Cold Hit Page 6

  “I’ve got a shitload of correspondence here. Hang on a second. Let me shoot through them.” As he started scrolling, he brought me up to date. “I examined that contact when it first came in yesterday. It’s a rigid gas-permeable lens.”

  “Is that normal?” I asked.

  “Gas perms with this kind of correction are pretty expensive and are used for special eye problems. I checked it under a microscope for a manufacturer’s edge mark, but it wasn’t made by any of the labs here in the U.S., so I sent it out to an eye clinic we use that buys from manufacturers in Europe to see if they can trace the country of origin. Ahhh, here we go.” He leaned forward and read the screen. “Okay, the guy I sent it to says that he can tell from the way the lens was made, that it is from Europe, but they don’t know where yet. It could take him a while to run it down because he says there are any number of countries with labs that might be able to do this kind of lens.”

  “Why don’t you start with Russia?” I said.

  He leaned back from his computer, looked at me and frowned. “Why Russia?”

  “Hunch. Cops get hunches, it’s how we solve cases.”

  “Okay, I’ll start with Russia.”

  “You also might try all of the countries in the old Soviet Union,” I suggested. “Georgia. The Ukraine.”

  “Okay.” He picked up a sheet of paper from his out basket and handed to me. “I scanned your lens last night,” he said. “That’s the condition it was correcting.”

  I studied the sheet. Bell graphs and squiggly line drawings with a column of numbers.

  “That prescription corrects an eye disease called Keratoconus, or KC. It only occurs in a fraction of one percent of the world population, so it’s extremely rare. It usually occurs when a person’s in their mid-twenties and can progress for ten to twenty years. The name refers to a condition in which the cornea grows into a cone shape and bulges forward. To correct KC, you need one of these rigid gas-permeable lenses.”

  “This is good,” I said. “Anything else?”

  “Historically, degeneration of an eye with KC slows around age forty or fifty. According to this prescription, the dead man in the wash was significantly sight-impaired and probably past middle age. Without his contacts, it would have been impossible for him to even drive.”

  “How expensive are these to get made?”

  “My eye expert says hundreds of dollars. They have to be fitted several times to make them wearable.”

  I sat for a minute holding the printout, thinking not many bums are walking around with expensive contact lenses. “Since this is a rare eye condition, if we can find the lab in Europe that made the lens, we’ve got a damn good chance of finding out who he is.”

  “Yep,” Brandon said. “ ’Bout the way the donut crumbles.” Then he took another Krispy Kreme.

  10

  “You have the transcripts from the cassettes we made at the first three murder scenes?” I asked Zack.

  “They aren’t in the murder book.”

  He was wearing yesterday’s clothes and was slumped in his wooden swivel chair across from me in our cubicle, scowling down at the reorganized murder book, thumbing through the pages. He must have gone to a doctor because his nose was now encased in a metal splint and heavily bandaged. He seemed sober, but then it was only 10 A.M.

  “I put them in there. In the flap leaf,” he said, pointing at the binder. “Somebody musta removed ’em.” Since I was the only other person with access to the book, the implication was that I had done it, forgetting for the moment that he’d left the damn thing unattended in the Xerox room. But so what? I stand accused. Our troubled partnership wallowed on.

  Then a look of momentary clarity spread across his discolored face and he snapped his fingers, tilted forward, and started rummaging around in his bottom desk drawer. After a minute, he sat up with an apologetic grin and handed me some Xeroxed pages.

  Accused and exonerated. Swift justice.

  “I threw ’em in there,” he explained. “Was gonna put ’em in the book later…forgot.” He shrugged as if to say, hey, I’m only human.

  I took the blue LAPD murder book out of his hand and started to tape the Xeroxed transcripts for Woody, Van, and Cole onto a fresh page in each of their sections.

  “You really wanta take this dumb-ass, new theory of yours to Calloway?” Zack said, leaning back and looking down his nose, studying me across a pound of medical adhesive.

  Since Cal had demanded a theory that tied all the unaligned facts together on Forrest’s murder, I’d been trying to find one. I’d come up with a promising idea this morning. The more I’d thought about it, the more I liked it. I bounced my copycat theory off Zack as soon as I got in to see how it played. It had been met with stony silence. Now I ran down my new idea. After I finished, Zack glowered at me.

  “The skipper’s gonna say two things,” he complained. “He’s gonna call this a hunch and tell us that Homicide Special dicks operate on evidence, not hunches. Then he’s gonna say, you ain’t got nothin’ but bullshit here. Which of course, is exactly what it is.”

  “He’ll listen to reason.”

  “If you’re five and a half feet tall and shave your head every morning, you don’t need reason.” He leaned forward in the wood swivel. It squeaked loudly. “So, after he hears your dumb-ass idea, he’s gonna call us morons and broom us both off the fucking case. No way he’s gonna let us separate out John Doe Four ’cause it’s not a copycat, and that’s the only murder in this chain a hits that we got a halfway decent shot at. Besides, he’s also getting his nuts roasted over a slow fire every other Tuesday morning in the COMSTAT meeting.” He was referring to the chief’s bimonthly meeting with all the division commanders to review computer crime statistics.

  “We gotta tell him anyway,” I persisted. “Because regardless of what you think, I believe I’m right.”

  Then, as if he had been waiting outside, listening for his cue, Captain Calloway stuck his shaved head inside our cubicle.

  “You guys asked for a meeting?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  He turned and walked across the squad room toward his office.

  “You tell him,” Zack said as I stood. “I ain’t up to being screamed at by Mighty Mouse this morning.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Just hold my back.”

  “Only reason I still come in is so I can hold your back and watch you work.” Sarcasm.

  On our way out, we collided in the doorway. I caught a gamey whiff of him.

  “Since you’ve given up showering, how ’bout investing in some cologne?” I muttered.

  “This is cologne. Eau de Werewolf. I send to Transylvania for this shit.”

  “Go ahead and joke it off. You got half the Glass House circling you. Maybe if you didn’t come in smelling like Big Foot, it would help.”

  “Lemme get back to you on that,” he snarled.

  We walked into Cal’s office.

  “What’s up?” Cal said. He removed his jacket, exposing huge arms in a short-sleeved shirt. His bi’s and tri’s bulged the white cotton.

  “Cap, did you read the update I e-mailed you this morning?”

  “On the hard gas lens? Looks promising.”

  “I think when we find out where it was made, it’s gonna come back as being from a lab in one of the old Soviet Union countries.”

  “Are we having hunches again?” Cal said, half-smiling.

  Zack shot me a dangerous look.

  “Hunches based on shrewd observations,” I corrected.

  “Such as?”

  “The tattoos in the vic’s eyelids turn out to be Russian Cyrillic symbols. They translate: ‘Don’t wake up.’”

  “How do you get tattoos done on your eyelids?” Cal asked. “Don’t they have to press the needle down too hard?”

  “I called a tattoo artist, Big Payaso, at the Electric Dragon in Venice. He told me this kind of eyelid art is mostly done in prison. They slide a spo
on under the lid to make a work table.” Both Cal and Zack winced. “Also, the bullet came from a Russian automatic so I think the vic is maybe a Russian immigrant and the lens is gonna trace back to somewhere in the Soviet Union.”

  “Okay, so John Doe Four is a homeless Russian who did time. That’s why you wanted to see me?”

  “As I told you yesterday, I think this last hit is a copycat. I think I may also have the thread that ties it together.”

  Cal got up and closed the door. Then he turned back and motioned for me to continue.

  “I think this last guy might have done time in a Russian prison and John Doe Number Four might be an ROC hit.”

  “Russian Organized Crime?” Cal said, raising an eyebrow. His expression told me I better make this good.

  “The Odessa mob is aggressive and proactive. They’ve been trying to infiltrate the department for at least fifteen years, ever since Little Japanese came over here from the Ukraine in the late eighties.”

  Little Japanese was a violent Russian gangster named Vyatcheslav Ivankov who got his street handle because he was short and had squinty eyes. He brought several members of the Odessa Mafia with him. They had started small, but now there were more than five thousand members listed in our gang book, with large concentrations of Armenian Odessa mobsters in Glendale, Burbank, and Hollywood. I didn’t have to remind Cal that we found Forrest right on the Burbank city line.

  “The Odessa mob has tried to infiltrate the LAPD two or three times before,” I said. “Maybe they put a mole in the ME’s office and somehow found out about the symbol carved on the victim’s chest. With that piece of info, they could duplicate these killings and use the Fingertip case to hide a high-profile mob execution.”

  Cal looked over at Zack. “How ’bout you? Whatta you think?”

  “I completely disagree. I think John Doe-Four is part of the Fingertip case,” Zack said, not looking at me. “Besides, if we isolate the case out on weak shit like this, we got a lotta explaining to do. There’s more at stake here for all of us, than just who’s killing a few bums.”

  He was obviously talking about our careers. So, despite his promise to the contrary, Zack had left me hanging. Maybe I should call that the last straw.

  Cal thought for a moment, and then leaned forward on the edge of his desk. “I agree. We’re not gonna take this last kill out of the Fingertip case because no matter how we rig it, it’s still only a theory with nothing to back it up. But I also agree with you that all this background is starting to make this last kill look shaky, so I’ll put a little weight on the Russian angle. Hibbs and DeMarco are freed up right now. I’ll send them down to Russian Town with the dead guy’s photo. Have them show it around, see if anybody knows him. But until something tells us for sure, like a positive ID or a witness, this last guy stays in the Fingertip case.” He got up and opened his office door. “Stay in touch with DeMarco and Hibbs, but keep this on the DL. It leaks and you two humps will be workin’ Saturday traffic at the Coliseum.”

  “Yes, sir,” I muttered.

  Zack and I turned and started out of the office. But Cal stopped us.

  “And one more thing. If this investigation doesn’t get a whole lot better before the next body drops, I’m gonna have to make a move.”

  “What’s that mean?” I asked him.

  “It means you guys better hurry up and clear these murders.”

  We nodded and exited the office.

  “Thanks for the backup,” I muttered.

  “Motherfucker’s about to replace us,” Zack growled.

  11

  “Terrell Bell has lousy footwork,” Chooch said. “He doesn’t set up good at all. Remember the Montebello game? Three picks. If he goes to USC, I’ll smoke him. I can’t believe Coach Carroll would be recruiting that guy.”

  Chooch had been going on like that since we all arrived at Toritos, our favorite Mexican restaurant near the Pier in Venice. It was 6:30 and Alexa, Delfina, and I had barely been able to find an opening in his wall of braggadocio.

  “Okay, you want to know who’s pretty good?” he conceded. “Andre Davis from Servite. He’s not what you’d exactly call overpowering as a runner, but the guy has an okay gun. His problem is he’s slow. You gotta be able to run the naked bootleg and have enough mobility so when Coach Sarkisian wants to move the pocket, you can get out there. Davis probably can’t break five flat in the forty.”

  “Anybody want to order?” Alexa said, shooting me a hooded look that said, what’s gotten into this boy?

  “Maybe you ought to wait and see if they even offer you a scholarship before you do all this brilliant hatchet work on the competition,” I said.

  “Sí, Querido,” Delfina agreed. “It is not good to criticize others to make yourself strong.”

  “I’m just saying…ifCoach Kiffen saw two of my games, then he’s gotta know I have great mobility. That’s a big plus running the USC offense.” Then, without taking a breath: “If I can get rid of my last Spanish language requirement, which I should be able to test out of, maybe I can graduate early, get out of spring term at Harvard Westlake and enroll at SC for spring football. If I got a jump on those two guys, I know I’d be ahead on the depth chart by fall. Whatta ya think, Dad?”

  I didn’t know what I thought beyond being put off by his attitude.

  Our waitress came to the table and everybody ordered the combination plate.

  “Anything for dessert?” our waitress asked. “If you want the Mexican pie, I have to put the order in now.”

  “The Mexican pie is good,” I said. “But what we could really use at this table is some humble pie.”

  The waitress smiled and left.

  “Come on, Dad, I’m just saying…”

  “You sound like a blowhard, Chooch. We taught you better than this. Del’s right. You need to concentrate on your own game, and stop running everybody else down. Want my opinion? We were lucky to beat Montebello. That wasn’t your best performance either.”

  “Sometimes I think you guys don’t have a clue what it takes to win in football. You have to be confrontational and believe in yourself to win.”

  “Might be right,” I said. “But you don’t sound much like a winner tonight.”

  Right in the middle of this awkward moment, my cell phone rang. I pulled it out and pried it open.

  “Detective Scully?” a woman’s voice asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Homicide Special Dispatch. You’ve got a one-eighty-seven in the L.A. River at De Soto Avenue in Canoga Park, near John Quimby.”

  My heart sank. This was it. Five bodies and no clearances. I was about to get the hook. “Okay. Notify patrol that I’m on my way. Should be about twenty to thirty minutes, depending on traffic.” I hung up without even asking if they’d been able to reach Zack. Deep in my heart I was hoping they couldn’t find him.

  “Another one?” Alexa said, concerned.

  I nodded and stood. “Gotta roll. It’s in Canoga Park.”

  I kissed Alexa, squeezed Delfina’s hand, and was about to hug Chooch, when my son stood up with me.

  “Can I walk you out?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  We walked through the crowded two-room restaurant without speaking. Outside, I gave the valet the ticket for my car. Since joining Homicide Special, I’d begun following Alexa on family outings so I’d have a car if I got called out. The wind off the water was still cold, and was energetically flapping the red awning over us.

  “Listen, Dad, I know you think I was spouting off in there, but I wasn’t,” Chooch said.

  “It’s okay to be frightened,” I said, finally picking the way I wanted to deal with this.

  “I’m not frightened. Whatta you talking about, frightened? Who says I’m frightened?”

  “In police work, courage is a career commodity. You learn pretty quick that the loudest talkers on the job are usually the last ones through the door. You see a cop with a big bore magnum in some fancy quick-draw holster
, you’re probably looking at a wuss. I hear a guy going on like you were in there, it just tells me one thing. He doesn’t believe a word he’s saying and he’s scared to death somebody’s gonna find out he’s a fraud. I was only with Coach Carroll for an hour, but that was long enough for me to know he’s a guy who understands what motivates people. You go running off at the mouth like that around him, and he’s gonna know you don’t think you’re very good. I wouldn’t let him see that if I were you.”

  I could see from the look on his face that I had read him right. He was scared to death, looking down at his feet.

  “It’s a big step, a Division One school like USC,” he finally said.

  “I know it is. But whether you go there, UCLA, or Penn State; or whether you go and sell clothes at The Gap, you gotta be yourself. The way to impress people is through actions, not words. You want Coach to play you, work on your game and be a good teammate. Help the other guy, even if it means he plays and you don’t. Somewhere down the road it’s going to bring success.”

  I could see that Chooch wanted to keep talking, but my car was delivered to the curb and I tipped the valet. It always amazes me how life chooses times when you can’t linger to deliver up defining moments.

  “We gotta pick this up later, son. I’ve got somebody important waiting for me.”

  I gave Chooch a hug, climbed into the Acura, and pulled out seeing my son in the rearview mirror, looking after me.

  As I got on the freeway I tried to get my mind off Chooch and what I needed to tell him. I ran the case again in my head. It had been six days since we found Forrest. However, if you removed him from the Fingertip case, it put the killings back on a two-week clock.

  I exited the 101at De Soto. Old haunts beckoned me—bars and liquor stores where I’d once tried to eliminate the hollow feeling inside myself by drowning the ache with booze.

  Being back in this part of the West Valley put me emotionally closer to Zack. I had a weird flashback. Zack and I were on the mid-watch and had just heard a SHOTS FIRED OFFICER NEEDS ASSISTANCE call on the scanner. We raced to the scene, breaking red lights, going Code Two. Zack always chased adrenaline rides, always made a tire-smoking run at any Shots Fired situation. I was drunk in the passenger seat and the wild ride made me sick.