CHAPTER FIFTEEN
As they pulled up at the address twenty minutes later, Jessie looked out the car window.
At this late hour on a Sunday night—approaching midnight—traffic was minimal, even in the heart of Hollywood. The victim lived in a large apartment tower near the corner of Sunset and Vine. It wasn’t immediately obvious that a crime had been committed here. There were two squad cars and a crime scene truck on site, but they were parked a half block up, giving the impression that they might be here for an incident that happened on the street rather than inside.
Susannah parked in a loading zone right in front of the building and they hopped out, rushing up the stairs to giant, locked glass doors. Susannah rapped on the glass to get the attention of the security guard, who was talking to an LAPD officer. The guard, a portly man in his fifties, shook his head as if he ran a business and was telling them it was closed for the night.
Susannah slammed her badge against the glass, which seemed to have an impact. The guard, along with the officer, a tall, youngish Latino man with uncertainty in his eyes, walked over. When they were close enough to hear, Susannah shouted, “We’re handling the case. Open the door.”
The officer nodded at the guard, who pushed a button to the left of the door. A lock automatically clicked. Once he opened the door, Susannah stepped in with Jessie close behind.
“We saw the CSU truck out front but no medical examiner van,” Susannah said, dispensing with any pleasantries. “Are they not here yet?”
“Not yet, Detective,” the officer said. “There was a drive-by shooting near the corner of Fountain and La Brea about an hour ago. There were two fatalities, and this late on a Sunday, they’re a little short-handed. I’ve been told someone will be here in the next thirty minutes though.”
“Okay, tell us where we’re going,” Susannah said.
“14 th floor,” he said. “Apartment 1406 at the end of the hall.”
They went to the elevators with the guard, who had to swipe his access card to unlock the buttons. He pressed 14. The door was about to close when Jessie stopped it.
“What time do you lock those front doors?” she asked him.
“10 P.M.,” he said. “After that, residents need to swipe cards like this for entry or be admitted by me.”
“What about earlier in the day?” Jessie pressed. “Do non-residents have to sign in, or could they just walk in after someone else does and head upstairs?”
“In theory, everyone is supposed to sign in,” he answered, “but I have to be honest. Sometimes people slip through the cracks. This building has twenty-one floors with ten units on each one. There are well over four hundred residents. I don’t claim to know each one on sight. Sometimes, people get by when it’s busy. I’ve had food delivery people come out of the elevator after dropping something off and didn’t even realize they’d gone upstairs. I do my best, but I’m one guy working a ten-hour shift.”
“Do you have video cameras in the elevators, stairwells, and residential hallways?”
“Yes to the first two, along with the fitness center, the parking garage, and the lobby here,” the guard said, “but not to the individual floors.”
“Sergeant Frank, who’s upstairs, already requested everything from today,” the officer told them. “One of our people is processing it all now. It should all be available soon, certainly by the morning.”
“Great,” Jessie said, handing over a card. “Make sure it gets sent to our research team as soon as it’s ready.”
She let the elevator doors close. As it started upward, Susannah looked over at her.
“Any preliminary thoughts, Ms. Hunt?” she asked.
“Nothing brilliant just yet,” Jessie conceded. “I’ll be curious to check out what’s on those cameras, but the truth is that whoever did this was likely aware of them too. I doubt we’re going to find someone putting on latex gloves as they stare up at the elevator security camera. Our killer might have snuck in here twelve hours ago with a big group. Or they could be a resident with access to the whole place.”
“Hopefully, the officers in the room will have clues,” Susannah said. “What do we know about this woman again?”
“According to what Beth pulled together while we drove over,” Jessie said, looking at her phone, “the victim’s name is Evelyn Channing. She’s twenty-six and works in marketing for a record label. She went to school at USC, graduated four years ago, and moved to this address about eight months ago soon after she got a promotion. She’s also quite attractive.”
Jessie held out her phone to show Susannah a headshot of Channing from the record label’s website. On the screen was a blonde with bright blue eyes and a vivacious, high-wattage smile.
The elevator doors opened, and they were met by an officer who was blocking the hallway in the direction of Channing’s apartment, making sure that no lookie-loos got by. They displayed their credentials and headed to the end of the hall, where they again showed their IDs to another officer, who stepped aside to let them in.
Once they entered, Jessie took in the place. It was more impressive than the building’s exterior, which was fine, but essentially a cookie-cutter residential tower. Channing had done up her apartment to reflect her interest in music.
There were posters of album covers from multiple eras on the walls, framed like pieces of art. A bookshelf that took up half of an entire wall was filled with vinyl albums instead of books. Jessie guessed that there were over three hundred of them. Even her furniture reflected her love of the music industry.
A circular coffee table in the living room looked like an actual LP. It was black with grooves and album information in the center. When she looked more closely, Jessie saw that it was from Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours . The throw pillows on the couches had recreations of famous album covers from Michael Jackson’s Thriller to Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks to Pixies’ Doolittle .
It was admittedly a little cheesy and not what Jessie would have anticipated, based on Channing’s website photo. The woman’s personal vibe seemed more akin to a male rock critic in his early forties than a stunning twenty-something music executive. It was a reminder that as a profiler, she needed to check her assumptions at the door.
Just then, a man Jessie recognized stepped out of the bedroom. It was Sergeant Robert Frank. In his late forties, Frank’s belly was fighting his belt and what little hair he had left was more gray than brown. Jessie and Susannah had handled a case with him once before, and while he had exuded a worn out, beaten-down demeanor most of the time, he’d proven to be a competent professional. They could have been dealt a worse hand.
“Hello again, Sergeant,” she said as he approached.
“Ms. Hunt, Detective Valentine,” he replied, nodding. “Thanks for coming so quickly.”
“Thanks for reaching out,” Valentine replied. “Did you call us because you’d heard about the prior case or just because the scene was so unusual?”
“A little of both,” he said. “As soon as my people described the scene, it sounded really out there, so I checked the database and found your case in Hancock Park. Didn’t seem like a coincidence. There was one other reason, too.”
“What’s that?” Jessie asked, noting the ominous note in his tone.
“The only reason we found her was because of an anonymous tip. Someone called 911 from the victim’s cell phone to report the dead body. Then, they left the line open. I believe the killer wanted this woman found fast rather than wait for friends or co-workers to get worried after not hearing from her for days.”
“That was a risk,” Susannah noted. “If there was an officer in the immediate area when the dispatcher put the alert out, the killer might have been caught leaving the building.”
“That means they considered it a risk worth taking,” Jessie noted. “They wanted their work to get full credit right away. Apparently, after having to wait for the Hartleys’ bodies to be discovered the next morning, they didn’t want to take any chances. Whoever this is, it doesn’t appear that delayed satisfaction is up their alley.”
Sergeant Frank nodded in silent agreement.
“Did you find any sign of forced entry?” Susannah asked.
“No,” he said. “Your tech people will want to verify it, but we think they swiped an access card to gain entry. This might be a fancy apartment complex, but the cards are no better than at a cheap motel. They can be duped easily if someone has even basic skills. We also think they might have snuck in while Channing was in the shower.”
“Why do you say that?” Jessie asked.
“I’ll show you if you’re ready to go in the bedroom now. Jessie looked over at Susannah and nodded that she was. The followed the sergeant through the door. Jessie made sure not to look at the bed yet as he led them to the bathroom. They stopped at the threshold.
“The shower interior is still wet, as is the towel,” he said, pointing at the giant bath sheet lying in a heap on the floor. “Plus her body was still damp when we arrived, along with her hair.”
“You ready to take a look?” Susannah asked her.
“Yeah,” Jessie said, girding herself for what was to come.
They walked over the bed and Jessie’s scanned the body on it. The first thing she noted was that, as Sergeant Frank had indicated, her naked body still had beads of water on it. The comforter was damp, as was her hair, which was splayed out, Medusa-like, around her head. Her arms and legs had also been spread out like a recreation of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man at its widest point.
She was wearing a mask. It was clearly in the same style as the Hartleys’, but this one was adorned with a dozen small rubies, some above the eyes slots, some on the cheeks as if intended to give the impression of them being flushed.
Unlike with the Hartleys, it was clear where on her body the killer had made their initial assault. A large bump protruded from the upper back right section of her head, and there was some goopy, coagulated blood matted in her wet blonde hair. Jessie guessed that she’d been knocked out as she exited her shower, then dragged to the bed, where she’d been positioned like this before she was murdered.
As she stared at the young woman, Jessie felt a wave of empathetic loss overcome her. Evelyn Channing was in the prime of her life, beautiful and clearly doing what she was passionate about. And all that had been snuffed out in a matter of minutes.
Jessie sensed another emotion pushing the empathy out of the way and asserting itself. It was a familiar feeling, especially lately. It was as if acid was churning in her gut, a pit of venom that she wanted to spit at whoever was responsible for this act.
She had a flash of herself grabbing something heavy, maybe one of the dumbbells she saw in the corner of the room and using to smash in the skull of the perpetrator. She pictured it cracking like an egg, then saw herself pounding it over and over again, until the brains oozed out. Turnabout was fair play. She had to literally shake the image out of her head as she tried to refocus on the task at hand.
“You should have those dumbbells by the foot of the bed checked by CSU,” she told Sergeant Frank, pointing at them. “One of them might have been used to knock her out. I doubt there will be prints or DNA, but it’s worth looking at.”
“Will do,” he said, scribbling on a little notepad he’d pulled out.
“And you should have her pillows bagged and tested for saliva,” she added. “The medical examiner at the last scene determined that the victims were knocked out but still alive. The killer used their pillow to suffocate them, then placed the masks on their faces.”
“Okay,” Frank said, looking visibly disturbed, which was a rarity for him.
“Anything else?” Jessie asked, turning to Susannah.
The detective sighed in frustration.
“Since the killer used it, we should have Channing’s phone tested too,” she suggested, “but like the dumbbells, I doubt we’ll find anything on them. Maybe Jamil could do voice analysis on the 911 call, help us narrow down potential suspects.”
“I listened to it,” Frank told them. “It appeared to have been altered, but the voice sounded clearly male to me.”
Jessie nodded. If verified, that would help a little, but she didn’t want to put too much emphasis on it. There were a lot of guys in L.A.
“I hate to say it,” Susannah muttered, “but this ugliness has at least one positive.”
“What’s that?” Sergeant Frank asked.
Jessie answered, giving the same response she knew Susannah would have.
“It gives us fresh evidence,” she said. “More potential clues on the body. But from our perspective, it also offers additional lines of inquiry. We’d kind of hit a brick wall before we got your call. Maybe this will send us in a new direction.”
She didn’t mention it out loud, but she was already wondering if they’d be able to connect Channing to any of the warehouse or mansion parties. Or to the Hartleys?
She turned to Susannah, who said exactly what she was thinking too.
“We’ve got a long night ahead of us.”