Chapter 50
Around nine, Alex was awoken by a series of sharp knocks on her hotel room door. She hissed as she sat up, pain wracking her body. When she realized the time, Alex felt a wave of panic. She’d overslept and, even though given the circumstances this was completely understandable, it still made her feel guilty.
She hated being late.
“Alex? It’s Con.”
“Coming,” she replied, trying to sound less sleepy than she actually was. “What time is our meeting with Marcus?”
“Pushed to this afternoon, there’s something we need to do first.”
Alex got out of bed and cleaned herself up. She popped two Advil, reconsidered, and then took another.
She looked like shit, but what the hell.
It was no consolation, but Con looked worse. There was something different about him, too, something harder, maybe.
Con seemed almost apathetic now.
They said little on the way to the car. Sometimes, when you had too much to say it was impossible to get the ball rolling.
Selection fatigue but for tough discussion openers and not forty varieties of pasta sauce at the supermarket.
“Look in the back,” Con instructed.
Alex did as he asked. Lying on the seat was a computer.
“Is that—”
“Yeah, Edward’s computer. AA made a call, assumed that there might be some sensitive material on there that we don’t want others to see. He’s giving us the first crack at it.”
Alex knew she liked Art, knew she liked the big police chief before he saved her life, but now she knew that she could trust him, too.
Alex wasn’t sure if she could say the same about Con.
Con drove to OC Post and Dwight—her partner had clearly called him beforehand because the bespectacled man didn’t have that deer in a headlight look when they arrived—led them to the familiar conference room.
Once there, they hooked up Edward’s computer.
It took a handful of tries, but they eventually gained access.
The username was DLean1908, and the password was director .
Alex found all of the original videos within seconds—no splicing and hawk-like focus needed this time.
The video of Adon Guerrero spouting his despicable message.
Thomas Ellsberg soliciting a prostitute outside of a seedy liquor joint.
Charles Calloway engaging in bondage with a woman. This was disturbing but at least the act appeared consensual.
Alex hesitated before playing the video labeled, simply, Martin .
She’d seen it before.
And she didn’t want to see it again.
But Alex forced herself to open it.
Shot from an angle above and behind the two people in the scene, the movie was dark, black in places. House music throbbed in the background, the bass shaking the image with every beat.
Martin was holding a woman beneath him. She was gagged, and her hands were pinned to a wooden headboard. Alex had no idea where the video was taken, but it wasn’t the same bed that they’d found Martin’s corpse in.
It was the young girl’s eyes that really haunted Alex. In Charles’ video, the woman had lust plastered on her features.
This one most definitely did not.
She was scared.
Scared for her life.
“Fuck,” Con whispered and Dwight’s throat clicked.
Alex closed the video. There was one more file in the folder, but this one had no name—it was just a series of numbers. Alex was so disturbed by what she’d just seen that she didn’t recognize the format right away.
“That’s the date of the party,” Con remarked.
Indeed, it was.
Alex played this video next.
This was shot from inside Martin’s bedroom, and the man was lying face down on the bed, almost identical to how they’d found his body.
But it differed slightly. For one, his sleeves weren’t rolled up. Two, he was still breathing. Alex could see Martin’s lips vibrate and his back rise and fall with shallow breaths.
The timecode on the security footage read 3:46 AM.
“He’s still alive,” Con said.
All three of them huddled closer as they watched.
The bedroom door opened, and a dark figure entered. Their back was to the camera as they inched toward Martin.
There, they paused, looking down at his body, hooded head cocked. Time sluiced forward, and the figure pulled what appeared to be a plastic bag from the center pocket of their sweatshirt.
Alex held her breath when she saw the syringe. Then the spoon and the lighter. They watched as the gloved figure rolled up Martin’s sleeves.
She was well aware that this had already happened and that there was no way to intervene, but Alex still felt a familiar tightness in her chest.
It was almost ritualistic the way that the heroin was prepared and injected into Martin’s arm.
The man had probably hit the bottle hard after the argument with his colleagues—they wanted him to pay, but he simply didn’t have the money.
He was good and drunk.
Completely passed out.
After the trembling stopped following the deadly injection, he was good and dead.
“Fucking Edward,” Con whispered as the figure meticulously laid out the paraphernalia on the table where they later found it. “Fucking—”
But then the figure turned and for a brief second, their face, shadowed, downcast, was visible to the camera.
And it wasn’t Edward at all.
“Holy fuck, is that Julia Yeo?” Dwight whispered breathlessly.
Alex, who was now experienced at pausing movies, did so at the exact moment that the woman’s face was in full view.
“It is,” she confirmed, still trying to wrap her mind around this new and highly disturbing development.
“Julia killed her husband,” Con said.
“Holy shit, he was telling the truth,” Alex said with a nod. “Edward didn’t kill Martin.”
Con exhaled loudly.
“Follow the money,” he said.
“What do you mean?” Dwight and Alex asked in unison.
“Martin had a hefty life insurance policy through IP. More than enough to pay off his debts and for Julia to live comfortably for decades.”
“Well, I hope she finds an eight-by-ten-foot cell comfortable,” Alex remarked.
“I bet Martin was going to use this to blackmail her, too,” Con continued, ignoring her comment. “Get the two-hundred and fifty grand that he figured Martin owed him that way.”
“No doubt.”
Alex let the video run out.
Before leaving, Julia went back to Martin’s body one last time.
“Look, she’s taking his watch,” Alex said.
“The watch that Edward used to try and frame me,” Con said.
Alex mulled this over.
“Does that mean they were working together?” It was a rhetorical question and was treated as such. Alex bit her lower lip and then added, “Edward might not be a murderer, but he was some kind of evil. He watched all of this—Martin raping that girl, Julia killing him, and did absolutely nothing about it. Never even tried to intervene, never went to the cops. That’s some kind of sickness to watch this disturbing material and only think of how to profit from it.”
“He was a sick bastard.” Con straightened. “Come on, let’s talk to AA, get him to pick up Julia.”
“One sec.”
Alex found the videos that Edward had sent Con, the one of them kissing at the party, the one outside the bar, of Con digging.
The one of Valerie and The Sandman outside the gas station.
She deleted them all and then got up.
They were almost out the door, computer in hand, when Dwight said, “ Uhh, guys?”
The man’s beady eyes were on Con, and they exchanged something without speaking.
“Do it,” Con said with a forceful nod. “Write the article. Just leave me and Alex out of it.” He seemed contemplative. “You know what? I have an idea…”
***
Con and Alex watched as LAPD Police Chief Art Abner arrested Julia Yeo, cast and all. She was feisty.
“This is an outrage! I—”
The police chief cut her off. He mentioned the security footage from Martin’s home, which she clearly thought she’d disposed of, but Edward had managed to get his hands on.
Julia clammed up, only speaking to demand a lawyer.
AA gave them both a nod as he lowered Julia into the back seat of his car.
Con nodded back.
“That’s one favored returned,” he muttered.
“Indeed,” Alex said. “You know, I’ve been thinking.”
“Yeah?”
“Maybe the woman in the video, the one where you’re digging by the rock, maybe that was Julia Yeo. Maybe she and Edward were working together the entire time.”
It wasn’t.
Con knew that the woman was his sister, just like he knew that she was driving Anna Holstein’s car in the desert.
He didn’t understand how or why that was the case, he just knew it to be true. Con didn’t feel like getting into it now, so he focused his reply on the second part of Alex’s comment.
“Maybe once the FBI gets their hand on Edward’s computer, they can find a link between the two of them. Emails, maybe. But, to be honest, I don’t think it matters. Edward is dead and Julia is going away for life.”
Alex sucked her lower lip into her mouth.
“I was also thinking about what you told me about when you and Tate arrested Matthew?”
Con tensed.
“What about it?”
“I read the case file, and there was no record of a cell phone found at the scene.”
“Matthew didn’t have one.”
“Then how did he call for food?”
Con raised an eyebrow.
“Food?”
“Yeah, the Arby’s delivery. Someone had to call it in, but it couldn’t have been Matthew—there was no service to that house, it was abandoned. It had to be someone else.”
Con did not like where this conversation was going.
“And then I was thinking about the anonymous phone call, the tip?” Alex went on. “What if—”
“No,” Con said sternly.
“Excuse me?”
“ No .”
“But it could be that Val—”
“I said, drop it.”
Alex appeared hurt but eventually acquiesced.
“Okay. Sorry.”
They left the crime scene. It was time.
Time to stop delaying the inevitable.
They could only push back their meeting with Marcus Allen for so long.
Halfway from Julia’s house to the OC Field Office, Con’s phone rang.
The caller ID read: San Quentin .
“Hello?”
“Is this Agent Constantine Striker?” a male voice he didn’t recognize asked.
“It is.”
“I have a note here to call you if Matthew Nelson Neil’s status has changed.”
A myriad of thoughts roared through Con’s head.
Was The Sandman’s sentence being commuted? Impossible. Had the State of California finally set an execution date? Equally unlikely .
“What do you mean—”
“He’s dead, Agent Striker. Matthew Nelson Neil died earlier this morning from a massive brain hemorrhage.”