Michael Connelly - Lost Light

Hollywood was always best viewed at night. It could only hold its mystique in darkness. In sunlight the curtain comes up and the intrigue is gone, replaced by a sense of hidden danger. It was a place of takers and users, of broken sidewalks and dreams. You build a city in the desert, water it with false hopes and false idols, and eventually this is what happens. The desert reclaims it, turns it arid, leaves it barren. Human tumbleweeds drift across its streets, predators hide in the rocks.

I took the Mulholland exit and crossed over the freeway, then at the split took Woodrow Wilson on up the side of the mountain. My house was dark. The only light I saw when I came through the carport door was the red glow from the answering machine on the kitchen counter. I hit a light switch and then pushed the PLAYBACK button on the phone.

There were two messages. The first was from Kiz Rider and she had already told me about that. The second was from Lawton Cross. He had held back on me once again. He said he had something, his voice croaking into the phone like static. I pictured his wife holding the phone to his mouth.

The message had been left two hours before. It was getting late but I called back. The man lived in a chair. What was late to him? I had no idea.

Danny Cross answered. She must have had caller ID on the phone because her hello was clipped and carried an edge of malice in it. Or was I reading too much into it?

“Danny, it’s Harry. I’m returning your husband’s call.”

“He’s asleep.”

“Can you wake him, please? It sounded important.”

“I can tell you what he wanted to tell you.”

“Okay.”

“He wanted to tell you that when he was working he used to keep copies of his active files. He kept them here in the home office.”

I didn’t recall seeing an office in the house.

“Full copies?”

“I don’t know. He had a filing cabinet and it was full.”

“Had?”

“His sitting room is where the office was. I had to move everything out. It’s all in the garage now.”

I realized I needed to stop the flow of information from her. Too much had already been said on the phone. Paranoia was raising its ugly head again.

“I’m coming out tonight,” I said.

“No, it’s too late. I’m going to bed soon.”

“I’ll be there in half an hour, Danny. Wait up for me.”

I hung the phone up before she could further dispute my intentions. Without having gone further into the house than the kitchen I turned and left, this time leaving the light on.

A light rain had begun to fall in the Valley. Oil beaded on the freeway and slowed everybody down. I used all of the half hour and more to get to the house on Melba and shortly after I pulled into the driveway the garage door started to go up. Danny Cross had been watching for me. I got out of the Mercedes and entered the garage.

It was a two-car garage and it was cluttered with stacked boxes and furniture. There was an old Chevy Malibu with its hood sprung like somebody had been working on the engine and had just lowered the lid without latching it while taking a break. I think I remembered something about Lawton Cross driving a ’60s muscle car as a private vehicle. But there was a thick layer of dust on the car and boxes stacked on its roof. One thing for sure was that he was never going to work on it or drive it again.

A door that connected to the house opened and Danny stood there in a long bathrobe with a belt knotted tightly around her thin waist. She had the same look of disapproval she always had on her face and that I had become quite used to. It was too bad. She was a beautiful woman. Or had been, at least.

“Danny,” I said, nodding. “I won’t be long. If you can just point me in -”

“It’s all over there next to the washing machine. The file cabinets.”

She pointed to a spot in front of the Malibu where there was a laundry alcove. I walked around the car and found two double-drawer file cabinets standing next to the stacked washer and dryer. They were key-lock cabinets but the locks had been punched out on each. Lawton had probably picked them up used at a yard sale.

There was no exterior labeling on the four drawers that could help me with my search so I bent down and opened the first drawer on the left. It contained no files. Rather, it held what looked like the contents of a top of a desk. There was a Rolodex file, its phone cards yellowed, a stand-up photo frame featuring Danny and Lawton Cross at some happier moment, and double-decked in and out trays. The only thing in the tray marked “IN” was a folded map of Griffith Park.

The next drawer contained Cross’s files. I thumbed through the tabs looking at the names and hoping for connections to what I was working. Nothing. I went to the top drawer of the second cabinet and found more files. Finally, I found a file marked “Eidolon Productions.” I pulled it and put it on top of the cabinet. I went back to thumbing through the files, knowing that often cases expanded into many folders.

I came across a file marked “Antonio Markwell” and remembered the case because it had played hotly in the media about five or six years earlier. Markwell was a nine-year-old boy who disappeared from his backyard in Chatsworth. RHD worked the case with the FBI. It lasted a week, until they found a suspect-a pedophile with a motor home. He led Lawton Cross and his partner, Jack Dorsey, to the boy’s body in Griffith Park. It had been buried up near the caves in Bronson Canyon. They would have never found it if they hadn’t turned the killer. There were too many places to hide a body in those hills.

It had been a big case, the kind that made your name in the department. I imagined that both Cross and Dorsey thought that they were golden after that. They had no idea what the future was holding for them.

I closed the drawer. There were no other files that seemed connected to my investigation. The bottom drawer, the last one, was empty. I took the file I had pulled over to the Malibu. I put the file down on the hood and opened it. I should have just put it under my arm and left with it. But I was excited. I was anticipating something. A new lead maybe, a break. I wanted to see what Lawton Cross had kept in the file.

As soon as I opened it I knew the file was incomplete. Cross had copied some of the working documents of the case for use at home or on the road. The basic case reports were missing. There were no reports that specifically related to the investigation of the murder of Angella Benton. The file mostly contained reports relating to the movie set robbery and shoot-out. There were witness reports-including my own-and forensic reports. There was a DNA comparison between the blood found in the stolen movie van and the semen found on Angella Benton’s body; no match. There were interview summaries and a time and location spread sheet-a document on which the locations of various players in the case are charted at different times important to the case. These T amp;L reports were also known as alibi sheets. It was a way of sifting through multiple players in a case and possibly coming up with a suspect.

I quickly went through the pages of this report and determined that Cross and Dorsey had been charting eleven different people and not all of the names were familiar to me. The T amp;L report was a good find. I put the document to the side because I would put it at the top of the stack in the file when I was finished my review.

I moved on and had just picked up a copy of the currency report, which contained the serial numbers taken at random from the stolen money, when I heard Danny’s voice behind me. She had remained in the doorway to the house watching me and I hadn’t realized it.

“Find what you were looking for?”