Gridlock: A Ryan Lock Novel (18 page)

In her opinion, whether Raven Lane had committed the murders was secondary. In fact, part of her hoped Raven had killed Larry Johns and cut off his balls. Twenty years of practising law, and Fay had finally found the ultimate case, all wrapped up with a red Hollywood bow, that would have the whole nation watching. Now, the first part of her task was in many ways the most delicate: transforming Raven Lane, at least in the eyes of the American public, from serial-killer
femme fatale
to a woman who had rejected her role as victim and decided to fight back.

Now, in the interview room, Fay decided to drop the traditional handshake, as Raven got up from her chair, looking tiny and perfectly vulnerable. Fay went to hug her, but Raven took a step back and ducked away.

In the end, Fay had to settle for the handshake but before she had a chance to deploy the speech she had prepared on the way over (a journey she had taken from her plush suite of offices in Century City in her top-of-the-line Mercedes Benz CL65 AMG), Raven had beat her to the punch.

‘I’m not a victim. I’m not a
cause celebre
. And I’m not a serial killer. So I don’t want to end up going down for life because you want to make a name for yourself, and it’ll give you something to talk about at your next five-hundred-dollars-a-plate dinner where a bunch of rich anorexic bitches from Beverly Hills whine about how much they’re discriminated against. You understand me, lady?’

Fay smiled. ‘I’ve never quite had those instructions from a client before, but you can rest assured that my primary function and that of my entire law firm will be to get you out of here.’

‘Good,’ Raven said.

Pulling a yellow legal pad from a soft-leather Gucci folio, Fay sat across from Raven. ‘Okay, so take me through this from the start.’

The flash of anger that Raven had shown a moment ago seemed to fall from her face. She took a breath. ‘I got the first letter about six or so months ago—’

‘No,’ Fay interrupted. ‘Listen, your case might go any number of ways, depending upon what the other side has, so I’m going to need some stuff I might be able to plea-bargain with. I’m not saying it’ll come to that, but I want you to go right back for me.’

Raven eyed her with suspicion. ‘I didn’t do it. Don’t you get that? I’m innocent,’ she said, her voice inching up in pitch and volume with every syllable.

Fay cleared her throat. Whenever she had a client who had never found themselves jammed up in the gears of the criminal-justice system she had to explain the same thing to them. It often came as a hammer blow as it sank in, as if Fay were snatching out from under them every belief they had held, which in a way she was.

‘Raven,’ she said, putting down her pen. ‘This is America. It’s not about guilt or innocence. It’s about playing the game. The best player wins. Now, thankfully for you, I’m top of the league compared to those bozos out there,’ she continued, waggling a thumb at the door behind her. ‘So, if you want to go home, you have to help me out here.’

Fay put both hands on the table between them, and opened her palms. ‘Now what’s it to be?’

34

Darkness was falling fast in the hills above Hollywood as Lock counted down house numbers until he was sure he was close to the address Carrie had given him for Vince Vice. Despite the ebbing away of hours since she had told him about her encounter with the director, the quiet rage that Lock felt had not left him. If anything, it had taken root and blossomed.

He was going to cause Vice some pain, that wasn’t in question. But he had to proceed with care. Guys like Vice were usually the first people to go squealing like a stuck pig to the cops, should someone decide to give them a taste of their own medicine.

He had talked it through with Ty earlier in the afternoon, and Ty had suggested that he call some of his homeboys from Long Beach and have them pay a visit, but Lock had declined the offer. Making the phone call to have someone else do your dirty work was, in the eyes of the law, more serious than doing it yourself. Plus, from what Lock knew of Ty’s former buddies in that neighbourhood, they were apt to shoot Vince Vice in the head rather than scare him.

In the end, Ty had stayed behind with Kevin, and Lock had come alone. Much as he enjoyed Ty’s company, and it was good to have someone watching your back, this felt personal enough that he didn’t crave company.

Lock parked on the narrow street and got out of the car. Stepping on to the sidewalk he was immediately buffeted by a warm gust of air. The devil winds were back with a vengeance, he thought, as he walked past the open gates and started up the slope towards the house.

He pressed the buzzer at the front door. No answer. And no sign of anyone stirring inside.

Lock stepped back and walked to an open carport that held two vehicles. The first was a Dodge Viper, the second an Escalade. He touched the engines of both cars. They were stone cold. Unless Vice had walked somewhere, which seemed unlikely in this neighbourhood of twisted canyon roads, he was either asleep or hiding out.

He went to the back of the house. Walking along the concrete lip, he was almost level with the kitchen before he noticed the smashed window. He looked down at the ground. There were no shards of glass anywhere to be seen. That told him the window had been smashed from the outside in, rather than by someone breaking out of the house. Jagged glass teeth still jutted from the frame. With this type of construction it would have taken a lot to punch through a window this size.

He edged along the lip, and caught his breath. He stared into the kitchen. There was blood everywhere. It lay in a thick, heavy sludge in the sink, patterned the walls and the counters. It was smeared across the floor. Lock had done a nine-month tour in Sierra Leone, and this was the most blood he had seen at any one time since then.

Torn about what to do next he stood there, the metallic smell burning his nostrils. The concrete lip he was standing on seemed to narrow as the drop beyond it deepened. His heart thumped a staccato beat.

If there had been a body and it wasn’t moving he would have left this to the cops. But there was no body. Someone might still be inside. They might even be alive. Although how someone could survive the loss of so much blood he had no idea.

He scanned the bottom of the window frame for an entry point. Finding a fourteen-inch gap where the glass was entirely gone, he levered himself up, and quickly realized that he would have to clamber inside over the marble counter top. But the counter was slick with blood, and there was no way he’d be able to avoid it. Reluctantly, he lowered himself and called into the house. ‘Hello? Is anyone there?’

The only answer was a heavy silence. Lock retraced his steps, skirting back to the front of the house. He aimed a heavy boot at the door.

On the eighth or ninth assault, the door peeled back from the frame, only by an inch or two, but it gave him the room he needed. He ran back to the Range Rover and retrieved a crowbar.

He jogged back to the front door, shimmied the crowbar into the gap and used it to pop open the door. A final kick separated the chain, and he was inside. More blood pooled directly in front of him at the foot of the stairs. Either side, the floor was clear. There was nothing for the first two steps, then a blob on the third.

The pattern trailed up the staircase, red breadcrumbs leading towards a corpse. Lock stood back. Should he follow the trail or call the cops?

A faint moan from upstairs gave him his answer. Skirting a smear of blood, he started to climb the stairs.

He took them at a steady clip, skipping the globules of blood as he went. Drops of sweat slid down his back. A click from somewhere beneath him was followed by a rush of cold air from the vents, as if the house itself was reading his mind. He checked his watch. It was dead on the hour, which suggested that the air-con coming on was a coincidence of timing rather than anything more sinister.

He reached the landing and stopped. He listened for the sound and it came again, but this time it had a rasping quality, like the wind rattling through the slats of window blinds.

It seemed to be coming from behind a door at the far end of the landing. Lock walked towards it, wishing he’d taken the chance and borrowed Ty’s gun.

He toed the door with his left foot. It opened with an ill-tempered creak. His guts twisted in on themselves as he realized that the sound hadn’t come from the door but from the creature lying on the bed. He couldn’t bring himself to call what was on the bed a man – or a woman. It was human-shaped, but only just.

He rushed over and started to untie Vince Vice’s left leg, which, freed from its restraints, kicked out, catching him on the side of the head.

Lock rose to his feet, aware for the first time since he had entered the room that the plasma screen facing the bed was switched on. Two women writhed together on a bed.

Vince Vice’s face was like a carved Venetian mask with black holes for eyes. Reaching over his body, Lock freed an arm, allowing Vice to roll over to one side into the recovery position. The movement brought a series of screams and an elbow, which had been pared down to bare bone, crashing into Lock’s chest.

Lock ran to a closet, found some spare sheets and used them to mop up the blood. Within seconds the first sheet was saturated. He grabbed another, clearing the blood from Vice’s face, then jamming a third bundled sheet against his groin which was a mass of gore and shredded soft tissue.

The creature strained to speak.

‘Raven,’ Vice whispered.

35

Moorpark was Cop Land. A suburb of spacious ranch homes thirty-five miles north-west of Los Angeles, it had the highest concentration of law-enforcement personnel of any area in Greater Los Angeles. It was where the people who dealt with the worst that the metropolis had to offer, the endless litany of casual violence and bad choices, retired at night to raise their families. It was a long commute if you worked downtown or in one of the outlying areas, like East Los Angeles, but the compensation for those long drives was that, for the price of a parking spot on the Westside, you could get a good-sized four-bed detached house. Your daytime might be filled with ghetto nightmares but at night you could retire to the white picket fences of Moorpark to live the dream.

It was for those reasons that Marilyn Stanner’s husband, Lawrence, had suggested they move out there. That and the fact that they had found a house they had both fallen in love with. They had lived there for more than eight years now and Marilyn had never regretted their decision.

She liked the house, she liked the street they lived on, she even liked the neighbors It was also nice to be among people she felt could understand what it was like for her to be married to a man who worked in law enforcement.

Lawrence put in long hours, and while he tried to save weekends for them, that wasn’t always possible. But when he was at home she had his full attention. As soon as he walked through the door, usually with flowers, he would change into shorts and a T-shirt and they would laze about the pool, drinking wine or firing up the barbecue.

He was a good man, reliable and solid. He cared about the job but not to the exclusion of her. She looked forward to seeing him, and that was more than many wives could say after so many years of marriage.

She was in the kitchen, scrubbing the counters, when the doorbell rang. She took off the rubber gloves she was wearing. The doorbell rang again.

‘Okay. Okay, I’m coming,’ she called, flustered.

She opened the door to a neatly dressed man in his late thirties. His truck was parked behind hers in the driveway. It looked like the kind of vehicle used by building contractors. He must have got lost and, on seeing her car in the driveway, stopped for directions.

‘Mrs Stanner? Mrs Marilyn Stanner?’ he asked her, with a smile.

She was taken aback. She had no idea who this man was but he certainly seemed to know her. ‘I’m sorry. Do I know you?’

The man cut her off. ‘It’s about Lawrence. Your husband.’

Marilyn felt her face flush. ‘What about him?’

‘May I come in?’ the man asked, making a face that spoke of spared embarrassments.

Marilyn folded her arms but the gesture was undercut by a nervous peek at the surrounding homes. ‘If you could tell me what this is about?’

The man smiled again, awkwardly this time. ‘It’s of a personal nature. It’s about your husband and a young woman called Raven Lane.’

Marilyn had heard the name from Lawrence. The young woman the man had just mentioned was being stalked. She had turned to the LAPD for help and Lawrence had been assigned to her case. Then some people had been killed and Lawrence had said that the cops thought she was behind it.

She had caught sight of Raven’s picture in a file Lawrence had brought home. It had struck her as unusual because he always made a point of leaving work behind at the office. The picture had got her thinking. Raven Lane was young and pretty, and when Lawrence had mentioned her, a sparkle had appeared in his eyes.

She had dismissed any thought that he might have got involved with her almost immediately. Lawrence wasn’t the type. And, anyway, what would a woman like that want with Marilyn’s husband?

But now this man was here and suddenly Marilyn wasn’t so sure about anything any more.

‘You’d better come in,’ she said, opening the door and ushering him inside.

36

Response times in this part of Hollywood Division were fast. The first LAPD radio car had arrived within three minutes of Lock’s phone call. An Emergency Medical Service ambulance had followed quickly on its heels. The paramedics disappeared inside and stayed out of sight as more and more LAPD units swarmed the scene. Lock briefed the cops on what he had found and gave the paramedics what information he had before he was cuffed, taken out of Vice’s house and placed in the back of a radio car.

A full ten minutes later a chopper appeared, buzzing low. At first Lock took it for a local news-station helicopter until he saw the Helicopter Emergency Medical Service livery on the side of the fuselage and a couple of patrol officers clearing a space for it to land in the street outside. The front door opened and four EMS technicians appeared carrying a stretcher, a body stretched out on top of it. An oxygen mask covered the face rather than a blanket. Vince Vice was still alive, but judging from the gaunt features of those carrying him it was a close-run thing.