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  "Captain, please."

  "Shane, work with the guy. He needs your guidance. You're my cleanup hitter. My cheval de guerre. Get Hitchens out of the ditch and back on the road."

  "Do you really want this numbnuts working on Scott Berman's high-profile homicide? Forgetting his agents at UTA and the fact that when the movie comes out, Howie Mandel is gonna be playing you in blackface, he's completely unreliable. Hes gonna screw up."

  "You're the one who's working the case. I'm looking to you. He's just driving the car and learning from a master." Then Jeb looked down at his watch. "You're done, Scully. Request denied and you got a whole two minutes instead of just forty seconds. See what a nice guy I am? Now go out there and hit it. Bring me back a collar and do it before this is next week's cover story in People magazine."

  During the intervening hour, the rest of the CSI responders hit the scene along with the medical examiner and his staff. They continued to mill around at the foot of the drive, waiting for Carla Morris from the district attorney's office to show up. She finally arrived with the warrant signed by a superior court judge.

  "How come this warrant is only for the backyard? What about the house?" Alexa asked as she stood by the sagging driveway gate with a swarm of evidence techs and glared at the paper.

  "I thought you said the bodies were in the backyard. I don't think you said anything about a house," Carla said. "If you want me to go back and get a new warrant, it's gonna take another hour."

  Alexa pondered this for almost a minute.

  On a murder scene, time lost at the outset can allow a perp to get away. Prints or other evidence, if recovered soon enough, could allow us to effect a quick arrest. Since the house was locked and probably not part of this anyway, Alexa made her decision.

  "Let's get started. If we need to, we can go back and get a paper for the house tomorrow."

  With the warrant in hand, about twenty CSIs and coroner's assistants carrying their crime scene kits full of investigatory tools started up the path Alexa and I had marked in the grass by the side of the drive.

  Except for pointing out areas of examination, the primary homicide detective is a third wheel during this stage of an investigation. The tech squad and coroner had full control of the scene.

  The CSIs began by setting up an inward spiral search, walking the outside circle of the yard, moving slowly in toward the pool, where the bodies were. Ten investigators walked in a line, looking down, marking anything that looked like evidence with cards that were folded into a teepee shape with numbers that corresponded to a master sheet.

  Slowly, they began finding 9 mm brass shell casings and meticulously gathering and cataloging potential evidence, photographing footprints and blood spatter.

  I walked around the edge of the backyard, looking for my new partner. He was off talking to Tom Rosselli, the crime scene photographer.

  I thought, Well, okay. This is good. At least hes working, helping the guy set up his photo log. But as I got closer, I realized they weren't talking about the case at all.

  "You gotta pound the sucker with a hammer," Hitch was saying.

  "You always wanta go to town with the hammer," Rosselli answered. "Is that like an African-American thing or something?"

  What the hell is this? I thought and slipped behind the pool house so I could eavesdrop.

  "Don't be starting in with me on how to prepare the meat," Hitch was saying. "You gotta hammer it first to make it tender."

  "We're talking about a Sicilian meat roll, asshole. It's supposed to be a little chewy. I'm Sicilian. You're from fucking Sixty-sixth Street in South Central. Whatta you know about Sicilian cooking?"

  "I'm the king of Sicilian cooking," Hitch shot back. "Check it out. You arrange your meat on your wax paper, you arrange the ham slices on top of the meat "

  "Ham goes on the outside, not on top, dipshit."

  "This is so pathetic," Hitch said. "You make your living photographing dead people. What am I wasting my time on you for? It's like talking to a garbageman about the ballet."

  Not as bad as I first thought but still pretty awful. Here we were at one of the hottest murder scenes of the year and Sumner Hitchens was distracting the videographer with an argument over Sicilian cooking when Rosselli should have been doing his initial walk-through to memorialize the scene before the swarm of techies moved anything. I stepped around the side of the building and faced him.

  "Lets go," I said. "Let Rosselli do his job. You're with me."

  I left abruptly and Hitch followed me across the pool deck.

  "Try the recipe my way," Rosselli called after him.

  "I gave up vomiting after meals when I found out Lindsay Lohan was doing it," Hitch called back.

  I led him to a place near where Alexa was standing.

  "After the bodies are processed I want you to go to the ME's office with Alexa. Witness the autopsies with her." Thinking it would at least get him out of my sight for a while.

  "I'm not gonna be that easy to ditch," he said. "I already had this out with Jeb. I'm not the kind of partner you can bullshit. I know I'm junior man, but that's only in hours. When it comes to working this case, I'm your tight. It's you and me, cheek to cheek, brother."

  He pulled out a red notebook. It was covered in expensive leather and had gold-embossed edges. Across the center, engraved in gold script, it said: MY JOURNAL. The thing must have cost him three hundred dollars.

  "This isn't going to be a movie," I informed him. "So you can put away your little writer's journal."

  "I know you're upset, but I'm gonna grow on you, man. I got this feeling."

  He smiled at me. He was handsome. He was charming. He was hard not to like. But he was also a hopeless bullshitter and opportunist. At least, that was my take back then.

  "I'm not going to the morgue. I can't," he added.

  "Why not?"

  "I don't get along with dead people. I don't like them; they don't like me." His smile widened. "Besides, I already secured some valuable info for us. The morgue is backfill on any investigation. With a red ball like this, time is everything. We need to be moving forward. Somebody else can watch the coroner fingerpaint."

  I stood there, not sure how to play it.

  "I called a friend of mine in real estate who sold me my Hollywood house last year." He grinned again. "LeAnne has a big case on the Hitchmeister. I'm otherwise involved right now so I haven't gotten around to her yet, but the girl's managed to secure a spot on my farm team. That means she's eager to help me so she ran the title on this house. It's owned by something called the Dorothy White Foundation. It's some kinda trust and the primary beneficiary is listed as…"

  He flipped open his leather notebook. "Brooks David Dunbar, 236 Schuyler Road. Schuyler Road is a primo street in Beverly Hills, by the way. I've also got the zip if you want it, but I hate showing off."

  After the coroner left with the bodies I handed Alexa the keys to the MDX. She was still on the dispatch sheet as one of the primary responding officers so she was going to accompany the ME to the morgue and cover the autopsy. Then she would officially sign off on the case.

  Since CSI would have control of this crime scene until almost morning, I agreed to follow up on the Brooks Dunbar lead that Sumner had just supplied.

  I told Jeb and Alexa where we were going, then Hitch and I walked down to Mulholland where our cars had been reparked by patrol.

  We got into Hitch's Porsche Carrera. As I sat in the soft tan leather passenger seat, he turned on his scanner. Then we pulled out and sped toward Mulholland, top down, both straight pipes snarling like angry jungle cats.

  Chapter 7

  "What was that all about with Rosselli?" I asked as we raced across the mountain ridge on Mulholland to Coldwater, then made a left turn and headed down the winding canyon road into Beverly Hills.

  "Rosselli thinks he can cook," Hitch answered, using the Porsche's mid-engine cornering dynamic to take the S-turns on Coldwater at nut-puckering speeds. "Fuckin
g Italians. All those greaseballs ever came up with that was worth anything was pizza and that's just a cheese sandwich with anchovies."

  "And you're some kind of expert?"

  "I've trained at the Cordon Bleu. I fly to France and take cooking classes on my vacations."

  "I didn't know bullshit could be prepared in the French style," I said.

  "Bullshit is a French specialty." He grinned. "And don't knock my cooking 'til you've tried it. Wait 'til you taste my eggs Portugal."

  "What I meant was, what kinda deal do you have going with Rosselli? You get him movie premiere tickets or actress phone numbers, he sends you your own personal copies of the crime scene photos so you can include them in your movie pitches at UTA?"

  "Come on, Shane. Let's not do this, okay? Everybody in this town is in business. Even you. We just have different profit expectations. Don't tell me you never flashed your badge to get out of a speeding ticket." He smiled. "Besides, how many L. A. cops have sold cases to the movies before me? LAPD Sgt. Joe Wambaugh single-handedly turned that into a cottage industry. Onion Field, Lines and Shadows, Echoes in the Darkness, just to name a few.

  "We got a front-row seat to the greatest show on earth. You want to just write this stuff up in some stupid case file and forget it? I'm asking you to take a minute here and clear your bowels, man."

  "We're working a triple homicide, Sumner. I told Jeb I'd work with you, but if I lose patience and throw you back like all your other partners, then you'll be out of Homicide Special and down to chasing smash-and-grabs in the Valley. We do this my way or you're gonna get your next decent police posting about the same time we colonize Mars."

  He took a moment, grimaced, then said, "You're being very shortsighted."

  "This case is not going to end up in a theater near you. It's gonna end up in court."

  After a minute where he raced through another S-turn, causing me to grab the door pull, he said, "You need to relax on this, Scully, because a case like Mosquito doesn't come along very often.

  "Granted, when it does, the Hollywood gantseh machers will drop trou and grab for the K-Y 'cause most studio execs have business degrees from Princeton or Yale, but they got no story imagination. What they do know is, they've got a much better chance of getting a picture greenlit if it's been a big national news story first, making it what we in the biz call a presold title.' Right now this Skyline Drive case is just an interesting springboard with no ending." He turned and focused the Hollywood Hitch persona at me. "Lemme give you some Screen-writing 101 here."

  "That's okay."

  "No, you should hear me out 'cause I can tell you're needlessly freaked. On this Scott Berman thing we're only at the top of Act One. The central job of Act One is to define the problem. Admittedly this inciting event has a high-value player and two hot-looking dead chicks floating in a pool, but while all that is mildly interesting, it won't carry a picture. There's gotta be something much more menacing hiding under the surface that drives the action forward. Something nobody sees that will rise up and grab the audience by the throat in Act Two. So far we ain't got that. Not even close. Meaning we got a ninety percent chance this story dies right here at the top of Act One."

  "I think when you get to Lindacrest you want to go left," I said.

  "Got it." A moment later he turned on Lindacrest but the writing lesson continued. "Like, suppose it turns out Scott Berman was cheating on his old lady and she got fed up, hired some guy with a harelip to put Scott on the ark. Bing, bang, boom, end of story. Provocative start, no ending. See what I'm saying?

  "For a movie to have legs, you need a great first act with a sharp attack on the story, then a complication in Act Two with some hellacious moves where the antagonist is rippin' up the landscape.

  "Next comes your second act curtain where the hero ends up on the balls of his ass, completely destroyed, or, alternately, where something so big happens it puts the screenplay in a whole different place. In Mosquito, by the way, it was when I almost became victim number six. Then Act Three needs a firestorm ending where you blow the shit outta something big.

  "On a true-crime story its okay to embellish a few flat spots slightly to keep it interesting because as Albert Einstein once said, 'imagination is more important than knowledge/ But that's it. Believe me, we're a long way from having something we can sell for megabucks like Mosquito."

  I was getting a headache.

  A car full of girls in UCLA sweatshirts pulled up next to us and started honking and waving. Hitch honked and waved back.

  We left them as they turned on Sunset Boulevard, heading to the UCLA campus while we continued on down Lindacrest Drive, navigating the narrow curving streets, finally arriving at 236 Schuyler Road five minutes later.

  It was another huge house located behind closed gates. Another Christmas party was in progress. My third in one night and I don't like them much to begin with.

  We pulled up in the Carrera with the top down and Hitch smiled at the gate guard, a black guy with shoulders like a bookcase and a CIA-style earpiece jammed in one ear.

  "Sumner Hitchens," he said. "I'm sure I'm on the list. My office at Paramount phoned my acceptance in late this afternoon." All this before I could stop him.

  "Just show him your fucking badge," I growled under my breath.

  I pulled my creds out and held them across his chest for the guard to see. "Police. We're here to talk to Brooks Dunbar."

  "Okay," he said. "But I have to announce you."

  "Fine, just open up."

  He pushed the gate button and Hitch squealed up the drive.

  "You gotta chill, dude," he said as we approached the palatial house. "I know this place. It's a Hollywood landmark. Elton John used to own it. Then Spielberg before he got married. They call it Knoll House. When a mansion has a name it means its like one of a kind. There's some major weight living on this six acres of manicured velvet. I know how to play this crowd. We won't get anything butting heads."

  "If you so much as open your mouth I'm gonna fill it with shoe leather."

  "Suit yourself, but you'll see."

  We pulled up in front. More Christmas music was leaking out of the open front door. About twenty-five fancy cars were in the huge driveway, as well as one or two limos with their liveried drivers standing beside them.

  "The guests at this Christmas party might be stoned, but hopefully they won't be dead like at the other one," Hitch said as he parked and we got out. Another security guard was in the doorway with a clipboard. This guy was Hispanic with a weight lifters build. We approached him in the entry.

  I showed my badge. "Detectives Scully and Hitchens from Homicide Special."

  "Hey, nice to know you," he said. "I work at the Police Administration Building too. LAPD Sergeant Bob Cruz. I think I've seen you guys around."

  "What are you doing here?" I asked.

  "I moonlight for Ameritech Security after hours. This is one of my semi-regular accounts." Then he leaned closer. "Homicide Special, huh? What's up?"

  "We're working a triple murder that took place tonight on a property Brooks Dunbar owns in the Hollywood Hills," I told him. "Before we talk to him it might help if you could give us some background."

  "Welcome to the care and feeding of the asshole elite," off-duty Sergeant Cruz said. "Brooks Dunbar has his head so far up his ass he's looking at most stuff through his navel. This kid is twenty-four and says he's a movie producer, or sometimes it's an art dealer, but what he really does is snort dope and throw up in the backseats of cars. His buds call him Heir Abhorrent, which might give you an idea."

  "Who owns this place?" Hitch asked. "Looks a little lush for a twenty-four-year-old drug addict."

  "You're right. His dad, Thayer Dunbar, owns it. He's a big Texas billionaire who lives half the year in Houston, checking on his oil leases. He's divorced. The mother lives in Malibu. Brooks has inherited money, but since his parents know he's a total nimrod, they've locked it all up in trusts.

  "Ameritech has
the contract to protect the property. But for parties like this one, Brooks takes on extra people like me, 'cause he's got this thing about paparazzi getting shots of him that will piss off his dad. But when you work for Brooks you gotta get your money up front cause he's a very slow pay. Slow like in months."

  "Can I help you?" a young man said.

  He had appeared out of nowhere and was standing behind us. This guy was thirtysomething, dressed in an open-collared silk shirt and gabardine pants. He had a glass with some kind of foamy Christmas punch in his hand, eggnog maybe.

  "We're police, here to see Brooks Dunbar."

  "That's what they said when they called up from the gate," the young man said. "I'm his attorney. I'm afraid you'll have to start with me."

  Chapter 8

  The young attorney introduced himself as Stender Sheedy Jr. He was with the famous Century City law firm of Sheedy, Devine amp; Lipscomb, where his father was the letterhead Sheedy. Junior informed us he was in the entertainment law department and handled Brooks Dunbar's film and music business, which if Sergeant Cruz was correct probably consisted of phone camera gags and recorded farts.

  As we stood in the massive marble-floored entry, I could see a swarm of young revelers partying in the huge living room beyond.

  "Could I possibly use the men's room?" Hitch said.

  "It's right through there on the left," Stender said, pointing.

  After Hitch left, young Stender tried to tell me that I'd have to come back in the morning that Mr. Dunbar was hosting his annual Christmas Do, and could not be pried away from his important guests, who, from what I could see, were just a bunch of stoned Hollywood leeches and midnight club crawlers.

  "Let me put it to you another way," I said, politely. "Your client owns a property at 3151 Skyline Drive. A triple homicide was committed there tonight. My partner and I are working that crime, which means that Mr. Dunbar can talk to me here, right now, as a friendly, cooperative material witness, or he can talk to me at Mens Central Jail as a guest of the city."