HE SLOWLY STARTED to think that it didn’t matter if the cop were indicted because he’d just be acquitted at trial. No one would be hurt. He wondered how he might present the facts of the case to leave open enough doubt for the grand jury to indict. It wasn’t reasonable doubt. A case was indicted on majority of votes by the jurors. It would be easy. Easier than working on Road Patrol. Midnights. With Wednesday and Thursday off. He took more than one break to vomit in the small men’s room on the third floor.
THE DAY OF his grand jury testimony, he wore his lone blue suit with the matching blue tie that the guy from Penney’s had thrown in because he was a cop. He had a file with a few notes and some lab reports in case anyone asked him about them. He knew it would hinge on how long the fight was, if the officer had had any other option, and if he acted within state guidelines for use of force.
Stoltz nodded to the PBA attorney outside the grand jury room. Although Stoltz had spoken to Carla Lazaro numerous times since the shooting, always giving her reports and keeping her informed, he had been careful not to give her any clue as to what he planned to do. He dealt in facts, not feelings. Her superior tone showed that she believed she had won. He knew she felt as if she owned him. Why not? She could call his captain and complain, and he’d be moved. The S.O. needed the state attorney more than it needed him. He shuffled into the room and took a seat, and a bailiff swore him in.
He swore to tell the truth. His stomach flipped. He felt bile build in the back of his throat.
All Stoltz really remembered was the look on Carla Lazaro’s face when he noted that all the witnesses had said the cop was exhausted. He threw in a fact from what he had researched: it was the longest hand-to-hand fight between a cop and a suspect in Florida history. Also that the suspect had five convictions for assault on a police officer, one of whom he had tried to choke to death. Stoltz followed up, without being asked, with how the cop applied first aid immediately.
The grand jury came back with a “no true bill” in record time.
As he stepped down from the witness stand, the look from Carla Lazaro said everything. He figured he had nothing to lose and winked at the fuming assistant state attorney, leaving the room with his integrity intact.
On the following Monday, his new phone played the theme to Hawaii Five-O as he picked it up and said, “Stoltz, Economic Crime, may I help you?” He jotted some notes on a check-cashing fraud and opened his first economic-crime case. He now had one case to go with the file his sergeant had allowed him to bring over from Homicide. Jane Doe number sixty-eight had her own drawer in his new desk. As he copied down some information on his first identity-theft investigation, he wondered when he’d get to her. One thing was for sure: there were no droughts in financial crime in South Florida.
Divine Droplets
By Paula L. Woods
The past is not dead. It’s not even the past.
— William Faulkner
During those anxious nights, coiled into his narrow bunk, his mind would soar along the 101, down the 405, or out on remote stretches of Pacific Coast Highway until he arrived at one of those longed-for places — with their low counters, perfectly spaced chairs, glass cases holding the glistening jewels he’d come to crave. Ruby-hued maguro, carnelian-colored beads of ikura, or kurage glistening like citrine ribbons — he could feel the cool flesh yielding in his mouth, washed down with a subtly flavored sake. The sensation was liberating, one of the most intense he’d ever experienced. And he had come that close to losing it all.
But this afternoon, as he hastily assembled his Japanese pens and sketchbooks, he knew with a certainty that made his nerves dance that all the pleasures he craved would once again be his. He was being released from the county jail, his case dismissed by a fair-minded judge after his defense team showed just how stupid and overzealous the police had been. Their stupidity, not his. Because, in almost every aspect of his behavior, he had been remarkably clever. Clever enough to allow himself visits to only exclusive sushi bars such as Urasawa or Matsuhisa when preparing for his outings, although he’d stopped when he became aware of the pattern after the third. Later, there were the receipts from the decidedly downscale Yamashiro and the eyewitness testimony of bartenders who rang up rounds of sake he conspicuously bought for himself and anyone sitting within shouting distance in the lounge overlooking Hollywood. Even his accessories had been purchased years before, from specialized stores all over the country, always for cash and never more than one or two pieces at a time. Every contingency had been considered. There was no reason he should have been arrested.
As he was escorted to the reception area by two burly sheriff’s deputies, he savored the moment, knowing in the end he was much smarter than the cops would ever be. He hadn’t fallen for their subterfuge that first time they came calling. Had they asked him outright, they would have learned that he could thoroughly account for his movements on the nights in question, that they would never be able to put him anywhere near the locations where those eight girls had been found.
Yet because of his carelessness and one foolish lie, they had persisted until they trapped him. Then it was those detectives — Truesdale from the LAPD and Firestone from Simi Valley — who had interrogated him for four hours in a little room in Parker Center, their hot breath tickling his ears like the gnats one August at his mother’s home in the Hamptons. He’d laughed in their faces when they tried to trick him into confessing in exchange for a reduced sentence. But he never cracked, never said one word they could use against him.
But they indicted him anyway, on two counts, although he had refused to believe the misbegotten evidence would be admitted into court. And he was right, although his certitude had to be backed up by three days of grilling the cops on the stand and a fortune in legal fees to get the evidence excluded. It pleased him to think that the trust fund his mother had so diabolically constructed to control him from the grave had been relieved of 1.3 million dollars to secure his freedom. It pleased him even more to know he was being released three days before Mother’s Day.
But his vindication was anticlimactic. As opposed to the pack of reporters who had clamored outside the jail at his arrest and throughout the proceedings, their number had dwindled to only a half-dozen stalwarts willing to brave the weather for a sound bite. He stepped outside the confines of the jail — refusing the umbrella being held by Michelle Dunn, the lead attorney on his team — and tilted his head back, allowing the drizzle to caress his face. He could imagine how the shot would look on CNN — his untanned, chiseled face raised skyward, longish brown hair lifting slightly in the wind. He allowed himself to be gently led away by Dunn, selected as much for her resemblance to Tiffany Rutherford as for her skills in the courtroom. Superimposed over the shot, he could envision the words “Heir to Solange Fashion Empire Freed After Murder Charges Are Dismissed,” as the camera caught him in a private moment, mouthing a prayer, his palms raised as if the raindrops whispered a heavenly communication.
He wasted little time talking to the reporters, moving swiftly into the limo that had been arranged to pick them up. “Aren’t you joining me?” he asked, lowering the window as Dunn closed the door that separated them. “You worked so hard, I thought we might celebrate.” He sniffed the air around her, his nostrils identifying the scent of her rage and fear, but nothing else that told him she was his. “Urasawa maybe?”
One hand to her face as if to shield her mouth from the cameras’ prying eyes, Dunn leaned into the car, the smile she wore for the reporters congealing into an ugly grimace. “Our services to your mother’s estate are concluded, Mr. Nolent.”
He fingered the sketchbook in his lap. “I’m sorry, but you seemed to admire my work so much, I thought that you and I might — ”
He reached out for his attorney’s unadorned hand, which she withdrew at a speed that surprised him. “You’re out of your fucking mind if you think I’d ever have anything to do with you. Good-bye!”
Scanning the faces of the peop
le around her, Christophe raised the window, hoping the paparazzi hadn’t captured the tense exchange. Had she forgotten who he was? With just a phone call to one of the major magazines, he could obliterate Michelle Dunn and her media-hungry partners, these so-called defenders of justice who raided his mother’s estate of its assets but never shook his hand, never touched him unless it was for the cameras. But what did she matter? She and the rest of the minions his mother’s money had bought were no more than servants, there to do his bidding, not the other way around.
“Let’s get out of here!” he muttered to his driver through the open glass partition. As the small knot of reporters and deputies receded in the rear window, Christophe Nolent settled into the leather seats for the ride to his home in Bel-Air, knowing God was on his side.
A LONE FIGURE stood at the rear entrance of the county jail, collar of his suit jacket turned up against the stinging rain, wondering why God was punishing him. He’d stood for a half hour, waiting, then watched as Christophe Nolent slithered by him, had a brief conversation with one of his attorneys, then pulled off in a Bentley limo, burning rubber as if leaving the scene of a crime.
Which he was, the little shit. First crime being the murders of those women, and the second, beating the rap because his slickster attorneys had got him off on a technicality. But no one would remember it that way. All they’d remember — the cops he used to work with here and those at his current job in Simi — was that Steve Firestone had fucked up again, and now a serial killer was back on the streets.
What the hell was he supposed to do?
His former coworkers in the department would have never had Nolent on their radar if it hadn’t been for him. He was the one who watched the news and pored over the LAPD bulletins on the murders of several women that Robbery-Homicide detectives believed were the work of a single killer. He was the one who reached out to Lieutenant Kenneth Stobaugh when they found Tiffany.
Tiffany Rutherford was an exotic dancer, like the other vics in the LAPD’s bulletins. She worked at a club in West LA, although she lived in Simi, out in Ventura County. She was found near the entrance to a remote park at the north end of town, skin flayed from her body and chunks of flesh removed from her stomach and arms. Firestone had caught the case with his partner, Kraig Tytus, nice guy but a wuss, threw up all over the crime scene. Steve had seen much worse than that in his fifteen years as a Homicide detective in the LAPD, although he had to admit that in his ten years at Simi, there hadn’t been one as brutal as this.
But rather than hold on to the sensational case and sew up that promotion to chief of the Detective Unit he’d been coveting, Steve had swallowed his pride and picked up the phone a couple of days after Tiffany was found, and called Lieutenant Stobaugh. “Just don’t tell me Detective Cortez or Justice is working it from your side,” he’d tried to joke with his former boss.
Stobaugh had refused to laugh about it, merely referred him to Billie Truesdale, who had been a fairly new transfer from one of the divisions into RHD when he was there but who had almost ten years on the job now. She’d shown up that afternoon wearing a boxy blazer, fitted trousers, and no makeup. Women that butch and that dark had never been Steve’s type, which probably was fine with her, from what he’d heard through the grapevine.
“Mind if I look around?” she’d asked as she stood in the tiled entryway of Tiffany Rutherford’s town house that day.
“Why the fuck else would I’ve called you?”
“Look, Firestone, I got no beef with you, okay?”
“You think Cortez and Justice feel the same way?”
“That’s the past, forget about it!”
Steve felt his fists unclench and his shoulders go down an inch or two. Maybe Truesdale meant it, maybe she didn’t, but at least she looked him in the eye when she said it. Maybe it was because she knew the sexual-harassment charges those bitches had filed against him were bogus, just sour grapes because he’d slept with one and not the other.
“You find anything of interest when your team went through the place?” Truesdale was asking him.
He shrugged. “For a stripper, she sure bought a lot of clothes.”
“You mean for her act?”
Steve shook his head as he led her upstairs. “According to her employer, she did a straight-up thong song at the Three-Way. What I mean is, she bought a lot of professional-looking clothes, like the girls wear on those Law & Order shows.”
The master bedroom’s wenge-wood bed and expensive perfumes on the dresser hinted at a sophistication out of step with the suburban setting. The adjacent walk-in closet was jammed with skirted suits, soft blouses, and flowing dresses, tags on a full third of the garments. Truesdale pulled out a tiny knit dress with the tag still on it, in a tiger print like Steve’s ex-wife used to wear and that probably would have suited the petite detective, if this dyke ever wore dresses.
“And look at all the receipts.” Steve gestured to an accordion file on a desk in the corner. “Maybe her family can return the shit with the tags still on and get their money back.”
Truesdale had donned a pair of gloves and started fingering through the file, making notes as she went along. “Your vic spent good money on her clothes. More for some of these outfits than I bring home in a week.” She flipped through some more receipts, pausing at one near the front. “It looks like Tiffany went shopping the day she was murdered.”
“No shit, Sherlock.” Steve tried but couldn’t keep the acid from his voice. “We’ve already talked to the salesladies where she bought the stuff on that receipt. They recognized her from the picture we had but didn’t remember anyone with her.” Steve and Tytus had used the high school graduation photo sitting on the desk, Tiffany’s California-girl looks striking even then. Taken no more than three or four years before, it was more flattering than her driver’s-license picture, not to mention the postmortem photo taken by the coroner, the girl’s face rendered unrecognizable by the butcher who’d killed her.
Truesdale extracted a crumpled piece of paper that was wedged in a corner of the file. “You talk to the customer-service department too?”
Wondering what he’d missed, Steve could feel his shoulders stiffen. “The people working the counter that day were off when we went through,” he’d lied.
“Well, I’d talk to them sooner rather than later. It looks like Tiffany paid her credit card bill the same day she went shopping. The date and amount’s been recorded on the statement, right here.”
Smartass Truesdale’s discovery led them to the Simi Valley Town Center and a videotape of Tiffany Rutherford paying her bill in Macy’s customer-service department. Just as Tiffany was leaving, a white male wearing a Kirin baseball cap was recorded bumping into her. After they exchanged a few words, he approached the counter as if to ask the clerk a question, then headed in the same direction as the victim.
“Pause it right there,” Truesdale had ordered the guard in Security, where they were watching the tapes. She started fumbling through her notebook, muttering, “So that’s what she was saying!”
“What is it?” Steve had asked.
“Mrs. Apkarian, the salesperson in the lingerie section of Bloomie’s, Beverly Center, thought our seventh vic, Yustina Flores, was being followed by a white male in a baseball cap. With her accent, I thought she was saying ‘Korn,’ like the band, was the logo on the cap, not ‘Kirin.’” She handed a police artist’s drawing to Steve. “Mrs. Apkarian said he eased up on Flores like he did to your vic on the video, squeezing her forearm as he made his apology, as if sizing her up. I blew her off as being overly dramatic, but damn if I’m not watching this guy do the same thing she described!”
“She remember if he bought anything?”
“A pink flannel nightshirt with dogs on it.”
Steve suddenly felt cold in the pit of his stomach. “There were pink fibers found on my vic’s ankles and wrists. Was Yustina a stripper?”
“No, she was an exchange student from Argentina.”
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“So if it’s the same guy you suspect did the strippers, then he was stepping outside his pattern with Yustina . . .”
“But went right back to it with your vic a few days later,” Truesdale added. “Sounds like he’s escalating.”
Which made him that much more dangerous. “What else do you have?” Steve asked.
“Apkarian almost got him to sign up for a credit card, but he decided midway through filling out the application to pay cash. Left without his change.”
“Probably in hot pursuit of your vic. Wonder what set him off.” Steve stared at the video as if it could tell him. “Did the saleslady, by any chance, keep the application?”
It was Truesdale’s turn to be embarrassed. “I didn’t think to ask.”
Thank God he did. A quick call to Bloomingdale’s revealed that Mrs. Apkarian, assuming the man was part of the store’s mystery-shopping team, had folded his change up with the application in case he returned to claim it. She dug it out from under the bill drawer to show Truesdale and Steve when they arrived an hour later.
Holding the application gingerly by the edges, Steve had known instinctively that it was bogus — the name “D. Vinedropletz” sounded completely made up, and the address the guy had given on PCH was so far up the coast, it should have been in Oregon. But there was always the hope that his prints would show up in one of the computerized systems, if he had a prior.