Hollywood Forbidden: A Hollywood Alphabet Series Thriller Read online

  Grace turns as Wendy enters the room with the man who calls himself Priest. He brings her over to where they’ve all gathered. She sees that Wendy’s crying, begging them to let her go.

  “Silence,” Priest says to her. “You must show respect.”

  Grace watches as Lamech goes over to Wendy. He looks over at Priest and nods. The two men then reach up and remove their blue hoods.

  “You?” Maddie says, her brow knitting up in a way that makes Grace think she recognizes the man named Lamech .

  Priest comes over to her. “Final warning. Shut your mouth or you die.”

  Maddie remains silent as Lamech bends down on one knee in front of Wendy. When he speaks, Grace hears that his voice is different. The change is so sudden and dramatic, that it’s as if a different person is now speaking. “Wendy, will you marry me?”

  Wendy’s crying is louder now. Grace thinks she might even collapse. Priest comes over to her, whispering something. She can tell his voice is harsh and demanding. Wendy controls her sobbing long enough to softly answer, “Yes.”

  Lamech rises and goes over to Wendy, taking the girl into his arms. “Tomorrow will be our day. We will pledge our love to one another forever.” He then turns back to the other girls. Grace thinks he is deciding something. After a moment he walks over to Sissy, takes her hand, and says, “This is your lucky day. You will be Wendy’s maid of honor.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  “He’s in the makeup room,” Mildred Butcher said to me and Buck before her gaze flicked down to Bernie, a sneer finding her lips.

  “Must not be one of Mildred’s good days,” Buck said, as we walked toward the back of Clowney’s Funeral Home.

  “She probably spent the night tied to her bedpost.” He gave me a look. “Don’t ask.”

  We found Peter Roth standing over a coffin. He had on the Dexter apron, a pallet of makeup in one hand, and a brush in the other. I heard him say to whoever was in the coffin, “Oh shit, what the hell am I doing?”

  “Just a wild guess,” I said coming over to him. “But it looks like you’re having another dress up party with a dead woman.”

  Roth jumped when he heard my voice, almost dropping the makeup. “You nearly scared the life out of me.”

  “Then you’re in the perfect place.”

  Buck came closer, peered into the open coffin. “Looks like she could use a little lipstick.”

  “Everyone’s a critic,” Roth said. “You should have seen her in life. Betty Crabtree looked like Casper the Ghost.” He glanced over at me. “Actually, your timing is perfect. I could use a little help with Betty’s undergarments.” He held up a purple thong, smiled. “Forgot this. A special request from her husband.”

  “I’ve already done my time in the land down under.” I looked over at Buck. “Maybe you’d like to help saddle her up.”

  He smiled, his eyes crinkling up. “I know firsthand that when it comes to thongs you’re more of an expert than me.” I blushed, remembering how my dress had ripped during the courthouse shooting. He looked over at Roth. “You want my advice. Keep the lid down.”

  “We need to talk,” I said to Roth. “Let’s go someplace where there are no dead bodies in need of undergarments.”

  Roth led us to a back office where we took seats across from his cluttered desk. He removed the apron. “Don’t tell me. You’re out doing a little shopping for one of the recent homicide victims. I’ve got a special…”

  “Enough,” I said. “Tell us about your relationship with Clay Aster.”

  All the color drained from Roth’s usually florid face, bringing Betty Crabtree to mind again. “I was afraid this might happen.” He opened his desk drawer, found a bottle of Jack Daniels, and poured himself a shot. “It’s not what you think.”

  “Then what is it?”

  He sucked down the whiskey, poured himself another shot. “I was Clay’s paralegal a few years ago, helped him out on some cases to make ends meet before I got my law degree. That’s the only relationship we had.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us this before?” Buck asked.

  He downed the second shot. “I didn’t want to raise any suspicions on your part, make you think that I was somehow involved in what happened.”

  “Guess what?” I said, leaning forward. “Our suspicions are now on high alert. Tell us about Collin Rae Hopkins.”

  Roth blanched, went for the bottle again, but apparently thought better of it, maybe because it was ten in the morning. “I helped Aster out with his defense. I was really just Clay’s gopher, running paper and making copies. That’s it.”

  Buck lowered his deep voice, also leaning in closer to Roth. “As it turns out your defendant, Mr. Hopkins, murdered a girl in a snuff video we found in Aster’s house. It’s time you come clean about what you know.”

  “What?” The lines on Roth’s forehead deepened. “The victim was…”

  “The Fallen Angel,” I said. “Angela Mae Waters. We know all about her.”

  He scratched his uncombed hair. “Aster had a video with her in it?”

  Buck nodded. “And what they were doing to that poor girl wasn’t pretty.”

  Roth’s gaze drifted off. “That’s hard to believe. I had no idea that she and Aster were involved.”

  “What do you know about Clay Aster and Harvey Brill being involved in a sex club on the island, something called the Blue Hoods?”

  He looked back at me. “Never heard of it. If they were involved in something like that, it’s news to me.”

  Roth seemed genuinely perplexed by what we were telling him. “Tell me something,” I said. “How did Aster come to be Hopkins’ attorney? From what I know Hopkins was destitute at the time he committed the crime so he could hardly afford a high priced mouthpiece like Aster.”

  “I’m not sure. Clay never…” Roth paused, maybe reflecting on the case. “Now that you mention it there was something strange about the way things were handled. I was new to the legal system and didn’t think too much about it at the time.”

  “We’re listening.”

  “Aster’s defense…it was…I mean it really wasn’t much of a defense. I remember thinking at the time that maybe he assumed Hopkins was guilty and was just going through the motions of defending him. He seldom objected to the DA’s questioning and only called one or two witnesses in Hopkins’ defense—his mother and a friend.”

  I looked at Buck. “Maybe Aster wanted Hopkins to take the fall for a crime he committed.”

  He shrugged. “It’s possible.” Buck then turned to Roth. “What are you doing this afternoon?”

  “Just need to finish up with Betty and then I have a couple of more makeup sessions. Why?”

  “Put your lipstick back in its holster, son. We’re all going to death row.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  We dropped Bernie off at the Stardust, took a sheriff’s helicopter to the mainland, and caught a Southwest flight out of LAX that afternoon. Roth took full advantage of his free flight, ordering drinks, and hitting on the stewardess. By the time we landed he was unsteady on his feet and slurring his words. I got him a cup of coffee at the Oakland airport and told him to sober up.

  San Quentin State Prison, also known as California’s Death Row, sits on 432 acres of some of the most expensive and desirable waterfront real estate in Marin County, just north of San Francisco. The prison houses the state’s only gas chamber, which hasn’t been used in years.

  One of California’s most notorious killers, Richard Ramirez, also known as the Night Stalker, was housed at the prison, after a murder spree that included thirteen people, not to mention the victims that he brutally raped, disfigured, and left alive. The most notable aspects of Ramirez’s crimes might be the fact that his victims were marked by satanic pentagrams, the few survivors reporting that they were forced to sing their praise to Satan before he raped them.

  For all his horrific crimes, Ramirez was sentenced to death, and sent to San Quentin. He remained there, i
n the middle of an appeal process that went on for decades, before dying of liver failure in 2013. The Night Stalker’s case was only one of almost seven hundred currently condemned prisoners that served to demonstrate the death penalty in the state was purely symbolic. As far as I was concerned, the only purpose death row served was to tell murderers, commit your crimes and spend the rest of your life with free housing, food, and medical care. Not a bad deal for those inclined to rape, torture, and murder.

  After checking in at the prison’s reception building a detention officer told us that he’d have to escort us because Hopkins was in something called the AC. The prison was enormous and I was grateful that we had a guide.

  “What’s the AC?” Roth asked, as we walked through the corridors with Ramon Garcia, a muscle-bound detention sergeant at the facility.

  “It’s the prison’s Adjustment Center,” Garcia explained. “All the recently condemned inmates are sent there, as well as the state’s most violent inmates.”

  We soon learned that the AC was an enclosed facility where the staff were locked into the prison with the inmates. Garcia escorted us inside a sally port that looked more like a cage as he explained, “We call this the drawbridge. It’s the primary line of defense to prevent escapes.”

  Once we were inside the drawbridge another officer checked our credentials and stamped our hands with something Garcia jokingly referred to as a get out of jail free card. We then heard the mechanical hiss and whir as the detention sergeant pulled the locking gate closed behind us, sealing us from the rest of the prison. Once we were locked inside our ID’s were checked once again by a man behind bulletproof glass.

  After leaving the sally port we walked through a courtyard. “That’s the AC,” Garcia said, pointing to a free standing building with barred windows. There were more checkpoints inside the building before we were led down a hallway. I immediately sensed a change in the staff working here. A nervous tension seemed to ripple through the building, probably caused by the need to be constantly vigilant.

  We stopped at a desk and were each given a green security vest by a detention officer. Garcia explained its purpose. “It’s called a stab vest, designed to protect against anything an inmate might improvise and use as a weapon to injure you. It protects the vitals.”

  After Roth put on his vest he broke the tension by pulling on the bottom of it, showing that the vest stopped at his waist. “I think maybe I got a female vest.”

  Garcia smiled, lowering his eyes. “Sorry. Nothing’s considered vital down there.”

  Roth grinned. “That’s a matter of opinion.”

  I turned and saw that the mug shots of all the prisoners in the cellblock were affixed to a wall. It was an intimating group and I noticed that each mug had a color-coded designation.

  “Yellow is for the condemned,” Garcia explained. “White are the admin segs, inmates that can’t get along outside the AC.” He tapped one of the mugs. “As you can see Hopkins is a yellow but even if he wasn’t condemned he’d be here.”

  “Why is that?” I asked, at the same time noticing that Hopkins looked like a bull of a man with an intimidating stare.

  “You’ll see in a minute.”

  We continued walking until we were on the south side of the AC. There were three tiers of identical cells and we could hear prisoners communicating with one another even behind the solid doors.

  We stopped a few feet from the cells. “Mr. Hopkins is going to be handcuffed and put in leg restraints, then we’ll put him in the black box,” Garcia explained.

  “The what?” I asked.

  “It’s an interview room but you’ll have a guard with you at all times. Prisoners often try to assault staff as a code of conduct. They know that if they don’t make an attempt at assault they’ll be disciplined by the other inmates.”

  While we waited for Hopkins, I glanced through the security fencing beyond the cell block and saw a couple of recreation yards. There were about a dozen inmates shooting hoops in two separate groups. Armed guards surveyed the inmates from a walkway above the yard.

  Garcia must have seen me looking at the recreation yard. “The yards are strictly for the AC inmates. They get three hours outside. Otherwise, they stay in their cells.”

  We all turned at the same time, watching as Collin Rae Hopkins was escorted from his cell to the black box. Our prisoner looked like he could play professional football if he wasn’t on death row. He was well over six feet tall with broad shoulders. His shaved head was covered with tattoos. Given his size and stature, I knew at a glance he was not one of the men in the video who had attacked Angela Waters.

  As Hopkins’ gaze swung over to us I had the impression the inmate would attack us if given the slightest provocation or opportunity. I’d interviewed a lot of dangerous and intimidating subjects before, but Hopkins was now at the top of my list.

  My throat was dry as we settled in at a table directly across from the prisoner with a security guard at our backs. The interview room, called the black box, was hot, the air stale. We made brief introductions, Buck and I giving the inmate our names, but leaving Roth out of the discussion for now.

  “What the fuck is this about?” Hopkins demanded.

  “We’re here,” Buck began, “because some information has come to our attention about the victim in your case, Angela Mae Waters.”

  “What about her?” Hopkins’ voice was deep and ominous, his stare one of intense hatred for anyone in authority.

  “First, let me ask you about your relationship with…”

  “We didn’t have a relationship. I watched her dance, that’s all.”

  “You never saw or talked to her otherwise?” I asked.

  Collin fixed his blue eyes on me. His gaze then moved lower, his lips lifting up at the corners. He cut his eyes to Buck, back to me. “Do you suck his dick?”

  My expression was unchanged. I made an effort to keep my voice even. “Answer the question.”

  He exhaled, the smile evaporating. “Why? What’s in it for me, cunt.”

  “It’s Detective Sexton and as Detective McCade said some things have come up about the victim. It might be in your interest to cooperate. You want to sit there and continue with the insults we’ll leave. It’s your choice.”

  He studied me for a long moment. “I never saw her before.”

  “How do you explain your fingerprint being on the business card in her purse?” Buck asked. Roth sat next to him, shifting nervously in his chair but remaining quiet.

  “It was a set up. I met a guy at a bar. He showed me one of the Corral’s business cards and asked me to meet him there. I picked up the card for a minute, gave it back to him. He must have planted it on the girl.”

  “Any idea who this guy was?”

  Hopkins gaze went over to Roth and stopped. His body seemed to stiffen, his voice becoming angry. “You. You’re the little asshole that worked with my god damned attorney.”

  “I…I…just helped with the pp…paperwork,” Roth said, squirming in his chair. “I wasn’t involved in y…your case.”

  “That bastard did nothing for me.”

  Roth looked over at me but otherwise didn’t respond.

  “How did you end up with Clay Aster as your attorney?” I asked, trying to defuse the situation.

  Hopkins’s eyes remained fixed on Roth for several seconds before breaking away. “He came to see me and offered his services for free. Since I had a PD who was a worthless piece of shit I took him up on the offer. It was a fucking mistake.”

  “Any idea why Aster worked on your case for nothing?” Buck asked.

  “He said he took cases like mine now and then, said it was something about giving back and helping out, some bullshit like that.” His eyes fixed on Roth again. “You had to know he wasn’t doing anything for me. Why didn’t you speak up?”

  Roth shrugged, said something about not understanding the legal system, and not even being an attorney at the time.

  “Let’s go back
to what you said before,” I said, trying to deflect the confrontation, “about somebody setting you up. Do you have any idea who he was?”

  Hopkins’s death stare on Roth finally broke. He looked over at me. “Like I said, a few days before that night at the Corral, I met I guy at a bar in the valley. We played some pool and hit it off pretty well. He bought me a few drinks, asked me if I wanted to meet him at the Corral a couple of nights later. At first, I put him off, told him I was busy. He kept asking me to go, even said he’d pay for some girls if I’d meet him there. I finally agreed.”

  “What’s the guy’s name?” Buck asked.

  “He called himself Dave. I didn’t get a last name.”

  “So a couple of days later you guys met at the Corral,” Buck said. “What happened after that.”

  “We had some drinks. Dave got us some girls. We went to a motel, partied until late. I drank a lot and don’t remember anything after that, except the cops knocking on my door a few days later with a warrant.”

  I took a moment, exchanging a look with Buck. I then brought out my laptop, set it on the desk, and turned the screen so that Hopkins could see it. “I’m going to play you a few seconds of a video. I want you to tell me if you recognize anyone.” I made a couple of keystrokes and the video we’d found in Aster’s secret room played.

  “Son of a bitch,” Hopkins said after a moment.

  “You recognize the girl?” I asked.

  “It’s her, the one I supposedly murdered.” He looked at me. “What’s this about?”

  I killed the video, put the laptop away. “The video was found on the island of Catalina. Angela had visited there a few days before she was murdered. Have you ever been on the island?”

  “Hell no and I sure as hell wasn’t in the video.”

  “The two men wearing blue hoods, do you recognize either of them or ever hear about a secret organization called the Blue Hoods?”