himself.
“Don’t wreck my life for this,” he said. “I didn’t kill Piper. I may have invited girls to my house for Danny. I may have served liquor. Some girls maybe woke up in bed with Danny and thought they’d had sex with him.”
“That’s not a confession. That’s a ‘maybe.’ ”
“But I did not push Piper off a cliff. Not accidentally, not on purpose. I had nothing to do with her death.”
Nora said, “Mr. Barstow, you’re under arrest on suspicion of murder and a few dozen lesser charges that will keep you in custody while we check out your story. You have a right to remain silent. Anything you say can be used against you in court. It’s time to call that lawyer. I think you’ll find that you have a morals clause in your contract, in which case CTM is going to cut you loose. But play it out. See what happens.”
Barstow turned desperate eyes on Nora.
He said, “Wait. If I can help you get Piper’s killer, can we make a deal?”
Deals were what Alan Barstow did. He was finding hope in his comfort zone.
Nora said, “If you have information that leads to the arrest and conviction of Piper Winnick’s killer, I’ll do my best to help you.”
“Okay,” Barstow said. “I’m cooperating with you. I’ll put it in writing. If we can all relax, start over again. I think I know who killed Piper. It wasn’t me. And it wasn’t Danny.”
CHAPTER 94
Justine was back at the Topanga Canyon cabin, this time in sunlight, standing with Dr. Sci and Nora Cronin a few yards from the flower bed where fresh tire tracks had been pressed into the earth.
A car had parked among the flowers recently, just as Danny had said. And Danny had also said that whoever killed Piper had to have been driving that car.
The LAPD’s tire track specialist aimed his Minolta at the tread marks and fired off a few shots. He put a scale down next to the impressions and fired off another few rounds.
“Thanks, Stan. We’re good for now,” said Nora.
Dr. Sci was as excited as a kid on his birthday. “This is a beautiful thing, Justine. What a great tread mark.”
The LAPD had two big Leica scanners back at the lab.
Sci was using Private’s state-of-the art, handheld ZScanner 70 °CX, which captured images in three dimensions, in full color, with self-positioning in real time. There was no scanner anywhere that could top it.
Nora said, “I don’t care if you show off, Sci. But gloating is just uncool.”
Sci laughed. “Just sayin’, you’re going to thank Jack for spending the fifty grand on this.”
“If we catch the dirtbag because of your scanner, I’ll kiss Jack on the mouth, okay?”
Sci grinned. “If it’s okay with Jack, it’s okay with me.”
The 3-D scanner looked something like two hairdryer heads fused onto one handgrip. Sci laid down a net of small positioning markers in the tire track, then passed the scanner above the track in one continuous motion. As he did so, the image transferred to the laptop Justine had set up on a nearby tree stump. Every ridge, wave, and detail of the tread mark appeared right on her screen.
Nora came over to watch as Justine ran the image through the software that compared the image to six thousand distinct patterns in the TreadMate database.
Justine held her breath as the computer stopped at a tread mark identical to the image Sci had scanned. The word match flashed onscreen.
“We have a hit,” she said.
Sci joined Nora in looking over Justine’s shoulder.
“An N-spec,” Sci said. “That’s a Porsche standard tire. Justine, may I?”
Sci tapped the laptop keys and found what he was looking for.
“The N-spec tires have a special tread design. Yep, it’s got a thin groove around the outboard shoulder. I’m gonna say it’s the tire of choice on the Porsche 911.
“Hey-hey. Look at this,” Sci continued. He pointed to a flat mark near the image that wasn’t part of the tire track. “This is a partial shoe print. Part of the toe. The guy stepped in the dirt when he got out of the car. Too bad he backed over the rest of the prints on his way out.”
“Can you run that?” Justine asked.
“Even if we could identify the type of shoe, it’s not enough to give us a size or idiosyncratic wear patterns.”
Justine was thinking back to way early yesterday morning.
She had started down the trail behind Danny’s cabin in the direction of his cries. Del Rio had caught up to her, and then they’d heard car doors slamming behind them.
Del Rio had gone on ahead while Justine had gone back to the cabin. When she got there, she spoke with each of the men who’d arrived to help Danny: Schuster, Barstow, Koulos.
She hadn’t been looking at cars, couldn’t make a positive ID on any vehicle she’d glimpsed at four a.m. in the dark.
Still, she thought one of those cars had been a Porsche.
What model? Who had been driving it?
She couldn’t say. But all the cars had parked in the gravel driveway. If one of those three men had arrived earlier, while Danny was sleeping, if he had been in a hurry and parked his Porsche beside the Ferrari, not behind it, in the flower bed…
Justine said, “We can get a match the old-fashioned way.”
“Justine, there’s no way,” Nora shouted at her, right there in front of Sci and Stan and every other tech within earshot. “I can’t get a warrant based on a tire track that could match any of six jillion Porsches in LA.”
Justine stood speechless, not used to having a rule book, not used to be shouted at either. Of course Nora was right. But there were other ways.
“Can you look at traffic cam footage, Nora? Can you do that without a warrant?”
CHAPTER 95
It had taken Justine two minutes on the DMV database to learn which of Danny’s handlers owned a Porsche 911. After that, she and Del Rio had gone looking for the car in logical places and hadn’t found it.
Now Del Rio parked the fleet car in the circular drive of a six-million-dollar, ten-thousand-square-foot Mediterranean-style house in Bel Air.
He took his gun out of the glove box, slipped it into his shoulder holster, and said, “Justine, there’s no point in getting worked up. As my old cell mate used to say, ‘If you can’t find what you’re looking for on the street, go into someone’s house and take it.’”
“Great. We’re taking advice from a convict.”
“And you’re taking advice from my cell mate too.”
Justine laughed. “No offense, Rick. I don’t think of you as a jailbird.”
“I’m honored. You ready to risk your life and reputation?”
“Maybe. I mean, let’s go.”
A young Hispanic housekeeper came to the door under the portico, smiled pleasantly, said, “I’m sorry. No one is home.”
Del Rio held up his badge, opened his jacket to show the woman his nine. He said, “It’s okay, miss, we’re authorized to do a quick search and seizure.”
“We’re painting the great room,” the young woman wailed.
Justine said, “Don’t worry. We’ll be careful not to step in anything. Where is the master bedroom?”
