‘Ten years. And apparently, after his sentence was read out, and before being taken away by the court officers, Sands had time to look back at Nashorn, who was sitting just behind the state prosecutor, and utter the words – “I’ll be coming for you”
Time seemed to halt for several seconds.
‘Do we have an address for him?’ Hunter asked.
‘Just his old home address. Sands wasn’t paroled, he served his sentence – clean release, no need to report to a parole officer, or a judge, or anything. No restrictions either. He can even leave the country if he wants to.’
‘OK,’ Captain Blake said, looking back at the printout on her desk. ‘Let’s find him ASAP and have a little chat with him.’ She motioned for Alice to hand over her folder and the report.
‘Until we find him,’ DA Bradley said, ‘let’s keep this as quiet as possible. I don’t want any of this leaking to the press, or anyone.’ He looked at Hunter and Garcia as if they’d publicize the new finding as soon as they left the room. ‘And I mean
Neither Hunter nor Garcia replied. They just stared at the DA.
‘
‘Crystal,’ Hunter answered.
Forty-Eight
After the morning’s development, the rest of the day began to drag. Nothing else materialized. Not surprisingly, the address Alice had on file for Ken Sands was out of date, and since he had left prison only six months ago, he hadn’t filed for any documents that could help track him down – no driver’s license, no passport, no national-welfare registration, nothing. His social-security record still showed the old address.
Hunter had a team trying to track down a bank account, a gas or electricity bill, anything that could point them in the right direction. They were also looking into Sands’s old friends. People he hung out with before going to prison, people he met in prison who were now on the outside; anyone, really. But obtaining information from old friends or prison mates was a lot harder than it sounded, and Hunter knew it. In Los Angeles street law, ratting someone out, especially to the cops, was a crime punishable by death. Even his enemies wouldn’t talk easy.
Hunter had also requested all the prison-visitation records for Sands and Ortega, but because of California privacy laws it could be a day or two before they got a judge to sanction the request, and another few before they got the files.
Gina Valdez, Ken Sands’s girlfriend, whom he had beaten almost to death, had disappeared. Getting your name changed in America wasn’t a very complicated process. And in the Internet age, changing your whole identity was getting easier and easier. No one knew if Gina had changed her name, or created a new identity. No one knew if she was still in LA, in California, or even in the country anymore. But one thing was for sure: she didn’t want to be found.
As an LAPD detective, Andrew Nashorn had sometimes worked with a partner, Detective Seb Stokes. Stokes wasn’t involved in Ken Sands’s arrest, but Hunter gave him a call anyway. They arranged to meet first thing tomorrow morning.
Brian Doyle, the head of the LAPD Information Technology Division, had gotten back to Hunter towards the end of the afternoon with what he’d managed to extract from the computer they found in Nashorn’s apartment. Hunter and Garcia spent an hour pouring over all the emails retrieved, and what had been compiled from the computer’s Internet history. It became obvious that Nashorn was a frequent user of several escort agencies, many of them specializing in fetish, bondage and sadomasochism services. There was also a string of porn websites, and though many of them could be considered hard edge – none were illegal.
The emails gave them nothing suspicious, no threats or anything that could be construed as one. Nor had they made any progress identifying the second person who had talked to Derek Nicholson in his house when he fell ill. What Nicholson’s nurse had told Hunter, about Nicholson clearing his conscience and telling someone the truth about something, was still rolling around in Hunter’s mind.