L.A. Bytes (29 page)

“So, can I leave now?”

254 P.A. Brown

The door opened again and Ronaldson entered. He was sweating even more than the fi rst time, his face looked sheathed in grease. He pushed his limp hair back, where it stuck to his scalp.

“You can go, Mr. Bellamere,” he said. “I expect we’ll want to talk to you again. Make sure you’re available.”

“Trust me, I’m not leaving the state.”

“Good,” Ronaldson said, and held the door open for him.

“We’ll be in touch.”

After they tested his skin and his clothes for gas, which proved negative, and he repeated what he had told Martinez, Chris followed Martinez out of the station to his brown Crown Victoria.

“I got permission from Lieutenant Peters to revisit the scene. I want you to show me where you found David’s Smith

& Wesson.”

They drove back to Terry’s. The house was sodden rubble, the lawn trampled to mud. Yellow crime scene tape had been strung around the yard. When they stepped out of the car a sheriff ’s deputy came around the side of the building. The air stank of fi re and gas and death.

“This is a secured crime scene—”

Martinez fl ashed his badge and after a hasty phone call to the station, they were allowed on the property. Martinez grabbed a torch out of his trunk and followed Chris behind the burnt out house. He kept the powerful light on the ground just in front of them and Chris studied the chewed earth, looking for landmarks.

“It was around here,” he fi nally ventured, kneeling on the wet, trampled ground. Martinez obliged by focusing the light on the ground in front of him.

The small yard was hemmed in by a fence along the back and boxwood hedges on each side. The hedge extended between the two houses almost into the front yard and looked solid as L.A. BYTES
255

stone in the low light. If David had fallen here, how did the Sandman get him out? Chris hadn’t been inside long enough for him to drag David around to the front of the house and into a waiting car. He had to have taken him over the fence or the hedge immediately after the fi re.

Chris remembered his efforts to move Terry. Could the Sandman even move a big guy like David?

Chris crawled. The light wavered then began following him.

The ground was torn here; he could imagine heels dragging across the rain-dampened ground. He stared ahead, at a shadowy indent in the boxwood hedge. He waved his arm at Martinez.

“Shine it over there, on the bushes.”

Martinez did as he asked. Chris stayed on the ground, knowing he would miss too much if he tried to walk. His left hand skidded on something wet and he sprawled onto his stomach with a soft
umph
. The light vanished and rough hands grabbed him and hauled him to his knees.

“You okay? Chris—”

Chris held up his hand. It was covered in viscous red. “Shit!”

He scrambled to his feet and grabbed the torch. The ground at his feet was red with blood. David’s blood? The killer’s? In the baleful light of the torch, he spotted something metallic. With numb fi ngers, he lifted the St. Michael’s medal he had given to David just last week.

Martinez was instantly on his cell. All Chris heard was

“forensics team,” and “Code Thirty.” He swung the powerful beam of light along the ground toward the hedge while Martinez talked. The dark shadow proved to be one of several ragged holes in the ill-kempt fence. More wet redness stained the outer edges of branches—

“You have to give them the jewelry, Chris,” Martinez said.

“It’s evidence—”

“It’s David’s.”

“You’ll get it back.”

256 P.A. Brown

Chris wanted to refuse, but he knew he couldn’t. He clutched the bloody medal against his chest and felt like weeping.

Reluctantly he handed it to Martinez, who passed it off to the watching deputy.

“Let’s take a look,” Martinez said, letting his hand hover over Chris’s shoulder. “They dragged him through there.” He pointed at the hedge. “Peters is sending a forensics team out. In the meantime don’t touch anything.”

Chris turned away. He hurried toward the front of the house, rounding the hedge and shining the light down the dark passageway beside the neighboring house.

A car turned onto the street, a van following. Ronaldson hopped out of the lead car. A greyhound-thin Latino man in a tan business suit emerged from the passenger’s side. The van discharged three men in baby blue sterile suits lugging spotlights and suitcases. Trailing cables, they set up the lights on the lawn between the burnt house and the hedge.

Within thirty minutes the spots went on, driving away the night. The blood on the trampled ground immediately leaped into focus.

“Over here,” Chris called.

When Martinez added his voice, the two deputies left the forensic team to their work and followed Chris and Martinez around the back of the house next door.

“They dragged him through there,” Chris pointed.

“They?” Ronaldson looked skeptical.

“David’s not a little guy,” Martinez said with more patience than Chris could have mustered. “I doubt if anyone short of Andre the Giant could drag him around alone. Not if he was unconscious, and trust me, he wouldn’t let anyone drag him around if he wasn’t unconscious.”

Chris was all too aware of Ronaldson’s eyes coming back his way repeatedly. Was he trying to fi gure out Chris’s place in all this? Chris knew he didn’t swish, but he also didn’t do anything to L.A. BYTES
257

hide his orientation. Some people picked up on it right away. He suspected Ronaldson was doing just that. With that knowledge, Ronaldson had to wonder at Chris’s presence and his obvious distress over David.

Armed with their own powerful torch and a second one Ronaldson had, they had no trouble picking up the trail.

Ronaldson lingered at the hole in the hedge; Chris and Martinez were more interested in where the trail went next.

Chris was the fi rst to spot it.

Two distinct round drops of blood on the back doorsteps of the house next door. Chris stared at the door with a crazy kind of hope.

“Jesus, they took him in there.”

Ronaldson came over when Martinez called him. He studied the door intently. Then he glanced at Martinez, ignoring Chris.

“We canvassed the area. This house came up empty.”

“Or they just weren’t answering the door,” Chris snapped.

“Imagine that.”

Ronaldson was joined by his partner, who he laconically introduced as
José
Otélo. The two deputies approached the wooden door. Ot
é
lo rapped on it sharply. There was no response.

Otélo banged the door a second time, harder. When there was still no response, he glanced at his partner and nodded. Both of them slipped on police issue gloves; Ronaldson tried the door. It opened easily.

Chris suddenly had memories of another door. Would history repeat itself? Would they fi nd another body on the other side?

Would they fi nd David?

He watched the two detectives enter the dark house. Martinez followed, leaving only Chris outside, his legs too weak to carry him.

Suddenly the house was full of lights and there was a fl urry of activity and rising voices. Chris bolted up the steps into a tidy, crowded kitchen.

258 P.A. Brown

A woman—at least Chris assumed she was a woman, though her face was bloody and her clothes baggy and shapeless—sat in a ladder back chair, her hands bound behind her back with soiled strips of duct tape. More duct tape was in Ronaldson’s hand and had obviously just been removed from the captive’s face. Otélo was on his cell, calling for an ambulance.

She stared at Chris, wild-eyed, the whites of her eyes standing out against her bloody and bruised face.

A surprisingly gentle Ronaldson knelt by the chair, while Otélo used a pair of scissors to cut the bindings on her hands.

“Ma’am? An ambulance is on the way. Can you tell us what happened here?”

Her voice was high-pitched and edged in hysteria. “I was making supper. Gerry’s gone to San Diego for a conference so I was just making a bowl of soup.”

Chris looked at the stove. There was a blackened pot containing what might have been cream soup. Both pot and soup were ruined, though Chris doubted she would be hungry for anything for a good long time to come.

Otélo got a bottle of cold water from her fridge. She sucked on the bottle greedily. It seemed to help her fi nd her voice.

“They came in the back door. I didn’t know what was happening at fi rst. I thought there was three of them, until I saw what they had done to that poor man...”

Chris perked up.
Poor man?
He stepped forward. “What man?

What did he look like?”

Ronaldson threw him a dirty look. Chris subsided only when Martinez touched his arm.

“Go ahead, ma’am,” Ronaldson said. “What did they look like?”

She shook her head, ringlets of sweat and blood-stiffened hair falling over her pale face. “They wore masks. Those black things, with holes...”

“Balaclavas, ma’am?” Otélo suggested.

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She nodded gratefully. “Yes, they wore those. Except the third man. They had him all tied up too.”

“Can you describe them? How big were they? Tall, short?

Heavy—”

“The one they had tied up was big, the other two were both smaller than him. The one guy wasn’t any bigger than me; the other man was burlier, dark haired.”

“Anything else?”

She shuddered and wouldn’t look at anyone. “He had an accent. Oh, and a beard.” Her nose wrinkled. “The smaller man stank.”

“Stank, ma’am?”

“Like he hadn’t had a shower in weeks.”

Otélo wrote that down. “What kind of accent did the other one have?”

Her voice grew small. “I don’t know... French, I think. But rough French, not like what you hear on TV.” She shook. “I was so sure they were going to kill me.”

“You’re safe now, ma’am.”

She stared up at him as though to ask “Are you sure about that?” but all she did was rub her arms and wipe a tear that leaked from her bruised eye.

“The man who was taped. What can you tell us about him?”

“Like I said, he was big,” she said. “They dragged him in here between them and dumped him there—” She indicated another chair at the tiny kitchen table. Chris could see fresh blood on the wooden ladder-back.

“Was he alive?” he whispered.

“Yes, he was. But they had most of his face covered in duct tape. But even with that I could tell they had beaten him pretty bad.”

Chris winced but refrained from saying anything more when Martinez’s hand tightened painfully on his arm.

260 P.A. Brown

“What did they do then?” Ronaldson asked.

“N-nothing.” Even she seemed surprised by the admission.

“They stood where you are and waited in the dark, made me turn out every light in the place.” She twisted the loose fabric of her dressing gown in shaking hands. “We heard the fi re trucks and all but they wouldn’t let me look, they said no one must know they were here. The doorbell rang after that and the one with the accent took one of my knives out of the drawer and told me if I made a noise he’d kill me.”

“What time did they leave, ma’am?” Ronaldson asked.

She glanced at the clock over her stove. It said twelve-thirty.

“Maybe two hours ago. I thought to look at the clock after they’d been gone a while. It was just after ten-thirty.”

Chris was stunned. That meant the whole time he had been out there with Terry and his wife’s body, and later sitting in the sheriff ’s car, David had been in the house next door. Hurt. Maybe dying.

What did they want with him?

He didn’t realize he’d spoken aloud until Martinez answered him.

“Come on, Chris,” he said. “Let’s take this outside. Let them fi nish up here.” Martinez and Ronaldson shared a glance. “If you’re done with him...”

“He can leave,” Ronaldson said. “We know where to fi nd him if the need arises.”

Reluctantly Chris followed Martinez out of the house, back to his car. They stood beside the unmarked.

“He was in there,” Chris murmured. “David was there the whole time—”

“Don’t,” Martinez said sharply. “That won’t help David now.”

Chris was about to protest when his Blackberry vibrated. He fumbled for it and studied the tiny screen in confusion, until L.A. BYTES
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he remembered the web bug he had sent to the Sandman. He suddenly spun away.

“I have to get home.”

“What is it?” When Chris didn’t answer, Martinez stepped in front of him. “What’s going on, Chris? Talk to me.”

At fi rst Chris wasn’t going to say anything, then he realized that wasn’t fair. Martinez was David’s partner. Had been longer than Chris and David had been together. Despite being a loud-mouthed homophobe, Martinez stuck by David when he had been outed so ignominiously. He knew how much that meant to David.

So he told Martinez about his web bug. Martinez frowned.

“What does that mean? You can track him?”

“Not exactly. But I might be able to tell where he’s been.”

“And that just might let us know where he’s going.” Martinez jerked his door open. “Well then, what are we waiting for?”

Chris scrambled into his own car and the two vehicles headed back toward the freeway and home.

Wednesday 1:40 am, Cove Avenue, Silver Lake, Los Angeles
Chris put on coffee, knowing he was going to need all the help he could muster in the hours to come. He began to regret going quite so straight once he’d hooked up with David. He really could have used something stronger than caffeine to get through this night. Once the coffee was brewing, he took his laptop and Blackberry into his offi ce. He stopped in the doorway.

Martinez nearly plowed into him. “What?”

“My server’s gone.” David must have taken it. Why would he do that? Did he suspect what Chris was doing? Then he saw the suspicion darken Martinez’s face. He fumbled for a way to cover his admission. The lie came all too easily. “Oh, that’s right. They picked it up for service. I’m upgrading it with new SCSI drives. It won’t be back until next week.”