“The letter’s not signed by any of them.”
Dance shrugged. “A handwriting expert could verify which of the four wrote it. But they talk about ‘after “Abbey Road.”’ Who else could it be? They must’ve stayed around the studio afterward and just thrown a few songs together. Doesn’t matter; they’re still Beatles songs.”
“Bobby got the tapes from his father.”
“Right,” Dance said, gesturing at the shelves. “The perp found out and has been waiting for a chance to kill him and steal them.”
“Waiting for Edwin or somebody like him to show up as a fall guy.”
“Exactly.”
O’Neil said, “So it’s somebody who knew Bobby and his archives and would have heard the rumors about the Beatles songs.” He regarded the lyrics. “Could the perp sell them, though?”
“I’d think at the least he could work out a finder’s fee in the millions. Or maybe he could sell them to a reclusive collector—like that Japanese businessman who got busted for spending fifty million for a stolen Van Gogh. He was going to keep it in his basement, never let anybody see it.”
O’Neil pointed out, “Well, we know the motive. The second question is, who’s the perp? You have any ideas? I don’t know the cast of characters here.”
Dance thought for a moment, looking round the trailer.
A to B to Z …
“I need you to do something.”
“Sure,” the detective said. “Evidence, crime scene? You’re a better interrogator than I am but I’m game.”
“No,” she said. She took him by the shoulders and walked him backward five feet. She then stepped away and examined him closely. “Just stand right there and don’t move.”
As she walked out the door, O’Neil looked around and said, “I can do that.”
A HALF HOUR later, Dance and O’Neil, along with a contingent of FMCSO deputies, sped through the hazy late-summer afternoon toward a motel off Highway 41.
It was a Red Roof Inn. Decent, clean but surely far below what the guest they were about to arrest had been used to at certain points in his life.
The four cars approached silently.
There were jurisdictional considerations, of course, but Dance and O’Neil weren’t here to claim the trophy, merely to help out. They were happy to let the local constabulary handle the arrest. She had, after all, agreed to let Madigan take the collar and corner the publicity, though it would be FMCSO in general who’d get the credit, since he wasn’t on active duty.
The three police cars and Dance’s Nissan slipped silently up to the motel and parked. With a shared smile and tacit understanding, Dance and O’Neil glanced at each other and wandered to the back of the place, while Harutyun, Stanning and four other deputies sprinted through the halls to the room where surveillance had revealed the suspect was staying.
As they’d guessed, the nervous perp had been anticipating the visit; he’d seen the cars approach and he literally leapt out the window of his room onto an unpleasant patch of grass reserved for dogs doing their business. He righted himself fast, wrapped his computer bag strap around his chest and poised for a sprint, then wisely chose to stop as he glanced at the guns in the hands of Dance and O’Neil, both of the muzzles pointed steadily at his head.
Two other somber deputies, one Latino and one Anglo, joined them in the back. They were the ones who slapped the cuffs on Kayleigh’s producer, Barry Zeigler, and led him toward the parking lot around front. It was Kathryn Dance who took possession of the computer bag that would contain the priceless songs that he’d stolen from Bobby Prescott’s trailer, the morning after he’d killed the roadie.
Chapter 49
“YOUR HEIGHT,” DANCE explained to him.
Zeigler sat, miserable, in the backseat of a sheriff’s office cruiser. The door was open and he was facing outward, hands shackled behind him.
She continued to elaborate, answering his question about how she knew it was he. “The perp would know Bobby pretty well and had probably been in his trailer before. And he’d been somebody who was very familiar with everyone connected with the band.”
The deciding factor was what she told him next: “And he was tall.”
“Tall?”
She explained about her interview with Tabatha, across the street, several days ago. “She said she’d seen somebody inside that morning. Except, she couldn’t see the intruder’s head, only his chest.”
This was why she’d put O’Neil in front of the window of the trailer a half hour ago. Recalling that she’d been eye-to-eye with P. K. Madigan, outside, when she’d searched the trailer, she’d positioned the Monterey detective about where Tabatha had seen the intruder. She’d then stepped outside and walked across the street. Looking back, she’d clearly seen O’Neil’s face.
Which meant that the intruder Monday morning had been well over O’Neil’s height of six feet. The only person she’d met recently with an interest in Kayleigh Towne, who knew Bobby and who fit that stature was Barry Zeigler.
“Shit,” the man muttered, utterly defeated. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry.”
Dance heard that often as an interrogator.
Sorry …
Of course what it meant, ten times out of ten, was: I’m sorry I got caught.
“When I met you at Kayleigh’s house you said you’d just driven there from Carmel. But we talked to the desk clerk here. You checked in the morning after Bobby was killed.”
“I know, I know. I lied. I’m sorry.”
That, again.
Dance said, “And then there was the recording of Kayleigh singing ‘Your Shadow.’ That you played to announce the attacks? It was done on a high-quality digital recorder. The sort that pros use—pros like you, producers and engineers.”
“Recording?” he asked, frowning.
She glanced at Dennis Harutyun, who ran through the Miranda warning. He added, “You’re under arrest for murder, for—”
“Murder? What do you mean?”