Light Before Day (33 page)

I climbed into the dinghy and untied the line with fumbling hands. Everett watched at the top of the metal ladder. Once the line was loose, the boat began to drift away from the back of the yacht.

Everett's face went lax. He disappeared inside the main cabin. I pulled the rip cord on the outboard motor and the boat beneath me jerked and shot forward so fast I nearly tumbled out. It took me a minute to steady it, then to angle it toward the dark slopes of the Malibu coastline.

Behind me, I heard a dull roar, as if some creature was rising out of the depths. I glanced back and saw a maelstrom of froth shoot up behind the yacht as it swung to face the open ocean.

It headed out to sea, leaving me with only the grating whine of the outboard motor I was struggling to control. The wind tore the tears from my eyes as I watched the shoreline swell before me. Billy Hatfill had been double-crossed and he didn't know it. I planned on telling him.

As I neared the shore, the brutal whitecaps almost threw me from the boat. The near plunge reminded me that I was carrying Martin Cale's keypad and Corey's drawing of a young man named Reynaldo Reyez. I cut the motor and let the surf carry me in like a piece of driftwood. I made landfall on a wide beach lined with post and beam mansions that sat right on the sand, just yards back from the surf line.

From a gas station on the Pacific Coast Highway, I called a cab. I gave the driver the address of a glass and steel house in the Hollywood Hills. He gave me a helpless look in the rearview mirror. I assured him I would give him more specific directions as soon as we reached the winding hillside streets above the Sunset Strip.

The gate to Billy Hatfill's property buzzed when I was still several feet away from it. He had probably watched my approach on security cameras I couldn't see. The silver shades had been lowered over the house's glass walls, but I could see a vague light beating against them in the foyer and living room. The gate was unlocked. I stepped through it. Buried lights threw interspersed triangles of white across the empty lawn. Beyond the infinity pool, the skyline of Century City loomed in sharp relief. Streetlights twinkled in the expanse of treetops that was Beverly Hills, making the city below look like an inverted night sky.

In the living room, Billy Hatfill stood in front of the flat screen television on the other side of the massive sectional sofa. The security cameras had given Billy time to conceal his reaction to my resurrection. He held a small black pistol in both hands, aimed in my direction. His arms were awkwardly bent. He had adopted a pose he had learned from movies that I doubted he would be able to maintain under assault. His eyes were sharp under his brow, his lips parted. He knew his plan had failed, but he didn't know how.

"Corey came to you and told you he knew Spinotta was operating some kind of child porn ring and that his uncle was a customer," I said.

"Yes," he said in a breathy but controlled voice.

"Then what happened?"

"I told you already. He wanted to teach you a lesson. He said your mother's death wasn't going to be enough. He said he could get me a tape, and if I didn't broadcast it, he would bring the whole operation down."

When I reached for the zipper on my jeans, Billy made a small, frightened sound and jerked the gun up several inches. "Did you watch the tape?" I asked.

"Adam, let's—"

I pulled my jeans and my underwear down past my waist.
"Did you watch it?"
I rounded the corner of the sofa. The answer was on his face. I saw a riot of emotions fighting for control of his eyes as he scrutinized what I was showing him and realized what it meant.

When he saw I was forcing him to back up by several steps, he straightened his arms. I zipped myself back up and he blinked several times. Dazed.

"It wasn't me," I finally said.
"You
asked Corey to make the tape, and he used a body double.

A marine helicopter pilot named Daniel Brady. An old friend of his. A pedophile. A real one.

Daniel Brady killed himself a week ago, Billy. Corey sent a copy of the video to his wife—the same video I saw on Cale's yacht. She knew it was him, and she confronted him about it. So he flew his helicopter into the Pacific Ocean."

I started approaching him again. Billy backed up into the glass wall behind him. Helpless fury stuttered his breaths.

"Corey duped you," I said.

"Bullshit."

"Come on, Billy, you know it's the truth. Otherwise I'd be dead. See, Everett watched the tape tonight as well, and he knew it wasn't me. He saw the evidence up close and personal the other day, right outside your front gate. That's why he didn't kill me. And you did order him to kill me, didn't you?"

He leaned his head back against the glass. His eyes were filmy, but he kept the pistol aimed at the center of my chest.

"Put the gun away."

"Why?" he asked, a new edge to his voice.

"Because I've got a new boss. And he figured you out before I did. If I turn up dead, all roads will lead to you."

"What if you don't turn up at all?"

"Corey wanted something from you," I said. "He had information that could have sent you to jail for the rest of your life. But you forced him to deal. How?"

"He wanted to know where they were," he said.

"Joseph and the Vanished Three?" I asked.

He gave me a small nod.

"Why?"

"He didn't say," Billy answered. "And I didn't know where they are. I still don't know. I never will. That's how they want it. I said it enough times that he finally believed it." He sounded childishly indignant that the Vanished Three had left him out and that Corey had doubted his truthfulness. "Then I told him that I could think of one person who could find them. One determined little reporter with a big drinking problem. And I knew of a way to send you after them without you going to the authorities."

"Set me up," I said. "Make me believe I had raped a child."

"No," he corrected me.
"Make
you rape a child! He said he could do it. He said all he would have to do is put a few drinks in you and you'd be down on all fours, begging to please him. But I knew what he really wanted. He didn't have to say it. He wanted to teach you a lesson. I could see it in his eyes. I could see that we were both going to teach you a lesson."

"Even you?"

"Yes," he said. "You think you're different, Adam. You think you're better. You think you can live a normal, sober life. You're trying so hard it's almost touching. But you're wrong. We are as sick as everyone else thinks we are. We lose our youth and then we take it from someone else. That is what faggots do, Adam. And you're one of them." A flicker of panic under his hard voice told me that he had been desperate to believe this proclamation for some time now.

"You're just a whore, Billy," I said. "You're just a whore trying to defend your best customer."

His lips pursed.

"If Corey wanted to teach me a lesson, why didn't he use me instead of Brady?" He didn't answer. 'Why did he want to know where Spinotta was?"

"He was desperate," he hissed. "He was more of a vigilante than you are. He was going to take us all down in a blaze of glory. That special kind of glory you dream of when you're a white-trash piece of shit from nowhere."

"Bullshit," I whispered. "You never wanted to teach me a lesson. You knew the minute Corey came to you that you would eventually have to get me out of the way, too. You knew the minute he disappeared that I would come looking for him, so you figured out a way to drag me into it. You want to be evil, Billy, but you try too fucking hard."

"That disappoints you, doesn't it?" he asked.

"What happened when he gave you the tape?"

He removed his left hand from the pistol's handle and dug into his pants pocket. He tossed something at me. It thumped against my chest and hit the carpet at my feet.

It was a thin gold chain with a small medallion that had the shape of a scorpion carved into it. This same chain had rubbed against my bare chest every time Corey brought his body down onto mine.

I met Billy's stare and watched the expression on my face bring a twisted smile to his mouth.

"I've been carrying it with me the whole time," he said. His voice quivered. He had lost his grip on the cold, smirking malice he had used to bait me into meeting with Martin Cale. "I almost dropped it on the table when we were having dinner. You don't know how tempted I was."

"Which one of you killed him?"

Billy sealed his mouth.

"Not you. Not Joseph. I'm sure he doesn't do his own dirty work. Was it Terrance Davidson?

Roger Vasquez? Ben Clamp?"

"Are you out for revenge now, Adam?"

"Which one of you killed him?"

There was fear in his eyes. "It was a third party," he said warily.

"Who?" I asked.

He didn't answer.

"Does Joseph know about the game you tried to play with Corey, with me?" I asked.

He shut his eyes briefly.

"He doesn't, does he? You just told him Corey was trying to blackmail you and you needed him out of the way. Joseph has no idea how much you endangered his operation over the past two weeks."

I heard the answer in his rapid breaths. Then I watched a strange energy liven his face. He laughed gently at a joke I hadn't heard, cocking his head to one side as if I had just sung a particularly pleasing note.

"Find them," he urged. "Tell them. Then my bullshit plan will actually become a reality.

Adam Murphy will bring down our whole operation. That's only fair, don't you think? It's practically a compromise."

He lowered the gun slightly and straightened his spine against the glass. He was waiting eagerly and happily for me to react. I didn't. "You're going to do it, aren't you?"

"Who killed Corey?"

"Good luck, Adam."

He brought the pistol to his mouth, closed his teeth around the barrel, and fired.

The gunshot knocked me to my knees. I blinked and saw that I had raised both hands on either side of my head, as if the ceiling was about to fall in. When I heard him hit the glass wall, I thought it was a second gunshot.

My ears were ringing. Billy lay in front of me. Blood peppered the carpet around his head and laced the glass wall behind him with what looked like a blossom composed of empty night sky. The window was spider-webbed where the bullet had blown through it after leaving his skull. His gaping mouth was a strange shape. The pistol's kick had knocked his front teeth out of alignment.

I had never seen death before and couldn't see how anyone would think the scene before me would constitute a victory.

I picked Corey's gold chain up off the carpet and left the house.

I walked downhill to Sunset Plaza. It was just after two A.M. Sunday morning, and the Sheriff's Department was closing down the strip. A river of brake lights led me toward my apartment building. A hundred pounding bass beats from a hundred car stereos gave a rhythm to my footsteps that my brain could not. I walked past the darkened high-end retail shops and overpriced restaurants. I heard drunken motorists shout homophobic expressions out their car windows.

When I reached the sudden dip in Sunset Boulevard that housed Tower Records and Book Soup, I saw two motorcycle cops who had been idling on a corner ahead of me go lights and sirens. They swerved out into traffic, weaving through the thwarted cars as they headed off in the direction I had just come from. I figured they were responding to a report of a gunshot up in the hills. I paused to watch them pass.

Billy Hatfill had killed himself rather than give me the identity of Corey's killer. Maybe he knew he would be as good as dead if Joseph Spinotta discovered how Billy had risked his operation. A third party had killed Corey. A hit man of some sort. Someone who could be sent after Billy just as he had been sent after Corey.

I didn't believe that Billy had killed himself out of fear alone. His split-second decision to take his life seemed like an attempt to ensure that I would hunt Spinotta down and get the answers Billy had refused to give me. If I went any further, I would be fulfilling the dying wish of a man who had tried to destroy not just my dignity but my sanity.

I imagined myself sitting in an interrogation room trying to make real what I had seen and heard that night. For all I knew, young Everett was still piloting the scene of Cale's murder across the open seas, leaving me with a drawing of a young man named Reynaldo Reyez and a blinking keypad with a perpetually changing series of numbers on it.

I struggled to remember the things Martin Cale had told me. Four years earlier, Corey and Joseph Spinotta had met face-to-face; neither man had said a word about the meeting afterward.

Nothing Billy had said to me indicated that he knew about this meeting.

A few weeks earlier, Corey had been desperate to find Joseph Spinotta. I had to know why.

I rounded the corner onto my street and saw a Toyota 4Runner parked across the street from my building. Behind the wheel was one of the security guards Jimmy had hired to prevent me from leaving the house. Now he was awaiting my return.

I hurried back uphill toward the traffic-clogged strip. I turned my cell phone on. I had fifteen new messages. Nate answered after one ring. "Where the hell are you?" he said in a fierce whisper.

"Are you still at Jimmy's?"

"Yeah. He's freaking out."

"I need my Jeep," I said.

I heard a door open and then Nate let out a small grunt as his cell phone was plucked away from him. Before I could swear, Brenda said my name in a cool voice.

"I need my Jeep."

"Why?"

"Because I need to get out of LA. And you can call the guard who's waiting for me outside of my building and tell him to get lost."

"Jimmy's pissed."

"I don't give a shit. He was wrong."

"How?"

"Corey wanted to know where Joseph Spinotta was. Billy didn't know, but he came up with a plan to find out: he'd get me on tape raping a kid, then use the tape to send me after Spinotta.

Corey agreed, but he used a body double—"

"Daniel Brady," she said for me.