Nine

He cussed himself out for wasting time talking to Neuly, then ran a DMV check on the driver’s license for Grady.

The answer came back quickly. Eric Grady was deceased.

He asked for a date of death.

“Last year. July fifth. That’s a presumed DOD.”

He looked at the application. “Eric Grady” had applied for a job two days after he was dead. The employee who used his name and driver’s license had been hired by Ty Serault on July 7.

He called the homicide bureau and got one of the detectives on duty to run a computer check for him, to look up all the information available on Grady’s death.

The call came back within minutes. “He was a John Doe for over half a year. One of our cases-in fact, you should talk to Ciara. It was hers.”

“I will. Tell me what you have, though.”

“He was twenty-two, hadn’t been seen since a Fourth of July party last year in Malibu. At first, no one missed him. His body was found in Carbon Canyon in February of this year. Didn’t identify him immediately, but Ciara brought a forensic anthropologist in on it. Got the age and sex, and from there, Ciara put it all together. Theory was that he wandered off drunk from the party sometime after midnight on July fifth-he was found not all that far from the party house-stumbled in the dark and fell to his death.”

He thanked the detective and hung up. For a few moments, he sat in the car, resting his forehead on his fists on the steering wheel. Angry at himself for not seeing the differences in the photos earlier, Alex also wondered what kind of background checks Serault was doing.

So the phony Eric Grady was in a position to take calls-or hear of other calls-from people who thought they were seeing FBI fugitives in various parts of the country. He had joined the Crimesolvers USA staff just after the real Eric Grady died, used his ID and probably his references to get the job. He left the staff not long after the body was found, perhaps fearing publicity about the case would expose him.

But the identification of John Does didn’t make the news as often as the public supposed. For that matter, murders didn’t always get attention from the media. Alex just happened to be working on three cases that had the full attention of the country at the moment.

He looked at the goofy photo of the young man on the ID badge. The clown. Some clown. He’d sure as shit brought the circus into L.A. County.

Alex got back on the freeway, heading toward the last known address for the phony Eric Grady. He tried calling Ciara but only got her cell phone’s voice mail. She might be on her way back from Catalina, out of cell phone range. He left a message for her.

He called Serault Productions and asked for Nola Phillips.

“Nola? I’m hoping you can help me out here. Who takes the photos for the employee ID badges? Is that done there at the studio, or off-site?”

“We do it here. One of my jobs. I take the photos and then laminate them onto a badge.”

“Do you keep the negatives?”

“I take them with a digital camera, but yes, I keep the files. Why?”

“Eric Grady. His photo was a little-”

“Dumb? Yeah, I thought so, too. But that’s the one he wanted on his badge.”

“Do you have any others of him?”

“I’ll look.”

“He worked for you for eight or nine months and left about two months ago, right?”

“Yes, I think so. It’s in the files we made for you.”

“Anyone else worked at his desk since he left?”

“No, I don’t think so. We haven’t filled that position yet. Ty wanted to wait until summer. We start taping new segments in August, so we hire in June and July.”

“How late will you be there tonight?”

“Until eleven or so.”

“Mind if I come by again?”

“Not at all.”

“I’ve got another stop to make, but I have a feeling it won’t take long. I’ll call when I’m on my way from there.”

Eric Grady’s “apartment” turned out to be a rented private mailbox. The store in which it was rented was closed for the night. Alex turned around without getting out of the car and called Nola to say he was ten minutes away.

Ciara called back before he reached the studio. She hadn’t had any luck on Catalina, but she was bringing several boxes of papers back to the office, to continue following up on the next day. He told her what he had learned about the Crimesolvers employee.

“Eric Grady? God damn, this means we’ll have to reopen that one. This is going to be so hard on the family.” She was silent for a moment then said, “I can see how perfectly his identity would work for someone else, though. He was from Missouri, a good student, well-liked, but a little restless. He had decided to take a few months off from school, and his family disapproved. So, they weren’t communicating much. He worked as an extra in some films and made friends here, too, mostly in the Topanga Canyon crowd. He ran out of money, but he was one of those guys who could always find someone to stay with. I think that was losing its charm, though-he told some people at the party that he was thinking of going back home.”

“So everyone here thought he went back to Missouri, and everyone in Missouri thought he was still out here.”

“Right. So it was autumn before a missing persons report was filed by his family, and months before anyone even knew that the party was the last time he was seen. No progress was being made on it. I got called out to a scene that was just John Doe’s bones in a canyon, and we didn’t make the co

“The remains were skeletonized?”

“Completely. In fact, we never recovered the complete skeleton-predators had made off with the smaller bones. We didn’t know it was Grady until the dental came in.”

Alex glanced down at the open folder on the seat next to him, open to the copy of Eric Grady’s driver’s license. He saw the young, hopeful face in the photo, and closed the folder.

“Well,” he said, “now we know what happened to his wallet.”

Nola was waiting in the reception area, standing very still and looking even a little more pale, ignoring the banter of the security guard who now sat at the receptionist’s desk. Her blue eyes were fixed on Alex’s face as he came in, and he tried to smile for her. She didn’t smile back.

You know, he thought. You looked at his employee records and now you know.

The guard slid a sign-in sheet toward him, and he filled it in and then silently followed her down the hallway, this time not to the glowing kingdom of dinosaurs and stars, but to a larger room on the opposite side of the hall. She flipped a switch and fluorescent ceiling lights hummed to life.

Four metal desks. Three were decorated with framed photos and plants. One was cleared off. She pointed to the empty desk as if accusing it and said, “That one was-” She had started to say, “Eric’s,” but caught herself. She dropped her hand. “That one was his.”

“Thanks.” He started toward it.

“He wasn’t Eric Grady.”

He turned toward her and said quietly, “No. Eric Grady is dead.”

She clenched her fists. “Did that asshole-who is he, anyway? The guy who worked here for almost a year, pretending he was Eric.”

“I don’t know. Not yet.”

“Did he kill the real Eric?”

“I don’t know that either.”

“Probably yes.”

“Maybe. At the very least, he didn’t report Eric Grady’s death.”

“Oh, right, and then he went around hanging people upside down over bathtubs!”

He didn’t reply.

She splayed her hands out in front of her and said, “Sorry, sorry. I just-I’ll be okay. I will. Really.”

He asked if she had called Ty Serault.

She shook her head.

“Do me a favor and call him. Ask if he would mind if I had a crime lab technician come in and dust the desk for prints.”

“Do you need his permission?”

“It’s just easier this way.”