Diagnosis Murder 6 - The Dead Letter (7 page)

You can't help yourself That's the one secret of yours I was able to find out.

Make the bastard pay, okay? And tell him I'm working on my tan in hell, waiting for him to show up.

Nick Stryker

Steve handed the letter back to his father. "Where's the box all of these files came in?"

Mark motioned to the kitchen. Steve went over and examined the box. He noted the law firm's return address and double-checked the date of the postmark.

"Do you know the law firm?" Mark asked.

Steve nodded and came back to the table. "They're criminal defense attorneys for the crook on a budget."

"We'll have to ask them when Stryker was murdered and how they knew about it," Mark said. "But at least we know from the postmark that it was a day before his office was torched."

"That doesn't mean the corpse Amanda's got on a slab isn't Stryker," Steve said and then explained to his father about the body that was found in the burned-out trash bin.

"He could have been killed a few days ago. Whoever did it could have tossed the body in the Dumpster last night and torched it with the building."

"I suppose it's possible," Mark said. "We'll know in the morning."

Steve gave his father a look.

"What?" Mark asked.

"Nothing. It's just going to be a big morning, that's all," Steve said. "So what have you gathered from all these files?"

"I know why Monette Hobbes got those photos today and not a year ago," Mark said.

"So do I," Steve said. "Stryker knew all about Lowell's affair with his stepdaughter and was blackmailing him to keep quiet about it."

"Stryker had no professional ethics whatsoever," Mark said.

"You're just discovering this?"

"I thought at the very least he was loyal to his paying clients," Mark said. "Clearly I was wrong."

"He was loyal to whoever could pay him the most," Steve said, "whether it was the client or the person he was following."

"I'm assuming Lowell paid Stryker not to tell Monette about his affair with LeSabre," Mark said. "But when Stryker was killed, his lawyers automatically sent the photos to Monette."

"The blackmail of Lowell Hobbes is probably just one example of the 'domestic crap' Stryker was talking about in his letter."

"There are a lot of people who got a very unpleasant surprise in their mailboxes today," Mark said.

Steve gestured to the files on the table. "So what makes this stuff so special?"

Mark picked up a yellow legal pad covered with his notes. "I've only skimmed a few files, but the people he was black mailing with all these documents, photos, and videos aren't just guilty of infidelities. They committed felonies."

"What kind of crimes are we talking about?" Steve pulled out a chair and sat down next to his father, looking over his shoulder at the indecipherable scrawl on the legal pad.

"Extortion, grand theft, bribery, and manslaughter," Mark said. "The perpetrators run the gamut from CEOs to politicians, from rock stars to police officers. Stryker compiled all the evidence necessary to put them in prison."

"And put himself in the ground," Steve said.

Mark and Steve had pizza delivered and spent the night going through Stryker's blackmail files, audiocassettes, and videotapes, creating a master list of the information, photos, and tapes and what they contained.

Although Mark found Stryker ethically challenged and morally bankrupt, he had to admire the man's skills as a detective. The files showed that Stryker was a meticulous, tenacious, and inspired investigator with a keen understanding of the dark side of human nature. His natural talent at investigation should have propelled him to the upper echelons of the field. Instead, he let greed undermine his potential.

The irony, as Mark saw it, was that Stryker could have made so much more money as an ethical professional than he did as a blackmailer.

He also might have lived longer.

Mark, fascinated by the information in the files, would have liked to work through the night, but his body betrayed him. Around three a.m., he started to nod off at the table and finally dragged himself to bed. But he forgot to close the shades and was awakened only four hours later by the morning sun streaming through the window.

He trudged into the kitchen to find Steve where he left him at the kitchen table, a laptop computer open in front of him and the files rearranged into piles on the floor around his feet.

"Make any headway?" Mark asked.

Steve yawned and leaned back in his chair. "I've separated the files into categories." He motioned to each pile as he spoke. "Cases where I can go out and make immediate arrests. Cases where I've got to get a search warrant. Cases I need to refer to other law enforcement agencies. And cases requiring further investigation or surveillance. There's enough here to keep me busy for months. I hate to say it, but I'm almost grateful to Stryker. All these arrests could knock me up a pay grade and make me Cop of the Year."

"You can pay him back by catching his killer," Mark said. "Anybody jump out at you as more likely than the others to want him dead?"

"I'm sure they all want him dead, but not all of them have the resources or the stomach for it or have enough to lose to make murder seem like a reasonable option," Steve said, turning the screen of his laptop to face Mark. "Anybody he was blackmailing could have done it, but these are the people my gut tells are the likely suspects."

Mark looked at Steve's notes on the screen. The details of three cases were listed, as well as Steve's rationale for picking them as suspects.

In one case, a woman hired Stryker to follow her ex-husband, a Los Angeles city housing official named Delmar Campos, who she was convinced was cheating her out of her fair share of his income.

"Delmar left her for a stripper and moved into an opulent new home, so naturally his ex wanted blood," Steve said. "Stryker discovered that the new home was built by Douglas Lorusso, a contractor who'd won millions of dollars in city contracts from Delmar to build low-income housing. He also found out that Delmar's girlfriend drove around in a Mercedes leased to Lorusso Construction. Stryker was black mailing both Delmar and Lorusso."

"So what makes them more likely than the others to have killed Stryker?"

"Lorusso's name has come up in several organized-crime investigations," Steve said, "but we've never been able to make anything stick. He wouldn't have a problem finding someone to remove Stryker from the population."

"Makes sense." Mark scrolled down to the next case.

Weldon Fike was a convicted rapist who was paroled and given a new identity in exchange for testimony against a prison gang responsible for arranging the murders of trial witnesses. One of Fike's rape victims hired Stryker to track him down so she could expose him to the public.

"Where is Fike now?" Mark asked.

"Here in LA," Steve said. "About to marry a woman worth about a hundred million."

"That's a hundred million motives for murder right there," Mark said.

Steve clicked to the next case. "This is the file that's going to be the trickiest to handle."

"Why's that?"

"Because it hits so close to home," Steve said and went on to summarize the case for Mark.

Stryker was hired by a church to find tens of thousands of dollars in stolen computers, paintings, and rare artifacts. The police, in the opinion of the pastor and his congregation, just weren't doing enough. Stryker's search included scanning eBay, where he found several of the stolen items listed under several different auction accounts.

"He bought some things and managed to trace the items back to a warehouse in Chatsworth, owned by Harley Brule," Steve said. "Who happens to be the detective in charge of LAPD's West Valley Major Crime Unit"

"That explains why the police weren't aggressively pursuing the case," Mark said.

"It gets worse. Stryker tapped into the warehouse's own surveillance system and discovered the place is stocked wall to wall with stolen goods, hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of jewelry, electronics, artwork, even a couple of cars," Steve said. "He also kept track of people coming and going from the warehouse, which included other MCU cops, as well as several patrol officers from ValTec, a private security company."

"Who was Stryker blackmailing." Mark asked.

"Everybody," Steve said. "It's his most recent score. They were supposed to make their first payment this week."

"Did they."

Steve shook his head. "If they did, it was with a bullet."

CHAPTER FIVE

While Mark made breakfast, Steve showered and got into fresh clothes. Over pancakes and bacon, orange juice and coffee, they sketched out a game plan for the investigation.

Their first stop would be to see Stryker's attorney. Then, depending on whatever warrants the DA could get them, they would move to arrest and interrogate the three top suspects in Stryker's murder and the firebombing of his office. In the meantime, they'd go over Stryker's phone and credit-card records and see if they could trace his movements over the last few days.

Steve called his captain and the DA to brief them on the Stryker files while Mark cleared away the dishes, took a shower, and got dressed.

When Mark returned to the kitchen, Steve was just hanging up the phone. He told his father there was going to be a slight change in their itinerary. Amanda had called to say that she'd finished her autopsy report on the body found in the dumpster and that Tim Lau, the arson investigator, was on his way down to meet her with his preliminary findings.

Mark and Steve packed the stacks of files into old cardboard boxes and priority-mail cartons scrounged from the garage, put the boxes in the trunk of Steve's department-issue Crown Victoria, and slogged through the rush-hour traffic to Community General Hospital.

They walked into the morgue to find Amanda and Tim at her desk, sipping coffee and laughing together over something. They were as at ease having coffee among the corpses as they would have been in a Starbucks. Amanda seemed unusually upbeat and animated considering the early hour and the gruesome nature of her work. Mark attributed her bright demeanor to Tim's company, and judging by the scowl on Steve's face, so did his son. Steve didn't harbor any romantic inclinations towards Amanda, but he was very protective of her, as an older brother would be towards a younger sister.

"Should we have brought pastries?" Steve said.

Tim glanced at Steve, then back to Amanda. "Is he always this sour in the morning?"

"Morning, noon, and night," Amanda said, then introduced Tim to Mark.

"It's an honor to meet you, Dr. Sloan," Tim said, his back to Steve, who rolled his eyes, earning a glare from Amanda. "Your work on the Sunnyview Bomber case is textbook material in the training of arson investigators."

"Really?" Mark asked. "I didn't know that."

Tim couldn't see Steve behind him, kissing the air to illustrate his view of the investigator's comments.

"Here's my preliminary report." Amanda threw a file at Steve's head, then politely handed Mark and Tim each a copy of the file. "The first thing I can tell you is that he's not Nick Stryker."

"Then who is he?" Steve asked, picking up his file from the floor.

"He's the guy who set fire to Stryker's office." Amanda said.

"You can tell that from an autopsy?" Steve said.

"I'm amazing," she said.

"I can vouch for that," Tim said.

"Can you?" Steve said.

Amanda walked over to one of the autopsy tables, where a body was covered by a white sheet. The three men followed her. She pulled back the sheet to reveal the blackened corpse, seared down to the charred muscles.

"The victim suffered multiple traumatic injuries. Fractures, ruptured organs, and collapsed lungs," she said. "He was nearly incinerated. The nature of his burns indicates he was near the source of the explosion when it occurred."

"What explosion?" Steve said.

"The one that blew him out the window of Stryker's office and into the trash bin," Mark said, leaning over the body to examine it closely. "These are concussive-force injuries."

"Translation, please," Steve said.

Tim looked at Steve and gave him the kind of smile a person might give an old lady he was helping across the street

"The concussive wave from an explosion is like a fall from a high building," Tim said. "It has the same impact on a body as smacking into the sidewalk would have."

Mark glanced at Steve. He could tell his son was restraining the urge to slap the helpful smile right off Tim's face.

"And how do we know he wasn't tossed off the roof of the mini-mall?" Steve's voice was unnaturally even, betraying the effort he was making.

"A two-story fall wouldn't have produced such extreme trauma over his entire body," Mark said.

"How do we know he wasn't tossed off another building, scraped off the pavement, dumped in the trash bin, and then set on fire?"

"The burns tell the story, Steve," Tim said. "And it's corroborated by the fire damage in the building. Let me show you."

He walked back to Amanda's desk and picked up his leather shoulder bag from the guest chair. He reached inside, pulled out a stack of photos, and spread them across her desktop.

Mark, Steve, and Amanda joined him to look at the various wide and close-up shots of the fire scene and individual pieces of twisted metal and burned wood. To Mark's untrained eye, it was all just blackened rubble. Tim took a sleek silver pointer from his breast pocket, extended it, and used it to direct their attention to individual photos.

"Judging by the intensity of the heat on these structural elements, the second-floor office was clearly the point of origin for the fire, which was started with gasoline," Tim said. "The pattern of spalling on the walls and floors indicates where the gasoline was spread. The guy splashed it every where, as you can see, including the wall around the door."

Tim retracted his pointer. "Since we didn't find traces of any other explosives in the office, we've developed a theory as to what happened."