Guilt (3 page)

Liz repeated her initial impressions. “Not that you need me for any of that.”

He said, “Young Moses needs you, I appreciate your input.”

Detective I Moe Reed was her true love. They’d met at a swamp full of corpses.

She laughed. “Moses appreciates me, too. Say hi when you see him, which is probably before I will.”

She stood. “So what else can I do for you?”

“Take custody of the bones and do your wizard thing. If you need the box, you can have it, otherwise it’s going to the crime lab.”

“Don’t need the box,” she said. “But I’m not really sure I can tell you much more.”

“How about age of victim?”

“I’ll get it as close as I can,” she said. “We can also x-ray to see if some sort of damage comes up within the bones, though that’s unlikely. There’s certainly nothing overt to indicate assault or worse. So we could be talking a natural death.”

“Natural but someone buried it under a tree?” He frowned. “I hate that—
it
.” His shirt had come loose over his paunch. He tucked it in, hitched his trousers.

Liz said, “Maybe covert burial does imply some sort of guilt. And no visible marks doesn’t eliminate murder, asphyxiating a baby is way too easy. And it’s not rare in infanticides.”

“Soft kill,” he said.

She blinked. “Never heard that before.”

“I’m a master of terrible irony.”

M
ilo and I returned to Holly Ruche. Her husband was gone.

She said, “He had a meeting.”

Milo said, “Accountant stuff.”

“Not too exciting, huh?”

Milo said, “Most jobs are a lot of routine.”

She scanned the yard. “I’d still like to know why a psychologist was called in. Are you saying whoever lived here was a maniac?”

“Not at all.” He turned to me: “You’re fired, Doc.”

I said, “Finally.”

Holly Ruche smiled for half a second.

Milo said, “That woman in the white coat is a forensic anthropologist.”

“The black woman? Interesting …” Her hands clenched. “I really hope this doesn’t turn out to be one of those mad-dog serial killer things, bodies all over the place. If that’s what happens, I could never live here. We’d be tied up in court, that would be a disaster.”

“I’m sure everything will turn out fine.”

“Just one little teensy skeleton?” she snapped. “That’s fine?”

She looked down at her abdomen. “Sorry, Lieutenant, it’s just—I just can’t stand seeing my place overrun with strangers.”

“I understand. No reason to stick around, Holly.”

“This is my home, my apartment’s just a way station.”

He said, “We’re gonna need the area clear for the dogs.”

“The dogs,” she said. “They find something, you’ll bring in machinery and tear up everything.”

“We prefer noninvasive methods like ground-penetrating radar, air and soil analysis.”

“How do you analyze air?”

“We insert thin flexible tubing into air pockets, but with something this old, decomposition smells are unlikely.”

“And if you find something suspicious, you bring in machines and start ripping and shredding. Okay, I will leave but please make sure if you turned on any lights you turn them off. We just got the utilities registered in our name and the last thing I need is paying the police department’s electrical bill.”

She walked away, using that oddly appealing waddle pregnant women acquire. Hands clenched, neck rigid.

Milo said, “High-strung girl.”

I said, “Not the best of mornings. Plus her marriage doesn’t seem to be working too well.”

“Ah … notice how I avoided telling her how you got here. No sense disillusioning the citizenry.”

Most homicides are mundane and on the way to clearance within a day or two. Milo sometimes calls me on “the interesting ones.”

This time, though, it was a matter of lunch.

Steak, salad, and scotch to be exact, at a place just west of Downtown. We’d both spent the morning at the D.A.’s office, he reviewing the file on a horrific multiple murder, I in the room next door, proofreading my witness statement on the same killings.

He’d tried to avoid the experience, taking vacation time then ignoring messages. But when Deputy D.A. John Nguyen phoned him at mid-night
and threatened to come over with cartons of week-old vegan takeout, Milo had capitulated.

“Sensible decision and don’t even think of flaking on me,” said Nguyen. “Also ask Delaware if he wants to take care of his business at the same time, the drafts just came in.”

Milo picked me up at nine a.m., driving the Porsche 928 he shares with his partner, Rick Silverman. He wore an unhealthily shiny gray aloha shirt patterned with leering sea lions and clinically depressed angelfish, baggy, multi-pleated khakis, scuffed desert boots. The shirt did nothing to improve his indoor pallor, but he loved Hawaii so why not?

Solving the multiple had taken a lot out of him, chiefly because he’d nearly died in the process. I’d saved his life and that was something neither of us had ever imagined. Months had passed and we still hadn’t talked about it. I figured it was up to him to broach the topic and so far he hadn’t.

When we finished at the court building, he looked anything but celebratory. But he insisted on taking me out for a seventy-buck sirloin-T-bone combo and “all the Chivas you can tolerate, boy-o, seeing as I’m the designated wheelman.”

An hour later, all we’d done was eat and drink and make the kind of small talk that doesn’t work well between real friends.

I rejected dessert but he went for a three-scoop praline sundae drowned in hot fudge syrup and pineapple sauce. He’d lost a bit of weight since facing mortality, was carrying maybe two forty on his stilt-legged seventy-five inches, most of it around the middle. Watching him maximize the calories made it tempting to theorize about anxiety, denial, masked depression, guilt, choose your psychobabble. I’d known him long enough to know that sometimes gluttony was a balm, other times an expression of joy.

He’d finished two scoops when his phone signaled a text. Wiping his chin and brushing coarse black hair off his pockmarked forehead, he read.

“Well, well, well. It’s good I didn’t indulge in the firewater. Time to go.”

“New case?”

“Of sorts,” he said. “Bones buried in an old box under an older tree, from the size, a baby.”

“Of sorts?”

“Sounds like an old one so probably not much to do other than trace ownership of the property.” Tossing cash on the table, he got up. “Want me to drop you off?”

“Where’s the property?”

“Cheviot Hills.”

“No need to drive all the way to my place then circle back.”

“Up to you,” he said. “I probably won’t be that long.”

Back at the car, he tucked the aloha shirt into the khakis, retrieved a sad brown tweed sport coat from the trunk, ended up with a strange sartorial meld of Scottish Highlands and Oahu.

“A baby,” I said.

He said nothing.

S
econds after Liz Wilkinson left with the bones, Moe Reed beeped in.

Milo muttered, “Two ships passing,” clicked his cell on conference.

Reed said, “Got all the deed holders, El Tee, should have a list for you by the time you get back. Anything else?”

“That’ll do it for now, Moses. Regards from your inamorata.”

“My what?”

“Your true love. She was just here.”

“Oh,” said Reed. “Yeah, of course, bones. She have anything to say?”

“Just that she thinks you’re dreamy.”

Reed laughed. “Let’s hope she holds that thought ’cause we’re going out tonight. Unless you need me to work late or something.”

“Not a chance,” said Milo. “This one won’t earn overtime for anyone.”

Reed was waiting outside Milo’s office, holding a sheaf of paper and sipping from a water bottle. His blond hair had grown out a couple of
inches from the usual crew cut, his young face was pink and unlined, belying his old-soul approach to life. Massive muscles strained the sleeves of his blue blazer. His pants were creased, his shoes spit-shined. I’d never seen him dress any other way.

“Just got a call, El Tee, got to run. Blunt force trauma DB in a bar on Washington not far from Sony Studios.”

“Go detect.”

“Doesn’t sound like much detection,” said Reed. “Offender’s still at the scene, patrol found him standing on top of the bar yelling space demons made him do it. More like your department, Doc.”

“Not unless I’ve offended someone.”

He laughed, hurried off. Milo unlocked his door.

One of Milo’s lieutenant perks, negotiated years ago in a trade-off deal with a criminally vulnerable former chief of police, is his own space, separate from the big detective room. Another’s the ability to continue working cases, rather than push paper like most lieutenants do. The new chief could’ve abrogated the deal but he was smart enough to check out Milo’s solve stats and though he amuses himself with chronic abuse of “Mr. So-Called Hotshot” he doesn’t fix what isn’t broken.

The downside is a windowless work space the size of a closet. Milo is long-limbed and bulky and when he stretches he often touches plaster. When he’s in a certain mood the place has the feel of an old-fashioned zoo cage, one of those claustrophobic confinements utilized before people started thinking of animals as having souls.

He sank down into his desk chair, setting off a tirade of squeaks, read the list, passed it over.

Holly Ruche’s dream abode was a thirty-one-hundred-square-foot single-family residence situated in what was then the Monte Mar-Vista Tract, completed on January 5, 1927, and sold three months later to Mr. and Mrs. Jacob Thornton. After ten years, possession passed to the Thorntons’ daughter, Marjorie, who unloaded the property thirteen months later to Dr. and Mrs. Malcolm Crowell Larner.

The Larners lived there until 1943, when the deed was transferred to Dr. and Mrs. George J. Del Rios. The Del Rioses resided at the property until 1955, after which possession shifted to the Del Rios Family Trust. In 1961, ownership passed to the Robert and Alice Hannah Family Trust and in ’74 Alice Hannah, newly widowed, took sole possession, a status that had endured until sixty days ago when her heirs sold to Mr. and Mrs. Matthew Ruche.

Initial purchase price: forty-eight hundred dollars. Holly and Matt had gotten a recession bargain at nine hundred forty thousand dollars, with a down payment of a hundred seventy-five thousand and the remainder financed by a low-interest loan.

Milo jabbed the list twice. “
Dr
. Larner to
Dr
. Del Rios. The time frame works, that box came from a hospital, and a shady white-coat fits with swiping medical equipment for personal use.”

I said, “I’d start with the period of those newspaper clippings—post-’51. That narrows it to the Del Rioses’ ownership.”

“Agreed. Let’s see what we can learn about these folk.”

He plugged in his department password and typed away, chewing a cold cigar to pulp. Official databases yielded nothing on Dr. George Del Rios other than a death certificate in 1947, age sixty-three, natural causes. A search for other decedents with the same surname pulled up Del Rios, Ethel A., DOD 1954, age sixty-four, cancer, and Del Rios, Edward A., DOD 1960, age forty-five, vehicular accident.

“I like Edward A. as a starting point,” he said. “The trust sold the house a year after he died, so there’s a decent chance he was George and Ethel’s boy and inherited the place.”

I said, “A boy in his thirties who George and Ethel might’ve worried about, so they left the house in trust rather than bequeathed it to him outright. And even though the trustee didn’t get it until ’55, a son could have had access to the property before then, when Mama was living there alone.”

“She goes to bridge club, he digs a little hole.”

“Maybe their lack of faith was due to lifestyle issues.”

“Eddie’s a miscreant.”

“Back then a well-heeled miscreant could avoid stigma, so ‘vehicular accident’ might’ve been code for a one-car DUI. But some stigmas you’d need to take care of yourself. Like a socially embarrassing out-of-wedlock birth.”

He said, “Eddie’s married and the mother’s someone other than wifey? Yeah, that would be blush-inducing at the country club.”

“Even if Eddie was a bachelor playboy, burying a social inconvenience could’ve seemed like a grand idea.”

He thought. “I like it, Alex, let’s dig dirt on this charmer. Pun intended.”

He searched for obituaries on all three family members. Dr. George J. Del Rios’s was featured in the
Times
and the
Examiner
. He’d been an esteemed, certain-to-be-missed cardiologist on staff at St. Vincent Hospital as well as a faculty member at the med school where I sometimes taught. No final bio for his widow. Nothing on her at all.

Father Edward Del Rios, director of the Good Shepherd Orphanage of Santa Barbara, had perished when a bus ferrying children from that institution to the local zoo had veered off Cabrillo Boulevard on July 6, 1960. Several of the children had been injured, a few seriously, but all had recovered. The priest and the bus driver hadn’t been so lucky.

The
Santa Barbara News-Press
covered the crash on its front page, reporting that “several of the terrified youngsters describe the driver, Meldrom Perry, suddenly slumping over the wheel leading to the bus going out of control. The children also report that ‘Father Eddie’ made an heroic attempt to gain control of the vehicle. Both Perry, 54, of Vista, and Father Del Rios, just days from his 46
^th
birthday, perished after being thrown free of the bus. But the man of God’s valiant attempts may have prevented an even worse disaster. An investigation has begun into allegations that Perry suffered from a prior heart condition, a fact known to the bus charter company, an outfit with previous violations on record.”

“Some playboy,” said Milo. “Poor guy was a damn hero.”

I said, “He lived in Santa Barbara so the house was probably rented out during his ownership.”

“And try finding a tenant. Okay, time to canvass the neighborhood, maybe some old-timer will remember that far back.”