A Darkness More Than Night

He took up the notebook and made the owl the sixth entry on his list.

    ***

    The rest of the crime scene videotape fostered little interest in McCaleb. It documented the remaining rooms of the victim’s apartment – the bedroom, bathroom and kitchen. He saw no more owls and took no more notes. When he got to the end of the tape he rewound it and watched it all the way through once more. Nothing new caught his attention. He ejected the tape and slid it back into its cardboard slipcase. He then carried the television back up to the salon, where he locked it into its frame on the counter.
    Buddy was sprawled on the couch reading his paperback. He didn’t say anything and McCaleb could tell he was hurt that McCaleb had closed and locked the door to the office on him. He thought about apologizing but decided to let it go. Buddy was too nosy about McCaleb, past and present. Maybe this rejection would let him know that.
    “What are you reading?” he asked instead.
    “A book,” Lockridge answered without looking up.
    McCaleb smiled to himself. Now he was sure that he had gotten to Buddy.
    “Well, there’s the TV if you want to watch the news or something.”
    “The news is over.”
    McCaleb looked at his watch. It was midnight. He had not realized how much time had gone by. This had often been the case with him – while at the bureau it was routine for him to work through lunch or late into night without realizing it when he became fully engaged in a case.
    He left Buddy to sulk and went back down to the office. He closed the door again, loudly, and locked it.

Chapter 4
    After turning to a fresh page in his notebook, McCaleb opened the murder book. He snapped open the rings and pulled the documents out and stacked them neatly on the desk. It was a little quirk but he never liked reviewing cases by turning pages in a book. He liked to hold the individual reports in his hands. He liked squaring off the corners of the whole stack. He put the binder aside and began carefully reading through the investigative summaries in chronological order. Soon he was fully immersed in the investigation.
    The homicide report had come in anonymously to the front desk of the West Hollywood substation of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department at noon on Monday, January 1. The male caller said there was a man dead in apartment 2 B in the Grand Royale Apartments on Sweetzer near Melrose. The caller hung up without giving his name or any other message. Because the call came in on one of the nonemergency lines at the front desk it was not recorded, and there was no caller ID function on the phone.
    A pair of patrol deputies were dispatched to the apartment and found the front door slightly ajar. After receiving no answer to their knocks and calls, the deputies entered the apartment and quickly determined that the anonymous caller had given correct information. A man was dead inside. The deputies backed out of the apartment and the homicide squad was called. The case was assigned to partners Jaye Winston and Kurt Mintz, with Winston as lead detective.
    The victim was identified in the reports as Edward Gunn, a forty-four-year-old itinerant house painter. He had lived alone in the Sweetzer Avenue apartment for nine years.
    A computer search for criminal records or known criminal activity determined that Gunn had a history of convictions for small-time crimes ranging from soliciting for prostitution and loitering to repeated arrests for public intoxication and drunk driving. He had been arrested twice for drunk driving in the three months prior to his death, including the night of December 30. He posted bail on the 31 st and was released. Less than twenty-four hours later he was dead. The records also showed an arrest for a serious crime without subsequent conviction. Six years earlier Gunn had been taken into custody by the Los Angeles Police Department and questioned in a homicide. He was later released and no charges were ever filed.
    According to the investigative reports Winston and her partner had put into the murder book, there was no apparent robbery of Gunn or his apartment, leaving the motive for his slaying unknown. Other residents in the eight-unit apartment building said that they had heard no disturbances in Gunn’s apartment on New Year’s Eve. Any sounds that might have emanated from the apartment during the murder were likely camouflaged by the sounds of a party being held by a tenant in the apartment directly