Michael Connelly - The Gods of Guilt

Jennifer cut in on the back-and-forth then.

“I don’t know, if I had this record on my name and I wanted to start over somewhere, I’d lose the name. Nowadays everything’s digital and a lot of it is public information. Probably the last thing she wanted was somebody in Hawaii digging up all of this stuff.”

She patted the stack of files in front of her. She made a good point.

“Okay,” I said, “what about Giselle Dallinger? When did she show up?”

“Not so sure,” Cisco said. “Her current driver’s license was issued in Nevada two years ago. She never changed it when she moved over here. She rented the apartment on Franklin sixteen months ago, providing a four-year rental history in Las Vegas. I haven’t had time to go back into it over there but I’ll get to it soon.”

I pulled a pad out of my briefcase and wrote a few questions I needed to ask Andre La Cosse the next time we spoke.

“Okay, what else?” I asked. “Did you get to the Beverly Wilshire yesterday?”

“I did. But before I get to that, let’s talk about the apartment on Franklin.”

I nodded. It was his report. He could deliver it the way he wanted.

“Let’s start with the fire. It was first reported at twelve fifty-one Monday morning when smoke alarms in the hallway outside the apartment went off and residents entered the hallway and saw smoke coming from our victim’s door. The fire gutted the living room—where the body was located—and heavily damaged the kitchen and the two bedrooms. The smoke detectors inside the apartment evidently did not go off and the reason for that is under investigation.”

“What about a sprinkler system?”

“No sprinkler system. It’s an old building and it was grandfathered in without it. Now, from what I was able to pick up over at the fire station, there were two investigations of this death.”

“Two?” I asked.

This was sounding like something I could use.

“That’s right. Both police and fire investigators signed off on it at first as accidental, with the victim falling asleep on the couch while smoking. The accelerant was the blouse she was wearing, which was made of polyurethane. What changed their minds about that was the coroner’s initial survey. The remains were bagged and tagged at the scene and taken to the ME’s Office.”

Cisco looked at his own notes, which had been scratched on a pocket notebook that looked tiny in his big left hand.

“A deputy medical examiner named Celeste Frazier did a preliminary examination of the body and determined that the hyoid bone was fractured in two places. That changed things pretty quick.”

I looked at Lorna and knew she did not know what the hyoid bone was.

“It’s a small bone shaped like a horseshoe that protects the windpipe.”

I touched the front of my neck in illustration.

“If it’s broken, it means force trauma to the front of the neck. She was choked, strangled.”

She nodded her thanks and I told Cisco to keep going.

“So they went back out, with arson and homicide investigators, and now we have a full-on murder investigation. They knocked on doors and I talked to a lot of the people they talked to. Several of them heard an argument coming from her apartment about eleven Sunday night. Raised voices. A man and a woman going at it about money.”

He referred to his notebook again to get a name.

“A Mrs. Annabeth Stephens lives directly across the hall from the victim’s apartment and she was watching out her peephole when a man left following the argument. She said the time was between eleven thirty and midnight because the news was over and she went to bed at midnight. She later identified Andre La Cosse when the cops showed her a six-pack.”

“She told you this?”

“She did.”

“Did she know you were working for the guy she identified?”

“I told her I was investigating the death across the hall and she spoke willingly to me. I didn’t identify myself further than that because she never asked for anything further.”

I nodded to Cisco. Being able to finesse the story from a key prosecution witness so early in the game was good work on his part.

“How old is Mrs. Stephens?”

“She’s midsixties. I think she was stationed at that peephole a lot of the time. Every building has a busybody like that.”

Jennifer chimed in.

“If she says he left before midnight, how do the police account for the smoke detector in the hallway not sounding for fifty more minutes?”

Cisco shrugged again.

“Could be a couple of explanations. One, that it took the smoke some time to work its way under the door. The fire could’ve been burning in there the whole time. Or, two, he set the fire with some sort of delay or other rig to allow him time to get out and get clear. And then there’s three, a combination of one and two.”

Cisco reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and matches. He shook a cigarette out of the pack and then put it inside the folded matchbook.

“Oldest trick in the book,” he said. “You light the cigarette and it slow burns down to the matches. The matches go up and ignite the accelerant. Gives a three- to ten-minute head start, depending on the cigarette you use.”

I nodded more to myself than to Cisco. I was getting a sense of the state’s case against my client and was already working out strategies and moves. Cisco continued.

“Did you know that by law in most states, any brand of cigarette sold in that state has to have a three-minute burn-down rate for unattended smoking? That’s why most arsonists use foreign cigarettes.”

“That’s great,” I said. “Can we get back to this case? What else did you get from the apartment building?”

“That’s about it at this time,” Cisco said. “I’ll be going back there, though. A lot of people weren’t at home when I knocked.”

“That’s because they looked through the peephole and got scared when they saw you.”

I meant it in jest but it wasn’t without a point. Cisco rode a Harley and he dressed the part. His usual outfit consisted of black jeans, boots, and a skin-tight black T-shirt with a leather vest over it. With his imposing size, dress, and the penetrating stare of his dark eyes through a peephole, it was no wonder to me that some people didn’t answer their doors. In fact, I was more surprised when he reported the cooperation of a witness. So much so that I took pains to make sure cooperation was fully voluntary. The last thing I ever wanted was a witness backfiring on me while on the stand. I personally vetted them all.

“I mean, maybe you should think about wearing a tie every now and then,” I added. “I have a whole collection of clip-ons, you know.”

“No, thanks,” Cisco responded flatly. “Can we move on to the hotel now or do you want to keep taking shots at me?”

“Easy, big guy, I’m just poking you a little bit. Tell us about the hotel. You had a busy night.”

“I worked it late. Anyway, the hotel is where this thing gets good.”

He opened his laptop and punched in a command as he spoke, his big fingers punishing the keyboard.

“I managed to obtain the cooperation of the security staff of the Beverly Wilshire without even wearing a tie. They—”

“All right, all right,” I said. “No more discussion of neckties.”

“Good.”

“Go on. What did they tell you over there?”

6

Cisco said it wasn’t what they told him at the hotel that was important. It was what they showed him.

“Most public spaces in the hotel are under camera surveillance twenty-four seven,” he said. “So they have almost all of our victim’s visit to the hotel Sunday night on digital. They provided me with copies for a nominal fee that I will be expensing.”