“Flaky.”
“Seems to come with the weather, Lieutenant.”
Milo said, “When can we do our own walk-through?”
“Say when and I’ll have someone from the office meet you there.”
“How about in an hour?”
“An hour? I didn’t realize… there are meetings all day… let me see here-more meetings until noon tomorrow. How about eleven a.m. tomorrow? I’ll send Sandra, my best paralegal.”
“Have you checked the beach house?”
“Simone and I had a brief look and it seemed to us no one had been there for a while. I’ll make sure Sandra has keys to the beach house as well.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“I’m sure the family’s fine,” said Weir. “There’s absolutely no reason for them not to be.”
Milo phoned a source at Homeland Security and verified Simon, Nadine, and Kelvin Vander’s flight schedules. All three had traveled first-class on Singapore Airlines, with Simon entering SFO a day before his wife and son.
The next call was to the Seattle money managers, where he cajoled a cagey Ronald W. Balter, Certified Financial Planner, and confirmed that nothing beyond airfare had been billed to the Vanders’ credit cards.
“Do they have a place in Northern California?”
“A home?” said Balter. “No.”
“What about a rental property?”
“No.”
“Any idea where they could be, sir?”
“Of course not.”
“Of course?”
Balter said, “I manage their money, I don’t get involved in their personal life.”
“Mr. Weir seems concerned.”
“I’m sure he is.”
“Why’s that?”
“He’s more involved with their personal life.”
Moe Reed returned to the office and gave a thumbs-up. “Marc Green didn’t want follow-up. He recalled something else Selena told him.”
“Sudden memory jog?” said Milo.
“My feeling is he didn’t want to bring it up in front of his mother. Apparently, Selena had started dating someone a few months before she died. Marc can’t remember exactly when but he thinks it was three, four months ago when she told him. An older guy.”
“How old?”
“She didn’t say. Marc says she was embarrassed about it, so could be there was a serious age gap. The juicy part is she kept up that confession habit of hers, told Marc the guy liked it rough. And so did she, the two of them fit together like a socket and a wrench. Her words.”
“Sounds like something a guy would tell her.”
“I agree, Loo. So now we have a dominance thing consistent with Sheralyn and DeMaura. Maybe on that level Selena
I said, “It does put things in a new light.”
Milo said, “An older guy into rough. She say anything else about him?”
Reed said, “No, no, it’s likely some swinger she met at one of those parties, right?”
Milo said, “Older. Simon Vander would sure qualify. And so would Huck, he’s thirty-seven, which is eleven years older than Selena. The net does seem to be tightening. And things could be even nastier than we thought.”
He summarized the news of the Vanders’ return and disappearance.
Reed said, “Simon’s sounding more like a victim than a bad guy. Unless he did bad things and needs to keep a low profile… to me, it still smells like Huck’s our prime guy. We need to find him, we really do, Milo.”
First time he’d addressed the boss by name.
Optimal workplace adjustment.
CHAPTER 26
At seven p.m. the following day, an LAPD press release offered Travis Huck’s name to the media. The timing was fine-tuned: too late for the papers or the six o’clock news, early enough for a feed to the eleven o’clock broadcast. Or in D.C. Henry Weinberg’s words, “a trickle, not a flood, we’re vulnerable, Lieutenant.”
Departmental spinners described Huck as a “person of interest” and included “a prior felony conviction.” None of the four women found in the marsh was mentioned by name. The Vanders never came up.
In the interim, Milo and Reed and I did walk-throughs of both Vander residences. We hit the beach house first, found no evidence the family had ever lived there. Soggy leather furniture sat on purple wall-to-wall. The smell was salt, rust, an old-paint sourness that shouted disuse. Oars and a man’s wetsuit in the closet said the place hadn’t progressed much past bachelor pad.
Heavy twin doors at the mansion on Calle Maritimo opened to a loose chain of high, broad vanilla rooms, tastefully if blandly furnished, floored with golden limestone. Family photos tilted on a couple of mantels, abstract art hung in the spaces where windows didn’t dominate. A grand piano took up a corner of a cavernous back room. A spinet piano sat in Kelvin’s sky-blue bedroom.
Travis Huck’s quarters consisted of a smallish room past a vast caterer’s kitchen and a lav. Twin bed, IKEA dresser, aluminum reading lamp. Monastic, but cheered by an ocean view. Placement in the service wing said the space had been designed as a maid’s room.
No signs of struggle or body fluids there, or anywhere else, but Milo called for a crime scene team. The legal assistant Buddy Weir sent to keep watch looked alarmed, but she checked with the attorney and he told her to cooperate.
Given a huge backlog, the techs were expected “within days,” and Milo ’s call to the crime scene office didn’t change that. He tried the chief, couldn’t get through, smiled grimly.
Moe Reed said, “Keeping it in low gear?”
“Heaven forbid, kiddo.”
Reed smiled. “I’m learning.”
I left the detectives to their frustration and drove home. The discovery of Selena’s lover had scrambled my theories about the three other women being a rehearsal for her; the case was boiling down to another hideous pattern of sexual sadism.
A killer building up his confidence. Selena, the unlucky upgrade.
I phoned Marc Green to see if there was anything more to tease out.
He’d been hovering on the brink of rage. My voice pushed him over.
I waited until he stopped shouting. “I know it’s tough, but I still need to ask. Is there anything more you-”
“More? All that shit I just told them isn’t enough?”
Slam.
I drove to the Crenshaw District and paid a second visit to Beatrix Chenoweth, Big Laura’s mother. Ready to serve as an anger receptacle again. If anyone was trained for that, I was.
She saw me in graciously, served coffee and chocolate wafers. Waited me out as I approached the topic with as much tact as I could muster.
She said, “Let me understand this: You want to know if Lurlene liked being hurt?”
“We’ve found evidence of that in other victims, so-”
