Diagnosis Murder 4 - The Waking Nightmare Page 2

  Gelman got to his feet, not the least bit embarrassed to have been caught playing with toys. Mark didn't see any reason why he should be. It was a healthier way to handle stress than the methods most of the people he'd just seen would try tonight.

  "What can I do for you?" Gelman asked.

  "I'm Dr. Mark Sloan. I'm Rebecca Jordan's doctor. We've got her in the intensive care unit across the street."

  "So she's alive," Gelman said, sighing with relief. "Thank God."

  "She's in a coma and in critical condition," Mark said. "But I think she's going to make it. I'd like to contact her family."

  Gelman regarded Mark suspiciously. "That's why you came here? Surely you could have asked the police for that information."

  "You're right," Mark said. "To be honest, I was hoping you could tell me more about her as a person."

  "Why?" Gelman asked.

  It was a fair question, one Mark hadn't even bothered to ask himself yet. He didn't know the answer. There was only one thing he could think of to say.

  "I saw her sitting in her window. We looked at each other. There was a connection. Before I could say or do anything, she jumped," Mark said. "So here I am."

  Gelman studied Mark for a long moment, then seemed to come to a decision. He picked up one of the robot soldiers from the coffee table and held it out to Mark.

  "See this? Everybody in the toy business is making them. We're working on a ray gun that a kid can fiddle with and turn into a robot ship," Gelman said. "Mechanical heroes and spatial-manipulation games are what kids want today. So what does Rebecca come up with? Let me show you."

  Gelman led Mark two doors down the hall to another office. From the way everybody was looking at them, Mark knew it belonged to Rebecca. It was clean and sparse. The window was wide open and he could see straight across the street to the fifth-floor window of the doctors' lounge. The walls were covered with sketches, which fluttered in the breeze. Each sketch was a rough, yet strangely animated, depiction of the giant stuffed bear that sat in the guest chair in front of Rebecca's orderly desk.

  It was the biggest, fluffiest, most lovable-looking stuffed animal Mark had ever seen, with outstretched, broad arms, a goofy smile, wide eyes, and a round little belly that demanded patting. Mark gave the belly a pat and was surprised by how soft it was.

  "This is Cuddle Bear. Just an enormous stuffed animal. It should have bombed, but it's the biggest hit in the fifty-year history of this company." Gelman shook his head. "It took off immediately. We can't keep up with the demand and the publicity has been amazing."

  Gelman pointed to a framed newspaper clipping on the wall. It was a wire-service story, dated a month earlier, about the surprising success of the stuffed animal. There were two photos with the article. One of the pictures was of a little child hugging the Cuddle Bear, snuggling up against its comfy belly, practically lost inside its big arms. The other picture was a candid photo taken of Rebecca in the Community General pediatric cancer center, a huge swarm of kids gathered around the stuffed animal, looks of pure joy on their faces.

  She'd been in the hospital before, Mark thought. Perhaps they'd even passed in the halls or stood beside one another in the elevator. Perhaps she knew who she was looking at when their eyes met. Perhaps she was hoping for a spark of recognition and empathy in that instant before she jumped.

  Mark shifted his attention to the newspaper article, reading a portion of it out loud. "Ms. Jordan describes the Cuddle Bear as a friend you can tell everything to, a friend who is always there for you."

  "She could have been describing herself," Gelman said. "You start talking to her and before you know it, you've told her things you'd never tell anybody. She's a great listener. Everybody comes to her with their problems."

  "Where does she go with hers?" Mark asked.

  "I don't know." Gelman gave Mark a sad, guilty look. "We didn't realize until today that maybe she came up with the Cuddle Bear because she needed one herself."

  Mark's cell phone trilled.

  "Pardon me," Mark said, taking the phone from the pocket of his lab coat and bringing it to his ear. "Mark Sloan."

  "Hey Dad," replied Steve, his voice even and businesslike, indicating he was not alone. "I need your help."

  "What's the problem?" Mark asked.

  "It will be obvious as soon as you see the corpse."

  Lt. Steve Sloan knew his conversation with his dad was overheard by the police officers and forensic techs working around him that afternoon in the middle of a vast expanse of dry scrubland.

  It didn't really matter. As soon as his father arrived at the scene, on the northernmost edge of Los Angeles, the usual derisive whispers about Steve's competence as a homicide detective would start up again.

  He didn't have to hear a word of it to know. He'd see it on their faces. He'd see it in the way they looked at him without looking at him. He'd see it in the judgmental smirk of his superiors, even though they'd often called on his father's deductive expertise.

  But they held Steve to a different standard than the one against which they measured themselves. He was the forty-year-old son of a legendary detective, one who didn't even have a badge and yet managed to solve an astonishing number of perplexing, high-profile cases. If not for that, Steve's impressive solve rate would certainly have earned the unqualified respect and admiration of his peers. Instead, the assumption was that whenever he closed a difficult case, his father must have helped. The widespread belief within the department was that Steve Sloan was a mediocre detective with a brilliant father.

  Steve couldn't blame his colleagues for their opinion of him. His father was brilliant and he showed up frequently with him at crime scenes, which only confirmed the speculation. If that wasn't enough, Steve lived on the first floor of his father's Malibu beach house, making it easy to consult with him on cases. Mark often offered his unsolicited advice, sometimes leaving his thoughts behind on little Post-it notes stuck in the case files that Steve brought home. More than once, Steve forgot to remove a Post-it or two, and they were discovered by other detectives, who immediately told others what they'd found.

  On top of all that, his father often intruded on homicide investigations, whether they were Steve's or not. That was partly because the county's adjunct medical examiner, Dr. Amanda Bentley, worked out of the morgue at Community General Hospital, giving Mark plenty of opportunity to stumble in on an intriguing autopsy and offer his insights.

  Steve didn't mind living under his father's shadow. He'd made peace with it a long time ago. He loved his father and respected him. Steve was good at his job, but he knew his father had a gift, a natural affinity for solving mysteries. Together, they made a great team. How many sons had that kind of relationship with their fathers? Too damn few, as far as Steve was concerned.

  He cherished it.

  Even so, he knew this time his professional reputation would take a bigger hit than usual. This time he was openly and directly asking for his father's help and he didn't care who knew it. He couldn't solve this murder without his father. Nobody could. And he wasn't going to let his pride get in the way of capturing a killer.

  "You did the right thing calling Mark," Dr. Amanda Bentley said, crouching over the corpse that lay on the parched earth at Steve's feet. The beautiful African American woman knew exactly what Steve was thinking. She'd be a fool if she didn't.

  She glanced down at the hunting knife buried to the hilt in Winston Brant's chest, his parachute spread out behind him, dancing in the desert wind.

  "If anybody can figure this out," Amanda said, "Mark can."

  CHAPTER THREE

  By the time Mark Sloan arrived at the scene, a large white tent had been erected over the corpse to protect it from getting ripe in the sun.

  Two Range Rovers, a Lincoln Navigator, and a Jeep Cherokee with the words AIRVENTURES SKYDIVING written on the side were lined up in a neat row facing the tent a hundred yards away, like patrons at a drive-in movie angling for the best view of the
screen. Several patrol cars and Steve's police-issue Crown Vic were parked at haphazard angles behind the SUVs.

  Four men wearing blue Airventures jumpsuits milled around talking in hushed tones to family and friends, all under the watchful eyes of five uniformed cops sweating in the hot sun. Everyone but the cops seemed to have the same stunned expression on their faces as the employees at Funville Toys. The cops were trying hard to show no expression at all, their eyes hidden behind reflective sunglasses.

  Mark drove past them, his Saab convertible bumping and lurching across the rough terrain, and continued on to the tent, where the morgue van was parked, the engine idling to keep the air conditioner running and the interior cool for passengers living and dead.

  He got out of the car, nodded at the bored morgue assistants in the van, and stepped into the tent, where Steve and Amanda were waiting, holding bottles of water and standing on either side of the body. The first thing Mark noticed was the knife in the guy's chest. The second thing he noticed was the bright blue parachute, gathered up into a bundle, its lines still attached to the backpack that was strapped to the victim.

  Steve was surprised by the instant relief he felt when he saw his father, despite the misery he knew would soon be coming his way from within the department. It was one thing to call his dad for help; it was another to keep the witnesses around and put up a tent to protect the body until he arrived. He could already hear the Chief yelling in his ear: Why didn't you just put up a billboard on Sunset Boulevard announcing that the LAPD is full of morons who can't solve a murder on their own?

  "Thanks for coming all the way out here, Dad," Steve said.

  "How could I resist?" Mark said with a smile. "It's not often I get an invitation."

  Besides, he was grateful to have something to distract him from the haunting image that kept replaying in his mind, of Rebecca Jordan calmly looking at him and hurling herself out her window.

  Steve explained that the victim was Winston Brant, the forty-two-year-old publisher and editor of Thrill Seeker magazine, a publication that celebrated the American man's pursuit of excitement and adventure. Brant tried to personify the ideals of his magazine, like Hef did with Playboy.

  Brant was always making news, whether it was running in the Iditarod, swimming across the English Channel, or bungee jumping off the Eiffel Tower. Each year, he'd shame his board of directors into joining him in an "adventure weekend" before the annual shareholders' meeting. One year it was white-water rafting, another year it was rock climbing, this year it was skydiving.

  Although these annual events weren't nearly as extreme as the activities Brant did on his own and wrote about in his magazine, they were often terrifying for his fellow board members, most of whom limited their thrills to playing the stock market.

  That afternoon, the board of directors of Brant Publications flew out of Van Nuys Airport in a Cessna that was owned and operated by the skydiving company. The plan was they'd jump, be picked up at the drop zone by their waiting family and friends, and then meet that night for a private dinner at Spago in advance of the shareholders' meeting the next day.

  Brant, his three fellow board members, and one dive instructor jumped from a Cessna at twelve thousand feet above the drop zone. Everyone landed safely except for Brant, who landed dead.

  "It's not often a murder this bizarre comes along," Steve said, motioning to Brant. "I've never seen anything like it."

  "If you need to know how it was done, yeah, it's baffling. But from my standpoint, it's nothing special," Amanda said. "It looks like a simple stabbing to me."

  "'Simple' is not a word anybody would use to describe what happened here," Steve said.

  "I see a great big knife in his heart," Amanda said. "That's about all I need to know."

  Mark looked down at the dead skydiver. Brant was wearing the same jumpsuit as the skydivers outside, presumably his fellow board members. In addition to his parachute pack, Brant wore gloves, an open-faced helmet, and a pair of tinted, streamlined goggles that didn't look any different than the kind swimmers wore.

  "If you don't need to know any more," Steve asked Amanda, "why are you still here?"

  "I like to see Mark work," she said. "And it also happens to be my responsibility as adjunct county medical examiner to take possession of the body and transport it to the morgue for autopsy. I can't just leave it here unattended."

  "And you enjoy watching me fumble around," Steve said.

  Amanda shrugged.

  Steve shifted his attention to his father. "So what's your take on what happened?"

  "It's pretty obvious," Mark said, rising to his feet with a sigh. "He was stabbed."

  Amanda looked at Steve. "Told you."

  "It's a little more complicated than that," Steve told her, then turned back to Mark. "Isn't it?"

  "He was stabbed in midair," Mark said. "Sometime between the moment he jumped out of the plane and the instant he hit the ground."

  Saying that, the image of Rebecca Jordan, slamming into the parked car, flashed across Mark's mind again. He blinked it away and tried to concentrate on the matter at hand.

  "How do you know he wasn't stabbed and then pushed out of the plane?" Amanda asked.

  "I thought you knew all you need to know," Steve said to her.

  "I'm naturally curious," she replied, then faced Mark. "How do you know he wasn't stabbed when he landed?"

  "For one thing, this is a flat, wide-open space and the family and friends of the skydivers were waiting here," Mark said. "If Winston Brant was murdered after he hit the ground, everyone would have seen it."

  "Maybe they did see it," Steve said. "Maybe they lied when they told me he was already dead when he landed."

  "There must be a dozen people out there," Amanda said. "You think they were all in on it?"

  "Did you ever see Murder on the Orient Express?" Steve asked.

  "No," Amanda replied. "And now I never will. Thanks for ruining it for me."

  "I knew whodunit in the first five minutes," Steve said.

  "How?" she asked.

  "Dad told me," Steve said.

  "The witnesses aren't important in this case," Mark said.

  "They aren't?" Steve said.

  "At least not to determine when this man was killed. I'd know he was stabbed in midair even if there were no witnesses at all and he jumped in pitch darkness," Mark said. "The evidence right here in front of us says it all."

  "What evidence?" Amanda asked.

  Mark crouched beside the body. Steve and Amanda joined him.

  "There's specks of blood on his chin, his goggles, and his helmet. There's also traces of blood on the risers, the lines, and the chutes, but there's hardly any blood pooling around the body," Mark observed. "All of which proves Brant did most of his bleeding out as he fell, the blood blown upward by the force of his descent."

  "Didn't any of the other skydivers see anything?" Amanda asked Steve.

  "Everybody on board the plane, including the instructors, insist there wasn't a knife in his chest when he jumped," Steve said. "And they have the video to prove it."

  "A video?" Mark asked.

  "Their jump was filmed by the skydiving instructor as a souvenir of their experience," Steve said. "During the minute of free fall, they all joined hands, waved at the camera, all the usual hey-look-at-me-I'm-skydiving stuff."

  "And none of the hey-look-at-me-I'm-being-murdered stuff," Amanda said.

  "You never know. Where there's video, there's hope," Mark said, remembering a murder investigation of his own not so long ago where the crucial clue was hidden in the video. "I'd like to see that tape."

  "I'm having copies made," Steve said, then gestured to the body. "So, how do you think he was murdered in midair?"

  "I have no idea," Mark said. "I suppose I'll have to find out more about skydiving."

  "The crime scene mice are scurrying over every inch of the plane," Steve said, referring to the techs from the LAPD's Scientific Investigation Divisi
on. "When they're done with that, I'm going to bring in an FAA-certified rigger to help them go over Brant's equipment. In the mean time, I'm getting a bunch of uniforms and some cadets from the police academy bussed out here to walk the drop zone, looking for any evidence that might have fallen from the sky with the corpse."

  "That's going to make you real popular with the rank and file," Amanda said. "What are you hoping to find?"

  "I'm thinking maybe the knife was in Brant's parachute pack," Steve said. "Maybe it was rigged to spring out somehow when he pulled the rip cord or when his automatic activation device released the chute."

  "Then it seems to me he'd be stabbed in the back, where the pack is, and not the chest," Mark said. "Don't you think?"

  "I think maybe it was a very clever device and the cadets will find pieces of it scattered over the drop zone," Steve said. "And then we'll know how it could have been designed to stab him in the chest."

  "Uh-huh," Amanda said.

  Steve glared at her. "I have to explore every avenue of investigation. That's my job."

  "I didn't say anything," Amanda said.

  "You said 'uh-huh'," Steve said. "It was a very critical 'uh-huh'."

  "It was a nonjudgmental, I'm-paying-attention 'uh huh'," she said.

  "I don't think you'll find anything unusual about the parachute rigging," Mark said. "Someone on that plane knows how this man was killed."

  "You mean one of the skydivers did it," Steve said.

  "Maybe all four of them did it," Amanda said, earning another glare from Steve. "And the instructor was in on it, too."

  "If we can find out who," Mark said, "we'll figure out how."

  "Uh-huh," Amanda said.

  "That was definitely not the same 'uh-huh' you gave me," Steve said. "That was a very supportive, I-agree-with-you 'uh-huh'."

  "Uh-huh," she said again.

  "That's exactly what I mean," Steve said, pointing as if the words were written in the air and still floating between them. "That was a patronizing, you're-crazy 'uh-huh'."

  "Can I remove the body now?" she said. "We're going to hit rush hour getting back to Community General as it is."