She ripped through Cobb’s chest-one drawer after the next-disappointed that the gun wasn’t here. She lifted the mattress, and looked beneath the bed. Moving to the closet, she checked the top shelf, searched through Cobb’s clothing, and bent over for a quick look at the floor. And then she stopped.
It wasn’t the gun. It was a blue binder hidden behind a shoe box.
She pushed the shoes away and grabbed it. When she read the table of contents-when she saw Lily Hight’s name at the top and noted that the binder was overflowing with paperwork she had never seen before-she didn’t stop to think it over.
She held it tight and closed the door.
Then she hustled into the living room for a quick look at Cobb’s computer. The hard drive revealed nothing out of the ordinary. But as she checked his bookmarks and skimmed through his email, she slowed down some.
It looked like Cobb was a frequent visitor of the dating Web sites. Lena counted at least one hundred e-mails from a woman calling herself Betty Kim. Picking an e-mail at random, Kim was describing her body and what she wanted in a sexual relationship. She called herself “hot,” left nothing to the imagination, and wanted to send Cobb a couple of nude photos. In his reply, Cobb stated that he loved eating sushi and going to the movies. He agreed that she sounded hot and would like to see the photos as soon as possible.
Lena’s mind shot to the surface.
She could hear that old woman shouting at someone in Spanish. When the shadow of a man moved across the curtains, she felt the rush of adrenaline and shut down the computer. Cobb was home. She could hear his key in the lock. Grabbing the murder book, she fled into the bedroom and tossed the binder out the window. Then she climbed outside, clinging to the sill, and grinding to push the window closed.
She heard the front door open. She heard Cobb’s voice through the glass. She made the drop and hit the concrete hard. But she was on automatic pilot now. Out of patience. Out of understanding. Out of everything except bullets.
A jet flashed through the sky with its landing gear down, the noise deafening, the ground shaking. Lena grabbed the murder book and ran up the street as fast as she could.
43
She hung up the phone and turned to Vaughan.
“It’s a TracFone,” she said. “There’s no name attached to the number. The phone hasn’t been used since.”
They were working in that corner office at the end of the hall, the one that wasn’t wired for picture and sound. Cobb’s murder books were laid out on the table side by side. They had begun by pulling Lily’s cell-phone bills from both binders for comparison, and unfortunately, they didn’t match. Someone had been calling Lily the week before she was murdered. The calls began the day after she left Club 3 AM with the man in the pinstripe suit and continued with frequency during the week.
“When was the last call made?” Vaughan asked.
“Early evening on the night she was murdered. They spoke for seven minutes.”
“The guy she met at the club,” he said. “The killer.”
Lena nodded, glancing at the cell-phone bill that had been in the murder book Cobb had given her. “So why isn’t this number listed on this bill?”
The answer seemed obvious. They were dealing with a group of desperate people. People who felt cornered and had been willing to manipulate and manufacture evidence. People who didn’t want her or anyone else in the future to see that phone number. They were dealing with a man like Dan Cobb who had filled out a property request card from a case he worked eight years ago because he needed a gun. The same 9-mm Smith that was used to murder Bosco and Gant. And in all probability, the same gun that put three holes in Escabar and was used to coldcock his guard before that trash bag went over his head and the man smothered to death.
Vaughan opened his briefcase and pulled out a thick file. “That’s not the question, Lena. The question is, what did Bennett and Watson use in court?”
Leafing through the papers, he found another copy of the cell-phone bill and set it beside the other two. Most of the numbers had been blacked out with a Sharpie-the bill featuring only those calls that came from Jacob Gant. But even a permanent marker couldn’t cover the text underneath once they turned the bill into the bright light. The number from the TracFone had been removed.
A moment passed like they’d hit a gap in the universe. They were dealing with a dirty cop and a triad of dirty prosecutors.
Lena lowered her voice. “You want to bet that the copy Paladino received didn’t include this phone number, either?”
Vaughan still appeared stunned. “No,” he said slowly. “I wouldn’t take that bet. I think the same thing’s going on with the e-mails Gant sent the girl.”
“How?”
“I was reading these while you were on the phone. They don’t match, either. The version in the murder book Cobb gave you makes Gant sound like an angry man who’s threatening to hurt Lily. The version from the binder you found in Cobb’s closet reads like Gant was worried about her and offering help.”
Vaughan set the two e-mails down. While Lena read them, he returned to his briefcase and found the version Bennett and Watson had used in court. As Lena examined the third document, she couldn’t help thinking about how much this ripped at her faith and trust.
“They submitted an edited version,” she whispered.
He gave her a look. “You ever hear of the Michael Skakel case?”
She nodded. “Ethel Kennedy’s nephew. He was tried for the murder of Martha Moxley. They were kids. She was fifteen at the time.”
Vaughan pulled a chair over and sat down. “The prosecutor took audio recordings of Skakel talking about masturbation and his fear of being seen and edited them to sound like he was confessing to the murder and afraid he might get caught. When Skakel appealed his conviction, the judge turned out to be just as ignorant, just as morally challenged as the prosecutor.”
Lena reached for the murder book she had taken from Cobb’s apartment. The binder was stuffed with hundreds of documents that weren’t included in the book she had received from the detective just a few days ago. As she paged through the binder, she saw something she recognized and stopped. It was a copy of the polygraph results Paladino had sent to Higgins, Bennett, and Watson. But there was something stapled to the back of the report. It turned out to be a letter addressed to Bennett. A letter from Cesar Rodriguez, the forensic psycho-physiologist who had performed the polygraph on Gant. As Lena started reading she began to realize that Rodriguez was making a plea to Bennett on Gant’s behalf. According to Rodriguez, there was no indication whatsoever that Gant had anything to do with Lily Hight’s murder. In all his years working for the LAPD’s Scientific Investigation Division, Rodriguez had never seen a case so clear-cut and was willing to champion Gant’s cause and put his reputation on the line.
It was a plea that Bennett obviously saw fit to ignore.
For Lena, reading Rodriguez’s letter burned in her chest like a white-hot sun drying up rain before it could hit the ground. Trial attorneys playing with the facts like politicians running for office happened every day. She knew that. But this was something different. Something beyond sleazy. Something beyond sick.
“I want to meet with Bennett,” she said.
“Why? You look pissed off, and these people are dangerous. I don’t want to scare you, Lena. But all of a sudden, we’re sitting in the same seats Bosco and Gant sat in.”
She shook her head. “I need to see him about something. Would you call him for me? I don’t have his number.”
Vaughan gave her a long look, but finally picked up the phone and dialed Bennett’s office.
“Tracy, it’s Greg,” he said into the phone. “Is he available? I need to talk to him. It’s important.”