Hancock Park Read online

  Copyright © 2004 by Katherine V. Forrest

  Spinsters Ink

  P.O. Box 242

  Midway, FL 32343

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

  Originally Published by The Berkley Publishing Group 2004

  First Spinsters Ink Edition 2013

  Spinsters Ink eBook released 2013

  Cover Designer: Sandy Knowles

  ISBN 13: 978-1-935226-70-3

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Also by Katherine V. Forrest

  From Bella Books

  Curious Wine

  An Emergence of Green

  Daughters of a Coral Dawn

  From Spinsters Ink

  The Kate Delafield Mysteries

  Amateur City

  Murder at the Nightwood Bar

  The Beverly Malibu

  Murder by Tradition

  Liberty Square

  Apparition Alley

  Sleeping Bones

  FOR JO

  Acknowledgments

  To Jo Hercus, first and best critic and best everything else as well.

  To Montserrat Fontes whose friendship and astute advice have spanned a suddenly amazing number of years, and virtually all my books. To my writer-brother Michael Nava, with many thanks, always with love and admiration. To Paula L. Woods, my sister-in-crime and L.A. maven, for her invaluable counsel, her talent, her friendship.

  To Shannon Minter for his advice and pioneering transgender activism.

  Very special thanks to Elaine Wolter, extraordinary mother of an extraordinary family, for sharing with me the story of her family and the emotional journey with Gus, her transgender son. I take this opportunity to share part of one of her letters to me: “The fact that a child is gay, straight or transgender doesn’t change their soul. I love them all equally and only want them to be happy, healthy and fulfilled. Kids must live their own lives and parents should respect that. As I have said many times, love is not conditional but should be all encompassing.” My wish for all transgender people is that they could be cherished by a parent like Elaine.

  To Natalee Rosenstein for editing that has never failed to lift my work—and my spirit.

  Chapter One

  In a courtroom on the third floor of the Criminal Courts Building in downtown Los Angeles, Judge Jackson Terrell ordered: “Call your next witness.”

  “The People call Detective Kate Delafield,” responded deputy district attorney Alicia Marquez from her seat at the prosecution table.

  Through the gate held open by the bailiff, Kate walked into the inner court. A plump, blond clerk briskly administered the oath, and Kate stepped up to the stand to sit in its simple leather chair. After complying with the request to state and spell her name, she put her shoulder bag beside her, smoothed her jacket, laid her folder of notes on the ledge of the stand, adjusted the microphone.

  Her expression carefully courteous, she made eye contact with Judge Jackson Terrell, who peered at her over the top of his rimless glasses, his thin face expressionless. An African-American, this judge ran a tightly controlled courtroom and had earned a reputation of careful, humorless competence. Kate gave the jury a swift, expressionless glance, careful not to give any impression that she was attempting to ingratiate herself. The usual mixture of gender, age, and race, they were better dressed and from a higher median income group than usual during this time of depressed employment in the upper echelons of American commerce. With the assumed right of all juries, they were unabashedly scrutinizing her and she felt the burn of their stares after she looked away.

  She was nervous, but not because of Aimee, who had neither returned to the house nor called. There was no choice but to deal with that particular anxiety later. No matter how many times she testified, she never lost her awe of the courtroom, her awareness of the presiding black-robed judge and uniformed bailiffs, the solemnity and somberness of the proceedings, the spare elegance of the wooden walls and tables and benches, the seal of the state of California on the wall above the judge, who sat between the national and state flags. She took comfort only in the certain knowledge that over numerous court appearances she had learned how to present herself. How to project an air of calm certainty, of competence and credibility not only to jurors but no less importantly to judges, attorneys, clerks, and bailiffs.

  On court days she took meticulous care with her appearance, selecting the simplest of black or dark blue jackets and pants, complementing them with either a plain shell or a turtleneck; never a shirt whose collar she might feel the need to adjust, no wristwatch she might inadvertently glance at and give an unintended indication of impatience or anxiety, no jewelry she would twist or tug to telegraph unease. Long since resigned to her finely textured, unmanageable hair, having lost all hope of taming it when alteration from dark to light gray changed its consistency not a whit, she simply brushed it in the morning and let it go where it may, touching it only to skim it from her face, rarely running her fingers through it as was Aimee’s habit. The reward for successfully cultivating physical stillness was the far fewer clues she revealed about her emotional state to witnesses or suspects, to defense attorneys or juries.

  She turned her attention to deputy district attorney Alicia Marquez, who stood behind the podium unhurriedly arranging her notes. These consisted of three legal-size yellow pads with a confetti of multicolored Post-its protruding from the ends and sides and several loose white pages interleaved in the pads. Kate was not impressed with her organizational habits. And had serious misgivings about the range of her competence.

  Marquez did make a good appearance. Trim and compact, with alert dark eyes and full lips, she dressed conservatively, today in a dark brown jacket and skirt, a beige silk blouse, and matching wedge-heeled shoes. Kate suspected that a sizable chunk of Marquez’s budget went to maintaining her attractive hairstyle, a simple ash-brown curve parted in the middle to frame the golden tones of her skin.

  In a city where Hispanic influence was rapidly growing, this fifth-generation Latina had been fast-tracked. Rumor had it she’d required longer than usual to be promoted to drug-related homicides and class A felonies, and her prosecution win-loss record was undistinguished. This case was her first major break, the plum assignment of lead prosecutor on what appeared to be a medium-profile case—meaning it would make page three in the California section of the L.A. Times. In the opinion of the Office of the District Attorney, the case had an unexceptional defense lawyer on the other side, and the further advantage of a detective—Kate herself—whose solid investigations and preparation for court were well documented and rarely provided that major bugaboo to prosecuting attorneys: surprises.

  In her meetings with Marquez, despite her best efforts to establish a connection, Kate had felt little rapport with her or personal warmth from her. She knew Marquez was a divorced parent with two teenage boys and had attained her level of success through hard work and unremitting determination. Kate admired her serious demeanor, her ambition and dedication. But she had heard via the rumor mill that Marquez thus far seemed lacking in imagination and courtroom generalship—significant deficiencies in a homicide prosecution.

  Before this case had even gone to trial, Kate’s apprehension about Marquez’s competence had been proved justified. Three weeks ago the original defense attorney had been replaced with Gregory Quantrill, a lawyer with a nationally growing reputation. Quantrill had asked for no continuance, obviously pleased to allow the District Attorney’s Office scant maneuvering room to make changes in its own legal team. Kate had never made the mistake of thinking the courtroom was anything less than a theater, and she knew she was now a supporting player in a live production with a lead actor whose unexceptional talent and marginal stage craft could bring the production down no matter how strong her own skills might be. This case had fallen into unpredictable jeopardy.

  “Detective Delafield,” Marquez began in a clear voice that carried throughout the courtroom, “how long have you been a member of the Los Angeles Police Department?”

  “Since nineteen seventy-two,” she answered firmly.

  Marquez turned a page as if searching for a note, then turned the page back, a standard courtroom tactic; she was allowing the jurors to do the math, allowing the positive message of a three-decade police career to penetrate. Kate took the opportunity to glance at the defense table, and met eyes the color of black coffee—the stare of Gregory Quantrill, so intensely focused she felt it as a physical sensation impaling her to the back of her chair. He offered the hint of a smile, confident and faintly personal, as if he had somehow read and sympathized with her pessimism over Marquez. She held Quantrill’s gaze to give him no reason to think she was impressed with him or intimidated.

  Marquez asked, “And what is your current assignment?”

  “I’m in Homicide at Wilshire Division.”

  “How long have you been in Homicide?”

  “Twenty years.”

  Again Marquez paused, and Kate
shifted her attention to the defendant seated beside Quantrill. Handsomely presentable in a gray-green suit and paler green shirt and tie, he was listening attentively but not looking at her, his gaze fixed somewhere in the space between her and the jury. His quiet body language was far different from her last experience with him, his arrest, meaning that he had been thoroughly coached by the defense about courtroom demeanor.

  Marquez asked, “In the ranks of homicide detectives, what is your classification?”

  “I’m a detective-three, the highest classification in my rank.”

  She glanced over the courtroom. Now that Quantrill had entered the case, it had acquired a higher profile, but on this third day of trial, courtroom seats were sparsely filled, mostly with the victim and defendant’s relatives and friends. Son and daughter Allan and Lisa Talbot were here; Rikki, the other daughter, was yet to come to court. L.A. Times police reporter Corey Lanier sat by herself on the aisle in the back row, head bent over a notepad. Lanier had attended opening statements, so why would she choose to hear Kate’s testimony, a laying out in detail of what had been covered in Marquez’s recitation to the jury of what she promised to prove?

  Marquez’s opening had been relatively brief; her strategy was to take advantage of the lack of pretrial publicity and to allow the cumulative power of the evidence to emerge, followed by a strong closing argument. Quantrill had been even more succinct, offering the colorful metaphor that the People’s case was no more than a flimsy tissue of unproven speculation that would blow apart with one good sneeze.

  The reason for Lanier’s presence had to be Gregory Quantrill. Prepared as Kate was, and she was fully prepared—no thanks to Aimee’s confounding behavior—she would have a thorny time on the stand under his cross-examination. A homicide case not pled out was never easy—attacking the credibility of investigating officers was what defense attorneys did for a living—but much of what they did involved predictable courtroom maneuvers in providing a competent defense, albeit one that brought in tens of thousands of dollars to private attorneys; homicide cases were exceedingly expensive to defend. Corey Lanier was here for one reason: She smelled courtroom drama and a story. The cross-examination of the lead detective would be a prime indicator of what that story might be…

  Marquez asked, “How many cases, approximately, would you say you’ve investigated over the course of—”

  “Your honor,” Quantrill said pleasantly, rising to his six-foot-plus height, “the defense is willing to stipulate as to the detective’s sterling record and experience.”

  Judge Terrell raised his pencil-thin eyebrows and waited for Marquez, who cast a confused glance at Kate. Kate looked back at her incredulously. Had she forgotten the basics of law school? Was she actually considering—

  “Your honor,” Marquez said, shaking her head as if the appropriate response had just been delivered to her, “we will not so stipulate. This jury should hear the detective’s qualifications and—”

  “Proceed,” Terrell said crisply. Quantrill took his seat with an amiable grin toward the jury that said, I did my best to prevent this boring crap.

  “I’ve been involved in more than two hundred and fifty investigations over that period,” Kate answered, doing her best to conceal her fury. Out of a staff of over one thousand deputy district attorneys serving this city, she had to get this one. A prosecutor like Linda Foster would have reacted with outrage, accusing Quantrill of attempting to sabotage the laying out of Kate’s credentials—essential to establish maximum credibility for her key testimony to this jury—until the judge intervened.

  Calming herself, Kate continued to answer a litany of questions about her position as a D-3 supervising detective at Wilshire Division and lead detective in homicide investigations and what that entailed, her experience as a training detective for other homicide detectives. At the edge of her mind was how awed Marquez might be by Quantrill.

  That Quantrill’s clients would be well heeled was a given. His first high-profile, big-money win had been Oklahoma oil mogul Damian Winfield, acquitted of murder and conspiracy to murder his wife and her lover, plus the follow-on win of a lucrative lawsuit against two tabloids for libel, plus a best-selling ghostwritten book on the case. The lengthy trial had been carried on Court TV, and the show’s reporters had made him a star with their fawning praise of his smooth and deadly cross-examinations, his courtroom presence and charisma. The only reason they were not covering this trial was because their hastily made plea to do so had been denied. In a city where fallout from the O. J. Simpson case still poisoned the atmosphere of law enforcement all these years later, televised trials were viewed with implacable hostility by much of L.A.’s judiciary.

  Gregory Quantrill had come into this case fully expecting to win. Which meant, worst-case scenario, that he knew something Kate did not. Or far more likely, had detected amid the discovery documents and the defense’s own detective work an avenue of reasonable doubt leading straight into the jury box. Unlike Marquez, who had to convince twelve jurors of this defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, Quantrill, if he could not persuade all twelve to acquit, had to reach only one for a hung jury, which would be viewed as a victory. By everyone except, of course, the defendant and the murder victim’s family, who would be put through the same torturous process all over again.

  Thus far, the prosecution’s leadoff witnesses, the responding officers, had given their testimony and Quantrill, beyond politely clarifying a few details about the scene of the murder, the position and condition of the body at death, had asked not a single challenging question on cross-examination.

  Marquez continued, “On May twenty-ninth of last year, in your professional capacity, were you called to an address on Oakview Road?”

  “I was.”

  “This address is located in Hancock Park?”

  “Correct.”

  “Would you agree that this is in general an affluent area of the city?”

  Kate knew Marquez was reminding the jury of the prosperity of the defendant and that he could afford the best of lawyers. “It is affluent,” she confirmed.

  “At what time did you arrive at the scene?”

  “At approximately eight-fifteen that morning.” Her crime scene log lay on top of the stack of reports and notes in her folder if she needed to ask permission to consult it.

  “You came from the station?”

  “I was on my way into the station. I received notification on my cell phone and proceeded directly to the location, where I met Detective Joseph Cameron, who had driven there from the station.”

  “Detective Cameron was your partner?”

  “He was and still is my partner.”

  “How long has he been your partner?”

  “Three years.”

  “He was on the scene prior to your arrival?”

  “We arrived simultaneously.”

  “Describe what you saw when you arrived.”

  “The responding officers had secured the scene—”

  “Meaning they had deployed crime scene tape?”

  “Yes. Among other duties.”

  The paramount rule of testifying was answer as briefly as possible. That course of action required closed-ended questions to elicit brief answers. But Marquez seemed to like open-ended questions whose answers she would frequently interrupt. Kate resigned herself to making her answers simple and clear to the jury, and watching their reactions, especially juror number three, a gray-haired man with a blue polo shirt stretched over his paunch; he had settled a faint, approving smile on her. She continued, “Sergeant Fred Hansen was in charge—”

  “Have you worked with him before?”

  “Many times. Over many years.” When Marquez did not follow up, she continued, “Officer Dane Garrett was maintaining the crime scene log, a list of everyone entering the crime scene.”

  As the detailed questions continued, her memory of that morning sharpened into focus.

  Chapter Two