The Turin Shroud Secret (2 page)

‘Just hoping.’ She circles again. Slower this time, stooping to study the vic’s hands and feet. ‘Any idea how long she’d been
in the water?’

Amy looks up again. ‘C’mon, Mitzi, I need to check body temperature and tides – you’re way too early to get a polite answer.’

Amy forces a thermometer through the eye socket into the brain. It will give her a window of about three hours on the time
of death. She glances up at the pull and push of the waves beside her. Once she’s consulted a tidal expert, she’ll have a
good idea of where and when the vic met her end. She notes the body temperature then uses scissors to cut off the fingernails
and bags the clippings.

Mitzi is still hanging over her and she feels obliged to give the cop something. ‘We’re talking hours in the water, less than
a day. That’s all you’re getting for the moment.’ She straightens up, brushes off sand and beckons two orderlies who’ve been
waiting with a marine body bag, the type that lets water out but keeps any evidence in. ‘Okay, parcel her up.’

‘What kinda freak could have done this?’ Nic’s eyes are scanning the raw, mutilated flesh.

‘No mystery there.’ Amy pulls off purple rubber gloves and snaps her metal case shut. ‘Some bad son-of-a-bitch kind of freak
– you know, the type that’s done it before and will soon be doing it all over again.’

MIDDAY
DOWNTOWN, LOS ANGELES

The food corner in the mall is a free-for-all. Shoppers and office workers jostle like cattle at feeding troughs. Stressed-out
servers bark orders in the soupy air and pound labelled till keys.

An olive-skinned young man in his mid-twenties with dark hair and even darker eyes waits patiently in the thick of it all.
An island of calm caught in a raging river of inhuman rudeness. Indifferently, he waits his turn, then pays for miso soup,
a box of sushi and black coffee. It’s a diet that renders him more slim than muscular – lean, if you want to be kind in your
description – too small and skinny for women who like big broad-shouldered guys to hang on to. It’s also landed him with the
nickname ‘Fish Face’ at the factory where he works.

‘Let me help you.’ He moves quickly to clear chairs and tables so an old man can push his wife’s wheelchair through the dining
jungle and lay their food tray at a free table.

‘Very kind of you.’ The senior nods a thank you as they settle.

‘No problem, you’re welcome.’ He takes his lunch to a table a few yards away. He smiles at the couple as he mixes
fiery wasabi paste with soy sauce, stirs it with chopsticks and dips a tuna roll, then turns his attention to the tide of
people flowing past. They fascinate him. All of them. No exceptions.

A teacher leads a crocodile of foreign schoolchildren, Chinese he thinks, in a two-by-two line, little cherubs all holding
each other’s hands. All wearing the same orange tops and caps and looking like dolls fresh off a production line. He remembers
seeing a poster somewhere proclaiming that there are five times as many people in China learning to speak English as there
are people in England. The world is changing. So is he. He can feel it. Sense it.

His eyes swing to a mature blonde in a business suit scrambling for a ringing cell phone in her small black leather bag. A
cougar past her prime. Smart clothes and a good diet can’t hide what age and the Californian weather do to your hair and skin.
She finds the iPhone in the nick of time but doesn’t look pleased. Not a call from her husband or lover, he guesses. More
likely a wail of despair from a colleague – a cry for help from the workplace she’s just left behind.

The young man smiles as she passes him. There’s something familiar in her eyes. He snaps his fingers as he realises what it
is. She reminds him of the woman he was with last night.

The one he murdered.

MANHATTAN BEACH, LOS ANGELES

The ME’s heavy morgue wagon, a white Dodge van with shaded windows, ploughs ruts in the litter-free sand as it disappears
with its sad cargo. Crowds of rubbernecking bathers return zombie-like to towels and loungers as though nothing had happened.
Life goes on – even after death.

Nic Karakandez steps out of the taped-off crime scene and walks the amphibious tightrope between sand and sea, the line where
the dark water washes onto the white sand then mysteriously vaporises in a fizz of outgoing wave. A north-easterly wind is
kicking up as he looks to the glittering horizon.

He’s done with being a murder police.

Done with being any kind of police for that matter. His notice is in. The well-muscled six-footer made the decision years
back, following an incident he doesn’t talk about – the kind that would make most good cops quit. Since then he’s been treading
water, going through the motions, marking time until he got enough money together, nailed down his skipper’s licence and finished
the repairs on his little sloop. Thirty days from now he’ll be sailing into the sunset to start a whole new life.

Mitzi looks back towards the disappearing tape and the uniforms she’s just briefed to start canvassing the gawping
zombies. ‘How d’you think Mr Freak dumped her? I mean, I didn’t see any tyre marks back there and the sand’s as soft as my
gut.’

Nic points east to a band of black running from the coast road across the beach and out to a squat building some way off in
the sea. ‘Over there’s the Roundhouse. I guess he drove down the pier as far as he could then popped his trunk and simply
slid her body over the side.’

‘I can see how that would work. From the looks of her, she didn’t weigh more than eighty pounds. It’d be an easy drop.’ Mitzi
gazes out towards the end of the pier with its marine lab and aquarium, a big draw for the rich locals and their kids. Not
hers, though. Her twin daughters are allergic to anything academic. They’d rather chase a soccer ball, play video games or
bait the boys next door.

As she and Nic trudge towards the jetty, Mitzi gets a mental flash of the dead woman. ‘You notice our Jane Doe was still wearing
jewellery?’ She twists the tiny wedding ring that’s been on her finger for close to two decades and waggles it for Nic to
see. ‘She was carrying a rock big enough for boy scouts to camp on.’

‘Certainly wasn’t a robbery,’ observes Nic. ‘Given the brutality of the other injuries, our perp wouldn’t hesitate to cut
off her finger if he wanted that sparkler.’

‘So what then? A kidnapping gone wrong?’

‘Maybe, but I would have expected a ransom demand. Even if the husband – presuming there still is one – had been frightened
into keeping us out of it.’

Mitzi thinks back to the corpse. ‘Yeah, it doesn’t follow. Kidnappers stiff their victim when the money talks are over, not
before. By then the family’s jumpier than Mexican beans and always come running to us. So if it was an abduction, we’d have
heard something.’

As they climb the last stretch of beach to the pier Nic’s thinking the kill bears the mark of a professional – albeit a crazy
one. ‘Last time I saw anything like this, it was Italians out in the valley,’ he says. ‘They cut up one of their own after
he crossed them. Revenge, pure and simple.’

Mitzi frowns. ‘You think she was mixing with organised crime?’

‘Could be. Imagine, for a minute, that she’s a mob wife and her old man finds out she’s cheating on him.’ He puts out his
hand and pulls Mitzi up. ‘At first she refuses to name the guy banging her, then, finally when she gives it up, said lothario
turns out to be hubby’s brother or best friend. Boom.’ Nic slaps his hand. ‘The boss gets all emotional. He feels he has no
choice but to have someone mess her up and finish her off.’

‘You’ve got one sick imagination.’

‘It’s how you taught me.’ He looks beyond her, down the wide pier leading to the red-tiled angular building at the end. A
four-bar metal rail runs either side, out over the water. It comes up to his chest. He was right. Drive a car out here, it’d
be easy enough to tip a body over the side.

Mitzi drops into a squat. ‘Lots of tyre treads down here.’ She sweeps an indicative hand over the area just in front of
her. ‘And, thank you God, a nice layer of sand that’s printed just about everything that’s recently come and gone.’

‘I’ll get uniforms to tape off the pier and have CSI do the treads.’ He pulls a cell phone and sits up on the rail while he
makes the call.

Mitzi takes out the small camera she always carries and snaps off some shots. Sometimes the techies turn up too late and the
evidence has gone. Better safe than sorry.

Ten minutes later a red-faced, overweight cop in a sweat-stained uniform arrives with a young crime scene photographer. While
Mitzi briefs them, Nic wanders a few yards away to watch the surf breaking around the legs of the pier. There are pictures
in the bubbling white froth. Abstract images, open to interpretation. Some people see galloping horses or Vikings or sea gods.

Nic sees the wife and baby son he lost.

They’re lying in a sea of their own blood. Eyes rolled back like rancid scallops.

And every time he sees them – when their unexpected appearance breaks his heart – he does nothing to block them out, nothing
to divert the blame from himself.

Carolina had wanted him to leave the apartment and push the pram a while. Max was crying and a stroll around the block always
seemed to settle him. But Nic got stuck on the phone – a work call on his day off. She’d grown bored waiting and finally gone
without him. Two blocks later she stopped at a grocery store. Had Nic been there it would have been different. He’d have known
right away what was
going down – the crackhead robbing the register, jittery and paranoid, a human timebomb bound to explode; the dope of a store
owner playing hero by grabbing a gun taped beneath the counter and the shoppers panicking and screaming, ratcheting up the
mayhem.

It had been Armageddon.

After the weapon came up from behind the counter, the junkie slaughtered everyone. Then he just stood there in a daze. He
was still staring at the carnage when the cops came. One lowlife’s moment of madness ended a dozen good people’s lives and
created a lifetime of misery for their families.

‘If this was the killer’s drop spot, he’s not a local.’ Mitzi is pacing again.

‘What?’ Nic’s thoughts are still three years back.

‘The
ocean.’
She points over the rail to get his attention. ‘The water here is too shallow. The perp probably thought it was deeper. When
he dumped her over the side, he must have believed the body would be gone for ever.’

‘The tide might have been in,’ says Nic, his brain and body finally reunited in the same time zone. ‘Or else the guy didn’t
care. Could be he was only bothered about her being hidden long enough for him to skip town.’

‘You’re good,’ she says with a smile that hints at why ten years ago every cop in the precinct made time to walk by her desk.
‘I’m going to miss you when you’re working as a crabber on
Deadliest Catch.’

He laughs. ‘Does the Discovery Channel have any other shows than that damned thing?’

‘Not worth watching.’

They walk single file down the edge of the pier, close to the rails, so as not to disturb any more tyre tracks. He makes a
slow circuit of the aquarium and marine lab, shielding his eyes and looking skyward. Eventually he finds what he’s looking
for.

‘Surf cams.’ He points out two small cameras at the tip of long poles. ‘You can watch shots from these things online in real
time.’

‘Kill me before my life becomes so boring that I would even think about doing that.’

‘Each to their own, Mitz.’ He points to another steel pole, one topped with a security camera. ‘Now this is more your taste.’
He palm-gestures like a teleshopping host showing off some pile of crap that can only be bought in the next ten minutes. ‘A
channel exclusively available to good-looking and talented LAPD cops, featuring –
hopefully –
all the once-in-a-lifetime footage of Big Rock Lady’s killer.’

LATE AFTERNOON

Amy Chang suits up, snaps on latex gloves and enters the newly equipped morgue. It’s a cold vault of stainless steel, illuminated
by pools of limpid green and blue lights. Steel
body-fridges, sinks, carts, tables and tools crowd the central autopsy table with its inelegant taps and cruel draining holes,
portals for the last of the deceased’s blood and body fluids. There’s far too much dull and deathly metal for Amy’s liking.
Another world away from the thirty-two-year-old’s elegant bachelorette home, steel-free except for the knives in the pretty
picture-window kitchen overlooking a small but well-ordered garden.

Less than a week old, the morgue already smells of Deodorx and Path Cloud cleansers. Amy looks sympathetically at the flesh
and bones laid out on the slab. To her, the remains are still a person, a desperate woman in need of her expert help. ‘So
who are you then? What can you tell me, honey? What secrets do you have for us?’

Even at first glance it’s obvious the victim suffered excruciating pain before she finally died. The injuries are all pre-mortem.
Lips are split, teeth are missing and then there’s the awful cavity where her left eye should be – a terrible testament to
the level of torture she endured.

She clears space so she can work. Adjusts the ceiling-mounted dissecting light with its dual beams and slips on a tiny, head-mounted
video camera for the close-ups. She wants to capture everything she says and sees during the examination.

‘The victim is a well-nourished woman in her late forties or early fifties. She has extensive pre-mortem injuries to her face
including the loss of her left eye and two upper middle teeth. There is evidence of recent plastic surgery,
nip and tuck scars still healing around the ears and neck.’ Her voice grows more sombre as she realises how the deceased must
have hoped a more benign encounter with a blade would keep her looking younger and more desirable. ‘Less cosmetic are the
injuries to the left and right cheeks – these are consistent with a series of blows, probably from front- and back-handed
slaps. She’s suffered powerful blunt trauma to the left cheek, possibly from a fist. It’s split open and the flesh exposed
to the bone.’ Amy moves down to the neck. ‘The deceased has bled out through a horizontal three-inch wound that severed the
vessels in the carotid sheath. A fatal cut. She’d have died from an air embolus even if she’d survived the wound.’ Amy can’t
help but notice its precision. No hesitant stab. Just a confident and ruthless action.