I don't want to get into Trevor Wine's file on Max Darrow without involving him. We'll do that in the morning. Here are the prelims. Get some sleep, I'll see you at nine A.M.
– Boss
A file was attached. She downloaded the document and decided to print it out. Reading too much on a computer monitor made her eyes ache. She grabbed the pages out of her printer and slipped under the covers. Oscar managed to jump on the bed, but Loren could see him wince from the effort. The old cat cuddled next to her. Loren liked that.
She scanned the documents and was surprised to see that Trevor Wine had already come up with a decent hypothesis for the crime. According to the notes, Max Darrow, a former detective with the Las Vegas Police Department and current resident of Raleigh Heights, Nevada, had been found dead in a rental car near the Hebrew cemetery in Newark. According to the report, Max Darrow had been staying at the Newark Airport Howard Johnson's. He had rented a car from someplace called LuxDrive. The car, a Ford Taurus, had been driven, per the speedometer, eight miles in the two days the car had been in Darrow's possession.
Loren turned to the second page. Here was where things got interesting.
Max Darrow was found shot dead in the driver's seat of the rental car. No one had called it in. A patrol car had spotted the bloodstains on the window. When Darrow was found, his pants and boxers were pulled down around his ankles. His wallet was gone. The report stated that Darrow was wearing no jewelry when found, implying that he'd probably been robbed of those items too.
According to the preliminary report- everything was still preliminary- the blood found in the car, especially the trajectory on the windshield and driver-side window, showed that Darrow had been shot while sitting in the driver's seat of the car. Splatters were also found on the inside of his pants and boxers, which would be consistent with the man having his pants pulled down before the gun fired, not after.
The working theory was obvious: Max Darrow had decided to get lucky- or more likely, to buy some "get lucky." He had picked up the wrong prostitute who waited for the right moment- pants down- and then rolled him. Something had gone wrong then, though it was hard to say what. Maybe Darrow, being an ex-cop, had tried to make a hero play. Maybe the prostitute was simply too strung out. Whatever, she ends up shooting and killing Darrow. She takes what she can find- wallet, jewelry- and runs.
The investigative team, in cooperation with the Newark Police Department, would squeeze the prostitution trade. Someone would know what happened. They'd talk.
Case solved.
Loren put down the report. Wine's theory made sense if you didn't know about Darrow's fingerprints being found in Sister Mary Rose's room. Still, now that Loren knew that the lead theory was crap- what did she have left? Well, for one thing, this was probably a pretty clever setup.
Play it out for a second.
You want to kill Darrow. You get in a car with him. You put a gun to his head. You tell him to drive to a sleazy part of town. You make him pull down his pants- anyone who'd ever watched any forensic TV show would know that if you pulled the pants down after the shooting, the blood splatters would show that. Then you shoot him in the head, take his money and jewelry, make it look like a robbery.
Trevor Wine had bought it.
In a vacuum Loren probably would have come to the same conclusion.
So what would be the next logical step?
She sat up in bed.
Wine's theory had been that Max Darrow had done some cruisin' and picked up the wrong girl. But if that wasn't the case- Loren was sure of that much- how did the killer get in the car with Darrow in the first place? Wouldn't it be most logical to assume that Darrow was with his killer from the beginning of his car trip?
That meant Darrow probably knew his killer. Or at least did not view him as a threat.
She checked the mileage again. Only eight miles. Assuming he used it the day before, well, that meant that he hadn't driven very far.
There was something else to consider: Another set of fingerprints had been found in Sister Mary Rose's room- more specifically, on her body.
Okay, Loren thought, suppose Darrow was working with someone else- a partner maybe. They'd stay together, right? Or near each other, at the very least.
Darrow had been staying at the Howard Johnson's.
She checked the file. The rental car company LuxDrive- they had a counter at the same hotel.
So that was where it all started. At the Howard Johnson's.
Most hotels have security cameras. Had Trevor Wine checked out the ones at the Howard Johnson's yet?
Hard to say, but it would definitely be worth it for her to check it out.
Either way, it could wait until morning, right?
She tried to sleep. She sat in bed and closed her eyes. She did this for well over an hour. From the other room, she heard her mother's snores. The case was heating up. Loren felt the buzz in her blood. She pushed back the covers and got out of bed. There was no way she could sleep. Not now. Not when there was something of a clue in the air. And tomorrow she'd have a whole new set of problems, what with Ed Steinberg calling the feds and Trevor Wine getting involved.
She might be taken off the case.
Loren threw on her sweats, grabbed her wallet and ID. She tiptoed outside, started up her car, and headed for the Howard Johnson's.
Chapter 27
NOTHING WORSE than crappy porn.
Lying in the motel room bed, that was what Charles Talley had been thinking before the phone rang. He'd been watching some weirdly edited porno on the Spectravision Pay-Per-View channel. It had cost him $12.95, but the damn movie cut out all the good stuff, all the close-ups and, well, genitalia both male and female.
What the hell is this crap?
Worse yet, the movie, in order to make up for the lost time, kept replaying over and over the same parts. So the girl would be like sliding down to her knees and then they'd show this guy's face tilting back and then they'd go back to the girl sliding down, the guy's face, the girl sliding down…
It was maddening.
Talley was about to call down to the front desk, give them a piece of his mind. This was the friggin' United States of America. A man has a right to watch porn in the privacy of his own hotel room. Not this chicken-ass soft stuff. Real porn. Hardcore action. This stuff, this soft porn- might as well be put on the Disney Channel.
That was when the phone rang. Talley checked his watch.
About time. He'd been waiting for this callback for hours now.
Talley reached for the phone, put it to his ear. On the screen the girl was panting the exact same way for, what, ten minutes now. This crap was beyond boring.
"Yeah."
Click. Dial tone.
A hang-up. Talley looked at the receiver as if it might give him a second response. It didn't. He put the receiver down and sat up. He waited for the phone to ring again. After five minutes passed, he started to worry.
What was going on here?
Nothing had turned out as planned. He'd flown in from Reno, what, three days ago now? Hard to remember exactly. His assignment yesterday had been clear and easy: Follow this guy named Matt Hunter. Keep a tail on him.
Why?
He had no idea. Talley had been told where to start off- parked outside some big law office in Newark- and to follow Hunter wherever he went.
But the guy, this Matt Hunter, had spotted the tail almost immediately.
How?
Hunter was strictly an amateur. But something had gone very wrong. Hunter had made him right away. And then, worse- much worse- when Talley called him a few hours ago, Matt Hunter knew who he was.
He had used Talley's full name, for chrissake.
This confused Talley.
He didn't handle confusion well. He placed some calls, tried to find out what was going on, but nobody had picked up.
That confused him even more.