City of Fire (37 page)

He stepped away from the window, quickly eyeing the house and searching for a weakness. He needed to get inside. He needed to get closer. The night wasn’t over yet.

LENA turned from Novak and gazed at Tim Holt’s X-rays on the light box as the medical examiner pointed to the exit wound.

“It was a clean shot,” he said. “Straight up from the roof of his mouth through the skull.”

Art Madina was slim with short black hair and green eyes that remained bright and alive despite his calling. Although he was young and fairly new to the coroner’s office, Madina had already earned a reputation for being extremely thorough and had become the DA’s new first choice when presenting evidence to a jury at trial. Lieutenant Barrera had delayed the autopsies until the pathologist could return from his conference in Vegas. When Lena called in this morning to verify the time, she learned that he had been the keynote speaker.

“The injury was obviously catastrophic,” Madina said. “The force was so great that most of the frontal lobe followed the path of the bullet exiting here. Death would have been instantaneous. But with Jane Doe it’s another story.”

Madina took a step to his right, the film on Jane Doe clipped to the light box beside Holt’s. The autopsies had been scheduled for 11:00 a.m. In spite of their importance, Lena and Novak had been more than forty-five minutes late. They’d spent the first three hours of the day working Burell’s list of sex partners from his Web site. Working through the remaining ten women as quickly as they could. Although they knocked three more names off the list, four of the ten
had become frightened and left town, and the last three weren’t home and didn’t pick up when Lena tried their cell phones. The morning had been a bust. None of the women they interviewed knew or remembered seeing or even meeting a virile man with a buffed head and smooth skin. By the time they arrived at the coroner’s office and got suited up in their scrubs, the only thing they missed were the X-rays.

Madina adjusted his glasses as he examined the film. “The knife wounds on the girl follow the same path as the wounds we found last Friday on Nikki Brant. They’re almost a perfect match. The big difference is the cause of death. I’m betting we’ll find it here.” His hand moved away from Jane Doe’s torso and rose to her neck. “We’ve got severe trauma. A definite break. We’ll see which came first when we open her up.”

“Let’s start with the male victim,” Lena said. “He’s our primary focus right now.”

She didn’t use Holt’s name because she needed distance. Autopsies were hard enough. Watching a pathologist cut open someone she knew skidded into a parallel universe. As she sniffed the Vicks VapoRub behind her surgical mask, she wondered how long she would last and wished she’d caught a better night’s sleep. In spite of the wine, she spent most of the night tossing and turning. Listening to the house creak in the wind and fighting off nightmares from an eighteen-hour day spent at two crime scenes. Charles Burell winked at her from the other side. But so did Romeo. She could remember seeing his hazy figure standing over her bed last night. And he was a giant of a man, completely hairless. When she looked at his face, she couldn’t find it in the gloom. All she could see were his eyes, glowing back at her in the dark. She woke up after that, her heart racing, and kept her eyes open until the sun rose over the city and the shadows went away.

Madina grabbed his clipboard, skimming through his notes. “You’re thinking Tim Holt isn’t a suicide? That’s not in my preliminary report from the field. Gainer called it an obvious suicide.”

“That’s why we’re here,” Novak said. “All we want to know is what’s possible.”

“You mean that what we’re looking at could be a homicide.”

Lena cleared her throat. “We have reason to believe that it’s worth keeping an open mind.”

She glanced at Novak, then followed Madina across the operating room to the two bodies already laid out on a pair of stainless-steel gurneys. Five autopsies were under way in the same room. As her eyes drifted over Jane Doe’s corpse, she realized that she had never seen her face and was surprised by how young she looked. How innocent and pretty she must have been, and why Holt would have wanted her in his bed. When she turned to face Holt’s naked corpse, she tried to ignore the sound of a technician working his skull saw on a gangbanger directly behind them.

“Was there any sign of a struggle at the house?” Madina asked. “Anything specific I should be looking for?”

Novak shook his head. “Not that we know of. But it was a tough crime scene, hard to walk around in. He’d just moved into the place and never got the chance to unpack.”

Madina nodded and seemed to relish the challenge. “Then let’s have a look.”

He began his examination by carefully studying Holt’s hands. Lena remembered seeing the gunshot residue at the crime scene. Because GSR samples were so delicate, Ed Gainer would have performed the lift in the field, and she wondered if that hadn’t been what Madina was looking for just a few minutes ago when he checked his notes.

“His fingertips are heavily callused,” the ME said, glancing at Lena. “He was a lefty, right? He played keyboards but also a little guitar.”

She met his eyes, surprised by his knowledge of what Holt did for a living. “Yeah,” she said. “He was a lefty.”

Madina turned back to the corpse, examining Holt’s wrists and ankles and lingering over a slight bruise just above the stomach. “I was sorry I couldn’t get back sooner,” he said. “They had a new album coming out, and I listened to the
sample tracks on the band’s Web site just last week.” He glanced at Lena, his voice quieter now. “I was a fan.”

She nodded and understood, then took a step back with her partner. For the next two hours, she watched as Madina and two technicians dissected her friend’s body. It was about surviving the spectacle. Not flinching when the ME made the Y-cut down the center of Holt’s chest with his scalpel. Ignoring the sound that the zap lights made every few minutes when another insect drawn to the dead bodies made a wrong turn and went down hungry.

But it was also about flooding her mind with thoughts about the case. Hoping that the three women from Burell’s Web site they hadn’t been able to reach would return her call and that one of them actually knew who Romeo was. Weighing the differences between Romeo and the cop who murdered her brother with the understanding that while one couldn’t help himself, the other could, yet both were lethal. She glanced at her partner, admiring his strength and resolve. She had been upset last night and forgot to ask Novak about his daughter. When she apologized this morning, he told her that he’d found crack cocaine hidden in her bedroom but couldn’t do anything about it until she returned home. In the past her binges lasted for a day or two. Sometimes as long as a week. Yet here he was, by her side working the case.

And then it was over. What remained of Holt’s body was hosed down, his empty chest cavity laced up with a thick, black twine by a technician as Madina stepped forward and wanted to talk.

“I don’t see it,” he said. “Nothing about this victim looks like a homicide. There isn’t even a hint that something’s wrong.”

Lena moved closer, trying to block out the din of the room and those zap lights. Madina glanced at his notes.

“The fingernail clippings taken by Gainer at the crime scene revealed no human skin. Nothing that would indicate that he scratched someone or fought back. There are no abrasions on his knuckles. No ligature marks on his wrists or ankles, and his neck is clean. No signs of hemorrhaging
around his eyes or beneath his eyelids, and when we opened him up, his hyoid bone was intact. He wasn’t held against his will and he wasn’t strangled. I’m sorry if the results don’t fit with what you had in mind. But there are no defensive wounds on this body.”

“But what about that bruise on his stomach?” Novak asked. “It looks fresh.”

“I agree,” Madina said. “It probably happened within an hour or two of his death. But it could have been caused by anything. You said that he hadn’t unpacked. That the house was hard to move around in. He could have easily walked into something.”

Lena traded a hard look with her partner.

Madina moved closer to the body. “That’s what we didn’t find,” he said. “Now let’s talk about what we did. The gunshot residue. Enough GSR was lifted away from his skin and already verified by the lab to prove that his left hand fired the gun. When we removed the blood from his face, we found his left cheek tattooed from the muzzle flash. Burns on his chin, his lips and tongue. I’m guessing he held the muzzle an inch or two away from his mouth when he fired the weapon. But there’s no guessing at all when it comes down to how the man died.”

Novak’s cell phone rang. Digging into his scrubs, he glanced at the LCD and mouthed the words
Lieutenant Barrera
as he flipped it open. The call didn’t last more than thirty seconds. When it was over, he said, “We’ve gotta get back to Parker.”

“What about Jane Doe?” Madina asked.

“You’ll have to fly solo. We can talk about the results when you’re done.”

It was difficult to get a read on Novak because he was wearing a surgical mask. But Lena could see it in his eyes. And when he told her that the DNA results were in from Jane Doe, she had to think twice because of the way he said it. The way he shot her the look and heavy nod. The DNA results were in, but it sounded more like he was saying,
It’s done, Lena. The fix is in.

They left Madina in the operating room. Scrambling out of their scrubs, they raced up the back steps and out of the building.

“Give me the keys,” Novak said. “I’ll drive.”

“What did Barrera say?”

“What we thought he would.”

She tossed Novak the keys, then climbed into the car and took a deep breath of fresh, L.A.-flavored air. As Novak sped past the guard shack and pointed the Crown Vic toward the city, her eyes drifted out the window to what looked like an endless parade of homeless people trudging up and down the sidewalks in rags. The American Dream had a back door, she thought. Once it hit your backside, you were out.

“It’s not like we didn’t know this was gonna happen, Lena. We guessed as much last night.”

She turned and gazed at Novak. “Then why do you look scared?”

“Because we don’t know who it is. We don’t know who we can trust. We’re dealing with a motherfucker in our own house and he’s pushing a lot of buttons right now.”

That summed it up, she thought. But the implications ran deeper than that. The way the record would be written. Romeo killed Jane Doe. Holt murdered her brother, then shot himself. Forget about the rag sheets at the grocery store. That’s the story that would be produced for television. Those were the words that would skip the California Section and make the front page of
The Times.

She could feel her stomach turning as they approached the Glass House and pulled into the garage. Her pulse fading as they rode the elevator up to the third floor. The desire to vomit when Lieutenant Barrera waved them into the captain’s office and she saw Stan Rhodes already sitting at the conference table with his eyes down.

“Have a seat,” Barrera said, closing the door. “We’ve got work to do.”

Lena pulled a chair away from the table and sat beside her partner, then watched Barrera cross the room and take a
seat beside Rhodes. A line had been drawn, she figured. Us versus them.

“The DNA results are in,” Barrera said. “The semen samples taken from Jane Doe at the Holt crime scene match the samples we got from Teresa Lopez and Nikki Brant. Romeo’s good for the kill. He did Jane Doe, then waited for Holt to get home so he could watch.”

She glanced at Rhodes. He hadn’t acknowledged their presence since they entered the room. He looked strung out, and it seemed obvious that he’d missed a second night’s sleep. Her eyes moved to the scar on his left earlobe, the
X
even more pronounced than last night.

“You with us, Gamble?” Barrera asked.

She turned to the man and nodded without saying anything. He slid the lab report across the table as if that might help them see the light.

“Romeo’s good for the kill,” he repeated. “And Holt’s good for your brother’s murder. We’ve got verification now. It’s over, Detective. It’s time to close the case out.”

Barrera’s eyes were on her. He was sizing her up as he spoke. She could tell that there was more, so she kept her thoughts to herself and remained silent. The question was how much more.

“Your brother’s murder was a high-profile case,” he said. “It’s a feather in our cap that the department was able to solve it. The new chief is extremely pleased, but he’s also worried about leaks. He’s holding a press conference in an hour instead of waiting until later in the day. I know it’s short notice, Gamble, but he wants you to make a statement. He wants you standing on the podium right beside him.”

She could feel the weight of the moment pulling her under the surface, then turned when she realized that Novak had knocked over his chair and jumped to his feet.

“This is total bullshit,” Novak shouted.

“Sit down, Detective,” Barrera said.