“Isn’t that like eating evidence?”
“Right. Grab a plate, dummkopf.”
We each dished up a large helping on rice, then grabbed some lagers from the fridge and went out onto the deck.
The view tonight was partially eclipsed by a low blanket of fog hanging over Hollywood, but the air wasn’t too cold and we sat at the table and tasted the gumbo. Masterful.
“So who do we know in this big, ugly, bullshit case who could be cooking Cajun?” Hitch asked.
“Lee Bob Batiste,” I said.
“Correcto mundo.” He beamed. “Our Creole-French chucklehead from Louisiana.”
“Okay, okay. Hold on. Let’s not get carried away. This is a big jump. Let’s take it slow.”
“Fine,” he agreed. “But remember what you said about Nash calling Lee Bob Bobby? I think you were actually on to something there.”
“Now you think Lee Bob and Nix Nash knew each other when he was a cop?” I asked. “I thought you said I was grasping at straws.”
“Maybe the bust in the Everglades was for real and Nash fucked up on the square, or maybe he knew the guy and arranged to get him kicked loose. Either way, it’s the same result. What’s important is, I think he knows him now.”
I thought it over for a minute before I said, “So you’re saying Nash cut a deal with Lee Bob Batiste to commit these murders at times when Nash is out of town and alibied up. Then Nash solves the case on his TV show, looking like a genius, making huge ratings and multi-million-dollar grosses.”
“Exactly,” Hitch said. “Going back to Atlanta, what if Lee Bob Batiste, not Fuzzy, was wearing that overcoat when he killed those girls in Piedmont Park? During the murders, Batiste gets their DNA on the coat. Then Nash finds Fuzzy sleeping in the public toilet there. He’s brain-dead from all the meth and doesn’t know if he’s upside down or inside out. They give Fuzzy the coat. It’s December and he’s glad to have it. Then, a day or so later, Nash just happens to find poor old Fuzzy in the evidence-stained overcoat, and the Atlanta PD busts him while Nash is rolling cameras, taking all the credit. How hard would it be to get a schizophrenic to cop to the six kills? Fuzzy had a pet spider named Louis, for chrissake.”
“It also helps connect the two murders here in L.A.,” I said, warming to Hitch’s idea. “Obviously, Nix had nothing to do with Hannah Trumbull’s death in ’06, because he was still in prison, but this could explain how he was able to link Lita and Hannah to Stephanie and Lester Madrid. He worked backward, like you said before. But the second death, Lita’s, wasn’t random like we thought. He selected her because of the fights she’d had with Stephanie and then he had Lee Bob kill her.”
“Bingo,” Hitch said. “He starts with the cold-case Trumbull murder from ’06. Nash, or some L.A. contact, finds out Hannah was dating a cop and that turns out to be Lester Madrid. He probably turned that up just like we did, by asking around. Then he starts looking at Lester’s life and up pops Stephanie, who runs IA and has a history of public dustups with his old compadre from the Anti-Police League, Lita Mendez. She’s an acquaintance of Nash’s, but she’s also a perfect murder victim who will be a high ratings getter for
This take wiped out the impossible coincidence of both those seemingly unrelated cases touching the Madrids. “Nash sets up his alibi in advance,” I said, ironing out a few more wrinkles. “He accepts an invite to be at that fund-raiser in Boca Raton while Lee Bob, or Bobby as he calls him, sneaks over to Lita’s house. Batiste beats her to death and then double-taps her with the nine-millimeter Federals.”
“A perfect murder,” Hitch said, nodding.
Then I remembered another detail from the meeting in Captain Bligh’s cabin. “Nash told me that in the Everglades, Batiste was stealing food out of his victims’ backpacks and cooking it over their own campfires. Could that be some kind of MO? The Gumbo Killer? He whacks Lita, cooks a Cajun meal in her kitchen just like he cooked food from the backpacks of the campers he killed in the Everglades.”
We both thought about it. The gumbo feast over Lita’s body seemed a little far-fetched. He would have had to bring all the ingredients. But in ten years of solving homicides I’ve seen some very strange behavior.
“Sociopaths and psychopaths have strange realities,” Hitch said, picking up my unspoken thought. “Remember that gay unsub in Santa Monica who killed boys on their twenty-first birthdays? He brought them home, sat them up at his dinner table, and served the corpses birthday cake.”
“Okay, let’s put a pin in that for a minute. We don’t know why he actually cooked a Cajun dinner, but let’s assume he did. Then he washed the pots and pans, vacuumed the body. This guy used very strict crime scene protocol. The kind an ex-cop or an ex-lawyer like Nix Nash would be able to give him.”
I pulled out the photo of his boot print. “Let’s go on the Internet and see if we can get a picture of this Baffin rubber boot,” I suggested.
We went into Hitch’s office, logged onto his Mac, and found it on the Baffin Web site. That particular boot came in black rubber and neoprene and was calf high.
“Lookit this,” Hitch said. “They’re called Marsh boots. Good choice for a guy working the Florida swamps.”
We went back to the porch feeling like supercops and kicked back on the deck chairs.
Finally, Hitch broke the silence. “What do we do now, Batman?”
“Let’s start by finishing this great gumbo you cooked. Then we need to go down to the PAB and get this theory blessed by a rabbi.”
“Thank god you’re married to yours,” Hitch said somberly.
CHAPTER 40
It was nine thirty that same night and we were gathered in the public affairs conference room, just down the hall from the new four-hundred-seat auditorium, which would soon be getting a lot of use with this media-intense murder.
Deputy Chief Hawkins was seated at the head of the conference table, flanked by Jeb and Alexa. Hitch and I remained standing as we presented our theory. When we were finished, silence prevailed.
“You’re saying that this famous, internationally known TV personality is committing serial murders and then solving them to make his show more entertaining?” DC Hawkins finally asked skeptically.
“He’s not doing the actual murders himself,” I said. “Lee Bob Batiste is. And let’s not forget the ratings this is producing.
More silence.
I could feel sweat beginning to form under my ass. This was a very cold house. Only Alexa seemed neutral, but to be fair, she trusted my instincts on cases and had seen me be right too many times. Our captain, Jeb, sat Buddha-esque, impossible to read.
“It certainly straightens out that bizarre coincidence that has Lita Mendez’s murder and Hannah Trumbull’s both involving the Madrids,” Alexa said. “All Nash needed was one open murder, Hannah’s. It touched Lester. Then he kills the second victim, Lita, and plants Stephanie’s coffee cup with her DNA evidence in Lita’s driveway just like he did with that overcoat in Atlanta.”
“Detective Cole told us that everything would tie together,” I said. “And this is how he’s doing it.”
At that point, Deputy Chief Hawkins stood and walked to the door. I thought we’d lost him, but he stopped abruptly and turned to face us again.
“Okay,” he said, surprising me. “Let’s say I go for it. You still don’t have enough to write either a search or arrest warrant on Nash. That Baffin boot print certainly isn’t enough unless you can prove it belongs to Batiste, which you can’t. So how do you propose to do this?”
“We need to find Lee Bob Batiste and bust him first,” I said. “If we can get him to flip, we’ll have Nix Nash. I’ve got no proof that Lee Bob’s still in L.A., but my bet is he is. This isn’t a guy you’re gonna fly around on United Airlines. Nash probably hired somebody to drive him out here and parked him some place out of the way. If that’s
