Chapter 4
The front porch of the estate was long and pillared, with an elegant style of rustic grandeur. It ran the entire length of the home’s front. Although the designer used logs and rough-hewn wood on the exterior, somehow the house looked completely modern. Quite a trick to pull off. Lots of dark wood, lots of half logs, lots of river rock, lots of flagstones. It was designed to blend into the lake’s granite cliffs and towering old trees. In Claire’s opinion, the architect had gotten it exactly right. The blinking lights were giving her a headache, though, making her want to scream for mercy. Why couldn’t the owner have been a Scrooge? Christmas overkill, and nothing less.
The house sat high on the bluff. She stopped on the porch and looked out over a lake that was obscured by the growing darkness and bad weather. You couldn’t see the water at all, but in the quiet landscape you could hear the stiff winds pushing waves up onto the rocky beach far below. The wind up top had died down momentarily, and the sleet had miraculously turned back into large, intricate snowflakes floating softly to the ground in perfect straight lines. They looked like bits of torn lace dropping down all around them, but in this case each and every flake turned from white to red to green to blue and then to orange by the damned blinking and winking and twinkling tangle of lights. It was enough to make one dive for cover. Claire loved Christmas, especially now that she had Black and Rico to spend it with, an actual true-life family, which was a new concept for her heretofore bleak and lonely life. But this place? This was a sleazy L.A. overkill production with look-at-me syndrome. She could spot extreme narcissism anywhere. Especially here.
Way too much glitz and glamour, like everything else in L.A., which made that city her least favorite place on earth. Strike that—in the universe. She had worked LAPD when she’d first started out in law enforcement and had ended up the target of media sharks there, too. So she knew how celebrity Angelinos thought. If the owner of this place turned out to be an actor, or, heaven forbid, an A-list star, he or she would be an arrogant jerk and hard to work with. Count on it. It would be a miracle if said person wasn’t self-centered, self-entitled, and self-righteous. In her experience, they all turned into pompous fools in accordance with their degree of fame, each and every single celebrity that she’d ever met.
Best scenario? There would be a heavy snowfall that would ground their deluxe private jets and keep them in warm and sunny southern California. Then she and Bud could conduct their celebrity interviews over the phone and not have to actually be near anyone. Now that would be a Christmas present worth its weight in gold. She wondered if Black could arrange it; he’d been able to arrange just about everything else she’d ever wanted. Bless his little darlin’ heart.
After the cheerful glare outside, the interior of the home looked like an exploding supernova. What was wrong with these people? On the other hand, it was as warm as toast in there, which felt good to Claire’s frozen nose. Bud already looked like a new man and was jerking off his brown sock hat. The interior was as woodsy as the exterior, but in a very “wow” and “whoopee” kind of way, and only if you disregarded the myriad of silver tinsel and endless evergreen swags from hell. The room itself was beautiful and smelled utterly delicious, like a fresh pine forest bedecked with cinnamon sticks and pumpkin pies and lots of other holiday things that Claire loved. Her stomach growled at the thought of pumpkin pie. With lots and lots of Cool Whip curled up high on top. She’d skipped dinner, and lunch, too. Her appetite would die off completely when they found the body, of course. It always did, so she definitely wouldn’t have to suffer hunger pains long. They stopped just inside the big, bizarre, lightning-bolted front door. There, they tugged on protective paper booties and pulled on the obligatory disposable gloves.
Claire glanced around the central hallway. Giant and spacious and spread out, big time. It looked like there were two floors, both with matching hallways radiating out to either side and going on forever, all in the aforementioned rustic modern style. Somehow it was sort of elegant, too. A new and unusual concept. Cedar Bend Lodge was rustic, too, but with a homey kind of elegance that didn’t sport the stark modern bent and modular furniture inside this house. She hadn’t seen this décor anywhere else, lots of bare wood and black glass and marble and stainless steel, all very pricey by the looks of it. Everything reeked of Beverly Hills panache and exorbitant prices.
There was a black marble-topped table in the center of the foyer with a tall copper statue on its top that depicted Claire knew not what. Looked pretty damned peculiar to her, like an upside-down angel with barbwire sticking out everywhere. But, to each his own—even if their own was damn hideous. The walls were painted a warm, golden yellow, with fancy dark wood moldings just about everywhere you looked. Like something that would have its own spread in Lake Living for L.A. Living Legends. Black would probably love this place. Claire preferred small, cozy, old, and comfortable. Shabby chic floated her boat just fine.
The cop posted at the bottom of the main staircase was another young guy Claire didn’t know. This one had the sense to be polite and respectful and not ignorant. He pointed at a door at the back of the hall, under a fabulous staircase that swept up into a wide spiral on both sides. “The victim is back there, Detectives. We checked out the room but didn’t touch anything.”
This new recruit was so young and fresh-faced that Claire suddenly felt decrepit. He had shaved off his hair, but she could tell by the shadows on his scalp that he’d had plenty of hair before he went crazy with that razor. His baldness looked out of place with his baby face, smooth skin, and innocent brown eyes. But he smiled at her, and it was a pleasant one. Better than that, he didn’t mention People magazine or the National Enquirer, so she took to him right off the bat. His black name plate read Paul Wingate.
“Thank you, Wingate. Good job,” she said to him.
Bud stood back and allowed her to precede him into the library. He was a veritable Rhett Butler, unless it came to foodstuffs. Then he’d eat all the pizza, except for her one piece. They stopped inside the door and observed the room. Unfortunately, more holiday decorations, stem to stern, top to bottom. A good Walmart aisle’s worth of lights everywhere. Even Santa Claus’s elves wouldn’t subject some poor innocent family to this. Soft music played somewhere: Christmas carols. “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.” Ironic, maybe, but not funny.
Bud was looking at a seventy-inch television screen right across from them. “How does anybody watch a football game with all these lights reflecting onto the screen? That would drive me up a wall.”
“Maybe he hasn’t moved in yet. My God, this is simply blinding. Wonder where we could pull the plug?”
Claire then looked down the long length of the room. One honking big Christmas tree took up most of the far wall, where it stood in front of a ton of built-in log bookcases, all empty of tomes. But her eyes latched solely onto the victim. The woman appeared to be dressed like an angel. She was wearing some kind of diaphanous, loose white garment, or maybe it was a flowing nightgown. There was a wide balcony running around the top of the room, lined on all four walls with more empty bookshelves. It looked as if the young woman had been posed to sit atop the balcony bannister right above the tree. Her arms seemed to be holding onto the rail, and her robe had been pulled out over the top of the tree.
“He made her look like an angel tree-topper,” Claire said, feeling a bit sick.
“Good God,” Bud breathed out from next to her.
Together, they walked slowly down the room toward the tree. Claire couldn’t take her eyes off the victim high above them. “How did he get her to stay up there like that?”
“Dunno. Man, she looks like she’s just a kid,” Bud said.
At the bottom of the tree, they stopped and stared up at the victim. Her arms were outstretched at her sides, maybe tied somehow to the bannister railing, and the sleeves of her gown had been draped artistically, as if they were wings. The pose gave the impression that she was hovering up there on outstretched wings. But Claire could not take her eyes off the woman’s face. Bud was right: She was young, really young. Her eyes were wide open, pale blue and staring straight down at them. She had been struck from behind. They couldn’t see the damage done to her skull, but they could see the blood from the wound. It had run down over her face, weaving together in intersecting red rivulets. The blow that had killed her must have been brutal as hell.
Claire moved slightly to her right. That’s when she saw the huge hole behind the girl’s right ear. Long blond hair was matted with blood, making it look dark and sticky. More blood had soaked down into the front of the white gown, and the killer had wound a string of blinking white lights around her forehead to resemble a bright and glowing halo. Claire swallowed her revulsion. This young girl was dead and gone forever. A Christmas angel, no more.
“This guy is psycho, man,” Bud muttered, angry. “What is she? Eighteen? Nineteen? Why would anybody wanna do this to some young teenager like her?”
Claire met his eyes. He had the most appalled look on his face—even after so many years in homicide, he was affected. So was she. She knelt down at the base of the tree and examined the small gift sitting just under the lowest tree limb. It looked like a ring box, maybe. She didn’t touch it and wouldn’t until the photographers had shot crime scene photos. But she could read the tag.
“What’s it say?” Bud asked.
“It says: ‘To my cop friends. Merry Christmas. May this angel light your way to me. I’ll be waiting. Game on.’”
“Oh my God, this is gonna be brutal. Looks like he left us the murder weapon, too, Claire. See it back there, behind those presents?”
Claire hadn’t seen it. “The killer’s already playing games with us, Bud. Leaving the murder weapon behind is nothing but a taunt. He feels secure. And you can bet he wiped the thing clean, like everything else he touched.”
“Killer could be a she. This is a staged scene like no other that I’ve ever seen.”
“Highly imaginative, too.” Claire hunkered down and studied what she could see of the weapon. It looked like some kind of a trophy. Another gift for them, this one unwrapped. It also looked heavy, and about a foot tall. “There’s blood on it, and maybe some brain matter.”
Bud squatted down beside her. “Yeah, I see that. Think he found that trophy somewhere in this house? What is that on top of it?”
“Looks like a bishop from a chess set, I think.”
Bud turned his attention on her. “Chess? Really? Why would those guys get trophies? Trophies are for real sports. Contact sports, like football.”
“Give me a break, Bud. Chess is a game. There are winners and losers. It’s not like checkers. You’ve got to have brains to play it well. These guys pit themselves against each other in tournaments and get themselves a trophy to sit around and collect dust. Until they want to murder somebody with it. Like this guy.”
“Trophies for chess?” Bud was still grousing around. “Man, that just does not seem kosher. Hell, Claire, they just sit there and stare at those little things on the board. No effort in that. So you’re sayin’ we got ourselves some kind of nerd killer?”
“I’m not saying that. And not all chess players are nerds. You have to be smart to play the game well. You know, lots of strategic moves and second-guessing what the other player’s gonna do.”
“How do you know all that? Don’t tell me you play chess?”
“Well, no, of course not. Black does, but not with me. Too boring, and it takes forever. I tried once to play with him but I fell asleep waiting for him to make a move. Fast paced it’s not.”
Claire stood up and raised her gaze to the victim, who stared back down at her. “She’s just a tiny little thing, isn’t she? And she looks so young and innocent. I wonder who she is and why he picked her? Why her, out of all the girls in this county?”
“We’ll find that out soon enough.”
Claire nodded. The victim looked like the kind of kid who’d never hurt anyone in her entire life. Frail, skinny, pale skin that looked creamy and young and smooth. The loss of color might have been from all the blood, because there was plenty of it turning that filmy white gown to scarlet. Some of it had dripped down from her widespread arms onto the tree and its top ornaments. The whole scene was bathed in the glow of the lights strung around the balcony bannisters, all of them blinking on and off, on and off, coloring her face red, then green, then yellow, a bizarre kind of cheerful strobe, almost psychedelic in effect. Like some scenario out of a horror movie. It was horrible.
“How do you think he got her?”
“I don’t know. She’s so little that it wouldn’t take much to subdue her. And that might be a nightgown. Maybe he came in the night, broke in somehow, and got her when she was asleep.”
“So she must live here? Or maybe she’s just a tour guide. Know what? Come to think of it, seems like I remember seeing a picture of the tour guides in the paper a few weeks ago. Some of them had on angel costumes.”
“It could be a costume. Looks like a nightgown to me, though.” Claire couldn’t seem to drag her focus off the victim’s little heart-shaped face. Her mouth was slightly open. Claire could see the tip of her tongue. The halo of lights was another of the killer’s dramatic flourishes to set a shocking scene. He had been proud of his work and wanted to showcase it. Definitely. Claire felt slightly sick to her stomach.
“Look, there’s a spiral staircase that goes up to the balcony. We need to go up and check her out,” Bud said, heading quickly that way.
Claire followed him, and then rounded the wooden, winding steps. It was a two-story library without a single book. There were several rolling ladders for selecting books on the high shelves. Claire and Bud didn’t touch anything. Hopefully they’d get some prints. This guy had gone to a hell of lot of trouble and might have gotten careless. There were a lot of dramatic flourishes that he’d had to have touched in order to arrange. Upstairs, they could see the damage done to the girl’s skull, up close and way too personal. Half of the back of her head was gone, lying behind her on the floor in chunks. Claire looked away, nausea churning in the back of her throat. The blow had been brutal. Parts of her head had been crushed.
“Looks like he hit her twice.”
“This guy’s a friggin’ monster,” Bud was saying. “Look at this.”
Claire leaned closer and realized what Bud was talking about. The killer had nailed the victim’s hands to the bannister in order to get the effect of those outspread wings. “He’s a psychopath, all right. She was still alive. Look at all the blood that dripped down the bannister onto the floor.”
“What’s that smell?”
Claire knew instantly what it was—singed human flesh. “The lights are burning into her forehead. He strung them over the wound, so he probably bludgeoned her first.”
The whole scene was eerily horrendous, the young woman dead and bloody as all the lights around her blinked merrily. She looked like some kind of a scary mannequin in a Halloween haunted house. Claire’s happy state of mind took a slow dive into dark oblivion. She stared at the back of the girl’s head. “Who would have the stomach to do this to an innocent girl?”
Bud said, “Maybe she wasn’t so innocent. Maybe she was a devil, disguised as an angel. Could be the killer’s stab at murderous irony.”
“Maybe.”
“I’ve got a real bad feeling about this case.”
“Me too. Too much theater. This guy has been practicing.”
“He’s a serial. I’d bet next week’s pay on it.”
Across the room, a new song came on, “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.” That did it; Claire had had enough. “Please, Bud, find that music and turn it off.”
Bud descended to the ground floor and walked across the room. A moment later, the CD was turned off mid-stanza. Claire breathed a sigh of relief. Somehow the soft and melodious Christmas carols made everything seem worse. As if it could get any worse. She hadn’t worked a murder like this in a while. Especially not a carefully staged one full of cruel clues left for them to puzzle over. This killer liked to play mind games, all right, so it was going to be complicated and messy. She had not forgotten the dread that processing the body at the scene brought up inside her. She steeled herself. They’d get him. They’d get him and he would pay for what he’d done to this poor girl.
Claire moved down the turn in the spiral stairs and met Bud at the bottom. They moved away from the tree; there was nothing they could or should do until forensics showed up. When they stopped at the other end of the library, Bud looked back. “I wish we could turn off those lights around her head. They’re burning her skin, damn it.”
“Well, we can’t. Not until Buck gets here and we get our still shots and the video. I wish they’d hurry up. I want her down off that tree, too.”
“I’m gonna look around and see if I can find her purse or something with ID. She could be a maid or housekeeper, something like that. She’s got to be in this house for some reason.”
“If it’s an angel costume she could be a tour guide. But I still think he got her in her nightgown.”
Bud nodded. They both sobered at once when the music suddenly kicked on again. Startled, Claire had her weapon out before she realized the music must be on a timed loop. For some reason, a chill rippled up her arms. “A Holly Jolly Christmas” was playing now. Huh uh, not with a well-lit bloody corpse in the room with them. “Guess you’re gonna have to unplug it, Bud. I can’t stand listening to any more cheerful music right now.”
“Yeah, I hate this case already.”
Claire did, too. Big time. Something terrible had gone down here, and the reason for it was not going to be a fun thing to investigate. “We’ve got to get an ID first. Somebody in this town really, really hated this girl’s guts and wants us to know it in no uncertain terms. Who goes to this much trouble, for God’s sake, and then spends time decorating the corpse with lights and tinsel? And then there’s the trophy and gift left as clues. This guy definitely is a game player.”
Games that left people dead. Games that Claire did not want to play. But she had to. They had to find this guy, and soon. She just hoped the clues he left panned out. Maybe he wasn’t quite as brilliant as he thought he was—and maybe they were smarter than he thought.