Cold Case. Faye Kellerman

       CHAPTER 3

      THE DRY FACTS of the homicide played out like this. After a full day of work, Little left his office and headed to the school parking lot. Before he reached his three-year-old silver 350SL Mercedes-Benz, he was cornered by a group of six students. The pupils described the interchange as jocular. They chatted with Dr. Ben until Little checked his watch and excused himself, saying he was late for a meeting. According to the kids, Little left the parking lot around four-thirty.

      The meeting consisted of a local group of residents and Connie Kritz, a member of the L.A. Board of Supervisors. They were talking about community shelters for the homeless—a hot-button issue in the nineties.

      Not that the homeless weren't just as needy today. But having gone through years of dealing with civic issues, Decker knew that there was only so much room for star status. The unwashed schizophrenics seemed to have been supplanted by global warming.

      According to records, Dr. Ben had called his home number from his car phone at 4:52 P.M. Melinda Little, Ben's wife of fifteen years, said that the conversation was brief because the car phone's reception was full of static. Ben stated that he expected to be home around seven.

      When the clock struck eight, Melinda started to grow concerned. She called his car phone but no one answered. She paged him on his beeper but he didn't call back. Still, she wasn't really worried, figuring that Little had turned off his beeper and was deep in debate. Passions ran high when dealing with the homeless. When her cuckoo clock struck nine and there was still no word from Ben, Melinda told her sons that she was going out for a few minutes.

      Melinda drove to Civic Auditorium only to find it empty. With shaking hands, she drove back home, locked herself in the bedroom, and started going through a roster of community numbers until she managed to secure the home phone listing for Connie Kritz. The supervisor was surprised that Melinda hadn't heard from Ben. Connie told her that the homeless meeting had finished up around seven-thirty. She thought that Ben had left with the rest of the group.

      It was now close to ten.

      Melinda called the police, only to be told that an adult isn't considered officially missing until he or she has been gone for at least forty-eight hours. She told them how unusual it was for Ben to be late, but the sergeant wasn't interested. He suggested some other possibilities.

      Maybe he was with a friend.

      Maybe he was with a girlfriend.

      Maybe he stopped off to get some dinner.

      Maybe he stopped off at a bar.

      Maybe he took a drive.

      Maybe he was having a midlife crisis and needed some time to think.

      What ever the situation was, the sergeant suggested that she go to bed and the situation would probably resolve itself by morning.

      Melinda would have none of that. She knew that if Ben had gotten waylaid, he would have called on the car phone. That's what the damn thing was for. Emergencies.

      At eleven-thirty that evening, the boys knocked on the bedroom door and asked why their mother had been locked in her bedroom for the past hour and a half. Not wanting to alarm them, Melinda said she was helping a friend in crisis.

      “Where's Dad?” asked the youngest.

      “Out helping someone else.”

      The sons had no problem believing the story. Ben was always helping someone.

      Melinda told her sons to go to bed and began making more phone calls. An hour later, when Melinda still hadn't heard from Ben, her closest friends came over to stay with her until this ordeal resolved. Their corresponding husbands had been sent out to look for Ben and/or his car.

      The dreaded call came in at three-thirty in the morning. Ben Little's Mercedes had been spotted—the sole vehicle in a paved lot at Clearwater Park. The police had been called. Two squad cars eventually arrived at the location.

      The interior of the Mercedes was empty and there was no sign of Ben anywhere. As the group decided on their next move, a particularly alert officer noticed that the back of the Benz was sagging, and something was dripping from the rear of the car. Gloving up, one of the uniforms fiddled with the lock until the trunk popped open.

      Bennett Alston Little was fully clothed. His hands and feet had been tightly bound by generic shoelaces, and a blindfold had been placed over his eyes. He had been shot three times in the back of the head.

      Again Melinda found herself talking to the police.

      This time they had taken her very seriously.

      THE FIRST THING Decker did was sort through photographs. In cases where he wasn't the original primary detective, he liked to have clear mental images. The premortem snapshots showed that Ben Little had been a very handsome man: sharp light eyes, a wide, bright smile, a strong chin, and an athletic build. The file contained two head shots and one with Ben and his family.

      In contrast, the postmortem shots showed the hapless teacher in the fetal position with his knees bent and touching his forehead—an odd position to take after death. Ben's head was resting in a big pool of blood. Decker continued to read the crime scene report until he found what he was looking for. Several bullet shells had been found inside the trunk, which probably meant that the trunk was the original crime scene. Ben had been living when he had been placed inside and had instinctively curled up in a defensive position. Then he had been executed.

      There was something otherworldly about reading original case notes. It transformed a corpse into a living, breathing human being. The two original homicide investigators—Arnold Lamar and Calvin Vitton—seemed to have worked hard, and the file was complete. The resurrection of Ben Little would demand that Decker have a long chat with Lamar and Vitton, but he wanted to form his own opinions first.

      Slowly, Little emerged as a complete and complex person. He had his idiosyncrasies—knuckle cracking, a braying laugh, and compulsive list making—but he didn't seem to have any overt or dangerous vices. According to Melinda Little, her husband was a man of boundless energy, involved with the school, with the faculty, with the troubled students, with the honor students, with community clubs and civic duties, and—not to be neglected—with his family. Once in a blue moon, he'd wear out and come down with a cold or flu, and when this happened, Ben reverted, “as most men do, to a complete