Cold Hit Read online

  Zack knelt down across the body from me and we unbuttoned the victim’s damp shirt and pulled it open. Carved on his chest was the same design we’d found on the other three victims. A crude figure eight opened at the top, inside an oval, with two parallel lines running horizontally and one vertically.

  In homicide there is a simple formula. How plus Why equals Who. The modus operandi of an organized kill is part of the how. It tells us how the unsub did the murder. But MOs are dynamic, meaning they can be learned and are subject to change. They are basically methodology and evolve as a killer gets better at his crime and attempts to avoid detection or capture. But this symbol on the chest was not MO, not part of the how. It was what is known as a signature element and was part of the why. Signatures have psychological reasons. In this case, I thought the unsub was labeling his victims and the symbol was part of the ritual and rage of the crime. If we could decode it, we’d gain insight into the why of these murders. So far the cryptologists at Symbols and Hieroglyphics downtown had not been able to identify it. We quickly rebuttoned the shirt, covering the mutilation.

  Zack and I had kept this signature away from the press. On high-profile media crimes, there was never any shortage of mentally deranged people who step up to take credit for murders they didn’t commit, wasting hours of police time. Zack called them “Droolin’ Just Foolin’s.” By holding back this symbol, we were able to easily screen them out.

  Zack informed me that he had to go tap a kidney and went back up to the road in search of a tree to water.

  While we waited for the ME and crime scene techs to arrive, I took a second careful visual inventory of the body. This victim had bad teeth. Dental matching was a good way to identify John Does except when it came to homeless people who obviously didn’t spend much time at the dentist.

  I knew from all the books I’d been reading that the homeless were low-risk targets and high-risk victims. A fancy way of saying they were vulnerable and easy to attack and kill. I shined my light over the body, trying to see past the carnage into the killer’s psyche. John Douglas, one of the fathers of criminal profiling at the FBI Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico, once said that you can’t understand the artist without appreciating his art. So I studied the mutilated corpse trying to step into the killer’s mindset.

  Then I noticed something on the victim’s eyelids. I knelt further down and shined my light onto his face. His eyes were half open so I slowly reached out and closed them. Four strange symbols were tattooed on each lid.

  The coroner’s wagon pulled in just as the sun was beginning to lighten the sky. A slight man made his way down the flagged trail toward me. As he neared, I recognized Ray Tsu, a mild-mannered, extremely quiet, Asian ME known widely in the department as Fey Ray. He was so hollow-chested and skinny, his upper body resembled a sport coat draped on a hanger. Straight black hair was parted in the middle and pushed behind both his ears.

  “Who’s the guest of honor, Shane?” Ray whispered in his distinct, undernourished way as he knelt beside me.

  “No wallet. Unless you can find me something that puts the hat on, he’s John Doe Number Four.” We both looked at the clipped fingers. I pointed out the symbols tattooed on the victim’s eyelids.

  “How the hell do you tattoo an eyelid without puncturing the eye?” I asked, thumbing the lids back to their original position.

  Ray shook his head. “Beats me.” He opened the shirt and studied the chest mutilation. “Sure wish we knew what this was.” His gentle voice was almost lost in the sharp wind.

  “I need this guy to go to the head of the line, Ray.”

  Normally, in L.A., there’s almost a two-week wait on autopsies due to the huge influx of violent murder. But our Fingertip case was drawing so much media attention we had acquired the treasured DO NOT PASS GO autopsy card.

  Tsu looked at his watch. “I’ll squeeze him in first up,” he said. “Doctor Comancho will want to do the Y-cut, but I oughta be able to get everything done here and have him back to the canoe factory by eight.” The ME’s facility was dubbed the canoe factory because during an autopsy, the examiners hollowed out corpses, removing organs and turning their customers into what they darkly referred to as body canoes.

  “Thanks Ray, I owe ya.”

  Just before I stood to go, I shined my light one more time over my new client. I wanted to remember him this way. Shot, mutilated, then dumped in the river like human trash.

  I named him Forrest, for Forest Lawn Drive.

  Homicide cops see way too much death, so lately, to fight a case of overriding cynicism, I’ve been naming my John Does, who are generally referred to as “its” and thought of as “things” with no gender or humanity. By giving them names, it helped me remember that they were once alive, walking around with treasured hopes and dark fears just like all the rest of us. Life is God’s most precious gift, and nobody, no matter where they are on the social spectrum, should end up like this.

  I looked at Forrest, taking on emotional fuel as the beam from my light played across his face. Then something caught my attention. I moved closer and leaned down. The top of his right eyelid refracted light slightly differently than the left.

  “Hey, Ray. Come take a look at this.”

  The ME moved over and while I shined my light, he looked down into Forrest’s eyes, then took forceps out of a leather case and carefully lifted the lid.

  “What’s that look like?” I asked.

  “Contact lens pushed up in the eye socket. Right one only,” he said, leaning closer, studying it.

  “So where’s the other lens, I wonder?”

  “I’ll have CSI look around down here, see if they can find it,” he answered. “Probably washed out when he was underwater.”

  The crime scene van was just pulling in as I got back up to the road and spotted Zack talking to some cops over by our car. As I started toward him he laughed loudly at one of his own jokes. Some of the cops near him shifted awkwardly and frowned. The crime scene is the temple of every investigation. Zack was drunk, defiling our temple.

  I was starting across the street when I felt a hand on my arm. I turned and found Mike Thrasher staring at me.

  “Your partner’s loaded,” he said flatly.

  “He may have had a few,” I defended. “We were off duty when we caught this squeal.”

  “This is your murder. There’s no excuse. You’re senior man and you need to take action, Scully. He’s been stumbling around up here pissing on the bushes in front of the press, breathing whiskey on everybody. If you’re not going to take care of it, I’ll be forced to file a one-eighty-one. With all the bad shit this department has been through since Rodney King, O. J., and Rampart, none of us need this.”

  Of course, he was right. But I felt my heart pounding in anger, my cheeks turning red with frustration.

  “It’s not your problem, Sarge. You don’t know what he’s been going through. He’s in a messy divorce. He just lost his moonlighting job at the Galleria. He’s having big problems. Why don’t you just be a good guy and stay outta his business?” Thrasher glared at me, so I said, “And if you file that one-eighty-one, I’ll have to look you up and do something about it.”

  After a moment, he turned and walked away.

  I’d won. But I’d also lost because I’d been forced to watch all the respect drain out of his cool gray eyes.

  4

  I dropped Zack at the main entrance of Parker Center and watched as my partner trudged up to the large glass double doors, dragging anchor. Zack was in charge of keeping the murder book, so he was heading to Homicide Special to update the case file. While I attended the autopsy, it was his job to start a new file for John Doe Number Four, copy in the names and addresses of our two teenage respondents, Xerox the diagrams I made of the position of the body in the river, then paste them all into the book. Once we got the photographs of the eyelid tattoos, we’d copy them and send the originals to Symbols and Hieroglyphics for analysis. We’d paste in the cri
me scene photos after we got them, and tomorrow the coroner’s report and autopsy photos would be added along with all the other details of the investigation. Little bits and pieces, some of it seemingly worthless, all of it carefully logged, dated, and placed in the murder book along with a detailed time line, until finally we hit some mystical investigatory critical mass and someone yelled, I know who did it! That was the theory, anyway.

  The problem with John Doe murders is until you have the victim’s ID, it’s almost impossible to solve them. Without a name, you can’t even make up a preliminary suspect list or question any witnesses. If we’d known who the first three victims were, maybe we could have begun to define the unsub’s kill zone and set up a patrol dragnet. As it was, the case was going nowhere.

  In an attempt to identify one of my John Does, I had the coroner retouch their faces and had a sketch artist do charcoal portraits. I ran them in the local papers and on TV under a heading DO YOU KNOW THIS MAN? Nada. Of course, most of the people who might have known them lived in doorways or cardboard boxes and didn’t watch much TV or read the newspapers.

  Now, for the first time in seven weeks, I was feeling hopeful. Forrest might deliver some useful clues. He still had the bullet inside him. The tool marks lab in ballistics would magnify it and graph the striations. Since every gun leaves its own specific rifling marks, maybe we could match the bullet to one used in another crime. He also had those unusual tattoos on his eyelids, which might tie him to some club or gang. Then there was the contact lens. If I could work that backwards, find the lab that made it, and use their records to locate the eye doctor who wrote the prescription, I might find out who the victim was.

  These possibilities were spinning my spirits into a more optimistic orbit as I pulled into the stark, ten-story County Medical Examiner’s building on North Mission Road. It was 7:45 A.M. when I got off the elevator on the seventh floor where autopsies were performed and walked past the losers from last night’s gang war. This group of departed karmas was lying on metal gurneys; a collection of shrunken memories.

  I checked the scheduling board and saw that Forrest had already picked up a city homicide number. He was now HM 28-05, which stood for Homicide—Male. The twenty-eighth murder in the city of L.A. for the year 2005. It was only the tenth of January, so not even counting the traffic jam of gang-bangers parked in the hallway, ’05 was getting off to an energetic start.

  As Ray indicated, Dr. Rico Comancho was doing the autopsy. Rico was raised in a blighted neighborhood in Southwest called Pico Rivera. But he’d been blessed with a high IQ and received a full academic scholarship to UCLA. He went on to med school, and a year after graduation, joined the ME’s office, where he made a rapid ascent, eventually reaching the lofty position of Chief Medical Examiner. An exciting success story if your thing is sawing up dead people.

  Dr. Comancho rarely did autopsies anymore, unless a press conference was scheduled to follow.

  The cut was taking place in Room Four, the big operating theater, which had a twenty-seat balcony for those who enjoyed sipping machine coffee while watching corpse carving. L.A.’s Theater of the Absurd.

  I don’t generally get along with city administrators, and Rico from Pico was a well-known municipal assassin, but I couldn’t help myself, I sort of liked him. He was devilishly handsome, with his full share of Latin charm. His teeth were as square and white as a line of bathroom tile and when he wasn’t smocked, he wore expensive suits on a lean, athletic body. An oversized gold watch always rode his slender wrist like a tailor’s pincushion. He also had a sunny disposition, which was an asset not often seen among those who perform the last act of desecration.

  The autopsy was already in progress when I walked through the door. The center of Forrest’s chest was cut from breastbone to crotch and clamped open. Dr. Comancho, in goggles, gloves, and smock, was leaning over the body peering inside like a man inspecting diamonds in a Tiffany jewel case.

  “Pull that light down, Ray. Let’s give Shane a look at the goods.”

  Ray Tsu reached up and lowered a large operating theater lamp over the body. The rib cage was already clipped and lifted. The stomach had been removed. Rico pointed at Forrest’s internal organs.

  “Kidneys are good. Nice and pink. Most of these homeless guys’ kidneys look like old army boots.”

  I grabbed a chair and placed it where I wouldn’t get splattered by the bone saw when Comancho got around to widening the Y-cut.

  “If I find anything edible, how would you like it done? I’m told my liver flambé is exquisite.”

  “That’s good kitch, Rico, very humorous.”

  “Guest of honor ain’t gonna be needing any of this stuff no more. Might as well get your order in, amigo.”

  “You find my bullet yet?”

  “Fished it out with needle forceps about twenty minutes ago. It’s in pretty good shape. Small caliber. I sent it over to ballistics. They’ll weigh it and let us know.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Some deep-tissue trauma to the left side in the lateral pectoral region and a totally ruptured spleen.”

  “That sounds like a left hook to the ribs.”

  “The guest of honor could’ve caught a couple a sledgehammer lefts before he winged on outta here. But for all this bruising to occur, the trauma had to be pre-mortem, or at the very least ante-mortem.”

  “You saying he was beaten to death and then shot?”

  He nodded. “Without the heart pumping blood, you don’t get bruises. Also, in my opinion, this guy would’ve eventually bled to death from internal injuries without the head shot. An alternate theory is he could have been shot and thrown down into the wash with his heart still beating and maybe got the three smashed ribs and the deep-tissue trauma when he hit the concrete levee. Then once he hit, he croaked.”

  “Threw him down? Somebody threw him? How much does he weigh?”

  “In kilograms or pounds?”

  “In candy kisses, asshole.”

  “ ’Bout two-twenty.”

  “So the unsub picks up two-hundred-plus pounds of dead weight and shot-puts this guy thirty or forty feet over the ledge into the river. You kidding me?”

  “Not entirely impossible,” Rico said. “You been down to Gold’s Gym lately?” Then he looked up from the body. “Ray says there’s no trace evidence, so how else would the killer get him down there without leaving drag marks or footprints?”

  I had to admit it was a pretty good question. “Our unsub would have to be Godzilla,” I said softly.

  “Godzilla, Rodan…pick your favorite Japanese lizard. But hey, it’s just a theory. Medical forensics isn’t an exact science, especially when it’s bein’ done by some border-jumping cholo.”

  The mask covered his mouth, but I was getting some crinkling around the eyes, the residue of a grin.

  “Anything else you want me to fish outta this guy, Shane?”

  “I want you to get the contact lens from his right eye traced.”

  “Already sent it out.”

  “And I’d like a standard stomach content analysis.”

  “This guy eats out of trash cans. Don’t put me through that.”

  I started to frown, when he waved a hand at me.

  “Come on, lighten up, Homes. Stomach’s already out.” He pointed to a plastic container with a grayish-brown organ in it. “You think I wouldn’t do a standard content analysis? This is Autopsy Central, dude. We serve the dead here. Speaking of which, sure you don’t want something to go?”

  Some jobs get black as coffin air.

  I moved my metal chair further back as Rico took the Striker electric bone saw off a peg and extended the cut. The blade screamed as he opened Forrest the rest of the way up, widening the Y from sternum to crotch. He scooped out the organs, making one more body canoe, then weighed the heart, liver, and kidneys on a hanging scale, read their weights into a mic hanging over the table, and dumped them all back into the body cavity like scrapings from a Christmas go
ose. Ray closed Forrest up with crude stitches reminiscent of the laces on a football. They ended with a standard toxicology panel and complete blood scan. Rico asked Ray to finish and do the stomach content analysis as the phone rang.

  The ME stripped off his mask, goggles, and surgical gloves, then crossed the room to answer it.

  “Yeah, he’s right here.” Rico turned the phone over to me and worked his eyebrows. “Some chavala named Darlene Hamilton from ballistics, wants your honkey ass. Cha-chacha.”

  “This is Detective Scully,” I said.

  “Are you the primary on HM twenty-eight-oh-five?” She had a high nasally voice.

  “Yeah, only his name is Forrest now.”

  “Did we get an identification already?”

  “No, but I can’t deal with the numbers so he’s Forrest ’til I can ID him. I was going to call him Barney after Barham Boulevard, but Barney’s a comedy name, so it’s Forrest.”

  She was silent for a minute. “Is this Rico? Is this a put-on?”

  “It’s Detective Scully. Tell me what you’ve got.”

  After a pause she said, “We just weighed the bullet Doctor Comancho sent over. It’s a strange, off-sized caliber. Rare, actually.”

  “What is it?”

  “A five point four-five millimeter, which makes it a little smaller than your standard twenty-two.”

  “That’s from some kind of foreign automatic, right?”

  “The most common gun still using that caliber is a PSM automatic. They were originally issued to KGB officers and Russian Secret Police during the Cold War and were very popular for execution-type slayings behind the Iron Curtain in the mid-eighties.”