Robert Ellis - Murder Season

Lena lowered her window. As she checked the store’s entrance again, she saw him walking out with two bags. Even from across the lot she could tell that the bag he held close to his chest contained several half-gallon bottles of booze.

She watched Hight open his trunk and place his groceries inside. Rooting through one of the bags, he fished out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. Then he circled around the car and opened the door. Curiously, he didn’t climb in. Instead, he leaned his elbows on the roof and gazed at the traffic moving up and down Lincoln Boulevard. For the next five minutes, nothing changed. Hight just stood there, smoking his cigarette and staring at the street.

After a while Lena began to wonder if he wasn’t fixated on something and turned around for a look through the rear window. She saw a young man on Rollerblades, pushing a baby stroller across the street. As they glided up the ramp onto the sidewalk, she turned back and watched Hight following their progress down the block. When they vanished, Hight kept his eyes on the empty sidewalk for several moments, then dropped his cigarette on the pavement and finally got into his car.

He drove off slowly. He pulled onto Ocean Park and lumbered up the long hill. It took him a while to reach the top, but Lena kept her eyes on the car until it finally disappeared. Then she pulled onto Lincoln, heading for the freeway. She didn’t want to follow Hight home. She wasn’t ready yet. She couldn’t find the words. And Hight hadn’t looked ready, either.

She could smell it in the pillow as she pulled it closer. On the sheets as she rolled over in the darkness and searched out cool spots that were not there.

Murder season.

She was floating. Drifting. Cruising through an open seam between sleep and consciousness.

She glanced at the clock radio but didn’t really see it, then fell back into the stream and let go. It was somewhere after midnight. Sometime before dawn. Early spring and the air inside the house had been deadened from the oppressive heat.

Murder season had come early this year. It had rolled in with the heat like they were best friends, like they were lovers.

Lena reached across the bed, probing gently for a warm body but finding only emptiness. As she rolled onto her back, she noticed something going on in the house. She could hear it in the background, a noise pulsing in the distance. She tried to ignore it and pretend that it wasn’t real. After a while she began to wonder if it wasn’t part of a dream.

Until she finally realized that it was her cell.

She opened her eyes. The phone wasn’t on the table. When she noticed the light glowing behind the bed, she reached down to the floor and reeled it in. It was 1:30 a.m., and she hoped that it wasn’t another callout. She needed more time before working another case. She needed more rest.

She slid the lock open on the touch screen. As she pressed the phone to her ear, she heard a man’s voice-an extremely timid voice that she recognized, but couldn’t place.

“Who is this?” the man asked.

“Lena Gamble,” she said. “Who’s this?”

There was a long pause. A long stretch of nothing. Lena looked around the bedroom and realized that she was at Vaughan’s house. The bathroom light was on, the door closed. Her memory of the night came back to her. It had been a good one.

Then the caller cleared his throat, his voice even quieter than before.

“What are you doing with this phone?” he said.

Lena sighed in frustration. “You called me,” she said. “Now how did you get my number? Who are you?”

He cleared his throat again. He seemed jumpy.

“But that’s the problem,” he said finally. “I don’t have your phone number, Detective, and I didn’t call you. I was calling my daughter’s phone. I wanted to hear her voice. I wanted to hear her message, but you picked up.”

The words hung there. Deep and dark and dead as night.

Lena bolted up to a sitting position. It was Tim Hight. She was holding Lily Hight’s cell phone. The one nobody could find. She looked at her naked body under the sheets and remembered that her clothes were in the living room. Worse, much worse, she was officially off-duty. She’d left her gun at home.

Hight broke the silence. “Are you in trouble, Detective Gamble?”

She didn’t answer. She couldn’t catch her breath. Her eyes rocked back to the bathroom door-everything radioactive now. Everything white-hot and burning down.

“You must be in trouble,” Hight said. “If you have Lily’s phone, then you’re with the man who killed her. You need to tell me where you are. If you can’t speak, there’s a program on the start page. Just press the icon and the phone will show me where you are.”

Vaughan. She’d just slept with the man.

She pulled the phone away from her ear, found the program, and opened it. As she watched the device send out her location, Hight ended the call and she got out of Vaughan’s bed. She tried to keep cool. Tried to keep in mind that she wasn’t dreaming anymore. As she crept past the bathroom door and rushed into the living room for her clothes, she glanced back at the phone. The icon marked PHOTOS just seemed to jump out at her. When she opened it, a number of files containing still photographs popped up, but she chose to look at the last video instead.

Her hands started quivering. She could feel the fear and terror in her bones.

She was watching Lily make love with her killer in candlelight. They were passing the camera back and forth. They were giggling and laughing. She was watching Vaughan pull Lily into his arms. Watching Vaughan kiss her. Watching them do it in Vaughan’s bed.

The light in the bathroom went out and the door opened ever so slowly.

Vaughan looked directly at her. He was dressed in a pair of jeans and a polo shirt, and he was holding a gun. He walked toward her and stopped in the middle of the room. Most of his face was cloaked in darkness, but she could see his eyes, those light brown eyes, glowing from the moonlight that was leaking through the windows at the end of the foyer by the front door.

Somehow Lena steadied herself. Somehow she found her voice.

“Why did you keep this?”

Vaughan reached out for the phone and grabbed it, his voice seething but just above a whisper. “Because I can’t stop looking at it,” he said. “I can’t stop thinking about it. The whole thing was an accident. A mistake.”

Lena found her bra and panties and started to dress as Vaughan watched.

“You call what happened a mistake?”

His face moved into the light and hardened. “You saw the video, Lena. You saw what she looked like sitting at that bar. I was in the middle of a divorce. It’s funny, but I went to the club with Bennett and Higgins that night. They went upstairs to talk to Bosco, and I walked into the bar and found Lily. She was beautiful. She was gorgeous. I knew that she was younger than me, but that’s all I knew. I saw her as a blessing. A gift given to me after my divorce. I was feeding on it. I needed it, and we clicked. We came back here. We drank a bottle of wine. We talked and made love. And then she asked me to drive her home.”

Vaughan paused, but only briefly to wipe his mouth.

“She said she lived with her parents. She told me that she was still in high school. Jesus fucking Christ. She was still in school.”

Lena tucked in her blouse and pulled her boots over jeans. She glanced at the gun in Vaughan’s hand. It looked like a small Glock.

“Your life flashed before your eyes,” she said. “You decided murder was your only way out.”

“Not at all, Lena. I called her. I bought one of those phones that can’t be traced. You saw the number appear on the bill … the number Bennett removed for the trial because it didn’t point to Gant.”