29
She didn’t know what Gant had been searching for. But whatever it was, it probably got him killed.…
Lena scooped up Johnny Bosco’s keys, slipped the chain-of-evidence form into her briefcase and left the building. While Vaughan had been anxious to get back to his analysis of the trial, she had spent the past two hours screening additional security videos pulled from Club 3 AM with a forensic analyst from the Photographic Unit. The analyst, Henry Rollins, had examined every image recorded that night.
Unfortunately, nothing had changed.
Tim Hight, a man who made his living working with cameras, had managed to avoid every lens in the building. The fire escape on the north side of the structure remained a blind spot and the most likely point of entry.
But Rollins had also given Lena an update on the street cam photo that captured Hight driving away from the club that night. The resolution of the image had improved significantly. To Lena, the shadow on the passenger seat was beginning to take on definition and look more like a gun than a flashlight. While Rollins agreed, he wasn’t ready to commit and said that the enhancement process would give them a definitive answer soon.
After reviewing Jacob Gant’s fingerprints for another hour with an analyst from the Latent Print Section, Lena was out of time and had to move on.
There could be no doubt that Gant had been in Lily Hight’s bedroom within the past two weeks, and that he had entered and exited the room through the window. Lena remembered the tree outside, and wondered how often Gant made the climb while Lily had been alive. How many nights he’d spent in her bed.
For reasons she couldn’t explain or even support, Lena’s first thought upon hearing the news from Orth had been that Gant was looking for the girl’s cell phone. But hiding a phone was different than hiding a photograph in a memory box. If the phone had been in the bedroom, she didn’t think it could have remained hidden for so long. Too many people had been looking for it. An entire year had gone by. But even more, how could the victim have even managed to hide it? The killer had delivered a mortal blow. Once the screwdriver was driven into her back, nothing else could have occurred but death.
Yet, Gant had to have been looking for something. Something important enough to risk breaking into the house.
Tim Hight’s house. Lily Hight’s bedroom.
Lena crossed the street to the garage and got into her car. She hadn’t had a chance to load the CD player or deal with her cell phone so she flipped on the radio and toggled down to 88.1 FM, a jazz station out of Long Beach. After adjusting the volume, she realized that she had dialed in at just the right moment and that the audio system in the car was worth the price of admission. She could see the playlist on the video display-the FM station was dedicating the next hour to Coleman Hawkins. Even better, the first cut was something she hadn’t heard since her last case.
“Mighty Like a Rose.”
As she pulled out of the garage, she let her thoughts drift down the road with Hawkins’s sax and wished that Paladino’s office was more than a twelve-block ride.
30
The law offices of Buddy Paladino occupied the twelfth floor of a high-rise building on the 400 block of South Hope Street in downtown Los Angeles. The view from Paladino’s desk encompassed the entire city, included Dodger Stadium in the hills to the north, and stretched out over the basin all the way to the beach. As Paladino offered Lena a seat and flashed that million-dollar smile that had become the defense attorney’s trademark, she noted the quality of his suit, his manicured fingernails and close-cropped hair, the simple but elegantly understated gold watch. The office itself followed the same basic floor plan as the oval office in the White House. As far as Lena could tell, the only difference was that Paladino had more money, didn’t have to justify what he spent, and had an interest in art rather than politics.
Lena sat down on the couch facing the windows and gazed at the sun hovering over the ocean. The fiery globe had turned red again as it burned through the clouds of carbon monoxide, washing out Paladino’s entire office in a bright crimson light.
“I can’t help but express my disappointment,” he said in a smooth and quiet voice. “Jacob’s death could have been prevented. The LAPD should have seen it coming. They lived next door to each other. Neither one could afford to sell their homes in this economy. It looks like the department dropped another ball, and it’s gonna cost them. And it looks like Mr. Tim Hight’s gonna get a big bill, too.”
“We haven’t made an arrest, and you’ve already started working on a civil case against Hight?”
Paladino settled into a chair, completely at ease. “You’ve been around long enough to know that the line between here and insanity is as thin as a thread, Lena. People cross it every day-back and forth like somehow it’s okay now. There’s something about that guy I find disturbing. The man’s out there looking in.”
“Then we can’t talk?”
He didn’t reply, but she could see him thinking it over.
“We need to talk, Buddy. As far as I’m concerned, this conversation isn’t taking place and I’m not here. You’ve probably already guessed that we may even be on the same side. But that can’t happen without your help.”
Paladino remained quiet for several moments. When he finally spoke, he was gazing at the bands of scarlet light rippling up and down the wall, but only seeing his past.
“I was thinking about something,” he whispered. “Something that happened a long time ago when I was in law school. My roommate had a good relationship with his father. His dad knew that we didn’t have much money, so once a month he’d stop by and take us out to dinner. He was a very wise man-more than most-and I was jealous that I didn’t have a dad just like him. One night he took us out for steaks and beer, and he said something I’ll never forget. He told us that we needed to keep our eyes open. That there are a lot of nice people in this world-lots of nice people-but that doesn’t mean they’re good. Good is special. Good is very rare. You might only meet one or two, three or four, in your whole life. That’s why you’ve got to keep your eyes open. You can’t afford to miss one.”
His eyes drifted away from the wall and lingered on her.
“Will you help me?” she asked. “Will you talk to me?”
He nodded slowly, and seemed ready and pleased to help. “What do you need to know?”
“Lily Hight’s image,” she said. “The way she was presented to the public versus the way she may have really been. They don’t seem to jibe.”
Paladino smiled at the memory. “They don’t, do they? It made things difficult for both sides during the trial. A very delicate situation.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Lily may have only been sixteen, but she had a voracious appetite for sex. She liked it, and she liked Jacob. She had something going on. I never met her, so I can’t really say. But you hear about women like her. The kind that can put a spell on a man. Jacob was infatuated with her.”
“Why did it make the trial difficult? Why didn’t you bring any of this out? You must have seen the nude shots of her that they pulled from your client’s computer. It would have gone a long way in proving that Gant wasn’t stalking her.”
Rays of deep red sunlight struck Paladino in the face. Shielding his eyes, he got up and crossed the room to a glass display case. After retrieving what appeared to be a commemorative mug, he sat down on the second couch with his back to the window-the outline of his body aglow in crimson light.
“You’ve got to remember that Gant’s trial had three parts, Lena. Everything that happened before the trial had just as much impact as everything that happened in the courtroom. Bennett and Watson set the table by introducing Lily to the public with family snapshots and home videos. And they did it well. Lily was seen as her father’s daughter-completely virginal and full of life. A child like everybody else’s child, the kind of child everybody wished they had-with one big difference. This child-this beautiful teenage girl-had been raped and murdered by a monster. Lily was presented as the ultimate victim-but always coupled with the terror that what happened to her
