Open Season on Lawyers

By Taffy Cannon

Somebody is killing the sleazy attorneys of Los Angeles. LAPD Robbery-Homicide Detective Joanna Davis matches wits with a serial killer who tailors each murder to a specific abuse of legal practice. They call him the Atterminator... and he likes it. Political and press pandemonium ensues, and tensions in the Southland rise even higher when the murders escalate. Then the killer begins to take a personal interest in stopping Joanna’s investigation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Taffy Cannon
• Release date: Mar 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781958749029

Taffy Cannon

Taffy Cannon is the author of fourteen books, including SibCare: The Trip You Never Planned to Take, which details all aspects of caring for a sibling. She lives in California. 

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

Somebody was killing the sleazy lawyers of Los Angeles.

In the beginning, hardly anybody even noticed.

Roger Coskins, who advertised his Bikes & Boats Legal Services heavily on local Los Angeles television stations, rode his Harley off a cliff along the Coast Highway north of San Luis Obispo sometime on the night of Thursday, August 29th. He had been returning to L.A. after presenting a continuing legal education seminar at the Rocky Ridge Inn just south of San Simeon.

There were no witnesses to the accident. His body and bike were noticed early the next morning in the pounding surf below the rocky cliff by a retired couple from South Dakota. Police found skid marks from Coskins's Harley-Davidson approaching the two-lane curve the attorney had failed to make. It was a treacherous curve cut into the side of a particularly steep mountain, sheer upright rock on the east, precipitous drop on the west. There was no evidence of impact with any other vehicle.

Obituaries for Coskins all noted the ironic manner of his demise. A few irreverent commentators wondered if anyone would file a lawsuit over the accident, and if so, against whom.

Warren Richardson was found dead in his garage, cherry red, on Wednesday, September 10th. His foot was jammed onto the accelerator of his late-model Lincoln Continental; the ignition was turned on, and the gas tank was empty.

Richardson was a Valencia ambulance chaser who had missed several key filing deadlines in plaintiff’s personal injury cases, causing his clients to lose their opportunity for legal redress. He had allowed his legal malpractice insurance to lapse. So when the aggrieved plaintiffs filed personally against Richardson, the best they could get was liens on the paltry equity in his practice. He owed more on his house than it was worth.

He left no note, but his death was officially adjudged a suicide after a hasty autopsy that failed to noticed a bump behind the decedent’s right ear.

Bill Burke’s barely conscious body was found outside his cabin in the foothills of the Sierra mid-morning on Sunday, September 21th. Burke was slumped sideways beside a tree, wearing jeans, an unbuttoned L.L. Bean chamois shirt, and Ugg boots.

His eyes were open. He could move his head and extremities only slightly and with great difficulty. He was unable to speak. He was taken by ambulance into Fresno and placed on a respirator while doctors tried to figure out what in the hell had happened.

The medical personnel had no idea that four days earlier, Burke had won a stunning defense verdict for a San Bernardino restaurateur being sued for an outbreak of food poisoning at a wedding reception. There were two related fatalities.

The jury had come in on Wednesday morning, 10-2 for the defense. On Thursday, two op-ed pieces in the Los Angeles Times used the verdict as a jumping-off point for left-versus right-wing diatribes on the concept of responsibility in the personal injury legal arena. Bill Burke was quoted in both pieces.

By the time doctors at the hospital in Fresno figured out that Bill Burke was suffering from botulism poisoning, it was too late.

Forty-three minutes after the first administration of antitoxin for Clostridium botulinum, Bill Burke was dead.

Three weeks later, on October 12th, civil trial attorney Lawrence Benton was found, parboiled, in the hot tub of his hillside home in Sherman Oaks.

Benton’s most notorious recent trial had resulted in a multimillion-dollar award against a fast-food chain that served its coffee hot enough to cause third-degree burns when spilled by a gentleman in the later stages of Parkinson’s Disease. The jury had not considered the plaintiff’s medical condition contributory negligence.

Benton’s trophy wife was out of town when he died, so the personal injury specialist’s body was discovered by his live-in housekeeper. Margarita Flores returned from a weekend with relatives in Santa Ana to discover her employer sprawled nude in the spa.

The hot tub had been bubbling so furiously for so long that it was half-empty due to evaporation.

CHAPTER TWO

Detective Joanna Davis was reading the Los Angeles Times and nursing a cup of exceptionally bad coffee in the cafeteria of the Santa Monica Courthouse while she waited to testify in one of her last West L.A. cases, a drive-by shooting.

Tiny, but toned and trim, Joanna was accustomed to asserting authority by sheer force of will. In another month she would turn fifty-two. She had been a detective for ten years, a cop for twenty-one, and a mother for twenty-nine. She instinctively kept her back to the wall and her radar was always on.

So she knew Detective George Watson, a former West L.A. co-worker, was in the room long before he noticed her and strode across to her table.

Hey, Watson, Joanna said, not looking up from the newspaper’s listing of recent restaurant closures by the Department of Health Services. Says here, they closed your favorite dive last month, Pedro’s on Wilshire. Vermin infestation and poor sanitation.

Watson shrugged. Nothing a little extra hot sauce won’t cure. You hear about Benton? Joanna looked up now, puzzled. Running the name through her personal data bank and coming up blank.

Who?

Watson turned a chair and straddled it to sit with his arms resting on the back. Lawrence Benton. Big-wind lawyer. Bought it out in the Valley.

Lawrence Benton? It was Joanna’s impression that the Lawrence Bentons of the world died in their sleep as octogenarians, leaving behind vast estates and anxious heirs. His most recent overreaching lawsuit sprang immediately to mind. What happened? Corporate counsel for Jiffy Burger shoot him at the drive-through window?

Watson shook his head and grinned. Better than that. Boiled in his hot tub.

No!

Yes.

Joanna smiled demurely, set the newspaper aside, and folded her hands neatly on the table. Do tell, Detective Watson.

Watson widened his grin, showing nicotine-yellowed teeth. Don’t know all that much, he admitted. Just heard about it. Maid found him this morning. Hot tub was boiled almost empty, and old Benton was cooked like a Maine lobster.

Joanna laughed. Fitting. I think he was from New England. Had one of those irritating accents. ‘Ah hahf to pahk the cah.’

But Watson wasn’t listening. Can somebody actually boil to death in a hot tub?

Joanna considered. Probably not. But people pass out and drown pretty regularly. Remember that couple in the motel in Palms?

As if I could forget. Watson had worked the case. A motel seeking to upgrade its image had installed hot tubs in all the rooms. Then, shortly after the grand opening, a couple grew woozy from the heat and the wine and died mid-tryst. The bodies were identified by the dead woman’s husband, who had not been invited to the party.

And we know Benton was a boozer, Watson went on. Beat a couple deuces back when you still could.

Joanna chortled. I knew the guy who wrote one of those. It seemed a million years ago. The cop who busted Larry Benton blowing a point two-three on the Santa Monica Freeway had been a friend of her first ex-husband. The tall, dour motorcycle cop was probably long retired by now, living in some heavily armed cop enclave in the remote Pacific Northwest.

Small world, Watson told her, checking his watch. Gotta go find my D.A. See you, Davis. He rose and swaggered away, while Joanna automatically considered scenarios in which a successful attorney might die in his hot tub.

By late afternoon, when Joanna got back to her office at Robbery-Homicide on the third floor of Parker Center in downtown Los Angeles, word had rippled through the various homicide arms of LAPD that the death of Lawrence Benton was neither natural nor accidental. The Santa Monica Courthouse, where Benton had tried and won the boiling coffee case, had swirled with rumors all day long.

At Robbery-Homicide, Joanna’s partner, Al Jacobs, was discussing Benton’s death with three other detectives. Joanna had known Jacobs since her second year in uniform, when she was first on the scene of a homicide that Jacobs worked as a detective in North Hollywood. The years had not been entirely kind to him. Much of his hair was gone and he was thirty pounds heavier. It had probably been a decade since he’d last shot a hole in the side of a recalcitrant beer keg to get the brew flowing again. And he seemed perennially weary. But he was still a good heart, with the demeanor of an unmade bed.

Oh, I don’t know, Jacobs was saying when Joanna walked through the door, I’ve seen lots of suicides tidy up with one last, incredible burst of energy. No reason Benton couldn’t have just fished out that boom box and put it on the counter. Hey, Davis.

She nodded and went to her desk.

And then he wrapped the cord around the boom box real neat, Mickey Conner added. Guy was probably a major neatnik. Conner was an old-style copper with a full head of thick white hair, a well-developed gut, and a telltale red road map on his face. His retirement was scheduled for next May, when he had his twenty-five in.

Helluva suicide statement, Dave Austin added. In this crowd Austin was a mere pup, one of the youngest Robbery-Homicide Division detectives. Austin was a poster boy for the post-Nam era detectives with bachelors’ degrees and great computer skills and a penchant for self-improvement. He was almost young enough to be Joanna’s son, a circumstance neither of them ever alluded to. He was also a snappy dresser, not in the usual flashy cop fashion, but with a certain muted style. Detective Eddie Bauer.

What suicide statement? Joanna asked, sitting down. And what’s all this about a boom box and a cord?

Somebody threw a plugged-in boom box into the hot tub and zapped Benton, Austin explained, turning to face her. Electrocution in the first degree. Actually the hundred and seventeenth degree, according to how hot the hot tub was. But that’s not the good part, Davis. The good part is what Counselor Benton was listening to when he began his final plea bargain, trying to talk his sorry ass into heaven.

"Good-bye, Cruel World? Stairway to Heaven?" Joanna suggested, riffling through her messages.

No on both counts, Austin shot back. Nope, this was a Warren Zevon tune. You know Zevon, Davis? His tone suggested doubt.

Of course. Joanna was a Valley Girl, born and bred. Rock and roll had been the soundtrack for her life. "Let me guess. Werewolves of London? She knew immediately that was the wrong song. As Austin shook his head she held up a hand and offered a beatific smile. No, of course that isn’t it. It’s gotta be Lawyers, Guns and Money."

Austin nodded slowly. The shit has hit the fan.

The last russet streaks of daylight were fading straight ahead of her when Joanna merged onto the Ventura Freeway heading home just after six. She felt the uneasiness that always overtook her when summer faded into fall and the light faded with it. Next week would end Daylight Savings Time, plunging the world into earlier and deeper darkness.

The romantic in Joanna loved fall, an ephemeral time when smog season segued into Santa-Ana-and-fire season and then into the brief, beautiful days of December and January. But she also knew that autumn delivered days with more darkness than light, brought nights that slithered firmly into position in late afternoon and lingered deep into each following morning. Days when it might rain and rain and rain, cloaking southern California in a wet gray shroud.

But this was supposed to be a dry winter, and so far autumn had been mild and wonderful, with an abundance of mellow, warm winds that swept the smog serenely out to sea. Quietly, too, without the atavistic howling of their more malevolent cousins, those legendary Santa Anas that bred arson and wildfires and psychosis.

Twice in uniform on night watch, Joanna had worked full moons during major Santa Anas. Both nights were wildly unforgettable. On a hot November night when flakes of ash drifted slowly out of a sky glowing crimson above Malibu, she had stood in the doorway of a Studio City bungalow where four people lay butchered, and listened to the inhuman wails of the man who killed them all.

It was fully dark when she finally arrived home, at her isolated rental house in the far western reaches of the San Fernando Valley. As always, she felt revitalized by the simple virtue of arrival at this, her nest. Single for the third time, her children grown and moved on to productive faraway lives, Joanna had created this environment to suit only herself, and she luxuriated in its idiosyncrasy.

She unlocked the cyclone fence gate, then followed the gravel drive around the two enormous California peppertrees that hid the house from the road. Programmed timers kept lights moving on and off around the small stone house while she was gone, and the place stood warmly inviting now, light seeping around the edges of the miniblinds.

She parked under the carport and went in the back door, tossed her bag on the kitchen counter, washed a handful of plump black grapes, and put them in a small glass bowl. Then she kicked off her shoes and sank into the depths of The Chair, a plush royal blue velvet marshmallow she had bought new on an uncharacteristic retail impulse. It was the only place to sit in the room. Privacy at this stage of her life ranked far above sociability. Only a handful of relatives and friends had even seen this place. Her sanctuary. Her modest monument to self-determination and a happily-emptied nest and doing whatever she damn well pleased.

She lingered over the grapes, then crossed to the jukebox that stood beside the pinball machine. Her daughter Kirsten—whose own furniture was purchased in groupings featured on the HomeLife show floor—had scornfully described this room as an adult playpen.

Joanna switched on the jukebox and lifted its glass top as the fluorescent light blossomed. The Princess Rockola's visible carousel held fifty 45-rpm records, a woefully inadequate number for Joanna's eclectic music tastes. A small chest of drawers beside the jukebox was filled with six or seven hundred additional 45s, all neatly catalogued.

From the bottom drawer, she now took Lawyers, Guns and Money, a double-sided Asylum Spun Gold disc backed with Werewolves of London. She switched the Warren Zevon record with the Janis Joplin currently occupying A-1, one of eight readily accessible slots that she used to rotate temporary songs. She closed the machine, pressed A-1 and listened, then listened again. And a third time.

It didn't really fit, the song. Its lyrics told of jaded youth in heaps of tropical trouble, requested that lawyers, guns, and money be sent. The singer proclaimed himself to be an innocent bystander. Could that be the message?

She listened to the song a fourth time, certain now that Dave Austin had instinctively picked up the key element here.

The shit had hit the fan.

Tuesday morning, the L.A. Times, short on hard facts about Lawrence Benton’s death, ran a piece expanding on the disturbing ironies attendant not only to Benton’s demise, but to the recent deaths of two other Southland attorneys, Bill Burke and Roger Coskins.

Later on Tuesday, the actual cause of Benton’s death leaked, and the media gleefully reported the name of the song apparently playing at the moment when the boom box and Larry Benton’s heart stopped functioning. Warren Zevon’s classic Excitable Boy album. From which the tune came, sold out all over southern California by nightfall.

Following Wednesday’s SRO Beverly Hills memorial service for Lawrence Benton, the attorney’s trophy widow held an impromptu press conference that landed her on all the networks. Swathed in black, the stunning young Vicki Benton wiped away a tear and wondered aloud at her husband’s death. There must be some kind of madman out there, she declared breathily. A terminator. Or maybe, since he’s killing attorneys, you’d have to call him an attorminator.

Which moved the story onto another plane altogether. By Thursday morning, TV newscasters and headlines alike had amended the spelling to a slightly more user-friendly Atterminator.

Who is the Atterminator? wondered the headline in the Los Angeles Daily News. And Who’s Next?

CHAPTER THREE

Ace followed the media coverage of Lawrence Benton’s murder with great interest and considerable satisfaction.

Atterminator! It was more than he had ever dared hope for. And there was a certain irony that the name had come from Vicki Benton, who was obviously a total bimbo.

Atterminator. It would look mighty cool on a T-shirt, though he had no intention of making one up. Better certainly than Legal Resolution Program, his own name for the project.

Of course, it was going to be much more difficult now to get close enough to his quarry to continue operations. The L.A. shysters would be so busy looking over their slimy shoulders that local chiropractors would need extended hours to service the cricks in their greasy necks. Ace was glad that he’d been smart enough to conduct most of his research and preliminary surveillance before the situation became publicly known. Now it would simply be a matter of confirming that established habits were being maintained. And if an intended subject proved to be absolutely unreachable, well, there were plenty of other candidates waiting in the wings. Understudies, so to speak.

As yet, he noted, nobody had connected the death of Warren Richardson to the pattern, and that was all right, too. Somewhere down the road, it might be necessary to establish his credibility. Knowing unreported details about another dead lawyer would be a compelling way to do so.

When he finished reading the newspaper coverage, he flipped through the TV channels, stopping finally on a local station rerunning Vicki Benton’s press conference. It was an camera angle on the widow that he hadn’t seen before, from her right. She looked exceptionally young and pretty, and when she pulled down her veil after making her little speech, he almost felt sorry for her.

But almost, as his father had always noted, didn’t count.

He switched off the TV and went to change his clothes. Time to go to work.

The Atterminator, they were calling him.

My, my, my.

CHAPTER FOUR

On Friday morning, Robbery-Homicide took over the Benton case and it was assigned to Joanna Davis and Al Jacobs, on call for the week.

Calling this a serial killing, the captain told them, straight-faced, is probably just wishful thinking. But it’s too much of a media event for North Hollywood to hang onto. And hey, who knows? Maybe somebody is taking out sleazy lawyers. Benton’s the only one in our jurisdiction, but once you get a handle on that, check on those other two that the media keep harping about. Burke and Coskins.

Could just be a coincidence, Jacobs said. Which was certainly true. But coincidences mattered. Any experienced detective could cite half a dozen coincidences that had tipped the scales, stilled the waters, cleared the case. Jacobs cocked his head, offered a wry smile. Still. Three separate killers independently pick three different ways to off three high-profile lawyers? Three different ways that each just happens to send a little message? In less than two months? He shook his head. That ain’t the kind of coincidence I like.

As they headed for the car, Joanna asked, Just what kind of coincidence do you like?

Jacobs laughed. The kind where the guy’s still standing there holding the smoking gun—the empty smoking gun—when I walk through the door.

They met in a conference room with the North Hollywood homicide detectives who'd caught the Benton case Monday morning. Quentin Reeves, known universally as Q, was a big man in his mid-thirties, with ebony skin, a smooth-shaven head, and a bodybuilder's strut. He wasn't going to come right out and say Robbery-Homicide was taking his case away because he was black, but he was damn sure going to think it. And though he was far too smooth to admit it, losing the case to a white woman really shoveled salt into his wounds.

No need for you to be stealing this away, Reeves announced almost immediately. Very politely. Directing his remarks to Jacobs. We can handle it.

Not our call, Jacobs told him easily. He'd worked with Reeves before. In your shoes I'd want to hang onto it, too. But face it, Q, once that Atterminator handle stuck, us coming in was a done deal. Nice catchy nickname like that's bound to be bringing out every weirdo west of the Rockies.

Howling at the moon, Q Reeves admitted grudgingly. Which isn't even full.

Jay Nestor, his partner, wasn't saying much. He was young, well-groomed, cautious, white, and junior to Reeves. Content to let somebody else do the bitching.

Q Reeves had the murder book ready. The blue loose-leaf binder was plenty full, showing that even though nothing had broken loose yet, they'd been giving it their all.

Last time anybody saw Benton alive, Reeves began, was last Sunday morning. There's three other lawyers he played golf with, eight A.M. every Sunday at the Riviera Country Club. Been doing it for years, same foursome. One of them was in Hawaii, but the other two both say Benton seemed just fine. Didn't say anything or do anything out of the ordinary. They played their regular eighteen holes and then drank brunch. Screwdrivers by the pitcher.

Q Reeves's tone carried a faint whiff of disapproval. Jacobs had mentioned that he was a church deacon. It was a safe bet he didn't spend his Sunday mornings drinking vodka and chasing a little white ball around a big green lawn.

Benton had a rep as a drinker, Jacobs noted.

Jay Nestor spoke up. He could hold a lot of liquor, they tell us. Nobody thought he was drunk when he left for home around one, not even the waitress who served him five drinks in an hour and a half. Just his usual self, they all say.

Q Reeves picked up now, shooting a look of minor irritation at Nestor. "When Benton left, he told the others he'd be working at home for the rest of the day. He had a big trial set to start in three weeks, first one since the coffee verdict. And that was the last anybody admits seeing him alive.

Seems he went straight home and started working, just like he said he would, Q Reeves went on. A young lawyer in his office gave him a bunch of papers Saturday morning and he took them home. He picked his sons up from his ex-wife's house on Saturday afternoon, took them to a Lakers game and out to dinner. Dropped them off at home in Beverly Hills around ten-thirty, saying he was tired. He probably didn't do any work that night, which means whatever work he did do was on Sunday after he got home from golf.

Q Reeves shifted his weight, leaned back slightly. We had the woman who gave him the papers Saturday morning take a look at his office at home. She says he'd gotten a lot done. She also said he'd stopped in the middle of something, and that he didn't like to work that way. Big on closure, she put it. So if he left it, he was probably interrupted.

Jacobs smiled. By a form of closure with precedence. As a lawyer might put it.

A-yup, Reeves agreed.

What about the neighbors? Jacobs asked. Anybody see anything, hear anything?

Reeves and Nestor shook their heads in unison.

Once you see the place, you'll understand, Q Reeves told them. It's the last house on one of those twisty roads that goes snaking up the hill. Houses are all set up for privacy, fences, alarmed, security gates, the whole nine yards. You could march the Bulgarian army through there and nobody'd notice. Couple of neighbors knew Benton was a lawyer, had seen him in his Jaguar. Nobody'd talked to him. One guy called him Mr. Coffee.

I like that, Joanna put in. Mr. Coffee. It has a ring to it.

Mr. Coffee boiled by Atterminator, Jacobs said. Film at eleven.

Whatever, Reeves said evenly. This was serious business to him. Most things would be. The long and the short is, nobody saw anything, nobody heard anything. Salvadoran maid lived in but she had the weekend off. Benton's wife was away getting starved and buffed at a health spa down by the border. She went down there Friday and wasn't due back for a week. Staff at the spa said she never left the premises.

What's the story on the wife? Joanna asked, ignored long enough. She cuts quite a figure.

Reeves offered her a wide and pearly grin. Ah yes. She does indeed. Vicki Benton, the former Vicki Vale. Thirty-three claiming to be twenty-six. A real looker. You obviously caught her on the news, dressed all in black. Goes good with the blond hair and the silicone, black does. Wore a veil like Coretta King's. High drama. Benton was sixty-two, had almost thirty years on her. He met her when he was golfing in Palm Springs. She was singing in the piano bar at his hotel. Nestor's the one mostly talked to her. Nestor?

Dumb as dirt, Jay Nestor announced. And if she thought of that Atterminator name herself, I'll eat Q's gym bag. Somebody fed that to her, maybe another nervous lawyer. The lady herself doesn't have a clue what her husband was working on, wasn't familiar with his colleagues, doesn't know of any enemies. Major talent seems to be spending money.

Jacobs perked up immediately. Money problems?

Nestor shook his head. Don't seem to be. Benton's made a lot of money and he owned a lot of property. First wife died in a plane crash when he was in his early thirties. No kids from that marriage. The second wife got a big settlement and the house in Beverly Hills when they divorced. Shared custody, but only on paper. The kids live with her and didn't spend much time with him.

He leave her for Miss Vicki? Joanna asked. Miss Vicki and Mr. Coffee, this week's hot media couple. Cooling rapidly, in his case.

Nope. The second wife left him. Miss Vicki came later. Nestor was grinning himself now. Go figure.

What's the story on the second wife? Bad blood there?

Not that you can see right off, Nestor answered carefully. She's got her own career, some kind of interior design stuff. Married another rich man, so money doesn't appear to be a major issue. The two boys at home are eleven and fifteen, and there's a daughter, twenty, with her own apartment in West Hollywood.

Daddy supporting her? Jacobs wanted to know.

Nestor nodded. She's a wannabe actress. Says she hadn't seen her father in months. Suggested we ask the child bride if we want to know what he'd been doing.

She called her `the child bride'? Joanna asked with interest. How long ago did her parents get divorced?

Four, five years.

Interesting, she noted. Not that it means anything when a teenage girl gets pissed off at a parent. Or a stepparent. The voice of experience.

You get anything on professional grudges, unhappy clients, that sort of shit? Jacobs asked. Personal motives?

Nothing obvious, Q Reeves answered, with clear disappointment. The coffee case seemed like the obvious place to start, but that looks to be pretty much a dead end. The guy who got burned is happy as a clam, or at least as happy as a clam can be with advanced Parkinson's. Jiffy Burger served the coffee, and the kid who served it lost his job, but he's with the Marines in Okinawa right now. Nobody else got canned.

Who owns Jiffy Burger? Jacobs asked.

TLK Enterprises, Nestor answered. "With corporate headquarters in Delaware. They own all kinds of shit: seven hundred Jiffy Burgers in forty-three states, some minor league base-ball teams, a chain of putt-putt golf places, lots of office buildings and apartment complexes, probably