Stephen Cannell - Vigilante

Deputy Chief Hawkins was seated at the head of the conference table, flanked by Jeb and Alexa. Hitch and I remained standing as we presented our theory. When we were finished, silence prevailed.

“You’re saying that this famous, internationally known TV personality is committing serial murders and then solving them to make his show more entertaining?” DC Hawkins finally asked skeptically.

“He’s not doing the actual murders himself,” I said. “Lee Bob Batiste is. And let’s not forget the ratings this is producing. Variety just reported Nash signed a new two-year deal with his syndicator for forty million dollars up front, plus fifteen percent of the back end. That’s huge. Don’t tell me money can’t be a motive for murder. Guys in this town can get washed out over a ten-dollar spoon of heroin.”

More silence.

I could feel sweat beginning to form under my ass. This was a very cold house. Only Alexa seemed neutral, but to be fair, she trusted my instincts on cases and had seen me be right too many times. Our captain, Jeb, sat Buddha-esque, impossible to read.

“It certainly straightens out that bizarre coincidence that has Lita Mendez’s murder and Hannah Trumbull’s both involving the Madrids,” Alexa said. “All Nash needed was one open murder, Hannah’s. It touched Lester. Then he kills the second victim, Lita, and plants Stephanie’s coffee cup with her DNA evidence in Lita’s driveway just like he did with that overcoat in Atlanta.”

“Detective Cole told us that everything would tie together,” I said. “And this is how he’s doing it.”

At that point, Deputy Chief Hawkins stood and walked to the door. I thought we’d lost him, but he stopped abruptly and turned to face us again.

“Okay,” he said, surprising me. “Let’s say I go for it. You still don’t have enough to write either a search or arrest warrant on Nash. That Baffin boot print certainly isn’t enough unless you can prove it belongs to Batiste, which you can’t. So how do you propose to do this?”

“We need to find Lee Bob Batiste and bust him first,” I said. “If we can get him to flip, we’ll have Nix Nash. I’ve got no proof that Lee Bob’s still in L.A., but my bet is he is. This isn’t a guy you’re gonna fly around on United Airlines. Nash probably hired somebody to drive him out here and parked him some place out of the way. If that’s the case, he’s probably still here. We need to find him and pick him up.”

“And how are you going to do that?” Hawkins challenged.

“I’m gonna try and scare the shit out of Nash. He thinks he’s way ahead of us. He’s not used to getting pushed. If he knows we’re on to him, he might do something stupid. If Nash contacts Batiste to warn him, then we try and get to Batiste before he splits.”

“You walk in there and tell Nash about all of this and he’s gonna throw you out. Then he’ll send his lawyers after you. You don’t have a shred of proof.”

“I have something else in mind,” I said. “But before we do it, we need to get a citywide phone trace set up. Then we need units parked strategically around the basin. If Nash calls to warn Batiste, we need to be ready to pounce.”

Then I explained the rest of what I had in mind.

When he first moved to L.A., Shaq O’Neal bought a huge, modern house for his mother on the east end of town, in the hills above La Canada Flintridge. It sat on a point that overlooked the Rose Bowl to the south and the 210 Freeway and Mount Wilson on the north. The front of the triangular house was three stories of rounded green glass that jutted out on a promontory point and looked like the prow of an ocean liner. When Shaq left the Lakers to play for the Miami Heat, his mother soon followed and the house was sold. With the real estate downturn, it was on the market again. When Hitch and I did our background investigation on Nix Nash, we found out that Nash had worked out a short-term lease deal for the property. He had moved into the mansion two months ago for his six-month stay here.

Even during off-hours in L.A. traffic, La Canada was at least a forty-minute drive from the V-TV studios in Century City. At peak rush hour I figured it could take as much as two hours. The estate was located well outside of the glitzy Hollywood limelight Nash seemed to covet. While it was a magnificent property, it seemed like a strange residential choice, and that got me wondering.

At eight thirty the next morning, Hitch and I were standing beside my bugged Acura in the parking lot of La Canada High School. Three hours earlier, ESD had begun to organize electronic surveillance teams and position them in various strategic spots around the L.A. Basin. The teams were now setting up receiving equipment so they could initiate a trap and trace on any cell calls transferred from Nash’s rental house to one of the hundreds of cell towers in the greater metro area.

We needed a warrant to do a regular hard line phone tap and we couldn’t get one, so Alexa and Deputy Chief Hawkins talked the phone company into temporarily shutting off service to Nash’s house, which would force him to use his cell if he wanted to place a call. We would not be listening in on his conversation but merely tracking it, so there were no evidentiary or procedural hurdles requiring a judge’s permission. No one knew where Lee Bob Batiste was hiding. It could be anywhere in the 490 square miles of Los Angeles. We were hoping the trap and trace would narrow our search to a single cell tower.

“You really think we should be way out here on the east end of town?” Hitch asked as he sipped from a cup of Starbucks coffee we’d picked up on the way out here.

“If you had a guy like Lee Bob Batiste under wraps, what would you do with him?” I asked.

“I’d have him chained up in the basement with a pound of raw meat.”

“But if you couldn’t do that, where would you put him?”

“Close enough to know what he’s up to.”

“That’s why I convinced Jeb to give us this sector. There’ve been dozens of fires in the Angeles National Forest and that dust we got off his boot print had traces of fire retardant.”

“So your theory is, Nix Nash leased this house way out here because it was a good out-of-the-way spot up in the hills where he could park Batiste?”

“Yeah.”

Hitch cocked a skeptical eye at me but said nothing.

By nine thirty, I got a text message from Jeb informing me that the ten ESD geeks were set up and ready to go. The operation was code-named Black Swan. I don’t know who picks these corny op names. When I asked, I was told that Nash was a dirtbag celebrity, a black swan. Some genius on the command floor had come up with it.

We had learned that Nix never left for the V-TV studio until after ten in order to miss the rush-hour traffic. At exactly nine thirty, Hitch and I got back into the parked Acura and I called Hitch’s cell from mine. As soon as he answered, I hung up.

“What up, Captain?” Hitch said to nobody, miming the conversation. “You got a latent print from where?” He was playing to the surveillance bug buried in my rearview mirror. “Okay. Gimme it.” He paused, then said, “Thanks,” and disconnected.

“You won’t believe this, Shane.” His voice was full of excitement. Like most cops who had risked their lives undercover, he was a remarkably good actor. “The science division got a palm and three fingers off the wall above the toilet in Lita Mendez’s bathroom. The print hit came back to somebody named Lee Bob Batiste.”

“That’s the serial killer Nix Nash busted in the Everglades back in the nineties,” I said, giving it my best gee-whiz reading. “Why would he be out here in L.A.?”