Stallworth stopped his car eighty yards from the pickup and decided to wait until backup arrived. He was on the radio to the Malibu station, describing the pickup truck and saying that he was not close enough to read its license plate, when suddenly there was a gunshot and the searchlight located above the side-view mirror exploded with the bullet’s impact. Stallworth killed the rest of the car’s lights and bailed out, crawling into the cover of some bushes that lined the clearing. He used his handheld radio to call for additional backup and the special weapons and tactics team.
A three-hour standoff ensued, with the gunman hidden in the wooded terrain near the clearing. He fired his weapon repeatedly but apparently his aim was at the sky. No deputies were struck by bullets. No other vehicles were damaged. Finally, a deputy in black SWAT gear worked his way close enough to the pickup truck to read the license plate by using high-powered binoculars equipped with night-vision lenses. The plate number led to the name Eli Wyms, which in turn led to a cell-phone number. The shooter answered on the first ring and a SWAT team negotiator began a conversation.
The shooter was indeed Eli Wyms, a forty-four-year-old housepainter from Inglewood. He was characterized in the arrest report as drunk, angry and suicidal. Earlier in the day, he had been kicked out of his home by his wife, who informed him that she was in love with another man. Wyms had driven to the ocean and then north to Malibu and then over the mountains to Calabasas. He saw the park and thought it looked like a good place to stop the truck and sleep, but he drove on by and bought a case of beer at a gas station near the 101 Freeway. He then turned around and went back to the park.
Wyms told the negotiator that he started shooting because he heard noises in the dark and was afraid. He believed he was shooting at rabid coyotes that wanted to eat him. He said he could see their red eyes glowing in the dark. He said he shot out the spotlight on the first patrol car that arrived because he was afraid the light would give his position away to the animals. When asked about the shot from eighty yards, he said he had qualified as an expert marksman during the first war in Iraq.
The report estimated that Wyms fired at least twenty-seven times while deputies were on the scene and dozens of times before that. Investigators eventually collected a total of ninety-four spent bullet casings.
Wyms did not surrender that night until he ran out of beer. Shortly after crushing the last empty in his hand, he told the cell-phone negotiator that he would trade one rifle for a six-pack of beer. He was turned down. He then announced that he was sorry and ready for the incident and everything else to be over, that he was going to kill himself and literally go out with a bang. The negotiator tried to talk him out of it and kept the conversation going while a two-man SWAT unit moved through the heavy terrain toward his position in a dense stand of eucalyptus trees. But soon the negotiator heard snoring on the cell line. Wyms had passed out.
The SWAT team moved in and Wyms was captured without a shot being fired by law enforcement. Order was restored. Since Deputy Stallworth had taken the initial call and was the one fired upon, he was given the collar. The gunman was placed in Stallworth’s squad car and transported to the Malibu substation and jailed.
Other documents in the file continued the Eli Wyms saga. At his arraignment the morning after his arrest, Wyms was declared indigent and assigned a public defender. The case moved slowly in the system, with Wyms being held in the Men’s Central Jail. But then Vincent stepped in and offered his services pro bono. His first order of business was to ask for and receive a competency evaluation of his client. This had the effect of slowing the case down even further as Wyms was carted off to the state hospital in Camarillo for a ninety-day psych evaluation.
That evaluation period was over and the reports were now in. All of the doctors who examined, tested and talked to Wyms in Camarillo had agreed that he was competent and ready to stand trial.
In the hearing scheduled before Judge Mark Friedman at two, a trial date would be set and the case clock would begin to tick again. To me it was all a formality. One read of the case documents and I knew there would be no trial. What the day’s hearing would do was set the time period I would have to negotiate a plea agreement for my client.
It was a cut-and-dried case. Wyms would enter a plea and probably face a year or two of incarceration and mental-health counseling. The only question I got from my survey of the file was why Vincent had taken the case in the first place. It didn’t fall into line with the kinds of cases he usually handled, with paying or higher-profile clients. There didn’t seem to be much of a challenge to the case either. It was routine and Wyms’s crime wasn’t even unusual. Was it simply a case Jerry took on to satisfy a need for pro bono work? It seemed to me if that was the case that Vincent could have found something more interesting, which would pay off in other ways, such as publicity. The Wyms case had initially drawn media attention because of the public spectacle in the park. But when it came to trial or disposition of the case, it would likely fly well below the media radar.
My next thought was to suspect that there was a connection to the Elliot case. Vincent had found some sort of link.
But on first read I couldn’t nail it down. There were two general connections in that the Wyms incident had happened less than twelve hours before the beach house murders and both crimes had occurred in the Sheriff’s Department’s Malibu district. But those connections didn’t hold up to further scrutiny. In terms of topography they weren’t remotely connected. The murders were on the beach and the Wyms shooting spree took place far inland, in the county park on the other side of the mountains. As far as I could recall, none of the names in the Wyms file were mentioned in the Elliot materials I had reviewed. The Wyms incident happened on the night shift; the Elliot murders on the day shift.
I couldn’t nail down any specific connection and in great frustration closed the file with the question unanswered. I checked my watch and saw I had to get back to the CCB if I wanted time to meet my client in lockup before the two o’clock hearing.
I called Patrick to come get me, paid for lunch and stepped out to the curb. I was on my cell, talking with Lorna, when the Lincoln pulled up and I jumped into the back.
“Has Cisco met with Carlin yet?” I asked her.
“No, that’s at two.”
“Have Cisco ask him about the Wyms case, too.”
“Okay, what about it?”
“Ask him why Vincent even took it.”
“You think they’re connected? Elliot and Wyms?”
“I think it but I don’t see it.”
“Okay, I’ll tell him.”
“Anything else going on?”
“Not at the moment. You’re getting a lot of calls from the media. Who’s this guy Jack McEvoy?”
The name rang a bell but I couldn’t place it.
“I don’t know. Who is he?”
“He works at the Times. He called up all huffy about not hearing from you, saying you had an exclusive deal with him.”
Now I remembered. The two-way street.
“Don’t worry about him. I haven’t heard from him either. What else?”
“Court TV wants to sit down and talk about Elliot. They’re going to carry live coverage throughout the trial, making it their feature, and so they’re hoping to get daily commentary from you at the end of court each day.”
“What do you think, Lorna?”
“I think it’s like free national advertising. You better do it. They told me they’re giving the trial its own logo wrap at the bottom of the screen. ‘Murder in Malibu,’ they’re calling it.”
“Then, set it up. What else?”