Robert Ellis - Murder Season

“If I’d murdered Jake, it would have been,” he repeated with less conviction.

“I can only speak for myself and the people I work with, Mr. Hight. The whole thing looks planned. Everything you did looks scripted, like you spent a lot of time in that chair in the sunroom thinking it over from every angle. Watching the Gants from your window and letting it eat you up from the inside. You dreamed about murdering Jacob Gant. Like you said, you wished for his death over and over again.”

A beat went by. Then another, and Hight started weeping like a man overcome by his memories. His ghosts.

“But Jake murdered Lily,” he whispered into his hands. “My girl. That’s how a crime of passion works.”

Lena spotted a box of tissues on the counter and brought them over to the table.

“You planned it, Mr. Hight. You bought the gun six weeks ago. We checked. It’s not registered. You followed Gant to the club last night. You knew the layout and waited on the fire escape.”

“I haven’t seen him since the trial. I told you that.”

“You shot an innocent man. You shot Johnny Bosco.”

“I didn’t. I couldn’t. I liked Johnny. He was nice to me.”

Lena lowered her voice. “You shot him in the back. You’ll need to tell your lawyers about it because that’s what it really comes down to. The gristle on the bone. You shot an innocent man in the back.”

His body shivered-a tremor from deep within that came and went.

“Why do you keep repeating it?” he said.

“Because you’re playing us. Because you’re trying to take the city down with you. No matter what I might feel for your loss, you’re hurting other people now. You shot Bosco and then you killed Gant just the way you dreamed about it. You took care of business. You wasted him. You disfigured him beyond recognition. Just the way you wanted to. Just the way you planned it.”

“No.”

“When you talk to your attorneys about selling what you did as a crime of passion, remember the details and don’t leave anything out. You took the time to pick up your shell casings, Mr. Hight. You took the time to go through their wallets and make it look like a robbery. You knew Bosco. Everybody knew he carried a lot of cash. So you took his money and tried to make the murders look like something else. You tried to cover your tracks. And then what?”

“I didn’t do any of these things.”

“And then what?” she repeated. “You stayed behind to watch. You got lost in the crowd outside the club because you wanted to see the fallout. You called ahead and sent your wife to Bakersfield. You came home and mended the wound on your hand that you’ve been trying to hide from us. You made a drink and sat down in your chair by the window. And then you waited. You waited for the news to arrive next door. Your dream came true. You made sure it came true. Jacob Gant is dead.”

Lena paused a moment, her words settling into the room.

“That’s not a crime of passion,” she said finally. “That’s the death penalty, Mr. Hight. That’s a trip to the dead room. That’s a ride on a gurney and a needle in the arm.”

He looked up from the floor. His eyes had hollowed out, and the tears were gone. He hadn’t weakened or given anything up. But he was looking through her now. All the way through her-his jaw tight, his gaze bitter and ice-cold.

People are capable of anything.

Given the right circumstances, the most gentle and meek can lash out in a single instant to become the most vicious and unforgiving.

It was the great lesson she had learned from her first partner in the division. Her last partner. Humanity can be shed as easily as clothing. Everything you know about someone can change in the blink of an eye. For anyone who works in law enforcement, this was the premise, the foundation, the key to survival.

She was standing in the foyer. Barrera had stepped out onto the back porch, smoking a cigar, and talking to the deputy chief on his cell. As she watched Mifune work with Hight in the kitchen, it occurred to her that Hight wasn’t necessarily as disappointed with the way things had turned out as he showed himself to be. He had dreamed about killing Jacob Gant, and the botched trial had given him the opportunity to realize that dream. A shrink would probably call it the quickest way through the grieving process. A shortcut to closure. Gant would never appear in an interview, never be seen in public, never be an issue again. He was nothing more than a memory now.

The thought faded as she climbed the stairs to the second-floor landing. Carson and Street were searching through the master bedroom at the end of the hall. Toward the front of the house she could see a small guest room, well furnished with large double-hung windows and a decent view of Venice and the ocean at the bottom of the hill. A door was open to her left. She noted the unfinished stairs leading to the attic and could hear a pair of detectives moving things around. Across the hall she found Hight’s office and walked in.

It was a large room with the same footprint as the living room. And like the room below, window shutters kept the space in a perpetual state of near darkness. She understood why when she noticed the large TV mounted on the far wall. She looked at the glass coffee table, the leather couch and chairs. The room served as both an office and a screening room. As she walked over to the desk, she realized that Fred Wireman, a senior detective due to retire next year, was searching the closet. Like Carson and Street, Lena knew Wireman to be extremely thorough.

“Lots of movies, huh,” he said.

Lena nodded, eyeing the bookshelves. Hight’s library of films looked to be as extensive as the music collection she had inherited from her brother. Several thousand titles filled the shelves from floor to ceiling. Skimming through the collection in the dim light, it took a moment to grasp that they were sorted by the director’s name, not the title of the film. Because this information wasn’t printed on the spine, Hight had to possess a certain knowledge of each film’s history. All the same, some of Lena’s favorites were here. Films by Truffaut and Bresson, Bunuel and Bertolucci. Works by Hitchcock, and Huston, Kubrick, Kurosawa, and Herzog.

It all registered even though she was thinking more about Jacob Gant’s murder and the memories that had surfaced while she examined the gunshot wounds to his head. She was looking for John Ford. When she found Hight’s copy of The Searchers, she pulled it from the shelf.

The cover was a reproduction of the original poster: John Wayne and Jeffrey Hunter on horseback with their rifles set on their saddles. Across the image the words, He had to find her … were repeated twice. Still, nothing registered.

“Hey, Fred,” she said. “Are you into movies?”

“Since I was a kid.”

“You ever see this one?”

She turned and held out the cover. When he read the title, he smiled.

“One of my favorites,” he said. “Along with Stagecoach, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and My Darling Clementine .”

“Someone shoots someone in the eyes. This is the movie, right? Without eyes, you can’t enter the spirit world.”

Wireman thought about it for a moment, started to nod, then stopped as he put it together. “That’s the one,” he said. “Of course, it doesn’t prove anything.”

“I’m not saying it does. All it means is that he owns the film and probably watched it once or twice.”

“More than once or twice would be my guess, Lena. Before Hight’s career tanked and he moved to reality TV, he directed Prairie Winds . The poster’s over here on the wall.”

Wireman swung the closet door shut, revealing the framed poster. Lena crossed the room. She had seen the film more than once and liked it. Once with her brother, and once with Rhodes.