Выбрать главу

Jonna pointed at me. She had never mentioned a recording, had not given a recording to me, and the police had not found such a recording in her possessions. I wondered if she knew she was lying. I wondered if she believed it.

“Go in the house, Jonna. Alan and I will work it out.”

She didn’t go into the house. She moved toward him.

“Two million dollars isn’t enough.”

Levy wet his lips. He looked from me to Jonna, then back to me, and his hands went back to his belt.

He said, “How much do you want?”

We had him with those words. Alan Levy had demonstrated knowledge and awareness of the pictures by negotiating with us. We had him, and Marx would now be issuing commands to effect the arrest, but then Jonna said something else.

“There isn’t enough.”

Jonna took a knee as if bending to tie her shoe, then came up like a sprinter out of the blocks with what we would later confirm was a rat-tail file she had palmed when she stumbled into the tool rack in the surveillance van. She went for his neck, hitting him so hard she knocked him backwards into the Dodge and onto the ground.

Everyone had been so concerned Levy might kill Jonna, it never occurred to us she would kill him.

The shooter teams crashed from their hides, but they were far away and unable to shoot with the three of us clumped together. Pike burst out of the trees. I grabbed Jonna from behind, but she had wrapped herself around Levy, stabbing him in the neck and the face and the head. I caught her arm to pry her away, but that’s when I heard the popping, and then Joe Pike shouting.

“Gun!”

Levy had a small black pistol pressed deep into her belly and made a high, keening sound as he shot her. He pulled the trigger as fast as he could.

Jonna suddenly stepped back. I pushed her aside, then moved for the gun, but Levy had already dropped it. He was holding the bloody rag of his neck with both hands when Pike slammed into him.

Jonna stumbled backwards, sat down, then burped a red mist. I tore off my shirt and pressed it onto her belly as the SWAT guys swarmed over us.

“Hang on, Jonna. Hang on. Keep breathing.”

I don’t think she saw me. Her mouth was set in the determined line, but something in her eyes had changed. The seeds of anger were softer. I’m not sure, but I like to think so. I hope so.

Jonna Hill died as the paramedics arrived.

THE ROSE GARDEN

47

THE SANTA Monica sky was incandescent with shoreline haze, filling Alan Levy’s backyard with light so bright the swimming pool sparkled. City Councilman Nobel Wilts and Chief Marx were standing beside me at the edge of the rose garden. Thirty-two varieties of roses had been carefully removed and heaped in a pile on the far side of the yard. They would not be replanted. When the city finished its work, the roses would be discarded.

Marx waved over Sharon Stivic, who was the chief coroner investigator overseeing the recovery.

“How much longer?”

“It’s a big hole. You have to be careful with the soil. We don’t want to miss something important.”

The bodies were found using a gas sensor that detected the unusual concentrations of methane generated by decomposing flesh. A side-scanning sonar had then been employed to determine the exact locations, and now members of the medical examiner’s office were scraping away the soil.

Wilts said, “Gotta be his wife and kids, right?”

Marx nodded. The sonar had defined their shapes and sizes.

“Won’t know for sure until the identification, but yeah-it’s an adult and two children.”

“Jesus Christ, I met the woman. I’m pretty sure I met her. It was a while ago.”

Wilts scrunched his face, trying to remember whether he had met Alan Levy’s wife or not, but finally gave up. He mopped his brow, then scowled at the sky.

“Fuck this. I’m getting out of the sun.”

We watched him walk to the house, which was swarming with criminalists, detectives, and reporters. Levy’s street was crowded with so many news vans, coroner vehicles, and gawkers that I had parked three blocks away. None of the newspeople had showed up when Yvonne Bennett was murdered, but Yvonne had not been a downtown attorney who had murdered his family-Yvonne was only a nobody who had once protected her sister.

Marx had called early that morning, telling me the bodies had been located the night before. He had asked me to come to the recovery, so I did, though I had seen enough bodies. I didn’t want to see more, but I was hoping for answers. Both for myself and the Repkos.

I gestured at the growing mound of dirt.

“Might find Debra Repko’s PDA in there.”

“Might.”

“Or in the house.”

“If we’re lucky.”

“Or more pictures.”

“I hope to hell not.”

“Levy’s autopsy show anything?”

“Nothing. Brain was clear. No tumors, cysts, or lesions. No drugs. Blood chemistry looked fine. What can you say?”

“What about the people at his firm?”

“Stunned, like everyone else. Levy told them his wife left him and took the kids east. That was eight years ago, just before Frostokovich.”

“Neighbors add anything?”

“Most of’m never met the man. We’ll be reconstructing this mess for months.”

There was nothing more to say. You want them alive to answer the questions. Why did you do this? Were there only seven, or did you kill more? Now we had questions that would never be answered. Why had Jonna Hill done what she did?

A booming laugh came from the house. Marx and I turned to see Wilts with a beautiful female reporter from one of the local television affiliates. Wilts was fingering her ass.

I said, “Does he know you suspected him?”

“Nah. I didn’t see the point.”

Marx had gone to the Repkos and the rest of the families to explain why he misled them, but had not told them his true suspect was Wilts. A fixer to the end, he kept Wilts out of it. I respected his courage for facing them.

Two men with blunt-nosed shovels were up to their thighs in a four-foot-by-eight-foot hole. They scraped the soil away one inch at a time. Both men stopped digging at the same time, then one stooped to touch something. They wore rubber gloves.

“I’m going to take off, Chief. I don’t want to see this.”

Marx stared at the ground for a moment.

“Do you think she taped him, the way she said? When he gave her the pictures?”

“She made it up. She made up a lot of things. Her sister was the same way.”

“If that tape exists, I’d like to find it.”

“You have her interview.”

“Hearing that tape would help. Not just what he said, but how. You never know what the sonofabitch might have said. It could explain a lot. Might answer a lot of questions.”

“If you find it, let me know.”

I hoped he was right.

I left him standing by the grave in Alan Levy’s backyard, and walked through the crowd to the street. The sky was a beautiful crystalline blue, as bright as any I had ever seen, but a certain darkness could blot the sky, even in the middle of the day.

Darkness had lived in Alan Levy. A dark shade touched Jonna Hill long before her sister was murdered. Debra Repko brushed darkness and never returned. Why had she gone for a walk with him? Why had he killed her on that night, and not another? We would never know.

The darkness frightens me, but what it does to us frightens me even more. Maybe this is why I do what I do. I chase the darkness to make room for the light.

Robert Crais

Robert Crais is the author of the best-selling Elvis Cole novels. A native of Louisiana, he grew up on the banks of the Mississippi River in a blue collar family of oil refinery workers and police officers. He purchased a secondhand paperback of Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister when he was fifteen, which inspired his lifelong love of writing, Los Angeles, and the literature of crime fiction. Other literary influences include Dashiell Hammett, Ernest Hemingway, Robert B. Parker, and John Steinbeck.