CHAPTER 49
I’d been beaten twice in the past twenty-four hours and both times by people who had loved Colleen. First Donahue had clocked me. He’d also apparently told Siobhan where to find me. And now I’d been clobbered by Siobhan.
The couch was a beauty, eight feet of down-filled cushions. I took a seat and put my feet up on the coffee table next to the sap Siobhan had used to knock me down.
Siobhan was tough, but she brought me a pillow, then took a bottle of water out of the bar fridge and gave it to me. She sat in the chair across from me and stared at me.
“Start talkin’,” she said.
I did. I told her repeatedly that I hadn’t killed Colleen. I explained where I’d been when Colleen had been shot, and I told her how much I cared about her sister.
“You made love to her,” Siobhan said accusingly. “Colleen called to say you took her to bed before you left Los Angeles. Do you deny it?”
“No, I don’t.”
“You were fooling with her.”
“I loved her. Just not enough to give her what she wanted,” I said.
I thought about Colleen’s last birthday. We’d gone to dinner at Donahue’s, sat at the same table where I’d sat with him last night. Donahue and a gang of waiters had brought out the birthday cake and sung to Colleen.
She had started out very happy that night.
I had known that, after a year of going out, what Colleen wanted for her birthday was a ring.
I had let her down. The best I could do had hurt her, terribly.
“You loved her? Then I don’t understand ‘not enough,’ ” Siobhan said. Her lips trembled. Tears slid down her cheeks. “Why would you have taken her to bed if you meant nothing by it?”
“Why did you sap me?”
“I had to do it.”
I paused to let her words stand alone.
“I missed her, Siobhan.”
I wanted to say more, but nothing I said would make sense, even to me. It had been a mistake to sleep with Colleen. If I hadn’t gone back to her hotel with her, maybe she’d still be alive.
Siobhan struggled to interrogate me through her grief.
“And so, if you didn’t kill Colleen, who did? Aren’t you supposed to be good at this sort of thing-investigating murders?”
Siobhan was sobbing now.
I stood up, reached out my arms to her.
She shook her head no.
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s okay.”
She came to me and I held her as she cried.
“Find the bastard. You owe that to Colleen.”
“If it can be done, I’ll do it.”
“I miss her,” Siobhan choked out. “I loved her so much. She and I were best friends. Never a cross word. No secrets. I don’t know how I’m going to go on without her.”
“I’m so sorry, Siobhan. Losing Colleen-it’s a terrible thing.”
My voice cracked and then both of us were crying. It had been years since I had let myself cry. Sadness for Colleen swept through me. Holding her sister felt to me like saying good-bye to Colleen again.
Maybe Siobhan felt as if Colleen were saying a last good-bye to me.
Siobhan pulled away from me but gripped my arms tightly as she looked up at my face.
“You really did love her, didn’t you, Jack? So why didn’t you do the right thing by her?”
“I thought I did. I set her free.”
CHAPTER 50
Del Rio’s office smelled of pepperoni pizza.
It was after nine, and he and Cruz had been working on the Beverly Hills Sun murder all day and now well into the night, comparing and contrasting the five murders that had been committed in California hotels in the past year and a half.
The first two killings had been six months and a hundred miles apart, so no one thought they were linked.
Victim number one, Saul Cappricio, was found strangled in Jinx Poole’s San Diego hotel. Victim number two, Arthur Valentine, was discovered decomposing at the Seaview, a third-rate hotel in LA.
By the time the third victim, Conrad Morton, had been found garroted in the San Francisco Constellation, also a Poole hotel, the cops were looking for a connection-but even with several police departments involved, or maybe because three departments were involved, no viable suspect had turned up.
To date, five businessmen, including Maurice Bingham, ages thirty-five to fifty-one, had been strangled with various types of ligatures in their hotel rooms. The men had not worked for the same companies; all had different occupations, lived in different cities. Three were married and two were not.
Right now, Del Rio was at one computer cross-checking phone logs. Cruz was at a second computer, examining credit card charges.
Cruz said, “Bingham used the same escort service as Valentine, who also charged up six hundred bucks for two hours of patty-cake.”
Del Rio leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. “All of them used hookers. Not the same service, though. Is that a lead or is that just what road warriors do?”
“I feel a business trip coming on,” said Cruz.
“Crap. Me too.”
“It’s a lead,” Cruz said. “The escort services are a lead, not a coincidence. Maybe a hooker with a thrill for the kill is moving from one place to the other.”
Del Rio could see how the next few days were going to go: interviewing prostitutes and johns and widows. He turned off his computer and threw the pizza box into the trash. He put on his jacket.
A list of escort service names and numbers chugged out into the printer tray.
Del Rio said, “Get the lights, will you, Emilio? I’ll meet you here tomorrow morning at eight. We’ll stop first for coffee.”
CHAPTER 51
Mitch Tandy was poking around the side of the house, looking for anything out of place. He wanted to find something tangible that could link Jack Morgan to the Molloy murder.
He thought about the glove in the O. J. Simpson investigation, found near Simpson’s property line. The glove was conclusive evidence, but through a freak of prosecutorial incompetence, it had ended up helping the defense.
If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.
The Simpson investigation had been the shame of the LAPD.
Never mind. This was today.
Ten guys from the crime unit were out on the beach. Divers were doing their thing in the shallows, looking for metal. Inside, CSIs were going over the house again.
