The Ghost Orchid: An Alex Delaware Novel
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Synopsis
LAPD homicide lieutenant Milo Sturgis sees it all the time: Reinvention’s a way of life in a city fueled by fantasy. But try as you might to erase the person you once were, there are those who will never forget the past . . . and who can still find you.
A pool boy enters a secluded Bel Air property and discovers two bodies floating in the bright blue water: Gio Aggiunta, the playboy heir to an Italian shoe empire, and a gorgeous, even wealthier neighbor named Meagin March. A married neighbor.
An illicit affair stoking rage is a perfect motive. But a “double” in this neighborhood of gated estates isn’t something you see every day. The house is untouched. No forced entry, no forensic evidence. The case has “that feeling,” and when that happens, Milo turns to his friend, the brilliant psychologist Alex Delaware.
As Milo and Alex investigate both victims, they discover two troubled pasts. And as they dig deeper, Meagin March’s very identity begins to blur. Who was this glamorous but conflicted woman? Did her past catch up to her? Or did Gio’s family connections create a threat spanning two continents?
Chasing down the answers leads Alex and Milo on an exploration of L.A.’s darkest side as they contend with one of the most shocking cases of their careers and learn that that some secrets are best left buried in the past.
Release date: February 6, 2024
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Print pages: 293
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The Ghost Orchid: An Alex Delaware Novel
Jonathan Kellerman
CHAPTER
1
Nearly getting killed can change your life in interesting ways.
There’s the physical healing, but that’s tedious to think about. What fascinates me is how people behave when they know you’ve come close to death.
Some you haven’t heard from in a while get in touch out of obligation. Most of the time they have no idea what to say or do and you end up assuring them you’re fine and trying to make them feel better. Or maybe that was just me, reverting to the psychologist’s role.
I’m close to only two people on the planet.
The woman I live with handled the whole thing beautifully, pulling off the perfect balance of caring for me and allowing me space when I needed it. Even more impressively, when Robin allowed herself to get angry at me for being in danger in the first place, she was able to talk about it reasonably.
My best friend, a homicide detective, was overcome with guilt. I’d been working with Milo when a lunatic nearly crushed me to death. No one’s fault, reasonable precautions had been taken. Just one of those things that happen. But, still.
He’d worked hard at keeping the guilt in check but I could tell. Our conversations began ebbing into long silences, terminating when he told me I needed to rest.
Eventually, his visits tapered off, though he tried to keep up with regular phone calls. But he avoided talking about work, which peppered the calls with awkward silences.
Worst of all, he stopped calling me in on cases. The “different ones” where he tends to overestimate my talent. When I brought up the subject, he claimed the two new murders he’d taken on were open and shut.
Four months after being injured I sat with Robin on the second-story terrace that fronts our house, eating and drinking and enjoying the weather that keeps people in L.A., and said, “Still nothing from Big Guy.”
She said, “Can you blame him?”
“I think he’s overdoing it. Objectively, he did nothing wrong.”
“Who’s ever objective, Alex?”
I poured myself another finger of Chivas—the pricey gold stuff I’d never buy for myself. A guilt offering from Milo.
Neither of us talked for a while and I resumed rubbing the big, knobby head of our little blond French bulldog, Blanche. She’s also been perfect. Sitting next to me as I knitted, silent and patient, careful not to touch the torn muscles in my chest. She’s always been a wonderful companion, intuitive, perceptive, more keyed in to nonverbal cues than any human could hope to be. But this was more. She knew something was different and she cared.
Robin said, “All those custody cases came in but you’re still bored.”
“I could use some variety.”
“Know what you mean.”
That surprised me.
She said, “Why do you think I do what I do, baby? Every instrument’s different, it’s not like I’m making the same armchair over and over.”
I said, “So you wouldn’t mind if I diversified. Maybe got into macramé?”
She grinned and placed her small, strong hand over mine. Her hair’s thick, auburn, and curly and when she’s not in her studio, she wears it loose to the midpoint of her back. Tonight, the moon was medium
strength and it gilded all those curls and limned her oval face, her pointy chin. The slightly oversized milk-white incisors that had attracted me in the first place.
“Would I prefer if you never got involved in all the ugly stuff? Part of me would. But I’d be living with a very unhappy man.”
“Unhappy fool.”
She laughed. “Don’t tempt me. Anyway, I’m sure he’ll call when he really needs you.”
“I’m not.”
She poured herself another half glass of Zinfandel. Daintily polished off a stuffed grape leaf. Greek takeout, tonight. Blanche had scored bits of rice and lamb. Everyone happy.
Except me. I’d been faking serenity for a while, had never stopped feeling incomplete.
It took another two weeks for that to finally change.
CHAPTER
2
The call came in at nine a.m. on a glorious Sunday. The familiar voice, tight with battle readiness but tinged with uncertainty.
“Too early for you?”
“No, been up for a while.”
“How you feeling?”
“Great.”
“Well…I’ve got one, been here since seven thirty, I figured maybe…”
“Sure.”
“Also,” he said, “not far from you. If you’re feeling up for it. Back in the old days you probably coulda run over here.”
I said, “Give me the address.”
The trip was four point eight miles from my house in Beverly Glen. A feasible run B.C.—before crushing—but even then I’d have driven because I like to get to scenes fast.
I wheeled the Seville down the nameless former bridle path that winds down treacherously from our half acre, drove south on Beverly Glen past the skinny chockablock houses that line the road in our neighborhood, and transitioned to the grand estates just north of Sunset Boulevard.
At Sunset I hooked right and continued to the western gate of Bel Air, sped up Bellagio Road before turning onto a series of serpentine side streets. Reversing the process: eight-figure palaces followed by progressively more modest houses on limited woodsy lots.
Every crime scene’s unique but there’s also a sameness to them. The procedures, the activities of those who’ve chosen to work with worst-case scenarios. The emotional tone.
The first thing you see is what I’ve come to think of as Death’s Parking Lot: detectives’ unmarked sedans, patrol cruisers, crypt vans, hybrid compacts driven by coroner’s investigators.
Behind all that, the inevitable yellow tape. Canary-bright and sadder for that.
This was my first crime scene in four-plus months and simply arriving tweaked my brain and made me feel alive. No point wondering what that said about me. I was imagining, wondering, lasering the layout.
This lot was so thickly wooded that no structure was visible from the street. To the right of the vehicles, a burly young officer stood guard. The foliage hid neighboring properties, as well, creating an illusion of forest.
Cruelly peaceful.
Usually, Milo informs the cops that I’m coming and they lift up the yellow strand. Sometimes they even smile and welcome me by name.
This time I had to show my I.D. to Burly, who looked to be allergic to smiling.
He examined my driver’s license as if it were written in hieroglyphics, re-read, checked me out squint-eyed, stepped away and made a call. Returning, he favored me with a lemon-sucking frown, said, “Okay,” reluctantly, and left me to lift my own damn tape.
Trying not to read to
much into any of it, I ducked under and picked up my pace, ignoring the twinges in my ribs that followed each footfall.
Aiming myself toward the old days.
The forest turned out to be little more than a poorly trimmed amalgam of ficus and eugenia backed by huge, shaggy silver dollar eucalyptus. Decades ago, a plague had killed off most of the eugenia hedges in Southern California but a few survivors remain. The ficus tack-on said someone had settled for a quick fix in lieu of re-landscaping.
Getting past the greenery landed me in front of a small, flat lawn fronting a one-story, cedar-sided ranch house.
In a suburban setting, another dated sixties throwback. In Bel Air, five million bucks if you hired the right real estate agent.
A second tape barrier ran across the front door. A black Maserati convertible sat in a gravel driveway to the left of the house. Newer model, the name of a Beverly Hills dealer framing the license plate. Littered with dust and leaves. Tennis racquet and balls on the passenger seat.
When the driveway reached the house, it converted to concrete and continued, ungated, toward the rear of the property.
The only feasible entry this morning. I walked along the house. Thought about easy access to a killer.
No sign of Milo or anyone else until I reached the end of the drive and turned right and there he was along with a pair of techs, a C.I., and half a dozen uniforms with nothing to do but look official.
Milo looked the same; why wouldn’t he? Tall, mastiff-jowled, top-heavy above oddly thin legs, he wore wrinkled khakis, pink-soled desert boots, a spinach-green sport coat, a white wash ’n’ wear shirt with a defeated collar, and a skinny black tie patterned with something hard to make out.
Sunlight waged a full-on assault on his pale, pocked face, having its way with every pit and lump. His black hair, slicked down hours ago, had rebelled and bristled. A limp flap in front diagonaled a brow the texture of cottage cheese.
He was on his phone, saw me and nodded. Grimly, I thought. But maybe not. Who cared, anyway? He’d called. Time to focus and not get sidetracked.
I got close enough to see the tie pattern. Goose heads. Rows of beaks pointing to the right. He clicked off and said, “Thanks for coming.”
Like there’d been a doubt.
I said, “What’s going on?”
Instead of explaining,
he waved expansively. Check it out.
Not much more to the backyard than a kidney-shaped swimming pool and concrete deck. Small, cup-shaped spa at the front of the pool.
A few feet from where we were standing, a naked man lay facing the sky. A single sizable crusted hole dotted the upper left quadrant of his chest. Blood spidered from the wound, running down from left to right and collecting on the ground. The flow dictated by the body’s slight rightward cant.
No positioning. Shot and left to drop.
The blood on the deck had pooled to an amoeboid blot congealed and turned rusty with lingering scarlet highlights. The man’s skin was gray, with faint pink traces of lividity visible beneath his left buttocks and thigh. No rigor or decomposition I could see.
“Is the pool heated?”
“The pool and the Jacuzzi.”
Last night’s temperature had floated in the mid-sixties. Warm enough for a swim but cool enough to slow down breakdown. Weather and exertion could’ve hastened muscle stiffening and caused it to fade more quickly. If rigor had come and gone, death had occurred sometime late at night or during the earliest morning hours.
Either way, in the darkness.
Partial darkness; a pair of outdoor fixtures just below the house’s rain gutter were still on and so was a light in the pool.
The body lay five feet or so from a rear bank of sliding glass doors. One panel was open.
Stepping out of his home into the warm night air and…
Something small had been yellow-tagged to the left of the corpse. I bent and took a look. Unrolled condom.
Stepping out into the charitable night air, ready for fun.
He was young, late twenties or early thirties, with a black buzz cut and a three-day beard the same color. Midsized, lean, muscular with a long chiseled face centered by a strong, slightly hooked nose. Hispanic, Mediterranean, or Mideastern.
Rose-vine tattoo around his left ankle.
He lay flat on his back, mouth open, eyes partially shut, what was visible of the sclera, dark brown.
A black terry robe had been tossed carelessly over a chaise lounge chair that faced
the pool. Next to the lounge a table held two crystal highball glasses, a bottle of Campari, an ice bucket half filled with water, and two cans of Pellegrino. Abutting the cans, a dish of small, ocher olives. The absence of pits said untasted.
Beyond all that, a naked woman occupied an identical lounge.
Prone and shot in exactly the same spot, head facing left, right arm dangling.
A bit older than her companion—fortyish—she was equally trim with crisp angular features and the kind of symmetrical beauty that cameras love. Blood of the same color and consistency striped her left breast and ran onto the chair, which was some sort of woven vinyl. Spaces between the weave allowed the rusty clot to settle on the deck below.
Her thick mahogany hair was scrunched up in a high pony. Her fingernails were polished pink, her toenails black. A black robe identical to her companion’s was draped neatly over the top of a third lounge.
No body ink I could see; any obvious adornment came from the carbon glinting on her left hand: a sizable rectangular diamond ring above a pavé wedding band.
Holes in her earlobes but no earrings.
I took in the rest of the layout. A few leaves floated on the pool surface. Only a few, because unlike the front of the property, the sliver of space was concrete, much of it cracked. It butted up against ten-foot redwood fencing that continued on both sides. Several feet behind the back fence, massive, bushy podocarpus asserted themselves. Layers of them, from the near-black density. They’re clean trees but slow-growing. These had to stretch back decades.
I said, “Who lives over there?”
Milo was surprised by the question. “No idea, Alicia’s canvassing. Anything right here intrigue you?”
I took a closer look at both bodies and a few of the uniforms took closer looks at me. “Big holes. A .38 or larger?”
He strode to the northern fence and pointed out a splintered divot in a plank. “Pulled out a bullet, no casings, mashed up but looks like a .38.”
“A revolver…there’s a precise feel to it. Confidence that one shot would take care of business and pinpoint accuracy. Where’s the other bullet?”
“Still inside her,” he said. “The back of the chair blocked exit, it’s wedged up against the plastic.” Shaking his head. “Miracle fiber, who knew.”
“Who found the
bodies?”
“Pool guy at six forty-five. He comes twice a month, this is the first stop on his route, he’s careful to be quiet. Says with no plants it’s an easy job, he’s in and out, has never actually seen or spoken to anyone, his company handles all the arrangements.”
He tapped his foot. “How do you see it happening?”
“My guess would be he got shot first.”
“Mine, too. Subduing him first would be safer.”
“His position suggests he’d gone inside, maybe for the condom, reemerged and was confronted. The killer could’ve been concealed at the side of the house and still had an oblique view of the yard. What time do you figure it happened?”
“C.I. guesstimates eight p.m. to two a.m., doubts the pathologist will be able to narrow it much.”
“No rigor.”
“There was some when I got here but it faded soon after, so I’m figuring on the earlier end.”
I said, “Either way, it was dark and they were preoccupied and less likely to notice an intruder. He waited until the time was right—after the male victim stepped out—came forward, and pulled off a quick shot to center mass. She was relaxing in the chaise, naked and vulnerable. She froze, the shooter walked up to her and finished what he’d come to do. I asked about the neighbors because if it’s also a small property, someone might’ve heard the gun go off.”
“No 911 calls, but we’ll check it out.”
“Her ring is sizable but it wasn’t taken. Anything lifted from the house?”
“Nothing obvious. Want to see for yourself?”
Without waiting for an answer, he gloved up, handed me a pair, turned and led through the open glass door.
CHAPTER
3
Inside, the house was small and boxy with an L-shaped living area feeding to a white-on-white kitchen on one side, a brief hallway on the other. Pink-beige tile covered every square inch of floor. The furniture was somber and angular: gray tweed stools pushed against a breakfast bar, three-piece sectional of the same fabric, two black leather deco-revival chairs, three occasional tables fashioned from a charcoal-tinted resin.
White walls were mostly blank, except for a few of the inoffensive abstract prints you see in chain hotels. A sixty-five-inch flat-screen faced the long arm of the sectional. On the floor beneath the TV sat a pair of squat little Sonos speakers. No attempt to hide wires.
I said, “Not much personal investment. A rental?”
Milo said, “You’re on a roll. Found the lease in a nightstand along with the guy’s wallet and an Italian passport.” He consulted his pad. “Giovanni Aggiunta, twenty-nine a few months ago.”
He spelled the surname. “In answer to your next question, don’t know anything about him yet.”
I looked around. “Don’t see any sign of disturbance.”
He pointed to the hallway, left me to follow. One door to the right, on the left a nondescript beige bathroom followed by a nondescript beige bedroom.
Giovanni Aggiunta’s sleeping chamber featured the same tile floor. A pair of windows facing the backyard were blocked by accordion shades. I lifted a few pleats on each. Both casements were shut tight and held fast by latches.
Not even cheap art in here, no chest or dresser, the only furniture a pair of chromium-legged black marble circles serving as nightstands. Rust-specked chrome. I’d seen budget hotels given more consideration.
A pair of wide double doors took up most of the facing wall.
Milo pointed to the bed. “Guess this could technically be counted as disturbance but not the type I’m interested in.”
The king-sized mattress was made up with plum-colored sheets and pillows that had seen recent use. The pillows were bunched up against a black lacquer headboard. A corner of fitted sheet had come untucked, exposing the mattress pad. At the foot of the bed, a quilted, purple-brown silk spread humped where it hadn’t trailed to the floor.
On the floor, neatly arranged a few feet from the bed, were a pink velour jogging suit, padded mini-socks, black-and-pink Asics running shoes.
The nearer stand hosted a matte-gray vibrator, a box of ESP condoms, a jar of Nivea crème, and a vial of something called Sweet Touch Love Oil. On the farther stand, a pink leather fanny pack.
Next to the pack were a diamond tennis bracelet and matching anklet, a platinum cocktail ring set with two serious diamonds and an even larger sapphire, and off to one side, a simple chain necklace set with a small purplish amethyst. The necklace seemed markedly lower-caliber. Maybe sentimental value.
Milo said, “No reason to go for small stuff when this was in plain sight but doesn’t look as if there was ever a laptop or a desktop, just that tablet in the living room. All that’s on it are the apps it came with and one that turns it into a remote. No evidence the bad guy ever came inside. So much for classic motive number one.”
He lifted the fanny pack, tweezed out the contents, arrayed them on the bed.
Three twenty-dollar bills folded in half, shiny gold Gucci lipstick tube, brushed-gold container holding one point six ounces of Gucci Guilty perfume, the California driver’s license of Meagin Lea March, blond/blue, five-six, one thirty, DOB forty-one years ago.
I said, “No phone?”
“It was on the stand next to the jewelry, techies pulled up prints on the case so they bagged and tagged before I had a chance to eyeball. I asked for a call-dump and a zip drive.”
I read the address on the license. Guarida Lane, 90077. “Right here in Bel Air. ...
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