On the wall by the office closet was a calendar with a woman in a yellow bikini standing next to a small airplane. Beside it another calendar with a woman in a red bikini standing next to a black Porsche.
“Pretty girls, guns, and shiny machines,” said Lobdell. “Fun hobbies. What kind of plane does he have?”
“Cessna,” said Nick. “Out at Orange County Airport.”
“You wonder how a little plane like that can carry enough drugs into the country to pay for a place like this. For cars and pools.”
“He just flies down to Mexico to negotiate and buy,” said Nick. “The drugs come north later. Some in cars. Some in bigger planes. They say Bonnett doesn’t even look at what he imports. Disgusted by everything about it, except for the money.”
“These hippies, you watch,” said Lobdell. “By the time they’re my age they’ll be carrying briefcases and wearing suits like their daddies. They’ll all want to work for IBM again, drive overpriced German cars. They’ll cut their hair for the dough. Tell their kids they never used dope or wore those dumbass clothes or called us pigs. You watch.”
Lobdell lit a cigarette. Nick smelled the butane, then the tobacco. Loved those smells. Liked the happy shear of metal on metal when the Zippo opened and closed. He missed the smokes. Just once in a while now. To bribe a subject, like Neemal. Build their trust in you and relax them.
Nick used his pen to prowl through the tools and containers on the workbench. Good stuff, well cared for. Some metal dust had mounded up on the grinder housing, but no clue as to what it had come from. Something for his plane? Nick thought of Bonnett’s white-handled Mexican switchblade, wondered if he sharpened it here.
Why would a guy with leather-cutting tools use a garden pruner?
He stood before the shelves and read the white labels on the boxes: pots and pans, extra blankets, pictures, trophies, sports gear, lantern and stove, sleeping bags, tent. Max had always used stick-on labels, too.
Then something grabbed his eyes. The loose bundle of material on top of the tent box. One corner of it dangling down over the cardboard. Didn’t fit with Cory Bonnett’s garage at all. Like a fly in a glass of milk.
“I’ve been looking at that for the last thirty seconds, too,” said Lobdell. “I’ve seen it before.”
White bedsheets with little pink roses.
“The curtains in Janelle’s yellow cottage,” said Nick.
“Yep,” said Lobdell.
Nick stepped up closer, leaning in. “I swear I’m looking at a bloodstain.”
Lobdell’s big head lowered over Nick’s shoulder. Nick smelled Old Spice aftershave and cigarette smoke. “Looks like blood to me.”
Nick just stared at the sheets. And the small drop of what looked like blood. It most definitely looked like blood. For the first time since he’d left the packinghouse he believed he’d found something that truly mattered.
“This isn’t the cleanest search here, Lucky. We could lose this stuff in court if we don’t see a judge and get a warrant.”
“The sheets are in plain sight, Nick. The blood, too. We came here to question someone in connection with a murder. We got permission. The garage door was wide open so we looked around. How can Bonnett expect privacy in his garage with his door wide open and a bloody sheet in plain sight?”
“No. I want it right. Let’s get a warrant.”
Nick couldn’t take his eyes off the sheets and that little stain. Damn. It was like throwing in your line hour after hour, day after day. And you finally catch a big fish you only half believed was there.
“See?” asked Lobdell. “My luck is rubbing off on you.”
“Yeah. But I still got a problem, Lucky.”
“I think I got it, too.”
“Say these are Janelle’s sheets,” said Nick. “Say she had two sets because she liked the pattern, got them on sale. Okay. I can believe that. One for the bed and one for the windows. But what are these doing here? What, Bonnett met her in Tustin, drove her back to Laguna to her place, killed her in her own bedroom, then changed the sheets and messed up the bed? Then drove back and dumped her at the packinghouse? Then brought evidence back to his own home?”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“No kidding.”
No planning and unnecessary work.
“Except bringing back the evidence,” said Nick. “I’ve been doing some reading. Heard this FBI guy up in L.A. And they got this new kind of killer out now. They’re not dumb. They’re more weird than dumb. They like doing what they do. And sometimes they’ll take stuff from their victims, stuff that isn’t worth anything. It helps them remember. Neemal likes fire. These guys like keepsakes of what they did. Maybe Bonnett’s one of those. And the sheets turned him on.”
Would he take something from her as a reminder, like you talked about?
No. But unpracticed killers surprise us by what they remove from the scene simply to keep the police from finding it.
“Or maybe,” said Lobdell, “he brought them back here to get rid of them. Panicked or forgot.”
Nick grasped for the logic in the sheets but couldn’t find it. No method to the madness. “Let’s get some paper and toss this place,” he said.
“I’ll call deputies to seal it off,” said Lobdell. “I’d hate to see Tarzan and Gidget clean this all up while we’re gone.”
IT TOOK three hours to get the search warrant and back to Bonnett’s home. Nick typed the supporting affidavit while Lobdell filled in the statutory page and dictated a “hero paragraph” that made Nick sound like a seasoned murder investigator rather than the first-time lead detective he was. Lobdell kept harping on the “training and experience” that led Nick to the “strong opinion” that felony evidence would be found in Cory Bonnett’s home. Lobdell said the secret was not to overstep the warrant once you were inside. If you had a doubt, like could you open a locked chest, or could you stick your head up into the attic, then you went back to the magistrate and got another warrant. That way, nothing got thrown out of court.
Just as Nick was ready to leave the homicide room his phone rang. It was Roger Stoltz, who said he was sorry that Nick had missed today’s four o’clock appointment. He had been looking forward to talking with Nick. Was everything okay?
Nick apologized. Felt like a school kid without his homework. Told himself it’s easy to forget appointments when evidence starts falling into your lap.
Stoltz asked him not to worry, said he was just in from D.C. a few hours ago and ready to go home.
“I’m looking forward to the weekend with Marie,” he said. “Now Nick, look. My secretary here says you wanted to talk about Janelle. Anytime. Anywhere. I’ll tell you what I know.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Nick, do you have a suspect?”
“Possibly.”
Silence for a moment. A very deep sigh from the other end.
“I would still like to know about the Newport Beach apartment,” said Nick.
“Anytime and anywhere.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Regards to Max and Monika. And to your brothers. We’ll see David in church Sunday.”
“We’ll be there, too,” said Nick.
By the time they got back to Cory Bonnett’s house the afternoon had gone cool. A stiff breeze rattled yellow leaves off the cottonwoods. A raven tore across the sky with a mockingbird after him.
The blue and white pickup truck was gone. Two deputies stood near the garage, two more in a unit blocking the driveway.
“Good to have the troops,” said Lobdell. “I had my hand in the cookie jar once, the guy comes home. I’m in the kitchen checking the cutlery box for a missing carving knife and he jumps me. Never heard him. Didn’t see him. I got him under control, but he could have shot me or stabbed me easy.”
Superior court judge Wes Dickinson had thrown them a loose one, good for the main house, the pool house, the garage, and both vehicles in the garage. Even the trunks of the cars. It specified not only the bloodstained sheets but “evidence of the subject’s presence at the SunBlesst packinghouse on October 1 or 2 of this year; evidence of the subject as party to or having knowledge of the murder of Janelle Vonn; evidence that the subject had prior knowledge that this murder had been planned or would or was about to happen.”