Marcia Clark - Killer Ambition

“Hey, Ms. Knight-”

“Call me Rachel. And you are…?”

“Justin.” He held out his hand. “Justin Wagner. Nice to meet you.”

As we shook I noticed he had brown eyes and really long dark lashes. Memories of the cornerback I’d crushed on in high school came flooding back and I had to force myself to focus on the task at hand.

“Did we get any response from the tenants?” I asked.

“Yeah, Kowalski got something. He’s out in the hall. You want me to bring him in?”

I glanced at Bailey, who was still on the phone. “No, that’s cool. I’ll talk to him.”

Justin turned to lead me out and said over his shoulder, “Oh, and none of us ever sat on that bed.”

Kowalski delivered on the cliché with a Marlon Brando, thick-shouldered build, though he looked a little too buttoned-down to do the whole “Stella!” routine. I introduced myself and asked what he had, and he hooked his thumbs under his Sam Browne and stood “at ease” with legs apart as he spoke. “The old lady on the next floor in 2A, Iris Stavros, said she saw Brian on Monday, around noon. He was with a short blonde girl.”

We’d show her a photo to make sure, but it had to be Hayley. And noon. According to the time stamp on Russell’s text, that would’ve been after the proof-of-life photo was sent but before the e-mailed ransom demand.

“How did she happen to see them?”

“They were coming in as she was going out. She said she was on her way to the store to get some milk.” He glanced upward as if to make sure Iris wasn’t listening, then lowered his voice. “You ask me, she was gonna buy something a little stronger.”

Iris Stavros might turn out to be an important witness. If she also turned out to be a heavy drinker, it’d be a real problem when she hit the stand. I’d have to do a lot of checking before I put her on a witness list. “Did she notice any signs of struggle or force, anything unusual?”

“No. Matter of fact, she said she’d seen the girl around here many times in the past couple of months. Seemed to her that they were boyfriend and girlfriend.”

But none of that meant Hayley hadn’t been kidnapped. Brian could’ve been hiding a gun, in which case Hayley wouldn’t have dared to struggle. Or maybe at that particular time, Hayley hadn’t known she was being kidnapped. She didn’t necessarily have to know that Brian took the photo of her at the Hollywood Hills house in order to use it later as proof of life. In fact, it would’ve been smart of him to keep everything looking normal for as long as possible. That way he wouldn’t have to worry about controlling Hayley until it was absolutely necessary.

“Did you ask her how well she knew Brian?”

“Said she’d known him a little less than a year, but that he seemed okay. He’d help her with groceries, that kind of thing. She didn’t say he was a ‘nice young man,’ but that was the gist of it.”

“Thanks, Stanley.”

He frowned. “Name’s Evan.”

“Right, I was just kid-”

Evan squinted at me. “Stan’s my brother.”

Of course he was.

Bailey joined usin the hallway, a worried look on her face. Without preamble, she tersely ordered the unis to stand guard on Brian’s apartment until our criminalist got there, then headed for the car. I trotted to catch up and jumped in as she gunned the engine.

I quickly brought her up to speed on what I’d learned, aware that whatever she’d just heard on her phone call wasn’t good, because she was taking it out on the gas pedal. Bailey listened to my report without comment as she whipped down Hollywood Boulevard. I wrapped up my assessment of Iris Stavros and asked, “Want to tell me why we’re traveling at warp speed, Captain Kirk?”

“The news release paid off, sort of. We got a tip from a guy at a cybercafé in Silver Lake. Claims he ‘sniffed’ someone sending a ransom note.”

“Sniffing,” the hacker’s term for spying on someone’s Internet mailings, is incredibly easy to do in a cybercafé. Don’t ask me how they do it, I’m a computer Luddite. I only know about it because Graden is a computer whizbang, and he’d told me stories from some of the hacking cases he’d handled.

“That’s all? I mean, that’s great, but…” The call had taken a lot longer than it should have for just that.

“Brian, or whatever his real name is, had a lot of jobs before he landed the gig in the Sherman Oaks Galleria. The first sign of him in L.A. was about a year ago. He was a busboy at the Pinot Gris. Three months later, he turned up as a waiter at the Hungry Pig. Two months after that, he applied for a security job at a Bank of America a few blocks away from the Hungry Pig. He hung on to that job for four months, and then he landed his job as a jewelry store manager in the Galleria.”

The progression was unremarkable. They were the typical low-level jobs young adults took to make ends meet until they figured out a career goal. And the move from security guard to jewelry store manager made perfect sense to me. I shrugged. “Doesn’t seem all that unusual.” But Bailey’s expression looked ominous.

“Not until you factor in the locations. Except for the Galleria, every single one of those jobs was within walking distance of Russell’s studio. And the Galleria? That was just a stone’s throw from Hayley’s school.”

I tried to make the pieces fit, but no matter how I turned them around in my mind, they refused to fall into place. “I would’ve said that sounded like Brian had been stalking Hayley for the past year, but he spent most of his time circling Russell’s studio.”

“Right. And we can check with the parents, but I doubt Hayley hung out at daddy’s studio much.”

“No.” Not at this age. She had her own world. And so did daddy.

Bailey pulled up to the cybercafé, charmingly named Head of Steam. It looked like any Coffee Bean, just with more tables. As we searched the room for our tipster, I got a strange and unappealing glimpse into the future: everyone there was transfixed by a computer screen, and most wore headphones. Though there were signs of life as we know it around the cash register, the rest of the café was eerily quiet; the primary sound was the clicking of laptop keys, the conversations virtual, not verbal. Was this where we were headed? Eye contact traded for Skype, personal discourse traded for e-mails or, worse, blogs? Thankfully, further depressing predictions were curtailed when our tipster spotted us and waved us over.

Pierced nose and lower lip, greasy black hair combed up in back and into long spikes at the sides of his face, skinny jeans that had room to bag on even skinnier legs, and black high-top sneakers. It came as no surprise to me that his name was Legs Roscoe. With the preliminary introductions completed, we got right down to business.

“I was just hanging out-”

“Sorry to stop you, but do you remember what day it was?” I asked.

“Yeah, it was Monday. Had to be well after five o’clock.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Because my last class ends at four and traffic’s a bitch that time of day. So I couldn’t have gotten here much before that.” Legs dipped his head. “I, uh, didn’t mean to ‘sniff’ anyone, it was just an inadvertent thing. I don’t usually run into any-”

I held up my hand. “Don’t sweat it. We’re not here to bust you.”

This seemed to calm Legs down considerably. He nodded vigorously, practically bowing at the waist in his seat. “Cool. Thanks. Cool. Well, so I catch the drift that this dude was saying he had this girl and not to call the cops-”

“Did you catch anything about money?” Bailey asked.

Legs sniffed and used a paper napkin to wipe his nose. I wondered whether the nose ring got in the way when he had a cold. I decided not to ponder that question.