bins made sturdy, if unsanitary, homes for derelicts. The victim in this situation might have died accidentally, if the flames from the building had ignited something in the trash bin where he was sleeping.

Or the victim could have been a witness, someone who saw the arsonist at work and was killed to keep him from talking.

He would check the cars parked in the area, see if one of them belonged to Stryker. If not, he'd put out an APB.

"Well?" Amanda asked, jarring Steve from his thoughts. "What's your theory?"

"I'll know more in the morning," Steve said.

"What makes you think you'll know then," Amanda asked.

"Nothing," Steve said. "But that seems to be the stock answer around here." He faced Tim. "There's something you can tell me. Which fire started first, the trash bin or the building."

"I don't know," Tim said. "When the firefighters arrived, both the building and the bin were already fully engulfed. We're collecting samples from the point of origin and from this trash bin and running them through the vapor trace analyzer. But I should have an answer for you soon."

"Let me guess," Steve said. "In the morning."

Tim smiled. "You must be a detective."

Dr. Mark Sloan got his wish. There were so many patients to treat, and so many bureaucratic hassles to deal with, that he didn't have a free moment to think about who sent Monette Hobbes the photos and why the person waited a year to do it.

When he left the hospital, his mind was still buzzing with the events of the last few hours, rehashing encounters with patients, meetings with staff, and memos he'd written.

He was halfway home to the beach house in Malibu when the mystery began to occupy his thoughts again. This time he welcomed the puzzle. He hoped the short respite from thinking about it would give him a fresh perspective on the facts and allow him to see something he missed before. Some times he just needed to give the jumbled bits and pieces of information a chance to settle.

But it didn't happen this time. The facts were as muddled and confusing as before.

Mark headed north on the Pacific Coast Highway, the slow-moving rush-hour traffic a ribbon of lights illuminating the curving shoreline ahead of him.

It was a warm summer night, so he was driving with the top down on his Mini Cooper convertible. He could almost smell the sea through the exhaust fumes and hear the waves under the roar of passing cars.

To his left, beachfront homes were crammed tightly against one another, their decks leaning out over the crashing surf. Every winter, the waves would swallow a house or two, but the lots were never left vacant for long. Someone was always willing to build a new home where the sea had claimed one. If Mark's beach house was ever washed away, he would probably rebuild too, assuming he could find anyone crazy enough to offer him homeowner's insurance again.

To his right were the ever-eroding hillsides of Santa Monica and the Pacific Palisades, held back by all kinds of elaborate retaining walls meant to keep the homes, apartment buildings, and parks along the cliffs from falling. But the slopes were littered with foundations, swimming pool tiles, exposed pipes, and ripped fencing, constant reminders of the futility of the costly efforts.

Mark tried calling Stryker and got sent to his voice mail again. Irritated, he checked his own voice mail for messages, but Stryker hadn't returned his call. He did, however, get two recorded sales pitches, one offering him low rates on home refinancing and another from a stockbroker with some wonderful investment opportunities to share.

He deleted the messages, recordings of recordings, and wondered if there was anybody who actually responded to cold calls from computers. His musing was a desperate attempt to distract himself from more pressing questions, and it didn't work.

When he finally arrived at home after what seemed like days on the road, there was a large cardboard box waiting for him on his front porch, his mail stacked neatly on top of it. The box was about the size of the file-storage cartons used in offices. He wasn't expecting anything larger than a book from Amazon, so he assumed the box was a mail-order purchase that Steve had made.

Mark and Steve lived together in the house. Steve had the beach-level first floor, which had all the conveniences of an apartment, including a small kitchen and a separate entrance. Mark lived on the street-level second floor, which had a gourmet kitchen, a dining room, and a family room that shared a sweeping view of the bay and opened to a wraparound deck with steps leading down to the beach.

This arrangement allowed each of them privacy but more opportunity to spend time together than a father and a son with busy professional lives would otherwise have had.

It was especially convenient for Mark, making it easy for him to pry into whatever investigations his son was working on.

Mark moved the letters off the top of the box and was surprised to see his own name on the address label. The box was from Weldon, Jarvis & Swann, a Century City law firm that he was unfamiliar with.

He carried the box inside, set it on the kitchen table, and opened it with a steak knife. The box was filled to the brim with bulging files, audiocassettes, and camcorder tapes. A white letter-sized envelope sat on top of the files.

Mark opened the envelope and pulled out a handwritten note. The first line grabbed his full attention.

If you are reading this, I'm dead.

CHAPTER FOUR

Armed with a search warrant, Steve went from the scene of the fire to Stryker's condo in a sprawling Marina del Rey complex inhabited primarily by recently divorced men, upwardly mobile singles, flight attendants, and airline pilots.

There was a reason the area was more popularly known as Marina del Lay.

Steve flashed his badge and the warrant to the forty-five-year-old property manager, a man who apparently never got the news that
Miami Vice
had been canceled. He wore a blue T-shirt under a white linen blazer and parted his hair down the middle. He tossed Stryker's key to Steve and didn't bother to escort him to the condo.

That was fine with Steve. He didn't need Sonny Crockett's uglier brother looking over his shoulder while he searched the place.

It was a typical bachelor condo, dominated by a huge leather recliner that faced a sixty-five-inch television and an elaborate entertainment system. A leather couch, a glass- topped coffee table, and several framed prints that Steve had seen before in one of those shopping mall galleries completed the living room furnishings. A camera with a massive telephoto lens was mounted on a tripod facing the closed drapes.

He parted the drapes, opened the glass doors, and stepped out onto the narrow deck overlooking the yachts in the marina. He wondered how many starlets Stryker had photographed sunning themselves on the decks of their boats.

The sky was impossibly blue and picture-perfect, sail boats drifting through the channel and seagulls appearing to float on the breeze that wafted in off the sea. He couldn't see the ocean from the deck, but he could smell the salt in the air.

Or at least that's what he thought it was. Considering how much toxic runoff ended up flowing into the sea, perhaps what he'd grown up assuming was the scent of salt air was actually industrial solvent, insecticide, and raw sewage.

On that sobering thought he stepped back inside to continue his task.

The kitchen was surprisingly clean and orderly, leading Steve to suspect that Stryker had a regular maid service. He opened a few cupboards and drawers, saw nothing unusual, and moved down the hail to the bedrooms.

One of the bedrooms served as a home office. The walls were lined with shelves filled with past issues of all the major monthly and weekly gossip and celebrity magazines, going back years.

The desk was simple and sleek, with no drawers. It held a slim computer, flat-screen monitor, printer, scanner, shredder, wireless router, and an iPod bay.

There was an empty slot in the computer where the hard drive had once been. It was unlikely that Stryker had ripped it out of his own computer.

Someone had been here before Steve.

He continued searching the office, but without much effort. He knew he wouldn't find any external hard drives, disks, CDs, DVDs, or a laptop. Whoever took the hard drive would have taken them, too.

He spent an hour searching the master bedroom, the closets, and the bathrooms and came up with nothing but a sore back. If Stryker had met his violent end here, there were no obvious signs of it.

Before he left, Steve called the crime lab and asked them to give the condo a more thorough ransacking, and to pay special attention to uncovering any hidden compartments or safes. He then called homicide and asked a junior detective to pull Stryker's phone records for his home, his cell, and his office for the last month, as well as a list of his recent credit- card transactions, and have them on his desk by morning. On his way out, he checked Stryker's parking spot. His Escalade wasn't there.

It was after eight p.m. when Steve walked through the front door of the beach house and found his father at the kitchen table, barely visible behind stacks of files.

"It's not like you to bring your work home," Steve said.

"It was waiting for me when I got here," Mark said with out lifting his gaze from what he was reading.

"What's your take on coincidences?"

"No such thing."

"Then this will interest you," Steve said. "Somebody torched Nick Stryker's office last night. I think he's been murdered."

"So do I," Mark said, still absorbed in the papers and pictures in front of him.

"You do?" Steve said. "You must have been talking to Amanda."

"I haven't seen Amanda all day," Mark said.

"Then how do you know Stryker was killed last night?"

"He wasn't," Mark said.

Steve rubbed his temples, trying to massage away his exasperation. "But you just said you thought he was."

"I think it's likely that he's been murdered," Mark said. "But it didn't happen last night."

"I've got a burned corpse that says otherwise," Steve said.

"It's not Stryker," Mark said.

"How can you possibly know that?"

"The post office doesn't move that fast," Mark said.

"You think the post office put out a hit on him?" Steve said. "They must really be cracking down on people who send letters without sufficient postage."

Mark finally looked up, a smile on his face. "I'm sorry, Steve. I'm a bit distracted."

"When have you ever found hospital paperwork more interesting than a homicide investigation?"

"This isn't hospital paperwork," Mark said. "Stryker sent me all this yesterday. It was waiting on my front porch when I got home tonight. These files are probably what the person who set the fire to Stryker's office was hoping to find or destroy."

"So what makes you think Stryker is dead?"

"He told me," Mark said, holding up the handwritten letter. Steve took it from his father and read it.

Dr. Sloan,

If you're reading this, I'm dead.

The odds are that whoever killed me can be found in these files. Somebody decided to gamble that I was bluffing when I told him that if anything ever happened to me, all the dirt I had on him would go public.

He was wrong and I'm dead. Life is cruel.

You're getting all the major-league stuff because I'm betting that's where the hit came from. All the petty domestic crap, the evidence against the adulterers and small-time embezzlers, has gone directly to the losers being betrayed or ripped off. I doubt any of those "civilians" had the guts or the means to kill me, but just in case, there's a list of them in here somewhere, too.

Before I met you, this box of explosives was supposed to go to various members of the press. I was always uncomfortable with the idea of sending my files to one man, newspaper or TV station. Reporters can be easily bought or intimidated, and the media are controlled by multinational corporations, who are cowards.

But you, Marc are the one guy I ever met who couldn't be bought or intimidated by anybody. I looked for dirt on you and I was never able to find any, which means you're either the most honorable man on earth or one of the cleverest.

Either way, I win. Except for the fact that I'm dead, which is lousy.

I know you thought I was a sleazebag, and that what you'll find in this box will only confirm your opinion, but I'm certain you won't stop until you find the sonofabitch who killed me.