Chapter Twenty-nine
Los Angeles, the present
Morris had used Gail Hawes’s Facebook entries, credit-card receipts, and cellphone call-log to create a timeline showing where she’d been over the last week, and was in the process of doing the same for Susan Twilitter when Natalie called.
“I’ve got a very unhappy dog here,” she said. “He’s been moping around all evening waiting for you to come home.”
“I can imagine,” Morris said. “I’ll make it up to Parker tomorrow.”
“I’m not entirely thrilled myself.”
“I’ll be making it up to you too. If not before then, on your birthday Saturday, definitely. I bet you thought I’d forgotten with all this craziness going on.”
“The thought had crossed my mind.”
“What’s it going to be, your thirty-fifth?”
“You’re a sweet talker, Morris.”
“I can’t imagine you being any older than thirty-five. Except we got a twenty-three-year-old daughter, so I’m not exactly sure how that works. But when I look at you, it doesn’t seem possible for you to be any older than that.”
“That’s because you need glasses. Or maybe it’s that old saying about memory making the heart grow fonder.”
Morris checked his watch. “It’s only been sixteen hours since I bid you adieu this morning.”
“You sure? It feels like it’s been days.”
“I know.” Morris rubbed his eyes as a tired sigh eased out of him. “We almost had him today, Nat. We know from her iPhone that when Gail Hawes left her apartment today, she turned left and walked about two hundred feet before running into SCK. If she had turned right instead, we would’ve had him on a surveillance camera. A damn flip of the coin. Right instead of left, and we’d have him.”
“You think you’re getting close,” she said softly, not as a question but as a statement.
“We are. He’s doing things he didn’t want to have to do. The woman found in her car trunk, Susan Twilitter, was a rushed killing. We might get him from that. We’re still pulling surveillance video from the area. And if Hawes saw Twilitter with SCK, someone else might’ve also.”
“You’re sounding like you might be getting obsessed again.”
“Not obsessed. Highly motivated. I think we’ve got a chance to stop him before he kills his next victim.”
“A young blonde girl.”
“Yes.”
“Okay. I understand,” Natalie said, her voice soft, and as if she were trying hard to sound like she did understand. “Will you be making an appearance tonight?”
“I’ll be trying to. Definitely by daybreak so I can pick Parker up.”
“Did you remember to eat something for dinner?”
“I did forget,” he admitted sheepishly. “The actor who’s been tagging along with me started complaining about my stomach rumbling, and took off to pick up some fish tacos that he claims are to die for.” Morris stared bleary-eyed at his watch for a moment as he tried to remember what time Stonehedge had left. “The restaurant is in Beverly Hills, and he should be back soon.”
“To die for, huh? Sounds very Hollywood. But at least he’s reminding you to eat.”
“Yeah, at least he’s good for something.”
Charlie Bogle was calling. Morris begged off the call with his wife, promising her that he wouldn’t be overworking himself into a stroke. When he answered Bogle’s call, his investigator told him that he, Lemmon, and Polk, were checked in at their hotel in New York. “Your press conference tonight made the New York news,” Bogle said. “The woman he killed, Gail Hawes, didn’t look like she matched the other women SCK likes to kill. The one found in the car trunk did, though.”
“That’s because Twilitter was the SCK’s original target. To make a long story short, Hawes saw the two of them together, so SCK moved on to her. Because of a Facebook post Hawes made, SCK had to eliminate Susan Twilitter also. He called Twilitter at work, most likely arranging to meet up with her, and then attacked her in the parking garage when she went to her car.”
“I see.” Bogle hummed softly as he mulled this over. “He’s getting sloppy. Any surveillance cameras in the area?”
“None in the garage. The Santa Monica police are trying to pull whatever surveillance video they can.”
“So you might have him already?”
“We might.”
“It certainly sounds like things are breaking. Or at least they’re about to.”
“It does.”
“Should we be getting on the first plane back to LA?”
“No. I still want you three to dig into this from the New York end. I got a name for you. Glen Blakeman. I’m not sure how serious he is, but find out what you can. Supposedly he was a stockbroker in 2008. Something happened five years ago to SCK. Maybe he got arrested, maybe he got into an accident, maybe he got sick. See if you can figure out which. Look for anything unusual happening before SCK’s New York disappearance.”
“Piece of cake,” Bogle said. “New York has what, eight and a half million people? With two top investigators plus Polk looking into this, we should have this wrapped up by noon tomorrow. Or in five years.”
“Try for noon.”
“Will do.”
Morris got off the call as Stonehedge returned carrying a large take-out bag. The actor brought back not only fish tacos, but sides of grilled squid in an olive and garlic sauce, roasted cauliflower, creamed brussels sprouts with pancetta, and a square pasta dish that Stonehedge said was a sunchoke and chestnut agnolotti in a brown butter and sage sauce. Morris skipped the squid but tried the other sides, and had to admit the fish tacos and the rest of the food was very tasty.
“Not a bad perk for having me tag along,” Stonehedge said with a thin smile.
“Almost makes it worthwhile,” Morris said, his expression inscrutable. He showed the actor the two timelines he’d been working on. “I’m trying to see where they intersect so I can figure out where Hawes ran into Susan Twilitter recently,” he said in between bites of fish taco.
“You don’t have much on Twilitter’s timeline,” Stonehedge observed.
“Unfortunately, she wasn’t nearly as active on social media as her friend was. But she had a seven-hour gap yesterday where she didn’t make any phone calls, and I’m guessing that’s when she was with SCK. Hawes was in Santa Monica yesterday having lunch at Stephanie’s Café.”
“Twilitter lived and worked in Santa Monica.”
“Yeah. I’m betting she met up with SCK somewhere near Stephanie’s Café, and that’s where Gail Hawes had the misfortune of seeing them.”
The thought of this excited the actor. He asked, “What do we do now? Head down to this café and show a picture of Twilitter?”
“We’ll wait until tomorrow afternoon when there’s a better chance the same waitstaff is on duty. For now, we’ll see if any surveillance video is found or whether the hotline brings in any plausible leads.”
After the day’s press conference, the hotline was busy for two hours generating forty-seven calls. Forty-three of them could be eliminated after a few minutes of talking, which left Morris with four calls he needed to follow-up on. These, however, seemed a low probability, at best, of leading anywhere, and Morris had decided to wait until tomorrow morning to handle them. The last hour a small trickle of calls came in, but these were from shut-ins looking for someone to talk to, or flat-out nuts.
A call came in from Walsh. Glen Blakeman was picked up in San Diego. “The detective I talked to told me he was acting squirrelly,” Walsh said. “I know it’s late, but if he’s SCK I want to know it tonight.”
It was late. Morris squinted at his watch, and saw it was already past ten. San Diego was more than a two-hour drive, which meant the earliest he’d be home would be three in the morning.
“I’m heading there now also,” he told Walsh.
Stonehedge raised an eyebrow at Morris. “Where are we heading?”
“San Diego.”
Stonehedge showed an amused smile. “Another perk of having me along,” he said. “I’ll chauffeur you in my BMW i8. At this time of night, I’ll have us there in an hour and a half. Guaranteed.”
* * *
Stonehedge kept his word. While the roadster never felt like it was going over sixty, Morris at times glanced over at the speedometer and saw that it was registering over two hundred kilometers per hour, which a quick conversion showed the car was speeding along at over a hundred and twenty miles per hour. He didn’t complain, and they pulled into the San Diego precinct where Blakeman was being held an hour and twenty-eight minutes after they’d left.
Morris called Walsh and told her that he and Stonehedge had just arrived. Walsh seemed surprised to hear that. “Did that actor fly you down in a private jet or something?”
“Or something,” Morris acknowledged.
“I’m still a half hour outside of San Diego. No reason for you to wait. You can fill me in when I get there.”
“Okay.”
The San Diego detective who had picked Blakeman up sat in with them as they joined Blakeman in the interrogation room where he was being held. Blakeman was a large, blubbery man whose eyes had a nervous twitch that left him blinking far too much as he sat staring at Morris and Stonehedge. He was also sweating badly enough that his shirt was drenched.
“I want a lawyer,” he told Morris.
“You haven’t been arrested yet,” Morris said. “You’re being held for twenty-four hours for questioning. If we can clear this up, you’ll be released.”
“I don’t care. I want a lawyer.”
“If you insist on that, you’ll be booked and arraigned on charges for three first-degree murders, all strong candidates for the death penalty given the heinousness and exceptional depravity of the crimes. Bail will be denied, and the news will be reporting that you’ve been arrested as SCK.”
Blakeman looked at Morris dumbly.
“The Skull Cracker Killer.”
It took several seconds for Blakeman to react to that, and when he did it was as if he’d been punched in the face, and his blinking became so rapid that it looked like he was blinking out a Morse code message.
“That’s who killed Freeman?” he asked.
“Him and two women today.”
“What?” This news surprised him enough to momentarily slow his blinking. “The same guy also killed two women? That’s not me. I swear it.”
“Why’d you come to San Diego?”
Blakeman grimaced as if he were suffering from an awful toothache, and then his large round face melted into a look of utter hopelessness, and his blinking came to a stop.
“I panicked,” he said, shrugging helplessly. “When I saw the news about Freeman being killed in one of my listed properties, I knew the police would be sure I’d done it, especially after I’d been shooting my mouth off to everyone in the office that I was going to bash Freeman’s head in. I had no alibi yesterday, and so I came down here.”
“When was that?”
“Last night.”
“What were you doing yesterday?”
Another weak shrug. “I didn’t have any showings scheduled. I spent the day smoking weed and watching videos.”
“Porn,” Stonehedge suggested.
Blakeman’s expression was both embarrassed and sickly. “Why’d you come to San Diego?” Morris asked.
“Maybe the weed got me paranoid, but when I saw the news about Freeman, all I could think about was escaping to Mexico.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Yet another half-hearted shrug. “Partly because I couldn’t work up the nerve, and partly that I was hoping that the real killer would be arrested for Freeman’s murder.”
“What time did you get to San Diego yesterday?”
“I checked into my hotel around eleven.”
“And you’ve been in San Diego the whole time?”
“Yep.”
“Can you prove that you didn’t drive back to LA today?”
Blakeman shook his head glumly.
“Where were you at twelve thirty today?”
That perked Blakeman up. “That was when one of those women was killed?” Tears of relief flooded his eyes as a smile broke over his face. “I had room service bring up lunch around one o’clock. Jesus. That should prove I’m innocent, right?”
At that moment, Walsh walked into the room. From the groan she let out, she must’ve sensed from everybody’s expressions that she’d just spent two hours on the highway for nothing.
“If we can verify it, yeah,” Morris said.
It took twenty minutes to verify it. On the drive back to Los Angeles, Stonehedge offered, “You win some, you lose some.”
“All part of the job,” Morris said. “You keep crossing off leads until you get one that sticks. My gut is telling me we’ll be getting one soon that sticks.”