Lena stepped around Escabar’s corpse, her eyes dancing between the computer monitor on the desk and the television mounted over the fireplace. The screens were connected, the images identical.
“Files are being deleted, Lena. Look at the size of them.”
She checked the screen, searching for a CANCEL option. When she found the button, she clicked it and sat down at the desk.
“Media files,” she said. “The security cameras.”
“Are we too late?”
“Not necessarily,” she said.
“Escabar told you that he made a copy?”
She nodded, her wheels turning, “He was burning it when I called.”
There was a stack of blank DVDs on the desk, but nothing else. The drive in the computer was empty. Lena searched through the desk drawers but found nothing there as well. After giving Escabar’s corpse a quick check, she turned back to the monitor and tried to think it through.
There were a number of programs that Escabar had opened. Each one had been minimized and parked at the bottom of the screen. As she read the icons, she realized that Escabar had burned a copy for her without closing the program. Clicking the icon, the software opened and a graphic box popped up.
Would you like to make another copy?
The program had recorded a mirror image of the project and saved it. She glanced at Vaughan unable to speak, then loaded a blank disk into the computer and clicked YES. The next five minutes idled by in the key of slow-the anxiety was overwhelming. But after the drive stopped churning, Lena highlighted the disk and a video image began rolling on both the monitor and the television mounted over the fireplace.
“My God, it’s her,” Vaughan said.
Lena stood up and walked over to the television, mesmerized by the image.
She was sitting at the bar with a glass of white wine. She had on that red lipstick, and was wearing a black dress without a bra. There wasn’t much to the dress, and her breasts were loose and only partially concealed. The bar was lit entirely by candlelight, and Lily seemed to glow more than everyone else in the darkened room. A man dressed in a pinstripe suit was standing beside her, his head lost in the shadows above the frame. But Escabar had called it right. Lily was laughing with the man and rubbing her fingers over his hand.
“Does she look sixteen to you?” Vaughan asked.
Lena shook her head and offered a sad smile that didn’t last very long. Nothing about Lily Hight looked like a teenager on the Friday night one week before she was raped and murdered. The sheen of her blond hair. The glint in her eyes. Her spirit and beauty and magnetic smile. On this night, Lily looked like the kind of woman no man could walk away from.
Lena tried to push through the shock and concentrate on the man Lily was with. There wasn’t much to see, and the camera angle was more than frustrating. She thought he might be wearing a wedding band, but when Lily finally lifted her fingers away, the man cupped his hand and lowered it below the bar. His pinstripe suit appeared expensive. As he turned and pressed his chest into Lily’s bare shoulder, Lena’s eyes zeroed in on the left lapel of his jacket.
“There’s a mark on his lapel,” she said.
Vaughan moved closer to the screen and squinted. “I’ve got it. I see it.”
“Some sort of flaw in the material.”
“You think it’s from a pin?”
It seemed obvious to her now. The more she looked at it-but then the shock returned and that anxious feeling swam back through her chest: Lily was gathering her things. The man was helping her off the stool and taking her away. And with only two short steps they were out of the candlelight’s reach. Lily wasn’t glowing anymore. She was passing through the shadows with the man in the pinstripe suit leading her to the door.
41
Lena lowered the visor and reached for her sunglasses. She was driving east on the San Bernardino Freeway, and the sun was beginning to rise directly in front of her. It looked like the freeway was burning at the horizon line-like the road was taking her on a straight shot into the flames.
She wondered if it wasn’t a warning of some kind.
Martin Orth had more news. He wanted to see her. Apparently, the news was so “good” that they couldn’t talk about it over the phone.
She hadn’t slept well last night. She’d dreamed about Lily. She’d dreamed about her in that black dress. Lena had been sitting at the bar beside her, trying to get a bead on the guy who was hitting on her. She could see them holding hands. She could see his pinstripe suit. But every time she looked up at his face, his head was gone. Not missing like it had been forgotten by an artist or framed out by a photographer. The man’s head had been cut off. She could see blood rushing down his shirt and cascading all over his hands. She could see Lily cleaning her fingers with a napkin.
It wasn’t the kind of dream Lena really wanted to stick with her. She had woken up three or four times-jolted out of her sleep in a cold sweat. But after fifteen or twenty minutes passed, she couldn’t help drifting back into the stream. And each time she’d find herself sitting at that bar again, watching Lily walk out of the club with her killer.
Lena looked at the pack of Camel Lights on the dash, but fought the urge to light one. Within fifteen minutes she had reached the crime lab, passed through security, and was walking down the hall to Martin Orth’s office. Because of the early hour, there weren’t many people around. About halfway down she noticed a fragrance in the air-a new building smell that seemed to permeate the hall. The scent worked like a time machine and brought back memories of being a girl in the second grade and walking to class on her first day of school. Memories of going to work with her dad, a welder who worked on high-rise buildings and forever changed the skyline in Denver.
Why was she thinking these thoughts? Why was she dreaming these dreams?
She found Orth at his desk. He was staring at his Mr. Coffee coffeemaker and trying to appear patient while it sputtered and brewed. He looked a mile or two past tired and more than ready to drink the entire pot on his own.
“Okay,” she said. “Tell me what I need to know.”
Orth’s eyes moved away from the coffeemaker and found her by the door.
“You can arrest Hight,” he said. “The blood on his shoe came from Gant. No doubt about it. Hight was at Club 3 AM the night Bosco and Gant were shot. Hight was in the room.”
Lena sat in the chair by Orth’s desk. His eyes had moved back to the coffeemaker, and there was something wrong with his voice.
“I’m not arresting Tim Hight for anything,” she said.
“Why not? The DNA proves that he was there.”
And so did the cocaine that they found at his house, the street cam photograph of Hight driving away from the club, maybe even the hundred-dollar bills. But that’s all any of it proved-that Hight was there.
Lena had been chewing it over ever since Orth gave her the results from Lily’s jeans linking her murder to a third man. There had to be another explanation for why Tim Hight was at the club the night Bosco and Gant were shot and killed. After remembering Gant’s brother telling her that Gant and Hight had argued earlier in the day, she’d put it together and thought she knew what the argument was about.
Gant had to have told Hight that he was on the brink of discovering who really murdered his daughter. Gant would have blurted it out in the heat of the moment.
He didn’t kill Lily, and he and Johnny Bosco were going to prove it tonight.
Hight never would have believed him, and so the argument would have progressed. But Hight would have kept an eye on Gant. And Bosco’s involvement would have worked on him over the course of the day. When Gant took off to meet Bosco, Hight might have been stewing on it long enough to follow him.
“Hight’s the one,” Orth said. “But you don’t look like you’re buying it, Lena.”