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CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

HUNTINGTON BEACH, CALIFORNIA

TUESDAY, MARCH 28, 2023

11:30 P.M.

Joel Franklin may have been observing all posted speed limits on his way to the 405, but Detective Ortega definitely hadn’t. As a consequence, he and Ray Horn beat both the Camaro and its tailing squad car to the intersection of Beach Boulevard and Warner by three whole minutes. When the Camaro rolled past, Ray pulled in behind it and let the squad car fall back into second place. As Franklin’s car merged into the righthand lane to take the southbound entrance onto I-405, another radio transmission came through, this one from police headquarters.

“On your welfare check request at 3759 Churchill Drive, no one answered the front door and uniforms found it locked. They went around back and made entry through a patio slider. They report having found some signs of a physical confrontation in the kitchen, although it looked as though someone had put a lot of effort into cleaning up. However, when the officers cleared the residence, no one was there.”

Ray turned to Eddie. “If both of them were at the house earlier, and nobody’s there now, what do you want to bet that Adam Brewster is in the back of Joel Franklin’s Camaro?”

“No bet,” Eddie replied, “and with his life possibly at risk, we don’t have to wait around for a warrant.” Then, into his radio he added, “We believe someone is being held captive in the trunk of a fleeing vehicle. Initiating a traffic stop so we can do a search.”

With that, Detective Ortega lit up the lights on his Interceptor. The uniformed officers in the patrol car behind them followed suit.

For a moment, Ray thought Franklin would hit the gas and make a run for it, but it was almost midnight. With freeway traffic at a minimum, Joel must have realized he had no chance of evading a police pursuit. He turned on his directional signal, hit the brakes, and pulled over onto the shoulder. Once Ortega came to a stop behind the Camaro, the officers in the patrol car rolled around to the front of it, close enough to keep it from being able to merge back into traffic.

If Joel Franklin thought this was some kind of ordinary traffic stop, he was in for a surprise. The uniformed officers approached him with weapons drawn. “Turn off the engine and step out of the vehicle!” one of them shouted.

For a long moment, nothing happened. Ray fully expected that Joel would come charging out of the Camaro with a weapon drawn, but that didn’t happen, either. He simply opened the door and exited. “What’s this about?” he wanted to know.

“Get on the ground!”

This wasn’t Ray Horn’s rodeo, and he wasn’t wearing a vest, so he stayed where he was in the Interceptor until Joel Franklin was on the ground with his hands cuffed behind his back. That’s when Ray leaped out of the car and sprinted for the Camaro’s back bumper. It took a moment for him to locate the button that unlatched the trunk. When the lid rose, he saw a bound and gagged Adam Brewster lying there, staring up at him with a look of absolute terror on his face. As Ray removed the gag, Adam’s terror morphed into relief.

“Detective Horn?” he asked. “What are you doing here?”

“Looking for you, as it turns out,” Ray replied.

By then, Eddie Ortega appeared at Ray’s side. “That’s a lot of blood,” he observed. “What happened?”

Up until then, Ray hadn’t noticed that the lower part of Adam’s shirt and his pants were strained bright red.

“Joel came after me with a knife,” Adam answered. “He tried to stab me in the gut. I almost managed to get out of reach, but I must’ve tripped over something. I fell backward and hit my head. The next thing I knew, I woke up in the trunk of the car. I knew I was bleeding, so I used my hands to apply pressure. Eventually the bleeding stopped.”

“It looks like you’re hurt pretty bad,” Ortega observed. “You’ll need an ambulance. I’ll make the call.”

While he did that, Ray turned back to Adam and began using his Leatherman to snip through the layers of duct tape binding his hands and feet.

“Why did he attack you?” Ray asked.

“Because I’d just found out he’s been robbing me blind. Our banker called this afternoon to let me know that the household checking account was overdrawn. It turns out that, instead of paying bills, over the last several days he’s been writing checks out of the household account and cashing them. I came home to have it out with him. Unfortunately, he was making dinner at the time. One moment he was chopping vegetables at the counter. The next, he came after me with the knife.”

Ortega returned. “EMS will be here in about ten,” he said.

Ray stood there for a moment with the phone at his ear, looking down at Adam Brewster. Since the bleeding had stopped, Ray suspected that the stab wound itself probably wasn’t all that serious. The trouble was, years earlier while he’d still been working patrol, he’d encountered a sixteen-year-old named Jeremy Foresman who’d been stabbed in the gut during the course of a gang-related street fight. In that case, too, the wound hadn’t seemed all that bad. Unfortunately, the tip of the knife had punctured Jeremy’s large intestine. By the time he was diagnosed with peritonitis, it was too late, and he had died of sepsis days later. Ray Horn worried the same thing might happen to Adam Brewster.

Just then a call from Monica came in from Ray’s phone. He started not to answer it, but then thought better of it.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“I’ve got a signed confession from Marc Atherton,” she announced triumphantly. “He claims Adam Brewster offered to pay Joel Franklin and him fifty thousand dollars each to murder Chuck Brewster and frame Clarice. And that’s not all. Marc and Joel have been romantically involved since well before Adam met Joel.”

All the pieces of the puzzle were finally falling into place. Not only had Joel Franklin been stealing from Adam, he’d been cheating on him as well. He’d also just physically assaulted him with a deadly weapon before kidnapping him. Based on all of that, the idea that Joel could be the mastermind behind Chuck Brewster’s homicide didn’t seem to be that far out of line.

“Ray,” Monica was saying in his ear. “Are you there? Did you even hear me?”

“Great news,” Ray replied. “I’ve got some, too. Huntington Beach PD just took Joel into custody. We found Adam Brewster bound and gagged in the trunk of Joel’s car, with a stab wound to his gut. I’ll get back to you with details, but right now I’ve gotta go.”

He hung up. Then, switching his phone to video record, he held the device up to Adam’s face. “Once they get you in the ER, it’s going to be a while before I’ll be able to talk to you again. Do you mind if I ask you a couple of questions and record your answers?”

“Go ahead,” Adam said with a half wave.

“We have physical evidence linking Marc Atherton to your father’s murder.”

Adam seemed astonished. “Are you kidding, Marc Atherton? He’s Joel’s writing partner. I barely know the man. How would he even know my father?”

“Good question,” Ray remarked. “But tonight my partner obtained a signed confession from Marc Atherton saying that he and Joel committed the crime at your request—that you offered to pay them a total of one hundred thousand dollars to murder your father and frame your stepmother.”

“That can’t be!” Adam declared in total disbelief. “I never did any such thing. I wanted my father back in my life. I wanted to start fresh and remember the good things. Why would I want him dead?”

“How much do you know about Marc Atherton?”

“Not much, really, other than he and Joel write together.”

“I suspect they do a lot more than write,” Ray suggested. With that he pulled out Atherton’s phone, logged in on it, and played back those most recent voice messages so Adam could hear them.

“That’s Joel’s voice, but who’s he talking to?”

“These are voice messages he left on Marc Atherton’s phone just tonight, starting a little past ten. The thing is, we’d already taken Marc into custody by then and had possession of the phone. We heard the messages. Marc didn’t. The last one came in about the time Joel’s Camaro was leaving your garage with you in the trunk.”

Adam seemed stunned. “Wait, are you saying they were going to run off somewhere together?”

Detective Ortega returned in time to hear the tail end of that conversation. “I don’t think so,” he said. “We just found a short-handled shovel in the front passenger-seat footwell of Joel’s Camaro. If he’d been able to connect with Marc tonight, I suspect he would have ended up in the trunk right along with you, and neither of you would have come out of it alive.”

“Oh, my God!” a clearly stricken Adam murmured. “How could he do that, and how could I have been so stupid? I thought he loved me. I really believed I’d found the one.”

“That’s why they say love is blind,” Ray observed. “People can’t see what they don’t want to see.”

An ambulance rolled up just then, and Ray ended the recording. By this time Detective Ortega had obtained a warrant on the Camaro, but before searching it further, he ordered it towed back to police headquarters to be properly processed. Once the ambulance headed for the hospital with Adam inside, Ray and Eddie Ortega returned to the Interceptor.

“Poor guy,” Ortega said quietly as they fastened their seat belts. “I think he was completely blindsided.”

Ray nodded. “So do I,” he responded. “And by the time we sit down and comb through all those electronic devices, we’ll have the evidence to prove it.”

There was a momentary lull in the conversation before Ray asked, “Did Joel say anything as you guys were cuffing him and putting him in the car?”

“Yes, he did,” Eddie answered. “Four words only, and you can guess what they were.”

“?‘I want a lawyer,’ maybe?”

“You got it,” Eddie replied.

“What a surprise,” Ray responded. “And if I have anything to say about it, he’s sure as hell going to need one.”