“I’ve been reading about the murders at Club 3 AM,” he said. “And I’m very concerned about Tim Hight. He’s my friend, and that’s why I called you.”
Lena glanced at Vaughan, then turned back to London. “Have you spoken with him?” she said. “Did he tell you what happened that night?”
“No,” London said. “He won’t take my call. We haven’t talked for a long time.”
“Since you let him go?”
A beat went by before London finally nodded. Lena tried not to show her disappointment. Vaughan picked up the slack.
“Why did you fire him?” he asked.
“I didn’t want to,” London said. “He took a month off after Lily was murdered. When he came back, he was different. I tried to overlook as much as I could. But at a certain point, no matter how much sympathy I may have had for what he was going through … it just wasn’t working and I had to let him go.”
“What about before that?” Lena said. “What about his relationship with his daughter?”
“What are you talking about?”
London obviously thought of Hight as a friend. Lena tried to work through the subject as gently as possible without sounding too vague.
“Did you ever notice anything odd? Anything out of the ordinary?”
“They were close,” he said. “But not that kind of close.”
“How do you know?” Vaughan asked.
“Because I’ve worked with him for most of my life, and I know who Tim Hight is. I produced Prairie Winds, his best motion picture. We spent three months living in tents and working in conditions that would break most men. Believe me. You do time like that with a guy and you run out of secrets. You walk away knowing each other like brothers.”
“You’re not upset, are you?” Lena said.
“Not at all. I know that you have to ask questions like this. It’s part of your job. If I can help, I’m happy to do it. But you’ve gotta understand something. Tim might be drinking and smoking and doping it up, but all of that started after Lily’s murder, not before. It isn’t part of who he was. He loved Lily. He was ruined by her death. Ruined by the way she died as much as the death itself. I don’t know what losing a child would be like, what demons are haunting the guy. All I hope for is that he gets help.”
“I’m guessing you knew Lily and spent time with her as well,” Lena said.
London looked away for a moment, eyeing the memory. “Tim was a great father. He used to bring her to work as often as he could. She liked cameras. She had real talent and got along with everyone on the set.”
“What about Jacob Gant?” Vaughan asked. “Did Hight ever talk about him?”
London nodded. “He was worried that Lily was growing up too fast and that her friendship with Gant was more than a friendship. Gant was in his mid-twenties, right? Lily was only sixteen. I mean, that kind of thing worked for Elvis. But in the real world, what dad wouldn’t be worried?”
Lena had been watching London. His story presented Tim Hight as a loving father. From what she could tell it was perfect. Everything about it was perfect. Everything except for the way London was cradling that paper coffee cup in his hand. Ever since they had begun the interview, London had been rotating the cup and swirling the brew. And that’s why nothing about the moment was perfect. It was supposed to be a cup of coffee, but London was treating it like a glass of bourbon.
Lena glanced around the tent and didn’t see anyone, then turned back to London. “Do you know what happens to people who try to mislead or interfere with police officers investigating a homicide?”
London froze up. Vaughan seemed just as surprised by the question.
“Do you know?” she repeated.
London didn’t say anything, still appearing shocked and trying to collect himself.
“If you want us to pull your phone records, I will,” she said. “But if you make me do it, if you waste more of our time, things aren’t gonna work out so well for you.”
London didn’t respond, but something was beginning to show on his face. Vaughan appeared to notice it as well.
Lena checked the tent again. Two people were standing by the catering truck, so she lowered her voice.
“When was the last time you spoke with Hight? And please don’t say that it was when you fired him, because all three of us know that’s not true.”
London couldn’t look her in the eye. “Yesterday,” he whispered finally. “We talked yesterday.”
“And he put you up to this?”
London nodded. “He said he needed some help. I thought I owed him.”
“Did you go over the things you told us today?”
“We talked about it. He had some ideas.”
“What else did he say?”
London paused, barely able to get the words out. “He said that you think he did it. That he murdered Lily.”
38
It was the kind of case where with every new seam, every half step forward, she hoped for the best but got pushed back. It had been that way from the very beginning, from the moment she walked into Club 3 AM and discovered that one of the two dead bodies was Jacob Gant. And it had been that way with Pete London and the story he’d told, written and directed by his friend Tim Hight.
On the drive over to the Westside this morning, Lena had been listening to KPCC, an NPR station broadcasting out of Pasadena. The host of the program was interviewing a baseball player at spring training in Clearwater, Florida-a slugger who had been averaging nearly fifty home runs a year and was considered to be an automatic first-ballot pick for the Hall of Fame once he retired. What struck Lena most about the interview was the player talking about how he’d dug his way out of a hitting slump last August. After a long series of strikeouts, he began to realize that the longer the slump went on, the more the percentages began to move in his favor. The longer he went without a hit, the more likely he was to break out of it at any moment and find the zone.
Lena watched Vaughan search through a stack of DVDs piled up beside his computer, and along side a single pair of headphones. He’d pulled a clip from Gant’s trial that he wanted to show her, but they couldn’t watch it in here with the sound up because of what Vaughan had found in his phone. Lena understood all too well that she wasn’t qualified to sweep a room for electronics. But after watching Bobby Rathbone search her house last year, she knew a few things to look for. The bug Vaughan had found in his phone was the obvious one. Unfortunately, it looked to her like there were at least three more in the room.
“Let’s go,” he whispered under his breath.
Vaughan slipped the DVD into his pocket and they walked out, heading around the corner for another office at the end of the hall. As Lena entered, Vaughan followed her in and closed the door.
“It’s okay,” Vaughan said. “He’s away on vacation.”
“Your office is wired, Greg.”
Vaughan rolled a chair over to the computer and switched it on. “I know,” he said. “I’ve been coming in here to use the phone.”
“I’m not talking about what you found in your phone. I counted three more, and I’m not even a pro.”
He stopped and looked at her. “Where?” he said
“The surge protector that your computer is plugged into. That was easy because I found one exactly like it at my place last year.”
“Where are the other two?”
“The wall plate covering the outlet above the credenza, and another just like it facing your desk. Both are wired for video and sound. If you look in the middle of the plate you’ll see what I mean. That’s not a screw holding the plate to the wall. It’s a small camera.”
Vaughan sat back in the chair, stunned. “They’re watching. They can see what I’m doing.”
“The signal’s probably not strong enough to reach the street.”
“It wouldn’t need to,” he said quietly. “Bennett’s office is right upstairs.”
He let out a deep breath and seemed to be letting the worry get to him.