Nine

“Probably. Wouldn’t be easy for one man to get past Adrianos’s bodyguards and subdue a guy like him. Adrianos never had fewer than two men guarding him. And it’s unlikely one man could hoist someone of Adrianos’s size up over the tub. If there had been a pulley or other device-”

“We should ask Marquez if there was one in the attic.”

Alex didn’t say anything.

She sighed. “I’ll go out there and apologize to him.”

He shrugged. “Like I said, give him a minute to cool off. You’ve been riding his ass since we got here.”

“He’ll live,” she said absently. Her brows were drawn together. “So, which of Bernardo Adrianos’s competitors took care of him before we could?”

“Maybe it wasn’t his competition.”

“Come on, Alex. Guys like Adrianos are never safe. I’m betting someone wanted a piece of his lucrative import business.”

“Another drug dealer? I don’t know. Dealers at his level have hit men at their beck and call. A pro probably would have downed him with one shot and left him where we never would have found him. Whoever killed Adrianos wanted him to be found.”

Alex saw the beam of a flashlight at the back door, and a slender young woman stepped onto the porch. She was wearing a crime lab jacket. She nodded toward them, then crouched down to take photographs of the doorframe.

“What are you doing?” Ciara called to her.

The tech explained that there were tool marks on it that might be useful.

“Unless this place has been robbed before,” she said.

Ciara turned back to Alex. “So if this isn’t drug lord warfare, what other possibilities are there?”

“I don’t know.” He hesitated, then said, “It reminds me a little of the way Jerome Naughton used to work.”

“Who?”

“About a dozen years ago. One of my first cases in Detectives. I was looking for him because J.D. and I were fairly sure he’d murdered his wife. Later, we learned we were right, although we never found her body.”

“Before my time, I guess,” she said, a little stiffly.

“Before you were in Detectives, anyway. Thing that makes me think about Naughton is that he’d hang his victims upside down like this-kind of like a hunter hangs a deer-over a hook above a bathtub. He usually chose abandoned properties or ones that had been vacant for a while.”

“You said his name was Naughton?”

“Yes-but this is not as much like his work as it sounds. For one thing, his victims were always women, and he wasn’t so neat about the blood. In fact, his scenes always had blood all over the place. Supposedly, that was part of the thrill for him. So that doesn’t fit. And I don’t think he used that trick of drilling holes and tying the rope over the beam.”

“Starting to sound like there’s not so much in common after all. But we should check this Naughton guy out. Any idea where he is now?”

“Dead. His fourteen-year-old stepson killed him. Long story, but some people thought the kid might have been Naughton’s accomplice. I’m not sure I agree with them, but no one ever had a chance to really question him at length.” An image of the boy came into his mind-a handsome face beneath old bruises; thin, but strong, with jet-black hair and large, haunted gray eyes. He didn’t think he’d ever forget that kid’s eyes.

“Why not?” Ciara was saying. “No-let me guess-he’s dead, too?”

“No, not as far as I know. He wasn’t questioned, because his grandmother was Elizabeth Logan. She had been looking for him for years.”

Ciara gave him a blank look.

“Logan Cosmetics?” he said.

“Oh. Big money.”

“That’s an understatement. Elizabeth Logan made money and married money. Probably aren’t fifty people in Los Angeles that have as much money as the Logans-if there are that many.”

“You’d know more about that than I do, Mr. Silver Spoon.”

Alex had long ago learned that there were those who would never forgive him for growing up among the wealthy-no matter what had changed since then or how little he regretted the loss of that world. It was a prejudice that wasn’t worth complaining about-but one he’d prefer not to find in a partner.

“Ah, shit, Alex, don’t take offense.”

He stayed silent.

“I’m sorry, all right?” she said.

“Sure.” He watched as the lab tech began to remove the strike plate from the door.

“So Elizabeth Logan took care of her grandson?” Ciara asked, drawing his attention back to her.

“Yes-listen, there really isn’t much in common with the Naughton cases. His victims were always women, and there was never any evidence that the kid participated in the killings.”

“But he murdered his stepfather,” Ciara said.

“Self-defense, or damned close to it. In all likelihood, it was exactly the way the D.A. decided it was-Naughton terrorized the boy, made his life a living hell-even killed the boy’s mother right in front of him. The kid killed Naughton because he believed that was the only way he’d ever get away from him. The sad thing is, he was probably right. Nothing more to it. Otherwise, he would have been brought to trial-money or no money. And as far as I know, the boy has never been in any trouble since.”

“But you’re going to try to find out what he’s been up to lately.”

He smiled. “I might.”

“Personally, I think it’s way too big a stretch. You haven’t heard anything about this kid for a decade, and if this was his sort of gig, he’d have been in trouble before now, right?”

“Most likely.”

“Face it, Alex, this is probably a job done by a pro, a guy who picked his killing spot carefully and was not impulsive. Adrianos pissed off the wrong people, and that’s all there is to it. As for the method-maybe his enemies hired someone new to the trade who enjoys his work.”

“Christ, I hope not.”

“What do you think that nine on the mirror is all about?” she asked.

“Hell if I know. But that’s another thing that doesn’t seem to fit if this is just drug dealer versus drug dealer. What kind of message is the number nine? And who’s supposed to get the message?”

“His business associates. Someone is using this to say they’re all working for new management. Which reminds me, Alex-I wonder where his bodyguards are?”

“Probably welcoming Bernardo to hell.”

“Shit. I guess that means we’ll get called out to some other spoiled meat scene one of these days. Probably closer to Adrianos’s home ground than Lakewood. With any luck, maybe the LAPD will catch it instead of Sheriff’s.”

“Might be on television then,” Alex said, and she laughed.

The sheriff’s department seldom got the media attention given to the Los Angeles Police Department. Alex didn’t think that was necessarily a bad thing.

“Well,” she said, “even if the bodyguards do drop dead inside L.A. city limits instead of somewhere within our jurisdiction, we’ve got the big news here.”

“Something tells me I’ll soon wish he had been found in L.A., too.”

He watched as the tech began to put away her camera and tools.

“I don’t suppose we can hope for latent prints?” Alex asked.

The tech shook her head. “Nothing that will be of use. Because this place has been on the real estate market, we’ve got all kinds of prints everywhere in the house except the bathroom, the back doorknob, and the attic. Those are wiped clean. Same with footprints.” She glanced at Ciara, then added, “Detective Marquez was good about preserving the scene-he let us check the hallway and bathroom floor before anyone other than the first officer on the scene stepped in there. Looks as if his are the only shoeprints on the bathroom floor. There are some others in the hall. They’re odd-I think the killer wore plastic booties or something else that left an indistinct, uniform flat sole mark. Big enough to be a man’s, but don’t try to take that to court-that’s just a SWAG-a scientific wild-assed guess.”

“Any SWAG about the rope?” Ciara asked, and Alex wondered if she was setting the tech up.