Outside the Wire Page 8

  She put her hands on her thighs and dropped her head to catch her breath. Maybe training with Joss Page wasn’t such a bad idea after all. “You call.”

  She got in the car and Vaughn drove back to Zeke’s cottage to wait for patrol officers to take the burglary report.

  “What did you find in the garage?” she said.

  “A bunch of old paint cans and a few tools.”

  “What about the neighbors?”

  “Only one person answered the door. She didn’t know anything. She and her husband just rented the place for a week on one of those online house-sharing sites.”

  Davie made it as far as the entryway of the house before her legs could no longer support her weight. She pressed her back against the wall and slid to the floor. Her body trembled and her breathing became shallow and fast.

  Vaughn reached out his hand and pulled her up from the floor. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, just out of breath.”

  A moment later Davie hauled herself the rest of the way to her feet. She went back to the kitchen to finish the search she’d begun when she’d been distracted by the litter box. Now she found crowbar-like marks on the back door and splintered wood around the lock. There was a bench against the wall on one side of the kitchen table. Davie tugged on the seat cushion and found that it opened for storage.

  “Hey, Jason,” she said. “Look at this.”

  Vaughn walked over to join her. “Looks sort of cramped in there but I guess there’s enough room to hide as long as the guy wasn’t a linebacker.”

  When the officers arrived, Davie directed them to the laundry room to collect the can of soda in case there was enough saliva for DNA testing. When they finished, they dusted for prints on the bench and then moved to the French doors. That’s when she saw a small piece of black cloth caught in the lock’s strike plate. Somebody had snagged his clothing, maybe in a rush to get away. Next to the cloth was what looked like blood splatter.

  The officers didn’t have a bloodstain collection kit, so Davie got one from the trunk of the Crown Victoria. At her direction, the officer opened the wrapper on one of the sterile cotton swabs and pulled the attached cap from its protective tube. She directed him to drop a small amount of distilled water on the tip of the swab and use a circular motion to collect the blood. There was enough for a second swab so she had him collect that as well. Then he broke off part of the stick so the swab and the protective cap fit into a coin envelope. When he was finished, he closed it with an official seal and had Davie sign for it. With the chain of evidence clear, he officially turned it over to the LAPD.

  The USB drive was useless for the time being. They no longer had a computer to open it, so she slipped it into an evidence bag, too. When she and Vaughn were finished, they locked the house and returned to the station.

  13

  The shrink was in his forties, pasty white and balding. Sitting in the brown leather wingchair—worn and cracked, its brass tacks tarnished—he looked like a softball nestled into an old catcher’s mitt. He wasn’t old enough to have worn out the chair. Either he had scoured yard sales and used furniture stores until he found it or it had been donated to the department by a well-meaning citizen who’d just cleaned out the garage. The shrink steepled his fingers and waited for Davie to speak.

  “I almost shot my partner today,” she said.

  “And how did that make you feel?”

  Davie figured shrink school hadn’t taught him to avoid psychiatry clichés. “What kind of a question is that?”

  He leaned forward, resting his forearms on the desk. The sleeves of his plaid shirt were rolled up to the elbows, which made him look like a camp counselor, not somebody responsible for mending broken minds.

  “Perhaps this will help you decide,” he said. “There’s disagreement among professionals, but let’s just say there are six basic human emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust. Which one of those most closely resembled your feelings at the time?”

  She thought about the question before answering. “None of them and all of them.”

  He caught her gaze and held it. “Perhaps you should ask yourself why it’s so difficult for you to pinpoint your feelings. You can speak freely. Our conversations are confidential.”

  Davie wasn’t so sure about that and she wasn’t the only one. There were many cops who worried that sensitive personal information would make its way from a shrink’s notebook to the Chief’s desk.

  The shrink paused to judge her mood. “You’re frowning. What are you feeling at this moment?”

  “I’m feeling irritated that you keep needling me about how I feel. I told you I could have killed my partner. I think you can imagine how I felt.”

  He set his pen on the desk. From the grim look on his face, she didn’t have to wonder how he was feeling at the moment—frustrated. She wondered why that emotion wasn’t on his official list.

  “That’s not how this works,” he said. “It’s not my job to project my emotions onto your experiences. I need to hear them from you. Don’t be a martyr.”

  She felt wounded by his accusation but gave it a fair hearing before deciding the label didn’t fit her at all. “If you think I’m suffering or withholding my feelings to get attention, you’re wrong. I love my job. I care about my cases. That’s why I need to get back to work.”

  He glanced up at the wall clock. “We have fifteen minutes left in the session.” He sat back in the chair and studied her face. “You look tired. Are you still having trouble sleeping? I can prescribe medication if you need it.”

  “I don’t do drugs.”

  “Stoicism is often associated with control issues. Are you afraid medication will cause you to lose your edge?” He waited for her to answer. When she didn’t, he wrote some words in his notebook. “If not drugs, perhaps you might consider yoga or meditation. When you’re awake at night, try counting to one hundred. Start again and again. Keep counting until you fall asleep.”

  Downward Facing Dog and numbers games were not on her agenda, but she’d agree if it meant getting out of the session early. “I’ll try it.”

  Expressing emotions was not her strong suit. Vaughn called her a machine. He was teasing but he had a point. Perhaps events in her past had used up her allotment of pain and drama, or maybe it was because her police training had taught her to compartmentalize. The worst thing she could do was become emotional, particularly on the witness stand or when interviewing a distraught family member whose loved one had just been murdered. Being stoic might make her a difficult friend, but it also made her a good detective. Life was full of trade-offs.

  He crossed his hands on his lap. “Darwin believed that emotions actually aid in human survival.”

  “I’m guessing Darwin never worked as a cop.” She leaned toward him. “My dad was a detective, too. Ever since I was a kid, he’s drummed into me that wearing the badge means you have power over people. When you combine power and emotions, somebody is likely to get hurt. Maybe holding back my feelings is what’s saved my bacon for all these years.”

  He gave her an impassive stare and closed his notebook. “Try counting and see if it helps you sleep.”

  Twenty minutes later Davie sat at her desk at the station, filling out the serology form to request blood analysis. As she filed a copy in the Murder Book, she thumbed through the pages, reviewing her notes until she came across the data on Hootch’s microchip.

  Dr. Dimetri had told her the information was unusual. Standard practice was to include the phone number of the pet recovery agency and the owner’s private code. Hootch’s chip held Shannon’s telephone number and a line of gibberish that Dimetri considered computer garbage. Davie checked the screen shot on her cell and again stared at the combination of letters, numbers, and symbols: A 1 € > ? 2 ¥ $ * > €

  Some of them didn’t even appear on her keyboard. She
opened the word processing program on her desk computer and clicked insert and symbols on the menu bar, searching the options until she found one symbol and then all of them.

  She copied the € first. When she pasted it into her Internet search box and learned it was the currency symbol for the Euro. The ¥ represented the Chinese yuan. The dollar sign was obvious. Maybe they represented the last three places TidePool had sent Zeke. The others she recognized as mathematical symbols. The > meant “greater than” and * meant “multiplication.”

  The more she thought about it, the more she suspected Zeke had included the sequence for a reason. Amber Johnson said he loved his cat. Hootch’s microchip led them to the daughter. The USB drive was hidden in the cat box. Maybe Zeke wanted the code to be accessed in an emergency. Tortured logic to be sure, but it rang true and Hootch was at the center of it all.

  She emailed the sequence along with her observations to a computer techie she knew at the Scientific Investigation Division and asked him to determine if it meant anything or if it was just a unique password Zeke had created. Perhaps it was the code that would open Zeke’s computer once it was recovered.

  Davie was about to plug Zeke’s USB drive into her desktop computer when a gust of air swept over her. She looked up to see Jason Vaughn strolling into the squad room.

  He dropped his notebook on his desk and peered over the workstation partition. “Where have you been?”

  His tone was a mix of curiosity and irritation. Vaughn didn’t realize how close he’d come to dying at her hand, and she didn’t plan to tell him. As for her schedule, she wasn’t obligated to account for every minute of her day, especially her mandatory shrink appointments.

  “Just wondering if Hootch’s microchip code would have opened Zeke’s computer,” she said, skirting the question. Her hands felt sweaty as she plugged the drive into the port and hovered her finger above the keyboard. She pressed return. A moment later a folder opened.

  “Jason. Come over here. You’re not going to believe this.”

  Vaughn ambled around Giordano’s desk to her side of the cubicle and pulled up a chair next to hers. He stared at the computer screen. “What is it?”

  “Zeke Woodrow’s whole life, including work records.”

  He leaned in for a better look as Davie opened documents. Zeke had organized his information into folders and subfolders. His monthly bank statements were listed under Finances. Under TidePool Security Consultants they found a series of files labeled with city names, including Kabul, Paris, and Montevideo. Each file included an expense report with costs—airfare, hotel, food, and transfers to and from the airport, which were marked Limo.

  Hong Kong appeared to be his most recent trip. Zeke had departed LAX for Asia just shy of two weeks before his death and spent five days there. Listed at the bottom of the document was a separate itinerary that included Juno Karst, confirming that he had accompanied Zeke to Hong Kong on the same flights.

  Vaughn pointed toward the screen. “There’s a second Hong Kong file.”

  Her partner was right, but it wasn’t under the main TidePool umbrella. She opened it and found several documents, including an Excel worksheet.

  “Looks like a list of expenses,” she said.

  Vaughn pointed to the first item. “He paid just under two grand for a ticket on Cathay Pacific for a trip back to Hong Kong. See that note at the bottom? The flight was scheduled to leave Bradley terminal at nine a.m. yesterday.” Vaughn blew out a puff of air. “At least we have the answer to why he was at the airport.”

  The file had been created three days before Zeke’s body was found in the parking garage. He came back from Hong Kong and immediately booked another trip to the same place. If he had additional business there, why not just extend his stay? It was cheaper to pay the airline’s change fee than to book a separate trip.

  “Why do you think this Hong Kong file wasn’t with the others?” Vaughn said.

  “Good question. Maybe he decided to go back on his own.”

  “You mean just for fun? Like he met somebody there?” Vaughn winked and nudged her with his elbow. “You know, like a hot Hong Kong romance.”

  Her partner was kidding, but the thought gave her a chill. Maybe Zeke had met somebody there, somebody who had stalked him to Santa Barbara and broken into his house. That idea was farfetched. The theft of the computer could have been a simple burglary, unrelated to Zeke’s murder. Maybe she and Vaughn had surprised an intruder in the midst of drinking cola. He ran, taking the only valuable item he saw—Zeke’s laptop.

  Davie wondered if Zeke kept sensitive information on the laptop since it was sitting on a desk in plain sight. It was the USB drive that had been hidden in the litter box. The drive contained all sort of personal and business-related information, but nothing on it seemed top secret. Maybe Zeke had another file floating in a cyberspace cloud somewhere.

  She pointed to another file labeled Numbers. “Could be more financial information.”

  The file turned out to be an address book, but Davie was disappointed that Zeke hadn’t listed the phone numbers for his friends Harlan Cormack and Dag Lunds.

  “There’s a number for Jade Limousine Service,” she said. “Must be the one Zeke used when he traveled.”

  “Except he didn’t ride with them the day he was killed, which suggests it might have been a personal trip. Otherwise, why not take the limo and write it off as a business expense?”

  Davie printed everything they’d found on the drive and slipped the copies into the Murder Book. “Let’s have a chat with the limo owner. If Zeke was a long-time customer, they might know something helpful.”

  Vaughn stood. “I’ll get a car.”

  14

  Jade Limousine Service was located in Westchester, not far from LAX. It was housed in a small building set in the middle of a parking lot filled with late model cars, SUVs, and stretch limos. Davie followed her partner through the front door and noted that the office was professional but not posh. The décor probably didn’t matter. She assumed that most business was done by telephone and over the Internet.

  A woman in an orange blazer sat on a stool behind the counter, keying information into a computer. Her DNA was an exotic stew that might have included genes from Asia or possibly Polynesia. Her silky black hair was gathered into a ponytail and held in place with a tortoise-shell clip. She turned when she heard the door open, staring at them through a pair of naughty-librarian glasses, the sort of eyewear that was meant to make beautiful women look studious.

  The woman stood and walked from behind the counter to greet them. “Good morning. I’m Jade Chen. How can I help you?”

  Chen towered over Davie by seven or eight inches. Davie craned her neck to catch her eye. She flashed her badge and introduced herself and her partner.

  “Do you know a man named Zeke Woodrow?” she asked.

  Chen smiled, showing her even white teeth. “I’ve been taking Zeke to one airport or another for the past two or three years. Is something wrong?”

  “Do you drive him yourself?” Vaughn asked.

  Her smile was replaced by the first hint of concern. “My brother and I own the company. I don’t usually drive customers anymore, but Zeke is a long-time client and he’s particular about who’s behind the wheel. I guess he just got used to me and didn’t want to break in somebody new.”

  Vaughn stepped closer. “When was the last time he used your service?”

  The crackle of a radio dispatch interrupted the conversation. Jade unclipped the handheld device from her belt and gave the driver instructions before answering Vaughn’s question. “I was supposed to drive him to the airport on Monday but he left a message late Sunday night, cancelling.”

  Vaughn frowned. “Do you know why?”

  “He didn’t say. I assumed he decided to drive or take a cab.”

  Davie picked up a business c
ard from the counter and slipped it into her pocket. “In the past when you picked him up, what kind of vehicle did you use?”

  Chen frowned. “Usually one of our Mercedes S models but sometimes an SUV. Zeke never wanted a stretch limo. I got the impression he didn’t like to call attention to himself.”

  Vaughn glanced toward the cars in the parking lot. “Do you have any BMWs in your fleet?”

  Chen moved to the counter to tidy a stack of brochures, but Davie sensed it was a diversion. “Mercedes is the only luxury sedan we use.” Her expression had turned wary and suspicious. “Why are you asking all these questions? Is Zeke in trouble?”

  Davie’s stomach clenched as she told her the news. “He was murdered yesterday morning.”

  Jade Chen’s mouth opened, but no words came out.

  Davie waited for a couple of beats while the woman regained her composure. “Before that cancelled trip,” she continued, “when was the last time you transported Mr. Woodrow?”

  Chen turned away and dabbed at her eyes with the sleeve of her jacket. She was the third woman who had cried over Zeke Woodrow’s death. That wasn’t always the case with murder victims, which told Davie that whatever his shortcomings might have been, people cared about this man.

  “A few weeks ago,” she said, “but I’ll have to check the date to be sure.” She went around the counter to the computer and pulled up a new page. “Here it is. I picked him up in Topanga not quite two weeks ago at around five thirty in the morning and dropped him off at LAX for a flight to Hong Kong.”

  Davie leaned over the counter to read the screen. “Did you ever meet him at the airport when he returned from one of his trips?”

  “Not always. Sometimes he called a cab. But I did pick him up when he got back from that trip.”

  “Was he alone,” Vaughn asked, “or with a friend?”

  “Alone.” She scrolled down the page and called out the date. “I remember because that day was out of the ordinary. Instead of driving him back to Topanga, he asked me to take him to a building on Wilshire Boulevard.”