The Scarecrow (21 page)

Rachel shook her head.

“With suffocation it is very difficult to pinpoint exact time of death. Narrowing it to even a two-hour window could still put you in the picture.”

“So you’re saying my being on a plane or in Vegas is no alibi?”

“Not if they can’t pinpoint time of death to exactly when you were on that plane or already in Vegas. I think our guy is smart enough to realize that. It was part of his plan.”

I slowly nodded and felt a terrible fear start to rise in me. I realized I could end up like Alonzo Winslow and Brian Oglevy.

“But don’t worry, Jack. I won’t let them put you in jail.”

She finally raised her phone and made a call. I listened to her speak briefly to someone who was probably a supervisor. She didn’t say anything about me or the case or Nevada. She just said she had been involved in the discovery of a homicide and would shortly be interacting with the LAPD.

Next she called the LAPD, identified herself, gave my address and asked for a homicide team. She then gave her cell phone number and ended the call. She looked at me.

“What about you? If you need to call someone you better do it now. Once the detectives arrive they’re probably not going to let you use your phone.”

“Right.”

I pulled out my throwaway and called the city desk at the
Times
. I checked my watch and saw it was well past one. The paper had long been put to bed but I needed to inform someone of what was happening.

The night editor was an old veteran named Esteban Samuel. He was a survivor, having worked for the
Times
for nearly forty years and having avoided all the shake-ups and purges and changes of regime. He did it largely by keeping his head down and staying out of the way. He didn’t come to work until six
P.M
. each day and that was usually after the corporate cutters and editorial axmen like Kramer had gone home. Out of sight, out of mind. It worked.

“Sam, it’s Jack McEvoy.”

“Jack Mack! How you doing?”

“Not so well. I’ve got some bad news. Angela Cook has been murdered. An FBI agent and I just found her. I know the morning edition is closed but you might want to call whoever needs to be called or at least leave it on the overnote.”

The overnote was a list of notes, ideas and incomplete stories that Samuel put together at the end of his shift and then left for the morning editor.

“Oh, my God! How terrible! That poor, poor girl.”

“Yes, it’s awful.”

“What happened?”

“It’s related to the story we were working on. But I don’t know a whole lot. We’re waiting on the LAPD to show up now.”

“Where are you? Where did this happen?”

I knew he would get around to asking that.

“My house, Sam. I don’t know how much you know, but I went to Las Vegas last night and Angela went missing today. I came back tonight and an FBI agent escorted me home and we searched the house. We found her body under the bed.”

The whole thing sounded insane as I said it.

“Are you under arrest, Jack?” Samuel asked, his confusion clear in his voice.

“No, no. The killer is trying to set me up but the FBI knows what’s going on. Angela and I were onto this guy and somehow he found out. He killed Angela and then he tried to get me in Nevada but the FBI was there. Anyway, all of this will be in the story I write tomorrow. I’ll be in as soon as I clear this scene and I will write it for Friday’s paper. Okay? Make sure they know that.”

“Got it, Jack. I’ll make some calls and you stay in touch.”

If I can, I thought. I gave him the number of my throwaway and ended the call. Rachel was still pacing.

“That didn’t sound very convincing,” she said.

I shook my head.

“I know. I realized I sounded like a nut job as I was saying it. I’ve got a bad feeling about this, Rachel. Nobody’s going to believe me.”

“They will, Jack. And I think I know what he was trying to do. It’s all coming together now.”

“Then, tell me. The cops will be here any second.”

Rachel finally sat down, taking the chair across the coffee table from me. She leaned forward to tell her story.

“You have to look at it from his point of view and then make some assumptions about his skills and location.”

“Okay.”

“First of all, he’s close. Our first two known victims were in L.A. and Las Vegas. Angela’s murder and his attempt to get to you were in L.A. and a remote part of Nevada. So my guess is that he lives in or is close to one of these places. He was able to react quickly and in a matter of hours get to both you and Angela.”

I nodded. It sounded right to me.

“Next, his technical skill. We know from his e-mail to the prison warden and from how he was able to attack you on multiple levels that his tech skill is quite high. So if we assume that he was able to breach your e-mail account, then we can also assume that he breached the entire
L.A. Times
data system. If he had free rein inside, then he would have been able to access home addresses for both you and Angela, right?”

“Sure. That information has got to be in there.”

“What about you being laid off? Would there be any e-mail or a data trail involving that?”

I nodded.

“I got a ton of e-mails about it. From friends, people at other papers, everywhere. I told a few people by e-mail, too. But what would it have to do with any of this?”

She nodded as though she was way ahead of me and my answer fit perfectly with what she already knew.

“Okay, so then what do we know? We know that somehow Angela or possibly you hit a trip wire and alerted him to your investigation.”

“Trunk murder dot com.”

“I will have it checked out as soon as I can. Maybe that was it and maybe it wasn’t. But somehow our guy was alerted. His response was to invade the
Los Angeles Times
and try to find out what you two were up to. We don’t know what Angela put in her e-mails but we know that you put your plan to go to Las Vegas last night into an e-mail. I am betting that our guy read it and a lot of your other e-mails and keyed his plan off of it.”

“We keep saying ‘our guy.’ We need a name for him.”

“In the bureau we would call him an unknown subject until we knew exactly who we were dealing with. An Unsub.”

I got up and looked through the curtains on the front window. The street was dark out there. No cops yet. I walked over to a wall switch and turned on the outside lights.

“Okay, Unsub, then,” I said. “What do you mean he keyed his plan off of my plan?”

“He needed to neutralize the threat. He knew that there was a good chance you had not confirmed your suspicions or talked to the authorities yet. Being a reporter, you would keep the story to yourself. This worked in his favor. But he still had to move quickly. He knew Angela was in L.A. and you were going to Vegas. I think he started in L.A., somehow grabbed Angela, and then killed her and set you up for it.”

I sat back down.

“Yeah, that’s obvious.”

“He then focused his attention on you. He went to Vegas, probably driving through the night or flying out this morning, and tracked you to Ely. It would not have been hard to do. I think he was the man who followed you in the hallway at the hotel. He was going to make his move against you in your room. He stopped when he heard my voice and that has sort of puzzled me until now.”

“Why?”

“Well, why did he abort the plan? Just because he heard you had company? This guy isn’t shy about killing people. What would it matter to him if he had to kill you and the woman he heard in your room?”

“So then, why did he abort?”

“Because the plan wasn’t to murder you and whoever you were with. The plan was for you to kill yourself.”

“Come on.”

“Think about it. It would be the best way for him to avoid detection. If you end up murdered in a hotel room in Ely, there is going to be an investigation that would lead to all of this unraveling. But if you were a suicide in a hotel room in Ely, then the investigation would go in a completely different direction.”

I thought about this for a few moments and saw where she was going with it.

“Reporter gets laid off, has the indignity of having to train his own replacement, and has few prospects for another job,” I said, reciting a litany of true facts. “He gets depressed and suicidal. Concocts a story about a serial killer running around two states as cover, then abducts and murders his young replacement. He then gives all his money to charity, cancels his credit cards and runs off to the middle of nowhere, where he kills himself in a hotel room.”

She was nodding the whole time I was running it down.

“What’s missing?” I asked. “How was he going to kill me and make it look like suicide?”

“You’d been drinking, right? You came into the room with two bottles of beer. I remember that.”

“Yeah, I’d only had two before that.”

“But it would help sell the scene. Empty bottles strewn around the hotel room. Cluttered room, cluttered mind, that sort of thing.”

“But beer wouldn’t kill me. How was he going to do it?”

“You already gave the answer earlier, Jack. You said you had a gun.”

Bang
. It all came together. I stood up and headed toward my bedroom. I’d bought a .45 caliber Colt Government Series 70 twelve years earlier, after my encounter with the Poet. He was still out there at the time and I wanted some protection in case he came calling on me. I kept the weapon in a drawer next to my bed and only took it out once a year to go to the range.

Rachel followed me into the bedroom and watched me slide open the drawer. The gun was gone.

I turned back to Rachel.

“You saved my life, you know that? No doubt about that now.”

“I’m glad.”

“How would he know I owned a gun?”

“Is it registered?”

“Yes, but what, now you’re saying he can hack into the ATF computers? This is getting far-fetched, don’t you think?”

“Actually, no. If he tapped the prison computer, I don’t see why he couldn’t get into the gun registry. And that may be only one place where he could have gotten it. Back during the period when you bought it, you were interviewed by everybody from Larry King to the
National Enquirer
. Did you ever put it out there that you owned a gun?”

I shook my head.

“Unbelievable. I did. I said it in a few interviews. I was hoping the word would get out and it would deter a surprise visit from the Poet.”

“There you go.”

“But for the record, I never did an interview with the
Enquirer
. They did a story on me and the Poet without my cooperation.”

“Sorry.”

“Anyway, this guy now isn’t as smart as we think. There was one big flaw in his plan.”

“What was that?”

“I flew to Vegas. All baggage is screened. I never would have gotten the gun there.”

She nodded.

“Maybe not. But I think it is a widely accepted fact that the scanning process is not one hundred percent perfect. It would probably bother the investigators in Ely but not enough to make them change their conclusion. There are always loose ends in any investigation.”

“Can we go back out to the living room?”

Rachel headed out of the room and I followed, taking a glance back at the bed as I went through the door. In the living room, I dropped down on the couch. A lot had happened in the last thirty-six hours. I was getting fatigued but knew there would be no rest for the weary for a long time.

“I thought of something else. Schifino.”

“The lawyer in Vegas? What about him?”

“I went to him first and he knew everything. He could put the lie to my suicide.”

Rachel considered this for a moment and then nodded.

“That could’ve put him in danger. Maybe the plan was to kill you and then double back to Vegas and take him out, too. Then, when the chance was missed with you, there was no reason to hit Schifino. I’ll have the field office in Vegas make contact, anyway, and see about protection.”

“Are you going to have them go up to Ely and pull the video from the casino where I sat with this guy?”

“I’ll do that, too.”

Rachel’s phone rang and she answered immediately.

“It’s just me and the homeowner,” she said. “Jack McEvoy. He’s a reporter for the
Times
. The victim here was a reporter as well.”

She listened for a moment and said, “We’re coming out now.”

She closed the phone and told me the police were out front.

“They’ll feel more comfortable if we come out to meet them.”

We walked to the front door and Rachel opened it.

“Keep your hands in sight,” Rachel said to me.

She walked out, holding her credentials high. There were two patrol cars and a detective cruiser in the street out front. Four uniformed officers and two detectives were waiting on the driveway. The uniformed officers pointed their flashlights at us.

When we got closer I recognized the two detectives from Hollywood Division. They held their guns down at their sides and looked ready to use them if I gave them the right reason.

I didn’t.

I
didn’t get to the
Times
until shortly before noon on Thursday. The place was bustling with activity. A lot of reporters and editors were moving about the newsroom like bees in a hive. I knew it was all because of Angela and what had happened. It’s not every day that you come to work and find out your colleague has been brutally murdered.

And that another colleague is somehow involved.

Dorothy Fowler, the city editor, was the first to spot me as I came in from the stairwell. She jumped from her desk at the raft and came directly toward me.

“Jack, my office, please.”

She changed directions and headed to the wall of glass. I followed, knowing every eye in the newsroom was on me once again. No longer because I was the one that got pink-slipped by the axman. They watched me now because I was the one who might have gotten Angela Cook killed.

We entered her small office and she told me to close the door. I did as instructed and then took the seat directly across the desk from her.