Vertical Coffin s-4 Read online

  "What's going on here, a boy scout meeting?"

  "That'll be enough of that, Sergeant." Alexa said, stepping out from behind the front door into his view. Ruta's face whitened, then darkened. Last came a ghastly expression where fleshy jowls pulled away from tobacco-stained ivory in a gargoyle's smile.

  "Sorry, Lieutenant, didn't see ya back there," he muttered, then kneeled and studied the corpse.

  The bullet had hit Greenridge in the forehead, leaving a delicate, dime-sized hole positioned like an Indian caste mark right between his eyes. Then it blew the back of his head off, leaving bone chips and gore all over the porch.

  "Somebody look for the bullet," Ruta told the CSI techs, who were now standing nearby waiting for instructions. "Looks like a drive-by. Guy was comin' out his door. If the shot came from the passenger seat of a car parked down on the street, we got an upward trajectory, so start looking high in the walls across from the front door and in the living room ceiling."

  The techs jumped into action.

  I pulled Alexa aside, leading her down off the porch. "This guy's a joke, Alexa. The vie fell forward. How's that an upshot? Ruta's gonna screw this up."

  She looked troubled. Her problem was that, as head of DSG, she couldn't favor one detective over another. Since Ruta had been next up on the homicide rotation at Rampart, she couldn't just pull him off without cause. He'd go to the union, file a complaint, and he'd win. She also couldn't admit she had a bad detective out here working active shootings. But the truth was, Ruta had lost interest years ago, and everybody was holding their breath until he got his twenty in and pulled the pin in March.

  Just then, two sheriff's units roared past the LAPD squad cars blocking the end of the street and chirped to a stop. Four deputies got out and started toward the house, but the LAPD officers stationed there stopped them. The deputies gathered back by their cars. It didn't take long for ATF and sheriffs to start giving stink-eye to each other.

  "This is going to the dogs," Alexa said, observing the cliques of angry agents and deputies gathering out on the street.

  Happy Zant had picked up the microphone in his federal car and started talking to someone, probably calling in reinforcements.

  "You gotta move some of this meat outta here before we have another fistfight," I told Alexa.

  She nodded, looked at the street, then turned back to me. "Okay, here's how this is gonna work. As of now, I'm reassigning you to Rampart homicide. You're gonna be the primary on this shooting. Work it with Ruta and his partner, but you're on point."

  "What about the Hidden Ranch investigation?"

  "This is the Hidden Ranch investigation. That's your case, so as far as I'm concerned, all crimes that flow from it are yours. You work this hit, while I try and keep us from getting shot down by Title Eighteen."

  Then she turned and addressed the blues who had wandered back up toward the porch. "Get enough police presence out here to move the sheriffs and ATF guys out of our staging area and down the street." One of the uniforms hustled to his car to make a call.

  I crossed to where Lou Ruta was standing over the body, peeling a cigar. He let the wrapper fall and it blew away in the morning breeze, landing in the bushes by the far end of the porch. I walked down the steps and picked the cellophane off the oleander. I took it back up onto the porch and handed it to him.

  "Got your fingerprints, Sarge. CSI finds it, you could get busted for this murder."

  He glowered, but stuffed the wrapper in his pocket, then jammed the cigar into his mouth and started searching for a match.

  "And if you light that stogie and spew ash on this site, you're gonna be smokin' it out of your ass."

  "Big tough guy," he said. But he pocketed the unlit cigar as well, then started looking out at the street. "Where the fuck's my split-tail partner?"

  A few minutes later Alexa took Ruta aside and gave him the news that from now on he was reporting to me on this homicide. His face contorted when she told him, but he said nothing. Then Alexa left to try and cut a deal with the U. S. Attorney.

  Five minutes later Ruta's partner arrived. She was a nervous-looking honey-blonde with too-big hair. Her name was Beverly King, and from the way she looked at him, I could instantly tell she hated his guts.

  Chapter 13

  CRIME SCENE

  ATF didn't work many homicides. Their beat was illegal party favors-guns, booze, and stogies. Because we worked hundreds of murders a year, normally on homicides that fell in their jurisdiction, they'd send us an agent to help out, but would leave us on point. After the Hidden Ranch shoot-out, that obviously wasn't going to happen.

  Ruta was pacing in the living room shooting off orders at everybody. "Get me a phone dump on this hard line and don't forget his cell calls," he barked at Beverly King.

  She nodded, her face pinched tight with stress, her body language a concert of uncertainty. She took off through the living room toward the phone.

  "Not through the crime scene, you idiot!" Ruta yelled. "Go out the front door, around to the back porch. After it's dusted, use the phone in the kitchen. Who the fuck taught you crime scene tactics, Katie Couric?"

  Beverly King muttered an apology and scooted out the front door on her errand.

  I walked over to Ruta. "Why don't you cut her some slack?"

  "Why don't you suck my dick? Or can I say that to the husband of our division commander?"

  "Hey, Lou, you can say anything you want, just don't piss me off, or I'll drag your sorry ass outside and disconnect your dome light." I smiled benignly. "Besides, how would I ever find your dick in all that blubber?" He reddened but didn't respond.

  All around us, CSIs were doing their thing. They were getting ready to flip Billy Greenridge, after bagging his hands. In my opinion, there wasn't going to be any DNA under his nails. This didn't look like it was done from up close. He looked like he was shot from a distance with a high-powered round, probably from a sniper's rifle.

  Everybody was more or less thinking that someone from the sheriff's enforcement bureau had done this, but nobody wanted to say it because of where that would take us.

  Beverly King found the bullet hole in the living room wall. It had punched through a copy of that corny painting of dogs playing poker. The picture hung opposite the front door, the bullet passing right through the head of a fox terrier holding five spades in his paw. Apparently not a winning hand. Then the slug went through the laundry room and back porch, blasting out into the backyard, where it was lost somewhere in the open field beyond. It had to have been a big round, like a.308, to go through Billy's head, three walls, and keep going. Hunting for it in the field behind the house was going to be an iffy project. The bullet would probably never be found.

  When the M. E. S were finally ready to transport the body I went over and watched them load Billy onto the gurney, his bloody remains now all zipped up neatly in a rubber coroner's bag. I walked out with the M. E.'s assistant, an Asian man named Ray Tsu, helping him push the gurney. Tsu had a pipe-cleaner build and long hair parted in the middle and pushed behind his ears like black tieback curtains.

  We struggled, pushing the load up to the coroner's van. The front wheels of the gurney folded under and we slid the body into the back. Before he shut the van doors, I stopped him.

  "Can I take one last look, Ray?"

  "Sure." He unzipped the bag and Billy's pasty, white face came into view. I examined the bullet hole in the center of his forehead. An ugly red cyclops.

  "Up or down?" I asked, referring to the trajectory.

  "Ruta says up," Tsu dodged.

  "Yeah, but whatta you say?"

  "Depends on the attitude of his head when he got hit," he hedged again. "I'm just a tech. You should get all that from the M. E."

  Just to keep the conversation rolling, I said, "Bullet fired from some shooter sitting in a car parked out front would be slightly up, right? An upshot would knock his head back. The head's responsible for what? A little over a tenth of a person's
gross weight?"

  "Eighteen percent."

  "Right, eighteen. So it's like a fulcrum, whichever way the head goes, so goes the body. An upshot should blow him back, but he fell forward, head toward the street. How come?"

  "There's no rules on this stuff, Shane," Ray said, smiling now, despite our ghoulish subject matter.

  "Take a guess," I said. "You see a lot of this. I won't hold you to it."

  "Well, two ways it happens, maybe. One, if he was shot up close, like from a few feet away with a big round. The muzzle velocity on a three-oh-eight or a two-twenty-three is so great coming out of the barrel, it maybe blows out the back of his skull without much recoil. So he doesn't fall back, but his head rebounds slightly from the exit kick and that throws him forward. Or it was a down-shot from a ways away, and the shot takes him to his knees. From there, depending how he hit, he could fall anywhere."

  "Any other way it happens?"

  "I've seen hundreds of drive-bys the last few years. Sometimes there's no reason why a body lands the way it does. Bullets ricochet off bones, change directions. The rules of physics on this can get skewed. He could have even bounced off the door frame and got knocked forward."

  Ray Tsu rezipped the bag and closed the van door, then paused before leaving. "Ruta's got his full, fair share of mean, don't he?"

  "In our business, it's real easy to go sour. It's something to watch out for."

  Tsu nodded, then got into the van and pulled out. The rest of the preliminary crime scene investigation went right down departmental guidelines. We drew a grid of the place, graphed everything, vacuumed for trace evidence, hair, and fiber, in case the shooter had been in the house before he pulled the trigger. A long shot, but you never know. We looked for brass out front. Didn't find any. Photographed and dusted, taped up and backed out. Textbook.

  Out on the street Ruta was hovering. I wanted some time alone to run my theories and thoughts, so I told him I was done. He grunted, walked to his car, and pulled away. I saw Beverly King sitting on the curb having a cigarette, trying to get rid of some anger. I walked up to her. Her hands were shaking as she took a drag.

  "Good going in there," I said, referring to the fact that she had found the bullet hole in the painting. It wasn't a huge victory, but she needed something.

  "Right. Mrs. Columbo saves the case." Her tone was bitter. Angry.

  "Detective King, some things we can change, some things we can't. The secret is knowing the difference."

  "I guess," she said, looking up and snapping the butt away. It scattered sparks in the street where it landed. "The guy just gets me froggy. Once he starts selling his wolf tickets, I end up getting tentative and start making mistakes."

  "Ruta can't define you. Only you can do that. You let him get into your head, you're finished. The trick is to ignore his flack and stay focused. You're in charge of your game; he's in charge of his. Don't get the two mixed up, just because he's got two extra stripes and some attitude."

  "Easy to say."

  "Think of it this way. You're a homicide dick. A specialist. A lot's at stake when you get a call. You're the last hope the vie has for justice. Billy Greenridge is your client now. Don't let exposure to negativity cheat your client out of the best you have."

  She frowned. "Who are you supposed to be, Deepak Chopra?"

  "I'm just a guy who's done it wrong too many times and had to pay for it."

  Finally her look softened and she smiled. "Thanks, Shane," she said softly.

  Chapter 14

  SIGHTING

  I drove across town to the new County Medical Examiner's office located on the southeast corner of the L. A State College campus. They had recently broken ground on a high-tech, state-of-the-art crime lab facility next door and as I pulled in I could see the growling bulldozers working in the adjoining field preparing the site. The coroner's unit was already up and had been in business for about a month. It was a modern three-story building with mirrored glass. I pulled into a slot in student parking, put my handcuffs over the steering wheel-the universal signal to all cruising traffic control officers and parking police that this was a cop car-then I entered the air-conditioned, sterile confines of the new facility.

  I was there because I needed some time to pass. I wanted to let things settle down before going back to Billy Greenridge's little house on Mission Street. There was a good chance that the sheriff's black-and-whites and ATF cars would cruise that neighborhood for hours. It was going to be the latest "Whatta-buncha-bullshit" gripe for both agencies.

  I didn' t want to get caught standing on the front porch chewing my nails with a dumb look on my face, so I came here to satisfy one little detail that I probably already had the answer to.

  I badged my way down to the second subbasement floor and found a county M. E. named Lisa Williams, who had done the DNA match on Smiley. She was a thirty-year-old African-American wearing a blue medical smock, slippers, and hair net. A surgical mask was hanging around her neck.

  "Sure," she said after I told her what I wanted. She led me down a hallway into a quarter-acre-sized, windowless room full of fluorescent-lit workstations and cubicles. We arrived at her desk and she turned on her computer and waited for it to boot up. "The DNA sample we got from the Arcadia P. D. was taken by their medical officer in 'oh-two. It's a legally obtained sample, witnessed with double signatures. We matched it to the DNA we got off the corpse at Hidden Ranch."

  Her computer had loaded, and now the two DNA strands were side by side in the center of her monitor. She started scrolling.

  "On the right is the 'oh-two Arcadia sample. The left is the one we took from the charred body last week. It's a perfect match. No variables, intangibles, or dropouts. These strings of base pairs line up perfectly. That corpse in the morgue is definitely Vincent Smiley."

  "Thanks."

  I left with nothing new learned. Okay, maybe it was a waste of time, but I'm a stickler about this stuff. I looked at my watch. I'd been gone an hour. Time to head back to the house on Mission.

  I parked up the street, then walked back to the wooden Craftsman. Ruta was sure that the shooter had been in a car, but according to the location of the bullet hole in the living room, my trajectory estimate put a shot from a car on the street too low. Of course, the doer could have opened the car door, stepped out, fired from a standing position, then picked up his brass and left. That would have more or less lined him up with the bullet hole. But if he did it that way he was risking exposure and identification by a neighbor.

  Ray Tsu had said a down-shot might have knocked Greenridge to his knees and pitched him forward with his head toward the street.

  I remembered Billy from the bar fight. He and I had stood toe-to-toe trading body shots. We were about the same height. I had measured the height of the bullet hole in the living room two hours earlier, using my arm. When I pointed at the hole, it was about three inches below my shoulder. So now, facing the opposite direction, centered in the doorway where I thought he had been, I extended my arm to about head high, pointed it straight out and raised it three inches. It was now, more or less, pointed up at an apartment building across the street. If the shot hadn't come from a parked car, then maybe the bullet had come from that building.

  I knew it was an outside chance, because most street assassins like to have a set of wheels under them when doing a drive-by. Disregarding that logic, I sighted along my arm at the four-story apartment complex. It was an old, sixties-style building. Concrete boxes. Ugly. In my opinion, the sixties had been a decade of architectural blight. I counted windows and realized that, if the shot came from over there, it would have to be from the third or fourth window at the end of the building, second floor.

  I walked up the street so I wouldn't be seen by any of the people living in the apartments, then doubled back and came down the sidewalk, hugging the buildings on the other side. I entered the apartment complex and took the elevator to the second floor. It was a groaning, creaking ride. The door finally wheez
ed open and I exited into a dark hallway. I knew approximately how far down the hall the window I had sighted would be. When I reached the spot, I looked at the closest door. It was ajar. I pulled out my Beretta, and with my toe, pushed it open a crack and looked in.

  The apartment was carpeted but had no furniture or drapes. Standing on the east side of the room, looking inside an empty bookshelf, was a woman. I knew those muscular legs, cut arms, that spiky white hair. I stepped inside. She heard me behind her and turned.

  "Aren't you supposed to be riding teacups at Disneyland?" I asked.

  "Hi," she smiled at me. The smile really was a dazzler. I'm sure it had gotten her out of a lot of tight spots, but not this one.

  "Listen, I can explain," she said.

  "How?" I replied. Then I moved forward and snatched her purse off her shoulder and went through it. I found her wallet, opened it.

  "Look-okay, I'm not Kimmy Whatever. I'm…"

  "Nancy Chambers?" I said, reading her California driver's license. The picture was definitely her: weight lifter's neck, mismatched eyes, white-blonde hair.

  "First you're at Hidden Ranch digging through that crime scene, trying to remove evidence, now you're poking around up here. This needs to be an excellent explanation, Nancy."

  "I'm a newspaper reporter. My press card is in there. I work for the Valley Times, the crime desk. I'm doing a series of articles on urban violence. The Hidden Ranch thing is this Sunday's Op-Ed piece."

  "How's that get you over here?"

  "I have a police scanner in my car. I was monitoring federal frequencies. I heard them talking about this. I knew Billy Greenridge was on the ATF SWAT team that was up at Hidden Ranch, so I came over."

  By then I had found her press card for the Valley Times. Under her picture it read "Nancy Chambers, Reporter."