The Gods of Guilt Read online

  The good news for Haller & Associates was that rock bands slept late. Every day the building was largely deserted and quiet until late afternoon at the earliest. We had taken to using the loft for our weekly staff meetings. The space was big and empty, with wood floors, fifteen-foot ceilings, exposed-brick walls, and iron support columns to go with a wall of windows offering a nice view of downtown. But what was best about it was that it had a boardroom built into the southeast corner, an enclosed room that still contained a long table and eight chairs. This is where we met to go over cases and where we would now strategize the defense of Andre La Cosse, digital pimp accused of murder.

  The boardroom had a large plate-glass window looking out on the rest of the loft. As I walked across the big empty space, I could see the entire team standing around the table and looking down at something. I assumed it was the box of doughnuts from Bob’s that Lorna usually brought to our meetings.

  “Sorry I’m late,” I said as I entered.

  Cisco turned his wide body from the table and I saw that the team wasn’t looking at doughnuts. On the table was a gold brick shining like the sun breaking over the mountains in the morning.

  “That doesn’t look like a pound,” I said.

  “More,” Lorna said. “It’s a kilo.”

  “I guess he thinks we’re going to trial,” Jennifer said.

  I smiled and checked the credenza that ran along the left wall of the room. Lorna had set up the coffee and doughnuts there. I put my briefcase on the boardroom table and went to the coffee, needing a jolt of caffeine more than the gold to get myself going.

  “So how is everybody?” I asked, my back to them.

  I received a chorus of good reports as I brought my coffee and a glazed doughnut to the table and sat down. It was hard to look at anything other than the gold brick.

  “Who brought that?” I asked.

  “It came in an armored truck,” Lorna reported. “From a place called the Gold Standard Depository. La Cosse made the delivery order from jail. I had to sign for it in triplicate. The delivery man was an armed guard.”

  “So what’s a kilo of gold worth?”

  “About fifty-four K,” Cisco said. “We just looked it up.”

  I nodded. La Cosse had more than doubled down on me. I liked that.

  “Lorna, you know where St. Vincent’s Court is downtown?”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s in the jewelry district. Right off Seventh by Broadway. There’s a bunch of gold wholesalers in there. You and Cisco take this down there and cash it in—that is, if it’s real gold. As soon as it’s money and it’s in the trust account, text me and let me know. I’ll give La Cosse a receipt.”

  Lorna looked at Cisco and nodded. “We’ll go right after the meeting.”

  “Okay, good. What else? Did you bring the Gloria Dayton file?”

  “Files,” she corrected as she reached to the floor and brought up a nine-inch stack of case files.

  She pushed them across the table toward me but I deftly redirected them to Jennifer.

  “Bullocks, these are yours.”

  Jennifer frowned but dutifully reached out to accept the files. She was wearing her dark hair pulled back into a ponytail, her all-business look. I knew her frown belied the fact that she’d willingly accept any part of a murder case. I also knew I could count on her very best work.

  “What am I looking for in all of this?” she asked.

  “I don’t know yet. I just want another set of eyes on those files. I want you to familiarize yourself with the cases and Gloria Dayton. I want you to know everything there is to know about her. Cisco’s working on her profile in the years since those cases.”

  “Okay.”

  “At the same time, I want you on something else.”

  She slid her notebook in front of her.

  “Okay.”

  “Somewhere in the most recent file there, you’ll find some notes from my former investigator, Raul Levin. They regard a drug dealer and his location in a hotel. His name is Hector Arrande Moya. He was Sinaloa cartel and the feds wanted him. I want you to pull everything you can on him. My memory is that he went away for life. Find out where he is and what’s going on with him.”

  Jennifer nodded but then said she wasn’t following the logic of the assignment.

  “Why are we chasing this drug dealer down?”

  “Gloria gave him up to get a deal. The guy went down hard and we might be looking at alternate theories at some point.”

  “Right. Straw man defense.”

  “Just see what you can find.”

  “Is Raul Levin still around? Maybe I’ll start with him, see what he remembers about Hector.”

  “Good idea, but he’s not around. He’s dead.”

  I saw Jennifer glance at Lorna and Lorna’s eyes warn her off the subject.

  “It’s a long story and we’ll talk about it someday,” I said.

  A somber moment passed.

  “Okay, then I’ll just see what I can find out on my own,” Jennifer said.

  I turned my attention to Cisco.

  “Cisco, what have you got for us?”

  “I’ve got a few things so far. First of all, you asked me to run down Gloria since the last time you had a case with her. I did that and went through all the usual channels, digital and human, and she pretty much dropped off the grid after that last case. You said she moved to Hawaii, but if she did, she never got a driver’s license or paid utilities or set up cable TV or purchased a property on any of the islands.”

  “She said she was going to live with a friend,” I said. “Somebody who was going to take care of her.”

  Cisco shrugged.

  “That could be but most people leave at least a shadow of a trail. I couldn’t find anything. I think what’s more likely is that’s the point where she started reinventing herself. You know, new name, ID, all of that.”

  “Giselle Dallinger.”

  “Maybe, or that could have been later. People who do this usually don’t stick with one ID. It’s a cycle. Whenever they think somebody might be getting close or it’s time to change, they go through the process again.”

  “Yeah, but she wasn’t in Witness Protection. She just wanted a new start. This seems kind of extreme.”

  Jennifer cut in on the back-and-forth then.

  “I don’t know, if I had this record on my name and I wanted to start over somewhere, I’d lose the name. Nowadays everything’s digital and a lot of it is public information. Probably the last thing she wanted was somebody in Hawaii digging up all of this stuff.”

  She patted the stack of files in front of her. She made a good point.

  “Okay,” I said, “what about Giselle Dallinger? When did she show up?”

  “Not so sure,” Cisco said. “Her current driver’s license was issued in Nevada two years ago. She never changed it when she moved over here. She rented the apartment on Franklin sixteen months ago, providing a four-year rental history in Las Vegas. I haven’t had time to go back into it over there but I’ll get to it soon.”

  I pulled a pad out of my briefcase and wrote a few questions I needed to ask Andre La Cosse the next time we spoke.

  “Okay, what else?” I asked. “Did you get to the Beverly Wilshire yesterday?”

  “I did. But before I get to that, let’s talk about the apartment on Franklin.”

  I nodded. It was his report. He could deliver it the way he wanted.

  “Let’s start with the fire. It was first reported at twelve fifty-one Monday morning when smoke alarms in the hallway outside the apartment went off and residents entered the hallway and saw smoke coming from our victim’s door. The fire gutted the living room—where the body was located—and heavily damaged the kitchen and the two bedrooms. The smoke detectors inside the apartment evidently did not go off and the reason for that is under investigation.”

  “What about a sprinkler system?”

  “No sprinkler system. It’s an old bu
ilding and it was grandfathered in without it. Now, from what I was able to pick up over at the fire station, there were two investigations of this death.”

  “Two?” I asked.

  This was sounding like something I could use.

  “That’s right. Both police and fire investigators signed off on it at first as accidental, with the victim falling asleep on the couch while smoking. The accelerant was the blouse she was wearing, which was made of polyurethane. What changed their minds about that was the coroner’s initial survey. The remains were bagged and tagged at the scene and taken to the ME’s Office.”

  Cisco looked at his own notes, which had been scratched on a pocket notebook that looked tiny in his big left hand.

  “A deputy medical examiner named Celeste Frazier did a preliminary examination of the body and determined that the hyoid bone was fractured in two places. That changed things pretty quick.”

  I looked at Lorna and knew she did not know what the hyoid bone was.

  “It’s a small bone shaped like a horseshoe that protects the windpipe.”

  I touched the front of my neck in illustration.

  “If it’s broken, it means force trauma to the front of the neck. She was choked, strangled.”

  She nodded her thanks and I told Cisco to keep going.

  “So they went back out, with arson and homicide investigators, and now we have a full-on murder investigation. They knocked on doors and I talked to a lot of the people they talked to. Several of them heard an argument coming from her apartment about eleven Sunday night. Raised voices. A man and a woman going at it about money.”

  He referred to his notebook again to get a name.

  “A Mrs. Annabeth Stephens lives directly across the hall from the victim’s apartment and she was watching out her peephole when a man left following the argument. She said the time was between eleven thirty and midnight because the news was over and she went to bed at midnight. She later identified Andre La Cosse when the cops showed her a six-pack.”

  “She told you this?”

  “She did.”

  “Did she know you were working for the guy she identified?”

  “I told her I was investigating the death across the hall and she spoke willingly to me. I didn’t identify myself further than that because she never asked for anything further.”

  I nodded to Cisco. Being able to finesse the story from a key prosecution witness so early in the game was good work on his part.

  “How old is Mrs. Stephens?”

  “She’s midsixties. I think she was stationed at that peephole a lot of the time. Every building has a busybody like that.”

  Jennifer chimed in.

  “If she says he left before midnight, how do the police account for the smoke detector in the hallway not sounding for fifty more minutes?”

  Cisco shrugged again.

  “Could be a couple of explanations. One, that it took the smoke some time to work its way under the door. The fire could’ve been burning in there the whole time. Or, two, he set the fire with some sort of delay or other rig to allow him time to get out and get clear. And then there’s three, a combination of one and two.”

  Cisco reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and matches. He shook a cigarette out of the pack and then put it inside the folded matchbook.

  “Oldest trick in the book,” he said. “You light the cigarette and it slow burns down to the matches. The matches go up and ignite the accelerant. Gives a three- to ten-minute head start, depending on the cigarette you use.”

  I nodded more to myself than to Cisco. I was getting a sense of the state’s case against my client and was already working out strategies and moves. Cisco continued.

  “Did you know that by law in most states, any brand of cigarette sold in that state has to have a three-minute burn-down rate for unattended smoking? That’s why most arsonists use foreign cigarettes.”

  “That’s great,” I said. “Can we get back to this case? What else did you get from the apartment building?”

  “That’s about it at this time,” Cisco said. “I’ll be going back there, though. A lot of people weren’t at home when I knocked.”

  “That’s because they looked through the peephole and got scared when they saw you.”

  I meant it in jest but it wasn’t without a point. Cisco rode a Harley and he dressed the part. His usual outfit consisted of black jeans, boots, and a skin-tight black T-shirt with a leather vest over it. With his imposing size, dress, and the penetrating stare of his dark eyes through a peephole, it was no wonder to me that some people didn’t answer their doors. In fact, I was more surprised when he reported the cooperation of a witness. So much so that I took pains to make sure cooperation was fully voluntary. The last thing I ever wanted was a witness backfiring on me while on the stand. I personally vetted them all.

  “I mean, maybe you should think about wearing a tie every now and then,” I added. “I have a whole collection of clip-ons, you know.”

  “No, thanks,” Cisco responded flatly. “Can we move on to the hotel now or do you want to keep taking shots at me?”

  “Easy, big guy, I’m just poking you a little bit. Tell us about the hotel. You had a busy night.”

  “I worked it late. Anyway, the hotel is where this thing gets good.”

  He opened his laptop and punched in a command as he spoke, his big fingers punishing the keyboard.

  “I managed to obtain the cooperation of the security staff of the Beverly Wilshire without even wearing a tie. They—”

  “All right, all right,” I said. “No more discussion of neckties.”

  “Good.”

  “Go on. What did they tell you over there?”

  6

  Cisco said it wasn’t what they told him at the hotel that was important. It was what they showed him.

  “Most public spaces in the hotel are under camera surveillance twenty-four seven,” he said. “So they have almost all of our victim’s visit to the hotel Sunday night on digital. They provided me with copies for a nominal fee that I will be expensing.”

  “No problem,” I said.

  Cisco turned the computer around on the table so the rest of us could see the screen.

  “I used the computer’s basic editing program and put the various angles together in one continuous take in real time. We can track her the whole time she was there.”

  “Then play it, Scorsese.”

  He hit the play button and we started watching. The playback was in black and white and had no sound. It was grainy but not to the point that faces were obscured or unidentifiable. It began with an overhead view of the hotel’s lobby. A time stamp at the top said it was 9:44 p.m. Though the lobby was busy with late check-ins and other people coming and going, Gloria/Giselle was easy enough to spot as she strolled through the lobby toward the elevator alcove. She was dressed in a knee-length black dress, nothing too risqué, and looked totally at ease and at home. She carried a shopping bag from Saks that helped her sell the image of someone who belonged.

  “Is that her?” Jennifer asked, pointing to a woman sitting on a circular divan and showing a lot of leg.

  “Too obvious,” I said. “Her.”

  I pointed to the right of the screen and tracked Gloria. She smiled at a security man who stood at the entrance to the elevator alcove and passed him without hesitation.

  Soon the angle changed and we looked down from the ceiling of the elevator alcove. Gloria checked her phone for e-mail while she waited. Soon enough an elevator arrived and she got on.

  The next camera angle was from inside the elevator. Gloria got on and pushed the 8 button. As she rode up, she raised the bag and looked inside it. The view we had did not allow us to see the contents.

  When she arrived at the eighth floor, she stepped off the elevator and the screen went black.

  “Okay, this is where we go dark,” Cisco said. “No cameras on the guest floors.”

  “Why not?” I asked.


  “They told me it was a privacy issue. Recording who goes into what room can be more trouble than it’s worth when it comes to divorce cases and subpoenas and all of that stuff.”

  I nodded. The explanation seemed valid.

  The screen came back to life again, showing Gloria riding the elevator down. I noted on the time stamp that five minutes had gone by, meaning that Gloria had apparently knocked on the door and waited in the hallway outside room 837 for a significant period of time.

  “Is there a house phone up there on the eighth floor?” I asked. “Did she spend all that time knocking on the door or did she call down to the desk to ask about the room?”

  “No phone,” Cisco said. “Just watch.”

  Once back on the ground floor, Gloria stepped out of the elevator and went to a house phone that was on a table against the wall. She made a call and soon was speaking to someone.

  “This is her asking to be connected to the room,” Cisco said. “She is told by the operator that there is no Daniel Price registered in the hotel and no one in eight thirty-seven.”

  Gloria hung up the phone, and I could tell by her body language that she was annoyed, frustrated. Her trip had been wasted. She headed back through the lobby, moving at a faster clip than when she had arrived.

  “Now watch this,” Cisco said.

  Gloria was halfway across the lobby when a man entered the screen thirty feet behind her. He was wearing a fedora and had his head down, looking at the screen of his phone. He appeared to be heading toward the main doors as well, and there was nothing suspicious about him other than that his features were obscured by the hat and the downward pose of his face.

  Gloria suddenly changed directions and headed toward the front desk. This caused the man behind her to awkwardly change his direction as well. He turned and went to the circular divan and sat down.

  “He’s following her?” Lorna asked.

  “Wait for it,” Cisco said.

  On the screen, Gloria went to the desk, waited while a guest ahead of her was taken care of, then asked the deskman a question. He typed something on a keyboard, looked at a screen, and shook his head. He was obviously telling her that there was no Daniel Price registered as a guest in the hotel. All the while, the man in the hat sat with his head tilted down and the brim of his hat hiding his face. He was looking at his phone but not doing anything with it.