Based on what he knows about Joel Allen, Billy doesn’t see him as the sort of guy who watched the WWE business channel or read the Bloomberg report. ‘Probably not at first, but it wouldn’t have taken him long to find out. A few Google searches would have shown him that he’d killed the son of a billionaire who also happened to be a pedophile.’
Alice’s eyes are intent. She’s totally into this now. Billy thinks again that a rinky-dink business school in Red Bluff would have wasted a lot of potential. And hairdressing school? Forget it.
‘So this paid killer, this mechanic, this cleaner, had two things worth money – that the father was almost certainly the one who paid to have the son killed, and the father also raped a child. Because he “just wanted to see what it was like.”’ Some of the light goes out of her eyes when she says that.
‘I doubt if he tried to turn what he knew into cash, although he might have down the line. He would’ve known that blackmailing someone as rich and powerful as Roger Klerke would be a tremendous risk. I think he kept it as a hole card. Which he eventually had to play not for money but because of his own stupidity.’
Double stupidity, Billy thinks, if you count in the lady writer.
‘Almost like he wanted to be caught,’ Alice says. ‘Some repeat killers do.’ She rewinds what she’s said and puts a hand on his wrist. ‘Ones without a moral code, I mean.’
Is that what you call it? Billy wonders.
‘I doubt if Allen wanted to get caught. And if he was able to figure out what made that picture such a valuable commodity, I guess he wasn’t completely stupid, either.’
‘If he wasn’t completely stupid, why kill that man over a poker game? And why attack that woman in LA?’
Well, Billy thinks, Allen believed the poker game guy was cheating. And the lady writer pepper-sprayed him. But neither of those things goes to the heart of Alice’s question.
‘My guess? Simple arrogance. Do you want to stop somewhere for dinner?’
She shakes her head. ‘Let’s drive straight through and eat when we get there. I want to hear the rest.’
5
Billy feels surer about this part even though it’s still mostly guesswork. After Allen was arrested for assault and attempted rape in LA, he must have known he’d be connected almost immediately with the murder and attempted murder back east in Red Bluff. There was a lively trade in cell phones in the county lockup, most of them burners. Allen could have gotten hold of one, called Nick, and said that if he had to go back to Red Bluff and stand trial for murder in a death penalty state, a very rich man, initials RK, was probably going to spend the rest of his life in jail, possibly getting buggered by Harvey Weinstein. And if anything happened to Allen in LA lockup, RK was going to be very, very sorry.
‘Nick got in touch with Roger Klerke. Klerke – almost certainly through an intermediary – hired an expensive lawyer to fight extradition. Nick and Klerke had another meeting at that island and laid out any number of possible scenarios. I imagine they had the expensive legal talent on speed-dial. If so, he would have told them what Nick probably knew already, that he could draw out the extradition fight for quite awhile, but in the end Allen was going to be put on a plane and sent back to face trial. Because first-degree murder trumps aggravated assault.’
‘That’s when Majarian hired you.’
‘Around then, yes. To get me placed where I could eventually take the shot. By then Allen was out of gen-pop because he’d been attacked. By arrangement, I’d guess. Maybe his idea, probably his lawyer’s. Either way he wound up having his own private accommodation while the extradition fight was ongoing. He met regularly with the expensive lawyer, who told him everything was under control. Or would be, once he was back east. Either an escape would be arranged, along with a completely new identity, or certain wheels would be greased, certain witnesses would be bribed, certain key evidence would disappear, and Allen would walk free as himself.’
‘And he had no reason to doubt it.’
Billy shakes his head. ‘Guys like Allen doubt everything. But he had no choice.’
‘What about the picture? Or pictures? His hole card?’
‘I think both Nick and Klerke had people looking for that all the time the extradition fight was going on. That was one reason why the extradition fight was going on. And I think they eventually found it, or them. All I know for sure is that no federal marshals have turned up to arrest Roger Klerke.’
‘Maybe we’ll turn up first,’ Alice says.