City of Fire (9 page)

“Ten weeks,” Colletti said. “She was hoping for a boy, but it was still too early to tell.”

Novak stared at the photograph for a long time, then passed it back to the doctor. On their way through the lobby, Lena heard Colletti tell the receptionist to hold her next exam for another fifteen minutes and watched the doctor close her office door. The front she put up had been a good one, Lena thought. But it didn’t take much to know what the doctor would be doing for the next quarter hour. Yesterday afternoon she had the pleasure of telling a young woman that she would be a mother, supporting that dream with pictures from an ultrasound. Today, both were lost in the void. Knocked out and gone.

SIXTEEN hours ago Nikki Brant had stood five feet two inches tall and weighed ninety-eight and one-quarter pounds. Now her small body was laid out on a cold sheet of stainless steel, the ultimate violation complete. Lena watched Lamar Newton take what would be the last photograph of the young woman. When the flash of light died out, the medical examiner moved in, pushing her chest cavity back together and lacing the childlike body up with a heavy black twine as if she were nothing more than an old, worn-out shoe.

Lena checked her notebook, making sure she had written down the main points of the autopsy so she wouldn’t have to wait for a report.

The plastic bags that the perpetrator had wrapped around the victim’s hands and face would be sent to the lab, but appeared to be a hoax. Pure window dressing. Nothing was found beneath Brant’s fingernails. There were no defensive wounds on her palms or wrists, nor was any debris evident when they combed out her hair. Although enough ejaculate was found for DNA analysis, closer examination of her vagina yielded no bruising, rips, or tears.

No physical evidence supported that Nikki Brant had been raped.

Lena underlined the note and turned to the next page. Art Madina, the ME, confirmed what they already suspected by carefully inserting probes into the wounds and taking multiple X-rays. Cause of death came from a knife matching the exact
size and shape of the one found in the Brants’ dishwater. But the wound in her upper chest hadn’t killed her, even though her right lung was punctured. It had been the wound to her abdomen that was ultimately responsible for her death. The twelve-inch blade had been driven upward, severing the aorta and piercing the young woman’s heart.

Lena turned away to collect herself. Six autopsies were under way in the same room, the smell of disinfectant and decomposing flesh hitting her like a brick wall. It had been a long day. Removing her mask and safety glasses, she stepped out of her scrubs and left the room without looking at anyone. In the hallway, bodies were lined up on gurneys awaiting their turn. Some were covered in a translucent plastic. Others were laid out with nothing more than a toe tag. Lena shook it off and kept walking.

The wait for the elevator seemed endless—the fluorescent tubes in the hall blinking and buzzing and casting the walls in a sterile light without shadows. When she finally reached the front door, she gave it a hard shove and stepped outside into the chilly, night air. Crossing the lot to the next building, she sat down on the front steps and gazed past the guard shack to the street. An ambulance was speeding up Mission Road on its way to USC Medical Center just next door, its siren blistering the eardrums.

Novak sat down beside her without saying anything. Lena kept her eyes straight ahead, the immediate view reminding her of a third world shantytown. The people drifting down the sidewalks in this neighborhood were dressed in rags, didn’t speak English, and never would. Across the street a fast-food restaurant and a gas station gave way to a bleak industrial setting marred by layer upon layer of graffiti. And rising out of the muck about a mile in the distance was this beautiful city called Los Angeles—its buildings sparkling in the black sky, shimmering in reds and blues and surrounded by white electric beads of light from the thousands of cars stuck in traffic on the freeways. It you weren’t trying to get somewhere, L.A. was a knockout.

Lena dug into her bag for a tissue and wiped the Vicks
VapoRub away from her nose. In spite of the strong mentholated odor, the smell of death permeating the building had cut through. The scent had a certain density to it that took root in the body and was hard to shake. Lena had attended her share of autopsies before and never found them easy. But the smell was far worse than the view. Days would pass, the odor nearly forgotten, until one morning she might sneeze or cough after a shower and there it was again—the smell of death lodged in the back of her throat. Nearly forgotten, she thought, but always close enough to taste.

“Give me one of those,” Novak said.

She passed him a tissue and watched him wipe the gel away from the base of his nose.

“You know anything about erotic asphyxiation?” he asked.

“You mean the bag over her head.”

“The drawer in the kitchen was full,” he said. “They had an endless supply.”

He flipped open his cell phone, entered a number, and clicked on the speakerphone. Rhodes picked up before either one of them heard a ring.

“Tito and I are still here,” he said. “The house is sealed.”

“What about Brant?” Novak asked. “How’s he holding up?”

“Okay, I guess. He’s still with us.”

“Anything new?”

“Barrera came out and spent a couple of hours going through the house, then left to get started on the warrants.”

Barrera was their lieutenant. He often came to crime scenes and liked to play an active role in as many investigations as he could.

“What else?” Novak asked.

“Their next-door neighbor told us that the perfect marriage wasn’t so perfect. They argued a lot and sometimes it got loud.”

Novak gave Lena a look and shook his head. “We’re hearing the same thing. We need to keep things friendly, Stan, but we’ve gotta bring him in. You understand how to play it?”

“Got it,” Rhodes said. “Keep it friendly. Maybe the piece of shit can help.”

Lena thought about the game they were playing. The rules were simple: string Brant out for as long as they could and hope he didn’t realize he was a suspect and lawyer up. They had stepped across the line, the investigation following the statistical average now and headed in a loose but single direction. No matter how bizarre, most murders involving a married couple still pointed to the surviving partner. Odds were that Brant had murdered his wife, then tried to make it look like something else with a chef’s knife and three grocery bags. And it had almost worked. The way the body had been left. The missing toe that he had probably flushed down the toilet.

“How do you want to handle the interview?” Rhodes asked.

Novak turned to Lena as he considered the question.

“They’ve spent more time with him than we have,” she said. “I’ll get started on the murder book.”

Novak nodded in agreement. “You hear that, Stan? Lena can fill you in on what we’ve got when you get downtown.”

“See you soon,” Rhodes said.

Lena watched Novak return the phone to his belt, her mind drifting back to the moment they showed Brant the Polaroid of his dead wife. The tears. The emotion. What seemed like nothing more than an act now. Last month Jose Lopez had been just as convincing over a period of thirteen hours before finally making the turn and admitting that he’d murdered his wife, Teresa. Now he was awaiting trial at Men’s Central Jail. Lena found the building in the skyline. She could remember the rage in Lopez’s voice as he spit his words out and confessed to stuffing an entire bath towel down his wife’s throat and slashing her neck open with a box cutter from her own utility belt. She could still see the look on the man’s face, his eyes burning with emotion as he finally admitted to painting a cross on the bed with his wife’s blood and laying her body out as if she had been nailed down. The thought of it rattled Lena’s nerves. That first glimpse at what some people were capable of. How they acted when they shed their humanity
and poked at the end. She mentioned it to Novak at the time, who called it a warning sign. A sanity check. He told her that if she ever got comfortable working a homicide case, he hoped she had enough sense to quit. Lena wasn’t comfortable, nor was she ready to quit.

“I need to ask you a favor,” Novak said.

She glanced at her partner without responding. The handcuffs had been removed so that Lopez could sign his statement. Before anyone noticed, the man unzipped his fly and started urinating on Lena’s leg. It took a moment before even Lena realized what was happening and the man was pulled away by his own attorney. Welcome to RHD.

“You with me, Lena?” Novak asked.

She nodded. She hadn’t felt clean since that night. No matter how hard she scrubbed in the shower, no matter how often or what brand of antibacterial soap she used, she didn’t feel entirely clean. Not yet anyway.

“I was gonna take Kristin out to dinner,” Novak said. “She called me yesterday and we set it up for tonight.”

Novak got to his feet. Lena grabbed her briefcase and they headed down the steps to the car. Kristin was Novak’s eldest daughter. Twenty-one years old and the one he seemed to have the most affinity for in spite of her recurrent problems with drugs and alcohol. She had been in and out of rehab since she was sixteen. Novak blamed himself for not being there for her. His divorce and its timing for his daughter’s shaky footing. From what Lena had gathered over the last couple of months, Novak and his daughter didn’t speak on the phone often and saw each other even less. But things had recently changed. The girl was clean and sober and talking about another try at college. Lena had met her several times and liked her, even though she was a fan of her brother’s music and seeing her often reminded Lena of her own loss. But that was Lena’s burden, not the girl’s.

“What’s the favor?” Lena asked.

“We’re working,” he said. “I could easily bag it. But after all this, I don’t want to bag it. I want to see my daughter and make sure she’s okay.”

“I’d do the same thing. Besides, we’ve got two teams. Go see her.”

Novak raised his hand and she tossed him the keys.

“It’ll only be for an hour or two,” he said. “There’s a new steak house downtown. I was thinking we’d eat there and I could bring you something back.”

Lena got into the car, feeling her stomach bottom out. It was 7:00 p.m. They hadn’t stopped for lunch, and she knew she needed something to snack on because two hours seemed like a long way off and there was a lot of work to do. But what she really wanted was a cup of hot coffee. Something with more octane than any coffeemaker at Parker Center could provide.

Novak pulled out of the lot, turning left at the light. Within five minutes, the shantytown was lost in the rearview mirror and they were cruising through the city of hopes and dreams. Three blocks from the Glass House, Lena spotted the Blackbird Café and grabbed the door handle.

“Drop me off here,” she said.

“It’s dark. I was gonna pull up to the front door.”

“I want to stop first. My car’s still on the Westside.”

Novak pulled over. Lena got out, slinging her briefcase over her shoulder. The computer inside was getting heavy, but it didn’t matter. The Blackbird served what might be the best cup of coffee in town. She would drink a cup there, she decided, then order another one to go.

“How do you want your steak?” he asked.

Lena didn’t need to think about it. “Black and blue,” she said, slamming the door closed and hurrying off.

FRIDAY night at the factory. Parker Center or the Glass House. No matter what people called it, the building was a dinosaur. A symbol of the past set in a city that had spent more than four decades driving forward. Pipes leaked, the walls were cracked and paper-thin, and every time Lena plugged something into an outlet, she waited a beat for the lights to pop off.

She didn’t like the building, nor did she think it safe.

The Glass House only survived the 1994 Northridge earthquake on paper, she figured. A technicality based on what it would cost the city to tear it down and replace it. Rather than condemn the six-story building with a red tag, city inspectors awarded the structure a yellow tag, meaning that the building had been heavily damaged and might just be unsafe. The city councilwoman who chaired the Public Safety Committee seemed to agree with that assessment, saying that the building would be replaced or renovated in the
reasonable near-term.
But the Northridge earthquake had stopped rumbling more than ten years ago, and no one who worked here, including the new chief, needed an inspection team or a politician to tell them which tag the building really deserved. Civilian employees only saw red and were fleeing. If they couldn’t transfer out, they were starting to quit. Lena had no doubt that the next time the ground began to shake, the Glass House would collapse into a pile of rubble. Inspectors filing false reports would no longer be necessary, and all those politicians could finally end their foolhardy debate.