“Robin’s done plenty of last-minute repairs for guitarists about to showcase.”
“Well, this wasn’t for a guitarist, it was for a deejay. Parmenter stepped outside to have a smoke and got nailed through the neck just like O’Brien. You know the obvious assumption on something like that.”
“A gang thing. What were Parmenter’s felonies?”
“Theft, burglary, one carjacking, but all years ago before he discovered his muse. Still, a gang thing was A on the list. But B was a business dispute because Parmenter had been making noise about being ripped off by his producer and manager, the same guy who’d thrown the showcase. And had fired him.”
“Parmenter crashed the party.”
“Looks like it.”
“What was the conflict over?”
“Don’t know but Parmenter had thought he was destined to be Jay-Z and bitched about not getting fame and fortune fast enough. The case went nowhere because there was no evidence other than the bullet and no one was willing to talk. The D assigned to it retired shortly afterward and no one picked it up.”
“How’d Petra discover the link?”
“She asked around about rifle murders and someone had a vague recollection. She searched, found it, learned ballistics had been done but there’d been no match to any previous shooting. So she rushed through a comparison with O’Brien. Not expecting anything, then boom, same .308 rifle.”
I said, “A hunter for hire.”
“Looks like it. We’re gonna be expanding the search to any similars. How’s the rest of your day looking?”
“Open.”
“Excellent.” He finished the two slices, cut another one, chewed and swallowed, got orange juice out of the fridge, filled a glass and finished it in one long gulp.
“The team’s meeting in an hour.”
“Hollywood?”
“No, my place because I first-dibbed the big room.”
Chapter
11
The largest interview room at West L.A. is down the hall from Milo’s office. Not used much; detectives downstairs have their own spaces, and the cold, lab-like ambience makes it wrong for meetings with the families of victims. Talking to multiple suspects is possible, but isolating suspects is the rule and exceptions are rare.
Milo uses the place for group meetings, rolling in a couple of whiteboards, lugging chairs and long tables from wherever he finds them, furnishing boxes of pastries he picks up at a bakery in West Hollywood.
Today’s group was the two of us, Petra, Raul, the three “baby D’s” he sometimes got to work with him, and an older bald man with a white brush mustache sprouting under a sunburnt nose.
Milo and Petra stood near the whiteboards, markers in hand. The rest of us sat facing them.
Petra began by introducing the stranger as Hawes Buxby, the original investigator on the Jamarcus Parmenter murder. The retired D, eyeglasses hanging from a chain around his neck, had dressed for the occasion in a wide-lapel gray suit, royal-blue shirt, and tan tie patterned with red fleurs-de-lis.
When he heard who I was he shot me a quizzical look. The type of scrutiny you give a strange animal in a zoo.
Of the young D’s, only Sean Binchy matched Buxby’s level of formality. His suit was the usual narrow-lapel navy blue, his shirt fresh and white, his tie a Technicolor display of flamingos and palm trees. The tropical touches and Doc Martens harked back to his days as a ska-punk bass player.
Alicia Bogomil, clean-jawed, intense and sharp-eyed, long hair still blue at the tips, wore a fitted brown leather bomber jacket, black turtleneck, and skinny black slacks.
Moe Reed, chronically enlarged by power lifting, had on an unstructured charcoal sport coat sewn from a miracle fabric that stretched past the point of apparent danger, a gray T-shirt, and thigh-accommodating Barbell jeans.
Both boards were nearly filled.
The first held headshots of Marissa French, Paul O’Brien, and Jamarcus Parmenter, each topped by a question mark. A second grouping showed crime scene shots for all three victims. Marissa’s revealed where she’d been dumped. An adjacent photo showed her clothes and purse on the floor of Paul O’Brien’s bedroom.
