Light Before Day (22 page)

He was identified as "Corey, Recruit." His face was rounder and more boyish and his black hair had been shaved to bristle. In an expressive voice, far more articulate than he had ever been with me, he informed the camera that even though recruits wound up in boot camp for different reasons, none of those reasons mattered in the end. The only thing that mattered was that they did what they were told.

Corey Howard had never mentioned a word to me about being in the Marine Corps. There were no telltale tattoos on his body, no Semper Fi bumper sticker on his truck. And an active-duty marine would never take an apartment and a job in the middle of a gay ghetto. Corey's marine days were over.

Nate hadn't stirred.

A few days ago, the week before, another marine, this one not only active-duty but also married, had paid a visit to West Hollywood. Daniel Brady's marine days were over now, too.

Two disparate threads had come together, and I got the sense they were about to knot tight.

Billy Hatfill had not only confirmed that Corey was blackmailing him; he had told me that the Corey he met with that night had been full of rage, and that Billy was convinced it was about something far more infuriating than a boyfriend who wouldn't quit drinking.

I took the portable phone out onto my tiny balcony. After a few rings, Jimmy answered in a sleep-clogged voice. I told him about what I had just discovered. Then I played out the scenario I had come up with: Corey learned something incriminating about Billy from his uncle, Martin Cale. Corey used that information to force Billy Hatfill into blackmailing a marine helicopter pilot named Daniel Brady. To carry out this plan, Billy had enlisted the aid of Scott Koffler.

"Corey never mentioned his time in the corps to me," I said. "And he didn't have any marine tats. I've never seen a marine, even a gay one, who doesn't have some kind of Marine Corps bumper sticker. Corey didn't. I think his time in the marines was short and it ended badly."

"All right," Jimmy said, but I could tell that 1 hadn't sold him on the connections yet.

"The majority of gay service members are discharged because a former lover or a guy they rejected files a report with their commanding officer. That's a statistic. It's not up for debate."

"So you think Corey was discharged?" he asked. "And Daniel Brady was responsible?"

"It's a guess," I said. "And there's something else, Jimmy," I said, more tentatively now. "I just thought of it tonight. Brady and I look a lot alike. Same hair color, same eyes, same build.

Nate commented on it when he first told me about meeting Brady."

"You think Corey fell for you because you reminded him of his old love?"

"Something like that," I muttered.

Jimmy breathed into the phone. I tried to tell if Brenda was stirring beside him, but heard nothing. "It's the second part of your theory I don't like," he said. "I don't believe a guy like Billy Hatfill would hire a loser like Scott Koffler to help him take out the trash."

I thought of how Billy had gone ballistic when I had compared him to Koffler, and how he said he'd ejected Koffler and his young charge from one of his parties. Billy's ire had seemed genuine at the time. I wondered if it had been a show for my benefit.

"Think about it, Adam," Jimmy said. "We're talking about Billy Hatfill here. Loads of money. Lots of connections. Joseph Spinotta out there somewhere, ready to watch out for him if he gets in a jam. Are you asking me to believe that this guy would stoop so low as to hire a two-bit pimp who lives in Palmdale with his mother?"

"They have similar interests, Jimmy. Koffler uses teenagers to get ahead in the social world.

Billy's housing a teenager because he wants to turn him into a trophy boy."

"You're putting a streetwalker and a high-priced escort at the same party."

I let this stew for a minute. "I want to go to Oceanside tomorrow," I said. "See if I can find a connection between Corey and Daniel Brady."

"How do you plan to do that?" he asked. I could tell he didn't think I was up for the assignment.

"I've got an hour-long documentary on Corey's days in boot camp. I'll see if I can track down of any of the other guys in his platoon. Maybe some drill sergeants. That's a good place to start, right?"

I was lying to him and he knew it. "Why don't you just tell me how you plan on approaching Daniel Brady's wife?" he asked.

"Very carefully," I said.

"Check in me with every few hours," he said. I agreed.

"What do you think this revenge against Daniel Brady was?" he asked.

"Photographs," I said. "Koffler probably got him in the act with one of his young charges.

Maybe he mailed the pictures to his wife."

"So Brady responds by killing himself
and
four crewmates?"

"What do you think they did to him, Jimmy?"

"If Corey needed Billy Hatfill to carry this plan out, that means Billy was bringing something very special to it. Any idea what that might be?"

"No."

"Me neither," he said.

The next morning, I woke up on the love seat to the sound of the shower running. I was waiting for the coffeemaker to let out its thick rattle when Nate emerged from the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist and a wary look on his face. I told him he could borrow some clothes and watched his every move as he stepped over my bed and started rooting through my closet.

The towel gaped around his waist, revealing his shaved thighs. "Oh, sorry," he gasped, gathering the towel around him.

"Nate," I said, "I usually never see someone again after I sleep with them, all right? I'd like things between us to go a different way."

"Fine," he answered. "But my sponsor said if you're investigating a murder, I shouldn't hang out with you anyway."

'Who told him I was investigating a murder?"

"I saw your desk, Adam," he said. "The Vanished Three. The West Hollywood Slasher."

"Tell your sponsor I'm not investigating a murder," I said. It was easier than explaining the things he had seen.

"Why?"

"Because I like hanging out with you."

I couldn't tell if my words had affected him. He turned his back to me and slid into my one of my white T-shirts. I had about seven hundred of them. "I don't want you to stay at your place right now. Do you have somewhere else you can go?"

He gave me a blank look. He obviously didn't want to take instructions from me unless they involved various actions performed on my body parts. But Scott Koffler was having him followed, and I now believed that Koffler was acting out something larger than a personal vendetta.

"I can stay at my sponsor's," he finally said.

I drove him there. His sponsor lived in a townhouse condo that took up half of a hunter-green concrete block in the West Hollywood flats, in the blocks just behind 24 Hour Fitness. Its front lawn was crisscrossed by lines of bamboo.

Nate stepped out of my Jeep without saying goodbye. Then he paused and I thought he might apologize for his sour mood. "They've got a dungeon room in there," he said. "I forgot to ask if that was okay with you."

"Knock it off, Nate." He rolled his eyes. "Don't go out by yourself. And if you see that guy again, call me."

He muttered something under his breath and walked off.

C H A P T E R 10

San Diego County welcomed me with massive roadside signs advising me to watch out for dust clouds and illegal immigrants attempting to flee the checkpoint station that straddles the interstate's northbound lanes. The hills to the east turned dry and sharp-edged, with power lines riding their ridges and the shadows of fast-moving clouds sliding across their flanks.

A Navy Sea Knight helicopter flew in off the ocean. The sunlight flashed off its dual rotary blades as it came in for a landing on the narrow strip of scrub between the highway and the sea.

Camp Pendleton sits on over one hundred thousand acres at the northwest corner of San Diego County, and the stretch of Interstate 5 that passes through it is named for the first marine to win the Congressional Medal of Honor.

The small town of Oceanside sits just to the south of the base. According to the
LA Times,
Daniel and Melissa Brady had lived there for the past four years. They were listed. As I drove in, I didn't see a major chain restaurant on the North Coast Highway. I passed hole-in-the-wall bars, a used car dealership that promised no money down to enlisted men E-l and higher, and a 1960s movie theater converted into a church. Beneath a neon starburst, the marquee welcomed home the town's marines and sailors and complimented them on a job well done.

I went east on Mission Avenue and found the Bradys' sprawling apartment complex, sitting between two round green hills. It had a spread of duplex units that looked exactly like the one I had seen Melissa Brady being led away from on the eleven o'clock news. The swimming pool in the middle of the complex was full of water the color of a rain cloud and surrounded by a chain-link fence overburdened with warning signs.

I had purchased an orchid on the ride down there. I carried it stiffly in one arm as I walked the steps to Melissa's second-floor apartment. Her windows were heavily curtained and the darkness on the other side was silent. Just as I suspected, she wasn't home.

Her downstairs neighbor came to the door after one knock. She was a pear-shaped woman with a lantern jaw and a long gray ponytail that hung the length of her back. The kittens on her sweater stared at me as if they expected milk. She took one look at the orchid I was holding and narrowed her eyes.

"A little soon for suitors, don't you think?" she asked.

"I'm not a suitor," I said with a sheepish smile. "Let's just say I failed that test a few years ago."

"That's what we're gonna say, huh?"

"I heard what happened to Daniel," I said. "I wanted to pay my respects."

"She hasn't been back here since it happened," the woman said, her eyes wandering over my shoulder. "News was camped out here for a while."

"That must have been a pain."

"So what happened?" she asked brightly. "You break her heart?" I bowed my head as if the answer were too embarrassing to go into. "You look like him, you know? Danny, I mean. That's why I asked."

"I'd like to see her if I could," I said in a funeral-home voice.

"How long's it been?"

"A while."

She frowned, as if my answer had grave implications, then rested her head on the door frame. "She's not doing so well."

"That's understandable."

"She wasn't doing so well before. These days, doctors will give you codeine for a stubbed toe, know what I mean?" I made a sharp sound in my throat to give her the impression that this news about my old friend stung me. "She's staying with a friend of hers. Elena. You know her?"

I summoned an image of the furious friend I had seen leading Melissa down the front lawn behind me on the eleven o'clock news. "Tall, big-boned. Hispanic."

"That's her," the woman said tightly, as if I had identified a murder suspect.

"I'm not a fan," I said.

"Neither am I," she said. "She thinks she's protecting Missy but she's not. She's doing the reverse. What's that called when someone—"

"An enabler," I said.

"That's right," she said. "I dropped the mail off over there yesterday. I knew they were home.

I saw that little death trap Elena drives parked out front, but nobody came down when I rang the bell."

"Elena drives a Miata?" I asked.

"Naw, a Celica, I think," she said quickly. "Anyway, I don't know. The newspeople are all gone now. There's no reason to keep Missy under lock and key, but I'm pretty sure that's what she's doing, and it's not going to help anything. Missy's gonna have to get out into the world at some point."

"Sounds like it wasn't that easy being her neighbor," I said sympathetically.

She let out a breath that sputtered her lips. "I've had worse neighbors," she said.

"It would be nice to know what I'm walking into. That's all. And I would like to take Missy out into the world, if I can. Just for lunch at least. You think Elena's going to have a problem with that?"

"She sure will," she said, her face reddening. "Last week I tried to talk to Elena. Missy had some land of meltdown in the middle of the night and I was . . . scared for her. That's the only way to put it."

"What happened?" I asked breathily.

"She threw her computer out the window. That's what happened." I frowned, wondering what Melissa Brady might have seen on her computer screen that would make her want to eject the entire machine from her home. I had a fairly good idea what it was. "It was about three in the morning and I heard this crash. I went outside and there she was, whaling on that thing with a baseball bat."

"The computer?" I asked as if confused. I wasn't.

"Yeah. She was furious. I asked her what was wrong and she just gave me this crazy look.

She told me the thing froze up on her and she got pissed. I know it wasn't the right thing to do, but I laughed. I mean, she was standing right over there on the lawn, her computer in pieces everywhere, apologizing to me for waking me up. Did she really think I was going to sleep through that?"

She looked at me as if she expected me to explain Melissa's behavior. "Does that sound like a meltdown to you?" she asked. "'Cause Elena didn't think so. When I told her about it, she said Missy was under a lot of stress—Danny being in Iraq for so long. I pointed out that Danny had been back for two months, and she just looked at me like I'd called her some kind of name."

"This is unbelievable," I said in a winded tone of voice that sounded somehow naive, like the one my father always used when he was told of my mother's drunken antics. "When was this?"

"Thursday," she said. "Well, Friday morning, technically."

The night before Daniel Brady's suicide mission. The neighbor seemed to register this fact as well. I spoke again before she could get suspicious. "I should talk to her," I said, as if it were going to take all my nerve.

"Missy? I don't think that's going to do any good."

"No," I said firmly. "Elena."