Last Shot Read online

  Tim returned Mary to her rightful post and nosed through the nightstand drawers. The top held a variety of condoms and lubricants and a tray filled with single earrings. Tim wondered if whatever house Chase shared with his fiancée was as well stocked. A leather-bound notebook in the second drawer held an anthropological accounting that might have put Kinsey to shame. Silver-dollar areolas. Landing-strip trim. Faint blond down across lower back. Tim flipped through May and June searching for one name. No mention of Tess. Was Chase too smart? Did she not make the best-of reel?

  When Tim glanced up, Bear was standing before the swung-open doors of the armoire, regarding a wall of gift-wrapped boxes. Pulling out the top package, he tilted it to show Tim the Frederick’s of Hollywood logo on the paper. Lingerie. Outcall party favors?

  Below, a carved see-no-evil monkey served as a bookend to a row of generic DVDs, his two simian cronies bracing similar collections on the shelves below.

  Bear plucked out a DVD and plugged it into the player underlying a massive plasma screen. Chase’s naked ass bobbing up and down, the limbs of a woman crabbing up around him. Bear regarded the footage as if considering Chase’s form, ready to hold up a judging card. The woman’s face popped into view over Chase’s shoulder, her mouth open in a moan, but the DVD seemed muted. Bear raised the volume, but the bars already stretched across half the screen. Tim backtracked the camera angle to a wall-mounted mirror. He pressed his fingertips to the glass. No separation between his nails and their reflection. “One-way,” he said.

  “There goes the obvious motive.” Bear ejected the disk. “I don’t think Chase was worried about news of Tess leaking to his fiancée. Nor do I think a knocked-up broad from the high desert would throw his world into Puritan uproar.”

  “No, he doesn’t strike one as the most discreet individual.” Tim looked from the urn to the DVD in Bear’s hand and thought someone could probably write a treatise on the psychology stretching between them. “Can we take the DVDs as evidence?”

  Bear stared at the seventy or so unlabeled DVDs. “You’re thinking Tess makes a guest appearance?”

  Though the notion of enduring a review of Chase’s humping through the twelve seasons was less than palatable, Tim nodded. “It’ll give Guerrera something to do while his café cubano congeals.”

  “If there was footage, I doubt Chase would be reckless enough to keep it after Tess was killed,” Bear said. “We can talk to the AUSA, but even at Camarillo Vet-n-Law, we know prosecutors won’t green-light a warrant for the DVDs anyway. Not with the Kagan lawyers and various elected allies weighing in from around the country. Think ahead to how appalled—appalled—they’ll be about the way our pursuit of unrelated sensitive materials undermines the murder victim’s dignity.”

  “Unless the tapes themselves are illegal,” Tim said. “Then we could seize them and avoid an ass chewing from Tannino.” Bear shrugged. Also unfamiliar with state statutes, Tim flicked open his Nextel and dialed home. “Is it illegal to videotape yourself having sex with someone without their consent?”

  Dray said, “Babe, all you have to do is ask.”

  Tim laughed, then said, “Seriously.”

  “That’s one of those laws that makes you wonder what they’re smoking in Sacramento. Video without consent is perfectly okay in California, but audio without consent is illegal.”

  “Clever prick kept the sound off,” Tim said.

  “Who’s this clever prick you’ve been cheating on me with?”

  Edwin floated into view at Bear’s shoulder, and Tim muttered, “Gotta go.”

  “You seem to have lost your way en route to the door?” Edwin suggested.

  Bear slotted the DVD back into the row and closed the armoire. “We need to speak with Dolan.”

  “He’s quite upset.”

  “Us, too. Distraught, even.” Bear took a step forward, forcing Edwin’s head to tilt back until his Adam’s apple bulged out. But if Edwin was intimidated, he didn’t show it. A man practiced at contending with the whims of plutocrats didn’t scare easy.

  “Mr. Kagan has gone to the indoor pool.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “I’ll be happy to escort you.” The impeccable white glove unfurled toward the door, and for not the first time, Tim wondered if Edwin might be holographic. L.A.’s rich loved their musty props, but even for the town that produced Citizen Kane, Edwin seemed a stretch.

  Bear and Tim hung back on one of the endless halls that conveyed them soundlessly across the mansion.

  “What kind of idiot has an indoor pool in Los Angeles?” Bear whispered.

  “The kind of idiot who has an outdoor one already.”

  They arrived at an unimposing door off a dank corridor, and Edwin rapped on it once and pushed it open. Diffuse green light undulated around the dark walls like sheets of gauze. Dolan’s form streaked through the water, swimming laps with punishing exertion. When he came up for air at the near end and spotted them, he was gasping.

  Tim and Bear stepped down onto the tile, and Bear thanked Edwin and shoved the door closed in his face. They’d have limited time before Edwin’s situation report would bring Dean’s interference.

  Dolan swiped his thin brown hair out of his face and squinted, handicapped without his glasses. “Hi.”

  Tim reached the edge of the pool and crouched, looking almost directly down into Dolan’s face. “We know about the rape in the limo. We know everything. Your brother’s dead. You can’t protect him anymore. We want to hear your side of what happened—it’s Jameson’s motive, but it’s also what makes you an accessory.”

  Dolan’s chest was still heaving from the laps. For a moment it seemed he might cry, but then he slapped the water with both arms and sank down so his head bobbed on the surface. “Chase keyed to Tess the minute he saw her. Sitting outside her house with his stupid guitar. He likes older women. Milfs, he calls them. He told me Tess turned him on even more since she had”—he blushed at the memory—“a fuck trophy.”

  Resting on the poolside towel, a cell phone put out a classical-music ring—Bach’s haunted-castle organ riff shrilling off the hard tile. Dolan tensed. Tim looked down at the hot-orange caller ID screen. DadStudy.

  “I program rings for certain people.” Dolan’s face said the rest.

  Eager to get him back on track, Tim said, “And ‘fuck trophy’ would be slang for…?”

  “A kid.”

  Bear gave Dolan the stare he’d perfected from years of playing bad cop in interrogation rooms.

  “Look, Chase was Chase. He was a dick. But he was charming when he wanted to be. He was my brother, but I didn’t…No one could…” Dolan trailed off, staring at the rippling water. When he spoke again, his words were pressured, almost eager. “I didn’t see much at the shoot. He’d followed Tess out to the garage. I went to get him because he was supposed to be overseeing the producer. I could…I could hear some banging from the limo, but I thought…I don’t know what I thought. Percy was there, outside, like he was standing guard. I started for the limo. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. When I got close, Percy squared himself toward me, said, ‘Let’s give a man his space.’” Dolan made a faint sound of disgust. His face was wet from the pool water; Tim couldn’t distinguish tears on it. “I heard her…kicking on the window, you know, then her hand, fingers spread. I could see it even through the tint, the shadow of her hand. Banging.” Dolan raised a dripping arm and imitated the gesture, perhaps unknowingly. “You know when you freeze?”

  Tim wanted to say no but opted for silence.

  “I’m not like them. I never know what to do.” Dolan looked shrunken and feeble in the pool. “So I left.” His gaze dropped again to the water. “I left. I waited around the corner by the elevator. A few minutes later, I heard the door open. I peeked around the corner. I saw her bloody mouth in the crack of the door before it closed. Chase straightened his shirt. The front pocket, the monogrammed one, was ripped. The driver rolled down the window and said, ‘She okay?
’ and Chase said, ‘She’s fine. I’ll get her son as soon as we wrap. Then you can take her home.’ And he thumped the roof like a pit-crew guy sending off a race car. I went upstairs before he reached me and pretended like nothing had happened.”

  “And Tess threatened to prosecute?”

  “I can’t—how did you…?—I can’t discuss that. I can’t discuss anything involving the trials.”

  “Trials?” Bear was mystified. “What trials? The drug trials?”

  A boom startled Tim upright and jerked Bear 180 degrees. The door vibrated on its hinges, stunned, where it had struck the tile wall. Backlit by the light of the corridor and centered in the doorway was Dean’s silhouette, somehow conveying the strength of a man with enormous power at his disposal, a man assured of his place on the planet.

  “Gentlemen, it’s already been a very long night, and I need to ask you to continue your questioning in the morning,” Dean said. “My surviving son has a great deal of work ahead of him.”

  “What did you talk to them about?”

  Dolan turned toward his open locker, searching for privacy but finding none. Now that he’d actually dredged up the memory and cast it in words, he realized that what he hadn’t told the deputies seemed almost as vivid. Chase’s air of exuberance when he’d returned to the commercial shoot, as if he’d just stepped off a harrowing roller coaster. Chase’s sullen face days later when the chickens had come home to roost. How Chase had gone directly into Dean’s study and seemed to disappear, swallowed up by the high-backed leather chair. Though Dolan had walked with him to their father’s door, he’d held in the hall, knowing himself to be an outsider in matters such as these. As Percy swung the door shut, Dolan heard his brother’s disembodied voice, finally confessing to the old man—We’ve got a problem here.

  “Nothing, really,” Dolan said. “Just the same details we covered earlier.”

  “Did you talk about the business?”

  “Of course not.” Dolan cast a glance over his shoulder. Dean’s eyes were still boring through him. Dolan hooked his towel loosely around his waist before shucking his trunks, and he held it in place until he’d managed to pull on his boxers. From what he knew, Dean had never changed him, bathed him, or dressed him. Aside from a few vague recollections of his mother (scented powder, dangling ringlets, stern vertical lines etching the lips), Dolan mostly remembered nannies. Being naked in front of his father now was more uncomfortable than the prospect of stripping in public.

  “For security purposes, we’re ending all outside access to the office and lab,” Dean said. “No tours, no visitors. You’ll be transported with armed guards to and from work. After Friday’s presentation we’re de-camping to the London office until this blows over. We are the family now. I won’t have you at risk.”

  “Did you say after the presentation? Chase just—” Dolan buckled his belt with an unnecessarily hard pull. “How can we do the presentation without him?”

  “It’s taken nearly five years to maneuver your company into position. If we show weakness now, in this marketplace, it’ll be a death sentence. Plus, it’ll be giving Jameson what he seems to be after. Vector is strong, but there are worthy competitors. If we pull back now, we’ll miss our window of competitive advantage. You want to let this son of a bitch take that away from you? From your shareholders?”

  “From the patients who could benefit?”

  Dean ignored the sardonic edge in his son’s rejoinder voice. “Of course. Them most of all. We have responsibilities bigger than ourselves, Dolan.”

  “Sir, I think we should consider working more closely with the deputies.”

  “You let me deal with the police.”

  The humidity of the room was starting to get to Dolan, making him light-headed. “The guy ate Percy for lunch.”

  “You’re taking your brother’s death hard. You’re in shock, which is understandable.” Dean rose from the bench. “Don’t worry about this bullshit. Go back to your lab. Leave this in my hands.”

  Dean padded through the doorless arch that led to the pool, the underwater light’s refractions playing across the back of his charcoal suit, making the fabric swim. Dolan smoothed his wet hair and watched his father make his way across the tiles.

  As Dean reached the exit, Dolan called out, “Dad? Sir?”

  His father turned, the flickers having a dizzying camouflage effect. He was a specter, there and not there at the same time.

  “Who’s the Piper? Walker Jameson mentioned the Piper.”

  His father’s voice came back reverb-enhanced by the hard walls, each word trailed by the edge of an echo. “I don’t know.” He mounted the three concrete steps, the door closing heavily behind him.

  Chapter 53

  A lingering party remained at a back table inside the long-closed restaurant, bathed in golden light. Tim and Bear stood shoulder to shoulder on the Beverly Hills patio, waiting for a worker to come to the locked door.

  “We’ll never beat him,” Bear said.

  “Walker?”

  “Dean Kagan. Guys like that, they don’t get beat.”

  The Ivy’s point man arrived. “Sorry, gentlemen, we closed hours ago.”

  Bear’s gaze shifted to the VIPs drinking red wine in the rear corner. “Uh-huh.”

  “Deputy Rackley.” Tim showed his badge and creds. “I spoke with a manager on the phone earlier, asked for some security footage for a federal investigation?”

  The manager wore an expression of mild irritation that Tim would’ve bet occupied his face with some frequency. “That was me. Your guy already came and picked up the footage.”

  “When was…?” It hit Tim, and he lowered his head and laughed with stunned respect.

  A moment later Bear shook his head. “That’s a ruse worthy of…”

  “What?”

  “Worthy of you, Rack.”

  The basics they pried from the bemused manager fit Walker perfectly. Eager to help, The Ivy had surrendered the original security footage, and there was no backup copy.

  They climbed back into Bear’s double-parked Ram. Bear had left the Marshals placard on the dash to fend off the tow-truck drivers who circled L.A.’s affluent communities, clanking scavengers with sharp night vision.

  Of course it would be Thomas who fielded Tim’s call to the command post. When he didn’t bother to gloat, Tim knew that something was wrong.

  “Esteban Martinez just called here and chewed on my ass,” Thomas said. “There was a break-in tonight at the warehouse that stores his legal files, and the box containing his case information on Tess Jameson was the only thing taken. He said one of the guards claimed you were by earlier, casing out the joint. Anything you want to come clean on?”

  Tim tried to open the glove box, but like everything else on Bear’s truck, it was broken. “Walker stole the files.”

  “How do you know?”

  Tim gestured excitedly, and Bear finally clued in. “We thought he might,” Tim said.

  “And you didn’t post men?”

  Bear banged the dash in a particular spot, and the glove box fell open.

  “Not on site. He would’ve seen them.” Tim rooted around among Burger King wrappers and retrieved the GPS handheld he’d put in there this morning.

  “Why are you protecting this guy, Rack? Whose side are you on? Walker Jameson’s playing you. And you’re letting him.”

  The GPS unit whirred to life, throwing a blue glow across Tim’s face. “That might be true if I hadn’t—” Tim’s call-waiting beeped, and he checked the screen: Electronic Surveillance Unit.

  “If you hadn’t what?”

  Bear screeched across the corner of someone’s lawn, winging the mailbox with his remaining sideview mirror and revving down the residential street as Tim said, “No, left. Your other left.”

  His head knocked the window as Bear screeched into a U-turn, and it took him a moment to relocate the RF pulse of the digital transmitter on the network of streets rendered schematically on t
he GPS readout. Along with four other task-force cars, they’d been chasing Walker—more specifically, the transmitter Tim had dropped into the legal file box Walker had stolen—around the neighborhood. His evasive maneuvers were so keen it seemed he was invisible. Bear kept circling the same route, Richco Storage flying by on their right like scenery in a Saturday-morning cartoon. Frisk droned on the primary channel of the dashboard Motorola, along with the other ESU units that had been in the area for hours, waiting for the file box to leave the warehouse.

  Tim watched the dots of the Marshal vehicles converge on the blinking red light.

  “We got him boxed in.” Frisk’s voice was just shy of a shout. “Thomas and Freed, take your hard left. Denley—slant-park and throw up a roadblock. Bear, where the hell are you?”

  “Look up.” Bear squealed to the four-way intersection, meeting the other vehicles penning in the stretch of asphalt. The GPS unit showed Walker right in their midst, moving slowly.

  Shouts came through from the various cars on a slight radio delay; Tim could see the speakers arrayed around the four stop signs, mouths moving behind windshields.

  “The fuck is he?”

  “You got your left?”

  The ring of headlights caught wisps of vapor and little else. Thomas was out of his car in the fork of the open door, Glock drawn and aimed at nothing. Tim and Bear shoved free of the Ram, Bear gripping his Remington shotgun.

  A pattering approach, something clicking across the asphalt. A faint jingling—coins in a pocket? About ten firearms swung to aim at the darkness behind Denley’s car.

  A Doberman padded into view, looking humorously intimidated.

  The guard dog from the storage facility.

  He sat in the middle of the ring and licked his chops self-consciously, then scratched behind the red band of his collar. The bouncing ID tags jingled again.

  Too humiliated to lose his temper, Tim closed his eyes and cursed softly. The guns lowered, but the men behind them remained frozen. The dog, suddenly wary, bared his teeth.